Page 12 of Edge of Secrets (The Edge Trilogy #2)
Chapter Eight
Duncan
I stared at the screen of the online version of The Golden Thread Poetry Journal and sent the relevant pages to print.
The collection of short lyric poems by Antonella D’Onofrio were really hard to grasp.
I wanted them to exist in a solid, physical form.
As if being able to hold them in my hand might help me understand what was in them.
The pages churned out of the machine, and I tried reading them again, but no dice. It was the tenth time I’d gone through them and I still had no clue what the fuck she was getting at.
The poetry thing baffled me on so many levels. The poems themselves were gibberish, but it was the way they made me feel that alarmed me most. Like a cliff had suddenly appeared in front of me, and I was reeling backwards to keep from falling.
Except not in a bad way. Which made no sense. And I usually didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense. I always scrambled to fix it, order it, organize it.
This was different. This defied fixing, ordering, organizing.
I read the poems again, searching for that strange, vanishing feeling they elicited.
It was like glimpsing something out of the corner of my eye, but having it disappear when I looked at it straight on.
Or trying to spot a star so faint, I could barely sense that it was there.
Just a tiny, teasing blur of light in the sky. The vague idea of a star.
I stared down at my stubborn boner with unfriendly eyes.
I’d tried to deal with it in the shower, with the help of some extremely vivid water-sex fantasies: Nell—naked, soaked, and soapy, hair drenched, face rosy—pinned to the shower wall, her legs draped over my arms. Whimpering with delight at each deep, slick thrust.
I’d come so hard I practically knocked myself out, so why I still had a tent pole poking out of my sweatpants was beyond me. Maybe it was the poetry. Hah.
I couldn’t believe how completely I had bulldozed through all my fine principles.
I’d gone all alpha on her, grabbing her, kissing her, making her come.
God. Peak experience. One that could totally fuck my professional life, depending on how she felt about it after the fact.
I’d left myself wide open to attack. Thinking with my dick.
I’d been at the computer since I got home, too wound up to sleep.
I’d used the time researching everything I could glean off the internet about the D’Onofrio crime saga.
I was chomping at the bit to call my old buddy Gant, my NYPD source, to get some hard inside details. But it was still too early for that.
So I’d ranged further to pass the time. I’d tried reading the articles she’d published in a bunch of literary journals—pieces about Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sappho.
Her paper for her graduate seminar. There was poetry she’d written and published herself.
Entries on websites that catered to poets and scholars.
Online poetry workshops she’d critiqued.
It was outlandish stuff. Computer nerds were bad enough, but they had nothing on poets. This crap was from fucking outer space.
I glanced at my phone. It was almost five a.m. Good enough for me.
My friend and ex-colleague back in our NSA days was now a detective in the NYPD.
Gant owed me his life, after various bloody and memorable adventures in Afghanistan back in the day.
If he wasn’t awake by now, it meant he was getting soft and needed his ass kicked.
I dialed the number and waited as it rang twelve times before he picked up.
“Who the fuck is this?” said Gant sleepily.
“I need some info,” I said.
“Oh, Christ. You. For fuck’s sake, Burke. Couldn’t it wait till daylight?”
“It’s dawn.” I stared out the picture window of my condo at the spectacular New York City skyline, silhouetted against the faint glow of breaking day.
“I need the details on an ongoing police investigation in Hempton. It involves an elderly woman named Lucia D’Onofrio.
She died of a heart attack during a burglary in her house. It happened few weeks ago.”
“Yeah? Why do you want to know? What’s it to you, Dunc?”
I leaned my hot forehead against the cool window glass. “I’m interested,” I hedged.
“Interested, my hairy ass. You wake me up at this un-fucking-godly hour because you’re interested ?” Gant paused for a moment. “This is about a woman, right?”
“None of your goddamn business,” I told him.
“Bullshit. At this hour, it’s definitely my business,” Gant bitched.
“I knew this would happen. Goddamn over-compensating freak that you are. You act like a fucking monk for years at a time. It was just a matter of time till you blew your top. So it’s finally happened, huh?
You’re obsessed with some girl? Tell me you’re not awake at this hour because you spent the entire night googling this woman’s entire life. Go ahead, tell me that.”
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” I said. “Don’t be a dick.”
“This poor woman has no idea what she’s in for. What does she have to do with the old lady who had the heart attack?”
“She’s the old lady’s daughter,” I said reluctantly. “Stop busting my balls and just get me the info.”
“You’ll have to wait. I won’t call my people until it’s a decent hour. That’s known as basic common courtesy. Baseline, elemental social skills. Ever heard of those? Go to bed, Dunc. Better yet, go jack off, and then go to bed. Later.”
Gant hung up. I tossed the phone onto the bed and spun the chair around to read Nell’s poems again. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but who cared?
They made something shift and flex inside my mind as I read them.
It felt strange, but good.