t it. But I don’t see what you’re trying to do.”
“Hang on. You will.” With his pen still pressed to the paper, he glanced up. Rossi, focusing on the pen, was starting to slowly nod his head. “So then we go upward to the upper left-hand corner where we veer sharply right, creating the upper left-hand point, or…?”
“Number three.” Rossi was taking note.
“Right! And back to the right we go straight across, only to turn downward and so the upper right-hand point is four and”—he brought the pen back to the point of origin, completing the drawing of the star with a point in the lower left-hand corner—“so here’s number five down at the left and the middle is now complete, making it area number six.” He nodded to himself, as if double-checking his figure, then started writing names in the appropriate spots. “Now, if you correspond the numbers of the points as they were created with the birth order of the Flannery kids, you get something that looks like this:
“And if you notice, the ones who were killed or are missing, numbers five and four, Neville and Oliver, are where the missing points should be. Because they’re already gone.”
“So Neville’s dead.”
“I would bet.”
“Then what’s with the broken line, for number two?” Rossi pointed at the page.
“It must mean that the killer took out Robert’s wife, Mary Beth. Why? On purpose? A mistake? To make a statement?” Paterno scowled thoughtfully. “I don’t know, maybe it’s to show her thin, failing connection to her husband, and if that were the case, then our perp would have to be very close to what was happening, privy to the inner workings of Robert’s love life. Or maybe he was pissed at her, too, and the line will only become solid when he kills Robert.”
“If that’s what this is all about.”
“Right.” Paterno was on a roll. There was a certain electricity—almost a smell—he experienced when he was about to break open a case. He felt it now, that stirring of excitement, the thrill of figuring out some sicko’s MO before he could strike again. “I don’t know what the star’s got to do with anything, but the killer wants us to know about it.”
“Kind of far-fetched, if ya ask me,” Rossi said, scratching at his soul patch.
“Got anything better?”
“No.”
“Exactly! And if it doesn’t make much sense, remember, we’re not dealing with a sane guy here.” Paterno straightened and surveyed his handiwork, the picture of the star with the names scrawled across it. “It might take a while to figure out, but I swear, there’s a method to this guy’s madness.”
“If you say so,” Rossi said skeptically.
“I do. And the kicker is that the sheriff in Lewis County, Oregon, called with the news that the woman who was butchered up there the day Dani Settler was abducted, turns out to be Ryan Carlyle’s birth mother.”
“Isn’t that out of left field?” Rossi asked, tracing the star with one thick finger.
“What it is, is another connection to Shannon Flannery.”
“But what does it have to do with the kid being abducted?”
“That’s something we’ve got to figure out.” Paterno looked at his rudimentary drawings. What was the killer trying to tell them? All he could make out of it was that Shannon Flannery was at the center of it all.
The phone rang and, still staring at the drawings, he lifted the receiver to his ear. “Paterno.”
It was Jack Kim, the tech wizard in the lab. “I think we’ve got something down here you might want to hear,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Something interesting on that tape of the girl that you brought in. Come down and listen for yourself.”
He wasted no time. Heading out of his office, he told Rossi, “The lab’s got something on the tape of the Settler kid.”
“Wait up.”
They wended their way through glassed-in cubicles that did little to mute the sound of clacking keyboards, jangling phones, buzzing conversation and the wheeze of the old air-conditioning system. Rather than wait for the elevator, they took the stairs, hurrying down three flights of steps, the soles of their shoes ringing on the scarred wood as they descended into the lab where, if nothing else, it was several degrees cooler.
Paterno walked unerringly to the windowless, soundproof audio room where the technician, Jack Kim, was waiting for him. “What have you got?” the detective asked.
“Listen to this.” He played the tape and they heard Dani Settler’s pleas over the crackle of flames for her mother to help her. Kim stopped the tape and rewound it. “Okay, now listen again. We’ve isolated the sounds and listen to what you hear when I mute her voice and the fire.” He adjusted several levers and knobs, then played the tape again.