Reacting to my tone, she glanced at me and shrugged, saying, ‘Different on the outside, kind of like you on the inside. What’s the rub?’
I didn’t know how to answer that, but I thought I knew who the man was. I decided to go have a talk with him, but LA derailed my attention. Looking at the chief standing alone on the point gazing off toward the dam like a ship’s captain spying out whales, she said, ‘So tell me, what did Max have to say?’
‘You guys all bark up the same tree,’ I said. ‘His thinking was pretty much the same as yours. And he told me depression can look like cold-heartedness.’
‘So listen to the man.’
When I looked back toward the sycamore, Stetson was gone. ‘Seems like Jana and the girls are having a good time,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ LA said, glancing back toward their table. ‘Look at Casey – she’s already as tall as Jana. Word is, the boys are showing a lot of interest lately.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve been meaning to get around to that.’
‘To what?’
‘Selling them into slavery.’
‘Daddy?’
I looked around to see Casey catching up to us, pink and a little breathless, her golden hair loose and shining, modest breasts bouncing under her white sweatshirt.
She said, ‘Officer Harnes wants to know if you and Aunt Lee want your catfish cajun or wuss.’
‘Cajun,’ said LA.
‘Same here,’ I said. ‘Hey, uh, Case – ’
But she was already running back to deliver her message.
Suddenly I smelled Clubman aftershave and breath mints, looked around and saw Dwight Hazen at my elbow, watching Casey run and giving me his jawy, clear-eyed Captain America profile. He wore what I took to be a carefully chosen guy outfit: black tracksuit, brand new Adidas cross-trainers and a fresh-off-the-shelf Longhorns cap. He turned to me with a bright smile and stuck out his hand.
‘Lieutenant Bonham,’ he said. ‘Good to run into you.’ He transferred his smile smoothly to LA. ‘And you must be Dr Rowe.’ Handshakes all around. ‘We’ve certainly got a beautiful day for it, haven’t we?’
‘Haven’t seen you out for one of these before, sir,’ I said.
He looked around the scene as he drew in a hearty breath through his nose and blew it out. ‘Fresh air, changing leaves, great fellowship – it’s a lot to be thankful for. And let’s not forget the chow.’
LA gave me a look. I said something non-committal as Jordan came up to us, decked out in jeans, a red pullover and her beat-to-hell Sea World cap, but looking like a serious little corporal delivering a battlefield dispatch.
‘Aunt Lee, Mom says can you please help her put up the volleyball net?’
‘Sure, hon,’ LA said, and arm-in-arm they were off.
‘Those are lovely girls you have there,’ said Hazen.
Saying nothing, I looked at him until his smile wavered and broke and his eyes slid away.
‘Chief Royal tells me we may be making a little headway on the Gold case,’ he said, gazing off across the lake.
‘We’ll get them, sir,’ I said.
‘Any idea at this point when we might look for an arrest?’
‘No, sir, not really. I tend to think in terms of finding out who did it and getting the evidence to make an arrest before we talk dates. It’s not always easy to go at it from the other end.’
Hazen watched the chief make his way back toward the crowd, longneck Bud in hand. ‘Look at him. He’s a dying breed, isn’t he? I mean a slice of the old West right here in our midst. I don’t care if it is going against the grain, I think he’s a tremendous asset to the city, and it’s going to be tough to see him go when he retires.’
‘Against the grain?’ I said.
Hazen looked at his shoes, cleared his throat. ‘I don’t mean to talk out of school here, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘It’s just that the chief’s style isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, know what I’m saying?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, I guess it’s like anything else – results are the bottom line for all of us, aren’t they? OZ’s a legend, you could even say an icon, and he’s been above question or reproach ever since he stepped in. That was before my time, but I don’t think anybody’d deny he’s done a great job. That covers a multitude of sins, I’m sure you’ll agree. And everyone knows he wants you for his replacement.’
‘Hard to imagine a higher compliment, coming from him.’
