Dark Prophecy

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  “Not with Dark.”

  What pissed Riggins off the most was that he knew Constance was right.

  Part of him ached to bring Dark into this. Hell, Dark’s mind was already on the case. Riggins had seen the tarot card pack at the house, and that was long before Knack had broken that connection in the media.

  And if Riggins knew anything about Constance, it’s that she wouldn’t give up. She might seem to give up in the moment. But she’d find ways to keep picking at him, wearing him down, trying to scrape away at a yes. But Riggins couldn’t tell Constance the truth. How could he?

  The Steve Dark she idolized shared a genetic link with the worst serial killer they’ve ever encountered.

  This wasn’t hearsay, or a rumor, or even casual evidence. Riggins had run the test himself, lifting up Sibby’s cold dead hand, running the stick under the nail as gently as he could. Sibby had fought for her life and the life of her newborn daughter with everything she had. She’d ripped through the freak’s latex suit and gouged away a tiny piece of flesh. DNA, now at the end of the stick.

  Originally, Riggins intended to rule out one horrible possibility: that Sibby’s infant daughter had actually been fathered by this maniac.

  But he’d ended up confirming something even more horrific.

  He’d run the sample personally in the trace lab. If the monster had any relatives who’d ever had their DNA entered into the system, it would be revealed. The results arrived with a ding: seven of thirteen alleles were a match. To Steve Dark.

  Riggins still loved Dark like a son. But he knew the violence the man was capable of. He watched it once, in that basement. Why had he left Special Circs?

  Because he knew that, sooner or later, Riggins would discover the truth?

  chapter 44

  The sound of a girl screaming woke him up.

  Johnny Knack bolted upright and saw something trembling beneath a stack of papers. The scream was his cell phone’s e-mail alert. After the slaughter in Philadelphia, he’d assigned a Janet Leigh Psycho shriek to the alarm clock app. Yeah, it was juvenile, of course. But it kept his eyes on the prize.

  Funny thing was, Knack hadn’t even realized he’d fallen asleep. He’d spent a good part of the night working on a book proposal. Timing was everything. The murders were still ongoing; he knew that much. This Tarot Card Killer was just getting warmed up. Hell, how many cards were there in a deck? This guy, whoever the fuck he was, had staying power.

  So Knack wanted to be ready to go. Book publishing was different now. Back in the old days you could putter around with an In Cold Blood or Helter Skelter or Zodiac for years and readers would happily wait. Not today. They wanted to be reading about a serial killer while the bodies of his victims were still slightly warm, and they wanted the cable movie already cast. Publishing had finally caught up and had become very good at producing insta-books, especially now that you really didn’t even need paper or binding glue anymore. A friend of Knack’s had knocked out a fifty-thousand-word quickie e-book about a tween star’s sex-and-booze weekend binge at an Aspen resort that made it sound like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 2: Loathe Harder. The wretched thing had 130,000 downloads (and rising) plus a movie option, all for a weekend’s worth of work. Sorry, Capote, old chap. You had it wrong.

  Knack was determined to go one better. He wanted to publish a book while the murders were still ongoing. Four cards, six dead bodies—fuck, that was more than enough. Pack the thing with blood-soaked detail, add plenty of speculation here and there, plus some bullshit background on the cards themselves, and boom, you’ve got a book. Sequels unfolding live.

  So maybe this e-mail was from one of the book editors he’d blitzed last night, teasing the project. Which would be awesome.

  Knack reached for his phone with one hand, his breath mints with the other. His mouth was so rank, it even offended him. He popped a mint, thumbed the app. Nope, not a publisher. Message from someone called TCK.

  “No fuckin’ way ...”

  Knack opened it. Of course this was somebody screwing around with him, right? Had to be. Maybe even one of those fucking editors.

  The message:

  I enjoy your work. Don’t bother going to the mountains. The story there is a dead end. You want to be ahead? Go to Wilmington. Send a blank reply for more.

