What The Ribbon Reveals: A Guy Manning Mystery
Sometimes knowing old tech comes in handy.
“We’ll never find the innocent girl this psycho kidnapped now.”
Police Sergeant Tina Lopez stands, lifting her tall, uniformed frame away from the kidnapper’s dead body. She reflexively reaches back to her long, black ponytail, and looks down at the portly, bearded man, crumpled on the floor in this seedy apartment bedroom.
“I should say, ‘dead psycho,’” she amended.
Blood was puddled around the man’s head. A handgun lay quietly nearby, backlit by blinking neon from a nearby bar sign shining through an open window.
It was night. It was South St. Louis.
“We will find her,” assures Detective Guy Manning, re-entering the door to the bedroom from the hall.
“Manning!” Lopez says, greeting her colleague. “I didn’t know you were on this case, too.”
Manning pulls his weathered hands from his trench coat to stroke his grey goatee. “This is South St. Louis, Lt. Lopez,” Manning says. “My hood is always my case.”
“The patrol at the front door let you waltz right in?,” Lopez says, knowing the answer.
Manning squats to the body, pulls a notebook from a vest pocket.
“Of course they did,” she says.
Lopez walks to that neon window, waving at the squad cars joining the scene.
“Then tell me, Detective…”
She turns, gestures to the slumped chump.
“How the heck will we find that poor, missing girl? He stashed her somewhere. Somewhere nearby.”
She holds up her phone.
“We watched this guy shoot himself in the head on livestream video. Tik Tok. Instagram. Facebook Live. It was everywhere.
She looks at her Fitbit.
“Just 44 minutes ago.”
“I saw it, too,” Manning says. “It was grisly.”
He stands.
“But before he pulled the trigger, this nutjob told us he was typing the exact location of his hidden victim on that typewriter… on that desk.”
The large, white electronic typewriter, relic from another age, sat amid the clutter of a blood-stained, wooden desk.
“Yes,” says Lopez. “And then in defiance, he laughed, pulled the paper out of the typewriter, and lit it with a lighter…”
She lifts a metal trash can with gloved hands.
“…and threw the burning paper in here.”
Lopez tilts the trash can to reveal the smouldering ash. “Now whatever he wrote is gone forever,” she says.
“It’s not,” says Manning, his hand brushing back his long, grey hair. “We still have the typewriter.”
“So? That isn’t a computer. It has no storage, no memory. We can’t hack it.”
“Not entirely true. Look.” Manning puts both hands on the typewriter. “This is an IBM Selectric, circa 1985. I used to type reports on it in the 80s. The keys strike a black ribbon before hitting the page.”
“What does that give us?”, says Lopez.
“A record,” Manning says.
Lopez’s brown eyes go saucer-wide as Manning opens the top of the typewriter and removes two black cartridges with a black ribbon dangling between them.
He pulls the ribbon like a thread and holds it up to the light.
“Look,” Manning says.
Backlit, a series of white letters appear against the black ribbon. Courier font. 12 point.
“Here are the last letters he typed,” Manning says “R - E - T - S – P – M - U – D.”
“RETSMUD? That’s nothing, that’s nonsense,” Lopez says, shoulders slumping.
“You have to read it backwards,” says Manning. “To see the way the keystrokes were actually entered.”
“Well, what does it say that way?” Lopez counters.
Manning’s face goes white.
“Dumpster,” he says.
Lopez spins. She touches her earpiece.
“Lieutenant, this is Lopez. We know where the victim is.”
“Tell them to hurry,” Manning says.
[30]