Dark Prophecy

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  “The next card will be the Wheel of Fortune.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  Dark remained silent. It sounded ridiculous, even to him. Because a five-dollar tarot card reader in Venice Beach told me.

  “Trust me.”

  “In my line of work, trust me is code for fuck you.”

  “Just check your sources for recent murders,” Dark said. “Almost definitely sure we’re talking about in or near a casino. The big ones. Where the high rollers flock.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Graysmith said.

  After minutes later, Graysmith sounded almost gleeful when she called back to report: “Nothing. We’ve got beaten prostitutes, a full drunk tank, and a lot of meth dealers taking shots at each other, but nothing that matches the profile of the TCK.”

  “That just means it hasn’t happened yet. Keep looking.”

  As the small jet raced over the Mojave Desert, Dark stared at the image of the Wheel of Fortune card he’d loaded on his phone. The crime scenes so far always referenced details in the cards. Sometimes overtly, sometimes in subtle but meaningful ways. The illustration on this card was one of the more fanciful ones in the deck: pale clouds swirling around a wheel inscribed with arcane symbols. Winged beasts and an angelic figure poring over tomes. A snake, with its whiplike tongue extended, writhing next to the wheel. A jackal-headed man—Anubis, the guardian of the underworld—either gliding along the outside of the wheel or being crushed by it. A sword-carrying sphinx resting on top, overseeing all, yet nearly faded into the background of the sky.

  During the plane’s descent, Dark put it together. When Graysmith called back, he didn’t give her time to open her mouth.

  “Something happened at the Egyptian, didn’t it?” Dark snapped.

  There was a stunned pause, and then:

  “How the hell did you know?”

  The Vegas CSI techs beat Dark to the scene by mere minutes. They were snapping on gloves and unlocking gear when Dark stepped into the room, and immediately the lead homicide detective marched over, telling Dark to get the fuck out. Dark showed him the credentials that Graysmith had sent to his phone. This only further enraged the homicide dick—a balding lifer who looked like he wanted to take a swing at Dark. But his colleagues pulled him aside. “Not worth it, Muntz,” someone muttered. The Vegas guys were used to jurisdictional skirmishes; this was just another one in a long line of them. Immediately, Dark realized that alienating these guys was a mistake. This crime scene was no more than thirty minutes old; their killer was no doubt still in the city. The Vegas PD would be more of a help than a hindrance at this point.

  “Look,” Dark said. “I’m not here to interfere. How about walking me through what you know?”

  “What, you want me to do all of your work for you?” Muntz, the homicide dick, asked.

  “I’m not here officially.”

  “You guys never are. But let me ask you this. How the fuck did you get here so fast? We only caught the call a few minutes ago.”

  Because, Dark thought to himself, I’m finally listening to Hilda.

  chapter 55

  The victim’s name was Haruki Kobiashi. He had checked in the night before—the first of six nights he planned to spend here in Sin City. The man was a notorious high-stakes gambler—a Japanese whale, in Vegas parlance—who made a spectacle of his time at the roulette wheel. When Kobiashi won, he roared, and the crowd roared with him. Beautiful babes would rub his bald head for luck. When he lost—which was often—it was the stuff of high tragedy, and he would inevitably need to console himself with eight-hundred-dollar bottles of Cristal, which he would share with his audience. Kobiashi’s legendary spending and losing sprees were a better show than Wayne Newton’s.

  Such massive losses and bar tabs would be the ruin of any mortal millionaire. But Kobiashi was worth 6.1 billion yen and rising, thanks to his empire of cheap clothing emporiums. Kobiashi, of course, wore the best, and never wore the same item of clothing twice. In his philosophy, according to Forbes and Fast Company, material goods and cash were transient, and not meant to be held on to for long. He was doing his best to keep the worldwide economy humming.

  Until tonight.

  The economy would have to limp on without him.

