“I agree.”
“Then what?”
“You trust me, right?” he asked. “I mean really, really trust me?”
“What.”
“I know a guy. A code breaker.”
Heat didn’t say no this time. She just continued to stare out at the city slowly coming to life. Then she nodded almost imperceptibly and turned to him for the first time as he stood there on the roof. “Rook?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not wearing any clothes.”
Rook found Keith Tahoma where he knew he would at seven in the morning. In Union Square playing simultaneous games at a pair of Parks Department chess tables. And winning both.
Nikki watched the skinny old guy in sunglasses, with the George Carlin whiskers and gray ponytail, dancing from game to game, talking smack and busting some blatantly OCD moves. Through a taut smile she muttered to Rook, “Are you kidding me?”
Even though Heat had accepted intellectually that it was time to get some expert help with the code, Rook still had to overcome her emotional reticence. “Look, you said yourself that Wynn may be trying to cover up something imminent.” He tapped the copies of the marked-up music they had scanned. “We might be sitting on the answer to that right here. And the longer you delay, the greater the chance you’re blowing your shot at stopping whatever conspiracy you believe is heating up. Now, if you want to be all proud and stubborn and bang your head against the wall while time slips away, go ahead. But if you seriously want to crack this, I trust my expert completely.”
Rook’s expert tore open six packets of sugar, dumped them all at once into his coffee, paddled-stirred the paper cup waving his pipe cleaner arms, and then sipped with a stage wink across the café table at Nikki. “Mr. Tahoma, I hear your grandfather was one of the Navajo code breakers back in World War Two,” she said.
“You’re a friend of Rook’s, you call me Puzzle Man, OK? And yeah, my shi’nali was a Windtalker, damn straight.” He blew across his coffee and set it down. “He and his unit created codes for the Marines rooted in our Navajo language. Totally skunked the Japanese. Is it in my blood? Duh. I spent the Cold War in the army eating schnitzel and cracking signal traffic out of East Berlin, basically getting medals I can never wear for turning the Soviets into jackasses. The NSA snatched me up, and next thing, I’m breaking down secret cables about who shot down an airliner over Korea, which tent Gadhafi sleeps in, and who’s buying ammo for the Chechen rebels.”
“Is that where you and Rook met, Chechnya?”
“Fuck no,” he said. “Star Trek convention.”
Rook gave her a rueful shrug. She asked Tahoma, “I assume you’re no longer involved in government work?”
“What gave me away, the shorts and flip-flops?” His high-pitched laugh turned a few heads, then he leaned in to her speaking in a low voice. “I was invited to pursue independent interests when a psychological review suggested I might be borderline.” He cocked an eye and grinned, “Like that’s a drawback in the spook trade.”
In a weird way, his nuttiness made it easier for Nikki to make the leap. An on-the-spot, unscientific gut profile told her that Puzzle Man possessed a genius-level knack that also made him such a social misfit that he survived by operating under strict personal rules. He was a head case who not only broke codes, he lived by one, too.
Plus, Rook had nailed it. The longer she sat on this, the more likely she was to squander the opportunity, either to find Wynn or to head off whatever he was involved with-or both. Time to give Puzzle Man his shot.
Ten minutes later, at the kitchen table of his cluttered shoe-box apartment above the Strand Book Store, where he worked part-time, Keith Tahoma swept aside the draft of the 3-D anacrostic-Sudoku puzzle book he was designing and studied the copies of Heat’s coded sheet music. She tried to give him the provenance; that the pencil marks between some of the notes appeared in the songs of Nikki’s old piano exercise book, and how her mother, whose handwriting this was, had been killed hiding some unknown secret information from spies. But when she began to speak, Puzzle Man just snapped a finger at her to stop, keeping his eyes riveted to the pages. After a few minutes, he looked up at the two of them and said, “Man, I am impressed. And I’ve seen them all, Vigenère ciphers, Polybius squares, Trimethius tableaux, Alberti discs, the Cardano grille, Enigma machines, Kryptos… I’ve trained in acrophony, redundancy, word breaks, Edda symbols. But this. Wow.”
“What does it say?” asked Rook.
“Beats the fuck outta me.” Heat’s chin dropped to her chest. “But dispirit not. Give me some more time to rassle this gator.”
At the door on the way out, Rook said good-bye, but Puzzle Man didn’t hear. He was already lost in the code.
Nikki’s first order of business when she arrived at the Two-Oh was to pull in Malcolm and Reynolds to help Rook and Rhymer set up their RFID track on Tyler Wynn. She knew Captain Irons would pitch a fit when he got a whiff of the redeployment of assets from the serial killer investigation, but the electronic consumer tracking presented the hottest lead in either case, and Detective Heat’s training and experience dictated the hot lead was the lead you followed until a hotter one came along.
That happened mid-morning.
Raley and Ochoa came to her desk, each one trying to get there first. “Detectives, you’ve got those funny looks again,” said Heat.
“I know you don’t like curse words in the bull pen,” said Ochoa, “but see this grin? This definitely is my shit-eater.”
Raley said, “We spent all morning over in Long Island City at Bedbug Doug’s HQ. You should see the place; it actually has a giant metal sculpture of a bedbug on the roof.”
“Anyway,” continued his partner, “we went there to go over the victim’s accounting books, like you had us do with Conklin.”
“And you found a connection to one of the other victims?”
“No,” said Ochoa, “but we found something you’d call an Odd Sock. Made us wonder if it might point to a new victim.”
“These are copies from Douglas Sandmann’s accounts receivable.” Raley held up a file. “We found a pattern of him performing bedbug checks in buildings, but getting paid by a third party who has no connection with the buildings Doug inspected.”
Ochoa picked up. “So we asked his wife about it, and she says, ‘Oh, yeah, Doug made some money on the side from that guy because he could get into buildings and apartments pretending to do his inspections.’ ”
“But he was really snooping undercover for the guy who paid him. You know, the third party,” said Detective Raley.
“And here’s what set off the alarm bells in our heads,” continued Ochoa. “Know that little hand snipped from the oil painting the serial killer left us? This third party guy is in the art business.”
“I assume you got a name,” said Heat. Raley opened the file. Nikki reeled when she saw who it was.
By the time Heat, Rook, and the other detectives rolled down to the marina on the Hudson at West 79th Street, Parks Enforcement had already found Joe Flynn’s body. It bobbed three feet under the surface of the river, tethered between the marina dock and the fifty-foot ketch he had lived on. They didn’t need a coroner to know he was beyond CPR; Flynn’s eyes bulged in their sockets, peering skyward through the murky water from a swollen face. His body had bloated with gas, and his skin had changed color to a pallid shade of green.
Distant thunder mixed with the pair of diesel 60s from the harbor unit response boat that slowed up to kill its wake on the other side of the Boat Basin’s wave wall. The smooth water in the protected marina broke with the first drops of the approaching storm. Heat got down on one knee. Through the dimpled river surface she could see the wooden handle of a small knife, something a painter would use-perhaps a palette knife-protruding from Joe Flynn’s throat. She also noted that his body wore no shoes. He had a sock of a different color on each foot: one light, one dark.