The Book of Fate (48 page)

It was easy to overlook—tucked back between the cars and filled with even more shrubbery, the narrow opening in the shrubs practically disappeared in its own natural camouflage. Fortunately for Nico, he had plenty of training with camouflage.

Nico, you got something?

Nico pulled his gun from his pants, tapping the barrel against the rosary beads on his chest. But as he strode toward the cutaway and into the dog run, all he found were muddy footprints scattered like buckshot, and patches of matted-down grass. At first glance, it looked like there could’ve been a struggle, but with the rain . . . the muddy runoff from the lot . . . it could’ve just as easily been nothing.

Undeterred, Nico searched the branches (so many crosses), the bushes, the trunks of each tree. God brought him here. The Lord would provide. He squatted down on his knees, peering under shrubs, swishing his free hand through shallow puddles. There were dog prints and footprints under a few overhanging branches, but most of the ground was already too muddy to read.

Crawling through the flooded grass, Nico felt the mud seeping through the knees of his jeans. His heart plummeted. He didn’t understand. God was . . . God was supposed to provide. But as Nico frantically searched . . . as he continued to crawl like a dog, pawing through the mud—the proof . . . where Wes went . . . all of it was gone.

“Please—please stop raining,” Nico pleaded to the now-dark sky.

The drizzle continued, falling like a mist from above.

“Please . . .
stop raining!
” Nico exploded, throwing a fistful of mud and wet grass in the air.

The drizzle continued.

Down on all fours, Nico lowered his head, watching the rosary beads swaying from his neck. How could . . . ? Why would God bring him this far? As the rain ran down his face, Nico climbed to his feet and walked deliberately between the lampposts, back to the parking lot.

His head was still down as he approached the Pontiac. He clutched the rosary, trying to say a prayer, but nothing came out. He tried closing his eyes, but all he could picture was the mess of mud and grass and sticks that covered all tracks. His fist tightened around the rosary, pulling tighter, ever tighter. God promised. He . . . He swore to me—
swore!
—that the devil’s door would remain shut—that avenging my mother’s death would bring redemption. And now to just abandon me like—

With a sharp crack, the rosary necklace snapped, spilling dozens of wooden beads like marbles down on the asphalt of the parking lot.

“No . . . God—I’m sorry—I’m so sorry!” Nico begged hysterically, scrambling to pick them all up as they bounced, rolled, and scattered in every direction. Diving sideways as he scooped them against his chest, Nico lurched for a stray wooden bead like a five-year-old trying to catch a cricket. But it wasn’t until he skidded down on his already-wet knees . . . until the bead hopped, hopped, hopped, and rolled beneath the Pontiac . . . that Nico saw the mushy wet pamphlet stuck to the ground. Just in front of the right front tire.

From the look of it—the top half perfectly flat, the bottom half swollen and soggy from the rain—the pamphlet had already been run over. But even in the moonlight, even with the top half of it flaking away and pancaked from tire treads, Nico could still read the big red-lettered restaurant name at the top of the Chinese menu. And more important, the handwritten note at the bottom.

You need to know what else he did. 7 p.m. at Woodlawn. —Ron

Ron.

Nico read the name again. And again. The Beast.

Ron.

The letters blurred in front of him. Gently peeling the menu from the asphalt, he could barely stop his hands from trembling . . . trembling just like his mom’s head. Half the menu ripped away as he tugged. He didn’t care. Clutching the soggy remains to his chest, Nico looked up at the sky and kissed the fistful of loose rosary beads in his other hand.

“I understand, God. Wes and Boyle—the traitors—together. One final test . . . one last chapter,” Nico whispered to the sky. He began to pray. “I won’t fail you, Mom.”

93

T
he scratched metal door to the old apartment yawned open, and the stale smell of pipe tobacco swirled across Lisbeth’s face.

“The reporter, right?” asked a stubby, sixty-year-old man with brown-tinted glasses, a short-sleeve white button-down, and a pointy, crescent-moon chin. He looked no different than the last time she saw him—except for his forehead, where a jagged oval hunk of skin the size of a campaign button had been sliced from the top of his receding white hairline down to his eyebrows, leaving a lump of fresh pink skin in its place.

“Squamous cell skin cancer,” he blurted. “Not pretty, I know, but—aheh—at least it didn’t reach my skull,” he added with an awkward shrug and laugh.

Eve had warned her about this. Like the comic strip folks and the obituary guys downstairs, every crossword designer could use a few lessons in social graces.

As Lisbeth stepped inside, Martin Kassal followed a bit too closely, trying to hide a small limp while trailing her into the living room, where packed bookshelves clogged every wall. Even the tops of the bookcases were stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, magazines, dictionaries, thesauruses, and full sets of the 1959 and 1972
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Just past the living room, a small sitting area held a white Formica desk that was yellowed from the sun, a two-person beige love seat buried under newspaper clippings, and a freestanding chalkboard that was framed with at least fifty diamond-shaped, suction-cup Baby on Board signs:
Student Driver on Board
,
Twins on Board
,
Marlins Fan on Board
,
Gun Owner on Board
,
Mother-in-Law in Trunk
,
Michigan Dad on Board
,
Nobody on Board
, a bright pink
Princess on Board
, and of course, a black and white
Crossword Lover on Board
, where the
o
’s in
Crossword
and
Lover
intersected.

