The Vanishing (12 page)

He reached the others just before noon.

Eight

On Friday, Brian met with Dr. Lisa LaMunyon, professor of linguistics and recognized authority on written languages, in her office at UCLA. After talking on the phone the day before and detailing all of the questions he had, Brian had e-mailed Dr. LaMunyon scanned photos of his dad’s letter and the messages scrawled at the murder sites. He’d expected to wait weeks for an answer, but to his surprise, the professor had called back early in the morning to set up a meeting. Although admitting that she had no real news, she still wanted to see Brian in person, and after filing a story on the mayor’s reaction to the governor’s response to the president’s new immigration policy, Brian drove up the 405 freeway to UCLA.

Lisa LaMunyon was younger than Brian had expected. Although at first glance she looked more like a suburban mom than a tenured academic, the softness of her appearance did not diminish the intellectual confidence she projected. The professor rose from her chair enthusiastically when Brian knocked on the frame of her open office door. ‘‘Brian Howells?’’

‘‘Guilty.’’

Dr. LaMunyon motioned him in. ‘‘Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. I know you must be busy.’’

Brian glanced around the office. The professor not only had the e-mailed photos of his father’s letter and the blood-scrawled crime-scene messages showing on a computer monitor, but she had printed them out in various permutations, electronically cutting and pasting the figures and symbols to create new characters. The resulting pages were tacked onto a cork bulletin board that covered one wall.

‘‘I see
you’ve
been busy, Dr. LaMunyon.’’ Brian motioned toward the board.

‘‘Yes indeed,’’ the professor said eagerly. ‘‘And call me Lisa.’’ She picked up a piece of paper from her desk, turning it over in her hands, looking at the printed symbols right-side up, sideways and upside down. ‘‘I cannot tell you how glad I am that you sent me all this. These writings are really remarkable. I can’t make heads or tails out of them and can find no repeating pattern that would enable me to decipher these characters, but it’s clear to me that this is indeed a shared form of communication, quite possibly a code or even, as you suggested, a language of some sort. The stylistic similarities between the symbols are just too pronounced to be entirely coincidental. Last year, I helped develop a computer program designed to analyze various forms of writing, but the computer is stymied as well. Whatever this is, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. I plan on running it by a few of my colleagues, but to be honest, this is my field of expertise, not theirs, so I don’t expect them to decipher any of it. I just want to show it to them. Fascinating.’’

Brian sighed. ‘‘I was hoping you’d come up with something.’’

‘‘I’m sorry. I thought I made it clear over the phone that I hadn’t—’’

‘‘Yeah, I know. It’s just that that letter was from my dad, whom I haven’t seen in some twenty years. And it looks just like what those killers wrote. In blood. So, as you can probably guess, I have a little bit of personal interest in this.’’

‘‘I’m going to keep working, but it’s challenging, to say the least. Do you know of any other linguists or cryptologists who are trying to decipher these messages? Someone with whom the police are working, perhaps?’’

‘‘No,’’ Brian admitted. ‘‘I have no idea what’s going on at that end. I noticed the similarities on my own and decided to find out what I could for a possible story— and for myself. When I asked around about linguistics experts, especially people who study written languages, your name came up, so I contacted you. If there’s anyone else working on this, I don’t know about it.’’

‘‘I’m going to do my best,’’ Dr. LaMunyon promised. Once more, she turned the paper in her hand before setting it down next to the monitor. ‘‘But, like I said, I have nothing so far.’’ She called up a screen on her computer and, pointing with her pencil, began enumerating attributes of the symbols that she believed would eventually lead to a usable key. Brian asked a few obligatory questions, but it didn’t seem to him that the professor was anywhere close to interpreting the writing.

‘‘I have something I want to ask you,’’ Dr. LaMunyon said. ‘‘About your profession. And I apologize in advance if it’s rude.’’

‘‘Go ahead,’’ Brian told her. ‘‘Shoot.’’