  Mountains? That didn’t make a lick of sense. Nor did Wilmington. But that’s what creeped Knack out. This wasn’t someone playing a joke—and if it was, the prankster had a predilection for the obscure. He should check the news sites, run a keyword search for “mountain” and “murder” and see if anything popped.

  Knack didn’t have to bother with a search. After he woke up his laptop, his home page—the Slab, naturally—already had the story, posted early this morning in its usual sensitive style:

  MOUNTAIN: 10, BANKING INDUSTRY: 0

  Westmire Execs Headed to Sybaritic “Retreat” Killed in Freak Plane Crash in Moonshine Country

  Knack skimmed the article with a nasty yellow ball of unease in his belly. If someone else was on this fucking tarot thing, he’d be ripping heads from neck stumps. But no. No mention of tarot cards, or any occult links. Just a weird rumor that the pilot was missing, and a joke that he probably bailed because he couldn’t take his passengers’ obnoxious coked-up behavior anymore. Maybe it was totally unrelated to the TCK.

  But what if it wasn’t? And what did he mean by “Wilmington”?

  Knack picked up his phone, thumbed the REPLY button, and hit SEND.

  chapter 45

  Airspace over the Appalachian Mountains

  Dark sat in the plush belly of a modified Gulfstream G650, the fastest business jet in the world. He overheard the pilot bragging that while the official top speed was somewhere around Mach 0.925, he’d personally flirted with Mach 1 on a few test runs. And while this $60 million plane had room for a dozen passengers used to luxury travel, Dark was alone. God knows how Graysmith had arranged the services of an aircraft like this on such short notice. Come to think of it, he didn’t want to know. Strange enough that he was speeding to the site of a plane crash.

  Mach 1, 2 or whatever—Dark didn’t think it would be fast enough. Riggins was going to beat him to the crash site. Sure, his old boss would have to negotiate official channels—the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board, Homeland Security, and the rest of the alphabet soup outfits who jumped all over a plane crash. But if Graysmith came through for him on the ground—like she did with this insanely fast plane—he might be able to sidestep all of that and take a look at the scene unimpeded.

  Secondhand photos and reports were fine, but they weren’t the same thing.

  This might be his best chance at picking up the killer’s trail.

  As the Gulfstream landed at Roanoke Regional Airport, Dark imagined the Ten of Wands card in his mind.

  The next card from his personal reading.

  And yet again, the next card dealt by the killer. Or killers.

  The Ten of Wands depicted ten long sticks in a bundle, held by a man eager to carry them to some unknown destination. Hilda told Dark the card implied a burden, requiring an almost superhuman effort to complete. The nearby village implied that the end of the task was at hand, as well as the sense that there can be no breaks, no rest at all, that the load must be carried.

  According to Hilda, the man in the illustration was a symbol of oppression. A single man’s will played out to the end of its strength and deprived of its magic. Someone had set this burden upon him.

  Did the killer imagine himself as this man, carrying these ten souls to the afterlife? If so, he would have blinders on, focused only on his task, nothing else. There would be a clarity of purpose, a simplicity to his life. He would eat and breathe and sleep only to carry out his mission: to kill.

  So even as Dark was transported by a white van to the crash site, he knew that the killer wouldn’t be among the dead.

  Maybe he jumped out of the plane. If so, he would have waited un
til the end, so he could watch the crash himself. All of the murders so far had been hands on; he wouldn’t have done it by remote. He needed to be there.

  As promised, Graysmith had delivered on the weapon, too. After they arrived at the scene, the driver wordlessly handed him a black hard case containing a Glock 22 with three extra magazines of .40 bullets—Dark’s gun and caliber of choice. If he did encounter the killer out there in the wilds of the Appalachian Mountains, he didn’t want to be caught defenseless.

  The credentials sent to his cell phone got him past the perimeter and among the NTSB investigators and Virginia K-9 units. Dark saw that Special Circs was already here, as predicted. He recognized the vehicles, the license plates. Definitely from their auto pool.

