Chapter Text

“I’m guessing this is how he got out?”

The cop’s flat look is answer enough. Sam turns back to the large iron fence at the entrance of Green-Wood cemetery. The bars are bent apart like spaghetti strands, leaving a wide gap in the middle. Sam pokes at one, but it doesn’t budge; still hard as steel. “And he definitely bent the metal by hand, didn’t carry some sort of device with him?”

“Definitely by hand,” she says. “I’ll have the security footage forwarded to you. Our best guess, the perp is a young, white male, below average height. I’ll have them send you the autopsy report as well, Captain.”

“Thanks.” Sam glances back at Bucky, who stands right next to the spot where the victim was found and stares down at a patch of grass between the grave stones. The victim was young, late thirties. Strangled with a garrote, according to the security footage. “You said the killer left a message?”

“Walk with me.”

They move to the parking lot, Sam waving for Bucky to follow. The cop halts by her car and takes out a see-through plastic bag with a piece of paper inside. Letters, cut out from magazines to spell out:

NYU WOT TRU WOK JZY VOW UPY YOZ VLU NVY UVQ WRY ZUU URK

“What does it mean?”

“It’s Swedish for ‘I’m a young, white male, below average height’,” the cop says. “How should I know what it means? We’re sending a copy over to the FBI to be decoded, but you can have the original. You guys are handling this file, yes? I can scratch it off my to-do list?”

“Scratch away.”

-

A killer who leaves a coded message at the scene, is not a killer who acts on impulse. He must have been planning ahead, which means he likely chose his victim for a specific reason.

Sam and Bucky spend the next three days talking to all of the victim’s contacts. None of them can think of anyone who might have a grudge against her.

“Young white male, below average height,” Sam says as he sits at his kitchen table and thumbs through the file, for probably the one hundredth time. “That’s what were going with. Though I saw the footage and both “young” and “male” is TBD if you ask me. Impossible to really tell. So bottom line is, we don’t really know anything.”

“Intelligent.” Bucky says from the couch. “A killer who leaves a puzzle at the scene is intelligent. And psychopathic.” He is watching TV with the sound off. It supposedly helps him to ‘think outside the box’.

“It could be forensic countermeasures,” Sam judges. “The perp just stuck some random letters on a piece of paper because he knew it would cost us manpower to try and figure out what it says. Whatever supposed cryptology expert they have over at the FBI, they still haven’t cracked it.”

“Cryptology expert.” Bucky says. “Can you get a degree in cryptology?”

Sam shrugs and scratches his chin.

“Idea.” Bucky turns the TV off. “Young white male, below average height,” he says. “Young white male who loves coded messages. We walk into the, ah, the cryptology wing of NYU and we’ll find a lecture hall full of ‘em.”

“Okay,” Sam says slowly. “And then what? Background check on every single one of them?”

“No. We show them the coded message. We ask them for help. We ask really nicely. And if someone gives us the answer, we have either found our killer, or we’re at least a step closer to solving the case.”

“Why would the killer help us decode the message?”

“He left it for a reason.” Bucky says. “He wants to be found. Psychopath. He likes the thrill, the cat and mouse. I bet he’ll start drooling at the thought of helping the police finding himself. I bet he’ll get a real kick out of it. The first word of the code is literally ‘NYU’. That might be a coincidence, but what if it’s not?”

“It’s not bad thinking,” Sam judges. “And we got nothing else. I’ll see if I can contact a professor who teaches there.”

-

Sam’s evening support group for Vietnam War veterans runs late that evening.

Eugene shuffles up to him when he is stacking the chairs. “Hey, guess who just moved into the room next door to mine?” he asks excitably. “Steve Rogers. How old is he now, more than one hundred years?”

“106,” Sam says, straightening. “But I— what?”

“We played checkers together last night. Very amiable man.”

“But don’t you live in a….”

“Well, yes,” Eugene says, and his face suddenly falls. “Shit. Didn’t you know? I shouldn’t have… Sorry.” He makes a hasty retreat.

When Sam gets home, Bucky is sitting on his couch again, staring at the wall, pressing the remote against his chin. The TV is off.

“Did Steve call you tonight?” Sam asks.

