Page 29 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

“A humane serial killer?” Marcus questioned. Enriquez shrugged.

“He’s ex-P.D.,” she said. “Lieutenant Leonard Palmer. Retired ten months ago.”

Kate opened her mouth to say something but then stopped. “Can you get an ID photo for him?”

“Sure,” replied Enriquez, already on the phone. They flashed their warrant cards at the guy on the cordon and went inside.

“Cameras all over the show,” Marcus said, pointing to the ceiling. “You think he had anything particular to fear, or was he just paranoid?”

“Both,” Kate said. “Every retired cop’s got a few enemies.”

One of the techs from before squeezed past them, gave a nod of greeting.

“Go see the fire-pit,” she said. “Something for you, I think.”

They picked their way through the blackened shell of the kitchen and made it outside. They could hear loud sobbing from the house next door – a traumatized neighbor, they guessed.

“Motion-activated UV lamps,” Marcus said. “The guy took his security seriously.”

“It didn’t help him,” Kate said, vaguely. Her attention was elsewhere: the other tech was photographing the fire-pit from various angles. As she moved closer, she saw what was exciting the interest. A single piece of paper, A4, inscribed with symbols and weighted down at the corners with pebbles.

“Hieroglyphics?” Marcus queried, as Kate carefully removed the pebbles.

“Could be the killer’s version of it,” she said, taking photos with her phone. “Looks like far fewer symbols, though. There were over a thousand different hieroglyphs.”

On their way out of the building, Enriquez approached her, phone in hand. “Victim’s police ID.”

Kate looked at it.

“What’s the matter?” asked Marcus. “Vee?”

“I thought the name sounded familiar,” Kate said. “But he was a Sergeant then, and we called him by his middle name. George.”

“Who is he?” Marcus asked, urgently.

“He led the investigation into my father’s murder.”

+ + + + +

“It is simply not safe.”

“Given that it’s an investigation into a serial killer, how could it ever be safe?”

“You know very well, Kate, that in each and every case, there are acceptable parameters of risk, and this investigation just flew right past them.”

Kate took a deep breath, trying to get some mastery over her mounting frustration. On return to the field office, she and Marcus had gone in to brief Winters on the latest developments. And the boss had not taken them well.

“It’s now crystal clear that you have a disconcerting centrality to the killer’s actions and motives.

You are not merely investigating a trio of murders; that trio of murders is, in some complex way, built around you, around the death of your father, around your pursuit of Denton and Denton’s near-fatal attack on you. ”

“With respect, ma’am, you’re presenting that as if it’s my fault.”

“I’m not suggesting anything of the sort. But I’m now wondering when you first became aware of these links and why you didn’t immediately escalate your concerns to me.”

“It’s… I just… I mentioned it to Marcus, but… I guess I had to see if what I thought was true,” Kate replied, lamely.

Winters started typing something angrily; largely, Kate suspected, as a way of calming herself down.

“Ma’am, the way I see it,” Marcus began, cautiously, “the first hint was a link between Denton and Father Thomas. Kate pursued that, discovered a further link to Professor Whitman. And things escalated swiftly after that. There wasn’t an opportunity for a review until now.

I mean, we were literally going over the evidence we had when you called. ”

Winters gazed at the two of them coolly. At least she’d stopped with the anger-typing.

“Two questions,” she said abruptly. “First. What do you think is going on here?”

“I think there’s every possibility that the killer is principally fixated upon Denton, rather than me.

They’re trying to undo the reality of his capture and death with this fantasy of some continuing divine plan, and by trying to do battle with me, his captor, using the coded messages.

But they’re not puzzles for the sake of it.

I think they, and the choice of victims, may be an attempt to lead me somewhere. To reveal something.”

“Such as?”

“Something that fits with a Biblical narrative. Completes something unfinished, or rewrites something that currently ends unsatisfactorily. These are my suggestions, based on commonly held beliefs among millenarian-type cult groups and individuals.”

Winters nodded. “And what are your next steps?”

“Crack the latest code as a matter of urgency.”

“Meanwhile, thanks to Kate’s visit to the facility in Pennsylvania, Elijah Cox has become a person of interest,” Marcus said.

“While serving as the prison chaplain, he clashed with Father Thomas and seems to have influenced Robert Denton’s decision to stop appealing the death penalty.

There are question marks surrounding his sudden resignation from the role, not to mention what he’s been doing since then. ”

“The person behind these puzzles knows a lot about Denton’s final hours, as well as about me,” Kate clarified. “That suggests privileged access, the kind that a spiritual adviser might have.”

“So I’ll be trying to track down Cox and bring him in,” added Marcus.

Winters nodded. “Okay. But given how close this is getting to you, Kate, I want your security elevated. Local PD outside your apartment at night, and the rest of the time, you stick to base. Is that clear?”

They went their separate ways. Kate sat at her desk with the code, aware that colleagues were arriving for their Sunday shifts, the office slowly filling up with fresh faces and neatly knotted ties.

Meanwhile, here she was, groggy after a snatched couple of hours of sleep, wired from all the coffee, her hair a mess as she stared at another incomprehensible sheet of symbols, willing it to give up its secrets.

The symbols seemed to represent the letters of an alphabet; that much she could work out by counting. But whose alphabet? The clue might be in the nature of the symbols chosen. There was an ant and an owl, a weasel, a horse, a goat kid, a quiver of arrows, a Fez hat and a yucca plant…

Okay, maybe the clue was not going to be found in the nature of the symbols.

But there was a sliver of hope. Kate knew that had seen this code before.

She hadn’t used it to encode or decode a message.

But something about that particular assembly of symbols – most of them seemingly taken from nature – she had been taught or read about.

