by Meg Gardiner
She knew he needed something primal to ground himself, to connect with life when the work he did took him to scenes of destruction. Sex, giving everything, was affirmation. It was him saying, I’m here. With you.
He ran his hands up and down her thighs as she sat across his hips, his jeans still on. She said, “Raise your hands over your head and hold still. Don’t move until I tell you to.”
He was smiling, his eyes bright. When he stretched his arms overhead she lay down on top of him and reached up to circle his wrists like handcuffs.
She wanted to tell him to close his eyes but he never would.
He was the one who knew she fought to keep herself in the world, that even if she closed her eyes she couldn’t stop her emotions. He was the one who finally made a connection with her.
There was violence at the heart of his life, as there was in hers. He knew her history. He acknowledged her anger, that corrosive force that she tried desperately to rid herself of.
She held his hands down and pressed herself against him. She felt his pulse against hers.
Sean was the one who’d urged her to tattoo the scars she’d cut with the razor blade. The serpent—sign of transformation and healing. The quote, from Rita Dove’s poem “Dawn Revisited.” About second chances.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
She hadn’t truly wanted to die. That day when she was fifteen, when the blade cut too deep. But she had been desperate for release. It had taken half her life to deal with it. The pain of the tattoo needle had brightened her, let her integrate the truth into her still-living body.
Sean was a cop. But she didn’t think he was inevitable. She thought he was a miracle.
She released his hands. “Now,” she said.
He swept them around her and rolled over and let her fight his jeans off, and then he was wild, and wide-eyed, and smiling at her.
15
The morning broke clear, with the wind rushing through the trees. The alarm woke Caitlin at six. Sean was deep asleep in a jumping-jack pose. She slipped out of bed, dressed in running gear, and headed out.
By the time she reached the meeting point, her running group, the Rockridge Ragers, was already halfway down the street. Caitlin pounded down the hill, pulling the watch cap lower on her forehead. The sky was deep blue, brightening to orange behind the Berkeley Hills. A lone figure waited at the corner, clapping and beckoning, Come on.
Caitlin’s knee felt stiff and was still the color of an eggplant. She would have liked a slow solo run. But twice a week this group met to hit the hills. Workdays, they did 5K on city streets. Weekends, they hashed, setting a hare-and-hound chase through parks and trails.
“Move it, Red,” called the woman at the corner. “Tomorrow’s lone-wolf day. Today we run with the pack.”
Caitlin reached her and they fell into stride together. “You’re feisty this morning.”
“Then let’s go sub twenty-three.”
“Bitch.”
Michele Ferreira laughed.
Caitlin matched her pace to Michele’s, though she was six inches taller. They aimed for the group, about two hundred yards ahead.
“Big crowd this morning,” she said.
Michele gave her a look.
“I know. Nobody wants to run alone,” Caitlin said.
Michele had dark eyes and wore her hair in a pixie faux-hawk. She was a mighty mite, warm but edgy. “How much of what I hear on the news is true?”
“Every bit. UFOs are behind it. And the Illuminati. The Jesuits. Major League Baseball.”
“Fine, smart-ass. Don’t talk about it.”
Leave the case at the station, she thought. But it was boiling in her head. If she talked about it with Sean, she would let slip her old obsessions. Michele wouldn’t judge. And even though Caitlin had met Michele through Sean, she trusted that her friend would never let their conversations get back to him.
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “Running in groups is smart right now. And not talking to strangers. I mean not at all. Keeping distance from them. Locking your car doors.”
“Saint Peter on a fucking pony. You dealing with this?” Michele said.
Piece of cake, Caitlin nearly said. Her instinct was to keep her gloves up.
“It’s a nightmare.” Her feet pounded the sidewalk. “But it’s been a nightmare for twenty-five years. If I can do anything to stop it . . .”
“Then maybe you can finally wake up?” Michele said.
