JJ licked her lips. “If-if I promise not to wear makeup, would you please stop that-swinging thing?”

“I merely use this as an example of what society has done to you. Just as it has taught you that because I take lives I must be some kind of monster. Just as it has taught you that your ephemeral life here on earth is so precious you must cling to it even when it is perfectly evident that your time is coming to an end.”

“I-I don’t want to die!”

“Darling,” he said, leaning close and whispering, “your life on earth is over. But because of my work, because of your sacrifice, we will all be translated to a better world, a happier one. We will leave behind this earthly plane of disappointment, discontent, and disillusionment. We will usher in a Golden Age.”

She trembled so much it was difficult for her to speak clearly. “Is-that-why I’m strapped to this table?”

“I would like to believe you have the strength to remain in position when the pendulum begins its final descent. That you would not run or attempt to save yourself. But the flesh is weak, even when the spirit is willing. And so much is at stake. I felt a few precautions were in order.”

“Where are my friends?” Her eyes followed the blade, back and forth, back and forth. It was so close now it never escaped her line of sight.

“They are in other rooms. Enjoying similar experiences I’ve devised for their delectation.”

She stared at the blade, barely an inch away now. “Is it going to hurt very much?”

“Yes,” he said, stroking her brow, “I’m afraid it is.” He pushed to his feet. “It’s almost time. I’ll leave you alone now.”

She quivered, then rocked hysterically, crying, wailing. And the pendulum kept swinging. She screamed hysterically. “Stop it! Please help me! Please!”

The pendulum swung again and this time she felt it crease her exposed flesh. She cried out. But it did not stop. Again it swung and again it cut her. A thin line of blood trickled to the surface. She cried out uncontrollably, insanely, crazed, her eyes wild with frenzy. The next pass would be the one, she knew. The next swing of the pendulum would kill her.

“Please, God! Someone! Help me!”

The pendulum descended even lower, sweeping toward her chest-

Then stopped.

She was so hysterical she couldn’t hold still. She arched her back and twisted, flinging herself from one side to the other, straining against her bonds, as if she’d lost all sense of time or place, all reason, all sanity.

Above her, holding the pendulum barely an inch from her breast, the Raven smiled.

The only thing more frustrating than knowing a killer is on the loose and not being able to do anything about it is knowing a killer is on the loose and not having anything to do. I was totally stymied. Waiting for reports. Waiting for lab results. Waiting for someone to give me the magic piece of information that would allow me to catch the miserable table-strapping picture-taking bastard once and for all. But that magic bullet was not forthcoming.

I thumbed through the stack of information that had trickled across my desk. They still hadn’t gotten a fix on who owned or had built the cabin out by the dam. Speculation was that hunters or fishers had slapped it together, maybe dug the basement to store or cure fresh kills. Edgar found it and took it over. Maybe killed the original occupants, who knows? There were few other dwellings in the area, and they had found no one who had any knowledge of who lived there. Some of the new FBI personnel working the case had managed to track down the identity of two of the girls found in Edgar’s basement-two out of twenty-two-by comparing the physical remains against old missing-persons reports in the FBI database. They were both runaways, both last seen in small towns in northern California about six months before. Although it was difficult to make reliable determinations about bodies so decomposed, the coroner believed they had been killed first, then brought to the shack sometime afterward. The logical conclusion was that our Edgar had a previous life-one in which he buzzed up and down the coast killing helpless girls, then dumped their corpses back here. All before the Poe motif fully developed.

I was feeling better. Not 100 percent, not even close, but given what that bastard put me through, I was pretty damn solid. I called Rachel, but she was out. Basketball game. Seems the team was still undefeated and if they won another game would be guaranteed a spot in the play-offs. Bully for them.

Called Lisa, too, but she was not at home.

Found a book on the corner of my desk, one I’d forgotten about in all the turmoil following my abduction. Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose-Poem. The only Poe I hadn’t read yet, as far as I knew. And weird as all get-out.

I opened the book and started to read. It was hard going. Strange. Poe as writer qua astrophysicist. Lots of cosmological theorizing, but couched in unscientific, poetic language that made it extremely difficult to follow. I’d read Poe’s bio-he was no scientist. Why had he written this? It was like Carl Sagan on an acid trip.

I had to reread a passage three times-some babble about irresistibly attractive forces-before I got any sense of what he was talking about. Then it occurred to me that what he was describing, an enormously powerful force in space sucking everything toward it, sounded a lot like a black hole. Did we know about those in Poe’s day?

Then there was the passage in the coded message Edgar sent us: From that one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.

Which, placed in context, sounded for all the world like the big-bang theory, once I read it over about six times and decoded some of the nonscientific terminology. My history of science was sketchy, but I thought that idea came later, that in Poe’s era people were still mostly buying into the Adam and Eve bit. How could Poe know this?

Normally, I tried to empathize with a living, breathing person, but this time, I let my mind wander into the psyche of this writer, long dead, who had penned this bizarre work. What was he trying to accomplish? And what did Edgar-our Edgar-get out of it? Why was this book so significant to him that he led us to it? It was baffling.

Until I started to see a weird sort of pattern emerging, a secret latticework woven between the sentences. And some disturbingly familiar terminology. Dream-Land. Ascension. Golden Age.

That was when I started to get it.

I was so absorbed in my reading I didn’t even notice the woman standing at the other end of my desk. She had to clear her throat, then drum her fingers.

“Thallium.”

I looked up. It was Jennifer Fuentes, the toxicologist.

I squinted. “You’re saying I need Valium? Do I seem stressed?”

“Not Valium. Thallium. A deadly poison.”

I pulled my head out of the book. “And the reason you’re saying this is…”

“I found it in Fara Spencer’s mouth, just like the O’Bannon kid predicted. I used a wide range of reagents for different hard-to-detect poisons. Thallium clicked. The spectrophotometer confirmed it. It had broken down, as any poison would over that period of time. So to double-check, I put the sample in a graphite tube and heated it to vaporize the poison. Put it under the blue light. Voilà. Thallium. Judging from what was left more than a week after her death, I’d say it was a significant dosage.”

“Enough to kill her?”

“Oh, yeah. Instantly.”

“So he took the heart out after she was dead.”

“I think so. Immediately thereafter, before the blood had a chance to coagulate.”