  Kobiashi had been found on the floor of his suite, stark naked. He’d been shot in the face at point-blank range. A steel .44 Smith & Wesson and a pair of blood-splattered dice were a few inches away on the desktop. Five bullets in all. Four still in the chamber. One inside Mr. Kobiashi’s skull.

  chapter 56

  30,000 feet above Nevada

  When the three of them agreed to keep close tabs on Dark, Constance got the idea to follow the money. Credit card transactions, car rentals, beer bodegas, everything. If Dark spent a traceable dime, they’d know when and where. She was also working on satellite surveillance of his home and car.

  Meanwhile Josh Banner hit a database of traffic cameras trained on West Hollywood and LAX, entering Dark’s make, model, and license plate number. Within a few minutes they had multiple hits, tracing Dark’s movements down the 405 all the way to a parking garage, where a credit card transaction revealed that he’d purchased a last-minute flight to Vegas—just a quick hop over the Mojave Desert.

  Their own plane was descending into McCarran now.

  “Strange place for Dark to visit, isn’t it?” Constance asked.

  “Yeah. Dark’s not exactly a gambling man,” Riggins said. “Hell, he used to roll his eyes at me when I used to play the ponies.”

  “So why here? What kind of lead does he have that we don’t?”

  “No idea,” Riggins said. But he was thinking to himself: Because Dark’s in league with the killer—some crazy woman with big breasts and a gas mask fetish. So of course he’d know where to strike next. His only regret now was not putting constant surveillance on Dark from the moment he had left the man’s house in L.A. If it had been anyone but Dark—if Riggins had done his fucking job and treated Dark as a person of interest—then maybe he could have stopped all of this sooner.

  “Guys,” Banner said, thumbing his smart phone. “I think I know why he’s here.”

  chapter 57

  Vegas likes to keep its eye on you, Dark thought.

  They say what happens here stays here . . . but that’s the point. It stays here, and they know all about it.

  Every bet you place, every plate you take from the stack in the hotel buffet, every drink you’re served, every drink you leave behind . . . they’re keeping track. They know how much time you spend on the floor. They know how much time you spend in your room. They know, because they track your universal key card.

  The only two people to enter Mr. Kobiashi’s penthouse suite in the past twenty-four hours were Mr. Kobiashi himself and a bellhop named Dean Bosh. As a valued guest of the Egyptian, Mr. Kobiashi’s suite was prepared just the way he liked it. Buckets of shaved ice, an array of flavored vodkas, and an absurd quantity of shelled nuts. According to the hotel, Bosh entered the room three times. First, an hour before Kobiashi’s arrival. Then upon his arrival. And finally, about fifteen minutes before he died.

  “Find this Bosh,” Muntz told his team. “Now.”

  Within minutes they found him—bound and disoriented in a supply closet on the top floor, amid bottles of booze and toilet paper and towels and shampoo. Bosh couldn’t remember who he was or where he was, or even what day of the week it was. As a result, he had no idea who’d taken his key card. Bosh apologized deliriously, then began to sob. Whatever knockout drug he’d been given, the stuff was clearly still wreaking havoc on his nervous system.

  Meanwhile, Dark accompanied Muntz down to the private hotel security stronghold, located on a phantom sixth floor. The Egyptian had cameras for show, where patrons could see them. Those video feeds went to central security office on the ground floor. Dark knew those feeds would be useless. The killer had taken great precautions to avoid being caught on tape so far. Why give a
way the game now?

  However, there was a second, more elaborate set of cameras—a holdover from the hotel’s CIA glory days, recently updated and digitized. A series of pinhole cameras covered every possible public area, along with the interiors of certain rooms. Kobiashi’s suite was not one of them—whales were afforded certain perks, like privacy. But the outside of his suite? That was fair game.

  “Right there,” Dark told the tech manning the video bay. “Bring it up.”

  The image showed a skinny figure with dark hair, wearing a hotel uniform. Was it male or female? Hard to tell from the angle. The figure was taking great care to avoid showing his/her face to the cameras, and that meant holding his/her body in a slightly awkward position.

  “Can you pull that up a little closer?”

  “Not too much,” the tech said. “The cameras are small, and for that we sacrifice some clarity.”

  “Okay. Keep it rolling.”

