The Fourth Flame

By six in the evening, the rain had erased the city’s edges. The towers across the river appeared to be sinking, floor by floor, into the dark water, and the old industrial quarter had become a country of gutters, locked gates, and shining black streets.

Edgar Vale stood beneath the awning of a closed pharmacy and read the message again.

THIRD BODY. CANDLE ROOM. EASTERN BLEACHERY.

The words had been sent by an unknown number. Beneath them was a photograph: four candles arranged on a concrete floor, their flames reflected in a shallow pool of rainwater. Three burned steadily. The fourth had gone out.

Vale did not need to see the body. He knew the room.

He had invented it twenty years earlier, though invented was a word that required a certain generosity. In The Hollow Men, the killer called the place a chapel and used four candles to measure the victim’s final hour. The published scene contained an error that readers had admired as an eccentricity: the killer lit the candles counterclockwise, beginning with the one nearest the door.

That was not how Vale had done it.

He had lit the farthest candle first, then the two on the left, then the one nearest the door. He remembered the order because his hands had been shaking, and because the last wick had taken three attempts. He had written the wrong order deliberately when revising the manuscript. An error, he told himself, was the only fingerprint a writer could leave without being arrested.

The photograph showed the nearest candle burned almost to its base.

A fourth body had been found in the bleachery, according to the evening bulletin. Male, unidentified, seated upright against a brick wall. The police had not released the method. They had not needed to.

At the edge of the photograph, beyond the candlelight, someone had placed a small square of paper. Vale enlarged the image until the pixels broke apart. There was writing on it, but not enough to read.

“Mr. Vale?”

He turned. Detective Ione Mercer stood in the rain without an umbrella. She wore a dark wool coat and held a plastic evidence folder against her chest as if it were a book she had no intention of lending.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“I’m standing outside a pharmacy.”

“You shouldn’t be near this case.”

“I’m not near it. You came to me.”

Mercer’s expression did not alter. “You received the image before I did.”

That was almost a question. Vale slipped his phone into his pocket.