Forgotten Place (46 page)

Devlin slowed and signaled at my
driveway.  The front gate was already wide open.

"No!" I rasped.  "We're too late. 
Datello's already been here."

Chapter 41

It sickens me a little to realize that my
first emotion was an overwhelming sense of grief for my beautiful
home.  I was certain, even as Devlin killed the lights on the
Expedition, that we would find nothing but a burned out husk when
the circle drive looped around the prepared ground where next
spring I planned to have a water fountain built. 

To my surprise – all of our surprise
actually – not only was the house intact, but the OSI officers were
in the courtyard that buffered my front door from the real
world.

"Stay," Devlin shot a look over his
shoulder.

I didn't listen of course, even though hours
earlier I had offered a compelling bit of evidence there are no
atheists in foxholes when I promised God all sorts of stuff if he'd
only save Johnny's life.  I had no intention of keeping a
foolish promise to behave and never do anything stupid again. 
It wasn't stupid; it advanced the case.  Even though the back
of my head, still oozing a little bit of blood through Maya's
stitches, and Johnny's frontal lobe and memories were both
casualties of the war with Datello.

Ned shot me a look and Devlin simply focused
on Darnell's men.

"Why is the gate open?"

They looked at each other and pulled
weapons.

"You didn't know?"

"It's not exactly in sight, ma'am."

I pushed past them but Devlin stopped me
with his large frame.  He stepped in front of me. 
"You're not charging in there, Helen.  Not until we've
thoroughly searched the grounds and determined that no one forced
entry."

"You're being ridiculous.  The alarm
would've sounded if someone went inside."

Ned concurred with Devlin.  "Would
it?  These guys got past your gate without triggering any
high-tech bells and whistles.  You," he pointed to one of the
OSI guards.  "Call the officer guarding Ms. Ireland. 
Make sure they're safe and stay put.  Detective Mackenzie and
I will circle the house and look for signs of entry.  Keep
Detective Eriksson here and from entering this house until we've
cleared the property."

"Yes sir."

"I'm going with you," I said, "or I'm going
through this door right now and –"

"Fine," Devlin gripped my upper arm and
dragged me along with him.  "We'll go left.  You go
right.  We'll meet in the back of the house."

"There are four points of door entry
excluding the garage and the front door," I said.  "I presume
you would've heard the garage door open."

The other guard nodded.

"As for window entries, it would be a lot
more difficult to breech the house that way.  The door entries
are all equipped with alarm boxes.  The windows are not. 
After entering, they'd have thirty seconds to find the alarm box
and enter the code to disable the signal that would alert my
security company and the police."

"Agreed," Ned said.  "Let's go."

I suspected which door had been breached
before we left the front courtyard.  My heart sank when the
door to the family room off the lanai was ajar.  The security
panel showed the alarm system had been disabled. 

"You knew," Ned whispered.  "It's the
closest entry to the office."

"He's got Ireland's files."

"Datello will recognize those pages, Helen,"
Ned said, "and he'll know that we've seen them too."

I made my way carefully to the office door
and flicked the light switch.  Devlin's shoulder brushed mine
when he pushed past.  "I don't get it."

"Neither do I."  All the boxes of
Ireland's notes had been removed.  "Are we missing
something?  Has this been about one of his cases after
all?"

Ned looked near the multipurpose office
machine – fax, copier, scanner, printer where we'd left the pages
we suspected were important, where the lot of them remained. 
"Or they figured that stack of papers was exactly what we thought
it was at first.  Test pages.  Gibberish."

"But that would mean Datello didn't tell his
men what they were looking for."

"Helen," Devlin said, "they've been looking
for a disk for all these years.  Do you think that any of
them, even Southerby, is aware of its contents?  Datello is
probably operating on a need to know basis.  Nobody needs to
know he was about to rat out his uncle.  He'd as likely paint
a target on his back as let that become common knowledge."

I snatched the pages off the desk and picked
up the phone.  Darnell answered on the second ring.

"Your men allowed someone to break into my
house."  Nice greeting, huh? 

Darnell responded with a
snarled, "
What
?"

I brought Darnell up to speed.  "You
need more men out here.  Ireland is safe.  Her guard
apparently snoozed through the break in, because Datello's men came
in and made off with David Ireland's files."

"I'll take care of it.  When are you
coming back to the hospital, Helen?"

"I'm not."

"You should be here.  Things aren't
what you think, Helen."

"No?  Was he not asking for someone who
died before I arrived in this city?"  Out of the corner of my
eye, I watched Ned and Devlin slip out of the office, no doubt to
check on the occupants of the house.  At least that's what I
wanted to believe.

"Yes, he asked for Gwen."

"Then my presence there is moot.  He
doesn't know me.  He doesn't remember anything that happened
over the past six months.  In many ways, it's a blessing that
he lost all of that.  I suspect it wasn't making him very
happy."

"But he's –"

"I've got a case to close, Darnell. 
You may as well hear it from me directly.  I came here to get
Danny Datello, and I won't stop until it's done.  One way or
another."

"What does that mean?  One way or
another?  Helen, don't do anything stupid –"

I hung up the phone and gathered the printed
pages.  Dev and Ned were outside in the kitchen.  "Let's
get back to CSD.  I want to see if Forsythe has found a way to
open those files."

On the way across town, I started reviewing
the faded sheets of numbers again.  "They all end with
EX2012.  I see nothing that distinguishes one from
another."  The urge to toss them out the window was
strong.  "No wonder these were left behind.  They're
likely as meaningless as they..."

"What?"  Ned unbuckled his seatbelt
again and turned around.

