I nodded. It was a long time ago, over eight years, but I never forget my climbs. “I think I said we were going to try for a three-peak day. We’d just climbed Mount Democrat and Mount Lincoln, and Mount Bross was up next.”
“That’s not what you told me,” Ruby said. “When I asked where you were, you initially gave me your location in latitude and longitude and I laughed, because you were so focused on your climb, you forgot who you were talking to.”
My eyes went wide, and a tingle swept through my body. “You think these numbers are location coordinates?”
“Minutes and seconds,” Ruby said. “Longitude and latitude can be expressed as degrees, minutes, and seconds or as decimal degrees. You taught me that. I don’t think this is a code with a key for us to crack.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“I think it’s a place that Uretsky wants us to go.”
CHAPTER 43
We stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into a thicket of trees. What secret was hidden here? What did Uretsky want us to find, or worse—to do? The Middlesex Fells Reservation covers over twenty-five hundred acres and is a welcome retreat for city folk seeking a day of hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, or rock climbing. The hilly tracts of rocky land should have been a picturesque sight, but we had a different sort of picture troubling our thoughts—that of a woman at a playground, pushing her son on a swing.
I listened to the enveloping stillness and heard the forest come alive—the chirping of chickadees and other birds, the rustling of leaves in a light wind. A squirrel scampered up the side of a tall tree, its clawed feet clicking as it climbed out of my sight. The late afternoon, usually pleasing against my face, felt like nothing at all. The dampness of the bark and the moss would have normally brightened my spirits. This was a place of true scenic beauty, great for picnics and exploring. Horrible things weren’t supposed to happen here.
Maybe Ruby was right. Maybe Uretsky wanted us to commit another crime right here, right now. Maybe it involved Tinesha, but I doubted it. The only thing I believed continued to weigh heavy on my conscience. Tinesha, however we knew her, would become Uretsky’s next victim, unless we intervened.
At first Ruby had balked about coming here.
“It’s probably a trap,” she had said.
I had texted Uretsky after we figured out his clue, and he promptly texted back.
Go there and see for yourself.
He didn’t credit me with a job well done. No virtual pats on the back, Johnny old boy. Just a tersely worded “Go there and see for yourself.” I reminded Ruby that we had saved Dr. Adams’s life by robbing Giovanni’s Liquors but had helped to end Rhonda Jennings’s by our own inaction.
Ruby fell silent. Obviously, she agreed. Still, she couldn’t ignore her gut instinct about what to do next. “We should tell the police,” she said. “They should come with us.”
“He doesn’t want to hurt us, and he wants us to go alone,” I said.
Ruby’s arms folded, a look of indignation crossing her face. “You can’t know that for sure.”
I thought. “We’re too much fun for him,” I said. “I just know that he wants to keep playing with us, not hurt us. But if we take a chance and bring the police along, I don’t think Tinesha is going to live to see morning.”
Instead of responding, Ruby reached for her sun hat and put her jacket on.
“Let’s go,” she said.
It was close to five o’clock in the afternoon by the time we pulled into a parking area just off South Border Road. We locked the car and walked across the street. That’s when we stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into the trees. I held in my hand a pocket GPS from Garmin, procured back in my climbing days. Once I had a good satellite signal, I brought up the Mark Waypoint screen and scrolled up to select CURRENT COORDINATES. This produced an entry field that allowed me to key in the exact coordinates cryptically relayed to us through Uretsky:
N42 26 12 W71 06 57.
I showed Ruby the route we had to take. There was no path to follow.
“Do we just start trekking through the woods?” she asked.
“It is called an eTrek,” I said, flashing her the GPS.