Dark Prophecy (14 page)

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

 

 

Sure, the guy was deep into middle age, but there was some muscle beneath a layer or two of fat. His skin scarred in places, like he’d been in combat, but strangely pale in others, like he’s had time recovering in hospitals. He was facedown on the table, and soon he would have no secrets from her.

Nikki liked that.

She liked hanging on the poles above her clients, like a nightmare goth fuck angel descending from the secret basement of heaven, ready to make their dreams come true.

This was her little theater; she was the star.

Friends would ask her,
How can you touch gross old men like that?
And yeah, that was the typical clientele for this place—gross, old, disgusting, rich white men, away from their wives, wanting a little rubdown from a near-model, complete with happy ending. But Nikki’s friends didn’t understand. She wasn’t out on some street, offering hundred dollar handies. She was in complete control. For thirty minutes, she totally owned these old saggy bitches. They kept no secrets from her. Not on their bodies. Not in their minds.

Discretion was highly prized at a “retreat” such as this one—a few minutes outside Myrtle Beach. Management made it clear that if one breath of what happened inside these walls made it to the outside, the penalty was instant termination, with the veiled threat of criminal prosecution.

That was okay. She liked to keep these things to herself anyway.

In return, her regular clients would reward her with lavish gifts—glittering chokers, expensive perfume, rare liquor. Nikki loved to sit up late, jacked up on cable TV, watching C-SPAN of all things. It was a strange kind of power, knowing what a U.S. senator’s face looked like when he shot off a load. Or which ones liked fingers inserted in certain orifices.

She was part of the secret power structure of the United States, the way she saw it.

And now it was showtime.

Nikki looked at herself one last time in the mirror. She loved how the kimono hung from her body, accentuating her tits and hips and promising everything, yet revealing very little. The revelation could come later. She loved when her men, lying facedown, turned their heads to steal a glance. Their reaction was priceless.

The door behind her opened. A woman stepped inside the dressing room.

“Hey, you can’t come in here.”

Nikki turned and saw that the woman was completely naked and wearing a gas mask. Long dark hair flowed down to her shoulders, and big inquisitive eyes stared through the slightly fogged-over lenses of the mask. Nikki barely had time to register the bizarre sight before the woman lifted a can and sprayed something. The mist was cold and wet on Nikki’s face and began to work immediately.

On the floor, Nikki was paralyzed, fading fast. She stayed conscious enough, however, to feel the horrible sensation of her silk robe being stripped from her body,
leaving her completely naked . . .
U.S. Senator Sebastian Garner, naked on the table, prepared for the only moments of bliss left in his miserable life. The only place he could relax. He breathed in the warm musk of the lit candles and waited for his girl. She always wore a silk kimono—one he bought her, in fact. Reminded him of the war. The girls of the war, that is.

Garner heard the door open behind him and smiled. He wished he could freeze time and live in the next thirty minutes forever. Let everything else fade away. The Muslim holy warriors were promised an afterlife of milk and figs and virgins. Didn’t a tireless holy warrior of Almighty Capitalism deserve something similar?

The door clicked shut. Here we go. Turn your mind off, you old fool, Garner told himself, and focus on the moment. Enjoying the living hell out of this session. He waited for Nikki’s warm smooth fingers to work their way up his back, dancing along his tired spine, working the muscles into a state of blurred relaxation.

“Hi, Nikki,” he purred.

He could hear the gentle flapping of the silk robe as it slid down Nikki’s body and fell to the floor in a soft heap. Oh, that was the best. The anticipation drove him wild. Right now he was naked on the table, and she was naked just a few feet behind him. In a matter of seconds they would come together. No need for begging, or coy bullshit like
gee, my inner thighs are sore, would you rub them?
Garner and Nikki had a long-term understanding. She knew what was expected of her, and he knew exactly what to expect.

Garner waited for the first touch between them.

Instead there was a pinch at the top of his neck, like a bug bite.

