“The way?” I said, making a connection. “You said Scaler was the way and light, Harry.”

“Just a joke,” he said. “From the bible. Jesus was –”

“The way, the truth and the light, right? At least as I always heard it. Remember Scaler in the video?”

I tore open my briefcase, pulled out my notes, found the transcript of Scaler’s parable about the crumbling house. I read to Harry:

“‘If I don’t falter,’ Scaler says, ‘I will tell you the truth through the Trinity, and what I now believe to be the Truth…’” I indicate that Scaler forms a cross with his fingers. “He continues with ‘…the way and the light.’”

Harry’s eyes widened and he set aside the coffee mug. The keyboard ticked as he pulled up Google and ran Scaler’s name, this time adding the word “Way”.

I peered over Harry’s shoulder at the results. Over a hundred thousand hits, every sermon in which Scaler had used the word “way” or a detractor had responded with a screed like “Scaler is the way to hell.”

“Try, ‘Scaler, Way, Child’,” I said.

Harry typed, said, “Five hundred fifteen hits.”

“Make it recent, if you can. After the ‘Truth’ vid, before the day he died.”

I held my breath as Harry applied various filters, cutting the results to fifty-nine videos, the bulk of them anti-Scaler rants bouncing across the net daily. Harry scrolled, scrutinizing titles.

“There,” I said, “the one titled ‘The Child Shall Lead the Way’. It was put up on the afternoon before he died. Open it.”

We held our breath. And then we saw Richard Scaler. Not at a pulpit, but at his desk, as in the Truth video. Gone was the white suit. He was wearing a robe over what appeared to be pajamas. He was sweating, his eyes anxious. He closed his eyes and turned utterly still.

“What’s wrong with him?” I whispered.

“Praying,” Harry said. “Probably for strength.”

If he received it, I couldn’t tell. Scaler leaned toward the camera.

“I am frightened. I am weak. These past months have been the greatest trial of my misspent life. I was pitted against me. Past against future. I asked for truth, and received the answer from science, against which I have railed mightily.

“But if science studies the intricate workings of the universe, it studies the workings of the Creator. Science does not destroy, it informs. How terribly long it took me to know that. I had a plank in my eyes and thought it less than a mote. But my eyes are now clear.”

“Is that a reference to the problem with his eyes?” I said. “He called out motes in others, disregarded the plank in his?”

“When I tell this to the world, I will be castigated by the few, uplifted by the many. When the world understands, we will know peace. Here is the knowledge as it unfolds today…There came a child and its name was All of Us. The tribes of God assemble in this child. What an incredible message of love.”

A harsh noise from somewhere intruded and Scaler’s head snapped to the sound. His face tightened and his voice dropped to a whisper as he leaned toward the computer’s microphone.

“A danger to my greatest project, another terrible lesson I have learned: to believe with your eyes closed means others can lead you where they wish. I close now, and again file my words deep in the Tower of Babel. Stay safe, my world-wide kinsmen all, God bless you as He has finally blessed me.”

We heard another grating blurt of sound. Saw Scaler’s fear as he reached for a computer keyboard and the picture disappeared.

“Scaler never made it to the next video,” I said, “which should have been ‘Light’. Do you think he planned it to be the video that shines light on things?”

“Makes sense. But it’s never gonna happen. Did you make anything of that sound in there?”

I shook my head. “Just a sonic blur.”

“Lemme crank it up.”

Harry pushed the volume to distortion. We listened to the burble of sound that seemed to scare Scaler, but the mic on the computer lacked sensitivity.

“How about we run over to forensics, see if the audio folks can do anything?”

We were heading out the door when Riley, the newly arrived desk sergeant, looked up. “I didn’t know you guys were here. You got a delivery a few minutes back, Carson,” he said. “A package.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Some redneck-looking guy brought it in. Big guy, hard-looking. He dropped it off, turned and booked.”

Riley handed me an eight-by-ten mailing envelope. No return address. I held it in front of the lamp on Riley’s desk, saw nothing threatening inside. I slid a thumbnail under the loose glue, opened it and pulled out a single sheet.

I stared mutely at a photograph of Noelle. She was on a blanket. In the foreground was a Mobile Register. It was today’s paper.

Harry saw my open mouth. I handed him the photo.

“Someone’s telling us she’s all right,” I said, my heart racing at the back of my throat. “You think a ransom demand is about to arrive?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Harry whispered, his voice wind over dry leaves. “She’s alive.”

We continued to forensics, the photo between us on the dashboard. Something seemed off-key. I said, “You’re the one who’s been pushing Noelle’s case, bro. But someone sent the package to me. Why?”

“You got me.”

He stole another look at the picture, as if drawing sustenance from the image, and pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Arlis Hinton was the audio tech at the Alabama Bureau of Forensics. He was sixty years old and had run a recording studio for thirty-eight of them. Arlis was a wizard who could probably wire an iPod to an orange and make the fruit play music as you ate it. He ran the tape through a DVD, listened carefully to the sonic muddle.

“I’ll use voice-recognition software, the latest gen. That’ll give us a statistical probability of the words, insert them. While that’s going on, I’ll run a copy through this baby here.” He tapped a black box fronted with dials.

“Which is…?”

“The same thing, in a way, except it analyzes tonal aspects of the sound. It will recognize and filter out the sounds in the guy’s office – outside ambience, the computer’s motor, his breathing – then use the remaining sounds to reconstruct a vocal model.”

Arlis sat, put on a headset and began playing. After a few minutes he nodded. “Here’s the word reconstruction. It’ll sound robotic. We’ll fix that on round two. Coming atcha…”

We leaned forward toward the speakers as if that would do something.

“Rich-ard,” the flat, mechanical voice said, “where…the…fuck…are…you?”

“Sounds like Tutweiler,” Harry said.

“Only because he seemed like such a machine,” I said.

Arlis diddled with more knobs, talking to himself in audio-engineerese. I saw a series of wave forms on the monitor. They seemed to mean a great deal to Arlis. Finally, he said, “Got it as close as technology can make things. Ready?”

We nodded and leaned closer to the speakers on Arlis’s long desk.

“Richard!” a hard, shrill voice demanded. “Where the fuck are you?”

“It sounds kind of like Patricia Scaler,” I frowned, not matching the timid convalescent with the bark of cold command coming from the speakers. “Sort of. Not quite. Maybe.”

“You’re not sure it’s her?” Harry asked.

I paced the room. “Patricia Scaler wilts when you speak above a whisper. Computers scare her. Everything seems to scare her.”

“Acting?”

I frowned. “No one fools me like that. I can always see through an act.”

Harry put his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth, looking at the ceiling. Something hit and he spun to Hinton.

“What if two related people were analyzed? Like sisters?”

The audio tech tapped his chin, thinking. “If their voices were similar in tone and timbre, they’d sound closer through the computer than in real life, where the ear distinguishes more subtlety.”