Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (7 page)

“What other bad news do you have for me?” Giordano asked him.

“No more bad news; just inconclusive,” Rayburn said. With his index finger, he pointed to the bow and arrow that had been gouged into the victim’s left thigh. “These cuts weren’t made with a knife. They were made with some other sharp-pointed instrument. Something like a needle or a nail. I’m not sure what yet.”

“What did he strangle her with?” Hernandez asked.

Rayburn took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. “I’m still working on that, too.”

Giordano let out a deep sigh.

Hernandez saw his partner had fallen into one of his funks. He patted him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Frank. The guy’s not going to get away with it.” As he led Giordano out of the morgue, he added, “Let’s not release details to the media. Nothing about the astrology angle. Meanwhile we’ll check if any other murder reports have come in with similar MOs.”

Giordano let out another sigh. He’d learned that in situations like this one, the only thing you could do was to put one foot in front of the other and assume that maybe one day you would actually get somewhere.

S
ARAH’S PARENTS LIVED IN
the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in the same house in which she’d been raised. The rehabilitation facility to which her mother, Rose, had been moved from the hospital after her stroke was four miles away. The emotional distance between the two was vast: Sarah’s childhood home was a cozy brown-shingled two-story house with a small garden; the rehabilitation facility was a nondescript box with cinder-block walls that fronted on a decaying sidewalk and was flanked by alleys. Walking toward it, Sarah gripped the handle of her violin case more tightly and moved the bouquet she was carrying closer to her chest in an unconscious effort to stave off the desolate feeling that she had begun to have the moment she’d caught sight of the ugly, sterile building. Her only consolation was that the doctors anticipated that Rose would be able to return home within the next ten days.

Sarah’s father, Sam had been a contractor, but he’d retired two years before. He’d worked in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan and had done everything from home repair to partial renovations to building homes. He’d loved his work, but he loved his wife more, and he’d decided to retire so they could spend the rest of their lives together, enjoying each other’s company and traveling. Sarah had applauded his decision and been thrilled when he and Rose had taken a trip to Italy and then another trip to Greece,
Turkey, and Israel. Two months after they’d returned from Israel, Rose had had a stroke. She’d been in the garden, putting mulch in the flower beds to prepare for the autumn and winter weather. Sam may have retired, but Rose, although no longer a nurse, had found things to do from morning until night, and that day she’d been working in the garden for more than five hours.

When Sarah entered her mother’s room in the convalescent home, Sam was sitting beside Rose’s bed, talking to her about the World Series. He and Rose were both baseball fans, and since he had to carry on the conversation himself, he liked picking topics that he could expound on while looking into her attentive green eyes, which showed she understood everything even though she wasn’t yet able to speak. His face brightened as Sarah came in carrying her violin case and the flowers.

Sarah put the violin case on the floor and kissed her father on the cheek. “Hi, Dad.”

He smiled as he looked up at her. “Hi, sweetie.”

She turned to her mother and showed her the bouquet of pink roses. “Kelly sent these to you. She grew them in the greenhouse.” She placed the flowers in her mother’s left hand and watched as her mother’s fingers moved to hold them. She noticed that as Rose looked at the flowers, her mouth curved into a slight smile. It made Sarah happy. The doctor was right; her mother was making progress.

“The nurse said she’ll bring in a vase.”

Sarah saw her mother’s eyes focus on the violin case.

“We’ve got a rehearsal tonight. I’m excited about the concert.”

Rose glanced up at Sarah. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but no sound came out. After a moment, she closed her lips. In her mother’s eyes, Sarah saw tears from the pain of not being able to talk.

“That’s okay, Mom,” she said. “I know you’re proud of me. And I know you’ll be able to talk soon. Three days ago you couldn’t move your fingers on your left hand; now you can. You can even move your arm. And when I gave you the flowers, you smiled. Your smile has come back, too.”

Rose looked at her daughter and, with great effort, nodded.

“You moved your head, Mom!”

Sam took hold of his wife’s right hand and squeezed it. “That’s great, Rose.”

Rose looked at the flowers again.

