Dark Prophecy (15 page)

“You know what I saw on the way here from the airport?” Riggins asked.

Dark, who had already drained half of his beer, trailed behind him, trying to act casual. “No. What?”

“Mobile hookers. I thought they were an urban legend, but no. They’re real. Ladies of the night, driving down Sunset, looking for business. One tried to get me to pull over. Would have, too, if I wasn’t in such a rush to see you.”

“I’m touched. How do you know they were prostitutes?”

Riggins stopped, turned, and gestured with his bottle. “Well, either she was scratching the inside of her mouth with an invisible cucumber, or she was making an obscene gesture.”

“Maybe she just liked you.”

“Have you looked at me lately?”

“You look like you’ve lost weight.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

Riggins hadn’t laid eyes on Dark since he left Special Circs. On Dark’s last day there were no promises of calls, visits, or e-mails. Both knew their relationship—close as it was—existed solely within the context of the job.

The strange effect of this was that now, face-to-face again, it seemed like no time had passed at all. They picked up where they’d left off, as if they had just decided to meet up for beers after a four-month hiatus.

But as the banter flew back and forth, Riggins busied himself examining Dark’s house. From what Riggins could gather, Dark was keeping up the pretense of a “normal” life. Furniture from a big-box chain. Basic bachelor staples in the fridge. Some movie posters on the walls—some of Dark’s favorites from his teenage years:
The Hitcher. To Live and Die in L.A. Dirty Harry
. But that was just for show. Trivia shit.

And that was the problem. Where was the
real
Dark in this house? Where were the case files? The books on forensic science? His journals? His serial-killer book collection? Riggins didn’t even see a computer, which was like seeing the pope without a cross. It just didn’t happen.

Which meant Dark was hiding something. Hiding what he was
really
doing here, way out on the other side of the country.

 

 

Meanwhile Dark trailed behind Riggins, studying him. His ex-boss had walked right in, not giving Dark a chance to tell him it wasn’t a good time, or suggest they head to Barney’s Beanery for a beer or something. Riggins was a bulldog who wasn’t going to wait for an invitation. Beer in his hand; large, muscular frame strolling through the house. Like Riggins was nothing more than an old friend, out on the coast for a couple of laughs, checking out his buddy’s new place, maybe eyeing early retirement and looking for a new place to hang his hat.

Then again, that was the peculiar genius of Tom Riggins. He was very good at making you underestimate him. He looked like a guy who would knock back a basket of wings and a six of Bud with you at the corner bar, the kind of blood brother you spill your guts to, the kind who would help you move furniture. Riggins was a curious blend of menace and good-ol’-boy friendliness, which is how he had disarmed countless perps over the years. Just like he was trying to disarm Dark right now.

Riggins must have seen the photo on the Slab
.
Why else would he be here? But so far he hadn’t mentioned it. Dark knew it was better to wait him out. Sooner or later, Riggins would get to the point. Which might be as simple as a warning. Or might be as dramatic as an arrest.

After all, Dark had noticed a van parked outside that didn’t belong in this neighborhood.

 

 

“What’re you up to these days?” Riggins asked, pausing in the kitchen, leaning his large frame against a tiled counter. Not much in the way of food in here. Not that Dark was a gourmand—as he recalled, Sibby had been the one with taste in that department. Still, the kitchen looked more like a television studio set than something you actually used to cook or eat. Like it was for show.

“I’ve been teaching,” Dark said.

“Yeah. Heard about your gig with the kids at UCLA. How’s that working out for you? Got any celebrity kids in your class? Like one of those . . . what do they call them, the Jones Brothers?”

“I enjoy it, and no, not that I know of.”

“Any promising Special Circs material?”

“These kids are twenty, Riggins.”

“You were that young once,” Riggins said. “In fact, I think you were just as young when we first met, isn’t that right?”

Dark drained the last of his beer, then held up the empty bottle, foam cascading down the neck. “Want another?”

Riggins stared at him—hard. “All right, fine. We could dance around your kitchen forever, but I’ll admit, my feet are getting tired. What are you
really
up to?”

