Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  “Leave it,” she said, taking a small flashlight from her purse and thumbing it to life.

  The curtains were closed, so the light was dim. The weak yellow illumination from the flashlight made the interior of the cabin seem more gloomy, rather than less. Dust spun and danced in the beam as Nina crouched down in front of the fireplace and pried up the third flagstone from the left.

  When it finally came loose in her hand, she blew away the dust and replaced the stone loosely and slightly crooked.

  “So,” Bell said. “He comes in through the door...”

  “Right,” Nina said. “He comes in through the door and goes right for the fireplace. We should wait there.” She pointed to a dark doorway. “In the bedroom. When we hear him come in...”

  “I grab him from behind,” Bell said.

  “And I’ll put the rag with the chloroform over his mouth and nose,” Walter said.

  “Then I cuff him and bind his legs together with duct tape,” Nina said.

  “While I prepare and administer the sedative,” Bell finished.

  “What’s through there?” Walter asked, gesturing to a second dark arched doorway.

  “Kitchen and back door,” Nina replied.

  “So that’s that,” Walter said. “We are as ready as we can be. All we have to do now is wait.”

  30

  Waiting, however, turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated. With no real idea of when the killer would arrive, and no way to watch for his arrival without exposing that they were there, the three of them were forced to sit in the bedroom, away from any windows, and try to remain on alert for what soon started to feel like an eternity.

  For the first hour, none of them could relax enough to do anything but sit and stare distractedly at each other. Nina on the bed, Bell in an old rocker, and Walter sitting on an old leather trunk with a musty moth-eaten blanket folded to form a meager cushion. They jumped at every sound, the settling of the cabin or the creaking of a tree branch outside.

  By the second hour, Nina was flipping through old issues of Field & Stream magazine that she had found on the bedside table, while Bell and Walter were playing chess on a pocket set Bell had brought. They were so distracted by listening to the sounds of the cabin that they kept forgetting whose turn it was.

  By hour three, Nina lay on the bed with an arm flung over her eyes, though judging from her breathing and body position, Walter didn’t think she was actually asleep. He and Bell had finally given up on chess after three stalemates. Bell had read through all the Field & Stream issues and had resorted to searching for the hidden pictures on the back of a copy of Highlights magazine for children.

  “Is that a fish?” he asked. “Or a water stain?”

  * * *

  Soon dusk fell over the little cabin, and Nina was anxious that any light would give them away. So they were forced to sit in the dark, waiting.

  Walter tried to nap, but his brain would not allow it. Instead, he pulled the musty old blanket over his head and turned on the flashlight, like he used to do when he was a boy, up late and reading under the covers long past bedtime. He knew that if even the tiniest sliver of light appeared, Nina would take it away from him.

  He took out the photocopies he’d made of the pages from the killer’s notebook and laid them on the floor around him, trying to figure out the key for that last fragment of text.

  He got nowhere.

  He had hoped that the keyword was in some way related to the word for the already translated page, whether phonetically, thematically, or structurally, but if it was, he could not discover the connection.

  Then he went back into the file from Iverson, and starting reexamining the original cryptogram included in the August 1969 letters—the ones that had been sent to the newspapers. The code that had been solved by the teachers.

  I like killing people because it is so much fun.

  At the end of that message, a grouping of 18 extra letters whose meaning or significance had never been determined.

  EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

  Strange, when the rest of the message had been based on a relatively simple substitution code. But the way these last letters were grouped, there was no way they fit in.

  In fact, the more Walter stared at them, the clearer it became that this segment had been created with a code so complex that each letter had more than one meaning. That first E was clearly an I, but then the second and third E seemed to have a totally different meaning.

  I am? Could those first three letters spell out “I am?”

  Walter concentrated on that third E. If there was a sliding key being used, then what was the numerical distance between the letter I and the letter M? Five. Move five more letters down the alphabet and you get R. But then at the fourth E, the key seemed to switch again, leaving him with a D.

