The Prophet Motive (24 page)

“If I can’t do it,” John said, “then will you do it, Tom?”

“If it comes to that, sure, but like I said, I’ve got confidence in you.”

They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. John peered across the bay at Berkeley. Teresa and Angela would be asleep there.

The SUV turned off Highway 101 and sped across the floor of Mill Valley. The early dawn traffic was sparse, the commercial district deserted. Before them towered the tree-studded walls of the valley. John directed the way upward along a narrow, twisty road. The ascent was sharp. They passed crowded rows of small residential homes, many of them perched on stilts, a belligerent army dug in, daring the nearest fault line to shake it loose from the hillside.

Through the front window John spotted a simple one-story house with dark green aluminum siding. The house sat at a bend in the road, heavily shrouded by California live oak.

“That’s it,” he said, pointing a finger. Tom cut the engine and coasted to the curb in front of the house, parking behind an old white Chevy Impala four-door.

“You sure he lives alone?” Tom scanned the area.

“Last I heard. He’s a widower, and his kids are grown.”

“Okay, let’s do this,” Tom said, turning to John. “Shut your door quietly.”

The windows of the neighboring homes were all dark, and the only sign of life came from a distant, yowling cat. John led the way down a narrow redwood deck that ran alongside the house. He stopped at the kitchen door and peered in through a glass pane.

Captain Ron Switzer sat alone at a breakfast nook wearing blue pinstriped pajamas, his thinning hair disheveled into two triangular tufts. He held a white ceramic bowl in one hand and used the other to shovel cold cereal with milk into his mouth with a spoon. A box of Kellogg’s Froot Loops
stood on the table beside a tall carton of orange juice and an empty glass.

“You see something?” Tom asked, hanging back from the door by several feet.

John nodded. “I see him, he’s eating breakfast.”

Now that he could actually see the captain, John knew that his initial instinct had been right. Not even for The Wizard, or for the sake of ensuring the survival of the human race, would he be able to harm this man, much less kill him. Nor could he stand by idly and let Tom do the job.

He was about to tell Tom just that when Switzer spotted him in the doorway. The heavy man reared back reflexively, tipping his chair, milk sloshing out of his bowl, bare feet kicking air.

“He sees me,” John said. “I can’t do this, I can’t.”

Switzer steadied his chair and stood, mouth agape, eyes wide in disbelief. He put his bowl down on the table and approached.

As John wondered what he would say to the Homicide chief, his right cheek twitched sharply on its own, and he found himself distracted by a small pang of mental irritation. He didn’t know why he was irritated, and yet his face broke into a frown, and his irritation grew to annoyance and then anger—unfocused, unfounded, illogical, and sudden. His jaw clenched and adrenaline iced his chest and pumped a flooding river of blood into his limbs. He felt a primal need to lash out.

But at who? Or what? And why?

The door flew open. Captain Switzer’s angry face confronted him, at last funneling his rage. His inexplicable rage.

“Richetti! What the fuck are you doing here?”

John answered with a loud grunt and a forward explosion, knocking Switzer back into the kitchen like he was a tackle sled. He throttled the captain’s stout neck, both thumbs digging in, crushing windpipe. Switzer sent a swift knee into John’s groin area, but only grazed the testicles, only caused John to squeeze harder. And John kept on squeezing, even as Switzer collapsed to his knees, his eyes protruding from their sockets like garishly painted golf balls.

“Die!” John screamed. “Die, you motherfucker!”

Then all words abandoned John, his vocal repertoire reduced to the grunts and shrieks and guttural sounds of a rabid animal. He bit Switzer’s nose as hard as he could, blood gushing into his mouth. With his wet teeth he bit into an ear lobe and ripped it loose. The captain howled and yowled.

John reared back his right fist—his left hand clenching pajama top, holding Switzer steady—and smashed it into the man’s face. Nose blood discharged in a satisfying spray. He punched the captain’s face again. And again. Switzer collapsed to the floor. He lay still.

John stepped toward a wooden block on the nearby counter, unsheathed an eight-inch carving knife, fell to his knees, and stabbed Switzer in the chest up to the hilt. With both hands, he withdrew the bloody blade and stabbed again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Again.

And again.

And again . . .

Minutes after frail life had left his rival it still mattered none to John. He straddled Switzer’s corpse on the floor and continued to puncture the still, red form with fury, his arms aching, his lungs heaving, thrusting back and forth into the face and neck and chest and belly.

The rage finally and abruptly drained out of John, and he ceased the carnage. His first calm thought was that he couldn’t even recognize Switzer anymore. Then the familiar moral voice inside his head made itself heard, saying simply,
It’s wrong to kill an innocent human being
.

Wiping spattered blood from his eyes, John heard another voice, this one coming directly from behind.

“Nice going.” John turned toward the voice. Tom stood beside the kitchen door. “You really get into your work, don’t you, Brother John.”

John held aloft the red-stained blade in his suddenly shaking right hand. “I can’t believe I did this!” He dropped the knife to the linoleum floor. Remorse, and the sickly sweet smell of fresh death, overwhelmed him now. In a cold faint, he fell face first on top of the oozing carcass.

Tom Mahorn drove the SUV through heavy early morning traffic in downtown San Francisco. His pulse was still racing. Watching John unleash his dark side had been terrifying. Way cool, but terrifying. So was the next part of The Wizard’s plan.

“That’s it, right?” Tom asked, pointing to a large concrete building on the left. “Precinct Forty-one?”

John didn’t seem to hear the question. Slumped in the passenger seat, he was staring down at his own blood-soaked clothing. Tom repeated his question. This time, John looked up and over at the building and nodded.

