Chapter One
“For a private investigator who divides his day between lunch with members of the underworld at a strip club and seeing clients in an office two doors down from a pawn shop, you come across very much at home here,” Dr. Leanne Thunberg, despite being a head shorter than my six feet, lead me across…
Chapter Two
I pressed my forehead against the marble wall of the shower and tried to unravel the previous night; I heard the story of Lilith, who some believed was Adam’s first mate in the Garden, a scholarly rumor about a series of books, written but not included in Genesis, something about Moses and the Beatles’ ‘White…
Chapter Three
With the top down, Lacey Whitelaw felt the morning-chilled wind tug at her hair like a schoolyard full of invisible seven-year-old boys; behind the wheel of the late model Porsche, her former faculty advisor, current wanderjahr guide and future cautionary tale, drove with a studied concentration intended to leave no doubt that the car was a…
Chapter Four
My office was quieter than a foreclosed church, as I sat at my cigarette-and-tear-stained desk, in the middle of a featureless Thursday morning, pretending to work; I suspected I was avoiding something, but my detective skills were insufficient to drag it out into the light. Hazel, my admin, had the day off, something about a…
Chapter Five
[Eibigen Abby Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany] “I won’t ask you again, who sent you?” The dusty-wet smell of ancient stone pushed aside the other sensory cues like a sixth grader with a five-o’clock shadow and a hormone-induced chip on his shoulder; Elias Thunberg tried to gather clues to establish the ‘where’ in what is, arguably,…
Chapter Six
“Dr. Thunberg, an envelope just arrived,” Kendra’s disembodied voice held a touch of shrillness on the interrogative, but then darkened and sank on the passive verb as it hung in the autumn light, leaching most of the color, and all of the softness, from Leanne Thunberg’s office overlooking the quad at Radcliffe University. The head…
Chapter Seven
“Welcome to Air France”, Rene spoke first by half-a-smile and Jean, slightly delayed by a perfect toss of her chestnut hair, threw a wink at us and added her greeting, “Bienvenue chez, Air France”; both stewards finished on ‘France’; I was in awe and tried to remember if the Foreign Legion still existed. With a…
Chapter Eight
The power of the engines suffused the cabin, a sub-vocal tone both powerful and beyond reach, an endless mantra, reminding us, hurtling through the sky, 565 mph at 35,000 feet that we all exist in a temporary magic spell. Pulling myself from the insides of my head, I glanced to my left where Leanne was…
Chapter Nine
“Yes, that’s Elias… my former….Doctor Thunberg.” Competing with the cold hiss of the fluorescent lights, the detachment in Leanne’s voice brought to mind dialogue balloons that float above the characters in a comic book; authenticity was not in question, her emotional investment in speaking for the man, now a thing, a body, laying on a…
Chapter Ten
We walked along streets that were old before there were calendars and pretended we were strangers; Leanne took in Wiesbaden’s subtly Russian architecture without comment, her face shimmering with an abstract intensity. “What’s wrong?” “Feeling mortal.” “Damn… next to being in love, is there any state of mind that offers more promise or greater cost?”…
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The Case of the Missing Fig Leaf 