Page 10 of Go Under

“Yeah. I think I just needed to work. Being at home cooped up and chasing my tail was driving me crazy.”

He cracked a smile. “That’s what Winters said. I told her it was a bad idea to put you back in the field so soon, and she said it was better for you to be at work looking for Cox than at home digging through garbage and snapping at flies. I guess she was right.”

Kate’s smile vanished. Marcus’s eyes widened. “Because of your injury,” he explained. “Injuries. Your concussion and your cracked ribs. I thought you needed more time to heal.”

“And Winters told you I was digging through garbage and snapping at flies.”

Marcus blinked. “Oh. Yeah, she thinks the whole obsession with your father and Cox… Well… I mean, I get that you have to be sure, but—”

“How did she know I was looking into it, Marcus?”

He frowned. “Poppy told her. Is that why you’re giving me the death stare? You thought I told her?”

This time, the redness made it all the way to Kate’s cheeks. She had assumed exactly that. In hindsight, it made perfect sense that Poppy—research genius but with the spine of an earthworm—had wilted the instant Winters caught a whiff of anything unusual and asked what she was doing. Winters had told Marcus because Kate was at least listening to Marcus and because Marcus was there to watch her.

“You know what?” Marcus said, “It’s on me. I brought it up. I’m sorry. Point is that I’m glad that you’re head’s in a good place. Please, pretty please with a cherry on top don’t let me ruin that.”

He sounded just pathetic enough that Kate was able to let go of her frustration, at least for now. She was feeling good, and she wasn’t going to let anyone ruin that right now.

She cleared her throat and said, “The rest of the cipher confirms the reason for Mace’s murder. ‘Gerald Mace bore false witness in deed if not in word, and buried the truth beneath his signature.’”

“That’s it?” Marcus asked.

“That’s it.”

“No other Bible verses?”

“No. Just the commandment, ‘Hey, Kate, look here, this is why I killed Gerald Mace,’ and that’s it.”

“Huh.”

He scratched his chin, which possessed only a one-day stubble instead of his usual three-day scruff. He’d cleaned up for his divorce. Even when he was leaving the woman, he was still obsessed with what Cheryl thought of him.

She tamped the unkind thought down firmly. She was not about to complicate their healing friendship with jealousy. They’d been there and done that. It hadn’t worked, tough shit, time to move on.

“Do you think it might be Cox after all then, since it’s calling you out directly?”

“No. I still don’t. Their seems to be a message there for me, but I don’t believe Cox was the actual killer this time.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You think another Quinn Marsh, maybe, someone with an actual personal connection to you?”

She pursed her lips. “Maybe. The false healer bit has me wondering, I’ll admit. And the general tone of this whole thing: the cipher, the murder, the forceful way the cipher was inscribed… it all reads personal to me.”

“We say that about every Commandment Killer, though.”

“No, not all of them. Thomas Brennan killed people he didn’t care one way or the other about. Emily Warren felt righteous anger toward her victims, but it wasn’t personal. Cox’s murders are highly personal, but only in how he uses them to talk to me.”

“Okay, touché,” Marcus said. “But what could they possibly be talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Kate admitted, “and I’ve certainly been digging enough that I should have found something if there was something to be found.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t know if the killer’s coming after me or only writing what Cox told them to write. I also can’t completely rule out the possibility that this is Cox demonstrating that he’s further losing his marbles.

“But it doesn’t feel like that to me. What it feels like is that the killer isn’t correcting someone for breaking a commandment, they’re sentencing someone for personally wronging them.”

“Hmm,” Marcus said. “If that’s the case, then we need to know who Gerald Mace pissed off.”

“And who else pissed them off,” Kate agreed.

She headed to the coffeemaker to start a new pot and to hide her expression from Marcus. It was true that she was far more sanguine about this message from Cox than she’d been about past messages, but that didn’t mean the allusion to her father didn’t disturb her. Was Cox saying he lied about someone?