Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (16 page)

“So they went to this guy
Antiochus
for readings and they ended up dead.”

Giordano didn’t take the time to answer Hernandez. He rolled his chair up to his computer and, with two fingers, typed the name
Antiochus
into his search engine and clicked “Search.” A moment later, a page of entries on Antiochus filled the screen. Giordano clicked on the first. When it came up, he read aloud: “‘Antiochus was the most influential astrologer in Greece in the second century BC.’” Finally looking at Hernandez, he commented, “Not too shabby, naming yourself after the most famous astrologer in ancient Greece.” He got up out of his swivel chair. “Let’s check out the Le Grand Hotel.”

As Giordano headed out of the office, Hernandez, following him, took out his cell phone. “I’ll call West Orange. Tell them to look for an ad like that in the victim’s place up there.”

“Ten to one they’ll find it,” Giordano said. “Unless she threw it out. I’m telling you: this is who he is and how he finds them.”

T
HE TWO-ROOM SUITE ON
the eighth floor of the Pierpont Hotel in Tarrytown, New York, was divided into a modest living room and an even more modest bedroom. The living room drapes were closed and the room was dark except for the pinpoint light of a small architectural lamp. He’d brought the lamp with him and set it up on the desk prior to the arrival of his clients. He needed the lamp for his work—not the work his clients thought he was there to do, but his real work, his vocation.

If the client who came up from the lobby to see him was a man, he didn’t use the lamp at all; it had no purpose, because he wasn’t looking for men. With men, the session was direct and quick, over in half an hour. But when a woman came up from the lobby to consult with him, his procedure was very different. A woman was with him now, which was why he had drawn the drapes and turned on the lamp, so that the pinpoint of light would reflect in the shiny metallic circle that he swung slowly, back and forth, in front of her half-closed eyes on the string from which it was suspended. She was thirty-two and pretty in an exotic way, with medium-length brown hair, skin that looked suntanned, and long, dark eyelashes.

“Very good, Cassie,” he said to her. “You are falling asleep so easily, so restfully …”

Her eyes closed completely now.

“Are you in that special safe place now?” he asked her.

Her eyes still closed, she answered, “Yes, I am.”

Gradually, he let the circle stop moving. “It is the place where you will create the destiny of your dreams. The place where you will fulfill all the potential your planets have given you …”

He was pleased to see that she smiled; she was cooperating. “You will stay exactly as you are with your eyes closed until I tell you to open them,” he continued as he placed the shiny metallic circle on his lap. “Until then, nothing will disturb you. No sound, no thought, not anything. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.” She was still smiling.

“Then repeat my instruction.”

“I will stay exactly as I am with my eyes closed until you tell me to open them. Until then, nothing will disturb me. No sound, no thought, not anything.”

“Good.” He turned the lamp he’d brought with him away from her face but left it on. “As a Cancer, home is very important to you. Do you have your own home?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Is it a house or an apartment?”

“A house.”

“Do you live alone or with someone?”

“I live alone.”

“Are you dating anyone?”

“No. That’s why I’ve come to see you.”

“I know.” He made his voice sound especially soft and sympathetic as he said: “But before we can expand and look at your relationship path, it’s vital that your home—your home base, the place where you draw energy and sustenance—feels safe to you. Does your home feel safe?”

“Yes, it does,” she said immediately.

“What makes it feel safe?”

“It’s warm and comfortable. I like going home to it every night.”

“Good.” That wasn’t what he wanted to know. He tried a different approach. “Describe what you do to make your house feel safe after you walk in at the end of the day and you close the door.”

“I lock the top lock and I make sure that the bottom lock is locked, too.”

“Good. Do you do anything else to make it feel safe before you go about your evening?”

“I close the chain.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“I turn on the lights.”

“Wonderful.”

“And I make myself a drink. I need a drink at the end of the day.”

“Do you feed the dog?”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“I see.” He felt encouraged. Two locks and a chain. And she drank.

Of course he wouldn’t have cared if she also had a dog; he had ways of dealing with dogs. “What is the man of your dreams like?” he asked her. “Describe him for me.”

“He’s older than me. And successful in whatever he does …”

Seeing that her eyes were still closed, he bent forward, reached into her shoulder bag on the floor, found her keys with his fingers, and gripped them so that he could remove them from her bag without jingling them. In his other hand, he held a softened piece of wax.

“He likes music and he has a good sense of humor,” she
continued. “He has to be fit …”

There were two car keys and two house keys on her keychain. He pressed one of the house keys into the wax and made an impression of it.

“I like to go hiking, and I’d like him to like hiking, too …”

As she talked, he took the second key and pressed it into another piece of wax.

“The thing I want most is for him to love me for who I am, not for what I look like or anything.”

“Good, Cassie.” As he bent down, he said, “Now describe how you would like him to see you.”

“I would like him to see me as a loving woman with a lot to give.”

He slipped the keys noiselessly back into her purse and sat up, facing her. Her eyes were still closed and she was smiling again.

“The right man will see you that way, Cassie. He’ll know you have a lot to give.”

He was smiling now, too. Because he was the right man. And soon he would be ready to take everything that she had to give.

A
FTER HIS FRUITLESS EXAMINATION
of Kelly’s roof, Stevens drove back to the precinct house. His clothes were drenched, but instead of changing into the spare jacket and pants he kept in his locker, he went to his desk and put a trace on Kelly’s phone lines. Without taking the time to remove his wet jacket, he sat down at his computer and started looking into Chris Palmer. He found that Christopher Palmer had been arrested for assault and battery twice in the last three years, but that Christopher Palmer was twenty-one and at the moment was serving six months in Ossining. The Chris Palmer who had photographed Kelly had no record. But he did have a listed phone number. Stevens called it and got Palmer’s answering machine. He didn’t bother leaving a message.

