Tyrannosaur Canyon Page 7

  "Now we're talking." Willer had heard about the bullets but not the results.

  "These are standard NATO rounds, 5.56mm, metal-jacketed, lead alloy core with a steel penetrator, mass of sixty-two grains. Instantly recognizable because of the green tip. Our shooter was probably using an M16 or similar military-type assault weapon."

  "Could be ex-military."

  "Not necessarily. There are a lot of gun enthusiasts who like these weapons too." He consulted his notes. "One round was embedded in the ground; we found the entry channel – gave us an idea of the angle. The killer was shooting from above, thirty-five degrees off the horizontal. With that we were able to nail the location of the shooter: an ambush point on the rim. That was the third point you asked about. We found some partial boot prints, couple of cotton fibers from what might have been a bandanna or thin shirt. No shells. We had a hell of a time getting up to the shooter's vantage point. The guy knew the country and must've planned the killing ahead of time."

  "Suggests a local."

  "Or someone who scoped it out pretty carefully."

  "Hair?"

  "None at point three."

  "And the second bullet?"

  "Deformed and fragmented by passing through the victim. Traces of blood on it, matched the blood in the sand. Again, no latents."

  "Anything else?"

  "Wool and cotton fibers at the site of the killing – we're still analyzing – and a human hair with root. Golden brown, straight, Caucasian."

  "From the killer?"

  "Could be anyone: victim, killer, one of your cops. Maybe even me." He grinned, ran a hand through his thinning hair. "Won't be the first time. We're getting DNA on it, see if it matches the blood. Might need to get some hair from your guys for elimination purposes."

  "Broadbent, the guy who found the body? He's got light brown, straight hair."

  "Might need a sample from him, too."

  Willer thanked Calhoun, turned to his deputy. "Hernandez?"

  "I checked out Broadbent's story. Seems he rides around a lot in the high mesas."

  "So what was he doing in the Maze?" Willer asked.

  "He says he was taking a shortcut up Joaquin Canyon."

  "A long cut, you mean."

  "Says he likes the ride. Says it's nice country."

  Willer grunted. "I thought he was a vet. Vets are supposed to be busy."

  "He's got a partner, a guy named Shane McBride."

  Willer grunted again. He hadn't liked Broadbent from the beginning and he had a feeling that the guy was holding out on him. It was asking a lot to believe he just happened to be up there when the man was shot. "Hernandez, I want you to ask around, see if Broadbent's shown any recent interest in that area up there – prospecting, pot hunting, that sort of thing."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You consider him a suspect?" asked the D.A.

  "He's what you'd call a 'person of interest.'"

  There was a guffaw from the D.A. "Yeah, right."

  Willer frowned. No wonder they couldn’t convict, anyone these days, with guys like that in the D.A.'s office. He looked around. "Any bright ideas?"

  Calhoun said, "This is a bit out of my field, but I’m curious – is there any permanent water up in those canyons?"

  "I don't know. Why?"

  "It'd be a great place to grow marijuana."

  "Noted. Hernandez?"

  "I'll look into it, Lieutenant."

  Chapter 15

  WEED MADDOX WAS just rising from his hiding place in the chamisa when he heard a sound from the house – the shrill of a telephone.

  He hastily crouched back down and raised his binoculars. She had gotten up from the table and was walking toward the phone in the living room, disappearing around the corner. He waited. She must have answered the phone and was talking.

  At the corner of the house he could see where the phone lines came in. He had rejected the idea of cutting them, because a lot of houses these days had private alarm systems that notified a firm offsite when the phone lines went down. He cursed softly to himself; he couldn't move on her until she was off the phone. He waited, five minutes... Ten. The stocking on his head itched, the latex gloves made his hands hot and sticky. She reappeared in the living room, coffee cup in one hand, holding a cordless to her ear with the other, nodding and talking – still on the phone. He felt a rising impatience, which he tried to quell by closing his eyes and reciting his mantra – to no effect. He was already too keyed up.

