The Codebook Murders

by Leslie Nagel

  “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  They climbed in and Charley touched the keyless ignition, thrilling at the engine’s throaty rumble. All murder and no play makes for a dull detective, she thought. This was her birthday present, after all.

  The car handled beautifully. As she stopped at a red light, she glanced over at him. “Scenic route?”

  “Goes without saying.”

  The light changed, and Charley laid a little rubber turning south onto Far Hills. She smothered a smile as Marc gripped the dashboard.

  They rode without speaking for several minutes. At every stop, Charley glanced down at Marc’s stubbornly silent cellphone, willing it to ring, trying to take her own advice and relax, but unable to shake a creeping sense of anxiety.

  “Sweetheart.” Marc’s expression was sympathetic. “They’ll call as soon as they hear anything. In the meantime, if you want to be productive, let’s sift through the case and see if we can shake anything loose.”

  “You’re right. Talking it through always helps.” She blew out a long breath as she marshaled her thoughts. “Okay,” she began. “The most logical assumption is that whoever killed Berkeley did so because they also killed Regan, or they know who did and they’re protecting that person.”

  “Thanks to you, Paul and Mitch are investigating Dye’s case as a probable homicide. I vote we let them handle Dye while we focus on Regan.”

  “If I’m right, which I am,” Charley cautioned, “we’re after the same person. The two cases will overlap sooner rather than later.”

  “A bridge we can cross when the time comes,” he said firmly. “So, what else did you learn today?”

  “Quite a bit.” In greater detail this time, Charley described the events at Smith Gardens and her conclusions.

  “You believe the fact that Regan was seated when she was struck proves the killer was already there, ready and waiting?” Marc frowned. “How so?”

  “The only place those rocks were used forty years ago was around the pond,” Charley explained. “Because the bench was next to the pond, the killer would have had to dig up a rock before Regan arrived. Otherwise, she’d have seen him do it.”

  “Which means the killer knew she was coming,” Marc said slowly, “and why. Charley, that’s an incredible piece of deduction.”

  She flushed with pleasure. “That’s not the biggest news. Sharon says our reenactment proves Regan’s killer was between five eight and five ten.” She emphasized her next words. “The same height as both Harding Knox and Merritt Vance.”

  “I’ve been keeping an open mind, but Dye’s murder made it much more likely that Alsayegh’s confession was crap,” he said. “He was six feet tall, so I guess he’s definitely in the clear. Up until you found that photograph, Carter was still high on my list, too. Thanks to your sleuthing, the pool of suspects is getting smaller.” He hesitated. “On that note, do you consider Kendall a suspect?”

  This question had been lurking in the back of Charley’s mind all day. She’d been reluctant to confront the possibility, but as she considered everything she knew, she came to a decision.

  “I don’t think it’s Kendall,” she said at last, “but we can’t eliminate her, either. On the one hand, she’s about the right height, and she was at the game. She could have seen Regan leaving and followed her.”

  Marc studied her face. “But?”

  “But.” Charley made the turn onto Springfield Street, downshifting smoothly as she thought about the conversation with her former teacher. “She was so passionate about the damage this has done to her family. Marc, she begged me to investigate, to clear suspicion from her brother once and for all. If you’d heard her, you’d know that wasn’t an act.”

  “If it is Kendall, what would have been her motive?”

  “Robert Gleason said that Kendall worshipped Carter,” Charley recalled. “She suffered some sort of breakdown after his arrest. What if she…” Her eyes widened at a new thought. “What if that hero worship went a little, you know, sideways?”

  “Kendall was jealous of Regan, so she killed her? That would be one twisted love triangle, but I’ve seen worse.” He glanced at her. “What? You disagree?”

  “No.” Charley waved a hand. “It was just when you said that about a triangle, it reminded me of…Forget it. You were saying?”

