The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 2
The Woman in the Yellow Raincoat
She saw the woman as she left Harrow Lane. Standing across the street under a chemist’s awning, wearing a yellow raincoat that was wrong for the weather — it was dry, and cold, and the kind of pale winter morning that didn’t threaten rain for weeks. The woman was watching the building. She had a paper bag in one hand and the stillness of someone performing casualness.
Mira crossed the street. The woman didn’t run, which was either confident or foolish. She was perhaps fifty, with a face that looked as though it had held many expressions and had recently decided on none of them. Her hair was silver-black and cut with a precision that suggested discipline. She held the paper bag the way one held something that wasn’t actually a paper bag.
“You sent the note,” Mira said. Not a question.
“I sent several notes, over several days, to people I thought might be curious enough.” The woman’s accent placed her somewhere in the northeastern coast, the same flat vowels as people who grew up near harbors. “You’re the first one to actually go inside.”
“Who are the others?”
“One journalist. Too frightened. One retired police officer. Disinterested. One academic from the university radio-astronomy department.” A pause. “He took photographs and left quickly. He did not look well when he left.”
“What’s in the paper bag?”
The woman handed it over without ceremony. Inside was a manila folder containing a single printed page — a spectrum analysis, the kind produced by professional signal-capture equipment. It showed a clear broadcast on 87.3 MHz, timestamped three weeks ago, four days before Casimir Lund’s body was discovered. The signal strength was remarkable: consistent, clean, and focused. It was not a stray transmission from a leaking oscillator. It was intentional.
“I live two streets away,” the woman said. “I have my own equipment. I’ve been monitoring that frequency for six weeks, since I first picked it up by accident while calibrating a new antenna. I’ve recorded over forty hours of transmission.” She let that settle. “My name is Petra Sulc. I was Casimir Lund’s colleague, years ago. And I believe he was murdered.”
Mira looked at the spectrum analysis. She looked at the woman in the yellow raincoat. She looked at the building she had just left, where a dead man’s radio played a signal that didn’t exist into an empty room.
“What makes you think he was murdered?” Mira asked.
“Because,” Petra Sulc said, with the patience of someone who had rehearsed this moment many times, “the signal began broadcasting before he died. Which means someone set it in motion while he was still alive. And it has not stopped since he died. Which means someone is maintaining it. Someone who knows he is dead. Someone who is not him.” She fastened the top button of her raincoat against the cold that neither of them had acknowledged. “The signal is a message. I simply haven’t been able to decode what it says. I’m hoping you can.”