The Redactor, Chapter 09

Barely half-an-hour.

  That’s how long it took the police to track me down.

  My guess is the nosey couple had found Li Min’s body, and called it in. The police had canvassed the corridor and obtained my details from the man with the toolbox. It isn’t hard to copy down a driver’s license. A search for my name in the hotel registry database would have quickly yielded my hotel.

  On reaching my room, I had tossed my briefcase on the bed, and taken a shower. I’m not normally a long showerer, but when I towelled off, the clock by the bed told me I’d been in there for almost half-an-hour.

  I put my trousers back on, found a small bottle of bourbon from the minibar, and took it out onto the balcony. I was on the fifth floor, close enough to see the police car arrive, and its officers stride purposefully into the lobby. A minute later the phone rang. I answered. It was the concierge, checking that everything was to my satisfaction.

  Checking that I was in.

  The phone call confirmed it. The cops were coming for me.

  For a moment I contemplated waiting for them to arrive. My anger seemed to have burned itself out, and now I simply felt sick. The urge to wait for the police was strong. They were the good guys. I was a good guy.

  But then I remembered Detectives Thomas and Palmer of Murdoch Police Station. I remembered the death smile. You didn’t give the good guy the death smile.

  I threw a shirt on—no time for the tie, which smelt of vomit in any case. I picked up my shoes, socks, and briefcase, and slipped out the door, and along the corridor toward the fire stairs.

  I bounded down the stairs on bare feet, and had reached the third floor landing when I heard the clap of hard-soled shoes rising up the stairwell, and the measured breathing of a fit man. I ducked into the corridor, shut the door, and pressed my ear to it.

  My wrist buzzed once, and I realized my Medline watch was bleeping at me. The adrenaline of my flight had pushed my heart rate into the red zone. I wrapped my hand over the watch to mute its noise, and tried to think calming thoughts.

  The clap-clop of standard issue shoes rose, until they sounded from the other side of the door, then began to die away.

  I lifted my hand from the watch. My heart rate was dropping back into the green zone. I opened the fire door, and with a glance up the stairwell, continued, padding slowly downward on my bare feet. I didn’t want to die. I also didn’t want to burst from the stairwell into the lobby looking like a fugitive.

  At the ground floor, I paused to put my shoes on, took a breath and squared my shoulders, then entered the lobby.

  Through the glass revolving door that gave onto the street, I could see a tour bus parked, its freight hatches thrown open. It had evidently disgorged its passengers into the lobby. The buzz of voices and clatter of luggage feet on tiles filled the air.

  I set my face toward the revolving door and headed for it, my back prickling with imagined glances. I hoped there was no cop stationed on the street.

  There wasn’t. I walked till my feet began to ache, stopping only at an automatic teller to drain my savings accounts dry. I had $5722.25 in my wallet, and after that it was the credit card, and a big fat blip on the radar every time I charged it.

  When I finally found a public phone with an enclosed booth, I entered, shut the door, and hunched over the machine to take a little weight off my feet.

  I picked up the receiver, slipped a $10 note into its slot, and dialled Australia.

  “Murdoch Police Station. How may I help?”

  “I want to speak to Detective Thomas,” I said. Then added, “Tell him it’s Jack Griffin,” thinking that ought to shift him off his donut.

  Tinny holding music, then a gruff voice. “Thomas here, Mr Griffin.”

  “How’s the investigation going, Detective Thomas?” There was a tremor in my voice.

  “So, so,” he said, as if I’d disturbed his rest about as much as rain a rock. “We have one person of interest who doesn’t follow instructions too well.”

  “I guess you’re talking about me,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Want to tell me about it?”

  “I’m in Hong Kong.”

  That put a ripple through his calm.

  “Then if you want to avoid a world of trouble, you’d better get your arse back in Perth.”

  “He’s done the next one.”

  “Who’s done what?” he said irritably.

  “Detective Thomas of the Murdoch police station, I’m on the phone to you to tell you that Hieronymus Beck has murdered another girl. The next one on his list. You do remember the list I showed you this morning? Now do you believe me?”

  There was a long pause, then he said, “Okay, but the best place in the world for you right now is here, so—”

  “Okay?” I said, almost a shout. “Li Min. Her name was Li Min. And now she’s dead.”

  I hung up.

  The digital readout on the phone said I had $5.60 credit left. I dialled the US, California.

  A sweet voice spoke from the receiver, and echoed in my head: “Hello?”

  “Tracey, Honey, it’s Dad, I just—”

  A giggle interrupted me, then, “Just Kidding. You got the machine. Leave a message at the...” Beep.

  Where was she? It was early morning in San Francisco, and Tracey had never been an early riser.

  Then I remembered. She was in New York, attending a seminar by some screen guru. Damn.

  I hung the receiver up, and waited without much hope for it to return my remaining credit. It didn’t.

  From the safety of the booth I scanned the street for uniformed cops. Nothing. Across the street a damaged neon sign advertised an Internet cafe. I exited the booth, crossed the street, and descended steps that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. I bought a watery coffee and an hour’s credit, and wedged myself into a corner seat in front of a terminal.

