What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  Jarsdel could smell that scent on himself now—heady and tropical. He tasted mint, too. She must have had one in the car on the way over. He wanted more of her, and tried not to show his disappointment.

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because the thing is, I also need your help, and I don’t want you to feel like this…this thing that seems to be happening between us, that it has strings or anything. That would be weird. I want it to be real, you know?”

  Jarsdel wasn’t sure what she meant. “Need my help? With what?”

  “I have a city council thing coming up on the fifteenth. You wouldn’t have to go out on a limb for me or anything, maybe just talk about the state of the department’s cameras and how it affected you.”

  “Oh. I suppose I could. But I don’t know why anyone would bother listening to me. I’m not a tech guy or anything.”

  “Are you kidding—what about your hand? A decorated homicide detective gets assaulted—”

  “I’m not decorated.”

  “Still, a homicide detective gets assaulted on city property, at a police station of all places? You could talk about how with an upgrade to my system, it never would have happened.”

  “Not technically assault,” said Jarsdel. “Criminal mischief. Mayhem, maybe. Not quite as impressive.”

  “I think you’re handling it amazingly well. You could’ve brought a lawsuit against the department for failing to maintain its cameras.”

  “I guess. Wouldn’t solve anything. But sure, I’ll be in your corner.” He thought of Haarmann and his plastic, game-show-host smile, and knotted his good hand into a fist.

  “My system, the one I’m proposing,” said Varma, “would have all law enforcement camera feeds routed to a secure, dedicated installation. One that’s responsible for monitoring and preserving all the footage for easy recovery. I’m talking flawless, uninterrupted service, with built-in redundancies. Power outages, civil unrest, human error—no longer a problem. Malfunctions or equipment breakdowns could be spotted and dealt with right away.”

  “You’re very passionate about this.”

  “Oh, I’m very passionate. People behave better when they’re being observed. Well, more specifically, when they know they’re being observed.”

  “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “Sometimes? You do realize I’ve put more than a little thought into this.”

  “Mob mentality—”

  “I’m not talking about mob mentality. That’s a very specific situation. I’m talking about you: the individual, reasonable person. You’re walking down the street, eating a sandwich. A giant slice of tomato falls out and splats on the ground. It’s biodegradable, no big deal, right? You leave it there and keep going.”

  Jarsdel shrugged. “Not necessarily.”

  “It’s hypothetical. Please bear with me. Now repeat that scenario, only you notice a PTZ mounted above you.”

  “PTZ?”

  “Pan-tilt-zoom camera. Only it’s encased in a darkened, semitransparent globe, so you have no idea if it’s looking at you or not. The eye-in-the-sky cameras in casinos—you’ve seen them. Now what do you think you’re going to do? I bet you’ll pick up that tomato.”

  “That’s a bet you’d win,” said Jarsdel. “Never liked the whole biodegradable excuse. Spit is biodegradable, and I have a powerful aversion to spitting. You’ll have to come up with a different hypothetical.”

  Varma squinted at him. “You’re being difficult.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” It was an honest answer, so he gave it more thought. “Sorry. I think I like finally being able to really talk to you. And if that means messing with you a little, or getting challenging, it’s only because I’m feeling comfortable.”

  “So you’re basically the awkward kid in third grade who’d show a girl he liked her by pulling her pigtails?”

  “Pigtails,” Jarsdel agreed. “Also throwing little bits of paper at the back of her neck. Telling her she had big teeth.”

  “What a Casanova.”

  “Yeah. So at least you know it comes from a good place. Hopefully that makes it a little less annoying.”

  “Unlikely. But we’ll see.”

  Jarsdel smiled. It felt good to smile like that, in the fullness of the moment. She was wonderful, and she was brilliant, and she had kissed him. Something about his expression must have appealed to her, because she returned the smile.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’re you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I admire you.”

  “Admire me?” Varma looked surprised.

  “Have you ever heard of Lady Mary? She was the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, early eighteenth century.”

