“Hey, are you okay?” the chubby woman asked, although her voice sounded as if it was at the far end of a long tunnel.
Walter nodded absently, then stumbled away from the two women, clutching the newspaper in sweating hands, a terrible memory seared into his reeling mind.
A Ridgid Tool calendar on a warehouse wall.
A girl in a bikini.
The date, September 21, 1974.
Today is September 20th.
Walter bulldozed his way through the crowd of female admirers around Bell and gripped his friend’s arm.
“Hey, watch it,” a tall brunette with glasses said.
“Jerk,” spat another, shorter brunette.
“Belly,” Walter hissed. “We need to talk.”
* * *
“You’re like a cold shower, Walt,” Bell said. “You know that?”
Bell extracted his arm from his friend’s desperate grip and dug in his heels, refusing to go any further.
“So what is it?” Bell demanded. “What the hell is so important that...”
“The man we saw at Reiden Lake,” Walter said breathlessly, “the one who came through the gate. It wasn’t a hallucination. He’s real.”
“Are you having some kind of flashback?” Bell gripped Walter’s chin. “Let me see your pupils.”
Walter shrugged him off and thrust the crumpled newspaper into Bell’s hand.
“Look at this!”
Bell rolled his eyes and looked down at the paper with a skeptically arched brow.
When he saw the police sketch, all the color drained from his face.
“I guess you could say there are... similarities in certain features,” he said.
“Similarities? It’s him, Belly. You know it’s him.”
Bell looked up at Walter, his expression grave.
“If he is real,” he said, “then what is he? He seemed... so human.”
“Human, yes,” Walter replied. “But... different in some way.”
“In what way?” Bell asked.
“I remember that strange glow,” Walter said. “Like sparks in the palms of his hands. Almost as if there was some kind of unknown process disrupting the very atoms of his flesh.”
“Maybe he’s a time traveler from a future that’s been poisoned by atomic warfare,” Bell suggested.
Without skipping a beat, Walter responded.
“Or perhaps some kind of pan-dimensional being who only adopts a human form in order to facilitate contact with the people of Earth,” Walter said. “Maybe that glow is his true form showing through the artificial skin.”
Bell tapped the article.
“But why would a pan-dimensional being want to shoot people with a normal gun?”
“It’s so much worse than that,” Walter replied. “This man publicly threatened to shoot senior citizens on a city bus. Just like in our vision. He hasn’t made good on that threat yet, but in the vision, the bus shooting took place on September 21st, 1974.” He paused, gripping Bell’s sleeve. “Belly, that’s tomorrow!”
“My God,” Bell said, looking disoriented. “What are we going to do?”
“That’s obvious,” Walter replied. “We have to find a way to stop him.”
2
The Doe library at U.C. Berkley was the kind of place where Walter could happily spend the rest of his life, under different, more peaceful circumstances. Built in the early nineteen hundreds, it was a large, stately building fronted by classic Doric columns and decorated with richly patinated copper trim. Several large rectangular skylights were embedded in the red tiled roof.
Walter took the stone steps two at a time, huffing and breathless as he pushed through the door. Bell was close behind.
Inside it was tranquil and beautiful. He was immediately attracted to a large, airy room with a curved, tiled ceiling and large arched windows. Leaded glass skylights filled the chamber with gentle natural light and each of the dozens of sturdy wooden tables had its own wrought-iron reading light. Tall shelves packed with colorful volumes lined the walls, beckoning Walter with their intriguing titles and vast cornucopia of knowledge. The smell of foxed paper and wood polish was seductive, and made him wish he was there for any other reason.
The librarian at the main desk was one of the tallest women he had ever met, a little over six feet and standing eye to eye with Bell in her flat, sensible shoes. She was in her late fifties, with a stiffly lacquered poodle haircut that likely hadn’t changed in twenty years. On the left lapel of her modestly cut blouse she wore a red Bakelite brooch in the shape of a key, and a name badge on the right that labeled her as Mrs. Alder.
Her face was wide and plain, but her green eyes sparkled with intelligence and wit.
“How can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.
“We’re looking for information on the so-called Zodiac Killer,” Walter told her.
“Ah, yes,” she said with a knowing nod. “Popular topic these days.” She indicated a stairwell off to the right. “Newspaper archive is in the basement, at the end of the hallway on the left.”
“Thank you,” Walter said.
“Do you think they’ll ever catch him?” she asked.
Walter and Bell exchanged a look.
“Good God, I hope so,” Walter replied.
* * *
The newspaper archive boasted a lot of carefully preserved newspapers, but it was primarily devoted to floor-to-ceiling shelves of microfilm. Where the upper areas of the library were quaint and old-fashioned, evoking images of turn of the century scholars in waistcoats and wire-rim glasses, the archive room was sleek and ultra modern, coldly illuminated by recessed fluorescent lights and outfitted with cutting-edge technology.
There were six brand-new microfilm readers, two of which already were taken by students. One was female, blond and wan with very pale skin and an underfed physique beneath her bulky striped sweater. The other was male, black and prematurely balding with glasses and a leather jacket. Both were so engrossed in their own research that they didn’t even look up when Walter and Bell walked into the room.
