His Ex-Wife Gave Birth Seven Months After Their Divorce—Then a Nurse Handed Him a Mysterious Key

The call didn't come to my phone. It came over the longshoremen’s private radio frequency that Mateo had hooked up through the Buick’s dash.

*“Grant. It’s Chen. We have a problem at the service gate.”*

The voice was distorted by the sleet, crackling through the small speaker with a dry, static hiss that made the hair on my arms stand up.

*“Three men... they aren't state police. They have commercial recovery plates on two flatbeds. They’re trying to hook the emergency generator for the chapel wing.”*

"Victor," Mateo growled, his boot hitting the floorboards, the Buick’s rear tires breaking loose on the wet cobblestones of Mount Vernon Street before the heavy limited-slip differential locked and threw two tons of Detroit steel toward Charles Street.

"He isn't trying to steal the generator," I said, leaning forward against the dash, my fingers digging into the vinyl. "He’s trying to kill the power to the choir loft. If the temperature drops below sixty in that organ room, Leo won't last twenty minutes."

"He knows he’s finished," Mateo said, spinning the wheel to avoid a municipal salt truck that had broadsided an ambulance at the corner of Cambridge. "He’s doing this for spite, Grant. Victor Vance doesn't leave witnesses when he’s facing twenty years in Cedar Junction."

We crossed the Longfellow Bridge approach at sixty miles an hour, the wipers smearing the gray slush across the curved glass until the world outside looked like a photograph taken through a wet bottle.

St. Catherine’s was dark.

Not just the fourth floor—the whole south wing had gone black. The blue-spectrum phototherapy lamps, the high-frequency ventilators, the emergency exit signs—all extinguished. Only the red hazard beacons on the roof were blinking, powered by an auxiliary battery that had forty minutes of life left in its lead plates.

In the alley behind the chapel, the yellow flatbed was backed against the brick transformer vault.

Victor Vance was standing on the rear deck of the truck, wearing his three-piece flannel suit without an overcoat, his white hair plastered to his skull by the rain, holding a three-foot iron spud bar that he was driving into the main breaker assembly with the rhythmic, mechanical fury of a madman.

Standing below him, with a twelve-gauge Remington riot gun pointed toward the chapel doors, was the man in the yellow slicker whose fingers I had broken in the church.

"Mateo," I said. "Don't stop."

The Buick didn't slow down.

Mateo hit the high beams, the twin halogen lights cutting through the sheets of rain like two white spears, illuminating the man in the yellow slicker just as he turned toward the alley mouth.

The shotgun came up, but he was shooting with his left hand, his broken right fingers wrapped in a bloody dishtowel, and the heavy lead shot went wide, punching six jagged holes through the brickwork above the chapel door.

The Buick’s bumper hit the rear tire of the flatbed at thirty-five miles an hour.

The impact was a massive, ringing shock that threw me forward against the dash, my seatbelt locking so hard it bruised my collarbone through my shirt. The flatbed groaned, its rear axle sliding four feet across the greasy asphalt, pinning the man in the slicker between the two chassis with a wet, heavy crunch that ended his interest in the Waverly Family Trust forever.

Victor dropped the spud bar.

He didn't run. He jumped from the truck bed onto the roof of the Buick, his heavy leather shoes denting the sheet metal with two loud *thuds*, then came down over the windshield, his nickel-plated automatic—no, he had lost that in the church—a long, heavy hunting knife in his fist, the blade flashing blue under the alley lights.

The windshield shattered into ten thousand white beads of safety glass.

I kicked my door open, rolling out onto the wet asphalt before the blade could clear the dashboard. The cold water soaked through my trousers instantly, but the shock cleared the bell-ringing in my ears.

Victor came off the hood like a panther.

He was seventy-one, but he had spent forty years killing men for my mother in places where people didn't call the police, and his knife moved with a short, upward rip that missed my throat by the thickness of a thumbnail, slicing through the collar of my poplin shirt and cutting a three-inch line across my collarbone.

