Rusty Nail

CHAPTER 19

THE PHONE WOKE me up, which was a blessing. I’d been in the middle of a dream where I had to warn some children that danger was coming, but no matter how hard I screamed, no sound came out.

After shaking away the disorientation, I picked up the receiver.

“Daniels.”

“Morning, Jack.”

I sat up. “Hi, Herb. How are you doing?”

“Okay. Didn’t mean to be a jerk the other day.”

“You’ve got a lot on your mind. Any results yet?”

“We should find out today. I heard about the fire. You coming in to work? I’ve got something.”

I looked at the clock. Nine twenty. I’d gotten about four hours of sleep. Not too bad.

“What is it?”

“I got in early, went through the old Gingerbread Man files. Something was missing. I remember searching Kork’s house and finding an address book. Wasn’t there.”

“Misfiled?”

“Signed out. Bill checked the sheet, and the last person to go through the Kork stuff was our old friend Barry Fuller, right after the case ended. So I had Bill pull Barry’s things, and found the address book.”

“You wouldn’t be telling me this unless you found something.”

“Book was mostly empty, except for some scribbles. They look like the letter L, except some of them were upside down and backwards.”

That got me fully awake. “Is it a code?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

I showered, and dressed in a gray Shin Choi A-line skirt, a white Barbara Graffeo blouse, and some Dior flats, no hose. The shoes were acquired at an outlet store and had been mispriced. I got them for eight bucks. I remember holding my breath when the cashier rang them up, figuring she’d notice. She didn’t. That’s been the high point of my year so far.

The day was dark, cool. Looked like rain. I stopped at the churros cart before going to my office, and bought Herb two with extra cinnamon.

“Churros?” Benedict lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. “Jack, my stomach thanks you. Both for me?”

“Both for you.”

He bit a sizeable portion out of the first. “Mmmm. I’m taking you to dinner on your birthday.”

Benedict had been saying that for years. By my count, he owed me 108 dinners.

“What have you got, Herb?”

He handed me the address book, open to the page with the scribbles on it.

“I thought it was a doodle at first. But then I realized it had ten characters.”

“A phone number with an area code.”

Herb nodded, his mouth full of fried Mexican dough. While he chewed, I stared at the symbols.

“Pigpen code.”

My partner frowned. “That took me an hour to figure out.”

“We learned it in Girl Scouts.” I drew a quick tic-tac-toe board and filled it in with numbers. “Each symbol represents the number inside it. So the first number is a two.”

Herb stared at me as if I’d grown a tail. “You were a Girl Scout?”

“My mother thought it would build character.”

“Can you get cookies at a discount?”

I quickly deciphered the first nine numbers. The dot on the end had to stand for a zero.

I clucked my tongue. “Two-one-nine area code. Indiana.”

“I already looked up the number. It’s in Gary. Unlisted. And you won’t believe who it belongs to.”

Herb waited for me to ask, so I did.

“Tell me if this name sounds familiar, Jack. The owner of that phone number is Bud Kork.”

“The Gingerbread Man’s father?”

We’d tried to locate him after the murders, but he never turned up.

“The one and only.”

I thought about the jar of severed toes, all of them at least thirty years old. Too old for Charles Kork to have done it, but not too old for his father.

“Insanity runs in families.” Herb shoved the remainder of the churros in his mouth.

I rolled it around in my head. Could our perp be the father, taking over where his son left off?

Only one way to find out for sure.

“Want to go for a ride?”