CHAPTER FOUR
Kate sipped her coffee, and closed her eyes briefly, savoring the rich, toasty brew. She tasted hints of dark chocolate fading to a roasted cacao note before she swallowed.
Wow. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had coffee that good.
The food, too, was unusually delicious, a cheesesteak made with Cheez Whiz and onions, a popular alternative to the older recipe which called for no cheese or for melted provolone.
How the hell they made fake cheese from a can taste so good, Kate would never know.
A breeze wafted through the window of the hotel room, pleasantly chill and carrying the unique detergent odor of snow mixed with grease, oil, and the must of a large city. She looked at the open window, open because she had opened it, and realized why everything felt so good.
She was back. She was where she belonged. Instead of being cooped up in her apartment staring at ancient history and praying that something would jump out that would give her the answers she craved, she was at work, hunting a killer, cutting off the next head of Cox’s hydra.
She gave the cipher on the table a triumphant smile. Okay, Cox. Time to prove that you still haven’t beaten me.
She sipped more of her coffee, set it on the coaster, and got to work.
The cuneiform was absolutely Akkadian. Her first hour had proven that and yielded confirmation that the killer was “correcting” those who violated the ninth commandment.
As with all of the Commandment Killing ciphers, this one opened with the relevant commandment.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
That code was the simplest code, a basic substitution that replaced the first phoneme of the Akkadian lexicon with the last, the second with the second last, and so on.
The hour of work came from the fact that rather than consider the consonants before the vowels as academics did, the killer placed the vowels first. Once Kate made that leap, she had the first sentence decoded in no time.
That was also a hallmark of the Commandment Killing ciphers.
The opening sentence was always the simplest. It was the part always meant for the world.
While some killings included larger and more general messages, others continued with more personal messages, directed specifically at Kate.
Oftentimes, those specific messages were hidden behind what seemed like ordinary rhetoric, but there was always a clue, always something they added to let Kate know that Cox was thinking about her.
The rest of this cipher was more difficult to figure out. Basic substitution yielded gibberish, and double substitution yielded the same.
Kate wasn’t cowed, though. She’d joined the FBI after dropping out of graduate school in linguistics with an emphasis in encryption and cryptography. She had far more experience decrypting codes than this killer had making one.
And with patience and care, the cipher began to reveal its secrets. A word here, a line there, and little by little, Kate pieced together the message.
And confirmed that this one was meant for her. The second line of the cipher, the one directly underneath the verse, read, daughter of the false healer, know this.
Kate’s lips thinned. The prior May, Quinn Marsh had corrected people who broke the fifth commandment, “Honour thy Father and Mother.” When Kate finally tracked him down and confronted him, he told her of the death of his mother, a woman her father had chosen not to save in favor of another candidate for an experimental stem cell treatment.
It was clear that he was the false healer, and Kate was his daughter.
This was the first time she’d been addressed so directly.
No, the second. In the last commandment killing case, Cox had eschewed a traditional cipher in favor of placing stolen objects in the homes of his chosen victims so that they pointed toward a specific location, St. Anselm’s Cathedral in Baltimore, formerly the Church of St. Simon and St. Jude.
That was as explicit as it got. In fact, the “cipher” seemed to reference the eighth commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” almost as an afterthought. The primary message was, look here, Kate.
This cipher so far appeared to emphasize both the commandment and the personal connection to Kate.
But how had her father borne false witness?
Surely, she would have come up with something during her exhaustive search of her father’s past. Surely Poppy, whose research skills bordered on superhuman, would have found something.
She kept working. She finished her first cup of coffee and poured another. She finished her cheesesteak and made it halfway through a bag of peanuts before folding the rest to save for later. Rather than starving herself as she had at home, her new focus apparently left her ravenous.
As the cipher slowly took shape, Kate began to understand the point of the message.
The more she understood, however, the more questions she had.
Marcus returned after dark. She looked up and noticed the darkness outside. Way after dark.
She checked her phone. Really way after dark.
“Did you find something?” she asked.
He sighed. “No. I talked to everyone on that street, and I grilled the officers who responded to the assault call, and no one saw anything or anyone out of the ordinary.”
Kate frowned. “No one saw a single person who didn’t belong in a neighborhood known for crime.”
Marcus poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot at the corner of the hotel room’s counter and took a big gulp, not seeming to notice either the temperature or the flavor.
“That’s the thing about neighborhoods like that.
I wasn’t being cute when I made that crack about ordinary urban background noise.
When you live in a safe neighborhood, people notice when people don’t belong.
When you live in a bad neighborhood, gunshots, fighting, shouting, and car alarms really are the background noise. ”
“And no one thinks, ‘Hey, maybe if we took action and reported this, it would stop?’”
He chuckled. “Most people think, ‘If I mind my own business, I probably won’t get shot.’”
He downed the rest of his coffee in two enormous gulps, then poured himself another cup. He took a more moderate sip from that cup, then used it to gesture at Kate’s notes. “Did you have better luck?”
“Yeah,” Kate said, pushing a chair out so he could join her.