Garner instinctively tried to lift his hand to swat away whatever it was that had bit him, but found that he couldn’t. His right arm felt thick, rubbery, lifeless. This made no sense. He couldn’t move his right arm at all. The first frenzied thought that went through Garner’s mind:
stroke
. A motherfucking stroke, here of all places! How was he going to explain this? He tried his legs, his toes . . . nothing. No, no, no . . .

“Shhh,” someone whispered.

“Nikki” was the name he wanted to say, but he couldn’t bring his lips together. Not in any way that could form a syllable. If he could, he’d be screaming right about now.
Nikki, what the hell are you doing? Can’t you see I can’t move? Can’t you see I need help!?

Garner could still see, though. Not much. Just a tiny sliver of peripheral vision.

He saw a flash of silver. And the blur of a robe—not a kimono. This wasn’t Nikki here in the room with him. Was it a medic? Had he passed out? What was going on?

Hands touched him. Rough hands. He could feel that much at least. Someone trying to help him. Thank God. Because Garner couldn’t move a muscle. He felt like a slab of beef on a butcher’s steel counter.

Where was Nikki? Who’d moved him? Garner tried to squint, to clear his vision, but he couldn’t move his eyes, either. Everything was too bright. Too loud.

Fingers moved along his spine. Poking. Searching. Pinching for a moment, then releasing. Finally the fingers seemed to find the spot they wanted.

“Hold still,” voice said. It wasn’t Nikki.

No!
he wanted to scream. But couldn’t.

The first jab was brutal—painful. His muscles and bones may have been locked in place, but Garner could feel everything. The sharp tip of the dagger. The steel as it slid past his skin and muscle and worked its way deep into his body. His own warm blood bubbling up and running down the sides of his back, along his ribs.

The thing standing next to him seemed to be laughing. And it had another dagger. The thing showed it to him, sweeping a slender hand beneath its sharp tip, as if to demonstrate. “Ready?”

The fingers began searching again. Poking. Prodding. Tapping. As if counting the vertebrae.

Garner heard a soft laugh. He tried to claw at the table, but couldn’t. His pain—off the charts. He was helpless as a baby. Goddamnit, why didn’t his mouth work? Why couldn’t he scream? At least a scream would be some kind of release. But there was no release. There was no escape. Only the steel pushing its way into his helpless body.

No. No more. He couldn’t take this anymore. Garner willed his eyes to move. Not much. Just a fraction of an inch to the left. If nothing else, he wanted to see who was doing this to him. He knew it couldn’t be Nikki. Not his sweet angel Nikki. Someone else. Some evil bitch who’d lost her damn mind, got off on this kind of thing. Garner blinked hot tears from his eyes and tried to focus, his eyeballs straining in their sockets.

He couldn’t see who was torturing him like this.

But he could see a small table, on which rested a clean white towel.

And on top of the towel were
eight more daggers
.

chapter 29

West Hollywood, California

 

 

Dark tore off the plastic wrap, opened the flimsy cardboard box, and shook the glossy tarot cards out onto his kitchen table. He’d picked up a set at a bookstore in Westwood on the way back from LAX. If the killer was working with tarot, then fine. Dark would immerse himself in its language. He hated working blind.

The instruction book included with the deck made great pains to state that tarot was “not fortune-telling, nor religion.” It was merely a symbolic language.

Still, the choice struck Dark as odd. Usually, leaving a tarot card was the kind of thing teenagers did at vandalism sites to panic authorities—to be all
spooky
. You draw a pentagram, you stab a cat, you leave a tarot card. Kid stuff. Still, Dark knew that some serious killers had tarot on the brain. He could recall two major cases. The infamous Beltway Sniper—John Allen Muhammad, along with his underage partner, Lee Boyd Malvo—left tarot cards for investigators at the scenes of his attacks. One of them was the Death card, along with a message scrawled on the back:

This card was found where Muhammad had shot a thirteen-year-old boy as he was walking to school in Bowie, Maryland. The media quickly dubbed the sniper “The Tarot Card Killer,” but it became clear that Muhammad had his fevered mind on jihad, not fortune-telling. In essence, Muhammad was acting exactly like a teenaged kid trying to be spooky.

