Dark Prophecy (6 page)

Oh yeah. Knack needed to find out who the fuck he was, pronto.

Sure, he could try official sources. But that was almost always a supreme waste of time. Instead, Knack walked up to the guy’s rental and tried the handle of the passenger door. It was unlocked. Knack loved that—the cock-sure confidence of federal law enforcement officials. Dude pulls up to a crime scene full of cops, why would he bother locking his door?

Knack lowered himself into the seat, popped open the glove box. There it was, just like he thought. The rental agreement. You’re supposed to keep them with you, of course, but this guy probably just stuffed it out of sight quick because he’d been in a hurry to get to this crime scene.

Knack wrote down the name, along with his address and phone number, before stuffing the rental agreement back in the envelope and replacing it in the glove box. He scanned the inside of the car, quick. The vehicle had that new-car smell—something the rental companies sprayed in. Knack had once written a piece about it.

In the backseat was a small duffel bag. File folder sticking out of the side pocket.

Knack looked around. Nobody had noticed him. Yet.

He reached back, grabbed the file folder, flipped it open. Inside were a few pieces about Martin Green—the same pieces Knack had dug up a few weeks ago. But then, in the back, was a little thin slice of gold.

A printout of a crime-scene photo—embedded in an e-mail.

From someone named Tom Riggins, to this mystery man—Paulson. The terse message read:

But the photo. Oh, the photo. Even in black-and-white printout, Knack could see this had been no simple home invasion. Somebody had played around with poor Marty Green. Hung him, skinned him, burned him, and did God knows what else to him. Someone clearly had
fun
.

The scene reminded him of something, but he couldn’t place it. Knack had been raised a good Catholic boy, and it looked like the torture of a saint. You had saints who were stabbed in the head. Saints who were flayed alive then tossed into salt mines. Saints who had their eyes and tongues removed and then were forced to eat them. Forget torture-porn flicks. You want the real hard-core stuff, you read
Lives of the Saints
.

So who was the saint of the upside-down torture snuff? If only he’d kept in touch with Sister Marianne. She could help him sort this out in a minute.

Knack suddenly remembered where he was—in the rental car of some unidentified Federal agent of some sort. He gets caught in here, he might be breathing through a hood in a secret Cuban prison later tonight. Keeping the printout in his lap, he gingerly slid the folder back into the duffel bag, stepped out of the car, closed the door. Calmly strolled back toward his own car, wondering where he could find a scanner.

 

 

At a local copy shop, waiting for the image to scan, Knack thought about how he could put himself in a position to see what was on that legal pad. In the meantime, he pecked away on a netbook, Googling this mysterious Tom Riggins. Guy turned out to be a lifer at something called Special Circs, which was notable only because it wasn’t noted very often. Special Circs seemed to be tied into the FBI, but Riggins’s name also popped up in relation to the DOJ. Interesting. So Paulson had to be Special Circs, too. Why had he been summoned to the Green murder?

Within the hour Knack e-mailed a follow-up about Green being the target of a “vigilante death cult” (oooh, yeah, he liked the sound of that) according to “well-placed anonymous sources.” He buttressed this assertion with a blind quotes from the local cops, as well as innocuous quotes from friends and neighbors that, with just the right framework, could read as sinister and despairing. For instance:

Green kept to himself
—which could also mean he was hiding.

Green drank occasionally
—which could also mean he was drowning his guilt in single-malt.

Green was divorced
—even his family couldn’t stand to be around him. By extension, he deserved to die.

The trick wasn’t to say these things overtly. You let the “facts” and the quotes hang out there. Readers were good at connecting their own dots. Readers just wanted a few surface details that would help them categorize a guy like Green and then file it away. It was shorthand for real thinking.

Simple.

This “death cult” was designed to provoke a reaction from the Feds. They’d want to know his sources. Well, fellas, tit for motherfucking tat. Besides, Knack had the best thing: the crime-scene photo.

chapter 10

West Hollywood, California

 

 

Another night, another panicked wake-up. Another frenzied sweep through the house, checking doors and windows, lingering on his daughter’s half-finished room. Another series of hours to kill before dawn.

So Dark surfed through murder stories.

He knew he shouldn’t. He had promised himself that he’d pull his mind out of murders. For his daughter’s sake, if nothing else. Even reading about this stuff was like an alcoholic just
browsing
at the local liquor store or a heroin addict pricking the crook of his arm with a syringe, you know . . .
just to remember what it felt like.

Dark knew this.

He read the stories anyway.

The early morning roundup included a mother who killed her husband in a ritzy $3,500-a-night Fort Lauderdale hotel. It had been their anniversary. Her suicide note claimed she’d endured thirteen years of hell. A father in Sacramento had suffocated his two-year-old daughter. Turned himself in. Asked to be put to death immediately. An accountant had been stabbed on a street in Edinburgh, Scotland. A bandit who claimed his pistol fired accidentally when he held it to the temple of the kid he was robbing. At least eight—no, nine cases of children shooting other children. And this was just since midnight.

There are an estimated 1,423 murders in the world every day. That worked out to a murder every 1.64 seconds. Dark did a daily scan of homicide briefs, which included the cruelest words in the English language:
Bludgeoned. Slashed. Stabbed. Shot. Gutted. Eviscerated.

But this morning, Dark found one that practically jumped off the screen.

The ritual torture-murder of a man named Martin Green.