“Roses for Rose,” Sam said.

Sarah sat on the chair beside her father’s and moved it closer to the bed. “Remember, Mom, when Kelly’s granny had Dad build the greenhouse? I was eight. I remember the day Dad finished, you took me to work with you at Kelly’s grandmother’s because it was a school holiday. The only greenhouse I’d ever seen was at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’d never imagined someone could have one in their own backyard! I remember her sitting in her wheelchair in the garden, telling you all the flowers she was going to raise in that greenhouse, and she did!”

As she remembered the day Sarah was talking about, Rose’s lips curved into a slight smile again, and her eyes looked wistful. She was thinking about Kelly’s grandmother, Irene; Irene had been more than just a patient to Rose; she had been a close and dear friend.

As if reading her mind, Sarah said: “You really loved Kelly’s granny. I bet she lived ten years longer because of you.”

Sam squeezed his wife’s hand again. “Your mother was the best damned nurse anybody ever had. Irene was lucky to have you.”

Rose’s eyes were full of tears again. So were Sam’s and so were
Sarah’s.

“I love you so much, Mama,” Sarah told her. “I just know you’re going to get well.”

Rose looked at her daughter again and, with great concentration, slowly nodded her head.

K
ELLY WAS GLAD TO
see the Dennisons. Michelle Dennison was her closest friend. They’d met at NYU when Kelly had gone back to get her BA after her divorce from Jack. Michelle had been premed; Kelly had majored in psychology. They’d sat next to each other in a psychology class that had ended at noon, and they’d often spotted each other having a quick lunch between classes in the coffee shop on University Place, just north of Washington Square. One day they’d sat next to each other at the counter and begun talking, and that was that—they were friends for life. Whether this was despite their different backgrounds or because of them, Kelly couldn’t say; all she knew was that at NYU she’d felt more comfortable with Michelle than she did with other women their age, and nearly two decades later she still felt the same way.

Kelly had been twenty-three and already had Jeff and Julie when she’d met Michelle. As a psychologist, she’d come to understand since then that it was because of her parents’ deaths when she was a child that she’d married Jack and had children at such a young age. Unconsciously wanting to replace the family she’d lost, she’d been so eager to start her own family that she’d instantly accepted Jack’s proposal. She’d been so moved that he loved her and wanted to marry her that she’d ignored the female fans she’d seen waiting for him outside the locker room when
he’d played football at Northwestern, and then later when he’d joined the New York Jets.

At the time Kelly had become friends with Michelle, Michelle had been twenty-one, and, like most women at the college, hadn’t yet been married or had children. Michelle had been brought up Jewish in a suburb of Duluth, Minnesota, and had lived in the NYU dormitory on Washington Square, in Greenwich Village. Kelly had been born Episcopalian and raised with a New Age spirituality that her grandmother had practiced long before people had begun calling it
New Age
. She’d lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan most of her life, and she’d commuted from there to NYU on the subway. Manhattan had been a constant source of excitement for Michelle; Kelly had loved it but taken it for granted; she’d thought of it as just
home
. Michelle had brought Kelly out of herself and her sorrow about her divorce by encouraging her to go to the theater, museums, and concerts with her; she’d loved getting to know Kelly’s children, her grandmother Irene, and Emma and Rose. It had been such a different household from the one that Michelle had grown up in, and as a future doctor, she had been inspired by Irene’s positive attitude in dealing with the MS that had bound her to a wheelchair.

Michelle had also encouraged Kelly to go to graduate school to get her PhD in psychology, and the two of them compared notes about the massive amounts of work each of them had to do while Michelle was in medical school at Columbia and Kelly was in the doctoral program at NYU. When Michelle had started dating Mark Dennison, who’d been freelance writing for magazines at the time, she’d arranged for Kelly to meet him and give her approval, which Kelly had done, and the couple had soon gotten engaged. Michelle had tried fixing up Kelly with some of Mark’s friends, and although Kelly had dutifully gone out on
dates with them, even seeing some of them three or four times, nothing had ever worked out.