“Last night.”

“Is he still living in that same place? Did he move?”

“Not that I know. Why?”

“Just.” Sam says. “Just thinking about it.”

-

Turns out you can’t get a degree in cryptology. But NYU does offer a course in ‘Cryptography and Cryptanalysis’ for students of engineering and computer science. And on the phone, the lecturer had sounded rather enthusiastic about letting Sam have the floor for five minutes to ask her students for help on a real-life cryptology problem.

Sam left out the part where one of her students might be a psychopathic killer.

“You really think one of these skinny nerds is our perp?” Sam asks as he peers through the window in the double door to see into the lecture hall.

“I think I’m gonna keep my eyes open while you explain. Read their reactions.”

“How about I leave the public speaking part to you?”

“How about I serve your lasagna with little pieces of broken glass tonight?”

Sam grins.

The door is pushed open.

“Captain America,” the professor says, a little out of breath.

Sam winces at the title. “Just Sam is fine.”

“Come in, come in. I’ve finished my lecture.”

Bucky lingers near the doorway, his dark eyes scanning every face in the room as Sam steps up to the lectern and explains their case as succinctly as possible: Suspect of a crime left a coded message. FBI hasn’t solved it yet. The Avengers would be much obliged to anyone who can help them crack it. Sam writes the full code out on the black board, and the students diligently copy it down. Some look fascinated, some look bored.

“I opened an email account,” Sam adds, scribbling down [email protected] below the encrypted message. He hears Bucky snort behind him. “I’m hoping to hear from one of you.”

The professor thanks them and the students start filtering out.

A woman with short, blonde hair and combat boots shuffles past. “Good luck. Cryptography courses at NYU are a joke,” she informs Sam with a sniff. “I wanted to go to MIT, didn’t get in.”

She walks on without pause.

Her offhand remark makes Sam think, though. He waits until they got back to their car before sharing. “You think we should go to MIT as well? Cast the net a little wider. We won’t find our perp there, but maybe someone who knows the solution to the code.”

Bucky shrugs his consent.

“You know, MIT is only a short drive away from—”

“I’m not visiting Stark.” Bucky says.

-

“How do you always talk me into shit like this?” Bucky asks as he looks out over the lake. Ahead of them, the trees part and Pepper and Tony’s lake house comes into view.

“Come on, Buck. This is a murder investigation. It’s been three days and the FBI came up with diddly squat. We’d be negligent if we didn’t at least try to set the world’s best AI to work on our little coded message.”

Sam parks the car, turns off the engine.

Bucky’s knees wobble up and down. “How many times have you visited Stark? After he snapped Thanos away?”

“Three of four times.”

“Does he look really sick? Because I don’t like being around people who look really sick.”

“It’s been three years.”

“Yeah, but I heard he still can’t walk.”

Sam sighs and bounces his head back against the headrest. “Do you want to stay in the car? Because honestly, it’s just in and out. It’s not like I need you as back-up.”

“You’re making it sound like I’m scared,” Bucky says, offended, and he promptly gets out.

Sam follows.

-

“I’m insulted,” Tony tells them as he stands on his front porch, leaning on a cane, “to the deepest of my core. That you waited four entire days to present me with such a finger-licking case. Wormholes, flying cities, infinity stones. That’s all very well. But a killer who leaves riddles. There’s a case I’ll actually get out of bed for.” His hand trembles a little as it grips around his cane, but he looks better than the last time Sam saw him. The maniacal grin on his face is simultaneously making it better and worse.

“Hey.” Bucky says. “I see you can walk, now.”

“I’m not walking, just standing,” Tony says, “Pepper wheeled me out here on one of those hand trucks when we saw you pull up. Just kidding, I’m great at walking now. I can do almost half a mile without passing out. Coffee, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes?”

“We’re in and out,” Sam says. “Just to debrief you. Then we’re driving on to MIT to talk to their students. We’ll return here afterwards. Hopefully you’ll have found something by then.”

“Sure,” Tony says. “You’ll join for dinner, then?”

Sam doesn’t remember Tony Stark being so hospitable.

“Okay.” Bucky says, standing a little straighter. “We will join you for dinner.”

