UNSUB
Page 21
It mocked her.
There was a pattern in it. In all the messages. She knew so.
But nothing she’d come up with made sense.
Yet.
She returned to her desk and typed the lines into a search engine. Nothing. It wasn’t a published poem like the line from Paradise Lost or the T. S. Eliot verse written on Kelly Smolenski’s arms. It wasn’t song lyrics or gang mottos, not even the lines individually. At least not in English.
She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. Take it in another direction.
Poetry. The messages the Prophet had sent this time seemed related to poetry. And poetry had form—meter, rhythm, rhyme. She compared the number of syllables in each line of this latest one, wondering if it translated into a mathematical pattern.
Nothing.
She stopped looking at the words then, and told herself to free-associate. Back up a few steps.
Why were the words in the message so spread out? Because he was rushed as he wrote? Because of the difficulty of spray-painting on a vertical surface?
She didn’t think so. She sat up straight.
The Prophet had written dozens of notes and messages over the years. On paper, in marker, in paint. The written messages were all perfect grammatically. The handwritten ones were neat and clear. Even the map her father had found showed deliberate, well-articulated penmanship.
The breaks in the line had to mean something.
At least, she wanted them to mean something.
She grabbed a pad of paper and a pen. Wrote out the message. First with an approximation of the spaces. Then with normal spacing. She didn’t think the extra spaces—ten inches between Yelling and Whimpering—were to indicate where punctuation should go. Maybe they were caesuras, to indicate pauses in spoken speech. She read the message aloud.
It wouldn’t come. Nothing would come. She stabbed the pen into the notepad, hard, and harder.
“Speak to me.”
Breaks. They were breaks.
She rewrote the message, this time giving each segment of text its own line.
Deep in her mind, a worm of recognition uncurled. A hint, intangible, just out of reach.
She held her breath, almost touching it, fearing to move or blink lest the thought blow away before she could grasp it.
And there great coils of vipers swarm
hideous
amid that nest he writhes terrified
Yelling
Whimpering his confession
Endlessly—THIEF.
Hell awaits you all.
She scrabbled through the files on her desk for a folder. Flipped it open. Found a copy of the Prophet’s message that had accompanied the black lilies.
She pulled up another message on the computer screen. From the cornfield. Still not breathing. She found the one sent to KDPX News after Stuart Ackerman was found floating in the water trough. She pulled out every written communication the Prophet had sent since he returned.
Only one was publicly available—the message to KDPX. The rest were in the hands of the Alameda Sheriff’s Office and had not been made public. She picked up the notepad. Her hands were starting to shake.
The cornfield note. All these years you thought I was gone. But . . . hell . . . Angels . . . your . . . wail . . . Equinox . . . hurricane . . .
The video message sent to KDPX after the math teacher’s murder. Arrows pierced him when he ran . . . hunted . . . Alameda . . . Yet . . . without . . . Expect . . . here . . .
The note that came with the black lilies. All your hunger . . . Howl . . . and . . . You . . . wretched . . . Eventually . . . Horrible . . .
The postscript scribbled on the back of that note. And, caitlin: How does it feel? All . . . You’re . . . When . . . Electroshock . . . He’ll . . .
She said, “Jesus.”
The first letter of each line was the same in every one. Except for the personal postscript. And in that note, the capitalized letters matched the first letters in the other messages.
A H A Y W E H.
37
Caitlin’s pen hovered above the sheet of paper. She didn’t want to move an inch or the letters in front of her might disappear.
A H A Y W E H.
She checked all the Prophet’s messages again. No doubt. Those were the first letters in the lines of every one he’d sent to the police since his return. Same order every time. It was an acrostic puzzle.
“Damn.” She hadn’t seen it before. Noise-to-signal ratio. Focus.
She shoved files off her computer keyboard and brought up Search. A H A Y W E H.
Did you mean: YAHWEH.
Did she? What did the letters signify?
She scrolled down the page of search results.
Descent: Ahayweh Gate. Level 1, Level 2, Level 3.
Ahayweh on Game Jam.
Ahayweh Art and Music, Omaha.
ACRONYM DEFINITIONS. WHAT DOES AHAYWEH STAND FOR?
She clicked.
“Fuck me.”
There it was, staring her in the face.
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.
She read further, her mouth going dry, palms tingling.
That was the common phrase in English. Seven words, well-known, though inaccurately translated. They didn’t originate from fire-and-brimstone sermons, or from Pirates of the Caribbean. They weren’t modern.
The phrase came from Dante’s Inferno.
Caitlin read on, the room seeming to focus and brighten. She found a university site that summarized the Inferno. She knew only the barest bit about it. The title, basically. Shortcomings of a criminal justice degree—you didn’t study medieval Italian literature.
She tried to absorb it, racing through the text.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
Canto III, Line 9.
In the Inferno, Caitlin read, the phrase is carved in stone above the gate to the underworld. It greets lost souls as they pass forever into the world of the damned. All hope abandon. Because every soul that reads those words is condemned to eternal torment. They’re entering a world of cries and suffering from which they will never be released.
Welcome to hell.
She thought of the message written on Lisa Chu’s arm. Infinite wrath and infinite despair. The line, she knew, was from Satan’s soliloquy in Paradise Lost. Even twenty years back, the Prophet’s messages had been pointing at hell.
She grabbed her phone and went to an online bookstore. Her fingers trembled with excitement. This was the track. This had to be. Her search pulled up a dozen versions of the Inferno. The Longfellow translation. The Ciardi translation, the Pinsky bilingual edition, in English and the original Italian. She could buy it separately, or as part of the trilogy—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—Hell, Purgatory, Paradise. The Divine Comedy.
She bought the trilogy, downloaded the Inferno, and turned to Canto III. Its opening lines read:
I am the way into the city of woes.
I am the way into the forsaken people.
I am the way into eternal sorrow.
Her head throbbed. I am the way . . . That’s what the Prophet had said on the drive-time radio show, just before he hung up. I am the way, the proof, and the strife.
She’d thought he was perverting the words of Jesus: I am the way, the truth, and the life. But no. Way, proof, strife. Woes. People. Sorrow. W. P. S. The same letters in both cases.
“Son of a bitch.”
Then she remembered something else. She tossed aside papers on her desk and found her father’s journal. March 21 . . . “The soul falls headlong.”
She searched online.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Hell, Canto XXXIII. “When a soul betrays as I have done . . . the soul falls headlong into this cistern . . .”
All at once, Caitlin understood. She saw it. She saw through the years, and the deaths, and the grotesque crime scenes, into the Prophet’s secret fantasy. She read on, frantic, finding confirmation. She ripped a page from a notebook and in bold, big letters wrote ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
“Sergeant Guthrie,” she called across the war room.
She stood and strode toward the wall. People looked up. Martinez spun in his chair and stood up to follow her. Guthrie emerged from his office. She stabbed the torn sheet of paper onto the center of the board.
Guthrie approached, fists on his hips. “Yes, Detective?”
She turned. When Guthrie caught the heat of her glare, he stepped back.
“I know what he’s doing,” she said. “The Prophet. He’s staging the murders to portray the Nine Circles of Hell.”
38
Dante,” Guthrie said.
“It’s all here. I’m positive. I have no doubt,” Caitlin said.
“Slow down. Take me through it.”
“Every move the Prophet makes comes straight out of the Inferno. Even speed-reading, it’s there. References to wasps, wild dogs, vipers—it’s all there.”
Martinez approached. Guthrie raised his hands as though trying to calm a stampeding horse. “Back up.”
“The book. It’s about a journey through hell. Which Dante imagines as a cave beneath the earth. Like a funnel. With nine concentric circles descending deeper and deeper, punishing different levels of sin.”
She bent over her phone, peering at the text. “Look. In the Seventh Circle, violent people are scalded in a river of boiling blood. If they try to escape they’re shot down with arrows.”
Another connection hit her. She raised her head, ran to her desk, and grabbed the Prophet’s new messages. She scanned them with increasing excitement.
“It’s here. He’s been telling us. It’s right here.” She read from the message sent after Stuart Ackerman’s murder. “‘Violence sought violence. So he was hunted into a river of blood.’”
“Mother Mary,” Martinez said.
Guthrie was looking at a crime scene photo. Stuart Ackerman’s body in the bloody water trough. “What about the Mercury symbol? Does that play into it?”
She searched the text. “It’s . . .”
She stopped the fast scroll and looked at a footnote. The hairs rose on the back of her neck.
“Hendrix.”
“Hold on.”
“Come on.”
“This is one of the greatest works in Western literature and I’ve had half an hour to skim it on a phone. Give me a second.” She shot him a look, and regretted it. “Sorry, Sergeant.”
He set his face and nodded at her screen. “Continue.”
Canto IX 61ff. THE MESSENGER APPEARS.
She paraphrased the footnote. “In the Inferno, the Messenger of heaven strides through hell, raging at the damned. He lashes it like a hurricane and scatters demons. The footnote says, ‘The Messenger is sometimes identified with the god Mercury.’”
She turned to the board, to the photo of the Prophet’s symbol.
“The killer isn’t a disciple of Satan. He thinks he’s on the side of the angels. The messenger of death, punishing a world that heaven hates.”
Electricity seemed to charge the air, a subliminal hum.
“How does this relate to the T. S. Eliot poem? Does it?” Guthrie said. “And the equinox?”
“The Inferno takes place over the Easter Triduum. Dante descends to hell on the night of Maundy Thursday. The story ends on Easter Sunday.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know.” She looked again at the cramped text of the book on her phone.
He thought a second. “Take a car. Get to the nearest bookstore and buy all the copies they have.” He looked around the war room. “Everybody reads tonight. The Prophet has a twenty-five-year head start and we need to run like hell to catch up.”
39
Saturday
Caitlin marched into the war room at seven thirty A.M., sleep-deprived and wired. She dropped her satchel on her desk and pulled out the Inferno Sparknotes Literature Guide she’d nabbed at the bookstore overnight. Pages were dog-eared. Multicolored Post-it notes protruded from the book like paper tongues. When she looked around, everybody’s desk had a paperback on it. Dante was everywhere.
