William Bernhardt - Strip search

"So what did you come up with?"

"Hard to describe. Kind of a combination of plaster of Paris and cotton candy."

"You're joking, right?"

She winked. "Great scientists never reveal their secrets." The buzzer on her wristwatch sounded. "It's soup."

With anyone else, I would've had my doubts, but Amelia knew her stuff. Carefully, Amelia put a gloved hand on each corner and lifted the cast. To her evident delight, it all held together in one perfect piece. Her secret recipe had worked. With an elegant flip, she showed me what was on the other side, what had been fingerpainted into the grease.

It was reversed, of course, but I could still read it. As it turned out, it wasn't a message at all, at least not in the conventional sense. There were no words. Only…numbers. And symbols. And it wasn't a sentence, it was an equation:

"What does it mean?"

Amelia gently slid her impression into a plastic evidence bag. "As if I would know. I gave up on math after my second semester of algebra."

"Uh, yeah. That was a tough one for me, too." I hadn't taken a math class since junior high school. "If this was left behind by the killer, it might be important. There must be someone on staff who knows math."

"My understanding is that O'Bannon is trying to round up experts, but not having much success. You know anyone who's good at math?"

As a matter of fact, I did, but he had been barred from the premises. I jotted the equation into my notebook and started to move on, when Amelia said, "By the by, Susan-it's really good to see you here."

"Because of my sunny personality?"

"Because the person who did this…" She grimaced. "Needs to be caught. As soon as possible."

"Amelia, dear. Have you no faith in our distinguished chief homicide detective?"

"I wouldn't want to say anything that might lose me my job…" She paused. "So I won't. But as I said…I'm really glad you're here. And most of the gang in Forensics feel the same. So don't let Granger get you down, okay?"

"Deal," I said, not feeling nearly as much confidence as I pretended. But when you had someone as sweet as Amelia trying to give you a happy shot, it would be churlish not to cooperate. The reality was, I was already feeling edgy, nervous. I knew Granger didn't want me on this case. He was content to let me handle minor matters-property theft, embezzlement, and what-not. But this was something else again. If I didn't produce, and fast, Granger would be pushing O'Bannon to get rid of me. The first time I slipped up, any way at all, he'd have my consulting contract yanked and kick my butt back to the suburbs. That kind of pressure I didn't need. That kind of pressure made me instantly flash on my uneraseable mental map of every liquor store in the city, made me calculate the approximate distance to the nearest of them and plan a route.

Granger, Tony, Amelia-all of them had said the same thing, in one way or another. This was my kind of case. They were counting on me to bring this monster in, to stop him before he mutilated someone else.

The only problem was-I didn't know if I could.

"Chief Robert O'Bannon found his son, Darcy,lying on the floor in his library, as usual. Darcy didn't look up, didn't say hi. But then, he never did. Why would he? In his mind, there was no reason to offer a common greeting. What purpose did it serve?

The library also doubled as O'Bannon's home office, but he always preferred to call it the library. Because he loved books. Three walls of the room were lined with high-quality mahogany shelves-he'd done the carpentry work, as well as the wood-staining, himself. And all the shelves were full. Full and then some-they'd had to put overflow shelves in the garage. He had all kinds of books-dictionaries, encyclopedias, fiction, nonfiction, books on every topic imaginable. He was curious about almost everything. He often said the best cure for being lonely, or depressed, was to learn something new.

He had scores of criminology texts; every time something at the office was replaced by a more current edition, he took the throwaways home. But he rarely read them. That was what he did during the day. At night, he indulged his first love: novels-the best of everything, from classic literature to current bestsellers. But his favorites had always been nineteenth-century British fiction: Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Trollope, and perhaps his personal favorite, Jane Austen. Not exactly the conventional image of what a tough-as-nails cop read in his spare time. But he was not a cliche he didn't go to monster truck shows or watch NASCAR races and he was content to keep it that way. It hadn't held him back any so far. And there had been benefits, he thought, as he gazed down at his hapless autistic adult offspring, who was thumbing through the pages of Wuthering Heights, a book he'd read so many times he could probably recite it from memory.

Forget the probably. He could recall every word, like one of those living books in the last chapter of Fahrenheit 451. The image brought a small smile to O'Bannon's face. Darcy was his boy, after all. At least a little piece of him.

O'Bannon placed his sterling steel cane against his desk and eased into his chair. He'd spent every day for the past several months pretending he wasn't having any serious trouble getting around. What was a gunshot wound in the gut to a tough old cop like him, anyway? Barely worth mentioning. Except that it still hurt, even half a year later, every hour of every day, even with the medication no one at the office knew he was taking. It was much more difficult now for him to get around, to take care of business. More difficult to take care of Darcy. And Darcy typically required a lot of care.

"Have a good day, son?"

"Okay," Darcy said, not looking up from the book on the floor, his chin propped up on both elbows. "Not Excellent. Certainly not Very Excellent."

"Did you go to the day care center?"

"For three hours and forty-six minutes. But they do not really let me do anything with the children. Not by myself."

"And I guess there was no time for custard. Because of course then it would be a Very Excellent Day."

"Susan took me to The Custard Factory." He rolled over onto one elbow and, although he didn't actually make eye contact with his father, did look in his general direction. "But she got a call before we finished. I had to take Bus 14, then Bus 36B home."

"She, um, didn't take you with her?"

"No. Not this time."

"Did she say why?"

"She said they would not let her."

"Did she say who they was?"

"No."

"Did you ask?"

"No."

Well, that was a relief. "Why didn't you?"

"B-B-Because I already knew." He twisted back onto both elbows and resumed the adventures of Heathcliff and Catherine.

Oh. Well, of course he did, damn it. The kid was scary sometimes, the way he knew everything. Except the common sense and social skills normally acquired by a five-year-old. Looked like O'Bannon was in for a chilly evening. Unless maybe…

"Darcy, you wanna play a game? Maybe chess? It's your favorite."

"But you hate it," he said, mumbling into his hand. "It is not fun to play with someone who is not enjoying the game."

"Okay, what about Scrabble? We both enjoy Scrabble."

"I always beat you at Scrabble."

Yes, that would be because you know every word in the whole damn dictionary and can anagram letters like a code-breaking computer. "I still enjoy playing."

"I would rather not, if you do not mind."

"Well…what would you like to do?"

Again he turned, if only for an instant. "I would have liked to have gone with Susan."

O'Bannon sighed heavily and closed his eyes. He knew better than to perpetuate a discussion that could never reach a satisfying result. They couldn't talk to each other. They just didn't know how. And much as he might like to, he couldn't blame it all on the neurological disorder. Darcy did much better with Susan. Some of the young women at the day care center. Even small children. But not with his father.