when they call you, but you’d better be enthused and let them know how much you appreciate it, or else word gets around and your urgent requests start taking a backseat.
But now it clicked it was the computer geek calling about Stoltz’s encryption. They must be through the second firewall.
‘You said call you no matter what the hour.’
‘Yeah, and thanks for calling. Did you get through?’
‘We got through but I’ve never seen anything like this. We can read stuff, but it doesn’t stick. It’s like the program is a living thing and it adapts to us. We’re reading sentences and then they start scrambling, you know, going away again.’
‘What have you read?’
‘Things that are like observations of people and feelings he had, maybe after killing someone. We can only get it to hold for five seconds or so and then the program takes over again. I need somebody better than me to look at this.’
‘I’ll come in.’
‘No, I mean someone that understands encryption.’
‘I mean I’m coming in to read what I can.’
Streetlights blurred a syrupy yellow-orange in fog and his car climbed from shadow into light and the streets were empty as he drove toward Bryant. He called la Rosa.
‘They’re through the firewall, but there are problems still.’
And maybe it was the fog, but as he waited briefly for la Rosa downstairs at the Hall, the dream returned and Donny and the new girlfriend, Elena, came out of the trees. He told them about the heavyset guy who’d run when the motorcycle cop drove up and Elena put her arm around him and said, you’re so cute. He closed and with Donny leading and Elena behind him, they dropped down off the Heights, hugging the rock wall, staying on the Presidio side.
Raveneau shook the dream off but remembered how it had gone. The next day, Sunday, there’d been news about a cab driver murdered at the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets. He’d heard it first on his clock radio, on KFRC, before watching a TV report. Whoever the cab driver had picked up had probably killed him, and later that night after their dad got off his shift he told them that the police were initially given the wrong description, which was why the killer had gotten away. They’d been looking for a NMA, a Negro Male Adult, when they should have been looking for a Caucasian.
He’d debated telling his dad about the guy who’d come into the Julius Kahn playground, but he and Donny weren’t supposed to be out and they’d just gone a month of being grounded for a six-pack of Hamm’s beer their mom had found in their room. He would have grounded them for another couple of months, so Raveneau had written an anonymous letter to the homicide detail. He mailed it Monday morning before school and years later realized that was the moment he’d started toward a homicide career.
The next day, Tuesday, October 14, 1969, a different letter had arrived, this one to the San Francisco Chronicle, and Raveneau didn’t hold that letter in his hand until after he had his homicide star and his father had retired and Donny was dead. The envelope had been addressed with blue felt tip. Where the return address should have been was a crossed circle. That letter was still with the Zodiac binders. Raveneau had pored over all of them, but knew that particular letter word for word. It started this way:
This is the Zodiac speaking
I am the murderer of the
taxi driver over by
Washington St & Maple St last
night . . .
FIFTY-FOUR
‘This is the most recent entry,’ the tech said. ‘Ready to question her.’
As Raveneau read the phrase vanished and reassembled as numbers.
‘Wild, huh, look how it morphs, weird,’ the tech said, and his fingers went rapidly over the keyboard. He glanced up several times at the screen and then was in the file again and quickly scrolled.
‘I’ll come back for her. I’ll come back when the time is right. She’s unfinished business.’
Raveneau read the date of the entry as it began to fade away.
‘That could be you he’s writing about,’ he said to la Rosa. ‘This is a recent entry.’
La Rosa had just walked in. She stood behind him reading over his shoulder.
‘I get that, but what’s up with it fading away?’ and the tech launched into the spiel he’d given Raveneau about living encryption.
‘Like an organism reacting to stimuli,’ he said and chuckled, adding, ‘we’re causing it pain.’
He seemed more interested in that than what