Comes a Horseman (9 page)

NEARLY HALF a world away, a cell phone rang. A man awoke, blinking against the morning sun that filled his hotel suite. He squinted at the infernally chirping device on the nightstand and picked up a jewel-encrusted watch beside it—8:50, which meant 6:50 in his own time zone. He slipped on the watch and picked up the phone.

“What is it?” he said gruffly in his native tongue.

The caller spoke his name. The words were filtered through an electronic voice changer, jarring him fully awake.

“Yes. Who is this?” He realized it was a stupid question.

“Speak English,” the caller ordered.

He complied. “How did you get this number?”

“Pippino Farago is ready.”

“Pip?” The man sat up. “Ready for what?”

“For you. He has what you want. Be persuasive. Do it now.”

“What do you mean? Hello?”

The line was dead. He looked at the phone. The screen informed him that the caller was “unidentified.” Of course. But did that matter? If his information was correct, he had just received an extraordinary gift. His heart was racing when he started scrolling through the phone's memory for Pip's number.

9

A
licia's lights panned into the kitchen and almost immediately captured the screaming horror of Cynthia Loeb's severed head. It was perched upright on the edge of the counter, its chin hanging over the edge, in front of a stack of unwashed dishes and an open box of Cheez-Its.

Alicia hitched in a sharp breath, which through her helmet's little speakers sounded like a squawk and reverberated back to her as a piercing crack. Her shoulders came back instinctively, a slight move, exaggerated by the bulky lights mounted to them. Detective Lindsey, who was standing immediately behind her in the hall, caught one of the lights squarely in the forehead.

“Hey!” he yelled painfully. “Watch it now!”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

He pushed past her, rubbing his head. Then he saw the thing on the counter and made a sharp choking sound.

The tech, Fleiser, entered next, squeezing by her on the other side. He didn't make a sound, but Alicia felt a hand grip her arm.

“So this
is
a Pelletier killing.” Lindsey's voice was flat, like a documentary's narrator. Until now, he'd had to trust the assessment of the responding patrolman who had set everything in motion.

Fleiser cleared his throat. “I heard the name, but why Pelletier?”

Alicia suspected the man would have asked anything that would, however insignificantly, move his thoughts away from the grotesque sight before him.

“Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier,” she answered. “In 1792, he was the first victim of the guillotine.” This nugget of trivia had popped from the mind of one of the investigators at the first known killing by the assumed perp in Utah. The name had stuck.

The head's strawberry blond hair was matted and sticking up in a pointed swirl. Alicia realized with sick vividness that the killer had carried it by the hair. But there hadn't been a trail of blood. She lowered her view to check again, bringing the lights with her.

“What are you doing? Go back to the head! The head!” demanded Lindsey, sounding panicked over the possibility of Cynthia Loeb's head taking flight in the dark and whispering in his ear.

“Hold on.”

The floor was clean, except for a few thin swirls of brown—obviously dried blood. Almost as if the spilled blood had been wiped up. But why? Then her lights caught a mark on the floor, and she stepped closer. Three-quarters of a dog's paw print, made of blood. And it came to her: the animals had licked the floor clean.

“Come on, lady.” The detective was really pouring on the charm now.

Slowly she turned back to the head.

Cynthia's irises—green, Alicia noticed—had rolled up slightly, as if just becoming aware of how atrocious her hair looked. One eyelid was drooping. Blood filled both nostrils and caked the left temple and cheek. A purple-yellow bruise had blossomed on the other cheek. Dry lips were twisted in a sour grimace . . . a bloated tongue . . . blood . . . pooling, dripping onto the floor.

A ridiculous saying came to Alicia's mind—
I wouldn't be caught dead—
and she realized this was what that meant.
All the times you primped and groomed and applied your makeup just so,
thought Alicia, assuming this woman had shared the cares of her gender.
And you end up like this. No one else to impress. Not even yourself.

