David Baldacci - Hour Game

When he rose back up, he noted the wall Eddie had written on. It had been cleaned off, but there were still traces of the word he'd written there.

TEAT

A few days before, he'd played with various combinations of the word: tent , test, text. Nothing seemed to work. Yet he didn't believe Eddie would have written that word if it wasn't important.

King pulled the cipher disk out of his pocket and played with it. He had taken to carrying it around for some reason. Long ago it was discovered that frequency analysis could break an encryption of fair length. The method was straightforward. Some letters of the alphabet occur far more frequently than others. And the letter that occurs far more often than all others is the letter e. This discovery had put the code-breakers on top for quite some time until the encryption folks once more got the upper hand centuries later.

King spun the outer ring of the cipher disk around until the letter e was lined up with the letter a. One tick off. He looked at the wall and in his mind's eye changed one letter, e for an a . Now it read:

TEET

That made no sense either. What was a teet? As a long shot he left and went back to his office, went to a search engine on the Internet and typed in the word teet, and for the hell of it, the word crime. He didn't expect to find anything. However, a long list came up. Probably all garbage, he thought. And yet when he looked at the very first listing, he suddenly sat up.

"Oh, my God," he said. He read all that was there and sat back. He felt his forehead: it was damp with sweat, his whole body was. "Oh, my God," he said again.

He stood slowly. He was glad Michelle was out. He couldn't have faced her. Not right now.

King had some things to track down, just to make sure. And then he was going to have to just face it. He knew it would be one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do.

TWO DAYS LATER KING PULLED UP into the parking lot and got out of his car. He went inside the office building, asked for Sylvia and was directed back to her office.

She was at her desk in her medical office, her left arm in a sling. She looked up and smiled, then came around and gave him a hug.

"Do you feel halfway human yet?" she asked.

"I'm getting there," he said quietly. "How's the arm?"

"Almost as good as new."

He sat down across from her while she perched on the edge of her desk.

"I haven't seen much of you lately."

"I've been kind of busy," he answered.

"I've got tickets to a play in D.C. for next Saturday. Would it be too forward to ask if you'd like to join me? Separate hotel rooms, of course. You'll be perfectly safe."

King glanced over at the coatrack. The woman's coat, sweater and shoes were neatly arranged either on or next to the rack.

"Is something wrong, Sean?"

He looked back at her. "Sylvia, why do you think Eddie came after us?"

Her demeanor instantly changed. "He's crazy. We helped bring him down. Or at least you did. He hated you for it."

"But he let me go. And he kept you. He had you bent over a tree stump, about to cut your head off. Like an executioner."

Her face twisted angrily. "Sean, the man had killed nine people already, most at random."

He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. She sat back behind her desk and slowly read it.

She looked up. "It's the newspaper article about my husband's death."

"He was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, case was never solved."

"I'm well aware of that," she said coldly, sliding the paper back across. "So?"

"So the same night George Diaz was killed Bobby Battle's Rolls-Royce was damaged. The next day the Rolls was gone, and so was the mechanic who looked after Bobby's collection."

"Are you saying this mechanic person killed my husband?"

"No, I'm saying Bobby Battle did."

She looked at him, stunned. "Why in the hell would he do that?"

"Because he was avenging you. He was avenging the woman he loved."

Sylvia rose, her fingers digging into her desktop. "What the hell are you trying to do here?"

Now King's demeanor changed. He sat forward. "Sit down, Sylvia, I have a lot more to say."

"I-"

"Sit!"

She slowly sank back into her chair, without ever taking her gaze off him.

"You told me once that you'd seen Lulu Oxley at the gynecologist you both used. You intimated she'd changed docs. But she didn't change docs. You did."

"So is that a crime?"

"I'm getting to that. I got the name of your new ob-gyn from your old doctor, and then I went to see your new gynecologist. She was way up in D.C. Why so far away, Sylvia?"

"That's none of your damn business."

"When you had your surgery three and a half years ago, your husband performed it. He was the best, you said. Only he had another agenda when he opened you up. I've discovered after talking to a surgeon friend of mine that the procedure to correct a ruptured diverticulum is one of the very few that would allow the surgeon to do something ‘extra' in the pelvic region that most likely wouldn't be noticed by anyone assisting him."

"Would you please get to the point!" she exclaimed.

"I know, Sylvia."

"You know what?" she said fiercely.

"That a tubal ligation was performed on you without your knowledge that rendered you infertile."

There was a long silence. "You don't know what you're talking-"

King interrupted. "George Diaz corrected your diverticulitis and operated on your colon all right, but at the same time he also stapled your fallopian tubes shut. And he did it on purpose. You couldn't go to your old ob-gyn with those staples in you: how could you explain them? So you went to a new one, probably with dummy records, and she removed them. I went to see her with a bogus story about my ‘wife' and her fallopian tube problem. I said you'd recommended her because you said she'd done such a wonderful job on you. Because of confidentiality restrictions she couldn't tell me much, but it was just enough to confirm my suspicions. And the damage was permanent, wasn't it? You'd never have children."

"You bastard, how dare you-"

King interrupted her again. "Your husband found out you and Bobby were lovers. You fell for the old man just like hundreds before you. And George took his revenge for your infidelity. And then you took yours." He picked up the photo of George Diaz off her desk and laid it facedown. "You don't have to keep up the facade of the poor, pining widow for me."

"I was lying flat on my back in the hospital when George was killed!"

"That's right. But I'm betting your husband told you what he did. He'd want you to know how he'd avenged himself for your betrayal. And you called Bobby and told him all about it. And he took his Rolls-Royce, went over to your house, saw Diaz out walking, and that was that. At first I thought Bobby had run Roger Canney's wife off the road and killed her, because her death also occurred around the time George was killed. But hers was a simple car accident. Your husband's death was murder."

"It's all conjecture. And even if it happened as you say, I did nothing wrong. Nothing."

"The wrong comes later. Because you killed Bobby by injecting a lethal dose of potassium chloride into his nutrition bag."

"Get out of my office."

"I'll go when I've had my say," he shot back.

"First you say I'm the man's lover, and then you say I'm his murderer. What possible motivation would I have for killing him?"

"You were afraid of being exposed," King said simply. "On the very day he was killed we saw you at Diane Hinson's home. Michelle told you Bobby was conscious, but that he was just rambling, calling out people's names, saying stuff, totally incoherent. You were terrified he'd say your name, talk about your relationship. Then everything might come out. Maybe he'd already thrown you aside by then. So maybe you owed him nothing. I don't know that for sure, but I do know that you went and killed him. For a doctor it would be easy. You knew the hospital routine. You put the poison in the bag and not the tube, and you left the feather and watch because you wanted the murder attributed to the other killer. You were very quick to support my theory of a family member having killed Bobby. But you made a mistake. You didn't take anything from his hospital room. Those thefts from the other victims, the St. Christopher's medal and the like, weren't revealed to the public or to you. So you didn't know to copy that detail."