More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II Read online

  Something the reverend had said that afternoon came back to him. The Da Vinci Code. A code… Silverman thought about the snitch: The man hadn’t been a college grad but he was smart in his own way. Maybe he had more in mind than the literal meaning of the passage; could it be that the specifics of his warning were somehow encoded in the letters themselves?

  It was close to four a.m. but Silverman ignored his exhaustion and went online. He found a website about word games and puzzles. In one game you made as many words as you could out of the first letters from a saying or quotation. Okay, this could be it, Silverman thought excitedly. He wrote down the first letters of each of the words from Luke 12:15 and began rearranging them.

  He got several names: Bob, Tom, Don… and dozens of words: Gone, pen, gap…

  Well, Tom could refer to Tommy Doyle. But he could find no other clear meaning in the words or any combination of them.

  What other codes were there he might try?

  He tried an obvious one: assigning numbers to the letters, A equaled 1, B 2 and so on. But when he applied the formula all he ended up with were sheets of hundreds of random digits. Hopeless, he thought. Like trying to guess a computer password.

  Then he thought of anagrams — where the letters of a word or phrase are rearranged to make other words. After a brief search on the web he found a site with an anagram generator, a software program that let you type in a word and a few seconds later spit out all the anagrams that could be made from it.

  For hours he typed in every word and combination of words in the passage and studied the results. At six a.m., utterly exhausted, Silverman was about to give up and fall into bed. But as he was arranging the printouts of the anagrams he’d downloaded, he happened to glance at one — the anagrams that the word possessions had yielded: open, spies, session, nose, sepsis…

  Something rang a bell.

  “Sepsis?” he wondered out loud. It sounded familiar. He looked the word up. It meant infection. Like blood poisoning.

  He was confident that he was on to something and, excited, he riffled through the other sheets. He saw that “greed” incorporated “Dr.”

  Yes!

  And the word “guard” produced “drug.”

  Okay, he thought in triumph. Got it!

  Detective Mike Silverman celebrated his success by falling asleep in his chair.

  * * *

  He awoke an hour later, angry at the loud engine rattling nearby — until he realized the noise was his own snoring.

  The detective closed his dry mouth, winced at the pain in his back and sat up. Massaging his stiff neck, he staggered upstairs to the bedroom, blinded by the sunlight pouring through the French doors.

  “Are you up already?” his wife asked blearily from bed, looking at his slacks and shirt. “It’s early.”

  “Go back to sleep,” he said.

  After a fast shower he dressed and sped to the office. At eight a.m. he was in his captain’s office, with his partner, Steve Noveski, beside him.

  “I’ve figured it out.”

  “What?” his balding, joweled superior officer asked.

  Noveski glanced at his partner with a lifted eyebrow; he’d just arrived and hadn’t heard Silverman’s theory yet.

  “The message we got from the dead CI — how Doyle’s going to kill Pease.”

  The captain had heard about the biblical passage but hadn’t put much stock in it. “So how?” he asked skeptically.

  “Doctors,” Silverman announced.

  “Huh?”

  “I think he’s going to use a doctor to try to get to Pease.”

  “Keep going.”

  Silverman told him about the anagrams.

  “Like crossword puzzles?”

  “Sort of.”

  Noveski said nothing but he too seemed skeptical of the idea.

  The captain screwed up his long face. “Hold on here. You’re saying that here’s our CI and he’s got a severed jugular and he’s playing word games?”

  “Funny how the mind works, what it sees, what it can figure out.”

  “Funny,” the senior cop muttered. “Sounds a little, whatsa word, contrived, you know what I mean?”