“I’ll stand.” She frowned, and he explained, “I’m pissed off. If I sit down, I’ll get anxious and get more pissed off. If I stand and listen to good news, I’ll calm down.” She kept staring, and he said, “Hey, don’t judge. I do what I have to do.”
She smiled. “No, it’s fine. I think it’s cute.”
The words slipped out before Kate considered their connotation. Marcus reddened a little and looked away. Heat climbed the back of her neck, and she cleared her throat and gestured toward her notes.
“I translated the cipher. It’s relatively short, especially compared to the monologues we got for the sixth and seventh commandments.
It opens with the commandment, Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness, then continues with a direct call to me.
‘Daughter of the false healer, know this. God’s law must be obeyed in word and deed, in body and mind, in soul and spirit.
God knows all those who seek to circumvent His laws by skirting the literal meaning of the words and violating the hidden meaning of the Spirit. ’”
“Dramatic,” Marcus said. He looked at Kate closely. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Actually, I’m really fine. I feel better than I have in weeks.”
He brightened. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think I just needed to work. Being at home cooped up and chasing my tail was driving me crazy.”
He cracked a smile. “That’s what Winters said. I told her it was a bad idea to put you back in the field so soon, and she said it was better for you to be at work looking for Cox than at home digging through garbage and snapping at flies. I guess she was right.”
Kate’s smile vanished. Marcus’s eyes widened. “Because of your injury,” he explained. “Injuries. Your concussion and your cracked ribs. I thought you needed more time to heal.”
“And Winters told you I was digging through garbage and snapping at flies.”
Marcus blinked. “Oh. Yeah, she thinks the whole obsession with your father and Cox… Well… I mean, I get that you have to be sure, but—”
“How did she know I was looking into it, Marcus?”
He frowned. “Poppy told her. Is that why you’re giving me the death stare? You thought I told her?”
This time, the redness made it all the way to Kate’s cheeks.
She had assumed exactly that. In hindsight, it made perfect sense that Poppy—research genius but with the spine of an earthworm—had wilted the instant Winters caught a whiff of anything unusual and asked what she was doing.
Winters had told Marcus because Kate was at least listening to Marcus and because Marcus was there to watch her.
“You know what?” Marcus said, “It’s on me. I brought it up. I’m sorry. Point is that I’m glad that you’re head’s in a good place. Please, pretty please with a cherry on top don’t let me ruin that.”
He sounded just pathetic enough that Kate was able to let go of her frustration, at least for now. She was feeling good, and she wasn’t going to let anyone ruin that right now.
She cleared her throat and said, “The rest of the cipher confirms the reason for Mace’s murder. ‘Gerald Mace bore false witness in deed if not in word, and buried the truth beneath his signature.’”
“That’s it?” Marcus asked.
“That’s it.”
“No other Bible verses?”
“No. Just the commandment, ‘Hey, Kate, look here, this is why I killed Gerald Mace,’ and that’s it.”
“Huh.”
He scratched his chin, which possessed only a one-day stubble instead of his usual three-day scruff. He’d cleaned up for his divorce. Even when he was leaving the woman, he was still obsessed with what Cheryl thought of him.
She tamped the unkind thought down firmly. She was not about to complicate their healing friendship with jealousy. They’d been there and done that. It hadn’t worked, tough shit, time to move on.
“Do you think it might be Cox after all then, since it’s calling you out directly?”
“No. I still don’t. Their seems to be a message there for me, but I don’t believe Cox was the actual killer this time.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You think another Quinn Marsh, maybe, someone with an actual personal connection to you?”
She pursed her lips. “Maybe. The false healer bit has me wondering, I’ll admit. And the general tone of this whole thing: the cipher, the murder, the forceful way the cipher was inscribed… it all reads personal to me.”
“We say that about every Commandment Killer, though.”
“No, not all of them. Thomas Brennan killed people he didn’t care one way or the other about. Emily Warren felt righteous anger toward her victims, but it wasn’t personal. Cox’s murders are highly personal, but only in how he uses them to talk to me.”
“Okay, touché,” Marcus said. “But what could they possibly be talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Kate admitted, “and I’ve certainly been digging enough that I should have found something if there was something to be found.
” She crossed her arms. “I don’t know if the killer’s coming after me or only writing what Cox told them to write.
I also can’t completely rule out the possibility that this is Cox demonstrating that he’s further losing his marbles.
“But it doesn’t feel like that to me. What it feels like is that the killer isn’t correcting someone for breaking a commandment, they’re sentencing someone for personally wronging them.”
“Hmm,” Marcus said. “If that’s the case, then we need to know who Gerald Mace pissed off.”
“And who else pissed them off,” Kate agreed.
She headed to the coffeemaker to start a new pot and to hide her expression from Marcus.
It was true that she was far more sanguine about this message from Cox than she’d been about past messages, but that didn’t mean the allusion to her father didn’t disturb her. Was Cox saying he lied about someone?
Or was he trying once more to lead her to his sanctuary so he could sacrifice her on his altar?