Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (15 page)

“You think he blocked the chimney and that’s why he suggested that the two of you make a fire?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said, anguished by the thought that she had been ruminating on since the firemen had arrived the night before. “Why would he have wanted to be here with me when the house filled up with smoke?”

“Maybe he wanted to see how upset you’d get. Or maybe he wanted to play the hero and have you become dependent on him.”

Kelly met the detective’s eyes with hers. He was right; those
were reasons Chris might have wanted to be there with her when a fire was lit in the fireplace.

“Do you know any reason he’d want to hurt you?” Stevens asked.

Kelly shook her head. “I told you, we just met yesterday.”

“But that doesn’t mean his girlfriend or wife didn’t come to see you before she walked out on him. When you check your files, see if any of the women who came about relationship problems described their boyfriend or husband in a way that make you think it could’ve been Chris Palmer.”

Kelly felt her jaw tense again. “I will.” It was devastating to think that maybe she was right about Chris; she would have preferred Stevens to have told her that her fears about Chris were groundless, that she had no reason to be suspicious of him at all. She’d rather be a fool who’d ruined a potential relationship with a man she’d been attracted to because she’d imagined things about him that were untrue than to find out she might have been attracted to a man who wanted to hurt her.

“Are you all right, Dr. York?” the detective asked her.

Kelly was slow to answer him. “Yes,” she said finally. “It’s just a lot to absorb.”

Stevens looked at her. He didn’t get up right up away. Regardless of what she’d just said, he knew that Kelly wasn’t all right. He wanted her to know, by his presence, that he would do his best to keep her safe. That was what he wanted to do—keep her safe. It was why, when he’d heard that she had called the station to report the phone call, he had wanted the case. For reasons he wasn’t quite ready to tell her, he wanted to help her.

Kelly didn’t get up right away, either. Sitting with this giant of a man in her small office, she felt there was a possibility that he could actually protect her. His gravity gave her confidence in
him. That was what she needed right now, because each day she lost more confidence in herself.

It started raining a few minutes before Stevens went up to the roof of the brownstone, and now it was raining hard. He hadn’t thought of asking Kelly for an umbrella, so it didn’t take him long to get drenched as he walked across to the spot near the eastern border of the roof where the chimney protruded from the floors below. The bricks from which the chimney was made had once been red; now they were a dull brown from decades of exposure to smoke and to New York City’s filthy air. He crouched next to the chimney and studied the silver-coated tar paper lining the roof, but it didn’t tell him anything about who had been up there before. It didn’t even show the impression of the boots worn by the fireman who had inspected the chimney the night before. If the weather had been hot and humid as it had been this summer and earlier in the fall, it might have softened the silvered tar paper enough to hold footprints, but now the surface was hard, and it told him nothing.

He stood up and looked at the brick wall around the roof. It was about three feet high, the chimney next to it about six feet high. Anybody could have climbed up on the wall and stuck whatever he wanted to in the chimney to clog it up. Anybody. That included Kelly’s ex-husband, Jack York, and the photographer Chris Palmer.

T
HE MEDICAL EXAMINER FROM
the West Orange Police Department finished his examination of the body on the bed and turned to the police detective in charge of the investigation. “From the temperature and lividity of the body, I’d say she’s been dead six or seven hours, which means she was raped and killed sometime around three this morning.”

The detective, Vincent Nichols, didn’t say anything. He wasn’t surprised by what the ME had just told him; from the moment he saw the victim’s thigh, he knew that she had been raped before she was strangled and that it had happened between two and four a.m. That was when the other victim—the victim he’d read about in the report from the New Kent PD—had been raped and strangled. The only difference was this victim had a contusion on her jaw. She must have fought back.

The ME saw Nichols staring at the cuts that formed some kind of design on the upper part of the woman’s leg. “What do you think that is?”

“It’s an astrology sign,” Nichols told him. “I don’t know which one. I’m not up on those things. But it looks like an old-fashioned scale. The kind they used to weigh things on, using weights.”

The ME bent closer to scrutinize the cuts. “You’re right. It is a scale. What makes you think it’s an astrological sign?”

Nichols glanced at the photograph of the woman on the
night table. In life, she’d been a stunningly pretty blonde. He said to the ME: “This woman, Sheryl Doyle, she’s not the first. There was one in New Kent. We’re looking for a serial killer. The astrology sign is part of his MO. He rapes women, strangles them, and carves their sign into their thigh.”

“Why do you suppose he does that? The astrological sign, I mean.”

Nichols thought about it. “Maybe to brand them with their sign. And to show that he knew what their sign was.”

“How would he know?”

Nichols looked at the ME somberly. “That’s what we have to find out.”

K
ELLY KNEW SHE HAD
to tell Emma and Sarah about the phone calls. After Detective Stevens left, she decided that she would do it over coffee in the kitchen. The painters and the other workmen were occupied in other parts of the house, so for the time being, at least, the kitchen would afford them privacy. Emma had made coffee early that morning, but Kelly put up a new pot before asking Emma and Sarah to join her. Making the coffee gave her something to do as she anxiously deliberated what she was going to say to them. As they walked into the kitchen, she could see on their faces that the chaotic state of the brownstone was taking a toll on both of them. She could also see that they were apprehensive about why she’d asked them to come into the kitchen with her. She felt that she’d done it awkwardly, with a kind of self-conscious formality that communicated to them that she had an announcement to make. Now that they were there, she wanted to set them at ease, but she didn’t know how; she was too uneasy herself.

