“You’re back early.” Nettie looked sideways at Mars, holding out a pink message slip. “Which is a good thing. I found a cryptologist at the university who can talk to you about the number, but he’s leaving for Iceland later this week. He’ll be hard to reach for six weeks after that.”
“Thanks,” Mars said, staring at the slip.
“How was the weekend?” She gave him a second look. “You look shot.”
Mars sat down at his desk, leaning forward on the edge of his chair, elbows on the desk, chin resting on his folded hands. “I feel shot. Too much driving in too short a time. And I didn’t sleep much last night, fast-food breakfast this morning on the road. Other than that, the weekend was good. A great place. It made me feel bad about being poor.”
“Just think how much worse you’d feel if you really were poor.”
“Thanks for that bit of moral judgment. And I do know that I’m not really poor. Just that it’s not often I want something that costs a lot of money. But that place was something else. The lodge was—well, luxurious. But there were smaller cottages that were almost better. Don’t know when we’ve had more fun … .”
“I take it not a lot of investigative work got done?”
He sat up and spun around. “You’re wrong about that. Came up with a red-hot suspect.”
Nettie looked at him closely, not sure if he was serious.
“Ted Pogue,” he said.
Nettie was still squinting in skepticism.
He talked through what he’d found out from Ivings, purposely not saying anything about his own vulnerability in having failed to consider Ted Pogue’s possible involvement.
When he’d stopped talking, Nettie looked at him with an open expression of disdain.
“You thought through how you’re going to explain why you were staying as a guest in the suspect’s lake house?”
“Let’s say the problem has occurred to me. But after thinking it through, I’m pretty sure Pogue isn’t going to be our guy.” He held up both hands in self-defense, anticipating Nettie’s response. “Which isn’t to say it wasn’t damn dumb of me not to consider that Pogue might have been a suspect and that I had some conflict of interest issues.” He went through his reasoning and was relieved to see from Nettie’s expression that what he said made sense.
“So,” Nettie said, after he’d offered his explanation, “how are you going to go about establishing that conclusion as fact?”
“I’m going to start by finding out if Pogue has a credible alibi.”
Nettie knew Ted Pogue only slightly. But her vicarious connection to Pogue through Mars and Karen gave her a pretty good idea of how Ted Pogue would treat somebody who approached him on the assumption he might be a murder suspect. She grinned maliciously. “That’s going to be an interesting conversation.”
“I’m going to start with Karen. See if she can give me anything solid on where Pogue was on December sixth. Talking directly with Pogue will be a last resort. I’m not into sado-masochism. What did you say you’ve got on the cryptologist?”
Nettie nodded in the direction of the message slip she’d handed him. “Gerry Weiler. Mathematics Department at the university. He gave me some times he’d be available to see
you—want me to just go ahead and set something up for this afternoon?”
“Sure. Anything else while I was gone?”
There was just a moment’s hesitation before Nettie said, “We had a response on the five-state request we sent out on deaths with the Beck number on the body.”
Mars’s head came up sharply. “And you’re just telling me this now, on an oh-by-the-way basis?”
Nettie shook her head. “It was a nonresponse response. Came from an emergency med tech in Bebloe County, Wisconsin.” Nettie leaned over and read from a notebook on her desk. “Dona—with one ‘n’—Helmer. Like I said, it wasn’t much. What she said was that about seven months ago she went out on an ambulance run to a suicide scene. The victim—Gaylord Rowe—was an older guy whose wife had died of cancer … .”
“A hanging?”
“Yes, a hanging. Nobody was surprised. The guy had been depressed, hadn’t had much motivation since his wife’s death. Had even mentioned that he was considering suicide. A county mental health worker had been visiting him regularly and had listed him as a high suicide risk … .”
“And Beck’s numbers were found on the Rowe’s body?”
“Well, that’s what makes Helmer’s call a nonresponse response. She was still in training and wasn’t in charge of the scene, didn’t have much contact with the body. She remembered seeing numbers on Rowe’s arm, but couldn’t remember what they were or even how many numbers.”
“Still,” Mars said, “a hanging victim with numbers on the arm. That’s something.” He thought for a minute. “Why’d an EMT call? Why didn’t the county sheriff’s department call?”
“Helmer’s got a story on that.” Nettie passed Helmer’s number over to Mars.
“I saw your request on the bulletin board in the sheriff’s department,” Dona Helmer said. “What you need to understand
is, I’m too short to be a cop. So I did EMT training instead. Every time I mention something to the sheriff that I think should be looked at, he blows me off. Thinks I’m trying to make the point that I’m smarter than cops, even if I am short. Besides which, he’s lazier than sin. He’s not gonna follow up on anything that means he’s got to get off his chair or do something as complicated as dialing a long distance number.”
