The 7th installment in the Geier and Lark Mystery Series…

Snow drifted past the tall windows of Geier’s office, flakes spiraling like bits of ash in the gray light. He sat behind his desk, coat still on, sipping bitter coffee that had been reheated twice. The radiator clanked in protest. He didn’t light his pipe. He held it, stem resting against his thumb the way a man holds a memory he’s not ready to put back on the shelf.

“Sunday makes you sentimental,” Susan Lark said gently. She was sitting on the couch, shoes off, legs folded, reading a file. “Is it…?”

“Elissa’s day,” he said. “Thirty years is a habit the nervous system can’t break.”

She nodded. Lark’s mother had died when she was seventeen; grief in a room recognized its own. “Want to cancel the world for an hour?”

“I want the world to stop knocking,” Geier said.

Naturally, that’s when Detective Vasquez knocked, once, brisk. “Sorry,” he said, stepping in, snow still on his jacket. “We’ve got bodies.”

Geier sighed. “Plural. Of course.”

“Three so far,” Vasquez said. “And I think we’re dealing with a theme.”

“We just did crosswords,” Geier muttered. “If this is acrostics I’m retiring.”

“Greek myths,” Vasquez said. “And you’re going to hate this.”

Asphodel

The first body lay in a private garden behind a townhouse in the West Village, an expensive square of earth pretending not to be New York. The victim, a hedge-fund architect with a podcast about “disruption,” was curled on a marble bench. A silver coin rested on his tongue. Pomegranate seeds ringed his shoes like red punctuation. White flowers—wild asphodel, somehow—had been scattered on the snow.

“Hades,” Lark said quietly. “Coin for Charon. Pomegranate for Persephone. Asphodel for the fields of the dead.”

Geier peered down. “No visible trauma. Internal hemorrhage, maybe. Or a heart that decided wealth was enough after all.”

Vasquez shivered and unfolded a page slid under the back gate. On it was a single word, block-printed in ink the color of old bruises:

HUBRIS.

“What are we thinking?” Vasquez asked.

Geier tapped the coin with a gloved knuckle. “We’re thinking someone wants to be graded by a classics professor.”

Wax

The second body lay two nights later, twelve stories up on a Murray Hill rooftop. A start-up CEO, barefoot, chest flushed with the cold. Around him: white feathers charred at the ends, a fallen ring of candles, the smell of burning wax still floated in the air. A white smear of something on the parapet that turned out to be beeswax.

“Icarus,” Lark said, eyes on the sky.

“And someone with a flair for production design,” Vasquez added.

The building’s cameras caught only blur and flare when the candles were lit, and then… nothing. “Power dips,” the super said. “Like something walked through the circuit.”

Geier looked at the skyline, the moving lights, the patient cranes. “Some myths are warnings,” he said. “Some are instructions.”

“You think the killer wants us to decode a list,” Lark said.

“I think whoever this is,” Geier said, “believes they are right.”

Laurel

The third body stopped being a body at the foot of the Temple of Dendur in the Met, where a philanthropic media baron collapsed during a gala. No wound; no poison the ER could find. A wreath of bay, laurel, had been placed on his head after he fell. Witnesses said they didn’t see who did it. The cameras, again, showed a kind of smear. On his phone’s lock screen: an unopened message sent minutes before he died.

APOLLO REMEMBERS.

“God of plague and poetry,” Lark murmured. “Also of prophecy and punishment.”

Vasquez exhaled. “I’m getting calls from City Hall asking me if a Greek god is murdering donors. I told them no, because I like my job.”

Geier’s gaze was on the temple’s sand-colored stone. He had seen that shade in ruins and in hospital rooms. “Who were these men before they were victims?” he asked.

“Different circles,” Vasquez said. “But each had a scandal and a lawyer like fraud, hush money, an offshore arcana. They didn’t pay for their sins anywhere that mattered.”

“So, someone else is collecting the debt,” Lark said.

Geier said nothing. He was counting, silently, on the pads of his fingers—seeds, feathers, leaves. Three tokens. Three names.

The List

Back at the office, they spread everything across Geier’s desk. The garden photos. The rooftop report. The Met transcript. Lark flipped a yellow legal pad and drew three columns.

“Not how,” she said. “Why.”

“Hubris,” Vasquez said, pointing. “The first note said it.”

Lark nodded. “But hubris is just the charge. In myth, the answer is who responds.”

Geier looked at her. “Nemesis.”

“The goddess of retribution,” Lark said. “Balance. The one who brings down the proud.”

