Brigands Key Page 13

He passed from room to room, stopping in Roscoe’s office. Nothing caught his attention, and he headed back downstairs. A worn bookshelf lined one side of the front hallway, listing slightly. On it were a couple hundred books in no apparent order. Engine repair manuals, a row of John D. MacDonald novels, travel books. Treasure books like those in the footlocker were conspicuously absent.

  Then he saw the volume he’d hoped he would find: The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare. He pulled the fat book off the shelf, stuffed it into his backpack, and left through the back door. He carefully propped the brick against the door to hold it shut and replaced the wounded doorknob back in it. At a casual glance, at least, the door wouldn’t appear to have been broken into.

  Back in his bedroom, Charley opened the Shakespeare to the first page. Boring introductions and whatnot. He flipped ahead to the first play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and started reading.

  His heart sank. Five lines in, he saw what he was up against. Codes? Shakespeare damned near wrote in code. The language was gorgeous but dense. And the book was a good four inches thick, with over two thousand pages.

  He stopped reading and flipped through the heavy tome. He turned it over and shook it, hoping a hidden leaflet would fall out, as it had with the Colonel Fawcett book. No such luck.

  He turned back to the table of contents and read through the titles. A bunch of them he’d heard of, others he’d not.

  One title caught his attention and he lingered over it for a moment: Julius Caesar. He’d never read it, never even seen it in a movie. Why did he stop on that title? He was a big believer in subconscious connections. He flipped ahead in the book, found Julius Caesar. And there, scribbled in the bottom margin on the first page of the play, was a line penciled in a shaky hand:

  RTFIHS NWRPVJCRL YXAC UJMH

  Whatever it meant, Charley knew he’d found Roscoe’s clue.

  He studied the cipher. Four words, apparently. But even that was unsure. The beginner’s code book Roscoe had mailed to Charley made it clear that word spaces could be part of a code themselves.

  The code book. Charley’s mind raced, forming the link that had fixed his attention upon this, of all of Shakespeare’s plays. He opened his code book and hurriedly found what he’d hoped for.

  One of the most basic of codes was traced back to Julius Caesar himself. Surrounded by enemies, Caesar had invented his own code, now called “Caesar Shift.”

  It was a simple substitution code. Caesar shifted his Roman alphabet three characters over and encrypted his secret messages that way. In the modern English alphabet, A would be substituted by D.

  Charley reread the handwritten cipher, mentally shifting the start of the alphabet to D. All he got was more gobbledy-gook.

  He looked at the line again, and the solution jumped out at him. The first word, “RTFIHS,” was written backwards. Reversed, it became “SHIFTR.” Shifter? No; it was shift R, an instruction as to where the alphabet shift began. R-shift—Roscoe’s Shift.

  He took out a clean sheet of paper and wrote the alphabet out on one line. Immediately below it, he wrote the alphabet again, but with A lining up directly below R.

  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

  JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHI

  He then wrote out the last three words of the encryption and substituted the corresponding letter from the alphabet shift directly below:

  NWRPVJCRL UJMH YXAC

  ENIGMATIC LADY PORT

  A thrill of excitement raced through him. He’d cracked the code. But the decryption was as mystifying as the encoded message. Enigmatic lady port? What in the world? “Enigmatic lady port,” he said. He repeated it slowly, then again rapidly. It had a certain melodic ring to it. A familiar ring.

  The answer fairly slapped him in the face and his estimation of Roscoe climbed again. Trickery this way, sleight of hand that way. “Roscoe, you old bastard,” he said, laughing. “Can’t ever play it straight, can you?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wednesday morning, Sanborn heard the ruckus outside his office before Jackie could do anything about it. “Hey, you can’t go in—,” he heard her say, and Carson Grant barged in and shut the door behind him.

  Sanborn looked up from a pile of paperwork, startled, angry. “Won’t you please come in?”

  “You and me, we both have a problem, and you’re it,” Grant said. “You’re treating me like a suspect while your situation is spiraling out of control. Let’s get this out of the way right here and now. You know damned well I’ve been telling the truth, so either charge me or get off my back. Do the first and you’ll be wasting everyone’s time when no one has time to spare. Do the second and we’ll attack this little problem from the same side. What’ll it be?”

