Lethe's Cipher

By Peter Sargent

A homeless man named Ted wakes up in the luxury car of a missing woman. When the police question him, he babbles about a man he claims will lead them to the woman, though Ted also says he has never met this man. Detective Lyons believes there is a secret meaning in Ted's incoherent monologues, though his superiors believe they are nonsense. When Lyons follows the case in his own time, he stumbles into the secret life of a powerful investor and his unexpected connection with the poorest of poor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Sargent
• Release date: Aug 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310725111

Peter Sargent

Peter Sargent's ancestors were lamplighters, steam train engineers, architects, firemen and preachers. He has a sense for the timbre and color of urban life and industry, coupled with a taste for philosophy and its questions of human destiny. With a classical training in mathematics, Peter spends most his career writing radar processing software. His fiction, mostly of the speculative variety, is the passion of his nights and weekends. A native of Greater Boston, Peter still resides in Massachusetts with his family. If you like his work, then you might consider liking him personally. Visit Peter Sargent's author page on Facebook and get notifications of upcoming work! https://www.facebook.com/petersargentscifi http://petergsargent.blogspot.com/

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Peter Sargent

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Lethe's Cipher

The police found Ted sleeping in a blue Jaguar XJ 220. It was parked in Chelsea under the Tobin bridge, with the key still in the lock. The car belonged to Norma Stern, who’d gone missing that morning. Ted, who carried no identification and refused to provide his last name, was dressed in a hooded Harvard sweatshirt and cargo pants. His many pockets were full of neatly folded papers covered in Bible passages. He looked like a homeless man who’d stumbled across an unlocked luxury car. He didn’t look like a kidnapper or a murder – but hell, when you find a guy sleeping in a car that belongs to a very rich and very absent woman, you haul his ass in. Besides, what else did Ted have planned for that day? He complied with the police and didn’t speak much when they put him in the cruiser, except to say that he hadn’t urinated in that car so you had to give him credit for that.

* * * *

At that moment, Manuel Stern, the husband of the missing woman, was standing in the library of his Commonwealth Avenue townhouse. He was providing details of Norma’s disappearance to Bill Lyons, a Boston Police inspector, but to Lyons the man looked bored. The library was a mezzanine in the family room. It hung on the wall across from a massive window and Stern’s eyes were fixed on that window as if he were hoping to escape through it.

Lyons saw a children’s book on the floor and used it to bring Stern’s attention back.

Do you have children? he said.

Yes. She’s still in school; she doesn’t know yet. Stern turned back to Lyons and saw what he was looking at. He picked up the book, which was open to a page with a drawing of a bear in a castle, and shut it. He held it against his chest with two arms crossed over it, obscuring the cover. Ally, our daughter.

He pointed his nose at a photograph.