Dark Prophecy (25 page)

But not now. Vegas was no longer the gaudy whore. Now she had a shiv in her Gucci clutch.

Knack’s phone buzzed in his hand. Another text.

The texts had started this morning, God help him. Little messages—all of them obscure at first. Until he tuned into their delirious form of logic. The sender was speaking between the lines.

And so on, making Knack think he had a loon on his hands. Light and dark? Comfort and hurt? What the fuck—was this a meth addict reading him nonsense out of a fortune cookie? But then this anonymous texting “source” starting giving him details on the slaughter of that nurse in Delaware, stuff that checked out later with a few well-placed hundred dollar bills to the Wilmington Police Department. This was either the killer or someone who knew the killer’s every move.

Abruptly, the source told him to fly to Vegas. And now here he was, being led around by the ear.
Go to Egypt
. What the fuck did that mean?

One look at a cheap handbill, though, clued him in. The Egyptian Hotel and Casino. Of course.

After hopping into a cab and giving the driver a hundred dollar bill to get him there as fast as humanly possible, Knack saw that he was already too late. Vegas PD all over the place, with the usual bright lights and chaos of a crime scene’s outer perimeter. What now? Did his mystery texter expect him to pull some Jason Bourne shit and make his way into the hotel?

Knack thumbed in a reply:

Then he waited. The number of his mystery texter had a 559 area code, which meant Fresno, California. Which probably meant he wasn’t hiding behind a neon sign somewhere, sniper rifle trained on his head. Hell, Knack had seen
Red Dragon
. You start messing around with a psycho, sometimes you ended up crazy-glued to a fucking wheelchair, talking to a guy with freaky false teeth.

No, Fresno could mean that he was dealing with an honest-to-God source, and not the killer himself. Who could it be, though? A concerned relative or friend? Somebody looking for a payday at the end of this all—a greedy Deep Throat? Didn’t matter. As long as the information was good.

Knack’s phone vibrated in his hands. A response.

Fucking great. More riddles. More light and dark stuff . . .

And then it hit him. Dark. Oh God, he was so dense sometimes. He thumbed back:

A new story bloomed in his mind. Why didn’t he see it earlier? Steve Dark wasn’t investigating the Tarot Card Murders.
He was the prime suspect.

chapter 59

Graysmith opened the van door. “You don’t ask a lot, do you?”

Dark squeezed in past her. “You offered.”

“You won’t believe how many chips I’ve cashed in over the past week.”

“This is Vegas, isn’t it?”

Dark knew his request wasn’t completely ridiculous. If Graysmith was right and this was still a CIA kinda town, then it wouldn’t be too difficult to scrounge up the latest Face-Tek software from some agency in the Greater Las Vegas area. Face-Tek was a program that used biometrics—the structure of your face, the shape of your irises, width of your mouth, curve of your nostrils—to identify you, even if you tried to obscure your identity. Most people didn’t know that you could just as easily be identified by the shape of your ear as you could by a fingerprint. Special Circs had received a Face-Tek upgrade not long before Dark left the agency; that version had been impressive, reconstructing the sharp image of a face out of a grayish mush of pixels. He hoped Graysmith would have access to the same—or something better.

He needed to see that face.

Dark handed her the flash drive with the footage from the secret security cameras. Graysmith plugged it in, then called up the program. She hesitated for a moment, as if she had forgotten where she was, what she was doing.

“Let me,” Dark said.

“I don’t use this stuff all that often,” she said, standing up.

“You have people for that, right?”

Dark swung himself into the seat. Again the paranoid part of his mind screamed at him:
She’s hesitating because it’s
her
on that recording. She’s letting you figure it out, then she’s going to shoot you in the kidneys while you’re distracted.

Using the touchpad, Dark dragged the footage into the Face-Tek window, cueing it up to the moment when the mystery woman looked at the camera. Instantly, measurements were made, processed. Extrapolations were made. Years ago, it took a skilled artist countless hours to rebuild a human face from a buried skull. Now, it took a computer a few moments—and you didn’t even need a skull.

