Omphalos

By Gerald Lynch

When Eugene DeLint, the head of Omphalos, the world’s dominant philanthropic organization, is found murdered, Detective Kevin Beldon is called in. Beldon, who readers will be familiar with from Lynch's previous novels, Missing Children and Troutstream, has been on medical leave, and he brings along much personal and professional baggage: his wife Cynthia is a recent suicide, his absent son Bill is a disappointment, and his daughter Kelly, who began her legal career at Omphalos, is emotionally distant with him. Kevin is still disturbed from his failure the year before to have solved the so-called Widower serial killings. He still suspects that the escaped Widower was connected to Omphalos, and secretly he views Eugene DeLint’s murder as a last chance to solve the Widower case and so absolve his wife of the sin of suicide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Oct 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773240138

Gerald Lynch

Gerald Lynch has authored seven books and edited some dozen others, including three previously in the Reappraisals series. His critical studies include Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (McGill-Queens University Press, 1988) and The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles (University of Toronto Press, 2001). He has published numerous short stories, essays and reviews, including a number on the writings of Munro. He is a former winner of the National Magazine gold award for short fiction, and has been teaching at the University of Ottawa since 1985.

Book preview

OMPHALOS

GERALD LYNCH

Doug Whiteway, Editor

logo: Signature Editions.

© 2017, Gerald Lynch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Doowah Design.

Photo of author by Maura Lynch, Crow Photography.

Acknowledgements

Once again I am very much indebted to the Signature Editions team: to publisher (and editor) Karen Haughian for her continuing devotion to real publishing in a world that one day must thank her commensurately for keeping the fire burning; to publicist Roanne Solitario for her energized dedication to making our books better known; and to editor (and writer) Doug Whiteway, the best editor with whom I’ve worked, for his sharp eye and sound ear, for his knowledge, intelligence, and good humour. To Mary Jo I owe far too much to begin covering at the end of a brief acknowledgements; she has been the better part of me for so long that any such attempt would be tantamount to thanking myself.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lynch, Gerald, 1953-, author

          Omphalos / Gerald Lynch.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77324-012-1 (softcover).

--ISBN 978-1-77324-013-8 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8573.Y43O47 2017    C813’.54    C2017-904694-2

    C2017-904695-0

Signature Editions

P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

www.signature-editions.com

for

Kevin, Sean, and Francie

By the Same Author

Fiction

Omphalos

Missing Children

Exotic Dancers

Troutstream

Kisbey

One’s Company

Non-Fiction

The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles

Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity

Edited

Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art: Critical Essays (with Janice Fiamengo)

The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy (with Shoshanna Ganz and Josephene Kealey)

Leacock On Life

Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story (with Angela Arnold)

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock

Familiar Ground: A Prose Reader (with David Rampton)

Short Fiction: An Introductory Anthology (with David Rampton)

The Canadian Essay (with David Rampton)

Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal

Prose Models (with David Rampton)

The Rising Village, by Oliver Goldsmith

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

About the Author

I’ve seen the future, brother:it is murder.

Leonard Cohen

Chapter 1

The early hours of a Sunday morning in mid-August, with Ottawa coughing dryly in another heat wave like a mouthful of drought. High above its shuffling world of cheaply patched street people just looking for a safe place to lie down, high above the jaundiced security lighting whose nightly sizzling seemed to continue microwaving exposed skin, and high atop Omphalos working away on one of his legendary letters to a new find sat Eugene DeLint.

The expansive office had to be kept chilled so DeLint could always comfortably sport one of his signature baby-blue jackets which, as a result of his bulk and the slight hump, rode up behind like the cresting vest of an obese waiter. Dead silent too, the office, but for the click of DeLint’s splitting pistachios with his teeth and the thp of his spitting the shells into a big black wok on the floor.

Click…thp. …Click…thp. …Click…thp. …

Floor-to-ceiling PANOGLAZ formed the room’s two exterior walls, blocking UV by day and enhancing by night what natural illumination there was, though the pissy lighting from below still paled against the bright island of DeLint’s desk. Large as it was, and cluttered, even it was dwarfed in the office space that occupied a quarter of the seventeenth floor of Omphalos. The desk’s surface was dominated by the big glass crock of red-dyed pistachio nuts and a twelve-by-sixteen holo frame. DeLint’s rosy fingers dipped continuously into the crock as his gaze compulsively found the likeness of his deceased mother (smile-enhanced). He slowly turned his buffalo head and squinted at its faint reflection in the window opposite, then found the holo again, pained looks for both himself and her.

