He had to remember not to blame the girl. What could she know? She only acted out of fear, ignorance. He bent over and lightly brushed his lips across her forehead. Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, / And tempted her out of her gloom…
He threw a tarp over her, hid the axe behind the seat, and pulled out onto the street.
That was sloppy, he scolded himself, driving away. He’d been clumsy, foolhardy, as if he wanted to be caught. And it had almost cost him everything.
He could take no more risks. His work was too important. She was the third, the final component in the sacred trinity. First Helen, then Annabel, and now Lenore. The chosen offerings. After this, there would be only rejoicing. He was the Instrument who would usher in the Golden Age. As it was meant to be. As it was foretold.
10
It was a miracle I woke at all, much less before nine o’clock. I didn’t know which was dragging me down more-the reading all night or the drinking all night. I’m not sure when I finally gave it up. I was in the middle of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”-a jolly Poe yarn about someone being killed via a poisonous leech-when my eyelids finally gave in.
A quick glance at the watch told me I had less than thirty minutes until I was supposed to pick up Darcy, who was about ten minutes away. My first instinct was to just grab my keys and go-what would he care if I was groomed or not? But O’Bannon might be lurking about, and he’d know something was up if I came in looking disheveled, distraught, or drunk. He’d fire my sweet ass in a heartbeat, and then I’d have no chance of reclaiming Rachel. So I showered quickly, steaming the smell out of my skin, and I brushed my teeth relentlessly.
I stared at the smoky brown liquid resting at the bottom of the bottle on my nightstand. If I polished that off, I could ditch the bottle. That would be smart. Get rid of the evidence, just in case Lisa or O’Bannon dropped by.
But if you start drinking first thing in the morning, I reminded myself…
Don’t be idiotic. It was barely a swallow. I raised the bottle to my lips and downed it. It burned going down, but it burned good.
And then I brushed my teeth some more.
I may have violated a few traffic regs making my way to O’Bannon’s, but they were minor ones, I’m sure. After I’d been in the car a few minutes, my cell beeped out the theme from Dragnet.
“Pulaski.”
“Susan, it’s Colin. I’ve got something for you.”
“Talk to me, Einstein.”
“Those messages you left behind-they really are messages. Coded messages. I can confirm it.”
Since he couldn’t see my face, I figured it was safe to smile.
“It’s a code, but an insanely complex one. A normal substitution cipher has twenty-six characters, for obvious reasons. This one has three hundred and forty.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“And given the relative brevity of the messages, that leaves a lot of characters to decode on not much information. Over half of the symbols appear only one or two times. See, he starts by substituting each letter for another symbol, then transposes these symbols, creating a hybrid substitution-transposition cipher. The cipher alphabet changes after every seven letters. So each letter of the plaintext is represented by several different symbols in the cipher-text. It’s called polyalphabetic cryptology.”
“So,” I ventured, “have you cracked it?”
“No way. It’s a major accomplishment just to have figured out what it is. I suspect a full decoding will require one of those mainframe code-breaking computers at the CIA. All I have is a few words. That first cipher says something about a grave. A deep one, I think.”
“ ‘Deep, deep, and for ever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.’ ”
There was a pause. “Could be. Where’d you get that?”
“And the other one reads, ‘In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth.’ ”
“Teeth?” He fairly squealed into the receiver. “No wonder I didn’t- What kind of message is that?”
A damn good question. “You ever read Edgar Allan Poe?”
“ ‘The Gold Bug.’ ”
“ ‘The Gold Bug’?” I hadn’t gotten that far yet. “What’s that?”
“Short story. Big hunt for pirate treasure. Which they find by solving a substitution cipher.”
“Poe wrote about ciphers?”
“He was the first writer to ever use one in a story, if I’m not mistaken. He’s probably the granddaddy of American codes and code breaking. He was really into it. The story gives a mini-lecture on how to solve cryptograms. As I recall, he ran ciphers in whatever magazine he was editing at the time and challenged people to send him one he couldn’t crack. I don’t think he was ever stumped.”
Codes were important to Poe. And so of course they were important to anyone to whom Poe was important.
“You know, Susan, if your killer’s really into Poe, he may be up to some seriously bizarro business.”
I let Colin sign off, with that sobering thought ringing in my head.
After a brief stop, I pulled into the O’Bannon driveway at a quarter after nine. Darcy was waiting for me on the front porch.
“You came!” he said, plainly delighted. Was he worried that I wouldn’t? I approached bearing tall ones from the corner Starbucks clone. I needed a cobweb clearer, and I thought he might, too.
“How ’bout a cup of jamoke? Your choice-regular, or the more exotic white chocolate mocha.”
He stared at them, not taking either. “On Wednesdays I have two eggs and bacon and the eggs sunny-side up and not touching the bacon and a half glass of orange juice at eight o’clock. Then I take Bus 17 to the day care center so I can be there by nine, except today I called and told them I wasn’t coming so it’s okay that I’m not there yet.”
And they say autistics are inflexible. “So you want coffee or not?”
He was still staring at the cups. “Did you know that most coffee comes from the west coast of Africa?”
“I thought South America…”
“Less than ten percent comes from South America. Most comes from Africa, where acid rain is constant and bathes the coffee beans all year round.”
That explains the rich aroma. “Come on, Darcy. Choose your poison.”
“Caffeine has been used as a highly effective poison in many agricultural arenas.”
“Well, I’m not a plant. Take one.”
He hesitated, looking at the cups the same way he had looked at the spider. “Did you know that caffeine is more addictive than cocaine?”
My arms were getting tired. “No…”
“It’s also a diuretic. It dries you up and creates an addiction. Causes headaches and diarrhea and other physiological ailments.”
I sighed. “You don’t want any coffee, do you?”
“Scientists say that it’s best to avoid addictive substances. Do you think that it’s best to avoid addictive substances?”
The cups were starting to burn my fingers. I poured the mocha into the grass. “Absolutely. Horrible things, those addictive substances. Avoid at all costs.”
The Poe Gallery. Of course. The significance of this burial site was increasingly apparent, thanks to Darcy.
There were only a few cops left at the Transylvania. A couple of techs and one uniform standing guard. Another day or two and the room would likely be released back to the hotel. What they would do with it, I had no idea. I suspected the memory of a real corpse turning up in this Disney-Meets-Death joint might spoil the fun for some of the patrons.
Tony Crenshaw was on the scene. I decided to walk over and give him a good chin-wag. “Anything new?”
“No. Not here, anyway. There’s a rumor the coroner might release something later today.”
“Be still my heart.”
I noticed that Darcy was hanging back. Probably shy around people he didn’t know. I thought about introducing him around, then decided it was probably best to let him absorb the crime scene in his own way at his own speed.