Stolen (21 page)

R
uby studied the sheet of paper with the numbers scrawled on it.

“It’s code,” Ruby said. “How the heck are we supposed to crack some code? John, we’ve got to take this to the police. They have experts in cryptography. They can figure this sort of thing out.”

The look I gave Ruby conveyed my disagreement. “He’d told me he’d know if we did that,” I reminded her. “He’ll kill the woman in the picture. We know that he will. He picked her because she’s somehow connected to us. We can’t let her down.”

“We’ve got to get out from this, John!” Ruby said, pulling her hair to show her exasperation. Ruby slumped down on the futon, and Ginger took the opportunity to move in for a little snuggle. Despondent as she was, Ruby couldn’t resist giving Ginger what she needed. The cat purred delightedly while Ruby studied the numbers some more. “How will he know if we take this to the police?” Ruby said. “We tell them it has to be contained. We tell them everything.”

“I don’t know how he’ll find out, but say that he does. Maybe there’s a leak,” I said.

“By a leak, you mean Clegg?” Ruby said.

I shot my wife an angry look. “Are you back on that?” I said. “Do you still believe that Clegg is helping Uretsky?”

“Think about it, John,” Ruby said. “Who was the guy Clegg arrested the night Rhonda was killed? We don’t know anything about him. Maybe he’s helping Clegg out. Maybe Clegg got a computer guy to set everything up. He’s had time to plan this. I don’t know how Clegg is doing it, but I have a gut instinct about him. You’ve always trusted my gut. Why aren’t you trusting me now?”

I thought back to Ruby’s vision board, her penchant for asking the universe for answers. It was true she seemed to always be in the know.

“So if it’s Clegg,” I said, “then is he helping Uretsky or pretending to be him?”

“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “We don’t even know what Elliot Uretsky actually looks like.” Ruby correctly judged my expression as one of dismay. “What’s wrong?”

“I should have asked Ruth Shane what Elliot looked like when we were at Uretsky’s house,” I said, angry with myself. “She’d know. Maybe she even has a picture of him. If we had that, we could have matched it to the mug shot of the guy Clegg busted and we could be done with this debate.”

“Fine. You should have done that,” Ruby said. “But there was a lot going on, and we’ve got to do something right here and right now. I say we go to the police.”

I looked down at my phone and once again fixed my gaze on the smiling faces of Tinesha and her son. It was sickening to think that Uretsky was there—hiding in the shadows, watching them from a distance. He took this picture, and he sent it to me for a reason. What did he want us to do?

Uretsky’s words came back at me like an arrow shot from a bow.

Ginger leapt off the futon and onto the floor when I sat down beside Ruby.

“There’s no crime this time,” I said to her. “We just have to solve the clue. We already have Jenna and Rhonda on our conscience. Dr. Adams and your man, too. Do we really want to add a fifth victim to the list? Because that’s what’s going to happen here.”

I showed Ruby the picture on my phone. Unfair of me, but I couldn’t let Jenna and Rhonda’s fate become Tinesha’s as well.

Ruby stared at the display screen for a long while. She didn’t pick up on the connection to me, either.

How did I know this woman?

“We have nothing to lose by trying,” I said, “And Tinesha has everything to gain. We’ve got to try, Rube. We’ve got to try.”

In one hand, Ruby held the paper with numbers on it, and in the other, my iPhone with Tinesha’s picture. She appeared to be weighing the two choices, as though her hands had become scales.

“Do you want to be responsible for what happens to her?” I said. “Because I don’t.”

Ruby’s gaze fell to the numbers. “Have you Googled them?” she asked.

“No, but I’ll give it a try.”

Since Ruby had thrown my laptop against the wall, I used my iPhone to Google the number sequence. I showed her the results, which were pages full of climatological data—sequences of numbers that happened to have all our numbers in it, but not in the order that Uretsky had given them to me.

“So this is pretty much useless,” Ruby said. “What now? How long do we have to figure this thing out?” Her question made me pause. Ruby didn’t have patience to wait for an answer. “John, I said how long?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t tell me.”

“He’s always given us a deadline,” Ruby said.

“Well, this time he didn’t.”

Ruby looked at me, unblinking. “That’s strange,” she said.

We spent the next couple of hours trying various cryptographic approaches, many of which I got off the Internet. We tried substituting letters for numbers, but that just yielded a string of gibberish.

“There’s no key,” Ruby said. “He can’t expect us to solve this without a key.”

We were working at the dining table, with every inch of available surface covered by our spread of papers, all failed attempts at cracking the code. I found a Web site that listed two dozen different ciphers: Caesarian Shift, Double Transposition, Playfair, and the list went on.

“We don’t have time to learn all of these,” I said, “let alone apply them.”

“Time,” Ruby said, her voice trailing off.

