by Meg Gardiner
Mack Hendrix stood in the shadowed entry hall. Caitlin raised a hand in greeting.
Mack kept his hand on the knob, like he might slam the door on them. He was weathered, slim, his hair shorn close, a prickly white. His blue flannel shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. Caitlin wondered if he was getting construction day labor again. His eyes looked clear. The mug he was holding smelled like coffee, not whiskey.
“Detective Hendrix,” Guthrie said.
“I’m not a detective anymore.” Mack looked at the file folder in Guthrie’s hand, then at his daughter. “Why are you here?”
It wasn’t a question, Caitlin knew. It was a challenge.
Guthrie stepped up to the threshold. “We’ve got two dead. A man and a woman.”
Mack didn’t even acknowledge him. He stared at Caitlin.
She said, “It’s him. It’s the Prophet.”
Mack stood there for a minute, as blank as a concrete block. Then he turned and walked into the gloom of the hall, leaving the door open wide.
Caitlin’s jaw tightened. She and Guthrie followed Mack down the hall and into the living room. The house smelled of fried food and air freshener, like a McDonald’s bathroom.
Guthrie held out the fat case folder. “This is your file on the Prophet. Your murder book. Everything you know.”
Mack walked slantwise to the bay window and stared out. Backlit by the garish sun, he seemed to vibrate.
“‘Everything’ is never in the file,” he said. “He’s not in the file. He’s . . .”
He waved as though smoke was coiling through the air, and pressed a fist to his forehead.
“That’s exactly why we need you.” Guthrie approached, but Mack acted like he didn’t see him.
Caitlin sensed static electricity building in the room. There were rhythms, tempos, that had to be observed if Mack was to keep on track. The problem was, those tempos, those rules, changed capriciously. And you never knew what would trigger him. They’d been there less than ninety seconds and she already felt thunderheads gathering.
Guthrie said, “Give me the stuff you didn’t put in the file. Impressions. Hunches.”
Mack shook his head. Caitlin knew that a movie had started running behind his eyes.
“What’s his victimology?” Guthrie said. “What does the Mercury symbol mean to him? We gotta get up to speed fast.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Then your private notes. Scratch paper. Jottings. Post-its.”
“I burned them. Destroyed it all.” Mack cut a glance at Caitlin, looked at the floor, and finally turned to her. “This case will destroy your life. Stay the hell away from it.”
The circuit blew. Not Mack’s—hers.
“That’s real easy for you to say now,” she said.
Mack leaned toward her and made air quotes. “‘Dreams of domination and control contrast with UNSUB’s inner inadequacies.’” His voice became insistent. “Domination and control. Domination and control. I told you, serial killers don’t quit.”
“That’s it? Recite his profile? Come on.”
Guthrie opened the file. “You warned that he was going to escalate. You got that from reading this letter.” He ran his finger along the note. “‘Mercury speaks through the sky. He controls the vertical. He controls the horizontal. He—’”
“You think I unspooled his plan just from reading that letter?” A vein throbbed in Mack’s temple.
“‘He rises with the sun. And—coming up after the break!—he will rule. Tune in for your message, at seven on the dial.’ You got his schedule from that. How?”
“From my Prophet decoder ring. You heard of it. The wire in my head that picks up Radio Satan.”
Caitlin clenched and unclenched her fists.
Mack spread his hands. The coffee mug was shaking. “Rise, Mercury, seven. A sky chart showed Mercury rising on the horizon seven degrees southeast of the sun the morning of April eighteenth.” He gave Guthrie a scorching look. “He was going to kill that day. Everybody should have seen it, not just Captain Crazy.”
“Dad. Stop,” Caitlin said.
His smile was cutting. “Help. Stop. Make up your mind.”
She dug her fingernails into her palms. “He’s going to kill again. Maybe on April eighteenth. Less than four weeks.”
“Or not. He’s patient. Twenty years—he could outwait death.”
