Horoscope: The Astrology Murders

by Georgia Frontiere

  He leaned forward. “What is it?”

  “The night I got the first call, I looked at the transiting planets and how they were aspecting my chart. The aspects create the influences at a specific time.” She was looking at him again, making sure he understood. “The movements of Mars and Pluto mean that this is a time of danger for me. My chart says the danger may be coming from something hidden, from the dark or the past. I think it’s from someone I know directly or indirectly from the past and that it has to do with something that’s been hidden.”

  Stevens continued looking at her, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t believe in astrology, do you, Detective?”

  He uncrossed his legs, sat back in the chair again, looking like a very focused Papa Bear sitting in Baby Bear’s chair. “It doesn’t take astrology to know whoever’s calling you is probably someone you’ve already had some kind of contact with and that he’s hiding things. He’s obviously hiding his identity, and he’s not even telling you the details of his grievance against you.”

  Kelly liked the way Stevens said this. He wasn’t dismissive or condescending; he was just stating how he assessed what she’d told him.

  “Is there anybody in your personal life who might have a reason to threaten you?” he asked.

  She responded immediately. “No. Nobody.”

  “What about your ex-husband?”

  “Jack?” The tone of her voice reflected her skepticism. “It wasn’t Jack. I’d have recognized his voice.”

  “You said the caller was whispering.”

  Kelly was silent.

  “Was it you who decided on the divorce?” he asked her.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Then you were responsible for a woman walking out on him,” he observed.

  “That’s ridiculous. Jack and I get along well. We saw each other just a few months ago at our daughter’s high school graduation. Whoever’s calling me, it’s not Jack.”

  Stevens was quiet; then he asked, “What about the fireplace? You think the caller was responsible?”

  Kelly hesitated; it was another question she’d thought about in the early hours of the morning. “The fire department said it was just debris that the wind carried.”

  “I read their report.”

  The way Stevens said this, Kelly couldn’t tell if he agreed with what the fire captain had told her or not. His opaque brown eyes and sallow face gave her no clue of what he thought, either.

  “We’ll put a trace on your phone,” he said after a long silence. He ran his fingers through his close-cropped brown hair, a nervous habit, then took the police report he’d brought with him out of his pocket and unfolded it on his lap. “You’ve already given us the number. 212-555-323—”

  Kelly cut him off. “Oh my God! That’s my office number! That’s what he called the first time. But the second time he called my private number! Nobody has that number except my family and friends. How did he know my private number?”

  Stevens saw Kelly’s alarm; it seemed she was only now realizing that the caller had already penetrated her life—or that he’d been in her life all along. Before he could say anything, there was a knock on her office door, and he turned around to see the petite black-haired woman who had let him in standing in the doorway.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But someone’s here to see you, Kelly. I told him you were busy, but—”

  “That’s okay, Sarah. Who is it?”

  “Chris Palmer.”

  Stevens saw that this news made Kelly even more unhappy. Rising from her chair, she excused herself and told him she would be back in a minute. As he watched her follow the other woman out of the office, he thought Kelly seemed to disappear behind a facade under which he could sense her fear.

  Kelly walked into Sarah’s office and found Chris waiting for her, holding a manila envelope. He was wearing the leather jacket he’d worn the night before and a black sweater and jeans. He glanced into the hallway, and then he turned to her and smiled. “Looks like you made a fire after I left last night. You should’ve let me stay.”

  Kelly felt the muscles in her jaw tighten; she didn’t know what to say to him, what to think of him, so she said nothing.

  He smiled again, this time with contrition. “I know I shouldn’t be joking about it. What happened, Kelly?”

  His dark eyes seemed sympathetic, but all she could think about was the tattoo of the skull on his arm and what he’d said to her before he left about making a fire in the fireplace. And he’d just talked about it again.

  “I’m in the middle of something important,” she said, “so if you just came by to chat—”

  “I printed some of the photographs for you and the contact sheets. They came out very well.” He opened the envelope and started taking out the photographs. “See what you think.”

  “Thanks. But I don’t have time now.” She was doing her best to sound in control of herself.

  Chris looked at her; then he tossed the envelope with the photos half out of it onto Sarah’s desk. “See you around sometime,” he said, hostilely sarcastic.

  Kelly’s eyes remained on him as he walked into the hall and turned toward the front door. The carpenters were still working to replace the door, so it didn’t surprise her not to hear the door slam behind him as he left, but she knew he would have slammed it if he could have.

  Without looking at Sarah, she walked back into her office, relieved that Chris was gone and that Detective Stevens was there.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  “Chris Palmer. A photographer for the magazine I write a column for.”

  Instead of going back to sit in her chair, this time she sat in the other chair she used for clients, on the same side of the desk as Stevens.

  “He was here last night?”

  Kelly nodded. “Yes.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “I just met him yesterday afternoon. He took my pictures for the magazine, and I invited him to dinner.” She felt foolish telling Stevens this, but there was no point in not telling him.

  “He went out of his way to bring you the photographs,” Stevens observed. “It would’ve been easier to send them on the computer. Obviously, he wanted to see you.”

  Kelly met his eyes but said nothing.

