Six
QUESTIONS
“WHAT DID YOU mean before?” I watched him from where I stood in the middle of his sunken living room, my voice openly wary. “One of ours? One of our whats, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He acted like he hadn’t heard me.
For the last minute or so, I’d been watching him pace and think.
He didn’t seem to be over the fact that I’d insisted I was human.
Yes, as in my insisting to him that I was actually a human being.
Now he leaned over his kitchen bar, staring down at an electronic tablet resting on the black counter. Now that I stood next to it, I realized the bar wasn’t granite at all but some denser, more-expensive looking stone. It almost looked volcanic.
Black might have been working from the concentrated look in his eyes, or perhaps he was just actively ignoring me.
I was about to give up, to just walk out for real, when he spoke.
“Would you like to accompany me?” he said, tapping through a sequence on the tablet without looking up. “I was more or less serious about the B&E. I plan to go tonight.”
That strange nervousness I’d seen on him when I’d first gotten to his apartment seemed to have vanished. He was back to treating me with almost a clinical detachment.
“Go where?” I said, bewildered. “What do you mean, B&E?”
“I wasn’t lying to your Inspector Tanaka about going through a list of the most frequently-used wedding sites,” he said, not looking up from whatever he was doing on the tablet. “...But I misspoke. I should have said wedding-related sites, not wedding sites per se. Which includes a number of locations beyond just those where actual marriage ceremonies frequently occur.” He narrowed his eyes, sliding his finger across the front of the tablet. “So places where engagement photos are taken. Places where receptions occur... etc.” Glancing up at me with those gold eyes, he added, “I can see why that might have been confusing.”
“Where are you going tonight?” I asked again.
“I’ve created a sort of algorithm,” he explained, again as if I hadn’t spoken. “Probability factors for wedding-related activities to occur, combined with a subset for the other variables the killer has displayed...” He glanced up a second time, cocking an eyebrow at me. “I thought perhaps we could visit the next one on the list together.”
“Which is where?” I said.
Again, he acted like he hadn’t heard me.
I fought the interest out of my voice in spite of myself, trying to make it annoyance.
“Are you going to tell me where you’re going or not?” I thought a few seconds more and added, “You know Nick’ll have a tail on you?”
He met my gaze directly that time. His lips slid upwards in a faint smile. “By ‘Nick,’ I presume you mean Inspector Tanaka?”
I flushed, although I couldn’t for the life of me have said why. “Yes.”
“I am not concerned.” He paused, studying my eyes. “Are you? I am guessing he told you to stay away from me. From what I saw, he very clearly intended to tell you to stay away from me when he left me in that interrogation room this morning. He seemed quite intent on bullying you on that point, if necessary...” He smiled at me. “I’m glad to see that he succeeded in that about as well as I expected.”
I frowned.
Putting down my now-empty glass of pomegranate juice on his kitchen counter, it struck me again to wonder what I was doing. Rather than conducting any kind of examination, I think it was safe to say that I was now simply “hanging out” with Quentin Black at his apartment.
He seemed to be perfectly comfortable with that fact as well.
Moreover, now we were discussing a murder case we had no earthly business discussing.
No wonder Nick thought I had some kind of past with this guy.
“Did you read his mind for that?” I said, deciding to be direct.
“Yes,” he said absently.
I watched him use his finger to slide open a new screen on the tablet. I wasn’t close enough to see what he was looking at, so I sighed in frustration, and partly in defeat.
“What are you looking at?” I demanded.
“Specs for the building.”
“Which building?” I said. “Are you really not going to tell me?”
“The Legion of Honor,” he said, glancing up. “It’s next on our list. I thought it best to break in tonight, when it is closed. I strongly suspect our friend will wait until it’s closed as well... so we should endeavor to get there before he does.”
“It’s definitely a man then?” I said, catching his pronoun use.
He shrugged. “Statistical probability.”
I fought not to ask him one of the dozen or so questions that rose to my mind. Exhaling in frustration when he didn’t go on, I picked one and asked it anyway.
“What in God’s name makes you think he’ll be there tonight?” I said.
Exhaling some frustration of his own, he pointed vaguely at the sun through the plate glass window, which was already starting to sink in the sky.
