“He’s strong as an ox,” she came back at me.

“I am an ox,” I told Florence Campbell, imparting a little secret of my own.

CHAPTER 30

I STARED into the dark eyes of Seth Samuel Taylor. He stared back. I kept on staring. His eyes looked like jet black marbles set in almonds.

Naomi’s boyfriend was tall, very muscular, and workingman-hard. He reminded me more of a young lion than an ox. He looked disconsolate, and it was hard for me to question him. I had the premonition that Naomi was gone forever.

Seth Taylor hadn’t shaved, and I could tell that he hadn’t slept in days. I don’t think he had changed his clothes, either. He had on a badly wrinkled blue plaid shirt over a T-shirt, and holey 501s. He still wore his dusty workboots. Either he was very upset, or Seth Taylor was a shrewd actor.

I put out my hand, and his handshake was powerful. I felt as if I had put it into a carpenter’s vise.

“You look like shit” were Seth Taylor’s first words to me. Digital Underground was blaring out the “Humpty Dance” somewhere in the neighborhood. Just like it was D.C., only a little behind the times.

“You do, too.”

“Well, fuck y’all,” he said. It was a familiar greeting on the streets, and we both knew it and laughed.

Seth’s smile was warm, and somewhat contagious. He had an overconfident air about him, but it wasn’t too obnoxious. Nothing I hadn’t seen before.

I could see that his broad nose had been broken a few times, but he was still good-looking in a rough-hewn sort of way. His presence dominated a room as Naomi’s did. The detective in me wondered about Seth Taylor.

Seth lived in an old working-class area north of downtown Durham. At one time, the neighborhood had been filled with tobacco-factory workers. His apartment was a duplex in an old shingled house that had been converted into two apartments. Posters of Arrested Development and Ice-T were up on the hallway walls. One poster read: Not since slavery has so much ongoing catastrophe been visited on black males.

The living room was filled with his friends and neighborhood folks. Sad Smokey Robinson songs played from a blaster. The friends were there to help in the search for Naomi. Finally, maybe I had some allies in the South.

Everyone at the apartment was anxious to talk to me about Naomi. None of them had any suspicions about Seth Samuel.

I was struck in particular by a woman with wise, sensitive eyes and skin the color of coffee with cream. Keesha Bowie was in her early thirties, a postal worker in Durham. Naomi and Seth had apparently talked her into going back to college to get her degree in psychology. She and I hit it off right away.

“Naomi is educated, so articulate, but you already know that.” Keesha took me aside and talked seriously to me. “But Naomi never ever uses her abilities or her education to belittle someone else, or make herself seem superior. That struck every one of us when we met her. She’s so down-to-earth, Alex. She doesn’t have a phony bone inside her. That this could happen to her is the saddest thing.”

I talked with Keesha some more, and I liked her very much. She was smart and pretty, but this wasn’t the time for any of that stuff. I looked for Seth and found him off by himself on the second floor. The bedroom window was open, and he was sitting outside on the gently sloping roof. Robert Johnson was singing his haunting blues somewhere in the dark.

“Mind if I come out and join you? This old roof hold us both?” I said from the window.

Seth smiled. “If it doesn’t and we both crash through to the front porch, it’ll be a good story for everybody. Worth the fall and the broken neck. C’mon out, you got a mind to.” He spoke in a sweet, almost musical, drawl. I could see why Naomi would like him.

I climbed out and sat with Seth Samuel in the darkness settling over Durham. We heard a smaller-town version of the police sirens and excited shouts of the inner city.

“We used to sit out here,” Seth muttered in a low voice. “Naomi and I.”

“You okay?” I asked him.

“Nah. Never been any worse in my life. You?”

“Never worse.”

“After you called,” Seth said, “I was thinking about this visit, about this talk that we’d eventually have. I tried to think the way that you might be thinking. You know, like a police detective. Please, don’t have any more thoughts that there’s some chance that I could have anything to do with Naomi’s disappearance. Don’t waste time on that.”

I looked over at Seth Samuel. He was hunched over, and his head rested on his chest. Even in the dark I could see that his eyes were shiny-wet. His grief was a palpable thing. I wanted to tell him that we were going to find her and that everything would work out, but I knew no such thing.

We finally held on to each other. We were both missing Naomi in our own way, mourning together, on the dark roof.

CHAPTER 31

A FRIEND of mine from the FBI finally returned one of my phone calls that night. I was doing some reading when he called: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I was working on Casanova’s profile and still not getting very far.

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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