Page 5 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

Cracking codes reminded her of trips to the cabin.

Kate’s parents owned a little place, three hours north of Chicago, at a spot called Sugar Meadow Forest. According to a family legend no one really believed, Kate’s mother’s great-grandfather had won it, playing poker with a Prohibition-era mob boss.

It sat on the shores of a lake which froze solid in the winter.

Kate remembered winters and skating, long, hazy summers, swimming, hiking, den-building in the forest. Cook-outs on the shore, the grown-ups getting tipsy and the kids flitting in and out of them like a cloud of gnats.

The spot was idyllic, the journeys to it much less so.

Kate’s mother would be packing up the car, her father, without fail, delayed by work.

There was always a surgery that took longer than predicted, a nervous junior who needed a second opinion, a snap meeting of the hospital board.

In the run-up to each trip, Kate’s mother would plead with her husband to keep his schedule free, to do some forward planning and ensure that this time, just this once, they made it out of the city before night fell.

And Kate’s father would smile that easy, twinkly, Irish smile of his, put an arm around his wife’s slender waist and kiss her, saying, “It’ll work out fine, Cath, just fine.”

But it didn’t. He’d be late, Kate’s mother would get a headache, there’d be an argument as they crawled out of Chicago in the Friday night exodus of exhaust fumes and impatient horns.

An argument, or a tight silence with Kate in the back, soaking up all their tensions and converting them into carsickness.

Eventually, she would fall asleep, and until she was quite big – eleven or twelve – she’d never witnessed the moment they arrived at the cabin. She’d wake up in the stuffy little attic room and, no matter how many times it happened, she’d panic initially, not knowing where she was.

After that initial confusion, things fell into place.

Certain sensual anchors told her where she was, beginning with the small, crunchy pillow.

Then the smell of dust, that rag doll that had scared her when she was very small.

The pattern on the curtains, which sometimes looked like paw-prints, sometimes like a crowd of surprised faces.

She’d hear her parents talking softly on the deck outside with their morning coffee, their quarrels forgotten.

And something would at last unlock. I’m here .

Code-cracking was the same. An unbearable tension at first, this traffic-jam of letters, numbers, symbols, a sense of time running out.

Like someone trying to escape an unfamiliar city: you tried one route, then another, retraced your steps, lost your patience, tried again.

Sometimes, sleep was the only solution – you had to step away from the conundrum, physically and mentally, before clarity would come.

And it always did. Kate was trying to remind herself of that as she sat at her desk in the cramped back room of the county police headquarters. It would come. It had to.

But not yet.

Right now, she was blaming Marcus for that.

He’d agreed to start interviewing the townsfolk while she got to grips with the cryptic hymn-sheet, but instead of getting out there and knocking on doors, he had decided to start with everyone in the PD building.

He was currently talking to the younger of the two traffic cops, Arthur.

Arthur had the inside track on Douglas Cove’s underworld.

Or at least, Arthur wanted to give that impression.

“Literally two guys and an RV, parked in the woods, about seven miles out of Marburg. Flooded the state with crank.”

“Seriously? Don’t they know how Breaking Bad ended?”

“Few days after the bust, guy calls up, says him and his brother found a suitcase full of the stuff, buried near the trailer. Wants to know if there’s a reward. So we say, sure, bring it in. I mean, there’s no reward, but we want that meth off the streets, right?”

“Sure.”

“So they bring it in. It’s a hundred pounds of bath salts.

It even smells like bath salts. There’s no way you couldn’t know that.

The guys are all ‘we didn’t know, dude, we’re just a pair of good citizens, where’s our reward?

’ We do some checking, there’s footage of them at Walmart, buying the suitcase. ”

“What did you charge them with?”

“Chief wanted to book ‘em for making false reports. But Father Thomas came up and had a word. He knows the boys and the boys’ families. Well, we all know them. The whole family’s… how can I put it? It’s not so long since they were all living in the trees.”

Kate sighed. She shared an office with Marcus back at base, but when they were there, he seemed to understand when she needed quiet and privacy to do her work. Why didn’t he think that applied here?

As the cop ambled out to the main office, Marcus came over.

“Getting anywhere?”

“Seriously, Marcus?”

