A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  “I’m not sure why, but it stuck with me. I still don’t understand it all – her death, why it would ever happen. But I can say something I did learn: I don’t let myself miss the good moments anymore, even though she’s not here. Does that make sense?”

  She looked at him, her eyes vulnerable, “A lot, actually.”

  The bartender returned, “Another one, sir?”

  “Thanks, I’ll stay with the water.”

  He turned back to Lani, realizing he’d only had one drink. He didn’t want her to think he was leaving so soon.

  “Sorry, I have to be alert for this appointment I have later tonight.”

  She smiled, “An appointment in D.C. after eight? Sounds like 007 stuff.”

  He laughed. “Sorry, not that glamorous.”

  He switched topics. “Tell me about this double homicide of yours. To be honest, my old cop self is dying to know.”

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about it, run it by you. It’s strange. Our victims are a Pearl-stationed Army Major and his stateside mistress out on vacation, found nude in a luxury beach house over by Tunnels. The strange thing is that no one heard a thing. And, no marks on either of the bodies. At least that’s what on-site forensics is telling me so far. I handle all of the homicides, even some in Honolulu, but this one is looking tough. I know, not much, but any quick hunches?”

  “Anything else?”

  “The male had his eyes clenched shut in rigor mortis. The female had her eyes wide open, the sclera pink with blood. To be honest, I think it even creeped out some of the forensic guys, and they’ve seen a lot.”

  “Well,” Jack observed, “as the old saying goes, you can’t have two cranial subdural hematomas at the same party. What’s the coroner say?”

  “That’s another problem – our coroner is a hack, brother-in-law to the mayor. I’d fly the bodies out to Honolulu, but that’s a crapshoot these days too. So, I’m heading back to sort it out. On top of that, I’m scrambling to find someone to finish up my class.”

  Jack thought for a moment. “Not sure, but here’s an idea. I still know a few people around D.C. If you can get the Lihue PD to extend custody of the bodies to the Feds, we could ask Dr. Takamura to take a look at it over at the FBI lab. Mac could help facilitate the transfer. It should be relatively easy on this end, if you can handle the island side.”

  She smiled. “Very clever, Mr. O’Neill.”

  His phone went off. He looked at the number.

  “Sorry, I have to take this.”

  He moved away and listened, showing no reaction as Mac told him that Aisha had taken ill, a flu bug, something.

  “She’s fine, though,” Mac said. “She’s getting plenty of fluids and so on, practically an army of doctors over there. That said, she’s not too focused. On the other hand, maybe we should adapt and go after her while she’s physically down. It might show us a few things.”

  “Tempting,” Jack considered, “but I’m trying to work the ‘nice guy’ angle, at least for now. And for that she needs to be alert. I think it’s best if we cancel for tonight. We can go through our next move tomorrow morning. That work for you?”

  “No problems, Jack. See you tomorrow.”

  He hung up and moved back towards Lani. Catching the eye of the bartender, he tapped the edge of his glass.

  The bartender looked down the long mahogany bar, “And you, ma’am?”

  She paused, lightly touching her nail on the stem.

  “Sure.”

  12

  Daniel Huff was the only person who’d ever left a mark on the killer.

  In their first grade art class, Dan Huff, a foster child acting up, had spun on his heels with arms wide like a helicopter and had caught the killer with a pencil he was holding tight in his hand.

  The pencil struck hard, embedding into the fat part of the thumb, breaking the lead off.

  The killer looked down at the mark, now dispersed into a dark cloud. No one would have noticed, but he knew.

  The only mark.

  He moved over to the lanai and sat down in the chaise lounger. He pressed the keys that entered the program into the weapon, arming it.

  Dan Huff and his family were on vacation in New Zealand. He would intercept him in San Francisco when they returned. He only needed to wait.

  He felt an unrelated vibration in his pocket.

  It was the text message from his Russian counterpart with their daily move.