  Just before the mystery figure reached the door, the head turned, face to the camera. The image was blurry, but now you could see the shape of the face, as well as the cheekbones. It was a woman.

  Dark squinted and tried to recognize the features. There was something strangely familiar about them. At first, the hyper-paranoid voice in his brain said Lisa Graysmith, but that wasn’t right. Dark tried to match the features against other women he knew—Constance Brielle, Brenda Condor . . . okay, now he was being insane. If he looked long enough, he’d start seeing Sibby’s face in those features, too.

  “Get me a copy of the highest res image you’ve got,” said Dark. “I can get it analyzed.”

  “So can we,” said Muntz. “Our guys are really good at this stuff, you know.”

  “No doubt,” Dark said, “but I might have access to a different set of toys.”

  chapter 58

  In years past, whenever Johnny Knack rolled into Vegas, it almost always meant a puff piece. Interview some vapid celebrity in a suite, or by an over-chlorinated pool, or in a dark velvety hotel bar, or some other ridiculously clichéd location. Knack hated Vegas, to be perfectly honest. Other cities were whores, but they had a quiet dignity about them. Vegas practically gave you a handjob on the way in and shook you down for a penicillin shot on the way out. There was very little a writer could do with Vegas. Even the great Hunter S. Thompson had to make shit up.

  But not now. Vegas was no longer the gaudy whore. Now she had a shiv in her Gucci clutch.

  Knack’s phone buzzed in his hand. Another text.

  GO TO EGYPT

  The texts had started this morning, God help him. Little messages—all of them obscure at first. Until he tuned into their delirious form of logic. The sender was speaking between the lines.

  TO FIND THE LIGHT YOU MUST FIRST SEEK THE DARK

  THOSE WHO CLAIM TO GIVE COMFORT CAN HURT YOU THE MOST

  And so on, making Knack think he had a loon on his hands. Light and dark? Comfort and hurt? What the fuck—was this a meth addict reading him nonsense out of a fortune cookie? But then this anonymous texting “source” starting giving him details on the slaughter of that nurse in Delaware, stuff that checked out later with a few well-placed hundred dollar bills to the Wilmington Police Department. This was either the killer or someone who knew the killer’s every move.

  Abruptly, the source told him to fly to Vegas. And now here he was, being led around by the ear. Go to Egypt. What the fuck did that mean?

  One look at a cheap handbill, though, clued him in. The Egyptian Hotel and Casino. Of course.

  After hopping into a cab and giving the driver a hundred dollar bill to get him there as fast as humanly possible, Knack saw that he was already too late. Vegas PD all over the place, with the usual bright lights and chaos of a crime scene’s outer perimeter. What now? Did his mystery texter expect him to pull some Jason Bourne shit and make his way into the hotel?

  Knack thumbed in a reply:

  IN EGYPT NOW

  Then he waited. The number of his mystery texter had a 559 area code, which meant Fresno, California. Which probably meant he wasn’t hiding behind a neon sign somewhere, sniper rifle trained on his head. Hell, Knack had seen Red Dragon. You start messing around with a psycho, sometimes you ended up crazy-glued to a fucking wheelchair, talking to a guy with freaky false teeth.

  No, Fresno could mean that he was dealing with an honest-to-God source, and not the killer himself. Who could it be, though? A concerned relative or friend? Somebody looking for a payday at the end of this all—a greedy Deep Throat? Didn’t matter. As long as the information was good.

  Knack’s phone vibrated in his hands. A response.

  SOON DARK SHALL GUIDE YOU

  Fucking great. More riddles. More light and dark stuff . . .

  And then it hit him. Dark. Oh God, he was so dense sometimes. He thumbed back:

  DARK MEANING STEVE?

  A new story bloomed in his mind. Why didn’t he see it earlier? Steve Dark wasn’t investigating the Tarot Card Murders. He was the prime suspect.

  chapter 59

  Graysmith opened the van door. “You don’t ask a lot, do you?”

  Dark squeezed in past her. “You offered.”

  “You won’t believe how many chips I’ve cashed in over the past week.”