“Do you have a record of the numbers—would anyone else remember specifics?”
“I don’t think so. I mentioned the numbers to the EMT supervisor. He said they weren’t anything. Said the guy did a lot of carpentry, and he probably just wrote down some measurements on his arm while he was working. I asked one of the deputies about it later, and he didn’t even remember seeing the numbers.”
“And the body?”
“Gaylord Rowe had a sister in—just a sec, I’ve got the information right here … .” Mars heard Helmer flipping through paper. “Anamosa, Iowa. Her name is Esther Moberg. She’d just had hip replacement surgery when she got the call about her brother. Signed off on cremation, and we mailed the ashes to her. Said she’d come up later when she was on her feet again and go through Rowe’s house. Only other thing she asked us for was the uniform he had on when he died. Apparently it was some kind of family heirloom. She wanted her son to have it.”
“What kind of uniform?”
“Nothing like any uniform I’ve ever seen. Looked real old.” Helmer was quiet for a moment, then said, “I asked the EMT supervisor about it at the scene. He said something about the vic being a ‘reenactor.’ Whatever that is. The sister would know for sure.”
There was no answer at Esther Moberg’s residence in Anamosa, Iowa. Mars was reluctant to leave a message about her brother’s death, and he was anxious to get over to the university to meet with the cryptologist. So he left Moberg’s number on his desk.
Gerry Weiler was a small man in every physical sense of the word. Not more than five foot five, he was small boned, with small hands, small feet, small features. He was dressed the way central casting would dress an academic, which is to say in a tweed jacket, a button-down oxford cloth shirt, and a miniscule bow tie—all of which was expensive and fresh looking. Nothing like the long-haired, scruffy types Mars saw circulating through the hallways of the Mathematics Department at the university.
“How can I help you, then?” Weiler stood behind a neat desk, facing Mars, his fingertips pinpointed on the desktop. “Your secretary should have told you I’m pressed for time. I leave for Reykjavik in”—he pulled a pocket watch out of a pocket in the pleats of his gabardine pants and clicked it open—“almost exactly seventy-two hours. And I’ve an awful lot to do before then, so please.” He made an expansive gesture toward a chair in front of his desk.
Mars pulled the slip of paper with the number written on it from his wallet, sliding it across to Weiler. “I’m involved in a homicide investigation where these numbers were written on the victim’s arm. We’ve ruled out that the numbers were written by the victim or that the numbers relate to any of the victim’s account numbers, personal identification numbers—things like that. So, what I’m looking for is anything in cryptology that might give us a start on analyzing what the numbers mean.”
“Hmmm,” Weiler said, staring at the numbers. “Hmmm. Yes, yes. I see. Hmmm. Well, yes, indeed.” He slid the slip of paper back to Mars, drew up the fabric of his pants at the knees and sat down. “I can tell you this. At first glance, I don’t see anything terribly sophisticated at work here. Which is good news, bad news. The good news is, if the writer’s intent was for you to find a message in what he’s written, it’s not likely he’d build many blind corners into the deciphering process. The bad news is, once you’ve identified a sophisticated enciphering methodology, the message will
reveal itself. The message you have here appears to be a very simple correlated cipher. That is to say, the numbers relate to something else. Very probably letters of the alphabet. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it?”
Before Mars could agree, Weiler started off again. “But it’s not straightforward at all. The problem is, one really doesn’t know—unless there is a sophisticated enciphering methodology at work—the relationship between each of your numbers. This is particularly a problem if the message is not a simple phrase or whole words. Take your number. If the numbers represent letters of the alphabet, depending on how the numbers relate to one another, you have the possibility that the cipher includes a letter of the alphabet, a combination of letters, a combination of words and numbers, whole words, abbreviations, or a combination of all five. If you’re lucky, the cipher will at least be a coherent phrase with whole words—if so, it will start making sense to you as you get parts of it—rather like that television game show where letters are turned or a crossword puzzle. The more you see, the closer you get to the meaning. But, just as easily, you could have a cipher that does not contain a simple message or whole words. Very difficult, that. Give me a sophisticated enciphering methodology any day over these amateur inventions. What I would do if I were you would be to start correlating the numbers to the corresponding letter of the alphabet—in other words, ‘one’ equals ‘a,’ and so on. See if anything pops out that relates to your problem. But I caution you. There may be millions of combinations within those—what was it, thirteen numbers?”
Mars was taken aback. He’d looked at the number countless times, but couldn’t have said how many individual numbers there were. He looked at the slip of paper, counting. “Thirteen it is,” he said.
Weiler smiled. “Something of a message in its own right, wouldn’t you say?”