  Frustrated, he went back to the O-R-I, and after several false starts and aborted attempts, he wound up with S-C-H, which he added to the letters he’d already deduced.

  I AM SCHR_D_________

  That couldn’t be right. It seemed as if he was stuck with too many consonants in a row, and couldn’t think of any English words that began with SCHR. He decided to tackle the last three letters, I-T-I.

  If the Es did not have the same value, then the Is must not, either. It seemed to Walter that the last I was actually a T, but the neighboring T seemed to be an A.

  The number of three-letter English words ending in AT was enormous. Bat, rat, mat, sat, hat, fat, cat...

  Cat.

  I AM SCHR_D______CAT

  Like lightning, it hit him. There was only one thing it could be, only one way to make those seemingly unrelated letters spell something. Something eerily apropos.

  I am Schrodinger’s cat.

  “My God,” he said out loud, throwing the blanket off his head and shoulders.

  Bell looked up, squinting at the sudden light. Nina raised her head from the pillow and opened her eyes.

  “Are you crazy?” she hissed. “Turn that off!”

  “What is it?” asked Bell.

  Walter ignored both of them and grabbed the photocopy of the final page in the killer’s diary, honing in on the final untranslated chunk. Using the word Schrodinger as the key he tore through the final segment, feeling the hair on the back of his neck prickle as he translated.

  Walter held up the translation, his hands shaking.

  “It’s details of his next murder.”

  Nina took the translation from Walter and read out loud.

  “I think I shall wait until the following Monday night. Pretty little Miranda Coleman, usherette at the Roxie Theater, works late on Monday nights. She leaves at eleven thirty and walks alone to the lot where she parks her car on Hoff street. She will die at 11:40 p.m. next Monday the twenty-fifth of September.”

  And those same English words scratched furiously into the page.

  BY KNIFE

  Bell stood, setting the rocker rocking.

  “Why that’s...” He looked at his watch. “A little more than two hours from now.”

  Nina jumped up from the bed, letting Walter’s translation seesaw through the air and land at his feet.

  “Then we have to go,” she said. “Now! We have to stop him!”

  “But what about...” Walter gestured around with pleading hands. “What about the plan. The trap. He...”

  Nina rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t be a fool, Walter,” she said. “Why would the Zodiac disrupt his plans for us? Unless he’s desperately impatient, there’s no real reason he would need to come get the book today. If his next victim only works late one day a week, then he’d have to wait seven more days to kill her. Why would he do that, when he can just come up and get the book after she’s dead?”

  “Nina’s right,” Bell said. “Having intercepted our supposed note to Iverson, our killer will be confident that no one will be coming for it. Which means he doesn’t have to hurry. He can retrieve the journal any time. Which me
ans he’s going to kill that girl in two hours, and we’ve been waiting in vain for him to walk through the door.”

  From the main room came the low, haunted-house sound of the creaky old front door swinging slowly open.

  31

  Walter jumped as if someone had stuck him with a cattle prod, and hooded the flashlight with his palm. Bell stepped back and nearly tripped over the rocker. Nina clamped a hand over her mouth then pointed at their tools.

  “The chloroform!” she whispered. “Get it!”

  Walter went to the duffle bag and traded the flashlight for the chloroform bottle and a rag. Soft steps and shifting noises came from the main room. He made certain the cap on the bottle was loose enough to open easily at the very last minute, but not loose enough that fumes could escape and overwhelm him.

  His hands were shaking so badly, he was afraid he might drop the bottle. Nina grabbed the handcuffs and duct tape while Bell got out the syringe and started to prepare the chemical cocktail that would keep the killer unconscious long enough for them to put him through the gate.

  “Ready?” Nina whispered.

  “I suppose so,” Walter said.

  “Come on,” Bell said.

