Horoscope: The Astrology Murders (32 page)

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Still holding Anthony’s fork, he turned his tall frame toward her. “I’m worried about Dr. York.”

“I thought you said the FBI was there.”

“They are,” Stevens told her. “But I’m still worried.”

Diane continued looking at her husband. She expected him to say more, but he became silent again and returned to feeding his son.

By the time Winslow called into the office to check on Arthur Jones, Broadbent was back at his desk. Now he was looking at Arthur Jones’s driver’s license on the computer screen. Although the man was forty-five, his photograph showed that, as Kelly had suggested to Winslow, Arthur Jones had a youthful face.

“Arthur Jones is five nine, with brown eyes and brown hair,” he told Winslow. “His address is Woodman Turnpike, Sienna, New Jersey.”

“Sienna is just across the George Washington Bridge, isn’t it?” Winslow asked him. “Not very far from any of the victims.”

“Yes, and that’s not all,” Broadbent told her.

He’d googled Jones’s address to see if there was a photo of the place where Jones lived. When he described what showed up in the photo, Winslow’s attention was riveted.

Scott Green sat on the sofa in his hotel room, drinking a glass of water. He seemed nervous, which Rothman and Gary both took as a sign that Green had something to hide.

“I’m a business consultant,” he told them. “The reason I’ve flown up to New York so often in the last week is because I have a client here, but I have other clients in Baltimore that I need to service, too.”

Rothman decided to focus on his activities during the time the most recent victim was raped and killed in Tarrytown. “What were you doing last night?” she asked.

“Last night? I was having dinner with a vice president of RMA Bank.”

“After dinner,” Gary said, picking up where Rothman had left off, “say three or four in the morning?”

Green looked away embarrassedly. When he faced the FBI agents again, he said, “Actually, I was sleeping with her. We’ve been having an affair. She works for the client, so I shouldn’t be doing it, and if this comes out, I’ll be fired. But it’s the truth. I can give you her phone number if I need to prove it.”

“You do,” Rothman told him.

“I should know it by heart, but it’s programmed into my phone,” Green said, “so I never learned it.” He got up from the sofa and went over to his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair.

Rothman’s cell phone rang. She opened it and saw that it was Winslow. As she watched Green looking up his lover’s phone number on his smartphone, she told Winslow that it looked like a dead end with Green. At first Rothman was surprised that Winslow seemed to take the news in stride; then Rothman
listened to what Winslow had to tell her. When Winslow was done, Rothman hung up, turned to Gary, and told him to stay with Green and check out his alibi.

“Where are you going?” Gary asked her as she headed out the door.

“Broadbent’s coming to pick me up.”

That was all she said. In the meantime, Green had gotten his lover’s number from his phone and written it on a piece of the hotel’s notepaper. When he handed the number to Gary, Gary was so involved in wondering about what Rothman and Broadbent were doing that he had to remind himself why they’d wanted the number in the first place.

Kelly had sat on one of the stone benches and listened in silence as Winslow had made the phone calls. She knew that Winslow was excited by what her first phone call had revealed about Arthur Jones, excited enough to make the second phone call and send FBI agents to question him. But so far, the FBI agent had said nothing to Kelly; she’d made her calls and acted as if Kelly weren’t even there.

Finally, she turned to Kelly and spoke. “You may be right. Arthur Jones matches the physical description and he lives within an hour’s drive from all four victims and from the locations where the calls were placed to you. But it’s not just what he looks like and where he lives that makes it possible he’s Antiochus. It’s what was in the photo of his property.”

Winslow’s pretty face became animated, as if the knowledge she was about to impart were an aphrodisiac. “Jones has horses. And the women were strangled with a leather cord, like the kind used for horse reins.”

I
T WAS EARLY EVENING
when two agents from the Newark office of the FBI pulled onto the shoulder of Woodman Turnpike, opposite the horse farm. The agents, both men in their thirties, drew their guns as they got out of the car. They closed their car doors, but not all the way, because if Arthur Jones was home, they didn’t want him to hear the sound of metal against metal in the quiet evening.

The moon lit their way in the darkness as they walked across the asphalt road to the farm, climbed over the white wooden fence, and lowered themselves onto the grass. The meadow in which they found themselves was bordered by a forest. They ran over to the trees and used them as a cover as they proceeded swiftly toward the house and barn about four hundred yards away. The one-story house had lights on inside; the barn was dark.

Inside the barn, a five-foot-nine, youthful-looking man of forty-five with brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a black sweater and black jeans, was sitting at his worktable. Earlier, he’d closed the shutters of the window in the workroom he’d built for himself, and now he was working by the light of the architect’s lamp that he found so helpful when he hypnotized women who responded to his ads for an appointment with Antiochus. The man was Arthur Jones. In his left hand he was holding a new set of horse reins that he’d bought; in his right, a pair of scissors. He
opened the scissors and put one side of the rein between the two blades; then he cut off a piece of the leather, making a cord of the size he liked to use to strangle the women he conquered.

