The 24th Letter ((Mystery/Thriller)) (28 page)

O’Brien sat next to Dave and studied the two images without saying anything.   Max trotted over and sat beside him.  O’Brien said, “When I saw that cloud rise in front of the moon, it triggered something I’d seen at some point in my life.  I didn’t make the connection earlier when I found Father Callahan’s body and saw the drawing he’d left.  But when I saw that image in the moon, I felt the two were somehow related.  In a dream I saw an image of…the Virgin Mary.  She was coming out of the moon.  It was overlooking a bay, ships, maybe one ship on fire in the harbor.  A hawk flew in and out of an old cathedral.  There was an elfish figure there and an angel.  Then the angel was pointing toward the Virgin Mary.  I saw a man in a flowing robe reading a book, maybe the Bible.  I remember reaching out to touch Mary, and I touched a wet painting.” 

Dave nodded.  “I combed the halls of every museum that has its art online, and most do.  If not, the work of the masters can be found hanging on plenty of cyber walls.”

“Masters?”

“Indeed, Sean.  You’re not dreaming schlock nightmares, my friend.  You’re picking pieces of memory paint up from one of the best, perhaps most overanalyzed painters in the history of renaissance art.”

“Who?”

“Today, he is just as misunderstood as he was in his day, around the late fourteen hundreds.  When Columbus was discovering the New World, this artist was painting a

tortured world.  A place revealing a garden of earthly delights, seven deadly sins, the last judgment…and I present to you, Sean O’Brien, the painting done by Hieronymus Bosch that brings together the puzzle pieces.”

Dave typed in few keystrokes.  Both images on the screen faded to black and then a painting appeared.  It was an old painting—one depicting a man sitting on a hillside overlooking a harbor.  In the harbor, a ship was burning.  A hawk was sitting in the left side of the frame.  The right side showed a gnome-like little man tiptoeing.  An angel was descending down a hill in the background pointing to an image of the sun or moon with the Virgin Mary in the center of it sitting on a crescent moon and holding an infant.

O’Brien leaned in closer to the image.  “This is it!  I remember seeing this as a child in a museum in Spain.”

“Bosch’s painting is called
St. John on Patmos.”

O’Brien looked at Dave and said, “Patmos.  Now I know what Father Callahan was referring to with the letters P-A-T.”        

SEVENTY-SIX

Gibraltar
moved.  “We have company,” said O’Brien.

Dave looked at his watch.  “It’s Nick, we’re supposed to be heading down to the tiki hut about now for dinner.”

Nick Cronus entered the salon.  He grinned, the thick moustache rising like a cartoon drawing on his face.  “Sean, what happen to you, man?”

“Long story.  The short side is, to save a life of a man on death row, you have to step around or over people who don’t want that life saved.”

Nick snorted, popped the knuckles in his calloused hands.  “Man, you got to call me before you get yourself in those situations.”

“Believe, me, Nick.  I had no idea I’d wind up in a sport boxing ring where the sport ends in death.”

“What?  Like hell, man.  What happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I have more time.  Dave just showed me a picture of a very old painting.  The artist was a guy named Bosch.  He painted a lot of art depicting the forces of good and evil.  Look at this.”

Nick stepped over to the computer.  O’Brien said, “This is one of his paintings.  It’s called
St. John on Patmos
.  What do you know about this Greek island?”

Nick studied the painting and said, “It is a holy island.  A big monastery is there.  Many people in Greece go there at least once in their lives.  It is where Saint John was

exiled.  He survived with the help of God.  He lived in a cave, lived there for almost two years, man.  Listening to God and foretelling the apocalypse…Armageddon.”

“The Book of Revelation?” asked Dave.

“Yeah, man.  He was chosen by God to tell it like it is, you know.  You screw up…I mean screw up a lot and you don’t enter the kingdom of God.  Good triumphs over bad.  The place where the Saint lived, in Greece, we call it the Holy Grotto.”

Dave looked at the painting. “Bosch was apparently influenced by all of this.  I was trying to figure out the reason Father Callahan drew the Greek letter Omega, too.”  Dave hit a few keys and another painting appeared.  “This Bosch painting is called
Temptation of Saint Anthony
.  Let me pull up an isolated section, see right there.”

O’Brien and Nick leaned in closer. “Yeah, man,” said Nick.  “It’s there, Omega.”

