The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [30]
In the meantime, with the bodies of Marlena Falcone and Solomon Gold heavy in his mind, Kloska worried they might find Canada Gold dead, too. She had been just a teenager holding her daddy’s hand from the car to the courthouse metal detector back when he started hating Solomon Gold. Canada showed up on the poker tour a few years later, and the media noted it briefly before she abruptly quit playing. She’d since been forgotten again—even coming up with her name would be a head-knocking challenge for trivia buffs—but when they found her body and made the connection back to Kloska’s heater, it would get front-page treatment all over the country and the feds would be on the Falcone case like flies on—he thought darkly—Dr. Falcone.
He needed to close this case fast, and so those four numbers were always in his head: 2, 19, 329, and 7,883. In the last forty-eight hours, he’d spoken on the phone with a dozen friends and former colleagues of the victim. The numbers meant nothing to them.
Along with the newspapers, Kloska had been poking at the connection between Gold and Falcone. Neither he nor the press had come up with much new. Kloska had spoken to a nurse who had lost her license in the same scandal that had tainted Falcone. Canada’s procedure had been part of that mess, but the nurse couldn’t give him anything except that Solomon Gold had seemed like a decent father.
His date was asleep and Kloska was bored, so he reached a hand blindly across her nightstand and grabbed a handful of papers and Chap Sticks, looking for some hint about this chick. Some people liked to smoke after sex. Since he’d quit smoking for the eleventh time, Kloska preferred to snoop.
He found an ATM receipt showing a twenty-dollar withdrawal and a pitifully low balance. He found a prescription for something that sounded like birth control. A ballpoint pen. A warranty for a recently purchased television. Maybe the first new television she ever purchased on her own, Kloska thought. He found an index card with a man’s name—probably more like a boy’s name—and what must have been a phone number: 312 365 9078.
His cell was in his pants somewhere, so Kloska picked up the girl’s pink phone and dialed a 773 number—in the city but not downtown. After the seventh ring, his ex-wife answered.
“Are the kids up?” Kloska said with a slur.
“Hell, Bobby, it’s the middle of the night.”
“I know. I just haven’t talked to them in a long time and things are crazy. I’m working this case, Dr. Falcone—”
“Where are you calling from?”
“My desk,” he said.
“No you’re not.”
Bobby rubbed his eyes. “When did you get caller ID?”
She hung up.
What had he been thinking? Not about the time, that’s for sure. There was something about that card with the phone number, so much like the note on his desk reminding him to call his kids. Sometime. Anytime. He looked at the index card again: 312 365 9078. Except she hadn’t written it that way.
Detective Kloska tried to imagine it. The phone was on the left side of the bed. She had picked up the phone and needed to write a number, so she grabbed a piece of paper and with her right hand jotted down the digits. From an especially creative bit of foreplay, Kloska remembered that the girl was left-handed, so when taking down this number with her right hand, she had done the best she could: 31236 5 90 78.
I’m an idiot, Kloska thought. It’s not four numbers. It’s ten.
He picked up the girl’s pink phone and dialed 1, followed by 219-329-7883. He listened to a recording and wrote six letters on his palm: C-E-P-E-D-A.
The girl’s apartment already smelled like an herbal cocktail of cumin, tobacco, and weed, so Kloska didn’t feel as if a lit Newport would be noticed. He borrowed a cigarette, lit up for the first time in a month, and called Jim Traden.
“Christ, Bobby, it’s two in the morning.” There was a pause while his partner apparently checked