I'd Kill For That Page 12

  “Anything preliminary?” He was sitting in her visitor’s chair, and, even with the open door behind him, the space felt peculiarly small.

  “Nothing helpful. What I want to know is where Mayor Drysdale and Roman Gervase went after they finished buzzing the marina.”

  “They took off right after that dark guy showed up and headed for the Sans Sin,” Ford noted.

  “Yeah. And if we hadn’t had to clear out just then to avoid a few nosy passersby, we could have stuck around and maybe found out if his arrival was … expected.”

  Ford pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Friday afternoon three-way?”

  “Toni Sinclair certainly had sex on her mind when she arrived,” Diane agreed, remembering the other woman’s honeyed drawl and knowing eyes. “On the other hand, I can’t see Senator Carbury being quite that indiscreet—at least not with a murder investigation taking place on his home turf. He’d have to be incredibly stupid, and despite evidence to the contrary, most politicians are fairly bright.”

  Ford said, “I wouldn’t have said it was in character for him to do anything stupid.”

  “So there’s still a good chance it was some kind of business meeting. Does Toni Sinclair have anything to do with her late husband’s business?”

  “Lincoln Sinclair didn’t have a business. I mean, he’d sold out—something techno, I think—and retired young. One look at that palace of theirs and you know he was filthy rich. Left it all to her.”

  Slowly, Diane said, “Where there’s a lot of money, blackmail is always possible. I dunno. Rich widow, politician scrambling for votes…”

  “Add in murder and meetings on the sly and I don’t know what you’ve got, but I’m betting it isn’t pretty.”

  Diane grimaced. “Yeah.”

  Ford looked at his watch. “My shift starts in a couple of hours, and I’m on till midnight. Anything in particular you want me to keep an eye out for when I patrol tonight?”

  “Will Carnegie be with you?”

  Ford grinned. “Some of the time, yeah, but don’t worry—he only sees the obvious.”

  “Such a fine quality in a security guard.”

  “In Gryphon Gate,” Ford pointed out dryly, “it’s considered an asset.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not an asset in my book.” She sighed. “You can move around inside the gates with a lot more freedom than I can, but you still get noticed, so be careful. Watch and listen, but don’t change your routine any more than you can help.”

  “They’ll expect some changes,” Ford pointed out. “Expect us to step up regular patrols, have a more visible presence. At least, I would.”

  “You’ll probably be stopped a few times. Asked about what’s going on, what we know. I doubt many of the fine citizens of Gryphon Gate will expect you to be deeply involved in the investigation, but they’d expect you to know more than they do.”

  “Any juicy bits I can drop to make myself look more impressive?” Ford asked, more amused than serious.

  “Since we don’t know which juicy bits might be important,” she replied with a grin, “I’m afraid you’ll have to at least appear to be as frustrated and confused as they are. But reassuring, of course. Gryphon Gate is an oasis of safety and sanity in a scary, troubled world. You know—the company line.”

  “Little hard to sell that with two murdered citizens in the morgue.”

  “Do your best. As for what to be on the lookout for—damned if I know. Anything unusual. Anything that surprises you. Someone in a place they shouldn’t be or doing something out of the ordinary.”

  “I’d expect most of them to behave a bit differently.”

  Diane nodded, her respect for him inching up another notch. “People get jumpy with an unsolved murder in their circle; two unsolved murders are apt to make them nervous wrecks. Plus, most everybody has a secret or two they’d rather keep to themselves—not necessarily illegal or even sinful, just not for public consumption.”

  “And murder investigations tend to bring a lot of secrets out into the open.”

  “They do. They certainly do.” She smiled. “So, if you have any secrets you don’t want exposed, Lee, you’d better rethink this assignment.”

  Leland Ford smiled in return. “Secrets? Me? No, no secrets. And too much curiosity not to want to get involved. So I’m in for the duration.”

  “Good,” Diane said. “Good.”

