had gotten overeager and stepped beyond the bounds of their rituals.
Ahead of her, Grays formed a thin gruel that shifted over the roof of the law school, spreading and curling like milk poured into coffee, drawn by the grind of fear and ambition. Book and Snake’s towering white tomb loomed on her right. Of all the society
buildings, it was the most like a crypt. “Greek pediment, Ionic columns. Pedestrian stuff,”
Darlington had said. He saved his admiration for the Moorish screens and scrollwork of Scroll and Key, the severe mid-century lines of Manuscript. But it was the fence surrounding Book and Snake that always drew Alex’s eye: black iron crawling with
snakes. “The symbol of Mercury, god of commerce,” Darlington had said.
God of thieves. Even Alex knew that one. Mercury was the messenger.
Ahead of her lay Grove Street Cemetery. Alex glimpsed a cluster of Grays gathered by
a grave near the entrance. Someone had probably left cookies for a lost relative or something sugary as a fan offering for one of the artists or architects buried there. But the rest of the cemetery, like all cemeteries at night, was empty of ghosts. During the day, Grays were called to the salt tears and fragrant flowers of mourners, gifts from the living
left for the dead. She’d learned they loved anything that reminded them of life. The spilled
beer and raucous laughter of frat parties; the libraries at exam time, dense with anxiety, coffee, and open cans of sweet, syrupy Coke; dorm rooms staticky with gossip, panting couples, mini-fridges stuffed with food going to rot, students tossing in their sleep, dreams full of sex and terror. That’s where I should be, Alex thought, in the dorm, showering in the grimy bathroom, not walking by a graveyard in the dead of night.
The cemetery gates had been built to look like an Egyptian temple, their fat columns carved with lotus blossoms, the plinth emblazoned with giant letters: THE DEAD SHALL BE
RAISED. Darlington called the period at the end of that sentence the most eloquent piece of
punctuation in the English language. Another thing Alex had been forced to look up, another bit of code to decipher. It turned out the quote was from a Bible verse:
Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall
sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
“Incorruptible.” When she saw that word she understood Darlington’s smirk. The dead
would be raised, but as for incorruptibility, Grove Street Cemetery was making no promises. In New Haven, it was best not to hope for guarantees.
The scene in front of Payne Whitney gym reminded Alex of the operating theater,
police floodlights illuminating the snow, throwing the shadows of onlookers against the ground in stark lines. It would have been beautiful, carved in white and black like a lithograph, but the effect was ruined by barriers of yellow tape and the lazy, rhythmic whirl of blue and red from patrol cars that had been parked to block off the intersection where the two streets conjoined. The activity seemed to be focused on the triangle of orphaned land at its center.
Alex could see a coroner’s van with its bay doors open; uniformed officers standing at
attention along the perimeter; men in blue jackets, who she thought might be forensics based on the television she’d watched; students who had emerged from their dorms to see
what was happening despite the late hour.
Her time with Len had left her wary of cops. When she was younger, he’d gotten a kick
out of having her help with deliveries, because no uniform—campus security or LAPD—
was going to stop a chubby kid in braids looking for her big sister on a high school campus. But as she’d gotten older she’d lost the look of someone who belonged in wholesome places.
Even when she wasn’t carrying, she’d learned to keep well clear of cops. Some of them
just seemed to smell the trouble on her. But now she was walking toward them, smoothing
her hair with a gloved hand, just another student.
Centurion wasn’t hard to spot. Alex had met Detective Abel Turner exactly once