  “Maybe he wanted to see what was going on here this morning, after the chimney made the smoke back up.”

  He saw in Kelly’s face that what he’d said troubled her. “What is it, Dr. York?”

  “I’m not sure if I’m just imagining that it’s important, but—”

  “But what?”

  “After dinner, Chris suggested making a fire. I told him I was too tired and that he had to leave. But then, when I was alone, I did what he said. I made the fire in the fireplace.”

  Kelly was looking at him as if she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. She glanced at the floor, as if what she was thinking embarrassed her. Stevens did nothing to fill the void in their conversation. Finally, she looked up at him again.

  “He has a tattoo of a skull on his arm. He said he used to be a Goth, and it didn’t mean anything. But it scared me. That’s why I asked him to go.”

  “You think he blocked the chimney and that’s why he suggested that the two of you make a fire?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said, anguished by the thought that she had been ruminating on since the firemen had arrived the night before. “Why would he have wanted to be here with me when the house filled up with smoke?”

  “Maybe he wanted to see how upset you’d get. Or maybe he wanted to play the hero and have you become dependent on him.”

  Kelly met the detective’s eyes with hers. He was right; those were reasons Chris might have wanted to be there with her when a fire was lit in the fireplace.

  “Do you know any reason he’d want to hurt you?” Stevens asked.

  Kelly shook her head. “I told you, we just met yesterday.”

  “But
that doesn’t mean his girlfriend or wife didn’t come to see you before she walked out on him. When you check your files, see if any of the women who came about relationship problems described their boyfriend or husband in a way that make you think it could’ve been Chris Palmer.”

  Kelly felt her jaw tense again. “I will.” It was devastating to think that maybe she was right about Chris; she would have preferred Stevens to have told her that her fears about Chris were groundless, that she had no reason to be suspicious of him at all. She’d rather be a fool who’d ruined a potential relationship with a man she’d been attracted to because she’d imagined things about him that were untrue than to find out she might have been attracted to a man who wanted to hurt her.

  “Are you all right, Dr. York?” the detective asked her.

  Kelly was slow to answer him. “Yes,” she said finally. “It’s just a lot to absorb.”

  Stevens looked at her. He didn’t get up right up away. Regardless of what she’d just said, he knew that Kelly wasn’t all right. He wanted her to know, by his presence, that he would do his best to keep her safe. That was what he wanted to do—keep her safe. It was why, when he’d heard that she had called the station to report the phone call, he had wanted the case. For reasons he wasn’t quite ready to tell her, he wanted to help her.

  Kelly didn’t get up right away, either. Sitting with this giant of a man in her small office, she felt there was a possibility that he could actually protect her. His gravity gave her confidence in him. That was what she needed right now, because each day she lost more confidence in herself.

  It started raining a few minutes before Stevens went up to the roof of the brownstone, and now it was raining hard. He hadn’t thought of asking Kelly for an umbrella, so it didn’t take him long to get drenched as he walked across to the spot near the eastern border of the roof where the chimney protruded from the floors below. The bricks from which the chimney was made had once been red; now they were a dull brown from decades of exposure to smoke and to New York City’s filthy air. He crouched next to the chimney and studied the silver-coated tar paper lining the roof, but it didn’t tell him anything about who had been up there before. It didn’t even show the impression of the boots worn by the fireman who had inspected the chimney the night before. If the weather had been hot and humid as it had been this summer and earlier in the fall, it might have softened the silvered tar paper enough to hold footprints, but now the surface was hard, and it told him nothing.

  He stood up and looked at the brick wall around the roof. It was about three feet high, the chimney next to it about six feet high. Anybody could have climbed up on the wall and stuck whatever he wanted to in the chimney to clog it up. Anybody. That included Kelly’s ex-husband, Jack York, and the photographer Chris Palmer.

  Twenty-Three

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINER FROM the West Orange Police Department finished his examination of the body on the bed and turned to the police detective in charge of the investigation. “From the temperature and lividity of the body, I’d say she’s been dead six or seven hours, which means she was raped and killed sometime around three this morning.”

  The detective, Vincent Nichols, didn’t say anything. He wasn’t surprised by what the ME had just told him; from the moment he saw the victim’s thigh, he knew that she had been raped before she was strangled and that it had happened between two and four a.m. That was when the other victim—the victim he’d read about in the report from the New Kent PD—had been raped and strangled. The only difference was this victim had a contusion on her jaw. She must have fought back.

  The ME saw Nichols staring at the cuts that formed some kind of design on the upper part of the woman’s leg. “What do you think that is?”

  “It’s an astrology sign,” Nichols told him. “I don’t know which one. I’m not up on those things. But it looks like an old-fashioned scale. The kind they used to weigh things on, using weights.”

  The ME bent closer to scrutinize the cuts. “You’re right. It is a scale. What makes you think it’s an astrological sign?”

  Nichols glanced at the photograph of the woman on the night table. In life, she’d been a stunningly pretty blonde. He said to the ME: “This woman, Sheryl Doyle, she’s not the first. There was one in New Kent. We’re looking for a serial killer. The astrology sign is part of his MO. He rapes women, strangles them, and carves their sign into their thigh.”

