The Athena Factor by W. Michael Gear
“So, maybe it’s DNA?”
“Sure, maybe. But that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why is that, Sherlock?”
“If it was DNA, why would they be involved in these high-profile assaults and burglaries? Do you know how easy it is to get someone’s DNA? They could have done something as facile as grabbing Sheela’s champagne flute at the Wilshire.”
“Her champagne flute? How?”
“They could have isolated a couple of mesodermal cells from the lipstick smudge she left on the rim. Or, better, someone could have grabbed the paper towel she’d dried her hands on after she threw it in the trash. They didn’t need to set up an elaborate hoax with fake legs and a plastic-lined toilet. In Julia Roberts’ case, they didn’t need to take the sheets. Cops pull DNA off of sticky-tape samples that pick up flakes of skin.”
“But these aren’t cops.”
“No,” Christal mused. “But if they were after DNA, they’d know how simple it is to get it.”
“Okay, so DNA’s out.” He paused. “What would a witch want with any of this stuff?”
“You know how they give bloodhounds an article of clothing so they can track down the person? Evil magic works the same way. A witch needs to have something very personal and intimate to tie the curse to. Like an e-mail address to direct the evil to the right person.”
“You know”—he gave her a level look—“I don’t buy this witchcraft stuff.”
“Neither do I. Despite my upbringing.”
“Then, why are you looking so worried?”
“Because it’s not what you or I believe that’s at issue.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”
She gave him a grim smile. “Because all that matters is that someone does believe it. Figure out that core belief and this whole thing will make perfect sense.”
He considered that. “Just like the stalkers. At least one in particular. I told you about her. She believes that Sheela is secretly in love with her.”
“Krissy, right?”
“Right.”
“Then you begin to understand.”
“But that’s a delusion. An obsession gone wrong. An example of the human brain making up rules when it operates dysfunctionally.”
“And witchcraft isn’t?”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
They ate in silence for a while. Finally, Lymon put his fork down. “Here’s the thing. The guy in New York didn’t look like a wacko.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like a professional … doing a job.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled. “Just like Copperhead.”
“So much for your theory.”
Christal crunched a jalapeño between her teeth, savoring the burst of flavor. “Maybe not witchcraft, Lymon. But something similar, something parallel.”
17
The water was colder than she had anticipated. A chill unlike anything she had ever experienced before ate through her, trying to numb her muscles. Above, the night sky seemed remote, cold as the water, and as heartless.
She swam on, glancing up on occasion to orient herself by the bowl of the Big Dipper. Shivers were picking at the edges of her muscles. The midnight waters had an oily feel. From some vague corner of her mind, she was reminded that ocean swimmers greased their bodies.
Come on, Nancy. It can’t be far. She’d seen the faint sparkles of lights just after dusk. She hadn’t expected to see them from the water, not bobbing on the surface. Not until she got close.
Stroke after stroke, she forced herself forward. A leaden feeling had grown in her legs. Had it been so long since she’d been on the high school swim team?
It seemed a distant memory, as though from a dream life. She maintained the rhythm. Stroke and kick, stroke and kick. This race wasn’t to the fast, but to the steady.
She had too much to live for. Not just herself, but the others. They all depended on her.
It would be so nice to stop, float, and rest for a bit.
Stroke and kick, stroke and kick.
She tried not to think of the black depths below. What did it matter? One hundred fathoms? Or fifty? All it would take in her condition was six feet.
Stroke and kick, stroke and kick.
She maintained her pace, doggedly panting as her muscles began to ache. A desperate fear had knotted in the back of her brain. What if she cramped?
Who would ever know?
No one. Only the black and lonely sea.
Stroke and kick. Stroke and kick.
Blessed God? Where are the lights? Please, just show me the lights!
Sheela glanced at Rex. He was in the window seat, his head lolled to the side, his mouth open. A faint snore was borne on each exhalation. The stubble on his dark cheeks marred the shiny texture of his skin. She could see where the oils in his hair and scalp had smudged the clear plastic of the window.