“What?”

“He didn’t give us a time limit,” Ruby said.

“You’re back to that,” I said.

“He hasn’t done that before,” she said. “We had a time limit for the other crimes, shoplifting, armed robbery, prostitution, arson. Only this time we don’t have any limit at all.”

“Play the part,” I said. “He didn’t give us a time limit for that.”

“That’s because we weren’t the drivers for that. Dobson was coming to us. We didn’t go to him. But here he wants us to take action to get an advantage, not wait for it to happen. Just following his own logic, there should be a time limit.”

“I still don’t see how that helps us,” I said.

“You need to tell me exactly what he said to you.”

“He just gave me these numbers. He told me not to go to the cops—that he’d find out if I did. He told me he wanted to tip the scales in our advantage. He said we didn’t know what city he was in, or what state. If we didn’t play along, Tinesha would go missing.” I was talking fast, probably too fast, but I wanted to remember every possible detail, so my mind was free-form thinking and recalling.

“Not helpful,” Ruby said. “What else?”

I couldn’t think of anything else that struck me. “He just ended the call by saying that every minute and every second counts,” I said. “That was all.”

Ruby’s eyes went wide. “John, don’t you get it?”

“What?”

“Open your eyes and your mind. He didn’t give us a time limit, but he said the seconds and minutes count? Does that make sense to you?”

“I don’t see how that helps us with these numbers,” I said.

Again, Ruby looked at the sheet of paper. Her head was bent low, eyes studying. “Do you remember that climb you did in Colorado when I called your cell and asked where you were?”

I nodded. It was a long time ago, over eight years, but I never forget my climbs. “I think I said we were going to try for a three-peak day. We’d just climbed Mount Democrat and Mount Lincoln, and Mount Bross was up next.”

“That’s not what you told me,” Ruby said. “When I asked where you were, you initially gave me your location in latitude and longitude and I laughed, because you were so focused on your climb, you forgot who you were talking to.”

My eyes went wide, and a tingle swept through my body. “You think these numbers are location coordinates?”

“Minutes and seconds,” Ruby said. “Longitude and latitude can be expressed as degrees, minutes, and seconds or as decimal degrees. You taught me that. I don’t think this is a code with a key for us to crack.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“I think it’s a place that Uretsky wants us to go.”

W
e stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into a thicket of trees. What secret was hidden here? What did Uretsky want us to find, or worse—to do? The Middlesex Fells Reservation covers over twenty-five hundred acres and is a welcome retreat for city folk seeking a day of hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, or rock climbing. The hilly tracts of rocky land should have been a picturesque sight, but we had a different sort of picture troubling our thoughts—that of a woman at a playground, pushing her son on a swing.

I listened to the enveloping stillness and heard the forest come alive—the chirping of chickadees and other birds, the rustling of leaves in a light wind. A squirrel scampered up the side of a tall tree, its clawed feet clicking as it climbed out of my sight. The late afternoon, usually pleasing against my face, felt like nothing at all. The dampness of the bark and the moss would have normally brightened my spirits. This was a place of true scenic beauty, great for picnics and exploring. Horrible things weren’t supposed to happen here.

Maybe Ruby was right. Maybe Uretsky wanted us to commit another crime right here, right now. Maybe it involved Tinesha, but I doubted it. The only thing I believed continued to weigh heavy on my conscience. Tinesha, however we knew her, would become Uretsky’s next victim, unless we intervened.

At first Ruby had balked about coming here.

“It’s probably a trap,” she had said.

I had texted Uretsky after we figured out his clue, and he promptly texted back.

Go there and see for yourself.

He didn’t credit me with a job well done. No virtual pats on the back, Johnny old boy. Just a tersely worded “Go there and see for yourself.” I reminded Ruby that we had saved Dr. Adams’s life by robbing Giovanni’s Liquors but had helped to end Rhonda Jennings’s by our own inaction.

Ruby fell silent. Obviously, she agreed. Still, she couldn’t ignore her gut instinct about what to do next. “We should tell the police,” she said. “They should come with us.”

“He doesn’t want to hurt us, and he wants us to go alone,” I said.

Ruby’s arms folded, a look of indignation crossing her face. “You can’t know that for sure.”

I thought. “We’re too much fun for him,” I said. “I just know that he wants to keep playing with us, not hurt us. But if we take a chance and bring the police along, I don’t think Tinesha is going to live to see morning.”

Instead of responding, Ruby reached for her sun hat and put her jacket on.

“Let’s go,” she said.

It was close to five o’clock in the afternoon by the time we pulled into a parking area just off South Border Road. We locked the car and walked across the street. That’s when we stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into the trees. I held in my hand a pocket GPS from Garmin, procured back in my climbing days. Once I had a good satellite signal, I brought up the Mark Waypoint screen and scrolled up to select
CURRENT COORDINATES.
This produced an entry field that allowed me to key in the exact coordinates cryptically relayed to us through Uretsky:

N42 26 12   W71 06 57.

