The Prophet Motive (4 page)

The local business folks, tourists, and counter culture aficionados were out in force. Normally, the streets would be teeming with students too, for the University of California at Berkeley’s campus ran up the nearest hillside. Yet because the Spring quarter had just ended and the first Summer session had yet to begin, few people of college age roamed the vicinity.

Marilyn’s disguise took advantage of the missing students. She was trying to pass herself off as an alienated and lonely college age drop-out, someone considered the easiest of pickings by cult recruiters. Until the students returned, she would be a highly visible target in a highly active cult recruiting area.

Her true age didn’t concern her much. She’d been blessed with youthful genes and kept a trim body. Even at thirty-two, she was still getting carded in restaurants and quite often when buying wine from a store. But she couldn’t help worrying about her ignorance of the latest youth lingo. Marilyn hadn’t known much of it even as a
real
youth. She’d been a nerd all her life.

At least she no longer worried about her disguise. In creating one for herself, the team of cops she was supposed to be working with hadn’t been too helpful—none of them really wanted her involved in the undercover operation, least of all John Richetti—but this morning she’d enlisted the aid of a ring-nosed street teen with scum green hair, nicknamed Chlorine, who’d given Marilyn a stark make-over—or
make-ugly
, as Chlorine had called it.

The make-ugly had cost her the beauty salon-like price of one hundred and twenty dollars. What little remained of her blonde tresses had been snipped into a catastrophe of points and knots and snaking bare skull—the preferred coiffure of the young, the alienated, the high, and the destitute. For another fifty bucks, Chlorine’s transvestite friend, Big O, had sold Marilyn a soiled, ratty Tee shirt—emblazoned with the word,
Greenpeace
—and a smelly canvass backpack with a broken zipper.

On the sidewalk, just up ahead, a small crowd had gathered to listen to a female guitarist singing a Grateful Dead song with a Euro-accent.

Truck-ink . . . down to New Orleans

Truck-ink . . .

Marilyn halted, seeking a path to slither her lean, Amazonian frame through the crowd. A hand gripped her upper arm.

Turning, she confronted an aged female face, sunburnt, with grime highlighting every line, a face like an antique mosaic.

“What are you up to?” demanded the old woman, her breath as foul as the air above a freshly churned garbage disposal.

Marilyn recoiled. “I beg your pardon?” She reached for her purse, expecting to be accosted for spare change.

“I seen you pass by here all day today,” the old woman said. “Again ’n again ’n again.”

“I’m afraid you’ve—you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

The old woman shook her head in disagreement. “Ungh-ungh. I seen you, seen you all day.” She leaned in closer. “What sort of trouble you in, anyway? You a runaway?”

“I’m not in any kind of trouble, and I’m not a runaway. If you’ll excuse me—”

“Be straight with me, now,” the old woman said, roughly cupping Marilyn’s cheek. “I can sense trouble, and you . . . you got it, child. Better come on over.”

The old woman moved toward a rickety card table set against the building wall, one folding metal chair on each side. On top of the table stood a glass jar of cash and a neat fan of tarot cards. “We’ll see now,” said the fortune-teller, “see what fate has in store for you.”

But Marilyn would have no more to do with her. Without another word, she turned and mixed into the crowd. The fortune-teller called after her.

“Hey you! Come back here!”

Marilyn sped half a block, then jaywalked across the intersection, a twinge of panic in her chest. Superstition, although officially banished to the innermost recesses of her highly educated brain, had made one of its periodic returns from exile.
What if the fortune-teller is a bad omen
?

She shook off the notion—more or less—only to be overtaken by self-doubt, and she wrenched to a stop on the sidewalk.
Is this a mistake? Will I be out of my depth working an undercover homicide investigation? And what about this John Richetti? Will I be safe with a partner like that
?

The night before, she’d made a surprise visit to his condominium, slipping by him in the doorway—him and his tinkling glass of scotch on the rocks—before a word had been spoken. He’d been wearing his work clothes still, only with the shirttail out.

“Stopped by your house,” she’d said as she swiftly circumnavigated the living room, scanning everything in sight from floor to ceiling, sniffing the air. “Only you don’t live there anymore, turns out.”

This was no typical bachelor pad—no dirty laundry strewn about the floor, or over the backs of chairs, no rotting food smells, no furniture dust you could do math problems in. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture at all, in fact, just a white wicker sofa and a matching coffee table facing an old TV—tuned to The Simpsons. The beige walls were stark naked.

John slammed his front door shut and recovered his smoldering cigarette from an otherwise empty ashtray on the coffee table. “My wife has a big mouth, telling you where to find me.”

“Not big enough. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here now.”

He blinked like a man who’d been drinking for hours, slow as a drawbridge. “What do you want to know?”

“Whatever it is you don’t want me to know.”

“You tell Teresa about Earthbound?”

“Of course not. I know better than to compromise a homicide investigation, even with the wife—soon to be ex-wife—of the lead investigator. But why ask me that? Oh, of course. You’d love to provide headquarters with a sound reason to pull me off the case. Well, the feeling’s mutual, now that I know you better.”

She zipped by him into an immaculate kitchen smelling of pine and soap. Despite John’s built-in dishwasher, a pile of clean dishes dried in a dish rack by the sink. Not The Simpsons, but The Odd Couple crossed her mind. Only here was Felix and Oscar in the same body.

He pounded to a halt behind her. “Now what? You want to fix yourself a snack?”

She faced him. “What’s the matter, John? Your dishwasher broke? Or it doesn’t quite get the job done for you?”