  He walked back into the glass house and considered the glistening board – ebony for black squares, glass for white – and slid his opponent’s white rook to g5.

  Interesting.

  Igor Prokhor, his chess master opponent from Moscow, was trying to hide behind his queen. It wouldn’t save him.

  The killer was allowed until the following day to transmit his move, but he didn’t need to wait. He wished he could see Prokhor’s face when the move came back directly.

  Fear – it was a part of the game, of any game.

  He returned to the lanai and observed clouds building on the mountains.

  Yes, he considered, the Cascade had begun.

  †

  Paris was beautiful in winter. People knew this about the other seasons, yet overlooked her in the cold. Overnight, the city had received a rare snowfall, an inch or two, and looked as if draped in mink.

  Parisians simply didn’t know how to drive in the snow and the wide boulevards – designed centuries ago to allow armies to pass – were gnarled like wet knots. Even though the snow was starting to melt, it didn’t matter; the weather had already gotten inside the people’s heads.

  Garneau heard a horn blare three cars back and ignored it. Very gauche.

  People assumed, he mused, that they had conquered the world, brought Gaia to her knees. And yet it only took a dusting of tiny white flakes, a subtle turn in the jet stream, to get Homo sapiens scurrying around the forest floor once more. Every next great civilization was simply convinced that it was the most “advanced” – until, of course, it snowed, or rained, or the Earth became impatient with our nature. He supposed the illusion made us all feel more secure, somehow more significant within the vastness of the cosmos.

  Garneau was a doodler, yet one of the mind. Outside, he was as regimented as a surgeon. Inside, however, he allowed his mind to ride to and fro – between civilizations, postmodern paintings, the chemical composition of dew on the grass – each movement seeking a connection. It was how things came to him.

  Earlier that morning, near dawn, he’d been sitting at his kitchen table, holding a pencil for ten minutes in front of the matrix: the dots that were the killing points for the U.S. Ambassador and his mistress. He’d held the pencil steady, his mind flowing, stopping, starting again.

  The dots couldn’t be random; they possessed some type of intent within them, he could feel it.

  And then, he’d seen the connection.

  Like the gravity between stars, the dots didn’t exist in isolation. The kill marks were relational.

  He drew the lines and looked at the figure – a pentagon.

  Later that morning, as soon as the rest of the world had started into the snowy streets, Garneau had called a writer friend, Marcel, who’d once mentioned over dinner that he had a mathematician friend. “Oh, yes, Dr. Dresden, that’s him,” Marcel gushed, excited to be a part of any investigation. “Yes, yes, I’m sure he can help you.”

  Garneau pulled into the main parking lot of the University of Paris, commonly referred to as the Sorbonne, and found the visitor spaces. It was fortunate that the university was so close to his home. He looked at the scrap of paper, “Dr. Malcolm Dresden, Blaise Pascal Hall, R. # 1022.”

  He walked down the hall and received directions from a passing teacher. When he rounded the corner, Advanced Mathematics Professor Malcolm Dresden was standing in his office door.

  “A real pleasure to finally meet you, inspector. Marcel has told me all about you through the years. All good news, incidentally.
And which, I’m sure you know, is not always the case with our dear Marcel, poor soul. Please come in. And don’t mind the mess – I’m in the middle of a publication, deadline looming.”

  Garneau thanked Dresden for meeting on such short notice and they dove into a series of shared stories on their mutual, roguish, tortured friend.

  “Yes, Marcel is unique, a cad if you ask the ladies, admittedly brilliant. And that, of course, is why we all love him! But I know that’s not why you’re here, inspector. Please, how can I help you?”

  “We’re wondering about a symbol found at one of our crime scenes. I thought, given your background, that you might be able to help us. We’re looking for possible meanings.”

  Garneau took out his drawing of the pentagon and laid it out of the desk between them.