  I must’ve been the oldest patron by twenty years. I hefted my briefcase onto the desk by the terminal, and hunkered down behind it.

  Behind closed eyes, my thoughts eddied and wouldn’t sit still. Li Min’s face kept bobbing to the surface, and then came the painting of the devil creature and its yellow eyes. I felt again the cold shower water that had made me shiver, and remembered how my eyes had stung when I’d cried again. I don’t know if the tears were for the girl or me. Probably me. I didn’t know her from a bar of soap.

  But hardly anyone has seen her the way you have...

  The part of my brain that I would have until then called cautious kept jabbing me with the assertion that the police hadn’t been looking for me.

  But beneath it, a harder voice, told it to shut up. Start working on a way out of this hell.

  I knuckled my eyes, and opened them. No one was looking at me. Okay.

  My first task was to gauge Hiero’s next move. But I had failed at that once already. I decided to take my own advice. I would research.

  I opened my briefcase and took out Li Min’s journal. The cover was so pink. I shot an embarrassed glance about the room, but no-one seemed to be paying me any attention.

  The journal’s lock was thicker than the usual bon-bon treat securing a girl’s journal (A guess based on a sample of one—my daughter). But the clasp it was holding was weaker than a tin can. It tore away easily, and I folded the journal’s cover back.

  The first page was covered in a neat, small script. The date at the top left of the page indicated the first of January. Li Min was a journal keeper. I flipped forward till the writing abruptly disappeared and I hit blank pages, then backtracked to her last entries, looking for what exactly, I wasn’t sure.

  As I read, the dead girl’s voice spoke in my mind. And her favourite word was Hieronymus. Never Hiero. Always Hieronymous. It was an infatuation, complete and utter. I skipped back through the year to find where the infection had begun, and found her first glowing tribute to the ebullient American with the brown hair and deep blue—almost alien eyes—and the chivalrous manner. As I flicked forward, the voice told me of group dates to the movies and karaoke, coffees with friends, and ultimately, dinner alone. They read heavy books together on blankets by the river, and she learned of the novel he dreamed to write. She believed the dream.

  And having believed the dream, her journal entries grew terse. The end of semester closed in, and she feared their parting would be the end of their relationship.

  She wrote nothing in the final week of semester, and her journal ended with one last abrupt entry. It had been written only yesterday. It said: tonight we celebrate our love. Love was followed not by a full stop, but an absurd winking emoticon.

  Following that was the last phrase Li Min wrote in her journal, perhaps the last she ever wrote: Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffin.

  I shook my head, frustrated, and glanced about the cafe. But there was no-one there to help. No one that understood.

  It took a moment for the bomb to drop.

  Griffin?

  I scanned the last journal entry again. Obviously I had misread.

  But no. There on the page, in stubborn ink: Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffin.

  Griffin?

  I’d dropped acid and this was my trip, only I’d forgotten I’d taken it.

  Griffin.

  The girl I didn’t know knew me. The dead girl, the hard-liner in my head added.

  And why MC Griffin? Of what Celebration was I supposedly Master, pray tell, dead girl? Your celebration of love?

  What the hell was I doing in Li Min’s journal entry for the day she died?

  Hoping to silence the dead girl’s voice, I clapped the journal shut and threw it back into my briefcase, and withdrew, instead, Hiero’s folder.

  I wet the end of a finger and flicked through his notes, past the injured girl, past the dead, to number three. I pulled it out and extracted the key parameters.

 

  Means: Blunt force trauma

  Scene: Vienna, Hauptbahnhof

  Time: TBD

  Victim: Chalky.

 

  He had dropped the poetry, which was helpful, but the information was scant. Means, city, even place. But no time. And Chalky? The name wasn’t familiar. It sounded like a nickname.

  Assuming Hiero was targetting exchange students, would it be enough to determine which one he had next in his sights?

  I pushed the folder aside, pulled the computer keyboard over, and entered the code for my hour’s credit. Soon I was looking at the familiar login screen for the university student database. I entered my credentials and fidgeted while thousands of miles away a computer tucked into a room the size of a closet on the university decided whether to trust me.

  The seconds mounted till at last it replied, Forbidden. Not friendly, but unambiguous. Someone had terminated my access.

  Which was either an error—possible—or the police had contacted the university. And the only reason I could think of for them to do that was that they suspected I was on the loose and intent on fiddling with students.

  Ignoring the part of me that said, ‘Bugger them—forget about it and let them find out the hard way who is fiddling with the students’, I rubbed my face with both palms and tried to think of Plan—which plan was I up to now, anyway? Let’s call it Plan F.

  The professor was hiking into Plan F, and Hiero, the alpha male, was still cruising on the alpha plan.

  Think, man.

  I looked again at the screen that was still telling me politely, but forcefully, that I was Verboten, when I noticed the fine print at the bottom of the screen, the essence of which was that in the event I thought the response mistaken, I should contact the administrator.