On a coffee table Guthrie spread photos taken at the cornfield crime scene. “He’s not waiting anymore.”
For a second, Mack’s mouth worked silently. A wild light flared in his eyes.
Guthrie turned to him. “You hate this guy? Help us catch him.”
Mack let out a roar and flung his mug across the room. It shattered against the wall, spraying coffee. “Don’t show me this shit.”
His shaking hands drew into fists and he squared up to Guthrie. Caitlin jumped between them, pressed her palms against her father’s chest, and pushed him back.
“For God’s sake. This isn’t about you. Can you focus for one actual minute and think about that?” she said.
A woman in a bathrobe and moccasins appeared in the doorway. The landlady, from the scowl on her face.
“Mack,” she said.
He didn’t respond. He backed away from Caitlin, breathing hard, scratching at his forearms.
Caitlin said, “It’s all right. I’ll clean it up and pay for the mug.”
The woman muttered and shuffled back down the hallway.
Mack stared at the crime scene photos. Pain darkened his face. Caitlin knew the horror show was now playing in his mind. That final day. The cemetery. He continued scratching his arms. He pushed up his sleeves and clawed at his skin.
Caitlin circled to face him. “The latest victims. The woman and man”—the kids, she thought—“in the cornfield. They were alive when the nails were hammered in.”
Mack’s chest rose and fell. “I know what you’re doing. You want to stop what I couldn’t. Make things right. If you think that, he’s already claimed his next victim.”
She reddened. “It doesn’t matter why I’m doing it. I need an edge. Help me.”
He looked at her unsparingly. “You want me to be a cop. Caitlin Rose, you’re not nine years old anymore. Don’t be pathetic.”
The words hit her like cold water. He leaned in, enunciating each word. “Stay away from this case. Run from it. You won’t catch him.”
She stared. Where his sleeves were shoved up, tattoos stood out on his forearms.
“Get out. Go.” He backed away.
Caitlin did too. “Sergeant Guthrie, we’re done here.”
She stalked into the hall without looking back. Her pulse was pounding.
When did he get those tattoos? What was he thinking?
Mack almost always wore long sleeves. So did she, on duty, because her arms were marked too. But that ink—on his right arm, Caitlin. That shocked her. Confused her. But not as much as the tat on his left arm.
What the hell was wrong with him?
It was the Mercury symbol.
4
Caitlin jogged down the steps of the boardinghouse to the street, putting on her sunglasses to hide her eyes. In the doorway behind her, the landlady pocketed the cash she’d handed over to pay for the mug and for cleaning the rug. The morning fizzed with sunlight. It didn’t cut the chill, just put a buzz at the back of her eyes. A headache was ready to leap. She’d been up all night and couldn’t fight the exhaustion any longer. She knew her face was crimson.
Guthrie was on the phone, leaning against the car, facing away from her. It took her a second to realize that he was speaking to her Narcotics lieutenant.
“. . . waste of time,” Guthrie said. “Hendrix is a basket case.”
She hesitated, a stutter step. That scab just kept getting
ripped off.
It always would. She walked up to the car. Guthrie glanced at her, seemingly embarrassed, and wrapped up the call. The air now felt blazing hot.
“Sergeant, I want to work this investigation,” she said.
He put away his phone. “You want to be detailed to Homicide?”
“Immediately.”
He took her measure again, openly, head to toe. “You know how green you are?”
“You can look up my record.”
She knew what he’d find: age twenty-nine. Seven years on patrol. Took a gunshot to the shoulder during a bank robbery. Only six months as a detective, but on her first assignment in Narcotics, she apprehended the Glass House Arsonist, a crank dealer who set fire to rivals’ drug labs.
Guthrie continued to eye her. Forget pride in her work. Forget her oath as an officer. Right now, it seemed, her record boiled down to Daddy’s Girl. So be it.
“I’m pea green. But I have something nobody else can give you.” She nodded at the boardinghouse. “His insights.”
Guthrie nodded, slowly. “Can you keep your eyes open and your head down while you learn how homicide investigation works?”
“I can do whatever needs doing.”
He pursed his lips. He looked wary, but—maybe—willing to take a chance. “Your lieutenant said the same thing on the phone just now. Your transfer is already going through.”
Her heart raced. “Where do I start?”
“With the cold case files.”
The wind shifted, swinging around to the north. It seemed to swirl in a great arc across the bay.
The Prophet was out there. Savoring, raging, planning. Caitlin thought, Mack’s wrong. We damned well are going to stop you this time. We’re coming, bastard.
“You got it, boss,” she said.
* * *
Sean was waiting for her when she came through the door. He was ready to head to work, badge around his neck, Glock 22 holstered on his hip. The sun blazed through the kitchen windows. He poured her a cup of coffee but she set it on the counter and buried her face in his chest.
His arms went around her. They stood for a tight minute. He held on. He knew.
“This time,” she said, forcing her uncertainty to become a vow. “This time we’ll stop him.”
“Anything you need, Cat.”
She held him tighter. “This is it. We have to shut him down. Our only chance.”
He leaned back, looked her in the eye, and nodded. Cop to cop.
Special Agent Sean Rawlins had been with her for two years. He understood why the Prophet was a name she never mentioned. He knew it was the poison that had cored a hole in her life, marked her as an outsider as a kid, and driven her to become a police officer. He knew how this was hitting.
“What happened to my dad is not going to happen to me,” she said. “The case is the case. My life is my life. They will not bleed together.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“Don’t worry.”
The concern on his face only deepened.
He was aware that when she applied to the academy, she had written vows on a legal pad. Dedication. Persistence. Job stays at the station. That last one was easier said than done.
“I swear,” she said.
He wasn’t about to express fear. But he took her face in his hands. “Be careful.”
“Compared to Narcotics, Homicide is a Zen garden. Detectives hardly even get to break the speed limit.”
“Not this case.”
Like a lot of cops, Sean viewed the world as a dangerous place where he could do only so much to make it safe for the people in his life—Caitlin, his three-year-old daughter, and his ex-wife. He touched Caitlin’s shoulder, where she’d taken the bullet years before. Then he rested his hand on her heart.
“Careful. Got it?” he said.
She nodded. She got it. And I got you, thank God. “Yeah. And now I’ve got to get to the station.”
* * *
At four P.M., the halls of Sequoia High School were quiet. The buses had pulled out. A few athletic teams were practicing, and the a cappella choir. But the clean suburban campus, on the outskirts of Pleasanton, was gearing down. For the most part, teachers and custodial staff were the only ones around.
In his classroom in the math quad, Stuart Ackerman packed up for the day. He erased the board, pausing when he reached an algebraic equation some ninth graders had scribbled when he wasn’t looking. 32A x 36C = 68DD. A pair of bulging boobs drove home the joke.
Cheeky monkeys. At least the kids were engaged.
He erased the drawing almost wistfully. He knew too many guys his own age, thirty-three, whose sense of humor hadn’t grown beyond this kind of stuff. He himself was trying to be a complete adult. Button-down shirt and khakis, a tie except on Fridays. Hair cut stylishly short—his mom assured him—and a hipsterish stubble that the school administration never openly complained about, thanks to his students’ test scores. He slotted a stack of homework into his briefcase. His forearms, he decided, were buff. Three days at the gym was doing it. Huzzah.
He was in a spring mood. Easter weekend was coming up soon.
He closed the briefcase and grabbed his keys. He thumbed his phone—the battery had run down. He looked at the desktop computer. His fingers tingled. Personal use was prohibited. Delete Browser History was disabled. The school could track every site he visited.
But he was feeling good. Feeling lucky. Feeling . . . please, oh, please . . .
Just once, he decided. Well, just once more. Just for a minute. He leaned over the keyboard and oh-so-quickly checked a website.
