Dark Prophecy

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  Barnes knew the story firsthand—her own daughter was a nurse. She hadn’t worked in a year.

  Meanwhile, too little sleep had taken its toll on Barnes’s face. She used to be the pretty one—the petite, chesty, funny blonde everyone bought drinks. Even better when she’d finally admit to being a nurse (as if the scrubs weren’t a dead giveaway). Working with kids? Even better. Men were apparently still very much suckers for the whole nurse-patient fantasy.

  It had been a long time since someone offered to buy her a drink. Men in bars (as if she ever saw the inside of a bar these days) were more likely to suggest a vacation or, at the very least, some Advil. Her dirty-blond hair was nothing more than something to be pulled back and clipped so it wouldn’t hang down in her face. Her tired, puffy face, her weary eyes completely drained of life. What the hell had happened to her?

  Too much, too little. Same old story.

  There was a small bodega across the street that catered almost exclusively to the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff. Barnes slid her money across the counter, the owner slid back a pack of her favorite smokes. The habit was growing more expensive by the day, and it flew in the face of the advice she gave every young person she met—and you’re never going to smoke, right, Josh?—but what the fuck. Everyone needed an outlet. Barnes tapped one out of the soft pack, lit it, and looked over at the hospital. The institution that had sucked away more than two decades of her life.

  Not that she regretted it. She’d helped a lot of kids, held a lot of worried parents’ hands. She wouldn’t trade that for anything. Still, she wished the stress would let up, just for a little while.

  As she stood and smoked, a bracing wind cut through Barnes’s body. The sky was a dark gray. Looked like snow up there. Weird for late October. She should have worn her coat out here.

  All too soon her smoke was finished. Back to the floor. Barnes flicked the stub to the ground, smashed it with a foot. Don’t smoke, Josh, and never, ever litter, she thought to herself. Then someone grabbed her from behind.

  A thick forearm was suddenly around her neck, choking off her air. Christ in heaven, Barnes thought. A drug addict? The more she squirmed, the angrier she became. God, even this neighborhood was turning to shit. Who the hell would mug a nurse outside a children’s hospital?

  But then Barnes heard a clear, calm whisper in her ear. The voice sounded muffled, as if speaking from behind a hollow mask:

  “Shhhh . . . How does it feel to be helpless? To have your life slip away from you, no matter what you do to hang on to it?”

  This was no addict. There was no trembling, no stink of the streets. This person was huge, strong.

  As Barnes struggled, the white nurse hat fell from her head. Barnes tried to cry out but then she inhaled and saw gray, and then nothing at all. This was it.

  No. There was more.

  She was in a hard bed. Stiff sheets. Was it over? Was she a patient now? No. She couldn’t be. They wouldn’t have put her in one of the beds in the children’s hospital. Why was it so dark in here? And cold. So, so cold. She reached out into the darkness and her knuckles immediately smashed against a hard surface.

  What was going on?

  Her fingertips tried to make sense of it. A cold, hard surface was directly above her, just inches away. Now that she groped around in the dark, she realized she was pinned in from the sides, too. When Barnes felt the bed beneath her, she realized that there were no sheets or mattress. It was the same cold surface.

  All at once she realized where she was and why it was so cold. . . .

  She was locked in a morgue freezer.

  Evelyn Barnes screamed and pounded at the roof and thrashed her tired legs trying to make as much noise as possible, praying someone would hear her before she froze to death. She tried to stay calm but couldn’t. Who would? Oh God, please let me out of this; I promise I’ll do whatever you want; I don’t want to die like this; oh God, who’s going to take care of my daughter; please, God, LET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING BOX . . .

  But no one could hear her screams. It was growing late, and the morgue—like the rest of the hospital—was horribly understaffed.

  chapter 48

  Wilmington, Delaware

  Constance couldn’t imagine the horror of being left to freeze to death in a morgue body locker.

  Yet the Tarot Card Killer had done just that to Evelyn Barnes. Abducted the veteran nurse right from her own hospital. Drugged her into unconsciousness. Placed her body on a sliding tray. Then he’d locked her in tight, knowing that at this hour, no one would hear her cries for help. Not in this tiny morgue, buried at the bottom of the hospital.

  And Constance knew that Barnes had cried, screamed, kicked, punched, and clawed at her cold steel prison. Her hands, elbows, knees and feet were horribly bruised. She had fought to the very last . . . knowing exactly what was happening to her.

  She couldn’t imagine.

  Why punish someone so severely? What had Evelyn Barnes done?

  Or was this murder like the others—horribly random?

  Riggins had sent Constance to Wilmington alone. At first she thought it was punishment. But then Riggins explained the tip Knack had received, and that he wanted his “best” ready to pounce if something happened. That made her feel good. The smallest scrap of praise went a long, long way.

  Especially when faced with a nightmare like this.

  And there was little doubt that this was the Tarot Card Killer at work again, barely a day after the plane crash. He’d placed a Five of Pentacles card beneath Barnes’s back, the one place where it wouldn’t be disturbed no matter how much she thrashed and kicked and punched. The logistics worked, too; it was easy to imagine him bailing at the plane crash scene and traveling up to Wilmington. The drive would be six hours, maybe.

