by Gregory Ashe
“So you took the necklace.”
“He wanted to be a chef. He made me scrambled eggs and told me all about all the folds on a chef’s hat.” After that burst of clarity, Jager’s voice grew muzzy again. “Kissed him in a stand of box elder. Pressed me against the wall. I could feel the sun trapped in the sandstone.” Then Jager started to cry again. “I was going to kill them. The night I found you in my office. Was going to kill them. Kept his gun and his necklace so I could kill them. When I came across you in the office that night, I was going to kill them, but you’d already found the gun, and everything went wrong.”
Jem was silent for a long time; he could feel the strain in Tean’s body, his fingers hooked like iron in Jem’s shoulder. Ammon was frozen on the other side of the room.
“He told me about the drugs.” Jager broke the silence in a surprisingly steady voice. “He knew they were going to kill him, so he told me.”
“He knew who was going to kill him? What did he tell you about the drugs?”
“Floating them in on the Dolores River. Two million dollars. Maybe three.”
“Who was going to kill Blake?”
“That one. Tanner. He saw Blake talking to me. Walked right up to the Jeep because he wanted the rifle. Liked it. Thought it was a toy, cause of the darts. I was supposed to dart the mares that day; Ronnie called in sick. He heard us. Saw us. They both tried to play it cool, but Blake knew Tanner wanted to kill him after that, so he told me all of it.”
Jem traded looks with Tean, but Ammon spoke first. “As best you can, why don’t you walk us through the whole thing.”
“Somebody was cooking meth in Gateway.”
“Colorado?” Jem asked.
“DEA raid coming. Got a tip.” Jager’s eyes fluttered, and he whined, “You promised.”
Jem held up the pump’s control and pressed the button; he wasn’t sure it was doing anything at this point because it probably had some sort of limit, but he didn’t mind making a show out of it.
“Managed to get some of their stuff out. Floating down the Dolores because feds are watching the roads. Tanner and them—they’re supposed to meet the mule Tuesday, take the shipment.”
“Today,” Tean said.
“What guy?”
Jager shook his head.
“Where does Kalista fit into this?” Jem asked. “And Nick? What about them?”
“Dating the guy who got raided. Supposed to meet the mule and provide a vehicle, but she just wants money. She said . . . she said Tanner could have half. He was supposed to be the muscle, kill the mule, take the meth. Blake said he’d kill her when he got the drugs.”
“And Nick?” Ammon said.
“Her friend. Gay best friend.” Jager gave a very un-special-agent-like giggle. “Cute ass.”
“Not that cute,” Tean muttered.
Jem and Ammon each shot him a look, and Tean blushed.
“No,” Jager mumbled. “Got all those scars. Ears fucked up. Not that cute.”
“How many times did you press that thing?” Ammon said.
Jem ignored him. “Tanner stole the injection rifle from your truck and saw Blake talking to you; that’s what you said. Is that why Tanner killed him? He thought Blake was ratting him out?”
“Told him . . . careful.” Jager’s eyes screwed shut. “Whole life being careful. Went back to the lodge for his stuff. I told him no. Forget it. Went back anyway. When I found him, they already done him. Dropped him in that ravine like old garbage.”
“Where’s Tanner?” Jem asked. “Where’s he been holed up?
Jager shook his head.
“Don’t hold out on me, Jager. You’re not going to like it.”
“Don’t know. Gone.”
“Gone where?”
But Jager just dry swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Where the fuck could he be hiding? Where is he? Where is he?” Jem realized he was shouting again; he couldn’t seem to rein it in, but the pain in his shoulder, where Tean was clutching him, helped ground him again.
“Something wrong in here?” The Vegas officer poked her head in from the hall.
“Still figuring out our rhythm,” Ammon said. “We’re good.”
She studied each of them again, rubbing her tight fade, and then nodded and shut the door. As soon as she did, Ammon drew out his phone. “I’ve got to call Nobles.”
Jager made low, moaning noise.
After pressing the button a few more times, Jem tossed the pump’s control on the bed. “This was useless. We got nothing except McEneany out of him.”
Ammon was talking quietly in the background.
“That’s not quite true,” Tean said. “We not only got McEneany and a reason for why he’s involved—the drugs—but we also got confirmation that Tanner killed Blake and Weckesser, and that McEneany helped cover it up. Jager verified our suspicion that Kalista and Nick are trying to steal a shipment of drugs, and that somehow they got Tanner to agree to help them kill the mule. At the very least, now we know why everything has happened.”
“But we don’t know where Tanner’s hiding. And we don’t know where the handoff is supposed to take place. Sometime today, Tanner’s going to grab several million dollars’ worth of drugs, put a bullet in Kalista and Nick, and leave their bodies in the desert while he spends the rest of his life getting hand jobs in Ibiza.”
“Ibiza is too expensive,” Tean said, “not to mention environmentally—oh. That was just a figure of speech.”
Jem smiled wearily and squeezed Tean’s hand.
