Horoscope: The Astrology Murders

by Georgia Frontiere

  He was so immersed in mentally weighing the known and the unknown about this killer who was targeting Kelly that he hadn’t even realized Diane had gotten up off the floor and come over to him until she gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “Why are you home so early?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said, going back into his thoughts as he walked toward the kitchen.

  Diane’s eyes followed her husband. She knew he was working on Kelly York’s case. She also knew she had to leave him alone with his thoughts so he could work through them.

  “Do you want dinner?” she asked.

  “I’ll make it,” he said, continuing to the kitchen. “It’ll help me think.”

  Fifty

  OF THE THREE FILES Kelly had looked at so far, one of them belonged to a man who had been twenty-nine when he’d had an appointment with her in Philadelphia, three days before she’d arrived in Washington, DC, and realized that her ephemeris was missing. His name was David Wheaton, he was a Taurus, and he was unmarried when she’d seen him. That meant that not only was he the right age to fit the description of Antiochus as in his midthirties today, but he’d been single, like the FBI profiler said Antiochus was.

  The personal notes she’d taken on David Wheaton were scant, only that he was a pathologist who had been doing lab work in Philadelphia, where he’d grown up and gone to school, and that he wanted a change that would expand his life. She hadn’t written anything about his eye or hair color, just that he had a friendly manner and seemed to be genuinely open. As she read the notes, she was disappointed to realize that nothing came back to her about what the man looked like.

  She took out his chart and began to read it, looking for signs of the violence that would lead a man to become a rapist and killer. She noticed that his rising sign was Virgo, which meant that …

  Her analysis stopped when Sarah came into her office with the file folders Kelly had given her.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Sarah said, “but I’ve reviewed these and none of the men were in their late twenties or early thirties when they consulted with you.”

  As she put the files on Kelly’s desk, the phone rang. Kelly looked across the desk at Sarah and saw in her eyes the same fear that she was feeling. Kelly hesitated a moment, letting the phone ring again. It was her office phone, and she’d heard it ring thousands of times before, but this time the ringing sounded louder and more shrill.

  Sarah reached for the phone, but Kelly picked it up before Sarah could answer it.

  “Kelly York,” she said. She felt her throat constricting again; she hoped that if it was Antiochus, he did not hear the anxiety in her voice. “May I help you?”

  Sarah watched Kelly’s face, afraid that Kelly was talking with the man Agent Winslow was looking for. She reminded herself that the call was being traced, but even that didn’t reassure her. All at once she saw Kelly’s face relax into a smile.

  “Of course,” Kelly said, handing the phone to Sarah. “It’s Connie.”

  Sarah took the phone, greeted Connie, and listened. “I don’t think I can go,” she said after a while. Then she cupped the phone. “Connie wants to call a rehearsal in forty-five minutes.”

  “Of course you can go,” Kelly told her.

  Sarah continued to cup the phone. “But don’t you want me to help you—”

  “There are only five files left from that part of the tour, and I can go over them myself,” Kelly said adamantly.

  Sarah didn’t budge. “I think I should stay with you.”

  “There’s no need,” Kelly told her. “Agent Winslow is here, and she’s going to have two men outside the house all night. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

  Sarah still looked doubtful. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “I’m sure,” Kelly said.

  Sarah uncupped the phone and brought it back up to her ear. “I’ll be there in half an hour.” She hung up and looked at Kelly. “Thank you. But if you change your mind—”

  “I’m not going to change my mind. I can read through the files, and I’m well taken care of. And Emma’s here if I want company.”

  “Okay. Just as long as you know—”

  Kelly stood up. “I know, Sarah. And I love you for it.” She walked around her desk and gave Sarah a hug. “Now go and rehearse.”

  Sarah lingered a moment longer; then, seeing that the fear had gone from Kelly’s face, she left Kelly’s office and closed the door behind her.

  Kelly returned to her desk and went back to David Wheaton’s chart. Once more she began the task of looking for evidence in the location of his planets at the time of his birth that he might become the rapist and murderer who had killed four women and zeroed in on her. She was glad she’d made Sarah go to rehearse for her concert, that she’d been able to pretend to her that she wasn’t scared; inside, as she stared at David Wheaton’s chart, she was still shaking, and she had to work hard again to concentrate and make her eyes focus so she could read the words and symbols in front of her.

  Fifty-One

  HIS WORK SPACE HAD just enough light for him to admire once again the precision of the two keys to her house that he’d made the week before. He’d had to file the zigzagged teeth on both keys several times to get them just right. He didn’t enjoy filing; in fact, it was the one part of his job he didn’t like. But it gave him pleasure to think about how he’d “borrowed” the keys to her house and made impressions of both of them in the soft wax without her knowing it.

  Of course, that wasn’t unusual. No woman he’d chosen ever knew what he was doing until he wanted them to. It was amazing how easy it was, providing you knew, as he did, how to create a situation that would get you into their lives without their realizing why you were there. Until it was too late, of course; then it didn’t matter; then they were yours anyway.

  He glanced at the leather cord next to him on the workbench. Seeing it, he started to grow hard in anticipation of what he was going to do with it. His next conquest was a proud, beautiful woman, a woman he particularly looked forward to bringing down. He’d been thinking about it and thinking about it, and now he was ready to do it.