She felt like she’d been given a shove. “Something like that.” She looked at Michele. “Damned ER nurses. Seeing what’s really going on.”
“Yeah. You have a hickey on your neck.”
Caitlin didn’t, but she smiled. They were gaining on the rest of the group, warming up and falling into rhythm.
“Can I ask you something, as a nosy civilian?” Michele said. “The symbol. Why does he mark his victims with it?”
“It’s how he signs his work.”
“You mean it’s his signature.”
“Literally,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
It had baffled investigators from the start. Mercury was one of astrology’s ruling planets. Did the killer use it as homage to the Zodiac? In her early teens, Caitlin had become obsessed with Mercury’s astrological portents. She had learned to spot Mercury in the sky, low on the horizon after sunset or before dawn. She had ached to know if it had a true pull over the Earth, and over the killer who had destroyed so many.
“It depends on what mercury means to him,” she said. “Mercury, the planet closest to the sun? Or Mercury, the winged messenger—Roman god, guide of souls to the underworld. Or maybe mercury the chemical element. Symbol Hg. Atomic number eighty. The only metal that’s liquid at room temperature.”
She was gradually picking up her pace. They were reeling in the group ahead.
“It also has astrological power,” Michele said.
“If you believe in that.”
“Honey, you haven’t met my mother.”
They reached a corner, checked for traffic, and ran across. The sun was brightening.
“Mom never planned a trip without knowing the state of the planets. She didn’t want me to take the SAT in November because my chart looked bad,” Michele said.
“So you know Mercury’s astrological meaning?”
“It’s about communication. You’ve heard of being mercurial.”
“Unpredictable. Capricious, volatile. Fickle.”
“When’s your birthday?” Michele said.
“September fourth.”
“Virgo. Mercury rules Virgo.”
They started up a hill, the group only twenty yards ahead.
“But the symbol itself,” Michele said. “You know how people see it.”
“As a devil’s head.”
For too many millennia, humanity had given Satan cloven hooves and curved horns. The image was stuck in deep. Nobody who grew up in a society inflected by Judaism, Christianity, or Islam could keep themselves from the involuntary shudder. Hell, she’d read Childhood’s End.
Michele said. “Before he kills them, does he . . .”
“No,” Caitlin said. “None of the victims has been sexually assaulted.”
“I thought serial killers did it to get off.”
Caitlin measured her words. “You’re not wrong. But sometimes their sexual thrill comes from carrying out their fantasy. And reliving it afterward.”
“Fuck me with a telephone pole.”
“Serial killers are, almost without exception, sexual sadists. But . . .”
“Some get off on death and torture.”
“And power. Possession.”
Michele glanced her way, breathing hard now.
Caitlin nodded at
the runners ahead. “Time to put them in the dust.”
“Aren’t you freaked out? I am,” Michele said.
Caitlin accelerated on the uneven sidewalk. “I can’t let that happen.”
When she got home, hot and out of breath, Sean was in the kitchen. He was dressed, Glock on his hip, phone to his ear.
“I’ll be there before eight,” he said. “Siefert has the warrant. The trucking firm parks thirty trailers at that depot, and we search every one.”
She got a mug from the cabinet, poured herself a cup of coffee, and refilled Sean’s. He ended the call, thanked her, and downed half his coffee, black, in one go. It was less ritual than start-up procedure.
“Hot,” he said. “Good. Gotta go.”
He kissed her. Shadow padded into the room, ears pricking.
Sean pulled on his ATF windbreaker and hung his badge around his neck. He cocked his head at Shadow. “You go to doggy day care while Mommy scours a crime scene?”
Shadow barked. Caitlin smiled and walked past him. He stopped her.
“I know I wound you up about the arsonist angle last night. I don’t want it to get under your skin. Don’t let this guy into your head.”
“Don’t worry.”
He held on.
“Seriously,” he said. “But watch out.”
“Seriously. I hear you loud and clear.” She kissed him again. “Be safe.”