  “This is Vegas, isn’t it?”

  Dark knew his request wasn’t completely ridiculous. If Graysmith was right and this was still a CIA kinda town, then it wouldn’t be too difficult to scrounge up the latest Face-Tek software from some agency in the Greater Las Vegas area. Face-Tek was a program that used biometrics—the structure of your face, the shape of your irises, width of your mouth, curve of your nostrils—to identify you, even if you tried to obscure your identity. Most people didn’t know that you could just as easily be identified by the shape of your ear as you could by a fingerprint. Special Circs had received a Face-Tek upgrade not long before Dark left the agency; that version had been impressive, reconstructing the sharp image of a face out of a grayish mush of pixels. He hoped Graysmith would have access to the same—or something better.

  He needed to see that face.

  Dark handed her the flash drive with the footage from the secret security cameras. Graysmith plugged it in, then called up the program. She hesitated for a moment, as if she had forgotten where she was, what she was doing.

  “Let me,” Dark said.

  “I don’t use this stuff all that often,” she said, standing up.

  “You have people for that, right?”

  Dark swung himself into the seat. Again the paranoid part of his mind screamed at him: She’s hesitating because it’s her on that recording. She’s letting you figure it out, then she’s going to shoot you in the kidneys while you’re distracted.

  Using the touchpad, Dark dragged the footage into the Face-Tek window, cueing it up to the moment when the mystery woman looked at the camera. Instantly, measurements were made, processed. Extrapolations were made. Years ago, it took a skilled artist countless hours to rebuild a human face from a buried skull. Now, it took a computer a few moments—and you didn’t even need a skull.

  Soon, they had their answer.

  There was even a hit on a national database.

  Her name was Abdulia Maestro.

  chapter 60

  The police band was alive with chatter about Kobiashi and the tarot card. Another murder, right on the heels of the last. Nothing fancy about this one, though. A Japanese gambler, naked, one bullet in his head. Shit, Riggins thought. For Vegas, this was positively sedate.

  Still—there was the possible Steve Dark connection.

  As they sped toward the Egyptian, Riggins called Vegas PD. He was old buddies with the night-shift supervisor of the local CSI team—who immediately put him in touch with the detective in charge. Yeah, Dark had been there at the crime scene. In fact, he’d just left a few minutes ago, with a copy of the security footage, said he had a way to enhance it. What, didn’t he check in? Say—didn’t you guys send him out here in the
first place?

  Riggins couldn’t ignore the evidence now. Dark had been spotted near at least four of the seven scenes—Paulson’s apartment building, the bar slaying in Philly, the plane crash in the Appalachians, and now here, in Vegas—the whole time insinuating himself into the mix without so much as a plastic badge from a box of breakfast cereal.

  Now he was leaving the scene of a murder, evidence in his hands, to do God knows what with. Was Dark trying to cover his tracks? Or worse, was he keeping little trophies of his Tarot Card Murders?

  Riggins hated to think it, but there was a pretty good chance that Dark was not only involved in these slayings, but the mastermind behind them all.

  Dark had killer in his blood, right down to his very DNA.

  Once Riggins allowed himself to go there, and ran through the crimes in his mind, the events of the past week snapped into place with alarming ease. Martin Green’s hanging/torture murder? Easy enough for Dark, especially knowing the entry and submission methods of a monster like Sqweegel. Paulson’s murder? Even easier. Paulson idolized Dark. Paulson would trust him immediately. The three MBA students in the bar? Dark was a handsome enough guy to lure them into the ladies’ room, smart enough to spike their beers, strong enough to string them up. The senator? Another cake-walk, with knives that Dark could have ordered—or had custommade—years ago. The plane crash? Now that was tricky. Dark wasn’t a pilot, but he suddenly appeared on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere, like he’d fucking parachuted himself in. The nurse in Wilmington? Simple, with plenty of time left over for a flight to Santa Barbara, a drive down to Burbank, and another flight to Vegas. Dark had pretty much lived out of planes for the past five years since the Sqweegel murders; flights were as second nature as bus rides for most people.