Dark returned his glare. “Why don’t you just cut through the shit and tell me why you came all the way out to L.A. for a couple of beers? Considering that just a few days ago you wouldn’t even talk to me on the fucking phone.”

Riggins gestured to the tarot cards on the kitchen table. “Well for starters, you want to tell me about those?”

“Intellectual curiosity,” Dark said.

“Right.
Professor Dark.
I forgot.”

Riggins slammed his bottle down on the kitchen countertop.

“Look,” Riggins said. “I saw the photos online, and you know I did. You were in West Philly at the murder scene. Pretty sure you’ve been in Falls Church, too. What I want to know is, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? I thought you’d had enough of this manhunting stuff? Enough of the bureaucracy? I thought you wanted to reconnect with your daughter.”

Dark said nothing.

Riggins grunted.
Okay. Fine. Don’t tell me. I’ll know soon enough, either way.
And he would. Outside, Riggins’s field techs, on loan from the NSA, were busy sweeping the house and the dozen others in the immediate vicinity.

chapter 31

Riggins knew that if there was an upside to working with a suit supreme like Norman Wycoff, it was the access to his toy box. And the secretary of defense had a lot of shiny toys at his disposal. Such as an Econoline van full of state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, which was parked across the street from Dark’s house. This was NSA-level surveillance gear—able to pick up not only audio and video through concrete walls, but also to scan the hard drive of virtually any computer through foot-thick concrete walls. At such close range, the techs in that van would be able to lay Dark’s entire house bare.

If Dark was hiding anything, Riggins would find it.

And once his team confirmed that Dark had stuff he shouldn’t, Riggins could take Dark into custody with a clear conscience. Papers had been signed, agreements had been made. Dark would have to understand that, right? Besides, Riggins would honestly feel better with Dark somewhere safe. Maybe he needed to talk to somebody.

“Tell me how you got access to the crime scene,” Riggins said.

Dark just stared at him.

“I can’t figure it out. Not only do you have some kind of magical fucking access, but you were there even before anybody from my team could make it. Who tipped you off, Dark? What’s going on? Just talk to me, man. Set my mind at ease.”

Dark said nothing.

The cell in Riggins’s pocket buzzed. Exactly the sensation he didn’t want to feel. No doubt, the team in the van had found something. Would Dark fight him? If so, Riggins steeled himself for a long night. A man like Dark had to have more than one escape route. A gun, possibly two, stashed somewhere. Glock 22, .40 caliber. Dark’s favorite. A fast car—probably that cherry Mustang that Riggins saw parked out front, pointed on the downward slope. The cell buzzed again.

“Got to take this,” Riggins said, fishing the phone out of his pocket.

“No problem,” Dark said.

But it wasn’t the surveillance team outside. It was a text from Constance.

chapter 32

Dark was surprised when Riggins stood up, slid his phone into his pocket, drained the rest of his beer, and announced that he had to leave. Was this a ruse? Was Riggins trying to lure him to the front door so a team could cuff and hood him? This wasn’t the man’s style—but then again, these weren’t the usual circumstances. They were both in uncharted territory.

“I’ve got to go—but this isn’t over,” Riggins said. “You owe me some answers.”

Dark nodded, eyeballing the outside of his house. He looked for shadows. Noises—the scrape of a rubber sole on pavement. Tells of any kind. He knew he could outrun Riggins, make a break through the backyard. There might be a team out there, too, if Riggins was serious about this.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Dark said.

“Fuck you for making me worry about you,” Riggins said.

“You know, there’s an easy solution,” Dark said. “Don’t worry about me.”

Riggins gestured around the room. “Is this what you think Sibby would have wanted?”

“I don’t know, Riggins. She’s not here to tell me. Say hi to the team in the van for me. Anybody I know in there?”

Riggins grunted once, shoved his empty beer bottle into Dark’s hand, then left.

 

 

Inside the van, Riggins looked at the techs. They were hunched in front of the most sophisticated eavesdropping gear currently available. Riggins felt a little like Gene Hackman from
The Conversation
—that is to say, a stone-cold pro about to be fucked hard from every conceivable direction. The lead tech, a freelancer named Todd, lowered his headphones down to his shoulders and shook his head.