  “Why do you suppose he does that? The astrological sign, I mean.”

  Nichols thought about it. “Maybe to brand them with their sign. And to show that he knew what their sign was.”

  “How would he know?”

  Nichols looked at the ME somberly. “That’s what we have to find out.”

  Twenty-Four

  KELLY KNEW SHE HAD to tell Emma and Sarah about the phone calls. After Detective Stevens left, she decided that she would do it over coffee in the kitchen. The painters and the other workmen were occupied in other parts of the house, so for the time being, at least, the kitchen would afford them privacy. Emma had made coffee early that morning, but Kelly put up a new pot before asking Emma and Sarah to join her. Making the coffee gave her something to do as she anxiously deliberated what she was going to say to them. As they walked into the kitchen, she could see on their faces that the chaotic state of the brownstone was taking a toll on both of them. She could also see that they were apprehensive about why she’d asked them to come into the kitchen with her. She felt that she’d done it awkwardly, with a kind of self-conscious formality that communicated to them that she had an announcement to make. Now that they were there, she wanted to set them at ease, but she didn’t know how; she was too uneasy herself.

  The best she could do was to gather them around the table with her and serve them the fresh coffee. Just pretend it’s an ordinary morning, she told herself. But she couldn’t pretend. On ordinary mornings, they drank the coffee Emma prepared, and Kelly didn’t serve them. On ordinary mornings, the kitchen walls didn’t have dark streaks where smoke residue had been washed away. On ordinary mornings, the house wasn’t filled with men trying to put it back together. And on ordinary mornings, a police detective didn’t come to see her and have a closed-door conversation with her in her office.

  Sitting down at the table with them, she took a sip of the coffee and told them about the phone calls. She explained that she hadn’t mentioned about the first call because she’d hoped she wouldn’t get another, and if she didn’t, there would have been no point in worrying them. But after the second call, she felt he’d be calling again, and that he had meant it when he’d threatened her. She also told them he’d said it was because of her that a woman had left him. She didn’t tell them her suspicions about Chris Palmer; she’d had to tell Detective Stevens, but she didn’t want to tell Emma and Sarah unless she was sure that Chris was the caller. Emma and Sarah looked at her as she told them Detective Stevens was putting a monitor on her phones and that he’d asked her to go through her records to see if one of her clients in the last year fit the circumstances that the caller had described.

  “You don’t have to stay here with me,” she said, her hands clasped around her hot coffee cup, as if it could make her feel warm and protected, as if anything could. “Emma, why don’t you go to Donald’s? I’m sure he—”

  Emma interrupted her. “Of course we’re staying! The firemen said the smoke was just an accident. It wasn’t done on purpose or anything!”

  “I’m not sure Detective Stevens believes that,” Kelly said.

  “Well, I believe it!” Emma responded. “And I believe the man who called you is full of hot air!”

  Sarah looked at Kelly. “I agree with Emma. I’m not afraid of some coward who calls in the middle of the night. He’s just a creep with a telephone. He’s not going to do anything.”

  Kelly was grateful for Emma’s and Sarah’s support, but she wasn’t sure they were right.

  Sarah saw the doubt in Kelly’s face. “Once the house is put bac
k together and everything’s running normally again, we’ll all feel better. You’re strong, Kelly. You’re going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay.”

  Kelly felt herself become emotional. She’d prepared herself for Emma and Sarah to leave the house after they’d learned the situation; she hadn’t prepared herself for them to stay. She looked at both of them and said, “Thanks,” almost unable to get the word out because she didn’t want to cry in front of them.

  Twenty-Five

  GIORDANO SAT AT HIS desk reading the copy of the August issue of You and Your Sign that Kim and Hernandez had found in Jennifer McGraw’s house. He’d glanced at astrology columns in magazines at his dentist’s office and even occasionally perused his horoscope—he was a Taurus—but he’d never known that whole magazines were devoted to the subject, and if he’d known, he wouldn’t have cared. He considered reading about astrology to be a frill, and he didn’t have time for frills. The only thing he believed in reading was the newspaper, which almost invariably aggravated him, because almost invariably it told him that things were as bad as he’d imagined.

  Regardless of his prior attitude about astrology columns, the articles he was reading in You and Your Sign fascinated him. They told him something about how the victim, Jennifer McGraw, had thought about herself and about life. They also told him something about how the man who had raped and killed her thought about life. Astrology connected them: Jennifer had been a Sagittarius, the murderer had gouged her sign into her thigh, and Jennifer had an astrology magazine in her possession at the time of her death. Not just an astrology magazine; this astrology magazine.

  Giordano had almost completed his reading. He’d read every word of every article, but he’d paid special attention to the articles Jennifer had marked with dog-eared pages and underlined sentences. Not surprisingly, she had folded down the corner of the page on which August’s predictions for Sagittarius appeared. The forecast was generally positive, emphasizing August as a good time for travel to distant places and socializing, with only a vague warning about the need to pay particular attention when negotiating contracts. There was nothing prophesying that in a little more than two months, Jennifer McGraw would be raped and murdered.