Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (20 page)

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Kelly. Nothing cuts it anymore. Not for you.”

Stevens heard the caller click off the line. “Shit,” he said to himself. He was only at 10th Avenue and 15th Street; Chelsea Piers was seven blocks away.

The cop who’d been monitoring the call came in over the radio: “Sorry he cut off before you got there.”

“Yeah,” Stevens said. “Me, too.”

“He used a prepaid cell phone. It’s probably in the Hudson by now.”

“Shit,” Stevens said for the third time that night.

K
ELLY WAS IN THE
living room sitting on the sofa with King curled up next to her when she heard a knock on the door. Detective Stevens had called to tell her he knew she’d received another phone call and that he was on his way. After that, she’d gotten dressed and had come downstairs to wait for him.

As she got up from the sofa and hurried into the hallway, King came with her, running between her legs as he always did. She had to gently push him out of the way so she could get to the door. She felt relieved when she looked through the peephole and saw Stevens. She unlocked both locks and opened the door for him. The moment he walked into the house and she’d closed the door so King wouldn’t get out, she turned to him and asked, “Do you know who he is?”

Stevens shook his head. “No. He used a phone he bought at a convenience store. A throwaway.”

She felt herself plunge again into despondency. “Then you’re never going to know who he is until it’s too late! Until he does something to me!”

All of a sudden she was crying. She hadn’t wanted to cry in front of Stevens, but she couldn’t stop herself.

He looked at her steadily. “That’s not true. I’ll find him.”

She tried to dry her eyes, but she kept crying. “I shouldn’t act like this—”

“That’s okay,” Stevens said.

Despite his reassuring words, Kelly got her crying under control and dried her eyes again. Then she asked him if he’d like a cup of tea and led him toward the kitchen.

“Have you started looking through your files?” he asked as he followed her and King.

“So far I’ve found four women who consulted with me about possibly leaving their relationships,” she said, turning on the kitchen light. “I wrote down their names, phone numbers, and addresses. Two of them gave me their boyfriends’ names, and two just gave me their birth date and time.” She handed him the information she’d taken from her files. “Any of these women could’ve broken off their relationship, and the men might have blamed me.”

Kelly watched as Stevens looked at the sheet of paper she gave him. She wished she could leave him with just that, but she knew she couldn’t. After a moment, she said: “I’ve been thinking, Detective. There are two other men it might be …”

She stopped speaking, and he could see how painful this was for her. “Just tell me, Dr. York.”

Kelly took a deep breath before she continued. “One of them was a boy my daughter, Julie, dated in high school. Billy Whitmore. She broke up with him the middle of her senior year. I remember her showing me this.” She took the letter she’d found from the pocket of her pants and gave it to Stevens. “I never told her to break up with him, but he blamed me. He said I was an astrologer and I should’ve known it was a mistake. But he’s only eighteen. Do you really think it could be him?”

Stevens was already reading the letter. So that was who Billy was; he’d heard Kelly ask the man on the phone if he was Billy.

“Age has nothing to do with it,” he said. He finished reading
the letter and put it in his pocket along with the other piece of paper she had given him. “You said two men. Who’s the other one?”

“Kevin Stockman.”

“Who’s Kevin Stockman?” he asked.

She still felt hesitant. “I don’t know … I could be wrong …”

“If you’re wrong, it doesn’t matter,” Stevens told her. “If you’re right, it could matter a lot.”

“Kevin is my assistant Sarah’s old boyfriend. I’ve always liked him.”

“Like age, that has nothing to do with it. Tell me why you think it might be him.”

“Because of what happened in their relationship,” Kelly explained. “Kevin is an opera singer. He and Sarah met at Juilliard, and they dated while he lived in New York. Then he started getting jobs in Europe, and he proposed to her. He wanted her to travel with him, but it would’ve meant giving up her career as a violinist. Today she told me how angry he was when she wouldn’t marry him. He knew she’d consulted with me. I never said she should turn him down, just that whatever decision she made, she would have to find a way to fulfill her own need for creativity. But he might not know that …”

Her blue eyes looked at Stevens with urgency for him to understand how unfair this was, that someone would hate her for something that she’d never even said. “What we talked about this morning is true, Detective Stevens. It doesn’t matter what I really said. It only matters what whoever is calling me thinks I said.”

Stevens’s eyes met hers; he wished there were something he could say to comfort her, but nothing came to mind. “Where is Kevin Stockman now?” he asked.

“He’s in New York, singing at the Met. He told Sarah he’s
found another woman, and they’re going to get married, but …”

Kelly stopped. She knew that if she continued, she would start crying all over again. She looked away from Stevens and took control of the emotions that were threatening to unmoor her and take her over.

“Why don’t you go stay with friends for a while or go to a hotel?” he suggested.

That was it, the trick question, a question that would not be a trick for anyone but her to answer. She didn’t answer him.

“What is it?” Stevens asked.

She looked at him and unleashed her frustration and bewilderment. “Everything,” she said. “Everything! My whole life! I can’t stay with anyone or go to a hotel because I can’t leave my house. I have agoraphobia. I’m afraid to leave. And now I’m afraid to stay. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore!”

If he saw urgency in her eyes before, now he saw desperation.

“I always believed that I knew a lot. I knew psychology and astrology, and between them I could make good decisions and help other people make good decisions and that everything would be better because of what I knew. I married my ex-husband knowing from his chart that he had a predilection for other women, but I thought I could bring out the best side of him instead. When that didn’t work, I comforted myself by telling myself I saw the potential for it from the start, and if I thought I could overcome it, that was my choice. But this! This—someone threatening my life—I didn’t see it!”