* * *
In the crisp March daylight, the burned-out car stood vivid and dismal. A creek trickled at the bottom of the ravine, descending through the brush until it flowed through a drainage pipe under a road. Caitlin logged in to the scene and met the arson investigator down the slope. Carvalho was a neat man who had a thirty-five-millimeter camera on a strap around his neck and a clipboard with a sketch pad. He was drawing all pertinent features of the scene.
“First thing, no casualties except a Toys ‘R’Us somewhere that’s missing several dozen dolls’ heads,” he said. “The birds were already dead, your initial report says.”
“Definitely,” she said.
“Basic phone-triggered incendiary device.” Carvalho showed her the burned cell phone in an evidence bag. “The other components were a beer bottle filled with gasoline, a sparkler—probably twenty-inch, ninety-second burn time—and maybe five bucks of electronic components and model rocket fuses. Stripped USB cable, thyristor, alligator clips. Calling the cell phone completed the circuit.”
The crime scene techs had set up a table and a sifting screen to sieve evidence from bird bones and charred seat fabric. There were bits of wire and shattered brown glass, the remains of the beer bottle.
“How much technical know-how did this take?” she said.
“Science-fair proficiency. It’s not a nuclear trigger.”
He looked over the scene. “This is a hell of a lot of trouble to go to, just to burn a car. Has kind of a pagan sacrifice feel to it.”
“Yeah.”
“This guy’s set fires before?”
Caitlin’s throat felt dry. “Once. Twenty years ago.” The day in the cemetery. “He killed two people. And he stayed long enough to watch.”
“Arsonists love to watch. It’s part of their thrill,” he said.
Caitlin looked morosely at the phone. “Can anything be recovered from that?”
“The fire eliminated any fingerprints, DNA, trace. The techs may be able to pull some data off the device.”
“It’s going straight to Computer Forensics?”
He nodded. She texted Eugene Chao at the lab to tell him it would be coming.
Carvalho said, “With luck, what was on the phone is stored in the cloud.”
“We’re checking that, and his online accounts.”
“And his laptop,” he said.
“All computers he had known access to,” she said, and stopped. A mental lightbulb went off. She knew where she needed to head next. “Thanks, Carvalho. I’ve got to go.”
She jogged up the hill, squinting against the morning sun.
* * *
The woman who met her at Sequoia High was wizened, five feet tall, with Jackie O glasses and hair dyed the color of motor oil. She emerged stooped and scowling from the vice principal’s office.
Caitlin extended her hand. “Mrs. Lovado?”
The woman examined the badge on Caitlin’s belt. “You sounded older on the phone.”
“Thank you for making time to meet with me.”
Mrs. Lovado made fish lips, expressing her displeasure. “This way.”
She led Caitlin across campus to the math quad.
“I would have contacted the sheriff earlier if I’d known,” Mrs. Lovado said. “We’re all in such shock. We didn’t make the connection. Mr. Ackerman’s . . . his . . .”
She blanched.
“Ma’am?”
“What happened to him had no connection to the school,” Mrs. Lovado said.
Morning classes were in session, the halls quiet. Metal lockers were painted Nutella brown. The linoleum floor coolly reflected morning light from the doors at the end of the building.
Mrs. Lovado stopped at a classroom door, lifted a heavy set of keys, and paused. “After you phoned, I decided it would be wise to examine the computer in his classroom. So I could help your department. It’s school property. And that’s when I . . .”
Her face was pinched. So was Caitlin’s. On the phone, Mrs. Lovado had assured her that the computer had been untouched since Stuart Ackerman last used it. Caitlin had asked her to keep it that way.
“What did you do, Mrs. Lovado?”
“Nothing. The machine is fine. I didn’t delete anything. But . . . you’ll see.”
The woman unlocked the door, led Caitlin in, and headed to the teacher’s desk. Caitlin took in the big windows, the half-erased whiteboard, the posters for MATH! High school never changed.
