The Book of 21 (7 page)

“That’s it? That was
The Book of 21
?”

“No, that’s just the folktale,” she countered. “It got Ted published; he was smart enough to keep that one away from Dunglison until it was accepted by a journal. It was really a great story.”

“So, then why was the paper so bad? It got him published.”

“It was sort of like the tale itself; it was both his ultimate high and ultimate downfall. Ted heard the folktale on a trip to Turkey and then went to the little village that it seemed to originate from. He wanted record it properly, based on the tales told by the people. When he was there, he heard other tales about a book that was written to record not only how the gods were imprisoned, but also how to release them. According to the stories, the book was carried back to Europe by a crusader. Once there, it came to be known as
Le Coeur Codex
, or the core book. Ted would not let that storyline go.”

“Why was that a problem?”

“It was our job, as scholars, to record the tale, but Ted’s paper on the topic started to sound like a conspiracy theory. He started drawing connections to real events and artifacts. Then he started talking about one group that wanted to find the book to restore the gods, and another that was protecting the book with funding from the church.”

“What you call ‘funding’ sounds a little like protection money,” John said. “What church?”

“He never really specified, nor could he find out. The whole theory seemed rather silly. Richard humored him and tried to show him that he should move on, but he started linking almost everything he studied back to the book.”

“Like what?”

“Well, it’s hard to remember everything right now.” Amy rubbed her forehead.

“How about the Brethren of Roxborough?”

Amy cringed. “Yeah, that was the group here locally that he felt may be the guardians of the book. It was crazy—the idea that they would happen to be right here where he was studying. Over the last few weeks, we all started to wonder if he might losing his grip on reality.” Amy kneaded her hands nervously. “Should we have said something? He didn’t seem dangerous.”

“Who knows?” John replied. “Is there anything else you want to tell me about Ted?”

She breathed deeply and shook her head.

John regarded her for a second. She seemed to be handling the stress better when she focused on the tales, but now her eyes were misting up again. He decided to give her some time to calm her emotions before he pressed too much further.

John looked at his watch; he really needed to make a few phone calls and get over to Hallman’s before someone else did. The guy that punched him in the nose might be on his way there now, and this was taking longer than he had planned. If he came back later, Amy might be able to pull herself together, and if he could find some aspirin, he might be able to stop the pounding in his aching skull. The opening he needed suddenly presented itself.

“I have to get to class,” she muttered. She wandered over to her papers, still strewn about the lawn, and started to gather them.

John stood and followed her. “Ms. Ritter…”

Without turning from her papers, she said, “Please, call me Amy.”

“OK, Amy, would it be OK if I stopped by to talk to you more later?”

“I’d like that.”

He stood there for second, somewhat puzzled by her odd response. Deciding that it might be best to clarify, he said, “Thanks, I think you may be able to add to the facts we should consider here. By the way, someone might be contacting you later for a hair sample, just to rule out any hair of yours they find up there.”

She stood up and John found himself staring into her deep blue eyes. The sunlight lit them up like sapphires. He wondered whether the hue was the result of actual pigmentation or colored contacts. He watched as she dropped her jaw ever so slightly and parted her glistening lips. After a second, she slipped her backpack onto her right shoulder and put her left hand in her pocket.

“My TA office is in Logan, the floor below Dunglison’s,” she said. “I have a class now and at two, but otherwise, I’ll be here until five.”

“Did Ted Hallman have an office as well?” John asked, puzzled at why campus security did not mention it.

“No, he was a research assistant; he didn’t teach any classes.”

“Ah, anyway, is there phone number I can use to reach you later?”

She took a paper from her stack, scrawled a number on it, and handed it to him. “There’s my office number. See you later,” she said softly. She turned and walked across campus.

He walked over to his busted cell phone and moaned. He loved that phone. Getting a new one would not be hard, but the extra chore was one more task he did not need.

