By Paths Coincident

Chapter 24

When Eve arrived at the Annex in the pitch dark of pre-dawn, Ezekiel Jones was already there, poking at the computer with one hand while leaning sleepily on the other. An array of super-sized, caffeinated beverage containers surrounded him.

Eve blinked at him over her own vitally necessary coffee. "What are you doing here so early?"

"I never left," Ezekiel said, beckoning her over.

"What?" Eve exclaimed, bemused. Ezekiel was not the one of her charges she expected to find pulling overtime, particularly an all-nighter—unless, of course, he was moonlighting as a thief.

"I'm working on a couple of leads on Stone that we should probably investigate."

"Seriously?" Eve was a little too sleep-deprived to modify her astonishment. "You don't even get along with him!"

Ezekiel shrugged and did not meet her eyes. "Hey, he's an officious twit sometimes, well, all right, all the time, but nobody deserves to be lost and have no one at least try to find them."

Eve sat down beside him, and probably as a side-effect of the same exhaustion-induced lack of control, gave him a hug with one arm around his shoulders.

Most likely due to his own sleep deprivation, Ezekiel took a deep breath and scrubbed his hands over his face as though wiping away some betraying evidence. "Anyway, I managed to hack into Stone's cellphone records, and I found something interesting." He brought up a screen filled with dates and numbers. "Most of these are calls to you, relating to something we were doing on the job. Some are to the Annex. Not too many to me or Cassandra. A bunch to his landlady, and the rest seem to be related to the work he does for her. But this last text he received . . ."

Ezekiel clicked on the record and brought up a screen that made no sense to Eve. There weren't any words, just a bunch of punctuation marks.

"This one came in a couple of hours before he disappeared."

Eve squinted at the screen. "If that makes sense to you, I need a lot more coffee."

"I was kind of hoping it made sense to you," Ezekiel said, "because the person who sent it was Eliot Spencer."

Eve felt her heart jolt as her pulse picked up in response to hearing that name. She smoothed her hand with a suddenly damp palm over the crackle of paper in her pocket and reminded herself to breathe. What had Stone received from his cousin, and did it have anything to do with what had happened to him?

"I think it's a code," Ezekiel continued. "These hyphens and periods must make a pattern of some sort."

She was an idiot. "It's Morse Code," Eve said. "Of course. Stone is the only one of you who knows it."

"Can you read it?"

"Give me a pen." Finding a piece of scratch paper, Eve concentrated on the dots and dashes. The patterns refused to resolve into sense for her eyes, but if she said them aloud, her ears, trained to sift through the "dits" and "dahs," could translate. Rapidly, she wrote down the letters.

It was an appointment—the first clue they had as to where Stone had been heading the afternoon he had disappeared.

"Where is Lan Su Garden?" she asked Ezekiel.

Ezekiel woke with a start from where his head had gradually wilted onto the table. "What?"

"Lan Su Garden. I need a map. It's where Stone was heading to meet Spencer."

"Oh. Sure."

As Ezekiel located the Garden and printed out directions, he informed Eve, "I'm working on hacking Stone's bank records. That's the other thing you do with a missing person. Who have they called? Where have they been spending money? I'll let you know when I've got in."