Every Dead Thing

“So Remarr is going in, his one pair of gloves on, and maybe he spots the kid and it throws him. He probably starts to sweat. He goes into the house and finds the old lady. Bam! Second shock, but he goes to take a closer look, steadying himself as he leans over her. He touches blood and maybe considers wiping it away, but he figures wiping it away will only attract more attention to it and, anyway, he’s got his gloves.

“But the problem with latex gloves is that one pair isn’t enough. You wear them for too long and your prints start coming through. You get thrown, you start to sweat, the prints are gonna come through faster. Could be Remarr has been eating before he came out, maybe some fruit or some kind of pasta with vinegar. That causes extra moisture on the skin, so now Remarr is in real trouble. He’s left a print he doesn’t even know about, and now the cops, the feds, and difficult people like our good selves want to ask him about it. Ta-da!” He gave a small bow from the waist. Rachel gave him a round of applause. Louis just raised an eyebrow in resignation.

“Fascinating,” said Rachel. “You must read a lot of books.” Her tone was heavily ironic.

“He does, then Barnes and Noble gonna be grateful that their stolen stock being put to good use,” remarked Louis.

Angel ignored him. “Maybe I dabbled in these things, in my younger days.”

“Did you learn anything else, in your ‘younger’ days?” Rachel smiled.

“ Lot of things, some of them hard lessons,” said Angel with feeling. “Best thing I ever learned: don’t hold on to nothin’. If you don’t have it, can’t nobody prove you took it.

“And I have been tempted. There was this figure of a knight on a horse once. French, seventeenth century. Gold inlaid with diamonds and rubies. About this tall.” He held the palm of his hand flat about six inches above the table. “It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” His eyes lit up at the memory. He looked like a child.

He sat back in his chair. “But I let it go. In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.”

“So is nothing worth holding on to?” asked Rachel.

Angel looked at Louis for a while. “Some things are, yeah, but they ain’t made of gold.”

“That’s so romantic,” I said. Louis made choking noises as he tried to swallow his water.

Before us, the remains of our coffee lay cold in the cups. “Do you have anything to add?” I asked Rachel when Angel had finished playing to the gallery.

She glanced back through her notes. Her brow furrowed slightly. She held a glass of red wine in one hand and the light caught it, reflecting a streak of red across her breast like a wound.

“You said you had pictures, crime scene pictures?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Then I’d like to hold off until I’ve had a chance to see them. I have an idea based on what you told me over the phone, but I’d prefer to keep it to myself until I’ve seen the pictures and done a little more research. I do have one thing, though.” She took a second notebook from her bag and flicked through the pages to where a yellow Post-it note stuck out. “ ‘I lusted for her, but that has always been a weakness of my kind,’ ” she read. “ ‘Our sin was not pride, but lust for humanity.’ ”

She turned to me, but I already recognized the words. “They were the words this Traveling Man said to you when he called,” she said. I was aware of Angel and Louis moving forward in their chairs.

“It took a theologian in the archbishop’s residence to track down the reference. It’s pretty obscure, at least if you’re not a theologian.” She paused, then asked, “Why was the devil banished from heaven?”

“Pride,” said Angel. “I remember Sister Agnes telling us that.”

“It was pride,” said Louis. He glanced at Angel. “I remember Milton telling us that.”

“Anyway,” said Rachel pointedly, “you’re right, or partially right. From Augustine onward, the devil’s sin is pride. But before Augustine, there was a different viewpoint. Up until the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was considered to be part of the biblical canon. Its origins are a matter of dispute-it may have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, or a combination of both-but it does seem to have provided a basis for some concepts that are still found in the Bible today. The Last Judgment may have been based on the Similitudes of Enoch. The fiery hell ruled by Satan also appears for the first time in Enoch.

“What is interesting for us is that Enoch takes a different view of the devil’s sin.” She turned a page of her notebook and began to read again.

“ ‘And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose…’”