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With the dishes rinsed and stacked in the dishwasher and the counters and tabletop cleaned and straightened, Becker was forced to regard the letter once more. It was addressed in typescript to "Agent John Becker" in care of "FBI, Washington, D.C." The envelope was plain white, ordinary stationery as unremarkable as the typewriting. With a sigh, Becker lifted the envelope by its edges. Whomever it was from, Becker didn't want to hear from him. FBI agents didn't receive friendly letters addressed to headquarters. They got angry letters, they got pleading letters, they got threatening letters from attorneys insinuating lawsuits, they got paranoid letters from screwballs concerned about UFOS. And, in Becker's case, there were letters from psychopaths.

More than one of the serial killers whom Becker had tracked and apprehended tried to stay in touch with him, as if their relationship had not been severed by incarceration. They wrote to him as if they knew him, as if they shared something in common, some deep affliction of the soul that had empowered Becker to find them-that had allowed them to be caught by one of their own. For these correspondents the twisted growth within their souls that made them the way they were was a source of exultation.

They loved their mania, clutched it gleefully, protected it fanatically.

He could sense their caged but unaltered joy like the cackle of the demented in every line they wrote.

They crooned to him from their prison cells and mental wards like wolves howling for a caged brother to join them. For Becker, his understanding of their dementia was a sickness that he had quit the Bureau in a vain attempt to expunge. If he was no more capable of reforming his soul than they were, at least he could avoid the exercise of his failings. He was like a man with allergies that medicine could not control. Unable to live cleanly in a certain place, Becker had taken himself elsewhere, out of the FBI, away from the antigens that plagued him.

But the crazies would not let him go, they called to him, singing their siren songs of mutuality through the mail, and the Bureau, conscientious good citizen that it was, acted as middleman, running him down with the messages of lunacy.

He slipped a paring knife under the flap and opened the envelope, then turned it over to shake out its contents, still reluctant to come into contact with it. The masthead of The New York Times floated to the table. Scissors had cut away the newspaper's motto, "All the News That was Fit to Print," on one side, and the weather information on the other, leaving intact only the name of the paper and the date immediately underneath. The edition was two years old.

Becker flipped the paper to its other side. There was the name CARTIER in large letters, Part of an advertisement which had been cut away, a portion of a female model's face that was part of an adjoining ad, and the word "News," the second half of "News Summary" having also been excised. Pinching just the tip of the paper, Becker held it up to the light, half expecting to see an "invisible" message scrawled in some lunatic's urine.

What he saw were tiny dots of light bleeding through the paper, poked with caution through the letters of the masthead by a pin. Above the masthead was another series of dots. On the reverse side of the paper, the holes in the masthead fell in the empty space of the illustrations used for the advertisements.

A game player, he thought. Someone wants me to cooperate so he can jerk me off at the same time he does himself.

But despite his annoyance, Becker rummaged through the extra bedroom that they called a family room until he found an old Scrabble set. For each letter in the masthead with a hole in it, Becker selected a lettered square from the Scrabble set and placed it on the table. The who and the w each had two holes, so he added an extra of each letter to his little pile. Taken in Order from the masthead, the letters spelled "hNwwooki." Placing the capitalized n first and following it with a vowel, Becker came up with "Now i howk. " Nothing more intelligible presented itself immediately, so he shuffled the tiles and tried again.

At the first random casting the letters formed the word wowikhno."

With rising exasperation, he reshuffled the letters, then again and yet again, trying to find words that made sense.

After ten minutes of effort his hands froze over the tiles.

His message was on the table before him.

"i know who."

"So you know who," Becker said aloud, his voice sounding strange in the empty house. "Who what? Or who cares?"

The dots that ran above the masthead took a bit longer to decipher. They were neatly, almost meticulously placed, as if they had been ruled off with a caliper. Applying a tape measure, Becker determined that they were precisely one eighth of an inch apart. In some cases two dots ran vertically and in some cases one stood alone. The vertical holes were also precisely one eighth of an inch from those below them. However, they were not systematically aligned with any of the letters in the masthead that ran below them. The dots were a message by themselves:

At first glance they looked to Becker like a broken box kite, and then like an old-fashioned door key. He played with the idea for a moment before deciding that the pattern didn't look much like a key after all.

Leaving the tiles and their message on the table, he paced the kitchen, wondering why he was taking the trouble in the first place.

Whoever had sent him the message had been smart enough, or knew Becker well enough, to make it a puzzle.

He knows my weakness, Becker thought. Or one of them at least. If the message had been straightforward, Becker might well have dismissed it out-of-hand, throwing it out joining this jerkoff in his activity. with the morning's trash. Now here I am, he thought, Disgusted with his correspondent, and with himself for accommodating the faceless ghoul, Becker reached out to crumble the bit of newsprint and its cryptic holes when he stopped, arrested suddenly by the date on the newspaper. There was nothing special about the date itself-, it rang no bells; Becker could recall nothing unusual about the day; but its very presence was strange. The man had cut away everything else from the paper that was irrelevant. Why had he left the date? The obvious answer was that the date was not irrelevant.

"i know who" meant he knew something about someone who did something on that date. And in that newspaper? The New York Times was a large newspaper; where was Becker supposed to find the "who"? The dots had to be a page number. The correspondent wanted Becker to solve this code, after all. He was trying to say something and he wanted to be heard, even if his listener had to work a bit first. He is confident that I will take the trouble, Becker reasoned, so he must be equally confident that I can break the code'. It can't be that much of a mystery. The punctured letters didn't amount to much of a code after all, just enough to avoid a cursory inspection.

Whatever the writer was trying to hide, he wasn't trying so hard that someone of average intelligence couldn't find it, Becker thought. The code was meant to be a puzzle, not a mystery, and puzzles, by their nature, can be solved.

Becker walked the mile and a half to the library, a stroll he took frequently to clarify his thoughts. He had replaced the masthead in its envelope and carried it with him in his pocket, feeling as if he were transporting something smelly and indecent. Traveling the clean, tree-lined sidewalks of Clamden, Connecticut, Becker felt like a dirty old man with pornography in his possession, as out-of place in this verdant patch of suburbia as a flasher in his trench coat.

Don't pursue this, he berated himself Whatever it is, it's no good for you, no matter how little you involve yourself. Alcoholics don't sip wines just to determine the source of the grapes. It's a quagmire, your entire association with that past life. Put a toe in to test the surface and you'll get sucked in again, right up to the neck.