Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  The FBI men led them to an unmarked black car waiting in a no-parking zone. They were placed in the back seat, and it wasn’t until the doors were closed that Walter noticed there were no handles on the inside.

  “Not a goddamn thing,” Bell repeated.

  Walter nodded, hands twisting anxiously in his lap.

  * * *

  He wasn’t familiar enough with the Bay Area to have any idea where they were being taken. Since they hadn’t crossed a bridge, he assumed they were still on the Berkeley side of the bay. They drove along several different, unremarkable streets through forgettable neighborhoods, and then down into the underground garage of a bland, beige office building with no visible sign or company name.

  Walter’s anxiety ratcheted up a notch as they pulled up beside a bank of elevators. The man with the shiny black hair stayed in the car while the gray man got out to meet two more men—presumably agents—who were waiting by the elevator. Both of them looked like they had been grown in the same cloning vat as the gray man. Same conservative, dated haircuts, and same colorless, lifeless complexions.

  They looked like men who spent way too much time under florescent lighting.

  “Which one is Bishop?” one of the new agents asked the gray man, as if Walter wasn’t standing right there. Like he was livestock, incapable of speech.

  “I’m Walter Bishop,” Walter said, indignant. “What is this about? I know my rights!”

  “You’ll be fully briefed in due time, Mr. Bishop,” the gray man said.

  “Listen,” Bell said, placing himself protectively between Walter and the stone-faced agents. “My friend, he’s a little bit... eccentric.” Bell touched his temple. “Reads too much science fiction. He gets... weird ideas sometimes, but it’s nothing serious. Really, he’s harmless.”

  “We’ll be the judge of that, Mr. Bell,” the gray man said.

  “No, really,” Bell persisted, gripping Walter’s arm and looking into his eyes like he was trying to tell him something other than what he was actually saying. “He’s crazy, get it? Crazy.”

  Walter got it.

  The elevator door opened and the two new agents each took one of Walter’s elbows, escorting him with gentle but implacable force. The gray man stepped in front of Bell, preventing him from entering the elevator with his friend.

  “Hey, wait a minute—” Bell was saying, but it was too late.

  The elevator doors closed, and Walter was alone with the two agents.

  His mind was racing, wondering where he was being taken, and what was happening to Bell. He thought about what Belly had said, telling him to act like he was crazy. But why?

  Bell harbored a powerful but understandable distrust of police and government agents. He had watched friends and fellow students being tear gassed and arrested for protesting the war in Vietnam. But perhaps these agents were the people in charge of the Zodiac case, and they wanted Walter’s help.

  Maybe they would be able to help stop the bus killing.

  The elevator doors opened, revealing a long, institutional green hallway. A short, chubby man in a lab coat poked a Geiger counter at him before he was allowed to exit the elevator.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Walter asked. “I’m not radioactive!”

  “Just a precaution, sir,” the man in the lab coat said. “Right this way, please.”

  He was led down a hallway, then another, through several turns and into a small, windowless room, empty except for a metal desk, two folding chairs, and a boxy camera bolted above the door. The agents withdrew, leaving him alone.

  Walter sat in that room for what felt like an eternity, giving him plenty of time alone with his thoughts. Every second that passed brought September 21st closer and closer. He kept on seeing that old woman in the red coat, looking up at him with that terrible questioning look in the endless second before she was gunned down in the street.

  He tried to distract himself with a mind game, in which he was working his way through the periodic table, seeing how many different words he could make by rearranging the letters that spelled each element. He was up to selenium, which was a great word with plenty of vowels and nice common consonants, but he couldn’t stay focused. His mind kept returning to that awful vision over and over, like a scab he couldn’t stop picking.

  He checked his watch, then checked it again.

  The passing minutes felt like a slow torture. Each minute gone left them less time to find and stop the killer.

  Finally, after what he estimated to be nearly three hours, someone came in to talk to Walter.

