Winslow put the document she’d been reading back into the folder. “Actually,” she said, “we thought it was possible that she didn’t steal it from you.”
As Kelly sat down on the bench facing Winslow, she saw the FBI agent glancing up with annoyance at Detective Stevens, who had come into the garden behind Kelly.
Winslow didn’t waste a word on him. “We think your ephemeris was taken by the killer, and Sheryl Doyle got it from him,” Winslow told Kelly. “Maybe by stealing it like he stole it from you. Sheryl Doyle went to him to help her solve her problems through astrology. She saw him as an authority. People often fetishize authorities, investing them with magical powers. When they fetishize them, they want to own something that belonged to them. We think the killer has fetishized you. He didn’t just take your ephemeris and your card, he took something else from you, too.”
Winslow leafed through the papers in the folder. When she found the document she was looking for, she removed it from the folder and gave it to Kelly. “This is a copy of the ad he placed in You and Your Sign and in the suburban papers.”
As Kelly read the ad silently to herself, Winslow continued: “He calls himself an intuitive astrologer. That’s who you are. He’s taken part of your identity. Now, by targeting you as a victim, he’s showing that he’s superior even to you. The phone calls, the ‘accident’ on the stairs, he’s taunting you. Punishing you. He’s letting you know he has power over you. And he’s spying on you so he can watch the effects of what he’s doing.”
Kelly finished reading the ad. She didn’t need the FBI agent to point out that Antiochus had used the words intuitive astrologer to describe himself; the words seemed to vibrate on the page as she read them. That this man who had raped and killed was identifying himself the same way that she described herself constricted her throat and made her feel as if she would suffocate. It took her time to start breathing again and to think and start sorting things out.
Eventually, she looked at Winslow. “You mentioned he’s never been in a relationship, but on the phone he said I made his wife or his girlfriend leave him. I’ve been going through my files with Detective Stevens to find a woman who saw me about troubles with her husband or boyfriend and—”
Winslow stopped her. “That’s a cover,” she said, “to keep you from figuring out who he is. Start concentrating on the men who came to see you on your book tour, around the time you discovered your ephemeris was missing. Look for a man who was in his late twenties or early thirties at the time. Do you write down descriptions of the people who come to you for appointments?”
“Usually not physical descriptions. But most of the time I write down my impressions. And—”
Winslow cut her off again. “Good. Look for a man in that age group who struck you as isolated, impressed with himself, not only interested in astrology but perhaps someone who considered himself an expert in it. Perhaps someone who was a little too interested in you. A man you had a bad feeling about. As you review your records, see what you can remember, what comes back to you—”
Kelly nodded. “I’ll look at their charts, too, to see what they can tell me.”
“If that helps you remember, fine.”
Stevens had been pacing near the greenhouse, listening to Winslow and Kelly. Now he walked up to Winslow, taking the list that Sarah had written for him out of his pocket. “What about seeing if any of the men who worked here after the smoke damage match the profile? They had access to put in the surveillance equipment.”
Winslow took the list from Stevens before he offered it. “We’ll check out any man on here that fits the physical description. But, Detective, this killer has already proved he’s a master of breaking into houses. If he wanted to get in here, he’d get in without anybody knowing he’d been here till he’d done whatever he’d come to do. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”
“But Dr. York’s been in the house the whole time. And she has a dog. Don’t you think—?”
Winslow interrupted him. “We don’t know when he installed the equipment. We only know when he made the first call to Dr. York and when what he said to her made it seem like he could see and hear her.” She focused on Kelly now. “He may have broken in and installed the mini-cams and microphones before you developed agoraphobia. I assume before that there were times you went out at night.”
Kelly nodded. “Of course.”
“And times you were away on vacation?”
“Yes.”
“And your dog, where does it sleep at night?”
“In my room to begin with,” Kelly said, “but usually during the night he goes down to my housekeeper’s apartment. There’s a door to it on the first floor.”
“After your housekeeper lets him in,” Winslow continued officiously, “does she leave her door shut or open?”
“Shut, until she wakes up in the morning. If he wants to go out before that, she lets him into the garden.”
Winslow looked at Stevens, her lips curled up slightly in a smile of superiority, as if she were about to reveal a winning hand in poker, “I told you, Detective, if this SOB wanted to break into the house, he’d get in without anybody knowing. He’s had plenty of opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do before Dr. York’s agoraphobia and after.” She looked at Kelly again. “Why don’t you review your files from your book tour and see if you can find a man who matches the description I gave you?”
As Kelly stood up and put the crutches in place under her arms, Winslow addressed Stevens. “You can go, Detective. I’ll call you if I need you.”
Kelly saw anger rising in Stevens’s face. He was about to protest when Winslow added, “Since Dr. York doesn’t leave the house, I’ll stay here. And I’ll keep two men outside around the clock.”
Stevens didn’t move; he looked at Winslow; then he looked at Kelly. “Goodbye, Dr. York,” he said, as if he had to force the words out.