“This,” said Dave, “look carefully above the piece of cloth he painted over here, next to the fellow in the top hat.  Above it you can see a shackle, a spot where a prisoner could have been chained…and right there is the perfect depiction of the letter Omega.”  Dave typed in another key and another painting appeared.  “This Bosch painting is called
Ship of Fools
.  Some in the art world theorize the flapping sail off the mast, if you look at in a horizontal position…”  Dave touched a key and flipped the painting into a horizontal perspective.  He continued, “Now you can see the sail makes a perfect Omega.”

Nick chuckled.  “This dude, Bosch, looks like he ate too much of his paint.”

O’Brien said, “It looks like he left it up to the viewer’s interpretation.”

“Exactly,” said Dave.  “Bosch was an allegorical painter.  He dropped all kinds of symbols, things that might depict hidden meanings, maybe not.  He straddled the art

border somewhere between medieval and renaissance, and he straddled the lines between the age-old conflict of good and evil.  Salvador Dali was influenced by Bosch.”

“And it appears that Father Callahan was too,” said O’Brien.  “But why?  What is the significance of the Omega sign, the Bosch painting of Saint John and the six-six-six?”

Nick squinted at the painting.  “This Bosch guy, he liked to paint a lot of naked people running all around.  I’m getting a headache just trying to look at it.  Let’s eat!”

Dave grinned.  “At dinner we want to hear what happened in Miami Beach.  And I’ll tell you more of what I’ve learned about Omega.”

SEVENTY-SEVEN

They took a corner table at the tiki hut, away from the tourists and a few charter boat captains who sat at the bar and swapped stories about how, too often, they had to teach tourists to fish once they got out to the reefs or the flats.

O’Brien tied Max’s leash to a leg of his chair. 

Kim Davis approached the table with three menus in her hands.  “Sean, what happened to you?”

“My boxing career is over.”

“Sugar, you need to learn to take care of yourself.  Want some ice for that eye?”

“It’s actually much better.”

Kim smiled.  “Just in today are flounder and redfish.  Start you off with a round?”

“First round is on me,” said Dave.  “Three Coronas.”

“I’ll bring Miss Max a little bowl of ice water.”

When she left, Dave turned to O’Brien. “Okay, what happened in Miami Beach?”

“Think they have stone crabs here tonight?”

“Don’t know, why?” asked Nick.

O’Brien began to tell them what occurred in Miami Beach.  Both Nick and Dave listened without interruption until Kim brought the beers.

Dave said, “Sean, my old gray head is spinning.  Let’s take a breather for nourishment.”  They ordered food and reached for the beers.

O’Brien concluded by saying, “Tucker Houston is filing every petition he can think of to get the courts to intervene.  I’m tracking down Alexandria’s old roommate and trying to figure out what message Father Callahan left behind.  Charlie Williams paces his cell, and I want to let him know we’re close.  But I couldn’t bear giving him false hope.  I’ve given him eleven years of hell.  His execution, set for Tuesday at 6:00 a.m.”

Dave said, “Hope, false or real, is all he has right now.”

Nick raised a bottle.  “To you Sean, for gettin’ outta that ring alive.”

“But right now I can’t even prove I was in the ring.  It’s like some bizarre dream.”

“Not unlike a Bosch painting,” said Dave.

Kim brought the food and they ordered a second round of beer.

Dave pulled the shell off a steaming shrimp, the flavor of garlic and Old Bay seasoning, heavy.  He said, “Let me try to put this in perspective.  After Salazar’s body was found, Russo dropped trumped-up charges against you.  His pedophile cohort, Sergio Conti did the same.  Salazar, as Russo’s hit man, is dead.  Assuming Salazar spoke to no one about killing Spelling, Father Callahan and Lyle Johnson—Salazar is buried in Miami Gardens and his secret goes with him to the grave.  Russo knows you have nothing on him to stop or delay the execution of Charlie Williams.  So Russo steps out of the radar to lay low until the state executes Williams.  Am I there so far?”

“You’re there,” said O’Brien as he handed Max a bite of flounder.