  Walter crept to the door, chloroform and cloth held together in one hand, reaching for the knob with the other. They had deliberately left it open a crack so that they would be able to surreptitiously peer into the main room and see when the killer was bending to check under the flagstone.

  Walter looked through the crack.

  The light had been switched on in the main room, but no one was at the fireplace.

  Where was the killer?

  There was a footfall just on the other side of the door. Walter stepped back, his breath catching, and bumped into Bell.

  The door swung open and Chick stuck his head in.

  “Hey, hey, cats and kittens,” he said. His gaze dipped to the handcuffs in Nina’s hands and he flashed a wink and a sly smile. “Oh, wow, kinky!”

  Walter couldn’t imagine what he was referring to, but clearly both Nina and Bell did, since they turned matching shades of magenta.

  Nina elbowed past Walter and shoved the newcomer back into the living room.

  “Never mind, Chick,” she said. “What the hell are you doing down here? We told you to stay up in the main lodge until we called you on the walkie-talkies.”

  Chick looked sheepish.

  “Well, you know,” he said. “You told us we were gonna get some more of your special acid, but we were getting bored just sitting around waiting. You said it was only gonna be a little while, and it’s been ages. So we thought we’d come down and see how things were going. I didn’t mean to...”

  “We?” Nina said.

  Chick shrugged toward the front door. Roscoe and Alex were standing on the porch sharing a joint. Out in the rocky front yard, Dave and Iggy were playing with a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, missing more often then they caught it. Alex had an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder and gave a little wave, smiling the slow sleepy grin of the perpetually stoned.

  “We didn’t want to bug you, man,” Chick said. “But we didn’t want to miss the party either.”

  The other band members snickered and elbowed each other, and Walter realized they were all stoned out of their gourds. While he and Bell and Nina had been down here in the small cabin, chewing their nails to the quick with tension, up in the lodge, the band had been getting apocalyptically hammered.

  Nina started shooing Chick toward the door.

  “I don’t care how bored you are,” she said. “You guys can’t be down here right now. We’re still getting things ready. Now go back up and wait until we...”

  “Getting things ready with handcuffs and chloroform?” Some real worry was cutting through Chick’s stoned bemusement. “I thought this was supposed to be some kind of peaceful shamanistic mind-expansion thing, so we could see into...”

  He was cut off by a booming megaphone splitting the quiet mountain air, and a voice as deep and loud as the cartoon voice of God.

  “This is the FBI,” it said.

  Walter knew that phony snake-oil-salesman’s voice. It was Special Agent Dick Latimer.

  What the hell is he doing here? How could he have found us?

  “The cabin is surrounded,” Latimer said. “Step onto the porch and stay there, keeping your hands where we can see them.”

  32

  The disembodied order elicited exactly the opposite of the intended effect. It was like firing a shot at a tree full of pigeons. The guys in the band flew every which way at once, their sleepy calm instantly shattered and twisted into pot-fueled paranoia.

  Iggy, the drummer, shoved past Nina into the cabin, swearing and hurrying for the bathroom.

  “Gotta flush my stash!” he said.

  Roscoe and Chick raced back up the path to the lodge. Alex and Oregon Dave ran in the opposite direction, down the gravel road that led to the state highway.

  Men in dark suits burst from the bushes and swarmed after them. The door of the cabin slammed open and two agents came in, guns drawn. Walter ducked back into the bedroom, but the two agents ignored him and started to bang on the bathroom door instead.

  “Occupado, man!” Iggy yelled from the other side. “Occupado!”

  Walter and Bell stared at each other in fear and disbelief.

  “How... how did this happen?” Bell asked. “Our note to Iverson was a fake. And even if it wasn’t, the killer got it, right? Not the FBI.”

  “He must have realized it was a trap,” Walter said, figuring it out as he said it. “He knew we would be waiting for him, and so he dropped a dime to the feds, so to speak. Telling them we were here, knowing we would have the acid.”

