The answer seemed to embarrass Weyler and cease further questioning. He nodded and returned to the parlor. Jane started up the stairs again when she heard a door open and close downstairs.
Mollie appeared in the doorway on the way to her bedroom when she spotted Jane. The girl stopped, observed Jane’s appearance. She shook her head and whispered just loud enough for Jane to hear. “You look like a
bohmerkeh
,” she declared before disappearing behind her bedroom door.
Upstairs in her room, Jane tossed her mud-caked shirt on top of the one from earlier that day in a corner of her bedroom. She slipped into her
Ron Paul for President—2008
nightshirt and proceeded to carefully hang each of the physical clues that Weyler received from Bo on the clothesline. By the time she was done, she had a perfect visual in front of her. The clues were in order of their receipt, including the transcript of the two ominous phone messages. Jane wrote where each clue arrived on a sticky pad and affixed a note on each clue. She recovered the linen note page that she found in Jake’s locker and hung it at the far right of the clothesline. Next to that, she placed the bright green page where Bo had Bailey Van Gorden write Jake’s full name:
JACKSON JAKOB VAN GORDEN
. She recalled the red starred website in Jake’s notebook,
mysecretrevelations.com
, and jotted it down on a piece of paper before pinning that clue on the far right side of the line.
Crawling on top of the large king-size bed with the gossamer canopy, Jane rearranged the pillows so she could sit up straight and view the clues better. Her eyes drifted to the table to the right with the lonely pack that held the waiting cigarette.
God, that would taste incredible right now,
she thought. There was something about the marriage of nicotine and contemplative ruminating that was a powerful union. The nicotine slowed down the mind. The action of drawing the cigarette to her mouth, inhaling the smoke and slowly blowing it out while observing or reading created an almost Zen rhythm that allowed for focus and revelations. Jane repositioned the pillows several times in an attempt to find comfort, but all she could think of was that damn cigarette across the room—teasing her, torturing her and loving every minute of it.
She closed her eyes, desperately grabbing at anything in her consciousness to help. The soft scent of gardenias began to blossom along the edges of her mind. Jane could feel herself drifting outside of her body, but she forced herself back. Without thinking about it, she pressed the first and second finger on her right hand together and brought her hand to her mouth. In it was an invisible cigarette. As her fingers touched her lips, she sucked in the air, held it and then released it. The movement, repeated several times with her eyes closed, seemed to calm Jane as the gardenias drifted into the ether. She opened her eyes and regarded the clues with new vision.
The first was the book,
You Can’t Go Home Again
along with the sympathy card and envelope with the odd
BAWY
written on the outside. This was left in the Van Gorden’s mailbox.
The second clue was the message on Bo’s voicemail. Vi’s transcript included all the pauses and sounds on the tape in brackets. Jane moved closer to the end of the bed and read the words.
[Distorted voice] Do you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re two seconds from your last breath? Do you? It feels just like this…[Scratchy sound on phone, followed by the whining and begging of young male child in the background. Continues for 10
seconds and then stops. Scratchy sound and the distorted voice speaks again.] He pounds on the window and you do nothing. [Abrupt end.]
Jane viewed the third clue. It was the full-color figure cut out of from a magazine of an eight-or-nine-year-old boy wearing a vintage red baseball cap. Jane peered closer at the figure that was glued to the page to infer the impression that the child was being dragged by his arm. The other arm—artificially extended and highly exaggerated with a pen drawing—looked like the flat of the boy’s palm was pressed against a surface. Letters cut out from various magazines spelled the sentence:
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL INNOCENCE!
below the drawing. The accompanying envelope had the same obscure
BAWY
written across it. In the upper right corner was a lone, uncancelled, twenty-five-cent stamp with an old Packard on it.
The fourth clue hanging on the clothesline was another transcript courtesy of Vi of the second phone message from the kidnapper. It read:
[Sound of young boy crying in background. Scratchy sound on phone followed by distorted voice] He cried like a baby and will never be a real man. [Abrupt end.]
