Viggie put the apple down and said eagerly, “Not for me it won’t be.”

He said, “Suppose I’m a grandfather and I have a grandson who’s about as many days old as my son is weeks old and my grandson is as many months old as I am in years. My son, grandson and I together are 140 years old. How old am I in years?”

Horatio glanced at Alicia, who was working out the problem on a piece of paper she’d pulled from her purse. When he looked back at Viggie he said, “Would you like some paper and a pencil?”

“What for?”

“To work out the problem.”

“I’ve already worked it out. You’re eighty-four years old, but you don’t look it.”

A minute later Alicia looked up. On her piece of paper was a series of calculations with the number “84” written at the end. She smiled at Horatio and shook her head in a weary fashion. “I’m so clearly not in her league.”

Horatio looked back at Viggie, who sat there expectantly.

“Did you see all the numbers in your head?” he asked and she nodded before resuming her apple eating.

He gave her two large numbers and asked her to multiply them together. She did so in a matter of seconds. He gave her a division problem, which she solved almost instantly. Then he quizzed her with a square root exercise. Viggie answered them all within seconds and then looked bored as Horatio jotted some notes down on a piece of paper.

“I have another problem for you to think about,” he said.

She sat up straight though she still seemed bored.

Not a mynah bird. A well-trained dog, aren’t you, Viggie? “Suppose you had a best friend that you did everything with. Now suppose this best friend moved away and you’d never see her again. How would you feel?”

Viggie blinked once and then again. She started blinking so hard that her face scrunched up with the effort. Horatio felt like he was watching a computer whose circuit board was overheating.

“How would you feel, Viggie?” he asked again.

“There aren’t any numbers in the problem,” she said in a puzzled tone.

“I know, but not all questions have to do with numbers. Would you be happy, sad, ambivalent?”

“What’s ambivalent mean?”

“You don’t really care one way or another.”

“Yes,” she said automatically.

“Or how about sad?”

“Sad, I’d be sad.”

“But not happy?”

Viggie glanced over at Alicia. “There aren’t any numbers in the problem.”

“I know, Viggie, just do the best you can.”

Viggie shrugged and resumed eating her apple.

Horatio wrote some other notes down. “Have you been thinking about the last time you saw your father?”

“Why wouldn’t I be happy?” she asked suddenly.

“You wouldn’t be happy because your friend went away. You do fun things with your friends. So if your best friend went away you couldn’t do fun things anymore,” Horatio explained. “Like I’m sure you did fun things with your father before he went away. You’re sad that your father went away, right? No more fun things with him?”

“Monk went away.”

“That’s right. Were you doing something fun with him the last time you saw him.”

“Lots of fun.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, it’s a secret? Secrets are fun. Did you have lots of secrets with Monk?”

Viggie lowered her voice and edged closer to him. “It was all secret.”

“And you can’t tell anybody else, right?”

“Right.”

“But you could if you wanted to.”

“Right, if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to? I bet you do.”

For the first time she showed hesitation with a prompting like that. “I’d have to tell it in a secret way.”

“You mean like in a code? I’m afraid I’m not very good at codes.”

“Monk loved codes. He loved secret codes. It made him bloody. He told me so.”

Horatio glanced questioningly over at Alicia, who looked equally confused.

Horatio said, “It made him bloody, Viggie? What do you mean by that?”

She smiled and said, “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m asking you, what did Monk mean when he said codes made him bloody?”

“That’s right, that’s what he said, codes made him bloody. Codes and blood, that’s what he said.”

Horatio sat back. “Did Monk get bloody the last time he saw you?”

“Yes,” she said happily.

“So he told you a secret?” She nodded again. “Can you tell us what it is?”

Her smile faded and she slowly shook her head.

“Why not? Was it a super-secret?”

Alicia said gently, “Viggie, if you know something it’s very important that you tell us.”

“I don’t think I like him,” Viggie answered, pointing to Horatio. “I have to go now.” She got up and walked out of the room.

Horatio glanced over at Alicia, who seemed to have been holding her breath. “I told you she’d be a hard nut to crack. Did you learn anything useful?”

He said, “I know her better than I did an hour ago. That’s something.”

“Well, the next time you meet her she could be someone else entirely.”

After Alicia left with Viggie, Horatio called Sean and filled him in on the session.

“So is Viggie autistic?” Sean asked.

“Autistism is a broad term,” Horatio replied. “But even so, I don’t think she is.”

“What then?”

“I think in certain ways she’s so much smarter than the rest of us, that she can’t relate. In other ways she’s not very intelligent, or mature, I should say. It might be a perception problem. Our perception problem. We expect her emotional abilities to match her intellect, but she’s still a little girl. And I got some strange vibes from her about her father.”

“Like what?”

“Monk apparently treated her like an adult, at least sometimes. But other times he treated her, well, like a… device.”

“A device?”

“I know I’m not making much sense. I wished I knew something about her mother. Viggie apparently doesn’t believe that she even had one.”

“So where does this all leave us?” Sean asked.

“Not much further, I’m afraid.”

“Well, at least our results are consistent. Meaning nil.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to swing at a pitch and see if I can get on base.”

CHAPTER 50

SINCE THE WOMAN HADN’T GIVEN SEAN her phone number he checked the phone book and the Internet with no luck. Sean finally decided to head back to Williamsburg that evening and the same bar where he had seen her the previous night. Michelle wanted to tag along but Sean vetoed that idea as they sat in his room at Alicia’s cottage.

“I’m not sure Valerie would appreciate your presence as much as I would.”

“Sean, think about it, a guy like Ian Whitfield is not going to let his wife screw around on him. He probably has her followed 24/7.”

“Well, then they’ve already seen me with her. And if they spot me a second time they might just get rattled and make a mistake that will trip them up.”

“That’s a little bit of a long shot, isn’t it?”

“We don’t have a lot of other options. The bodies are burnt to a crisp, Ventris is stonewalling us, nobody at Babbage Town knows anything and the only person who might be able to help us, Viggie, doesn’t speak a language any of us can understand.”

“I thought Horatio was meeting with her.”

“He did.” Sean quickly recounted what Horatio had reported to him about his session with Viggie.

“So apparently Monk did tell his daughter something, but it’s in code.”

“If she’s to be believed. Codes and blood. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Michelle shrugged. “No clue.”

“That’s the thing about this case. There are a few clues but they keep disappearing. And there don’t appear to be any to take their place.”

“Speaking of, any word back from the pit bull in a skirt?”

Sean pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Monk traveled to England.

Joan managed to track down his itinerary. He visited several places. London, Cambridge, Manchester and a place called Wilmslow in Cheshire. And one other place that makes the other locations make sense.”