  Constance called to mind the card: two sick people, an adult and one child, making their way across a snowy field. Their bodies are bandaged; their clothes inadequate for the weather. They are poor people. The childlike figure hobbles along on crutches. The adult wraps a shawl tightly around her frame, her back to the child—ignoring him and his obvious difficulty. Behind them: an ornate window of stained glass, with five pentacles arranged in a treelike shape, fiercely yellow and glowing.

  So the nurse—Evelyn Barnes—was supposed to be the woman? So who was the child? No child had been reported missing from the hospital. Thank God.

  Like Martin Green, there was torture involved. The same couldn’t be said for all of the killings. Paulson was taken out quickly. Same with the three MBA students. Their bodies were arranged, but there were no signs of torture. With the senator, there was a methodical stabbing—definitely torture. The passengers in the plane, however, were knocked out, asphyxiated, burned. Methodical. Impersonal.

  Constance realized: With some of the murders, the killer had a personal stake.

  Some were examples, impersonal: Paulson, the students, the passengers.

  But the killer had a personal reason to hate Green, to hate Senator Garner, to hate this nurse here.

  So what tied them together—an economic expert, a politician, and a nurse in a children’s hospital?

  chapter 49

  West Hollywood, California

  Dark returned to California. At long last, he had a piece of hard evidence in his possession. Now it was just a matter of making sense of it.

  Over the years he’d collected spare pieces of gear from the Special Circs crime labs—outdated incubators, centrifuges—and built his own thermal cycler and sequencer from mail-order kits once he quit the job. The makeshift setup was a far cry from what some crime labs had at their disposal, but it would give Dark what he needed. There was no court of law, no chain of evidence to preserve. The DNA would merely fill in another piece of the story.

  After isolating the samples, incubating them, separating the DNA from the debris, expanding the sample, Dark loaded it into the sequencer. While he waited for samples to finish the analysis process, Dark thought about th
e killer’s seemingly random strikes.

  That was the thing: Ninety-nine point nine percent of the killers in the world did not choose their victims at random. There was always a reason.

  Movies and crime novels were always showing you assassins who let you live or die at the flip of a coin or card, heads or tails, red or black. But that’s not how it worked. Somebody wants to go through all of the trouble to take your life, they’re going to have a good reason. They’re going to have a plan.

  They’re not going to leave it up to a deck of fucking tarot cards.

  Right?

  Dark couldn’t shake the idea, though, that larger forces were at work. Let’s say the killer woke up one morning and decided, Okay, going to give myself a reading, and then I’m going to kill a bunch of people according to that reading. I’ll find people who match the cards, and it’ll freak people right out . . .

  Even if that was true, then the killer was still engaged in the action of selection. Of all of the men in the world you’d want to hang, why Martin Green in North Carolina?

  And surely he chose Jeb Paulson because Paulson introduced himself into the killer’s world.

  If Jeb hadn’t shown up—if, say, Riggins had gone in his place—what would have happened? Would the killer have targeted Riggins just the same? No. Couldn’t have been Tom Riggins, who was many things, but he was no “fool,” in the sense of the tarot cards. He was no fresh soul awaiting rebirth. Christ, you couldn’t get more battle-hardened if you tried.

  Again, it was selection. Not a random flip of the card.

  But then how do you explain the three girls in the bar? Utterly random, no connection whatsoever to Green, other than their field of study: business. Just like the plane crash victims—execs at a lending company. And just like the senator, who was involved in banking and regulatory information. A little bit of a stretch, but not too much. You could draw a nice clean line through all of the victims, except for Paulson.

  There was a digital ding from the sequencer. The samples were ready.

  The blood was animal.

  No link to the killer.

  chapter 50

  Dark sat in his basement staring at the ceiling in a near-fugue state, unaware of the passage of time. There were tiny fragments of fact in his head, and his brain struggled to piece everything back together again. The hard evidence was useless, just like it had been with Sqweegel.

  There was a new e-mail ding on his laptop. A report forwarded from Graysmith. There had been another TCK killing, just one day after the plane crash. This time: a nurse named Evelyn Barnes in Wilmington, Delaware. Dark clicked open the file and knew within a few sentences that he was reading a report from Constance Brielle. Her reports were crisp, precise, and smart. If he was going to cheat from anyone’s homework, Dark would pick Constance’s every time.

  Constance had quickly identified the tarot card being referenced: the Five of Pentacles. Then again, the killer (or killers, Dark reminded himself) hadn’t been sly about it. Whoever had shoved Evelyn Barnes into that cold morgue drawer had left a copy of the Five of Pentacles card in there with her.

  Again, another card from Dark’s supposedly “personal” reading. What had Hilda told him about the card?

  The card denoted hard times and ill health. Like the hard times after the brutal slaying of Dark’s foster parents, and he told Riggins he was quitting Special Circs. You were right, he’d told Riggins. I care too much. Was that why this nurse, Barnes, deserved her punishment? Did she care too much? Or, like the image of the old woman on the card, did she blithely ignore the pain of those around her?

