The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page A

then the girl came back. “People
live
for phone calls here, so if no one answered, I think there’s no one by that name here. Sorry.”
    “Okay,” he said, “thanks.”
    “Are you in Carter Hall, too?”
    “Um, no.”
    “Too bad.”
    “Okay, thank you,” he said, but she wasn’t ready to let him go.
    “If your feet point you Carter-way, I’m in the west tower. Fourth floor. I have to buzz you in, but it’s no problem. You have a nice voice, you know.”
    “Well, thank you –”
    “Cynthia Kronrod,” she said, and she spelled her last name. “If you can get here for seven tonight, we’re having a hall party.Two bottles of Everclear, six gallons of orange Gatorade, and one garbage can, and you know what that means, right? We’re getting perfectly hooped. Come if you can, okay? What’s your name, by the way?”
    “Um, Jimmy.”
    “Awesome,” she said, and he hung up before she could get another word in.
    “Good grief,” he muttered.
    He walked over to Cassie Jenner’s desk. “I don’t suppose you feel like going to a totally rad party at Carter Hall tonight, do you?”
    She looked at him strangely. “I’ve got plans.”
    “Too bad,” he said. He put the paper with his notes down in front of her. “What do you make of this, then?”
    She studied his scrawl. He noticed her checking out his clean fingernails and wondered if she could tell he wore a light gloss to protect them. “You dialled it?”
    “I did.”
    “I see,” she said. “I gather it was a dead end. Maybe it’s a serial number? A thing like that would need a serial number anyway, wouldn’t it?”
    “I was thinking that, but the serial number’s for the model, isn’t it? It’s not going to get us anywhere,” he said.
    “It’s all you got, Detective. Run with it.”
    He bent over her and typed the number into Google, but the search brought up nothing. He stood staring at Jenner’s screen. Then he turned and went back into the evidence room and leaned down close to the letters on the mannequin’s back. This close up, it stank of sulphurous rot, but his instinct had been right: close up, the letters of the name and the numbersweren’t straight and they showed a faint crackling around the edges. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached into his pocket and removed his penknife. Jenner was standing in the doorway.
    “You want to borrow my microscope?” she said.
    He pried open the knife and used the very tip of it along the top edge of the capital “F” in
Forms
. It peeled away cleanly and he lifted it off the plastic and held it out on the point of the blade to her. “Look at that,” he said.
    She took the knife. “It’s an ‘F.’”
    “It’s Letraset,” he said. “Someone rubbed these letters onto the mannequin. The numbers too. They’ve been put here.”
    “
Get
out,” she said.
    “Someone’s playing a game.” He went past her in the doorway, returning to her desk. He sat and looked at the numbers again. Then he remembered the GPS coordinates Constable Tate had made him write down. “How do we find out a location from its latitude and longitude?” he asked her.
    Jenner had pulled up a second chair from the desk beside hers. “There have to be convertors online.” She reached over him and tapped another search into Google. It brought them to a page that mapped coordinates.
    “The numbers Tate gave me were six figures each.”
    “Just try some combinations,” she suggested.
    He typed in 41.920 and -02.804 and they found themselves somewhere in the north of Spain. 4.19200 and 2.804 got them into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria. 41 92.0 and 02 8.04 moved them above the border between Spain and France. He entered 4 19.200 and -28 0.4 and plunged back into the ocean near Accra. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said, sittingback heavily. “But someone put those numbers and that name there deliberately.”
    “It was a good idea,” she said.
    Then he had a flash. “Wait a