  Dark knew he’d have to stay on the perimeter. Which was fine. From even this distance, the plane looked intact, as if it had landed instead of crashed. The ground in this area was flat enough for such a landing—risky as it was.

  After Riggins saw the wreckage of the crash site, he knew he needed a belt of whiskey. Maybe three. Instead, he’d have to settle for a smoke. A unit of NTSB investigators freaked out when they saw him reaching for his lighter. Riggins nodded, hands up, fine, fine, and moved farther away from the scene, lighting up and taking the tobacco smoke into his lungs, hoping to erase the taste and smell of burned flesh.

  As Riggins lit up, he thought about the killer. This guy managed to parachute out of the damn plane . . . and what, none of the passengers said anything? They just stayed in their seat belts as the nutcase made his getaway?

  No. That didn’t make sense. He had to be using his military-grade knockout drugs again, just like he’d done with Jeb Paulson and the others. Once his victims were out, then he could take his time leaving the scene of the crime. Which would be obliterated by a massive fireball not long after, leaving no trace of his exit.

  Or was there?

  Riggins looked at the chopped-up brown earth and wondered if he followed it out to the edge, would there be footprints? No. You can’t cover that kind of ground on foot. He’d have some kind of vehicle. A car. Motorcycle maybe. He needed to be looking for tire tracks.

  And then he saw the skinny figure in the jacket, off in the distance.

  About a hundred yards away from the crash site, Dark saw the first blood splatters in the dewy emerald grass.

  Is this you? Dark wondered. Did you injure yourself carrying your burden?

  He pulled a field collection kit out of his jacket pocket and quickly swabbed some samples. Maybe this killer had finally screwed up and left a piece of himself behind.

  Riggins thought he was seeing things.

  That couldn’t be . . .

  Dark?

  chapter 46

  Riggins darted forward, his feet sinking into the soft, wet mud. Somebody screamed his name—maybe Constance. He didn’t care. S Dark was here, on the scene. There was no denying it now.

  But how? The last time Riggins had seen Dark, he was still in Los Angeles. Unless Dark had developed precognitive abilities, there’s no way he could have made it here, to the scene of the accident, so quickly. Hell, the plane had crashed only what—five, six hours ago? The only other explanation was that Dark knew it was going to happen, and was here waiting for it. Maybe even helped plan it ...

  Riggins didn’t want to think about that. Push that shit aside, and focus on the important thing: taking Dark into custody. Lock him up in some concrete cell until Riggins got a handle on the situation. His only regret was not bagging him back in L.A.

  The moment Dark saw someone running toward him, he knew it would be Riggins. The man wouldn’t send anyone in his place. Not on a case like this. No matter that Riggins had just Ping-Ponged from coast to coast. His ex-boss would insist on being here, working the evidence, bagging the shell casings and spraying the carpet and escorting the bodies to a makeshift morgue nearby. Riggins was relentless. In that way, the man was still his role model.

  Not now, though. Now, Riggins wouldn’t understand. Wouldn’t tolerate his presence.

  Riggins would take him off the playing field without even blinking.

  Dark quickly tucked away the last swab in a test tube, jammed everything into his pockets, then pulled out his cell phone from his other pocket. He speed-dialed Graysmith as he darted for a line of shrubs and trees about a dozen yards away. Probably the same path the killer took. Away from the plane, and out of sight.

  “Graysmith, I needed to get the hell out of here. Where’s the driver?”

  Fast as he ran, the years of beer and poor eating and smokes and everything else Riggins jammed into his veins caught up with him. The guy vanished into the trees, leaving Riggins with his palms on his thighs, hunched over, struggling to breathe. Damn near vomiting, if he was going to be honest about it. Guy was younger, faster.

  Guy. Right.

  Just say it.

  You know it was Steve Dark, don’t you?

  Now Riggins had a tough decision to make. Either sound the alarm on Dark, send a team of men and dogs out into those trees, and have him chased down and cuffed immediately. Or do nothing, knowing that he possibly let a killer go.

