Flash Point (36 page)

Sent
Yancy
to the mall.

‘That's it. The two off-site were Scarlett—'

‘Knew it,' Jenna blurted without meaning to.

‘—and Beo.'

Goldenrod crashed in, and Jenna sucked in a sharp breath. The goldenrod. So many times in this case, the damned goldenrod!

She stormed out the door and slammed it, muttering under her breath as she bustled through the room, gathering her things. ‘I saw it when Marius passed Ashlee on the bank video when he should've easily seen her. I should've known it was him when I saw it again!'

Jenna imagined Grey poking her head out of the door just a while ago, wanting to discuss the ransom note.
‘I was wanting to just kind of verify that you knew that the letter writer is writing for the group member who is not in the group but is taken away from the group …'

Grey had realized it even before she had.

Jenna grabbed her keys, rapped on the window to alert Grey. She gestured for her ex-patient to come with her. There wasn't any time to waste.

‘What the hell are you talking about?' Saleda asked, following her down the hall. ‘Where are you going?'

Jenna wheeled to face her. ‘The goldenrod. When Flint revealed the whole e-book review trick to me, I asked if he ever checked the old one now and then, just to see if anything was happening. He said no. It seemed strange he wouldn't, even if just because it was a normal human reaction. The goldenrod was intentional overlook.'

‘OK … so where are you
going
?' Saleda asked again, following her and Grey into the parking lot and to Jenna's Blazer.

Jenna opened the door and climbed in. ‘If there wasn't any message about the mall attack, then the person who led us to the mall had to know about it some other way. There's only one person who led us to the mall, and if he wanted cops at the mall, it was because he'd planned it all perfectly – he'd throw all the loose ends under the bus and get the world watching for the
real
attack.'

‘So you're
going
where?' Saleda pushed.

Goldenrod flashed in again, this time as a part of the image frozen in her mind of the cover of the classic copy of
Beowulf
she'd seen in Flint's house set out in that strange way on that little shelf that didn't belong.

‘To Flint Lewis' house,' Jenna said. ‘I don't know where the real attack will be, but you better believe Beo does.'

As the chopper clipped through the air, the scenery of busy, trafficked streets and tall buildings below gave way to more green, rows of houses so similar in size and style they could've been sliced with the same cookie cutter. Any second, Flint's split-level would come into view.

‘Grey, when we touch down, you and I need to get inside as quickly as possible. I'll take you to the book where I saw it, but I'm going to need your help figuring out what the key is,' Jenna said.

Save for the two tiny nods she gave, Grey sat as still as a statue, belted into the chopper and clutching a tablet with the ransom note displayed on its screen.

‘You're sure the ransom note's a code?' Saleda asked as the helicopter banked left toward Flint's street.

Jenna nodded. ‘It's a bunch of rambling. Has to be. Just had no idea what the key to the code might be until now.'

Saleda glanced toward Grey, who was staring straight in front of her, clutching the tablet and blinking rapidly for no reason. ‘And you're positive the book you saw is the key to the crack? Because of a color? Jenna, you know I respect you. And you know that even though I don't always ‘get' the color stuff, that it works for you and has given us lots of leads, but if what Atticus said is right, there is an attack about to happen within the hour—'

‘It's not just the color, Saleda. It was the message in the e-reader review. It said two Black Shadow operatives were on off-site assignments,' Jenna said, reaching for the handle above her. She held on, her body thrown sideways as the helicopter made its descent. She yelled louder over the din. ‘It said, ‘Scarlett is on an off-site assignment, and Beo has it covered.' On the surface, the other Black Shadow members thought it meant Beo was providing cover for Scarlett's operation off-site, but it didn't. If Flint is Beo, he's off doing God-knows-what, pretending to be kidnapped. ‘Beo has it covered,' was another one of Flint's little Easter eggs for anyone worthy enough to find it. It meant Beo –
Beowulf
the book – “covers” the details of Scarlett's assignment.'