  * * *

  Leland Ford would have been happy to have been able to report something interesting—anything interesting—to Capt. Diane Robards after his shift, but Friday night was almost eerily uneventful. He and John Carnegie had, as usual, been forced to chase down a naked Roman Gervase and wrestle him into the patrol car around ten and then deliver him home and into the hands of his extremely polite and soft-spoken manservant.

  Ford couldn’t get over the fact that anyone in this day and age would have a valet, for God’s sake; but he had to admit, if only silently, that Roman Gervase needed a keeper of some kind, and his wife was still boozing it up at the club. Plus, the servant seemed to know how to handle his growling employer.

  Growling. Jesus.

  Anyway, other than Gervase’s usual nocturnal wanderings, everything seemed just as it should have been. Nobody got their head bashed in or died in some other fashion. The bridge playing went on as usual, with the usual crowd, and all the usual people got drunker and drunker as the night wore on. Outside the country club those not interested in the Gryphon Gate nightlife stayed peacefully in their very nice houses, with their very well-trained dogs peacefully quiet and their kids all tucked in. Or locked in.

  Ford had the weird feeling that he was the only one waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Carnegie talked incessantly about the murders, of course, speculating about the identity of their “serial killer.” Ford did what he could to stifle his partner, but it was pretty much a losing battle.

  “Middle-aged white men,” Carnegie said.

  “Place is full of them,” Ford agreed.

  “No, I mean that’s obviously the killer’s target. His MO is to go after middle-aged white men.” Carnegie considered. “Rich ones.”

  Ford had elected not to drive on their regular but slightly stepped-up patrols through Gryphon Gate in the hope that it would keep Carnegie occupied, but it obviously wasn’t working. “Or,” Ford suggested, “they could be grudge killings. Killings for gain or spite. Or, hell, not even murders. Accidents.”

  “You know damned well they aren’t accidents, Lee.”

  “Okay, so they don’t look like accidents. Truth is, we don’t know what they look like. Not really. You and me, we’re amateurs at best; and for all the books we’ve read and TV we’ve watched, this is the first time either one of us has been within spitting distance of a murder investigation.”

  “Yeah,” Carnegie agreed reluctantly.

  “So we don’t know squat,” Ford said.

  “No.” Carnegie was quiet for about half a block, then said, “But we know these people, Lee, you can’t deny that. We know ’em better than Captain Diane Robards does. Hell, we probably know ’em better than they know themselves. We’ve seen ’em drunk and sober, polite and rude, triumphant when they win one of their games and sore as hell when they lose. We’ve seen them shaking hands with a wink and pinching their neighbor’s wife on the ass when nobody seems to be looking. We’ve watched while they work against each other, sweet as honey one minute and ice-cold the next.

  “We’ve seen them before they’ve had their coffee in the morning, and tossing their cookies behind the bushes at the country club. We’ve seen them sneaking out of the wrong house at dawn. We’ve heard them talk about stuff like we weren’t even there.” Carnegie drew a breath. “I’m telling you, Lee, we know them.”

  Ford gazed out the window at the seemingly peaceful houses, most of them still showing a few lighted windows, and he wondered ruefully why it hadn’t occurred to him that his slower-witted partner would, once again, see the obvious.r />
  An obvious fact that Ford himself had overlooked.

  Quietly, he said, “Yeah, I guess we do know them.”

  “Bet your ass we do. So, who do you see as a murderer, Lee? Tell me that.”

  He hadn’t thought of it from that angle, hadn’t questioned himself about these people and what he knew of them; and having the question posed so bluntly made him consider it for the first time. So he looked out on the peaceful Friday night and seriously asked himself which one of these people could have killed two men.

  There had to be only one killer, he was sure of that. Diane was sure, he thought, even though she hadn’t committed herself out loud. Logic said it just stretched coincidence too far to think a place like Gryphon Gate would play host to two separate murderers in a bare twenty-four hours. No, it had to be just one—just one person with the will and the motive to kill two men. And one of those victims had been an ex-marine in pretty damned good shape.

