Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (6 page)

And none of the women wanted to talk to him, just like last year.

Bell, on the other hand, was holding court in the center of a crowd of enraptured females. Bell, with his sharp sport coat and rust-colored turtleneck and charming smile. The scientist in Walter liked to believe that he could replicate the results by duplicating the methods, but in his heart he knew there was something about Bell that couldn’t be duplicated.

Off to the left, he noticed an older, slightly mannish woman and her chubby friend deep in conversation. They were the only two females who seemed unaffected by Bell’s charisma, and Walter found himself eavesdropping on them.

“Can you believe he’s back?” the older one was saying, pointing to an article in a folded newspaper. “I swear I was just starting to feel safe at night.”

“But how can they be sure the new letters are from the same guy?”

“They used handwriting analysis. It’s him, alright. I wonder if the killings are going to start back up again.”

“Jesus,” the older woman said. “I took a cab to work for two years after I saw that letter where he threatened to shoot senior citizens on a city bus.”

Walter’s blood suddenly felt like liquid nitrogen in his veins.

“Excuse me,” he said, stepping closer to the two women. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. What were you saying about a letter threatening to shoot people on a city bus?”

“It’s the Zodiac Killer, man,” the chubby woman said. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“I’m...” Walter’s throat was so dry he could barely form words. “I’m from the east coast. I guess I don’t really keep up on national news.”

“Well,” the chubby woman said, warming to the topic. “This psycho killer was running around murdering people about four or five years back. He sent letters to the paper and used this... what did they call it? Like a code.”

“A cipher,” the mannish woman said.

Nausea bloomed and twisted in Walter’s gut.

“But the bus...?”

“He said he was gonna shoot senior citizens on a city bus, wrote it in one of his letters,” the mannish woman replied. “What was that, ’69?”

“October, ’69,” the chubby woman said, shivering slightly and wrapping her thick arms around her body. “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

“But he never followed through,” the mannish woman said. “Not yet anyway. Here, look.”

She handed him the paper.

He looked down at the article, but the headline and the text below never registered. All he saw was a crude police sketch of the suspect. A sketch he recognized instantly.

It was the man at Reiden Lake.

A wave of dizziness swept over him, and he braced himself against the wall.

“Hey, are you okay?” the chubby woman asked, although her voice sounded as if it was at the far end of a long tunnel.

Walter nodded absently, then stumbled away from the two women, clutching the newspaper in sweating hands, a terrible memory seared into his reeling mind.

A Ridgid Tool calendar on a warehouse wall.

A girl in a bikini.

The date, September 21, 1974.

Today is September 20th.

Walter bulldozed his way through the crowd of female admirers around Bell and gripped his friend’s arm.

“Hey, watch it,” a tall brunette with glasses said.

“Jerk,” spat another, shorter brunette.

“Belly,” Walter hissed. “We need to talk.”

* * *

“You’re like a cold shower, Walt,” Bell said. “You know that?”

Bell extracted his arm from his friend’s desperate grip and dug in his heels, refusing to go any further.

“So what is it?” Bell demanded. “What the hell is so important that...”

“The man we saw at Reiden Lake,” Walter said breathlessly, “the one who came through the gate. It wasn’t a hallucination. He’s real.”

“Are you having some kind of flashback?” Bell gripped Walter’s chin. “Let me see your pupils.”

Walter shrugged him off and thrust the crumpled newspaper into Bell’s hand.

“Look at this!”

Bell rolled his eyes and looked down at the paper with a skeptically arched brow.

When he saw the police sketch, all the color drained from his face.

“I guess you could say there are... similarities in certain features,” he said.

“Similarities? It’s him, Belly. You know it’s him.”

Bell looked up at Walter, his expression grave.

“If he is real,” he said, “then what
is
he? He seemed... so human.”

“Human, yes,” Walter replied. “But... different in some way.”

“In what way?” Bell asked.

“I remember that strange glow,” Walter said. “Like sparks in the palms of his hands. Almost as if there was some kind of unknown process disrupting the very atoms of his flesh.”

