Free The Ninth Step by Grant Jerkins Page B

address.
Please, if you have any information, no matter how small, contact me.
    Next, he went to work on a stack of mail, methodically opening each envelope, slitting it neatly with a silver letter opener. Should any bits of paper or dust fall onto the desktop during this process, he would promptly scoop the offending mess into a small trash can.
    Most of the mail was bills. He promptly paid these online. No convenience of fully automated payments in the Woolrich household. And he insisted on hard copies of all statements. Edgar felt it best to review each bill in both its printed and electronic formats before clicking the “transfer funds” button. Like many who were not born into the online generation, Edgar relied on the Internet, yet harbored a vestigial distrust of it, particularly when it came to matters of finance. So he exercised caution. Kept a close watch. The road to hell, he believed, was likely paved with autopay errors.
    The remainder of the stack consisted mostly of advertisements. One was a piece of junk mail addressed to Judy Woolrich. It was going on seven months now and still she got mail. Edgar opened it and retrieved the reply envelope from inside. He then opened his file drawer and extracted a form letter—of which he had printed twenty copies. It read:
Mrs. Judy Woolrich is deceased. Please remove her name from your database.
    Edgar signed the letter, folded it into a razor-edged triptych, and sealed it in the envelope.
    After that, he got up and went to the kitchen, where he placed one of Jane’s frozen dinners in the microwave and set it to cook for ten minutes.
    Back at his desk, he looked up at the state map that was mounted to the wall there. Neatly drawn concentric circles rippled out from the area of origination—which was labeled
Crash Site
. Each circle was dotted with numbers and letters. The numbers corresponded with car dealerships, the letters to automotive repair shops.
    A wall chart was mounted directly next to the state map. This chart was labeled
CHAOS AND CRIME BIFURCATION MAP
. The chart was a complex series of egg-shaped swoops and swirls. The legend at the bottom neatly indicated that the solid lines represented stable crime statistics, while the dotted line represented chaos.
    Edgar affixed a blank chart to the wall and, using a Sharpie marker, labeled it
LIKELIHOODS
. He wrote:
    # of cars of any color on road in 2-hour time frame
    Number of red cars in that period
    Prevalence of red cars on road in that time period
    Percentage of all cars that are red
    Percentage of red cars on road during given time frame
    Mean difference
    Chance of being struck by a red car—on that road—during that time frame
    Next Edgar performed a quick Google search for the term “percent red cars road” and navigated to a web page with a bar graph that listed vehicle color popularity. The color red was graphed at 7 percent. Edgar clicked the “print” button, and a copy of the graph whispered from his laser printer. He added the printout to a bulging file labeled
Statistics
. He made a mental note to split the file into parts A and B so that it wouldn’t bulge so much.
    Referencing his notes from late-night car counting, Edgar began to fill in the new wall chart. The doorbell rang, and Edgar capped the marker.

30
NOTE TO SELF
    Parked at the curb, Helen sat in her car and watched Edgar’s house. The blinds were down and the curtains were drawn, showing only a bit of yellowish light behind them—like embers banked in deep ash.
    Helen unfolded her clenched fist to reveal her six-month sobriety chip. In actuality, it was a blue poker chip available by the gross at Walmarts across the world. To her, it was everything. She placed it on the dashboard of her car and went to the front door.
    Although she had parked on this street and watched this house in the past, she had never actually seen Edgar Woolrich up close. The man who opened the door squinted at her behindludicrously thick bifocals. He