A book code.
Book codes were about as simple as cipher could get: choose an agreed-upon text, say, a specific edition of the Bible, and then send your message by referencing the letters. Send a message like second page, fourth line, eighth letter, and it leads to H; fifth page, second line, tenth letter, you get I. Together they spell HI. Whole messages could be constructed in a similar fashion.
The thing that had grabbed Laura’s attention was the numbers. Once a code was agreed upon, most book codes used a numerical abbreviation. HI would be rendered something like 2–4–8, 5–2–10, with not a letter to be seen. She ran a finger down the photograph of the tattoo. Could it really be that simple?
The book code had other advantages. Despite its simplicity, it was nearly impossible to crack. There were too many books in the world. Even for a computer, finding the right one would take hundreds of years.
But what if she already knew which book? What if it wasn’t a book at all? What if it was a newspaper article?
First she arranged the numbers in order. The organization of the numbers into a grid meant they could be read up and down or side to side. For the sake of moving forward, she assumed they would be read in a normal left-to-right, top-to-bottom fashion. When she finished, she had a long string of them:
8 27 4 4 3 5 4 9 4 4 8 2 3 6 3 7 11 17 3 6 3 3 8 27 3 6 3 7 8 27 8 27 11 51 11 37
Next she tried to match them to the Globe story. The difficulty was that she didn’t know exactly how they related to each other and to the article. If they were supposed to indicate, say, sentence, word, then letter, she should organize them into groups of three numbers each. She tried it and got utter gibberish, no matter how she sliced it. She thought maybe it was an anagram and tried reorganizing the letters but couldn’t come up with anything.
She went back to the list of numbers and stared at it again. The highest number was fifty-one and the lowest was two, but the distribution was off. The lower numbers were favored by a huge margin. Assuming they indicated sentence and letter, wouldn’t there be an easier way to do it?
Laura tried to recreate the same message, gibberish though it was, and found she could locate all the necessary letters much earlier in the article. There was no need to use, say, sentence eleven just to indicate a U and a T.
Just to make it more difficult, maybe?
No, the very creation of a code had a certain logic to it. Even if he was insane, clearly he had the acumen to put something like this together. She would have to assume the code was a product of some kind of logic; otherwise it would be impossible to make any progress at all.
Assuming this is a book code at all, and assuming this is the right text, she thought.
She decided to stick with her interpretation of the list of numbers as ordered pairs and organized them as such.
8–27, 4–4, 3–5, 4–9, 4–4, 8–2, 3–6, 3–7, 11–17, 3–6, 3–3, 8–27, 3–6, 3–7, 8–27, 8–27, 11–51 11–37
Right away she knew she was on to something. There were too many repeats for it to be a coincidence: 8–27 appeared four times, 3–6 appeared three times, while 3–7 and 4–4 both appeared twice.
She was looking at a pattern.
The second thing that jumped out at her was the distribution of the low numbers. If she looked just at the first number in any given pair, the highest they went was eleven. Counting sentences didn’t work. What if the first number referenced paragraphs?
The article had only nine. She tried it anyway.
Gibberish again.
“Goddamn it.” She rubbed her eyes and started again. This time she would try paragraphs and words. Carefully, she counted down to the eighth paragraph and then across to the twenty-seventh word, THREE.
Almost immediately, she realized her mistake. Her eyes were getting tired; all the parts of the page were starting to blend together. She had counted down from the very top of the page, including the headline, the byline, and the date. She’d ended up on what was really the fifth paragraph, the one that began with the word ASKED.
She sighed and began to start over, then stopped again. Something caught her eye.
It seemed unlikely he had started at the top. But say, just for a second, that he had. Then paragraph eight appeared twice, as 8–27 and 8–2. And 8–27 was the word THREE.
And 8–2?
It only took her a second to count it out. 8–2 led to the word FOR.
She stared at the words for a second, turning the paper back and forth.
THREE and FOR.
Her pulse began to quicken. Again, she didn’t believe landing on two numbers, even if one was misspelled, could be a coincidence. Something else stood out: the most common first number was three, and that would indicate the line with the date, January 27, 2015. A quick scan confirmed her suspicions. The date provided two, seven, zero, one, and five, and in the text were the words THREE, FOR, SIX, EIGHT, and the number nine. With a little creative reading, this article made it possible to encode all ten digits.
She started working it out in order: 8–27 would be three, 4–4 would be six. For 3–5, she counted January and then each individual number as its own word: 3–5 was zero, 4–9 meant nine, 4–4 was six again, and 8–2 equaled four.
Cautiously, piece by piece, she put it together. It was all numbers again—numbers translated into numbers. Then she got to the last two pairs, paragraph eleven, words fifty-one and thirty-seven.
She gasped.
Her own handwriting stared back from the paper, dancing in the light, mocking her, forming her own private message from a monster.
3609641581731533FINDME
FIND ME.
There was no doubt she had cracked the code. She read the two words again and again. Without punctuation, there was no inflection. The phrase seemed to lose all meaning.