  Stop it, Dark told himself. Focus on the case. Think about the killer. Not your own life. You’ve already been through that.

  But everything kept returning to the cards.

  How could this be possible?

  Maybe life isn’t what he thought. Maybe it was predetermined, and we only had the illusion of free will. Maybe the Celtic cross was a glimpse behind the façade of the machinery, giving you a glimpse into how the universe really worked.

  But if that was the case, what were we but helpless pawns? Just tiny bugs, trapped in an upside-down glass, trying like hell to scramble up the surface only to slide back down. Soon, the air would disappear. We all die. We have the illusion of a vast world beyond the glass, and we gasp our last breaths thinking we’ll be the ones to figure out how to escape the glass. No one does, however.

  No one person in the history of the world has ever beaten the glass.

  Dark picked up his cell, thumbed the number, and waited. C’mon, Hilda, answer. Please. Instead an automated voice mail picked up.

  “This is Madame Hilda at Psychic Delic. I am unable to answer your call right now ...”

  When the beep sounded, Dark left a message. “Hilda, you helped me more than I can tell you. But I have more questions, and I really need to see you. Tomorrow morning, if you can. I’ll be at your shop at nine sharp. Please be there.”

  chapter 51

  Special Circs Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia

  “Tell me you’re close to making an arrest on this thing.”

  Riggins stared at Norman Wycoff. “We’re throwing every available resource at it. But I’ve got six crime scenes with seventeen victims in six different jurisdictions. You want to give me more resources, I’ll happily take them.”

  The secretary of defense had shown up in his office, not content to call or send e-mails with a billion little red exclamation points next to the subject line. On television, the man looked like America’s most passionate defender. His bulldog tactics were allegedly part of his charm. Such things were getting a little long in the tooth, and American citizens were tired of hearing about extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, hoods, electric shocks, dogs, and genital torture. Wycoff looked weary from constantly defending himself, let alone running his department. Sometimes he took his frustrations out on whoever happened to be close by.

  “Do you understand that Homeland Security wants to treat this as a terrorist act?” Wycoff said now.

  “Good,” Riggins said. “Let them chase this down.”

  Wycoff sneered. “You don’t want to avenge your own, Tom? That’s not like you at all. I think you’re losing your edge.”

  “Like I give a fuck what you think?”

  Wycoff turned a strange shade of purple that Riggins couldn’t quite identify. From the look on his face, you could tell he wanted to strike back with something. Anything. He’d even go for the testicles. Finally, he spat out: “Maybe Steve Dark was the only member of Special Circs who knew what the hell he was doing.”

  Riggins twitched. He couldn’t help it, and cursed himself.

  Not because of wounded pride—Wycoff didn’t know shit about how Special Circs really worked. No, it was because Riggins had Steve Dark on the brain. To a man like Wycoff, Dark was like the hard steel pistol shoved inside a suburban father’s nightstand. You deny you have it. Deny you fantasize about using it on home intruders. You tell your liberal friends you wish you could just chuck it in the river. But you can’t seem to bring yourself to do that, either. In fact, you’re glad that pistol is within close reach. Since Dark had left Special Circs, Riggins hadn’t had a peaceful night of sleep.

  Wycoff caught the twitch. He narrowed his eyes.

  “Is he working this for some other agency?” Wycoff asked.

  “No,” Riggins said.

  “So what’s he doing sniffing around the crime scenes? I thought he was busy lecturing bratty UCLA kids.”

  “Yeah, Dark’s a teacher now, but he’s also been a manhunter for the last two decades. You just can’t shake something like that aside. He told me he was just curious. I told him to fuck off, and I think he will. But last time I checked, this was still a free country. You want to stop him from traveling?”

  Wycoff seemed to ignore that. He started for the door, pausing only to deliver his final thoughts on the matter:

  “Just get me results. And make sure Da
rk doesn’t get in the way. Or I’ll remove him myself.”

  The place was Banner’s favorite—a diner on the outer fringes of D.C. that served the most ridiculous pancakes ever. Pancakes with chunks of candy. Pancakes with jalapeño and habanero peppers. And Banner’s choice this morning: pancakes made with little hardened morsels of pancake batter inside. Constance—who was blessed with a metabolism of a long-distance runner—ordered three fried eggs, three sausages, a double order of buttered toast, and three small glasses of vegetable juice. Riggins stuck with black coffee, dry toast. His stomach was a mess. Better to lay something basic down there to get him through the morning.

  “You really should try a bite of this,” Banner said. “It’s like an infinite loop of pancake.”

  “I need your help,” Riggins said. “Off the books.”

  “I thought a free breakfast was too good to be true,” Constance said.

  Riggins’s head swiveled to the right. “Hey. Who said anything about free?”

  “So what is it?” Constance asked.

  “Dark.”

  “I knew it.”

  Banner, mouth full of a cooked and uncooked pancake, said: “You mean Steve Dark? I thought he was, like . . . gone.”