White River Burning полностью

“The possibility you’re talking about isn’t going to convince Heather or Kim to leave. I feel strongly that staying with them is the right thing for me to do.”

“Then I really should—”

She cut him off. “Don’t even think about staying here for something that iffy. You’ve committed yourself to the investigation. Go do your job, and I’ll do mine. I’m serious. People are relying on you. We’ll be fine here. I’ll make sure that Romeo out there keeps his eyes open for strangers and off the nurses.”

He reluctantly agreed, wishing he felt better about it.

She kissed him on the cheek.

A nearly invisible drizzle began shortly after he pulled out of the hospital parking lot, requiring only a single swipe of the wiper blades every minute or two. The blades needed replacing, having developed a stuttering squeak that kept intruding into his thoughts. On the section of the interstate between White River and Gurney’s exit, there was virtually no traffic. On the winding road from there to Walnut Crossing, there was none.

For most of the drive he’d been turning Rick’s message over in his mind, with the assumption that it meant something and wasn’t just the equivalent of someone talking in his sleep. But whatever that sequence—T O L D C 1 3 1 1 1—might signify, it continued to elude him. It had the appearance of a coded communication, but it seemed a far reach to imagine that a barely conscious man who’d just taken a bullet in the head would have the presence of mind required to encode something. And even if he did, for whom would it be intended? John Steele was dead; and the code meant nothing to Heather.

But if it wasn’t a code, what was it? An abbreviation would be one possibility. If he were having a hard time writing, shortening the message as much as he could would make sense. But an abbreviation of what? And which letters were attached to which? Did the message begin, “To LDC”? Or was it “Told C”? Did the following number represent a dollar amount? An address? A quantity of something?

Gurney was getting nowhere as he turned onto the road that led to his property, so he decided to put the issue aside. Perhaps later he’d be able to see whatever he was missing now.

He parked next to the old farmhouse. He went inside, got some carrot soup and salmon out of the refrigerator, and put the soup in a pot to warm it. He went into the bedroom to exchange his sport jacket, button-down shirt, and slacks for a well-worn flannel shirt and faded jeans. Then he donned his old rain slicker and headed out to the chicken coop.

The hens were already up on their perch. He checked the nesting boxes for eggs, checked the levels of chicken feed and water, and redistributed some straw that had gotten pushed into a corner. On his return to the house he stopped at the asparagus patch. Using the miniature jackknife attached to his key ring, he harvested a handful of spears, brought them in, and stood them in a mug with some water in the bottom to keep them fresh. After hanging his slicker to dry, he put his soup in a bowl and his salmon on a plate and brought them both to the table.

As he was eating, his mind returned to the cryptic jottings on the index card. This time, instead of asking which letters and numbers might belong together, he asked himself what sort of information the man might have been trying to convey.

If Loomis believed he was dying, he might have wanted to leave a love note for Heather. Gurney imagined that if he himself were dying, letting Madeleine know he loved her would be the only thing that mattered. But if Loomis’s sense of his condition was less than fatal, what might he want the people close to him to know?

Perhaps the identity of the individual who shot him.

Perhaps the identity of the person he was going to bring to his meeting with Gurney.

Perhaps both of the above—especially if they were one and the same.

In that context, “Told C13111” might be a shortened version of “I told C13111 about my planned meeting with Dave Gurney.”

But how could those characters be read as someone’s name?

The thought occurred to him that they might be an ID number, perhaps belonging to a White River police officer. But then he recalled that Mark Torres’s badge number had three digits followed by three letters. So, if it was an ID number, what organization did it belong to? Gurney had no answer. In fact, he had the feeling it was the wrong question.

As for the possibility that the initial C might refer to the individual and 13111 be his zip code . . . that seemed such an unlikely way to describe a person he would have dismissed it without another thought, except that the number did fall within the range of zips for upstate New York. He recalled that he was about to check its location when he was at the ICU but couldn’t because of the cell phone prohibition. He realized his phone had been turned off ever since. He picked it up and turned it on.