Salem's Cipher (3 page)

He studied her for a moment longer, an exclamation point of crisp darkness in the dawning light of the apartment, hair shaved close to the scalp, eyes bright and quick, nose strong over sculpted lips. Salem risked a glance, and his gaze laid her bare.

“Are you and your mother close?”

No, Agent Stone, we are not.
“I last saw her a few weeks ago.” Her cheeks burned so hot that her eyes watered as she stared at her feet. “But she always answers when I call.”

He paused a moment before answering. “I'll send officers to her home immediately.”

Salem clenched her jaw so no emotions could leak past, only words. “Thank you. Also, I'm not feeling well. ” She glanced at Bel, passing her a look they hadn't used since high school. “Can you come with me?”

The secret code hummed inside her purse.

It sounded like an urgent, papery whisper of warning.

4

Linden Hills, Minnesota

T
here was a whole lot FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Lucan Stone didn't like about this case.

He didn't care for the fact that five victims had been reported in seven days, their throats cut with an identical weapon, their bodies discovered in each corner of the United States, from Florida to Arizona to Nebraska and now Minnesota.

He also didn't like the nagging sense that there were far, far more victims out there than they would ever know.

And as head of a four-man task force, what really pissed him off? He hadn't a single lead.

Not one of the descriptions of the perp had lined up true, but they'd at least had a profile before this Linden Hills discovery. Their serial killer was certainly male, white, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. His victims were all female, four Caucasian and one multi-racial, two sets of them mothers/adult daughters and the fifth woman unrelated, none of them sexually violated. According to the FBI profiler assigned to the investigation, the killer had grown up with a domineering mother and an absent father. He also had a job that allowed him to travel without drawing suspicion. He was likely single and heterosexual.

His MO was consistent: locate the victim in her home, slice her throat, vanish. No staging. The only signature was a
lack
of a signature. If not for the peculiar randomness of the victims other than the two mother-daughter connections—a Cuban grandmother in Florida City, a woman who sold sage and crystals in Sedona, a newly married farmer's wife in Nebraska, a Maine attorney, and an elementary school teacher from Southern California—Agent Stone would have marked him for a contract killer.

Then along came this Minneapolis murder of a woman and her dog and the potential kidnapping or murder of Grace Odegaard. This perp's methods were identical—locate the woman in her home, slice her throat, disappear—which is why Stone and his partner had been called in, along with their task force. But this murder had taken place inside a female-only building, and the security tapes, which were as grainy as breakfast cereal and which he'd watched forward and backward twice, showed only women entering and leaving.

He powerfully hoped that it wasn't a serial killer
couple
they were dealing with because the only break they'd had so far was the media not yet connecting the cross-country killings. If it turned out they had a Bundy and Clyde on their hands, there's no way the press wouldn't catch wind of it. The FBI would lose their meager advantage.

Frankly, it was amazing the connections between the killings hadn't already been leaked. Senator Gina Hayes was likely to thank for that. The woman dominated the media. With the presidential election little more than a week away, she couldn't sneeze without it making headlines.

Stone didn't particularly care for politics. He liked that a black man was the current president. He'd like that a woman was president, too, if she did a good job. But he had more immediate issues in his sightline.

“Agent Stone?” The uniformed police officer stood a respectful distance away, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, like a kid who needed to pee.

Stone glanced up from Vida Wiley's FBI file, which he'd pulled the second Isabel Odegaard and Salem Wiley had left for the bathroom. Other than an unusual amount of cross-country and out-of-country flying for a history professor, nothing stood out. The examiners were closing up their murder bags and hoisting Mrs. Gladia into the body sack, which meant the cleaning crew would be arriving soon. He needed to find something, anything, any detail that had been overlooked. “Yes?”

“We've located a human finger.” The officer jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the back of the building. “In the dumpster. It's been sliced off like a rat's tail.”

Stone was about to reprimand the officer for his cavalier word choice when he noticed his face. It glowed with that waxy sheen that comes right before you vomit. “Female?”

“The techs say they think so.” The officer swayed, wiping at moisture collecting above his mustache. “It's a pinkie.”

“God
damn
.” Stone swallowed past his disgust because he knew what this meant: they might finally have a lead. “Get it to the lab.”

“It's already on its way, sir.”

He'd have assumed as much. The Minneapolis police force was one of the most efficient he'd worked with, their techs the best in the business. He glanced at the uniform's name tag. “Is there anything else, Officer Benokraitis?”

“Not really.” The young officer twitched at the loud zip of the body bag closing. “The techs haven't been able to enter the blood samples into the system. Too many cases ahead of you.” He nodded agreeably, on more comfortable ground now. “But some patrol cops were in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood and rushed to Vida Wiley's house, like you asked. They radioed that there's no sign of her, or of any trouble.”