The librarian in charge of the archives was a man, just a little bit older than Walter, with bushy sideburns and frizzy hair bullied into an ill-advised Afro. He wore a baggy green suit and a joke tie featuring monkeys with typewriters. His name badge read “Mr. Sternberg.”
“How you doing?” he asked, revealing a hard New York accent. “What can I do for you?”
“Fine, thank you,” Walter replied. “We are looking for information on the Zodiac murders.”
“Man,” he said. “You’re lucky that Graysmith guy’s not here today. He’s in here all the time, pulling every single thing we have on the Zodiac and going over it with a fine-toothed comb.” He turned around and grabbed a large cardboard box from a metal library cart behind his desk, setting it in front of Walter and Bell. “You’re also lucky that I’m a lazy bastard and haven’t re-shelved all his microfilms since his last visit. This is pretty much everything. Enjoy.”
Walter couldn’t imagine that he would “enjoy” reading up on the murders that had been committed by the man from Reiden Lake, but he made himself smile and thank the librarian. Bell grabbed the box and headed over to the closest available reader.
He set the box on a nearby table, sat down, and sorted through the microfilm reels to find the one labeled with the earliest date.
“December, 1968,” Bell said, opening the cardboard box and holding up the reel. “Why, that’s just two months after...”
His voice trailed off, and he looked around at the other people in the archives.
Walter nodded, understanding Bell’s unfinished point. He held out his hand for the microfilm, and Bell handed it over. Walter pulled up an extra chair for himself.
He threaded the microfilm into the reader with a sense of dread, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to know the awful truth.
* * *
The two of them spent nearly three hours glued to the reader, studying arti
cle after horrifying article of the torture and mayhem caused by the man from Reiden Lake.
It began with a young couple at Lake Herman, in Vallejo. The boy was seventeen, the girl only sixteen, and the pair had been parked in the Lover’s Lane area near the lake when they had been approached by a man with a 22. caliber semi-automatic pistol. According to the police report, their killer shot the boy first, point blank in the head, then shot his terrified girlfriend five times in the back.
Worse, Walter instantly recognized the pretty blueeyed brunette from his vision at Reiden Lake. He’d seen her death, exactly as it happened two months before it occurred!
The next two unsuspecting teens were shot in a Lover’s Lane area, as well, this time at Blue Rock Springs, also near Vallejo. Only this time, the boy actually survived the brutal attack, describing the killer exactly the way Walter remembered him.
The police had received a phone call from a man claiming responsibility for the shootings, describing details of the crime that could only have been known by the killer. That caller also took credit for the previous shootings, and the police knew they had a serial killer on their hands.
The third attack, at Lake Berryessa near Napa, was by far the most bizarre and frightening. A young couple were approached by a man wearing a black hood, with a white crossed circle painted on a flap of fabric that hung down over his chest. After some surreal conversation, the man tied the couple up and started stabbing them repeatedly. When he was finished, he just walked away, leaving them bound and bleeding. After being discovered by a local fisherman, both victims were rushed to the hospital. The young woman didn’t make it, but her boyfriend survived the attack to relate all the horrifying details to the press.
Again the killer made another call to police, as well as leaving a written message on the victims’ car door, listing the dates of previous murders. It was signed with the same crossed circle symbol.
Walter was appalled to find so many details that he remembered from his vision. The more he read, the more he started to feel punch drunk and overwhelmed.
The last case that was confirmed as a Zodiac murder was the shooting of a cab driver in the city, in an upscale neighborhood known as Presidio Heights. Another grimly familiar story. Walter was starting to wish he’d never found out about the killings.
Having gone through the details of all the murders, Walter and Bell began to examine the letters and ciphers that the killer had sent to various newspapers in the area, including the letter in which he threatened to shoot school children on a bus.
The more they read, the more a dull, drowning sense of hopelessness began to wash over Walter.
“What have we done?” he asked Bell.
“I think a more important question,” Bell replied, “would be, what are we going to do about it?”
3
Walter paced up and down the length of the Howard Johnson hotel room he’d shared with Bell for the conference. They had spent nearly the entire day in the newspaper archive, digging up every single scrap of information they could find on the Zodiac Killer.
More and more, Walter was haunted by the faces of the victims. The teenage girl at Lake Herman. The cab driver with the mustache. But the one face he just couldn’t get out of his mind was the face of that old black woman in the red coat.
LINDA’S GRANDMA.
On the scratchy bedcover beside him was a copy he’d had printed out of one of the Zodiac letters. His eye kept coming back again and again to the bottom of the page.
Senior citizens make great targets. Okay, I think I shall wipe out a city bus some morning, just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the grannies as they come bouncing out.
“We have to contact the authorities,” Walter said. “I just don’t see any other option.”
“That’s brilliant, Walt,” Bell replied. “What are you going to do? Tell the police that you saw the future while you were on acid? That’ll go over well—I’m sure they’ll leap into action.”
