More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

—”

Silverman closed the door to his den, sat down at his desk and checked messages. The forensic scientist testing the murdered CI’s note about the Bible passage had called to report there was no significant evidence to be found on the sheet and neither the paper nor the ink were traceable. A handwriting comparison suggested that it had been written by the victim but he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain.

And, as the hours passed, there was still no word from Reverend Lansing. Sighing, Silverman stretched and stared at the words once again.

“Beware! Be on your guard against greed of every kind, for even when someone has more than enough, his possessions do not give him life.”

He grew angry. A man died leaving these words to warn them. What was he trying to say?

Silverman had a vague memory of his father saying good-bye that night and later still an even more vague memory of his wife saying good night, the den door closing abruptly. She was mad. But Michael Silverman didn’t care. All that mattered at the moment was finding the meaning to the message.

Something the reverend had said that afternoon came back to him. The Da Vinci Code. A code… Silverman thought about the snitch: The man hadn’t been a college grad but he was smart in his own way. Maybe he had more in mind than the literal meaning of the passage; could it be that the specifics of his warning were somehow encoded in the letters themselves?

It was close to four a.m. but Silverman ignored his exhaustion and went online. He found a website about word games and puzzles. In one game you made as many words as you could out of the first letters from a saying or quotation. Okay, this could be it, Silverman thought excitedly. He wrote down the first letters of each of the words from Luke 12:15 and began rearranging them.

He got several names: Bob, Tom, Don… and dozens of words: Gone, pen, gap…

Well, Tom could refer to Tommy Doyle. But he could find no other clear meaning in the words or any combination of them.

What other codes were there he might try?

He tried an obvious one: assigning numbers to the letters, A equaled 1, B 2 and so on. But when he applied the formula all he ended up with were sheets of hundreds of random digits. Hopeless, he thought. Like trying to guess a computer password.

Then he thought of anagrams — where the letters of a word or phrase are rearranged to make other words. After a brief search on the web he found a site with an anagram generator, a software program that let you type in a word and a few seconds later spit out all the anagrams that could be made from it.

For hours he typed in every word and combination of words in the passage and studied the results. At six a.m., utterly exhausted, Silverman was about to give up and fall into bed. But as he was arranging the printouts of the anagrams he’d downloaded, he happened to glance at one — the anagrams that the word possessions had yielded: open, spies, session, nose, sepsis…

Something rang a bell.

“Sepsis?” he wondered out loud. It sounded familiar. He looked the word up. It meant infection. Like blood poisoning.

He was confident that he was on to something and, excited, he riffled through the other sheets. He saw that “greed” incorporated “Dr.”

Yes!

And the word “guard” produced “drug.”

Okay, he thought in triumph. Got it!

Detective Mike Silverman celebrated his success by falling asleep in his chair.

* * *

He awoke an hour later, angry at the loud engine rattling nearby — until he realized the noise was his own snoring.

The detective closed his dry mouth, winced at the pain in his back and sat up. Massaging his stiff neck, he staggered upstairs to the bedroom, blinded by the sunlight pouring through the French doors.

“Are you up already?” his wife asked blearily from bed, looking at his slacks and shirt. “It’s early.”

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

After a fast shower he dressed and sped to the office. At eight a.m. he was in his captain’s office, with his partner, Steve Noveski, beside him.

“I’ve figured it out.”

“What?” his balding, joweled superior officer asked.

Noveski glanced at his partner with a lifted eyebrow; he’d just arrived and hadn’t heard Silverman’s theory yet.

“The message we got from the dead CI — how Doyle’s going to kill Pease.”

The captain had heard about the biblical passage but hadn’t put much stock in it. “So how?” he asked skeptically.

“Doctors,” Silverman announced.

“Huh?”

“I think he’s going to use a doctor to try to get to Pease.”

“Keep going.”

Silverman told him about the anagrams.

“Like crossword puzzles?”

“Sort of.”

Noveski said nothing but he too seemed skeptical of the idea.

The captain screwed up his long face. “Hold on here. You’re saying that here’s our CI and he’s got a severed jugular and he’s playing word games?”

“Funny how the mind works, what it sees, what it can figure out.”

“Funny,” the senior cop muttered. “Sounds a little, whatsa word, contrived, you know what I mean?”

“He had to get us the message and he had to make sure that Doyle didn’t tip to the fact he’d alerted us. He had to make it, you know, subtle enough so Doyle’s boys wouldn’t figure out what he knew, but not so subtle that we couldn’t guess it.”

“I don’t know.”

Silverman shook his head. “I think it works.” He explained that Tommy Doyle had often paid huge fees to brilliant, ruthless hit men who’d masquerade as somebody else to get close to their unsuspecting victims. Silverman speculated that the killer would buy or steal a doctor’s white jacket and get a fake ID card and a stethoscope or whatever doctors carried around with them nowadays. Then a couple of Doyle’s cronies would make a halfhearted attempt on Pease’s life — they couldn’t get close enough to kill him in the safe house, but causing injury was a possibility. “Maybe food poisoning.” Silverman explained about the sepsis anagram. “Or maybe they’d arrange for a fire or gas leak or something. The hit man, disguised as a med tech, would be allowed inside and kill Pease there. Or maybe the witness would be rushed to the hospital and the man’d cap him in the emergency room.”

The captain shrugged. “Well, you can check it out — provided you don’t ignore the grunt work. We can’t afford to screw this one up. We lose Pease and it’s our ass.”

The pronouns in those sentences may have been first person plural but all Silverman heard was a very singular “you” and “your.”

“Fair enough.”

In the hallway on their way back to his office Silverman asked his partner, “Who do we have on call for medical attention at the safe house?”

“I don’t know, a team from Forest Hills Hospital, I’d guess.”

“We don’t know who?” Silverman snapped.

“I don’t, no.”

“Well, find out! Then get on the horn to the safe house and tell the babysitter if Pease gets sick for any reason, needs any medicine, needs a goddamn bandage, to call me right away. Do not let any medical people see him unless we have a positive ID and I give my personal okay.”