  Fifty-Two

  KELLY OPENED THE LAST folder of the seven she’d been examining and found that it belonged to Arthur Jones, whom she’d seen in Baltimore, the day before she’d gone to Washington, DC, the last city on her book tour. Arthur Jones, an Aries, had been forty, married to Nona, a Scorpio, age thirty-nine, with one child, Niel, also an Aries, age three.

  She closed the folder; Arthur Jones was outside the age group on which Agent Winslow had told her to concentrate.

  Besides Wheaton, she’d found two other men who were in the right age range: Fred Nugent, a Virgo, who’d been thirty-three when he’d seen her in Philadelphia, and Scott Green, a Gemini, who’d been thirty-one when he’d seen her in Washington, DC, the morning she’d noticed that her ephemeris was missing. Like Wheaton, both men had been single and therefore fit the FBI profile. Also as with Wheaton, Kelly had taken few notes of her impressions of them. She’d written that Nugent had seemed lethargic and somewhat lost, and Green had seemed a classic type A personality. Not much to go on in either set of notes, but she also had their charts.

  She pulled Fred Nugent’s chart from the folder and began to look at the placement of the planets at the time of his birth. It showed that Saturn was in the first house, conjuncting his ascendant. Everything she saw pointed to the extreme lack of energy she’d observed during their consultation. She wondered if anyone who had been born with the challenge of finding enough vitality to live could possibly be taking the lives of others. She looked up from his chart and shook her head; it just wasn’t possible.

  Scott Green’s chart showed Leo rising, which was in keeping with what she’d noted as his type A drive to achieve. But there was a softer side to him, too: his Venus in Pisces would give him a natural empathy and caring for women. He wouldn’t want to hurt them.

  Fifty-Three


  BROADBENT HAD NEVER DRIVEN to Brooklyn before. Fortunately, the FBI garage was only a few blocks from the FDR Drive, which he took down to the Brooklyn Bridge. From there he proceeded onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway into Brooklyn, where the GPS led him to the house he was looking for at 1732 Cadbury Avenue. If it hadn’t been for the traffic, the trip would have taken half an hour instead of an hour. He wasn’t generally an impatient man, but waiting in heavy traffic always frayed his nerves. He consoled himself with the thought that Winslow had sent him on his own for what could turn out to be the key part of the investigation; if his mission bore fruit, he would be the first investigator to discover Antiochus’s real identity.

  As he drove up to the two-story light blue-shingled house, he saw two pickup trucks parked in the driveway. One truck was five or six years old, the other was older than that; both were beige in color except for a sign painted in black script on the driver’s door that said Ace Painting with the phone number underneath and, below that, the words homes & offices.

  Broadbent walked up to the white door of the light blue house and rang the bell. Before long, a woman he judged to be in her mid to late thirties opened the door and blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.

  “What do you want?” she asked. She was wearing tight jeans, a pink tank top, and a heart-shaped pendant on a chain. She looked too young for her voice to be as gravelly and ravaged as it was, but the cigarettes had already done their damage.

  “I’m Eric Broadbent,” he said, showing her his badge. “I’m with the FBI. I want to ask your painters some questions.”

  She finished another drag on her cigarette before she asked, “They do something wrong?”

  This time he’d moved out of the way so he wouldn’t get smothered by the smoke. “No. I just have some questions for them.”

  She moved out of the doorway. “Be my guest.”

  Broadbent walked into the house and found himself in a small foyer that opened onto a large living room, where he saw two painters. The living room was covered with drop cloths, and the painters were on ladders, painting the ceiling with rollers. One of them was in his sixties or seventies, with gray, almost white hair and hunched shoulders. The other was a gangly blond man in his early twenties. Broadbent had gotten the information Sarah had provided to Winslow about the painters. From the descriptions he’d been given of the men who ran Ace Painting, he recognized the older man as Ed Murrin and the younger man as Peter Heath.

  He approached the older man and took out his badge. “FBI. Your wife told me you’d be here. I understand you painted Dr. York’s brownstone.”

  Ed Murrin had stopped painting and was looking down at Broadbent, upset. “Why? Is there a problem with what we did?”

  “No,” Broadbent said, “but I want to ask you about the rest of your paint crew. Any of them in their midthirties, average height and build, brown eyes? Maybe brown or black hair.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Murrin said. “Ernie Guerrero, for one. Ernie’s about, what—?” He turned to his younger partner.

  Peter Heath thought a moment. “Thirty-five, thirty-six. I’ll give you his number. You can ask him.”

  Broadbent frowned. “Does Mr. Guerrero have an accent?”

  “Yeah,” Heath told him. “Spanish. He’s from the Dominican Republic.”

  “I’m looking for someone without an accent,” Broadbent said, addressing both men.

  Murrin laughed. “Then you’ve come to the wrong guys. Besides Guerrero, we got men from Puerto Rico, Albania, and Turkistan. They’re not so great at English. We practically need a full-time translator to get the job done.”