“There are astrological reasons.” He looked back at his tablet, now using both hands to manipulate the size of something on his screen. “Related to rituals,” he added, turning his head as if looking at something on the screen from a different angle. “It’s not so simple to explain. I told you the algorithm was somewhat complex... and that it involved several variables, including astrological ones...”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Well... I meant to,” he said without a pause. “This particular system of astrology has to do with rituals, as I said. If our target is following the pattern I think he is following, we can expect three separate incidents related to this particular stage of the ritual... .and the third should be tonight. Unless, of course, we stop him.”
I stared at Black’s downturned head, frowning.
Sighing again, he raised his upper body, leaning his palms on the bar counter and looking at me directly.
“It is difficult to explain,” he repeated. “It has to do with wedding rituals from our home world. Wedding rituals of our people,” he added, in case I missed that part. “Clearly, our killer has weddings on the mind. He seems to have mixed feelings about them... wouldn’t you agree?”
I folded my arms tighter, biting my lip.
“You’re saying you’re from another planet, Mr. Black?” I said tersely.
“Dimension,” he said, leaning back over the tablet and using his fingers to slide the screen again. “Earth... but not this one. I’d really rather not talk about all that until I can get a look at your blood, if you don’t mind.” His voice grew preoccupied once more as he frowned at the screen. “Why don’t we table that whole aspect of our discussion, doc? Now that I know you didn’t ‘immigrate’ here knowingly, so to speak, I’d rather have something more concrete to show you before I explain things that are going to significantly alter your relationship to just about every aspect of your life... as well as your feelings of kinship towards the vast majority of this world’s inhabitants.”
My mouth opened. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say to that however, I closed it a few seconds later with a snap.
“There are a number of clues your Inspector Tanaka has missed,” Black added, without lifting his eyes from the screen. “Not his fault, really. I only noticed because I knew what I hunted. He would have no reason to look where I was looking.”
“Meaning?” I said, my voice terse once more.
He looked up, exhaling in open impatience as he stared at me.
“This is all going to be much more difficult and time consuming, if I have to walk you through even the basics of what I am doing every five seconds to keep you from having some kind of negative emotional reaction,” he said. “I confess, I still want you with me. I would prefer if we could approach this in partnership. But it’s going to be really tedious if I have to explain every single reference that comes up relating to our race. Can we please just table such things until we have the luxury to discuss them at our leisure?”
Closing the leather cover over the tablet with a magnetized-sounding snap, he stared at me, as if waiting for an answer.
“Y-yes?” I said, fighting with whether to be angry or not.
Or maybe whether it was worth arguing the point.
“Good.” Exhaling in relief that time, he looked away, gazing out the window at the slowly dipping sun as if summoning every last ounce of his patience.
He faced me once he had.
“There are others here... of our kind,” he explained in a short voice. “That’s all you really need to know for now. I have no idea how many, so don’t even ask. At least three. Likely not more than a few dozen, and frankly, that is pure optimism on my part. You are the first female I have encountered...” He hesitated, his stare flickering down my body. He seemed to shake something off before adding, “I have reason to believe that at least one of our kind here is ideological in an anti-human sense. He is also, I suspect, well-funded... and not particularly fond of me. But he is not located here.”
“On this... world?”
“In this country,” he corrected. Frowning at me, he said, “Why in the gods would I bring him up if he was still in our home dimension?”
Not sure what dimension he was talking about at that point, for either of us, I started to ask, then decided to drop it. After all, he’d asked twice.
“Russia,” he said, frowning back at me. “He’s in Russia. In this dimension.”
At my blank stare, he sighed again.
“Truly,” he said. “That is not important now. I only bring it up in case it becomes relevant in relation to the rogue I’ve been tracking... the one who might be killing these human females and combining rituals from that other dimension and this one.” Staring off into the distance, a more thoughtful look on his face, he added, “I admit I am curious if these deaths are the work of one of ours who has simply gone insane... or if it is part of some more deliberate orchestration. Something with an end-goal that has wider implications.”
“For who?”
He pretended not to hear my question. He glanced over my body with another of those appraising stares. “I admit, the coincidence of finding you here, at the same time, strikes me as overly...” He paused, as if searching for the right word.
“...Coincidental,” he finished.
