Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (26 page)

“An ancient Greek astrologer,” Kelly said. “He lived in the
second century BC.”

“He targets women who live by themselves,” Winslow continued. “He gets into their houses. He rapes and strangles them, and then he uses an object with a sharp point to gouge their astrological sign into their thigh. It’s not a needle or an ice pick. The police lab in New Kent found traces of bronze in the victim’s flesh. Our profiler thinks it might be connected to some kind of astrological instrument—”

“It could be a sharp-pointed rule or an alidade, from an astrolabe,” Kelly said. “Around the time of Antiochus, astrologers in ancient Greece used astrolabes to calculate the positions of the planets. The real Antiochus probably used one to do horoscopes. It would make sense for the killer to use part of an astrolabe to mark his victims with their signs.” She was finding that it helped not simply to listen passively, but to talk, to share what she knew about astrology; it made her feel that she had a reason to be there other than just as a potential victim, that she had value and, perhaps, at least some degree of control.

She noticed that for the first time since they’d met, Winslow was looking at her with interest, perhaps even with grudging respect.

“I’ll pass that along,” Winslow said. She removed a pad from her attaché case and wrote a note to herself before picking up her train of thought.

“We don’t have any fingerprints, but the clerks at both hotels provided the same description of him. Caucasian, midthirties, average build, dark eyes, dark hair. Rather nondescript. No distinguishing features. Not someone who’d stand out in a crowd. He speaks standard American English.

“Another thing we know about him is he doesn’t need money. He didn’t take anything of value from the victims’ homes. Also,
the victims’ checkbooks show they wrote checks to Antiochus when they consulted with him, but their bank records show that the checks weren’t cashed.

“Our profiler describes him as isolated, never been married or in a long-term relationship. He has delusions of grandeur; he’s superficially attractive and so obsessed with dominating and punishing women that he feels compelled to rape them, kill them, and brand them to show his special knowledge of who they are astrologically and to identify them as his.”

“Is that what led you to me?” Kelly asked. “Because he calls himself an astrologer and brands his victims with astrological signs?”

“No,” Winslow said. Without further comment, she reached into her attaché case again and this time removed a clear plastic bag inside of which was the hardback book whose worn blue cover was illustrated with stars. On the spine was its title:
One Hundred-Year Ephemeris, 1950 to 2050 at Midnight
.

Kelly was stunned. “That’s my ephemeris! Where did you find it?”

“It was in the night table of the victim in West Orange, New Jersey. Sheryl Doyle. Did you know her?”

Kelly repeated the name silently to herself and then shook her head. “It doesn’t sound familiar, but I’m not good with names. I remember faces.”

Winslow was already taking a photograph out of her attaché case. Now she gave it to Kelly. Kelly found herself staring at a beautiful woman in her forties, with long, straight blond hair and sculpted features. “She was lovely. She looks like an actress.”

“She was an actress. When she was younger, she had a running part on a soap opera.”

Tears in her eyes as she continued staring at the photo, Kelly
shook her head again. “Poor woman. I can’t bear to think about what happened to her. But I don’t remember ever seeing her as a client. “ She looked up at Winslow again and gave her back the photograph. “Sheryl Doyle … I’m sure I’d remember her face, it was so distinctive. But I’ll check my records.” She wiped her eyes with her hand. “I can tell you right now, though, when my ephemeris went missing. It was five years ago, when I was on tour for the book I wrote. I did consultations for people in the cities where I stopped to do publicity. I had a paperback ephemeris I used with clients and this one that I always kept with me. It was given to me by my grandmother on my tenth birthday. One morning, I went to look for it, and it was gone. I always thought somebody stole it.”

Winslow removed another evidence bag from her attaché case and showed it to Kelly. Inside the bag was a white business card with the name and other information printed in blue. The card read
Kelly Elizabeth York, PhD, Intuitive Astrologer
, and it gave her business phone number.

“It was in the book,” Winslow told her.

“I used it as a bookmark,” Kelly said. She found that it took all of her energy and concentration to speak.

“Do you remember what city you were in when the ephemeris went missing?” Winslow asked.

Kelly didn’t have to think about it; she remembered the morning she’d discovered that her book was gone as vividly as if it had just happened. “I was in Washington, DC, when I noticed it was gone. But I didn’t look at it every day. As I said, I used a paperback ephemeris when I did consultations, so it could have been stolen a day or two before that, when I was in Philadelphia or Baltimore.”

Winslow found that, despite her initial reservations, she was
increasingly impressed with Kelly. “Why don’t you look through your records to see if Sheryl Doyle ever had an appointment with you? And if she did, see if it was during your book tour.”

Kelly stood up, putting her weight on her left foot and gingerly touching the ground with her right. Then she took the crutches off the bench, got them in place under her arms, and started toward the steps that led to the glass door to the kitchen.

“If you close the door to your waiting room and office,” Winslow instructed, “he won’t be able to see you in there.”

Kelly nodded as she started up the steps toward the door. Stevens got there ahead of her and opened the door for her. “I’ll come with you,” he said.

Winslow’s teeth clenched, and her blood felt as if it had surged to one hundred and fifty degrees. She was enraged; who did Stevens think he was? She was about to shout that he should stay where he was and remind him who had jurisdiction over the case, but she stopped herself when she realized that with the kitchen door open, the microphone inside might pick up her shouting. To the surveillance equipment, she had to appear to be an old friend of Kelly’s, not an angry FBI agent telling a cop where he could stuff it.

As she watched Stevens disappear inside with Kelly, she took a deep breath and consoled herself with the thought that she would deal with Stevens later.