“Maybe he’s a time traveler from a future that’s been poisoned by atomic warfare,” Bell suggested.

Without skipping a beat, Walter responded.

“Or perhaps some kind of pan-dimensional being who only adopts a human form in order to facilitate contact with the people of Earth,” Walter said. “Maybe that glow is his true form showing through the artificial skin.”

Bell tapped the article.

“But why would a pan-dimensional being want to shoot people with a normal gun?”

“It’s so much worse than that,” Walter replied. “This man publicly threatened to shoot senior citizens on a city bus. Just like in our vision. He hasn’t made good on that threat yet, but in the vision, the bus shooting took place on September 21st, 1974.” He paused, gripping Bell’s sleeve. “Belly, that’s tomorrow!”

“My God,” Bell said, looking disoriented. “What are we going to do?”

“That’s obvious,” Walter replied. “We have to find a way to stop him.”

The Doe library at U.C. Berkley was the kind of place where Walter could happily spend the rest of his life, under different, more peaceful circumstances. Built in the early nineteen hundreds, it was a large, stately building fronted by classic Doric columns and decorated with richly patinated copper trim. Several large rectangular skylights were embedded in the red tiled roof.

Walter took the stone steps two at a time, huffing and breathless as he pushed through the door. Bell was close behind.

Inside it was tranquil and beautiful. He was immediately attracted to a large, airy room with a curved, tiled ceiling and large arched windows. Leaded glass skylights filled the chamber with gentle natural light and each of the dozens of sturdy wooden tables had its own wrought-iron reading light. Tall shelves packed with colorful volumes lined the walls, beckoning Walter with their intriguing titles and vast cornucopia of knowledge. The smell of foxed paper and wood polish was seductive, and made him wish he was there for any other reason.

The librarian at the main desk was one of the tallest women he had ever met, a little over six feet and standing eye to eye with Bell in her flat, sensible shoes. She was in her late fifties, with a stiffly lacquered poodle haircut that likely hadn’t changed in twenty years. On the left lapel of her modestly cut blouse she wore a red Bakelite brooch in the shape of a key, and a name badge on the right that labeled her as Mrs. Alder.

Her face was wide and plain, but her green eyes sparkled with intelligence and wit.

“How can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.

“We’re looking for information on the so-called Zodiac Killer,” Walter told her.

“Ah, yes,” she said with a knowing nod. “Popular topic these days.” She indicated a stairwell off to the right. “Newspaper archive is in the basement, at the end of the hallway on the left.”

“Thank you,” Walter said.

“Do you think they’ll ever catch him?” she asked.

Walter and Bell exchanged a look.

“Good God, I hope so,” Walter replied.

* * *

The newspaper archive boasted a lot of carefully preserved newspapers, but it was primarily devoted to floor-to-ceiling shelves of microfilm. Where the upper areas of the library were quaint and old-fashioned, evoking images of turn of the century scholars in waistcoats and wire-rim glasses, the archive room was sleek and ultra modern, coldly illuminated by recessed fluorescent lights and outfitted with cutting-edge technology.

There were six brand-new microfilm readers, two of which already were taken by students. One was female, blond and wan with very pale skin and an underfed physique beneath her bulky striped sweater. The other was male, black and prematurely balding with glasses and a leather jacket. Both were so engrossed in their own research that they didn’t even look up when Walter and Bell walked into the room.

The librarian in charge of the archives was a man, just a little bit older than Walter, with bushy sideburns and frizzy hair bullied into an ill-advised Afro. He wore a baggy green suit and a joke tie featuring monkeys with typewriters. His name badge read “Mr. Sternberg.”

“How you doing?” he asked, revealing a hard New York accent. “What can I do for you?”

“Fine, thank you,” Walter replied. “We are looking for information on the Zodiac murders.”

“Man,” he said. “You’re lucky that Graysmith guy’s not here today. He’s in here all the time, pulling every single thing we have on the Zodiac and going over it with a fine-toothed comb.” He turned around and grabbed a large cardboard box from a metal library cart behind his desk, setting it in front of Walter and Bell. “You’re also lucky that I’m a lazy bastard and haven’t re-shelved all his microfilms since his last visit. This is pretty much everything. Enjoy.”