For a long-feeling number of seconds we just looked at one another.
“The Velaquez family didn’t really hire you, did they?” I said.
He gave me a disparaging look. “They could not even afford my consultation fee.”
“How did you get them to say they had hired you?”
He gave me another look that translated more or less as really?
I bit my tongue, then pressed on. “So you’ve simply been looking for this... rogue... on your own? And you think he might be the murderer?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you looking for him, if no one is paying you?”
He frowned again, staring at me. “He is one of ours.”
The silence deepened.
“Would you like to accompany me, Ms. Fox?” he asked.
That time, his voice sounded formally polite.
He really wanted me to go, I realized.
“How are you going to get there without Nick following you?” I said.
“By leaving now,” he said, checking that expensive-looking military-style watch. “Well. Perhaps ten minutes from now. Soon.”
“Now?” I said, startled. “I thought you said––”
He sighed in open impatience.
“I would prefer to conduct surveillance beforehand,” he explained. “I can’t find enough recent pictures of the exhibit layouts to get a sense of where he might stage this. I need to walk the grounds. I thought we could do that while they are still open... during business hours, I mean. It is not practical to remain inside for the duration, given what my staff tells me regarding the most efficient means of circumventing their security protocols. But we could go, look around, then eat dinner while waiting for my team to finish prep.”
Glancing at my hand, the one wearing the engagement ring, he paused before making a strangely fluid gesture towards the ring itself.
“It may have to be a long dinner,” he said.
I shrugged. “Ian’s out of town. Your timing is good, on that front at least. Although he’s out of town most of the time these days...”
Trailing, I realized I was already talking as if I was going with him.
For a long moment, he only looked at me.
Then his eyes dropped back to the ring I wore.
“There are other things we could do, of course,” he said somewhat cagily. “To pass the time.”
I gave him a warier look. “Meaning?”
“I suppose sex is out of the question?” he said. He cleared his throat, going on in an almost carefully polite voice. “While we wait. Clearly, you’re in a relationship. But I don’t know what kind of agreement you and this... Ian... operate under.”
I let out a bewildered snort. “What?”
“I mean no offense.” He met my gaze with those riveting gold eyes, his face still polite but essentially unapologetic. “It’s a more pleasant way to pass the time than most. And I wanted to... clarify things. I admit I’m reacting to being around a female of my own kind more than I’d accounted for. Likely more than you realize. But you needn’t worry on your own behalf,” he added more sharply, maybe at something in my face. “...I am more than capable of controlling myself, Miriam.”
Flinching at his use of my first name, I continued to stare, fighting somewhere between asking him what the hell he was talking about, reminding him what I’d walked in on that afternoon, making some mention of him being an active suspect in an ongoing investigation of multiple homicides... and giving a flat, unequivocal no on the sex part before I did any of that and confused the issue more.
I ended up falling roughly on the last of these.
“No,” I said, incredulity leaking into my voice. “Absolutely no. Most definitely not on the agenda, Mr. Black. And yes, I’m in a relationship. I’m engaged. And no... that’s definitely not okay with me or Ian. Absolutely not. No.”
He nodded, seemingly unfazed.
Then he just stood there, his expression calm. It occurred to me after a few seconds more that he was still waiting for my definitive answer.
Not about sex.
About the other thing.
“And yes,” I blurted. “I’ll go. To the gallery, I mean. And to dinner at least, depending on what we find. But no... .funny business, Mr. Black. Dinner. That’s it.”
He gave me another of those curt nods.
“Understood,” he said. “Yes on the gallery and to dinner... with a pending ‘maybe’ on any subsequent B&E. Absolute no on any funny business between us. I agree to your terms.”
From anyone else, it would have sounded like he was making fun of me.
From Black, it sounded more like an awkward attempt at reassurance. Perhaps even some kind of informal contract. When he said it, he even held up a hand in a strange sort of peace gesture. Or maybe it was more of a promise gesture––like a boy scout’s salute, but less formal and he used all of his fingers.
As soon as it got quiet again between us, I wondered what the hell I was doing.
I’d given him a yes before I even let the rational part of my brain weigh in.
Nick would kill me. Arrest me, anyway.
