Hour Game

by David Baldacci

  During the drive to the police station King called Bill Jenkins, an old buddy of his in San Francisco. When he made his request, his friend was understandably surprised.

  “What do you need that for?” Jenkins asked.

  King glanced at Williams and then said, “It’s for a criminal justice class I’m teaching over at the community college.”

  “Oh, okay,” Jenkins said. “After all the excitement you and your partner caused last year, I thought you were messed up in something like that again.”

  “No, Wrightsburg is back to just being a quiet, sleepy southern town.”

  “If you decide you ever want to rejoin the big time, give me a call.”

  “How soon can you have that for me?”

  “You’re in luck. We have a special running this week on classic serial killers. Thirty minutes. Just give me a number to fax to and a major credit card,” he said, chuckling.

  King got the police station fax number from Williams and gave it to his friend.

  “How can you get it so fast?” King asked Jenkins.

  “The timing of your call is impeccable. We conducted a long-overdue office cleaning and just last week pulled that file for archiving. Copies of the schoolteacher’s notes are in there. I was just going over them the other night, in fact, for old time’s sake. That’s what I’ll send you, the key he came up with to decipher the coded letters.”

  King thanked him and clicked off.

  When they reached the police station, Williams strode in with King following.

  Out of his professional depth or not, the chief was back on his home turf, and he was going to act like it. He bellowed for the deputy who’d called him about the coded letter and also grabbed a bottle of Advil from his secretary. King and the deputy gathered in Williams’s office, where the chief plopped behind his desk and swallowed three Advil using only his saliva. Before he took the piece of paper and envelope from the deputy, he said, “Please tell me these have been checked for prints.”

  They had, the deputy told him. “Although Virgil Dyles, the owner of the Gazette, initially thought it was a joke when he got it in the mail. We wouldn’t have known anything about it, but a friend of mine who’s a reporter over there phoned and told me. I went right over and got it, but it’s all Greek to me.”

  “So what did Virgil do, pass it around the damn office?” shouted Williams.

  “Something like that,” replied the deputy nervously. “Probably more than a few people touched it. I told my friend at the paper to keep quiet, but I think she might have told some people that she thought this was serious.”

  Williams’s big fist came down on the top of his desk so hard both King and the deputy winced. “Damn it! This is spiraling right out of control. How the hell are we going to keep this on the q.t. if we can’t even control the folks in Wrightsburg?”

  “Let’s look at the message,” King said. “We’ll worry about the media spin later.”

  He hovered over Williams’s shoulder as the lawman examined the envelope. The postmark was local, mailed four days before, with a stamp applied very exactly. It was addressed, in block letters, to Virgil Dyles of the Wrightsburg Gazette. On the lower right-hand corner of the envelope was the circle with crosshairs. There was nothing written in the return address block.

  “Not much there,” said Williams as he unfolded the note. “Maybe there’s some expert who can tell us something from how he wrote the letters, placed the stamp and such, but I sure as hell can’t.”

  The message was written in blurred black ink, again using block letters, and the lines were in tightly structured columns arranged both horizontally and vertically.

  “The blurred part is from the ninhydrin,” the deputy explained. “They use that to fume the letter for prints, you know.”

  “Thanks. That never would have occurred to me,” Williams said testily.

  All the lines were in code. Some of the characters were letters; others were merely symbols. Williams sat there for some minutes going over it carefully. He finally sighed and sat back.

  “You don’t happen to know how to break codes, do you?” Williams asked King.

  At that instant Deputy Rogers—who served with King when he’d been a part-time Wrightsburg police officer—knocked and came in, holding some pages in his hand. “This fax just came in for Sean.”

  King took the pages and said to Williams, “I do now.”

  He carried the letter and faxed pages to a small table in the corner, sat down and began to work. Ten minutes later he glanced up. This wasn’t good, he thought. In fact, this was probably worse than having someone running around copying the Zodiac killer.

  “Have you deciphered it?” demanded Williams.

  King nodded. “I have some experience with cryptograms from my years at the Secret Service. But I recalled that a high school teacher from Salinas originally broke the code to the San Francisco Zodiac’s letters. I have a friend on the force there who’s very familiar with the case. I thought he might have access to the teacher’s notes. That’s what he faxed to me, the key to the code. That made it pretty easy.”

  “So what does it say?” asked Williams, swallowing nervously.

  King checked his notes. “It contains misspellings and grammatical and syntax errors, deliberate ones, I think. So did the original Zodiac.”

  Deputy Rogers looked at Williams. “Zodiac? What the hell’s that?”

  “A serial killer in California,” explained Williams. “He was slaughtering people long before you were even born. He was never caught.”

  A look of panic appeared in Deputy Rogers’s baby blues.

