a record on your bill that you called me here, man. Didn’t you think about that?”
I couldn’t believe his carelessness, especially in light of his own warnings about the FBI and Agent Walling.
“Oh shit, I . . . I don’t really think I care. Nobody’s going to pull my records. It’s not like I passed on defense secrets, for crying out loud.”
“I don’t know. You know ’em better than me.”
“So never mind that, what have you got?”
“I told you I’m still looking. I’ve got a couple names that might be good. A few names.”
“Well, then, good. I’m glad it was worth the risk.”
I nodded but realized he couldn’t see me do this.
“Yeah, well, like I said before, thanks. I gotta get back to it now. I’m fading and want to get it done.”
“Then I’ll leave you to it. Maybe tomorrow, when you get a chance, give me a call to let me know what’s going on.”
“I don’t know if that will be a good idea, Michael. I think we better lay low.”
“Well, whatever you think. I guess I’ll be reading all about it, eventually, anyway. You have a deadline yet?”
“Nope. Haven’t even talked about it.”
“Nice editor. Anyway, go back to it. Happy hunting.”
Soon I was back in the embrace of the words of the poet. Dead a hundred and fifty years but reaching from the grave to grip me. Poe was a master of mood and pace. The mood was gloom and the pace often frenetic. I found myself identifying the words and phrases with my own life. “I dwelt alone / In a world of moan,” Poe wrote. “And my soul was a stagnant tide.” Cutting words that seemed, at least at that moment, to fit me.
I read on and soon felt myself gripped by an empathic hold of the poet’s own melancholy when I read the stanzas of “The Lake.”
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake
Poe had captured my own dread and fitful memory. My nightmare. He had reached across a century and a half to me and put a cold finger on my chest.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
I finished reading the last poem at three o’clock in the morning. I had found only one more correlation between the poetry and the suicide notes. The line attributed in the reports to Dallas detective Garland Petry—“Sadly, I know I am shorn of my strength”—was taken from a poem entitled “For Annie.”
But I found no match of the last words attributed to Beltran, the Sarasota detective, with any poem that Edgar Allan Poe had written. I began to wonder if through my fatigue I had simply missed it but knew that I had read too carefully, despite the lateness of the hour. There simply wasn’t a match. “Lord help my poor soul.” That was the line. I now thought that it had been the last true prayer of a suicidal man. I scratched Beltran from the list, thinking that his words of misery were truly his.
I studied my notes while fending off sleep and decided that the McCafferty case of Baltimore and the Brooks case of Chicago were too similar to be ignored. I knew then what I would do in the morning. I would go to Baltimore to find out more.
That night my dream came back. The only recurring nightmare of my entire life. As always, I dreamed I was walking across a vast frozen lake, the ice blue-black beneath my feet. In all directions I was equal distances from nowhere, all horizons were a blinding, burning white. I put my head down and walked. I hesitated when I heard a girl’s voice, a call for help. I looked around but she was not there. I turned and headed on. A step. Two. Then the hand came up through the ice and gripped me. It pulled me toward the growing hole. Was it pulling me down or trying to pull its way out? I never knew. In all the times I’d had the dream I never knew.
All I saw was the hand and slender arm, reaching up from the black water. I knew the hand was death. I woke up.
The lights and the television were still on. I sat up and looked around, not comprehending at first and then remembering where I was and what I was doing. I