Walter couldn’t imagine that he would “enjoy” reading up on the murders that had been committed by the man from Reiden Lake, but he made himself smile and thank the librarian. Bell grabbed the box and headed over to the closest available reader.

He set the box on a nearby table, sat down, and sorted through the microfilm reels to find the one labeled with the earliest date.

“December, 1968,” Bell said, opening the cardboard box and holding up the reel. “Why, that’s just two months after...”

His voice trailed off, and he looked around at the other people in the archives.

Walter nodded, understanding Bell’s unfinished point. He held out his hand for the microfilm, and Bell handed it over. Walter pulled up an extra chair for himself.

He threaded the microfilm into the reader with a sense of dread, simultaneously wanting and not wanting to know the awful truth.

* * *

The two of them spent nearly three hours glued to the reader, studying article after horrifying article of the torture and mayhem caused by the man from Reiden Lake.

It began with a young couple at Lake Herman, in Vallejo. The boy was seventeen, the girl only sixteen, and the pair had been parked in the Lover’s Lane area near the lake when they had been approached by a man with a 22. caliber semi-automatic pistol. According to the police report, their killer shot the boy first, point blank in the head, then shot his terrified girlfriend five times in the back.

Worse, Walter instantly recognized the pretty blueeyed brunette from his vision at Reiden Lake. He’d seen her death, exactly as it happened two months before it occurred!

The next two unsuspecting teens were shot in a Lover’s Lane area, as well, this time at Blue Rock Springs, also near Vallejo. Only this time, the boy actually survived the brutal attack, describing the killer exactly the way Walter remembered him.

The police had received a phone call from a man claiming responsibility for the shootings, describing details of the crime that could only have been known by the killer. That caller also took credit for the previous shootings, and the police knew they had a serial killer on their hands.

The third attack, at Lake Berryessa near Napa, was by far the most bizarre and frightening. A young couple were approached by a man wearing a black hood, with a white crossed circle painted on a flap of fabric that hung down over his chest. After some surreal conversation, the man tied the couple up and started stabbing them repeatedly. When he was finished, he just walked away, leaving them bound and bleeding. After being discovered by a local fisherman, both victims were rushed to the hospital. The young woman didn’t make it, but her boyfriend survived the attack to relate all the horrifying details to the press.

Again the killer made another call to police, as well as leaving a written message on the victims’ car door, listing the dates of previous murders. It was signed with the same crossed circle symbol.

Walter was appalled to find so many details that he remembered from his vision. The more he read, the more he started to feel punch drunk and overwhelmed.

The last case that was confirmed as a Zodiac murder was the shooting of a cab driver in the city, in an upscale neighborhood known as Presidio Heights. Another grimly familiar story. Walter was starting to wish he’d never found out about the killings.

Having gone through the details of all the murders, Walter and Bell began to examine the letters and ciphers that the killer had sent to various newspapers in the area, including the letter in which he threatened to shoot school children on a bus.

The more they read, the more a dull, drowning sense of hopelessness began to wash over Walter.

“What have we done?” he asked Bell.

“I think a more important question,” Bell replied, “would be, what are we going to do about it?”

Walter paced up and down the length of the Howard Johnson hotel room he’d shared with Bell for the conference. They had spent nearly the entire day in the newspaper archive, digging up every single scrap of information they could find on the Zodiac Killer.

More and more, Walter was haunted by the faces of the victims. The teenage girl at Lake Herman. The cab driver with the mustache. But the one face he just couldn’t get out of his mind was the face of that old black woman in the red coat.

LINDA’S GRANDMA.

On the scratchy bedcover beside him was a copy he’d had printed out of one of the Zodiac letters. His eye kept coming back again and again to the bottom of the page.

Senior citizens make great targets. Okay, I think I shall wipe out a city bus some morning, just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the grannies as they come bouncing out.