She had always insisted that he was husky, that the other kids were afraid to pick him for football and box-lunch sharing. Such purported cowardice had dogged him through time and space — south to the Ivy League where, as a seventeen-year-old prodigy, he was just so much smarter, already much more fully fledged, than the other ambitious legal eaglets at Harvard. It was an established psychological fact that girls just couldn’t take competition from a better-looking boy, such as her Gene, what with his naturally wavy sandy hair and, it had to be said, prettier face (this last solace was always accompanied by a painful cheek-pinch and spit-slicking, even as recently as a year ago). It was envy pure and simple that motivated competitors to trip him up at every step along the career path. But Mom, his rock and springboard (as he still often described her), had lovingly urged him over every hurdle, mothering his threatened failures to manly successes.

And now she was gone.

And things had gone downhill at Omphalos ever since, for…over a year, at least, it felt; yes, at least eleven months…anyway. (Inexplicably, calculating was weirdly difficult this early Sunday morning.)

Tears from both eyes tracked to the corners of his mouth, where he tasted their salt with reaming tongue tip. His feelings were as real as any loving child’s, they were. Though the saline residue could have come from the pistachios. Anyway, she’s dead. Omphalos was all his.

The eyes shifted back to business, his letter to the new find. The fat hand moved.

Click…thp.

Because the top of the glass jar of pistachios curled thickly, DeLint could pinch and remove only one nut at a time. He transferred the red pod to his mouth where, with the forepart of his tongue, he pressed it against the palate and, heavily lidded eyes shutting sumptuously, sucked out the salt. Then he worked the nut forward with wiggling tongue tip, finished cracking it, sorted shell from meat with dexterous tongue, swallowed without chewing, and spat the faded remainder into, or towards, the big black wok — thp.

The wok, the largest Administrative Assistant Anna Kynder could find, was a gift from the girls, the secretariat. But the gaping bowl still caught only half the spat shells. Someone still had to clean up DeLint’s nightly mess. No problem, because the girls adored Eugene. He all but lived at Omphalos, he still wrote beautiful longhand drafts of all his correspondence, and he never forgot an occasion with expensive gift. No one could be less sexually threatening than Eugene DeLint. Still, there remained something icky in the chore of cleaning up the mess around his desk, a repulsive something to try any real woman’s morning stomach.

Click…thp.

He looked up from his letter-writing, a tiny beige-pink nut in his teeth. He furrowed his big brow and called past the shell, Don?… Did you change your mind then, Mr. McNicol, respecting some wee-hours work, as ’twere?

Nothing.

Click…thp.

He returned to his letter, the fist dipped, if a touch more clumsily. He paused again, crinkled the beetling brow and looked up at the repeated sound.

"Ewan…Doctor Randome? I thought you were at that big shrinks’ confab in Florida?… If that is you, Ewan, as I told you: we have nothing more about which to discuss Psychiatric Wellness and Omphalos finances. … Don?… Mrs. Kynder? …"

DeLint returned to work, his letter to the new find. With first letters to finds, Eugene DeLint was always careful, especially considerate of length: not too long, but expansive and warmly probing. Through Administrative Assistant Anna Kynder he’d learned the new man’s name, Mark Prendergast, and his Omphalos sector, Essential Supplements. The week before, Mark Prendergast had stood behind DeLint at the executive meeting of World Food Bank (the earliest incarnation of Omphalos itself, and now a failing subsidiary). Anticipating nicely, Prendergast had poured his water just so, like he enjoyed rendering service to his president. His hip bone had pressed, or at least brushed, DeLint’s beefy shoulder.

DeLint was a star-maker, famous all over the capital for spotting talent. He preferred young men; the only woman he’d ever favoured, Kelly Beldon from the legal temp pool, was currently a federal Crown prosecutor. More than that, Ms. Beldon was already being touted, young as she was, for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, should the lone female judge be the next to die.

DeLint appeared to smile menacingly because of the shell in his teeth.

Click…thp.

The famous Dr. Ewan Randome had also been one of DeLint’s finds (if Mother’s, actually). Though more often lately he felt like Randome’s boy. That just went to show the deteriorating impasse that had been reached at the highest echelon of Omphalos. He was right, per usual: Ewan had to go. They would have the biggest Omphalos blowout ever for him, the cream of two nations’ capitals would be invited, blah-blah-blah. But go Randome must. The bad doctor no longer had Eugene’s best interests — or Omphalos’s — at heart, especially not since Mom…passed… Whatever concerned lies Randome told at their weekly sessions. Or went to her reward, her just reward. Yes, much better.