  Where the previous men had been grim, gray and serious, this guy was tan, hearty, and way too friendly, with twinkly blue eyes and a big, rubbery smile like a used car salesman.

  “How you doing, Walt?” he said. “You don’t mind if I call you Walt, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My name is Special Agent Dick Latimer.” He gripped Walter’s hand and pumped it exactly three times, then took a seat in the empty chair. “I understand you have some information that you think will help us with the Zodiac murders. Is that right?”

  “Um...” Walter pressed his lips together. “I... well...”

  “Why don’t you just start by telling me what you told Mrs. Berman on the tip line.” Latimer leaned forward, predatory smile still at full volume.

  Walter was torn, unsure. He still wanted desperately for someone in a position of authority to step in and take care of this terrible situation, but there was something about this guy Latimer that he just didn’t trust. He wished that Bell was with him. Belly would know what to say. He always knew what to say.

  And what not to say.

  “I don’t recall exactly,” Walter said. He had hoped to sound confident, but his voice felt constricted in this throat.

  Latimer’s thousand-watt smile dimmed for a heartbeat, and his blue eyes went cold.

  “Come on now, Walt,” he said. “This is no time for games. You told Mrs. Berman that you had urgent information for us. Something to do with...” He leaned in even closer, so close Walter would have scooted his chair defensively back if it hadn’t already been pressed against the wall. “Radioactivity?”

  “I did, didn’t I...” Walter paused, looking down. Then he looked up again. “Would you happen to have any grape Nehi?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Latimer replied. “But there’s a soda machine down the hall. I’d be happy to get you a 7 Up or something, as soon as you explain exactly what you meant by the suggestion that the suspect has been giving off an unknown type of radiation.”

  “I’m afraid it has to be grape Nehi,” Walter answered. “Only grape Nehi contains the precise balance between citric and phosphoric acid to adequately protect us from the cosmic radiation from the future.”

  Latimer narrowed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

  “Don’t you watch The Outer Limits?” Walter asked. “It’s just like ‘Demon With a Glass Hand,’ only this guy has a radioactive hand. He’s a soldier from the future, like Robert Culp. I’m from the future, too. That’s how I know.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a roll of Necco wafers, offering one to the increasingly annoyed Latimer. “Candy?”

  “Look, Walt, why don’t you just take it easy and try to stay focused.”

  “I was hoping to get boysenberry pancakes at the Howard Johnson’s, but they only had blueberry,” he said earnestly. “Do you suppose that’s some kind of regional thing? When I was a kid, my mother used to make the best boysenberry pancakes. The trick is to coat the berries in powdered sugar before you add them to the batter. Of course, you can substitute lingonberries, but I’d increase the amount of sugar to compensate for the radiation.

  “Have you ever been to Vienna?”

  Latimer stood up, metal chair scraping loudly against the linoleum floor.

  “Enough,” he said.

  “Enough?” Walter asked, on a roll now. “That’s a pretty sub
jective concept, enough. It’s really relative to how much you already have, and how much more you imagine you might want. It’s not a good solid concept like, for example, a number. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have three of something. Like three rolls of Necco wafers. You might think three is enough, while someone else could reasonably argue that three is too many. I, on the other hand, may believe that three is not anywhere near enough. And although we are each right in our own minds, none of us is right in the minds of the other two. Therefore, we are all both right and wrong at the same time.

  “Are you familiar with quantum physics?”

  “Jesus,” Latimer said, reaching out to press a button Walter hadn’t noticed on the underside of the table. The two stone-faced agents reappeared in the doorway. “Get this crackpot out of here, will you?” Latimer instructed.

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, Dick,” Walter said over his shoulder as the two agents hustled him out the door. “I hope you’ll visit me in the future. I think you would really enjoy the year 1999.”

  His last glimpse of Latimer as the door closed behind him was of the big man wiping his hand over his face like an exasperated teacher. Walter really hoped he’d done the right thing.