  A glimmer of hope. Plan F grew legs. I would contact the administrator. An administrator, to be precise.

  I closed the database screen and logged into Skype. Within the program, in a pane on the left, a list of my contacts was displayed. For each contact a small icon indicated if they were logged into Skype, and whether they were available. I scanned the names until I found the one I wanted—Matthew Price. His icon was a happy green, indicating he was online, like always. Matthew Price was a geek, a techie through and through. He would be the first on the list for surgically implanted ‘net connections when they became available.

  He was there, and a click away. He was also an administrator of the university computer systems. He would be able to get me into the database.

  Matthew Price also happened to be an ex-boyfriend of my daughter. And in this case, that was good. Theirs had been an amicable parting, and I had always had time for him. I hoped it would be enough now.

  I initiated a chat session: “Matt. Can you talk?”

  A full three seconds later his reply bobbed onto my screen: “Sort of. In the thick of a rollout... what’s up?”

  “I need you to run a query on the student database.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “No. I can’t login.” Please don’t ask me why.

  “OK. Send me the details. I’ll run it tonight.”

  “It’s urgent. I need it yesterday.”

  A pause.

  “Send it through.”

  “I want a student with...” What? I wracked my brain for where to start. “A name like ‘chalk’.”

  Another pause.

  “Okaaay. What sort of like? Includes chalk, sounds like chalk, hobbies include collecting chalk?”

  Smartarse.

  “Whatever you’ve got,” I said.

  A full minute passed, while I watched the cursor pulsing on the screen. Then his reply came.

  “Not much there. Best I got is Ryan Faulk.”

  “Is he an exchange student? Sorry, meant to say to limit the search to exchange students.”

  “Nope.”

  Damn.

  I snatched up Heiro’s third sheet and ran my eye over it again.

  That’s when I noticed the ‘a’ in chalky had an umlaut over it. It was faint, but there.

  I typed: “Okay. Forget chalk. Just give me students from Germanic countries.”

  Two minutes passed this time, and then a list spewed onto my screen. It had to be twenty names long or more. This was getting me nowhere. Maybe the umlaut was just fly crap.

  My mind returned to Time. The first sheet had a time. The second was vaguer. But this had no time at all? Nothing but TBD—To Be Decided. No help at all.

  Did I need to get more lateral? Maybe TBD stood for something else. I squeezed my mind sideways. Maybe it was an abbreviation for a time period, a celebration, a season...

  I dragged my Skype connection with Matthew to one side, and opened a web browser. I searched for definitions of TBD.

  The first definition my search returned was something called TBD Fest. My pulse quickened. Clicking around the site I discovered that TBD Fest was “a multi-day festival that embraces creativity through music, art, design, food and ideas.”

  Perfect. My mind filled with a vision of students thronging a stage, surging half-seen to the music, and prowling at its edges in the near-dark, Hiero.

  But after my initial excitement I saw that the festival was held in October, not November. And Sacremento, not Vienna.

  Returning to the results of my search I discovered that TBD might be a record label, a restaurant, an organic food importer or an accountancy firm. It could mean To Be Delayed, To Be Deleted. To Be Discontinued.

  Equally well it might stand for Tick-borne Disease, Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Triazabicyclodecene (good for all of your Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reactions needs).

  It could signify The Best Deceptions.

  In short it could mean just about anything.

  It could even mean Tipsy Borderline Drunk, which was becoming more appealing with every minute I sat in that Internet Cafe.

  It took a memory of Li Min’s forever stilled body to snap me out of my self-pity.

  Only then did I gain the presence of mind to step back. Perhaps I was being too lateral. Hiero’s second sheet, the one foretelling Li Min’s murder, had been figurative, slantwise. But the first sheet, detailing the attempted murder of Rhianne Goldman had been straight down the line.

  I activated Skype again and typed another message: “Give me the cities of all exchange students that did humanities this semester.” Li Min had returned to her home city at the end of semester. Perhaps Chalky, whoever he or she was, would too?

  Scant seconds elapsed before another list rolled up onto my screen, pushing the names above.

  I scanned the cities listed there, until my gaze struck one: Vienna, Austria.

  “Which student lives in Vienna,” I said.

  “Annika Krieder,” came the reply.

  On a hunch I searched for that name and ‘chalk’, and was immediately rewarded: Krieder, derived from kriede, the German word for chalk.

  Chalky. I’d found my man. Woman. It appeared Hiero was targeting females. I could add that to the next search.

  Next? Damn. For a moment I’d begun to think I was playing a game.

  I asked for her phone number in Vienna, but Matt could only find an address. I copied that down, and said, “Thanks, Matt. Hope you get your rollout done.”

  “No probs, Professor,” he replied. “Glad to help.”

  Professor? He never called me professor. Matt’s rollout mustn’t have been going so smoothly...

  The last thing I did before logging off was to send Jean an email. They say communication is vital to marriage. A degree in literature doesn’t help any. My emails simply said: “I’m in the shit.”