“For a private investigator who divides his day between lunch with members of the underworld at a strip club and seeing clients in an office two doors down from a pawn shop, you come across very much at home here,” Dr. Leanne Thunberg, despite being a head shorter than my six feet, lead me across Harvard Yard, without once turning to make sure I followed.

I’d met Leanne last year, on a missing persons assignment and, despite her being the chair of the Department of Advanced Anthropology and Cultural Semiotics, we clicked; she had a Noomi Rapace thing going on and we all know that any self-respecting cobra falls in love with the mongoose, if only for a brief moment.

She’d emailed me an invitation to come to Cambridge, saying only she had a problem best served by talking to a private investigator; I stopped by her office and, with a smile, she informed me she had reservations at a new restaurant, ‘Craigie on Main’ that she was certain I would enjoy; Leanne had a way of making promises that carried the undertone of a dare.

The restaurant was everything she promised and, accepting her suggestion we have a drink at her home in West Cambridge, I found myself wondering who, among the founders of most established religions, was shrewd enough to insist that the devil was a man.

“Are you familiar with the story of Adam’s first wife?”

The whisper of silk drowned out all other thought and, not for the first time, I was amazed at how such an expensive fabric can be so costly; in the dark it sounded like both the cry of love and whisper of danger; I gave up all hope to steer the night, at least until dawn.