Again a noise made DeLint look up from his desk. Has Head Secretary Don McNicol changed his mind and decided on an early morning interview? Don had reported to DeLint that his, DeLint’s, therapeutic corporate autobiography was coming along just fine, but that Dr. Randome had ordered him, Don, to get more material from DeLint of an intimate nature. Don had shown DeLint the memo from Dr. Randome: If Eugene’s bibliotherapy is to succeed in re-establishing Omphalos’s true global charity mission, then Gene must share more of an intimate nature. The planet’s psychological wellness depends upon it!

The closing appeal had almost worked, as it represented the good old Ewan, the caring Randome. But Don’s still not getting more, of an intimate or any other nature, thank you. Don knows too much already. Her Gene had been careless respecting Omphalos business. Mother would kill him, were she…

He puckered up, because now, along with finishing the letter to the new find, Mark Prendergast, he must pen the letter-cum-report that would initiate Dr. Ewan Randome’s termination at Omphalos. That eventuality would have broken Mother’s heart. Ewan had been her pet.

DeLint combed his fingers through thinning hair, brushed Mother with another glance, then stared again at his pale reflection in the window as he flicked hair from his fingers like waving bye-bye to a baby.

Why so much hair?

Again a noise from the hallway caught his attention. Hadn’t he left the door farther ajar than that?

DeLint’s bulbous eyes appeared heavier-lidded than usual, puffier, and pink-rimmed. For some reason this early morning, the nondescript stub of a nose had started depositing mucus at the top of his throat, so that between nuts he now must snort and swallow.

When younger and somewhat less husky, he had been profiled in the Ivy Alumni as having that Kennedy look. But if applicable at all this morning, it could be only to DeLint as caricature of a Kennedy, with the matted forelock not so much draping the big brow as pasted there. Only the dead gaze of the eternally promising, aged boy remained, and it was that disappointed boy who now looked hopefully towards the wedge of hall light at the far end of the room.

Mrs. Kynder?…

Nothing. Did he believe in ghosts? Yes. So did Dr. Randome. And so did Mom.

Mmmm… Mom?

No one will ever love you like I do, Gene.

So soothing, always, her living voice inside him. At least Ewan was still helping with that.

Becalmed, fortified, he paused further to reflect on his few… he wouldn’t call them failures. Rather boys who hadn’t worked out. Disappointments. Yes, finds who’d become disappointments. They’d disappointed him, and after all he’d done for their careers. But why think of them at all?… He knew the answer all too well, for he lived in daily terror of another failure’s returning and confronting him with more lies. Then the routine, the scene, security called. The legal team alerted. Expensive settlement. Randome on his case. Mother not speaking for weeks.

Reaching blindly he knocked his right pinkie knuckle against the glass lip of the crock of pistachio nuts, and cursed a blue streak while shaking the offended hand like trying to throw off something sticky.

And don’t forget: the so-called Widower is still at large, as the stupid police say. Almost a year had passed since that Detective Beldon — Kelly Beldon’s dad! — had insinuated a connection between Omphalos and the Widower serial killings. Acting then as assistant Crown prosecutor, Ms. Beldon had helped outsiders almost gain deep access to Omphalos! That’s gratitude for you!

Click…thp. But in his strangely creeping weakness, DeLint was unable to project the shell sufficiently, and its two halves stuck to his chin, one down, the other up, like inny and outty bellybuttons.

Omphalos is our baby, Gene, yours and mine, never forget that.

The Widower, yes. I’ve been the goddamned widower since you abandoned me!

I will always be with you, Gene. But right now you must do what you have to to save our child, Omphalos.

Still at large. He could find him.

From the jowls down Eugene DeLint was unrecognizable as the Kennedyesque wunderkind who, answering his country’s call (Mother’s) and reputedly sacrificing a lucrative legal career in the big leagues (Washington), had returned to Ottawa (the bush leagues) from a temporary teaching assistantship at Harvard’s pre-law school to unite Canada’s charitable organizations under the banner Omphalos Philanthropics (Mother had begun the promising work years before with Canada’s Food Bank and had come to believe that a male figurehead was necessary to advance Omphalos’s charitable mission, and who better than her Gene?).