  Varma laughed. “That sounds like an extremely obscure person. Why on earth would I know who that is?”

  “She wrote these terrific letters about the time she spent over there, helped expose the West to the culture of the Muslim Orient. She was also a celebrated beauty, and—well—she’s one of my heroes, kind of my big historical crush. She took a big chance and got her kids inoculated to smallpox, which wasn’t being done in England. Western medicine had mostly dismissed inoculation as crazy, but she saw the science in it. Because of her, experiments in Europe got kicked off, and when the next epidemic struck, London lost only a fraction of the people it would have. Compare it to Boston, which lost a quarter of its population that year.”

  “Okay,” said Varma. “And why are you asking me about her?”

  Jarsdel hesitated. “If I explain it, it’ll sound stupid.”

  “Now I’m definitely curious.”

  “I guess you remind me of her in some ways.”

  “Even the part about being a celebrated beauty?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Really?” She bit her bottom lip. It was a coquettish gesture, not the sort of thing he would have expected from her, and that made it even sexier. “Okay. I like this conversation. What else?”

  “She was brave, the way you are. Tough, uncompromising. Used her brain. Even when people told her she was wrong, she didn’t let it throw her off.”

  Varma drew a featherlight finger down his chest. “I’m lucky to know you. In more ways than one.” Their lips met once again. When they’d finished, she gave him a little push. “You’re gonna have to stop doing that. Or you’re gonna get me to do something I don’t think I should do yet.”

  “Could bend the rules a little.”

  “Now if I did that, I wouldn’t be the woman you claim to be attracted to.” She put an arm around his waist. “Couple more weeks, okay? Just let me get past this city council thing.”

  Jarsdel tasted the mint again. Savored the scent rolling off her.

  “And after that…” Varma shrugged. “Then we can have some fun.”

  A flower is an affordance to a bee, Jarsdel recalled from Varma’s book. But so is a pitcher plant to a fly.

  He pushed the thought away.

  “Sounds good,” he told her.

  13

  Jarsdel was the first to see the lieutenant’s face, and his shock must have been apparent.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Sponholz, shuffling over to the conference table. “But before you say anything—no, I wasn’t mugged, and no, it’s not serious.”

  Rall looked up at his boss. “Shit, LT, what happened?”

  At that, Mailander and Al-Amuli turned in their seats to see what was going on.

  Sponholz was a wreck. His lip was split, and the skin around his left eye was puffy and dark with bruising. Three parallel scrapes, already scabbed over, marred his other cheek.

  “It’s too embarrassing,” he said. “I’d love to tell you all I foiled a bank robbery and t
hese are my nobly earned war wounds. But I think a quick check of the local news will prove me a liar. So not only is it embarrassing, but I’m going to have to tell the goddamn truth to everyone who asks.”

  “What, you and the woman get into a fight?” Al-Amuli asked the question with a knowing grin.

  “Such a dick,” Mailander sighed.

  “Uh, no, actually,” said Sponholz. “That’s kind of an inappropriate thing to say, Detective, even in jest.”

  Al-Amuli nodded. “Yeah, I’m just…” He shrugged.

  “Please be mindful of stuff like that. Especially in today’s climate.”

  “Yeah. ’Course.” Al-Amuli looked down at his hands.

  “Anyway, no. I was fixing a part of our eaves where birds had been nesting in this tiny hole they’d found. This is out at Amy’s ranch in Shadow Hills, and you know, when you don’t go out to a place often enough, it begins to fall down around your ears. I mean, she goes there all the time, but she never notices things like that. Little things—you know, like animals living inside the structure of our property. Oy.”

  He slumped into a chair. “Idiocy. You know, you forget sometimes, when you get to be my age, that you should really be hiring professionals. But when you’re stubborn the way I am, you still try to do everything yourself. So I’m up there trying to put in this little screen to keep the birds out, and I thought they were all gone, but one of them flies out right toward my face.”

  “A bird did that?” said Rall.