“So,” said Dave, “Lauren Miles, with the FBI, is trying to see if equipment in Quantico can reveal the name of the Florida town where Spelling’s mother lives.  You’re trying to track down Alexandria’s former roommate.  You have a Miami defense attorney

trying to engineer some legal way to make lethal injection illegal.  In the meantime, we’re trying to help you solve a riddle Father Callahan left behind that’s fitting of a Herculean challenge and worthy of a sphinx trophy if solved.  And you have…”  He looked at his watch.  “You have about eighteen hours left to do it.”

“Pretty much sums it up.”

Nick pushed back from the table.  “Sean, I keep telling you to sell your old house on the river.  Let me teach you to fish and you’d stay outta of this kinda shit, man.”

“I’m trying to get there, Nick.”  O’Brien said to Dave, “Omega, what were you going to tell us about it?”

Nick interjected, “I told you it means the end of something.”

Dave grinned.  “He’s right.  Viewing the Omega letters in Bosch’s paintings and the one that Father Callahan left behind, it intrigued me to do a little research.  Omega is the Greek letter that physicists and cosmologists have taken to represent an equation that could mean the end of the world and universe or the continuation of it.”

“Got to mean the end,” chimed in Nick.

“Perhaps,” said Dave.  “There is this huge tug-of-war going on in our universe.  As the planets go zipping around the center of our cosmos, the sun, there’s an outside influence from other galaxies—a push and pull, sort of a yin and yang of gravity verses matter.  So in the simplest terms, Omega equals the push or the pull.”

“Which one?”  O’Brien asked.

“No one knows what the Omega number—the key to the fate of the world—really is.  If Omega is greater than one, there is more pull than push in the Universe, which could lead to the reversal of the Big Bang theory.  It’s called the Big Crunch—the end of

life.  If Omega is less than one, the Universe and our little Earth may go on expanding forever.  But, like finding clues to solve Alexandria’s murder, the challenge scientists have in hunting for Omega is this:  they can’t measure distances in space or matter.  Sean, you’ve got eleven years of time and space from the first killing.”

Kim brought another round of beer and cleared the plates.

When Kim left, Dave said, “I believe Omega, the twenty-fourth letter or the first number, is connected to whoever killed Father Callahan and the others.  Not only is it found in Bosch’s paintings and the horrific sketches Father Callahan left in his blood, but Omega is truly symbolic of what Saint John was scribbling in his cave.  Omega today is the life sustenance—the pot liquor—that combines physics and theology into one spiritual soup.  If it boils over, it’s the end of the world.  If it simmers a billion more years, its existence is the ingredients of life and it tastes good.  The hunt for Omega is like the hunt for Alexandria ’s killer.  Both very difficult to track, and time may be running out in each instance.  Omega is said to be the prophecy of Armageddon, dictated to Saint John on the Isle of Patmos.  And somehow the meaning of the twenty-fourth letter is inextricably tied to Father Callahan’s death and ultimately Alexandria Cole’s.  The salvation of the innocent in all of this…Charlie Williams.”

“Man,” Nick said, “I feel like I should make the sign of the cross.”

“Sean, what do you think?” Dave asked.

“I’ll go back to the beginning—to the place and the time when and where Sam Spelling was shot.  But before I go there, I need to go all the way back to the beginning—Alexandria Cole’s murder—back to Alpha.  Maybe there I’ll find what I missed.”

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Judy Neilson lived in a remote neighborhood on the east side of St. Cloud near Orlando.  As O’Brien checked his GPS and followed the coordinates to Neilson’s address, he wondered if the S – T in St. Cloud might prove to be the place that Sam Spelling’s mother lived. 

There was one car in the drive.  A late model Lexus.  Lauren Miles, and her FBI database, had scraped up enough information on Neilson to let O’Brien know that she worked in timeshare sales.  Probably worked weekends and had Monday off.

He parked and rang the doorbell.  A woman peered from beyond a chain lock.

O’Brien smiled and said, “Judy?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Sean O’Brien.  I arrested Charlie Williams in the death of Alexandria Cole.”

“What do you want?”

“May I come in…it’s about Alexandria.”

“Don’t know what this has to do with me.  Come in.”  She opened the door and led O’Brien into the living room.  He could smell stale wine on her breath.  She wore a long lavender robe tied at the waist.  No shoes.  Dark hair pinned up.  O’Brien remembered her features from more than a decade ago.  She had been a near supermodel in her own right.  Now she was turning prematurely gray, darker skin under puffy suspicious eyes, gauntness to her face.  Fingernails chewed.  Nostrils slightly red.