Why didn’t you call me when it happened?”
Kidder, amused, says, “Gee, God, you must have been too busy listening to all those prayers, huh? Too busy to notice what was happening to me. Otherwise you’d know I crawled up the stairs and went out and found the kid and locked him in the closet, and then I passed out again.”
“Show me,” Gatling demands.
Kidder leads him to a bedroom closet. The bi-fold closet door doesn’t lock, so the door has been blocked shut by a heavy bureau. Gatling lends a hand and they both shove the bureau out of the way, Kidder dusting his hands melodramatically and saying, “Hoo-ha! Everything’s easier when God’s on your side.”
Gatling studies the closet door and frowns. There’s nothing he likes about the situation, but he knows what has to be done. The building will have to be burned to the ground, to destroy any evidence of the kidnapping, but first he has to take care of the boy, who is himself the most damning piece of evidence. Gatling reaches into his back pocket, snakes out a plastic Ziploc bag, holds it to his side. With his left hand he sweeps open the bi-fold door.
Crouched in the corner, small hands covering his eyes, is Joey Keener.
“Come out of there, little man,” Gatling says softly, soothingly. “It’s okay, you’re safe. I’m the good guy.”
He takes an ether-soaked rag from the plastic bag and holds it to the boy’s mouth until he stops struggling.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The first Naomi Nantz case I ever worked involved a teenage girl, a movie star and a nationally known wacko-religious cult that will remain nameless in these pages because I really hate finding rattlesnakes in unexpected places. At first I didn’t believe a word of the girl’s story, touching, as it did, on midnight visits from extraterrestrial beings, but Naomi was somehow able to cut through all the spin and special effects (mostly created by the movie star) to the core of truth about what really happened. It’s like the average person-me for instance- when confronted by the impossible, sees exactly that, the part that couldn’t possibly be true, and can’t get around it. Whereas Naomi sees behind the impossible, and is able to make cognitive leaps that to this day boggle my little mind.
Case in point, the strangely encoded message that arrived about ten hours after we returned from our failed mission to rattle Taylor Gatling’s gilded cage. Naomi is in the command center with Teddy, all screens blazing, the two of them sifting databases for clues on where Gatling might be hiding a five-year-old boy. They’re working from a fifty-mile radius of Boston, in light of the fact that Joey and Mrs. Mancero were filmed on Harvard Bridge, within sight of the MIT dome. Compiling cross-references to buildings and properties that may have any connection to Gatling, his company, his extensive business contacts and his circle of friends.
Teddy has a satellite map up on the largest screen, with red dots indicating possible locations. This seems to include most of southern New England.
“Exclude business locations,” Naomi suggests. “Try residential properties owned by anyone who has ever crossed paths with Mr. Gatling.”
Teddy does so at the stroke of a key. If the dots were pimples the poor screen would have a very bad case of acne. “Why exclude business locations?” he wants to know. “A lot of these involve warehouses and storage facilities.”
Before Naomi can explain, every screen in the command center goes blank.
“What the hell?” says Teddy, his voice rising an octave or so.
The largest screen, the one that had been dedicated to the satellite map, starts to glow blue. Then a white dot begins to bounce along the middle of the screen, as if to an unheard musical beat. Teddy, eyes bugging, is frantically jabbing at various keyboards, to no effect.
“Wait,” Naomi says softly.
The dot finally settles in the middle of the screen, condensing and expanding in a way that reminds me of a beating heart.
“Now,” she says. “The escape button, top left.”
Teddy deliberately depresses the escape button. At first nothing happens. And then the pulsing dot expands and changes, morphing into an image of a young girl in a frock-style dress. Not a photograph, an illustration of some kind. Looks familiar, but I can’t place it.
Naomi chuckles, shaking her head. “Clever man,” she says.
“Clever who, and what does it mean?”
“That’s Alice from
“Ridiculous,” I say, folding my arms, preparing to be stubborn. “What makes you think this is him? And what could it possibly mean?”
“I conclude that it is Gatling because he has the ability to do this. It can’t be a coincidence that we’ve been hacked within hours of confronting him.”
“Hey, look at that,” Teddy says. “Her mouth is moving.”
“Click on her lips,” Naomi suggests.
Teddy clicks and the image of the young girl vanishes, replaced by a blinking password entry. “Any ideas?” he says. “It could be anything.”
“Not anything,” Naomi points out. “There’s a blinking cursor and eleven blank spaces.”
“So?”
“Password prompts don’t usually include clues about how many characters are required. And this came from Alice’s mouth.” She turns to me. “Therefore I conclude that the password is something you said.”
“That narrows it down to about a million words a month, if you count all those conversations I have with myself.”
“I’m curious,” Naomi says, evenly. “Why are you so resistant to the idea that Mr. Gatling prefers to communicate with you, rather than with me?”
“Because I loathe the man. It looks like he had a child kidnapped for his own political purposes, which is disgusting enough right there. Plus he’s smug and preening and so…so… I don’t know, macho.”
“You’re repulsed by machismo?”
“His version, yes.”
“Interesting. Maybe Mr. Gatling is attracted to women who revile him. But that’s neither here nor there. The image of Alice speaking is conclusive. Therefore the eleven blank characters represent a word or phrase uttered by you, in his presence.”
I shrug. “I said a lot of things.”
“Yes, but what utterance did he remark on? A few come to mind. ‘Swamp Yankee’ is twelve spaces, so that doesn’t work. And ‘backwoods colonial’ is out,” she says, before pausing to muse for a moment. “Teddy, try this: ‘wicked good.’”
He keys in the letters, hits Return.
The password entry space vanishes and is instantly replaced by a video play-bar on the bottom of the screen, with icons for play, pause, fast-forward and stop, and a digital clock that begins counting as a slightly grainy nighttime image forms out of the darkness.
“Stop right there,” Naomi says, and when Teddy hesitates-apparently fearful that he’ll lose the video enclosure-she reaches out and taps the keyboard herself, freezing the image.
“How did you do it so fast?” I ask, incredulous. “What led you to ‘wicked good’?”
“Logic. Rather obvious, actually. We can discuss the finer aspects of deductive reasoning later. Right now I want Jack Delancey, the quicker the better.”
As it happens Jack is already in the residence, specifically downstairs in Mrs. Beasley’s breakfast nook,
