Dark Prophecy (22 page)

So the nurse—Evelyn Barnes—was supposed to be the woman? So who was the child? No child had been reported missing from the hospital. Thank God.

Like Martin Green, there was torture involved. The same couldn’t be said for all of the killings. Paulson was taken out quickly. Same with the three MBA students. Their bodies were arranged, but there were no signs of torture. With the senator, there was a methodical stabbing—definitely torture. The passengers in the plane, however, were knocked out, asphyxiated, burned. Methodical. Impersonal.

Constance realized:
With some of the murders, the killer had a personal stake.

Some were examples, impersonal: Paulson, the students, the passengers.

But the killer had a personal reason to hate Green, to hate Senator Garner, to hate this nurse here.

So what tied them together—an economic expert, a politician, and a nurse in a children’s hospital?

chapter 49

West Hollywood, California

 

 

Dark returned to California. At long last, he had a piece of hard evidence in his possession. Now it was just a matter of making sense of it.

Over the years he’d collected spare pieces of gear from the Special Circs crime labs—outdated incubators, centrifuges—and built his own thermal cycler and sequencer from mail-order kits once he quit the job. The makeshift setup was a far cry from what some crime labs had at their disposal, but it would give Dark what he needed. There was no court of law, no chain of evidence to preserve. The DNA would merely fill in another piece of the story.

After isolating the samples, incubating them, separating the DNA from the debris, expanding the sample, Dark loaded it into the sequencer. While he waited for samples to finish the analysis process, Dark thought about the killer’s seemingly random strikes.

That was the thing: Ninety-nine point nine percent of the killers in the world did not choose their victims at random. There was
always
a reason.

Movies and crime novels were always showing you assassins who let you live or die at the flip of a coin or card, heads or tails, red or black. But that’s not how it worked. Somebody wants to go through all of the trouble to take your life, they’re going to have a good reason. They’re going to have a plan.

They’re not going to leave it up to a deck of fucking tarot cards.

Right?

Dark couldn’t shake the idea, though, that larger forces were at work. Let’s say the killer woke up one morning and decided,
Okay, going to give myself a reading, and then I’m going to kill a bunch of people according to that reading. I’ll find people who match the cards, and it’ll freak people right out . . .

Even if that was true, then the killer was still engaged in the action of
selection
. Of all of the men in the world you’d want to hang, why Martin Green in North Carolina?

And surely he chose Jeb Paulson because Paulson introduced himself into the killer’s world.

If Jeb hadn’t shown up—if, say, Riggins had gone in his place—what would have happened? Would the killer have targeted Riggins just the same? No. Couldn’t have been Tom Riggins, who was many things, but he was no “fool,” in the sense of the tarot cards. He was no fresh soul awaiting rebirth. Christ, you couldn’t get more battle-hardened if you tried.

Again, it was
selection
. Not a random flip of the card.

But then how do you explain the three girls in the bar? Utterly random, no connection whatsoever to Green, other than their field of study: business. Just like the plane crash victims—execs at a lending company. And just like the senator, who was involved in banking and regulatory information. A little bit of a stretch, but not too much. You could draw a nice clean line through all of the victims, except for Paulson.

There was a digital
ding
from the sequencer. The samples were ready.

The blood was animal.

No link to the killer.

chapter 50

Dark sat in his basement staring at the ceiling in a near-fugue state, unaware of the passage of time. There were tiny fragments of fact in his head, and his brain struggled to piece everything back together again. The hard evidence was useless, just like it had been with Sqweegel.

There was a new e-mail
ding
on his laptop. A report forwarded from Graysmith. There had been another TCK killing, just one day after the plane crash. This time: a nurse named Evelyn Barnes in Wilmington, Delaware. Dark clicked open the file and knew within a few sentences that he was reading a report from Constance Brielle. Her reports were crisp, precise, and smart. If he was going to cheat from anyone’s homework, Dark would pick Constance’s every time.

Constance had quickly identified the tarot card being referenced: the Five of Pentacles. Then again, the killer (or killers, Dark reminded himself) hadn’t been sly about it. Whoever had shoved Evelyn Barnes into that cold morgue drawer had left a copy of the Five of Pentacles card in there with her.

Again, another card from Dark’s supposedly “personal” reading. What had Hilda told him about the card?

The card denoted hard times and ill health. Like the hard times after the brutal slaying of Dark’s foster parents, and he told Riggins he was quitting Special Circs.
You were right,
he’d told Riggins.
I care too much.
Was that why this nurse, Barnes, deserved her punishment? Did she care too much? Or, like the image of the old woman on the card, did she blithely ignore the pain of those around her?

Stop it, Dark told himself. Focus on the case. Think about the killer. Not your own life. You’ve already been through that.

But everything kept returning to the cards.

Maybe life isn’t what he thought. Maybe it was predetermined, and we only had the illusion of free will. Maybe the Celtic cross was a glimpse behind the façade of the machinery, giving you a glimpse into how the universe really worked.

But if that was the case, what were we but helpless pawns? Just tiny bugs, trapped in an upside-down glass, trying like hell to scramble up the surface only to slide back down. Soon, the air would disappear. We all die. We have the illusion of a vast world beyond the glass, and we gasp our last breaths thinking we’ll be the ones to figure out how to escape the glass. No one does, however.

No one person in the history of the world has ever beaten the glass.

 

 

Dark picked up his cell, thumbed the number, and waited. C’mon, Hilda, answer.
Please.
Instead an automated voice mail picked up.

“This is Madame Hilda at Psychic Delic. I am unable to answer your call right now ...”