He might even have grounds at this point, although I couldn’t for the life of me think what those charges would be, since I was no longer officially on the case and Black had invited me into his home completely of his own volition.
Of course, if I accompanied Black into the Legion of Honor that night, Nick would definitely have grounds to arrest me. And how on earth would I explain that? I could just picture telling Nick I’d broken into a museum in the dead of night with a murder suspect to see if a serial killer from another dimension might show up.
The thought made me smile... if involuntarily. Then again, maybe I was giving the dark humor part of my brain a little too much free reign right now.
I knew some part of me was hooked, though.
I could admit that much to myself.
Remembering that Nick might know exactly where I was already, my humor faded still more. He might be waiting for me or Black to leave the apartment even now. After all, when I came here, it was with the understanding that Black remained in police custody.
Nick would have someone tailing Black. I was sure of it.
“Hey,” I said, glancing at Black. “When they let you out. Did you happen to notice––”
“They definitely tailed me here, yes.”
Black turned towards me from where he’d been putting the headset from the glass table into the pocket of a long coat I hadn’t seen him put on.
He wore boots now too, I noticed.
I frowned at his words. “I thought you said you couldn’t read me.”
“I can’t in the usual way. But I still catch things, here and there. And you aren’t trying to hide yourself from me as much as you had been before, in that police station.”
He said it matter-of-factly.
I thought about that, then shoved the possible implications of those thoughts from my mind. I tried to decide where his accent originated instead. Sometimes it sounded almost Asian. He didn’t look Asian, but he could be some obscure mix.
“He didn’t come himself,” Black added, shoving a smartphone with a wide screen into a different coat pocket. “...Tanaka,” he clarified. “He might be out there now, of course, but he had someone else follow me from the station, likely in the hopes I wouldn’t recognize the tail. There is still a good chance he doesn’t know you are here, Miriam. Whoever he sent would likely not have been looking for you.”
Before I could decide how to respond, he turned, heading for the corridor to the right of his foyer. I assumed his bedroom lived down there, given that he’d disappeared and reappeared from the same direction when he’d gone to fetch the blond.
The memory brought a faint smile to my face.
Then a more noticeable heat.
“I’ll be right back,” he informed me, glancing over his shoulder. “Just grabbing a few supplies.” Without slowing his steps, he spoke over his shoulder again. “...And don’t worry. We can get out via the roof. Your homicide detective won’t see us, even if he is down there.”
“The roof?” I muttered.
But Black had already gone.
I glanced upwards, as if I would be able to see what he was talking about through the wood-beamed high ceiling. Did he really have a helipad up there? It was the only thing that made sense. But was he seriously saying he was going to helicopter us out of there, just so we could commit crime undetected by the SFPD?
That didn’t strike me as particularly inconspicuous.
Then again, as they always say... the rich really are different.
HE DID TAKE me out via helicopter.
He flew the damned thing, too.
It was only me and him, and for the first time that day, I found myself wanting to ask him about his security company, as well as about his military background.
Five black-uniformed security personnel waited for us on the roof when we took the stairs up there after spending some time in the immaculate offices of Black Securities and Investigations.
On the other side of that copper-coated door, I’d discovered that the offices really did form a kind of island on the segment of floor not taken up by Black’s residence. As a result, unlike his apartment, it had no windows. None that I saw, anyway... which I supposed wasn’t a terrible thing for a security company, although pretty redundant considering how hard it was to even get up here. Smokey glass walls partitioned much of the offices off inside the business suite, too, so a fair bit of privacy existed even between Black’s agents.
I saw a lot of computers, of course, as well as a number of people doing what looked like research. I saw a lot of people on hands-free phones, too.
I only saw maybe twelve employees total on the main floor, but I suspected a lot more people worked for him who might be elsewhere. I glimpsed a few windowless offices in the back as well as a number of storage lockers that some part of me wondered about.
It was not a small-feeling operation.
It didn’t feel huge either, but it definitely felt bigger than the name implied. Big enough that I wondered why I’d never heard of it before today.
All of his employees were polite. Deferential even.
Not just to Black... to me, too.
