Death on the Diagonal - By Nero Blanc Page 0,52

as she recovered her composure, “I was looking for Orlando. Ah . . . that . . . spare saddle of mine? The Crosby? Do you know where it is?”

Rosco smiled and held up his hands. “Don’t mind me. I was just leaving.”

CHAPTER

21

As Rosco drove home, he left a message on Clint Mize’s voice mail indicating he had real suspicions that there were serious irregularities concerning the blaze and suggesting that the Dartmouth Group delay payment until he completed his investigation. As far as Rosco was concerned, Orlando Polk was protecting someone, but he couldn’t tell whom, or why, for that matter. He ended the call with, “Give me five more days, max; I’ll have some answers.”

He walked through his front door shortly before six that evening. Belle emerged from the kitchen and hurried toward him, faxes in hand, although she was no match for Kit and Gabby, who reached him in half the time, jumping and yipping, their short tails wagging out of control. Rosco walked to the center of the living room rug, flopped down on his back, and the two four-legged members of the household and its two-legged male resident began rolling around like tiger cubs freed into the wild.

Belle watched this lunacy for about a minute, then observed a sardonic, “I hate to interrupt your lovefest, but I think you might want to take a look at these crosswords.”

Rosco shook himself free of the dogs and stood. The “girls” continued to grapple with one another in his absence, so he walked toward Belle and made an attempt to give her a kiss. She stepped to the side.

“What? What’s wrong?” he said.

Belle reached up and brushed a few of Kit’s hairs from his eyebrows. “I think I can wait on the smooching for a bit. Is that a new cologne you’re wearing? Eau-de-road-apple?”

“Hey, I just came from a horse farm. What do you want?”

“Well, it certainly seems popular with the canine set. Perhaps you could patent it and market it to pet shops?”

He smiled, blew her a kiss, and gave her a rundown of his conversation with Orlando Polk, concluding with, “So, we’ve got ourselves a lying barn manager and a couple of suspicious crosswords? Do we know where they came from?”

“No. That’s the weird thing.” She handed him the two sheets of paper. “I thought return phone info was always printed at the top of a fax. It has been with every other one you or I have received.”

“That’s because they were transmitted by honest folk.” Rosco examined the paper and began walking toward Belle’s office. She followed him as he added, “The information that appears in the header of most faxes is programmed into the sending machine by the owner—just like we did with ours when we bought it. If you don’t enter that data, or if you delete it, nothing appears at the other end.” When he reached the machine he lifted the receiver. “Have you called out on this line since the message came in?”

“No.”

“And no other fax has arrived since?”

Belle shook her head. “No.”

“Good. Then as long as this crossword wasn’t sent from an unlisted telephone account, we should still be able to access the source number.”

Rosco tapped *69 into the keypad and waited. He then smiled, grabbed a pen from Belle’s desk, and jotted down a telephone number dictated by an automated voice. “Bingo,” he said as he showed it to Belle. “Recognize it?”

Belle thought for a moment. “No . . . do you?”

Rosco stared at the numbers. “Not that I can recall. We can go on-line and do a reverse lookup. But let’s think about this for a minute.” He dropped down into a black-and-white canvas deck chair and began scanning the puzzles. “Clearly, both were constructed by the same person; the graph paper is marked out in a similar manner, and the handwriting looks the same. Other than that, I don’t see what’s gotten you all hot under the collar.”

Belle stepped behind him and leaned over his shoulder. Again he tried for a kiss, but she put the kibosh on it. “No way, buddy, not until you hit the showers.” Then she pointed at the “Hitchcock” puzzle. “Obviously, the real Alfred Hitchcock went to the Family Plot years ago, so our constructor chose the name to get my attention—”

“Which worked.”

“Correcto. And it also inspired me to resurrect the first illegitimate crossword . . . which took a bit of searching, because I’d already relegated it to the recycling bin—”

“Proving