  “Well,” Dresden began, “this particular shape has no meaning that I’m aware of, outside of its geometric ones – it’s known in mathematical parlance as a five-sided polygon. Five equal length lines joined together. The problem with mathematics – or, perhaps, its advantage – is that is it does not deal in meanings, not subjective ones at least. Mathematics keeps its distance from such musings, for good or ill. However, I am aware of an integrated shape that is many times associated with a pentagon.”

  “Integrated?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Dresden said, “here, let me have that sheet of yours.”

  Garneau stared down at the sheet, at a picture of the pentagon with a star drawn within it, using the same kill marks that had created the pentagon.

  “A star?”

  “Not a star,” Dresden smiled. “That’s a common misconception, something we take with us from having drawn them so much in elementary school. Mathematically speaking, a star has no lines within it.”

  “So then, with the lines inserted, what do mathematicians call that?”

  “A pentagram…and I’m aware that it has many subjective meanings.”

  Garneau waited.

  Dresden smiled, “Many meanings, that is, outside of mathematics. A professor of religion, symbols, myths, that’s who you would you need to find.”

  Garneau thanked Dresden for his time and mentioned a dinner that he and Elise were having that next Saturday. “Yes,” Garneau said, “Marcel will be there, and also this professor from Belgium who’s visiting. A professor of music, I think you’d like him.” Dresden said what a wonderful celebration it would be after getting rid of his article and, yes, he and his wife would love to come.

  Garneau entered his car and drove east through Paris, having a difficult time focusing on his driving. In one way, he knew more than he did before seeing Dr. Dresden; in another way, he knew less. He felt drawn forward, as if the evidence trail itself was pulling him along. It was the same feeling he’d always had on cases when he was heading in the right direction.

  He looked down at the name that he’d scribbled on the note: Dr. Emile Dagneaux.

  †

  Garneau treasured his friends, he and Elise collecting them like others collect shells, gems. They would have a mix of friends and acquaintances over several times each month for dinner – a professor here, a politician over there, a young writer revealing his secrets of plot progression. Garneau believed in chances; in mixing together paints, or people, to see what colors they would make. Like every sky, it was always complex, always simple, always at the edge of grace.

  Last night they’d had such a dinner and Elise had asked Marcel, their writer friend, what he meant when he wrote in his last book that our dreams always seem to be just out of reach, as if they were designed that way. Holding Henri’s hand under the table she said, “But, Marcel, maybe you ask too much of your dreams? I have everything I’ve ever wanted – a loving and brave husband, devoted children with the values we gave them, with what they have inside of themselves, and little Millie, an innocent soul – what more is there? If you’re always striving for an unseen oasis, then you miss what is here, now. Maybe if you question the dream, your dream, it moves away from you? But if you have faith in it, perhaps it then moves into and becomes your life?”

  “By the way,” she smiled, “are you sure you’re not already in a dream?”

  Those questions had stayed with him, he didn’t know why, even as he attempted to negotiate the Paris traffic on this busy morning; dodging the absent-minded businessman stepping off a curb with his coffee, the errant delivery boy on the overpowered moped, the young tourist girl and her friends still out from the night before, still giggling with champagne.

  Elise had asked, are we actually in a dream, God’s dream?

  What was the purpose of our dreams?

  In all of history, no one had ever known. Sitting in his car, it all began to perplex him. We spend a third of our treasured lives in sleep, yet we still don’t know its purpose.

  He veered from another pedestrian and headed towards his meeting with Dr. Emile Dagneaux. Earlier that morning as he was leaving, a story had come across the television and it had made him think of all of this again, of Elise’s questions.

  It seemed – or so the reporter said – that there was a rash of people all over the world experiencing incredibly realistic dreams of stars. Nothing more, simply a star. The psychologists were dismissing the reports, citing collective turmoil in the wake of the theatre bombings and the stock market upheavals. It all appeared to Garneau as the same as the Parisians driving in snow, tying themselves into knots. On the other hand, it also seemed that there were stars everywhere these days.

