Horoscope: The Astrology Murders

by Georgia Frontiere

  The second agent turned toward the barn and fired in the direction from which Arthur Jones had fired his shot, but the barn was dark, and the agent had no idea where the shooter had fired from.

  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; Arthur Jones, gun in hand, had already fled the workroom and was running out the rear door of the barn and toward the woods. As he picked up speed, he heard a man shouting at him.

  “FBI! Drop your gun, Jones, or I’ll shoot!”

  Still running, Jones looked over his shoulder and saw that the man who had fallen to the ground wasn’t dead but was running after him, gun raised. He was the one shouting.

  “Do you hear me, Jones? Drop your gun!”

  Jones turned around, took aim, and missed.

  Broadbent and Rothman were climbing over the fence onto Jones’s property when they heard shots. They looked and in the moonlight saw Jones running across the field to the trees and the two New Jersey FBI agents shooting at him. It was evident that one of their bullets hit Jones’s shoulder, because Jones broke his gait, stumbled before he regained his balance, and put his hand up to his shoulder. Suddenly, he stopped running and pointed his gun at the men behind him.

  “Fuck you!” he screamed, and shot at the agent he thought he’d killed before. The man collapsed and dropped onto the lawn.

  By now Broadbent and Rothman had their guns out. The sharp sounds made by the firing of the two guns overlapped. It was impossible to know whose bullet hit Jones or if both bullets did, but Jones fell down just before he reached the trees. Broadbent and Rothman kept their guns raised as they ran over to Jones’s still body, not knowing if he was alive or dead.

  As they neared him, Jones didn’t move; his hand was clenching the handle of his gun, but his arm was outstretched on the grass, and his eyes stared without consciousness at the full moon. Broadbent, his gun still ready, knelt down next to Jones and saw the reflection of the moonlight in the puddle of blood that had collected on his chest. He knew there was no reason to check Jones’s pulse, but he put his fingers to Jones’s neck. Nothing.

  Broadbent glanced up at Rothman and got to his feet. Together they walked toward where the New Jersey FBI agent had fallen to the earth. The man’s partner was already approaching them. He was shaking his head and walking slowly. He didn’t have to say a word to let them know the state of his partner.

  Minutes later, Broadbent and Rothman were in Arthur Jones’s cell-sized workroom. Broadbent stood at Jones’s work-table, looking at the leather cord that had been cut from the set of reins and the open drawer that held the ephemeris, the box of surgical gloves, the mirrored disk, the piece of old brass that had been honed to a point almost as sharp as a needle, and four discolored needles, the kind used for sewing. He could see how Arthur Jones could have used the mirrored disk to hypnotize potential victims, but he wondered what the old needles had been used for. Still thinking about it, he took out his phone and called Winslow.

  “Jones’s dead,” Broadbent told her. “He got one of our men first. But he’s the one, all right.”

  Winslow answered immediately, “I’ll be right there.”

  When she hung up with Broadbent, Mary Ann Winslow turned to Kelly. “You were right. It was Jones.” She realized that she admired Kelly, but she showed her no sign of approval.

  “They killed him?” Kelly asked.

  “Yes. You’ve got nothing to worry about anymore.”

  Kelly soberly absorbed the news. She’d been correct about Arthur Jones; he’d been the man who had raped and killed the four women, who had covertly entered her house, pulled up the runner on her staircase, and put in surveillance equipment so he could see the effects of the accident he’d caused and her fear when he’d called and threatened her. And now he was no more.

  She felt as if she’d been facing a black void that would swallow her up and make her disappear, and now all at once the blackness was gone. But nevertheless, she felt she was still facing the void, the void of incomprehension. She knew from Arthur Jones’s chart that he had been filled with hatred, that he’d been capable of conscienceless rape and murder, but that didn’t mean that she understood it. And the four women he had raped and murdered were still dead.

  She looked at Mary Ann Winslow. “Those poor women …”

  “At least we got him before he got you,” Winslow said.

  Kelly nodded gratefully.

