Mystery: Satan's Road - Suspense Thriller Mystery (Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Suspense Crime Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  “Interesting,” answered Gideon, squinting into the sun. “I don’t truly care what you do at this point.” The disciple would translate this to do whatever is necessary. “We are so close to our goal that after the designated hour, it wouldn’t matter if there were millions of fish missing. No one will care. Not a soul. But I do like a clean workspace. As do you. It’s in our nature, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. Closure is compelling.”

  “Then be compelled. And feel free to use our software team here. They are chomping at the bit.” Gideon was referring to his killing team. They were growing anxious, waiting for Monday.

  “I already have something in mind.”

  “God speed.” Was all Gideon said, not interested in the gory details. He waved for the quad to return and the soldier to take the disgusting cell phone away so he could continue his walk.

  CHAPTER NINE

  According to Tamara, Professor Kaufmann was one of only three American experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls; had lived and studied at the Jerusalem Center for Antiquities behind the famed Father Bedard, the first human to translate the famous Gnostic scriptures discovered buried in an earthen pot in the fifties. He spoke Hebrew, though not a Jew by birth, as well as Greek, Aramaic and French. He met Indra Chapertah at a Conference in San Francisco on mixed disciplines – physicists rubbing shoulders with philosophers; mathematicians with biologists and world famous Big Bangers with skeptic agnostics.

  What Kaufmann had in common with Chapertah, and what brought them together that night at the famous Pasha restaurant, was Indian cuisine. Indra was expounding the benefits of using the darknet to corroborate research, Kaufmann was complaining about the lack of modern research on the mysterious John of Patmos – the hot Pao Bhaji came to the table, and both of them had an epiphany at the same time.

  The Christian disciple John had been banished to the island of Crete in the second century A.D. because of his Christianity by the Roman Emperor. Over the space of several years, from his prison cell, he wrote what came to be called Revelations. Because the guards carefully scrutinized his work for any sign of anti-Roman sentiment, he disguised his meaning in images and metaphors his audience would understand, but the Romans wouldn't.

  John wrote the original text in a version of Greek, the street language of the Roman Empire called Koine. Years later it was translated into Latin, then English and finally Hebrew. By this time, much of John’s original symbolism was lost or twisted out of context. Even the best scholars struggled with its meaning. The clergy, however, delighted in the fuzzy metaphors that fit every sermon.

  Kaufmann was explaining this because Chapertah had apparently mentioned in an off-handed way, following the curried chicken appetizers, that there were seven major nodes to the Internet; seven major computer centers that formed the backbone to the network that serviced the information highway.

  Kaufmann had laughed and said that Revelations repeatedly referred to a monster with seven heads. Chapertah then added that each of the seven major centers duplicated the seven servers making a total of 49 large computers. Kaufmann stopped, his wine almost at his lips. He then proposed the ghost of a theory that would eventually form the substance of their paper together – that Revelations was a prediction both generally and specifically of the Internet two thousand years before the invention of the computer.

  Kam O'Brien considered the predictions nonsense; he neither believed in fate or prescience. And he refused to believe the general gist of the theory that a skinny prophet sitting in a Roman jail could come up with the idea that one day the globe would be ringed with thousands of thinking machines. Kam preferred to believe that the paper was a smoke screen for something else – a riddle within a riddle – and even that was a stretch.

  “Professor Kaufmann?”

  “Yes. Thank you for getting back to me so promptly, Professor O’Brien. Your specialty was History I understand. At Boston U.”

  “That was a while ago.”

  “I took the liberty, as you know, of calling the police.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. What did they say?”

  “They said that Indra was the victim of an unfortunate accident.”

  “An accident? I was there, Professor. He threw himself from the balcony of the Royal York Hotel.”

  “They say he was on drugs. Very unfortunate. Just started the prescription a few weeks before.”

  “Drugs? What kind of drugs?”

  “SSR’s.”

  “Where you aware of this?” asked Kam. SSR’s were serotonin re-uptake drugs. They were used to treat depression, paranoia and bi-polar disorders.

