Son of the Morning Read online

  But still she crouched there, hidden from view and partially protected from the rain by the overhang of the building and the bulk of the trash bin. Her hair was plastered to her head, her sodden braid hanging limp and rain-heavy down her back. Her clothes were soaked, and even though the night was still unusually warm by Minneapolis standards, the dampness had leached the heat from her body so that she shivered with cold.

  She clutched a garbage bag to her chest; it was a small bag, the type sometimes used to line the trash cans in public buildings. She had liberated it from just such a can in the ladies’ rest room of the public library. The computer and the precious papers were protected inside the case, but when it had started raining she had panicked at the possibility of them getting wet, and all she could think of using to protect them was a plastic bag.

  Maybe it hadn’t been smart, going to the library. It was, after all, a public place, and one she frequented. On the other hand, how often did the police search libraries for suspected murderers? It was impossible for Parrish to have gotten a good look at her through that tiny slit in the bedroom curtains, but he certainly guessed she was the one lurking outside the window and had seen everything. He and his men were searching for her, but even though Ford had told them she’d gone to the library she doubted they would think she had gone back to one to hide.

  The police might not even have been notified of the murders yet. Parrish couldn’t report them without bringing himself into the picture, which he wouldn’t want to do. The neighbors wouldn’t have heard anything, since the shots had been silenced.

  No. The police knew. Parrish wouldn’t take the chance of letting days go by before the bodies—her mind stumbled on the word, but she forced herself to finish the thought—were discovered. Was there any way for forensics to tell if the pistol had been fitted with a silencer? She didn’t think so. All Parrish would have to do would be to call in a “suspicious noise, like gunshots,” at their address, and use a pay phone so nothing would show up on the 911 records.

  Both Parrish and his henchmen, and the police, were looking for her. Still, she had gone to the main branch of the library. Instinct had led her there. She was numb with shock and horror, and the library, as familiar to her as her own house, had seemed like a haven. The smell of books, that wonderful mingling of paper and leather and ink, had been the scent of sanctuary. Dazed, at first she had simply wandered among the shelves, looking at the books that had defined the boundaries of her life until a few short hours ago, trying to recapture that sense of safety, of normalcy.

  It hadn’t worked. Nothing would ever be normal again.

  Finally she had gone into the rest room, and stared in bewilderment at the reflection in the mirror. That white-faced, blank-eyed woman wasn’t her, couldn’t possibly be Grace St. John, who had spent her life in academia and who specialized in deciphering and translating ancient languages. The Grace St. John she was familiar with, the one whose face she had seen countless times in other mirrors, had happy blue eyes and a cheerful expression, the face of a woman who loved and was loved in return. Content. Yes, she had been content. So what if she was just a little too plump, so what if she could have been the poster girl for Bookworms Anonymous? Ford had loved her, and that was what had counted in her life.

  Ford was dead.

  It couldn’t be. It wasn’t real. Nothing that had happened was real. Maybe if she closed her eyes, when she opened them she would find herself in her own bed, and realize it had only been a ghastly nightmare, or that she was having some sort of mental breakdown. That would be a good trade, she thought as she squeezed her eyes shut. Her sanity for Ford’s life. She’d go for that any day of the week.

  She tried it. She squeezed her eyes really tight, concentrated on the idea that it was just a nightmare and that she was about to wake up, and everything would be all right. But when she opened her eyes, everything was the same. She still stared back at herself in the stark fluorescent light, and Ford was still dead. Ford and Bryant. Husband and brother, the only two people on earth whom she loved, and who loved her in return. They were both gone, irrevocably, finally, definitely gone. Nothing would bring them back, and she felt as if the essence of her own being had died with them. She was only a shell, and she wondered why the framework of bone and skin that she saw in the mirror didn’t collapse from its own emptiness.

  Then, looking into her own eyes, she’d known why she didn’t collapse. She wasn’t empty, as she’d thought. There was something inside after all, something wild and bottomless, a feral tangle of terror and rage and hate. She had to fight Parrish, somehow. If either he or the police caught her, then he would have won, and she couldn’t bear that.

  He wanted the papers. She had only begun to translate them; she didn’t know what they contained, or what Parrish thought they contained. She didn’t know what was so important about them that he had killed Ford and Bryant, and intended to kill her, merely because they knew these particular papers existed. Maybe Parrish thought she had deciphered more than she actually had. He didn’t just want physical possession of the papers, he wanted to erase all knowledge of their existence, and their content. What was in them that her husband and brother had died because of them?

  That was why she had to protect the laptop. Her computer held all her notes, her journal entries, her language programs that aided her in her work. Give her access to a modem, and she could connect to any resource on-line that she needed in her work, and she could continue her translations. She would find out why. Why.

  To have any chance of successfully hiding, she had to have cash. Good, untraceable cash.

  She had to make herself walk to that ATM. And when she’d emptied it—assuming there was any cash left in it, given the hour—she would have to find another one.

  Her fingers were numb, and bloodless. The temperature had remained in the sixties, but she had been wet for hours.

  She didn’t know where she found the surge of energy that carried her to her feet. Perhaps it wasn’t energy at all, but desperation. But suddenly she was standing, even though her knees were so stiff and weak she had to lean against the wet wall for support. She pushed away from the wall, and momentum propelled her several unsteady steps before panic and fatigue dragged at her again, slowing her to a standstill. She clutched the garbage bag to her chest, feeling the reassuring weight of the laptop within the plastic. Rain dripped down her face, and a massive black weight pressed on her chest. Ford. Bryant.

  Damn everything.

  Somehow her feet were moving again, clumsily shuffling, but moving. That was all she required, that they move.

  Her purse swung awkwardly from her shoulder, banging against her hip. Her steps slowed, stopped. Stupid! It was a miracle she hadn’t already been mugged, wandering back alleys at this time of night with her purse plainly in sight.

  She edged back into the shadows, her heart thumping from a surge of panic. For a moment she stood paralyzed, afraid to move as her gaze darted around the dark alley, searching for any of the night predators who prowled the city. The narrow alley remained silent, and her breath sighed out of her. She was alone. Perhaps the rain had worked in her favor, and the homeless, the druggies, the hoodlums, had decided to take shelter somewhere.

  She laughed in the darkness, the sound small and humorless. She had grown up in Minneapolis, and she had no real idea which sections of the city she should avoid. She knew her neighborhood, her routes to the university, the libraries, the post office and grocery, doctor and dentist. In the course of her work, and Ford’s, she had traveled to six continents and God knows how many countries; she had thought herself well traveled, but suddenly she realized how little she knew of her own city because she had been encapsulated in her own little safe, familiar world.

  To survive, she would have to be a lot smarter, a lot more aware. Street smarts meant a lot more than locking your car doors as soon as you were inside. She would have to be ready for anything, an attack from any quarter, and she would have to be read