5

After leaving the scene of the second murder, Kit went back to her office and called the vet to check on Lucky. She then spent the morning trying to write up a suicide case she’d investigated the previous week, a dentist who had killed himself by shoving a dental drill into his brain through a skull defect he’d had since birth. It was truly incredible some of the ways people chose to do away with themselves. This case would most certainly go into her book. It had taken far longer to write this report than usual because her pen often strayed to the margin of the paper, as it was doing now.

KOJE . . .

What the devil did it mean? And why was the killer leaving fewer letters? Suppose it was all some demented trick, meaningless events intended to drive them as mad as he was. She could picture the killer, hunched over his beer in the dark corner of a sleazy bar, a self-satisfied smile on his ugly kisser.

Except that wasn’t what the evidence suggested. He probably wasn’t ugly. More likely, he was pleasant looking, or at least respectable in appearance. And that wasn’t surprising. The Ted Bundys were more common than the Henry Lee Lucases. “He was a nice man who never bothered anybody” . . . if you don’t count those sixteen mutilated corpses.

KOJE the first time . . . KOJ the second.

Hmmmm.

The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea suggested by Gatlin at the second murder scene—that the killer was leaving fewer letters to indicate he was going to strike two more times. Did that mean KOJE meant nothing? Could he have used any four letters? No . . . Broussard was right: They were taped together to keep them in order, which meant KOJE was a separate message.

She was so deep in thought the sound of the telephone made her start. “Kit Franklyn.”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Teddy. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. Is something wrong?”

“Why would something have to be wrong for me to call you?”

“It wouldn’t, but we just saw each other a few hours ago.”

“Maybe I missed you.”

“Sure you did. C’mon, LaBiche, what’s this all about?”

“Did you talk to the animal hospital this morning?”

“Yeah, he’s still doing well.”

“I’m glad.”

“But we found another body, and some more letters . . . KOJ this time.”

“That’s awful. So you were right when you predicted it’d happen again. Actually, that’s why I called. I had a thought about those letters.”

“Great. I could use a new slant. It’s a puzzle about to drive me nuts. What have you got?”

“Maybe you’re concentrating on the wrong thing.”

“How so?”

“Those wooden blocks have more than letters on them. They also have the little numbers you use to keep score.”

Kit was surprised she hadn’t thought of the numbers herself or that it hadn’t occurred to either Gatlin or Broussard. But of course, for the most part, they hadn’t been looking at the actual tiles. Saturday, Gatlin had written the letters on a chalkboard, and she’d been looking at them on her legal pad. She felt a brief rush of excitement, then realized four numbers were as puzzling as four letters that didn’t spell anything. Unless . . .

“Is there more?”

“Hey, I’m surprised I came up with that.”

“I don’t suppose you know what the values are for KOJE.”

“Vowels are one each, but I don’t remember the others.”

“I think the J is worth eight. Why is there never a Scrabble set around when you need one?”

“I have to get back to work. Hope I helped.”

“At least you’ve given me a new way to look at the problem. If you come up with anything else, call me.”

“I wouldn’t hang around the phone waiting. One idea a week is about my limit.”

“Don’t let ’em get behind you.”

“I won’t. You be careful, too.”

Kit hung up and quickly wrote on her legal pad:

KOJE ?181

If she was home, it’d be easy to get the value of K and verify the J was an eight. Maybe she should just do that—go home and look. Lot of trouble, though, for something that might not even be a real lead. She put her elbow on the desk, rested her cheek on her hand, and stared at the paper. Probably she’d just wait until tonight, get out the Scrabble set, and look.

Her finger began to twirl a lock of her hair until she caught herself at it and quit. It was hard enough to get her hair to lie right without that.

Her fingers began to drum on the desk. Tonight was hours away. . . .

Drum . . . drum . . . drum.

She could guess at the value for K and see what the entire number looked like. . . . Bad idea. Why waste time thinking about the wrong number?

Drum . . . drum . . . drum.

She stopped drumming, got out the Yellow Pages, and looked up the number of the store where she’d bought the Scrabble set on Saturday, which according to their ad in the phone book, shipped anywhere.

Someone with the voice of a child picked up and said, “Hello” without reciting the store’s name. Kit figured she either had the wrong number or some customer’s kid had gotten to the phone. “Is this Happy Pastimes?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is there an adult there?”

“Like, how old a person did you want?”

“Are you a clerk?”

“Uh-huh.”

Kit briefly wondered what the applicant pool was like when this guy got hired. “I wonder if you’d do me a favor. I need to know how many points the K and the J are worth in Scrabble.”

“Gee lady, I don’t have any idea.”

“I didn’t think you’d know without looking. Could you check?”

“Like in some big book?”

“One of the Scrabble sets in stock might be a more direct approach.”

“They’re all sealed up.”

“Could you open one?”

“I’m not supposed to do that. Plastic gets torn, that thing’ll sit on the shelf like it’s diseased. Won’t nobody buy it.”

“Suppose I buy it.”

“Then you can do anything you want with it.”

“Can I make the purchase over the phone?”

“If you got a MasterCard, Visa, or American Express.”

