Nikki had only slept for a few hours. She had set her alarm early to converse with her mother before the meeting. The captain had invited her daughter to Nikki's parents' house.
"Your make-up is a little more superficial than usual,"Elizabeth noted as she poured two cups of coffee. "You had other things on your mind than make-up. Something serious from the look on your face."
"I spoke to Mardas yesterday,"Nikki began cautiously.
"And do you like him?"the captain replied with a wink before she took a sip from one of the cups. "He's available again. I can't recommend it, though."
Nikki took the other cup and frowned a little. "I'm serious, ma. He hasn't said anything, but he's dropped a few hints. I don't want rumors to start."
Elizabeth seemed unmoved. She took another sip of coffee, licked her lips, and then remarked: "A rumor is only a rumor if it's true. What are you alluding to?"
Nikki stroked her hair uncertainly. Her mother's composure did nothing to reassure her."You never told me you had a girlfriend after my birth mother."
Elizabeth was silent for a few seconds. Only after she had sorted out her thoughts did she reply. "Then I guess I had my reasons. You probably would have assumed that I just got over your mother's death."
"Well, is that so?"
Elizabeth slowly put her cup down and licked her lips again before she struck out. "They always say people become partners when they find themselves in each other. When one is the mirror of the other, Rupert liked Leonore but could never see where she had found herself in me."
"What is it between Mardas and you?"
Elizabeth took a deep breath and raised her eyebrows briefly. "It's a long story. And our opinions of each other aren't important either. He's not guided by sympathy in his work, and neither am I in mine."
"That wasn't an answer, ma."
The captain arched her left eyebrow. "If you think about it more carefully, you'll realize it was the best answer I can give you, Veronica,"she objected.
"What happened to Leonore?"
"That's not a subject I'm talking about. Maybe the mirror has broken. Or she's concluded that it was just a distorting mirror after all. One that made her unrecognizable, who knows?"
Nikki pushed her cup aside. Then she reached for Elizabeth's hand and clasped it. "Did she leave because of Mom? Or because of McMillan's murder? Or because the failure changed you?"
"That was all long ago,"Elizabeth rebutted and withdrew her hand. "I've become a different person."
"Did you see her again after you broke up?"
"Veronica, that was all long ago, and it was excruciating for me. And not just for me! A lot of people were unhappy back then. I don't want to talk about it."
Nikki thought Elizabeth's voice sounded slightly brittle than usual, but that could have been her imagination. "I remember what it was like after Mom died. You were devastated, and then there was the suspicion about you. And then you were like a different person for a while. I wasn't sure at the time whether you could love someone exactly like Mom again. And then Maggie came into our lives, and everything got so much better again, but I always felt like you were hiding something."
"Do you know that everything we think is love is just based on smells?"the captain asked, a little too matter-of-factly. "If you like the smell of a person, then all the rest is just pure projection."
"Scientifically, that's probably true,"Nikki conceded. "But do you want to see it that way?"
Instead of answering, Elizabeth pushed her cup aside and looked at her daughter insistently. "Now let's talk about it. What is this about? You're not sitting here with me to talk about a woman I was with over sixteen years ago?"
Nikki realized that she couldn't keep talking about her real issue. "Okay, there is something I want to talk to you about. It's a bit spicy, though."
Elizabeth didn't let on, but she was extremely curious about why her daughter had asked her so specifically for the private meeting.
"Let's stick to your theory about a person's scent,"Nikki finally began. "If we ultimately only react to pheromones, then people may find each other who don't seem compatible."
"Wait a minute,"Elizabeth interrupted, sticking her right index finger in the air as if to place it on Nikki's lips. "Things come together that don't seem to fit."
"At least apparently,"Nikki qualified her statement uncertainly, but Elizabeth didn't notice.
Nikki'scomment had triggered something in the captain, like the first domino whose fall had triggered a chain reaction. Images and memories suddenly flew wildly and incomprehensibly through Elizabeth's head, searching for a place where they could land.
But as far as I know, you enjoy puzzles. Pictures of fish and books about the sea are all over the house. Things find each other that don't fit together. If it was an emotional reaction at the time, why did the perpetrator stay at the scene for so long? You can only guess something like that with others.
"Ma?"Nikki tried to communicate with her mother, who was staring absently into space and repeatedly forming her lips into unintelligible words.
There was no dusting under the shelves and cupboards in the living room, except under the one next to the door that leads into the hallway. He wants to draw my attention to that door.
"You bloody scumbag!"Elizabeth suddenly exclaimed, causing Nikki to flinch. "The only shelf that had been dusted! He knew I would notice. Because it was a severe irregularity."
"He used it to point you to the right doorway,"Nikki recalled with a furrowed brow.
"He knew I'd notice a strong irregularity more than a weak one,"Elizabeth replied, blinking a few times. "He's testing me."