 

 

Dark quickly read the story—which had been first broken on a gossip Web site called the Slab. The piece was everything Dark hated about modern crime journalism. It was sensationalistic, vaguely sadistic, gruesome, and yet thinly reported. The writer, Johnny Knack, had woven a story using the thinnest of threads. The paucity of details—that’s what bugged Dark the most. The stuff he
did
have was misleading and obscured the real story. Most offensive of all, the story had a completely unsupported premise: that a financial adviser named Martin Green had been the targets of a “vigilante death cult.”

However, Knack
did
have an exclusive:

A crime-scene photo, right from Special Circs. Or as Knack put it: “High-level sources close to the investigation.”

 

 

Dark copied the JPEG from the Slab site and dragged it into a piece of presentation software on his desktop. After a few clicks, the image was projected onto the basement’s lone bare wall. Dark stood up, killed the lights. The bright image of Martin Green’s final moment shined on the white concrete. Nowhere near scale but large enough for Dark to see the smaller details.

The longer Dark stared, the more it became clear body position didn’t serve any specific torture purpose. This wasn’t like a waterboarding or asphyxiation. The man’s body was staged. It was meant to look like
something
. This was a ritual.

Why did your killer do this to you, Mr. Green?

Why did they burn your head, and nothing else?

Why cross your legs like that? An upside-down number 4. Did that number mean something to your killer? To you?

Who
were
you, Martin Green? Just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong hour? Or did our killer choose you for this grim ritual for a specific purpose. Did he find you, study you, hunt you. Then late one night, blindside you . . .

The fact there even
was
a photo amazed Dark. Special Circs took great pains to keep their cases out of the mainstream media. And the photo meant his old friend Tom Riggins had a mole in the department, or at the very least, a greedy support staff member looking to augment his meager government salary. Leaking photos like this wasn’t just a firing offense, in Riggins’s opinion. This was a torture-slowly-then-put-you-in-Gitmo kind of offense. Dark could imagine Riggins’s reaction to something like this. He’d be like a crack-addled shark right about now, making his way through the corridors, sniffing for blood.

Dark found himself reaching for his cell phone, his thumb almost pressing the auto-dial button—number six—which would connect him with Riggins. Then he stopped. Tossed the phone back onto the morgue table.

Riggins had made it clear: no more contact. No conversations, not even a cup of coffee and a hearty discussion of the weather. He and Riggins were through.

chapter 11

The cell buzzed in his pocket. Dark fished it out, recognized the number: his in-laws up in Santa Barbara. A delicate, sweet voice spoke to him: “Hi . . . Daddy?”

It was his little girl, Sibby. Named for her mother, who had died the day their daughter was born. Little Sibby was five years old, but sounded younger on the phone, somehow.

“Hi, baby,” Dark said, eyes still on the torture image on his wall. “How are you?”

“I miss you, Daddy.”

“I miss you, too, baby. What did you do today?”

“We went on the swings, oh, and then the slide. I went down the slide thirty times!”

“That’s good, baby.”

“Maybe even fifty!”

“Really,” Dark said. “That many.”

He knew he should turn away from the wall. Close his eyes. Something, anything.
Pay attention to your daughter, you asshole.
But Dark’s eyes refused to move. His mind was waiting for something to snap loose in his mind. Why had the killer chosen to pose Green’s body like this? Was there something in the context of the murder scene he was missing? It was frustrating, having access to only a few of the pieces. To do this right, Dark would have to be there. See the body. Smell it. Touch it.

After a while a sweet voice jarred him out of his fugue state.

“Daddy?”

“Huh? What, sweetie.”

“Gramma says I have to go to bed now,” Sibby said.

Before Dark could respond, there was a soft click. She was gone. Dark leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, closed his eyes. What was he doing? Why did he
keep doing
this to himself? This was not his case. This was not his business. Sometimes Dark wished he could just turn it off for good. Give himself just six months of being normal. Remind himself what it feels like, and maybe then he’d be okay.

II

the fool

To watch Steve Dark’s personal tarot card reading,
please log in to
Level26.com
and
enter the code: fool.

Falls Church, Virginia

 

 

Jeb Paulson tried to remember where he was—what he was doing. He couldn’t. Which frightened the hell out of him. Even after the deepest sleep, his memory always reloaded in an instant. Stranger still was that he could see the star-studded sky, and was breathing in cold night air. There was tacky material under his fingertips. See? Nothing made sense. He wasn’t even sure what day it was. The weekend, he thought. Yeah, had to be.

“Up,” a voice commanded.

Metal jabbed at the side of his head. The business end of a gun. Paulson started to look in its direction when the harsh voice barked again:

“Don’t turn around. Just get up.”

Slowly Paulson crawled to his feet. He was shaking all over, like he had a fever. His skin felt tingly.

“Now walk.”

The gun jabbed him in a kidney. His muscles were ultra-sensitive. Everything felt tender. The slightest touch was agony. He hadn’t felt this bad since his last bout with the flu a couple of years ago.

“Keep walking,” the voice continued.

As Paulson walked across the tarred roof, he realized where he was. On top of his own apartment building. He recognized the tops of the trees across the street, the telephone lines, and the park beyond. What was he doing up here?

Wait. It was coming back now. Last thing he remembered, he’d taken Sarge, their dog, for a walk. Sunday night, after dinner. He did some of his best thinking on those walks. So yeah, he’d been walking Sarge, and thinking about Martin Green, wondering what was next—trying to anticipate the killer’s next move. And then he woke up on the roof . . .