The letter had four words and too much white paper.
Hester put her glasses on. Detective Jalen had sealed the original in a clear evidence sleeve. He laid a photograph beside it so she could mark a copy without touching the letter.
“They found it in his desk after he died,” he said. “Liv has been missing since Tuesday.”
It was Friday morning.
Hester knew Liv by her flowers. The missing woman ran a shop near the station and refused to sell lilies to Hester because Hester’s cat ate anything that fit in its mouth. Last week Liv had given her a bunch of pink flowers instead and charged less than she ought to have.
Above the four words, the killer had typed a heading: READ BETWEEN.
Then this:
I will wait below
Hester hated the neat little sentence. The man had killed three women. His earlier letters had treated the police as guests at a puzzle night. They had no duty to enjoy him.
“Below what?” Jalen asked.
“He’ll want us to ask that.”
“Yes. But we still have to find her.”
Hester had spent forty years studying codes. She had helped with the earlier letters. Once she had been certain a reference to a bell meant the old church. Police searched it while the killer watched them from somewhere else. She remembered the volunteers’ faces afterward. She remembered saying certain.
Now she picked up her pen and put it down again.
“What else was in the desk?”
Jalen gave her a photographed delivery sheet. Before his arrest, the killer had run a small freight company. He owned three depots and several sheds. The police were already checking those places.
The sheet’s key read:
1 — North depot
2 — East depot
3 — South depot
Below it were the routes and their return sheds:
- South, North, East — canal return shed
- South, East, North — loading pier
- North, South, East — pottery yard
“The company closed months ago,” Jalen said. “These are old routes.”
Hester looked at the letter again. The gap after I was wider than the gap after will. The last gap was wider than the middle one.
“Do you have the solved letter from March?”
Jalen opened a folder. In that letter, groups of words had been separated by one, two, or three spaces. The space counts had stood for the three depot numbers. They had learned this after finding a second sheet with the matching route numbers. It was an old trick of his, already proved, not a new rule Hester needed to invent.
She held a ruler beneath the new line. The photograph was clear enough to show the positions of the typed letters.
After I: three spaces.
After will: one.
After wait: two.
“Three, one, two,” she said.
“South, North, East.” Jalen read the key. “The canal shed.”
“That is where the sheet points. I don’t know whether she is there.”
He was already on the phone.
“Send the canal crew now,” he said. “Keep the other checks going. North and East too. We aren’t canceling anything.”
Hester let her breath out.
“He may have left the answer in the spaces because he wanted us reading the sentence,” she said. “Arguing about what below means.”
“We can argue later.”
Jalen put the photograph in the folder. “Come with me. You know the old route maps. We may need to match a building.”
The canal was ten minutes away. Hester spent the drive looking at the route sheet. There were two buildings beside the water, one a stone store, the other a wooden shed. A faded company mark on the shed matched the mark on the delivery page.
A police crew had arrived before them. An officer waved Jalen over. The shed’s ordinary door was open. Inside were shelves, broken boxes, and no person.
“Anything beneath it?” Jalen asked.
“A storage space,” the officer said. “We haven’t got through yet.”
Hester stayed at the doorway. She heard water move along the canal. She heard a boot scrape on the floor.
Then three faint knocks.
Someone inside told everyone to be quiet.
The knocks came again, from below the shelves.
Jalen called, “Liv? Police. Can you hear me?”
Three knocks. A pause. Three more.
An officer moved the boxes aside. Under them was a hatch with a damaged lock. The crew called for a tool and kept talking to the person below while they opened it.
Hester gripped the door frame. She could not help by going in. She would be another pair of feet in a room where people needed to move.
“We’re opening it,” Jalen called. “Stay back from the hatch if you can.”
A voice answered. Hester could not make out the words. It was enough that there was a voice.
The lock gave. Jalen knelt beside the opening, then stood aside for the crew helping Liv up.
She had a strip of cloth around one hand. Her other hand held a short piece of loose pipe. She dropped it only when an officer took her arm.
“I heard boots,” she said. “I thought he’d come back. Then somebody said my name.”
“He can’t come back,” Jalen told her. “You’re out.”
Liv looked past him to the sky. Then she bent double, coughing. The medical crew took her to their vehicle.
Hester moved out of the doorway. Her knees were shaking now that nobody needed her to stand still.
A reporter arrived at the road. He called her name. She had been on the news after the church search, explaining a mistake in words that made it sound smaller.
She turned away before he could ask for a better explanation this time.
Jalen came to find her. “Liv wants a phone.”
“There’s yours.”
“Mine’s tied up with the teams. May I use yours?”
Hester handed it over and followed him to the medical vehicle. Liv gave her sister’s number twice because the first time her voice broke.
Jalen made the call and put the phone in Liv’s good hand.
“It’s me,” Liv said.
Hester waited beside the open vehicle door. She heard the sister’s cry from the tiny speaker and Liv answer it.
“I’m here. Yes. I’m here.”
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