"The first line of each page.  Did you
notice this?"  I started reshuffling the pages.  "The
numbers are sequential in the first line.  One through
whatever to reach the right margin, followed by another page that
starts with two and so forth."

"Then they're not meaningless," Devlin
said.  "There's an order to the pages."

"Fantastic," I muttered, "I've figured out
the first one or two digits on pages filled with hundreds of
numbers.  Somebody better tell Datello to run for the
hills.  We're about to crack this one wide open."

My sarcasm elicited a couple of
frowns.  Devlin didn't respond to it.  Ned took the
mature route of the diplomat.

"That's not exactly true, Helen.  We
know more about these pages than you think.  They have a
sequential order, but there's something else they all have in
common."

"Yes, printing on a crappy, obsolete
machine."

"No," he pointed patiently to the page in my
hand.  "They end with the same notation."

"Right, the abbreviation for the fifth
commandment.  That's surely helpful."

Devlin caught my eyes in the rearview
mirror.  "We've assumed all along that the reference simply
linked to David's case, that the EX2012 was the code identifying
parts of the whole.  He had similar codes for his other cases,
right?"

"Sure," I nodded, unsure where he was
going.

"What if it means something else?  I
mean, it's obvious that it ended up being the clue that his wife
used to point us in the direction of where the disk was hidden, but
does that rule out that Ireland didn't use it to mean something
else too?"

"Like what?"  Wariness leeched into my
tone.

"I don't know.  A way to figure out
what all the numbers mean," he said. 

"Forsythe will probably have better luck
finding a key code on the disk.  I doubt very much that
Ireland would've been so careless to put his key code on the pages
we've got here."

"Why not?" Ned asked.  "How many people
have had access to those documents over the years?  Nobody
thought they were anything of value.  Even we nearly missed
their importance, Helen.  Let's face it.  Even knowing
that they're linked to what he knew hasn't put us an inch closer to
figuring out what they mean."

I pulled open the door in the console
between the front seats and dug through the contents until I found
a small notebook and pad.  I scrawled the one bit of
information we clearly had in the case, the scripture.

Exodus 20:12 – Honor thy father and thy
mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord thy
God giveth thee.

I began scratching letters off the verse and
writing them below. 

Vowels:  A, E, I, O,
U, sometimes Y. 
E
x
o
d
u
s 20:12 –
H
o
n
o
r
th
y
f
a
th
e
r
a
nd th
y
m
o
th
e
r, th
a
t th
y
d
ay
s m
ay
b
e
l
o
ng
u
p
o
n
th
e
l
a
nd
wh
i
ch
th
e
l
o
rd
th
y
G
o
d
g
i
v
e
th
th
ee
.

My brain started
calculating the consonants,
B, C, D, F, G,
H, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, W, X
. 
"We're missing J, K, Q, Z."

I scrutinized unintelligible rows of
numbers.  The lines were mostly long strings of enormous
numbers, except for two, rows 20 and 12.  "It can't be a
coincidence."

"What?"

I thrust the first page under Ned's
nose.  "What jumps out at you on this sheet?"

"Numbers.  Poor print quality –"

"The numbers themselves, Ned."

Devlin's eyes darted over to the page. 
"Two lines with spaces between numbers."

"Exactly."

Ned's finger skimmed the page, and I knew he
was counting lines, just like I had.

He blew out a low whistle.  "Lines
twelve and twenty.  Look at that."

"We're missing exactly four consonants and
no vowels if you look at the text of the scripture and count the
alphabet.  Notice that the numbers ten, eleven, seventeen and
twenty-six don't appear anywhere on those two lines."

"Which means what?"  Ned asked.

"It's a code based on the fifth
commandment," Devlin said.  "What does it say, Helen?"

"Seven, nine, twenty-one, nineteen, five,
sixteen, sixteen, five, sixteen, one, fourteen, five, twenty,
twenty, one."

Ned was scratching the numbers into his
notebook.  "Giuseppe Panetta."

"No.  Way."

Devlin pulled off the street and spun around
to join Ned in staring at me.  "That name means something to
you?"

Oh, how would I ever explain this without
spilling the beans about my father's unknown darker history? 
Giuseppe Panetta was a name I heard Dad curse on more than one
occasion.  The sulci in my brain scrunched and quivered with
the effort of recall.  I must've been eight or nine years
old.

The quiver of fear's bow
shuddered through me. 
Is this about
Datello's father or mine?

Fingers snapped in front of my face. 
"Helen?"

"I – it's probably nothing."

"Start talking," Ned said.

"My dad was a cop.  I remember him
bitching about Panetta slipping through the cracks of the legal
system when I was a kid.  I mean, I was too young to know why
or what he'd done, what any of it meant.  It made Dad
angry.  That's what I knew."

"How young?"  Ned snatched the page out
of my hand and continued jotting numbers. 

"Eight, maybe nine years old.  It's got
to be a coinci–"

"April 10, 1979," Ned said.  How old
were you?"

"Seven," I whispered.  "Not quite
eight."

"Wonder what
CTF
means," Ned finished
the translation of the string of numbers.

"Line twenty is written differently, even
though it sticks out like a sore thumb," Devlin said. 
"There's no space between four and one, but there's no forty-first
letter of the alphabet.  We don't have a zero in the key code
either, not to mention that looks like a minus sign before a
seventy-two.  Is that a period separating those numbers? 
The ink is so faint, it's hard to tell."

CTF. 
CTF. 
The conversation with my mentor
popped back to the front of my thoughts. 
Southerby promised to deliver names, dates, coordinates where
the bodies were buried.