Ralph was driving and I was beside him, with Lien-hua and Brin in the backseat.
The women were talking quietly about the funeral. It sounded like Brin had moved past her issues with the sermon and she and Lien-hua were listing the people they’d seen there that they knew, discussing follow-up calls they might want to make to some of the family members who were grieving.
Ralph had just turned onto his road when my phone vibrated.
I tapped the screen and a text message came up from an unknown caller:
Cur homo mortalis caput extruis at morieris en vertex talis sit modo calvus eris.
“That’s weird,” I muttered.
“Whatcha got?” he asked.
“Somebody sent me a message in Latin.”
“Who’s it from?”
“I have no idea.”
The most obvious answer would have been Tessa, but this was from 426-2225, which wasn’t her number.
No area code came up.
I tapped at my screen to put a call through to the number but no one answered. No voicemail. After letting it ring a dozen times I hung up and called Cyber to have them trace the number.
The conversation in the backseat faded as our wives’ attention shifted toward what was going on in the front.
I copied the Latin text and pasted it into an online translator, but the translation it brought up didn’t make any sense: Why a mortal head up but such is only going to see the top, you will be bald.
Ralph’s house was right up ahead and he began to slow down.
“What did you get?” Lien-hua asked me.
“It’s nonsense.” I read it to them.
“You should have Tessa help you with it.”
That was not a bad idea.
We pulled into the driveway.
But first things first.
While the others filed into Ralph’s house, I went over to touch base with the agent who’d been assigned to watch the house.
I thought it would be Agent Woods, but apparently Danner had relieved her, and as I approached the car he rolled down his window. An empty burrito wrapper lay on the floor next to him.
I asked him how things had been. “All good. Quiet,” he told me. “I knocked on the door once, checked on them. They were watching TV.”
“Thanks. Hopefully, we won’t have to call you back again.”
There was a tiny pause. “Yes, sir.”
Inside the house, Tessa and Tony were in the living room. Tessa had the remote control on her lap and the wide-screen TV that stared out across the room had been paused in the middle of Star Trek Into Darkness, one of Tony’s favorite movies. I imagined that they’d been watching it as a necessary distraction from having to think about where their parents were.
Better to go to a funeral than to a party.
Maybe it depends a little on how old you are.
“Hey,” Tessa said to me.
“Hey.”
“Did it . . . did it go okay?”
“Yes.”
Brin and Lien-hua disappeared into the kitchen to round up some lunch and I said to Tessa, “I wonder if you can help me with something.”
“What is it?”
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
She handed off the remote to Tony, who went back to his movie. Then she followed Ralph and me to the room that had been set aside as the nursery.
“Yes?” Tessa asked inquisitively. “What do you need?”
“A translation. I tried plugging it into one of those online translators and what came up didn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, well, those things are pretty much useless unless you’re just trying to find out how to ask someone where the bathroom is or how much the sombrero costs.” She held out her hand. “Let me see what you have.”
“It’s Latin.”
“Perf.”
I gave her the phone and she settled into the rocking chair beside the crib. Some baby clothes sat neatly inside it. The pink hat that Brineesha had knitted for the baby lay on top of them.
Tessa studied the phone’s screen. “Well, it starts with cur, so it’s a question—why? Homo is ‘man,’ mortalis is an obvious one—even if you don’t know Latin you should be able to translate that.”
“Mortal, deadly?” I said.
“Yeah. Caput is ‘head . . .’” It sounded like she was thinking aloud. “‘Why, mortal man . . .’ Extruo is ‘to build up, pile up, raise . . .’ So: ‘Why, mortal man, do you raise up your head . . . ?’”
She paused and I wasn’t sure if she was expecting us to reply, but I didn’t interrupt, just waited for her to go on.
“Okay, so that’s the first part, then at morieris en vertex . . . In Latin the word at means ‘but’ or ‘while’ or ‘on the other hand’—anything along those lines. Morior can mean ‘to expire’ or ‘fail’ but also ‘to die.’ And en is a command—‘look!’ ‘Behold!’ . . . So I’m thinking it’s, ‘When, behold, you will die.’”
She scrunched up her face and studied the phone. “And then there’s vertex. It’s usually the crown or the peak or top of something, but that just doesn’t really make . . .” She mumbled a few comments about talis and calvus and eris and the random subjunctive construction of some sort. Then, finger-swiping to a Latin vocabulary website, she looked up a couple of definitions.
“Okay, here’s what I’m thinking about the second half: ‘When, behold, you will die and the top, or crown of your head, will become as bald as this’—calvus, that’s bald—‘as this’ . . . what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s referring to something bald and dead, you know, like a skull, but it’s just implied. It’s not implicitly stated.”
“So,” Ralph put the whole thing together: “‘Why, mortal man, do you raise up your head when, behold, you will die and—’”
Tessa cut him off. “‘End up as bald as this skull.’ I mean, you can condense it some; that’s basically what it’s saying, contextualizing it into English.”
Ralph pulled out the bulletin from the funeral, wrote her translation on it, and examined it.
I wondered what that text might mean to the investigation.
You will die? Is it referring to one of the people we buried today? Someone else entirely? Another victim?
The message could easily be taken as a threat against me.
We really needed to find out who sent that text.
“So what’s it from?” Tessa asked. “This phrase, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But it’s a case, right? It has to do with this bombing?”
“Tessa, I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. A mystery note in Latin about death and an awareness of the finite nature of human existence arrives right after the funeral of those killed in the explosion? And it just so happens to be sent to one of the FBI agents who actually survived the bombing? The guy whose book was left at the scene of a homicide that’s related to the case? Seriously? You don’t have to be C. Auguste Dupin to figure that one out.”
Most people might have said you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out, but Tessa hated Holmes, was convinced that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle plagiarized and based Holmes on Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin. But that was a rant for another day.
“Tessa.” I gestured toward the door. “Give us a minute, okay?”
“I already know what it says. Why can’t I listen in?”
“This is official FBI business.”
“So it is a case.”
“Tessa, you have to . . .” I paused. She probably knew Latin as well as, if not better than, anyone in the Bureau. It made sense to use her expertise as long as she was here. Besides, she’d already worked through the translation. “So, you haven’t heard it before? You don’t recognize it from any readings you’ve done?”
“No.” She looked deep in thought. “It sounds like something a medieval philosopher might have written.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the grammar is all weird and loose. It’s not smooth like it would be if it were written by a Roman, by someone who really knew the language well. Besides, in all my reading I’ve never come across it. And there’s no question mark, which is a little odd.”
“Lunch is served,” Brineesha called from the other room.
“Alright,” Ralph said. “We grab a bite to eat and then Pat and I look into this, see what we come up with.”
“Pat and you?” Tessa’s tone made her disappointment clear.
“Yes. Pat and me.”