“I hope I’m as sharp as you are, Decker, when I’m your age. I don’t mean that as a compliment, just a fact.” The kid started making phone calls. His voice sounded pleasant but professional. He was focused and all business. And that was the way it should be. He was doing the job. If the job was done well, the trust and finally friendship would come later on. Tyler had a long way to go before he’d prove himself. But he was getting there, working without complaint. In this so-called entitled generation, that was pretty good.

Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

OPENING A LOCKED cabinet, Detective Chris Mulrooney took out a spiral blue notebook with gloved hands. “We found it this morning, hidden behind a paneled door in the bathtub enclosure where a Jacuzzi motor should have been. The pipes were capped off.” He opened up to a random page. “English letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic letters, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, crap that looks like cuneiform. It’s some kind of code.”

Decker slipped on a latex glove. “Can I take a look?”

“Knock yourself out.” Mulrooney was short, squat, and bald with a constant smile on his face, like he loved what he was doing and loved life in general. He wore a sweater over an oxford weave shirt, slacks, and rubber-soled shoes. “You find anything in code in the girl’s apartment?”

“No, we didn’t.” Decker felt McAdams peering over his shoulder, mouthing words in a whisper. “You make any sense of this, Harvard?”

“Can I take a closer look?”

“Yeah, but glove up,” Mulrooney said. “We’ve dusted it for prints and came up dry, but we’ll give it a second go. Our victim might have been some kind of language guy. I know he was smart. He won some kind of prestigious award.”

“The Windsor Prize,” Decker said.

“Yeah, that’s it. I put a call into the committee office and got an answering machine. I don’t know if I’ll get a call back soon because the prize is given every four years. When I talked to the people in his department, they told me that he got a two-year lectureship because of the award.”

“What did his colleagues have to say?”

“The usual. They’re all shocked by his murder, he was a quiet guy. And he was young: a lot younger than the professors around him.”

“What was he lecturing in?”