The car was silent too on the way back to Quantico. Malick had said gruffly as Sarah got in that he didn’t want to talk about it. Sarah let it be, feeling she was unlikely to get anything from him tonight, but this wasn’t going to be the end of it. Not by a long shot.
Chapter 11
TYLER PINCHED THE BRIDGE of his nose and scrunched closed his eyes and then leaned back in his chair stretching his arms out in a wide arc to loosen up his upper body and back. He’d been looking over all the articles he could find online about the first of the ‘Agrarian’ murders and comparing them looking for something that stood out.
One of his contacts in the police had managed to get a copy of the crime scene photos to him. They were black and white photocopies and everything looked grainy, but it was a leg up on any of the other reporters on the story as far as he knew. Now all he had to do was find something in those photos that everyone else had missed. Though he was tired, Tyler was confident in his abilities and felt he could do it.
The police felt all of the items on the floor had been brought by the killer to the scene. If this was right then there was no doubting there was a message in there somewhere—unless of course the killer was simply toying with the police, which was always a possibility when it came to psychopathic killers. But Tyler didn’t think this was the case; something was there and he was going to find it.
The landline on his desk rang and Tyler looked at the little LED screen. No number came up. His heart quickened a beat and he glanced at his watch; it was just after 11pm and that was a good sign. In his business the best news or stories broke mostly at night when everyone else was just settling in for bed. He picked it up,
“Tyler,” he said. For a moment there was nothing.
Then the rasp of a disguised voice came over the line.
“Hello Tyler; it’s been a while,” he said.
“It has,” Tyler replied, “I was afraid something had happened to you.”
“Nice of you to be concerned for my welfare,” the man laughed, though Tyler was now thinking of him as Spalding too, “But your fears are misplaced. It is yourself you need to worry about.” It didn’t sound like a threat, but Tyler was unsure what he meant.
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Like I told you before; you’re putting your trust in Sarah Brightwater.”
“She helps my career.”
“For now,” Spalding said, “But later, when it is her own career on the line, who do you think she will throw to the wolves?”
“I can look after myself,” Tyler said.
“You are capable, I’ll give you that,” Spalding said, “But sometimes we don’t see the trouble coming until it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“Trouble is what my business is all about,” Tyler replied, thinking Sarah’s was too.
“I guess so,” Spalding said, and that was the end of the conversation as the line went dead. Tyler wondered did Spalding think the line might be traceable and had cut off before the time needed for such a thing, but he doubted it. Spalding had said what he needed to say; which wasn’t much—just enough to let Tyler know the game was still on and he hadn’t been forgotten about. Things were coming back full circle.
Circle. The word hung there in his mind and there was a spark to it; an intuition he got sometimes that lead to his break in a story. Tyler quickly pulled the crime scene photographs to him and poured over them once more, this time looking at the items laid out, trying to make a circle of them. He could make a crude circle if he tried but it didn’t make the message any clearer than before.
It was frustrating; he knew he was close to an answer but it was refusing to reveal itself to him. Taking one page in his hand, Tyler rose and began pacing the room holding it close to his face and then moving it away to see it from all different distances. He rotated it in every combination and even turned it backwards and held it up to the light to try and make something out, but it was all to no avail.
Finally, after about ten minutes of this furious pacing, he threw down the sheet in exasperation and let out a howl of anger. He stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard to shake off the ebbing fury.
And then he saw it.
The paper had landed on the floor face up and the image was clearer now than at any other time. It hadn’t been a circle he was looking for, but rather a spiral. Picking up the paper, Tyler went back to his desk and on a blank page started to write out the names of the items in the spiral pattern he’d seen. Then putting the photo away he stared at his own diagram for s time. He wrote the items out in a new list and then looked over the first letters of each hoping that finding the spiral would be the end of the riddle and it would spell out a message. There was no such luck. Tyler’s patience had returned, however, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he saw the message.
For the next hour he looked over the words and the images—both the photo and the diagram he’d made—making notes and writing down words he felt he was seeing. Pages of large scrawled notes were starting to accumulate when with a sudden moment of clarity he saw it!
Working from the centre of the spiral to the
