Read Online Hour Game by David Baldacci - Free Book Online

too,” said Sylvia. “Well, we used to have the same gynecologist.”
    Williams said, “That’s not all. We got a message from the
Wrightsburg Gazette.
They received a letter.”
    “What sort of letter?” asked Michelle nervously.
    “A coded one,” replied a very pale Todd Williams. “With the mark of the Zodiac on the envelope.”

CHAPTER
    11
    K ING ACCOMPANIED W ILLIAMS TO THE POLICE STATION TO look at the note while Michelle stayed behind with Sylvia and Deputy Clancy to go over the autopsies already performed on Canney and Pembroke.
    During the drive to the police station King called Bill Jenkins, an old buddy of his in San Francisco. When he made his request, his friend was understandably surprised.
    “What do you need that for?” Jenkins asked.
    King glanced at Williams and then said, “It’s for a criminal justice class I’m teaching over at the community college.”
    “Oh, okay,” Jenkins said. “After all the excitement you and your partner caused last year, I thought you were messed up in something like that again.”
    “No, Wrightsburg is back to just being a quiet, sleepy southern town.”
    “If you decide you ever want to rejoin the big time, give me a call.”
    “How soon can you have that for me?”
    “You’re in luck. We have a special running this week on classic serial killers. Thirty minutes. Just give me a number to fax to and a major credit card,” he said, chuckling.
    King got the police station fax number from Williams and gave it to his friend.
    “How can you get it so fast?” King asked Jenkins.
    “The timing of your call is impeccable. We conducted a long-overdueoffice cleaning and just last week pulled that file for archiving. Copies of the schoolteacher’s notes are in there. I was just going over them the other night, in fact, for old time’s sake. That’s what I’ll send you, the key he came up with to decipher the coded letters.”
    King thanked him and clicked off.
    When they reached the police station, Williams strode in with King following.
    Out of his professional depth or not, the chief was back on his home turf, and he was going to act like it. He bellowed for the deputy who’d called him about the coded letter and also grabbed a bottle of Advil from his secretary. King and the deputy gathered in Williams’s office, where the chief plopped behind his desk and swallowed three Advil using only his saliva. Before he took the piece of paper and envelope from the deputy, he said, “Please tell me these have been checked for prints.”
    They had, the deputy told him. “Although Virgil Dyles, the owner of the
Gazette,
initially thought it was a joke when he got it in the mail. We wouldn’t have known anything about it, but a friend of mine who’s a reporter over there phoned and told me. I went right over and got it, but it’s all Greek to me.”
    “So what did Virgil do, pass it around the damn office?” shouted Williams.
    “Something like that,” replied the deputy nervously. “Probably more than a few people touched it. I told my friend at the paper to keep quiet, but I think she might have told some people that she thought this was serious.”
    Williams’s big fist came down on the top of his desk so hard both King and the deputy winced. “Damn it! This is spiraling right out of control. How the hell are we going to keep this on the q.t. if we can’t even control the folks in Wrightsburg?”
    “Let’s look at the message,” King said. “We’ll worry about the media spin later.”
    He hovered over Williams’s shoulder as the lawman examined the envelope. The postmark was local, mailed four days before,with a stamp applied very exactly. It was addressed, in block letters, to Virgil Dyles of the
Wrightsburg Gazette.
On the lower right-hand corner of the envelope was the circle with crosshairs. There was nothing written in the return address block.
    “Not much there,” said Williams as he unfolded the note. “Maybe there’s some expert who