She looked at him and for a time said nothing.

“I told you that Mars is squaring my Pluto at the same time as Pluto is conjuncting my Mars,” she said after a while. “And that means danger. But what kind of danger? I’m not going to get run over by a car because I can’t leave my house! I never thought
somebody would want to come here and kill me! It makes me feel as though I don’t know anything anymore, that astrology is worthless … or that I’m worthless as an astrologer and as a psychologist.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said, “because it’s not true.”

“How do you know?”

“Because your column helped my wife, Diane.”

“How?”

“Two years ago, we were trying to have a baby, and she was about to give up. She’d had two miscarriages, and she felt so bad about herself, she started pulling away from me. I don’t know what you wrote, but it was something about obstacles for Aries being more temporary than they seemed and having the faith to stay committed to what you want. She opened up to me, told me how guilty she felt for miscarrying, and I told her I love her no matter what. Two months later she got pregnant.”

He took out his wallet and removed a photograph that he held out to Kelly. “That’s Anthony,” he said. “He was fourteen months old last week.”

Kelly took the photo of the small boy with a lot of brown hair, an open smile, full cheeks, and shining brown eyes not unlike his father’s. She was still crying, but not for herself anymore; it made her cry to see such a beautiful child.

“My marriage means everything to me,” Stevens told her. “I don’t know what would’ve happened if Diane hadn’t read your column.”

Kelly looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t believe in astrology.”

“I don’t know if I believe in it. But I believe you do help people. And I’m going to get this guy. Whoever he is. You got my word on it.”

Kelly could tell these weren’t just words to Stevens; he meant them with the full force of his being. “Thank you, Detective Stevens,” she said. “And thank you for showing me your lovely son.” As she handed the photograph back to him, she was no longer crying.

“I feel like you’ve given me the most important things in my life,” Stevens said to her. “My wife and my son. That’s why when I saw the report, I wanted to work this case. I want to do something for you. Why don’t you put up that tea now, and I’ll go over the information you wrote down about those clients to see if I’ve got any questions.”

He watched Kelly go to the stove for the teakettle and take the kettle to the sink to fill with water. He could tell she was feeling a little better. He hoped that one of the men she’d told him about tonight would turn out to be the caller.

H
E’D MADE GOOD TIME
driving to Tarrytown. And he’d made good time getting to the house, a rambling suburban ranch with mock weathered shingles and a shingled roof. He’d had no trouble getting in, of course; all he’d had to do was use the keys he’d made to open the locks and then cut the chain with a wire cutter. If she’d had an alarm, he could’ve taken care of that, too; he would’ve gotten her to tell the code to him the same way he’d gotten her to tell him everything else. Or she might have even written it down and kept it in her purse; he’d seen that before. And if she’d had a dog, he would’ve taken care of the dog as well. He had his ways.

But it had been easy. All of it. And Cassie herself was the easiest of all of them. When she felt his knees pressing against her body and looked up and saw his ski-masked face, she cried out, but just a little, and then she gave up. And then she gave in. And now she was no more.

Gripping the instrument in his surgical-gloved hand, he inserted the point into her thigh and began to carve what looked like the Roman numeral II, the symbol for Gemini.

He was still hard. It always excited him to see how well his plans worked. He hoped that this time when the police found what he’d done, they’d tell the newspapers and television about how he’d marked her body with her zodiac sign. It was
disappointing that until now they’d only said that the women he’d so carefully chosen had been raped and strangled. Leaving out his astrological expertise somehow made his accomplishments less personal, but it didn’t render them less satisfying.

K
ELLY FELT THE HOT
spray of the shower run over her body. It made her feel almost as if she were starting all over again with the new day. She found herself thinking about what Detective Stevens had told her the night before about how much her column had meant to his wife and to him. It felt good to know she’d helped them, that what she’d written, based on the disposition of the planets, about Diane’s problem being temporary and the necessity of staying committed to what she wanted, had not only proven true but had been what Diane had needed to hear.

She turned off the water, got out of the shower, and started to dry herself with her white terry-cloth towel. Besides thinking about his wife, she’d also been thinking about the women whose names she’d given the detective because they’d consulted with her about troubled relationships. As she’d reviewed their files and read her notes about them, she’d begun to picture some of them in her mind. She hadn’t had enough time to go over their charts or the charts of their husbands or boyfriends, and now she wondered what their charts would tell her. She decided that she would look at them and see. In the meantime, Detective Stevens was going to find out what he could learn about the men, so no time was being wasted.

She hung the towel on the rack. As she reached for her bathrobe, she was surprised to see King padding into the bathroom
carrying a bone in his mouth. She generally didn’t give him bones, and neither did Emma or Sarah.

“Where did you get that?” she asked him. “Did someone throw it into the garden?”

King looked up at her with his light blue eyes and gave her a soft howl, as if to say he hoped she would stop asking questions and just let him keep it. She pried the bone out of his mouth and looked it over. It was a leather bone, the kind sold in pet stores. It was in very good shape; in fact, it looked new. She bent down and smiled as she gave it back to King. “Looks like you got yourself a bone,” she told him.

Sarah was downstairs straightening her office. She’d been ready to take Kelly’s advice and stay home, but when she’d woken up that morning, she realized that she wanted to go to work. The night before she had practiced her part in Janáček’s String Quartet no. 1 for three hours, and playing the magnificent music had made her realize that, despite missing Kevin, she was still able to enjoy music and hopeful about the opportunities that the upcoming concert would create for her quartet. Part of what made her feel this sense of hope was the support Kelly gave her to pursue her career as a violinist, and it made her want to come to the brownstone to support Kelly.