Easy as pi, he thought. Maybe it was just Internet flotsam, stray debris floating in cyberspace and preying on the unwary.
Youd think a place that called itself a café, Internet or otherwise, would have coffee available. Keller asked, and the wrestler shook his head and pointed at a machine prepared to dispense Coca-Cola and a variety of energy drinks.
Keller found a Starbucks on the next block and splurged on a latte. He took it to a table along with his work sheets, looked at the original equation. Drop the symbols, he thought, and what did you get?
19 triangles equals 282437346.
He dug out his wallet, found his Social Security card, examined it, and added hyphens accordingly.
282-43-7346.
Where did the 19 triangles come in? And what good was a Social Security number, anyway?
Oh.
Forget the triangles, and use all eleven digits, and move the hyphens around a little
1-928-243-7346.
Oh.
Northern Arizona. 928 was the area code for northern Arizona.
He didnt know anybody in northern Arizona. He didnt know anybody anywhere in Arizona, not that he could think of. The last time he could remember being anywhere in the state was a while ago, and hed gone to Tucson on business. The person he was seeking had lived in a gated community surrounding a members-only golf course. Tucson was in southern Arizona, and its area code was 520.
As far as he could see, there were three possibilities.
First, it was all coincidence. That was impossible, because even the long arm of coincidence had a limited reach. It was too complicated a coincidence, of the sort it would take for a monkey at a typewriter to produce Hamlet . Even if he started out okay, sooner or later youd get a line that read, To be or not to be, that is the gezorgenplatz.
Second, the message was from Dot. True, she was dead, but shed found a way to communicate from beyond the grave. Shed ruled out materializing in front of him, or whispering in his ear, because shed figured it would spook him, so instead shed come up with this brilliant idea of running a cryptic ad in Linns . But that was impossible, too, because how could someone in the spirit world get an ad in a newspaper?
Third, the message was from the irrepressible Call-Me-Al. Hed know about Kellers hobby, because it was probably his bully boys whod carted the collection away. Hed know Kellers initials, even if he didnt know that they stood for Just Plain Keller, and he could have hit on Just Plain Klassics by coincidence. But, even if that struck him as a reasonable way to continue the hunt for Keller, would he go so far as to disguise the phone number, counting on Keller to puzzle it out? I mean, why bother? He didnt have to worry that someone else would get wind of him. All he had to do was put the bait out there and wait for Keller to take the hook.
Anyway, it was flat-out impossible that he would have included the toxic-waste business. Dot and Keller were the only two people on the planet to whom that would make any sense. The case was an old one, and everybody connected with it was long dead, and the murder weapon, if you were hung up on coincidence, was at the bottom of the same river that received the Nissan Sentra, albeit hundreds of miles to the north. And Dot wouldnt have given up the phrase toxic waste, not even under torture, because it would never occur to her. Now, woman, give us something to draw him in, or well pull out your toenails. Toxic waste, toxic waste! Yeah, right. Not a chance.
So there were three possibilities, and they were all impossible.
One more possibility. Dot, before she was killed, decided to make a run for it. First, though, she wanted to set things up so she could get a message to Keller when the time came. And how could she do that? Why, through an ad in Linns , and a phone number left on a website, something he could access without leaving a trail.
You could set up a website
and it would stay up unattended for a long time. You could place a Linns ad, pay a whole year or more in advance, and just let it run until it ran out. And maybe the website was under construction, maybe shed planned to make things a little clearer for Keller. Maybe shed done this early on, setting up the site, ordering the ad, and then the bastards broke in and killed her, and the ad and the website were out there to no purpose. And, until Julia brought home the paper, to no effect.
Was all of this possible? He didnt know, and couldnt think about it anymore. Because no matter how much thought he gave it, when all was said and done there was really only one thing to do.
He found a place where he could buy a prepaid cell phone, and made sure it was set to block caller ID. The police might be capable of determining where the phone was when the call was placed, but it wasnt the police who had run the ad or set up the website, and if Al had such technological forces at his command, well, that was just a chance Keller would have to take.
Even so, he got on I-10 and drove halfway to Baton Rouge before pulling into a gas station and making the call.