“MasterCard.”

“You want the deluxe model or the regular?”

“Regular, or anything cheaper.”

After the kid took her card number, he said, “Where do you want this sent?”

“I don’t. I just want you to open it and tell me what the point values are for the K and J.” There was a silence on the other end. “Hello . . . you there? Hello . . .”

“You gonna pick it up?” the kid asked.

“No. I really don’t want it.”

“If you’re not gonna come in, I have to ship it.”

“You keep it. You don’t want it, give it to a friend.”

“Lady, it’s gotta go either in ‘Will call’ or ‘To be shipped.’ You don’t come in, I can’t not send it. We got forms we gotta fill out. I don’t follow procedure and fill out all my forms, I could get canned. I don’t send it anywhere, I got nothin’ to put on one of my forms.”

To get over this impasse, Kit gave the kid her address. “Now will you open it and answer my question?”

“Okay.”

For a minute or two, there was no sound, then she heard the crinkle of plastic wrap, the sound of the lid coming off, then some noise she couldn’t identify. Finally, the kid’s voice came back on.

“The J is worth eight points and the F is worth four.”

“I didn’t want the F, I wanted the K.”

In the background, Kit heard a voice say, “Young man, are you going to be on that phone all day?”

“No ma’am,” the kid said. “I’m finished right now.”

Kit was afraid he was going to hang up, but he came back with the news that the K was worth six points. Before she could say thanks, he was gone. What an ordeal. But she had what she wanted.

KOJE 6181

Now what? She stared at the four letters and four numbers, waiting for a thunderclap of insight.

Automobile license plates.

Except in license plates, the maximum combination of letters and numbers was seven, with the standard pattern, at least for cars, being three numbers, a letter, and three more numbers, an arrangement that didn’t speak to her needs at all.

Vanity plates—they could have any combination of letters and numbers up to seven places.

She reached for the phone and called a friend in motor-vehicle registration who checked the computer and found there were no Louisiana plates with the sequence KOJE or 6181.

She went back to staring at her legal pad and drumming on the desk. Getting nothing out of the numbers, she went back to thinking about the letters. KOJE—that sort of sounded Japanese, like a town maybe. She got up and went down the hall to see Margaret, the senior forensic secretary.

The forensic office had two secretaries, Margaret Thibideaux and Jolanda Sizemore. Margaret had been there even before Broussard. And when Kit had first arrived and begun working around her, Phil Gatlin, and Broussard, with their long history together, she’d imagined herself associating with the human equivalent of old-growth redwoods. Margaret, in fact, fostered this impression by never calling Jolanda, a ten-year veteran of the forensic office, by name, always referring to her instead as “the new girl.”

Even before entering the office, Kit knew what each woman would be wearing. Very heavy and shaped like a salmon croquette, Jolanda would be in a circular piece of fabric with a hole in the center for her head. Proud of being slim and perhaps wanting to flaunt that in front of Jolanda, Margaret would be cinched at the waist with a wide belt and would most likely have accessorized with a crystal pin depicting some kind of insect.

Kit’s prediction for Jolanda went unchallenged, for her desk was empty. Margaret, though, was working at her word processor. She’d come to see Margaret because of her interest in travel. A reformed smoker, Margaret no longer headed for a cigarette on her breaks, but stayed at her desk and planned future trips by studying a large world atlas she kept close by, often picking obscure destinations purely by the sound of the name.

“Margaret, can I bother you for a minute?”

She typed a few more words, then looked up, a smile of pleasant indifference on her lips.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Franklyn?” Today, her pin was a large crystal bee.

“Is there a town in Japan called Koje . . . K-o-j-e?”

She thought for a few seconds and said, “There’s a Kobe. I don’t know about the other.” She reached down and came up with her atlas, which she held out in both hands. “But you’re welcome to look for yourself.”

Kit thanked her and took the tome back to her own office, where she thumped it onto the desk and sat down. After checking the table of contents, she turned to the picture of Japan, which spread across facing pages like a large green amoeba. Even before beginning her search, she saw something promising. The picture was divided by a series of widely spaced horizontal lines—latitudes or longitudes, she guessed. Along the left margin, each line was identified by a two-digit number. This led to the hope that 6181 was a map coordinate. But 61 was not among the numbers on the margin. And when she checked the top of the map, the vertical lines were identified by three-digit numbers.

Unwilling to let go of this idea, she began at the lower-left corner and worked her way across Japan town by town, giving no thought to what it would mean if she did find a Koje but feeling good to be doing something.

Japan had no shortage of towns, and that meant lots of tiny names to read, so that when she ran out of land at the upper-right corner, without having seen a Koje, she found a kernel of pleasure in simply being finished.

She closed the book and let her hands rest on its slick green jacket. So Japan was not the way to the killer. Her exercise with the atlas got her to thinking about great distances and how one traversed them. This sent her again to the Yellow Pages, where she looked up airlines and began calling each one, asking if they had a flight 6181, thinking the killer might be a crewman on such a flight. But no airline used that number.