Vasquez paced. “So, we’re hunting a vigilante with a classics degree.”

“Maybe,” Lark said. She tapped a printout. “But there’s more. Look at the victims’ names.”

The hedge-fund architect: Nestor Beaumont. The CEO: Micah Ardes. The baron: Simon Ehler.

“Initials spell N, M, S,” Lark said. “With a little latitude and some old Greek, you can form NEMESIS across the three scenes. See N-E-… the letters are seeded in the props.” She showed them the itemized evidence photos: on the garden bench a book of Ovid, opened to Persephone; on the roof a wax seal stamped with an E; at the Met, the laurel wreath with seven leaves stitched in silver, tiny, forming a crooked S.

“That’s a stretch,” Vasquez said.

Lark turned the page. “Or it’s a breadcrumb trail. You wanted a theme.”

Geier had stopped listening. He was reading the guest list from the Met gala. A name jumped: Noemi Sarne. Parlor mythologist, socialite, donor to the Hellenic Society. Noemi. Nemesis with a vowel change and a haircut.

“Of course,” he said. “She’s everywhere and nowhere.”

“Know her?” Vasquez asked.

“I know the type,” Geier said. “Faces that live in patron lists and are always just over a shoulder in photographs. The city’s ghosts wear pearls.”

Street

They found Noemi Sarne in the only place you would find a woman like that on a Wednesday evening: not at her Park Avenue apartment but under the Manhattan Bridge, where a series of illegal outdoor chess tables had been welded to the concrete. Men in hoodies slapped pawns; a kid with bright shoes juggled an orange. The river smelled like metal and kelp.

Noemi stood at the edge of the light in a dark coat that might have been expensive once. She watched the board. She did not seem surprised when Lark stepped beside her.

“You’re far from your circles,” Lark said.

Noemi smiled without showing teeth. “Everyone comes to the river. It has all the stories. Though some forget the endings.”

Lark let the quiet breathe. “Three men are dead.”

“So are three hundred who never made your paper,” Noemi said. “Balance takes the long view.”

“Balance has another name,” Lark said softly. “Nemesis.”

At that, Noemi finally looked at her. In the dun light her eyes were very dark and very old. It was a trick of the shadows, Lark told herself. A trick.

“Names are addresses,” Noemi said. “Sometimes the mail is late.”

Geier stepped forward, the river wind pressing his jacket to his ribs. “You’re clever,” he said. “But clever isn’t kind.”

“I’m not kind,” Noemi said. “I am necessary.”

Vasquez’s hand hovered near his belt. “Are you confessing?”

Noemi’s smile sharpened. “Detective, I’m telling you a city is a scale, and someone has been jamming their thumb on it. I’m removing thumbs.”

“By killing?” Lark said.

“By reminding,” Noemi said. “By returning the measure.”

“For whom?” Geier’s voice was suddenly rough. “For Elissa? For my wife? Balance didn’t come for her.”

The name hung in the air. Lark watched the way Noemi’s face softened, almost human.

“Some debts,” Noemi said, “are not collected here.”

And then a subway thundered by, wind slapping the game board, and when it passed, Noemi Sarne was gone. The men in hoodies blinked in the sudden quiet.

Vasquez swore. “She Houdini’d us.”

“She crossed,” Geier said. He glanced at the ground. The chalk outline of a hopscotch grid had been worn into the concrete by dozens of feet. The last square read HOME. It made him unexpectedly tired.

Marble

Noemi had an address and a foundation; foundations have offices; offices have walls and cameras and reflection. The next night, they entered her Park Avenue apartment with a warrant and a doorman’s offended sigh.

Inside, the air was hotel-still. Marble floors, white orchids, a framed lithograph of Nemesis from a 19th-century scholar’s book. On a table lay a thin silver balance scale, one pan filled with smooth black stones, the other with white. On the mantle: photos with governors and museum directors and board chairs. In each, Noemi’s face tilted just off-center, catching light that didn’t touch anyone else.

“There’s no prep here,” Vasquez said. “No gloves, no rope, no weird altar.”

“Noemi doesn’t prep,” Geier said. “She arranges. She’s a curator of endings.”

Lark stood at the lithograph. Rhamnousia, the older Greek name for Nemesis, was etched in serif at the base. Beneath that: a scribe’s tiny note.

What is owed returns.

“She’s not just performing,” Lark said. “She believes.”

“In what?” Vasquez asked.

“In a map,” Lark said. “Look.”

