Читать книгу Unravelling - Elizabeth Norris, Elizabeth Norris - Страница 18

hat are the numbers?” I ask as I reach for the photo and turn it over. For a minute I feel a sense of déjà vu, like I’ve seen them before. Then I realize why. They’re similar to a set of numbers I saw out of the corner of my eye when I walked in, written on top of another picture—one I hadn’t really looked at.

There are photos everywhere in this office. Reaching across the table, I grab a different one. This one is the body of a woman. The whole right side of her body is covered in burns that render her unrecognizable. The left side of her body looks pristine. It makes it even harder to look at her.

The numbers are there, though, in my dad’s handwriting. Written in black Sharpie in the top corner of the image. 44:14:38:44. I look back at the other set of numbers and the photograph of the dead man. The dates of the incidents on the time stamps are fifteen days apart. “It’s a countdown, but to what?”

A quick look of surprise flits across my dad’s face before he looks even-keeled again, and I know I’ve hit it right.

He shakes his head the way he does when he can’t figure something out.

“You’re counting down to something. I mean, what’s the end date?” Because that’s the bottom line—what’s important. Countdowns lead to something. What and when are the important questions to answer first. The how and why will come later.

He doesn’t answer. Not that I really expected him to. The fact that he hasn’t shooed me back upstairs to bed yet means he’s frustrated enough to forget the rules.

I set down the photograph and reach for one of the reports, skimming for numbers. I see them—46:05:49:21—and a reference to forty-six days only a sentence later. But I see something else too—UIED—before my dad remembers himself and pulls the report from my hand, placing it back on his desk.

“There’s something off about this one.” I have no idea what he means by “off.” He’s investigated thousands of cases, and there’s always one keeping him up at night.

But I know what UIED means—Unidentified Improvised Explosive Device.

How a countdown factors into a UIED is relatively easy to deduce. The countdown is a timer for some kind of explosive. But what it has to do with the bodies and the radiation is well beyond me.

“Where did you find an unidentified explosive device?” I ask. “Is it a bomb?” I grab the report back from him and flip through it.

“San Diego PD followed a lead and found it in an abandoned motel room after the first crime scene two months ago. They called in the bomb squad and us.”

“And?” But I’m still flipping through the report, and one line catches my eye.

So far all attempts to stop the countdown have been unsuccessful.

“This thing isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen,” my dad says, but it’s clear from his quiet, distant tone that he’s talking to himself. Then he sees the look on my face and adds, “The bodies and the UIED might not be connected,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe that.

I gesture to the countdown on the photographs. “You’re keeping track of how it relates to these deaths. How does it?” He must at least think it does, if he’s gone to the trouble to cross-reference them down to the second of the countdown. But even with my photographic memory and affinity for numbers, I don’t see an obvious connection. “Is there some kind of pattern?” If there is, I don’t see it.

My dad shakes his head, and for a minute I think he’s going to tell me—to say something else about the case. But instead he nods toward the door. “Go on, go back to bed.”

My skin itches—or rather, something underneath my skin itches—everywhere.

“You have to be exhausted, J-baby,” my dad says. “Don’t worry about this one. You know I’ll figure it out.”

I nod and leave the room, even though I’m not convinced the way I usually am.

I was exhausted. But now I’m not. Because I have the same feeling I did when I watched Ben Michaels ride his bike up Highway 101. Deep-seated conviction. A feeling of absolute certainty I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to.

I glance at my watch and hope being resurrected from the dead didn’t affect my ability to do math in my head. Based on the time stamps of the photographs, we’re at twenty-one days, seventeen hours, thirty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds. And counting.