Page 60 of A Deeper Darkness

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four.

God, the urge had snuck up on her, laying her bare in front of this street full of strangers. She couldn’t help that, ignored their curious glances, just scrubbed and scrubbed until her hands were dry, then poured more gel in her palms and did it all over.

Simon. Matthew. Madeline.

Donovan.

She stopped short when she realized she’d added him into her frantic prayer.

Breathe.

Open your eyes.

Cars driving by, the construction workers on the corner, the scrambling students hurrying past on their way to class. Slowly the real world came back. She looked to her left and realized she was standing at the base of the Georgetown University steps.

How many times had she stood in this very spot? Meeting friends before a night on the town carousing, exchanging study notes, sneaking kisses with Donovan, taking a breather after a run. The memories flooded her like waves on a beach, relentlessly crashing into the hard sand.

The code in Donovan’s journal.

He was referencing dates. Dates that corresponded to their time together at Georgetown.

As if he’d known Sam was going to see his journals one day.

She shook her head and sat down on the second step from the bottom.Think, Sam. That was crazy. That wasn’t it. You’re being narcissistic.

And then it hit her.

He wasn’t sending her a message. He was sending them to himself.

She sat there for a few minutes, letting the pages of the journal run through her head. She remembered…. Her breath caught. All the tumblers fell into place, and the vault in her mind opened wide.

The code she thought she was seeing wasn’t a code, per se. They were memories. Memories. That’s how he wrote his journal, covering the parts of his days that seemed so mundane, interspersed with memories. Now that she had that, she could see they certainly didn’t all refer to her, though some did, especially recently. But there were many, many moments he’d captured.

The elegance of his system made her smile.But my God, forty years of memories…Whatever was referenced on the missing pages could have been anything, from any time in his life.

Donovan had never been shy about the fact that he journaled. He used to talk about the process with their friends. He told them emptying his mind of what was there, regardless of topic or length, helped him sleep, so he did it every night, even when he was drunk, or so tired he couldn’t get the pen to run along the page properly.

That’s when Sam bought him the fountain pen. She thought it might be more fun for him to write with than a cheap blue Bic ballpoint.

Those close to him knew he wrote in Latin, but she couldn’t imagine him telling too many people that fact. Despite the teasing way he’d lorded it over them in school, to share such a detail with just anyone smacked of arrogance, and while Donovan had always had machismo to spare, he wasn’t a braggart.

Someone knew that he’d written down something incriminating, and had determined that they needed to stop him from sharing. So they broke into the house and stole the incriminating pages from the journal.

If she was right, if that theory held together, the culprit must be someone very close.

Or…when he received the note, he tore the pages out himself and destroyed them.

God, she felt like she was running in circles. She picked up her bags and started up the street, anxious to get back and look through the journal one more time. She couldn’t help but wonder again about the people he worked with at Raptor, and the men he’d served with. His death wasn’t random. Whoever had killed him was someone he knew well.

Sam needed to read Donovan’s journals from the time he was overseas with the unit comprised of the five men in the picture. See what story they had to tell. Susan had gone into the footlocker in the attic last night and pulled three dark red leather diaries from the pile. They were waiting for Sam back at the house.

The closer she got to the answers, the farther away she felt. But at least she had an idea of what to look for now. Leave it to Donovan to scatter a trail of bread crumbs, no matter how purposeful or unwittingly he’d done so.

Chapter Thirty-One

Washington, D.C.

Detective Darren Fletcher