After cutting off the cord, he returned the scissors to a drawer under the worktable. In the drawer was an ephemeris, the one he’d bought to replace the ephemeris he’d taken from Kelly York—Dr. Kelly Elizabeth York—which had recently been stolen from him in one of the hotels. Next to his new ephemeris was the mirrored disk he used for hypnosis, a box of surgical gloves, and the sharp-pointed tool he’d made from the alidade of an astrolabe so he could mark the corpses of his conquests with the astrological sign that they had been born with.

Beside the surgical gloves were some of the needles he’d gotten from his mother’s house after she died. The needles she had inserted under his fingernails when she’d caught him playing with himself. That’s what she had called it when she’d come into his bedroom in the middle of the night to check him. It had been the first time he’d done what he’d heard other boys in school talking about, and it had felt good, until she’d pulled the covers back and, when she saw what he’d been doing, slapped him and screamed at him, made him pull up his pajamas; then, while he was crying, humiliated, she had gone to get sewing needles and stuck them, one at a time, under each fingernail and watched the blood trickle from his fingertips onto his bed.

For years before that night, she had locked him in the closet because she’d found him wetting his bed; now the closet seemed like a haven to him. He’d never had needles under his fingernails in the closet; he’d just sat on the floor, in the dark, holding his knees, alone and safe from her for a few hours.

From the night that she found him playing with himself, he was afraid to do it again, and he never did, but she put the
needles under his fingernails anyway, to make sure, she said, that he didn’t. And she told him, as she’d told him since the earliest time that he could remember, that he was bad because he’d been born with ill-disposed planets and that it was he who made her stick the needles under his fingernails, because he was bad and would do bad things if he wasn’t punished.

When he was a child, the needles had been shiny; he remembered how they had sparkled after he had cleaned them—as his mother had always made him do—of the blood that he’d gotten on them when she’d stuck them into the flesh beneath his fingernails. Now the needles he held in his hand were tarnished.

Kelly Elizabeth York was tarnished, too. She wasn’t the intuitive astrologer she claimed to be; otherwise when he’d met her in Washington, DC, despite the lies he’d told her, she would’ve known who he really was, wouldn’t she?

It gave him pleasure to think of how he’d fooled her and how he’d surpassed her. He’d told her he wanted her help in finding a career, but he’d found the career he’d been searching for on his own. It had taken him time to plan for the work he was now doing, but he had practiced along the way, without having all the details in place, of course. Now that he’d worked out his plan and what he thought of as his trademark, there was no limit to what he could do. No limit at all.

He’d surpassed Kelly Elizabeth York as an intuitive astrologer in other ways, too; he could use his intuition to insinuate himself into people’s lives, and he could tell them not only about their lives but about their deaths, too.

Looking at the needles, he thought about the morning four months earlier that he’d discovered his mother’s body, dead and cold, in her bed. In that moment it had come to him, clearly—as clearly as if someone had spoken to him—that this was the job,
the vocation, he was born for. He would stop battling what his mother called his ill-disposed planets and stop trying to hold back the rage and violence that he had inside him; he would use it to fulfill his destiny and empower his work. He’d accomplished so much in the three months since his mother died.

And tonight he’d be working again.

He heard the horses neighing in the stalls outside the work-room and wondered what was troubling them. He had three of them, and one was particularly skittish. Maybe an animal was on the property; foxes were common in the area, and wolves were not unheard of. But the sudden roiling in his gut told him it could be something else. He turned off the lamp, leaving the workroom in utter darkness, opened one of the shutters a few inches, and peered out. In the moonlight, two men were walking from the woods toward the house and barn. They were both carrying guns. There was no way he could get past them without being seen.

He opened a second drawer under the worktable and grabbed his gun. Taking aim through the open space between the shutter and window frame, he shot at the man nearest him and watched him fall to the ground.

The second agent turned toward the barn and fired in the direction from which Arthur Jones had fired his shot, but the barn was dark, and the agent had no idea where the shooter had fired from.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; Arthur Jones, gun in hand, had already fled the workroom and was running out the rear door of the barn and toward the woods. As he picked up speed, he heard a man shouting at him.

“FBI! Drop your gun, Jones, or I’ll shoot!”

Still running, Jones looked over his shoulder and saw that the
man who had fallen to the ground wasn’t dead but was running after him, gun raised. He was the one shouting.

“Do you hear me, Jones? Drop your gun!”

Jones turned around, took aim, and missed.

Broadbent and Rothman were climbing over the fence onto Jones’s property when they heard shots. They looked and in the moonlight saw Jones running across the field to the trees and the two New Jersey FBI agents shooting at him. It was evident that one of their bullets hit Jones’s shoulder, because Jones broke his gait, stumbled before he regained his balance, and put his hand up to his shoulder. Suddenly, he stopped running and pointed his gun at the men behind him.