She grinned.“If I hug you right now, will it make everything worse?”
He laughed.
Then he wrapped her up in his big strong arms and held her.
She held onto him, and when she searched for the spark that had made her ask him to dinner five months ago as they made their escape from the swarm of reporters wanting to talk to the FBI agent who had saved the suicidal murder suspect’s life, she found only the warmth she had missed ever since trying to push for more than just friendship.
She liked that warmth.She was glad to have it back.
When they separated, he looked a lot less angry too.There was still tension in his eyes, but it wasn’t at the forefront anymore.They could deal with the tension later.That was a good start.
“Okay,” he said.“Talk to me about the photographs.”
Kate rifled through the photos for the ones she wanted and laid them out in front of Marcus.“I think thereisa cipher at these scenes.Or rather, I think each scene is a piece of a single cipher.I’m just not sure what it means yet.Look at this one, from the Schulz home.”
Marcus looked over the scene.It showed Schulz—who really was a big and imposing man—lying on his back, face mottled, eyes and tongue bulging, deep bruising around his throat where strong hands had throttled the life from him.It showed his living room, a typical middle-class bachelor’s living room with a comfortable easy chair set across from a too-large-for-the-room television with a couch off to the side and no decorative objects save one.
It was that one decorative object that caught Kate’s attention.“See the bird?”She pointed at the six-inch painted ceramic cardinal on the coffee table.
“Yeah, I see it.What about it?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said, “but look at this one.”
She pointed at a photograph taken from the home of Karen De Luca.Karen was only partially visible in the photograph, but it was the music box on the living room windowsill that caught Kate’s attention.It was a small copper box with a dancing ballerina performing a pirouette.Her toes pointed up and to the right, nearly but not quite parallel with the window.It sat in front of the drawn curtain, the only object within the house that was visible since all the other windows were shuttered too.
“What should I be seeing here?”Marcus asked.The killer’s leaving mementos?”
“Maybe,” Kate said, “but I don’t think so.I think he’s using objects that were already in the home to send a message.”
“What message?”
“I don’t know yet.That’s the cipher.”
Marcus took a deep breath.Kate steeled herself for another argument, but he only said, “Okay.I have no idea how you’re getting that from a bird and a music box, but I’ll trust you.”
She smirked.“You mean you know better than to try to stop me, so you’re going to go along.”
“You want to fight again?”
“Definitely not.”
She looked at the photos from Gloria Prentiss’s crime scene.It took some time for Kate to decide which object was out of place, but her eyes kept coming back to a brass sewing thimble positioned carefully on the sill of Gloria’s bathroom window.“It’s that,” she told Marcus.“It’s gotta be that.”
Marcus glanced at the thimble, then at her.“The thimble?”
“Yes.It’s out of place.And like the other objects, it looks to be positioned carefully to draw the eye.”
“To draw the eye where?”
Kate shook her head.“I still don’t know.”
She examined the final photo.The suspicious item in question was a pocket watch placed on the kitchen counter of Jordan Prescott's house.The watch was set to six-thirty, meaning both the second and minute hands pointed directly through the bottom of the watch, which was angled about thirty degrees off perpendicular to the counter in the rough direction of the kitchen window.
“The watch?”Marcus asked.
Kate crossed her arms and tapped her bicep.Then she grabbed her phone and looked up the number for Louisville police.After a couple minutes of navigating through automated menus and reluctant desk sergeants, she finally reached Detective Orrin Lacey.After working her way through polite greetings, Kate asked, “What can you tell me about the pocket watch found on the kitchen counter of Jordan Prescott’s home?”
"That's a good question," Lacey replied."It looks like Prescott collected pocket watches.There were three more in his nightstand.Funny thing is, they were all over the place in terms of value.One of 'em was an 1886 Hamilton that could probably fetch five figures.Another was an Omega that might have been a few grand new, but isn't really anything special.The third—that's the one on the counter—was a replica of an old Elgin watch.Worth maybe a hundred bucks.The fourth—the third one in the nightstand—was a Casio.Twenty bucks on Amazon, and it runs on batteries."