When the beep sounded, Dark left a message. “Hilda, you helped me more than I can tell you. But I have more questions, and I really need to see you. Tomorrow morning, if you can. I’ll be at your shop at nine sharp. Please be there.”

chapter 51

Special Circs Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia

 

 

 

“Tell me you’re close to making an arrest on this thing.”

Riggins stared at Norman Wycoff. “We’re throwing every available resource at it. But I’ve got six crime scenes with seventeen victims in six different jurisdictions. You want to give me more resources, I’ll happily take them.”

The secretary of defense had shown up in his office, not content to call or send e-mails with a billion little red exclamation points next to the subject line. On television, the man looked like America’s most passionate defender. His bulldog tactics were allegedly part of his charm. Such things were getting a little long in the tooth, and American citizens were tired of hearing about extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, hoods, electric shocks, dogs, and genital torture. Wycoff looked weary from constantly defending himself, let alone running his department. Sometimes he took his frustrations out on whoever happened to be close by.

“Do you understand that Homeland Security wants to treat this as a terrorist act?” Wycoff said now.

“Good,” Riggins said. “Let them chase this down.”

Wycoff sneered. “You don’t want to avenge your own, Tom? That’s not like you at all. I think you’re losing your edge.”

“Like I give a fuck what you think?”

Wycoff turned a strange shade of purple that Riggins couldn’t quite identify. From the look on his face, you could tell he wanted to strike back with something. Anything. He’d even go for the testicles. Finally, he spat out: “Maybe Steve Dark was the only member of Special Circs who knew what the hell he was doing.”

Riggins twitched. He couldn’t help it, and cursed himself.

Not because of wounded pride—Wycoff didn’t know shit about how Special Circs really worked. No, it was because Riggins had Steve Dark on the brain. To a man like Wycoff, Dark was like the hard steel pistol shoved inside a suburban father’s nightstand. You deny you have it. Deny you fantasize about using it on home intruders. You tell your liberal friends you wish you could just chuck it in the river. But you can’t seem to bring yourself to do that, either. In fact, you’re glad that pistol is within close reach. Since Dark had left Special Circs, Riggins hadn’t had a peaceful night of sleep.

Wycoff caught the twitch. He narrowed his eyes.

“Is he working this for some other agency?” Wycoff asked.

“No,” Riggins said.

“So what’s he doing sniffing around the crime scenes? I thought he was busy lecturing bratty UCLA kids.”

“Yeah, Dark’s a teacher now, but he’s also been a manhunter for the last two decades. You just can’t shake something like that aside. He told me he was just curious. I told him to fuck off, and I think he will. But last time I checked, this was still a free country. You want to stop him from traveling?”

Wycoff seemed to ignore that. He started for the door, pausing only to deliver his final thoughts on the matter:

“Just get me results. And make sure Dark doesn’t get in the way. Or I’ll remove him myself.”

The place was Banner’s favorite—a diner on the outer fringes of D.C. that served the most ridiculous pancakes ever. Pancakes with chunks of candy. Pancakes with jalapeño and habanero peppers. And Banner’s choice this morning: pancakes made with little hardened morsels of pancake batter inside. Constance—who was blessed with a metabolism of a long-distance runner—ordered three fried eggs, three sausages, a double order of buttered toast, and three small glasses of vegetable juice. Riggins stuck with black coffee, dry toast. His stomach was a mess. Better to lay something basic down there to get him through the morning.

“You really should try a bite of this,” Banner said. “It’s like an infinite loop of pancake.”

“I need your help,” Riggins said. “Off the books.”

“I thought a free breakfast was too good to be true,” Constance said.

Riggins’s head swiveled to the right. “Hey. Who said anything about free?”

“So what is it?” Constance asked.

“Dark.”

“I knew it.”

Banner, mouth full of a cooked and uncooked pancake, said: “You mean Steve Dark? I thought he was, like . . . gone.”

“He is,” Riggins said. “But I think he’s not quite able to leave the job. The Tarot Card Killings have put the hooks in him. Only problem is, Wycoff’s not happy he’s involved. So, for our friend’s sake, we need to find him, and keep him out of harm’s way.”

“Isn’t he in Los Angeles?” Banner asked. “So, like, he’d be easy to find, right?”

Riggins ignored Banner and turned to Constance. “You remember Wycoff’s special little friends, right?”

No matter how much he drank, Riggins certainly couldn’t forget them—even five years later. To Wycoff, they were probably no more meaningful than his landscapers or the people who cleaned his bathroom. But to Riggins they were nightmares personified. Five years ago, Wycoff had threatened to have Riggins killed unless he performed a certain “favor” for him. He’d backed up that threat with a black ops unit comprised of men in black silk masks and sharp needles. Wycoff called them “Dark Arts.” They were men who would kill upon demand.

“Yeah, I remember,” Constance said. “Charming guys.”

“Well, I don’t want them making Steve’s acquaintance. But that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless we rein him in ourselves.”

“Right. So what do we do?”

“Find Steve. Put him in protective custody until this tarot bullshit blows over, and Wycoff forgets about him. Catch the Tarot Card Killer.”

Riggins thought, but didn’t say out loud:
Pray to God that Dark and the TCK aren’t the same person.

Banner paused, fork full of pancake. “So you want us to hunt the world’s best manhunter?”

“That’s the idea,” Riggins said.

chapter 52

Venice, California

 

 

The streets of Venice Beach were unusually quiet—a morning storm was gathering itself off the coast. As Dark approached the shop, paranoid thoughts raced through his mind. Maybe he
should
have had Graysmith do a background search on Hilda. His gut told him to trust her, but his gut was a weird little organ sometimes. Dark knew he might be walking into a trap.