Shanklin was freshly put together, her hair slicked back into a bun. She held up her copy. “Aren’t we intellectual?” She read the back cover. “‘A poem of wild and interesting images. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’ No kidding.”
“That must be the best blurb in history.”
“Good for Dante. But we get to clean up after his mess.”
She dropped the book. Caitlin felt oddly relieved that Shanklin was back to her sharp-tongued self.
Martinez walked past, trilby cocked back on his gleaming skull. “There is some crazy shit in that book. Literally—people covered in it as punishment. Or dunked in boiling pitch. Or cannibalizing each other alive. Guy had a whack imagination.”
“Which still has power.”
“Spooked the crap out of me, man.”
Caitlin noticed that today, along with the aloha shirt covered in screaming green pineapples, Martinez wore a crucifix.
He touched the cross and pointed at her. “Wouldn’t hurt you either.”
She had just a few minutes before roll call. She phoned her father, excitement putting a quaver in her fingers. He deserved to know what she’d discovered. He might have insights to add. Voice mail.
“Dad, call me. It’s important. I have news.”
Hanging up, she texted Sean.
MUCH news. Working today. Will fill you in when I see you.
Thirty seconds later, Sean called. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Slammed. But, Sean, I broke the code.”
“Holy— Cat. What is it?”
Guthrie walked past. He nodded her toward the roll call room.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Call if you have time. I want to hear.”
“Will do.” She hung up. She started after Guthrie but lifted her phone again. She texted Sean: Send mojo. She silenced her ringer and headed after the sergeant.
Twenty minutes later, the Prophet team assembled in the war room. Lieutenant Kogara stood at the back. Guthrie nodded at Caitlin. “You have the floor.”
She walked to the wall. When she turned to face the entire team, nerves shot through her. Then her certainty kicked back in. This was a real breakthrough. She had it right. Her pulse was racing.
“Every murder committed by the Prophet, going back to the killing of Giselle Fraser in the shack at Peñasquitos Park, matches a scene in the Inferno.”
She held up the book. “This was written seven hundred years ago. An epic poem about a journey to the center of hell. And it’s the Prophet’s playbook.”
Everyone was silent.
“The story takes place from the evening before Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Dante descends to hell on the spring equinox.”
Martinez pushed his hat back. Guthrie straightened. She pointed at a crime scene photo.
“The first murder, September 23, 1993, was the autumn equinox,” she said. “The crime scene matches one of the first scenes in the Inferno. The entrance to hell. Damned souls are blown around the circle by a dark wind. These are the waverers—people who never took sides in life, and angels who stayed neutral in the heavenly battle between good and evil, when Lucifer fell. They fly through the air, wailing as they’re stung by wasps.”
Martinez whistled. Guthrie paced.
“This is the only murder that’s out of season. I think it’s because the UNSUB knew the victim, and took her when his need to kill overcame him. But once he started on his—project—he lined up the kill
ings with the chronology in the Inferno.”
She walked along the wall. “David Wehner. Professor of Eastern religions, killed on the 1994 spring equinox. He was suffocated with a plastic bag and left on a carnival Ferris wheel.”
She tacked up a photo: fun house, cotton candy stand. Wild Mouse, Limbo, Skee-Ball.
“The First Circle contains virtuous pagans—souls who didn’t know the light of Christ. They exist in endless sighing and sadness.” She checked that they were following. “It’s Limbo.”
Shanklin was nodding.
Caitlin moved to the next photo. “Barbara Gertz, left under the drying jets in a car wash. The Second Circle punishes the carnal, and Barbara was married five times. These souls surrender to the storm of their passions. In death, they’re swept through the storm of hell.”
She put up a photo of Helen and Barry Kim at a banquet. “Third Circle. Cerberus, the three-headed dog from Roman mythology, rips apart the gluttonous in a garbage pile.”
Kogara leaned against the back wall, suit sharply creased, arms crossed. “They were found April twelfth. That’s not an equinox. Was it Easter?”
“We can’t confirm the exact date they died. Their bodies had been in the landfill for days. But that year, April seventh was Easter—in the Eastern rite calendar.”
He nodded thoughtfully. She moved on.
“Fourth Circle. Justine and Colin Spencer. Holy Saturday in the Orthodox calendar. Their bodies rolled out of a dump truck.”
She tacked up a photo from a Bay Area lifestyle magazine. Justine Spencer was pictured smiling in front of a walk-in closet built for her designer shoes.
“The greedy haul rocks around hell, eternally fighting for possession of them.”
Caitlin reached the photo of Lisa Chu. “The Fifth Circle is Styx—a swamp. It punishes anger. The wrathful attack each other in the muck. The sullen are sunk in it, gargling slime.”
Guthrie said, “‘Infinite wrath and infinite despair.’”
Caitlin took a breath and moved on. “Tim and Tammy Moulitsas.” She touched the young couple’s wedding portrait. “That’s the Sixth Circle. Heresy.”