Page 49 of Go Now
‘They’ve probably farmed the admin overseas.People don’t like it, but everybody likes 24/7 support.’
Reassured, Kate opened the email.It confirmed that, just last month, someone had requested access to the plans of several buildings in the street where David Sterling lived.There was no fee, but enquirers had to register on the department website, giving a name and address.
She looked up the address: 5105 Lanark Street, in Hoboken. It didn’t take her long to establish that there was no 5105 on Lanark Street.In addition to that, judging by the streetview images, Lanark Street was composed entirely of small industrial units and large warehouses.
‘Alvira Meg White,’ she said, reading aloud.
‘Who?’
‘Good question.That’s the name of the person who wanted to know the internal layout of David Sterling’s house.’
Accessing the Bureau’s own, multi-database search engine, she discovered nobody called Alvira Meg White. But there were two people going by the name of Alvira Megan White.
One was 83, living in a retirement facility called Cedar Grove, in the town of Brewster, Wisconsin.The other one had married a British citizen called Avram White.They lived together in Haifa, Israel, having emigrated there in 1998.Alvira Megan White, née Berg, was a paediatric nurse, nearing retirement age.It was hard to imagine either of those individuals wanting to know the layout of David Sterling’s house, much less plotting his brutal slaying.
‘Don’t forget, some Megs are Margarets,’ Chen pointed out.
‘And some Margarets are Pegs,’ Kate replied.‘Go figure.’
A search for Alvira Margaret Whites yielded slightly more results, but every one of them, still, was a poor fit for the role of murderer.One of them must have just started pre-school, another was on secondment to the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and one more completing a short prison stretch for fraud.
‘Well, we know the address is made-up, right?’Chen said.‘So we have to assume the name is, too.’
‘In which case, the question is: whythatname?’
‘Exactly.’
On a hunch, Kate wrote all fourteen letters of the name in a circle.It was an old cryptanalyst trick; it stopped you from seeing the words you recognised and made you concentrate on other factors, such as the frequency of letters, or of adjacent pairs.The tiniest thing could help to crack it.
And the tiniest thing did.She noticed that the last A of Alvira and the M of Meg were adjacent, forming the word ‘AM’. It was relatively easy from there, and as often happened, she was so caught up in the joy of decrypting that she didn’t think about the implications of the slowly unfurling message.
I AM THE LAW-GIVER
Once it was there, she wished she could jumble all the letters up again, and not know about it. But there it was.
In the last case, Elijah Cox had left her cryptic messages, referring to himself as the Law-giver.
Of course, as soon as she’d realised the latest spate of murders involved the second commandment, she’d made the connection to Cox.And to the promise he’d uttered from prison.That there were disciples, many of them, and that the world, as he put it, would be washed in blood.
But as this investigation had progressed, she’d almost managed to convince herself it was a bluff. Hot air, typical serial killer narcissism, trying to pretend that his ‘work’, if you could call it that, would carry on beyond his capture, beyond his death. The absence of cryptic codes and ciphers at the crime scenes – a prominent feature of the last case – had helped to convince her that the murders of the artists were unrelated.
Now she realised how deeply misguided she’d been.
And whoever this ‘Law-giver’ was, once again, he was reaching out directly to her, to tell her just how futile her efforts thus far had been.Because she wasn’t facing a single killer.And even if she caught him, her job would not be over. Because there was a legion of them.
‘Are you okay?Did you crack it?’
Chen’s question startled her. Hastily, she closed up her writing pad.
‘I can’t make any sense of it,’ Kate said.‘Do you want coffee?’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A soft tap at the door disturbed her. It was only then that she realised she’d been falling asleep. Heart racing, she reached for the remote control and lowered the volume. The tap came again.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’