“I don’t care if he’s out of the station,” Ammon snapped. “Get him up on the radio. I’m a detective with the Salt Lake City PD, and I’m telling you this is an emergency.” The steady beep of the heart monitor made counterpoint. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ammon swung around, pacing toward the window. “Then get somebody on the phone who can.”
“Maybe you should call Haggerty,” Tean said to Jem.
“My hot cop boyfriend? But what is my hot vet boyfriend going to think?”
“Your hot vet boyfriend is going to downgrade you to dogwalker with occasional sexual benefits if you ever mention your hot cop boyfriend again.”
“Wait, you’d seriously pay me to walk Scipio? And I’d get sexual benefits? Ok, don’t make that face. I’m calling, I’m calling.”
Haggerty picked up on the third ring. When Jem identified himself, his voice warmed and he said, “Hey. I was hoping I’d hear from you.”
“Sorry, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I just got hired to be a sexual dogwalker, so I’m basically spoken for.”
“He didn’t,” Tean said, “and he’s not.”
Faint static rustled on the call. “What’s going on?”
Jem talked him through their conversation with Jager. When he’d finished, he waited for questions, but all he got was more of that static.
Finally, Haggerty said, “I’ve got to make some calls about this. It’s way above my pay grade. Keep your very fine ass away from Moab. Do you understand?”
“You’re breaking up,” Jem said.
“I’m not joking. I will put both of you in the city jail if I see you—”
Jem disconnected. The heart monitor was still beeping. From the next room, he could hear The Price is Right’s theme song.
“I think Haggerty is right,” Tean said. “I think we should—”
“Fuck,” Ammon said. “All right. Thank you. Goodbye.”
Jem turned in his seat to look at the other man. Ammon was pushing the fine blond hair away from his forehead; his face was red, and when he looked up at them, he shook his head.
“Last time anybody heard from Noble was yesterday afternoon. He was going fishing with McEneany.”
35
Jager couldn’t give them anything else, so they returned to Caesar’s Palace long enough to collect their belongings. Tean shook his head when Jem asked if he
wanted to say goodbye to his family; Tean knew it would only precipitate more drama, and he preferred to handle that by phone. Half an hour after they left the hospital, they were driving north on I-15, headed back to Moab. Mile after mile of subdivisions with stucco homes and Astroturf lawns and nacreous swimming pools gave way to the true outskirts of the city, where the old bones of ranch houses and barns and unroofed silos told the story of Vegas before it became Vegas. Then they were past even the bones, driving along dusty valleys of prickly pear, tumbleweed, and fishhook cacti. The hardpan glowed like a tungsten filament.
Jem had offered to drive so that Tean and Ammon could make phone calls, and Tean had offered to sit in the middle to prevent any incidental murders. Ammon was on the phone, talking to a supervisor—Tean thought he had heard Ammon say lieutenant—explaining their conversation with Jager. Judging by the blistering shouts from the other end of the call, the lieutenant was not pleased with how Ammon had handled things.
The conversation registered only at the edge of Tean’s consciousness, though. In his mind, he kept turning over something that had been bothering him for the last two days.
“How was Tanner supposed to find the mule?”
“Kalista and Nick told him,” Jem said. “Actually, if they’re smart, they won’t tell him until it’s time to pick up the drugs.”
“That just begs the question, though. How did Kalista and Nick know where to meet him?”
“She’s a drug dealer’s girlfriend. He told her before she came to Moab.”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what I would have done.”
“But,” Tean said, “that’s not what this guy did.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Actually, I do. We both do. Someone sent a burner text with the date for the meeting and that string of words.”
Jem was silent for almost a full minute. When he spoke again, his words were slow. “He gave a date.”
“Right.”
“And if he gave a date, that means they hadn’t arranged the meet in advance.” Jem grimaced. “I see your point: they were communicating about the meet. But they still could have arranged the location ahead of time.”
“But what do those words mean? ‘Replaces, broadly, shall.’ That’s what was in the text. And today’s date: Pioneer Day. Two pieces of information. That’s what you need for a meet: time and place.”
“Ok, I’m not saying you’re wrong. But what does ‘replaces, broadly, shall’ mean?”
Ammon’s conversation seemed to have become completely one-sided. He was leaning against the window, head bouncing with the truck’s vibrations, his expression washed out. Covering the phone’s mic, he whispered, “Code.”
“Oh really?” Jem said. “It’s a code?”
“Jem.”
“I’m just saying it’s awesome that we have a paid, professional detective who’s so brilliant he can figure out that three random words in a drug dealer’s text message are probably a code. Thank God. I don’t know what we would have done without Ammon Young here to crack the case.”
Ammon shot him the finger before saying into the phone, “No, sir, nobody else is here. But if I could explain—”
Shouting cut him off.
“Now that somebody with a college degree and fifty years of professional experience has helped us figure out that we’re dealing with a code—”
“Stop antagonizing him,” Tean said quietly.
Pulling a face, Jem said, “So how do you crack a code?”
“Let’s see what the internet has to say.” Tean opened his phone and began doing a search. He skimmed several articles, picked two to read more in depth, and realized he had quickly gotten into something well beyond his expertise. When he glanced up, Jem was smiling.