  “No. I knew he faced periods of depression. Wasn’t aware how serious it was.” Kam shook his head to clear his mind. Could Chapertah’s state be caused by a new prescription? Suicide had been attributed to new users of SSR’s. Could that be possible? He certainly was manic – almost crazed. That would explain his obsession with Revelations.

  “Professor, I almost feel silly asking this, but Indra claimed you helped him with his paper on Revelations.”

  Kaufmann shook his head; the effect, because of the latency of the image, was to turn his face into a gruesome pink blur. “Nonsense, Professor O’Brien. That was completely Indra’s doing. I thought it was a lark.” A lark! A two hundred-page joke! From a man who had written over a hundred papers on Physics and Cosmology!

  “Your name is on it,” said Kam.

  ”No attribution, I’m afraid. Another example of Indra losing grip on things, as it were.”

  “So why do this video call?

  “Ahhh. I looked up your picture on Boston’s alumni site. Just wanted to be sure I was talking to the right person. Pretty upsetting, this business. Can’t be too careful.”

  At that point Kam could see a person entering Kaufmann’s office from behind him. “Well, I can see you’re busy. I just wanted to ask about the other professors who worked on the paper with you.”

  “No problem, Professor O’Brien. But again, this was basically an April Fool’s joke that got out of hand. Mostly a joke on me, the antiquities geek. Before you go though, can I say something to you in confidence?”

  “Well certainly, but I see you have company.” The person in Kaufmann’s office stepped back into the frame, medium height, very dark and difficult to make out clearly. He paused behind Kaufmann.

  Kaufmann laughed. “You must have a bad connection. I am completely alone at the moment.”

  Kam tried to explain. “Kaufmann . . . I am seeing someone in your room on my screen. There must be something wrong. Or maybe I’m just tired.” Kaufmann leaned back and crossed his arms. Then Kam recognized the other person in the room and he choked harshly, as if something was lodged in his throat. He held the screen out at arms length, his face turning red, blinking to gain focus on the blurry images. It was Chapertah. And he was grinning back at O’Brien.

  “So are we done then, O’Brien? I need to contact Indra's family. And frankly, you are unnerving . . .” At that, the Chapertah character on the screen grabbed Kaufmann’s head in one violent motion with both hands. He began to twist and shake him. Kaufmann’s face became a blur, but his surprise was clear. He let out a yelp of fear then began to moan. He threw his hands out, but Chapertah’s grip was vice-like, almost superhuman. Kaufmann’s arms were swinging in wild arcs, beating at Chapertah’s head and arms, his whole body flailing wildly, his head pinned like an insect in a display case. Kam could see Chapertah's long slender fingers begin to press hard into Kaufmann’s eye sockets, and then the Professor began to scream in earnest. It was a keening mournful cry like a wounded animal.

  Kam yelled into the phone, causing heads to turn in the lobby. This was insane and couldn’t be happening. He could see Chapertah’s fingers forced deep into Kaufmann’s eye sockets, blood running freely down his tear-stained beard. They bulged out obscenely.

  Kaufmann made one final desperate lunge to free himself. He had his hands on Chapertah’s fingers, but there was no
stopping the attack. Chapertah’s strength was frightening.

  Kam heard the snap of bones and muscle. Then Kaufmann slumped, his body loose in Chapertah’s grip, gurgling like a drowning baby. Chapertah arched his back, laughed and flicked out his two middle fingers. In one smooth and sickening motion, Kaufmann’s eyeballs were forced from their sockets. They were hanging now by their optic nerves from the old man’s cheeks. Chapertah dropped the head on the table in a careless gesture. Kam heard Kaufmann’s nose crunch on the desktop. Chapertah then bent down and plucked one of the eyes from an exam paper it had landed on. He held it up close to the camera with his bloody hands.

  Kam leapt back from his iPhone screen, dropping the phone on the tile floor, knocking the ornate hotel lamp over that sat on the table next to him. As he reeled back, a sharp pain filled his head, and he blacked out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I get up every morning and go to work just like you.