I got a few curious stares as we walked by, with a number of women and men double-taking me as I walked past. Black took me into a back room before we went up to the roof, and I soon realized in surprise that he’d done it so I could grab a change of clothes. Of course, when I thought about that, it made perfect sense. I didn’t really want to be wearing a suit and heels during our break-in that evening, no matter how good of camouflage it might be beforehand.
He had clothes in a lot of different sizes... women’s and men’s.
It made me curious about his business all over again, but I didn’t ask.
He instructed me on a few articles of clothing, including an armored vest, boots... and a shoulder holster for a gun. When I protested I didn’t have a concealed carry license in California, nor could I legally use any of his guns, I expected him to tell me it wouldn’t matter given what we planned on doing that night.
Instead, he said he’d already taken care of that.
I had absolutely no idea what that meant.
He gave me a faint smile. “This is the point that concerns you?” he said. “Illegal possession and carry of a firearm during our planned breaking and entering?”
I folded my arms. “I can potentially explain the latter.”
“Can you?”
“Just... stop dodging the question,” I said, waving a hand at him.
“I’ve made you my employee,” he said, handing a dark dress shirt to me over the partition I’d been using to try on clothes. Seeming to feel my reaction to his words, he added, “On a temporary and purely consultative basis, of course... at least until we can hammer out the details on something more permanent.”
Looking over the partition, I gaped at him––again for maybe the twentieth or thirtieth time that day––then shook my head, pulling the shirt he’d handed me around my shoulders and buttoning it up. Only when I’d finished and was in the process of sliding an arm into the shoulder holster did I peer over the dark gray partition a second time, lifting an eyebrow.
“Fuck,” he said, smiling faintly. “Stop flirting with me, doc. You’re distracting me horribly.”
I flinched, pulling my head back behind the partition, and I swore I heard him smile again. When I looked around the partition at him next, my face carefully blank, I saw zero apology in his eyes.
“We don’t have a forensic psychologist,” he explained. “It’s a legitimate business expense. I’ve decided I need one on permanent staff.”
“You put me on the payroll without asking me?”
Thinking briefly, he nodded. “No. Well... yes. Temporarily. Until we can negotiate something formal... like I said.” He quirked an eyebrow of his own. “Would you like to hear numbers?”
“No,” I said, sure somehow they would be obscene. “Why?”
“I just told you why––”
“You know what I mean.”
He gave me another flat look, holding his palms out without answering.
Clearly he thought his reasons were obvious.
Or irrelevant, maybe.
Exhaling in irritation, I said, “There’s no possible way you got me a concealed carry permit in San Francisco in under two hours, simply because I’m on your staff as a contracted forensic psychologist.” The disbelief remained overt in my voice. “Trust me, I know.”
“I didn’t do it through San Francisco. Or California at all.”
I stared at him. “Meaning?”
He smirked, handing me a gun, handle first. “Stop stalling, doc. If the clothes fit, hand them over and put your street clothes back on... or I’m going to get distracted again.”
“You’re really not going to tell me?” I said, shedding the holster and the shirt all over again and pulling back on my dress blouse. I glanced up to make sure he wasn’t watching me, in spite of myself. “About the gun?”
He sighed as if bored. “You now have a special weapons permit, doc, through the DOJ. It allows for concealed carry when you are working under the auspices of Black Securities and Investigations.” Giving my disbelieving look another faint smile, he glanced down, watching me button my top. Briefly, his eyes showed a flicker of heat.
“What about wait periods?” I said, maybe to distract him. “Background checks?”
“Waived the wait period,” he said, glancing up. “And the written test. Oh... and the range test. They told me to try and get you to do all of those things, of course. We can talk about the details when we work on that thing where you join my staff permanently.”
Ignoring that part, I shook my head.
“That’s not possible,” I told him flatly. “Not even for you.”
He gave me another smile. Those gold eyes didn’t waver.
“Who are you?” I said, unwilling to drop it. “Why would they do that for you?”
“They like me.”
I couldn’t help it... I let out an involuntary bark of a laugh.
Even so, like I’d been doing all day, in the end I let it go.
I handed back the holster too, watching him stuff it along with a gun in a canvas bag along with the clothes and boots he’d already picked out for me. I watched everything disappear when he zipped up the bag... but not before I noted that the gun he’d chosen for me was the new version of the 1911 MC Operator and a gun Nick would have drooled over.