“Nothing,” Todd said.

“You can’t find anything?” Riggins asked.

“Far as we can tell, he’s totally clean,” Todd said. “No computer, anywhere. No security cameras. No cell phones. The guy doesn’t even have a television. Just a single landline, and we have that tapped. It’s like he’s living in 1980, or something.”

That didn’t make any sense to Riggins. Dark was security obsessed even
before
the Sqweegel nightmare. Why would he live in a place with absolutely no visible security measures? Was he trying to tempt the monster into attacking—kind of a “come and get me”? No. Dark was clearly hiding something. Maybe this place wasn’t really his house. Maybe it was a shell, and he was keeping his real shit elsewhere.

“Does he have any other property in California?” Riggins asked.

Todd said, “We checked. Nothing, other than an old address in Malibu, under his wife’s name. And the old foster family’s residence, but that’s been sold long ago.”

Riggins thought about it. “Hang on. The Slab photo showed Dark with a cell phone pressed to the side of his head.”

“Well, there’s no sign of cell phone activity here. That’s the easiest thing to trace, even if he pulled the battery, dumped the thing inside a bucket of water. We’d get a hit. Maybe it was disposable, and he tossed it?”

“Damnit.”

Riggins couldn’t spend any more time here. Constance was busy arranging him a flight from LAX to Myrtle Beach. There had been another freaky ritual slaying, and this time the target wasn’t just a bunch of MBA students. It was a fucking U.S. senator, stabbed to death in a high-class rub and tug somewhere near the beach. While he’d been dicking around here on the West Coast, this killer was gleefully making stops all up and down the eastern seaboard.

Wycoff would be up his ass about Steve Dark, but priorities were priorities. The killer first. Dark could wait.

chapter 33

After he was sure Riggins’s van had pulled away, Dark headed down into his basement lair to continue studying the crime scene evidence. A short while later Graysmith arrived, letting herself in the front door without a word.

“There’s been another one,” she said.

Before traveling out to join Dark in Philadelphia, Graysmith had made some modifications to his home security system—the one she’d called “Fisher-Price.”

“I gave it a security sweep,” she’d explained. “Now it will be like someone threw a lead blanket over your entire house. No one will know what you’re doing, who you’re calling, what Web sites you’re looking at—nothing. I won’t even be able to look.”

Somehow Dark doubted that. Graysmith didn’t seem to be an
explicit trust
kind of person. But apparently her modifications had saved his ass, because Riggins had brought along a complete mobile surveillance team, which was a lot of manpower for a friendly couple of beers.

But Dark decided to worry about that later. “Tell me about the murder,” he said.

“U.S. Senator Sebastian Garner. Hardliner, conservative. Made a lot of headlines last year defending Wall Street, especially at a time when his constituents were begging him to punish them. Vietnam War hero. Family man. So it should come as no surprise that they found him at a sex spa in Myrtle Beach. Naked, and stabbed to death with ten daggers.”

Daggers. Dark immediately remembered the suit of tarot cards that were swords. Ten of them, plunged into a prone man’s back.

“Was this trip general knowledge?” Dark asked.

“No,” Graysmith said. “Far as the media knows, Garner was attending an economic think tank session in the area. I’m sure his handlers are scrambling as we speak, trying to fabricate some kind of chronic back pain that would give Garner a reason to be there. It won’t last, though. The facts are the facts. Somebody’s going to have a field day with this story.”

“Do we know anything about the daggers?”

“One of the first responders said they looked like something you’d buy at an occult shop down by the ocean—ornate, and elaborate designs. I should be able to scoop up some images soon, but rest assured they weren’t steak knives.”

Dark leaned over Graysmith, did a quick Google search. “Look at this.”

On-screen was the image of the Ten of Swords. In the foreground, a man is lying facedown on a sandy beach, dressed in a vest and white shirt. A red robe or shroud of some kind is draped over his buttocks, covering his legs. Beneath the man’s head appears to be a small river of blood, the same color as the shroud. In his back: ten long swords, the first stuck in his head, and the rest following a rough path down his spine, past his buttocks, and down along one of his thighs. His head was facing a black horizon. Fingers dead, motionless on the ground.