10 July 2006

Thursday, November 19: Riley to the Rescue

Dag wakes up in a hospital and sees Riley in the chair opposite him playing with his computer. She looks at him and smiles a welcome greeting. She tells him what happened. Simon is dead. Dag begins to put together the pieces and surmises that Simon has somehow contrived to stage his own death and that he and Angel are long gone. Riley objects with the fact that the body is in the morgue. She finally reached Brenda this morning and she will be in Minneapolis tomorrow to identify the body and take it home. Dag asks where she is now and Riley says she is in Florida.

Dag needs Riley’s legs and sends her to the morgue to check the body herself. Specifically, Dag wants to know if there is a tattoo on the inside of Simon’s left arm and what it says. He also wants to know if there has been any sign of Angel. Then Dag goes back to sleep. He feels Riley pat his arm before she leaves.

The FBI agent shows up to talk to Dag and tells him that he’s suspected of murdering Simon. Dag explains that he never made it up there and that he suspects that it isn’t Simon that was killed. The agent poo-poos that thought, but tells Dag that he has pulled strings with the local authorities and has told them that Dag was trying to pursue Simon to prevent him from committing suicide, but had a heart attack on the way up. The absence of any evidence that Dag had made it to the top has caused the authorities to release Dag to the agent’s care, and he is telling Dag to go home and drop the case.

End Chapter Nineteen

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

> Specifically, Dag wants to know if there is a tattoo on the inside of Simon’s left arm and what it says.

Fun wrinkle: if you do end up with each guy having part of a numeric key tattooed on their arms, and if the key is given in binary, then there's a fun opportunity for confusion: if the tattoed 1s are sans-serif, it would be easy for Deb to write the key down backwards without knowing this. If Deb writes her 1s with serifs, as some folks do, then there may be some period of time in which Dag thinks the key is wrong, or his theory about it is wrong, until he figures out that, no, Deb just happened to be looking at it from the wrong (upsidedown) side when she wrote it down.