Dark Prophecy

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  Tiffany was about to yell when the plane hit the first tree and then her body was flung forward, into the instrument panel.

  He watched the crash from the ground a few miles away. All of his meticulous planning had paid off. There was the exhilaration of the perfectly timed jump. The recovery of the ATV, hidden in the brush. And a few moments later the plane went down, all according to plan. The fireball was beautiful as it bloomed out of the lush, green mountains.

  chapter 40

  West Hollywood, California

  Someone was already inside the basement lair by the time Dark returned home.

  Probaby Graysmith. But Dark didn’t want to take any chances. He recovered his Glock 22 from its hiding place under the floor, unwrapping it from oily rags and tucking it in his back waistband.

  After pressing the button that opened the hatch in the floor, Dark aimed his Glock down the entranceway.

  “Lisa?”

  Weapon still in hand, Dark descended the stairs. After all—fresh insights or not—paranoia was still his friend. Graysmith was probably just sitting down there, working. But she also might have a gun to her head, held by persons unknown. Or Graysmith might be the one holding the gun, and it would be pointed up at Dark—even though there were far easier ways for her to take control. In his efforts to secure his home, Dark realized he’d practically invited in the biggest security risk of all: a member of U.S. intelligence.

  Graysmith looked up from the laptop on the autopsy table. No gun to her head. No weapon in her hand. She blinked.

  “You keep wanting to shoot me,” she said. “I think there’s something Freudian at work here.”

  Dark lowered the weapon, but didn’t put it down. Not just yet. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out.”

  “Not at Venice Beach, by chance?”

  Dark said nothing.

  “Hey, I’m just looking out for you,” Graysmith said. “My goal is to keep you safe. Besides, it’s not too difficult to track a man in a Mustang tooling around L.A. in the middle of the night. I still have some friends in LAPD surveillance.”

  Dark didn’t reply. Somehow Graysmith knew he was at Venice Beach, but she made no reference to Hilda or the tarot card shop. Maybe she’d slipped some kind of GPS tracker onto his clothes, his wallet, his car. Could be anything, really, and short of stripping down and scrubbing himself under a hot shower, he’d probably wear it as long as she wanted him to. Fine. She could do what she wanted. But he intended on keeping Hilda—and her amazing, dead-on reading—to himself for now. Graysmith already had enough of his life on a microscope slide.

  “Come here,” Graysmith said.

  Dark moved around the autopsy table that doubled as his desk to find that Graysmith was wearing a T-shirt . . . and nothing else. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Graysmith said.

  “About you being here in my house, uninvited, pretty much all of the time?”

  Graysmith ignored the comment. “The first four cards. Where’s this going? What’s the killer’s next move? Take a look at this.”

  As he moved closer to Graysmith, he could smell the fresh scent of her hair. She’d recently showered. Had she used his shower? Dark peered over her shoulder at the screen, which showed a map of the U.S., pinpointing the murders so far: Green in Chapel Hill. Paulson in Falls Church. The cards and killings made sense individually. But what connected them? As he stared at Graysmith’s computerized map, Dark’s brain started to force the pieces together.

  Chapel.

  Church.

  A religious connection there? Was the killer mocking religion?

  Then there were the three MBA students in Philadelphia. City of Brotherly Love. The Quaker City. Founded by people fleeing religious persecution. More religious themes. Then you had the senator in Myrtle Beach. No obvious religious connection, unless you consider it a sin to enjoy a special massage at an ocean-side resort.

  Forget religion for now. Think about the locations.

  “So . . . what are you thinking?” Graysmith asked. She turned to watch him, her eyes transfixed on his face as he worked things through. Her mouth opened slightly. Dark ignored her. He had to ignore her. Focus on the task at hand.

  The locations were all within driving distances . . . to a point. There seemed to be no central hub. The murder trail climbed north, but then made an abrupt turn back south again. Why? Not convenience. It would be a pain in the ass to drive or fly back down to Myrtle Beach within hours of killing the three girls in that bar.

  “I don’t think we’re dealing with a single perp,” Dark said. “This is an organized team.”

  “Keep going,” Graysmith said.

  “Clearly there’s a lot of planning involved. Surveillance and staging, at the very least. A lone killer would space these things out. Give himself enough room to operate. But that’s not what’s happening. Maybe one killer does Green in Chapel Hill, and the next is ready to strike in Falls Church. Then the first killer—or a third—travels up to Philadelphia. And so on. They all follow in close sequence, except for the second murder. Paulson. That was a wrinkle in their plan. They had to adjust.”

  “And now they’ve started leaving cards at the murder scenes,” Graysmith said. “According to the Special Circs report, a Ten of Wand card was found on the tenth dagger in Garner’s back. That’s a big fuck-you, killing a senator and leaving a literal calling card.”

  “It’s also a big change,” Dark said. “Serials don’t usually vary their signature. They have their patterns, and they live inside them. There were no cards found at the scenes of the first three murders. The crime scenes took the place of the card, the living embodiment of the cards. So why be crass now and leave a card? What’s changed?”

  Graysmith didn’t respond at first. She chewed on a knuckle, typed in a URL, then turned the laptop to show Dark the screen.