  “Well, I’m not sticking around waiting to get arrested,” Nina said, pulling the gun from her purse. “Come on, you two. Put everything in the duffle and let’s go. We’ve got to get to the car.”

  “But... but...” Walter stuttered. “But we’re surrounded!”

  “They’re busy chasing after the guys in the band,” she insisted. “This is our only chance.”

  Walter put the bottle of chloroform aside and then snatched up his photocopies, notes, and Iverson’s file, and stuffed them into the duffle bag. He checked around the room for any other personal items as Bell tossed in the cuffs and sedatives, zipped the bag up, and slung it over his shoulder.

  “Right,” she said. “Through the kitchen and out the back. Let’s go.”

  “The back? There are FBI agents...”

  “I told you, they’ve got their hands full,” she said. “Come on.”

  Walter almost forgot the chloroform and grabbed it at the last second before following Nina and Bell out of the bedroom.

  She did seem to be right about the agents having their hands full, struggling with the vociferous Iggy inside the tiny bathroom.

  “I got nothing, man!” he was shouting. “Nothing! See? There ain’t no call to be hassling a man while he’s on the crapper!”

  Walter looked over Nina’s shoulder as she paused at the back door, peering out through the gingham curtains of a nearby window.

  “Damn,” she hissed. “Two more out back.”

  Walter looked out through the gap in the curtains. In the ambient light cast by the moon, he could see that she was right. Two more figures stood in the back yard, guns drawn, covering the back door. One of them was recognizable as the gray man who had picked up Walter and Bell at the Howard Johnson.

  Walter still had the bottle of chloroform in his hand.

  “Nina,” he said, holding up the chloroform. “Do you have any nail polish remover in your purse?”

  “Acetone?” Her eyes went wide. “Genius!” She fished a small bottle from her purse and handed it over.

  “Duct tape!” he called, like a surgeon asking for a scalpel.

  Bell pulled out the tape and slapped it into Walter’s hand. Walter tore off a large strip and used it to bind the two bottles together. He loose
ned the cap on the nail polish remover in the hopes that even if the bottles didn’t break on impact, at least the caps would be knocked off, allowing the two chemicals to mix and react explosively.

  The use of chemistry to make weapons flew in the face of his principles, so he’d never actually tried this before.

  But theoretically it should work.

  “Get the door on three,” Walter said to Bell. “One... Two...” His hands were sweaty, making the bottles slick and difficult to hold. “Three!”

  Bell pulled the door open and Walter threw the makeshift bomb out into the back yard. The two agents dove for cover as the bottles came sailing out and plopped down in the center of the yard.

  Nothing happened.

  The agents got slowly back to their feet, cautiously eyeballing the object. Both bottles were intact but leaking, generating a thready plume of foul-smelling toxic smoke, but no big exciting explosion like the one Walter had hoped for.

  “Good try, Walter,” Nina said, hand on his shoulder. “Now get back. Away from the windows.”

  Walter did as she suggested as she aimed her gun out through the crack in the door.

  “You can’t just shoot FBI agents!” Bell said. “That’s got to be a felony or something!”

  “Who says I’m going to shoot any FBI agents?” she replied with a smirk.

  She shot the bottle of chloroform.

  That did it.

  The resulting explosion rattled the old windows in their frames, and bathed the whole back of the cabin in bewitching blue-white light. The sound was flat and hollow, like someone dropping a fifty gallon drum off a skyscraper.

  “GO!” Nina shouted. She shouldered the door open, jumped down the back steps, and started running straight for the woods. Bell was right behind her, and as scared as Walter was, he wasn’t about to be left alone.

  Out in the scorched yard, the two agents were down on the ground, arms flung up to protect their faces. He couldn’t tell if they’d thrown themselves to the ground on purpose, or had their feet knocked out from under them. There was a large circle of grass burning in the center of the yard, and it looked almost cheerful, like they should gather around it and toast marshmallows. The fire turned their shadows into long leggy monsters as they ran.