  Marc raised his brows, then shrugged. “I was saying that I’m not so sure that theory tracks. Carter had been dating Regan for three years. Plus, he’d been away at college for the last two. It’s unlikely he’d shown his kid sister any encouragement in the creepy-incest department.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Thank heaven.” She shifted gears again, taking the northbound ramp onto the freeway and putting the pedal to the floor. “God, this feels amazing.”

  “Glad you like it. Let’s not crash it the first day?”

  She grinned. “Moving on. Merritt Vance claims he doesn’t care anymore about the illicit pot garden, but he sure did back then. If Regan wrote about it in her journal, would that be proof enough to get him fired? Maybe lose his pension?”

  “It’s possible,” said Marc. “A guy with a short fuse and everything to lose? Vance was a bully, using any excuse to yell at students, exploiting his position as a staffer to push around older kids who were physically larger, including me.”

  “Really?” Charley was immediately intrigued. “Marcus Trenault, big man on campus, got a scolding? What happened?”

  Marc squirmed. “Vance, uh, caught a couple of us scratching…messages into our football lockers. Don’t ask,” he commanded as she opened her mouth. “My point is, the man has a violent temper. He went ballistic: shouting, stomping up and down, banging locker doors for twenty minutes. The guy I was with almost peed himself. I can see Vance committing murder and having the nerve to ram a van over and over into a man.”

  “He made quite a hasty departure from the high school earlier. That was shortly after one o’clock. Berkeley left a voice mail for Harding around twelve-thirty. What if his next call was to Merritt? Oh, sorry,” Charley apologized. “I keep veering into the other case. It’s almost impossible not to.”

  “That’s because you’re right—the two cases are connected. As for Regan, there’s no proof Vance stayed until the end of the football game as he claimed. After he chased those kids out of the high school around halftime, his official duties were completed. Which brings us to good old ‘Hard Knocks.’ ” Marc made air quotes around the nickname. “I can’t believe nobody looked at him back then.”

  “According to Harding, nobody knew he and Regan were ‘dating,’ ” Charley said with a one-handed air quote of her own. “Regan used him as a blind for her parents so she could meet Carter. Can you imagine anything more humiliating? Harding had to hang out alone somewhere while the two lovers had their tryst, then collect Regan and pretend to end a nice evening, all for Douglas and Doris Fletcher’s benefit.”

  Marc rubbed his jaw. “All he gets is a peck on the cheek. Maybe she even smells of Carter’s cologne. Yeah, resentment and jealousy would fester and grow. When he found out Regan was leaving, all that buried emotion could have exploded into murder.”

  “He was questioned along with half the student body, but his alibi of photographing the football game was accepted at face value.” Charley tapped her fingers against the steering wheel for emphasis. “Except now we know he only has proof he was there until nine-twenty. He admitted to knowing that Regan was running away with Carter that night. And he’s got a wicked temper. Killing someone with a van? I can see it.”

  “Add in the fact that he stole the memorial box and then deliberately withheld a photo that might have gotten Carter acquitted,” Marc said. “That’s hardly the behavior of a man with a strong sense of right and wrong.”

  “He was obsessed with Regan, as those peeper photos prove,” Charley
allowed. “To play devil’s advocate, jealousy of Carter might’ve been motive enough for Harding to withhold that photo. Even if he didn’t kill Regan, a boy devastated by the death of his beloved might be glad to see his rival take the fall.”

  “But consider the other murder that we are absolutely not considering. Can’t you see Harding cooking up that hidden-necklace story?” Marc asked. “You and your minions left his house shortly after two o’clock. Dye was killed about three, so Harding had opportunity.”

  “Last on my list is Sawyer Magellan. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that he was spying on us.”

  “Seriously?” Marc’s tone was skeptical. “He’s ninety-six. Could he have killed Dye? Not that we’re investigating that case.”

  “Not that we are,” Charley agreed. “But if we were, we’d say that it doesn’t take much strength to drive a van. And forty years ago, Sawyer was young and strong. Kendall said her parents didn’t attend the game, meaning Sawyer wouldn’t have had to sneak away. If he knew where Regan was meeting Carter, he could have been there in plenty of time.”