  He clutched the Glock. The unpleasant smell of latex filled his nostrils. He watched her take two turns around the living room, talking away and laughing, her blond hair swinging. She picked up a brush and began brushing out her long hair, head tilted to one side. Now that was a sight to see, the long golden hair sprung out by static, backlit by the sun as she passed a window. She shifted the phone to the other ear, brushed the other side, her hips swinging with the effort. He felt a tingle of anticipation as she went into the kitchen. From his vantage point he could no longer see her, but he hoped she was hanging up the phone. He was right: she reappeared in the living room without the phone, went toward the front hall, and disappeared again – into a bathroom, it looked like.

  Now.

  He rose, scurried across the lawn to the patio door, flattened himself against the side of the house. He took a long, flexible shim out of his pocket, began working it in between the door and the frame. He couldn't see into the house now, but he would be inside in less than sixty seconds, before she got out of the John. When she emerged, he'd get her.

  The shim was through and he now worked it down, encountered the latch, gave it a sharp downward tug. There was a click and he grasped the handle, getting ready to throw it open.

  Suddenly he paused. A door had slammed. The kitchen door to the backyard. He heard footsteps crunching on the gravel of the drive, coming around the corner. He ducked down, crouching behind a bush next to the patio door, and through the screen of leaves he saw her striding to the garage, keys jangling from her hand. She disappeared inside. A moment later came the roar of a car engine and the International Scout nosed out, went down the driveway and out the gate in a swirl of dust.

  Maddox felt an impotent fury take hold, a mixture of frustration, disappointment, and anger. The bitch didn't know how lucky she was. And now he'd have to search the house without her help.

  He waited five minutes for the dust to settle, then he stood up and slid open the patio door, stepped inside, shut it behind him. The house was cool and smelled of roses. He controlled his breathing, calmed himself down, focusing his mind on the search ahead.

  He started in the kitchen, working swiftly and methodically. Before he touched anything he noted where it was, then returned it to its original position. If the notebook was not in the house, it would be a mistake to alarm them. But if the notebook was there, he'd find it.

  Chapter 16

  DR. IAIN CORVUS strolled to the lone window of his office facing Central Park. He could see the park pond, a bright sheet of metal reflecting the afternoon sunlight. As he watched, a rowboat drifted across the water – a father and his son on an outing together, each manning an oar. Corvus watched the oars slowly dipping as the boat crept across the water. The young son appeared to be struggling with his oar, and finally it hopped out of the oarlock and slipped into the water, floating away. The father rose and gestured in wrath, all of it taking place in silent, distant pantomime.

  Father and son. Corvus felt a faint sickness in his gut. The charming little scene reminded him of his own father, late of the British Museum, one the most famous biologists in England. By the time his father was thirty-five, Corvus's present age, he was already a fellow of the Royal Society, winner of the Crippen Medal, and on the Queen's birthday list to receive a K.C.B.E. Corvus felt a shiver of old anger as he recalled his father's mustachioed face, veiny cheeks, and military bearing, his spotted hand perpetually closed around a whiskey-and-soda, his voice offering sarcastic correction. The old bastard ha
d died ten years ago of a stroke, fell over like a dead mackerel, scattering ice cubes on the Aubusson carpet of their town house in Wilton Crescent, London. Sure, Corvus had inherited a bundle, but neither that nor his name had helped him get a job at the British Museum, the only place he'd ever wanted to work.

  Now he was thirty-five and still Assistant Curator in the Department of Paleontology, hat in hand, awaiting tenure. Without tenure, he was only half a scientist – half a human being, really. Assistant Curator. He could almost smell the odor of failure clinging to it. Corvus had never fit into the American academic perpetual-motion machine; he wasn't a member in good standing of the milling gray herd. He knew he was prickly, sarcastic, and impatient. He hadn't joined in their playground games. He had come up for tenure three years before but the decision had been deferred; his paleontological research trips to Tung Nor Valley in Sinkiang had not borne fruit. For the past three years he'd been running around like a blue-arsed fly with precious little to show for it. Until now.