Soon, they had their answer.

There was even a hit on a national database.

Her name was
Abdulia Maestro.

chapter 60

The police band was alive with chatter about Kobiashi and the tarot card. Another murder, right on the heels of the last. Nothing fancy about this one, though. A Japanese gambler, naked, one bullet in his head. Shit, Riggins thought. For Vegas, this was positively sedate.

Still—there was the possible Steve Dark connection.

As they sped toward the Egyptian, Riggins called Vegas PD. He was old buddies with the night-shift supervisor of the local CSI team—who immediately put him in touch with the detective in charge. Yeah, Dark had been there at the crime scene. In fact, he’d just left a few minutes ago, with a copy of the security footage, said he had a way to enhance it. What, didn’t he check in? Say—didn’t you guys send him out here in the first place?

Riggins couldn’t ignore the evidence now. Dark had been spotted near at least four of the seven scenes—Paulson’s apartment building, the bar slaying in Philly, the plane crash in the Appalachians, and now here, in Vegas—the whole time insinuating himself into the mix without so much as a plastic badge from a box of breakfast cereal.

Now he was leaving the scene of a murder, evidence in his hands, to do God knows what with. Was Dark trying to cover his tracks? Or worse, was he keeping little trophies of his Tarot Card Murders?

Riggins hated to think it, but there was a pretty good chance that Dark was not only involved in these slayings, but the mastermind behind them all.

Dark had
killer
in his blood, right down to his very DNA.

Once Riggins allowed himself to go there, and ran through the crimes in his mind, the events of the past week snapped into place with alarming ease. Martin Green’s hanging/torture murder? Easy enough for Dark, especially knowing the entry and submission methods of a monster like Sqweegel. Paulson’s murder? Even easier. Paulson idolized Dark. Paulson would trust him immediately. The three MBA students in the bar? Dark was a handsome enough guy to lure them into the ladies’ room, smart enough to spike their beers, strong enough to string them up. The senator? Another cake-walk, with knives that Dark could have ordered—or had custommade—years ago. The plane crash? Now that was tricky. Dark wasn’t a pilot, but he suddenly appeared on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere, like he’d fucking parachuted himself in. The nurse in Wilmington? Simple, with plenty of time left over for a flight to Santa Barbara, a drive down to Burbank, and another flight to Vegas. Dark had pretty much lived out of planes for the past five years since the Sqweegel murders; flights were as second nature as bus rides for most people.

What tripped Riggins up were the whys.

On some level, Riggins understood. He’d been through a living nightmare not once, but twice. Two families slaughtered, essentially, in front of his very eyes. Anyone could snap. Let alone someone with Dark’s genetic makeup.

So why?

Why wait five years to launch this spree? Was he just playing along, catching minor monsters while plotting his own masterpiece when the time was right?

All the beers they’d drunk together, food flipped on grills, late-night talks about life and God and fate and everything else . . .

Fuck it.

The
whys
could wait.

The mission now was to take Dark off the board.

Let someone else psychoanalyze him, study him, poke and prod him, whatever. The only thing he owed the world was putting Dark somewhere he couldn’t hurt anybody. If you looked back at the balance of their lives together, the people they’d saved, the monsters they’d caught—it would be enough. It would have to be.

chapter 61

Dark leaned away from the image on the flat-screen monitor as if she could reach out and slice his throat.

It was Abdulia. The second tarot card reader. Five bucks, tell you your fate.
There is no escape from your fate. It’s bigger than you.
“I know her,” Dark said quietly.

“The killer?” Graysmith snapped, reading over his shoulder. “Who is she?”

“I think her name is Abdulia. She was in a tarot card shop in Venice Beach, but I’m sure that she’s moved on by now.”

“She must have been tracking you, too, just like Paulson,” Graysmith said. “Your name, after all, has been all over the news.”