“Goodbye, Detective Stevens,” she responded. This time she let him precede her from the garden toward the kitchen. She kept thinking about Agent Winslow’s observation that she didn’t really know when the surveillance equipment had been placed in her house. That meant she didn’t really know how long she had been observed and listened to. Watching Stevens walk up the steps, open the glass door, and disappear inside, she felt forlorn and alone, even though she knew that the FBI was there to protect her.
Before heading for her office, she looked at Mary Ann Winslow again.
“What is it?” Winslow asked her.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why couldn’t Detective Stevens stay?”
“Because it’s my case and he’s getting in the way,” Winslow told her.
The FBI agent’s coldness only made Kelly feel worse.
“I intend to catch this killer,” Winslow assured her. “And you’re going to make it easier for me if you cooperate.”
Kelly felt she was being talked to as if she were a child. Still not feeling the reassurance she needed, she headed toward the door. She fully intended to cooperate with Mary Ann Winslow; she only hoped it would be enough.
As Stevens descended the front steps of Kelly’s brownstone, he felt an overwhelming sense of remorse. He’d been taken off cases before, but the other times it had been because of departmental politics, not because of the way he’d conducted himself; this time he’d been kicked off because he’d misplayed his hand. He’d known that he was flouting Winslow’s authority when he’d joined her and Kelly in the garden and when he’d gone with Kelly into her office instead of remaining alone with Winslow. That had been the kiss of death, hadn’t it? Going with Kelly to her office; if he’d stayed in the garden with Winslow, she would have rebuked him for not asking her permission to be there when she’d talked with Kelly, but she might have let him continue to be part of the investigation.
And why had he gone with Kelly to her office? If he was honest with himself, it wasn’t because he thought she needed his assistance in looking at her client list for Sheryl Do
yle’s name; it was because he didn’t feel like giving Winslow the opportunity to tell him off. He could kick himself for acting so stupidly. He’d recognized Winslow for the power grabber that she was, but he’d thought he had enough value to the investigation that she’d put up with his transgressions. Obviously, he’d thought wrong.
It wasn’t just his ego that was hurt; what hurt him was that he’d wanted to find the man who was targeting Kelly, and now he wouldn’t even be able to help. He’d already called his captain to tell him that the FBI had stepped in; now he had to call him to say that he was no longer involved in the investigation.
Walking by the FBI car, he saw Broadbent’s and Barr’s heads bent down in concentration over Barr’s laptop. They didn’t notice him as he headed toward his car. It was just as well.
Broadbent glanced up briefly as Stevens crossed in front of the car, but seeing the hangdog expression on Stevens’s face, he quickly looked down again at the computer screen. He could tell from the way Stevens was staring blankly ahead as he walked that Winslow had sent the detective packing. Broadbent was sorry that she had forced Stevens to go; he sensed that Stevens was a good man and a good detective. But in a way it made it easier. There would be no ambiguities; the FBI could take all the credit for finding the serial rapist and killer that was calling himself Antiochus.
Broadbent saw a new image coming up on the computer screen. A straight line with letters and numbers underneath.
“What’s that?” he asked Barr.
Barr kept his eyes on the screen as he responded: “It’s a link to a Web site. The packets are going to a Web site.”
Broadbent watched as Barr clicked on the link to the Web site.
A second later, Barr shouted, “Fuck!”
Broadbent didn’t need to ask Barr why he had cursed. On the screen were two thin, white rectangular boxes, one on top of the other. They were white because they were blank, waiting for whoever was at the computer to fill in the letters and numbers that would give him access to the Web site. Broadbent had seen blank boxes like these countless times before. The first box was labeled “User Name” and the second “Password.”
Barr leaned back in the seat, closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and gazed down again at the white boxes on the computer. “I’m not really surprised,” he said to Broadbent. “Just disappointed. But that’s silly of me. This whole thing was put together with a level of sophistication that shows this man knows his way around computers. He’s not going to make any of this easy for us.”
Now it was Broadbent’s turn to lean back in his seat and close his eyes. In his mind he silently repeated Barr’s curses.
Forty-Eight
SINCE THERE WAS no surveillance equipment in Emma’s apartment, Winslow decided to move down there to question Sarah and Emma about the workmen on the list she’d taken from Stevens. The apartment—a large L-shaped room containing a living room, a tiny kitchen, a dining area, and a bedroom nook—was more comfortable than Winslow had thought it would be. She sat on an easy chair, facing Sarah and Emma on the sofa. It soon became evident to Winslow that Sarah had been in charge of the work crew and that Emma knew nothing about the men at all. She just sat there, next to Sarah, tense, unhappy, and afraid while Sarah reviewed the names on the list.
“Ed Murrin’s in his sixties, maybe even seventies, too old to match the physical description you gave us,” Sarah said. “And Peter’s twenty-four or twenty-five, so he’s too young. I don’t know the rest of the painters, but a few of them had dark hair and looked like they were in their midthirties. You’ll have to ask Ed and Peter for the names. It’s their painting company. The carpenters are in their fifties, and the electrician, Ivan, is older and weighs more than two hundred pounds.”
She gave the list back to Winslow, who had already taken her cell phone from her purse and was now calling a number on automatic dial. “I’ve got something for you to check out, Broadbent,” she said. “You’re going to have to go back to the bureau and get another car.”