  He glanced at his watch. Time for the bloody meeting.

  THE OFFICE OF Dr. W. Cushman Peale, president of the museum, occupied the southwestern tower of the museum, and it commanded a sweeping view of Museum Park and the neoclassical façade of the New-York Historical Society. Peale's secretary ushered Corvus in and announced his name in a hushed voice. Why was it, Corvus wondered, as he stood before the august presence with a genial smile sculpted on his face, that one always whispered in the presence of kings and cretins?

  Peale came from behind his desk to greet Corvus, gave him a firm, manly handshake with the second hand grasping his upper arm, salesman-style, then seated him in an antique Shaker chair before a marble fireplace – unlike the one in his own office, this one worked. Only when he was assured Corvus was comfortable did he take his own seat, in a display of old-world courtesy. With his leonine mane of white hair brushed straight back, his charcoal suit, and his slow, old-fashioned way of speaking, Peale looked like he had been born a museum director. It was a show, Corvus knew: underneath the genteel exterior was a man with all the refinement and sensitivity of a ferret.

  "Iain, how are you?" Peale settled back into his armchair, making a tent of his fingers.

  "Very well, thank you, Cushman," said Corvus, tugging the crease on his pants as he crossed his legs.

  "Good, good. Can I offer you anything? Water? Coffee? Sherry?"

  "No thank you."

  "I myself enjoy a small glass of sherry at five o'clock. It's my one vice."

  Right. Peale had a wife thirty years his junior who was making an ass of him with a young archaeology curator, and if playing the doddering old cuckold wasn't exactly a vice, marrying a woman younger than your daughter was.

  The secretary brought in on a silver tray a small crystal glass filled with amber liquid. Peale took it, sipped fastidiously. "Graham's '61 tawny. Nectar of the gods."

  Corvus waited, maintaining a pleasantly neutral expression on his face.

  Peale set down the glass. "I won't beat around the bush, Iain. As you know, you're up for tenure again. The department begins deliberations the first of next month. We all know the drill."

  "Naturally."

  "This second time around is it, as you know. The department makes a recommendation to me. Technically, I have the final say, although in my ten-year stint as president of the museum I haven't once gone against a departmental tenure decision and I don't intend to change. I don't know which way the department's going to fall on your case. I haven't spoken to them about it and I don't intend to. But I am going to give you some advice."

  "Advice from you, Cushman, is always welcome."

  "We're a museum. We're researchers. We're lucky we're not at a university, burdened with teaching a gaggle of undergraduates. We can devote ourselves one hundred percent to research and publishing. So there's no excuse for a weak publication record."

  He paused, one eyebrow rising slightly as if to signal the subtlety of his point, which as usual was about as subtle as a blunderbuss.

  Peale picked up a piece of paper. "I have here your list of publications. You've been here nine years, and I count eleven papers. Roughly one per year."

  "What counts is quality, not quantity."

  "I'm not in your field, I'm an entomologist, so forgive me if I can't comment on the quality. I've no doubt they're good papers. No one has ever questioned the quality of your work and we all know it was just bad luck that the expedition to Sinkiang didn't pan out. But eleven? We have curators here who publish eleven papers a year."

  "Anyone can knock out a paper. Publication for the sake of publication. I prefer to wait until I have something to say."

  "Come now, Iain, you know that's not true. Yes, I admit there is some of that publish-or-perish stuff going on here. But we're the Museum of Natural History and most of what we do is world-class. I'm getting off the point. A year has gone by without you publishing anything. The reason I called you in here is because I assume you're working on something important."

  The eyebrows went up, indicating it was a question.

  Corvus shifted his legs. He could feel the muscles around his mouth straining from the effort to smile. The humiliation was almost unbearable. "As it happens I am working on an important project."