‘Amen to that. And personally I can’t think of a better choice under normal circumstances. But we’ve got a situation on our hands here, Lieutenant.’
‘Situation?’
‘To say the least. When the networks start booking hotel rooms down here, people get nervous. I have to answer to the council, and nobody over there wants to be on the ten o’clock news trying to field questions about hate crimes in Traverton. What I’m concerned about is whether we can show the world we’re able to clean up our own mess. I just had a conversation with the attorney general, and he wants to know why we don’t have anything more substantial for the press on this Gold thing. Frankly, I was at a loss to answer him.’
‘You mind if I ask whether you called him or he called you?’ I said.
Hazen examined the back of his hand and his manicured nails. ‘I think the point is, Jim, everything’s contingent on our getting somebody in custody on this Gold thing. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Yes, sir, I think I do,’ I said, watching a Channel Four reporter and cameraman approach us from the direction of the parking lot. ‘But let me ask you another question.’
‘Shoot,’ he said.
‘It’s about punishment fitting the crime,’ I said. ‘Take a child molester, let’s say – you think prison time is the way to go with a guy like that, or maybe some kind of rehab?’ I glanced back toward my daughters, then met his gaze and held it. ‘Or would it be best to just cut off his balls and see how far down his throat you can shove them?’
Hazen opened his mouth but nothing came out. By this time the news crew was on us.
The reporter said, ‘Lieutenant Bonham – ’
I held up both hands, nodded my head at Hazen and walked away to join my family as the guy handling the camera started setting his tripod up for the interview.
THIRTY
LA and Zito walked into the mid-morning situation briefing at Three, Zito decked out in black western pants, ropers, white shirt with pearl snaps, a tan cord blazer with its lower right sleeve tidily folded and pinned, and LA somehow looking equally tarted up in faded jeans, a rugby shirt and an old pair of boat shoes. Zito shook with, shoulder-chucked or hugged pretty much everybody in the room, then threw me a crooked little smirk as he grabbed a chair.
But I don’t think this stuff even registered on LA. I was guessing the Miami conference was off the table by now, because she was clearly in the zone. Several times I’d seen her going over some document or listening to somebody with the little High Noon squint that told me she was one hundred per cent engaged: no matter where this trail led, she was in for the kill.
What really brought out the predator in her was Dr Gold’s PC, now sealed and gathering dust on a shelf in the evidence room. It engaged LA because as a source of evidence it was the blue-ribbon pig – but, even more importantly, because she couldn’t have it. We weren’t even free to plug it in without a judge’s order.
People tend to treat the computers on their desks almost like provinces of their own minds, confiding in them like sorority sisters, baring their souls, even believing in the security of their firewalls, filters and passwords, so that the computer eventually becomes in effect a window into the user’s brain. LA was immune to this kind of self-delusion but she knew other people weren’t, and she kept eyeing Gold’s CPU like a fox casing the barnyard. Off and on over the past couple of days I’d seen her head to head with Bytes, the contracted digital geek, a tall skinny straight-backed guy whose actual name was Kevin Hauser, about what they’d do first w
ith the unit if they could get their hands on it.
Settling in his chair, Zito eyed me and said, ‘Say, sport, I came to watch the dogged nemesis at work, see if I can pick up a trick or two.’ He produced a small dog biscuit from his shirt pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it.
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘But that kind of puts us in a corner, old timer, because I’m gonna be using some two-syllable words here. All I can say is, try to follow along as best you can.’ I looked at the biscuit and took a bite. ‘Needs salt,’ I said.
‘What’s new with the Frix fire?’ asked Ridout.
Crossing his legs, brushing something invisible off his pants, Zito said, ‘Not much to tell. The accelerant was plain old kerosene. Looks like the bug split about five gallons of it between the body in the den and the stairwell, then touched it off.’ He shook out a cigarillo and lit it with his Marine Corps Zippo.
‘No smoking in the building,’ somebody said.
