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King pulled the cipher disk out of his pocket and played with it. He had taken to carrying it around for some reason. Long ago it was discovered that frequency analysis could break an encryption of fair length. The method was straightforward. Some letters of the alphabet occur far more frequently than others. And the letter that occurs far more often than all others is the letter e. This discovery had put the code-breakers on top for quite some time until the encryption folks once more got the upper hand centuries later.
King spun the outer ring of the cipher disk around until the letter e was lined up with the letter a. One tick off. He looked at the wall and in his mind’s eye changed one letter, e for an a. Now it read:
TEET
That made no sense either. What was a teet? As a long shot he left and went back to his office, went to a search engine on the Internet and typed in the word teet, and for the hell of it, the word crime. He didn’t expect to find anything. However, a long list came up. Probably all garbage, he thought. And yet when he looked at the very first listing, he suddenly sat up.
“Oh, my God,” he said. He read all that was there and sat back. He felt his forehead: it was damp with sweat, his whole body was. “Oh, my God,” he said again.
He stood slowly. He was glad Michelle was out. He couldn’t have faced her. Not right now.
King had some things to track down, just to make sure. And then he was going to have to just face it. He knew it would be one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.
CHAPTER
100
TWO DAYS LATER KING
pulled up into the parking lot and got out of his car. He went inside the office building, asked for Sylvia and was directed back to her office.
She was at her desk in her medical office, her left arm in a sling. She looked up and smiled, then came around and gave him a hug.
“Do you feel halfway human yet?” she asked.
“I’m getting there,” he said quietly. “How’s the arm?”
“Almost as good as new.”
He sat down across from her while she perched on the edge of her desk.
“I haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“I’ve been kind of busy,” he answered.
“I’ve got tickets to a play in D.C. for next Saturday. Would it be too forward to ask if you’d like to join me? Separate hotel rooms, of course. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
King glanced over at the coatrack. The woman’s coat, sweater and shoes were neatly arranged either on or next to the rack.
“Is something wrong, Sean?”
He looked back at her. “Sylvia, why do you think Eddie came after us?”
Her demeanor instantly changed. “He’s crazy. We helped bring him down. Or at least you did. He hated you for it.”
“But he let me go. And he kept you. He had you bent over a tree stump, about to cut your head off. Like an executioner.”
Her face twisted angrily. “Sean, the man had killed nine people already, most at random.”
He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. She sat back behind her desk and slowly read it.
She looked up. “It’s the newspaper article about my husband’s death.”
“He was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, case was never solved.”
“I’m well aware of that,” she said coldly, sliding the paper back across. “So?”
“So the same night George Diaz was killed Bobby Battle’s Rolls-Royce was damaged. The next day the Rolls was gone, and so was the mechanic who looked after Bobby’s collection.”