Through the years, Omphalos had grown exponentially, sub-Sahara Africa starved further, and the Philanthropics was quietly dropped (which helped early on with tax audits because no one could determine what Omphalos meant or was supposed to mean, charity-wise). In pace with the widening mandate and outreach of Omphalos’s global conglomeration, DeLint himself had grown until he looked, and never more so than at present, like a cartoonish Kennedy moulting at a huge desk in a hangar of an office perched atop Canada’s former National Defence Buildings (three proximate grey boxes of terraced heights) alongside low-rise Ottawa’s world-heritage Rideau Canal.

Click…thp. Whew (it was getting awfully hot).

Having manoeuvred the depleted Canadian military out of the stolid Department of National Defence buildings, DeLint had found the tallest structure too rectilinear. So its roof was capped with a copper dome that answered (or might one day) the pale green-roofed Parliament Buildings beyond the canal. Soon that dome was punningly known far and wide as DeLint’s Button.

Along with the signature baby-blue jackets, a more recent affectation was white pants, because (an ironically joking) Ewan Randome had told him they were slimming. Anxious now, he repeatedly spread and clapped his thighs, and the effect was of two carelessly amorous belugas.

Don? he called again into the spectral end of the spacious office. "Did you change your mind, Mr. McNicol? He sang: I hope, Head Secretary, that you have something to sho-ow me! Then barked: Like my life story!… That better not be you lurking out there, Ewan…Mrs. Kynder?…Anna? His tune ended with a prayerful, near whimpering Mom?"

This time he distinctly heard footsteps retreat beyond the open office door. Then dead silence.

Ah well. As Mom said at least once a week on bed-stripping day, it will all come out in the wash.

He returned to his letter, warming to the task. In fact, he was definitely feeling way too warm. He undid the second and third buttons of his check shirt, but wouldn’t rise to remove the jacket the colour of a sick robin’s egg. The skin at his throat had the look of stippled ceiling. He scratched idly there, but soon with intent, raising a rosy rash. Had the girls forgotten to set the A/C for weekend work?

The air conditioning was powered by Omphalos’s own diesel generators in the sub-basement power plant. Jake Shercock never slept. DeLint fingered three numbers on the glass desktop console and, compulsively secretive, touched the encryption icon. He spoke softly into the cool air:

"Jake? Check the climate-control for my office, will you?… You’re sure? It’s getting hotter than hell up here!… Of course I know! I don’t like to complain, but… Well, make goddamn sure again it’s working such as it well should be… What was that?… Why, you little piece of shit! Consider your ass fired! I’ll —"

He was suddenly sucking scarce air, so he pinched hard on the bridge of his nose for a hit from the aspirator implant…and settled some.

Soon again the only motions were DeLint’s stained right fingers dipping blindly into the crock of pistachios, though he now knocked his knuckles against the curled fat lip with every dip, and felt nothing. Finished the letter, he signed it with a weak flourish. He blinked strenuously and shook his head, then read with the settling smile of a satiated child tipping towards sleep.

FROM THE DESK OF EUGENE DELINT

FOUNDER, PRESIDENT, AND CEO ETC. OF OMPHALOS

"Charity Is Our Business"

Dear Mr. Prendergast (Mark),

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m a man just like you who takes his pants off one leg at a time. The fact that I am Eugene DeLint (Gene to my intimates, among whom I hope I will be permitted soon to number yourself) should not be permitted to faze you one way or the other one iotum. I am a worker here at Omphalos, pure and simple, just as you are too simple and pure. I don’t mean that to sound supercilious, just because I am Founder, President, Chief Financial Officer, and Chair of the Board of Governors of Omphalos, etc. I would say you have the brightest of bright futures here, too, Mr. Prendergast! If you play your cards with abandon and follow all my rules. Now shut up, Mark, and listen up!

You are new to our team, which I like to think of as a family. But I was new here once too, there at the Genesis. You will find as your time here evolves (and I trust it will be a lengthy evolution!) that, as in any family (or on any team), certain jealousies are directed at the most promising and gifted fresh members of the family/team, invariably those who have the most to offer and contribute on display on the table and when taking the initiative in the locker room!

If I may take some little liberty: I insist upon your not allowing such jealousy, when it invariably sticks up its serpentine head, as it will for one as obviously brilliant and attractive as yourself (I’ve already taken one tiny liberty to personally peruse your file) to put you off your game, whatsoever it may evolve to eventually be. I don’t want to be seen to be prying into private matters though. NOW DON’T BE EMBARRASSED, Mark!!!

