“Trust me, okay?”
Steve was waiting outside the task force room, and I saw he was using his time to work one of my puzzles. He saw that I’d caught him. “Don’t you ever do any easy puzzles anymore? It might be nice to have a no-brainer once in a while.”
“As a matter of fact, I made a simple one this morning.”
“When’s it going to show up?”
“I’m guessing sometime next week.”
He looked puzzled. “You don’t know when your puzzles are going to run in the papers?”
“The exact date? No, not usually. If I do a themed puzzle summary, they’ll usually run it when I ask them to, but I have to have those in a month early.”
“If you two are finished discussing number puzzles, I’ve got work to do,” Zach said as he unlocked the door.
“You know, it would make it a lot simpler if you gave me a key, too,” Steve said as we all walked inside.
“Not even Davis has a key to this room,” Zach said. “As long as I’ve got evidence stored in here, I’m going to keep it that way. No offense, Steve.”
“None taken. I don’t mind hanging around waiting for you to get back.” He grinned and slapped his newspaper against his leg. “I’m on the clock either way, Chief.”
“Don’t you think it’s time you started calling me Zach? I haven’t been the chief for a while.”
“I’m not sure it’s a habit I can break,” Steve said with a smile. “Or even want to.”
“Do you have a problem with Davis?” Zach asked softly, and I knew Steve was treading on dangerous ground.
“No, sir. He’s my boss. I’m behind him a thousand percent. Grady made his choice and I can live with it.”
Zach was clearly tired of that particular conversation; I could see it in his eyes.
Zach took the original of the note we’d just gotten and stored it in a locked box where he kept all of the other letters the police had received from the killer. Once that was safely put away, he pinned the front copy on the foam board with the rest of the copied notes, and then placed the back copy on the other side of the room. I didn’t know why he’d separated them so entirely, and then suddenly, I realized he was giving me my own space to work out my theory.
“It seems that there has to be a code here somewhere, don’t you think?” I asked.
“What makes you say that?”
I smiled at him. “If I told you it was woman’s intuition, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t.”
I walked over to the back copies.
“If we only knew for certain what they meant,” I said as I studied them. I was sure the numbers on the backs of the photos and letters were related to some kind of puzzle, a format the killer was using to map out the murders in his mind. But beyond that, I had no idea how it all came together.
“What do you want me to do, Ch—, I mean, Zach?”
Zach smiled at Steve. “I know it’s going to be tough, but you can do it.” He pointed to a pile of boxes in one corner of the room. “Those are notes from the two crime scenes. I need you to make a list of everything they have in common for me.” As Steve moved toward the boxes, Zach added, “Don’t include just what you see. Try to dig a little deeper and tell me what’s not there.”
“It sounds like I’m looking for a white dog in a snow-storm,” Steve said.
“Something like that. Are you up to it?”
“You bet,” he said as he moved away from us.
“How about you?” Zach asked. “Do you mind spending some of your time here to work on that theory of yours?”
“You can have all I’ve got.”
Zach nodded, and then to my surprise, he kissed me briefly on the lips. It was about as public as he ever got with his displays of affection. “You’re my kind of gal, you know that, don’t you?”
“That’s handy, since you’re my kind of guy.”
He winked at me, and then Zach walked over to the locked box and opened it again. When he was examining direct physical evidence, it was like he was channeling someone else, he got so lost in his thoughts. I had no idea what was going through his mind, but I’d seen that look in his eyes enough to know that I could set off a firecracker under his nose and he wouldn’t even notice it.
I looked back at the board full of copied clues, and studied the mishmash of letters and numbers. I was about to ask Zach for their order of appearance when I thought to turn the copies over. As I’d hoped, these were two- sided copies, with the crime scenes depicted on one side and the letters the killer had written matched to their codes on the other. That still didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, though.
“What order did these come in?” I asked, forgetting for a second that Zach could be on the moon for all the chance I had to get an answer from him.
Steve looked around, and then he said, “If you’re talking to me, there’s a log over on that table.”
I walked over to the spot he’d pointed to, and after digging through some of the paperwork, I found a master
