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pocket, and tossed it in the river. Then he rode his bike home to a neatly made bed.

 
    6
    Richmond, August 2010
    Felicia Stone stared dully at her new iPhone. She had bought it two days before, and already she hated it. Homicide investigators pretty much hated anything that woke them in the middle of the night, or like now, way too early in the morning. It usually meant only one thing: a new crime scene, a new stiff in the early stages of decomposition, a life destroyed, and a new hunt for yet another lost fucker. Luckily, before all that, there was time for coffee.
    She slipped out of the bed where she always slept alone. She answered the phone on the way to the coffeemaker, which was on the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room. It was Patterson, and she expected to get the usual overlong report full of assumptions and observations that were totally beside the point. Not that it really mattered. She put the phone on speaker, spooned coffee into the filter, and filled the coffeemaker with water. Soon the familiar chuffing sound served as the background for Patterson’s narrative.
    When he finished talking, she let the details sink in. This was something beyond the normal jealousy, greed, or drugs. Even though it was early, she was awake enough to realize that she had caught her first really big case since being assigned to the homicide division. It was a once-in-a-lifetime case, and she had no idea if she was ready for it.
    Before she hung up, she made her only contribution to the conversation:
    “I’ll be at the museum in twenty minutes.”
    She went to the bathroom and splashed some water on her face. She’d recently passed thirty, but she still looked young. Early in the morning she could see incipient bags under her eyes, but they were so small that they didn’t bother her much. Her dark hair was still shiny, and she kept herself in shape. She put on her clothes from the day before: blouse, jacket, and loose, light slacks with her police badge on her belt. Formal and unsexy. That was how a female homicide inspector should dress, neater than a male inspector, but not too much. On the job she was sexless. Maybe not in private either, she sometimes thought. She fastened her shoulder holster and service weapon under her jacket. Then she left the cramped apartment without taking a shower or putting on any makeup.
    In the car she thought of the lessons in poetry she’d had in high school. Her teacher had been a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, so Felicia Stone knew more about him than most of the other poets she was familiar with. But she’d never imagined she’d have much use for this knowledge in her job as a police officer. At least not until today.
    *   *   *
    What fascinated her most about Poe was the mysterious way he died.
    Edgar Allan Poe spent much of his childhood with foster parents in Richmond, Virginia. He then studied at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a while before he enlisted in the military. Oddly enough, it was in Richmond that he last enjoyed the full use of his mental faculties.
    On September 27, 1849, he left Richmond, where he had given a speech. The peripatetic author was supposed to continue on to Philadelphia to edit the poetry collection Wayside Flowers , by the lesser known American poet Marguerite St. Leon Loud. After several years of adversity, which included a tremendous consumption of alcohol, Poe was reportedly in the midst of a good period, and no one had seen him take a drink in more than six months.
    As Felicia Stone passed the Main Street Station, the elegant old railroad station in Richmond that was shut down in the 1970s and renovated in 2003, she tuned the radio to a classical music station. Music to think to. Listening to Beethoven, her mind went back to Poe.
    After he got on the train to Philadelphia, almost a week went by before anyone saw him again. When he finally resurfaced, he was not in Philadelphia, but in Baltimore, Maryland. Poe was