  “Okay, but what would be his motive?”

  Charley changed lanes, weaving expertly through the moderately heavy Friday afternoon traffic as she turned the question over in her mind. “I can think of two possibilities. First, Sawyer believes his son Carter really is guilty, so even if Sawyer’s not guilty of the first crime, he doesn’t want that case reopened. That’s his motive for killing Berkeley. Second, Merritt and Harding both hinted that Regan collected dirt on everyone and used it to blackmail them. What if she had something on Sawyer?”

  “I like that idea,” Marc said after a moment’s reflection. “Kendall and Bobby both described Sawyer as a proud, even arrogant man, a big fish who liked to control his little pond. Men like that are easy prey for blackmailers, especially if they play fast and loose with rules they feel don’t apply to them. But if Regan did have some kind of hold over Sawyer, it would have to be pretty serious to drive him to murder.”

  Charley exited onto Needmore Road, swung left over the freeway, and accelerated back down onto the southbound lanes. “Regan’s journal is the key. Finding it started the current chain of events, including Berkeley’s murder. Decoding that book might give us the answers we need. If we can’t do that—”

  Marc’s cellphone chirped with an incoming message, and Charley almost catapulted out of the driver’s seat. She held her breath as he consulted the display. “It’s a text from Lawrence. Oh, listen to this, babe! ‘Katie here with book key,’ ” he read. “ ‘Can you hurry home?’ ”

  “Can I ever.” Charley shifted gears and pressed down on the accelerator.

  Chapter 18

  Charley and Marc walked into the blessed cool of the Carpenter home to find everyone in the living room, hard at work. Lawrence stood at the whiteboard, while Heddy, Vanessa, and Afiya sat with thick books open before them.

  “Ta-dahhhh!” Vanessa held hers up in triumph, revealing the title embossed into the battered brown leather spine: THE NEW WEBSTER ENCYCLOPEDIC DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

  “You nailed it, Chip,” Lawrence declared. “This dictionary is definitely the book key!”

  Heddy smiled. “Our Katie is quite a resourceful little thing. The library didn’t have a dictionary old enough—and we know it has to be the exact edition for the decoding to work—but she didn’t let that slow her down, bless her. She found a picture online that matched the one in Harding’s photo, posted it on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and in under an hour she’d found three people in Oakwood who had one. Then she rode around on her bike and picked them up and brought them back here. Can you believe it?”

  “It seems that, unlike the library, this is not a household item people replace often.” Afiya laid a graceful hand on her copy. “This truly is the key we sought. The decoding is working like a charm.”

  “That’s fantastic!” Charley glanced around. “Where is Katie?”

  “She left again.” Lawrence frowned. “She’s awful worried about her friend, PJ. Kept checking her phone, texting and calling. They fixed to meet up here, but he never showed. Katie says that’s not like him, even if he’s on a deep dive into one of his projects, so she headed over to his house.”

  “And my father?”

  Afiya indicated the double doors leading to the dining and family rooms. Customarily left standing open, they were now closed. “Bobby would not go upstairs, so we settled him with a baseball game playing on the television.” She and Lawrence exchanged conspiratorial smiles. “He was asleep in minutes.”

  Satisfied, Charley perched on the love seat and pulled Marc down beside her. “Catch us up?”

  “After decoding a dozen or so entries, we’ve confirmed Regan was definitely a blackmailer,” Vanessa said with satisfaction. “One of my first entries was about Vance’s little pot farm. There’s another one about a girl she caught cheating on a test. The last line of both is: ‘Payment to be determined.’ In fact, that’s the final line on a bunch of these.”

  “It sounds like you’ve decoded a lot in a very short time.” Marc sounded impressed.

  “We really haven’t. But once you know that four-number sequence, you can pick it out on the page quite easily,” Heddy said. She handed Charley a sheet of paper.

