Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (31 page)

“Do you want to go out, boy?” she asked King. “Do you want to go into the garden?”

The dog looked up at her and rubbed up against her, apparently just wanting to be with her and not needing to go out. Blocking the view of the mini-cam in the hall, she closed the door to Sarah’s office and then went into her own office with King right behind her. He seemed to be looking at her crutches, trying to figure out why she suddenly had these long wooden appendages to her body.

“Don’t worry, boy,” she said. “They’re just temporary.”

She put her ephemeris on the desk and was about to go to her chair when she noticed that the files she’d eliminated because the men didn’t match Agent Winslow’s criteria were sitting in a
pile and needed to be returned to the cabinet. Leaning on the crutches, she reached down and, with her right hand, tried to pick up all ten files at once. For a moment she thought she was successful, but one of the files fell out of her grasp and landed on the floor, spilling its contents.

She propped the crutches against the desk and, keeping her weight off her right foot as much as possible, bent down to pick up the manila folder and the papers it had contained. She picked up the initial information sheet and saw that the file was Arthur Jones’s. She remembered reviewing it and seeing that five years ago, when she had seen him on the last leg of her book tour, Arthur Jones had been forty and married with one son.

She put the page back into the folder and her eyes fell on the chart she had drawn for him. It had fallen upside down, so that, from the angle at which she now viewed it, the astrological houses that should be at the bottom of the chart were at the top and those that should have been at the top were at the bottom. Instead of reaching for the chart, she just stared at this new configuration. Before, when she was reading through the files, she was so anxious that her eyes had blurred; now she was seeing perfectly clearly. She extended her hand, picked up the chart, and turned it right side up. Then she rose to her feet.

“Let’s see what this has to tell us,” she said to King.

The FBI agents in Baltimore were alerted by the local cops who’d gotten the APB that Scott Green’s car was parked in a lot at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. His parking ticket had been stamped at 10:17 a.m. yesterday morning. They decided to check the airline rosters to learn the destination to which Green had flown. While they waited for the airlines to
give them the information, they played the Hypothetical Game and came up with different possibilities for why Green might have taken a plane to the New Jersey–New York area when the drive was just over three and a half hours.

Could be the man was in a rush. If he was the serial rapist and murderer, could be he’d targeted a woman he wanted to get to right away. Or could be he wasn’t going to the New Jersey–New York area at all; could be he had a sense the FBI was closing in on him and he’d flown to a country that didn’t have extradition.

Kelly brought Arthur Jones’s chart into the garden and waited for Agent Winslow. It was close to five o’clock and, knowing that the garden would be cooler than it had been an hour before, she had put on a heavier sweater. Standing by the steps that led to the rear door of Emma’s apartment, she could hear Winslow ending a call by telling whoever was on the other end of the phone to check New York hotels, cabs, car rentals, and limousine companies.

When Winslow came up the steps from Emma’s apartment into the garden, she was perturbed. She gave Kelly a look that told her whatever she had to say was a waste of time.

“It’s Arthur Jones,” Kelly said excitedly, ignoring the FBI agent’s attitude. “He’s Antiochus, the man who raped and murdered those women.”

Winslow stared at her. “Who is Arthur Jones?”

Kelly gave her the file. “I did his chart in Baltimore, the day before I went to Washington, the day before I noticed my old ephemeris was missing.”

Winslow opened the folder in the fading daylight and looked at the first page of the file. “Arthur Jones was forty when you saw
him. He’d be forty-five now, and we know that—”

Kelly didn’t let her finish. “You don’t know how old the man who’s calling himself Antiochus is. He could be forty-five and only have looked younger to the clerks at the hotels.”

Winslow was still reading the information in the file. “Arthur Jones is married and he has a child. That doesn’t fit our profile.”

“That’s only what he
told
me,” Kelly said. “But he could have lied. If I’m right, he can’t help lying. He—”

“I just got a call about Scott Green,” Winslow told her. “He took a plane from Baltimore to Newark Airport yesterday. This is the fifth time he’s made the trip this month. Four of those dates coincide with the dates on which victims were raped and murdered. Green fits our profile. We think he’s our man.”

“But it’s not in his chart,” Kelly said adamantly. Despite her effort to control herself, she was angry at Mary Ann Winslow all over again. “I told you that when I gave it to you!”

Winslow looked at Kelly levelly. “What suddenly makes you think it’s Arthur Jones? Is there something in the notes you took about him that reminded you of the threats you’ve been getting on the phone?”

“No,” Kelly said. “It’s his chart. That’s what tells me it’s him.”

Winslow didn’t say anything; she just looked at Kelly with her usual reserve.