  Most days I hate what I do – despise the politics and the bullshit and the endless paperwork that goes with it. And if I have to listen to one more drunk at two in the morning – in some crowded bar, lipping off to me about his excuse for a good life wasted – I swear I will happily make him eat the working end of my service revolver.

  But I haven’t yet because the paperwork would kill me. So just let me dream.

  Then there are those other days. Days when I feel like I’ve accomplished something bordering on important. Well, maybe that’s going too far. It feels important to me anyway. Like finally catching that arrogant pimp Rodriguez dead to rights, the asshole who made four of his girls disappear over the past year, smiling at me with his missing teeth. Or putting the cuffs on some rich asshole from Georgetown whose wife of twenty-five years went on a permanent vacation and has never been seen again. These small successes keep me going for another few days. That’s what I live for.

  I work for the Washington D.C. Homicide Bureau if you haven’t already guessed – for far too long. Over twenty years. Half of my partners have retired or croaked or died in the line of duty. That should tell you something – that I’m lucky or blessed – or maybe not trying hard enough.

  Being around this long and still in one piece, gives me the luxury of working a special unit – a unit we unofficially call the Lost Hope Division. Cold cases and sometimes, special cases. Cases the Captain doesn’t really know what to do with and doesn’t want some rookie mishandling and making more work for him. The watch-your-ass cases loaded with ugly political potential. So I get them. Gregory Hyde at your service.

  This is such as case; a professor at Georgetown University, who went missing a week ago and was found yesterday in his four car garage lying dead on the concrete floor. The diagnosis was carbon monoxide poisoning. We’ve had a dozen of these cases this year alone. A pretty common way to go actually. Painless. Neat.

  But then why get me involved? Because the professor’s wife, who has a lot of connections in the community, made a big commotion and called the Captain personally. Her husband wasn’t suicidal and never had been she said.

  That wasn’t what caught our attention. A number of his peers had coincidentally died in the past few weeks as well. A Cosmologist he knew threw himself off a balcony yesterday in Toronto. An Engineering Ph.D. at Columbia had been accidentally cooked in a radiation chamber, a few days earlier.

  Was it open season on professors?

  I visited the wife of the prof from Georgetown U on my own. I’m told it’s budget cuts. I had lost a partner the year before, and there still wasn’t a replacement. That or no one wanted to work with a detective who had lost as many partners as I had. After all, cops for good reason are superstitious.

  I was surprised how young the professor’s wife was. Then I learned that her husband had been some kind of whiz kid. University education at fifteen. PhD at eighteen. Professor at twenty-two. He was an expert on antiquities. And a very successful writer and entrepreneur – who also taught history.

  Turns out he was younger than many of his students and his wife looked like the homecoming queen.

  She invited me into her freshly painted Georgetown mini-mansion, and we sat in front of the largest flat screen TV I had ever seen. She stared at me with red eyes, looking completely wrung out for someone so young.

  “I’m so relieved you’re here, Detective. Somehow I need to convince you that there is absolutely no way that Henry would end his life. You have to believe me. Henry was murdered. You need to find his killer.”

  “Mrs. Gridley, I don’t want to get your hopes up. I’m here to add my perspective to this case. That’s all. We really don’t have any evidence of foul play.”

  She leaned into me. “I know people who are depressed, Detective. I’ve had a close friend kill herself, but I’ve known Henry since he was a teenager. He wasn’t depressed a day in his life” Clearly more than I could say for myself. Just looking at her house depressed me.

  “Anything unusual in the last few weeks? Anything he did? People he worked with? Travel?” I asked.

  “He teaches. He writes. Does some lecturing. Or did.” She paused then and gently blew her nose on a monogrammed handkerchief. “That was his life. He had a new book coming out on the history of the Jesuit Commandos. He was very excited about making personal appearances to support the book.”

  “Jesuit Commandos?”