-

The MIT professor teaching cryptography had been equally easy to persuade. “Could we just have the final five minutes of you lecture?” Sam had asked him on the phone.

“You can have the first five,” the man said. “You can have the whole lecture. Practical application is vital, Captain America.”

“Just ‘Sam’ is fine.”

So Sam waits by the old-fashioned blackboard, feeling somewhat uncomfortable as students shuffle inside, stare, whisper, and pretend to take selfies while they actually take videos of him. Bucky stands off to the side again, still as a statue.

Sam picks up a piece of chalk and jots down the entire encrypted message. “This,” he explains, turning back towards them, “is a code we found at a crime scene, left by our suspect.”

The door swings open and another student shuffles inside, but freezes near the door.

“Mr. Parker,” the professor says, voice snide. “Late again.”

“Uhhh,” the young man says, tugging at his oversized scarf, eyes huge as he stares at Sam. “I—”

“Sit down.”

Mr. Parker turns and takes a few more steps, then freezes again when he spots Bucky leaning against the wall.

“This is a code we found at a crime scene, left by our suspect.” Sam repeats, as their latecomer squeezes into a seat, a flush high on his cheeks. “FBI experts have been at it for several days, but found nothing - - -“

-

“You had a fanboy.” Bucky says matter-of-factly when they drive back to Tony’s lake house, only forty miles west of Boston. “You should have brought signed pictures.”

“Signed pictures.”

“Signed pictures make people happy, I’ve seen it.”

“I’m never sure if you’re kidding when you say shit like that.”

Bucky gives him a somewhat bewildered look.

-

Tony is on the front porch again when they pull up; sitting in a chair with several blankets piled on top of him, a tablet propped up in his lap. “FRIDAY,” he says. “Please let Pepper know our esteemed guests are back.”

“Done,” her voice sounds from the tablet.

He waves a hand at the cooler standing at his feet. “There’s beer right here. It’s non-alcoholic. Placebooze. Basically lemonade.”

“I’ll have some lemonade,” Sam takes the lid of the cooler and passes one to Bucky. “Found anything?”

Tony hands him a piece of paper torn from a notepad. “Friday ran through a few thousand possibilities. And then came up with this.”

S U N A T M O U N T H O P E

Sam sits on the wooden bench next to him and squints down at the piece of paper. “Sun at Mount Hope? That still sounds like code. What’s Mount Hope?”

FRIDAY kicks in. “Mount Hope is a mountain rising to 3,239 meters, forming the central and highest peak of the—”

“Thank you ma’am.” Bucky says.

“So it doesn’t mean anything to you?” Tony asks. “Doesn’t relate to anything you’ve found so far?”

“No.”

“Keep scanning, FRIDAY,” Tony says, rapping his fingers against his armrest. “There’s probably more than one Mount Hope on this little blue planet. Look for coordinates, definitely look for sunrise times, anything that seems like it might be a next part in the code.”

“Scanning,” FRIDAY confirms.

“What about this?” Sam says, waving the piece of paper. “Not that I don’t have absolute faith in your AI, but how exactly does the original code translate into this?”

“I have her findings here,” Tony swipes through his tablet. “It was a two-step translation. The first step was changing each letter into their equivalent number. N equals 24, etcetera. Each sequence of three letters turns into a sequence of six digits. The first letters ‘NYU’ becomes ’14 25 21’. Step two was matching each digit to the braille alphabet, which uses a combination of six dots. Even numbers stand for raised dots. In ‘14 25 21’ the second, third and fifth numbers are even. In braille, that translates to the letter ‘S’ which has a raised second, third and fifth dot. And tadaa, you got your first letter.”

“Jesus on a pogo stick,” Sam says. “How’s anyone ever supposed to figure that out? Can you forward that to me?”

“Yup,” Tony says, tapping at the screen again. “Good luck figuring out the next step, because it seems even FRIDAY is stuck on the exact meaning. Maybe as you get more clues about this case the message will start making sense.”

Sam takes out his phone to check his inbox and nods when he sees the message from Tony appear. “Have you heard anything about suspicious enhanced activity in New York? Even vague rumors?”