Hoo boy. He had a private message from Starshine69.
He sat down. What a photo.
The screen briefly flickered. He lifted his hands from the keyboard, wondering if there was a loose connection or whether Mrs. Lovado in the vice principal’s office was secretly monitoring him, hunched in her dim cubicle like a KGB gnome. The screen cleared.
Starshine’s message said: Silver Creek Park tomorrow 9PM.
He replied, smiling. Ready to rumble.
Outside, he swung his briefcase and jauntily aimed his key fob at the car, like James Bond pulling a quick draw. He felt almost giddy climbing into his Nissan Sentra.
As he closed the driver’s door, he caught another flicker. Across the street, a black pickup idled, facing him. The driver’s sunglasses, or . . . binoculars?
The pickup drove away.
Ackerman pulled into traffic behind it. He shook off the weird feeling. If the pickup was ahead, it couldn’t be following him. Right?
He turned on the radio, and his anxieties about the pickup vanished. “Fight Song.” He cranked the volume and sang along. What perfect timing. What a sign.
5
The Briarwood Sheriff’s Station sat between sleek business parks on a broad suburban street. Caitlin swung into the parking lot at seven thirty A.M. She locked her Highlander and strode toward the building. The wind was up, rattling the spring-green leaves on the maples. Her hair was damp from the shower. She wore a snug long-sleeve white T-shirt, jeans, Dr. Martens, her badge, and her SIG Sauer P226 holstered on her hip.
A patrol car rolled past, a slick Dodge Charger, heading for the street. She nodded a greeting. When she came through the door, the civilian clerk behind the counter smiled from behind a cinnamon roll.
“Morning, Paige,” Caitlin said.
“Beautiful.” Paige licked icing from her thumb.
The girl was Miss Sugar High. When citizens arrived to report crimes, she greeted them cheerfully, with the predatory cuteness of a kitten. She liked hearing which penal code violation had brought them here. Caitlin thought the department should ship her to work at the DMV for a few weeks, to take the edge off.
Caitlin entered a code and buzzed through
the door. The station’s open brickwork and blond wood were deliberately calming. That worked for her, because the learning curve for new detectives was ballistic. She’d wanted to be a detective since kindergarten, when she watched her dad holster his .38, burn his mouth on his coffee, and sweep out the door to catch the bad guys. But some days she felt like the cowboy riding the H-bomb in Dr. Strangelove. Interrogation Methods. Protecting the Integrity of Evidence. Breaching Techniques. Yeehaw.
Across the floor, Guthrie whistled to her. From the intensity in his eyes, he was surfing the crest of a caffeine wave. “More files were delivered last night. Bring them up from Evidence. Team meeting in twenty.”
Thirty hours after the first victim was found in the cornfield, the department had ramped up a major investigation team for the killings. Guthrie had gathered a squad of detectives and turned a back section of the station into a war room.
One wall was covered with maps, profiles, old Identi-Kit sketches of suspects. And crime scene photos. Caitlin absorbed the new shots that had been tacked up. The cornfield, the bodies, three footprints—men’s size ten—and the trail of mercury. One after another, like Stations of the Cross. She approached the wall.
It was the temple of the Prophet.
September 23, 1993. Giselle Fraser. Found dead, hanging by her wrists from a crossbeam. Wasps swarming so thick in the shack, first responders could hardly see.
March 20, 1994. David Wehner. Suffocated with a plastic bag and left at a traveling carnival. A crime scene photo showed the fun house, cotton candy stand, rides and games—Wild Mouse, Limbo, Skee-Ball—and Wehner’s body, propped in the seat of a Ferris wheel. A note was pinned to his shirt. This is a sign of what was, and is, and is to come.
That was how the killer got his nickname. Talking like a prophet. That’s who he thinks he is. The public latched on, and the media, and finally law enforcement.
Everybody except the killer himself. He never referred to himself by any name. He only signed his messages with the Mercury symbol.
