Jack pulled a typed paper from his file. A vertical line split the page, with the words of each message in the left column and their translations in the right. He scrutinized the paper. "The first note was 'Hell calls hell,' but we don't know if it goes with the Peterson girl or the Walker man."
Olivia shrugged. "Maybe the killer sees himself as the keeper of the gates of Hell." She tapped a pencil against her teeth. "But if hell is his theme, so to speak, wouldn't he repeat the message?"
Jack massaged his neck. "Okay, here's the next note: 'Never faithful,' found with the waitress, Angela Buckley."
"The first victim, Laura Peterson, was promiscuous, but I was thinking of something else." Olivia told him about the vestal virgins, how breaking their vows meant death by burial.
Jack puzzled over the idea. "Unfaithful could mean another kind of betrayal, like unfaithful to an ideal to an ideal or goal."
When Olivia nodded, he continued, "That could go along with the note found with Keisha." He trailed a finger down the list. "Here, 'fame lives in great things.' Sounds like he's praising someone who accomplishes something."
Olivia ran her hands through her hair in frustration. "Or the notes could be all out of order."
Before Jack could respond, the doorbell rang, and moments later Slater walked into the library. "I just got the cub's autopsy," he said, sitting down in an occasional chair opposite Olivia. "The results were sent to the zoo instead of my office."
He dug in his pants pocket and pulled out a folded note. "It's long so I wrote the message down. The page was small and the writing degraded, but here's what the lab pulled off."
He read aloud, "'us est ad portas.' The first part was torn off and never recovered." He looked at Olivia. "What do you think?"
"First, 'us' isn't complete," