Comes a Horseman

by Robert Liparulo

  “Your timetable isn’t mine.”

  “Do you have some information that indicates we are moving too slowly?”

  “I know it . . . here.” Luco touched his chest.

  A beautiful woman in her forties, wearing a silk sari in shades of purple, held out a hand as if to offer something. “Mr. Scaramuzzi,” she said. “We have already given you so much. Your personal income alone—”

  “Princess Vajra Kumar,” Luco interrupted, bowing his head, “excuse me. I realize I am somewhat wealthy and wield a small measure of political power—”

  “You have the Italian prime minister’s ear,” interjected Hüber. He seemed ready to launch into some tirade, but Luco spoke first.

  “As an ambassador, yes. Still, I feel that I am being held back, that the prophecies are being . . . hindered.”

  Their disturbance showed in their mouths. A few parted in astonishment, but most tightened in anger. Even ultrapoised Arakawa managed a frown.

  In most institutional settings, it would be the reference to prophecies that provoked high emotions. But the Watchers was a theocratic organization, immersed in concepts alien to Harvard Business School—though three of the people in attendance held graduate degrees from that esteemed academy.

  No, it was, in fact, the suggestion that they were impeding the prophecy’s fulfillment that stirred them. It was the organization’s mandate to recognize, expedite, and exploit certain prophecies. And here was Luco Scaramuzzi, essentially accusing them of dereliction of duty.

  Niklas Hüber snapped his attention toward Arakawa. His eyes were bulging; his face had taken on the hue of a spanked bottom. Luco smiled at the thought.

  Hüber began, “I do not think—”

  Without turning away from Luco, Arakawa stopped him with a raised hand.

  “If you can’t have everything, what specifically are you after?” asked Arakawa.

  “I’ll start with Italy.”

  The regal Japanese man held Luco’s gaze, then looked at each of the others in turn.

  “It’s time,” Luco added.

  For a moment Arakawa appeared to study the empty water glass before him. Then he said, “Luco, would you give us a few minutes to discuss this among ourselves, please?”

  Luco nodded. “Of course.” He rose and walked away from the table, into the darkness of the chamber. He felt their lingering eyes. With his tailored clothes and the slightest hint of a swagger, he knew he looked great. Just as he had hired behavioral scientists to figure them out, he had contracted image consultants to figure him out, or at least to make his appearance as impressionable as his words and actions. They had perfected his wardrobe, hairstyle, and body language to convey strength and leadership. Slowly—sometimes too slowly for his liking—he was becoming the man the world would expect him to be.

  At the wall, he turned to survey his board of directors—his inquisitors. Leaning toward Arakawa’s central position, they whispered and gesticulated, pointing out one another’s errant logic. He raised a finger to his ear, as though to flick out an irritant, and clicked on a nearly invisible earpiece. Instantly their overlapping whispers came to him.

  “. . . this is too soon!”

  “It has always been our intention, the sole intention of this organization, going back—”

  “Nevertheless, I’m still not convinced . . .”

  He’d had ultrasensitive minimicrophones wired into the strand of bulbs above that side of the table. He was able to attribute the voices to their owners either through familiarity or by watching the movements of their lips. The tenor of the conversation was disappointing, if not surprising. They would tell him they needed evidence, some sort of sign it was time for him to reach beyond his present station. Signs were not what they actually wanted, however. They wanted to know for sure that he was who he said he was, the one they had been awaiting. Their faith in him had brought him this far, but the next step, the step he had just pushed for, was the event horizon, beyond which there was no turning back.

  He had prepared for this. A one-two punch that was certain to quash their doubts. Maybe not Hüber’s—but the others would be so convinced they would force Hüber to go along. Luco would present the first piece as he had all the other evidence, laid out before them, vetted by their own experts. But this one was strong, perhaps the strongest yet. The second piece was his masterwork, designed for maximum impact. At that very moment, it was in motion in the United States—thanks to Arjan’s tactical brilliance and the Norseman’s homicidal prowess. He would not bring it to the Watchers. They would uncover it themselves, and therein lay its power to convince.