  Sanborn tossed his pencil carelessly on the desk and leaned back. “Okay, hotshot. What makes you think I need or want your help?”

  “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, and all that.”

  The door creaked open and Jackie appeared. “Tommy’s here, Randy.” A young officer stood next to her, trying hard to look pissed, his hand resting on his holstered pistol.

  Sanborn kept his eyes firmly on Grant and motioned them away. “It’s okay, Jackie.”

  Jackie withdrew and closed the door with a gentle click.

  Grant took a seat and crossed his arms. He nodded slowly.

  “Think we’re a bunch of morons, Grant?”

  “I think we both recognize that something is seriously amiss. The rough beast’s hour has come round and we better start working together. You don’t have the staff to handle the shit that’s brewing.”

  “What can I do for you, Doctor?”

  “Show me the truncheon I found. We need to start somewhere.”

  Sanborn studied him, then reached into his desk drawer and withdrew a key. “Follow me. And as long as I’m collecting brains, I want Dr. Nakamura’s too.”

  * * *

  Sanborn unlocked the door labeled “Evidence” and stepped aside. Grant peered in and snorted.

  “Got a problem, Hoss?” Sanborn asked.

  “None at all, Lieutenant Columbo. This looks suspiciously like a converted broom closet.”

  “Welcome to life in the slow lane.”

  The tiny room was crammed with the stuff of fishing village crime scenes. Street signs riddled with bullet holes. Half a case of Budweiser. A grimy tackle box or two. Sanborn picked up a smashed crab trap. “This represents the most serious crime here in the last two months. Before the John Doe affair, that is. You don’t screw with a fisherman’s livelihood.”

  “How’d that one end up?” Kyoko asked.

  “Broken trap, broken nose. We called it even and now the two are drinking buddies again.” Sanborn slipped on a pair of white latex gloves and passed some to his companions. He selected a steel cabinet drawer, unlabeled but heavily padlocked, the only such one in the room, and opened it. “Our John Doe cabinet.”

  He carefully withdrew the truncheon. “Obviously beyond the capability of our forensics here, Dr. Nakamura. I could use Federal help with this.”

  Kyoko took the truncheon and studied it. “A sample, please?”

  “Got it.” Sanborn held up a small specimen jar, within which was a sliver of black wood.

  They returned to Sanborn’s office and Kyoko began dialing.

  During her seventh phone call, she excused herself and went into the next room. There was a lot of shouting.

  When she returned, she scowled at them. “Success. After a fashion. We’re overnighting it to the FBI lab in Quantico. Best in the world, but we’ve got a damned epidemic and they’re sticking us in line.”

  “When will we get some answers?”

  “With prodding, twenty-one days.”

  “I’ll have you an answer in two, three days,” Grant said.

  They both looked at him skeptically.

  He opened his phone, scrolled through a
list of numbers, selected one, sent the call. “Rolando, Carson Grant here. Got you on speaker phone, by the way. Listen, I need a favor.”

  “Ah, Dr. Grant. It’s been a while.”

  “I’ve got a hot item here. A wooden truncheon, manufacturer unknown. I need an analysis ASAP.”

  “I’d be happy to, but I’m on vacation in two days.”

  “You’ll have it in your hands tomorrow. You can still go on vacation.”

  “You haven’t changed. You think I will drop everything and deliver just like that? I have many loose ends to tie up before I go. You will have to wait.”

  “Remember that slow night in Bogota? When your wife was out of town?”

  Silence.

  “I guess you do,” Grant continued.

  “Very well. Send the sample. I will see what I can do.”

  “You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Rolando. I owe you one.”

  “By my count, you owe me six.”

  “Who’s counting? You’ll have the sample tomorrow.” Grant hung up.

  Sanborn smirked, and noticed that Kyoko did the same.

  “Archaeologists have resources around the globe,” Grant said. “Rolando Ruiz is the world’s leading expert on wood grain identification.”

