Page 30 (2/2)

He worked it out with pencil and paper It looked algebraic, and the algebra he’d studied in high school was long gone, but et somewhere with simple arithmetic 28 tih why you would add 37 only to subtract 34 a moment later was beyond him) Divide all that by 6 and it cales was equal to 1125, which meant one of them hat? The ansouldn’t come out even, and by the time he’d worked it out to nine deciht

Easy as pi, he thought Maybe it was just Internet flotsa on the unwary

You’d think a place that called itself a café, Internet or otherwise, would have coffee available Keller asked, and the wrestler shook his head and pointed at a y drinks

Keller found a Starbucks on the next block and splurged on a latte He took it to a table along with his work sheets, looked at the original equation Drop the syles equals 282437346

He dug out his wallet, found his Social Security card, exaly

282-43-7346

Where did the 19 triangles coood was a Social Security nules, and use all eleven digits, and move the hyphens around a little…

1-928-243-7346

Oh

Northern Arizona 928 was the area code for northern Arizona

He didn’t know anybody in northern Arizona He didn’t know anybody anywhere in Arizona, not that he could think of The last ti anywhere in the state was a while ago, and he’d gone to Tucson on business The person he was seeking had lived in a gated coolf course Tucson was in southern Arizona, and its area code was 520

As far as he could see, there were three possibilities

First, it was all coincidence That was i arm of coincidence had a limited reach It was too complicated a coincidence, of the sort it would take for a monkey at a typewriter to produce Haet a line that read, "To be or not to be, that is the gezorgenplatz"

Second, the e was from Dot True, she was dead, but she’d found a way to co in front of hiured it would spook him, so instead she’d co a cryptic ad in Linn’s But that was impossible, too, because how could soet an ad in a newspaper?

Third, the e was from the irrepressible Call-Me-Al He’d know about Keller’s hobby, because it was probably his bully boys who’d carted the collection away He’d know Keller’s initials, even if he didn’t know that they stood for Just Plain Keller, and he could have hit on Just Plain Klassics by coincidence But, even if that struck him as a reasonable way to continue the hunt for Keller, would he go so far as to disguise the phone nu on Keller to puzzle it out? I mean, why bother? He didn’t have to worry that soet wind of him All he had to do was put the bait out there and wait for Keller to take the hook

Anyway, it was flat-out impossible that he would have included the toxic-waste business Dot and Keller were the only two people on the planet to whom that would make any sense The case was an old one, and everybody connected with it was long dead, and theup on coincidence, was at the bottom of the same river that received the Nissan Sentra, albeit hundreds of iven up the phrase toxic waste, not even under torture, because it would never occur to her "Noo to draw him in, or we’ll pull out your toenails" "Toxic waste, toxic waste!" Yeah, right Not a chance

So there were three possibilities, and they were all impossible

One more possibility Dot, before she was killed, decided to s up so she could get a e to Keller when the tih an ad in Linn’s, and a phone nu he could access without leaving a trail

You could set up a website and it would stay up unattended for a long time You could place a Linn’s ad, pay a whole year or more in advance, and just let it run until it ran out And maybe the website was under construction, s a little clearer for Keller Maybe she’d done this early on, setting up the site, ordering the ad, and then the bastards broke in and killed her, and the ad and the website were out there to no purpose And, until Julia brought home the paper, to no effect

Was all of this possible? He didn’t know, and couldn’t think about it anyave it, when all was said and done there was really only one thing to do

He found a place where he could buy a prepaid cell phone, and ht be capable of deter where the phone hen the call was placed, but it wasn’t the police who had run the ad or set up the website, and if Al had such technological forces at his command, well, that was just a chance Keller would have to take

Even so, he got on I-10 and drove halfway to Baton Rouge before pulling into a gas station andno answer at all, orsomeone picked up And then a voice he’d never expected to hear again said, "I just hope this isn’t another daalore Well? Whoever you are, say so"