When Black shoved a good half-dozen magazines into another bag, I simply watched.
He tossed two bullet-proof vests into that bag, as well.
Really, I told myself, he was right––a concealed carry permit wouldn’t matter an iota, given what he intended me to do with the gun later that night. Even Black hadn’t tried to convince me he had permission to break into the Legion after hours.
Still, some part of me found it ironic that he could hand out off-the-books gun permits like he was some kind of mafioso drug lord in a third world country, but he still had to commit petty crimes to hunt his so-called “rogue-dimensional-traveler.”
The way his staff treated him didn’t lessen my curiosity.
They all but genuflected when he walked by, and I noted not a single one of them joked with him or acted like they knew him personally at all.
They also asked absolutely no questions about who I was... or what we were doing, or even where we were going in the helicopter. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single one of them ask Black anything that wasn’t strictly relevant to what he needed in that precise moment. I definitely got a military vibe from many of them, too. A few tattoos I glimpsed on bare arms around the edges of form-fitting black T-shirts supported that impression.
Black didn’t introduce me to any of them, or tell any of them my name.
The helicopter itself, which looked like some kind of modified military model rather than a rich guy’s recreational toy, was a gunmetal gray with Black’s eagle symbol on the doors.
He took the proffered headset handed to him by one of his staff and climbed into the cockpit as the man climbed out, presumably after conducting the initial pre-flight check. Black immediately started his own check once the guy vacated the cockpit, pausing only to motion me to take the seat across from him.
Watching another in his staff toss the three black bags into the cargo area of the helicopter, I approached cautiously, holding my hair and ducking down as I walked to where a very buffed-looking Asian woman wearing all black held the passenger door open for me.
Once I’d strapped in and clamped on my own headset, we were off.
The flight was short, but exhilarating, I admit.
What felt like bare minutes later, we landed on a helipad at the VA Hospital just south of Land’s End Park, not far from the Sutro Baths and of course the Legion of Honor museum itself, which was in the northwestern corner of the adjacent Lincoln Park.
Black apparently either knew someone or made arrangements at the hospital itself, because one of his black-clad employees met us on the roof when we landed. I watched that same employee hand Black what looked like a computerized car key before jerking open the back door of the helicopter and tossing our three bags of equipment out onto the helipad.
Then, exchanging places with Black in the cockpit seat, the man put on the pilot’s headset.
Black hadn’t powered all the way down when we landed, and now I watched, half-incredulous, as the employee powered it back up again.
I stood there, holding my hair to keep it from whipping my face as I watched him take off. The aircraft rose in a nearly straight line, then its nose tilted down right before it headed back in the direction of downtown San Francisco. It was nearly out of sight before we’d even made it off the rooftop and inside the hospital’s main building.
Despite our quick drop off and dust off, I was pretty sure it wasn’t “normal” to use a government hospital helipad as your personal parking space... no matter how rich you were.
Even so, Black must have been training me already, because I didn’t ask.
We carried the bags down to the parking lot and found the vehicle Black’s employee left us by clicking the electronic car key a few times until something beeped. After we dumped the three bags into the trunk, we were on foot. We were also more or less in street clothes, although I wore a long coat Black had given me, and he still wore all black.
We walked to the Legion of Honor through the military base where the VA hospital lived, using back roads in Fort Miley to cut over to a footpath which brought us to the back end of the Legion and into Lincoln Park.
Once we entered the museum, Black got quiet, and unnervingly focused.
Mostly, I felt like I was watching him... and following him, without having much idea of what he was looking for precisely.
We did two quick circuits of the exhibit halls without stopping much at all.
Black had his large-screened phone out for most of that, and seemed to be looking at that as much as at any part of the physical layout. Any time a guard watched him for too long, Black started taking pictures, I noticed, but I couldn’t tell if that was just a cover.
We lingered the longest in the courtyard.
Black also made a few circuits of the round exhibit room directly under the courtyard, the one below the glass pyramid that lived right by the main entrance to the building. Dominating that circle of light created by the pyramid was a bronze sculpture I didn’t recognize.
I found myself looking at that sculpture far longer than anything else we saw.