  “There are experts who do that?” Kyoko asked.

  “They don’t make the cover of Newsweek, but yeah. You’d be surprised how many grand Pooh-Bahs of arcane knowledge there are. Rolando will be hooked once he sees this bit of wood and won’t relent until he’s identified it. It’s a point of honor to maintain his kingly stature. And he’ll beat the FBI’s best by three weeks.”

  Sanborn looked at his watch. “Come on. Time for Brigands Key politics, 101.”

  * * *

  Sanborn paused outside the door, listening. The meeting had started without him.

  The mayor’s bullish voice was rattling the windows, drowning out dissenting voices. A shame, that.

  Without knocking, Sanborn pushed the door open and strode in. All talk ceased and all eyes turned to him. Grant and Kyoko followed him in.

  “You’re late, Randy,” Mayor Johnson boomed. “The hell are they doing here?”

  “Partaking of this great experiment we call democracy,” Grant said.

  “Easy, Grant,” Sanborn said.

  “This here is a private meeting,” Johnson said.

  “No, it’s not. State law says so.”

  “Afraid he’s right, Ralph,” said Clay Abbott. Johnson shot him a glance. Abbott looked away and pretended to study his note pad. “We don’t have to meet, though,” he quickly added, a note of hope in his voice.

  “Damn it.” Johnson turned to Hammond and Sanborn. “All right, then. Do we want to take a powder or continue?”

  “We’re not cutting out of this meeting,” Hammond said.

  “And I’m not letting them hear a word of it.”

  Sanborn shook his head and leaned close to Grant. “Listen,” he whispered. “Important stuff is happening here and needs to happen, but it won’t if you stick around. I already made my point to Johnson by bringing you here, so it’s not a total waste. Do me a favor. Go back to your room. You too, Dr. Nakamura.”

  “I’m a popular topic of discussion. I want to be in on that discussion.”

  “Let’s make a pact. If your name comes up, you’ll hear it from me. That’s better than nothing. Johnson won’t air dirty laundry in public. Simple as that.”

  Grant held up a finger. “I expect a report in one hour.”

  “You got it.”

  Grant motioned to Kyoko and they stalked out of the room.

  “Don’t like that little mixer,” Johnson said. “What’d you tell him?”

  “That he’s wasting his time so he might as well waste it someplace else.”

  Johnson glanced at Hammond, a skeptical look on his face.

  Hammond's face tensed. “Can we keep going? We’ve got nothing to hide. Do we, Mayor?”

  A stiffness filled the room. “Course not.”

  Abbott tapped briefly on the desk. “As I was saying, Gulf Breeze’s attorneys smell blood. That jackass, Pierce, has called me five times already today.”

  “And?”

  “Last call, he’s preparing legal action against Brigands Key, and against you specifically, Mayor.”

  “The hell ever for?”

  “Susan’s death, ostensibly.”

  “They blame me for that?” He grunted and rolled his eyes. “How much are they talking?”

  Abbott cleared his throat. “Ten million bucks.”

  Johnson’s face reddened, like a switch had been thrown. “That’ll bankrupt us!”

  “It’s not a real lawsuit, just the threat of one. Call it insurance. Susan’s murder is an excuse. Gulf Breeze sees an opening here, a highly likely vote of approval tonight. Pierce is sending a flunky to attend, just to make sure.”

  “Son of a bitch is too scared of getting sick to come himself.”

  “Bay View has been dragging for months while we dick around. The longer it drags, the more debt they carry. They want to see dirt moving. Susan told him your support was wavering. This lawsuit is intended to ensure you vote their way. Emma’s death and Roscoe’s absence make it two to none in favor, not counting you, Mayor.”

  “I can vote no and still watch it pass. But if Roscoe suddenly shows we got a two-to-one and everybody is looking at me. They force a tie vote and blackmail us with lawsuits. They’ve backed me into a corner, forcing me to vote.”

  “Isn’t that part of the job, Mayor?” Sanborn asked.

  “Don’t get smart. You know I want the project approved.”

  “So approve it.”

