David Baldacci: Hour Game

"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.

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.