What was it about men that they were at their most hideous when they were asleep in an airplane seat? Their breath seemed to taint the very air, thickening and fouling it with a faint odor.
She unbuckled her seat belt and stood, walking back in the hunched posture necessary to clear the Gulfstream III’s low cabin. Dot was propped sideways in her seat, a pillow cushioning her hair. Her two makeup and wardrobe women were likewise slumped on their side of the aisle.
Sheela found Lymon and Christal sitting across the aisle from each other in the rear. Lymon had the reading lamp on and was scrutinizing papers. Christal was frowning down at her laptop as she periodically tapped the scroll key. The screen was glowing and the cables were plugged into the plane’s Internet access. Sheela hunched down in the aisle between them. “What are you both doing awake?”
“Just double-checking the itinerary.” Lymon tapped the papers on his lap. “We’ll check into the St. Regis by nine—traffic and security willing. You can nap until three. Makeup and prep until five, when you’ve got a magazine interview. Cosmo, I think. At six-thirty Rex throws them out if they haven’t left already. At seven, we leave for the premiere.”
“I’m still a little hazy on this,” Christal said. “We’re flying to New York, checking into the hotel, watching a movie that Sheela didn’t even star in, and flying back to LA the same night. Am I the only one who thinks that’s a little nuts?”
“Fox is going to be there,” Sheela said with a shrug. “I have to be there to smile and hug and schmooze. Jagged Cat’s producers want me sucking up to the Fox bigwigs. The company producing Jagged Cat still hasn’t locked down the distribution rights. Universal and Paramount are dickering for them, and involving Fox adds heat to the deal.”
“Don’t they have people to do the selling?” Christal seemed confused. “You’re an actress. You’re supposed to be playing a character.”
“Christal, you seriously don’t think that they just pay me to act, do you?”
“Uh … yeah.”
“Oh, you dear naïve girl.” Sheela gave her a sympathetic smile. “This entire trip is targeted on three men who will be at the screening. They run Fox’s film distribution. That means they put the movies into the theaters. My sole job is to smile and flirt, to snake my arm around their shoulders and bat my eyes suggestively. My people want pictures of me and the Fox management in Variety, People, and half the society pages in the country. By tomorrow morning rumors will be floated all over Hollywood that Fox is interested in distributing Jagged Cat.”
Christal pursed her lips, frowning. “Just how far will people go?”
Sheela caught the undercurrent. “Christal, these deals can be worth tens of millions of dollars, depending on the picture’s success. It’s just as ripe for abuse as any other deal when people stand to make or lose millions.”
“I got it. Suddenly a midnight flight sounds perfectly reasonable.” She paused, laughing. “Oh, hell!”
“What?” Lymon asked.
“I stood Tony Zell up. I promised him dinner tonight.”
Lymon burst out laughing. “H
“Nineteen ninety-six?” Sheela wondered. “Oh, Christal, what a blow to his overinflated ego. He’s going to be drooling for you now.”
“Lucky me.”
“Make room.” Sheela motioned Lymon over, aware of Christal’s return to introspection. She was evaluating something, processing an idea based on something Sheela had said.
“What are you thinking?” Sheela asked.
“Brad Pitt was assaulted in New York tonight.” Christal tapped her laptop suggestively. “He was getting into a cab with Angelina Jolie when some guy in the crowd outside a club on West Fifty-second shot him in the ass with some kind of dart gun. In the scuffle, someone else, a woman, yanked out a hank of Jolie’s hair.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
Lymon, who had moved into the window seat, slowly shook his head. “No joke.”
“Shit!” Sheela dropped into his vacated seat, feeling his body warmth. Reassured by it. “So, they grabbed the guy?”