My personal motto has always been: Screw the little guy. By which I only mean those who are small-minded, and intend no insult to boys or the vertically challenged man (joke). But not literally needless to say (seriously whatsoever vile rumour you may have heard).

I wanted, though, in a sincere, slightly older-brotherly spirit, to take this opportunity to personally welcome you into our Omphalos family individually. Mottoes are disposable things, but ours — which I composed — is retainable:Charity Is Our Business. That’s Omphalos. That’s I. (Or should that be me?)

Irregardless, I would like to invite you to a private, all-informal luncheon in my personal suite on Tuesday at 11:45, to which I will, or shall rather, assume you are coming unless beforehand you phone my current head secretary Don McNicol or my administrative assistant: Anna Kynder; to cancel well beforehand in advance. I wish you the very best for your future propensities, proclivities and propositions here at Omphalos, Mark. I remain,

In Celebration of Ourselves,

Eugene DeLint

PS. One premature piece of advice occurs to me: until he’s officially terminated, be wary of Jake Shercock in the power plant. Ditto Dr. Ewan Randome.

One down, one to go: the letter-cum-report to initiate Randome’s termination.

But he was burning up! Perspiration was softening his scalp, drops of sweat were coursing his temples, and his forelock was sopping. Communicating with new finds always warmed him, but not to this degree! He was literally cooking!… It’s had to be the thermostat. He’d have that dwarf Jake Shercock’s balls on a shish kabob!

His plump pink forefinger, like part of a steamed lobster, hovered at the desk pad, then dropped from even that effort. Besides, what more could he say to dwarf Shercock in his subterranean power plant? Ewan suspected him of secret surveillance. He knew too much for his own good…must go…

DeLint was suddenly deeply flushed all over, and dizzy, and getting hotter by the second. His scalp was on fire!

He let the big head loll and roll, and for a brief spell the relief of moving air about the wattles was like Mother blowing gently on the damp crevices of his neck and chins, as she’d done during the torpid nights of the First Drought. He tried to fix his smile on her phasing holo. Idiot tech. He blinked hard. She was the one had really run Omphalos, admi…tit…puppet love…the sick…cun…c-u-n-t…sorry!…Mom.

When he looked up again, the room appeared darker. There: somebody had moved past him on the left… Good…he’s come…at last…for his…

Mo-om, pa-lease…I’m your…don’t make me…pa-lea…

A noise — a nightmare’s raving whispering — pulled his burning chin off his enflamed breast, and with all his will he held still and squinted into the dim distance. Wanted to rise now. Couldn’t. There was someone darkening the doorway, an arm raised, pointing.

Who? he managed. I’m on fire…Hel…p…me.

A voice, soft and low, and distantly familiar: "Look what you’ve brought me to, Gene."

Mom?…

A scream filled the room — "Machetazo!" — and the air was a whoosh of avenging steel wings.

DeLint blinked his harrowing eyelashes once. A premonition of parting was the last impulse to fix his mind for an infinitesimal moment. Then a searing tickle of fire — itself perhaps the briefest intimation — ended all consciousness, and a big buzz consumed creation instantly, a snapping off of the Big Bang’s light switch. Then separation.

Eugene DeLint’s head tilted forward to the right, bounced off the edge of the desk and landed face-up in the shell-littered wok with a sound of shifting beach shingle. Blood spurted from above and the eyes blinked once before standing open in the red rain.

Chapter 2

"Very well, thank you, Doctor…Ewan. Was that a steel guitar playing ‘Julia’? Strange, as you said it would sound at first, then lovely. It’s as moving as hearing Lennon singing it to his mother.

"Sorry, Ewan, I don’t have CATVID. Anyway, I’m standing here starkers, no matter you’d see only my mug. ‘Julia’ alone will have to do for now. But I look forward to hearing the whole album at my next appointment. Tomorrow morning, right?

Well, yes, I am on the shitty public bud… Ewan. Ewan?

Near-naked Detective Inspector Kevin Beldon set down the earbud and was arrested by his ghostly reflection in the balcony door. He half-turned and over his left shoulder appraised the state of his sagging grey jockeys: like an old man’s scrotum. He couldn’t remember when he’d put them on clean.

Change then, old man!… Shower and change. You’ve got a date with an angel.

He looked down at the maple dining table and picked up a hardcover copy book, black and pimply. The blank volume was a gift from his therapist, Dr. Ewan Randome, the renowned head of Psychiatric Wellness at Omphalos. Dr. Randome had fixed a white label to the front cover, on which he’d written in fancy Gothic script: The Near Future. Kevin slipped out the silver pen clipped to the spine, flipped open the book, and wrote:

In the near future, old-white-man loneliness will be the only acceptable joke.