FIND ME.
She couldn’t tell if he was daring her or begging her.
FIND ME.
But how?
And then she sat back in her chair, wide-eyed. The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Find me implied a location, and those numbers …
She scribbled them out again.
36.096415, 81.731533.
Her blood ran cold. Coordinates. A location. It wasn’t just a tattoo—it was an invitation.
An invitation printed on a young girl’s skin.
Doubt gripped her. Could that really be the truth? The message didn’t include north, south, east, or west, and she couldn’t remember which ones would be near the United States, but it only took her a second to find a website that would match decimal coordinates to locations. She decided to try them all.
It quickly became apparent that the area around thirty-seven degrees south, ninety degrees west was located in the South Pacific, about eight hundred miles off the coast of Chile.
Thirty-seven degrees south, ninety degrees east landed her in the Indian Ocean, more than a thousand miles west of Australia.
Thirty-seven degrees north, ninety degrees east put her in the corner of the Xinjiang Province, northwest China.
The last one was much closer.
The website offered a more detailed map. She zoomed in, then found the latitude line and used her finger to trace a line across the map from left to right. She located the longitude line and slashed her other finger downward, then drew them together at the intersection.
Close-knit topographical curves nestled deep in a sea of green marked the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Pisgah National Forest. The spot was in North Carolina, only about a hundred and seventy miles west of Hillsborough, little more than a three-hour drive from the very spot she was standing.
FIND ME.
The words would echo in her dreams. She could feel it.
She tapped the location on the map once more. The message couldn’t be clearer: X marks the spot.
CHAPTER
18
THE DART’S FLAT blue paint had been sucking up the sun for hours. Even in the relative cool of eighty-something degrees,
even with the windows down, the air inside had turned to soup and the cracked leather seats boiled.
None of it reached Laura, who sat in the driver’s seat, minute after minute, doing nothing. The keys hung in one hand. She pressed her forehead to the steering wheel and let it burn into her flesh. Hoped it would knock something loose.
Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Adrenaline, she told herself, and ignored them.
It was everything she wanted. A story that readers wouldn’t turn away from, that editors couldn’t afford to ignore. Yesterday it had held bushels of mystery and inherent drama, enough of both to make it a hit.
But today? With a message like that tattooed into a chunk of flesh?
It would be a sensation.
She pinched herself, tried to wake up. In her head, she was already writing the book. It would make a hell of a book, a best seller that would give back everything Boston had taken away. Her self-respect, her career, her escape from this godforsaken town—all of it had just been handed back to her on a silver platter.
All she had to do was reach out and take it.
She peeled her forehead off the steering wheel and looked at herself in the mirror, rubbed the angry red mark it had left on her skin, flinched at the sensation of touching her own flesh.
Perimortem.
Everything that had happened to Teresa Mitchem so far had happened while she was still alive. There was no reason to think that had changed. Charging up there with a camera, a notepad, and a pencil might make a great story, but it also might make that little girl dead.
An image crowded into her head. Teresa, ten years old and tied to a table somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, tattooed hour by hour, the relentless buzzing of the gun as he carved into her. Hearing that sound every time he turned it on. The harbinger of pain, the horror of anticipation.
And then to have her skin flayed off? She couldn’t imagine it, could not even wrap her head around it. The very thought of …
She snapped out of her reverie, crawled out of whatever dark hole she’d fallen into.
Realized she’d been punching the dash over and over.
The knuckles of her right hand were already swollen. Blood ran from an open cut. She reached out and touched the blood. Winced.
“Goddamn it,” she said.
And just like that, she made her decision.
* * *
The engine turned over once, caught, then sputtered and died. She turned the key again and punched the gas a few times, careful not to flood it.
“Come on.”
She turned the key again. A new sound came from the car, a creak of metal grinding. She ignored it and twisted the key harder.
“Come on!” she yelled, and pushed the gas pedal to the floor.
Metal shrieked against metal. The engine coughed one last time and thin black smoke began issuing from under the hood.
* * *
Running two blocks soaked her in sweat.
She had a message from the Kid, and a possible location for Teresa Mitchem known to no one else in the world. It seemed unfathomable. If anything happened to Laura, the poor girl would never be found. Desperation flooded through her. She carried a dangerously fragile secret. It needed to spread, to survive. It burned to get out.
Finally, at the corner of Wake and Margaret, she took a breath, pulled out her phone, and called Tim. The line rang four times before his voicemail clicked on. She hung up and dialed again.
“Motel,” Elias Quant answered.
“Elias, it’s Laura Chambers.”
“Motel here,” he said again. She could picture him flipping through one of his Dutch magazines, barely able to hear her over the phone.
“I need to get in touch with Agent Timinski. Please connect me with his room.”
“Timinski,” Quant repeated.
“Yes.”
“Which one is he?”
Laura suppressed the urge to bang her phone against a brick wall. “Don’t you have a register?”
“Oh, it’s around here somewhere,” he said in his precise, accented English.
