11th hour

Chapter 58

Cindy wasn’t the only person working after close of business, not even close. A dozen offices in her line of sight had the lights on; loud laughter came in bursts from the corner office; and down the hall, the copy machine in the hallway chugged out copies.

These days, no one left work early.

Everyone wanted to be sure of a chair if the music stopped.

Cindy turned on her desk lamp and read Richie’s text message again. Caught a homicide. Cya later. XXX. She texted back: Copy that. Ttys.

She put her phone down and asked herself why she’d let Richie’s message go unanswered for so many minutes, why she’d withheld returning the XXXs, wondered again if she was becoming like her parents.

Her mom was a shrink, her dad was a math teacher, and when she was a kid, she had called them Robo-Mom and Robo-Pop because they both overanalyzed absolutely everything. Every. Little. Thing.

This was what she was doing with her relationship with Richie: Yes, no, maybe. Repeat.

She was also obsessed with her story, treating the numbers found with the Ellsworth heads as if they were the da Vinci code.

She justified her obsession like this: If she didn’t decode those numbers, someone else would. Jason Blayney would. And so, partially because of him, partially because she would have done it anyway, Cindy had been flipping the flipping numbers every which way, forward, backward, inside out.

First she’d tried to connect the numbers to Harry Chandler. He’d notched his bedpost innumerable times during his long life as a star. He’d been named People magazine’s sexiest man in the world three times and had been the tabloids’ favorite cover boy for decades because of the many famous girlfriends he had squired to black-tie events.

Had Harry Chandler had 613 lovers? Was that what the number meant? If so, how did the 104 figure in? Not his address, not his birth date, not his license-plate number.

So Cindy had abandoned that line of inquiry and moved on. She had plugged the numbers into her search engine and found that if she put a colon between the 6 and the 13, Google kicked out an interesting passage from the Bible.

Romans 6:13: “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death.”

It was interesting and, in the context of the buried heads, very creepy. “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin…”

Was the person who dug up the heads at the Ellsworth compound saying the dead had been guilty of sin? Adding the colon to the other number didn’t help — biblically speaking, 1:04 meant nothing.

Moving on, there was 1:04; 6:13. Time of day, time of death, day of the year?

Cindy reviewed the lists she’d cut and pasted from Wikipedia into her research file, the tens of dozens of names of people who had been born on January 4 and died on June 13, and absolutely none of them rang bells when it came to the skulls at the house of heads.

Cindy grabbed her phone and texted Lindsay: Any IDs yet on skulls?

Still waiting, Lindsay texted back.

Thx.

Crap. Cindy got up from her desk, walked down the hall, and found three people who would share a pizza with her. She ordered out, and while she waited, she ran the numbers again.