Walker looked out the window of Jasper Brokaw’s apartment. He imagined someone watching the place, casing it, looking for the patterns of his trips home. Maybe they had him flagged at the airport in Utah, when he got on a plane and headed here. If Walker had more time, he would talk to the neighbors, see what they noticed back then and now. The witness to the abduction. Find out exactly how it had happened. There was no sign of a struggle in here. Nothing was tossed. The books were neatly stacked. The futon mattress was neatly tucked against a wall.
It didn’t seem right. What time was Jasper taken? Did his abductors drug him? Walker thought back to the needle in his neck back at LAX yesterday. They were missing something. It wasn’t right.
But he didn’t have the time.
The books.
Monica found a can of peaches in a cupboard and ate them with her fingers because there was no cutlery. She sat on the floor in front of the television. “Another attack coming in . . . six minutes.”
Walker was looking at the shelves for patterns. But there was no obvious pattern. It was a mix of fiction and non-fiction, recent and old. They were not ordered alphabetically. Nor by genre. Not color coded by spines. There seemed to be no obvious hierarchy of organization. Autobiographical, maybe? Stored in the order in which Jasper bought them? Walker lifted a book. Foucault’s Pendulum.
He imagined the books off the shelves and scattered over the floor. Cut-up technique. Look for a pattern in there. A favorite book. Something worn? Or something preserved, well kept? It had to be popular and generic enough to be used for the code. Something that each man had, Jasper and Paul, the exact same edition, so that they could use the same . . .
“This isn’t right,” Walker said.
“What’s not right?”
“I don’t think they have the same book.”
“That’s impossible. That’s how a book code works. Like the particular edition of the road atlas that you told Granger to get, to match my father’s.”
“I think it’s a book that’s here, and here only. I think he wanted Paul to come here to decode the message. And like you said, he already had it memorized.”
“How? And why?”
“It makes the code even harder to break.” Walker tapped the novel in his hands. “Think about it. If someone saw it as a book code, then they could crosscheck which books were at both locations—here, and at Paul’s house.”
“I didn’t see any books at Paul’s house.”
“Me either. But I think it’s here. And while your brother might have remembered them, Paul wouldn’t be able to. And because they’ve been out of contact for so long, there’s no telling, from Jasper’s knowledge, if Paul still had that book in his possession. So, the code has to be cracked here. He wanted Paul to come here. And I bet Paul knows exactly which book to look in.”
“Okay . . .” Monica leaned back, her hands behind her on the timber floorboards. “So, what do you look for? There’s got to be three or four thousand books on this wall.”
“How about a book that they had enjoyed together. One that they would have used back in junior high. A favorite.”
“Okay, okay. So, that rules out anything published since.”
“Right.” Walker looked at the spines. He recognized many of them. “Okay, that takes out about a third of them.”
“That’s a start.”
Walker nodded as he kept looking.
“When did they meet?” Walker said. “When did they start the book codes?”
“High school.”
“Years?”
“I don’t know. Jasper’d been doing it for years with Dad . . . but I know they were doing it by university. And probably before. I think anything from 1999 to 2003.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. So it could be anything pre then—but let’s concentrate on that range first, as a sweet spot. A book they enjoyed together, and probably used back then for codes.”
“Ah, okay, let me think . . . you know what, I have no idea. Why would I know that?”
“I thought you might remember it . . .” Walker trailed off, then turned to Monica. “Sorry.”
“Greek myths!” Monica said, suddenly animated. She sat forward and started to tap the floor with one hand while making a whirling motion with the other. “He was obsessive back then. He brought Paul into it too. They read them all. Let me think . . .”
Walker scanned the shelves. He came up with three titles. “The Odyssey, The Iliad . . . there’s texts on Achilles, the Trojan War, Alexander the Great . . .”
“Publication dates?”
Walker opened each to its imprint page.
“All in the right time frame,” he said. “All have his name written in the front. Same handwriting, seems like a young person’s writing, messy and unsure.”
“He’s always had terrible handwriting.”
“Does that mean something, psychologically?” Walker asked as he took the piece of paper with the code written down.
“It means he has crappy handwriting.”
Walker began to go from page to page through The Iliad, matching the pages and lines and words and reading them out.
“Not that,” Monica said. “Next.”
Walker moved on to The Odyssey.
Cut-up technique. How Bowie wrote his lyrics. Look for new patterns.
Then, Jasper came on the screen.