‘Right,’ Zito said, drawing on the cigarillo.
‘Sounded like the fire took off pretty good,’ said Ridout.
‘Yeah, went up the stairwell and involved the second storey by the time the first floor was going good. Guy was no pro, but he did what it took to send the place up.’
‘So your theory would be the bug was the killer?’ I said.
‘You got it, hombre.’
‘How bad was the body?’
‘Standard crispy-critter,’ said Zito, blowing out smoke. ‘Same as you’d get with napalm. ME’s crew broke him in two places bagging him.’
‘Any sign of what killed him?’
He nodded his head. ‘Sifted out a couple of shell casings. Forty-four Mag.’
‘Wayne’s got them?’ I said.
‘Yeah, he’s got ’em. What’s the connection with your shrink case?’
‘Frix had an involvement with Gold,’ I said. ‘Somebody does her, then a couple of days later he gets it.’ I spread my hands.
He nodded. ‘Hard to laugh off, all right,’ he said, triggering a small grunt of agreement from Mouncey. LA pointed her finger at me, dropped the hammer of her thumb, then found some change in her purse and headed toward the soft drink machines in the hall.
Chateaubriand on me.
Down at the other end of the table Wayne finished the conversation he’d been having with one of his techs about something and looked up at me. ‘I finally gave up on finding a perfesser to tell me about that coin and looked it up for myself, Lou.’ He consulted his notes. ‘It’s Roman, all right. The face on the front is Apollo. Them little curls are supposed to be pigtails, by the way. The other side’s Diana, goddess of childbirth and the forest. Romans decided she was the same deity as Artemis, who was the Greek goddess of the hunt. That’s why she’s got a bow and arrows on her shoulder.’
‘What’s the coin made of?’
‘Silver, mostly.’
‘And it’s never been in the ground?’
‘No telling, but for sure not recently. Under the microscope it looks like it’s been laying around in a drawer somewhere, a little of the tarnish polished off, couple of green felt fibres and whatnot.’
‘How about a date?’
‘Best I could do is it’s from the reign of Augustus.’
‘So, any reason to think it wasn’t our killers who dropped it there?’
‘Not really, because our information is Gold didn’t collect coins and neither did her husband,’ he said. ‘Beats the hell out of me what the bad guys were doing with it, though.’
No one offered a comment on that.
Next we all looked at his enlarged reproductions of the note found in Gold’s nose. Nobody had any new ideas about the mystery numbers or the ‘glowen’ inscription. Early on, thinking the word sounded vaguely Teutonic, I’d checked a couple of translation sites to see if it meant anything in German. No good. Likewise, since I was at it, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Latin. No luck there either.
‘An anagram?’ Somebody said.
‘Of what, “wongle”?’
‘“Legwon”?’
‘“Newlog”?’
‘How about an acronym?’
‘Let’s see, “Good-looking old women eat noodles”?’
‘“Gina lifts old willie every night”?’
‘Somebody trying to write “glowing”?’
‘Who the fuck knows?’
‘Nobody the fuck knows.’
‘Speaking of that, how about the numbers?’
‘Yeah, will somebody please tell us what the hell they mean?’
‘Four feet something?’
‘Counting something by twos?’
‘Measurements?’
‘Who the fuck knows?’
Trying to figure out what the numbers meant, I had tried a substitution cipher based on the ordinal positions of the letters of the alphabet, but all I got was gibberish. I’d also looked for a connection with decimal notation in library classification systems, navigational and mapping coordinates and the criminal codes, but got nowhere. None of the combinations of digits seemed to connect to any emergency call code, area code, telephone number, ZIP code, radio frequency or address anybody could think of. The spacing of the digits and the underlining of some of them looked like they should mean something, but I had no idea what. I stared at the sequence, massaging my forehead:
4’ 68 9172350
Four groups of digits, three short and even, the fourth long and odd. None of the groups was a prime number. Was it significant that no digit was repeated? I picked up a pencil and wrote the numbers in reverse order:
0532719 86 ‘4
The underlined numbers could then be read as March 27, 1986. I made a note to myself to check the media files for that date.