  “You’ve never heard of them? Sometimes they’re called the Pope’s Soldiers.” I couldn’t for the life of me see why the Pope would need soldiers. But if he did, and this wasn’t suicide, could it be possible that the publication of this book could have created enough animosity to get someone killed? Was that a potential motive? Or was it just her expensive perfume scrambling my senses.

  “Did Professor Gridley have any enemies?” I asked.

  “Professional jealousies perhaps. But he was a very likeable teacher. His students loved him.”

  “When you say jealousies, any names come to mind?”

  She thought about that for a moment. “There are always campus politics – people fighting for tenure or to get published. I’d really hate to send you out into the world with a hit list of cotton-headed eccentrics though.”

  She stopped to rub her nose and I couldn’t help but notice how perfectly it was shaped. Natural or surgical?

  “I would be very careful with any information you volunteered. Like I said, we haven’t even decided if this is a homicide.”

  She ignored that possibility. “Then I could probably provide you with names of professors – and not just ones teaching here at Georgetown. Henry was working with a committee of professors from Universities all across the states for example. They were working on Revelations. One of his favorite topics.”

  “Revelations … as in the end of the world book from the Bible?”

  “Yes. The Apocalypse.” Sitting in a bright and very modern room with a beautiful woman talking about the end of the world was a jarring experience. Even for me. I stared at her for a moment, which I could tell, made her uncomfortable. I’m six foot four and some people say I have a head like an anvil. I wasn’t built for heart-to-hearts over tea.

  “I’m sorry Mrs. Gridley, but I don’t often talk to people about Armageddon – especially in such fashionable surroundings. It threw me off a bit.” She smiled for the first time and then lightly touched my knee.

  “Detective, my husband lived in a strange world. One foot in the twenty-first century, the other in the Old Testament.”

  I stood up to stretch, happy to change the subject and asked to see the garage.

  We walked through a monstrous kitchen that could easily feed our entire precinct and through a back door into a spotless garage. There were two vehicles. A black Range Rover I assumed was the professors and a lime green Kia Soul. She then explained the Soul was her husbands. All evidence of the suicide was cleaned up.

  “He was found lying just beside his car. The door was open, and the car was running,” she explained. “The medical examiner said
she thought he might have changed his mind at the last minute and tried to get out, but it was too late. But they don’t know my husband.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he was planning on killing himself, he wouldn’t have changed his mind. You don’t get to be a full professor at the age of twenty-eight by waffling on your decisions. And you don’t become a millionaire at the age of twenty-five by wanting it all to end. He was killed, Detective. He may have tried to get away. He may have woken up. But he was not changing his mind.”

  She was clearly a very unique woman. She was standing only inches from where her husband had spent his last few minutes and yet appeared fully composed. In my experience, most people would just have pointed me in the direction of the garage and stayed away from the scene.

  I watched her for a few seconds, intent on where her gaze was directed. She kept looking at the Kia. “It says in the report that your husband had disappeared for three days before showing up here. Why didn’t you report him missing?”

  She looked up at me, guessing for the first time that she might actually be considered a potential suspect. She frowned. “Henry used to disappear on a regular basis. I know that sounds odd, but he was a unique character. Whenever he was finishing an important project or book, he would take off. We talked about it quite a bit. It was the only way he could finish something with so much going on around him.”

  “So where did he go?”

  She pondered that for a moment, and her lip began to quiver slightly. “I don’t know, detective. I guess we will find out when his credit card bill shows up in the mail. It was three days lost to us; that’s all I think about.”

  I gave her a moment, then moved on to Gridley’s schedule that day, his appointments, and I got her to give me the names of several of the teachers he worked with at G.U. as well as the names of the professors he was working with on the Revelations project.

  I walked around the garage trying to understand what Gridley was thinking. Carbon monoxide worked best in a smaller space. This garage was bigger than my house. From the police report, I knew there was no hose running from the exhaust to the car’s interior. It didn’t look very well thought out. Not the kind of suicide planned by a boy genius with an IQ of 145.