‘‘Why aren’t there any real journalists anymore?’’

Brian was about to give a glib, jokey response, but he sensed from the professor’s demeanor that the woman was serious, that she genuinely desired an answer. Brian paused.
Why aren’t there any real journalists anymore?
It was the sort of question he often asked himself, the sort of question that reporters frequently asked of each other—usually after several rounds of drinks—and it deserved an honest reply.

‘‘I’m not speaking of you in particular,’’ the professor said quickly. ‘‘I’m not familiar with your work, and I’m sure you’re an excellent reporter. But I mean in general. It just seems to me that most journalists don’t do their job these days. They’ll quote someone on one side of a story, then get a quote from someone else on the other side, print them both and pretend as though that’s a balanced article. There’s no attempt made to check the facts, to do a little research and determine which side is right. I’m not talking about opinions here. I mean articles on nuts-and-bolts subjects that have been settled for years and that have a verifiably correct answer— something I might put on one of my tests, that my students are supposed to know—and yet contemporary reporters act as though both points of view are equally legitimate. This really drives me crazy.’’

‘‘Me, too,’’ Brian said. ‘‘But, Dr.—’’

‘‘Lisa.’’

‘‘Lisa. You didn’t ask me to your office to discuss journalistic ethics. And everything else you told me we could have easily discussed over the phone. So I have a question for you: Why did you really invite me over here?’’

The professor hesitated, and for a fleeting instant, Brian thought he saw an expression of fear on her features. ‘‘I guess . . .’’ Dr. LaMunyon looked embarrassed. ‘‘I guess I wanted to meet the son of the man who wrote that letter.’’ She motioned toward the monitor.

Brian frowned.

‘‘I know how that sounds,’’ she admitted, raising a hand. ‘‘And after all my talk about the importance of science and facts, what I’m going to say next is going to seem completely crazy. But . . .’’ She took a deep breath. ‘‘I’m afraid of that language.’’

Brian wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. ‘‘What?’’

‘‘Those characters. There’s something wrong with them or, more precisely, something wrong
about
them. Make no mistake; I intend to decipher those symbols, find out what they mean and discover everything I can about them. But—and I know this is going to sound insane—they scare me. They make me feel like I’m a little kid. When I’m studying them, I have to have the door open and the lights on. I get goose bumps. I start jumping at shadows. It’s all in my imagination, of course, but I can’t help feeling that the characters are the cause of it all, that they
make
me think of such things. Which makes this all the more intriguing and makes me want to decipher their meaning even more.’’

Brian was silent. He hadn’t realized it until this very second, but he shared the professor’s misgivings. Dr. LaMunyon had articulated perfectly a feeling that Brian had not known he’d had, and he understood that it was not merely their connection to his dad that disturbed him but something about the nature of the symbols themselves.

There was little to say after that. On the freeway, on the way back, he wondered if the two of them should have discussed things more, if he should have been more forthcoming about his own reactions. But that sort of touchy-feely sharing felt awkward and unnatural to him.

He would have to just wait and see if Dr. LaMunyon could translate that alien language.

He pushed the thought from his mind. He wasn’t even going to go there.

At the
Times
, a new assignment was waiting for him, an interview with a prominent Latino activist that was supposed to run next to his story on the mayor’s immigration stance, and he was so busy the rest of the day that he didn’t have time to think about anything else.

It was nearly nine o’clock before he arrived home, and as he walked into the silent, darkened condo, Brian decided that he needed to find someplace to live that was closer to work. Someplace in LA. With the assignmentshe’d been getting and traffic the way it was, it was rare that he got home before eight or eight thirty. Sometimes, like tonight, it was even later. And in the morning, he had to be on the road by six in order to get to the paper by eight, which meant that he had to get up at five. Basically, all he was doing was sleeping here, and thanks to his schedule, he wasn’t even doing much of that.