  Prodded by his own impatience, he started for the chamber’s arched exit. No door, just a single threshold into a corridor. Guards waited with lamps somewhere out there, but so distant or around so many bends, the corridor may as well have been filled with dense black smoke. Through his earpiece, he heard someone whisper, “Where’s he going?” before Arakawa called out, “Luco?” The raised voice, echoing through the electronics as well as the room’s air, pulsed into his skull. He reached up and turned off the earbud.

  “Luco?”

  Without turning, he raised his index finger so they would see it. A moment later, he stepped into the corridor, and the blackness engulfed him.

  13

  A side from the killer’s MO, nothing readily linked the Pelletier victims. The first, Joseph Johnson, was a forty-six-year-old father of five in Ogden, Utah. An accounting prof at Weber State University. Caucasian. The investigator’s notes indicated that Mr. Johnson was in fit health, an avid skier, active in the Mormon Church. Born in Ramstein, Germany, where his father was stationed with the Eighty-sixth Airlift Wing, he’d moved to Utah at the age of eleven. Lived on Hill Air Force Base for three years, then moved off base into the neighboring town of Layton when his father retired. He was a Weber State alum, graduating with a BS twenty-four years ago. Overall, his life had been uneventful. At least it seemed so to an outsider reviewing a hastily compiled biography.

  On the pad in front of him, Brady jotted a line of particulars about Joseph Johnson’s life. On his right, Mr. Business was still engrossed in the Journal. On his left, the elderly woman was still engrossed in herself. He turned to the next section.

  Vic number two was William Bell, a twenty-four-year-old plumber’s assistant in Moab. Never married. Caucasian. Graduated from Grand Country High School with a low-C average. No college or trade school. Native of the town in which he died. Plenty of citations for public drunkenness and fighting, according to the notes.

  Vic number three: Jessica Hampton in Orem. Forty. Housewife. Married to the same man for twenty-two years, a mortgage broker. Son and daughter in high school.

  Strike off gender as a victim criterion.

  What made the killer choose you? Brady thought, looking at a blowup of Jessica Hampton’s driver’s license photo. It showed a brunette with floppy curls cut above the shoulders. Toothy grin, smiling eyes. Slightly overweight, if the apple-cheeked motif continued into her body. Nice-looking lady, and not a bad photo for a DMV shot. He knew the next page contained snaps of the woman at the crime scene, death shots. He didn’t want to see them, not now, and flipped to the next section.

  For the fourth victim, the killer had crossed over into Colorado. Big mistake. Once the lab techs found a definitive link between at least one of the Utah killings with one from Colorado, the FBI’s jurisdiction would be established and the Bureau would swoop down en masse. Brady smiled to himself. Contrary to popular belief, the FBI never “takes over” an investigation. Rather, it coordinates the efforts of local investigators and brings in laboratory, surveillance, and investigative assistance no other law enforcement agency in the world can match. Sometimes, locals needed reminding about the Bureau’s resources and its jurisdictional right to bring them to bear. Whether this constituted assistance or bullying was a matter of semantics.

  Brady liked to think criminals who brought the FBI down upon themselves had
screwed up big-time. Truth was, the type of criminal who’d do that usually didn’t care. In fact, many relished the idea of drawing federal attention. Who wanted to play a high-risk game with local yokels? Bring in the big guns. “Big guns”—that’s how the general public, and its criminal subgroup, perceived the FBI. Credit for that image went to filmmakers, whose scripts required Bureau approval if they wanted Bureau cooperation, and to the staff spin doctors who trumpeted the agency’s triumphs and downplayed its failures. And thanks as well, Brady reminded himself, to the organization’s own high standards and record of success. Ten thousand agents, 13,000 support staff, $3 billion budget. It was no wonder they caught their man. But the status also intrigued demented individuals with catch-me-if-you-can death wishes.

  The vic in Ft. Collins, Colorado, was a thirty-three-year-old man named Daniel Fears. High school phys ed teacher, a coach. Divorced, one daughter. African-American.

