Chinese food.
Up until that moment he’d only been vaguely aware of a distant discomfort somewhere in his midsection, but when the smell hit him, he was suddenly voraciously hungry. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to eat.
He lifted his blurring, exhausted eyes from the scattered pages of his notes and saw Nina and Bell. He hadn’t noticed them leaving the room, but they clearly had gone somewhere and returned. Bell was carrying a large box of beakers and burners and heavy, brown glass bottles.
But Walter was only interested in what Nina was carrying. She was the one with the food. At that point, Walter was willing to trade his right arm for one of those wonderful little folded paper boxes.
“Nina,” Walter said as she handed him one of the warm boxes. “You are my angel.”
“And what am I?” Bell asked. “Chopped liver? Ergot seems to grow on trees in this town, but do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain monopropellant-grade anhydrous hydrazine?”
“Are there any forks?” Walter asked, peeling open his box of noodles and breathing in the fragrant steam.
“Just these,” Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks.
“That’s okay,” Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.
“Lovely,” Nina said, separating a pair of the chopsticks for herself and delicately dipping them into her own container. “Just try not to make a mess on my desk.”
“No, no—of course not.” Walter moved a page of his notes over to the right to cover a large splat of sauce. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“So Nina’s got a small lab we can use, set up in the basement,” Bell said. “Small, and nothing fancy, but it’ll do. There’s even a darkroom for Chick’s photography.” He peered over Walter’s shoulder. “How are you getting on with the notebook?”
Walter slurped another mouthful of noodles, talking around them.
“I tried all the basic approaches,” he said. “Including the one those teachers used to crack the cipher he sent to the papers. No dice. This is much more complicated, and far more secure. See, look here.”
He poked at the notebook with a saucy finger.
“I started off with frequency analysis. Searching for pairs, right?” He flipped the pages and pointed first to a double Q and then a double F. “Hoping to lock down my L. The most common double-letter pairing in the English language being the double L, of course, challenged only by the double T. But here’s the thing. It’s rarely the same.” Another massive mouthful of noodles. “There are only one or two repeats in the whole book. So that got me thinking polyalphabetic substitution.”
“Vigenère?” Bell asked, putting down his box of chemicals and grabbing some food of his own.
“Could be,” Walter said. “But that seems like such a pain. Plus we have a few symbols mixed in here and there, though not on the last ten pages.”
“What’s Vigenère?” Nina asked.
Walter sorted through his notes until he came up with the Vigenère’s square he’d laid out.
“It uses twenty-six substitution ciphers,” he told her. “One for each letter of the alphabet. But the problem is that it requires a keyword to solve.” He pulled out a list he’d made of logical guesses that he’d already tried. Words like Zodiac and the names of several known victims. But none had panned out. “We could spend the rest of our lives trying to randomly guess his keyword. And worse, I’m fairly certain he’s using multiple keywords, maybe even more than one on every page. I wouldn’t say it’s crack-proof, but I believe it may be beyond my own personal abilities.”
Bell had stopped eating with his chopsticks frozen halfway to his mouth. He put the box of noodles down and came over to the desk, eyes zooming in on the last written page of the notebook.
“Try Reiden,” he said.
“My God,” Walter said, putting his own food aside and grabbing the pencil.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Walter had most of the last page of the notebook deciphered. He held the handwritten translation up and read it out loud to Nina and Bell.
* * *
After I take down the bus I shall kill another teenage whore. A pretty brunette, like the first one on this side. I’ve been watching one girl who I think will fit the bill perfectly. Her name is Miranda.
My last girlfriend was older, a sad drunken waste of a person, and I found myself abruptly distracted at what should have been my most beautiful moment by the loose skin on her neck and the baggy, worn-out shape of her breasts. Yet the sparks in my hands were brighter and burned longer than ever before.
Not that I regret my previous choice. It’s only that the anticipation of killing has me feeling particularly appreciative of youth. That young teenage whore will be the perfect reward for what is sure to be my most acclaimed performance to date.
I’d like to see that sad sack Iverson and his FBI cronies try to keep this one out of the press.
I think I shall make myself wait a few days to claim my reward. The sparks are getting hungrier every day, but controlling appetites is what separates man from beast. I shall wait until
“Until when?” Bell asked. “Wait until when?”
“That’s it,” Walter said. “The key shifts at this point, leaving these last few lines unreadable. Except for this.”
He turned the notebook around for Bell to see. At the very bottom of the coded page were two words in plain English, scratched so hard into the page that they were imprinted deep into the paper.
BY KNIFE
“Son of a bitch,” Bell said.
“A few days,” Nina repeated. “That has to be at least two, if not more. At least we can be fairly certain this won’t happen tomorrow.”
“As long as his failure with the bus doesn’t cause him to change his plans,” Walter said. “But we have to proceed based on that assumption. It’s not nearly enough time, but better than nothing,” he added. “We should get to work immediately on recreating the exact pharmacological launchpad we used that day at Reiden Lake.”
“Come on,” Nina said. “I’ll show you boys the setup.”
13
“Do you feel anything?” Nina asked.
“Not yet,” Walter replied. “Belly?”
“Nope,” Bell said. “Nothing.” He looked at his watch. “But it’s been only fifty minutes. According to my notes, it was fifty-four minutes before the onset of hallucinogenic effect on the night of the original experiment.”
“Four minutes,” Walter said, “seems like four hours.”
They’d already waited for what felt like ages for Roscoe and Abby to split for some kind of gallery opening. Chick and Iggy had never come home the night before, but according to Nina this was a fairly regular occurrence, usually attributable to drugs, women, or both. While Walter was glad everyone was gone, he had been particularly adamant that the pregnant Abby be as far away from their experiment as possible. He would feel horrible if anything happened to her and her baby, all because of him.
Thinking about Abby and her baby set his mind back to Roscoe’s strange claim that he and Walter would meet again in the far future, but wouldn’t remember having met. Although Walter was the first to admit that his own memory wasn’t the best—that he forgot people’s names all the time even when he’d been introduced more than once—he found it hard to believe that meeting one of his musical idols could vanish from his memory, just like that.
He found himself struck by a sudden fear that something might happen to him in the future that would destroy his memory. Some kind of disease or mental breakdown. He became instantly sure that, if he could just remove the top of his own skull and peer inside, he would see that future synaptic disaster spelled out in the whorls and convolutions of his brain.