  Anyway, he mused as he turned into the college entrance, he had way too much on his plate this morning to worry about all of that. Yet, still…

  Dr. Emile Dagneaux, Professor of Comparative Religion at the École Normale Supérieure, was one of their oldest friends. Garneau thought again about how Emile would’ve been a good addition to last night’s dinner discussion with Marcel. It was unfortunate that he’d been busy, “Sorry, Henri,” Emile had said, “I simply must get this article done, they are hounding me! Yes, yes, tomorrow morning at nine, come on up...”

  Garneau passed through the doors and found the out-of-the-way office. He pulled himself up the narrow stairway and they embraced at the top, the cubbyhole office hugging the eaves of the library archives.

  “My God, Emile, when are you going to get out of this rabbit warren? One of us, I tell you, is going to have a heart attack.”

  “It’s the charm, Henri,” Dagneaux laughed. “You of all people know such things. I tell you, last summer they offered me a shiny, new office and it took some tactics on my part to slip away. Things come to me here, ideas. You know what I mean. And, well, it’s practically my second home. They’ll drag me out clawing.”

  Garneau sat in one of the ancient leather chairs that fronted the large, wooden desk. The desk and chairs took up most of the space with a musty bookshelf behind them. Light poured in from an arched window.

  “Henri, did you get my email this morning?”

  “I’m sorry, Emile, I’ve been so busy with this ambassador thing. And, to be honest, I seldom check that box.”

  “I swear, you’re such the Luddite! And here you are giving me grief about my aged office.”

  “A Luddite? Not at all. I’m not necessarily against technology. I just don’t like it running me, or running me over. I have the car, don’t I? It is a machine, no?”

  “You know,” Garneau continued, glancing over the new books that Emile had placed on a bookshelf edge, waiting to be placed, “I was talking to Salvatore Roldan the other day – you remember, the Spanish writer living over in Montmartre, you met him once at dinner last year. Anyway, he’s writing this book on youth, on the so-called millennial generation and their children. I think he’s jokingly entitled it, People of the Box.”

  “Salvatore did say something interesting the other day. He pointed out that in every previous age, all the way back to when mankind first made tools, that the given technological invention of any era has always been controlled, and, thus, best unders
tood, by the adult class. Yet frighteningly, not now. Salvatore argues that the computer is the first critical technological invention that is best understood – and, thus, controlled – by the youth class, by the children. The stone ax, the catapult, the telegraph, they were all controlled by adults. But it is the youth that know information technology best.”

  “Salvatore says it’s engendering a fundamental shift in how society works. He says that this is why the so-called Millennials look at their parents as if they were dinosaurs. I told him he should rename his book, Children of the Box!”

  “Or maybe even, Children of the Corn!” Emile laughed. “You think it’s funny, but you should see my kids, how they look at me banging at these keys.”

  They both laughed at their predicaments. “Well, Emile, I guess it only means we’re getting old, an ancient match to these ancient books. C’est la vie…”

  “So, what do you have for me today?” Emile asked. “You sounded as if something was on your mind. Everything alright?”

  “Oh yes – I’m fine, Elise is fine. It’s this ambassador killing. I need your help.”

  He slid the sheet of paper across showing the pentagon. Next to it was the star and the pentagram. “Do these have any meanings for you?”

  “What context? Religious, you mean?”

  “Yes, religious. But also symbolic, mythic, anything of the sort. I’m simply picking your brain.”

  Emile leaned back. “In fact, yes, they have many meanings throughout history. The star, of course, has a Judeo-Christian meaning related to Christ, through the star of Bethlehem.”

  “Just a moment,” he said, reaching behind for a book. He put on his reading glasses.

  I see him, but not now. I behold him,

  but not near. A star will come out of

  Jacob; a scepter will rise…

  “Or, so the bible says.” Emile pulled the sheet closer. “On the pentagram, most people don’t know that it was actually used by the early Christians to represent the Christ star. Only in the last hundred years or so has it taken on its current meaning, religiously, that is.”