Instead, he looked up the phone number of
Luminary World
magazine and called it from his personal cell phone. He asked for the editor and was instructed to hold. He’d decided that, for now, at least, he wasn’t going to tell the editor he was making a police inquiry. For five minutes he listened to a canned-music version of old Sinatra songs. When Wendy Storr finally answered, he introduced himself, said he’d seen Chris Palmer’s work in her magazine, and was wondering if she would recommend him for an assignment. She answered that she’d recommend him wholeheartedly. He said the assignment was a women’s fashion shoot,
so he wanted to make sure that she’d never had any complaints about Chris Palmer from women he’d photographed. She told him she hadn’t had any complaints about Chris Palmer from anybody, women or men; it was obvious from her tone of voice that his question had surprised and perhaps even offended her. Stevens thanked her and hung up.

He was disappointed he hadn’t learned anything about Palmer that added support to Kelly’s suspicion of him. But on the other hand, what Wendy Storr had told him didn’t mean Palmer hadn’t made the early-morning phone calls to Kelly; nor did it mean that he hadn’t clogged her chimney to fill her house with smoke.

Looking out the window at the rain pouring from the gray sky, Stevens wondered if Kelly had started searching through her past year’s files for the names of the women who’d consulted with her about ending a relationship. He wondered if one of those women had ended a relationship with Chris Palmer.

Giordano and Hernandez entered Le Grand Hotel in New Kent through its brass-framed revolving door. Giordano was the first to push his way through the door and emerge into the lobby. Like the door, the small but high-ceilinged lobby was a relic of the hotel’s construction in the 1940s. Maybe at one time it had been a first-class hotel, but the lobby, though clean, needed new furnishings, and Giordano figured that nowadays the hotel appealed to businessmen who wanted to stay someplace economical and well located. Not just businessmen, though; according to the ad in
You and Your Sign
, this was where Antiochus had seen his clients on August 15.

Giordano walked up to the check-in desk, where a balding man in a black jacket with
Le Grand Hotel
embroidered on the
outside breast pocket was doing paperwork. He was concentrating so intently on what he was writing that he didn’t look up at Giordano or at Hernandez, who arrived as Giordano took out his badge and stuck it under the man’s face.

The clerk looked up, startled. “I’m sorry, Officer. I didn’t see you come in.”

“
Detective
,” Giordano corrected him. “
Detective
, not
officer
. I’m Detective Giordano. This is Detective Hernandez.” Giordano removed a photocopy of the ad from
You and Your Sign
from his pocket and put it on the marble counter in front of the clerk. “We’re hoping you can give us information about this man.” With his index finger, he pointed to the name
Antiochus
. “We’re hoping you remember him.”

The clerk bent over the ad and read it with the same intensity he’d exhibited doing his paperwork. Then he looked at Giordano and Hernandez with watery blue eyes. “I do remember him. He just signed in with that one name. Antiochus.” He reached for the maroon faux leather–bound sign-in book and thumbed backward through the pages until he found August 15. He turned the book around so that Giordano and Hernandez could see it. “There,” he said, indicating the first entry on the morning of August 15. “See. He registered at seven fifteen a.m. I’ve had a lot of John Smiths before but never an Antiochus. That’s why I remembered him.”

Giordano and Hernandez peered at Antiochus’s registration. He hadn’t written his name in script; he’d written it in perfect block letters.

“Because of his name, I thought he was a foreigner,” the clerk continued. “But when he talked, he was just a regular American.”

“Did he give you a credit card?” Giordano asked.

The clerk thought a moment before answering. “I think he gave me cash, which is why it sticks in my mind.” He went to
his computer, clicked away at the keyboard, and then read the information that came up on the screen. “Yeah, he paid one hundred and forty dollars in cash for the room and a deposit of two hundred and fifty dollars in case of damage. That’s what we ask for when people don’t use a credit card. As I remember it, he had the cash in his attaché case, and he just took it out and plunked it on the counter.” He left the computer and returned to Giordano and Hernandez. “He must have had ten or twelve people come to see him that day. Mostly women.” He gestured with his chin to the sofa and chairs in the lobby’s sitting area. “They sat there till they could go up for their appointment with Antiochus. I could tell they really wanted to see him, but I don’t remember any of them telling me he was an ‘intuitive astrologer.’ They went to him so he could do their horoscopes?”

“Apparently,” Giordano responded. “You remember what he looked like?”

The clerk was quiet for a while. He gazed down at the desktop, as if going back in his mind to the morning that Antiochus had appeared at the desk and signed the registration book. “Average build,” he said, looking at the two detectives. “Dark hair. I think he was about thirty-five.” He closed his eyes, as if trying to retrieve more details; then he opened his eyes and shrugged. “That’s about it.”

“What about distinguishing marks?” Hernandez asked. “A scar? A mole? A tattoo?”

The clerk thought about it and shook his head. “Sorry. I just don’t remember.”

“How about the women? Do you happen to know any of them?”

The clerk shook his head again. “Sorry again.”

“Thanks,” Hernandez said.

Giordano was already heading to the revolving door. Hernandez hurried after him. Sometimes he wished that Giordano would be more polite, but it was a battle he’d given up long ago. It was just Giordano’s nature to be rude. Hell, Giordano was even rude to him, and he was Giordano’s partner.

Out on the street, he said to Giordano, “At least we got a physical description.”

Hernandez wasn’t sure, but he thought Giordano nodded in agreement. He wasn’t sure because Giordano was already on his way to their car. All part of Giordano’s nature. When they were on a case, he wasn’t just single minded; he was insatiable. Any information they got that would help them follow a lead just made him want more—and he wanted it
now
.