  “Thank you,” Winslow said finally. With a strain in her voice, she added, “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have gotten him.”

  Before Kelly could say anything, Winslow turned away from her and made a call on her cell phone. “Barr, it’s Winslow,” she said. “Forget about trying to trace the broadcast back to the SOB’s computer. And tell them to take the monitor off Kelly York’s phone. We got him, and he’s dead.”

  Fifty-Nine

  EMMA WAS IN THE kitchen when Kelly told her the news. She was so jubilant, she threw her arms around Kelly, crutches and all. “Thank God!” Emma said.

  Kelly looked into the soft gray eyes of the woman she’d known longer than anyone else in the world. Emma’s relief and happiness were so powerful that Kelly finally allowed herself to feel relieved and happy, too.

  “Yes,” Kelly said. “Thank God.”

  “We’ve got to tell Sarah,” Emma told her.

  Kelly watched Emma hurry to the phone on the counter and make the call.

  “Sarah, it’s me, Emma. They shot the bastard. He was one of Kelly’s clients from her book tour.”

  As she talked to Emma on her cell phone, Sarah was walking toward her parents’ house in Bensonhurst. After the rehearsal, she’d taken the subway from Manhattan and had gotten off at 18th Avenue, four blocks away. She was carrying her violin case in her other hand as she held the phone to her ear. What she’d heard from Emma made her so joyous she started to cry.

  “It’s what I prayed for!” she said.

  “Me, too!” Emma told her.

  “I’m so happy,” Sarah said, still crying. As she continued walking, she listened to Emma’s account of what had transpired. When Emma finished telling her all the fine points, Sarah asked her to send Kelly her love and to tell her she’d see her in the morning. Then she put her phone in her coat pocket and dried her eyes. Her spirits lifted for the first time in days. Not even thinking of Kevin for the moment, she started whistling Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no. 5, a melody so rapturous that it always elated her to play it. Whistling it as she walked down the street, she felt she was serenading the whole neighborhood with her joy. In the light of the street lamp, she saw the truck with the Ace Painting sign on the door in the driveway of the Heaths’ house, five houses up the block from her parents’. Peter, still wearing his painting coveralls, came out of the garage and waved to her.

  “Hi, Sarah,” he said. “If you’re looking for your father, I just saw him drive away.”

  Sarah stopped walking as Peter reached into the back of the truck and took out a ladder.

  “I guess I should’ve called him first,” she said, “but I thought I’d catch him at the house and we could go to see my mother together.”

  Peter put the ladder down on the driveway and ran his hand through his messy blond hair. “Sorry you missed him.”

  Sarah smiled. “That’s okay. Nothing could ruin my mood at the moment.”

  Peter smiled, too. “Why not?”

  “The FBI found the man who was threatening Kelly.”

  “Someone was threatening her?”

  Sarah saw the surprise in the face of the young man in front of her and realized that the threat had become so pervasive in Kelly’s, hers, and Emma’s lives that she’d assumed Peter knew about it, too, because he’d been painting Kelly’s house.

  “I forgot you didn’t know,” she said to him. “We were told not to talk about it.”

  “So that’s why the FBI came to talk to Ed and me today about the guys we hired to paint the brownstone with us. They thought it might be one of them.”

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p; Sarah nodded. “But it wasn’t. It was someone else. And now it’s over. I can’t wait to tell my parents the good news.”

  Peter picked up the ladder. “Say hi for me, all right?”

  “I will.” Sarah was about to start back to the subway station when she turned to Peter again. “How’s your Dad?”

  “He’s doing okay. Thanks for asking.”

  “Say hello to him.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Peter lifted the ladder onto his shoulder and headed toward the garage. Sarah began whistling Brahms again as she started her walk back to the subway station. She’d forgotten what it felt like not to be scared; what it felt like was a miracle.

  Emma opened the refrigerator and surveyed the contents of the shelves. “What should I make for dinner to celebrate?” she asked Kelly.