With every step, Mrs. Lovado seemed to grow drier and more toughened, like a shrunken orange. She sat down at the desk and grimly tapped the keyboard. The desktop monitor came awake.
She looked over her shoulder at Caitlin. “Using school computers for personal reasons is strictly against district policy. It seems Mr. Ackerman disregarded that rule.”
Caitlin felt a buzz. “Please, show me.”
Mrs. Lovado hunched forward and ran bony fingers over the keys. “The day before he . . .”
She continued typing. Caitlin realized that the woman couldn’t say died for anything.
“He logged in to a website that is absolutely not appropriate for official use.”
Mrs. Lovado brought up the site. Caitlin leaned in.
“Zodiac Match?” Caitlin said.
Mrs. Lovado lifted her fingers from the keyboard as though a bad odor leaked from the screen. Caitlin felt an electric scratch along her arms.
The stars have your love match waiting.
The home page was blingy, cheesy, retro. Kaleidoscopic colors throbbed from the circle of the zodiac. At the center of the circle a couple smiled with lust.
Astro-Science: The TRUE way to find your soul mate.
Zodiac Match looked as sketchy as hell.
Your natal chart will reveal . . . Mars and Venus help to determine how a person behaves in romance . . . Mercury can provide information on how a person thinks . . .
Zodiac.
Mercury.
And all the killers in the deep blue sea.
Then she saw it: the blinking cursor on the log-in panel. No way. Stuart Ackerman’s username and password were pre-entered.
He had apparently logged in to this site so often that he had set up the Remember me feature. Even on his school computer.
Mrs. Lovado raised an eyebrow. Caitlin nodded. The woman logged in.
Welcome, Wild Sagittarius 23.
Caitlin hel
d bolt still. Stuart Ackerman’s sign was listed as Sagittarius. A drawing depicted a centaur drawing a bow, about to fire an arrow. Zodiac symbol: archer. Element: fire. Sign ruler: Jupiter. Detriment: Mercury.
Her excitement tried to gallop ahead of her. The department would subpoena all this information, but time was scarce. “Can you print this page?”
Mrs. Lovado hit a key.
Caitlin said, “Check messages.”
Mrs. Lovado went to the page.
“That one,” Caitlin said.
She opened a message thread dated three days before Ackerman’s body was found. It was from Starshine69.
Caitlin’s eyes widened. Mrs. Lovado sat screwed into the chair, hands folded primly, which told Caitlin she had already seen this photo.
Starshine69 [Thursday 1:26PM] Brace for impact.
Starshine69 was in her midthirties. Her head was coquettishly tipped to one side, index finger inserted in her plump, pursed lips. She was dressed as a lion. Full-on furry cosplay. Faux-fur bikini top. In a second photo, she was licking the back of her hand, as a cat does with its paw before it grooms itself. Caitlin didn’t think Starshine planned to rub her forehead with that hand.
A little profile avatar at the corner of Starshine’s message showed the astrological sign for Leo. Yeah, she was a real cat.
Mrs. Lovado said, “This is more than I ever cared to know about one of our teachers or indeed the world.”
Starshine69 [Friday 1:27PM] Silver Creek Park tomorrow 9PM.
Wild Sagittarius 23 [Friday 4:06PM] Ready to rumble.
The park. Caitlin kept scrolling. Ackerman’s final messages grabbed her breath.
Wild Sagittarius 23 [Saturday 8:24PM] On my way.
Wild Sagittarius 23 [Saturday 9:03PM] Pulling into the park. Are you here?
Wild Sagittarius 23 [Saturday 9:08PM] Here. Where are you?
Two minutes later, Caitlin rushed toward her car, printouts in hand, and phoned Guthrie.
“He had a date. A woman. We have to find her.”
16
Caitlin walked into the war room, to phones ringing, Guthrie huddled with Shanklin and Martinez, jangling energy. Guthrie whistled at her to join them.