  “No. A tree. I fell off the ladder and right into an oak. Grabbed at the branches, as you can see, trying not to plummet to my death. So here I am clutching at these things, getting cut up, taking all kinds of damage, working my way down the rest of the way to the ground. Naturally I fall about five feet, sprain my ankle, my wrist.” He lifted his hand and rotated it in its joint, wincing. “There goes my tennis game. Absolutely humiliating. And of course I definitely am not getting back up there to put up the wire. So now I look like I got jumped, and I have to call someone anyway. Fantastic.”

  He stroked his tie. That morning’s selection was a showstopper—a photograph of H. G. Wells surrounded by renderings of scenes from his books. There were Morlocks, time machines, Martian tripods. All these were set against a quote, which emerged in bold strokes, presumably a copy of the author’s own handwriting: “…slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

  “Sorry to change the subject,” said Rall, “but we were curious about yesterday.”

  “Curious?” Sponholz’s eyes twinkled.

  “C’mon, LT, what you got?”

  “Are you asking if I’ve made progress on the case?”

  Rall crossed his arms.

  “If that were true,” continued Sponholz, “it would mean I spotted something in the murder book that you missed. Explicitly, it would mean this old man here got wise to an angle of investigation that had eluded Detective III Goodwin Rall. Career badass, outdone by a failed actor turned brasshole.”

  Rall’s expression remained stern, though Jarsdel could see the corner of his mouth twitch.

  Sponholz raised his hands in a placating gesture. “It would be cruel of me to ask you to acknowledge that. Particularly in front of your subordinates.” He stood and crossed to the whiteboard mounted on the east wall. Picking up a dry-erase marker, he shot a smile to the group and began writing. It didn’t take long for him to finish, and when he stood aside he gave a stiff bow.

  Jarsdel stared at the board. He glanced around to see if it meant anything to the others, but they looked as puzzled as he was.

  In a cheery, lime-green scrawl, Sponholz had written the number:

  1000000000000066600000000000001.

  The team’s bafflement only seemed to excite the lieutenant more. “No math whizzes in here, huh? Well, this is properly spoken as one nonillion, sixty-six quadrillion, six hundred trillion, and one. It’s an interesting number. For one, it’s palindromic—same backwards as it is forwards. But you’ll also notice smack dab in the middle is that creepy, old 666. The Number of the Beast, for all you Iron Maiden fans out there. And on either side of the 666 are thirteen zeroes. And, the whole thing is exactly thirty-one digits long. Thirteen reversed! This, my friends, is known as Belphegor’s prime. Divisible only by itself and the number one.”

  “Whoa,” said Rall. “Hang on. What’s this—”

  “Almost finished. You see, there’s another way to express it, and that’s like this.” Next to the original number, he wrote an equals sign, then 1030 + 666 × 1014 + 1. He capped the marker and turned back to face the group.

  Rall shook his head. “Sorry, LT. You’re gonna have to slow down for us mere mortals. What’s this got to do with the murder book?”

  “Don’t feel bad.” Sponholz tossed the marker back onto the pen tray. “If I’m being absolutely honest with you, I didn’t know half this stuff until last night. But here, I’ll show you what got me going.” He gestured at the Galka murder book in front of Al-Amuli, and the detective handed it over to him. Sponholz flipped the pages, his expression clouding when he reached the crime-scene photos. Eventually he found what he was looking for, and turned the book around so the rest could see.

  It was the six photos from the day before. The garage, the mailbox, the bloody handprint near the front door. On the opposite page, the bowl of pinecones garnished with shit, the blood-smeared family photo, and the little piece of dark red plastic.

  Sponholz swept the book slowly back and forth. “Anyone see it?”

  No one did. Grinning, Sponholz tapped the picture of the handprint on the outside wall. “Right there.”

  Everyone leaned forward. Jarsdel was growing frustrated. The only number he could see was the placard giving the street address—10306. That didn’t match what Sponholz had put on the board. Well, not unless you…

  “Ah—think we got a winner.” Sponholz was pointing at him. “Go ahead, say what you see.”