  “The media attention,” she said. “This guy at the Slab, Johnny Knack, broke the story after the three girls in Philadelphia. Gave the killer—or killers, as it were—a name. TCK. Real cute, huh?”

  “So they like the attention,” Dark said. “Maybe that’s what they wanted all along. Maybe they’re not speaking to law enforcement. They could be trying to send a message to the world.”

  “So what’s the message? What are they trying to say?”

  Dark didn’t respond. His mind drifted back to his personal reading with Hilda and how she’d compelled him to face the truth about his past. The message in the cards cut to his very soul in a deeply personal way. But how could that same message apply to anyone else?

  She reached out and touched his face. “It’s okay, Steve. You can relax. Like I told you before, I’m here to support you. To give you whatever you need.”

  Maybe if he hadn’t been out all night, maybe if Hilda hadn’t given him that tarot reading, maybe if his heart hadn’t felt lighter than it had in years . . . maybe then Dark would have turned away, continued to seal that part of himself off from the rest of the world. But he stood still as Graysmith leaned into him.

  “I’m hurting, too,” Graysmith whispered in his ear.

  chapter 41

  There was no prelude, no foreplay, no conversation whatsoever. Dark quickly pulled her shirt—actually his shirt, he quickly noted—up over her head before beginning a frenzied exploration of her body. Graysmith tore at his clothes, too, commenting about the faint scent of incense on his shirt as she ripped it open. So where were you in Venice Beach? she tried to ask. But Dark smashed his mouth against hers, cutting off the comment mid-syllable. She quickly fought back, pinning him against the autopsy table with her legs, unbuckling his pants, sliding them past his hips.

  “I know all about you, Dark,” she said. “I know what calms you. I know what excites you. Brenda Condor filed detailed reports.”

  “Don’t,” Dark said, feeling the anger in his blood. “Don’t say that ” name.”

  “I’m sorry.”
/>
  “Just don’t.”

  Oh, Brenda Condor had fucked him good. He’d been vulnerable after Sibby’s death—jonesing for the physical connection they shared. If Sibby was his narcotic, then Dark was a junkie, and Condor had exploited this when she was keeping tabs on him for Wycoff. She’d even told him: I’m whatever you want me to be. Your psychologist. Your stand-in girlfriend. Your fantasy wife. Your partner. Your slut. Whatever it takes to keep you focused. After that fiasco, Dark promised himself he wouldn’t let it happen again. When he needed sex, he would seek it with anonymous professionals—not with anyone close to him, or who could potentially be close to him.

  Like Graysmith.

  But Dark told himself this was different. She wasn’t fucking her way inside his mind; Dark was trying to fuck his way into hers. She kept everything hidden beneath a layer of confidence and arrogance and hurt and flirtation that all seemed scripted—too studied to be real. He wanted to reduce her to her real self and watch what came slithering out.

  At least that’s what he told himself.

  Afterward, as they lay on the naked concrete floor, their bodies covered in each other’s sweat, Dark remembered the last time he’d lost control like this, feeling his blood boil and allowing every moral inhibition to fall by the wayside. The last time he let reason slip away, and the animal part of his mind take over.

  It had been the night he butchered Sqweegel.

  A little while later, Graysmith finally broke the silence. “I know what you were doing.”

  “Do you?”

  “Trying to break through to the real me, right? Look, the people in my field practically invented it.”

  Dark said nothing.

  “It’s not a criticism,” she continued. “Believe me. It’s welcome. My job is full of power plays and deceit and mistrust—and that’s just on the surface. You have no idea the depths of some agendas and grudges. So any chance to break through all of that and reduce human interaction to something primal, something basic, something raw . . . well, I fucking get off on it. No matter your intentions.”

  Dark said nothing, which prompted Graysmith to laugh.

  “Yeah, welcome to my fucked-up version of pillow talk. You don’t even want to know the conversations I have in my head at night. Like right around this time, the middle of the night—what do they call it? Night terrors? The time the primitive part of our brains tells us we should be afraid, be very afraid, because there are predators out there in the night.”

  “Or inside, lying next to you.”

  “True enough,” she replied.

  At some point he relaxed enough to let himself drift into a low-level state of consciousness. He was still aware of his surroundings, and Graysmith’s naked flesh next to his, her smell, the sound of her breathing. But he was able to turn off other parts of his brain enough to call it rest.

  Something beeped. Graysmith bolted upright, scrambled for her phone, then climbed up to the laptop on the autopsy table.

  chapter 42

  Dark looked over her shoulder at the screen. The headline:

  10 DEAD IN PRIVATE PLANE CRASH

  The site: the Appalachian Mountains. He immediately thought of Hilda in her shop, flipping the fifth card: Ten of Wands. Ten victims. As Graysmith read through the initial reports—the same reports sent to Special Circs—she started making the connections.

  “It’s the Tarot Card Killer,” Graysmith said. “Or one of them, if your theory of a team of killers is correct. According to a transmission picked up by the flight controller, the killer was on that plane, taunting his victims. Telling them exactly what was going to happen, what it would feel like to die.”

  “So he was on the plane with them?” Dark asked.

