J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

As I browse the little book, I notice pages where Jeff has underlined just a single letter in the middle of a word. On an entire page, there will be just one or two of these random lines underneath an I or an O or an F, reminding me of the way I used to mark up books as a kid first discovering cryptography, using a simple book cipher to write secret messages. The memory brings a smile to my lips.

The very first entry in the book is the most marked. It’s titled THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES, BUT THERE SHOULD BE. The first line in the second paragraph reads:

In these cases, the very same fear that prompts the theist to doubt his faith perversely motivated the atheist toward an artificial certainty in the existence of a spiritual world.

The letters he’s underlined-the I and N in the word in , the F and E in the word fear , the R in artificial , the N in certainty , and the O in world -they’re not a cipher code, but they do spell a word. Turning the pages with greater urgency, I find the pattern repeated, not all in one sentence as in the first instance, but stretching over the length of paragraphs and pages. Always the same sequence of letters, always spelling the same word.

INFERNO.

Jeff gave the impression that he didn’t know much about the inner workings of Nesbitt’s company, and when Hilda spilled her own version, she never alluded to Jeff by name, only mentioning that in the grip of paranoia Nesbitt had brought new people in from the outside, people she presumably didn’t know well. And yet, over and over in a strangely compulsive way, Jeff was picking out the sequence of letters that spell the code name of Nesbitt’s informer.

Why?

I pull out my phone and dial Jeff’s number. Evidently he knows more than he let on. Maybe giving me the book was his way of revealing this, knowing I would pick up on the underlining eventually. There’s no answer. The voicemail picks up and an electronically generated voice repeats the digits.

“Call me,” I say. “I’ve been reading your book.”

Then I wait. When he doesn’t call back right away, I pop the rings of my Filofax open, removing a couple of fresh sheets of lined notepaper. I make two lists side by side, the first column labeled NESBITT and the second ENGLEWOOD. Underneath the first I put Jeff and Hilda, Brandon Ford and the men in his paramilitary team. Then I relist Ford and his men under Englewood, drawing an arrow from left to right, since at some point they must have switched sides.

At the bottom of the page I write INFERNO, underlining the name.

What column should I put him in? I would write Inferno’s name under Nesbitt’s column, only it seems Ford is the only person in touch with the insider. If he’s switched sides, maybe Inferno belongs to Englewood’s team now. That’s where the power seems to be, after all. The way Wilcox was talking about him, there’s not much the man can’t do. The phony DNA results are proof of that. And if he has the power to manipulate the NCIC database, why maybe it’s not so implausible to think he could have arranged the traffic stop that led to Nesbitt’s death. Maybe Silvestri, the training officer, undid his thumb break for a reason; maybe he really did intend to shoot Nesbitt, just as the conspiracy theorists online insist. The crooked cop angle strikes me as ridiculous, the stuff of Hollywood or bad television dramas, but after my face-to-face meeting with Englewood, when he dropped Reg Keller’s name, anything seems possible.

I write SILVESTRI under Englewood’s column, but with a question mark.

At the top of the page, above all the rest, I add KELLER in heavy block letters. Unfinished business. The way he disappeared so completely when we were hunting him, that suggests powerful interests working in his favor. Englewood again? By mentioning Big Reg’s name, he as good as confirmed it. If Englewood protected him before, clearing the way for him to kill Chad Macneil in Buenos Aires, is it possible Englewood also brought him back to Houston, where he murdered my John Doe, who may or may not be one of the paramilitaries by the name of Robert Johnson?

All the names. All the interconnections.

I check my phone for missed numbers, but Jeff hasn’t attempted to return my call.

Staring at the lists, going over them in black ink, making everything darker and darker, scoring deep lines into the page, I don’t know, I just don’t know how it all fits together.

But my sense of Reg Keller is this: he committed minor crimes for personal advantage, and when his back was to the wall, he went as far as homicide. Still, there’s a difference between putting a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger, and tying a person’s hands down and methodically skinning them.

Any of us, in the grip of desperation, with fear narrowing our options down, is capable of the first kind of evil. The second takes a special kind of sadist.

Is Keller one of them? I would have thought not.

Here’s the thing, though. Since we last met, Big Reg has been on an outlaw journey, traveling to darker regions of the mind, perhaps unlocking doors even he didn’t know were there before. The man I went up against two years ago might not have been capable of such brutality, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t today.

I’m flailing, just like I told Wilcox. But there’s one thing I’ve learned, and it’s this. Even when you don’t connect, even when your fist keeps slicing through air, if you keep punching, sooner or later, you’re bound to hit something.

On his way out, the old guy in the flat cap peers down at the mess I’ve made on the table. He tucks his paper under his arm, shaking his head.

I smile up at him. “You have a nice day.”

The gate outside Jeff’s auto garage is padlocked and there’s no sign of activity on the lot, just the row of picked-over car husks out front, the debris of tires and crushed glass, brown weeds pushing up through the cracks in the concrete. The blacked-out windows show a layer of baked-on grime, and the creases in the articulated garage doors are outlined in rust. I walk along the curb, inspecting the coils of barbed wire at the top of the fence, not relishing the prospect of making the climb.

A tall hedge separates the property from the undeveloped lot behind. I pick my way across the overgrown, potholed ground, looking for gaps in the bushes, hoping there’s a back way into the alley I parked inside during my first visit. There’s no opening in the fence, but the wire stops where the fence meets the hedge.

I glance around to see if anyone’s watching. Across a side street is a liquor store with burglar bars over the windows. Next to it, some itinerant workers are loitering in the Burger King parking lot, but they aren’t paying attention to what I’m up to-or if they are, they’re making a point of not showing it.

The hedge is inside the fence on Jeff’s property, so I have to shimmy up, pushing my shoes into the links for a toehold. The climb is awkward rather than difficult, and soon my leg is over the top, seeking purchase among the tree branches. It’s a pine hedge, prickly and too fragile to support my weight, so there’s no choice but to slide down the fence itself, scrubbing my back against the needles. Once I reach the ground, I’m sandwiched by the hedge on one side and the fence on the other, with only a pocket of space to move around in and no visible path through the foliage. Wandering again, but in a not-so-dark wood. Covering my face with my upraised arms, I push my way through.

Outside the hedge, I’m cut off by the bumper of an old Plymouth Barracuda with no glass and a stripped interior. In the dark, the old muscle cars had looked a little better than they do in the blazing daylight.