I showed Ruby the route we had to take. There was no path to follow.

“Do we just start trekking through the woods?” she asked.

“It is called an eTrek,” I said, flashing her the GPS.

“I didn’t bring bug repellent.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll check you over for ticks,” I said.

Ruby gave me a look—that look—and started off ahead of me.

Something made her stop. She turned to face me. “What’s out here? What the hell are we going to find?” She knew I couldn’t answer the question, but she did look a little less bothered.

Initially, bushwhacking through the forest was easy enough, but the underbrush quickly grew thicker, and the mass of vegetation underfoot tripped one of us up every few steps. I used a stick to clear away some branches, but our trek was like a boxing match; we’d duck one tree, only to get thwacked in the face, neck, and arms by another. Every hundred yards or so, I checked my GPS for course corrections.

The route took us through one steep trough that required us to inch our way down. I could hear Ruby’s labored breathing behind me. The hike would have been moderately challenging without her cancer. At some point she stopped and, resting against a tree, took a long drink of water from the camel pack. The scrub provided excellent shelter for chipmunks and other woodland critters seeking a hideout. I wondered what else the land could be hiding. Had Uretsky put something here that he wanted us to find? If so, what could it be? How would it give us an advantage?

Ruby slumped to the forest floor, breathing hard. “I need to rest a bit,” she said.

I looked up. We still had plenty of sunlight.

After a few minutes we continued, walking west, swatting flies and branches in equal measure until we came to a sudden stop at a steep cliff face. My breath caught when I looked down at the jagged rocks jutting out from the clay-colored surface. As my eyes focused on the depth, the ground below began to swirl, the brown of dead leaves revolving until all color slipped into black. I felt the horizon pitch and roll, as if it had come unfurled from the earth.

I staggered backward and felt Ruby’s hands grip my shoulder to steady me. Seeing the height of the cliff, without any warning, with no time to prepare, hit me hard—instantaneously, I became light-headed, dizzy, and nauseated. I took ten steps in retreat before I found my bearings once again.

“We’ll take . . . the long . . . way down,” I said to Ruby between breaths.

The unsettling sensations lingered but eventually quieted down.

Ruby looked very troubled. “Is it getting worse, John?”

“You mean my acrophobia?”

A branch I had cleared catapulted backward and nearly knocked Ruby off of her feet. “Hey!” she said, surprised. “I’m your wife, remember!”

“You’re my everything,” I said, apologizing with a kiss on her cheek. “And to answer your question, yes, I think it’s getting worse, but hasn’t Uretsky made every facet of our lives worse?”

We marched on, with Ruby keeping close behind me. On my GPS display, the little triangle that represented “us” continued to close in on the
x
that represented our destination. A hundred yards to go . . .

What would we find?

Fifty yards . . .

I looked back and saw Ruby valiantly battle through a thicket of branches. Was her heart beating as fast as mine? Was her pulse racing, too? She knew we were getting closer.

Twenty yards . . .

I pushed my way between two pine trees—the forest version of a car wash. That’s when I had this thought about paths, the ones we take and the ones we don’t. I’d tried my best to live free from regret, but at that moment, I regretted becoming Elliot Uretsky so profoundly that I knew I’d never forgive myself. No matter what the outcome, I had an incurable disease called regret. Life, I thought, was full of paths, like the one Ruby and I were forging through this forest. There are paths made for us, and paths that we make. Sometimes we stumble upon a route we think about taking but, for some reason, don’t. Or worse, we walk one way and look back wistfully at the way we had left behind.

Ten yards . . .

I looked back at Ruby—pale, her pert nose blackened by dirt. A herd of flies roamed about her head like a haphazard halo. I wondered what path I took that led me to her. What made her apply to the same school as me? Why did we take the same class? Was it a series of choices, or was it all somehow predestined?

Ruby came toward me, her body trembling with exhaustion. Behind me was one final coppice to clear before we’d reach our destination.

“I love you,” I said, holding her tight. “No matter what we find. I love you.”

I pushed my way through the trees, with Ruby following.

We emerged into a small clearing with trees all around us. In the center of the clearing I saw loose-packed dirt, as though it had been dug up recently. No plants were growing in that patch of dirt, but set upon the barren oval was a large
X
composed entirely of stones.
X
marks the spot.

Ruby shrieked when she looked to her left. I cried out, too, after I looked. Leaning up against a nearby tree, I saw two shovels. Long wood handles, hard steel spades. I went over to the shovels, and I saw that each had a tag on it with a note written in neat printed lettering.

One tag read
Ruby’s.

The other tag read
John ’s.