Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (6 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
, K
ELLY LAY
under the cover, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Meow was at the foot of the bed, and Kelly could hear her snoring as she slept with her head on Kelly’s ankle. She glanced down at King sleeping soundly in his bed on the floor. She looked at the clock. Its illuminated digits told her that it was 2:15. She looked at the silent phone beside it. Except for the subtle sounds of Meow’s snoring and King’s breathing, the whole house was silent.

She knew that if she just continued lying there, thinking about everything that was troubling her, she would be awake all night, and at some point she would see her room growing lighter with daybreak and be all the more depressed knowing that she hadn’t slept. Rather than staying in bed and ruminating, she got up, put on her bathrobe and slippers, and went into her upstairs study to work on her column. It was due in the morning, and normally she would’ve started writing it before now, but after looking up the aspects for her own chart, she’d been avoiding it. She found it difficult to concentrate on writing her column when her own aspects were so difficult.

Doing her best to emerge from her somber thoughts, she sat at her library table in front of her laptop computer. At the top of the file on her screen, she typed the words that would appear on this week’s column: “The Stars: Week of October 26th.” The sun sign for the week, of course, was Scorpio, as it had been
since October 23. In her previous column, she had written about the sun entering Scorpio and the opportunities this offered for deeper reflection. Now she would elaborate on this in the context of the aspects for the new week.

She picked up her ephemeris, the almanac she used to see the positions of the planets as they moved through the heavens throughout the years, and opened it to October 26. She already knew that in the coming week Mars would enter Capricorn, where it would eventually conjunct Pluto—an aspect that would affect everyone and that she had been concerned about.

As always, she would begin her column by telling her readers the exact time that a significant planetary movement would take place. She was glad to see that on October 26, Venus was traveling with the sun, an aspect that she could write about favorably.

Once she’d gotten the time from the ephemeris, she typed:

She consulted her ephemeris again and saw that Mars would conjunct Pluto on November 10. Aware that by the end of the coming week some of her readers would start feeling this influence, she stared at the screen as she thought about what she
wanted to write next; it was a problematic aspect, and she wanted to write about it as positively and constructively as possible.

Finally, she began to type:

Reading over what she had written, she realized once again that Mars conjuncting Pluto would add to the danger she had already seen in her own chart. She reviewed again what she’d written for her readers and thought about how she could write about these aspects in a way that was accurate but encouraging. After a few moments, she started typing:

She stopped again and asked herself exactly how she could be vigilant about the man who had called her when she didn’t know who he was or what he wanted from her. Of course she would do all she could to be vigilant about him. She wondered if maybe his phone call had really been a one-time occurrence, a vicious prank, if maybe the danger from anger that her chart indicated she would have to be careful about didn’t have to do with the caller but with her own anger at being trapped in her home because she was afraid to leave it. Maybe the best way to apply her own advice was to become even more vigilant about her thoughts, to learn precisely what it was that had suddenly made her so scared of the world beyond the threshold of her house that the brownstone was the only place she felt safe.

Or at least this was the only place she had felt safe. Until the phone call. She looked toward her business phone and wondered if the man would call again.

I
T WAS A
T
UDOR-STYLE
house on a picturesque block in one of New Kent, New Jersey’s best neighborhoods. The houses were all four-, five-, and six-bedroom homes that had been built seventy or eighty years ago, and the massive trees were older than that. The police had gotten a call at one thirty p.m. from the woman’s maid, who had just found the body. She’d let herself in to clean and had started downstairs. As soon as she’d gotten upstairs, she knew something was wrong. When she got to the master bedroom, she found out what it was.

Forty-five minutes later, George Rayburn, the medical examiner, was looking at the pallid white body sprawled naked on the bed, her brown hair draped over the side. He remarked to himself that in life the woman had been beautiful. He examined the deep red line gouged across her throat and thought she must have been strangled with something like a rope. Not a rope, though, or at least not a conventional one, because a rope would have shown the marks of its weave and this didn’t seem to have a weave.

Rayburn had just turned sixty-two. He’d been ME for the New Kent PD for twenty-four years, and in that capacity he’d examined a lot of dead bodies. It was not something that he particularly liked to do, but he was good at it, and he did like when his work helped catch a murderer. “She’s been dead ten to twelve hours. I’m not quite sure what she was strangled with,” he said.
“But I’ll find out.”

Frank Giordano, the detective in charge of the investigation, stood next to the older man, watching him. The top of the woman’s left thigh and the sheet under her were covered with blood, but before determining the source of the bleeding, Rayburn was carefully examining the inside of her thighs and her genitals.

“Signs of forced penetration,” he told Giordano. “She was raped before she was killed.”

On the second-floor landing outside the bedroom, Sergeant Lanie Warner was doing her best to comfort the crying cleaning woman, but the woman seemed inconsolable. Tom Hernandez, Giordano’s partner, walked past them into the bedroom. He hated to see women crying; he felt so bad for them that it threw him off his game.

He went over to Giordano and summarized what he’d found from his investigation of the house. “No windows open or broken, no door locks busted. Either she let him in, or he had a key or some other way to let himself in.”

Giordano glanced at him. “So what are we dealing with? Friend? Family member? Or fucking clever sadistic stranger?”

Before Hernandez could speculate, the ME interrupted. “Whoever it is, he has a penchant for astrology.”

Giordano and Hernandez looked at the body. Rayburn had cleaned the blood from the woman’s left thigh. He pointed to gashes that had been made in the flesh.