  “He had to get us the message and he had to make sure that Doyle didn’t tip to the fact he’d alerted us. He had to make it, you know, subtle enough so Doyle’s boys wouldn’t figure out what he knew, but not so subtle that we couldn’t guess it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silverman shook his head. “I think it works.” He explained that Tommy Doyle had often paid huge fees to brilliant, ruthless hit men who’d masquerade as somebody else to get close to their unsuspecting victims. Silverman speculated that the killer would buy or steal a doctor’s white jacket and get a fake ID card and a stethoscope or whatever doctors carried around with them nowadays. Then a couple of Doyle’s cronies would make a halfhearted attempt on Pease’s life — they couldn’t get close enough to kill him in the safe house, but causing injury was a possibility. “Maybe food poisoning.” Silverman explained about the sepsis anagram. “Or maybe they’d arrange for a fire or gas leak or something. The hit man, disguised as a med tech, would be allowed inside and kill Pease there. Or maybe the witness would be rushed to the hospital and the man’d cap him in the emergency room.”

  The captain shrugged. “Well, you can check it out — provided you don’t ignore the grunt work. We can’t afford to screw this one up. We lose Pease and it’s our ass.”

  The pronouns in those sentences may have been first person plural but all Silverman heard was a very singular “you” and “your.”

  “Fair enough.”

  In the hallway on their way back to his office Silverman asked his partner, “Who do we have on call for medical attention at the safe house?”

  “I don’t know, a team from Forest Hills Hospital, I’d guess.”

  “We don’t know who?” Silverman snapped.

  “I don’t, no.”

  “Well, find out! Then get on the horn to the safe house and tell the babysitter if Pease gets sick for any reason, needs any medicine, needs a goddamn bandage, to call me right away. Do not let any medical people see him unless we have a positive ID and I give my personal okay.”

  “Right.”

  “Then call the supervisor at Forest Hills and tell him to let me know stat if any doctors or ambulance attendants or nurses — anybody — don’t show up for work or call in sick or if there’re some doctors around that he doesn’t recognize.”

  The young man peeled off into his office to do what Silverman had ordered and the senior detective returned to his own desk. He called a counterpart at the county sheriff’s office in Hamilton and told him what he suspected and added that they had to be on the lookout for any medical people who were close to Pease.

  The detective then sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes and massaging his neck. He was more and more convinced he was right, that the secret message left by the dying informant was pointing toward a killer masquerading as a health care worker. He picked up the phone again. For several hours, he nagged hospitals and ambulance services around the county to find out if all of their people and vehicles were accounted for.

  As the hour neared lunchtime, his phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Silverman.” The captain’s abrupt voice instantly killed the detective’s sleep-deprivation haze; he was instantly alert. “We just had an attempt on Pease.”

  Silverman’s heart thudded. He sat forward. “He okay?”

  “Yeah. Somebody in an SUV fired thirty, forty shots through the front windows of the safe house. Steel-jacketed rounds, so they got through the armored glass. Pease and his guard got hit with some splinters, but nothing serious. Normally we’d send ’em to the hospital but I was thinking about what you said, about the killer pretending to be a tech or doctor, so I thought it was better to bring Pease straight here, to Detention. I’ll have our sawbones look ’em both over.”

  “Good.”
r />   “We’ll keep him here for a day or two and then send him up to the federal WP facility in Ronanka Falls.”

  “And have somebody head over to the Forest Hills emergency room and check out the doctors. Doyle’s hired gun might be thinking we’d send him there and be waiting.”

  “Already ordered,” the captain said.

  “When’ll Pease get here?”

  “Anytime now.”

  “I’ll have the lockup cleared.” He hung up, rubbed his eyes again. How the hell had Doyle found out the location of the safe house? It was the best-kept secret in the department. Still, since no one had been seriously injured in the attack, he allowed himself another figurative pat of self-congratulations. His theory was being borne out. The shooter hadn’t tried to kill Pease at all, just shake him up and cause enough carnage to have him dive to the floor and scrape an elbow or get cut by flying glass. Then off to the ER — and straight into the arms of Doyle’s hit man.

  He called the Detention supervisor at the jail and arranged to have the existing prisoners in the holding cell moved temporarily to the town police station, then told the man to brief the guards and warn them to make absolutely certain they recognized the doctor who was going to look over Pease and his bodyguard.