The best she could do was to gather them around the table with her and serve them the fresh coffee. Just pretend it’s an ordinary morning, she told herself. But she couldn’t pretend. On ordinary mornings, they drank the coffee Emma prepared, and Kelly didn’t serve them. On ordinary mornings, the kitchen walls didn’t have dark streaks where smoke residue had been washed
away. On ordinary mornings, the house wasn’t filled with men trying to put it back together. And on ordinary mornings, a police detective didn’t come to see her and have a closed-door conversation with her in her office.

Sitting down at the table with them, she took a sip of the coffee and told them about the phone calls. She explained that she hadn’t mentioned about the first call because she’d hoped she wouldn’t get another, and if she didn’t, there would have been no point in worrying them. But after the second call, she felt he’d be calling again, and that he had meant it when he’d threatened her. She also told them he’d said it was because of her that a woman had left him. She didn’t tell them her suspicions about Chris Palmer; she’d had to tell Detective Stevens, but she didn’t want to tell Emma and Sarah unless she was sure that Chris was the caller. Emma and Sarah looked at her as she told them Detective Stevens was putting a monitor on her phones and that he’d asked her to go through her records to see if one of her clients in the last year fit the circumstances that the caller had described.

“You don’t have to stay here with me,” she said, her hands clasped around her hot coffee cup, as if it could make her feel warm and protected, as if anything could. “Emma, why don’t you go to Donald’s? I’m sure he—”

Emma interrupted her. “Of course we’re staying! The firemen said the smoke was just an accident. It wasn’t done on purpose or anything!”

“I’m not sure Detective Stevens believes that,” Kelly said.

“Well, I believe it!” Emma responded. “And I believe the man who called you is full of hot air!”

Sarah looked at Kelly. “I agree with Emma. I’m not afraid of some coward who calls in the middle of the night. He’s just a creep with a telephone. He’s not going to
do
anything.”

Kelly was grateful for Emma’s and Sarah’s support, but she wasn’t sure they were right.

Sarah saw the doubt in Kelly’s face. “Once the house is put back together and everything’s running normally again, we’ll all feel better. You’re strong, Kelly. You’re going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay.”

Kelly felt herself become emotional. She’d prepared herself for Emma and Sarah to leave the house after they’d learned the situation; she hadn’t prepared herself for them to stay. She looked at both of them and said, “Thanks,” almost unable to get the word out because she didn’t want to cry in front of them.

G
IORDANO SAT AT HIS
desk reading the copy of the August issue of
You and Your Sign
that Kim and Hernandez had found in Jennifer McGraw’s house. He’d glanced at astrology columns in magazines at his dentist’s office and even occasionally perused his horoscope—he was a Taurus—but he’d never known that whole magazines were devoted to the subject, and if he’d known, he wouldn’t have cared. He considered reading about astrology to be a frill, and he didn’t have time for frills. The only thing he believed in reading was the newspaper, which almost invariably aggravated him, because almost invariably it told him that things were as bad as he’d imagined.

Regardless of his prior attitude about astrology columns, the articles he was reading in
You and Your Sign
fascinated him. They told him something about how the victim, Jennifer McGraw, had thought about herself and about life. They also told him something about how the man who had raped and killed her thought about life. Astrology connected them: Jennifer had been a Sagittarius, the murderer had gouged her sign into her thigh, and Jennifer had an astrology magazine in her possession at the time of her death. Not just
an
astrology magazine;
this
astrology magazine.

Giordano had almost completed his reading. He’d read every word of every article, but he’d paid special attention to the
articles Jennifer had marked with dog-eared pages and underlined sentences. Not surprisingly, she had folded down the corner of the page on which August’s predictions for Sagittarius appeared. The forecast was generally positive, emphasizing August as a good time for travel to distant places and socializing, with only a vague warning about the need to pay particular attention when negotiating contracts. There was nothing prophesying that in a little more than two months, Jennifer McGraw would be raped and murdered.

Jennifer had also marked an article on decorating your home according to your sign and another article about love relationships. In the decorating article, Jennifer had underlined the advice for Sagittarius:
Put a round or oval table in your dining room to encourage wonderful conversations
. Jennifer had never gotten around to fulfilling that suggestion; her dining table, Giordano remembered, had been small and rectangular and stacked with several days’ worth of unopened mail. In the article on love relationships, Jennifer had underlined the paragraph that had told her the most compatible signs for Sagittarians are Leo, Aries, Aquarius, and Libra. She had also marked a paragraph advising her to find out what sign a potential mate’s Venus is in: for Sagittarian women, if his Venus is in Sagittarius, he might be a good match, regardless of his sun sign. Jennifer had underlined that information twice.

Giordano finished the article, the last in the magazine, and turned the page to find several pages of classified ads. Given her interest in finding a love relationship, it didn’t surprise him to see that Jennifer had underlined an ad, too. As he began reading it, he heard the sound of Hernandez’s rubber-soled shoes plodding toward him on the linoleum floor.

“What do you want?” he asked, continuing to read.

Hernandez was holding a computer printout. “A victim was raped and killed early this morning in West Orange with the same MO. Except this time he cut the sign for Libra into her thigh. They’ve agreed not to release details to the media.”

Giordano’s eyes remained on the classified ad in
You and Your Sign
. “And here’s how he’s choosing his victims,” he said to Hernandez. “‘Single? Wondering why you’re not attracting anyone and what you can do to change it? See the Intuitive Astrologer, Antiochus. Saturday, August fifteenth, Le Grand Hotel, New Kent, New Jersey. Ten a.m. to six p.m. Three hundred dollars for your chart and the answers to your life’s most important questions. Appointments on first-come, first-served basis.’”