Once He Longs by Molly Black

Author:Molly Black [Black, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Three women in five days,” Claire said. “The residents of this city are going to start panicking unless we can show some progress pretty damn quickly.”

Beside her Wilson nodded and put the flashing lights on to help cut through the evening traffic. Outside, the city’s own lights sped past the car window. This was the freshest crime scene they would have visited since arriving in California, and both agents were hoping that would lead them to uncovering something that had so far eluded them.

Claire tried not to cloud her mind with what she thought she would find at the apartment. Or with what she hoped she would find. Nixon had given what sparse details he had at the time. A woman, dead, probably strangled, found on her bed. The same golden coin placed on her stomach.

Nixon had said that the killer could have been disturbed, so Claire was hoping he had made a mistake. Maybe he hadn’t had time to remove his fingerprints. She stopped herself from getting carried away.

Her mind went back to her vision. As well as the feeling of impending dread, the strange silver box was the thing that stuck in her memory. She had never seen anything like it before and couldn’t get her head around what it was. What its function was. Was it merely an incense burner?

It had seemed far too complicated for that. Perhaps it made predictions, her mind remembering the symbols that lay along the path the burning orange tip had followed.

She took out her cell phone and Googled “incense burners” and scrolled through the images. None looked remotely like what she had seen. Had she misunderstood what she was seeing? Had she not seen the box properly, and her mind had filled in the gaps, creating something that didn’t exist?

Claire didn’t think so. The image had been vivid, even if she hadn’t known what it was that she was actually looking at. She clicked on a photograph of an incense burner on her cell phone’s display. It was similar to those that some of her friends at college had had but was nothing like what she had seen in her mind’s eye.

It took her to a large online store that seemed to specialize in eastern and mystic paraphernalia. She flicked through the pages and pages, amazed at not just the variety of objects but also the cost. Some pieces were retailing for upwards of three hundred dollars.

She brought up the menu, thinking she would take another look at the coins to see if the description on this site gave a fresh angle.

Then something caught her eye.

Under a list of several different incense burners, there was a category that stayed her thumb.

Incense clocks.

She touched it with her thumb, and immediately, the screen was filled with a wide array of new objects. Almost all were nothing like what she was looking for. But the second from the last was close. It was a square box, with an intricate pattern carved into the surface.

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