Michelle and Kelly had talked about it, and Michelle had accepted the fact that going to school full time and raising two small children, even with the help of Irene, Emma, and Rose to watch them while she was at class, was as much as Kelly could handle. And Kelly was still getting over her divorce from Jack. He’d been her first and only love. She’d thought they were married for life, and then she’d found out he’d been unfaithful to her repeatedly. She hadn’t really been ready to trust men after that, and that included Mark’s friends, however charming they’d been and however interested they’d been in Kelly.

It had taken her a while to understand this, too, and to heal from her divorce. Since then, she’d gradually begun to date, and she’d had three relationships over the last ten years. The most recent one was with a doctor friend of Michelle’s. They’d broken up the year before because he’d wanted a relationship that was heading toward marriage and starting a family, and they both knew that theirs wasn’t going in that direction. It had been a sad but amicable split.

As she’d looked at Michelle and Mark at the dinner table in the living room of the brownstone, Kelly had been tempted to tell them about her agoraphobia, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit it, even to her best friend. She was also tempted to tell them about the phone call. Now they were in her upstairs study, finishing off a bottle of cabernet and taking turns looking through Kelly’s telescope, which she’d set up at the window, angled over the low building next door.

At the moment, Mark was at the telescope. He’d taken off his blazer and loosened his tie and was bending his tall frame so that he could gaze through the eyepiece. “Jesus! The moon looks
like it’s next door. But it looks cold! Not the kind of place I’d like to live.”

Michelle poured herself another half glass of wine. “No one’s asking you to move there, silly!” She took a sip of the cabernet and then added teasingly: “On second thought, that might not be a bad idea. You’re always saying the house is too noisy. It would be very quiet on the moon.”

“I see a couple of stars, too,” Mark said amiably. “Maybe it would be better if I moved to one of them.”

Kelly laughed. “They’re probably not stars. They’re probably Venus and Saturn.”

Mark continued looking through the telescope. “Well, whatever they are, I see them. But that doesn’t mean I believe they influence my life.”

Michelle gave him a gentle poke in the butt. “That’s not very nice, Mark.”

“That’s okay, Mich,” Kelly told her. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.”

Mark straightened up his lanky body and turned to Kelly. “I don’t believe that. Words are powerful, and they can hurt you. Not that I meant to hurt you with what I said about astrology.”

“Of course not,” Michelle said. “You’re just a wiseass. He reads your column every week, Kelly.”

“Just for entertainment,” Mark corrected her. “I don’t actually pay attention to it.”

“Well, I do. In fact, I planned our vacation for the time Kelly said it would be good to travel. And we had a fabulous time, didn’t we?”

“Yes, we did,” Mark conceded.

Kelly heard her friends talking in the kidding way they always did, but she wasn’t really paying attention. She was looking
at the phone she’d answered in the early-morning darkness and remembering what she’d heard.

“And if I recall,” Michelle told her husband, “you waited till Kelly said it was a good time to sign contracts before signing your last book contract.”

Mark snorted dismissively. “That was a coincidence. I would’ve signed it right away, but I misplaced it, and—”

“The dog ate your homework, right?” Michelle countered. “He pays attention to every word you write.” She looked at Kelly and noticed that her friend was preoccupied. “You’re not taking him seriously, Kell, are you?”

Kelly attempted a smile. “Of course not.”

“Good. Nobody should ever take him seriously.”

“I concur,” Mark said emphatically. “I don’t even take myself seriously.”

Michelle saw that Kelly had withdrawn into herself again. She walked over and took her hand. “What is it, Kelly?”

Kelly looked at her friends. “I was just thinking about what you said, Mark. About how words can hurt you.” She felt her chest tighten and took a deep breath before continuing. “A man called me the other night. Four in the morning. I asked him if he knew what time it was, and he said, ‘You’re the one who doesn’t know what time it is.’ It wasn’t just the words. It was the way he said it. It scared me.”

Mark’s ruddy face was serious now. “Did you call the police?”

Kelly nodded. “They said it was probably nothing. But if he calls again, they’ll monitor my phone.”