“June 1992,” Kassal beamed, his moon-chin rising. “We did a scavenger hunt for the weekend section. Impossible stuff: an old pull tab from a soda can, a baseball card with a player not wearing a baseball cap, and
these
,” he said, pointing to the Baby on Board collection. “Anything but
BABY on Board.
”

Nodding politely, Lisbeth looked past the suction-cup signs and focused on the actual blackboard, which held an oversize hand-drawn grid. The top half of the grid was filled with words and darkened boxes; the bottom half was almost completely blank.

“You still design them by hand?” she asked.

“Instead of what, some computer program that’ll do all the work for me? No offense, but—aheh—I’m obsolete enough as it is. Last thing I need to do is wave the white flag and bury myself, if that makes sense.”

“Perfect sense,” Lisbeth agreed, staring down at the two crossword puzzles in her hand.

“So those the puzzles you were talking about?” Kassal asked, raising his nose and peering through the reading half of his tinted bifocals. As Lisbeth handed him the crosswords, he scanned the top one for a moment. “Fifty-six across should be
taser
, not
tasks.
”

“It’s not the puzzle that’s the problem,” Lisbeth pointed out. “It’s the symbols on the side.”

Following Lisbeth’s finger to the side of the puzzle, Kassal studied each symbol: the handwritten

“Sure it’s not just doodling?”

“We thought the same—until we found
this
,” she explains, flipping to the crossword Violet gave her.

“Aheh,” Kassal said with his wimpish little laugh. “Clever buggers. Their own little message.”

“See, but that’s the thing. I don’t think they made it up themselves . . .”

Already lost in the game, Kassal whispered to himself. “If the four dots represent the letter
D
as the fourth letter, and the two dots stand for
B
. . . No, no—it’s not a cryptogram—not enough symbols for letters. Not an anagram either.” Looking over the tops of his glasses at Lisbeth, he added, “They could be weather symbols . . . maybe Navajo signs. Who’d you say drew this again?”

“Just a friend.”

“But is it a clever friend, a dumb friend, a—?”

“Clever. Really clever. Head-of-the-class clever.”

“And what do you need it for again?”

“Just . . . y’know . . . just for fun.”

Kassal stared at her, picking her apart like she was the crossword. “This isn’t going to get me in trouble, is it?”

“Sir, the guys in comics—they said you were the best at deciphering these kinds of things.”

“Now you’re trying to flatter me, dearie.”

“No, that’s not—”

“It’s okay. These days, I don’t get flattered too often by pretty young redheads. I miss it.” Hobbling over to the yellowed Formica desk, Kassal pulled out a legal pad and copied the symbols one by one.

“So you’ll help?” Lisbeth asked.

“Less talking—more working,” he said, once again engrossed in the puzzle.

Lisbeth moved behind him, barely able to hide her excitement.

“Let’s start with the four-dot sign you have here,” he said, pointing to the : :. “If you draw a vertical line down the middle of it, like this:

: | :

“. . . and a horizontal line like this:

“. . . the symbol is the same on both sides of the line, which means this sign is multi-axis symmetric.”

“And that matters
why
?” Lisbeth asked.

“Ever try to look up a symbol in a dictionary?
Four-dots-in-a-square
isn’t filed under
F.
But the same way every puzzle has a solution, every symbol has its own classification, which breaks down into four distinct subgroups: First, whether it’s symmetrical or not. Second, whether it’s
closed
like a triangle or
open
like your four dots here. Third, are its lines straight or curved? And fourth, does the symbol have lines that cross, which opens up a whole new religious can of tuna.”

“And when you answer those questions?”

“When you answer those,” Kassal said, limping to his bookcases and pulling thick, phone-book-sized texts from his shelves, “then you go to the references.” With a thud, he dumped the pile of books on his desk.
Elsevier’s Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery
,
Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols
,
Franken’s Guide to Religious Images
,
The Visual Almanac of Occult Signs
,
Passer’s Handbook of Native American Symbols . . .

“This is gonna take some time, isn’t it?” Lisbeth asked, flipping open one of the books to a section titled
Multi-Axis, Closed, Soft Elements, Crossing Lines.
The open pages contained four encyclopedia entries for infinity (including its denotations in mathematics, genealogy, and botany) and six listings for various overlapping circles.

“Of course, it’ll take time,” Kassal replied, already cataloging the other symbols from the crossword. “Why? You got someplace t—”

Lisbeth’s cell phone erupted with a high-pitched ring. Flipping it open, she was about to pick up, then caught herself when she saw caller ID.

“Bad news?” Kassal asked, reading her reaction.

“No, just—not at all,” she insisted as the phone rang again.

“You say so,” Kassal replied with a shrug. “Though in my experience, looks like that are reserved for two people: bosses and boyfriends.”

“Yeah, well . . . this one’s a whole different problem.” But as the phone rang for the third time, Lisbeth couldn’t ignore the fact that even though her notepad was sticking out of her purse, she wasn’t reaching for it. Of course, that didn’t mean it was easy for her. But after nearly a decade of trying to turn four-inch stories into front-page headlines, well . . . some things were more important than the front page. Finally picking up, she asked, “Wes? That you?”

“Yeah,” he replied, sounding even worse than when they watched the video of the shooting.