She moved her eyes away, keeping the halogens trained on the gruesome orb for the benefit of the two men. The circle of light was wide enough to catch a mustard-streaked knife, bread crumbs, and a thin strip of clear plastic, the kind you tear off a pouch of cold cuts to get at the meat. An empty bread bag, crumpled and flat like a deflated balloon. She shifted the lights just a little and saw the rest of the meat package, empty. Behind it was the mustard bottle. Her eyes roamed the countertop, stopping at the pool of blood.

“The perp made a sandwich,” she announced.

“Huh?” It was Fleiser.

“How do you know the woman didn't make it herself, before she died?” asked Lindsey.

Fleiser snorted. “Thanks for clarifying ‘before she died,' Dave.”

“You know what I mean.”

“There are crumbs on top of the blood.” She centered the lights on them.

Fleiser took a step. “Yep. Some of them are still white, unsaturated.”

“Judas priest.”

Silence, for a time, as each of them imagined the macabre scene. Alicia sensed that even hard-nosed Lindsey was a bit dumbfounded.

Then Fleiser said, “What's that on her forehead?” He edged closer, mindful of the bloody floor.

“It was in the notice I sent out.” Alicia instructed the video camera to zoom in on the small mark above the right eyebrow.

“It looks like a burn . . . a brand.” The tech was close enough to kiss the unfortunate Ms. Loeb. “It's a sun.”

“A sun?” Lindsey repeated.

“About the size of a dime. Little flames radiating out from it.”

“The others were branded the same way,” Alicia said flatly. “She'll have them on her left palm too. When we find the body.”

“Is that some satanic symbol?” Lindsey's tone rose on the word
satanic
. “We got ourselves a devil worshiper?”

“Maybe.” After reviewing the case file on the Ft. Collins homicide, Alicia had searched for the sun symbol in the Bureau's database of symbols and signs. Lots of suns were associated with known occult groups, but nothing precisely matched this one. The closest was a
Sonnenrad
or Sun Wheel. Originating in ancient Europe, it was especially prominent in Old Norse and Celtic cultures. It depicted crooked rays emanating from a center point. Nazis often used the symbol in place of the swastika, which centuries ago had derived from the
Sonnenrad
. Neo-Nazis adopted the symbol to circumvent bans on Nazi imagery. In different cultures, the
Sonnenrad
meant different things, sometimes satanic or occult, but not always.

She had learned that many religions still deified the sun or had elements of sun worship tinting their general theology, even Hinduism and Buddhism. Cynthia Loeb obviously had some spiritual leanings. A connection?

“Could mean anything,” she said.

“It
is
burned into the skin,” the tech said with some wonder.

“We think the perp heats something like a small branding iron with a lighter flame.” She bit her lower lip. “Then he applies it.”

Fleiser nodded.

Alicia went through the ritual of checking for latents with the infrared and then imbedding the location of each item—head, blood, sandwich supplies, paw print—in the mapping software and evidence databank. After that, she walked back into the hall, stiffly and awkwardly under the cumbersome helmet, vest, arm and leg pads, gloves, and boots.

She found herself in the awful situation of wanting to get away from the head but knowing the next thing she'd find was the body. That dilemma alone, however, could not explain the extent of her discomfort—why her skin felt clammy, why her heart pranced like a racehorse at the gate, why she had to exert so much willpower to keep from hyperventilating. She had examined hundreds of crime scene photographs, had witnessed the aftermath of heinous acts of violence, had examined gunshot wounds, fatal lacerations, bodies crushed in cars—but there was something about a severed head that got to her. Maybe Brady would have some insight into it; she sure didn't.

“Think the murderer left the rest of the body?” Lindsey was right behind her.

“He did at the other killings.” She hesitated. Through the opening at the end of the hall, she could see an overturned end table or plant stand. A ring of keys and scrap of paper lay near it on the floor. A crack in the hardwood snaked over from deeper in the room, like a river on a map. Then she understood and swallowed hard. The crack was actually a thick ribbon of blood.

“Well then?” Lindsey called from farther behind. “Get a move on!”

She moved toward the room.

Lindsey grunted. “So that thing's supposed to suggest a sequence for processing this place?”