“That sort of information rarely makes its way to me anymore,” Tony says. “My current contacts in New York? Happy, who dedicated himself to some sort of charity work. I don’t know, something with the elderly. And Steve, who now is part of the elderly, with all the accompanying topics of interest: weather and ‘the good old days’.” His eyes flick to Bucky. “You’re still in touch with him, right?”

“Phone calls every night,” Sam says. “Like an old married couple being apart for the first time in their lives.”

“Phone calls maybe twice a week.” Bucky corrects with an eye roll. “And we never talk shop either. He usually talks about his gardening. I like it. It relaxes me.”

“He’s coming over for dinner next week,” Tony says. “You’re welcome to join. Little reunion.”

Sam knows Steve has only visited Tony once before, shortly after the man woke up from his coma. So this visit feels significant. All the more so, because Steve apparently just moved in next door to Eugene… And Eugene lives in a care home for veterans with a terminal illness. Bucky doesn’t even know, but Sam knows, which feels like the sort of thing Bucky might hold against him later.

He fiddles with his phone, idly checks the inbox of his ‘helpsam’ email address and— “Oh. Well. That’s. That’s certainly impressive.”

“What?”

Sam wordlessly turns the screen of his phone so the other two can see.

Hello Mr. Wilson, it reads. You were in my class today. I hope this helps. I translated your code into ‘sunatmounthope.’ Don’t know what that could mean. Probably still code, but not the kind a cryptographer can solve. Kind regards, Peter.

“Who’s that?” Tony asks. “Some college kid, are you kidding me? Who is that?”

Sam shrugs. “Peter.”

“Peter who?”

“I don’t know the name of every kid in that class!”

“You don’t know the name of any kid in that class.” Bucky corrects him.

“FRIDAY,” Tony pushes himself up in his chair with visible effort. “A Peter who is taking MIT’s cryptography courses. Get me a full name.”

“Browsing. Stand by. Peter Parker. Double major in mathematics and chemical engineering. In his third year. He also writes for the Boston Chronicle and works as a tour guide at Backroad Discovery Tours.”

“Oh.” Bucky says. “The latecomer. The fanboy.”

Tony hums. “FRIDAY, tell Pepper she should get him hired for Stark Industries before the competition gets him.”

“Tell her yourself,” FRIDAY says, and Sam almost chokes on his beer.

“Yeah, she does that now,” Tony sags back in his chair. “Pepper has been teaching her a thing or two. She thinks it’s hysterical. Pepper, that is. FRIDAY still hasn’t developed much of a sense of humor.”

“Knock, knock,” FRIDAY says.

“Pepper still works at SI?” Sam asks. “I thought you had both winked out. Cho took over?”

“Yup,” Tony says. “The difference is, I don’t really think about it anymore. But she’s still on the phone with Helen almost every day to talk about whatever. I don’t think she ever really wanted to quit. But she had me lying around the house like a sack of potatoes, so there wasn’t much choice.” Tony was comatose for three weeks after using the gauntlet, and had to relearn almost everything, from walking to speaking. “I don’t know how she did it,” Tony says. “Sometimes she says she doesn’t know how she did it, either. How she managed to help me with my morning exercises and drive Morgan to school every day. I can’t help her retell it; I still have huge gaps in my memory like it’s the Grand Canyon up in there. But she clearly managed somehow. Because I’m walking and Morgan is not yet a college drop-out.”

“Not yet, because she’s nine.”

“Hey. My daughter is a prodigy. She taught herself how to tie her shoe laces when she was six.”

“Yes, Stark. You’ve told me that story.”

-

Sam used to have a cat that he got from the asylum. She had a bit of a history with people, and he was not allowed to come anywhere near her. If he tried to pet her, no matter how slowly or carefully, she would hiss and scratch. But despite that, she always wanted to be in the same room as him. When he went into the kitchen, she went into the kitchen. When he went to sleep, she’d sit on top of the blankets. When he went out, she’d be waiting by the door when he got home.

Bucky is exactly that type of house guest. Everything about him screams lone wolf. But here he is, sitting in Pepper’s armchair with his feet propped up, a plate full of pralines on the table in front of him, looking like he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

It reminds Sam of the stories Steve told him about his childhood. When Bucky was the sociable one. The extrovert to Steve’s introvert. How they were entirely different, yet entirely inseparable.