After mentally constructing a list, he realized there was a lot to do. He had to go inside and make sure the right parts of the building were secure. He had to call Harry again and get a CSA team over here quickly. He needed get over to Hallman’s before someone else did. Most importantly, he needed to tell the officer at Hallman’s apartment to be ready for trouble.

Chapter 6:
Hallman’s Apartment

Hallman’s apartment building was dark and smelled like stale cheese. John walked up the dingy staircase to the fourth floor and headed down the hall. He found the officer-on-duty standing outside a doorway; next to the cop, a short old man in a t-shirt and plaid flannel pants fumbled with a large ring of keys.

“Mr. Klingman is the building super. He’s more than happy to let us in,” the cop, Pete Alvarez, said as he pointed at the short, beady-eyed old man who needed a shave and a shower.

John approached the super and held out his hand. “I’m Detective McDonough. Thanks for your help.”

“My pleasure, Detective,” the old man wheezed.

Klingman fumbled with the keys for a few more seconds, found the right one, pulled his t-shirt over his exposed belly, and moved to the door. He took some time to steady his shaking hands long enough to get the key in the lock. After a second, Klingman sighed, looked back at John, and weakly grinned.

John guessed that Klingman’s shaking was not due to cold or fear, but his age. He watched the old man labor painfully at the lock for a few more seconds. Just as he stepped forward to offer help, he heard the lock turn and saw the door pop open. Klingman slowly stepped back from the open door to allow John access.

The open door revealed an immaculate apartment. Whitewashed woodwork edged butter cream walls. A glass-topped coffee table sat before a brown leather sofa that looked as if it belonged in the Reform Club of jolly old Pall Mall, waiting for Phineas Fogg to rest his keester upon it and declare that he could make it around the world in eighty days. A red oriental rug concealed the tattered living room carpet. The fresh scent of cinnamon billowed outward and extinguished the scent of spoiled dairy that permeated the halls. The room was nicer than anything John had ever called his own.

“It’s a shame,” Klingman wheezed. “He was a very good man. I wish that all the other tenants kept their apartment as well and paid their rent so reliably.” He looked in at the living room, and said, “I will miss young Ted.”

John stepped into the living room. To the right, two doors flanked Hallman’s computer desk. They opened into the bedroom and kitchen.

Bookcases covered the wall to the left. Stuffed onto their shelves were classics of literature and contemporary literary works. In the classic genre, John saw
The Canterbury Tales
,
Crime and Punishment
,
Heart of Darkness
,
The Inferno
, and
Paradise Lost
. On the contemporary side, he saw
Atlas Shrugged
,
The Name of the Rose
, and
Tropic of Capricorn
. Other books also covered a spectrum of works outside the contemporary and classic titans. Hallman had arranged all the books alphabetically by title.

In the last column of shelves, John found research textbooks and compilations of folk tales. This set of books was set apart from all of the others by its own organizational structure. They seemed to be grouped first by topic, then alphabetically by author.

The worth of the books astounded John. He considered the possibility that the massive private collection was an egghead’s stand-in for safari trophies; the menagerie let a visitor know what works Hallman had conquered.

“Did Mr. Hallman say anything to you in the past few days?” John asked Klingman.

“No, nothing.”

“Did he have any friends in the building?”

“No, Mr. Hallman wasn’t here much. When I saw him in the hall, I always saw him treat everyone nicely, though you could tell that he really had nothing in common with anyone here.”

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Klingman. You have been most helpful. If you would excuse us, we are going to need to seal this apartment off as part of an investigation.”

“Oh, OK.” The old man nodded, then turned slowly and shuffled off without a glance back.

John thought back to Dunglison’s letter; he said Hallman would arrange for someone to find his information. Based on the interaction Klingman described, it seemed Hallman was lacking someone with which to plant clues, as Dunglison did with Brinker. If Hallman left something here, no one was going to point it out.

Slipping on a pair of rubber gloves, John turned to Alvarez, and said, “I’m looking for something—a pack of papers. They were supposedly hidden here somewhere.”