Alicia knew what he was thinking: Entry through a back bedroom. A head in the kitchen. The place of the attack—obviously—in the front room. The crime scene was expanding, growing in size and complexity by the second. It could quickly get out of hand once the rest of the team plowed into the house.

“We call it a POA—plan of attack. It suggests which techs should enter when and what they should process to preserve as much evidence as possible. I'll also give you most of the information your people will need for their reports.”

“Right away?”

“As soon as I plug it into the printer. It'll spit out a blueprint with evidence markings; a master sequential list of steps, designed to minimize damage; and the same list broken down by personnel, so each person knows precisely what to do, without redundancy or omissions.”

“Well . . . I'll need to consider them first.”

“Of course.”

The corpse's feet and legs came into view. As Alicia stepped out of the hall, the halogen beams slid up the body, making painfully evident the violence of the woman's demise: splotches and dots of brownish crimson speckled the top of her beige shorts and the bottom of her chambray shirt, growing in number and size, like a gradated screen, as more of her was revealed. By midthorax, the blood obliterated the shirt altogether. A stub of neck protruded from the collar—more neck than Alicia thought possible. It stopped cleanly where the head should have been, making her think of a badly framed photograph.

Using the keyboard strapped to her left forearm and the laser on her fingertip, she entered the body's coordinates. Another key click and the lasers at the top of the helmet, which had been cascading around the room, all swung forward and down. They converged on the body and began flitting over it so fast that they appeared as one growing red luminance engulfing the corpse. A still camera mounted at ear level snapped and hummed: its 35-millimeter film would provide flawless images to the Luddites still resistant to the high-res digital video accumulating on the hard drive.

As soon as this process was finished, she turned away. In front of the fireplace there was a palette with drying clumps of paint. Beside it was an acrylic wastebasket, still glistening with wet paint. She bent to take in the illustration.

“Do the overhead light switch,” said Lindsey behind her, “so I can turn it on.”

She turned to see him pointing. “Infrared first,” she said and began the routine again: lights off, infrareds on, lights on, laser-mark the evidence . . . New location, lights off, infrared on, lights on, laser-mark . . . until she'd covered the entire room. Finally, she checked the light switch and surrounding area for latents. “Clean,” she squawked through the helmet's pitiful speakers. He threw the switch. The glare of the halogens prevented her from detecting any change in the ambient lighting.

There was nothing else to look at but the body again. Squatting, she positioned herself to capture the top of the neck—wet, complicated anatomy that was never intended for display. Next, she trained the CSD's various systems on one of Cynthia Loeb's mutilated wrists. Veins and tendons jutted out from a gaping wound like a torn electrical cable. The mess was surprisingly bloodless, as if it had been washed clean. Or—her stomach contracted—
licked
clean. A constellation of tiny punctures fanning out from the wound bore witness to the animals that had somehow assisted in the slaying. A pool of blood had formed in the woman's open palm. On the fleshy orb under the thumb, the small branded sun. The ring finger had been chewed off.

Alicia stood suddenly. The weight of the helmet tried to throw her over. She took a step back to keep from falling, knocking into a piece of furniture behind her. It let out a deep chirp as it slid over the wooden floor. She swore under her breath. In her mind she saw herself stumbling about the room, pulled along by the weight of the helmet, careening against furniture and walls, crushing evidence, tripping over the body . . . Suppressing her curiosity over which piece of furniture she had bumped, she forced herself to stand still. When she felt equilibrium return, she powered down the system, unshackled the helmet from its shoulder-pad moorings, and pulled it off. She stood there, wavering slightly, holding the helmet with both hands. The overhead lights were on all right but seemed inadequate for the room. Her head felt ready to explode.

“Is that thing off?” Lindsey's voice was loud after the relative isolation of the helmet.

Alicia took a deep breath—a mistake, since she managed only to fill her sinuses and lungs with the heavy odor of blood. “It's off.”

“Thank God,” he said and released a dazzling example of volcanic flatulence.

Just what she needed. Alicia spun on her heels and strode away.