Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (14 page)

Since Kelly wanted the walls painted the same butter yellow as they had been with the same eggshell white for the molding, Sarah had been able to order the paint when she’d called the
painters and begged them to come right away, and she’d authorized Ed Murrin and Peter Heath at Ace Painting to hire extra men so the painting would go quickly. But seeing the walls still mottled with smoke residue even after washing, she wondered how fast that could be.

She looked up at Peter, who stood on a ladder as he painted the wall outside her office with a roller. He’d arrived forty-five minutes after she’d called, ready and eager to work. He’d brought along Ace’s whole painting crew and several of its part-timers, and they’d started right away, while his partner, Ed, finished another job in Queens by himself.

“How long are we talking about, Peter?” Sarah asked.

Peter was tall and gangly and, with his bushy blond hair, Sarah thought he looked like an overgrown child. He rolled on the yellow paint in a smooth, straight line as he answered her: “We’ve got eight men, so it’s possible we can finish tonight. It’s only the two floors. If not tonight, definitely by noon tomorrow.”

Sarah felt the tension in her hands begin to relax. She thanked him and approached the ladder that held the electrician, a two-hundred-fifty-pound man wearing an unflattering red toupee who looked precariously balanced on the next-to-the-top rung as he installed a new smoke alarm. “How are you doing, Ivan?”

Without looking down, he replied, “Don’t worry, Miss Stein. I’m not going to fall. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

Embarrassed that she’d been so transparent, Sarah felt her face heat up. “I know. I just meant—”

“You meant I should probably lose some weight, right?”

Sarah was still blushing. “I guess so.”

The older man laughed. “My wife tells me the same thing. So do my kids. So join the crowd. Like I said, don’t worry.”

“Okay, I won’t,” she responded.

Recognizing that if she stayed in the hall and continued exercising her nerves, she would do more harm than good, Sarah headed toward her office. She’d already canceled the day’s appointments; now she had to cancel the appointments for the remainder of the week. Entering her office, she was relieved again to see that Kelly’s having closed the office door so soon after the smoke had started had kept Sarah’s office walls almost free of smoke. They looked like all they needed was touching up. And the walls in Kelly’s office would only need touching up, too. That is, unless the touch-ups contrasted too starkly with the old paint; as a contractor’s daughter, she knew that if that happened, the office walls would need to be painted just like the other walls.

She sat at her desk and looked at the closed door to Kelly’s office. Kelly was inside, talking with a police detective. Sarah assumed he was talking with her about the chimney backing up, but she wondered why the police would be involved with something that Kelly had told her the fire investigator had said was an accident.

She knew that if she moved her chair close to Kelly’s office door, she could hear what they were saying. But no matter how curious and concerned she felt, she believed in privacy too much to ever do that. Instead, she turned on the classical radio station and opened her calendar to the appointments scheduled for the next day so she could start making calls. Pavarotti was singing “Nessun Dorma” from
Turandot
. She found herself thinking of Kevin; he’d sung the haunting aria for her last year when he’d been preparing to perform it in
Turandot
for an opera company in Germany. Regardless of the amount of work she had to occupy her, she felt heartsick. As she lifted the receiver to make a call, she wondered if she would ever feel another way.

Detective Mike Stevens sat in one of the chairs Kelly usually used for clients. The chair was a little too small for Stevens, who was six foot five, but he made the best of it. He crossed his long legs and sat back as if there were actually room for his big frame. At forty-five years old, that’s how Stevens was; he tended to make the best of inconsequential things. Things of consequence were another matter. With his investigations, he tended to be relentless. He also tended to read people well. Sitting across the desk from Kelly, he could see that she was not a woman who would call the police for attention; she was a woman who would rather not call the police at all. And that made him take the threatening phone call she had reported all the more seriously.

“You said he told you that you made her leave him. Why would he say that?” he asked her.

Kelly had spent the six hours that had passed between the phone call and the detective’s arrival pondering that very question herself. “Maybe his wife or girlfriend came to see me, and he thinks I told her to end the relationship. But I don’t do that.” She kept her eyes on his to make sure he understood what she was telling him. “The reason I call myself an intuitive astrologer is that besides being an astrologer, I’m a trained psychologist. The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung used astrology when he saw patients. I do the same thing in reverse. When I interpret people’s charts, I use my background in psychology to add to what their charts tell me about the disposition of their planets. I never tell someone to leave a relationship. I help the person to understand himself or herself and the other person and the kinds of adjustments that he or she would have to make if they stay together. Then it’s up to the person.”

“But like you said, he may
think
you told her to go. That’s why he might say that to you.” Stevens unbuttoned his brown sports jacket and tried to make himself more comfortable in the chair. “Do you remember any woman in the last six months who came to you wondering if she should break it off with a husband or a boyfriend?”

“I remember at least two. I’ll check my records for their names and see if there were others.”

“Might as well go back a year. It may have taken this guy time to work up the steam to call you after she left.”

“I will,” Kelly told him.

Stevens noticed that she was no longer looking at him; her dark blue eyes were looking at nothing in particular; she was preoccupied with something she was thinking about.

He leaned forward. “What is it?”

“The night I got the first call, I looked at the transiting planets and how they were aspecting my chart. The aspects create the influences at a specific time.” She was looking at him again, making sure he understood. “The movements of Mars and Pluto mean that this is a time of danger for me. My chart says the danger may be coming from something hidden, from the dark or the past. I think it’s from someone I know directly or indirectly from the past and that it has to do with something that’s been hidden.”