“Here?”

“Yes,” John said, realizing that Dunglison never specified that the papers would be here. He thought it best to keep Alvarez thinking that a search had some purpose. “Look around. Try not to disturb anything, but let’s see if we can find them.”

Alvarez tilted his head and shrugged. “OK, I’ll take the kitchen.”

John made his way to the bedroom and scanned the room to make sure nothing would literally, or figuratively, leap out at him. A book sat open on the nightstand. On the mattress of the canopy bed was a rich and intricately woven coverlet. The top drawer of the dresser was open, exposing a pile of socks and stack of boxer-briefs. In the three lower drawers, John found a large number of polo shirts, khakis, and sweaters. The closet held three dress-suits and a few oxford shirts.

John sized up possible hiding places. The easiest spot to hide something was in between the sweaters. Upon inspection, he found that only wool and cotton pullovers occupied the drawer. The other dresser drawers were also bereft of anything unusual.

He pulled out his keychain and found a small LED flashlight he kept attached there. Kneeling down, he shined it under the bed. He found nothing.

There, down on his hands and knees, John realized he was clueless as to where the papers were; he was just flailing around in hope of stumbling across them. He would need to do better than that. He stood up, a bit embarrassed at the weak effort, and sat down on the bed.

“Think, jackass,” he murmured to himself.

John considered a few possibilities. First, there was his earlier realization that the information could be somewhere else entirely; there was no guarantee it was in the apartment. Second, Hallman could have died before he ever stashed his papers or left the appropriate clues for someone to find what he wanted to share. Third, Dunglison never said there were papers, only information; that could be hidden on Hallman’s computer. Fourth, John considered whether Hallman might have mailed it to someone, but Dunglison said the information would be found, not delivered.

He stared at the bedroom, waiting for some clue to pop out at him, but he knew that he was waiting in vain. Unless he had some idea of where or how to find the hidden information, he was wasting his time. It would be a better use of time to let Harry pick the place apart while he sipped some coffee back at the office.

He stood to leave when the book on the nightstand caught his eye; it was
Hamlet
. His mind flashed to the one word written on the wall in Dunglison’s blood. Hallman’s last moments suddenly made sense to John. Just like Dunglison, Hallman was hiding his information in a book.

“Son-of-a-bitch.”

Flipping through the book revealed no notation on the inside. It was simply a pristine copy of
Hamlet
open to page 225, where Hamlet exclaimed to Horatio, “Alas, poor Yorick!”

John’s heart sank. Hallman’s recent memories, flooding back to him in a jumbled mess, could easily explain his last words. He sighed and replaced the book.

John walked back into the living room and started up the computer. The computer screen held the message: “No fixed-disk volume found.” Someone had deleted the partition from the drive. The only way to get information off the drive now, was to painstakingly crawl through the disk bit by bit, and that was only possible if the person forgot to securely wipe the drive. He was sure someone had beaten him to the apartment.

He turned and drank in the waterfall of books. If a book held the papers, as he thought a few minutes ago, it would take quite a while to go through them all. So even if someone beat him here, there was a chance that something could still be hidden in the bookcase. He scanned through the shelves, looking for something to be out of place, but each of the books was tucked snugly into its alphabetically correct place. Scanning down through the titles, John realized Hallman had two copies of
The Canterbury Tales
on the shelf. The same was true of
A Christmas Carol
and
Frankenstein
. He jumped to
H
, and there sat a second copy of
Hamlet
.

Reaching out, he grabbed the book from the shelf and tried to open it. The hardbound cover gave resistance until he heard a snap. The book opened, revealing a hidden compartment with folded papers. John slid the papers in an evidence bag and then tucked the bag into his coat pocket.

Reexamining the shelves for any books that might bear a similar appearance to the false book he had just pillaged, he found a false copy of
Crime and Punishment
that contained condoms and liquid KY lubricant. He closed the book and kept scanning, but nothing else seemed suspicious.