  “I don’t want you to make anything,” Kelly said, leaning on her crutches and putting cat food in Meow’s bowl while Meow and King were jumping up on her, waiting to be fed. “I want you to go out with Donald.”

  “But—” Emma protested.

  “I mean it, Emma,” Kelly said, overriding Emma’s objection before she could make it. “There’s no reason to stay home with me. I’m perfectly fine.”

  Emma looked at her and considered. “Well, Donald did call and—”

  Kelly interrupted her again. “Then it’s settled.”

  Emma closed the refrigerator and watched as Kelly propped the crutches against the counter and put her weight on her left foot so she could bend down to put the animals’ bowls of food on the floor. “I’ll be home by midnight,” she said to Kelly.

  Kelly stood up and placed the crutches under her arms again. “You don’t have a curfew. You don’t have to be home by midnight.”

  “You know what my mother said,” Emma said with a mischievous smile. “There’s nothing you can do after midnight that you can’t do before midnight if you want.”

  Kelly laughed and so did Emma. It felt good to laugh together again.

  Winslow stood with Broadbent over Arthur Jones’s body. She stared at the undistinguished face of the serial rapist and killer and wondered as she had in the past when she’d encountered evil in its human form why this man had lived as he’d lived and devoted himself to inflicting suffering on others and then taking their lives. She knew that psychologically there were reasons for it. There always were. Although in Jones’s case she might never learn what they were. Kelly York had seen it in his chart. If you believed in astrology as Kelly did, the arrangement of the planets at the time of Jones’s birth reflected the existence of conditions that had made him who he was, psychologically, emotionally, intellectually; they had shown his potential to succumb to darkness or to seek healing, and he had succumbed to darkness.

  But even if the planets reflected the conditions that had created Jones’s potential for darkness or light, there was another why that Winslow could not answer: Why had Jones been born on that particular date at that particular time? If she believed in God, Winslow might have said that God had chosen that time for Jones. But she knew from her Sunday school classes that God also had given man free will, and that meant that Jones had chosen between light and darkness for himself, and that still left her with the question. Why?

  She saw that men from the local coroner’s office were bringing stretchers to take away Jones and the felled FBI agent. For a moment, she mourned the loss of a colleague; then, her wall of reserve up again, she turned to Broadbent. “Did you call Detective Stevens to tell him about Jones?”

  Broadbent shook his head.

  Winslow took out her cell phone. “Might as well call him and let him know we’ve done our job.”

  Kelly finished trimming the fat off a piece of lamb that she was going to broil for her dinner. She was about to chop the broccoli she’d washed when the phone rang. She was so used to reacting to the sound with apprehension that she felt her body tense up, and she had to remind herself that it was over and she could relax. He wasn’t calling anymore; he was dead.

  Picking up the phone and hearing her son saying, “Hi, Mom,” she laughed, and once she started, she found it hard to stop.

  “What’s so funny?” Jeff asked her.

  “Myself,” Kelly said. “I just …” She took a deep breath to calm herself down. “I just scare myself sometimes over nothing. How are you, darling?”

  “I’m okay. What were you scared of?”

  Kelly could hear the distress in her son’s voice. “I told you, honey,” she assured him, “it’s nothing. I’m fine. Just fine.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding better. “I just want to make sure you are.”

  “You don’t have to take care of me,” Kelly told him. “I’m a grown-up. I can take care of myself. You have enough to do taking care of yourself.”

  Jeff laughed. “That’s true,” he said, “especially taking five courses this semester.”

  Kelly smiled; she loved knowing how hardworking and responsible an adult her son was becoming.

  “Love you, Mom,” he said.

  “Love you, too, honey.”

  “Only a few more weeks until Thanksgiving and Julie and I come home.”

  “Can’t wait,” Kelly told him.

  Hanging up the phone, she felt that things were finally back to normal. Then she looked into the hall outside the kitchen, saw the front door, and felt her body tense up again. She was still afraid to leave her house. And that meant that even though her life was no longer in danger, things might never really be normal again.