Marcus made his stunned and innocent “What did I do?” face, which sometimes looked a bit cute, but on other occasions made her want to slap him. She wondered how his fiancée, Cheryl, dealt with it. Judging by what she’d heard about Cheryl, Cheryl probably slapped him.

“Maybe I should go out so that you can complete your work in peace and quiet.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea.”

“There is no need for sarcasm.”

With a martyred expression, he pulled on his coat, grabbed the car keys, and his phone. He turned back in the doorway.

“It’s the lowest form of wit.”

“No, Marcus, you are the lowest form of wit.”

She returned to the images. She’d worked out so far that they were pages seventy-nine and eighty of the Saint Joseph Sunday Missal, published in 1986.

She made some notes for further checking:

Chase prints, DNA on page

A St. A hymn book, or the killer’s own?

She’d also found some detail on the hymns. On the side with the circles was “Faith of our Fathers,” a tribute to the Catholics martyred in the British Isles after King Henry VIII fell out with the Pope. Written in 1896, its author, she noted, was a Protestant clergyman who converted to Catholicism.

She made some more notes:

Martyred = burned at stake?

Did Father Thomas convert? Someone angry?

The hymn on the opposite side was called “None but Thee,” a translation of a sixth century Irish hymn, full of swords and shields, staffs and battle trumpets and countless other images of warfare.

The composer of the hymn was saying that their armor and weapons were useless without faith in God.

Reminded, suddenly, what Annie had said about the priest, Kate wrote:

Did FT have faith? Someone find out he didn’t?

It might have looked like tinkering at the edges, but this was often how the answer came about: a complex interplay between symbols, numbers, meanings, and allusions.

When training as a cryptanalyst, she’d learned to ignore that inner judge which says what’s relevant, what’s likely, what’s pie-in-the-sky.

In its place, she’d mastered free-association – like jazz, but with thoughts , as her mentor, Gabe Levine, once put it – considering every angle, like a sniffer dog sticking its nose everywhere at once.

Turning her thoughts to the page with the Z shapes, Kate noticed that the lines were less neat than the circles on the other side.

In each of the three shapes, the line bisected some letters, clipped the top or the bottom of some, and bypassed others completely.

However, the letter at each corner of the shapes began at a precise point underneath it – by enlarging the image, Kate could see that there was a barely perceptible dot, as if the author had deliberately placed their pencil there before beginning to sketch the line.

So they cared about the letters at the beginning- and end-points of each line, the corner-points of each shape. But why?

Testing a theory, Kate looked at the letters next to each corner-point.

The letters D and B, and I and Q formed the horizontal lines of the “Z,” and the diagonal was between the letters B and I.

She clicked an app on her laptop and jotted down the numbers 23, 6, and 7.

She went through the same procedure with the second Z shape, writing down another trio of numbers: 5, 32, and 17.

And finally, the third: coming up with 2, 20, and 3.

Next, she downloaded an online version of the church hymn book.

She looked up the twenty-third page, counted down to the sixth line and the seventh word.

“Chalice.” Well, it was a start. The same method applied to the other two trios of numbers yielded “Redeemer” and “Viol”.

Chalice – redeemer – viol. Somehow, she doubted that was the message. What the hell was a “viol,” anyhow?

But Kate was now certain she recognized the code in front of her, and that the numbers were coordinates, directions pointing her towards words or letters in a textual key.

Of course, that text could be one of a trillion texts in existence: the Qumran Scrolls, a handout from a Des Moines pizza joint, or a Tennessee teenager’s first sappy love letter.

But people didn’t put things in code so that nobody could read them.

They encrypted them so that somebody could decrypt them.

Whoever sent that message to Kate, wanted her to work out what it said.

Why that was the case, she didn’t know. But if she could work out what they were saying, she might then understand why it was important to say it to her. And if they wanted her to interpret the code, then the key had to be something connected to her, or to the crime scene, or the victim.

She continued with the page-line-word process, adding “serpent,” “gracious,” “soil,” “Higgins,” “foot,” “temple,” and other words to a list that continued to make no sense, however she ordered it. It was getting to look like the hymn book really wasn’t the key. So what could it be?

Think.