I felt the burn, but there was no blood yet—the cold was too deep.

I didn't reach for the .45. It had slipped under the Buick’s front seat during the crash.

I grabbed his wrist with both hands, using my body weight to drag him down into the slush. We hit the asphalt together, rolling into the brick wall of the transformer vault, our boots kicking against the iron casing of the smashed breaker.

His left hand—the one with the titanium shears—came out of his coat, the blunt points aiming for my eye.

I threw my forehead into his face.

The crack of his broken cheekbone was even louder this time, a sickening, wet crunch that made his whole body go slack for half a second. It was all I needed.

I twisted his right arm behind his back until the shoulder joint popped with the dry, distinct sound of a green pine branch breaking under a boot, then drove his face down into the four inches of freezing slush that had accumulated in the gutter.

He fought—he had the terrible, blind strength of an old dog that knows it’s being drowned in a bucket—but I didn't let go.

I held him down, my knees on his spine, my fingers tangled in the greasy white hair at the base of his skull, until the thrashing stopped. Until his legs straightened out with a long, final shudder, and the only movement in the alley was the steam rising from the Buick’s cracked radiator into the falling sleet.

Mateo appeared beside me, holding his left ribs, his face gray with shock.

"The chapel," he gasped. "The loft... Grant... the power’s gone."

I didn't look at Victor Vance.

I left him lying in the gutter where he had put three other men during my father's time, and I ran through the chapel door.

The stairs to the organ loft were completely dark.

I had to climb by touch, my bloody hands feeling the cold iron spirals, my boots slipping on the slick treads. The smell of cedar was gone, replaced by the bitter, dry chill of outside air that had begun to pour through a broken skylight above the pipes.

"June!" I shouted into the black.

A match flared.

Then a candle—a thick, yellow beeswax candle from the chapel altar—flickered to life on the wooden organ bench.

June was sitting there, but she wasn't alone.

Mara was there.

She was sitting on the floorboards with her back against the lowest wooden pipe, wrapped in three blankets, her face the color of wood ash, her hands holding the wicker Moses basket against her drawn-up knees.

Dr. Chen was kneeling beside her, his fingers holding a battery-powered penlight between his teeth while he adjusted a manual rubber bulb that was feeding air through a plastic tube into Leo’s mouth.

"He's breathing," Mara whispered.

Her voice was so thin it was barely audible above the rattle of the sleet on the tin roof, but it was clear. The fever-glaze was gone from her eyes.

"Mara," I said, falling to my knees in front of her, my hands hovering over the basket, afraid to touch the two tiny scraps of life wrapped in the wool.

"I heard the car," she breathed, her hand coming out of the blanket to touch my cheek. Her fingers were warm now—not the cold clay of the recovery room, but the living, salt warmth of a woman who had fought her way back from the edge of the pit because she knew her children had no one else to stand between them and the dark. "Grant... your face."

"It's nothing," I said. "The power... we’ll get them to Mass General now. The feds have the warrants. Eleanor is gone, Mara. It's over."

She looked down at the basket.

Leo had his thumb in his mouth. It was a thumb no larger than a white bean, but he was sucking on it with a rhythmic, fierce determination, his little chest moving with a steady, even beat that didn't have a rattle in it.

Beside him, Julian had opened his eyes.

They were dark. Dark violet, like the sea off Mount Desert Island when the sun goes behind a summer squall. He looked at me—not with the blank, unseeing stare of a newborn, but with that strange, terrifying ancientness that infants have when they have survived something that would have killed a grown man.

"What did you name him?" Mara asked softly.

"I didn't," I said, leaning down until my mouth was against her hair, smelling the cedar, the rain, and the faint, sweet almond of her skin. "You named Leo. You name him."

Mara smiled—a tiny, cracked movement of her lips that made three small drops of blood appear on the skin, but she didn't care.