Gideon's Corpse

16

In the week before December twenty-second, Kim’s call register listed seventy-one outgoing calls during work hours. They quickly discarded the calls that came from numbers in Kim’s address book and focused on the rest. There were groups of them, implying Chalker had borrowed the phone to make bunches of calls at the same time.

When they listed all of these calls, there was a total of thirty-four.

They divvied up the work, Gideon calling while Fordyce used his computer to access an FBI reverse-lookup database and gather personal information on the numbers. In half an hour they had identified each number and compiled a list.

They both stared at the list in silence. It seemed innocuous enough, consisting of work associates, a doctor’s office, dry cleaners, a Radio Shack, several to the imam of the mosque, and a scattering of other miscellaneous calls. Fordyce got up and ordered another triple espresso, returning with the empty cup, having already consumed it on the way back to the table.

“He called the Bjornsen Institute of Writing three times,” said Gideon.

Fordyce grunted.

“Maybe he was writing something. Like I said, he had an interest in writing.”

“Call them.”

Gideon called. He spoke for a moment, hung up, gave Fordyce a smile. “He took a writing workshop.”

“Yeah?” Fordyce was interested.

“It was called Writing Your Life.”

Another long silence. Fordyce gave a low whistle. “So he was, what, writing his memoirs?”

“Seems so. And that was four months ago. Six weeks later, he dropped out, disappeared, and joined the jihad.”

As this sank in, Fordyce’s face lit up. “A memoir… That could be pure gold. Where’s this institute?”

“Santa Cruz, California.”

“Let me call them—”

“Wait,” said Gideon. “Better if we just go. In person. You call them ahead of time, that’ll open up a can of worms. If the official investigation gets wind of it, we’ll be shut out.”

“I’m supposed to clear all our movements through the field office,” said Fordyce, almost to himself. “If we fly commercial, I’d have to get permission…” He thought for a moment. “But we don’t have to fly commercial. We can rent a plane at the airfield.”

“Yeah, and who’s going to fly it?”

“Me. I’ve got a VFR license.” And he began dialing a number.

“Who are you calling?” Gideon asked.

“Local airfield.”

Gideon watched Fordyce talk animatedly into the phone. He wasn’t too keen on flying, especially in a small private plane, but he sure didn’t want Fordyce to know that.

Fordyce put down the phone. “The FBO at the airfield can rent us a plane—but not for a few days.”

“That’s too long. Let’s drive there instead.”

“And waste all that investigative time just sitting in a car? Anyway, I’ve got an appointment in the FBI Albuquerque field office tomorrow at two o’clock.”

“So what do we do in the meantime?”

This was followed by silence. Then Gideon answered his own question. “You remember I told you Chalker gave away most of his stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“He offered me some of his book collection. Novels. Thrillers. I wasn’t interested, and so he mentioned something about giving them to the library of one of the Indian schools around here. San Ildefonso, I think.”

“Where’s that?”

“A pueblo on the way to Los Alamos. They’re a small Indian tribe, known for their dances and black pottery. Chalker was a fan of the dances, at least until he converted.”

“Did he donate his computer? Papers?”

“No, he just gave away the stuff he considered decadent—books, DVDs, music.”

There was a silence.

“So maybe we should go over to San Ildefonso,” said Gideon. “Check out those books.”

Fordyce shook his head. “They’re from his pre-conversion days. They won’t tell us anything.”

“You never know. There might be papers stuck into them, notes in the margins. You said we had to do something—so here’s something to do. Besides—” and Gideon leaned forward—“it’s the one place we can guarantee there won’t be a line in front of us.”

Fordyce stared out the window. “You’ve got a point.”