of my friends’ names so you can’t tell who they are. ’Cause of all the creepy stuff you talk about at school, Dad. Maybe they’re anagrams.”
Boldt bit back a smile on the screen.
“Worth a try,” he said.
“Looks like my daughters are going to help me,” Walt said.
“Can’t argue with that. I’ll give Buddy a call as backup.”
“Much appreciated.”
“And thanks again for the shoe stats. I think we may be able to pull this off by tomorrow sometime, if you’re available.”
“I’m here,” Walt confirmed.
They ended the call. Walt wrapped his arm around Nikki. “Okay, girl . . . looks like you just earned yourself a job. Double your allowance if you unscramble these names.”
“What about me?” Emily complained.
“You take half the names. Nikki takes half. Nikki goes first. You both get the extra allowance, and reading time is delayed by half an hour.”
“Hooray!” Nikki shouted, too close to her father’s ear.
The girls took to the work enthusiastically, thrilled to be needed, he realized. It alerted him to a glaring omission in his fathering: he took care of his girls, but he rarely asked them to take care of him. As the computer printer whined from the other room, Walt realized it wasn’t just the girls. He felt uncomfortable when others offered him their help—he looked at generosity as a debt, rather than as a gift. Even in the workplace, he had trouble delegating, pleased to have a deputy sheriff to handle that for him. He was sitting there contemplating the mistakes he’d made with Gail and was still making with the girls when Nikki delivered several pages of printout to him.
“We crossed out the ones that didn’t make any sense,” Emily explained.
“And we put arrows by the ones that sounded like names,” Nikki said.
He looked at his watch: they’d been at it for just over an hour, content to eat up reading time. He’d been occupied with Larry King and stewing over his personality shortcomings.
He praised their effort, placed the pages down onto the coffee table, and headed into their room; the three of them spent forty-five minutes reading about five kids inside Disney World after dark. The girls went to bed reluctantly, which was typical for any night, especially in summer when the sun didn’t set until nine-thirty and the sky glowed faintly well past ten p.m.
He got a kick out of their effort, pushing the pages aside and reviewing some paperwork from his briefcase until well past eleven. Letterman was tearing into the administration’s health care proposals as Walt packed it up for the night. He killed the TV and subsequently knocked the girls’ hard work onto the floor, scattering the pages.
There was no explaining what the eye could see or the ear could hear. No explaining why Walt could look across a forest floor and effortlessly spot game tracks where others could not. No explaining how a musician could hear a flurry of notes within the confines of utter silence. Walt was bent over and scooping up the fallen pages as his eye picked first one word singled out with a hand-drawn arrow, then a second.
Shaw Ken
His eye darted around the page as his fingers found the sheet and brought it up to a reading distance, Walt still bent over the coffee table. Both entries had been crossed out, distinguished as nonsense words by either Nikki or Em:
The cross-out was such that he could read the word as Fine or Fino.
The top of the page carried an extraordinarily long URL that combined the website and the search string. Walt hurried to the computer and carefully typed the address into the browser bar, his throat tight, his mouth dry, his heart pounding. He knew the answer but the investigator in him would not allow any jumping to conclusions, demanding precise evidence. He double-checked each letter in the long address, not wanting to input it a second time and, confirming its accuracy, hit Enter.
The screen went blank. Walt found himself holding his breath as the web page loaded. He scrolled down the results, the page lying alongside the keyboard.
Fino
“No . . .” he muttered aloud.
The e-mail address “Anon.Weakfish@gmail.com” unscrambled to Fino A Shaw Ken. Fiona Kenshaw.
He looked back and forth between the page and screen in disbelief, trying hard to convince himself there had to be a mistake. Obviously, the girls had input the address incorrectly. But that reliable eye of his picked out the truth: all the double-checking wasn’t going to change the results. Nikki and Emily had done