“Damnit,” Dark muttered as he realized it was true. He’d even given Abdulia his whereabouts when he called to Hilda the night before and left her a voice message. He’d even left an exact time. Dark felt a knot of unease in his stomach. By merely visiting Hilda’s shop on a whim, he’d put the poor woman in the crosshairs of a psychopath. How long had Abdulia been watching Dark? Since his visit to the Appalachian Mountains? Since Philadelphia? D.C.? Apparently she had watched Dark just like she’d watched Jeb Paulson. Saw him at one of the crime scenes. Followed him back to L.A. ...

But how? How could she follow Dark and still pull off this series of murders?

Graysmith began typing furiously on her laptop. Dark assumed she was plugging the name “Abdulia Maestro” into every secret search engine she could, and within minutes she’d have the woman’s complete history on the screen—date of birth, social security, education, immunizations, voting records, tax filings, medical, dental, vision records, everything. Everything except the most important thing.

“I’ve got it,” Graysmith said. “Finally, a real connection.

Dark turned around, snapping out of his reverie. “What is it?”

“Abdulia Maestro and the nurse—Evelyn Barnes. They met each other, at least once. Barnes cared for Maestro’s sick child. A boy, terminal case of bone cancer. He died last year.”

“In Wilmington?”

“Yeah. The children’s hospital.”

“If Abdulia believed that Barnes was to blame for her boy’s death, then there’s our motive.”

“But what about the previous cards?” Graysmith asked. “What’s the point? Why Martin Green? Why Paulson? Why the girls in that bar? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Abdulia’s telling a larger story. Everyone she killed was for a reason.” Dark remembered her words in Hilda’s tarot shop. Abdulia had told him directly she was
embracing her fate
.

Then he remembered his original theory about the killer working as part of a team. Abdulia couldn’t be doing this alone. There would be too many miles to cover.

Dark asked, “She had a boy—is she married?”

With a flurry of keystrokes, Graysmith started cracking open files. Indeed, Abdulia had a spouse: Roger Maestro. Graysmith downloaded sealed military records, juvenile criminal records, all based in Baltimore where he’d grown up an angry, mean dude. Construction worker. She speed-read the basics to Dark. Roger had married Abdulia seven years ago; had their only child, a boy, one year later.

“I’m pulling up everybody connected to the boy’s death—doctors, other nurses, case workers, everybody.”

“Did you say he was a construction worker, based out of Baltimore?”

“Yeah.”

The mention of Baltimore tripped a circuit in Dark’s mind. He thought about his trip to Philadelphia. “Has Roger Maestro ever worked a job with someone named Jason Beckerman?”

“The suspect in Philly,” Graysmith mumbled. “Goddamnit. Let me check the union records ...” More frenzied typing. “Yeah. For most of the past year.”

That was it, Dark thought. Roger Maestro had killed those girls in the West Philly bar posing as his coworker Jason Beckerman. The two men probably had an almost identical build; Maestro could easily have hand-picked him out of the whole construction crew. Before heading out to the bar, though, he’d stopped by Beckerman’s room (at around nine, just like the second witness had reported), dosed him, taken some of his clothes, then headed out. Beckerman would be out until morning. By that time, the Philly PD would be knocking down his door, and Roger Maestro would be long gone.

 

 

They had the names of the killers. They even had the next card:

The image on the card was of two lovers, stark naked, heavy chains looped around their necks, both of them tethered to a pedestal, on which sat a cloven-hoofed, winged, and horned monstrosity. One hand raised in a strange split-fingered salute; the other lowered with a flaming torch in its grasp.

So if the naked lovers were Roger and Abdulia—who was their tormentor?

“Do you see any religious affiliation?” Dark asked.

Graysmith tapped more keys. “Roger was raised Catholic.”

“The son’s burial?”

“Catholic cemetery. Last rites given by a priest—Father Warren Donnelly.”

“In Wilmington, Delaware, right?”

Dark thought about the layout of the tarot cards on a map of the United States. The Celtic cross in the East was finished; no reason for the Maestros to return. The next three cards—the Devil, the Tower, Death—would be placed out here, in the West.