  Though most serial killers murdered within their own race, that wasn’t always the case. Brady wasn’t sure they were dealing with a serial killer anyway; his geographic movement and short time between kills pointed to a spree killer—no difference to his victims, major difference in creating a strategy to catch him.

  The detective on Fears’s case had noted he collected coins, worked out at a gym three times a week, and was an elder at First Baptist Church.

  Hmm. Joseph Johnson had been active in his church. Different denominations. There was no mention of Jessica Hampton’s beliefs. If William Bell had been a churchgoer, his numerous citations indicated the sermons had not penetrated very deeply.

  No, whatever similarity the killer saw in each victim, it wasn’t apparent. Their ages were as broadly placed as their geographic locations. So were their positions on the socioeconomic ladder and their levels of education. Not gender. Not race. Ogden was a college town. So was Ft. Collins. He didn’t know about Moab or Orem. He made a note on the legal pad to find out.

  As disparate as the victims were, the killer’s MO had not varied. Decapitation. Each head had been placed away from the body, but otherwise there was no posing—the killer had left the bodies where they had fallen. Fangs had pierced the skin, muscles, and ligatures of the hands, wrists, and forearms of each vic. Jessica Hampton’s right hand had been nearly severed. On two bodies—Joseph Johnson’s and Daniel Fears’s—the coroners had found deep animal bites around the ankles and feet as well. Ogden’s lab had determined that fur found at the scene came from a wolf-dog hybrid, at least two different animals. The aggressive animals were now illegal in about thirty states; if the killer was using these creatures to restrain his victims, he must live in a state that still allowed wolf-hybrid ownership. Or else he lived in a remote area. A person couldn’t keep these dogs a secret in an urban or suburban setting.

  All the victims were killed at home. Had he already known where to find his targets? Did he have their addresses? Or had he been cruising for random targets and spotted them outside, making his choice then and there? Maybe he had selected them someplace else, a grocery store or gas station, perhaps, and followed them home.

  Brady jotted another note: “Out earlier in the day? Where?”

  He closed the binder and closed his eyes. Had his brain not been pickled when Alicia called, he would have asked her about last night’s victim. Awful as it sounded, more victims meant a better chance at identifying a pattern. No matter how obscure or irrational, there was always something the victims of a single killer had in common. This commonality often became the key in predicting the next target or locale and maybe—a slim maybe—preventing the next killing.

  With the steady drone of the plane’s engines in his ears and a few scant hours of alcohol-addled sleep pressing on his consciousness, Brady drifted off.

  Surprisingly, what danced in his head were not visions of flying skulls or maniacal ax-wielding fiends. No carved cadavers or disembodied screams in fields of blackness. He dreamed of his wife and son: Zach rolled down a grassy hill as Karen laughingly caressed Brady’s cheek with a daisy. A baby inside her made her belly big, and his fingers moved over the tight skin with the same delicateness as the petals on his face. He realized, in that semi-informed way of dreams, that she was pregnant with a child they never had. They looked at each other with something beyond joy. Their laughter mingled and swirled with colors as it rose into the sky.

  When the flight attendant gently shook him awake, he could still feel the petal on his cheek. Touching it, he found a tear.

  14

  When Luco reappeared in the chamber’s threshold, the disembodied faces of the Watchers rotated toward him. He stopped and turned back. Father Randall emerged from the corridor’s lightlessness into the pale illumination of the chamber’s bare bulbs. As he shuffled past, Luco pointed to a chair on the unoccupied side of the table.

  “Right there, Father, please.”

  Randall’s attention was on the stone floor three feet in front of him, and Luco wondered if he could see his pointing hand. When the old man angled in the correct direction, Luco again looked back into the corridor.

  An echoing clop . . . clop . . . clop preceded Pip’s appearance. Clop . . . clop . . . clop. Getting louder. Finally, the faint image of a cardboard box floated into view, the fingers of two hands gripping its bottom corners. Then the possessor of both the box and the clop stepped through the threshold and into the light. Luco smiled. Like his leg, Pip’s face had barely grown out of childhood, though he was Luco’s age. Only the most callous hearts did not take an instant liking to him, with his smooth skin, big brown eyes, thin eyebrows, and small nose.