  “I already did. ’Causa what the captain said, you know.”

  Silverman was about to hang up when he glanced at the clock. It was noon, the start of second guard shift. “Did you tell the afternoon-shift personnel about the situation?”

  “Oh. Forgot. I’ll do it now.”

  Silverman hung up angrily. Did he have to think of everything himself?

  He was walking to his door, headed for the Detention Center intake area to meet Pease and his guard, when his phone buzzed. The desk sergeant told him he had a visitor. “It’s a Reverend Lansing. He said it’s urgent that he sees you. He said to tell you that he’s figured out the message. You’d know what he means.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Silverman grimaced. As soon as he’d figured out what the passage meant that morning the detective had planned to call the minister and tell him they didn’t need his help any longer. But he’d forgotten all about it. Shit…. Well, he’d do something nice for the guy — maybe donate some money to the church or take the reverend out to lunch to thank him. Yeah, lunch would be good. They could talk about TV cop shows.

  The detective met Reverend Lansing at the front desk. Silverman greeted him with a wince, noticing how exhausted he looked. “You get any sleep last night?”

  The minister laughed. “Nope. Just like you, looks like.”

  “Come on with me, Reverend. Tell me what you came up with.” He led the man down the corridor toward intake. He decided he’d hear what the man had to say. Couldn’t hurt.

  “I think I’ve got the answer to the message.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I was thinking that we shouldn’t limit ourselves just to the verse fifteen itself. That one’s just a sort of introduction to the parable that follows. I think that’s the answer.”

  Silverman nodded, recalling what he’d read in Noveski’s Bible. “The parable about the farmer?”

  “Exactly. Jesus tells about a rich farmer who has a good harvest. He doesn’t know what to do with the excess grain. He thinks he’ll build bigger barns and figures he’ll spend the rest of his life enjoying what he’s done. But what happens is that God strikes him down because he’s greedy. He’s materially rich but spiritually impoverished.”

  “Okay,” Silverman said. He didn’t see any obvious message yet.

  The reverend sensed the cop’s confusion. “The point of the passage is greed. And I think that might be the key to what that poor man was trying to tell you.”

  They got to the intake dock and joined an armed guard who was awaiting the arrival of the armored van carrying Pease. The existing prisoners in the lockup, Silverman learned, weren’t all in the transport bus yet for the transfer to the city jail.

  “Tell ’em to step on it,” Silverman ordered and turned back to the minister, who continued his explanation.

  “So I asked myself, what’s greed nowadays? And I figured it was Enron, Tyco, CEOs, internet moguls…. And Cahill Industries.”

  Silverman nodded slowly. Robert Cahill was the former head of a huge agri-business complex. After selling that company he’d turned to real estate and had put up dozens of buildings in the county. The man had just been indicted for tax evasion and insider trading.

  “Successful farmer,” Silverman mused. “Has a big windfall and gets in trouble. Sure. Just like the parable.”

  “It gets better,” the minister said excitedly. “There was an editorial in the paper a few weeks ago — I tried to find it but couldn’t — about Cahill. I think the editor cited a couple of Bible passages about greed. I can’t remember which but I’ll bet one of them was Luke twelve, fifteen.”

  Standing on the intake loading dock, Silverman watched the van carrying Randy Pease arrive. The detective and the guard looked around them carefully for any signs of threats as the armored vehicle backed in. Everything seemed clear. The detective knocked on the back door, and the witness and his bodyguard hurried out onto the intake loading dock. The van pulled away.

  Pease started complaining immediately. He had a small cut on his forehead and a bruise on his cheek from the attack at the safe house but he moaned as if he’d fallen down a two-story flight of stairs. “I want a doctor. Look at this cut. It’s already infected, I can tell. And my shoulder is killing me. What’s a man gotta do to get treated right around here?”