  “I guess,” Jarsdel ventured, “if you were to read the exponents as whole numbers, you’d get one zero three zero six six six one zero one four. But if you stopped after only five digits, you’d get one zero three zero six, which I suppose matches the Galka’s address.”

  Sponholz made his finger into a pistol and pointed at Jarsdel. “Psht. You got it.”

  Rall looked as perplexed as Jarsdel felt. “Yeah? Huh. Definitely woulda missed it. What’s it mean?”

  “It means,” said Sponholz, “that we’re dealing with witches. Forgive me—no, I’m not referring to people with actual supernatural powers. But whoever the Creeper is, and keep in mind it may be several different people, he’s turned on by the occult.”

  “What about the other addresses?” asked Jarsdel.

  “See, I knew you and I were on the same wavelength.” Sponholz brought a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “I confess, not all of these were easy to figure out. Anyway, here we go. Verheugen. 2549 Thelma. Add the two and five, and you get seven. Add the four and nine, and you get thirteen. Lucky and unlucky numbers, right there. And the street, Thelma. That’s only missing one letter; add an e and you get Thelema, which is an occult spiritual group. Moving on to Rustad. There we’ve got 8010 Stoker. I’m not sure what the numbers mean yet, but Stoker is obviously a reference to the author of Dracula. That’s supported by the Santiago address, which is 6880 Joston. And 6880—get this—is known as a ‘vampire number,’ which is a little complicated to explain why but has to do with the way it’s factored.” He put the paper back in his pocket.

  Mailander raised her hand. Sponholz nodded at her. “Yes?”

  “What about the Lauterbachs?”

  “1320 Hollyridge Loop. Yeah, still trying to work that one out. But you’ve got thirteen right at the front, so I don’t think that’s a coincidence.” He reached up and carefully touched his
scratched cheek. “Really nailed myself with that stupid branch.”

  They detectives sat in silence, contemplating Sponholz’s revelation. Jarsdel scanned their faces, seeing if any of them were actually buying this. The leaps the lieutenant was making bordered on the absurd. Besides, they’d already considered and rejected the witchcraft angle. Nothing at the crime scenes backed it up. No inverted crosses or pentacles drawn in blood. Sponholz was so adamant, though, so certain this was the key, that Jarsdel thought maybe he was missing something.

  “This is going to be our focus,” said the lieutenant. “I want you to toss Fantasy Island again, top to bottom, but this time let’s narrow our search. Look for anyone in and out of there with any of that Devil bullshit going on. Tattoos of goats’ heads and what-not. Pay attention to self-harm, too. Dick piercings and nipple bolts, all that stuff’s typical of that crowd. Some people even get prosthetic horns—what’re they called?—subdermal implants. And if you don’t get lucky there, fan outward. State hospitals. Metropolitan, Coalinga, Atascadero. The neuropsych ward at UCLA. Still dry, then look national. Get a list of every 5150 recently relocated to the Golden State, emphasis on the pasty-faced, black lipstick variety.”

  “But we’ve done all that already.” It was Al-Amuli. He spoke in a soft, murmuring tone of the sort used by children who want to complain without getting in trouble.

  Sponholz was unfazed. He even offered a smile. “Then do it again, this time with real direction. Now you know what you’re looking for.”

  “But he would’ve come up in prints.”

  Sponholz’s smile broadened. “As I recall, you were the one who made the suggestion that his prints may have been deleted. Perhaps purposefully.”

  Al-Amuli sagged. “Yeah, I guess. Just a ton of work we already did.”

  The lieutenant ignored him. “We’re close, people. I can feel it. If he isn’t scared of us yet, he should be.”

  * * *

  Overall, Jarsdel thought, Oscar Morales was right about very little. Well, very little in a quantifiable sense. He’d often been right about procedure, interrogation strategy, motive, suspect behavior. Things that were difficult to measure, that depended on experience instead of stringent academic analysis. The stuff he was right about was—to use a cooking analogy—the flavor, as opposed to the ingredients.