  “According to this, yes. Right in the cockpit. Either he was the one flying the plane, or he had some kind of control over the pilot.”

  “And the plane crashed.”

  “That’s the report at least. The aircraft was smoking. Why?”

  “What kind of plane?”

  “Pilatus PC-12, single-engine turboprop.”

  “You can’t just eject out of a plane like that,” Dark said. “Unless the killer wanted to commit suicide, he’d have an escape plan. Some way to parachute out.” He considered this for a moment, ran a few scenarios through his mind. “Can you get me to the crash site? I mean, before Special Circs shows up?”

  By air, Los Angeles was at least four hours away from the Appalachian Mountains. Comparatively, the crash site was practically in Special Circs’s backyard—in the same state, no less. But Dark watched as the wheels in Graysmith’s mind spun like crazy, making frenzied connections. Who did she know who had what she needed; how could she reach that person within the next sixty seconds; what would she have to do in return?

  “Don’t shower, don’t even brush your teeth,” she said. “Put on your pants and haul ass to LAX. By the time you arrive I’ll have something arranged.”

  “Full access, like I had in Philadelphia?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you get me a weapon at the site?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Now go.”

  Dark hesitated, unsure of the gesture he should make. Would she want a kiss? Would she want to even acknowledge what had happened? It had been so easy with Sibby. No thought required. It was as if they could read each other’s minds. With Graysmith—God, listen to him, even referring to her by her last name. Lisa. Her name is Lisa. Fuck a woman, you really should start using her first name.

  Graysmith looked at him, then nudged him in the side with an elbow.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I promise you. Go. Now. Do what you do best.”

  chapter 43

  Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

  Riggins and Constance were buying a couple of turkey sandwiches on the way to the Myrtle Beach airport for a ten A.M. flight when both of their phones buzzed. Two different Special Circs assistants were calling with the same grisly piece of news: private charter plane crash in the Appalachian Mountains. Ten dead; pilot missing. But most disturbing of all: It appeared to be the work of the Tarot Card Killer.

  The first responders had discovered something on the plane that had clinched it. After exchanging glances, Riggins and Constance knew they’d heard the same things.

  “This son of a bitch is on an accelerated schedule,” Riggins muttered.

  Constance held the phone to her ear. “I’m calling the airport now. We’ll get as close to the crash site as possible. The fact that the pilot is missing says it all. He probably bailed mid-flight.”

  “Yeah,” Riggins said. “And he could be anywhere now. Just like D. B. Cooper.”

  “True, but he may have left some of himself behind in the cockpit . . . yeah, this is Special Agent Brielle, I want to speak to the pilot please. We need to be wheels up immediately.”

  While Constance made their travel arrangements, Riggins shoved his hands in his pockets. Nothing in them to fiddle around with. Not even a coin to flip. Nothing to do except wait. Wait while this sadistic bastard planned something else—God knows where. Maybe he should just bag the airport and go the nearest psychic shack. Had to be one in a tourist haven like Myrtle Beach, because that’s where you find the best marks. Yeah, maybe he should march in there, slap down a twenty, and demand an emergency reading. Fuck the tarot cards, lady. Fire up the crystal ball. Show me everything like I’m fucking Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Or maybe you’ve got a Ouija board handy? It’d be nice to consult some of my ex-partners on this one, if they’re not doing anything special in the afterlife. Then again, the way he treated some of them, Riggins expected their pale ghostly forms to go take a flying fuck at a doughnut.

  The whole occult thing bothered him. People who hid behind mysticism were nothing more than con men, in Riggins’s view. Smoke, mirrors, cards, thunder, light, all of that bullshit to obscure the truth: They were thieves who wanted to steal from you.

  Only difference was, this thief wanted to st
eal your life.

  Once they were buckled into their seats, Constance stole a glance at Riggins. When in these kinds of moods, the man was practically unapproachable. Gruff didn’t even cover it. But now Riggins seemed positively lost in his own mind. Riggins had been this way since . . . well, if she was honest, since Steve left.

  Constance didn’t think Riggins—no matter what he said—trusted her in the same way. Riggins had plucked Dark from obscurity in the NYPD, brought him to Special Circs, where they’d worked closely together for nearly two decades. What did she and Riggins share, really? An awkward couple of months as partners? Constance knew Riggins would never see her as an equal. To him, she’d always be the assistant who got a promotion. Nothing more.

  Still, Constance swore to always put the case first. Steve had taught her that. Put aside the personal bullshit, the politics, the jockeying, the brown-nosing, the interoffice politics . . . and focus on the work. Catching monsters was all that mattered.

  Which was why she felt confident enough to turn to Riggins and say: “What about Steve?”

  Riggins didn’t react at first. He continued to stare out of the tiny oval window at the wet black tarmac.

  “Riggins, I’m serious. We should call him in on this.”

  He turned, anger flashing in his eyes. “Dark? No fucking way. He made his choice.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t reach out to him.”

  “Wycoff’s already freaking out about Dark being at these crime scenes. You want me to bring him back now, of all times?”

  “Come on—when were you ever one to play by the book? He’s practically begging to be involved. Why not use him as a resource? Off the record? We do this all of the time.”