  Charley now saw that, in addition to copies of the dictionary, the three women each had several photocopies, printouts of pages from Regan’s journal, pages photographed by PJ. The page she held had been marked over with a pen, one word written in above each number. As Heddy had said, the phrase “Payment to be determined” occurred frequently. In fact, it appeared on this single page at the end of three separate entries.

  “Great job, team. I can’t believe how much you’ve accomplished.” Everyone beamed with pride as Charley handed the page to Marc. “It doesn’t say so here, but we know what payment Regan got from Merritt—he gave her master keys to the offices and lockers.”

  Marc scanned the page. “Too bad she didn’t go back and fill in details of whatever she squeezed out of these other people. That information might give us a lead on who killed her.”

  “What we do know is that she put those keys to good use,” Lawrence said. “Regan searched student lockers and found all sorts of blackmail ammo, stuff kids kept at school rather than risk having it found by their parents. Pot, cigarettes, condoms, birth control pills, pornography, test answers, you name it. None of it really scary, like a handgun. But anything on that list would’ve earned me a whipping from my mama, and that’s a fact.”

  “This journal reads like a contraband catalog.” Vanessa made a face. “What an evil hag. I’ll bet half the school secretly rejoiced when she turned up dead.”

  “Regan was a bad girl,” Afiya agreed. “And many of those items would have caused their owners trouble with parents or the school. But would fear of discovery incite someone to commit murder?”

  Charley considered the question. “To teenagers, for whom missing a single party signals the end of the world? One of Regan’s victims might’ve been desperate or pissed off enough to bash her over the head in the heat of the moment. But to slip away to Smith Gardens, dig up a rock, then lie in wait and kill her in cold blood? To me that speaks to a stronger motive than getting grounded for smoking.”

  “There are a lot of pages left to decode,” Heddy cautioned. “We could still come across something more serious. But Charley, just before you and Marc got here, we decided to move off these entries and tackle something more interesting. Lawrence?”

  “Yes, Miss Heddy.” Lawrence stood at attention. “Remember those columns of numbers PJ told you about? We started working on that page, and I think the boy was right. What we’ve got is a bunch of dollar amounts.” He indicated the whiteboard. Two columns of numbers had been written in his neat hand. “We know they’re not coded words, because those all c
ome in pairs, and none have decimals like these do. I wrote them exactly as they appear.”

  “Notice how the amounts in the first column are all higher than the second column?” Afiya asked. “And yet, they are similar, as if the first column was an inflated version of the second?”

  Marc drew in a sharp breath, and everyone turned. “You know what that looks like to me? Someone was keeping a second set of books.” At their blank expressions, he elaborated. “Back in Chicago, before I transferred to Homicide, I worked Vice. In cases that involved money laundering, illegal gambling, or embezzlement, we had a forensic accountant who followed the money. He taught me about double booking. Someone records payments or income on the company books. Then he inflates or deflates those on a second set, and that’s the so-called official record, the one he shows to his boss or the tax man. The first set, the real set of books, never sees the light of day.” He indicated the two columns of numbers. “It’s done to hide the true financial status of the business. We could be talking about either embezzlement of funds or losses someone wanted to conceal behind a falsely rosy picture of fiscal health.”

  “Financial status of what?” Charley asked. “There’s no title and no column headers.”

  “We were just about to begin decoding those headers in the hope that they might shed light on the mystery,” Afiya said. “Those words are written in the two-number code system.”

  Charley waved a hand. “Don’t let us stop you.”

  “Okay, ladies.” Lawrence consulted a printout. “First one is six, eight seventy-six.”

  Heddy flipped pages. “Page eight-seven-six, the sixth word…” She glanced up. “The word is ‘text.’ ”

  Lawrence filled in the first column header. “The next is twenty-two, nine hundred fifteen. Fee, my love?”

  Afiya bit her lower lip as she turned carefully to the proper page. “On page nine hundred fifteen, the twenty-second word is ‘uniform.’ ”