Janelle looked over her father’s place again. “It’s worth something, I guess,” she said dubiously. “Fine, fine. Let’s get on with it. And you”—she added, shrugging off his comforting arm and pointing at Nikki—“deal with the damned dog.”
“I will,” Nikki promised and wished she’d learned more than the obvious facts that Janelle Huber McGowan hated her father and seemed to be mad at the world.
Like the man who’d sired her.
Maybe the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree after all.
“So here’s what we know about that rock from the William Huber crime scene,” Clint Darden, one of the lab techs, said, his deep voice clear through the phone connection at the station. Reed had been about to leave the office when he’d gotten the call and now was seated at his desk again, pen in hand.
From his chair, he kicked the door to his office closed, blocking out the sounds of the department, the incessant ringing of phones and chunk of the fax machine over the buzz of conversations.
Darden continued, “The mark on the back of the polished stone is the number nine. In Hebrew. When you hold the stone upright to read that number, then rotate it side to side, it reveals the number nine in Arabic, or the numbers we use today.”
“If we assume that the numbers are the same.”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t flip the stone end over end?” Reed said, thinking aloud.
“Again, yes,” Darden agreed, and Reed considered it, wasn’t going to rule out that the Arabic side wasn’t a six. Yet.
“But that’s not the most interesting thing about the rock,” Darden told him.
“What is?”
“We can tell that it’s been tumbled or polished, smoothed and made to shine, and the numbers were etched into it deep enough to be visible. But—here’s the interesting part—that visibility was enhanced by blood. Stained, I guess you’d say.”
“By blood,” Reed repeated, feeling his pulse tick a little faster as he leaned closer to the desk phone. “Intentionally?”
“Looks like it. Because the blood is only in the crevices that are etched into the rock, almost as if it was painted into the etchings.”
“Why?” Reed asked, even though he knew there was no definitive answer yet.
“Possibly to make the numbers more distinct, so that they appear more clearly in the stone?”
So as not to go unnoticed. The killer, or whoever laid the rock beneath Huber’s body, wanted someone to find it with its hidden message. Or so it seemed. “Ink or paint or any other dark liquid could have stained the rock.”
“Probably.”
Reed tossed the idea of the blood over in his mind. If the killer left the stone purposefully, which seemed all the more likely, he was intent on making his message known. “What kind of blood?” he asked, wondering if somehow Billy Huber’s blood had been smeared onto the rock’s slick surface.
“Still working on it.”
“Let me know the minute you get anything on it—kind, type, DNA, whatever.”
“You got it.”
He hung up and tossed the information over in his mind. The number nine. In Hebrew and Arabic. On a polished stone. Left under Billy Huber’s body. He didn’t like it. Yeah, it was a mystery that intrigued him, but if the killer had left his mark and was intentionally trying to convey some kind of cryptic message, then there was more to Billy Huber’s death than simple murder.
He almost laughed at himself as he reached for his suit jacket. Wasmurder ever uncomplicated? The death of one human being by another. Even those killings that were acts of passion weren’t simple.
Patting his pants pockets to make certain he had his wallet and keys, he slid on his jacket.
Outside, the day was starting to cool. A spring breeze ruffled his hair as he unlocked the car remotely and then spied his wife standing next to her Outback. She was holding Chloe, who lit up when she saw her father. “Daddy! Daddy!” she called.
Picking up his pace, he noticed that the lift gate to the Subaru’s cargo area was open. Inside, lying on a dog bed in Mikado’s kennel, was Billy Huber’s dog.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head as the shepherd, chin on his paws, looked up at him with forlorn eyes. “We’re not taking this dog home.”