The chopper touched down, the blades loud in Jenna's ears.

Jenna nodded to Grey. ‘It's time.' She ushered Grey to the chopper door in front of her, followed behind, and hopped out the door as Grey cleared it. She ducked and ran toward Flint Lewis's brick split-level, hair blowing everywhere, grass clippings seeming to rain up from the ground under the deafening clops of the helicopter blades.

Finally, they were inside. Jenna led Grey and Dodd through the living room and toward the library while Saleda, who was the last one in, shut the door.

Jenna stepped into the library – a place that suddenly seemed much more sinister than the last time she'd been here – her eyes trained on the strange shelf by the chair.

Dodd stopped just inside the door as Jenna crossed the room, squatted next to the stack beside the chair she'd noticed last time because
Gone with the Wind
was at its base – the only book with its spine visible to the room. She lifted the book off the top and turned it over.
A Tale of Two Cities.
The origin of Black Shadow's motto.

Her theory solidifying, one by one she plucked the books off the stack, registering each in a mental tally as she re-stacked them in front of her:
Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Les Miserables, The Scarlet Letter, Johnny Tremain,
a Sherlock Holmes mystery,
The Three Musketeers,
the gold copy of
Beowulf
, another Sherlock Holmes installment. Finally, she reached the bottom, lifting
Gone with the Wind.
‘You son of a bitch,' Jenna muttered. ‘You left the whole club right out in the open, hiding in plain sight.'

Grey's cough reminded her others were there, and Jenna looked to Dodd, who was standing quietly, scanning titles on other shelves without touching then, then toward where her thin, pale ex-patient stood in doorway.

Grey pointed toward the stack of books. ‘Do you want me to inspect that
Beowulf?'

Jenna's eyes narrowed as she looked to the stack of books. The goldenrod of its cover had made her think back to this stack of books, want to come back to it. But …

She shifted her weight, turning to face the chair behind her. Chiefly, the other books she'd left there. Kneeling on her right knee, she scanned the titles she'd known would be there even before she'd turned:
The Three Musketeers, Nicholas Nickelby,
and
Beowulf.
The second copy with a powder blue cover.

That powder blue connected in Jenna's brain, matching something she'd seen multiple times with the same person, though she hadn't been able to properly fix it in her mind before. For a moment, a second color tried to battle in, but Jenna forced it away. The powder blue was the important shade here. Most recently, it had appeared when she had searched the home of Flint Lewis, and noticed the disorganization of his bookshelf.

The scene was staged. The players all in one stack there, these books here.

‘The key is in this copy,' Jenna said, handing Grey the powder blue hardback.

Grey flipped it over in her hands, scanned the back. ‘This is converted differently. The gold one and this one might not spell out the same. You sure?'

Jenna nodded. Grey was right; the powder blue
Beowulf
was a different translation – a whole different version of the poem. But if Jenna knew Flint, he'd done that on purpose. Even if he'd expected someone to get as far as figuring out what book – and at his own home
–
to use to decipher the ransom letter's hidden message, he'd leave one more little trick. One extra test that, if you weren't smart enough, would mean you didn't get the prize.

Grey nodded, sat on the floor cross-legged. She put the book in front of her and, beside it, the tablet with the note. She stared at the two for a long moment as the quiet in the room seemed to grow around them.

Saleda stepped into the room, looked to Jenna. ‘Anything?'

‘Shh,' Dodd hissed calmly, finger to his lips.

Jenna's gaze, however, never left Grey. Grey wasn't stumped. She might look like it to Saleda, but Jenna knew the twinkle in those otherwise glassy eyes staring down at everything and nothing. She was thinking, trying to pinpoint something flitting around in her mind's eye.

After a long moment, Grey seemed to jolt from a stupor, blinking fast and looking around. Her gaze finally landed on what she'd been looking for, apparently, because she reached for the stack of books from where Jenna had stacked the ones all related to Black Shadow.

