After striking out on the phone, he spent some more time alone in the cell with the plastic corpse. Its silent, ruined form was eerie; it made his stomach flip to look at it. With the head and extremities missing, it had no identifying characteristics but the tiny letters on its lower back. He wrote the name and serial number down and went out to his desk.
He wasn’t sure what the manufacturer would be able to tell him about a drowned mannequin, but maybe with some luck he’d be able to find out where a person might buy a Verity product. Was it local enough to suggest someone near Caplin had done this on purpose? Or was this just a dumb boondoggle: a discarded mannequin tangled in fishing net?
He looked up Verity Forms on the web but found nothing. He tried “Verity Mannequins,” and came up empty again. A wholesale mannequin site had an ordering number in Fresno, so he called it and the lady on the other end told him, as far as she knew, there was no “Verity Forms” manufacturing mannequins. She gave him the name of a Canadian wholesaler who told him the same thing. Wingate put down the phone and squinted at his handwritten notes. Maybe he’d transcribed the name incorrectly? Maybe it had said Vanity forms?
He went back into the holding pen and looked closely at the name. He’d not made a mistake. Maybe the serial number was actually a phone number… but it looked strange for a phone number: 419-20-028-04. He checked online and found that the 419 area code was for the northwest part of Ohio. Toledo, specifically. He dialled 419-200-2804, and a woman answered, saying “Yeah?”
“Hello?” said Wingate.
“Um, Hi.”
“Is this Verity Forms?”
“No, it’s Cynthia Kronrod. You’re looking for Verity?”
“I… yes, I am.”
“Do you know if she’s on this floor?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Wingate.
“If you think I’m knocking on every door in the res, you’re wrong, pal. Maybe you have the wrong floor.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Hold on,” the girl said, and he heard her cup the receiver. Her muffled voice reverberated through her hand. “HELLO? IS THERE ANYONE NAMED VERITY ON FOUR?” There was a long pause, and then the girl came back. “People live for phone calls here, so if no one answered, I think there’s no one by that name here. Sorry.”
“Okay,” he said, “thanks.”
“Are you in Carter Hall, too?”
“Um, no.”
“Too bad.”
“Okay, thank you,” he said, but she wasn’t ready to let him go.
“If your feet point you Carter-way, I’m in the west tower. Fourth floor. I have to buzz you in, but it’s no problem. You have a nice voice, you know.”
“Well, thank you -”
“Cynthia Kronrod,” she said, and she spelled her last name. “If you can get here for seven tonight, we’re having a hall party. Two bottles of Everclear, six gallons of orange Gatorade, and one garbage can, and you know what that means, right? We’re getting perfectly hooped. Come if you can, okay? What’s your name, by the way?”
“Um, Jimmy.”
“Awesome,” she said, and he hung up before she could get another word in.
“Good grief,” he muttered.
He walked over to Cassie Jenner’s desk. “I don’t suppose you feel like going to a totally rad party at Carter Hall tonight, do you?”
She looked at him strangely. “I’ve got plans.”
“Too bad,” he said. He put the paper with his notes down in front of her. “What do you make of this, then?”
She studied his scrawl. He noticed her checking out his clean fingernails and wondered if she could tell he wore a light gloss to protect them. “You dialled it?”
“I did.”
“I see,” she said. “I gather it was a dead end. Maybe it’s a serial number? A thing like that would need a serial number anyway, wouldn’t it?”
“I was thinking that, but the serial number’s for the model, isn’t it? It’s not going to get us anywhere,” he said.
“It’s all you got, Detective. Run with it.”
He bent over her and typed the number into Google, but the search brought up nothing. He stood staring at Jenner’s screen. Then he turned and went back into the evidence room and leaned down close to the letters on the mannequin’s back. This close up, it stank of sulphurous rot, but his instinct had been right: close up, the letters of the name and the numbers weren’t straight and they showed a faint crackling around the edges. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached into his pocket and removed his penknife. Jenner was standing in the doorway.
“You want to borrow my microscope?” she said.
He pried open the knife and used the very tip of it along the top edge of the capital “F” in Forms. It peeled away cleanly and he lifted it off the plastic and held it out on the point of the blade to her. “Look at that,” he said.
She took the knife. “It’s an ‘F.’”
“It’s Letraset,” he said. “Someone rubbed these letters onto the mannequin. The numbers too. They’ve been put here.”
“Get out,” she said.
“Someone’s playing a game.” He went past her in the doorway, returning to her desk. He sat and looked at the numbers again. Then he remembered the GPS coordinates Constable Tate had made him write down. “How do we find out a location from its latitude and longitude?” he asked her.
Jenner had pulled up a second chair from the desk beside hers. “There have to be convertors online.” She reached over him and tapped another search into Google. It brought them to a page that mapped coordinates.
“The numbers Tate gave me were six figures each.”
“Just try some combinations,” she suggested.
He typed in 41.920 and -02.804 and they found themselves somewhere in the north of Spain. 4.19200 and 2.804 got them into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria. 41 92.0 and 02 8.04 moved them above the border between Spain and France. He entered 4 19.200 and -28 0.4 and plunged back into the ocean near Accra. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said, sitting back heavily. “But someone put those numbers and that name there deliberately.”
“It was a good idea,” she said.
Then he had a flash. “Wait a second. Webpages have names so we can remember them, right? But don’t they all have numerical addresses too?”
“Try it,” she said. He typed HTTP:// 419.20.028.04 into her browser and after a couple of seconds, something began to happen. A page was loading.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come on…”
There was a box in the middle of the screen, like an abstract painting. The browser rendered it slowly, finally revealing a dirty whitish image. They stared at it, disappointed again, but then the image began to drift. “Whoa,” said Jenner. “It’s a webcam, I think.”
She was right. They were looking at a moving image. A camera was scanning slowly to the right, tracking along a wall, a painted concrete wall, it seemed, stained by water. There was a shag carpet and some litter scattered around the bottom of the wall. It was a basement. The camera moved slowly, in total silence, picking up faint pools of light and leaving them behind. There was nothing of interest in the room, and the pan took a full minute to reach its farthest righthand extremity and then the image flickered, went black, and renewed itself where it started: an image of the empty room and the camera beginning its pan to the right again. They watched the entire sequence a second time.
“I can’t believe this,” said Wingate.
Jenner stabbed the screen with her finger. “Wait – did you see that?”
“I saw someone’s dirty basement.”
“No,” she said. “At the end. Watch again.”