  5

  The unmarked car dumped Walter and Bell on a nondescript street corner, just a few blocks from some kind of highway. It was getting dark, and few of the streetlights seemed to be operational. There was a damp chilliness in the air. The buildings all around them were a mix of industrial and office buildings, currently vacant or closed.

  “You can’t just leave us here...” Walter began.

  But they did, pulling away the second the door was closed.

  “Where the hell are we?” Bell asked.

  Walter pointed out a disreputable looking gas station, barely visible on the other side of the street about five blocks down.

  “Maybe we can get a map at that gas station.”

  “Is it even open?” Bell responded.

  “Look, there’s a phone booth.”

  Bell patted his pockets for change.

  “I think I know someone who can come pick us up.”

  “Someone with two X chromosomes, I presume.”

  Bell didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

  He pushed in the folding door on the phone booth, kicking aside a slew of crushed beer cans and urine-soaked newspaper in order to enter.

  “Hold that door open, Walt,” he said, lifting the grimy receiver as if it might bite him. “I don’t want to asphyxiate from the ammonia fumes in this toilet.”

  Walter put his foot against the folding door while Bell held the receiver to his ear, joggling the cradle.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  An olive green ’69 Oldsmobile Cutlass pulled up alongside the phone booth. In the driver’s seat was a man with unfashionable glasses and thinning light brown hair. His slim build and ill-fitting suit made him seem younger than Walter, like a kid playing dress-up in his dad’s clothes, but there was something in his haggard face that aged him twenty years. Behind the magnifying lenses of those glasses, his watery blue eyes were sleepless and haunted.

  “Get in,” he said, reaching across the seat to open the passenger door.

  “What?” Bell dropped the useless receiver and stepped out of the phone booth, hand protectively across Walter’s chest. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Special Agent Jack Iverson. You want to know what’s really going on with the Zodiac Killer, you’d better come with me.”

  Bell looked over at his friend, brow arched. Walter could see he was skeptical, but Walter was dying for some answers. And there was something about this man’s tortured gaze that drew him in. Where Latimer had seemed smarmy and insincere, this guy seemed to be raw and wide open.

  He cast one more look back at Bell, then got into the passenger seat of the Cutlass.

  “Come on, Belly,” he said.

  Exasperated, his friend got into the back seat.

  “Just make room for yourself back there,” Iverson said over his shoulder. “This car has become kind of like a second office, since I’ve been out on medical leave from the Bureau.”

  As soon as Bell closed the back door, Iverson peeled out, anxious gaze obsessively scanning the empty street.

  “Medical leave?” Walter asked, peering into the back seat at all the crooked stacks of files and fast-food wrappers.

  “You can’t be too careful,” he said. “I’ve been followed.”

  Walter was starting to wonder if getting into the car had been a bad idea. But if there was something more going on than what had been made available to the public, then Walter needed to know.

  “We can’t go back to my place,” Iverson said, pulling into the empty parking lot of a closed carpet and flooring company. “So this will have to do for now.” He eased the Cutlass into a slot under a jaundiced sodium light and killed the engine. The windows began to fog up almost immediately, the damp bay chill creeping into the interior of the car.

  “Tell me what you told the woman on the tip line,” Iverson said, turning to peer at Walter. “I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Latimer.”

  “Well...” Walter said, pulling the worn lapels of his jacket tight around his throat, and wishing he’d taken time to put on a scarf.

  “Look,” Bell interrupted, leaning forward from the back seat. “Why should we trust you? Any of you?”

  “You shouldn’t trust Latimer,” Iverson said. “I wouldn’t. That weasel thinks he can capture the Zodiac Killer and figure out a way to use him as a weapon. He’s got... ambitions.” He said the word ambitions like he might have said herpes. “He was the bastard who hijacked my idea, for the formation of a special scientific division to handle cases that fall outside the boundaries of what would be considered normal criminal activities. Cases like this one.” He shook his head, rueful and defeated. “When he took over the project, he told our superiors that I was cracking under pressure, and campaigned to get me sidelined on medical leave.”