  “And kiss my elected ass goodbye? I’ve been mayor for twenty years. I get re-elected one more term, I get my full retirement package. Then I can fish and drink beer. If I vote for approval, I’m as good as gone. Brigands Key voters are three-to-one against right now.”

  “Sounds like you’re screwed.”

  “Randy, where the hell is Roscoe?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Dead?”

  “In my opinion.”

  “I don’t like this one damn bit. Gulf Breeze had something to do with his disappearance. Susan’s, too. Their own flack, murdered! Brilliant. Gulf Breeze is calling all the shots. Well, they grabbed the wrong bull by the balls. Roscoe ain’t dead until a judge declares him dead, and I want to give him a chance to come back and vote. It ain’t likely it’ll be tonight. Clay, I want tonight’s meeting canceled. Roscoe’s unexpected absence is the excuse.”

  Abbott shook his head. “Can’t do that. We still have a quorum. City charter dictates we meet.”

  “I want it canceled. Give me a reason.”

  Abbott’s face knotted. “There’s Hurricane Celeste. The charter allows us to cancel for emergencies and disasters.”

  “Do it.”

  “But Celeste is three hundred miles offshore and headed for Louisiana.”

  “Last I saw on CNN, the eye had jogged a couple degrees our way.”

  “Nobody’s forecasting a sharp turn, though.”

  “Do it!”

  Abbott’s face took on a hurt look. He cast his eyes down, picked up a pen and notepad, and began writing.

  “Sanborn,” Johnson said, “find Roscoe before the next Council meeting, dead or alive. He’s either voting or he’s getting replaced because he’s dead. We’re not leaving this open-ended.”

  “Working on it.”

  “Not good enough. Get me some results.” Johnson turned back to Abbott. “Well?”

  “The threat of Hurricane Celeste has prompted Mayor Johnson to declare a state of emergency and begin evacuations. Tonight’s City Council meeting is canceled. The safety of the citizens of Brigands Key is paramount, and takes priority over municipal business and the mayor is personally overseeing storm preparations.”

  “Heroic,” Sanborn murmured.

  Johnson ignored him. “You get to keep your job for ano
ther month, Clay.”

  “The Gulf Breeze sharks are going to blow a fuse.”

  “Let ’em. If Roscoe stays missing for three months, his seat is vacated. As mayor, I can appoint his replacement until the next election. Tell Pierce he’ll be damned happy with the replacement I pick. The wait will be a pain in the ass, but it’ll be well worth it to them. And tell that son of a bitch the next time he calls to talk to our attorney.”

  Sanborn left the meeting feeling slimy and disgusted. He wondered how much updating his resumé might need.

  * * *

  Kyoko Nakamura read through Hammond’s notes, her stomach knotting as the picture became clearer. She glanced at him. “Is this headed where I think it is?”

  “I sure hope not.”

  She set the notes aside and opened her laptop. “Your work is exemplary, Doctor. Few people are so detailed.”

  “Something weird bubbled up from the start. I had to be thorough.”

  Kyoko scrolled through a menu of programs and selected one. “I’m plugging your data into a graphic plot. Every sickness, every death, excluding Susan Walsh’s murder. We need to see an accurate progression of this thing. Give me an hour.”

  “Good. I’ve got to tend to my patients. I’ll bring back an updated list for you.”

  When Hammond returned, an hour later to the minute, Kyoko glanced up at him and back to the laptop. She doubted she could mask her fear.

  He dragged a stool closer. “Bad?”

  “Take a look.” She turned the laptop toward him.

  On the screen, a line graph glowed. Two white bars established time and incidence. Within the body of the graph, two lines, one red, one yellow, angled upward from the lower left start point.

  “Yellow is reported illnesses,” Kyoko said. “Red, confirmed deaths.”

  “The first reported illnesses were Thursday, two days after John Doe was discovered.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Nobles?”

  “I’m not counting him. We can’t be sure what’s happened to him. But the confirmed deaths begin last Friday.”

  Both the yellow and red lines started at shallow angles, maybe five degrees, but increased over six plotted days to an almost vertical slope. “It’s growing exponentially,” Hammond said.