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King had thanked him and went back to his car. Well, I certainly know someone who’s been taking strong narcotics: Dorothea.
His next target was an antique shop in Charlottesville’s downtown mall area that he’d been to several times. With the shop owner’s help he found the object he was looking for.
“It’s a cipher disk,” explained the owner. He pointed to the round piece of metal that had an outer ring of letters and an inner one. “You can decode encrypted messages that way. You move the rings to line up the two sets of letters: a for e, s for w and so on.”
“And if you’re off by one letter or one tick, the whole meaning of the message changes? One tick off?”
“That’s a good way to phrase it. One tick off and the whole thing changes.”
“You just don’t know how unbelievably satisfying that is.” King purchased the cipher disk and left, the curious owner staring after him.
A little later he was speaking with Bobby Battle’s private physician, a prominent doctor in the area and a man he knew well.
He discussed the results of the autopsy with the gentleman, who looked at the report very carefully and then took off his wire-rim glasses and said cautiously, “I’ve only been his doctor the last twenty years, you know.”
“But you’ve noted changes?”
“In his personality, yes, I suppose. But he was getting on in years. Half my patients have personality changes when they get to that age.”
“But in Bobby’s case did you suspect that was the cause?”
“Not necessarily. Usually, it’s a case of mild dementia or the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. Obviously, I didn’t have the benefit of a postmortem exam.”
“Did you run any tests while he was seeing you?”
“The symptoms weren’t extreme, and you know what he was like. If he didn’t want any tests run, none would be. However, these autopsy results could indicate he’d reached an advanced stage. I emphasize the word could.”
“Did you ever talk to Remmy about it?”
“It wasn’t my place and I had no hard proof. I suspected she knew that something was amiss,” he hastily added.
“Yet they had Savannah.”
“Typically, penicillin has been very effective against the disease. And the fact is, Savannah is hale and hearty.”
“If Bobby had it, how long could it have been in his body?”
“Decades. It’s chronic. It can have a long evolution in the body if left untreated.”
“So he might have contracted it after he had Savannah?”
“Or he could have had it before. In the late stage it’s not sexually transmittable, so even if he had it when Savannah was conceived, there would have been no danger for the fetus.”
“Yet Remmy could have contracted it.”
“I don’t know her doctor, but if she had, I’d imagine she would have sought treatment.”
King spoke with the doctor for several more minutes, then thanked th
e man and left.
He had one more stop to make. He phoned ahead to make sure the shop was open. Two hours later he was pulling into a parking garage in downtown D.C. Minutes after that he was walking into a very special retail store, where he spoke for some time with one of the employees there.
“It’ll do the job?” King asked the employee, holding up the piece of equipment the man had given him in response to his request.
“Without a doubt.”
King drove back to his houseboat, a big smile on his face. As he’d learned over the years, information was king.