  Sixty

  SARAH SAT NEXT to her mother’s bed, filling in her parents on the events of the last few days and their victorious outcome.

  “He told Kelly on the phone he was going to get even with her because she made a woman leave him,” she said. “But it turned out he didn’t have a wife or girlfriend, so Kelly never consulted with a woman who was thinking of leaving him. He must’ve just said that so she wouldn’t be able to figure out who he was.”

  Sarah was about to tell her parents what Emma had recounted to her about Kelly realizing who the man was from reworking his chart when she noticed that her mother was staring at her. Not staring with fascination or relief or confusion but with alarm. Sarah wondered if something had happened to her mother related to the stroke; then she saw that Rose’s lips were parting and she was trying to speak, but no sound was coming out of her mouth.

  “What is it, Mom?” Sarah asked.

  Sam pulled his chair over to his wife’s bed, too. “What is it, doll?”

  Rose closed her lips and tried again; this time a word came out. “Helen,” she said.

  “Helen?” Sarah asked.

  With great effort, Rose nodded.

  Sam turned to his daughter. “She must mean Helen Heath.” He faced his wife again. “Helen Heath?”

  For a moment, Rose just stared at him, her lips moving noiselessly. Then she said, “Yes.”

  Sixty-One

  KELLY STOOD IN THE greenhouse with her crutches, picking herbs to go with the lamb she was making for dinner. It had been a long day, and so much had happened that she was still in the process of absorbing it all. The moon shone through the greenhouse roof, illuminating the plants with a white glow, making the night seem magical. She gathered a handful of sage and rosemary, left the greenhouse, and walked up the slate steps. As she opened the rear door to the kitchen, she heard the phone ring, and for the first time in days didn’t feel frightened. She locked the door and walked with her crutches to the phone, wondering if Jeff was calling back or if it was Julie or Michelle and Mark.

  The phone was still ringing when she picked up the receiver. She was about to say hello when she heard a man’s whispered voice, the same voice that she’d heard before.

  “So you don’t have a monitor on your phone anymore,” he whispered.

  At the sound of his voice, Kelly stopped breathing and felt herself growing faint. Only the crutches were holding her up. “I thought you were—”

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bsp; “It doesn’t matter what you thought I was,” he whispered, venom in every word. “What matters is that I know what you did. You told her to leave. You didn’t care about me. You didn’t care about what my life would become.”

  Kelly’s mind was whirling in confusion. She didn’t know how he could still be alive, and she didn’t know what he was accusing her of, but whatever it was, she knew he was wrong. She struggled against blacking out as she cried, “That’s not true. I—”

  He continued as if she weren’t speaking. “Just like now I don’t care about your life,” he said.

  She couldn’t listen to him anymore; she just couldn’t, not if she wanted to keep her sanity. She slammed the phone down and looked around the kitchen at the familiar things that she lived with every day and tried to remind herself that she was safe. She told herself she would call Detective Stevens.

  The sharp crack of shattering glass broke the silence like a gunshot. She turned and saw a man letting himself into the kitchen through the garden door. His hand was reaching through the broken pane of glass to unlock the door. She stared at him, transfixed and frozen.

  “Guess I don’t need this anymore,” he said, opening the door and slipping his iPhone into his pocket.

  He was in his early twenties, tall and thin, with a tangle of blond hair, and he was wearing coveralls stained with paint. She’d seen him that morning and the day before when he was painting her house.

  She continued staring at him, barely breathing. It was hard for her to speak, but she did. “I know you …”

  “No, you don’t know me,” he said. “You just know I painted your house. You don’t even know my name, do you?”

  As he looked at Kelly, his light brown eyes were as cold as his whispered voice had been on the phone. She could see how much he hated her. And he was right; she didn’t know his name.

  “Peter,” he said. “Peter Heath. Does the name Heath ring a bell?”

  Still staring at him, Kelly wished she could give him the right answer; she knew that her life depended on it; but she couldn’t. His name meant nothing to her.