66

The temperature had dropped a few more degrees and the storage locker was even more like a refrigerator. Jessica’s fingers were turning blue. As awkward as it made it to work with paper, she put her leather gloves on.

The last box she looked in had some water damage. It contained a single accordion folder. Inside were damp photocopies of files taken from the murder books of victims over the past twelve years or so. Jessica opened the folder to the most recent section.

Inside were two eight by ten black-and-white photographs, both of the same stone building, one shot from a few hundred feet away, one much closer. The photos were curled with water damage and had DUPLICATE stamped across the upper right. They were not official PPD photographs. The structure in the photograph appeared to be a farmhouse; the long shot revealed that it sat on a gently sloping hill, with a line of snow-covered trees in the background.

“Have you run across any other pictures of this house?” Jessica asked.

Nicci looked closely at the photographs. “No. Haven’t seen it.”

Jessica flipped one of the pictures over. On the back was a series of five numbers, the last two of which were obscured by water damage. The first three numbers appeared to be 195. A zip code, maybe? “Do you know where the 195 zip code is?” she asked.

“195,” Nicci said. “Berks County, maybe?”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Whereabouts in Berks?”

“No idea.”

Nicci’s pager went off. She unclipped it, read the message. “It’s the boss,” she said. “You have your phone with you?”

“You don’t have a phone?”

“Don’t ask,” Nicci said. “I’ve lost three in the last six months. They’re gonna start docking me.”

“With me it’s pagers,” Jessica said.

“We’ll make a good team.”

Jessica handed Nicci her cell phone. Nicci stepped out of the storage locker to make the call.

Jessica glanced back at one of the photographs, the one showing a closer view of the farmhouse. She flipped it over. On the back were three letters, nothing else.

ADC.

What does that mean? Jessica wondered. Aid to Dependent Children? American Dental Council? Art Director’s Club?

Sometimes Jessica hated the way cops thought. She’d been guilty of it herself in the past, the abbreviated notes you wrote to yourself in a case file, with the intention of fleshing them out at a later date. Detectives’ notebooks always went into evidence, and the thought that a case might hang on something you wrote in a hurry at a red light while balancing a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee in the other hand was always a challenge.

But, when Walt Brigham had made these notes, he had no idea another detective would one day be reading and trying to make sense of them—a detective investigating his homicide.

Jessica flipped over the first photograph again. Just those five numbers. The numbers 195 followed by what might have been a 72 or a 78. Perhaps 18.

Did the farmhouse have something to do with Walt’s murder? It was dated a few days before his death.

Gee thanks, Walt, Jessica thought. You go and get yourself killed and you leave the investigating detectives a Sudoku puzzle to figure out.

195.

ADC.

Nicci stepped back in, handed Jessica her phone.

“That was the lab,” she said. “We struck out on Walt’s car.”

Square one, forensically speaking, Jessica thought.

“But they told me to tell you that the lab ran some further tests on the blood found on your multiples,” Nicci added.

“What about it?”

“They said the blood is old.”

“Old?” Jessica asked. “What do you mean, old?”

“Old as in whoever it belonged to has probably been dead a long time.”