“No, Wrightsburg is back to just being a quiet, sleepy southern town.”
“If you decide you ever want to rejoin the big time, give me a call.”
“How soon can you have that for me?”
“You’re in luck. We have a special running this week on classic serial killers. Thirty minutes. Just give me a number to fax to and a major credit card,” he said, chuckling.
King got the police station fax number from Williams and gave it to his friend.
“How can you get it so fast?” King asked Jenkins.
“The timing of your call is impeccable. We conducted a long-overdue office cleaning and just last week pulled that file for archiving. Copies of the schoolteacher’s notes are in there. I was just going over them the other night, in fact, for old time’s sake. That’s what I’ll send you, the key he came up with to decipher the coded letters.”
King thanked him and clicked off.
When they reached the police station, Williams strode in with King following.
Out of his professional depth or not, the chief was back on his home turf, and he was going to act like it. He bellowed for the deputy who’d called him about the coded letter and also grabbed a bottle of Advil from his secretary. King and the deputy gathered in Williams’s office, where the chief plopped behind his desk and swallowed three Advil using only his saliva. Before he took the piece of paper and envelope from the deputy, he said, “Please tell me these have been checked for prints.”
They had, the deputy told him. “Although Virgil Dyles, the owner of the Gazette, initially thought it was a joke when he got it in the mail. We wouldn’t have known anything about it, but a friend of mine who’s a reporter over there phoned and told me. I went right over and got it, but it’s all Greek to me.”
“So what did Virgil do, pass it around the damn office?” shouted Williams.
“Something like that,” replied the deputy nervously. “Probably more than a few people touched it. I told my friend at the paper to keep quiet, but I think she might have told some people that she thought this was serious.”
Williams’s big fist came down on the top of his desk so hard both King and the deputy winced. “Damn it! This is spiraling right out of control. How the hell are we going to keep this on the q.t. if we can’t even control the folks in Wrightsburg?”
“Let’s look at the message,” King said. “We’ll worry about the media spin later.”
He hovered over Williams’s shoulder as the lawman examined the envelope. The postmark was local, mailed four days before, with a stamp applied very exactly. It was addressed, in block letters, to Virgil Dyles of the Wrightsburg Gazette. On the lower right-hand corner of the envelope was the circle with crosshairs. There was nothing written in the return address block.
“Not much there,” said Williams as he unfolded the note. “Maybe there’s some expert who can tell us something from how he wrote the letters, placed the stamp and such, but I sure as hell can’t.”
The message was written in blurred black ink, again using block letters, and the lines were in tightly structured columns arranged both horizontally and vertically.
“The blurred part is from the ninhydrin,” the deputy explained. “They use that to fume the letter for prints, you know.”
“Thanks. That never would have occurred to me,” Williams said testily.
All the lines were in code. Some of the characters were letters; others were merely symbols. Williams sat there for some minutes going over it carefully. He finally sighed and sat back.
“You don’t happen to know how to break codes, do you?” Williams asked King.
At that instant Deputy Rogers—who served with King when he’d been a part-time Wrightsburg police officer—knocked and came in, holding some pages in his hand. “This fax just came in for Sean.”
King took the pages and said to Williams, “I do now.”
He carried the letter and faxed pages to a small table in the corner, sat down and began to work. Ten minutes later he glanced up. This wasn’t good, he thought. In fact, this was probably worse than having someone running around copying the Zodiac killer.
“Have you deciphered it?” demanded Williams.
King nodded. “I have some experience with cryptograms from my years at the Secret Service. But I recalled that a high school teacher from Salinas originally broke the code to the San Francisco Zodiac’s letters. I have a friend on the force there who’s very familiar with the case. I thought he might have access to the teacher’s notes. That’s what he faxed to me, the key to the code. That made it pretty easy.”
“So what does it say?” asked Williams, swallowing nervously.
King checked his notes. “It contains misspellings and grammatical and syntax errors, deliberate ones, I think. So did the original Zodiac.”
Deputy Rogers looked at Williams. “Zodiac? What the hell’s that?”