  McClintock hadn’t been drunk, his wife was right about that. The colonel didn’t get drunk, period. He might—and often had—drunk enough to put a platoon under the table, but he never got drunk. Which meant he hadn’t been staggering around out there helpless and vulnerable. That was an important point. It wasn’t likely the killer had snuck up on the colonel, because Ford himself had noticed the man had remarkably acute senses and took notice of what was going on around him, always.

  So, odds were he had been taken by surprise only in that he’d known his killer, recognized him—or her—and had not felt threatened in any way.

  “Lee?”

  “I’m thinking,” Ford muttered, doing just that.

  An ex-marine could have a lot of enemies, he thought. Big ex-soldier types often rubbed civilians the wrong way. He had certainly made a few enemies by being so vocal in wanting, for all intents and purposes, to shoot Bambi.

  Sigmond Vormeister, on the other hand, had seemed too low-key and unthreatening to have made any enemies. Except for his habit of watching everything and either writing constantly in his notebook or else using that little—what were they called? Personal data something-or-other? A Palm Pilot, that’s what he’d sometimes carried.

  Always watching, always noting down things.

  Ford could see how that might threaten a number of the people who lived in Gryphon Gate. And, unlike the colonel, Vormeister would have been an easy target for just about anybody.

  “Lee?”

  “I’m still thinking.” Ford gazed out at the peaceful houses they passed and wondered which one contained a murderer.

  Or a murderess.

  * * *

  By Saturday evening Diane Robards was feeling more than a little discouraged. Unless the postmortems turned up something interesting, she didn’t have much in the way of viable clues as to who had killed two men. Two very different men.

  To the open disgust of a number of fanatical golfers, she had refused to remove the bright yellow crime scene tape from the sixth hole sand trap, and she’d listened all day to complaints about that. At least it had given them something to bitch about while she and her crew took another round of statements in the Wild Goose Room.

  Wild Goose Room, for Christ’s sake. Either Laura Armbruster had a sly sense of humor, or else she was not so subtly offering her opinion of the investigation. Diane honestly wasn’t sure which it was.

  Leland Ford had been around most of the day. After endless briefings from her team of detectives and forensics experts, Diane had overheard Ford tell a couple of the club members—when they asked—that he was pulling a double shift for extra cash, an explanation that seemed to surprise no one. He went out on regular patrols, but strolled around the clubhouse as well, smiling reassuringly at the members.

  Diane had spent an hour or so in her office at the end of their Wild Goose Room marathon, and just before Ford’s actual shift, she began talking to him, and she had to admit that his slow-witted partner had made a good point about the Gryphon Gate Police and how well they knew the residents of the place.

  Leland Ford, at least, definitely knew those people. And his insights into who among them might be most capable of murder had interested Diane very much.

  But right now all she wanted to do was take a long, hot bath and go to bed.

  Alone.

  Maybe there’d be a horror movie marathon on one of the satellite channels (there usually was) that she could watch until she unwound and fell asleep. For some reason, horror movies had an effect on her that was directly opposite of the intended one. She was never scared, often amused, and always appreciative of style. She supposed it had something to do with the fun nature of fantasy bumping up against the grim reality of her job.

  At any rate, when she unlocked her apartment door and went inside, that was all she had on her mind. She hadn’t even planned on going into the little second bedroom office to check her messages, but found herself doing it out of habit.

  That was when she saw that someone had sent her a fax, and she frowned as she crossed the room to the two-drawer filing cabinet under a window where the fax machine sat. Probably just some dumb ad. It was amazing how many companies managed to get their hands on confidential things like private fax numbers and send their garbage through so you had to deal with it whether you wanted to or not.

  It wasn’t an ad.

  “What the hell?” she muttered, conscious of a peculiar, crawly sense of having something slimy too near for comfort.

  In the center of the page, neatly typed, were a few words.

  Be sure to go to church on Sunday, Diane. You won’t regret it.

  7

  AT THE PRECISE MOMENT CAPT. Diane Robards was relieving her fax of its mysterious message, Aaron Kaplan was thrusting a fist into the air above his head.

  “Yes!” The arm pistoned down.

  “Moron,” Aaron muttered, picking up his pen and returning to his task.