  Pip’s next step was silent, but every time his left foot came down, it made that awful hollow-horseshoe noise, and his body leaned way over in that direction. For years, Luco had offered to pay for a prosthetic foot or elevated orthopedic shoe or surgery . . . whatever it took to make Pip more comfortable. Pip always refused, opting instead for homemade remedies: paperback books, plastic videotape boxes, blocks of wood taped, tied, or glued to the bottom of his shoe.

  He was halfway to the table when Luco took the box from him.

  “Thank you, Pip,” he said.

  Pip nodded and took in the stares of the men and women at the table. He brushed his hair off his forehead, seemed about to say something, and then lowered his head and left, his noisy gait trailing behind him like strong cologne.

  Luco set the box full of notepaper and photocopied manuscripts on the seat next to Randall and pushed it closer to him. He moved to Randall’s other side and sat in his customary chair.

  “You all know Father Randall,” he said. “He has uncovered something that should”—he paused, stressing the suggestion—“alleviate any doubts you may have.”

  Randall raised his head. “Gentlemen . . . and ladies,” he said in a hardy baritone completely at odds with his wispy body. He infused the word ladies with a lilt and a nod; for a fraction of a second he could have been a schoolboy asking for his first dance. “Good to see you all again.”

  The Watchers nodded or mumbled their greetings, but Randall had already turned away to rummage through his papers.

  To Luco, the old man seemed as ancient as the papyrus he was endlessly poring over. His skin even resembled the stuff: heavily creased, dry and delicate, stained by time. His lips had narrowed and faded to flesh-tone, rendering his mouth invisible when closed. His nose was too large, his cheeks too hollow, his hair too gone—but the fire in his eyes instantly blinded observers to those imperfections. They were Russian blue and saw everything. They’d been seeing everything, in fact, for a long, long time. Wisdom ran deep in those eyes, as did intrigue and humor and compassion. Something about them made you appreciate the attention, as if they were capable of conferring some great knowledge upon whoever fell within their purview.

  Even Luco, impervious to masculine allure despite exuding it so effortlessly himself, found turning from Randall’s gaze a painful experience. Mostly, though, he envied its enchantment. His own charm w
as an amalgam of expressions, wit, and aura. Randall’s eyes could captivate, and so manipulate, all by themselves. Luco thought, The old coot must have been a sexual dynamo in his day, priest or not.

  A bulb above him illuminated Randall’s gleaming head, making what little silver hair he had appear even more diaphanous, as though his scalp were smoldering. His clothes—charcoal shirtsleeves, black pants—floated about him, a size too big. The material hung over his bony shoulders like drapery. From the sleeves jutted the thinnest of speckled arms, hairless, but host to magnificently interesting hands. Gaunt, with yellowed nails and brown nicotine stains, they were big hands with long fingers—piano fingers, Luco’s aunt would have called them—and they fluttered like doves when he spoke, dancing to the cadence of his words. But Randall wasn’t talking, so the hands stayed down, shuffling papers.

  He said, “Ahhhh”—drawing it out the way one would after a splash of cold water on a blistering day—and pulled a sheaf of papers from the box.

  Luco caught a glimpse of the minuscule handwriting covering the pages from edge to edge. He wondered how Randall hoped to find a note again once it was relegated to the thousands of identical lines he scribbled every day.

  Randall fanned the notes out on the table. His head moved back and forth as he read. Suddenly, he laughed robustly. With a look, he invited the Watchers, then Luco to join in his merriment. Their reticence did not diminish the joy in his eyes or his openmouthed smile.

  What an odd duck, Luco thought. Passionate and excitable, yet deliberate and reserved. Not so odd, really. Focused. Fervent about things that mattered to him, apathetic about everything else. Luco understood that; he was like that himself. Only his passions encompassed a world of pleasures; Randall’s were limited to a few choice studies—each of which served Luco quite nicely.

  Now that was an understatement. He could only imagine where he’d be without Randall’s work. Back in Rome, likely. At Centro di Psicoterapia Cognitiva, the loony bin, playing Old Maid with God and Napoleon.