“Come on, Belly,” he said.
Exasperated, his friend got into the back seat.
“Just make room for yourself back there,” Iverson said over his shoulder. “This car has become kind of like a second office, since I’ve been out on medical leave from the Bureau.”
As soon as Bell closed the back door, Iverson peeled out, anxious gaze obsessively scanning the empty street.
“Medical leave?” Walter asked, peering into the back seat at all the crooked stacks of files and fast-food wrappers.
“You can’t be too careful,” he said. “I’ve been followed.”
Walter was starting to wonder if getting into the car had been a bad idea. But if there was something more going on than what had been made available to the public, then Walter needed to know.
“We can’t go back to my place,” Iverson said, pulling into the empty parking lot of a closed carpet and flooring company. “So this will have to do for now.” He eased the Cutlass into a slot under a jaundiced sodium light and killed the engine. The windows began to fog up almost immediately, the damp bay chill creeping into the interior of the car.
“Tell me what you told the woman on the tip line,” Iverson said, turning to peer at Walter. “I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Latimer.”
“Well...” Walter said, pulling the worn lapels of his jacket tight around his throat, and wishing he’d taken time to put on a scarf.
“Look,” Bell interrupted, leaning forward from the back seat. “Why should we trust you? Any of you?”
“You shouldn’t trust Latimer,” Iverson said. “I wouldn’t. That weasel thinks he can capture the Zodiac Killer and figure out a way to use him as a weapon. He’s got... ambitions.” He said the word ambitions like he might have said herpes. “He was the bastard who hijacked my idea, for the formation of a special scientific division to handle cases that fall outside the boundaries of what would be considered normal criminal activities. Cases like this one.” He shook his head, rueful and defeated. “When he took over the project, he told our superiors that I was cracking under pressure, and campaigned to get me sidelined on medical leave.”
“Okay,” Bell said. “So we agree that it’s not a good idea to trust Latimer. But why should we trust you?”
“Because,” Iverson said, “the Zodiac Killer has been writing to me. He still does, tells me everything. Things Latimer doesn’t know. Even...” He reached into the back seat and grabbed a green folder off the top of a teetering stack, flipping it open and extracting the first sheet of paper inside. “About you two.”
He held up a rumpled, repeatedly folded sheet of paper. At the top of the sheet, the words “Dear Special Agent Iverson” appeared, above a few lines of the familiar code Walter had seen in his vision and in the newspaper accounts. At the bottom there was a rough sketch. It pictured two floating heads, hovering above a double row of stylized waves like a child might draw. The heads were simplistically rendered, but the heavy, strongly arched brows on the left and the wild curly mop of hair on the right made it obvious who they were supposed to represent.
“He says he’s from another world,” Iverson continued. “And that you two opened a psychic gateway that allowed him to enter this one.”
“Did he describe his own world?” Walter asked, excitement flaring magnesium hot in his belly and making him feel reckless. “Is it another planet? Or another dimension?”
“Hold on,” Bell said. “Start at the beginning.”
Iverson nodded, his look solemn.
“I don’t know why the killer became fixated on me,” he said, breath steaming in the chilled interior of the car. “It’s not like I was in charge of the case, or in any kind of position of power. I was just one of several junior agents working under Latimer. But for some reason, the bastard singled me out. He’s been writing to me, calling my house in the middle of the night, taunting me. I don’t sleep. My wife left me. But in a strange way, I think Latimer is jealous.” He shook his head. “Crazy, isn’t it?
“Anyway,” he continued, “the last confirmed and undisputed Zodiac murder on public record was the cab driver in Presidio Heights, back in ’69. But the truth is, the killer was just getting warmed up. After two of his male victims survived his attacks, he gave up on messing with couples and started concentrating on single women.” He flipped through the pages in the file on his lap, until he came to a photograph of a barely dressed dead blonde wearing the remains of a burnt polyester blouse. “Donna DeGarmo, age twenty-six, a dental hygienist from Alameda.”
“I recognize this woman!” Walter said, nauseous but unable to look away. “I saw her blouse, burnt like this.”
“There’s something else that’s different,” Iverson said. “When her body was found, it was giving off highly concentrated gamma radiation. Especially in the throat and... um... ” He cupped his hands over his pecs. “Chest area.”
“My God,” Walter said, remembering the vision, and the sparks dancing over the killer’s hands.
“The landlady who discovered the body and two of the first responders on the scene were subsequently hospitalized with acute radiation sickness. The entire block was evacuated and the residents quarantined. Naturally it was kept out of the papers, to prevent widespread panic. ‘Sewer leak.’ That was the cover story. But here’s the weird thing.”
“What?” Bell said. “Weirder than a radioactive corpse?”
Iverson nodded.
“Much weirder. See, it took us several hours to mobilize all the equipment we needed to enter the location safely and dispose of the body. I mean, the levels of radiation we were dealing with, standard lead shielding would have been as useless as lingerie. We were actually talking about filling the whole apartment with quick-dry cement, demolishing the rest of the building around it and trucking the cement block out to the Nevada desert for disposal. But, less than three hours later, before we could get a conclusive reading on the type of gamma-emitting radioisotopes we were dealing with, the radiation was just gone.”
“Gone?” Walter frowned. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“That’s impossible,” Bell said. “Radiation doesn’t just go away. It can take centuries to decay.”
“Yeah, I know,” Iverson said. “Impossible, but true. It was as if the unknown radioactive isotope somehow bonded with oxygen in the air and rendered down into harmless water.”
“Astounding,” Walter said. “Unprecedented.”
“And worse, that was only the first time.”
Iverson fanned out a handful of photos, each one featuring a different woman. All beautiful. All dead. Thirty-two total.
“The unusual gamma radiation was only found in six out of the thirty-two, but that’s because the bodies of those women were discovered within three hours or less of their deaths. It seems to be getting stronger with each new victim, but after the three-hour mark, the radiation still dissipates without a trace, leaving behind nothing but garden variety water.
“Regardless, the killer has claimed responsibility for all of them, proving it with samples of their hair or clothing in the letters he mailed to me.”
“This is horrible,” Walter said. “It’s so much worse than we ever could have imagined.”
“But what exactly is going on here?” Bell asked. “Could this be some kind of unique, short-burst radiation that’s as normal as sunshine in his world?”
“Or,” Walter continued, “maybe the killer’s very atoms have been somehow destabilized by passing through the gateway, resulting in a mirrored gamma-raylike effect within the flesh of his victims.”
“But why does he only seem to emit radiation when he’s killing someone?” Iverson asked. “We’ve tried tracking him with Geiger counters, figuring that anyone as close as he was to so many repeated radioactive events must give off some trace radiation—something that would be detectable. But that hasn’t been the case. It’s as if he lets off this intense burst at the climax of each murder and then... nothing.”