  Broadbent was so disappointed by what he’d heard that he almost forgot his customary manners, but as he headed out of the living room, he remembered to turn around and say, “Thanks.”

  “What’s this about?” Heath asked him.

  Broadbent continued toward the front door. “Sorry. Can’t discuss it.”

  “Good luck, whatever it is,” Murrin called after him.

  Broadbent was too discouraged to respond. The lady of the house was still standing in the entry, smoking. She’d heard everything that was said, and Broadbent could tell that she’d been intrigued by it. Before she could ask him anything, he thanked her and left the house. Once he was outside, he took out his cell phone and called Winslow.

  “It’s Broadbent,” he told her. “None of the painters can be Antiochus. The guys who are the right age and physical description all have accents. The hotel clerk said Antiochus speaks without an accent.”

  “Okay,” Winslow said. “But like I told Stevens, the son of a bitch we’re looking for didn’t need to block up the chimney to give himself an opportunity to get in. If Antiochus wants to get into a house, he gets in. Period. Good work. You’ve eliminated a futile lead.”

  It was rare that Winslow paid him a compliment, but it did little to lift Broadbent’s spirits. “What next?” he asked with a sigh.

  “Barr’s still trying to trace his Web site, and Dr. York’s going through her records from her book tour for men who fit our profile.”

  Broadbent didn’t say anything.

  “One of them is Antiochus,” Winslow told him. “The same sick mind that set up the cameras and the microphones to watch her before he comes here for the kill. Kelly York is the prize, the one he’s been working up to. He doesn’t believe anybody’s smart enough to see the link between the ephemeris getting stolen and him. You’ll see. We’re going to get him.”

  This time Broadbent spoke. “What do you want me to do now?”

  “Go back to the office,” Winslow said. “I’ll call you as soon as something develops.”

  Broadbent waited until he clicked off the phone call before he sighed again. He was still disappointed that his trip to Brooklyn had yielded nothing, and now that it was late afternoon, he knew he’d be facing even heavier traffic on his return to Manhattan.

  Fifty-Four

  PLAYING JANÁČEK’S STRING QUARTET no. 1 in her tiny apartment with the other members of her quartet—another violin, a viola, and a cello—filled Sarah with exquisite sadness. Janáček, she knew, had found his inspiration for the piece in Tolstoy’s novella, “The Kreutzer Sonata”; the music he wrote expressed the anguished life of the book’s tragic heroine, a woman pianist whose jealous husband shoots her because he’s convinced she’s been having an affair with the violinist with whom she has been playing Beethoven’s passionate Kreutzer sonata.

  Sarah knew from her research that the married Janáček also had had another inspiration: his own unfulfilled love for a woman almost forty years younger than he. Janáček’s music expressed such longing, such frenzy and mournful beauty that she wouldn’t have had to know any of this to feel its elegiac power. As she played it, she thought about herself, and she mourned the end of her relationship with Kevin. She thought about Kelly being in danger; she prayed that Kelly would be safe, and her sadness and her prayers infused every note she played on the violin and made them more fervent and sorrowful. She hoped that the music, like a prayer, would rise to heaven, and God would hear it and make everything all right.

  Fifty-Five

  KEITH BARR WASN’T THE kind of man to give up, but he’d spent hours in the front seat of Winslow’s car, working with his laptop and he was still stuck, unable to trace the broadcast from Kelly’s house to the computer on which the killer was receiving it. He’d tried hundreds of user names and passwords, everything from Antiochus, followed by assorted numbers, to each of the astrological signs to various arrangements of the words and letters in astrologer and in the name Kelly Elizabeth York, to key words from the ad in You and Your Sign, and he’d gotten nowhere. He’d tried getting around the necessity for a user name and password, but that hadn’t led him anywhere, either.

  As he’d told Broadbent, the man who’d set up the mini-cams and microphones and transmitted the broadcast to Kelly York’s computer was sophisticated; he knew his way around the technology.

 
Suddenly, Barr thought of another combination of user name and password that Antiochus might be employing. The cursor was in the “User Name” box, so all he had to do was type the possible user name: Kelly Elizabeth York. When he’d typed the last letter, he moved the cursor to the “Password” box and typed the word dead. Then he clicked to enter them to see if they worked.

  The same message he’d read hundreds of times before appeared on the screen: Invalid username or password.

  There was no one in the car with whom he could share his frustration, but he cursed anyway. It didn’t make him feel any better or any closer to tracing the broadcast back to the man they were looking for.

  As Kelly approached the door that led down to Emma’s apartment, she felt apprehensive, and realized that since she’d become agoraphobic she’d never gone down there. She hadn’t avoided it. She just hadn’t needed to go to Emma’s apartment, but now she did, because Mary Ann Winslow was there.

  Kelly didn’t understand why she should suddenly feel so nervous about going downstairs. Although she’d become terrified when faced with the prospect of leaving her house for the outside world, she’d never felt nervous about going into the garden, so why was her stomach upset as she walked toward the door to Emma’s apartment? Was it because the garden’s high walls made her feel protected? But Emma’s apartment was just as much part of the brownstone as the garden, if not more so; and its walls and ceiling should have made her feel at least equally protected. So why was she feeling like this?