Free Prayer by Philip Kerr Page B

Humanist Association, a celebrated author, and a well-known atheist. In 2009 he was listed by
Time
magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Just before Christmas last year, Davidoff gave a lecture at the Boston Public Library. His subject was ‘The Evolution of Superstition and Religion,’ and he argued that today’s religions are not a matter of divine revelation but of natural selection, in that only the strongest religions have survived by virtue of their fitness, which he defines as their willingness to exterminate other religions.”
    “That must have gone down well in Boston,” said Gisela.
    I grinned. “Actually, the lecture was a sellout. Afterward there was a party to which all of Boston’s Brahmins were invited. Before it ended, his publisher reported seeing Davidoff on one of the upper floors, talking to himself. She spoke to him and he ignored her. He was known to be an irascible character, so she was used to this and left him alone. No one saw him after that, and it was assumed he had gone back to his room at the Four Seasons. It’s a ten-minute walk. You could do it with your eyes closed. But the following morning a dog walker found Davidoff’s body in Olmsted Park, which is an hour’s walk in the opposite direction. He was still wearing his Rolex and carrying a wallet with three hundred dollars in it, so it was clear he hadn’t been mugged. His neck was broken and he appeared to have fallen out of a tree. His clothes were heavily stained with tree moss and there was bark underneath his fingernails.”
    “Was he drunk?” asked Gisela.
    “They found about a bottle of red wine in his system,” I said.
    “That would sure make me drunk,” admitted Helen.
    “The question is,” I continued, “was it the bottle of red that Davidoff drank in the Boston Public Library that persuaded him to walk three miles in the wrong direction on a cold night and then to climb a tree? Or was it something else? Someone on Huntington Avenue said they thought they saw a man answering Davidoff’s description running in the direction of the park at about ten-fifteen that night; and a nurse at a nearby hospital claimed she saw what could have been Davidoff almost getting knocked down by a city cab.”
    “So what did the BPD have to say about it?”
    “He came out of the library and walked in the wrong direction. When Davidoff realized he was lost, he chased after a cab, got lost some more, and found himself in Olmsted Park, where he met an accidental death. They picked the obvious explanation because the most obvious explanation is usually the correct one. Which is that Willard Davidoff climbed a tree when he was drunk and became one of the fifteen thousand Americans who died from falls last year.”
    Gisela tapped her pen impatiently on her notepad. “And I can’t honestly say that I disagree with that.”
    “Come on, boss,” I said. “This is a Yale professor, not some kid from the Skull and Bones. On a cold winter night in Boston, is climbing trees the normal behavior for an internationally famous sixty-five-year-old evolutionary biologist?”
    “You know, it might be,” said Gisela. “He was climbing a tree looking for some rare beetle or a piece of fucking tree bark, but it’s what biologists do, Gil. On the other hand, perhaps the tree afforded him an excellent view through an attractive young woman’s bathroom window. That’s biology, too.”
    “Don’t you think all of this is a coincidence? Each one of these guys seems like he was afraid of something. Three of them end up prematurely dead within six months of one another. It’s who and what they are that gives me an itch here. And I’m not the only one who wants to scratch it, boss. It was Bishop Eamon Coogan who put me onto this, remember?”
    “Need I remind you of something you should have learned at Quantico, Agent Martins?”
    That was me being bitch-slapped. Any mention of what I should have learned at the