  “Okay,” Bell said. “So we agree that it’s not a good idea to trust Latimer. But why should we trust you?”

  “Because,” Iverson said, “the Zodiac Killer has been writing to me. He still does, tells me everything. Things Latimer doesn’t know. Even...” He reached into the back seat and grabbed a green folder off the top of a teetering stack, flipping it open and extracting the first sheet of paper inside. “About you two.”

  He held up a rumpled, repeatedly folded sheet of paper. At the top of the sheet, the words “Dear Special Agent Iverson” appeared, above a few lines of the familiar code Walter had seen in his vision and in the newspaper accounts. At the bottom there was a rough sketch. It pictured two floating heads, hovering above a double row of stylized waves like a child might draw. The heads were simplistically rendered, but the heavy, strongly arched brows on the left and the wild curly mop of hair on the right made it obvious who they were supposed to represent.

  “He says he’s from another world,” Iverson continued. “And that you two opened a psychic gateway that allowed him to enter this one.”

  “Did he describe his own world?” Walter asked, excitement flaring magnesium hot in his belly and making him feel reckless. “Is it another planet? Or another dimension?”

  “Hold on,” Bell said. “Start at the beginning.”

  Iverson nodded, his look solemn.

  “I don’t know why the killer became fixated on me,” he said, breath steaming in the chilled interior of the car. “It’s not like I was in charge of the case, or in any kind of position of power. I was just one of several junior agents working under Latimer. But for some reason, the bastard singled me out. He’s been writing to me, calling my house in the middle of the night, taunting me. I don’t sleep. My wife left me. But in a strange way, I think Latimer is jealous.” He shook his head. “Crazy, isn’t it?

  “Anyway,” he continued, “the last confirmed and undisputed Zodiac murder on public record was t
he cab driver in Presidio Heights, back in ’69. But the truth is, the killer was just getting warmed up. After two of his male victims survived his attacks, he gave up on messing with couples and started concentrating on single women.” He flipped through the pages in the file on his lap, until he came to a photograph of a barely dressed dead blonde wearing the remains of a burnt polyester blouse. “Donna DeGarmo, age twenty-six, a dental hygienist from Alameda.”

  “I recognize this woman!” Walter said, nauseous but unable to look away. “I saw her blouse, burnt like this.”

  “There’s something else that’s different,” Iverson said. “When her body was found, it was giving off highly concentrated gamma radiation. Especially in the throat and... um... ” He cupped his hands over his pecs. “Chest area.”

  “My God,” Walter said, remembering the vision, and the sparks dancing over the killer’s hands.

  “The landlady who discovered the body and two of the first responders on the scene were subsequently hospitalized with acute radiation sickness. The entire block was evacuated and the residents quarantined. Naturally it was kept out of the papers, to prevent widespread panic. ‘Sewer leak.’ That was the cover story. But here’s the weird thing.”

  “What?” Bell said. “Weirder than a radioactive corpse?”

  Iverson nodded.

  “Much weirder. See, it took us several hours to mobilize all the equipment we needed to enter the location safely and dispose of the body. I mean, the levels of radiation we were dealing with, standard lead shielding would have been as useless as lingerie. We were actually talking about filling the whole apartment with quick-dry cement, demolishing the rest of the building around it and trucking the cement block out to the Nevada desert for disposal. But, less than three hours later, before we could get a conclusive reading on the type of gamma-emitting radioisotopes we were dealing with, the radiation was just gone.”

  “Gone?” Walter frowned. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”

  “That’s impossible,” Bell said. “Radiation doesn’t just go away. It can take centuries to decay.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Iverson said. “Impossible, but true. It was as if the unknown radioactive isotope somehow bonded with oxygen in the air and rendered down into harmless water.”