I frown. Maybe this is about the sergeant’s test. “Why exactly are you looking up my college record?”
“I wasn’t looking at you, Detective Jazz. I was looking for someone who knows poetry, even if it meant searching outside the department, but it turns out I got a hit with you.” He slides a file across the desk and sets it in front of me. “This should explain.”
My defenses lower, and the detective in me, the one who thrives on impossible puzzles, sits down, eager to work. Work is good. Work keeps me sane. It took me sixty days after my father died to convince the department shrink just how true that is. A month later, she’s seen me solve cases and perform at my best. Now, she believes me. Now, I’m rid of her.
I open the file and I’m staring at a naked man tied to a chair by his ankles and waist, but interestingly enough, his hands dangle freely by his sides. His head is dropped forward, a mop of dark hair draping his face. Vomit forms an unevenly edged pool on the floor to his right. In my mind, I imagine the moment that sickness overcame him, imagine that he tried to escape that chair, and noting the burn marks by his ribcage, perhaps violently. When unable to untie himself, in desperation, it appears that he most likely leaned forward and heaved.
I scan the information sheet on the inside flap of the file.
Cause of death: Poison. Substance undetermined. Pending toxicology reports.
My memory conjures up an old case. A husband who’d forced his wife to ingest a cyanide pill under threat of her children’s deaths. She’d never had a chance of survival. There’s no turning back from a substantial intake of cyanide, no chance of being saved. You’re dead in two to five brutal minutes. That mother was dead in two to five brutal minutes, never to see her children again.
That woman, that mother protecting her children, hadn’t been tied to a chair like this man, but her monster of a husband later confessed to having given her a choice. He’d told her to take a cyanide pill he’d snapped up from the dark web or he’d kill the kids. He’d wanted her life insurance. She’d taken the pill to save her kids, but he’d given the kids pills as well and then tried to make it look like a murder-suicide that left him alone and devastated.
I shove aside that morbid memory to focus on this new case, already forming a hypothesis. Perhaps something similar to what happened to that mother happened to this man. That’s why his hands are free. He was given a choice—freely submit to a poison-flavored death or an alternative that one can assume to have been worse.
For a moment, I believe that old case, and my history with a poison murder weapon, is why I’m looking at this file, but then I remember the captain’s reference to my knowledge of poetry. I flip the page and find a photo of a typed poem, much like an oversized fortune in a fortune cookie. There’s a note that indicates the poem had been shoved inside the victim’s mouth, and yet it’s free of the victim’s vomit. That’s interesting.
I set that thought aside for now and read the poem:
Who laugh in the teeth of disaster,
Yet hope through the darkness to find
A road past the stars to a Master
“We googled the poem,” the captain says, obviously following my review of the file. “It’s by—”
“Arthur Guiterman,” I supply.
His brows furrow. “The poem’s eight paragraphs. You have three lines. How did you know that?”
“Isn’t that why you called me in here? Because I have a knowledge of poetry?”
“Indeed,” he agrees. “I just didn’t expect—”
“That I really did? Well, I do.”
His eyes narrow. “What does the poem mean?”
“You could ask a handful of scholars that question and get a handful of disagreements.”
His lips press together. He doesn’t like my honesty, which is relevant to how impossible the question is to answer. “What does it mean to you?”
“My interpretation: it’s about destiny.”
Apparently, I passed the knowledge test, because he moves on. “The detective on this case made an abrupt decision to transfer to Houston, which leaves me reassigning the case.”
My brows dip in confusion, my mind focused on the detective departing, not the case that’s obviously going to land with me. We’re a small department of twelve detectives who know one another at least reasonably well. No one has said a peep about transferring. “Who’s leaving?”
“Roberts.”
Now I’m really confused. I mean, Roberts and I aren’t close, but I’ve known the man for years and he has roots here—a house, friends, an ex-wife he lives to fight with, a weekend football league. I shake my head with that confusion. “Why would he do that, Captain?”