It stood on a pedestal of blood-red marble, and depicted an angel on a winged horse, both with wings outspread. The angel held a scepter with a blood red jewel in the apex, but the jewel wasn’t what caused me to stare.
It was the headpiece to the scepter itself, which had been carved into the three-pronged spiral shape that I recognized from the dead bodies of the wedding killer’s victims.
“Black,” I said, motioning him over.
He sauntered over to me, barely looking up from his phone.
“Black,” I said, more insistently.
When he gave me a vaguely annoyed look, I pointed at the scepter.
He had to have seen it, but he barely gave it a glance before frowning at me, and then turning on his heel and walking away. I stared after him in disbelief, wondering if he didn’t know about the spiral patterns carved into the victims found so far.
I know, he told me silently.
He didn’t stop walking.
I watched him leave the round exhibit room for the next chamber and then I looked back at the statue myself, studying the three-pronged spiral. Like before, in the morgue with Nick, something about that symbol looked familiar to me, but I had no idea where I’d seen it before. I was sure I’d never encountered this particular sculpture before today.
I knew art a little, and I didn’t recognize the name of the artist, either.
The expression on the angel’s face appeared hard to me, almost cold. The horse’s nostrils flared and it pawed out with one foot, its wings curled and spread more in a war posture than one of flight, especially given the articulation of the angel’s streaming robes and upraised arm and outstretched wings. In the hand not holding the scepter, the angel carried a sword.
I’d never seen an image of an angel quite like that one before, not even in the more apocalyptic interpretations of the bible.
The spiral symbol looked a lot more pagan than Christian.
When I asked Black about the piece again, after he walked back through the exhibit hall to collect me, he only shrugged, his eyes back on his phone after a bare glance. I noticed he took a picture of the scepter before we left, however, as well as at least one of what appeared to be a brand carved into the rear of the horse in the same pattern.
“What does it mean?” I persisted. “That symbol?”
He didn’t answer.
The look he gave me told me he’d heard me, though. I more got the impression he didn’t want to discuss it. Not here.
I stared at the symbol for a few seconds more, maybe just to burn it into my memory. I found myself thinking it might be a distortion of something Celtic, kind of like how the Nazi swastika was a flipped version of a Vedic symbol that could be found all over Europe and Asia for thousands of years. I stared at the spirals long enough to memorize every particular, including the direction of each whorl.
Long enough that Black felt the need to click his fingers at me when he wanted us to leave the downstairs exhibits.
The second time we walked through, he seemed to be looking at the art more, but I got the sense he was comparing the location of every piece to whatever he stared at on his phone’s screen... versus looking at the art itself, per se.
I also found myself wondering if he was looking at things like cameras and blind spots, although I never caught him doing it overtly.
When we went out to the courtyard a second time, I sat by the ionic columns, drinking a bottled water I’d gotten from the downstairs café and watching as Black made a few circuits around Rodin’s Thinker, which stood near the exit overlooking a pool-like fountain. The fountain itself punctuated the center of a circular driveway where tour buses and taxis dropped off passengers, just on the other side of the French-styled pavilion.
I had no idea what he was doing.
While sitting there, however, I found myself thinking that it was an odd coincidence that the inspiration for this museum had come in part from the architecture of the Palace of Fine Arts, where the last murder had taken place. The wife of a wealthy sugar baron had taken a fancy to those French replicas during the World’s Fair and asked her husband to build a museum of the same style, which he had done.
I’d forgotten all that, with everything else that happened today.
I was still sitting there, thinking, when Black walked up to me, still gripping his phone in one hand.
“We can go,” he informed me.
“You know where he’ll stage it?” I said.
“I have an idea,” he said cryptically. When I didn’t stand up immediately, he just stood there, looming over me and exuding impatience. “I’m hungry,” he announced.
Nodding, I pulled myself to my feet, smoothing down the dark coat I wore.
Luckily, in San Francisco, wearing all black didn’t make you in the least bit conspicuous. Not in the fall, anyway. Not any time of year, really. Especially not when it looked like rain.
Thinking about that, I glanced up at the sky.
But Black was already walking away from me, his graceful steps purposeful. I watched him disappear through the French-styled archway that led to the stone steps down to the driveway in front of the museum and then to 34th Avenue.
With only the faintest of sighs that time, I followed him.