There was a story to go with them, something to do with World War II.

She couldn’t remember it now, but there had to be, surely, only one person who could have told her. She picked up the phone.

Gabe was old-school: landline, answering machine, a recorded message that made him sound like Yoda. He finally answered after three attempts. “I don’t make donations over the telephone,” he said.

“Gabe, it’s me. Sorry. Were you sleeping in?”

“I wasn’t asleep. I was trimming Winnicott’s ear-fur. I think the reason he doesn’t come in when I call him is because he can’t hear me.”

“Gabe, Winnie doesn’t come in because you haven’t trained him.”

Winnicott, or Winnie, was the name of Gabe’s notoriously willful Newfie/Saint Bernard mix. Everyone looked small, standing next to Winnicott, but Gabe… Marcus said Gabe should attach Winnie to a chariot.

She told him about the message. She’d spotted some fifty-six symbols, repeated with varying frequency: four turkeys, four lambs, three owls and three horses, two ants and a solitary bear…

“Send me a picture,” Gabe suggested. She sent him two.

“It makes me think of that Christmas song,” Kate said. “You remember – four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves…”

Gabe had obviously received the pictures as he started a peculiar, tuneless humming, a noise he only made when concentrating hard.

“You said you thought you’d seen it before.”

“Yeah. Something to do with the Second World War.”

“Does Platoon 382 ring any bells?”

She thought about it. “First Navajo unit in the Marines?”

“Bravo, Kate. The so-called ‘Code Talkers’ used words from their own language to denote letters in the English alphabet. The code was never broken. Do you know there are virtually no non-native speakers of Navajo, due to the immense complexity of the grammar?”

“I thought I recognized some of the symbols.”

“In February and March 1945, six Navajo code-talkers communicated round the clock during the Battle of Iwo Jima. They’re the reason for the Allies’ victory.”

“And they were so valuable that each one of them had his own bodyguard,” Kate said, the story coming back to her. “Isn’t that right?”

“Not quite. Due to the Code-Talkers’ physical features, they were constantly being mistaken for Japanese, so the bodyguards were there to protect them from their own side. But those guards also had orders to kill them if it looked like they were going to be captured.”

“What a job.”

“Oh, the guards were a story all on their own! There’s a book about them.

The Saint Jude’s Club . That was what they called themselves.

They were the absolute dregs of the US military.

Would all have been thrown out if there wasn’t a war on.

Heavy drinkers, brawlers, thieves, impossible to lead or control. Just right for the job, you could say.”

“Why Saint Jude’s?”

“Kate. I’m shocked. A good Catholic girl like you doesn’t know? St. Jude . Patron Saint of Lost Causes.”

She soon found the full details of the Navajo code and was able to start to decrypt the message. The sixty-three symbols translated into a short message, just fourteen words long.

AND THE FIRST GOLGOTHA

SHALL BE THE LAST

TWO BECOME ONE

IN PERFECT SACRIFICE

Golgotha . Denton’s last word, apparently, according to the warden at the prison.

And venue for the last words of Christ. A site just outside the walls of Jerusalem, the name from the Hebrew, gullet .

Skull. If Denton meant that the prison in Pennsylvania was Golgotha – which would certainly have tied in with the man’s narcissistic fantasies about being some kind of dark messiah – then was that the “first” Golgotha?

And if it was, then where was the last?

Two become one . She found herself thinking about the story she’d discussed with Gabe. What strange relationships must have developed, between the Navajo Code Talkers, and the men charged both with guarding them and, possibly, killing them, if circumstances demanded. The St. Jude’s Club.

It was as if a switch had been flicked. She sensed her own thoughts gliding, like ice-skaters or synchronized swimmers, gliding balletically into a precise formation, order where there had been a mess, precision where there was confusion.

The translation of the code was only one stage.

There was a meta-message, a message on top of the others.

It made perfect sense. She knew where the last Golgotha was. She knew where she needed to go.

She picked up her phone. Marcus answered after a couple of rings. There was music, shouting.

“How well do you know Walterville?”

“Hold on.”

He moved somewhere quieter. His tone of voice changed, too.

“I know it a little, Kate. What’s happening?”

“I need you to meet me. At the church of St. Simon and St. Jude’s.”

“Kate, Winters said –”

“Winters isn’t going to know.”

“She-”

“Isn’t going to find out, is she? Back me, Marcus, please. I need you.”

There was a pause. He sighed loudly. “You got me.”

She hung up before he could say anything else.

There were many mysteries surrounding that hot, airless August evening, thirteen years ago.

The person who shot Kate’s father multiple times with an assault rifle, had never been found, although due to his stem cell research, there were plenty of contenders at the fringes of Christian fundamentalism, and plenty who made a point of celebrating his death.

Nor was it clear why her father – a sworn atheist – should have visited the Church of St. Simon and St. Jude’s on the night in question.

It wasn’t close to his home, or any of his workplaces; there were no links between her father and the priest, or with any members of the congregation.

Footprints at the scene suggested the killer had hidden in a bush, smoking one cigarette after another, as they waited for Dr. Valentine to emerge from the church building.

Had they followed him there? Or had they lured him to that spot? Who was her father expecting to meet?

Kate had spent years of her life asking questions like these.

Years wondering. Years playing out different, fantasy outcomes.

That a detective would call her up, announce that they’d got a perfect DNA match, that some hitherto-mislaid scrap of evidence had come to light, that someone facing life without parole had grown a conscience, wanted to get something off his chest…

She tried not to play games like that with herself, but it was hard. She had to have hope, after all.

Could the killer of Father Thomas, Professor Whitman, and Leonard Palmer also be the killer of her father? Was he just playing games with her? Or could he actually unlock the mystery that had shaped her life?