“These cuts,” he said. “They were made as she was dying, while her heart was still pumping. That’s why there was so much blood.” He stopped a moment and swallowed the repulsion he felt before going on. “At first I thought they were random. But they form a pattern. It’s an astrological sign. I’ve seen it in the astrology column in the newspaper.” He held his index finger
above the gashes and traced the design. “See? Here’s an arrow. The symbol for Sagittarius.”

Giordano stared at the murderer’s handiwork. “What the hell?”

Hernandez stared, too. Then he turned to Giordano. “I’d say we’re dealing with a sadistic stranger.”

Giordano couldn’t take his eyes off the arrow the murderer had carved into the woman’s thigh. He didn’t disagree with his partner. “Shit,” he said after a while. “That’s only going to make it harder to find him.”

S
ARAH HAD HAD AN
uneasy feeling all day. Kelly had been distant and preoccupied since this morning. Until lately, she’d been a woman who clearly enjoyed her life, who loved her children and her work, who wore her success casually and without pretension, and used the city like a playground. Even in the last several weeks, when Kelly had changed, she had made the effort to be cheerful. But today she hadn’t even tried. Sarah wondered if Kelly had just become more depressed about the problem she was having or if it was something else.

The only bright spot in Sarah’s gray day was that she’d gotten a call from Kevin, whom she’d seen the night before at the Met, and he’d made a dinner date with her for his night off. He’d sung the title role in
Faust
, and he’d sung it beautifully. When he’d embraced her backstage, she saw that he’d become warmer and more loving toward her in the time that he’d been away on tour, that he’d forgiven her for disappointing him. Seeing him last night, she’d begun falling in love with him all over again.

She opened the glass door at the rear of the kitchen and walked down the slate steps into the garden behind the brown-stone. In the dusky light, she could see Kelly in the greenhouse reaching up to a climbing rosebush. Approaching, she saw that King was in the greenhouse, too, staying close to Kelly as she snipped off a pink rose and added it to the roses in her hand. He
howled one of his friendly hello howls, and Kelly turned to see Sarah standing in the doorway.

“I’m about to leave,” Sarah told her. “I’m going to visit my mother.”

Kelly looked at the roses. “I picked these for her. I thought she’d like them better than roses from a flower store. I’ve just got to put a wet paper towel around the stems. They’re Zephirine Drouhins. They smell wonderful, and they have no thorns. Tell her it’s the first time I’ve been able to grow them.”

“She’ll love them.”

Kelly glanced down at the greenhouse floor before looking at Sarah again. “I’m sorry I was short-tempered with you this morning. I have a lot on my mind.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. I shouldn’t take it out on you and Emma.”

“You don’t usually,” Sarah told her.

Kelly kept her eyes on her. “That’s no excuse.”

“It’s all right. Really, Kelly.”

Sarah moved out of the doorway. As Kelly led King into the garden, Sarah could see that Kelly was still preoccupied.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?” she asked her.

Kelly shrugged. “No, I’m fine. I’m just making something out of nothing.”

Sarah looked at her, waiting for her to say more, but Kelly didn’t. Instead, she started walking toward the kitchen.

“How was the opera?” she asked. “How was Kevin?”

Sarah walked alongside Kelly and King. “Wonderful. I was very proud of him.”

“Are you still seeing each other?”

“We’re going to have dinner tomorrow night.”

Kelly’s face relaxed into a genuine smile. “I’m glad.”

They reached the glass door to the kitchen and Kelly turned to Sarah. “Tell your mother I’ll come visit her when she’s home.”

Sarah knew that on one level Kelly meant this, but the hesitation and strain in the way she’d said it told Sarah it was more of an excuse than a promise. It confirmed to her that she and Emma were right about Kelly’s problem. She wondered how long Kelly thought she could keep it a secret from them.

As Kelly walked with Sarah into the kitchen, she could tell from the expression on Sarah’s face that Sarah realized she wasn’t being honest with her, and she prayed that Sarah wouldn’t confront her about it. She knew from her training as a psychologist that keeping a problem hidden only increased the stress surrounding it, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. Especially not after the phone call that despite her best efforts to rationalize, continued to replay in her head. She wasn’t ready to talk about any of it right now. So she took the bouquet of roses to the sink and began preparing it for Sarah to take to her mother. That way her back was to Sarah, so Sarah couldn’t see her face, and maybe she could go on pretending that she wasn’t afraid to leave her home and that a man hadn’t called her and terrified her.

I
T HAD BEEN THE
kind of day that made Frank Giordano wonder if he’d be better off in some other line of work. Maybe any other line of work. The victim’s name was Jennifer McGraw. She’d been thirty-five years old and had been a freelance graphic artist who had worked in a studio behind her house. For five years she’d been married to a partner in a Wall Street brokerage firm, and she’d gotten the house in New Kent when they’d divorced two years before. Six months later, her ex-husband had died of a heart attack. They’d had no children.

The tech team hadn’t found any fingerprints in the house except those of the victim, the maid, and the victim’s parents and sister, who lived in Short Hills and who’d been there on Labor Day for a barbecue. According to the parents and sister, Jennifer had had no known enemies and not many friends, and, despite having lived in the house for seven years, she hadn’t really known any of her neighbors. Going door to door on both sides of the street, Giordano had concluded it wasn’t a very friendly neighborhood. None of Jennifer’s neighbors had seen or heard anything unusual, and they’d been more concerned about what her murder might mean about their own safety and property values than they were about the fact that she was dead.

Now Giordano and Hernandez were in the morgue with Rayburn, standing over the victim’s body, and the ME had just
told them there were no traces of semen in her genitals, no pubic hair mixed with hers, no skin cells or saliva except hers, no traces of the man who had raped and strangled her that would allow them to identify him through DNA analysis.