Stone nodded. That's what he'd figured. He returned to the file, picturing Isabel Odegaard and Salem Wiley blowing in here like a hurricane. Odegaard was all business, scrambling to keep it together and be in charge all at once, an outlook that he understood intimately. Wiley he couldn't read as well. All he knew for sure was that she was so pretty she'd squeezed his heart when he first laid eyes on her.

He didn't like what it meant for either of them that the perp—if it was the same slicer he'd been following—had gone quirky with the finger. A serial killer changing his MO this late in the spree indicated an increasingly unbalanced mind.

The brutality of the crimes was guaranteed to escalate.

5

Linden Hills, Minneapolis

W
ith shaking hands, Salem smoothed the note from her mother on the bathroom counter of the third-floor apartment commandeered for police use. Bel stood watch at the door. Since they'd arrived at Grace's, Bel's gaze had grown hollow, her skin ashen, but she still held herself like a rod.

Bel blinked toward the note. “What's it mean?”

Salem shot her a weak smile. “Not anything worth bothering the FBI about. I bet it's a note Mom wrote years ago.”

Yet, she didn't quite believe that, or they wouldn't be here now.

She reached into her purse and tugged out a pen and pad of paper before grabbing the ancient spectacles. Their thin, rusting wire was wrapped around misshapen glass lenses. The ear bands were little more than metal sticks crafted of a copper so old it had turned green. Salem held them toward the light and squinted. The lenses were all scratched up. She set them to the side and pinned her attention on the note.

Bits: bwsmttmijwcbzmdmvombpmvowpwumnwttwebpmbziqtbzcabvwwvm

She was most comfortable solving computer problems. All the clean 1s and 0s could be perfectly lined up to crack a code as crisply as a key slid into a new lock. Her thesis research had taught her that Charles Babbage's Difference Engine was conceived in 1822 and the computer program written for it by Ada Lovelace in 1842, but it was Turing's Enigma cracker, first envisioned in 1936 and built in 1940, that demonstrated the code-breaking power of computing machines.

Alan Turing developed the apparatus for the British government during World War II. Turing's machine built off of an earlier model to crack even the most advanced German code, effectively shaving at least two years off of WWII and creating the first working model of a general computer. Salem wished for a handheld model now to help her crack the code her mother had left.

“Agent Stone asked me if we knew where Grace or Vida were.” Bel's words startled Salem. She glanced up from the note as Bel continued. “When we were both in my mom's bedroom. I told him we didn't know anything. We don't, right?”

“Not yet we don't.” Salem returned her attention to the message, clicking her focus back into processor mode. When she'd initially shown an interest in computers, she'd been excited to discover how many females had been involved in their development. Jean Jennings Bartik was one of six women who created programs for ENIAC, the first electronic general computer, in the 1940s. A decade later, Grace Hopper led the creation of COBOL, the original widely-used computer programming language. Computer science had been built on the work of women, who in the early years entered through the field of mathematics.

With computers, Salem felt like she was home.

But this code from her mom was old school, which was unsurprising given Vida's general avoidance of computers. With all the
w
s and
z
s and
j
s, it was unlikely to be a transposition cipher, where letters were jumbled to create an anagram. It was more probable that her mom had written her a substitution cipher, either a simple Caesar or a Vigenère.

“I don't think the FBI knows anything either.” Bel pressed her ear to the door. “And it looked like the beginnings of a task force out there. Plus, the ME would have come and gone by now if this was a standard homicide. I don't like any of this.”

Salem didn't either. She tapped the pencil eraser on the paper while she pondered. In a Caesar cipher, each letter in the alphabet was replaced by a letter a fixed number of positions down the alphabet. So if the Caesar cipher had a right shift of four, every
a
in the code became a
d
, every
b
an
e
, every
c
an
f
, and so on. It was a fairly easy code to break by using frequency analysis, starting with short words. In English, for example, a single-letter word was only going to be
I
or
a
, and a three-letter word was most likely to be
the
or
and
. Once those letters were established, the cryptanalyst worked out from there, making educated guesses until the puzzle was solved.

Salem began chewing on the end of the pencil. She held up the note so she could examine it from different angles. A Vigenère cipher was a Caesar cipher on steroids. If one didn't know the keyword, the code was uncrackable. At least it was until Babbage discovered that modular arithmetic and a dash of intuition could break
le chiffre indéchiffrable
.

Salem scribbled Vida's note on her pad, trying the Vigenère cipher first, using
Bits
as the keytext. When that didn't work, she switched to the simple Caesar cipher, testing every possibility in chronological order: right shift of one, right shift of two, right shift of three. It would have been easier if Vida had included spaces between words so Salem could run a frequency analysis, but she worked with what she had. Right shift of four, right shift of five …

When Salem arrived at right shift of eight, her heartbeat picked up. She felt the familiar buzz of a puzzle coming together.

