Page 10 of Go Alone

She looked around the home, as though the answer might pop out of the walls. “Might as well check up on Odum too. Still can’t figure why someone would want to kill Howard in Leonard’s house.”

Marcus lifted a questioning eye at Kate. Normally, they were the ones who told locals what to do.

Kate didn’t mind Anita delegating this time, though. She would have made the same requests. Besides, she kind of liked the laconic Ohioan.

Anita laid a single pat on Marcus’s stomach with sisterly affection. “Name’s Anita, by the way. Out in the country, a wave don’t count as a hello.”

She chuckled as she walked away, not giving Marcus time to offer his own name. Marcus looked at Kate again, and Kate laughed at the confusion in his eyes. She patted him on the stomach too and said, “Let’s grab a room in Wooster and get to work.”

“Sure, um… what was that?”

Kate laughed again. “Welcome to the Midwest.”

She made it all the way to the car before the thought clamoring in the back of her mind forced its way to the front. As Marcus pulled onto the main road that would eventually become a two-lane highway when it reached the outskirts of Wooster, she said, “Whoever this killer is, Greer’s not the last victim.”

Marcus frowned. “How do you know?”

“The commandment,” Kate replied. “It’s split into parts. This one only covered the house. It didn’t mention the wife, the servants, the ox, or anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

Marcus took a deep breath and released a long, slow sigh. The pair sped toward Wooster, wondering how many ways Cox would manipulate the Bible to keep killing.

CHAPTER FOUR

The bathroom door opened, and Marcus walked out, once again wearing sweatpants with one drawstring hanging invitingly lower than the other. Kate felt the obligatory pull, but the pull of the cipher was stronger, and she kept her eyes on the images and notes below her rather than the sculpted muscles of her partner.

“How’s it coming?” Marcus asked.

The question made Kate realize she was tired. She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. When she glanced through the window, she was surprised to see the sky had darkened. How long had she been working on this?

“That bad, huh?”

“Sorry,” Kate said. “No, I’m actually almost finished. The cipher is a modified Vigenère Cipher.”

“Should I ask you what that is or pretend I already know?”

She smiled, and the effort of the movement brought another reminder of her weariness. “It’s a type of Caesar cipher.”

“Oh. That clears it up.”

She rolled her eyes. “Make me some coffee, and I’ll explain it.”

“Coffee coming right up,” Marcus said, trudging to the kitchenette whose existence justified the Wooster Rooster Motel’s choice to label the room a suite rather than a simple double.

“A Caesar cipher shifts the alphabet over a certain number of letters. So if you shift the alphabet, say, nine characters, then A becomes J, B becomes K, and so on. Vigenère adds a layer of complexity by changing the shift with each letter, using a key to tell you how many spaces to shift.”

“I’m in the vicinity of understanding,” Marcus said, pouring water into the reservoir of the small four-cup carafe.

“In this case, the key is the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house’. So the first letter of the rest of the cipher is shifted nineteen letters, the second letter is shifted seven, the third fourteen, and so on.”

Marcus nodded slowly and scooped grounds into the basket. “Okay. I think I’ve got it.”

“Yeah, so did I,” Kate replied. “Except that yielded more gibberish. I spent, apparently, seven hours poring over it trying to figure out what I was missing. I tried just about every cipher I know of before returning to the Vigenère, only this time, instead of a straight Vigenère, I moved the key up by one letter each time.”

Marcus nodded again. “Now you’re losing me.”

“The Vigenère assumes that the shift always starts from the letter A. I made the second letter shift from B, the third from C, and so on, all the way to Z, then returned to A. That finally gave me the answer.”

Marcus nodded a third time, more firmly this time. “So what did that give us?”