He crossed his arms and glared. “Quit it, Doc. Quit snooping around, trying to psycho-analyze me, because it’s pointless. You can’t get rid of me, and I can’t get rid of you.”

On the sidewalk, a hunchbacked homeless man, his face shrouded by winter scarves, jostled Marilyn on his way by. She resumed her trek.

At the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue, she noticed a pamphlet distributor that she had not seen before, a slender young man in chinos and a button-down shirt with a solid green necktie—or a tie with one stripe, depending on one’s point of view. She crossed the street at the next traffic light and approached him, hoping once again that she’d found an Earthbound cult recruiter—the predator she’d been stalking in reverse.

She had no way to reduce her suspects by race or sex or age, but a pamphlet pusher of ecological concerns would most likely be the predator, whose favorite prey all shared one easily observable trait: commitment to preserving the environment.

Marilyn threw back her shoulders and thrust her chest out to give the pamphlet pusher a clear view of her ratty Greenpeace Tee shirt as she crossed in front of him. He was busy hollering now, hollering the same thing over and over again.

“Help stop the world population explosion!”

The pusher handed Marilyn one of his banana yellow sheets and repeated his unwavering shout almost directly into her ear.

“Help stop the world population explosion!”

She stopped to read the pamphlet. Its message was of the type she’d expected and hoped for: idealistic, cryptic hyperbole.

Do you feel as if the world has gone totally mad
?

But nobody seems to notice? Have you sensed

the growing anarchy in today’s so-called modern society?

The problem stems from the growing lack of
equilibrium
on planet Earth. The rampant and unrestrained
over-population
of human beings on every continent has
destroyed
the delicate
harmony
that until recently existed between man and nature. This has led to
disruptions
in the planet’s
magnetic energy flow patterns
, which we now know effects human brain waves ...

The zany literature might’ve been churned out by any number of local cults—or by the just plain nutty. For cults pamphlets such as this one gave their distributors an excuse to beg from passers-by. The pamphlets also helped to identify individuals who could be swayed by emotion, even in the plain absence of logic. For those seduced, rather than repelled, by a particular flyer’s message, a phone number or mailing address was typically printed at the bottom of the text, where more information—if not complete salvation—could be found.

She examined the sheet closely. The sponsor’s name wasn’t written anywhere, and the pamphlet pusher himself wouldn’t provide it, she assumed. For when cult members took to the streets to collect donations, or to lure potential converts, they usually hid their cult affiliation. In fact, new cult converts were often not told the name of their cult until they’d been thoroughly indoctrinated.

She read a paragraph on the need for preserving nature, which made her hopeful that she held in her hand an Earthbound document. But her hope died in the third paragraph when she read testament to the magical, healing power of red crystals. The pamphlet and the pusher belonged to Gnosis, a local New Age cult.

“Help stop the world population explosion!” The Gnosis recruiter shook the coins in his coffee can at her.

Marilyn balled up her yellow sheet of paper and tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. Then she marched two blocks to the Alternative Living Medicine Health Clinic, where the staff treated the ache and throb in her feet with a massage, herbal tea, and a Buddhistic incantation.

After nightfall, the streets of Berkeley turned rougher. As Marilyn skirted by the junkies lounging in People’s Park, a dealer approached her, whispering the latest nicknames for his drugs. “Joystick? Elephant X? Red Screamers?” A homeless man felt free to urinate in the street, and in an alley behind a music store she glimpsed a hetero pair of street punks copulating against the side of a dumpster.

A bearded man with an angry walk and a swinging ponytail followed her for blocks, never speaking, but constantly mumbling to himself. She had no gun, given the character she was playing, and had no stand-by assistance from her so-called team at all, just a cell phone.

“Hey, you!” her stalker called. “Wait up!”

But she didn’t. She half-ran to where her Lexus was parked in an unattended lot. She unlocked the car with her remote control key chain, jumped in behind the wheel, slammed the door shut, and locked it before revving up the motor.

Her stalker halted directly outside her door, open-mouthed instead of mumbling. He continued to gape at her vehicle as she roared off into the night. The highlight of her day.

She returned to the streets early the next morning. Her search remained luckless late into the afternoon. She ducked inside the restroom of Jody’s Books and Café and pouted a bit in front of the mirror when she saw that her 30 SPF sun block hadn’t prevented the emergence of a pink tint upon her normally steamed milk complexion.

“Next stop, fortune-teller face,” she said to her reflection, applying more sun block. Before leaving, she used her fingers to widen a rip in her shirt and then, working at cross purposes, brushed the horrid remains of her whitish blonde hair until she’d made a small aesthetic improvement.

Back on the sidewalk, she continued walking her all too familiar beat. At a crowded coffee shop on Telegraph Avenue, she sat down with some iced mocha and a cinnamon-raisin bagel. Glancing through a food-stained newspaper, left behind by the previous table occupant, Marilyn found her mind wandering back inside John Richetti’s tidy condominium. In his bathroom cupboard above the sink, she’d found some prescription sleeping pills, shook them at him.

“What’s keeping you up nights, John?”

“I think you better come back with a search warrant.”

Marilyn fixed her gaze on him. “I spoke with Captain Switzer as soon as I learned about your impending divorce.”

“He already knew.”

“So I discovered. And still, he backs you, because you’ve earned his trust over the years, and because your history of undercover work, while ancient, is stellar. But you don’t know what you’re getting into this time.”

“I think I do.”

“You think wrong.”