“The answer,” Bao said with a gleam in his eyes. “Meet me over at the picnic tables. Gotta grab my backpack.”
Moments later, he rolled over to one of several redwood tables outside the enclosure. He sat down across from Mike and Angie and powered up his computer. Mike showed his growing impatience by making “hurry up” gestures. Angie could relate; the anticipation was hard for her to take.
Bao turned his laptop screen to face them. The screen showed a website open to a page displaying a string of alphanumeric characters in the center and nothing else. Angie recognized the sequence immediately; she had it memorized, in fact.
IC12843488
“It’s obvious once you know it,” Bao said.
“Yeah, I’m not really loving the cryptic stuff, Bao,” Mike said. “
Bao grinned and returned several nods, all in quick succession. “Right on. So here’s the thing. We’ve been looking for the key to this code, right? The primer. Something we can use to decrypt its meaning. I mean, without the key we got nothing. Right?”
“Right,” Angie agreed.
“Then you found it.” Bao was looking at Angie.
“What did I find?”
“The key, the primer. The meaning!” Bao stood up from the table.
“If you leave now, I’m going to tackle you.”
“No worries, bro,” Bao said to Mike as he rolled his skateboard over to the fence. “I’m gonna dish it. But it was right there where it happened.” Bao pointed through the fence to a ramp inside the skate park. “I was working on smoothing out my 360 Ollie Heelflip.” He got a little momentum going on the blacktop and somehow launched his board into the air, spun three hundred sixty degrees, and landed back on his board.
“Bao, are we here to watch you do tricks?” Mike looked ready to make that tackle.
“No, bro, it’s the number. Three sixty. Three. Six. Zero. I kept thinking about the number because I was pounding the trick and zero got stuck in my head. And I got thinking about the check register Angie found in the attic of her parents’ house.” Bao wheeled back over. “A gift made to that ear place on March fourth of every year.”
Mike pretended to be awestruck. “Bao, if I had a clue what you were talking about, I would be so super impressed right now.”
Bao looked to Angie, expecting her to put it together.
Angie shook her head, but then her expression changed. “Zero,” she said. “Oh-three, oh-four. It’s a date!” She smiled.
“Two dates, to be exact,” Bao said, hitting some keys on his computer to force a webpage refresh. Angie gasped. The webpage now displayed two strings of numbers: the original code written on the back of the photograph, and a second string containing some dashes and few newly placed zeros.
12843488
01-02-84/03-04-88
Angie’s body hummed with an electric vibration. Her wide eyes were fixated to the screen. “Bao, you know what this means? IC. You know what it is?”
“I’m right there with you, Ange,” Bao answered.
Mike ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah, well, I’m a little in the dark here.”
“IC is someone’s initials,” Angie told him.
Bao hit the spacebar and the webpage refreshed again. The original code was up top and the modified version down below.
IC12843488
I.C. 01-02-84/03-04-88
“Oh, I see,” Mike said. “Not the letters I.C., I mean. I get it now.”
Angie took the photograph from her purse and set it face up on the table. The girl with the sad smile and deformed ear seemed to be looking right into Angie’s eyes, pleading with her for something. Justice, perhaps.
“The girl in this photograph,” Angie said, brushing the girl’s face with the tip of her finger. “We know her initials and when she was born.”
“And more important,” Bao added, “we know when she died.”
Raynor Sinclair was parked in his Acura SUV some four hundred feet away from the picnic table at the skate park, listening to Angie’s conversation with the help of a twenty-four inch parabolic microphone dish. The attached shotgun microphone was a Sennheiser model. The MKH-8040 used a special capsule to minimize feedback and off-axis audio. The compact design made the microphone ideal for almost any application from music recording to eavesdropping.
Raynor had heard enough and made a call he felt had to be made. “She knows.”
“Knows what exactly?”
“I.C.”
A lengthy pause followed. “Then it’s only a matter of time.”
“They have the dates,” Raynor said.
“I’ll have to make some arrangements.”
“What about me?” Raynor asked.
“You have a new focus.”
“And that is?”
“Ivan Markovich made bail. I want him.”
The call went dead. Just like that, Raynor had his new marching orders.
CHAPTER 40