  King began to read. “By now, you find the girl. She’s all cut up, but that ain’t me. Cut her up looking for clues. Ain’t none. Trust me. The watch don’t lie. She was numero uno. But more numbers to come. Lots of ’em. One more thing. I ain’t, repeat, ain’t the Zodiac. Or his second or third or fourth coming. I am me. It ain’t going to be that easy don’t you know. By the time I’m done you wish it be just Zodiac.”

  “So this isn’t the end of it,” said Williams slowly.

  “Actually, I’m afraid it’s just beginning,” answered King.

  CHAPTER

  12

  DEPUTY CLANCY WAS TALL

  and well built and trying hard not to look anxious as he stared between Sylvia and Michelle.

  “Are you going to be okay?” asked Sylvia as she watched him closely. “I don’t need you passing out on me.”

  “I’m fine, Doc,” he replied gamely.

  Sylvia said, “Have you seen an autopsied body before?”

  “Of course,” he answered curtly.

  “These are shotgun wounds to the head.” Sylvia looked at Michelle too as she said this.

  Michelle took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

  “Part of the job,” said Clancy, trying to project confidence. “In fact, next month Chief Williams is sending me to the Forensic Crime Scene School.”

  “That’s a great program, you’ll learn a lot. Don’t let what you’re about to see dissuade you from going.”

  Sylvia walked over to a set of stainless-steel doors. “This is what we unofficially call the grisly room. It’s for bodies that have undergone extreme trauma: burns,explosives, underwater for long periods of time. And shotgun wounds to the head,” she added with emphasis. She hit a button on the wall and the doors opened. She moved inside and came back out a few moments later pushing a gurney with a body on it. She rolled the gurney to her workstation area and clicked on the overhead exam light.

  Clancy coughed and put a hand up to his face mask. Sylvia quickly gave him the same lecture on sense of smell deadening. He removed his hand grudgingly but seemed to be a little unsteady on his feet. Sylvia nudged a chair over near him. Michelle noticed the movement; Clancy didn’t. The two women exchanged a silent communication.

  “This is Steven Canney.” When she uncovered the body, Michelle’s hand shot out and pushed the chair behind the deputy in
time to catch him as he slumped backward, gagged and then passed out.

  They rolled him in the chair to a far corner of the room, where Sylvia cracked open a tube of ammonia and stuck it under his nostrils. He came to, jerked up and shook his head, looking awful.

  “If you’re going to be sick, there’s a restroom right there,” she said, pointing.

  The young man turned red. “I’m sorry, Doc. Real sorry.”

  “Deputy Clancy, there’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s a horrific sight. And the first time I saw something like that, my reaction was the same as yours.”

  He looked surprised. “It was?”

  Yes, she assured him, it was. “I have a written report that I can give you. If you want to leave, you can. If you want to rejoin us when you feel better, that’s fine too. If you just want to sit here, that’s okay as well.”

  Deputy Clancy decided on the latter, although as soon as they turned away, he slumped down on the desk, his face in his hands.

  Sylvia and Michelle went back over to Steve Canney’s corpse.

  “Did you really pass out your first time?” asked Michelle quietly.

  “Of course not, but why make him feel even worse? The men almost always pass out. And the bigger the man, the faster.”

  Sylvia pointed out various areas of Canney’s wounds with a long stainless-steel rod. “As you can see, the supratentorial of the brain was pretty much eviscerated, not unexpected with a shotgun wound.”

  She put down the rod and her face clouded over. “Canney’s father came in to see his son. I advised him not to, that the wounds were very bad, but he insisted. That’s the toughest part of this business. He was able to give a presumptive ID from a birthmark and a scar on his knee from an old football injury. We obtained a positive ID from dental records and fingerprints.”

  Sylvia took a deep breath. “My heart went out to him, although he took it pretty stoically. I’ve never had children, but I can imagine what it would be like, having to walk into a place like this and…” Her voice trailed off.

  Michelle let the silence hold for a few moments and then said, “And Canney’s mother?”

  “She died several years ago. I guess that was a blessing of sorts.”

  Sylvia returned to her examination. “Determining the firing range on shotgun wounds is tricky. The most reliable way is to fire the same ammo from the exact same gun with the same choke setting. We don’t have that luxury here, but you’ll note that the entrance wound has no scalloping of the margin and no satellite lesions. So the distance between muzzle and victim was contact to less than two feet.” She covered what was left of Canney’s head with a small sheet.

  “Do you know the make of the ammo?”

  “Oh, yes. The wadding from the shotgun round was recovered from the wound. All the pellets also stayed in him. That’s why the wound is so devastating. All the kinetic energy’s used up internally.” Sylvia looked at her notes. “It was a twelve-gauge loaded with nine double-ought pellets of Federal manufacture.”

  “And Pembroke died the same way?”

  “She was shot in the back. The injuries were instantly fatal but not as devastating. There were numerous bits of the shattered windshield glass embedded in her skin as well. Conclusion: the killer fired the first shot through the windshield. Looking at the wounds alone, you’d think the range of weapon to victim was far greater. However, I think the barrel of the shotgun was near the windshield when it was discharged, or a total distance of about three feet to Pembroke. The entrance wound on her back has a characteristic scalloped margin, and there are additional satellite lesions as individual pellets separated from the main mass. Because the pellets had to break through the glass, it appears as though the shot was fired from a greater distance than was actually the case.”