This supposedly was helping, part of the good doctor’s so-called bibliotherapy. In the near future Kevin Beldon would achieve psychological wellness through writing such nonsense. That was the plan, anyway. Dr. Randome read Kevin’s entries at the start of each weekly session, often chuckling, or squinting at Kevin from sparkling pale-blue eyes and asking for elaboration, or laughing heartily in a way few risked anymore (because so many were made uncomfortable by laughter). Sometimes Dr. Randome would gloss the cryptic entries with a line from the Beatles: We can work it out, or All you need is love, or something equally banal. He was an ardent Beatlemaniac. One of that week’s entries in The Near Future would launch their talk. Kevin was charged with making at least one entry per day. If he could he’d have a session with Dr. Randome every day. But their next session was not till the next day, Monday morning, at Randome’s private practice in Sandy Hill.

What he really needed was to get out more, not just to the life-saving therapy sessions. Detective Kevin Beldon was a man who needed action in the real world, not these old tails he kept chasing around in his head, his regrets about the near past. Where were all the murderers when you needed them? Didn’t crime waves go with heat waves in those bad old movies? Bring the criminals!

His daughter, Kelly, now a Crown prosecutor, once said that his moral code was primitive. That’s not true, he’d countered. He valued the rule of law above all else.

She’d shot back, That’s what I mean, Kevin.

But what did that mean? And why had she taken to calling him Kevin?… God bless her. It was Kelly who had arranged things with Dr. Randome and dragged him out of the apartment and driven him to the first session, which really had been life-saving. Kelly knew Dr. Randome from her own brief stint in the legal temp pool at Omphalos years ago. But did everybody in this backwater capital have a connection to Omphalos?… Yes. And Kelly must have called in a big favour to get such high-level help for her dad.

The day’s entry in The Near Future done, he snapped the book shut and dropped it onto the table. At the balcony door he paused to look through his ghostly reflection, then slid the glass and dipped to avoid hitting his head again. Out on the small balcony and looking down at himself, he smirked at his legs: thin poles of legs, hardly bigger at the thighs than the calves, pale streaks of misery, and still hairy red like some orangutan’s. Though only his legs.

Red. No one called him Red anymore. Whitey would be more appropriate now, and for going on years, truth be told. But he was no Whitey. Only Cynthia, his late wife, had continued calling him Red, and in recent years she’d had to explain to new acquaintances: Kevin had flaming red hair — and not so long ago either. She’d make her scowling face: It was his secret weapon, that head of fire, way up there, scared the shit out of criminals, or at least their confessions. Now Kevin has experience.

Now, Cyn, I have nothing. Because of the Widower, I have nothing. Because the Widower made me his last widower, I have nothing. I should just go to my Nothing reward. Who knows, maybe I’d find you again in Nothing, my Love.

It had started like nothing, the Widower case. Kevin’s oldest and only remaining friend on the force, Chief Frank Thu, mentioned in passing what seemed the routine suicide of a middle-aged woman. Obviously, something about it had to have been nagging Frank, but Kevin hadn’t twigged, so the chief had handed off to Detective Otto Parizeau.

Then a second suicide, same profile as the first. MYCROFT, their near-intelligent computer (and getting nearer with every new version), determined that both couples had stashed their considerable fortunes in an offshore account traceable only to the wives. The accounts had been emptied, but not by the new widowers.

Then a third middle-aged woman turned up dead, same M-O: left neatly on her bed like a body in a coffin, apparent suicide by self-poisoning. There were a couple of things similarly unconventional about all three deaths: no suicide notes, and the poisons weren’t pills or anything handily available. The killing mixture had been constituted of chemicals even MYCROFT had trouble identifying. As in the first two deaths, the secret bank account of the third had been hacked using hundreds of proxy servers. The light-speed transferral of funds could not be traced, though MYCROFT suspected (with fifty-two-percent accuracy) that Pyongyang National was the ultimate, if likely penultimate, destination. MYCROFT was coaxed into going out on a cyber-limb and speculating (if refusing an accuracy rating) two locales for the money’s final destination: Beijing or Port-au-Prince. The Haitian capital was only a mild surprise.

The fourth victim followed in a month, same method, exotic poison. Alert for the funds transferral, MYCROFT was able to determine that the action twice accessed anonymous proxy servers in rogue state Haiti. Again: no