Sarah was as tense as the E string on her violin. She couldn’t hear what FBI Agent Broadbent said on the other end, but it wasn’t much because Winslow continued almost immediately to tell him to come to the street entrance to Emma’s apartment.
Kelly was standing with her crutches at the file cabinet, looking for the folders of the clients she’d seen in the last few days of her book tour, which had ended in Washington, DC. She remembered being pleased that so many people had signed up for consultations with her during the tour; now she wondered if even at that time one of them had already wanted to kill her and the other women that Agent Winslow had told her he had made his victims.
There was something different about how he was treating her, though, wasn’t there? The other women had responded to an ad he’d placed; except for their interest in astrology, they seemed to have been selected at random. From what Agent Winslow had said, he hadn’t called any of them and threatened them; he hadn’t caused damage to their homes or caused them to have accidents before raping and murdering them; he hadn’t spied on them.
Yet he had done all of this to her.
And something else was different, too. He had stolen her ephemeris and the term intuitive astrologer. It was horrible to think that he had used these words, her words, in the ads that had drawn his victims to him. And it was almost unfathomable to her that now he wanted to do to her what he’d done to them.
But what was reverberating in her mind was why, when she had done this dangerous man’s chart five years before, had she not seen the potential for violence that lived in him?
In her consultation with him during the tour, it was possible that he’d put on a face that had fooled her. By the time she’d gotten to Washington, DC, she’d been traveling for two weeks, some days doing back-to-back interviews and then consultations, and she remembered being tired; when she’d met him, it was possible that she’d not seen through his mask. But when she’d gotten home to New York and done his chart based on his date, time, and place of birth, it should have been there in black-and-white—not the actual acts of violence, perhaps, not even that it was fated that he would do these monstrous things, but that he had the potential for hate to consume and destroy all his other feelings, the potential to want to hurt and kill.
How had she missed the possibility for him to be so violent? She’d started doing charts under her grandmother’s tutelage when she was a young woman and had done them professionally since she’d finished her graduate work in psychology, and, to her knowledge, she had never missed anything so important. Had her desire to be positive rather than negative made her willfully blind to his potential for violence? Had she been so intent on finding a constructive interpretation for what the placement of his planets revealed that she had ignored the negative potential and just concentrated on giving him a positive perspective that she’d hoped would help him lead a good life?
As she brought the file folders she’d gathered to her desk, she told herself that besides looking at the men who’d had appointments with her around the date she’d noticed her ephemeris was missing and seeing if she’d taken any notes about the physical appearances of those in the right age range, she’d also review their charts to see what they told her now that she’d be looking at them with the benefit of hindsight.
She shouldn’t need hindsight, of course. Astrology was a science, and it was her job to practice it as a science. It disturbed her deeply to think that she might have avoided something so crucial because she’d been afraid to go into a place of potential evil. But if she’d made that mistake at the time, if she’d failed to live up to her job, this time, she vowed, she would not make the same mistake.
She heard a knock and looked up as Sarah opened the door.
“How are you doing?” Sarah asked quietly.
Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know. How about you?”
“All right,” Sarah said. “I came to see if I can help.”
Kelly showed her the thirte
en files she’d pulled from the cabinet. “Thanks. We’re looking for a man who—”
“I know,” Sarah said. “Agent Winslow told me. Late twenties or early thirties when you saw him five years ago, dark eyes, dark hair. She told me the psychological profile, too.”
Kelly handed six of the files to Sarah. “Any men you find who match the description, bring me their files. I want to read their charts before I give their names to Agent Winslow.”
Sarah nodded. Files in hand, she went into her office.
Alone again, Kelly suddenly felt anxious and dizzy, so much so that she found it hard to read the document in front of her. The words and numbers that she’d written on the page in the file before her appeared blurred; she had to concentrate for them to come into focus. She knew that in one of the thirteen folders was the information that Agent Winslow needed to find the man who had stolen her ephemeris and become a rapist and a murderer—if he hadn’t already been one at the time that she’d seen him. The fact that he was going after her meant that her finding the information was a matter of life and death—her own life and death and the life and death of any other woman he might target in the future.
Forty-Nine
STEVENS OPENED THE DOOR of his small, neat two-bedroom house in Jackson Heights and saw Diane sitting on the living room floor with Anthony, reading him a story. Usually, the sight of his wife and baby son enjoying each other filled him with such contentment that he was able to push aside thoughts about whatever case had been preoccupying him, but today the gloom he’d felt since leaving Kelly’s brownstone was still with him and so was his preoccupation with the case.
He kept playing back in his mind the details Winslow had recounted about the serial killer’s physical and psychological profile and wondering if it was possible that he’d actually seen the man as part of the work crew that had been in the brown-stone when he’d first arrived there to interview Kelly. He also thought about what Winslow had told him about this man’s skill in breaking into his victims’ houses with no trace of his having been there except for the corpse of the victim that he left behind, and he wondered if Winslow was right, that the man might not have been part of the work crew, that he’d managed to break into Kelly’s house and install the surveillance equipment without her knowing it as part of his methodical plan to terrorize her.
Horoscope: The Astrology Murders Page 20