“Maybe they were just being cautious, not knowing how long the body had been there, but chances are there was urine on the floor.”
She stared at him in disbelief, as if the violence of what had taken place here was only just becoming apparent to her. She’d probably imagined Jonas being drugged, his body hanging serenely as the rope starved his brain of oxygen. Perhaps she was only now beginning to imagine that he had struggled, that he had probably soiled himself, that his face would have been disfigured.
If she hadn’t come down to this basement, she might have held on to all kinds of romantic notions about Jonas and the way he’d died, but any such dreams were shattered now. Jonas had died a miserable and frantic death, and even if he’d realized he was courting danger, he’d almost certainly failed to anticipate the violence that would be done to him here.
Finn turned on the flashlight, aiming the beam along the passageway that linked the basement stairs to this room. Then he moved into the center of the room and pointed the beam at ground level, among the boxes and crates that had been stored there.
Hailey watched him, her attention finally drawn from the trauma of that disinfected patch of floor, and said, “What are you looking for?”
“His Moleskine notebook.”
“Why would it be down here?”
He made a mental note of the point he’d reached with the flashlight, and turned to her, saying, “It wasn’t anywhere else. I think he was too smart to let them take it. But I think once he was in here, once he knew what they intended to do, he might have tried to hide it, throw it aside, in the hope that someone else would find it.”
“You mean you?”
“Not necessarily.”
“He left the note for you on his computer. It’s like he knew he was in trouble, maybe even that they’d kill him, and he left all these clues for you to follow.”
Finn doubted that even Jonas had foreseen his own death. She had a point about the messages, though, because since leaving that note under Finn’s door it seemed that Jonas had been working exclusively as his agent.
He said, “I wish I’d been here, or that I’d seen him again before I left, because I would have told him to stop.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference—once he got something into his head he couldn’t let it go.”
Finn remembered what Jonas had said about puzzles, and about Hailey not having the same kind of mind, how she could just leave a puzzle unsolved. Then he looked at her and realized she was resentful in some way, perhaps because Jonas had been her best friend, that secretly they had been in love with each other, and yet in his final days and hours Jonas had thought of leaving messages only for Finn, whom he had hardly known.
“Hailey, he left things for me because mine was the puzzle occupying him at the time. For days before that, he’d been obsessing about you and where you’d gone. For all I know, he thought this was part of the same thing. The simple fact is, he didn’t plan on dying here—if he had, I’d have been the last person he’d have thought about contacting.”
She nodded. “I guess you think I’m being selfish.”
“In a good way.” She smiled a little. “When I was leaving, I told Jonas I’d probably see him when I got back, and he looked slightly freaked out and said, ‘It’s not like we’re gonna be hanging out.’” She laughed now, crying at the same time, wiping away the tears.
Then, quite abruptly, she stopped and pointed to a corner. “There’s something on the floor over there.” He aimed the flashlight in that direction, seeing nothing, but she said, “No, move over here. It’s between those two crates.”
He moved toward the middle of the room, standing almost where the floor had been cleaned, and now he saw it, what looked like a small black notebook. He moved closer, keeping the beam on it, as if he feared the darkness might swallow it up.
And he only turned off the flashlight once he’d picked it up—the Moleskine. He could imagine Jonas waiting for his moment, throwing the book toward this corner. The thought of that simple little act of bravery only reinforced the cowardice of the crime committed here.
“Is that it?”
He nodded and opened the book, turning through the pages of dense script before finding the last page Jonas had written on, in block capitals—a code in itself, Finn now sensed. At the top of the page was the name GIBSON, and below it were two addresses in Geneva. Next to one address he’d written BGS OFFICE, next to the other: APARTMENT WHERE GIBSON IS STAYING.