Страница 36 из 66
Okay." The officer's eyes flicked to the duty lounge. "Palmer?"
"I'd rather do this alone, if that's okay," Weylin said quickly. Lowering his voice, he added, "Uniformed officers make Kathi a little nervous, if you understand."
The other hesitated, then shrugged. "Well... all right." Reaching under the desktop, he pulled out a key and handed it over. "Make it fast, though—you're not really supposed to be alone upstairs when you're off shift."
"I know. We won't be long." Taking Lisa's arm again, Weylin led her behind the desk and toward a door flanked on both sides by pieces of paper with people's faces on them. As they got closer, she saw that beneath each photo were several lines of words. "What are those?" she whispered, pointing.
"Pictures of people we're supposed to be watching out for," he whispered back. "We go through here." He teeked open the door and stepped through.
Lisa started to follow... and abruptly stopped. "Wait a second," she said, frowning at the photo that had caught her eye.
"Come on," Weylin hissed, looking back at her.
Ignoring him, she stepped closer to the picture. Yes... yes, she decided; it was him. Lowering her eyes to the words below, she read with a growing sense of excitement.
Weylin was beside her again, pulling her arm with a grip that looked gentle but had teekay strength behind it. "Come on," he growled in her ear. "You trying to get us caught?"
"This is Dr. Jarvis—that scientist!" she told him, standing firm and nodding toward the picture.
"Not so loud! You're not supposed to have anything to do with him, remember?"
"But I saw him, Weylin, driving toward Rand back in June," she whispered. "He said he was taking his nephew home—" She inhaled sharply as it suddenly hit her who the sleeping child must have been. "I saw Colin too!"
"Later!" he hissed, pulling harder. "Let's get upstairs before someone wonders what we're doing here."
Reluctantly, she let him draw her along, eyes flicking across the other pictures as they again walked toward the doorway. One other face seemed vaguely familiar, but before she had a chance to read more than the man's name, they were through the opening and Weylin had teeked the door firmly shut.
"Okay," he said, taking a deep breath as he glanced around the deserted corridor. "The office is on the third floor; stairway's over there. Come on."
Abandoning the floor, he flew to the stairway and threaded his way up the open space in the middle. Lisa followed, and a moment later they were standing outside a door marked with the name "Stanford Tirrell—Detective First." She teeked the knob experimentally, discovered it was locked. "Now what? she whispered.
Weylin had produced something that looked like a meter-long strand of limp spaghetti with a combination penlight and eyepiece at one end. "Watch for company," he said tightly and dropped onto his back by the door. Putting the eyepiece to one eye, he teeked the strand's free end under the door.
Or, rather, tried to. "Grack," he muttered as the line refused to go. Wriggling a finger under the door, he felt around for a moment, and Lisa heard the muffled sound of heavy fabric tearing. "Rug was in the way," he grunted. He tried the strand again, and this time it slithered through the gap with ease. He sent perhaps half a meter under and then leaned his head back against the jamb, a look of intense concentration on his face.
"What is that thing?" Lisa asked, afraid of disturbing him but fascinated by what he was doing.
"A spy-scope," he said distractedly. "Sends light along the glass filaments to what I'm looking at and then back to me."
"What are you—?" She broke off, startled, at the click that came from the doorknob.
"Opening the lock, of course," Weylin said with an air of nervous satisfaction as he scrambled to his feet, yanking the spy-scope out from under the door. Sending quick glances both ways down the hall, he teeked the door open and all but pushed Lisa through into the darkened office. A second later he crowded in beside her, teeking the door shut and the lights on.
"Don't touch anything with your fingers," he warned her as she blinked in the sudden brightness. "That stuff they do with fingerprints in detective movies really works."
Her eyes adapted, Lisa looked around the office. Two chairs, a cluttered desk, a combination bookcase/file cabinet, and a large piece of paper she finally identified as a map taped to one wall were all the room contained. "What am I supposed to do?" she whispered.
"Whatever the Prophet told you to," he said. "I was just supposed to get you in."
Swallowing, Lisa moved to the desk and began studying the papers lying there. Everything that talks about Matthew Jarvis's cabin, the Prophet had said; but everything on the desk seemed to be about that. She'd be here all night if she tried to read all of it. Gritting her teeth, she read a few lines from each of the papers, hoping to find the most useful information quickly. One pile seemed to be from companies that had sold things to Jarvis several years ago; another sheet was covered with some kind of writing she couldn't read. Near the center of the desk was a large booklike folder with the words Soil Types of the Barona-Banat Region written on the cover. Teeking quickly through the pages, she found a section that consisted of short entries, each with several words and phrases followed by letters and numbers. Some of the entries were circled in red, and she stared at one for a long minute, sounding out the unfamiliar words and trying to figure out the letters and numbers that followed them. "Do you know what these mean?" she asked Weylin hopefully, teeking the folder up for him to see.
His ear pressed to the door, the righthand shook his head impatiently. "What're you asking me for?" he snapped. "You're supposed to be the one who knows what to do. And you'd better hurry—someone's bound to check on us eventually."
Lisa's heart was pounding. Calm down, she told herself. Don't panic. The numbers have to mean something. Her eyes swept the room again... and fell on the wall map. The words at the top—Barona University Geological Survey Map Number One—were largely meaningless to her; but as she looked closer she saw for the first time that a series of faint lines in both directions divided the whole map into small boxes. A string of numbers ran down the left side, a row of letters and double letters across the top, both in the same light brown as the lines. Lisa stared at them for several seconds, feeling she was on the edge of understanding something... and suddenly it clicked. Glancing back to the desk, she teeked the folder over to her and turned to one of the circled entries. The word location was near the top, followed by four letter-number combinations. With growing excitement, she found the points on the map where the lettered and numbered lines of each set met, and discovered they formed a sort of squashed square just a little ways from a blob labeled BANAT. Oh, of course—Banat, she realized as she sounded out the word. The second entry had five letter-number sets, which formed a shape near the first.
"Lisa—"
"Shh!" she cut Weylin off.
BARONA was easy to find: a good-sized blot in the lower center of the map. He was on the road to Rand that night, she remembered, her eyes searching the paper and sounding out the words there. Rand... Rand... there it was, finally, way off to the left. If the circled folder entries were indeed the places the police thought Jarvis might be, then all she needed to do now was find all those with—she glanced at the top and side—letters A through N and numbers thirty to fifty. Turning her attention back to the folder, she began to flip through the pages. There was one, and another—