Christal continued, “Witnesses said he looked Middle Eastern, dark complexion, medium build. When spectators tried to interfere, some kind of stun device was detonated. Probably just like the one that flattened you and Lymon at the St. Regis. In the confusion he got away. So did the woman who pulled Jolie’s hair out.”
“The dart is interesting, too,” Lymon remarked. “Kind of like a harpoon, it apparently spools out, impales its victim, and is reeled back in.”
“So, how’s Brad?”
Christal was pensive. “They took him straight to the emergency ward. They’re running tests now. Trying to see if anything was injected. They’ve got him on antibiotics and an HIV protocol, just in case.”
“It’s not an injection.” Lymon gave Sheela a meaningful look. “It’s another … . what? Specimen retrieval? Just like snipping a bit of Manny’s penis.”
Christal added, “We can’t be sure about what happened to Angelina Jolie. Was it an attack? Or just a scuffle? The details aren’t clear.”
Sheela leaned back, closing her eyes. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“Witchcraft,” Lymon muttered as he stared down at his papers.
“Hey,” Christal chided softly from her seat.
Sheela glanced back and forth between them. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that brought up. You want to fill me in?”
Lymon rubbed his eyes, then looked at her. She liked the concern in his weary hazel gaze as he said, “How are you on soul possession? Targeted evil? Voodoo dolls and the like?”
“Not very. I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“Neither do we,” Christal answered. “It’s just something we’re tossing around. It has to do with the personal nature of the things being taken.” She made a helpless gesture. “It shows how baffled we are, Sheela. Surely you’ve heard the stories of witches collecting fingernail clippings, strands of hair, and navel lint. Taking some personal item to do sympathetic magic. It’s the only comparison we can find. And it’s silly.”
“Is it?” Sheela felt a coldness in her breast. “Did Lymon tell you about my freaky fan? The one with the slice-and-dice course to unrequited love? She just knows that when I smile down from the screen, I’m talking straight to her.”
“Must make you feel peculiar.”
“Christal, until you’ve been there, I’m not sure I could ever make you understand. It curdles your soul. In a world full of six billion people, how many of them have wounded minds? How many were abused as children? How many brain damaged? How many have fried their synapses with drugs? How many have chemical imbalances? How many live for their fantasies, and how many would sell their souls to satisfy their delusions?”
“I’ve heard figures as high as one to two percent,” Christal answered. “More, given the right circumstances.”
Sheela barely nodded. “One of the most horrifying moments of my career was after I made my first film, Joy’s Girl. My character was a young prostitute. I did a scene that was sexually explicit.”
“I’ve seen it. That expression on your face is a heart-stopper. Was he really that attractive?”
“Hey, there were thirty people on set at the time. I hated the guy. The director knew it, so he told me to imagine that my favorite dessert was being dribbled on my face. That’s where that look came from.”
Christal laughed in delight. “Wow! It worked. The first time I saw that, I thought the screen was going to melt. Every man in the theater walked out weak-kneed.”
Sheela shrugged. “I didn’t understand the effect that scene would have. It was pieced together with bits from four days of brutal shooting. Do the shot, change the lighting, redo the shot, change the camera angle, redo the shot, change the color of the sheets, redo the shot. And on and on. You can only dream of chocolate soufflé for so long. After the first hour I felt as sexy as bread mold.”
She glanced at Lymon, curious about how he was taking it. “It wasn’t until the screening that I finally understood what a good film editor can do. I couldn’t believe that was me up there on the screen. My manager at the time, Angel, leaned over and said, ‘Well, kid, how about it? When this lays down in video, you’re going to have a half million men playing it slow motion, over and over, while they slump on their couches and jack off.’”
“Yuck!” Christal gave her a disgusted look.
“Yeah. One of the perks of being a star, huh?” Sheela arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes, on really bad nights, I try to imagine that … all those men. I can picture them, illuminated in the television’s glow, sweaty, hairy, their rumpled pants down around their knees, hands stroking up and down, and their wide eyes fixed obsessively on mine. How are they playing it in their minds? What are they doing to me? What would they give to turn that momentary fantasy into the real thing?”