But Steve still hasn’t told Bucky he is dying.

“You have that look again.” Bucky waves his fingers in the general direction of Sam’s face.

“What.”

Bucky has another praline. “Turn that frown upside down.”

-

They have dinner inside, by a roaring fire. Tony eats a normal sized portion, but slowly. Pepper is eating at an equally slow pace; like she doesn’t want Tony to feel awkward.

“We have guestrooms,” Tony says when he catches Sam glancing down at his watch.

It’s weird. They haven’t been much of a group since they defeated Thanos. Tony retired, Steve retired, Nat died, Vision died, Wanda went AWOL. Bruce is around, but became an out-and-out pacifist and refuses to do anything other than advise them. The only person Sam can really call for back-up is Rhodey.

But apparently Tony thinks now is the time to become a team player. Maybe that’s what a near-death experience does to a man.

“Okay.” Bucky says. “We will stay in your guestrooms.”

Morgan claps her hands excitedly. “Yes! We never do sleepovers anymore!”

-

“Sorry about the dust,” Pepper says. “I don’t think anyone has ever used this room. Let me open a window. Bathroom is across the hall. It’s going to be a chilly night but there’s extra blankets here in the— oh.” She has pulled the wardrobe door open and frowns. She reaches inside and takes out a blue hoodie, holding it up in front of her. It has an emblem with the words Midtown Tech written below it. “Don’t know where that came from.” She tucks it under her arm. “There, top shelf. I’m taking one to Bucky’s room, because I don’t think there’s any spare blankets in there.”

-

Sam leans against the doorpost of his guestroom until the bathroom door opens and Bucky emerges, toothbrush in hand. Bucky pauses and stares back at him. “So why ‘helpsam’?” he asks.

Sam shifts on his feet. “Huh?”

“The email address. Why not ‘helpcap’?”

“Does it matter?”

Bucky gives him a look like he thinks it does.

“I was thinking,” Sam says. “It was your theory that our perp might be a cryptology student. That he might be among the very people we’re asking for help. And now this Parker kid solves it, faster than any FBI expert. Does that make him a suspect?”

“No.” Bucky shakes his head. “I mean. Rule nothing out. But I was talking about students doing cryptology at NYU. Some kid at MIT has nothing to do with murders happening in New York. Makes no sense.”

“All right. So we won’t be paying him a visit.”

“Nope.” Bucky says. “Were going back home tomorrow. Massachusetts is too damn cold.”

-

Sam crawls out of bed before sunrise. He can hear Bucky snoring through the wall that separates their rooms.

He throws on a sweater and makes his way downstairs. Tony is already at the kitchen table under a dim light. In front of him is a cup of tea and his laptop. The blue hoodie Pepper found last night is hanging over the back of a chair.

“This Parker kid,” Tony says without even looking up from his screen. “This kid, Sam…”

“Don’t tell me you’ve been up all night googling him, Pepper will blame me,” Sam says. “I’m not really interested in him anymore.”

“I am,” Tony says. “And I don’t google, thank you very much. I have my own search engines. Forget about the coded message, the kid is the real riddle. I can’t figure it out. FRIDAY can’t get a coherent description on him, his records are… I don’t know, it’s like he barely exists. No birth certificate, but the date of birth he gave on his MIT application suggest that he is twenty years old. Twenty-five, actually, but it seems he snapped. And there’s something about how he was emancipated at seventeen because he was orphaned… but I can’t find any data on parents or other past guardians.”

“Odd,” Sam agrees. “Does FRIDAY often have trouble finding people’s information?”

“Absolutely never. I’m beginning to think he’s a North Korean spy or something. Although they usually do a better job at creating a fake background profile. And get this — If he didn’t lie on his MIT application form, he went to high school in New York. Certainly has roots there. Maybe still visits, for the occasional killing spree.”

“Sounds like I should be paying him a visit, after all,” Sam says.

“I’m coming,” Tony says.

“Pepper won’t approve.”

“I don’t need her permission!” He throws a quick glance over his shoulder and adds in a lower voice: “Let’s go right away, though, before she wakes up.”