“What?”
“Normally you’d tell me about how the Nevada slot rat, slotmachinicus rodentis—”
“Not a real animal.”
“—leaves secret, coded messages in its droppings, or about how the greater Lake Mead lazy bass, douchicus partyboaticus—”
“Again, not real.”
“—transmits its location in Morse code by blowing bubbles.”
“Well, I’m sorry that I’m not an expert on classical or modern cryptography.”
“So am I,” Jem said. “This is a real disappointment.”
“It’s not my fault that my specialization—”
“Will you two cut it out?” Ammon said. At some point during Tean’s reading, the phone call had ended. Ammon’s voice was rough, and he was still slumped against the window, eyes closed. “I didn’t sleep five minutes last night.”
More quietly, Tean said, “Well, according to this stuff, modern cryptography, in public-key algorithms, relies on computationally expensive mathematical problems to encrypt information.”
“We’re talking about three words on a burner phone. I don’t think there was anything computationally expensive about it.”
“Right.” Tean thought for a moment. “The whole idea of cryptography is that you want to send a message to someone else without a third party understanding the contents. In order to do that, the receiver has to know a couple of things.”
“They have to know it’s a code,” Jem said.
“Right.”
“And they have to know how to decode the message.”
“Exactly right. Why did you let me do all this reading if you already knew?”
Jem’s cheeks reddened slightly. “I just—it just made sense once you started saying that stuff.”
“I’m going to take this opportunity to beg you one more time to take the GED test—”
“So, for example, if the code is to write words backward, then they have to know that to decode it, all they have to do is flip it around. TAC becomes CAT. Like that, right?”
“Yep. That’s a transposition cipher, moving the letters around. A substitution cipher is another option, when you switch one letter for another.”
“So the way to decode something, they have to agree on it in advance, right?”
“Or it’s transmitted separately.”
“Three words: replaces, broadly, shall. None of those can be flipped.”
“No, it’s not a transposition or substitution cipher because that kind of text looks meaningless when it’s encrypted.”
“So maybe we’re talking about a key. Maybe they had a list of possible places, each one with a code word. Like, ‘replaces’ means Grand County, and ‘broadly’ means the Twins, and ‘shall’ means the north side.”
“That’s entirely possible.”
“You sound like you don’t like it.”
“Well, if it’s a key, then we don’t have any chance at cracking it because the associations are arbitrary. We don’t have enough samples to try to figure out if there’s a pattern.”
“What else might it be?” Jem asked.
“Well, typically you either needed to know something or to have something in order to decrypt a message.”
“Like that two-factor thing on your phone.”
“Yeah, more or less. I can’t log into my email account without both the password, something I know, and a unique code generated on my phone, something I have. An encryption method could rely on one or the other or both. For example, the Spartans used something called the Scytale cipher, which involved winding a piece of paper or papyrus around a staff. They’d write the message, filling in a bunch of nonsense, and then take the paper off the staff. If the enemy captured the messenger, they couldn’t make the letters line up correctly without the right size of staff. Another common method is to use a shared book or text and to reference page numbers and word numbers to spell out a message. The Enigma machine that the Nazis used is an example of a very complicated system, with daily local settings that were reinforced by unique settings used for each message. If you didn’t have both the Enigma machine and the daily settings and the unique s
etting for the message, you wouldn’t be able to unscramble it even if you did have an Enigma machine. Well, that’s not quite true because the Allies did eventually crack Enigma, but—”
“Ok, ok, ok.” Jem slumped over the wheel. “Message received. This is hopeless.”
“That’s not what I was saying.”
“We don’t know what they were using to send this message, and we don’t know what someone would have needed to decode it, and we’re never going to figure out where he is. He’s going to run off with millions of dollars and live the rest of his life drinking Mai Tais out of a girl’s bellybutton. He’ll probably become some sort of international drug lord and slaughter millions of innocent people and smoke Cuban cigars that he puts out in his enemies’ eyes and—”
“Don’t stop,” Tean whispered.
“Oh my God,” Jem said.
“No, you were doing so well. Keep going!”
“Oh my God, what is happening to me?” Jem smacked his head against the steering wheel. “You’re in my head now. This is so messed up.”
“That was possibly the best thing I’ve ever heard you say. More importantly, Tanner might be clever, but he’s also greedy. He stayed near Moab because he wants to take over this drug shipment, even though it would have been smarter to run. That means he’s greedy enough to be stupid sometimes. And that’s to our advantage.”
“Ok, fine, but we’re still not going to find him.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Tean said. “Let’s think about this for a moment. The code was sent to Nick and Kalista so they could meet the mule. That means they had to have a way of decoding it. Did you see anything in the villa they might have used?”
“Like a list of secret code words? No, Tean. No, I didn’t.”
“Maybe you would have if you hadn’t been so busy handcuffing yourself to the bed.”
“First of all, they were sex handcuffs, so I was sex handcuffing myself to the bed. Second of all—”
“Jesus Christ,” Ammon barked. He lifted his head from the glass to stare at them blearily. “You two are unbearable. Do you realize that?”