Stevens continued looking at her, but he didn’t say anything.

“You don’t believe in astrology, do you, Detective?”

He uncrossed his legs, sat back in the chair again, looking like a very focused Papa Bear sitting in Baby Bear’s chair. “It doesn’t take astrology to know whoever’s calling you is probably someone you’ve already had some kind of contact with and that he’s hiding things. He’s obviously hiding his identity, and he’s not even telling you the details of his grievance against you.”

Kelly liked the way Stevens said this. He wasn’t dismissive or condescending; he was just stating how he assessed what she’d told him.

“Is there anybody in your personal life who might have a reason to threaten you?” he asked.

She responded immediately. “No. Nobody.”

“What about your ex-husband?”

“Jack?” The tone of her voice reflected her skepticism. “It wasn’t Jack. I’d have recognized his voice.”

“You said the caller was whispering.”

Kelly was silent.

“Was it you who decided on the divorce?” he asked her.

“Yes, it was.”

“Then you were responsible for a woman walking out on him,” he observed.

“That’s ridiculous. Jack and I get along well. We saw each other just a few months ago at our daughter’s high school graduation. Whoever’s calling me, it’s not Jack.”

Stevens was quiet; then he asked, “What about the fireplace? You think the caller was responsible?”

Kelly hesitated; it was another question she’d thought about in the early hours of the morning. “The fire department said it was just debris that the wind carried.”

“I read their report.”

The way Stevens said this, Kelly couldn’t tell if he agreed with what the fire captain had told her or not. His opaque brown eyes and sallow face gave her no clue of what he thought, either.

“We’ll put a trace on your phone,” he said after a long silence. He ran his fingers through his close-cropped brown hair, a nervous habit, then took the police report he’d brought with him out of his pocket and unfolded it on his lap. “You’ve already given us
the number. 212-555-323—”

Kelly cut him off. “Oh my God! That’s my office number! That’s what he called the first time. But the second time he called my private number! Nobody has that number except my family and friends. How did he know my private number?”

Stevens saw Kelly’s alarm; it seemed she was only now realizing that the caller had already penetrated her life—or that he’d been in her life all along. Before he could say anything, there was a knock on her office door, and he turned around to see the petite black-haired woman who had let him in standing in the doorway.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But someone’s here to see you, Kelly. I told him you were busy, but—”

“That’s okay, Sarah. Who is it?”

“Chris Palmer.”

Stevens saw that this news made Kelly even more unhappy. Rising from her chair, she excused herself and told him she would be back in a minute. As he watched her follow the other woman out of the office, he thought Kelly seemed to disappear behind a facade under which he could sense her fear.

Kelly walked into Sarah’s office and found Chris waiting for her, holding a manila envelope. He was wearing the leather jacket he’d worn the night before and a black sweater and jeans. He glanced into the hallway, and then he turned to her and smiled. “Looks like you made a fire after I left last night. You should’ve let me stay.”

Kelly felt the muscles in her jaw tighten; she didn’t know what to say to him, what to think of him, so she said nothing.

He smiled again, this time with contrition. “I know I shouldn’t be joking about it. What happened, Kelly?”

His dark eyes seemed sympathetic, but all she could think
about was the tattoo of the skull on his arm and what he’d said to her before he left about making a fire in the fireplace. And he’d just talked about it again.

“I’m in the middle of something important,” she said, “so if you just came by to chat—”

“I printed some of the photographs for you and the contact sheets. They came out very well.” He opened the envelope and started taking out the photographs. “See what you think.”

“Thanks. But I don’t have time now.” She was doing her best to sound in control of herself.

Chris looked at her; then he tossed the envelope with the photos half out of it onto Sarah’s desk. “See you around sometime,” he said, hostilely sarcastic.

Kelly’s eyes remained on him as he walked into the hall and turned toward the front door. The carpenters were still working to replace the door, so it didn’t surprise her not to hear the door slam behind him as he left, but she knew he would have slammed it if he could have.

Without looking at Sarah, she walked back into her office, relieved that Chris was gone and that Detective Stevens was there.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Chris Palmer. A photographer for the magazine I write a column for.”

Instead of going back to sit in her chair, this time she sat in the other chair she used for clients, on the same side of the desk as Stevens.

“He was here last night?”

Kelly nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you know him well?”

“I just met him yesterday afternoon. He took my pictures for the magazine, and I invited him to dinner.” She felt foolish
telling Stevens this, but there was no point in not telling him.

“He went out of his way to bring you the photographs,” Stevens observed. “It would’ve been easier to send them on the computer. Obviously, he wanted to see you.”

Kelly met his eyes but said nothing.

“Maybe he wanted to see what was going on here this morning, after the chimney made the smoke back up.”

He saw in Kelly’s face that what he’d said troubled her. “What is it, Dr. York?”

“I’m not sure if I’m just imagining that it’s important, but—”

“But what?”

“After dinner, Chris suggested making a fire. I told him I was too tired and that he had to leave. But then, when I was alone, I did what he said. I made the fire in the fireplace.”

Kelly was looking at him as if she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. She glanced at the floor, as if what she was thinking embarrassed her. Stevens did nothing to fill the void in their conversation. Finally, she looked up at him again.

“He has a tattoo of a skull on his arm. He said he used to be a Goth, and it didn’t mean anything. But it scared me. That’s why I asked him to go.”