Tom found a parking spot at a meter across the street from the main entrance to John’s police precinct. “Let’s go over what we discussed,” he said. “Who was involved?”

“Just me,” John said. “I worked alone.”

“When they ask why you did it, you say what?”

“The Wizard told me to.”

“How did he tell you?”

“Through telepathy.”

“Good,” Tom said.

“But that’s not true.”

“Don’t try to understand The Wizard’s way, Brother John, just do as you’re told.”

“Wizard’s way,” John repeated.

“Remember, you won’t be coming back to the farm unless you follow instructions.”

John stared up at the police building. “But I’m a cop who killed another cop. They’re going to lock me up and throw away the key.”

“Not if you do as we discussed,” Tom said. “Stick to the story. No matter what. If you do, The Wizard promises you’ll be back with us on the farm in no time.”

“But how?”

“You didn’t think you’d find the strength to kill Captain Switzer, did you? But you did, you certainly did. Just like The Wizard predicted, right?”

John nodded. “That was miraculous.”

“Trust in The Wizard, John. I want you to trust in him with, uh, all your heart.”

“I do, I do.”

Tom took John through the story one more time, harping on the telepathy bit. That was important. No judge would issue a warrant for The Wizard’s arrest as long as John claimed he’d been issued his orders through telepathy.

“Roll down your window,” Tom said.

John did. Tom opened his own door, stepped into the street, and scooted around the front of the vehicle to the passenger side window. He told John to sit in the driver’s seat.

When John had slid into place, Tom had him grasp the steering wheel. Step on the clutch. Grab the gear shift. Leaving bloody imprints behind.

“Okay,” Tom said, “get out.”

On the sidewalk, Tom handed John the keys to the SUV. “Remember also, you took this vehicle from Earthbound without asking permission.” John nodded.

Tom removed the rubber gloves he’d slipped on shortly before entering Captain Switzer’s home. He deposited them in a nearby wastebasket and turned back to John.

“Time for you to go,” he said. “See you soon.”

John nodded, then stepped into the busy two-lane street, jaywalking in a slow daze, cars honking their annoyance. He made it all the way across, though, and as he neared the top of the limestone steps leading into the police precinct, Tom flagged down a taxicab and hopped into the backseat.

“San Francisco International Airport.”

John walked into the lobby of Precinct Forty-one. He recognized the sergeant on duty behind the watch desk. Rolly Bainbridge.

“John!” Bainbridge said. “John Richetti! What the hell happened to you? Is that blood?”

“I need to report a murder,” John said. “Captain Switzer has been killed.”

“What?! Captain Switzer’s dead?!”

John nodded solemnly. A few uniformed cops milling in the lobby came over to listen. “How’d it happen?” asked one of them.

“I killed him,” John said.

After breakfast, Marilyn left the dining hall to report for work duty with the mowing crew. She strode past a huge strawberry field, where stooped laborers already toiled. Their identical straw hats and shaded faces seemed to dehumanize them. Or else the cause of the effect was her knowledge that this was no labor force, but a regiment of mind-fettered slaves.

For many rank and file cult members, their days were consumed by physically exhausting, mind-deadening work. Toiling in agricultural fields. Standing on street corners selling flowers. Waxing and polishing the cult leader’s fleet of luxury cars. Twelve hours a day or more would be spent providing free labor—and any and all profits—to the cult leader.

She passed behind the sheep barn. In the backyard pen, a crowd of people, numbering at least a hundred, had gathered in a tight circle. The crowd was hushed. Curious, she hopped the fence and elbowed her way through the spectators until she had a clear view of the action.

In the center of the circle, The Wizard, crouched with his hands on his knees, was speaking to a lone sheep. “Do you like being a sheep?” he asked, grinning. The sheep’s head lifted up and down several times as if it were nodding. The crowd giggled.

“Would you sing for us, please?”

The sheep’s head bobbed up and down again and began to bleat. Bleat in song. The sheep delivered a coarse, off key, but recognizable tune, an old nursery rhyme.

Mary had a little lamb

Little lamb

Little lamb

Mary had a little lamb

Its fleece was white as snow
. . .

Marilyn gaped at the singing sheep, shaking her head at the same time in disbelief. It wasn’t a great rendition, to be sure, but any rendition at all was . . . impossible!

She backpedaled and fled, her mind reeling. As she scurried along an empty dirt trail, a mechanical whirring overhead lifted her gaze to the sky. It was a white helicopter, about to land.

Piper’s. She’d stumbled upon the helipad two days earlier. With The Wizard putting on a show at the sheep barn, the helicopter’s occupants, she guessed, would include Tom Mahorn and John Richetti, the pair returning from their trip. Perhaps soon she would know the answer to her big question—bigger even than how a sheep could sing.

Whose side did John belong to now?

At least she’s not my fuck-up
, Tom thought as the helicopter touched down.
Piper interrogated John, not me
. He would remind Piper of that when he delivered the police psychologist.

He ducked away from the chopper with its blades still whirling and struck out for the vehicle yard, where he borrowed Piper’s personal SUV hybrid, having left his own with John in San Francisco, and drove off toward the tree crops. Marilyn had been assigned to the mowing crew, he’d learned with a phone call, and the crew would be in the walnut grove today.

He saw Jim Tate first, the foreman, astride his palomino at the edge of the grove. Tom switched off his engine, so as not to startle the horse, and cruised to a stop within feet of Jim.

Tom push-buttoned his window all the way down. “Hey, Jim.”