"Can you please explain --"
"He's drawn my attention to the missing dust under the shelf. And he covered up that diversion by disguising it as a satisfying motivation. Clever. Very clever indeed!"
Elizabeth now recalled the two crime scenes of the murders of McMillan and Praetorius in her mind. Just as you would load a high-resolution, freely rotatable image onto a computer. At the same time, she scrutinized every detail of the two images with her mind's eye before finally deciding to discard the image from Dr. McMillan's apartment. However, the one from Dr. Praetorius' apartment still interested her. She zoomed through the room in her mind's eye, looking at the pictures on the walls, the objects on the tables, the flooring, the furniture, and the contents of the shelves.
"Of course!"she finally exclaimed and jumped from her chair. "It doesn't fit there!"
Without another word, the captain turned away from her daughter, ran out of her house to her car as fast as she could, and went to Dr. Praetorius' house.
Nikki was left alone in her parents' house. The two steaming coffee cups were still in front of her.
"Oh, Ma,"she said as she thought about the pictures on Nick's cell phone.
Then she looked at her wristwatch, reached for her coffee cup, and emptied it. "How much longer are you going to run away?"
xxx
The sun was still in the east, so its light fell directly through the glass patio front into Praetorius' house, as it had done the day before. Under these circumstances, noticing the lack of dust under the shelves was harder. The birds were chirping, and the street in front of the house had also returned to everyday life. Everything seemed much more peaceful and harmonious than the day before. Elizabeth had even seen the little frog again.
"Well, my friend. Have you been watching? What was going on here yesterday?"she had asked the animal, which had been sitting calmly on the fountain and which she had recognized by the shade of its skin.
"What are you doing there?"a resident suddenly called to Elizabeth from the street, who had not yet broken the police seal to re-enter the doctor's house.
"Don't worry, I'm one of them,"the captain replied, holding her badge without taking her eyes off the living room.
The resident couldn't make out the badge because of the distance but was satisfied with it nonetheless.
"Was the doctor murdered?"she asked.
"Were you his patient?"
"Most people around here were. Do you know who it was yet?"
Elizabeth looked over at her conversation partner. To her surprise, she realized it was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, standing on the sidewalk in extremely body-hugging sportswear, who had just come from a run in the nearby park.
"Do you have any suspicions?"asked the captain, without moving towards her conversation partner, whose cleavage was unmistakably the work of a plastic surgeon.
"He had no enemies!"
"How do you know that? Did you know him well?"
The woman waved her hand. "Sure, I live right next door. Besides, everyone knows everyone here!"
Elizabeth grinned. The district had over thirty-five thousand inhabitants but was still considered a rural exclave by Bostonians. Some die-hard residents even insisted that this part of the city wasn't part of Boston, although this was factually incorrect. "If I have any more questions, I'll get in touch,"Elizabeth finally choked off the conversation and broke the seal before opening the patio door with the spare key she had taken from the hook in the hallway the day before. And while the neighbor was still trying to ask some nosy questions, the captain finally re-entered the surgeon's house.
There are three passages. One leads to the kitchen, one to the stairs to the private rooms, and one to the surgery.
Elizabeth shook her head at herself.
You probably found the right passageway without the clue about the dust. Wouldn't you, Elizabeth?
She didn't have to look. During her journey, she had already mentally scrutinized every detail of the rooms she had looked at the day before. She walked purposefully to the bookcase above the sideboard under which the culprit had removed the dust. Then she smiled with satisfaction when she found what she was looking for.
"This isn't exactly Moby Dick,"she realized as she slipped on latex gloves and carefully picked up a book from the shelf. She looked at the cover. "Game dishes from A to Z,"she read aloud. "The spine is broken, so the book has been used extensively. But not by Praetorius."
Nothing in the living room, the hallway, or the rest of the room gave the impression that the surgeon was interested in anything besides his work or fishing. The pictures, decorative items, and even the books on the shelves all relate to medicine or fisheries. No other openly visible object indicated that Praetorius had been interested in preparing game dishes.
Elizabeth first examined the heavy, bound cookbook from the outside but could find nothing unusual about it. So she opened it and flicked through the pages at random. It wasn't long before she came across something. "There you go,"she realized with satisfaction as several scraps of paper fell to the floor that had been hidden between the pages.
Elizabeth got down on her knees to pick them up. When she read what was written on them, her brow furrowed.
I understand you enjoy puzzles.
The captain then picked up her cell phone and dialed Nikki's number. The detective answered the call quickly.
"Are you at the BPD yet?"asked Elizabeth.
"I've just arrived. Shall we reschedule the meeting?"
"No, I'll be with you in thirty minutes. Everyone, please be there; there's a new lead."
"What's happened?"
"Ishmael left me a letter."
"And what does he write?"
Elizabeth looked at the notes in her hand again before answering. "I have no idea!"