The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

to LS. I’ll be there.”
    It was even more enigmatic than the first message he’d sent earlier that evening. I had no idea what he meant, but I sent a reply asking him where he was. Again, there was no response, and I realized he could have sent the message an hour or more ago, when my phone had died. I glared at the screen for a full minute, trying to decipher the message. Why was he speaking in code?
    Leo would know. In fact, I’d promised to call him back and I hadn’t. I checked my watch. It was almost midnight but I guessed he’d still be up. When I rang his number, though, he didn’t answer.
    Feeling lonely and rather dejected, I thought about eating. I’d been starving all day, after eating only an egg sandwich at my desk as I worked through lunch. Usually, I loved to cook, and Josh and I made dinner together most evenings, relaxing together in the kitchen after stressful days at the office. But with Josh away, I hadn’t been as motivated to shop and cook. Now, staring at the sad contents of the refrigerator, I decided I wasn’t hungry after all, but I put some cheese and crackers on a plate and carried it with my wine glass into the living room. I put my mobile down on the cushion next to me so I could look at the enigmatic text while I ate. But I finished all of my food and most of my wine without making any sense of it. What was Ethan trying to tell me?
    Ethan was eccentric in an endearing sort of way. Apart from his obsession with organizational perfection, he always wore accessories that matched— yellow tie, yellow socks, and yellow designer reading glasses. Smart like my brother, he’d been educated at Cambridge and Harvard and had worked in the US for five years. That had been hard on Leo— he missed his friend— so we were all delighted when Ethan had come back to work in London eighteen months ago. Now I saw him fairly often. Even though he was the same age as Leo, three years older than me, I felt like his protector. His mind always seemed to be on something else and I worried constantly that he’d get run over or lost. He might be a genius analyst of global affairs, but he was remarkably unworldly.
    I wished I could talk to my best friend, Anita. She was working an emergency rotation on the pediatric ward at her hospital, which meant that she might be on duty or asleep, depending on which shift she was covering. Either way, I couldn’t disturb her.
    I jumped when my phone rang.
    “Sorry,” said Leo. “The boys insisted on giving me a line by line account of the movie when they got back. They’ve just gone up to bed.”
    I smiled, thinking of my young nephews, whom I adored.
    “So what’s going on?” Leo asked.
    “I found a book in the safe in Ethan’s office. You were right about the password.”
    “Naturally,” he said. “What kind of book?”
    I described it and the key in the leather pouch. “But there’s more,” I said. “Ethan never showed up at the restaurant, but I got another weird text from him. I’m really worried, Leo. His behavior is bizarre.”
    “What does the second text say?”
    “Take contents to LS. I’ll be there.”
    “And that’s it?”
    “Yep. Any ideas? Where the heck is LS?”
    Between us, we ran through a list of places with those initials.
    “Little Snoring,” Leo said.
    “There’s no such place.”
    “There’s a Great Snoring, so I’m pretty sure there must be a little one too—”
    “Okay, seriously. What about Lower Slaughter? Isn’t that in the Cotswolds?”
    “Yes, but what does that mean? You can’t go traipsing off to a village in the west of England with no address or other information. What would you do when you got there? Besides, there are probably another half dozen village names with LS as the initials, maybe more. Hang on… I’m looking online. Little Staughton, Little Stretton. How would you know which one to go to?”
    He was right. Ethan’s message was a shining star of misdirection. But he wouldn’t have sent