“Temporarily out of commission.”
“That’s good enough for now. You can tell me the rest later. In fact, everything can wait until you hear from Molly.” She didn’t realize that she’d been twisting her hands together until he looked down at them.
“Her timing couldn’t be worse, could it?” he said. “What about the professor?”
“You don’t need the distraction, God knows. But if I sat on this, I think you’d hate me for it.” Without further delay, she motioned him toward their computer table. The video was paused on the professor at his desk and the overloaded bookshelves behind him. “Here,” she said, pointing. “You have to get close to see.”
He sat down and leaned toward the monitor. “Son of a bitch.”
“Could he possibly be our man?”
“A home tattoo kit for a guy who wears argyle sweaters?” John said.
Beth saw that he was referring to a framed picture on one of the bookshelves. She’d noticed it before. It was of the professor, posing with a woman and a boy, presumably his son.
She said, “Doesn’t quite fit, does it?”
“No. Yet the kit is in plain sight. Like he was toying with us.”
“There’s something else.” She picked up the copy of the professor’s book and opened it to the page she’d marked with a Post-it. “He wrote eight pages about numerology and has a collection of books on it. Why did he downplay his knowledge of it?”
In thought, John scratched his chin with his thumbnail. “It’s not a smoking gun, but it’s starting to make sense. He circulates in that community.”
“Do you still think there’s an underground society of some sort, or did he commit all four abductions?”
“I don’t know, but his location is central enough for him to have. He travels around for his lectures. He would see young women on campuses.” He contemplated it, then said, “He’s looking good to me, Beth. If we had some pretext to have him watched tomorrow, we—”
“It is tomorrow, John. That’s why I didn’t want to postpone telling you about this. It’s past midnight. It’s March thirteenth.”
“Christ. Remember what I said about the moon always being there even—”
“If it’s not visible.”
“You were talking to him when Roslyn called to tell me Molly wasn’t at home. Where did you leave it with him?”
“He was flattered that we’d asked for his help again and said he would get right on it.”
“Some of those handles we sent could belong to him. He’d get a grin out of that.” He motioned for her to rewind the video. “Let’s listen to our chat with new ears.”
Beth, accustomed to watching videos and looking for contradictions, glitches, or nuances, paused it several times to comment on a hand gesture or a shift in the professor’s facial expression, but saw nothing that indicated he was a serial criminal.
“He seems perfectly benign,” she said. “He looks, acts, and sounds exactly like what he is.”
“Serial criminals usually do. That’s why they can commit numerous crimes before they get caught. They’re the last person anyone would suspect.”
They were almost at the end of the video when a phone jingled.
John reacted like he’d been snake bit and jerked it from his pocket. “This is Bowie.” He listened.
Beth could hear a male voice but couldn’t understand what he was saying. She could tell, though, that whatever it was, it wasn’t what John had hoped to hear.
“I appreciate the follow-up. Thank you,” he said, and disconnected. “The restaurant manager. One of the valets remembered Molly because she seemed upset when she came out of the restaurant and was rude to him when he asked if she was waiting on a car. She struck off down the sidewalk alone.”
He stood up and started pecking in a number on the phone. “I’ve got to let everybody know that was where she was last seen.” He made a call, talked in the shorthand of police officers, and ended it by saying, “Can you alert everybody to that, please? Be sure to include Mitch. Thanks.”
He went to the door, lifted his jacket off the peg, and put it on. “At least I have a starting place.”
“We,” she said. “We have a starting place. I’m going with you this time. No argument. Leave Molly a note, telling her we’re out looking for her. Tell her to call you and then to stay put till we can get back.”
He must’ve thought that was a reasonable course of action. He sat down again and began to scrawl on a legal tablet. “Let Mutt out, please. And fill his bowls. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone.”
She did that, then went into the bedroom and got her jacket. When she returned to the main room, John was in the kitchen pouring coffee from the carafe into a thermos.
She let Mutt back in, and he sensed their urgency. He kept in stride with her as she went over to the table to turn off her laptop. She noticed that there were less than two minutes left to run. She reached out to stop its play when her hand froze in midair.
She nudged Mutt aside and sat down on the edge of the chair seat. She backed up ten seconds of the video and replayed it, then quickly paused it and reversed it again. Her heart in her throat, she croaked, “John?”
He was moving quickly around the room, turning off lights. “Yeah?” He came over.
“Listen. Listen closely.”
She restarted the video where she’d stopped it. The professor was talking. Distantly, a phone rang. A chair was heard scraping back across the floor, then John’s whisper, coming through the professor’s monitor, was barely there but loud enough to be heard. “Molly.”
The professor’s eyebrows lifted.
Beth paused the video there. “Molly called you, remember? You got up to answer and told me who it was so I would know why you were leaving the virtual meeting.” She pointed to the monitor. “Look at his reaction when you said her name.”
“And a few hours later, he talked to me about names with double letters.”