Christal swallowed hard and looked away. “Jesus”
Sheela made a gesture of acceptance. “In that instant, they all want to possess me in one way or another. Maybe my soul, but always my body. So, guys, what’s a little witchcraft compared with reality?”
Sid Harness strode down the hall, his coat flapping as he entered the New York City medical examiner’s office. He was still blinking, wishing desperately for another cup of coffee, and decidedly sleep deprived. He’d had a whole blessed three hours of somnolence in his own bed, next to Claire’s warm body, before the phone rang.
He’d left his wife sleeping, taken a quick shower, driven into the city, and parked his car in the long-term lot at Union Station. The morning train had taken him to New York’s Penn Station. A cab had carried him to the ME’s on the Lower East Side.
Now he hurried down the hall, found the right office, and leaned in the already-open door. He tapped lightly, calling, “Hello? I’m Special Agent Sid Harness for Dr. Helen Lambout.”
A middle-aged woman who sat at the desk looked up, peering over the tops of her glasses. Gray streaked her brown hair, and her face had a severe look. A green surgical smock covered a gray dress.
She smiled and nodded. “Yes. DC said someone was coming up. Come on in. Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
He grinned at that. “Yeah, I’m running on caffeine and nervous energy.”
She studied him, apparently noting his swollen eyes and the lethargy that three hours of nodding to Amtrack’s version of comfort had left imprinted in his face. “Come on. You’ll want to see the lab results, too.”
She led him back the way he’d come, down a flight of stairs, and along a hallway lined with examining rooms. They stopped in a small lunchroom with a table, chairs, a snack and pop machine, a microwave, and a stained coffeepot from which she withdrew a cup of something that looked like crankcase drippings.
Lifting the paper cup, she inspected it, peering down her nose through her glasses. “I don’t know how fresh this is.” She handed it to him with a shrug. “Creamer and sugar are there. While it’s not necessary, any d
Sid fished out a dollar and slipped it through the slot. He sipped the coffee, struggled to keep his face straight, and went for creamer and sugar after all.
As he sipped cautiously he followed Dr. Lambout through double doors and into one of the forensic labs. He’d been in similar rooms before, but each time the surroundings sent a chill up his spine. The autopsy table with its lights, hoses, and drains always lurked like some ghost of the Inquisition. Light boards on the walls were for viewing X-rays. This room had a counter that sported a covered microscope, a small centrifuge, and glass-fronted cabinets full of test tubes, pipettes, beakers, boxes of rubber gloves, plastic specimen bags, and the other accouterments of necropsy. Even the air seemed chillier.
Helen Lambout led him to the counter, where a manila folder had the letters FBI marked prominently in black felt pen. She propped herself on one of the stools and flipped the cover open, asking, “Do you want to see the body, or are the photos sufficient?”
“The photos will do.” He bent to peer at the glossy eight-by-tens. A naked woman lay on the table, eyes half-slitted in death. She looked incredibly pale, the whiteness a result of demise. Outside of being a floater, she appeared to be a typical Caucasoid woman of moderate build. He could see no immediate sign of trauma, no indication of any abnormality except that she was obviously dead. “Got a cause of death?”
“She drowned. Preliminary samples test positive for seawater. When we opened her up, we found no evidence of foul play. We’re still looking for the more obscure pharmacology, but we came up negative on the usual: alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and so forth. Internal organs look healthy.”
“Stomach contents?” he asked.
“She had steak—beef, we think—at the last meal. Potato and broccoli were ingested about four hours before death. Again, the stomach contents tested negative for alcohol. Her lungs were fine, but deoxygenated from the salt water. We found no lesions on the skin, no evidence of injections or injuries. Vaginal swabs came back negative for semen or spermatozoa.”