The Mystery Megapack

and hurried away.
    Arpocras ran after me. I have never seen him so flustered. I think what amazed him the most was that for once I’d thought of something he had not.
    “But … how did you know it was Carus?”
    “He and Aper were two of a kind. Who else would know so much about a man’s misdeeds, and be so eager to relate them, except his mortal enemy? Aper and Carus had this fault in common. They both talked too much.”
    * * * *
    These events did not settle the puzzling affair, Most Noble Emperor, not entirely.
    Since Clodius Carus was not a Roman citizen, I could have him interrogated locally. I am told he became incoherent under torture, but there was evidence of sufficient crimes that I had him executed.
    Yet the enigma remains. There are three explanations at which one might grasp: the first that Licinius Aper stole the goddess, hid it in his country villa, and merely put on a last, desperate performance for us when his enemy, who had learned of it, exposed him. But I reject this. He was too convincing at the end. He wore his lies like a badly-fashioned mask. I think he was sincerely astonished and even terrified to see the goddess there.
    Or could it be that the fatally-loquacious Clodius Carus stole the goddess, placed it in Aper’s villa with the connivance of corrupted slaves, in order to destroy his enemy? The image actually crushing Aper was an accident, but the result was the same. This, indeed, is what both Servilius Pudens and Arpocras think happened.
    The people of Claudiopolis cling to a third view, which sometimes, toward which, in unguarded moments, I lean myself: that Aper stole the goddess, hid her elsewhere, and she came of her own accord to deliver her vengeance.
    * * * *
    I write to you then, Sir, with a specific question.
    Something has to be put back into the temple, to restore the religious commerce of the city. Was Arpocras correct, that the true forms of divinities may never be apprehended by human senses, and that consequently all such images, however grotesque they might seem to Roman eyes, are equally sacred? Should I take this opportunity to install a proper, Roman Venus in the temple, or should I employ a local craftsman to recreate the goddess in her original form?
    * * * *
    4. Trajan to Pliny
    You should restore the goddess in her original form, to which the Bithynians are accustomed. It would certainly be out of keeping with the spirit of our age to demand such a change in immemorial religious usage.
    Very likely, your wise Arpocras is correct. Certainly the gods and goddesses work through human agencies in mysterious ways. No one can deny that.

REAR VIEW MURDER, by Carla Coupe
    “Is he dead?”
    Her voice broke on the last word. She pushed lank, damp hair off her forehead, the musical tinkle of her charm bracelet loud in the momentary stillness. Sunlight sparkled off the crisscrossed street signs on the corner, ghosting the words “Fourth” and “Cedar” onto her retinas.
    The cop shifted his weight from one foot to the other and glanced down at her, the shade of his hat brim a dark slash across his broad sunburned cheeks.
    “Looks that way.” His voice an unexpected tenor. “He must of cracked his head on the pavement when he went down.”
    She nodded and wrapped her arms around her knees, staring at the deep scratches on the toe of the cop’s left shoe. Dead. The cracked cement curb radiated heat, the thin cotton of her shorts little protection against the rough surface. A crumpled package of Lucky Strikes lay in the gutter beside her. His?
    With a shudder, cold and hot flashing over her skin faster than a Times Square marquee, she tightened her grip on her sweaty legs. Her cotton shirt stuck to her back, drops of perspiration trickled between her breasts. It was beginning to sink in. She’d killed a man.
    A muffled clang buffeted the humid air, cut off in mid-strike, then began the deep resonant tolling from St. Cyril’s. They still hadn’t fixed the bells, even after … how many years? She counted the peals. Five o’clock.
    She raised her face as the sound shivered into stillness. “He just walked into the street right in front of me. I didn’t even have a chance to stop.”
    “Yeah, miss. I got it down when you told me the first time.” The cop rubbed his nose.
    A local boy, she thought, her mind veering onto yet another tangent. Most of the boys she’d grown up with had noses that size and shape: squat, fleshy, eastern European noses. Over half