I turned the page upside down and looked at the numbers, but they didn’t mean anything to me that way either. Borrowing Mouncey’s compact mirror, I looked at them in reflection. Same story. I clicked the pencil against my teeth, wondering if this could be part of a longer string of numbers. Was it possible the writer had failed to finish the series?
Somebody was saying, ‘Oughta have a national database of bite marks. Ever’ perp, give him a bite of cheese, make a cast of the marks and file it – ’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw LA walk back into the room, diet DP in hand. Noticing my expression and the page on the table in front of me, she stopped beside my chair and rested her hand on my shoulder, saying, ‘What are you doing with that?’
‘Mainly going nuts,’ I said. ‘This has got to mean something, but I don’t know what the hell it is.’
‘I do,’ she said.
THIRTY-ONE
‘It’s Welsh code,’ said LA.
‘Say what?’ said Ridout as everybody gathered around.
‘Welsh code.’
‘They got they own codes?’ marvelled Mouncey.
‘Ever see anything written in Welsh?’ said Wayne. ‘The language is a code all by itself. Takes the whole alphabet to yell at a cat.’
‘This Welsh is a man’s name,’ said LA. ‘The numbers are the old way of summarising an MMPI profile.’
‘What’s that?’ said Wayne.
‘It’s that big old test you have to take now before you hire on,’ said Ridout. ‘Prove you ain’t crazy.’ He looked to LA for confirmation, got a nod.
‘The one they’re using now is the MMPI-2, and most psychologists just file the profile itself in the chart,’ LA said. ‘If they use any kind of summary it’s usually no more than a three- or four-point code. This is kind of a fossil.’
‘Any current uses for it at all?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. Maybe to retrieve archived records or maybe in some system that requires it, which I think the VA used to.’
‘Would anybody but a psychologist be able to read it?’
‘Not likely. A few counsellors and psychiatrists, maybe some medical records and research people. That’d be about it.’
‘What does it mean?’ I said.
/> LA took the page, studied the numbers. ‘This is a pretty bad one, actually. Antisocial and paranoid traits along with atypical thinking and a lot of energy. Unstable, probably sadistic. Could be a dangerous person.’
‘Criminal?’
‘Yeah, especially at a lower level of intelligence. Going up the IQ scale, you’d be talking about an unscrupulous manipulator, maybe a white-collar criminal, lawyer, politician, something like that.’
‘How you tell that from them little numbers?’ asked Mouncey.
‘The numbers and markings and spaces, and the order they come in, give you the shape of the profile, and that gives you the personality structure.’
‘Any idea what all this might have to do with anything?’
She shrugged, saying, ‘Just that it’s connected with psychology and Gold was a psychologist. Otherwise, who knows?’
Bertie stepped into the room, pale as death, thumbs and forefingers pinching the corners of a sheet of notepaper and an envelope in the dead-rat carry. Beyond her in the squad room I could see a couple of curious faces following her progress.
‘Acetate,’ she said tightly.
Wayne found a couple of clear plastic page-covers in one of the cabinets, held them open as she laid the sheet and envelope gingerly inside.
‘I handled these before I knew what they were,’ she said. ‘My prints are going to be all over them.’
We all gathered to look at the envelope and the letter, which had been scrawled on cheap drugstore tablet paper.
Lt J Bonum
Tri-State Justice Bldg
TTN USA
‘It was in with the rest of the mail,’ said Bertie. ‘Postmarked downtown.’
Wayne disappeared down the hall to get his photo and print gear. I held the letter up to read it aloud.
To Lt Bonum
For without are dogs and SorCerers but I am the root and the offspring of David and the bright and morning star I am the flaming sword at the east of Eden that turns every way and keeps the way. Behold thy days approach that thou must die.
from the Chapel
‘Well, kiss my sweet pink ass,’ said Ridout.