Jane’s stared at the word
cried
. She’d brought this up in Bo’s office and it still bothered her. Why
cried
? Shouldn’t he have said, “He
cries
…” since the sound of the kid crying was previously active in the background? Was Jane just focusing on picayune details?
She turned her attention to the fifth clue on the clothesline. This was a duo sent to the Van Gordens: a blank sheet of crinkled paper and the twisted drawing of a child that implied sodomy. Jane’s heightened sense of smell detected something malodorous emitting from the crinkled sheet of paper ensconced in the protective plastic cover. It was sickly sweet and pervasive. She snapped that clue off the line and opened the plastic bag. Immediately, the aroma knocked her back on the bed. She knew the smell all too well. It was urine.
But why piss on a blank sheet of paper?
she wondered.
Unless
… Jane jumped off the bed and
scrambled to find the lighter in her leather satchel. Taking the crinkled page to the light, she held the flame under the paper, weaving it back and forth until the urine stains turned slightly brownish. Like magic, the words appeared:
Why you piss me off BAWY?
Jane sat back on the bed, somewhat stunned by the sheer creative bent of the kidnapper. She reasoned it could mean a couple things. Either the urine was a symbol of literally being pissed-off or, perhaps, it was a metaphor for being so scared that the kid peed in his pants. Either way, the secretive way in which the words were hidden using urine as the acidic ink certainly instilled a further concealment of the kidnapper’s message. The obscurity of the clues bound with the sense that on some level they all made perfect sense frustrated Jane. It was as if it was a secret wrapped in a larger secret and capped within a haunting enigma.
Jane returned the urine-stained page to the plastic evidence sheet, set it aside and turned her attention to the sixth clue that was sent to Bo Lowry’s office. It was the riddle that read:
Name this classy car.
Seven letters.
The first four spell what you do before going on a trip.
The first three spelled backward is something you take on that
trip and
wear on your head.
Jane sat back and ran through every classy car she could think of.
Mercedes. Rolls Royce. Porsche.
But then her eyes traveled to the twenty-five-cent, uncancelled stamp on the envelope that held the sympathy card. “Packard!” she said aloud. “The first four spell what you do before going on a trip,” Jane re-read. “Pack,” she muttered. “The first three spelled backward is something you take on that trip and wear on your head.” Jane quickly worked it out in her head. “Cap!” she exclaimed. She scanned the clues and locked onto the one with the magazine cutout of the child being dragged by his long arm. The boy in the cutout wore a red vintage baseball cap. Underneath were the words:
THOU
SHALT NOT STEAL INNOCENCE!
There had to be a connection. It was becoming more and more clear that this deviant was not just smart; he was deliberate. Everything in front of Jane had a purpose. She knew it. Each word was carefully chosen, allowing not one spent syllable of verbiage. Even the voicemails were sparse in their words, showing a calculated economy for expressing his message. This led Jane to believe that the kidnapper was unyielding in being heard and understood.
With that in mind, she viewed the final clue sent to Bo Lowry by the kidnapper. It was written in all capital letters:
I BEARED MY SOUL AND STILL YOU IGNORE ME???
Jane now had a much better feel for the person behind the clues. He was smart and he was purposeful. And when you’re smart and purposeful you don’t use the wrong spelling for a word. Instead of the correct
bared,
he wrote
beared
. He absolutely meant to write it that way.
She pulled herself back into the crush of pillows and stared at that single sentence for twenty minutes. She felt into the desperation behind every word. There was a sense of being neglected…ignored. Why ignored?
She spent another half hour reading the clues from left to right until she had them memorized.
And then she saw it. Not one, but two startling discoveries.
CHAPTER 12
Jane heard Weyler trod down the hallway. She bolted from her bed and opened the door. “Boss,” she whispered with punctuation.
Weyler stood there in his suit and tie and stared at Jane,
wearing nothing but her faded long nightshirt. “What?” he asked, almost feeling a need to avert his eyes.
