CHAPTER 42
Ruby studied the sheet of paper with the numbers scrawled on it.
42, 26, 12, 71, 06, 57
“It’s code,” Ruby said. “How the heck are we supposed to crack some code? John, we’ve got to take this to the police. They have experts in cryptography. They can figure this sort of thing out.”
The look I gave Ruby conveyed my disagreement. “He’d told me he’d know if we did that,” I reminded her. “He’ll kill the woman in the picture. We know that he will. He picked her because she’s somehow connected to us. We can’t let her down.”
“We’ve got to get out from this, John!” Ruby said, pulling her hair to show her exasperation. Ruby slumped down on the futon, and Ginger took the opportunity to move in for a little snuggle. Despondent as she was, Ruby couldn’t resist giving Ginger what she needed. The cat purred delightedly while Ruby studied the numbers some more. “How will he know if we take this to the police?” Ruby said. “We tell them it has to be contained. We tell them everything.”
“I don’t know how he’ll find out, but say that he does. Maybe there’s a leak,” I said.
“By a leak, you mean Clegg?” Ruby said.
I shot my wife an angry look. “Are you back on that?” I said. “Do you still believe that Clegg is helping Uretsky?”
“Think about it, John,” Ruby said. “Who was the guy Clegg arrested the night Rhonda was killed? We don’t know anything about him. Maybe he’s helping Clegg out. Maybe Clegg got a computer guy to set everything up. He’s had time to plan this. I don’t know how Clegg is doing it, but I have a gut instinct about him. You’ve always trusted my gut. Why aren’t you trusting me now?”
I thought back to Ruby’s vision board, her penchant for asking the universe for answers. It was true she seemed to always be in the know.
“So if it’s Clegg,” I said, “then is he helping Uretsky or pretending to be him?”
“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “We don’t even know what Elliot Uretsky actually looks like.” Ruby correctly judged my expression as one of dismay. “What’s wrong?”
“I should have asked Ruth Shane what Elliot looked like when we were at Uretsky’s house,” I said, angry with myself. “She’d know. Maybe she even has a picture of him. If we had that, we could have matched it to the mug shot of the guy Clegg busted and we could be done with this debate.”
“Fine. You should have done that,” Ruby said. “But there was a lot going on, and we’ve got to do something right here and right now. I say we go to the police.”
I looked down at my phone and once again fixed my gaze on the smiling faces of Tinesha and her son. It was sickening to think that Uretsky was there—hiding in the shadows, watching them from a distance. He took this picture, and he sent it to me for a reason. What did he want us to do?
Uretsky’s words came back at me like an arrow shot from a bow.
Are you ready for that big, bold step toward ending the game?
Ginger leapt off the futon and onto the floor when I sat down beside Ruby.
“There’s no crime this time,” I said to her. “We just have to solve the clue. We already have Jenna and Rhonda on our conscience. Dr. Adams and your man, too. Do we really want to add a fifth victim to the list? Because that’s what’s going to happen here.”
I showed Ruby the picture on my phone. Unfair of me, but I couldn’t let Jenna and Rhonda’s fate become Tinesha’s as well.
Ruby stared at the display screen for a long while. She didn’t pick up on the connection to me, either.
How did I know this woman?
“We have nothing to lose by trying,” I said, “And Tinesha has everything to gain. We’ve got to try, Rube. We’ve got to try.”
In one hand, Ruby held the paper with numbers on it, and in the other, my iPhone with Tinesha’s picture. She appeared to be weighing the two choices, as though her hands had become scales.
“Do you want to be responsible for what happens to her?” I said. “Because I don’t.”
Ruby’s gaze fell to the numbers. “Have you Googled them?” she asked.
“No, but I’ll give it a try.”
Since Ruby had thrown my laptop against the wall, I used my iPhone to Google the number sequence. I showed her the results, which were pages full of climatological data—sequences of numbers that happened to have all our numbers in it, but not in the order that Uretsky had given them to me.
“So this is pretty much useless,” Ruby said. “What now? How long do we have to figure this thing out?” Her question made me pause. Ruby didn’t have patience to wait for an answer. “John, I said how long?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t tell me.”
“He’s always given us a deadline,” Ruby said.
“Well, this time he didn’t.”
Ruby looked at me, unblinking. “That’s strange,” she said.
We spent the next couple of hours trying various cryptographic approaches, many of which I got off the Internet. We tried substituting letters for numbers, but that just yielded a string of gibberish.
“There’s no key,” Ruby said. “He can’t expect us to solve this without a key.”
We were working at the dining table, with every inch of available surface covered by our spread of papers, all failed attempts at cracking the code. I found a Web site that listed two dozen different ciphers: Caesarian Shift, Double Transposition, Playfair, and the list went on.
“We don’t have time to learn all of these,” I said, “let alone apply them.”
“Time,” Ruby said, her voice trailing off.
“What?”
“He didn’t give us a time limit,” Ruby said.
“You’re back to that,” I said.
“He hasn’t done that before,” she said. “We had a time limit for the other crimes, shoplifting, armed robbery, prostitution, arson. Only this time we don’t have any limit at all.”
“Play the part,” I said. “He didn’t give us a time limit for that.”
“That’s because we weren’t the drivers for that. Dobson was coming to us. We didn’t go to him. But here he wants us to take action to get an advantage, not wait for it to happen. Just following his own logic, there should be a time limit.”
“I still don’t see how that helps us,” I said.
“You need to tell me exactly what he said to you.”
“He just gave me these numbers. He told me not to go to the cops—that he’d find out if I did. He told me he wanted to tip the scales in our advantage. He said we didn’t know what city he was in, or what state. If we didn’t play along, Tinesha would go missing.” I was talking fast, probably too fast, but I wanted to remember every possible detail, so my mind was free-form thinking and recalling.
“Not helpful,” Ruby said. “What else?”
I couldn’t think of anything else that struck me. “He just ended the call by saying that every minute and every second counts,” I said. “That was all.”
Ruby’s eyes went wide. “John, don’t you get it?”
“What?”
“Open your eyes and your mind. He didn’t give us a time limit, but he said the seconds and minutes count? Does that make sense to you?”
“I don’t see how that helps us with these numbers,” I said.
Again, Ruby looked at the sheet of paper. Her head was bent low, eyes studying. “Do you remember that climb you did in Colorado when I called your cell and asked where you were?”
I nodded. It was a long time ago, over eight years, but I never forget my climbs. “I think I said we were going to try for a three-peak day. We’d just climbed Mount Democrat and Mount Lincoln, and Mount Bross was up next.”
“That’s not what you told me,” Ruby said. “When I asked where you were, you initially gave me your location in latitude and longitude and I laughed, because you were so focused on your climb, you forgot who you were talking to.”
My eyes went wide, and a tingle swept through my body. “You think these numbers are location coordinates?”
“Minutes and seconds,” Ruby said. “Longitude and latitude can be expressed as degrees, minutes, and seconds or as decimal degrees. You taught me that. I don’t think this is a code with a key for us to crack.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“I think it’s a place that Uretsky wants us to go.”