A few years later there was the so-called Hierophant, who named himself after one of the Major Arcana cards of the tarot. He didn’t leave behind tarot cards. Instead, he took on the moral crusade of a hierophant, finding “sinners” and then executing them so that they would be discovered along with their sin. Tax cheats were found sliced up and surrounded by paper evidence of their misdeeds. Adulterers were found butchered together, in their hotel rooms. Pedophiles were found with DVDs and printouts of kiddie porn. The Hierophant killed himself before he could be apprehended. Predictably, the killer on a moral crusade was covering up for a host of his own sins, including forcible detention, domestic abuse, and embezzlement.

This series of murders, however, was different.

The victims were the cards.

A story was being told.

But what?

Dark drank another beer as he pored over the details on the cards. On the surface, the images appeared simple. One central image, many of them obvious. But the closer you looked, the more the smaller details jumped out at you.

The Hanged Man, for instance. The twelfth card in the Major Arcana, according to the guidebook. The scene could be considered ghastly, but the look on the man’s face was one of calm, of relaxation. A halo of light burned behind his innocent head. The implication was that this man was at peace.

So go ahead and speak to me, Hanged Man,
Dark thought.
I know what it’s like to be left dangling. Why are you so calm?

 

 

 

Dark went down to his basement and projected the Martin Green crime-scene photo on the wall again. Then he dragged an image of the Hanged Man card into the projection program. After doing a little resizing, Dark made the card image slightly opaque, then dragged it over the Martin Green image.

They matched.

From the crooks of his elbows to the position of his head (turned slightly to the right) to the precise angle of his bent left leg . . . everything matched, down to the centimeter. The killer had clearly obsessed over this card, committing every detail to memory, then sought to re-create it with the hanging body of Martin Green.

The killer was not just some creep using the tarot card for shock value, Dark thought. The killer had a deep connection with the symbolism and ritual of the cards. The killer respected the cards and chose them to make these grand gestures.

Jeb Paulson’s body position wouldn’t match, of course. But for a moment in time, as he was most likely forced to take that step off the roof, he did. Maybe the killer didn’t need others to see the moment. Maybe it was something the killer wanted to keep to himself and savor in his mind’s eye.

The three girls in the bar, however—they had the same attention to detail as the Martin Green murder. All of that effort to bind them and hang them and slice their throats and keep their cocktail glasses upright ... again, it showed a slavish devotion to the tarot.

But what was the killer trying to say?

Dark admitted that the answers he needed wouldn’t be in some Wikipedia page, or the instruction book from a pack of cards.

 

 

Then came a knock at Dark’s front door.

chapter 30

After recovering his Glock from its hiding spot under the floorboards, Dark paused at the entranceway to his basement lair, then made his way to front of his house. He slid along a wall cautiously. The door had one of those old-fashioned magnifying peepholes mounted in the middle, but Dark never used it. Peepholes made it too easy for someone on the other side to fix your position. And even though Dark had selected the door to be thick enough to withstand a point-blank shotgun blast, the peephole was merely glass. A bullet could smash through it easily. Good-bye, brain matter. Good-bye, everything.

So instead Dark looked through a peephole hidden on the left side of the door. This gave him a line of sight to a set of mirrors mounted on the porch roof. The mirrors revealed a familiar face.

Tom Riggins.

What the fuck was
he
doing here?

Dark took a moment to control his breathing. More knocking. A little louder this time. Tucking the Glock into the back of his jeans, Dark flipped the brass lock and opened the door.

 

 

A few minutes later Riggins was twisting the top from his bottle of microbrew. He strolled through the house as if he owned the place. That was the trick; you didn’t ask, you just moved. His Sig Sauer hung heavy on his belt, his shirt untucked. It had been a long flight, on top of an even longer day. Tuesday morning in Virginia, Tuesday evening in West Hollywood, gut churning the whole way. Riggins wished he could have sent somebody else. God, anybody else. But he knew it was up to him to read Dark. No one else could.