H
E’D SEEN HER HOBBLE
to the front door on her crutches to let in the woman with red-brown hair, who turned out to be an old friend. It bothered him to see how glad Kelly was that the woman was visiting her. It meant Kelly could still enjoy something about her life. When he watched Kelly, the only thing he wanted to see was how scared and in pain she was. He relished her fear and her pain all the more because he knew it was just a taste of what was going to happen to her.

He’d watched her in the kitchen, making coffee for her friend, and then watched them go through the door at the back of the kitchen into the garden.

He couldn’t see them when they were in the garden. But, of course, he knew what the garden looked like, with its stone benches and its high brick walls. Her friend had brought her attaché case so she could show Kelly her photos. He could imagine the two women in the garden, talking, looking at pictures.

He hadn’t realized that at some point the cop had gone out there, too, but he must have, because now he saw the cop walking with Kelly through the kitchen toward the front hall. They had come into the kitchen together, through the glass door. He figured the cop must have gone into the garden through the housekeeper’s apartment downstairs. He knew about that apartment, too, of course.

He opened a can of beer as he watched Kelly come into the hall on her crutches and make her way toward her office. The cop followed her. She opened the door to her waiting room, but he couldn’t see inside. Kelly blocked his view. She let the cop in and then she closed the door behind them. His fingers and hand ached from opening the beer; it always did. But that’s just the way it was. The only remedy he’d found for it was more beer. Drinking from the new can, he thought about what was awaiting Kelly and how much he was looking forward to it.

He smiled again about how satisfying it was to have things set up so that he could watch it all. He was happy the cop still hadn’t figured out there were cameras and microphones in the house. Even if he found them, it wouldn’t matter, of course, since they wouldn’t tell him about who had put them there or about what was planned for Kelly.

He finished the beer and watched the empty first-floor hallway of Kelly’s brownstone, waiting for her and the cop to come out of her office. It felt good to know that whatever they did, she was doomed. He had doomed her just as she had doomed him. Because of Kelly, he knew what it was to live with the darkness of death every day; now she was learning what it was like to live with it—only the darkness of death that she was living with was her own.

B
ROADBENT WAS NOW SITTING
next to Barr in the front seat of the car. He craned his neck so he could see the screen of Barr’s laptop as Barr continued searching for the computer that was picking up the transmission from Kelly York’s brownstone. Barr had explained to him that the flashes of white radiating outward in a circle on the screen were packets of data from the transmission that were being sent from Kelly’s computer into the Internet cloud. By some means that Barr was still working to uncover, that transmission was then being received by the computer that they were looking for.

Barr had been at it for more than an hour, and Broadbent was getting a crick in his neck. He straightened up in the seat and massaged his neck muscles. As he kneaded the sides of his neck with his fingers, his thoughts returned to what they knew about the serial rapist and killer they were looking for: his physical description, his obsession with astrology, the ads he placed to attract potential victims, the skill with which he planned and executed his crimes without leaving DNA or fingerprints behind.

His reflections were interrupted by Barr’s voice. “The good news,” Barr was saying, “is that the transmission from her house is still going out and being picked up, so I can see that the packets are going somewhere. The bad news is I still don’t know where.”

Broadbent looked at Barr. He wanted to say something to
Barr to encourage him, but he didn’t know what to say, so instead he just watched as Barr tapped a series of keys on the laptop while keeping his eyes on the screen, trying to get his packet sniffer to sniff out the killer.

Coming back into the garden, Kelly found Winslow still seated on the bench, but now she was reading a document from a folder.

“I looked through my list of clients,” Kelly said, moving on her crutches toward the other bench. “Sheryl Doyle was never a client. She couldn’t have stolen my ephemeris.”

Winslow put the document she’d been reading back into the folder. “Actually,” she said, “we thought it was possible that she didn’t steal it from you.”

As Kelly sat down on the bench facing Winslow, she saw the FBI agent glancing up with annoyance at Detective Stevens, who had come into the garden behind Kelly.

Winslow didn’t waste a word on him. “We think your ephemeris was taken by the killer, and Sheryl Doyle got it from him,” Winslow told Kelly. “Maybe by stealing it like he stole it from you. Sheryl Doyle went to him to help her solve her problems through astrology. She saw him as an authority. People often fetishize authorities, investing them with magical powers. When they fetishize them, they want to own something that belonged to them. We think the killer has fetishized you. He didn’t just take your ephemeris and your card, he took something else from you, too.”

Winslow leafed through the papers in the folder. When she found the document she was looking for, she removed it from the folder and gave it to Kelly. “This is a copy of the ad he placed in
You and Your Sign
and in the suburban papers.”

As Kelly read the ad silently to herself, Winslow continued: “He calls himself an
intuitive astrologer
. That’s who you are. He’s taken part of your identity. Now, by targeting you as a victim, he’s showing that he’s superior even to you. The phone calls, the ‘accident’ on the stairs, he’s taunting you. Punishing you. He’s letting you know he has power over you. And he’s spying on you so he can watch the effects of what he’s doing.”

Kelly finished reading the ad. She didn’t need the FBI agent to point out that Antiochus had used the words
intuitive astrologer
to describe himself; the words seemed to vibrate on the page as she read them. That this man who had raped and killed was identifying himself the same way that she described herself constricted her throat and made her feel as if she would suffocate. It took her time to start breathing again and to think and start sorting things out.

Eventually, she looked at Winslow. “You mentioned he’s never been in a relationship, but on the phone he said I made his wife or his girlfriend leave him. I’ve been going through my files with Detective Stevens to find a woman who saw me about troubles with her husband or boyfriend and—”