“I found something.
Two somethings
!” She said, waving him into her room.
Weyler looked a bit askance when he spotted the odd setup Jane had erected with the clothesline. “What’s with all this…”
“It’s outside the box, Boss,” Jane motioned him to close the door and then stood in front of the clothesline of clues on the left side. “These are the clues in order of their delivery. But you can’t read them as individual pieces. You have to read them as a whole because they tell a story.” Weyler shook his head, not sure of where this was going. “Just wait! Hear me out. Each clue builds on the one before it. Like this one…” Jane pointed to the first drawing of the child with the red cap on his head. “In this picture, he’s being dragged somewhere, possibly in a car. But this one over here,” Jane quickly moved to the second, sexually graphic drawing, “is greater and more threatening than the first drawing. This one…” pointing to the second drawing, “is what happens days or maybe weeks after the first one.” She moved to the transcript from the first voicemail. “The kidnapper says, ‘He pounds on the window and you do nothing.’ Then we have a kid conveniently in the next clue looking like his palm is pressed against a flat surface, like a window.”
Weyler moved closer to the clothesline, reading through a couple clues in order. “I don’t see how the first clue of the book bleeds into the second clue of the voicemail.”
“I think the book,
You Can’t Go Home Again
, is establishing the theme.”
“Theme?” Weyler almost looked irritated.
“The sympathy card that came with it read,
So sorry for your loss
. It’s establishing the situation. I’m still not clear why he wrote
JACKson sends his regards
in the card. But I’m sure it means something along the way. Look, the person who did this is intelligent, motivated and vengeful.“
“So, you’re saying this is a crime of revenge?”
“Maybe. I don’t know yet. But I think there’s something in the book that’s obviously important. Something that literally states the purpose of everything else.”
“What was on the dog-eared page?”
“It talked of
phrases as symbols of something real.
And then there was a line in there regarding the main character George Webber about
something that mattered greatly to him and would not be denied.
Maybe the kidnapper is…pretending to be George Webber.”
“An intellectual kidnapper?”
“It’s not out of the realm of possibility, Boss!”
“Does an intellectual draw a graphic picture of a young boy being sodomized?”
“Sure. If it’s part of the story.”
“The story…” Weyler looked dubious. “So you think he’s telling us what’s going to happen to Jake?”
“Possibly.”
“If that’s so, then where is the demand to the Van Gordens to keep all of this from happening to their son? Isn’t it normal for the kidnapper to threaten this, this and this
unless you
do this, this and this?” He looked at the clues again. “There’s no request to the Van Gordens. No ransom demand…”
“He wants attention,” Jane interrupted, grasping the idea from the ether.
“Come on, Jane. You don’t go through all this and take a child just to get attention.”
Jane sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the clues. After a moment of silence, she spoke up. “He needs to be heard, Boss. He’s a loner. Nobody’s ever paid any attention to him. He was dismissed because he was in the way. So he chose a life of silence and isolation.” In that moment, Jane felt the unrelenting pain that poured forth from the pages on the clothesline. It was at once suffocating and shattering.
“You just described Jordan Copeland,” Weyler stated.
“I know,” she said quietly.
“All the more reason to keep him in our sights.” Weyler looked at Jane. “But not too close.”
Jane looked up at him. Weyler had a look of warning on his face. “What?”
“I know you pretty well, Jane. You tend to go against protocol. We’re here to help Bo but, in the end, this is
his
case and this is
his
town. Copeland is the number-one suspect and he knows it. If he’s involved in this case, give him all the space in the world so that he can fall on his own sword. We need to keep an appropriate distance from him so we’re not accused later at trial of compromising the case and getting it thrown out on a technicality. If we screw this whole thing up for Bo, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Jane implicitly understood Weyler and did her best to not show offense at his veiled threats toward her. “Because you owe him, right?” It came out far too petulant but she couldn’t help it.
“Because I take a promise as seriously as you do.”