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.”
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