‘This blue one might pick the lock, but the gold edition had a place marker in it,' Grey said, rifling through the stack until she came up with the gold
Beowulf
paperback.

Turning the closed book up on it's end so she could see the top pages, Grey dug her fingers in between pages, opening the book and laying it splayed open to show two random pages somewhere in the middle. Grey pointed to the corner.

‘I'll be damned,' Saleda muttered.

The corner of the page on the right had been dog-eared, though only Grey had managed to notice it. But once the book was open to the page, sure enough, a single passage was underlined lightly in pencil:

Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better

to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.

For every one of us, living in this world

means waiting for our end. Let whoever can

win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,

that will be his best and only bulwark.

‘What do we do with it?' Saleda asked.

‘Flint uses numbers for the codes. Like the e-reader reviews. It's find the numbers, then they tell you which letters from the text to grab,' Jenna said. ‘So …'

‘Lines 1384, 1385, 1386, 1387, 1388, and 1389,' Grey said.

‘Well, I'd have probably just said 1384 through 1389, but yeah, let's try them,' Saleda said.

Grey uncrumpled a piece of paper from her back pocket and took out a pen from another. Diligently, she used her finger to count through the words, writing down a letter every time she reached a letter within the ransom note that corresponded to the next number in the sequence of
Beowulf
lines.

‘You know,' Jenna whispered to Saleda, ‘You gotta hand it to 'em, though. It had to take hours to write these codes.
Tedious
hours. I can hardly find time to count letters in a crossword puzzle answer, and even then I end up having to get up before I have a chance to actually try and think of the answer.'

‘Good thing he likes tedious things, because hopefully this ends with him behind bars for a long time, where he can pay attention to special details like scrubbing toilets with his own toothbrush,' Dodd said.

‘Got it,' Grey said, hopping up from the floor. She handed the paper to Jenna.

‘Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people,' Jenna read out loud. ‘What the heck does that mean?'

Grey smiled. ‘Dunno. But there's always someone who does …'

She looked toward the pocket where Jenna kept her phone, smiled slyly. Jenna grinned and snatched the phone out of her pocket, dialed Irv.

‘Irv's Omnipotent After Hours, where Irv knows all at
all
the hours. What can we help you with this evening?'

‘I need you to search for any public landmarks that have anything to do with this quote,' Jenna said. She read the passage to him. ‘It'd be somewhere big where people pay tribute to something. Maybe a museum, a hall of fame … I don't know, historic sites, battlegrounds …'

‘No need to continue this brainstorm,' Irv said. ‘Got it on the first hit. Must've been late for his Mensa meeting when they wrote the code for this one, because this one was easier to spot than Dodd's toupee.'

‘Be glad you're not on speaker,' Jenna said. ‘Hit me with it.'

Jenna listened to Irv's answer. ‘Wait! Isn't that where the people are gathering to protest the law enforcement tactics used during this case?'

Irv sighed hard. ‘Yep. Activists scheduled the rally in reaction to what happened at the mall. When they first set it up, they were just demanding the heads of the operation for using excessive, reckless force, but since then, what with the curfew and all, they're saying now's the time to take a stand and refuse to become a police state.'

‘Christ,' Jenna breathed, already striding toward the Lewis's door, memories flooding her of the awful day a couple of years ago when another brilliant sociopath had made victims out of the hundreds of people outside of a jail, rallying for a prisoner's right to life.
They're out there fighting for the cause
you
told them to believe in.
‘Thanks, Irv. Keep us posted on anything you find on Flint or his family's location. We'll touch base when we touch down again.'

Time was running out, and they all made their way to the chopper as Irv told Jenna she was welcome.

‘And Irv? One more thing … If it wouldn't be too much trouble, will you call the hospital and get an update on Yancy for me? I know they say he's fine, but I don't even know what his technical diagnosis is—'

‘Don't worry,' Irv cut in. ‘Who needs to ask when you can hack into the system and read his file? I'll have his diagnosis, prognosis, blood type, and insurance number for you by the time you've cuffed the bad guys.'