Her tablet lit up with a virtual case board, pins and lines snapping into place. Geier eyed it with the same suspicion he reserved for elevators and smartphones.

The garden, the rooftop, the Met marked in red. She drew lines. The triangle pointed northeast, apex landing on a cross-street in Astoria where old Greek bakeries and new glass towers shared the weather. “There’s our sanctuary.”

Geier grimaced. “Of course, the gods prefer good coffee.”

The Crossroads

They found the old theater by the smell of dust and plaster and the sound of a woman’s voice reciting names to an empty room. Inside, footlights flickered. On the stage: a table with three tokens—a coin, a feather, a laurel leaf—and a fourth-place set with a small river stone. Noemi stood behind the table, palms up like a priest.

“Fourth,” she said, without turning. “He was a judge. Took money, hid it well, wore his robe like a god.”

“You don’t get to choose the dead,” Vasquez called, weapon low but ready.

“I don’t choose,” Noemi said. “I count.”

Lark stepped up onto the stage. The boards creaked. “You think you’re Nemesis.”

Noemi tilted her head. “Names are costumes. Functions are bones.”

“Even if I believed you,” Lark said, “you’re misreading the story. Nemesis punishes hubris—people who think they are above the gods. But this city doesn’t need another executioner. It needs a different ritual.”

Noemi’s eyes brightened. “Speak it.”

“Confession,” Lark said. “Public. Under oath. A broadcast balance. You want return? Make them return what they took. Not bodies—truth.”

For a long moment Noemi was very still. Then she slid her hands over the tokens and the stage lights dimmed and went soft like candlelight. The theater smelled suddenly, faintly, of bay.

“You ask mercy for wolves,” Noemi said. “You think your request makes you gentle. It only makes you brave.”

Geier’s voice, from the wings: “And you, what does all this make you?”

Noemi’s face, older, younger, turned toward him. “Tired,” she said. “And very busy.”

A door banged at the back of the theater. Uniforms flooded the aisle. In the strobe of their flashlights, Noemi looked briefly like a statue in a niche. Then the lights popped and she was no longer there.

The tokens remained. In the fourth place, a new stone, smaller, river-smoothed, the color of smoke.

On it, scratched with something sharp, one word:

ELISSA.

Geier picked it up. His fist closed hard around it. He did not speak.

After

The judge confessed on live television the next morning, flanked by a combative attorney who looked like he wanted to vomit. Three more recordings arrived in Vasquez’s inbox that week, anonymous voices admitting to crimes that had been too clever for the legal code. No murder scenes. No pomegranates. The city exhaled the way cities do, impatiently.

Noemi Sarne’s foundation announced a sabbatical for their director for “health” reasons. The Park Avenue apartment remained, impersonal as a hotel. The chess tables under the bridge held steady against the wind. Now and then a woman in a coat watched the river and was not anyone.

In Geier’s office, Lark found him standing by the window with the little river stone in his hand. He was not a man who let objects speak. Today he was allowing it an opening argument.

“You said names are addresses,” she offered.

“Someone forwarded mine,” he said.

They stood a while with the light snow blanketing the city in an endless, pale hush. Lark slid a file onto the desk, then didn’t move her hand away from it. “When my mother died,” she said, “a woman from the parish knocked on our door and told us it was ‘God’s will.’ I didn’t know Greek then, but I knew she was wrong.”

Geier half-smiled. “You studied, then.”

“I’ve been studying ever since,” Lark said. “People. Stories. Endings.”

He nodded. “Same field.”

He set the stone down beside his pipe, as if the two items could share a shelf without argument. “Vasquez will call,” he said. “He always does.”

“And you’ll tell him we don’t do gods,” Lark said.

“We do people,” Geier said. He looked at the stone. “The gods, if they’re here, can book an appointment.”

The phone rang. Vasquez, right on cue. Another body, another address.

Lark grabbed her coat. Geier took up his pipe and, after a moment, the stone.

Outside, the city steamed on its grates and glittered in its towers, a labyrinth that always promised an exit and never guaranteed the same one twice. They stepped into the hallway together, and for once, the door clicked shut behind them without sounding like an ending.

~END~

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For more stories like this, check out: The Last Appointment: 30 Collected Short Stories
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And read for FREE some of Charles Levin’s short stories:

The First Appointment
The Last Candy Store in East Apple
I’m Processing
Books Unread
Nora Delivers the Package
The Permission Slip
10 Life Lessons I Learned from Playing Poker
Missing the Ghost in the Palace Theater
Moon Landing Memories
Word Drunk

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