She gritted her teeth. “He’s about forty, bushy eyebrows, probably the only current guest who’s a goddamned FBI agent. Is it coming back to you?”
“No need to for such language, Miss Chambers.”
She said nothing.
“Yes, I do in fact remember him. Room four. I’ll connect you now.”
The phone rang and rang. Laura let it go on for three or four minutes, hoping Timinski was in the shower or otherwise occupied, that if she let it go on long enough eventually he’d pick it up.
He didn’t.
She hung up, dialed again.
“Motel.”
“Elias, he didn’t answer.”
“Now that you mention it, his car is gone. I suspect he may not be in right now.”
“Goddamn it!”
“No need for such language, Miss Cha—”
She pressed END and then shoved the phone down into her pocket. The sheriff’s station was only another two blocks away.
* * *
McKinney looked younger in person. He was at least fifty—she could remember him campaigning against Don Rodgers during an election back in the day—but up close the steel gray running through his hair served only to contrast against perfectly tanned skin, oily black eyes, and a jawline that would make Superman weep.
“Sheriff McKinney,” she said.
He didn’t bother to look up but gestured for her to take a seat and kept scratching away at the top of a stack of papers.
She waited, hands folded in her lap, and when two minutes had passed and he hadn’t even so much as grunted in her direction, she tried again.
“Sheriff McKinney,” she repeated.
“I’ll be with you when I’m ready, Miss Chambers.” He kept writing.
“Sir, it’s quite urgent.”
“You know what I’m working on here? No, of course you don’t. Let’s just say it’s official police business. Official police business. You understand what that is? Of course you do. It’s not scribbles on a piece of paper. No, here we deal with matters of life and death, Miss Chambers. Life and death. That means it’s important.”
“Sheriff, I’m sure it’s important, but I’m here because—”
“Because the rules of civilized society apparently mean fuck all to you reporters. That’s why you’re here in my office during the hour I set aside specifically to catch up on this paperwork. You think I like doing paperwork?”
“I—”
“That was not an invitation to speak, Miss Chambers. And it’s not like the question needed an answer. Of course I don’t like doing paperwork. It’s about as fun as licking a porcupine. But it keeps things moving, keeps the wheels turning. It has to be done, for the good of a civil society.”
“Sir, please, you need to pay attention—”
He brought one ham-sized fist down onto the desk and rattled every gold trophy on the shelves behind him. “That was not an invitation to speak, Miss Chambers!” he roared at her. “You come into my office, wasting my valuable time. You constantly interrupt me. And now you’re telling me how to do my job.”
He ticked her offenses off on his fingers, one by one.
“We are not off to a good start, ma’am. No, we are not. That’s what you damn reporters just can’t seem to understand. Rules exist for a reason. There are no arbitrary rules. We may think them so, but I promise you, every rule ever created by the mind of man or God was in response to some problem, some defect in our very nature. I count myself among the defective, Miss Chambers, and that—that!—is the beginning.”
He sat back in his chair and seemed to be waiting for her to speak.
She saw no choice but to indulge him. “The beginning of what?”
“Of understanding what we do here in this building.”
“Maybe I could write a feature about you someday.”
His nose wrinkled. “If I get my wish, this will be the very l
ast time we ever speak.”
“In that case, let’s get down to brass tacks. I think I know where Teresa Mitchem is being kept.”
McKinney’s face went through a remarkable transformation. First his eyes widened in surprise, and his mouth hung open. He started to speak, stopped himself, and the lantern jaw swung shut like a bear trap. The eyes narrowed into thin oblong pools, and she could almost see the calculations running behind his eyes.
“Say that again.”
She repeated herself.
McKinney took a breath. “Do you know, ma’am, that making a false police report is a crime in the state of North Carolina?”
“It doesn’t matter because this isn’t a false report. Listen to me. Those numbers tattooed on the skin—I figured out what they mean.”
He stood abruptly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit. I saw the official pictures.”
“If you’ve seen any official pictures, as you claim, the very act of letting you see them would be illegal. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve just reported a crime.”
She shook her head, dismissing him outright. “Not at all. I’m a journalist. This person was a source. No crime was committed.”
“That is my determination to make.”
“Well, I’m not giving you a name, so good luck with that.”
He rested his huge palms flat on the desk and leaned forward until he towered over her. “I don’t know how they do things in Boston”—he spit the last word like a curse—“but down here I tell you how things run. You want to make a First Amendment case about it? Fine. Just remember your place. In here, you and I might as well be all alone together.”
His eyes drifted down across her body, then back up to her face. The corner of his mouth turned up into a cruel smile.
She shivered, then tried to put away her disgust.
“Look, I’m sorry if I’m stepping on your toes here, but this is something you need to hear. It’s just like you said, a matter of life and death.”
He didn’t sit down, didn’t even move, just kept staring at her. “Okay, tell me how you managed to understand this killer’s message when everyone else is so baffled.”
“Because he called me.”
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