Brian checked his answering machine while he got a beer out of the refrigerator. For the third day in a row, his mom had left a message asking him to call her back as soon as he got home. He felt guilty as he erased it. But he couldn’t phone her now, he told himself. She was asleep already. He’d be waking her up. It would be better to call on the weekend, when they both had more time.

He was rationalizing.

The fact was, his reconciliation trip had turned out to be a disaster. Not just because of his dad’s letter— although that was a big part of it—but because he and his mother simply did not get along. Alone together, in close quarters, they were like oil and water. It was what had kept him away from Bakersfield all these years, and any hope he’d had that things had changed in the intervening decade had died his first night there. As much as he tried not to offend her, and as much as she tried to overlook their differences, the two of them ended up insulting each other, hurting each other, fighting, and what should have been minor disagreements escalated into epic battles of will. She still treated him as though he were a rebellious teenager, which was exactly how he reacted to her, and that dynamic was not healthy for either of them.

And the fact was, she’d gotten worse since he’d left there.

Part of it was the religion. Church so dominated his mother’s life now that every single thought and opinion was refracted through that lens. But whose fault was that? He was down here in Los Angeles, his sister was in San Diego, his dad . . .

Where
was
his dad?

That was one of the things that gnawed at him. Brian had accepted almost immediately the idea that his father had written the letter, but
where
had he written it? The paper had been delivered by hand, so he had to have come to the house. That meant he was either staying in Bakersfield or living there. Of course, there was no guarantee that he was still around. He could have dropped the message off and continued on his merry way. But somehow Brian didn’t think that was the case. As a reporter, he was supposed to base his opinions on facts not intuition, but more than one reporter’s hunch had led directly to a Pulitzer prize, and right now his hunch was telling him that his dad was sticking close to the old house.

Was his mom in danger?

That was another thought that was never far from his mind, and it was a question for which he had no answer. For all he knew, his dad had been living only a few blocks away for the past twenty years and it was only chance that had kept his parents from meeting up again at the supermarket or the gas station. He didn’t think so, though. He had the feeling that his father had been gone for all this time, that he’d been far away . . . and that he’d changed.

Changed how? Brian had no idea. But the idea that his dad had returned in order to deliver that letter and its indecipherable message seemed more than a little threatening.

He remembered what Dr. LaMunyon had said.

He went over to his desk and opened the folder containinghis father’s letter, looking at the dirty, wrinkled page. It
was
scary. He didn’t know how he could have missed that before. And, as always, those smudged—

—fingerprints jumped out at him, this time making him wonder if violence wasn’t behind their presence. In his mind’s eye, he saw his dad, dressed all in rags now instead of a business suit, killing another raggedy man, then grabbing a piece of charcoal and paper and writing this message.

He wanted to phone Jillian and talk about it, tell her what had happened today with Dr. LaMunyon, but it was definitely too late to call. She’d forbidden anyone to phone the house after nine unless it was an emergency. She didn’t want her daughter woken, for one thing, and as she explained, late-night calls scared the hell out of her; she always assumed that someone had died.

He looked at the paper for a moment longer, handling it softly, carefully, running a finger over the wrinkled ridges as though he might learn something about it through the sense of touch. He did this each time he picked up the letter, although he did not know why and an anal, logical part of his brain told him he was destroying evidence.

He put the letter away and turned on the television. It was on in the background, white noise, as he popped a Lean Cuisine into the microwave and sorted through today’s mail. He ate in the kitchen while he scanned through both the
Times
and the
Register
, reading the articles of friends and colleagues to take his mind off his dad, his mom and the letter. After dumping the remains of his dinner in the garbage can and breaking out another can of beer, he walked out to the living room, where he switched the channel to a local station with ten o’clock news.

‘‘. . . Devine, founder and CEO of Oklatex Oil, had recently agreed to a merger with British Petroleum—’’

Fumbling with the remote, Brian turned up the volume. In a small square to the right of the news anchor’s head was a file photo of Bill Devine.