“I’m going to tell them the truth, Belly.” He picked up the receiver of the bedside telephone. “I have a moral obligation, as a scientist.”
“Would you just stop and think for a moment...” Bell began.
Walter ignored him, dialing the operator.
“Yes, hello,” he said when she came on the line. “Give me the San Francisco police department.”
“Just a moment,” she replied.
“Come on, Walter...”
A gruff male voice answered on the first ring.
“SFPD,” it said.
“I’d like to speak to someone in charge of the Zodiac case, please.”
A long, weighty sigh on the other end, then, “Please hold.”
Bell looked away, exasperated, and started studying a Xerox copy of one of the ciphers.
Walter waited patiently until a woman came on the line. She had a gentle voice, like someone’s mother.
“Hello and thanks for calling the Zodiac tip line,” she said. “Please state your information.”
“Yes, I...” Walter looked over at Bell, who was deliberately ignoring him. “I need to speak to someone in charge of the case. It’s extremely urgent.”
“I’m sure it is, sir, and if you’d go ahead and let me know why you’re calling, I’d be happy to pass your information on to the detectives, right away.”
“But...” Bell was still ignoring him. “Well... This is probably going to sound pretty out there.”
“Go ahead, honey,” the woman said. “It can’t be more out there that half the cranks I hear from every day.”
“I’m a scientist,” Walter said. “Specializing in biochemical processes within the human brain. I believe I may be responsible for bringing the man you’ve been calling the Zodiac into our world.”
A moment of silence on the line, then, “I’m listening.”
Walter told her everything about the trip, the gateway, and the vision he’d shared with the strange man. When he was done, he felt exhilarated—and a little bit sick to his stomach. He hadn’t realized how it had been eating away at him, keeping that awful vision bottled up inside him for so many years. It felt like such a tremendous relief to let it all go, and put the burden of responsibility in the capable hands of trained law enforcement professionals.
“So what you’re saying is that the Zodiac Killer is a radioactive alien from another dimension?” the woman said slowly.
“Well, not exactly...” Walter frowned and switched the receiver from his left ear to his right. “I mean, there’s really no way of knowing precisely where he’s from until he can be captured and questioned, but that’s hardly the issue. I think it’s infinitely more important that he be stopped from killing those people tomorrow. Naturally, I’m happy to work closely with the detectives in order to deduce the location of the shooting, but time is of the essence. It’s imperative that investigation begin immediately.”
“Thank you very much for your interest in this case,” the woman said, her tone rote and dismissive now. “I’ve recorded your information exactly as given, and will pass it on to the detectives as soon as they come back on shift tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night?” Walter said. “But that will be too late!”
“Hello?”
He was talking to a dead line.
“So,” Bell said, without looking up from the cipher. “When does the cavalry arrive?”
Walter slammed the receiver back into the cradle.
4
Walter lay on his back, staring balefully at the ceiling. Several hours had passed, and they were no closer to devising a plan than they had been when Walter had first shown the article to Bell.
Clearly, there would be no help from the police.
“We did this, Belly, can’t you see that?” Frustrated, he ran a hand over his eyes. “It’s up to us to save that poor old woman.”
“But how?” his friend replied. “We have no concrete data.”
Any answer Walter might have come up with vani
shed with a sharp rapping on the hotel room door.
Walter got his bare feet under him and walked over to the door, leaning against it and opening it as much as the security chain would allow. Peering through the gap, he saw two men wearing identical suits and serious expressions. The man closest to the door was a grim, gray, older man. Gray hair, gray eyes, and gray skin. His companion was younger, with slick, black hair like patent leather, and pale blue eyes magnified by thick-lensed glasses.
“Walter Bishop?” the gray man said.
“Yes.” Walter, looked back over his shoulder at Bell. “Can I help you?”
The gray man held up a photo ID inside a slim leather wallet.
“FBI,” he said. “Please get dressed. We’ll need you to come with us.”
“Belly,” Walter called back over his shoulder. “There are men here from the FBI.”
“William Bell?” the gray man said, leaning into the crack in the door. “We need to talk to you, as well.”
Bell was on his feet in a heartbeat, eyes wide with alarm.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Walter said, struggling to get his sockless feet into his shoes without toppling over. “But we’d better do what they say.”
“Let’s go, gentlemen,” the gray man said. “Chop chop.”
“I don’t like this,” Bell said. “Why are they here?”
“This must be about the Zodiac,” Walter stage whispered to Bell, slipping the chain off the door and opening it all the way. “Is that what this is? The Zodiac Killer?”
“Sir,” the gray man replied, “I’m not currently at liberty to discuss the details of why we’re here. Please come with us.”
Walter looked back at Bell, suddenly anxious and unsure. Only minutes ago, he’d been longing for someone in a position of authority—someone who would step in and take this whole awful mess out of their hands. Now he was afraid.
It wasn’t as if there was any other option, but for some reason he felt certain that going with these men was a terrible idea.
Bell stepped up beside him and slung his arm around Walter’s shoulders.
“Don’t tell them anything, Walt,” he whispered between clenched teeth. “Not a goddamn thing.”
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