  Papers covered one corner of Rachel Vormeister’s guest room, some crumpled, others layered on the carpet or angled against chair legs, bed skirts, and baseboards. A green hooded lamp bathed the desk and its occupant in pale yellow light.

  The victory arm pump was unusual for Aaron, a kid who rarely showed emotion. More precisely, Aaron rarely felt emotion. The smiles were there, of course—the frowns, the grief-puckered brows, each response sending its proper social signal. But it was all for show. Real feelings were much too risky.

  Loving his grandfather had taught him that.

  Grandpapa Kaplan had been the center of Aaron’s boyhood universe. T-ball and swim coach, bubblegum smuggler and Popsicle confidant, Grandpapa was always there. The two were inseparable. Ten years ago the old man’s death had shattered Aaron’s six-year-old world. Wounded, frightened, and confused, little Aaron closed all portals. No love. No loss. No pain.

  No one noticed.

  Big Aaron was excited by just two things. Riding his skateboard down a handrail with the wind in his hair. And cryptography.

  Aaron rarely thought of Grandpapa Kaplan anymore. But sometimes, lying awake at night, he allowed a tiny sliver. Always the same sliver.

  Autumn cool. The smell of dead leaves in the gutter, dust, old wood. Aaron, age five, and Grandpapa cleaning the attic.

  A cardboard carton. Grandpapa withdrawing an odd ring, laughing.

  What, Grandpapa?

  A cigar box relic.

  What?

  Trash.

  Aaron had retrieved the thing, a Captain Midnight Decoder. Grandpapa had explained how to encode and decode messages by rotating the outer ring and substituting letters from the inner.

  From the moment he set eyes on the strange gizmo, cryptography had been Aaron Kaplan’s passion. Substitution ciphers. Shift ciphers. Transposition, polyalphabetic, digraphic. It didn’t matter. The kid could crack most codes in an hour.

  Thus, the disdain. The superior dismissal of yet another failed attempt at challenging him.

  Wanting to make certain his notes were unreadable, Sigmond Vormeister had
invented what he thought was a beauty of a code. Aaron considered it kindergarten crap.

  Finding the coded journal hadn’t been easy. Aaron would credit his brother-in-law on that. The search had required discipline. No wonder Robards’s goons hadn’t been able to find it. He’d had to wait until the house was empty, or until Rachel and his mother were asleep.

  Late that afternoon his patience had paid off. He’d known at first tap. What else would be hidden in a false-bottomed drawer?

  Aaron had worked nonstop since the discovery. Accustomed to her son’s obsession with his hobby, Mrs. Kaplan hadn’t questioned his seclusion. Rachel was too caught up in her grief to notice.

  Ciphers can be categorized into a number of types: substitution, transposition, diagrammatic. Substitution ciphers replace letters with other letters or symbols, keeping the order unchanged. Transposition ciphers keep the original letters intact, but mix up the order. Diagrammatic ciphers substitute symbols for letters.

  By eight o’clock, Aaron knew that his brother-in-law’s algorithm was a hybrid. Vormeister had used the tired old standard of a tic-tac-toe board, two Xs, and dots, substituting the line shapes surrounding each letter, and adding dots where needed.

  Though Vormeister had employed some sort of shift in assigning letters to his grid positions, he hadn’t altered word lengths. That mistake was the cipher’s undoing.

  Of 612 characters on page one, Aaron calculated that the empty four-sided box appeared 116 times, representing almost 20 percent of the symbols.

  Aaron checked page two. Similar frequency. Page three. Ditto.

  The empty box had to represent e, the most frequently used letter in English. Aaron began a list.

  The next most frequent symbols were the open-top dotted box and the inverted v. Aaron checked several pages, then jotted the letters o and m next to each.

  When he’d identified as many single letters as he could, Aaron examined the order of frequency of digraphs, such as er-, -on-, -an-, -he-. Then the order of trigraphs, common doubles, initial letters, final letters, one-, two-, three-, and four-letter words.

  About the time Robards was tiring of zombies on TV, Aaron was flying through Vormeister’s journal.