Bel shifted at the door. “Any luck?”

Salem nodded. She was close. Letters were turning into words, words into messages.

“Okay.” Bel leaned her ear back against the door. “But can you hurry? We've been gone too long.”

“Yes.” Salem knew that word was the appropriate response, though she hadn't processed what Bel said. She was almost inside the mystery. She could taste it. She scribbled furiously, decoding the substitution nearly as efficiently as a computer.

“Ah!” The solution flooded through all at once.
Bits
had thrown her off. Vida hadn't meant it as her name. It was part of the code, which a plus-eight Caesar cipher revealed to be:

Talk: to Keller about revenge then go home follow the trail trust no one

The cold tongue of fear licked her spine. This was a fresh note, and her mom had intended for them to find it at Gracie's. That meant that whatever tragedy had befallen Grace had also happened to Vida.

And she had known it was coming.

For the first time, Salem wondered why the FBI had been called in.

“Bel,” Salem whispered, “I don't think our moms were randomly kidnapped.”

A heavy knock landed on the bathroom door.

Salem, wound tight, squealed. Bel snapped into a fighting stance, her expression steely.

“Ms. Odegaard and Ms. Wiley? Agent Stone would like to meet with the two of you in the lobby, if you don't mind.”

6

Linden Hills, Minneapolis

S
alem ran over the words like a mantra as they left the bathroom, kept murmuring them as they entered the elevator, didn't stop when they laid eyes on Agent Lucan Stone in the lobby.

Talk: to Keller about revenge then go home follow the trail trust no one

Stone gestured toward the chocolate velvet couch near the door. “I have some more questions. Do you mind?”

Bel moved toward the sofa.

Salem didn't.

Are you and your mother close?

Geographically, less than three miles separated Salem's apartment from her childhood home. Emotionally, she might as well live in China for all the distance between her and her mother. They faked it well—phone calls twice a month and dinner once, erudite conversations on topics that Vida Wiley was passionate about, cards and gifts at all the appropriate holidays. Someone examining the relationship from the outside would have no idea how high the wall was between Salem and her mother, would compliment the two of them on what good friends they appeared to be. It had happened many times.

You two are almost like sisters.

The chasm between appearance and truth left a vacant spot inside Salem, a tunnel from her heart to her mouth where something solid should be.

“Do we have to answer your questions?” Salem gasped, startled that she'd talked back to Agent Stone—she, who'd spent her adult life avoiding conflict, who struggled to look people in the eye, who valued routine and order. And if she slowed down, she'd have to think about that, and about the repercussions, and about that shiny body bag they'd walked by to take the elevator down. So she floated ten feet above her frame, a gray balloon tied tenuously to the wrist of the shivering woman below.

“Are you asking if I can detain you?” If Salem's question caught Stone off guard, he didn't show it.

“Yes.” She watched her own feet. She felt him studying her, the whole energy of him trying to get inside her head.

“I can't keep you here,” he finally said, “but the more information I have, the quicker I can locate your mothers.”

“Salem?”

Salem glanced at her friend. Bel had brushed her hair in the bathroom and wore her smooth police officer expression, but worry and exhaustion lurked just below the surface. Salem felt the same emotions, her brain and body groaning under the weight of Grace and Vida's disappearance. As heavy as that was, though, it was outweighed by the memory of standing on shore doing nothing, not even yelling, as her dad deliberately drowned himself.

Vida's instructions in the balsa wood box had been clear:

Talk: to Keller about revenge then go home follow the trail trust no one

It was the most authentic communication she'd had with her mother in fourteen years. “I want to leave, Bel. Now.”

Bel's gaze sharpened. Salem knew she wanted more details on the case, wanted to stay and be the questioner rather than the questioned. In the end, though, she turned to Stone. “We're going to leave, Agent Stone.”

He drew up his shoulders. Salem thought he was going to argue, convince them to stay. He surprised her by instead reaching into his jacket and pulling out a card, which he handed to Salem. She reached for it.

“It's a bad idea that you leave,” he said. He didn't release the card, held firm until she finally glanced up. His deep brown gaze pinned Salem in her spot. She felt it like an electric jolt.

“Vida Wiley is not in her home, and until we hear otherwise, we're assuming she and Grace Odegaard are together and being held involuntarily.”

The world tipped for Salem. Still, she gripped the card.

“There is a possibility that the person holding them may target you, as well.” He finally let go of the card and turned to Bel. “Both of you.”

Bel nodded sharply. “Understood.”

“Thank you.” Salem slurred the word because her mouth was so dry. She tucked the card in her jeans pocket and walked toward the door, Bel following.

“My number is on there,” Agent Stone called after them. “Call if you need me.”

And you're
going
to need me
, Salem thought she heard him say, but by then they were out the door, crunching over leaves as brittle as bones.