Mayes, Casey - A Deadly Row

“Do you have a problem with Davis?” Zach asked softly, and I knew Steve was treading on dangerous ground.

“No, sir. He’s my boss. I’m behind him a thousand percent. Grady made his choice and I can live with it.”

Zach was clearly tired of that particular conversation; I could see it in his eyes.

Zach took the original of the note we’d just gotten and stored it in a locked box where he kept all of the other letters the police had received from the killer. Once that was safely put away, he pinned the front copy on the foam board with the rest of the copied notes, and then placed the back copy on the other side of the room. I didn’t know why he’d separated them so entirely, and then suddenly, I realized he was giving me my own space to work out my theory.

“It seems that there has to be a code here somewhere, don’t you think?” I asked.

“What makes you say that?”

I smiled at him. “If I told you it was woman’s intuition, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“You’re right, I wouldn’t.”

I walked over to the back copies.

“If we only knew for certain what they meant,” I said as I studied them. I was sure the numbers on the backs of the photos and letters were related to some kind of puzzle, a format the killer was using to map out the murders in his mind. But beyond that, I had no idea how it all came together.

“What do you want me to do, Ch—, I mean, Zach?”

Zach smiled at Steve. “I know it’s going to be tough, but you can do it.” He pointed to a pile of boxes in one corner of the room. “Those are notes from the two crime scenes. I need you to make a list of everything they have in common for me.” As Steve moved toward the boxes, Zach added, “Don’t include just what you see. Try to dig a little deeper and tell me what’s not there.”

“It sounds like I’m looking for a white dog in a snow-storm,” Steve said.

“Something like that. Are you up to it?”

“You bet,” he said as he moved away from us.

“How about you?” Zach asked. “Do you mind spending some of your time here to work on that theory of yours?”

“You can have all I’ve got.”

Zach nodded, and then to my surprise, he kissed me briefly on the lips. It was about as public as he ever got with his displays of affection. “You’re my kind of gal, you know that, don’t you?”

“That’s handy, since you’re my kind of guy.”

He winked at me, and then Zach walked over to the locked box and opened it again. When he was examining direct physical evidence, it was like he was channeling someone else, he got so lost in his thoughts. I had no idea what was going through his mind, but I’d seen that look in his eyes enough to know that I could set off a firecracker under his nose and he wouldn’t even notice it.

I looked back at the board full of copied clues, and studied the mishmash of letters and numbers. I was about to ask Zach for their order of appearance when I thought to turn the copies over. As I’d hoped, these were two-sided copies, with the crime scenes depicted on one side and the letters the killer had written matched to their codes on the other. That still didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, though.

“What order did these come in?” I asked, forgetting for a second that Zach could be on the moon for all the chance I had to get an answer from him.

Steve looked around, and then he said, “If you’re talking to me, there’s a log over on that table.”

I walked over to the spot he’d pointed to, and after digging through some of the paperwork, I found a master list of the mailings. Taking it back with me, I glanced at the board and saw that my husband had pinned them up randomly. I arranged the four entries in the order they were received until I had a good idea of how the mailings should be organized. Taking out my cell phone, I snapped a quick picture so I’d have a reference to carry with me, and then I turned the codes over and snapped a photo of the fronts. The two crime scene images were disturbing, but if I was going to help with the case, I had to steel myself for what I might see. Once I had the front pages in my phone, I turned the copies back over, and started recording the number sequences on a notepad. There were four sequences so far, two matching crime scene photos and two notes, including the latest entry.

3A, 5A, 2E, 4A, 1E, 4O.

I stared at it for what felt like an hour, hoping for some kind of breakthrough.

Nothing. If the forty meant anything, I’d have to figure it out later. For now, I had to focus on just the letter-number combinations.

Did the repeating pattern mean anything? A A E A E. Did that mean the next letter would be an E? Would it match the pattern? Even if it did, I still didn’t know what that might mean.

Okay, forget about the letters. How about the numbers?

3, 5, 2, 4, 1.

3, 5, 2, 4, represented a pattern, especially if the next entry was a 3. It was something to consider, but I couldn’t do anything with it yet. They added up to 15, and when they were added together, it made 6. Again, so what? 3 times 5 divided by 2 multiplied by 4 divided by 1 totaled 30, which added up to 3. Even though it was true, what could it mean?

I didn’t see any significance to any of the sequences I’d come up with so far. What else could they represent? How about if I took the letters and numbers and charted them on an x-y axis? Would that yield me anything? I took out a pad of paper from my purse and drew a rough graph, with numbers going vertically and letters horizontally.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There was a pattern there only if the next note was 6A or 6E. That would create a stair-step segment, but so what? So far, I had a 1E, 2E, 3A, 4A, and 5A. Why had 5E been skipped? Was there a missing note, one that the police misfiled or accidentally threw away before anyone realized the significance of it?

I had another thought, and redrew my grid, this time substituting numbers in the order of the notes received where the stars now stood.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

No, that didn’t make any sense, either. Had something been missed, perhaps a vital clue to the whole thing?

I finally gave up. If there was a pattern of any significance there, I couldn’t see it. Most likely I didn’t have enough information to solve the puzzle yet. Given time, and enough entries, I should have more of a chance to see what the killer was trying to tell us. Or was there any hidden message there at all? Was it a prank, a ruse to make the police work harder than they should on nothing more than a nonsensical set of letters and numbers that in reality meant nothing? No, I couldn’t believe that. Each entry had been painstakingly drawn, as if the murderer was proud of what the segments represented.

There was a message there.

I just hadn’t figured it out yet.

I looked up from my pad to find my husband staring at me, a broad smile on his face.

“What’s so funny?” Steve was far enough away and so focused on his work that he probably couldn’t hear us, but I kept my voice low just in case. I knew how it was to be interrupted in the middle of a thought, and I didn’t want to do anything to disturb the investigation.

Zach matched my soft tone. “You look so intense when you’re working. It’s just like you’re creating a puzzle.”

“I wish that’s what it was. There’s a logic to my puzzles, but this is all just a jumble.”

“Well, you gave it your best shot,” he said. “Thanks for trying.”