On the third try, the door gave. Gideon lost his balance and fell all the way through as the door swung open in front of him.
Here, sprawled facedown in the living room, the smell was just beginning to reach gagging levels. Gideon turned his head and saw an entertainment system, the rectangular TV screen casting a blind blue glow over everything.
He turned the other way and saw Davy, eyes rolled, kit laid out on the coffee table in front of him.
Gideon grabbed his crutch and made it to his feet. The fall, combined with the exertion of climbing the stairs, had ignited a throbbing ache in his injured leg. He tried to ignore it as he looked at Davy.
It was an obvious OD. Though Gideon had trouble believing in the coincidence. Finding Davy dead only convinced Gideon that he had found the right guy.
He walked over to where a phone sat on a table, pulled a tissue from his pocket, and picked up the receiver. There wasn't any way he could avoid calling this in. And the way his leg felt, Davy might not be the only one who needed to be carried out of this apartment.
Before he called it in, he had an idea. He looked at the receiver on the wireless phone, pulled out a pen, and used the dull end to press redial.
After a short series of beeps—a local number—someone picked up.
'The Zodiac, Renny speaking.' Behind the voice were the sounds of people talking and dishes clattering.
'I'm calling for Davy.'
'Davy ain't here, hasn't been in for near a week.'
'How about Lionel?'
'What? Didn't hear about what happened?'
'No.'
'Got hisself shot up on the Metro. He ain't taking no calls here no more.'
'Okay, thanks.'
He hung up with the pen. The Zodiac, a bar, club, or restaurant—somewhere Lionel and Davy both hung out at. It was the last place Davy had called. For Lionel maybe? For the person who had hired him?
Gideon put in the call to the department, wondering exactly how he was going to explain to IA what he was doing here.
In the hour he waited for someone to get there, Gideon went through Davy's apartment looking for anything that might give him a lead on who had hired him to move the Daedalus—or just some concrete evidence that he had found the right guy.
In Davy's bedroom he found something. Davy's wallet rested on the nightstand next to an unmade bed. He didn't need to go through it. Someone had already pulled it open and had spilled its contents all over the bed.
No cash. But there was a business card.
It was just a blank white rectangle bearing a symbol Gideon recognized.
' N,' the same mark he had seen on the side of the warehouse.
What the fuck is this?
This was it, the connection. The pulse throbbed in Gideon's neck, and he felt a copper taste in his mouth. He could leave the thing here, have it bagged in the department, and watch as the case sank.
Gideon knew that Davy was murdered, he knew it. He also knew that the path of least resistance would have the corpse tagged as an OD with nothing to do with Raphael's death.
Gideon knew that the card was important.
Gideon wrapped the card in a tissue and put it in his own wallet. He could feel the line he crossed as he did so, but he kept telling himself. . .
'You can’t run away, and you can’t ignore it. . .'
It took another three hours to get away, between waiting for them to come and haul away Davy's body, and explaining how the hell he came upon the corpse to the uniformed officers who showed up. A pale imitation of what would happen when that IA guy, Magness, caught wind of this.
He would have to worry about that later. If he was lucky, it would be a while before news of this filtered through the department. At the moment, he had more pressing concerns.
'You know what you're asking me to do?' Dominic Mallory was looking at the business card that Gideon had taken from Davy's wallet. Gideon had since moved it into a small plastic evidence bag.
Mallory was an employee of the District forensic lab. One of the fingerprint crew that went over the crime scenes that seemed to merit the attention. Davy, as an OD, didn't merit that kind of attention.
Gideon had come down to Mallory's workplace to ask him a favor. He leaned over the black laminated counter and said, 'I'm asking you to do your job.'
Mallory snorted. 'As if it was that easy. There's not enough resources, time, or money to do the stuff I'm supposed to be doing. I have a month-long backlog . . .' He , picked up the bag and shook it. 'I can't be doing work that isn't part of an official case.'
'This is an official case.'
'What're you talking about? You're on disability leave.'
'That card belonged to a DOA overdose named Franklin Alexander Jones, a pal of Kareem Rashad Williams —'
'So?' Mallory looked up from the card.
'The guy who set me up. That card might have the prints of the guy behind that whole fiasco.'
'And why isn't this coming down to me through the normal channels?'
'You've seen the news.' Gideon shook his head. 'The whole disaster has become some sort of political play by the Administration. They don't want an investigation. They want a fiasco. If someone discovered who set us up, it might dilute their play for money out of Congress.'
'Gideon, you're thinking too hard.'
'Will you do it?'
Mallory shook his head. 'Of course I will.' He sighed. 'This'll take a while. Even with the computerized files, it might take weeks to find a match, assuming we even find a print to compare. I can put it on the list.'
'That's all I ask.'
Mallory took the baggie and looked at the card inside. 'Hebrew?'
Gideon shrugged. 'I don't know. Does it mean anything to you?'
Mallory shook his head. 'Go on, I'll get hold of you if anything turns up from this.'
When Gideon came home, he hobbled up to his computer and connected to the Internet. The symbol ' N ,' kept running through his head. It had something to do with what was going on, he just didn't know what. It could be the symbol of some terrorist group, or it could be a word in some language he didn't understand.
He was hoping that he would find something out there that might tell him what it meant.
Gideon loaded his own netsearch software into Netscape and told it to fetch him information on the Hebrew alphabet. The symbol was Hebrew, that was about all Gideon knew about it.
The number of pages he found were in the thousands, but the most basic information he needed was in the first two documents. He looked at a page that simply named the characters in the Hebrew alphabet and showed their cursive form. The symbol, at least the first part without the little circle, 'K,' was called 'aleph.' The first letter.
The letter had no inherent sound, according to what Gideon read. In transliterating a Hebrew word it would disappear. In trying to find some sort of meaning for the little subscript, he kept hunting. The closest to some sort of meaning he found was the discovery that the original
Hebrew alphabet contained no vowels—the fact that something named 'aleph' was not a vowel seemed odd to him—and the only way the written language had of showing vowel pronunciation was as a pattern of dots and dashes above or below the written text.
That kind of text was called 'pointed' text, and when he first read about it, he thought that might be what the circle was. But when he saw an example of what pointed Hebrew text actually looked like, he saw that it wasn't anything like what he was searching for.
He discovered that the Hebrew letters doubled as numbers, with the first ten representing the numbers from one to ten, aleph being the number one . . .
Some sort of deeper meaning had to be there. Using the first letter as a trademark meant something.