This was impossible. To solve the riddle, she would have to be able to read the killer’s mind, and she’d never taken a course where they teach you to do that. She should just pack it in. No one could blame her for giving up on such a hopeless thing as this—no one except herself and probably Broussard.

She went to the window and pulled the blinds. Looking out over the city, she thought about her attempts so far to solve the riddle, soon seeing that they had not come from any logical analysis but had been desperate leaps into the wind.

So, analyze. . . .

Teddy’s call had shown her she needed to keep in mind the total picture, not just zero in on one aspect, divorced from the whole. That’s how she’d forgotten there were numbers as well as letters on the Scrabble tiles.

What was there in the big picture that had become lost in her thinking? Put that way, the answer was obvious. In both murders, the tiles were sitting on a section of the Times-Picayune. Was that significant or was the paper merely something convenient to put the tiles on so they’d be easily seen?

To assume they meant so little would bring that line of thought to an end. She therefore decided to take the other position and assume the paper was important.

At the second scene, she’d noticed that the Scrabble tiles were on the front page from the previous Friday’s paper. Making a call to the police property room, she learned that the pages left at the first scene were from Friday’s Sports section. Papers came out every day. Why did he use Friday’s paper both times? Was it simply because the paper was already in his car from the first murder? No. That trivialized the paper, and she’d decided it wasn’t trivial. So it was important that the same day’s paper was used in both murders.

Friday . . .

She went to her desk and flipped her calendar back to Friday—February 14, Valentine’s Day. And he kills by amputating a part of the heart. Her own heart began to beat faster, for this seemed like progress. Hearts . . . Hearts . . . Love . . . The killer’s wife had left him for another man. He’s killing other men for revenge. Wrong. He wouldn’t kill other men; he’d kill the one who’d crossed him, and maybe his wife, too. And the killer isn’t striking out in anger. He’s calculating.

Loves to kill? Could be it. Doesn’t help find him, though. Sensing for the first time an empty feeling in her belly, she looked at her watch and found that it was way past lunch.

BROUSSARD BRIEFED LEO FLEMING on the salient features of the two murders as they walked from the Hyatt to Charity Hospital, finishing up as they entered Broussard’s office.

“How can I help?” Fleming asked.

“On the first victim, the knife went through only soft tissue,” Broussard said, closing the door. “But on the second, it severed one of the rib cartilages. I was hopin’ you’d take a look at the cut surfaces and see if you can tell us anything about the weapon. They’re over here.”

Fleming followed Broussard to the dissecting microscope on the long table against the right wall, where Broussard helped himself to a pair of disposable gloves from a box near the scope and gestured for Fleming to do the same. He sat down at the scope and opened a wide-mouth screw-top jar sitting nearby. With a long pair of forceps, he fished a pinkish white nodule out of the liquid in the jar and put it in the culture dish sitting on the microscope stage. He returned to the jar for the second nodule and placed it beside the first.

“See you’re still usin’ the same filin’ system,” Fleming said, looking at the piles of papers and journals stacked about the room.

Broussard was so absorbed in what he was doing, he didn’t answer. Dropping his glasses to his chest, he leaned into the eyepieces and fiddled with the nodules until he was satisfied with their placement. Then he got out of the chair and stepped away from it, gesturing for Fleming to take over.

“All yours. I’ve got ’em arranged so the two surfaces produced by the knife are facin’ up.”

While Fleming examined the nodules, Broussard paced the room.

Seeing Broussard’s shadow pass by the frosted glass pane on his office door and wondering if he’d found anything of significance in the autopsy of the second victim, Kit knocked and leaned inside.

“Kit, come on in,” Broussard said. “You should be here for this. On the second victim, the killer wasn’t as precise as before. This time, he cut a rib cartilage. Leo’s checkin’ the cut surfaces for tool marks.”

Fleming’s eyes were pressed against the microscope eyepieces, his attention totally on one of the cartilage nodules, which he held suspended between the index finger and thumb of both hands. Dissatisfied with the angle of illumination, he reached over and twisted the limber gooseneck on the light and began to tilt the nodule back and forth in the altered beam. He did the same with the second nodule then leaned back and stripped off his gloves. “They’re pretty faint,” he said, “but I can see rills.”

“Knicks in the blade or serrations?” Broussard asked.

“Serrations.”

“Any way to tell how many teeth per inch?”

“If it was a saw, I could. But the curve on the tip of a knife makes that impossible.”

Kit had no idea why that would be, but it seemed to make sense to Broussard.

“What’s going on?” Phil Gatlin said from the doorway. “Or am I being too nosy?”

Broussard introduced Gatlin and Fleming to each other and told Gatlin why he’d brought Fleming in and what Fleming had found.

“Always helps to know what we’re looking for in a murder weapon,” Gatlin said. “Appreciate the help.” He looked at Broussard. “Same internal injuries on this one?”

Broussard nodded.

There was a pause where Kit could have mentioned the relationship she’d found between the newspaper and the way the victims had died. But on reflection, she realized there was really nothing to tell.

Broussard would have been grateful for any discussion that would have kept Gatlin from asking him the question he knew was coming, for he was struggling with a situation quite unfamiliar to him—confusion. And it was about to become evident to everyone there.