  Riggins thought back to the day Dark quit Special Circs the first time, not long after the slaughter of his foster family. They’d been standing together in a parking garage when Dark told him:

  “I’m on the brink. I’m walking a fine line. If I don’t get out now, I’m gonna be going to the dark side, and you’re going to be out catching me at nights.”

  Riggins had nodded, told him that he understood. But clearly, he hadn’t.

  Because now Dark’s own prophetic words had seemed to come to pass ...

  Riggins stopped himself. Was that what he really believed?

  If Dark was a killer, would he really linger around the scene, watching everyone work? Why not watch from the trees?

  When Riggins reached down for the cell clipped to his belt, fate made the decision for him. The phone buzzed.

  chapter 47

  Washington, D.C.

  Johnny Knack loved the stack of hundred-dollar bills in his jacket pocket. But when it came down to it, journalism was still about connections.

  If he could somehow trade what he knew for access, he’d finally have the lock on his book proposal. No one else would be able to claim exclusive access to the files of Special Circs. Never mind that Tom Riggins would never agree to that in a billion years, but even the slightest hint of official cooperation could be spun a lot of interesting ways.

  “The killer’s been in contact with me,” Knack said.

  “Knack,” Riggins said. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “You’re at the crash site now, aren’t you?”

  Silence on the other end. Knack knew he’d stunned him with that one.

  “You’re there because it’s the Tarot Card Killer, only nobody knows it’s him. Far as everybody else is concerned, just another sorry group of rich people bit the dust. But I know the truth. And how would I know the truth if the killer hadn’t told me?”

  “I’m not confirming anything.”

  “You don’t have to, Agent Riggins. I don’t want anything from you. I’m calling to give you something. Because I think the killer told me where he was going to strike next.”

  “Where?”

  “Happy to tell you . . . but just promise me one thing.”

  “Fucking knew it.”

  “Nothing major, I swear,” Knack said. “Just promise that we can keep talking. Or at the very least, you can keep up your stony silence while I run things by you. If something’s way off, grunt. If I’m on to something, sneeze. Come on, you know what I mean—All the President’s Men-style. Flag in the potted flower on the balcony, and all that.”

  Knack listened. The silence thrilled him. Riggins believed him! He was considering the proposal . . .

  “Where you right now, Knack?” Riggins asked.

  “At home.”

  “In Manhattan, right? Same Village a
partment you’ve rented for the past three years? Well, listen up, shithead. In about five minutes a couple of Federal thicknecks with buzz cuts are going to be walking through your front door and seizing your laptop, your notes, your files, your underwear and sticking it into little plastic ...”

  “Wilmington, Delaware.”

  Well, Knack had gone for it; Riggins shot him down. This wasn’t the first gamble he’d lost.

  “What’s that?”

  “Where the killer told me he was going to strike next.”

  “He, huh?”

  “Well, I don’t know. He . . . or she, whoever, started texting me this morning.”

  “I want copies of everything,” Riggins said. “And I want a tech there to look at your laptop.”

  “Whatever you need, buddy.”

  “We’re not buddies.”

  Knack thumbed the red button. Fucking ass.

  That’s okay. It was still a free country. And Knack felt a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, coming on.

  VI

  five of pentacles

  To watch Steve Dark’s personal tarot card reading,

  please log in to Level26.com and

  enter the code: pentacles.

  FIVE OF PENTACLES

  Wilmington, Delaware

  Too much, too little. That was Evelyn Barnes’s life.

  Like tonight—a unit of sick kids filled to capacity, and three of her nurses calling out sick. If it were up to Barnes she’d fire them all. This wasn’t the first time. But there was still a severe nursing shortage, and replacing these three meant Barnes might be stuck with three newbies with poorer training and an even bigger sense of entitlement. That was the real problem: the next generation, the twenty-somethings. Indulged by their parents, given nothing but treats and straight As despite their actual performance, and with this strange idea in their heads that they should all be paid outrageous salaries for barely adequate work. Worse yet, they would hold out for better paying positions, even if it meant not working for six months or a year. Why not? Mom and Dad would still take care of them at home.