  Cops grow very talented at ignoring difficult suspects and witnesses, and Silverman hardly heard a word of the man’s whiny voice.

  “Cahill,” Silverman said, turning back to the minister. “And what do you think that means for us?”

  “Cahill owns high-rises all over town. I was wondering if the way you’re going to drive your witness to the courthouse would go past any of them.”

  “Could be.”

  “So a sniper could be on top of one of them.” The reverend smiled. “I didn’t actually think that up on my own. I saw it in a TV show once.”

  A chill went through Silverman’s spine.

  Sniper?

  He lifted his eyes from the alley. A hundred yards away was a high-rise from whose roof a sniper would have a perfect shot into the intake loading dock where Silverman, the minister, Pease and the two guards now stood. It could very well be a Cahill building.

  “Inside!” he shouted. “Now.”

  They all hurried into the corridor that led to the lockup and Pease’s babysitter slammed the door behind them. Heart pounding from the possible near miss, Silverman picked up a phone at the desk and called the captain. He told the man the reverend’s theory. The captain said, “Sure, I get it. They shoot up the safe house to flush Pease, figuring they’d bring him here and then put a shooter on the high-rise. I’ll send a tactical team to scour it. Hey, bring that minister by when you’ve got Pease locked down. Whether he’s right or not, I want to thank him.”

  “Will do.” The detective was miffed that the brass seemed to like this idea better than the anagrams, but Silverman’d accept any theory as long as it meant keeping Pease alive.

  As they waited in the dim corridor for the lockup to empty out, skinny, stringy-haired Pease began complaining again, droning on and on. “You mean there was a shooter out there and you didn’t fucking know about it, for Christ’s sake, oh, sorry about the language, Father. Listen, you assholes, I’m not a suspect, I’m the star of this show, without me—”

  “Shut the hell up,” Silverman snarled.

  “You can’t talk to me—”

  Silverman’s cell phone rang and he stepped away from the others to take the call. “’Lo?”

  “Thank God you picked up.” Steve Noveski’s voice was breathless. “Where’s Pease?”

  “He’s right in front of me,” Silverman told his partner. “He’s okay. There’s a ta
c team looking for shooters in the building up the street. What’s up?”

  “Where’s that reverend?” Noveski said. “The desk log doesn’t show him signing out.”

  “Here, with me.”

  “Listen, Mike, I was thinking — what if the CI didn’t leave that message from the Bible.”

  “Then who did?”

  “What if it was the hit man himself? The one Doyle hired.”

  “The killer? Why would he leave a clue?”

  “It’s not a clue. Think about it. He wrote the biblical stuff himself and left it near the body, as if the CI had left it. The killer’d figure we’d try to find a minister to help us figure it out — but not just any minister, the one at the church that’s closest to the police station.”

  Silverman’s thoughts raced to a logical conclusion. Doyle’s hit man kills the minister and his wife at their summer place on the lake and masquerades as the reverend. The detective recalled that the church office had nothing in it that might identify the minister. In fact, he seemed to remember that the man had trouble even finding a Bible and didn’t seem to know his desk lamp bulb was burned out. In fact, the whole church was deserted and dusty.

  He continued the logical progression of events: Doyle’s boys shoot up the safe house and we bring Pease here for safekeeping at the same time the reverend shows up with some story about greed and a real estate developer and a sniper — just to get close to Silverman… and to Pease!

  He understood suddenly: There was no secret message. He’s on his way. Look out — Luke 12:15. It was meaningless. The killer could’ve written any biblical passage on the note. The whole point was to have the police contact the phony reverend and give the man access to the lockup at the same time that Pease was there.

  And I led him right to his victim!

  Dropping the phone and pulling his gun from its holster, Silverman raced up the hall and tackled the reverend. The man cried out in pain and gasped as the fall knocked the wind from his lungs. The detective pushed his gun into the hit man’s neck. “Don’t move a muscle.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “What’s wrong?” Pease’s guard asked.