  “Why do you think her back was to the windshield?”

  “They were having sex,” Sylvia said. “There was spermicidal residue from Canney’s condom in her vagina. She was probably astride Canney and facing him when it happened, with her back to the windshield. That’s a very natural position for intercourse in the close confines of a car. Her body acted as a shield; otherwise, Canney would have been killed from the first blast as well.”

  “You’re sure he wasn’t?”

  “There were two rounds total fired. The number of pellets we found showed that. There were nine in each body. Symmetry in death,” she added dryly.

  “I suppose no ejected shotgun shells were found.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “Either the killer picked up the spent casings or the weapon was a nonpump where the fired casings have to be manually extracted.”

  “I guess since it was a smoothbore barrel, there’s no possibility of a ballistics matching if we find a suspected weapon.”

  “Sometimes irregularities at the end of a shotgun’s muzzle will impart scratch marks on the plastic wad. That was actually the case here. I’m not a ballistics expert, but the police may have enough to do comparisons if they ever find the shotgun. And we have the slug from Rhonda Tyler’s body as well for ballistic analysis.”

  “There was talk that the shotgun blast that killed Steve Canney might have stopped his watch, giving the time of death.”

  “No. The watch was placed on him postmortem. It was stopped because the stem was pulled out. I noted that at the crime scene. I found embedded glass in his left wrist, right where the watch would have been.”

  “Any idea why the watch was put on him after death?”

  “As a calling card perhaps? I noted that it was set to three. Pembroke’s was set to around two. That also might confirm their order of death.”

  “And Jane Doe slash Rhonda Tyler had on a watch that didn’t belong to her either and that was set to one o’clock. And it was a Zodiac.”

  Sylvia looked at her. “And now we have a Zodiac-style letter.”

  “And three people dead.”

  “So I guess the next one will be four o’clock, representing the fourth victim?”

  “If there is a next one,” said Michelle.

  “There’s little doubt of that. The first victim was an exotic dancer. However, the next two victims were local kids making out in a car. Once they start their murders, serial killers usually stick to one segment of the population. This guy’s already showing us he’s not playing by the same old rules.” She paused and added quietly, “So the real question becomes, who’ll be next?”

  CHAPTER

  13

  OUTSIDE THE POLICE

  station, the pale blue VW Beetle drove slowly past and stopped at the intersection. The driver glanced at the one-story brick building that housed the police department. They would have gotten the letter by now. They might have also deciphered the contents. It wasn’t like he’d made it very hard. The hard would come later, as in trying to stop him. Try impossible, Mr. Policemen.

  Next they’d call in the state police’s criminal investigative unit. They’d want to keep things quiet, no sense panicking people. No doubt an application for profiling assistance would be submitted to the FBI’s vaunted VICAP. Important people would be contacted to see that the matter was expedited, and a profile on the killer, on him, would be quickly forthcoming.

  Of course it would be totally wrong.

  He’d driven past the morgue earlier, where the M.E. was probably pulling her red hair out over three bodies that represented very different things yet had common themes. The clues would be minimal. He knew what to look for and thus to remove, but no one was infallible and forensic science could dredge up much from microscopic wreckage. She’d find some things, draw some correct conclusions, but on the key points she’d come up empty. The no-see-ums wouldn’t trip him up.

  He drove through the intersection as several police officers ran out of the building and climbed into their patrol cars and sped off. They were probably running down irrelevant leads, wasting energy and time, which didn’t surprise him considering the weak attributes of their leader, Todd Williams. However, Sylvia Di
az was first-rate in her field. And at some point, as the killings mounted, the FBI would be called in to take over the investigation. He was actually relishing the challenge.

  He drove to another intersection, pulled up to the mailbox and dropped the letter in before speeding off again. When they got his next communication explaining the circumstances of Steve Canney’s and Janice Pembroke’s deaths, the police would know they were in for the fight of their lives.

  King picked up Michelle from the morgue and filled her in on the details about the Zodiac letter. She, in turn, brought him up to speed on the autopsy results for Pembroke and Canney. Unfortunately, reciting the details didn’t make the puzzle any less inexplicable.

  “So it seems the killer wants to make clear that even though he’s somewhat copying the Zodiac crime with Rhonda Tyler, he’s not the Zodiac,” she said. “What do you make of that?”

  King shook his head. “It seems these murders are just the opening salvo.”

  “Do you think we’ll see another letter?”

  “Yes, and soon. And though Todd’s not convinced of it, I’m sure it’ll deal with Canney and Pembroke. He’s going to talk to Lulu Oxley and obtain more info on Rhonda Tyler.”

  Michelle looked out the windshield. “And where are we headed?”