“I realized something about Arthur Jones’s chart,” Kelly continued. “It tells me he has the potential for cruelty and violence. At first I didn’t even look at the chart I’d prepared for him, because I was doing what you said, only trying to find men who’d be in their midthirties now. Since I didn’t look at his chart, I didn’t ask myself what it would mean if he’d given me the correct birth date but the wrong birth time. But then his chart fell on the floor, and when I picked it up, I looked at it, and I realized …”

She stopped for a moment and started over again intently. “I think his real birth time was twelve hours later than the birth time he gave me. I’ve had it happen before, when clients inadvertently misread the time on their birth certificate or they wrote it down wrong, and they think it’s a.m. when it was really p.m. Then they find out and call to tell me their mistake. But I don’t think Arthur Jones made a mistake at all. I think he did it on purpose to test me.”

She looked at Mary Ann Winslow to make sure that she was listening. “Antiochus is calling himself an
intuitive astrologer
, like me. I think he lied during our consultation and gave me the right birth date but told me his birth time was nine a.m. instead of nine p.m. because he wanted to see if I was intuitive enough to recognize what he’d done and to know who he really was and what his chart should show about him.

“He had to give me the right date, because he had to give at least one astrological clue to who he is, but the time—that’s where the test was. He was daring me to know intuitively just from being in the room with him that he couldn’t have been born at nine a.m. that morning. To be who he is, he had to be born twelve hours later.

“That kind of devious test would go along with everything you’ve told me about Antiochus. And it goes with what I see in Arthur Jones’s revised chart. If he was born at nine p.m., everything would make sense.”

“How?” Winslow asked, no longer quite as reserved.

“If he was born at nine p.m.,” Kelly said, “the planets would have been in different houses than they would have been at nine a.m. So that means they paint an entirely different picture of him. If he was born at nine a.m., like he told me he was, his Mars would be in the fourth house and his Mars would have been
squared to Pluto in the seventh house, which would make him the victim of angry people who lied to him. His challenge would be to learn to stand up for himself and commit to his capacity to heal, which he would’ve had in abundance. That’s what I told him, because I believed his lies.

“But if he was really born at nine p.m., Mars would be in the tenth house, and if he gave in to his anger, he would be mad at the world. At nine p.m., Pluto is conjunct with his ascendant and his moon. He could be the
agent
of violence. He could want to get even with everybody, especially women, because of his mother. She would have been obsessive and controlling and cruel.

“Lying would be as easy for this man as breathing. He said he’s married, but he told me his wife’s name is Nona. Nona as in none, nonexistent. He said his son was named Niel, like the Latin word
nihil
, nothing. Arthur Jones’s wife and son aren’t real. He made them up, and he gave me the clues to know that if I’d been intuitive enough to realize he was lying. Arthur Jones could steal my ephemeris as a point of pride, and he could rape and kill without regret. That’s not who Scott Green is.”

“How do you know that?” Winslow asked. “How do you know Scott Green didn’t test you by giving you the incorrect birth time, too?”

“Because I recalculated his chart and David Wheaton’s by changing their birth times by twelve hours, too,” Kelly told her, “and either way, the charts didn’t show them having the slightest propensity to be murderers.” She looked at Mary Ann Winslow and spoke as if her life depended on it. “I feel strongly that it’s Arthur Jones. Please. Please just see if it’s him.”

Winslow closed the folder. Despite herself, she’d been thinking about what Kelly had said earlier about her being emotional but hiding her feelings, and she realized that it was true. She was
emotional, and she hated letting other people see it. If Kelly was right about her, maybe Kelly was right about Arthur Jones. “All right,” she said finally.

FBI A
GENT
G
AIL
R
OTHMAN
learned that Scott Green had checked into the New York Skyway Hotel on 6th Avenue and 53rd Street that day just before one p.m. Now Rothman was standing in the hotel corridor, outside room 359, waiting for Green to answer the door. Winslow had wanted Broadbent to call on Green, but Broadbent was stuck in his car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so Rothman had to go in his place, and she took fellow agent Howard Gary with her as backup.

The door to the hotel room was opened by a dark-haired, dark-eyed man whom Rothman recognized as Scott Green. His shirt was half open, and even before they spoke, he looked at the two FBI agents anxiously.

“Scott Green,” Rothman said, holding up her badge so she could see it. “We’ve got some questions for you.”

Green ran his hand over his perspiring forehead. “Come in.”

Stevens’s fourteen-month-old son, Anthony, was sitting in his high chair as his father cut a piece of chicken for him. When Stevens finished cutting a small slice, he lifted it on a fork to Anthony’s mouth. Anthony opened his mouth, took the chicken off the fork, and smiled proudly as he started chewing it. Usually, this expression of infant prowess tickled Stevens and made him
laugh; tonight he was too absorbed in his thoughts to be pulled out of them, even by Anthony.

Diane was setting the table for dinner. She looked at her husband and saw that instead of sitting in his chair with his usual straight posture, he sat with his huge shoulders drooped, as if he were carrying a physical burden.