“I’ll tell you about it later.” Right now, all he wanted to do was trace Jerome’s connection to Parker Kline. “Jerome, do you remember Katie stopping to help you when your car went off the road?”
“Yeah, I remember that.” Jerome’s brows drew together. “Can’t tell you why I went off, though. Maybe a deer?” A note of appeal lingered for them to fill in the blanks. “I kind of remember something out there on the road with me.” He rubbed a hand across his lips, mulling the idea over. “At least I thought there was.”
“You were pretty disoriented when I found you.” Katie placed a hand on his arm with an encouraging smile. “I was worried about you.”
“Thanks.” A hint of color rose to his cheeks. Abruptly awkward, he plucked at the blanket layered over his lap.
Caden bit away a grin. The guy might be able to rattle off endless theory about aliens and UFOs, but grew self-conscious when accepting a compliment. Especially when that compliment came from a pretty girl.
“When I left,” Katie continued, “you were with Deputy Brown. Do you remember him?”
Jerome frowned. “That’s the weird thing. I only remember bits and pieces of that night and how I got here.” His scowl dug deeper. “I remember being afraid for some reason.”
“What about cold?” Katie’s prompting was gentle, almost as if she feared upsetting him. “You kept saying you were cold.”
“Cold.” Jerome repeated the word as if finding something familiar in the sound. For several seconds he didn’t speak, his eyes hooded, his gaze turned inward. Overhead the intercom warbled a page, asking Dr. Newton to report to radiology. Blinking rapidly, Jerome sat straighter. “That’s how he communicates. Over the airwaves.”
Caden exchanged a glance with Ryan. “Who are you talking about?”
“Indrid Cold.”
Exhaling, Ryan webbed a hand over his face. “Not him again.”
Jerome’s mouth dropped open. “You know about Cold?”
“We know Parker Kline believes he communicated with someone named Indrid Cold.” Caden tried not to rush the conversation, but he was growing impatient, especially after his encounter with the being in the igloo. “You went to see Kline the night Katie found your car off the road.”
“Yeah, I remember now.” Jerome’s voice lurched up an octave and he wriggled around on the bed, pressing his fists against the mattress to push higher on his pillows. “Katie, I gave you something that night. I tucked a piece of paper into your jacket pocket. Did you find it?”
Her gaze flicked to Ryan.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” He withdrew a white slip from his pocket.
“What’s that?” Caden had heard nothing about the paper.
“I’ll show you. There—grab the table.” Jerome motioned for the rollaway stand beside his bed. A box of tissues, plastic container for water, and a Styrofoam cup occupied the top. Someone had left a can of ginger ale and a pack of saltines, but both were unopened.
Caden slid the table close to the bed, repositioning it so that the surface stretched across Jerome’s lap. Tugging his bottom lip between his teeth, Jerome flattened the paper on top, smoothing away the wrinkles with a swipe of his hand. “Thank God you still had it.”
“What is it?” Caden stared down at a seemingly senseless jumble of numbers.
“I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it.” Ryan stood behind Katie, looking over her shoulder while Jerome ran a skinny index finger through the chain of digits. “Katie found it last night. I was going to run it by Parker’s doctors but haven’t had a chance.”
“You don’t need to run it by anyone.” Jerome’s finger paused on the third line, excitement creeping into his voice. “Here. This is it.”
Caden leaned closer. “I don’t see anything.”
“Give me a pen. And a notepad.”
Ryan beat him to it, pulling the small tablet he used for taking notes from his jacket pocket.
“Parker gave me this,” Jerome explained, without looking up. “I learned about what happened to him at Hank Jeffries’ place. That’s why I went to see him at West Central. After Hank killed Tim, Parker raced back to their truck.”
Caden winced. “I know that.” To get their dad’s gun.
“Parker was going for help,” Jerome said. “But he saw something on the way to the truck that changed everything. It changed him.”
Squashing a spike of anger, Caden paced a short distance away. “I was there, Jerome.”
“I know. Parker told me everything that happened. Cold was there too.”
Ryan’s brows crawled into the fringe of his bangs. “Indrid Cold? The guy from Lanulos?”
Jerome nodded. He plunked his finger onto the paper. “And this is when he’s coming back.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” There was no disguising the irritation in Caden’s voice as he stalked back to the bed. So much for not upsetting the hospital patient. “Are you trying to say that muddle of numbers means something?”
“It isn’t a muddle. It’s noise.”
Standing beside Ryan, Katie flinched.
“The cluster is intended as a distraction from the hidden message. If you look closely, you’ll notice all the digits repeat in sequence, one through zero. Then they begin dropping off. Two through zero, three through zero and so on. Eventually, the sequence starts over again. But the figures in the middle of the third line don’t follow the same pattern.”
Jerome pointed out the line, and Caden craned his neck to see.
99006677889900103123415677889900889900
It still looked like a clutter of nothing. “I don’t see—”
Jerome circled a handful of numbers in the center and read them aloud. “1031234156. These don’t follow the structure of the others.”
“It still doesn’t explain what they mean.” Katie had been mostly quiet, letting Caden and Ryan carry the conversation, but the word “noise” seemed to hold special significance for her.
Jerome looked up. “Broken down it translates to October thirty-first, at 11:41:56 PM.”