  "May I ask what?"

  "Right now it's at a somewhat delicate juncture, but within a week or two I'll be able to bring it to you and the tenure committee – in confidence, of course. It should answer most satisfactorily."

  Peale gazed at him a moment, then smiled. "That's splendid, Iain. The point is, I think you're a fine addition to the museum, and of course your distinguished name, associated as it is with your illustrious father, is also important to us. I'm asking these questions only in the spirit of giving counsel. We take it to heart when a curator fails to make tenure; we look on it more as a failure on our part." Peale rose with a broad smile, extended his hand. "Good luck."

  Corvus left the office and walked back down the long, fifth-floor corridor. He was so full of silent rage he could hardly breathe. But he kept his smile, nodding left and right, murmuring greetings to colleagues who were on their way out of the museum at the close of day, the herd heading back to their split-level ranches in faceless American suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey and Long Island.

  Chapter 17

  THE WHITEWASHED ROOM behind the sacristy of Christ in the Desert Monastery contained only four things: a hard wooden stool, a rough table, a crucifix, and an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop computer with a printer, running on DC solar power. Wyman Ford sat before the computer, tingling with anticipation. He had just finished downloading two cryptanalysis programs and was about to unleash them on the code he had laboriously typed in from the dead man's notebook. Already he knew that this was no simple code; it had not yielded to any of his usual tricks.

  It was something truly special.

  He lifted his finger and brought it down smartly: the first program was off and running.

  It wasn't exactly a decryption program, but rather pattern analysis software that looked at the code and made a determination, based on number patterns, as to what class of code it belonged to – substitution or transposition, placode or encicode, nomenclator or polyalphabetic. He had determined it wasn't a public-key code based on factoring large primes. But beyond that, he'd struck out.

  It was only a matter of five minutes for the program to return a beep, indicating the first analysis was complete. Ford was startled when the conclusion popped up:

  UNABLE TO DETERMINE CODE TYPE

  He scrolled down through the pattern results, numerical frequency tables, probability assignments. This was no random grouping of numbers – the program had picked out all kinds of patterns and departures from randomness. It proved the numbers contained information. But what information, and how encoded?

  Far from being discouraged, Ford felt a shivery thrill. The more sophisticated the code, the more interesting the message. He ran the next program in the mod
ule, a frequency analysis on single digits, number pairs, and triplets, matching it against frequency tables of common languages. But that too was a failure: it showed no correlation between the numbers and the English language or with any other common language.

  Ford glanced at his watch. He'd missed Terce. He'd been at it now for five hours straight.

  Damn.

  He went back to the computer screen. The fact that each number had eight digits – a byte – implied a computer-based code. Yet it was written with pencil in a grubby notebook, apparently in the middle of nowhere, with no computer access nearby. On top of that he had already tried translating the eight-digit numbers to binary, hexadecimal, and ASCII, and ran those through the decryption programs, still with no success.

  This was getting fun.

  Ford paused, picked up the notebook, flipped it open, ruffled through the pages. It was old, the leather cover abraded and worn, and there was sand between the well-thumbed pages. It smelled faintly of woodsmoke. The numbers were written with a sharpened pencil, clean and crisp, in neat rows and columns, forming a kind of grid. The evenness of the writing led him to believe that the journal had been written all at the same time. And in the entire sixty pages of numbers there wasn't a single erasure or mistake. Without a doubt the numbers had been copied.

  He shut it and turned it over. There was a stain on the back cover, a smear that was still slightly tacky, and he realized with a start that it was blood. He shivered and quickly put the book down. The blood suddenly reminded him that this was not a game, that a man had been murdered, and that the journal very likely contained directions to a fortune.

  Wyman Ford wondered just what he was getting himself into.

  He suddenly felt a presence behind him and turned. It was the abbot, hands clasped behind his back, a faint smile on his face, his lively black eyes fixed on him. "We missed you, Brother Wyman."