‘There will.’
The rest of the message must have been at the other two murders but annoyingly he hadn’t been able to get access to a copy of those yet. It was proving more difficult to get those and it ate him up that he didn’t have the information to hand to figure out the rest of the message.
Frantically, he went online again looking through all the articles for anytime someone mentioned the objects, but though there were a couple of references there were no descriptions of what the items were.
Sarah would know; not only would she know she would have access to the photos.
Tyler’s mind was racing. Sarah would also be very interested to hear about the phone call from Spalding as well. If these two items were not a clear indication of how they should be working together, then Tyler couldn’t imagine what would be.
As he sat back in his chair and lifted his cell phone to his ear, he smiled and tried to imagine a scenario where she wouldn’t be willing to work with him in order to get the information he now had.
The game was back on indeed.
Chapter 12
SARAH SAT BY THE WINDOW looking down on the crossroad traffic lights down below her fifth floor apartment. It had been a rough day and she was having a glass of wine—not something she usually did in the evening. Seeing Malick go to pieces the way he had today had jarred her and she couldn’t get the image of him cowering by the car out of her head. It was so unlike him.
The Police Department would be expecting a report from her and no doubt Daniels and Bobrick at the Academy were going to want to know what happened too. If she included what actually happened with Malick that could finish his career, but if she didn’t, was that doing him any favours really? In another situation today, they both could have been killed because of his breakdown. It seemed obvious that she should tell the truth, but Malick had been her friend and partner for a long time and Sarah knew there was no way he could take it other than a betrayal. If their roles had been reversed, she certainly would. This was an added mess Sarah could seriously do without.
Her cell phone started to ring and her first instinct was that it was Malick. It was a surprise when looking at the screen she saw it was Tyler Ford. She hesitated, her hand hovering over the phone. How she wanted to answer and yet how scared she was of what he might say. Danger lurked in every communication with him but so too, she was coming to learn, did progress on her cases.
“Hello,” she answered.
“The ‘Agrarian’ is leaving a message,” Tyler said. Sarah’s eyes shot open wide as she leaned forward on the seat. It had been the right decision to answer!
“What?” she asked, making no attempt to disguise how desperate she was to know.
“It’s spread over all the crime scenes, but I only have photos from the first one. Do you have the others at hand?” Sarah was already walking to the sleeping laptop on the table.
“Hang on a sec,” she said as she swiped the cursor pad to bring the machine back to glowing life. She logged in quickly and went for the files for the case. “Okay, I’m in,” she said.
“The items the killer brought, that’s what you need to be looking for,” Tyler said. Sarah clicked to those images from the other cases.
“Right, what am I looking for?”
“Like I said, I haven’t seen those ones, but is it possible to make a loose spiral shape from the items locations?” Sarah looked and for a moment her eyes refused to see it, but just as she was about to shake her head in exasperation and tell Tyler she couldn't see it, the pattern jumped out at her.
“Yes!” she said, “I see it, it’s messy but it’s there!”
“Write down all the names of the item on a sheet, do it for both and then call me back at this number.”
“Alright, I’ll call you in a few minutes,” she said and hung up.
Scrawling down the names of the items, Sarah hoped she was going to see the message without having to go back to Tyler, but by the time she had it all written down, it made no more sense to her than it had when she was on the scene of the crime.
When Tyler was back on the line, he talked her through his system for reading the message. Sarah wrote it down as they went but the end result was not as clear as she would have liked.
“This doesn’t make sense at all,” she said, almost shouting down the phone as though it were Tyler’s fault.
“Are you sure you followed the example exactly?” he asked, his voice calm and irritating on the line.
“Yes!” she snapped back, looking back over what she’d done to be sure. “Yes,” she said again.
“Maybe it’s backwards this time,” Tyler said, “Do the same thing with the items in the opposite direction and see what that gives you?”
“Okay,” she said wearily,
“I’ll stay on the line this time,” he added quickly before she could tell him she’d call him back. At least he was as eager as she was for the answer, she thought.
Sarah didn’t answer before laying the phone on the table and starting to work again on the puzzle before her. The pressure of the open phone line made it feel like she was taking part in some super important timed exam and it was grating on her nerves. Though she was making progress and words were certainly forming this time, she kept glancing at the phone like it was her enemy and hating it more and more.
“I got it!” she said lifting both the
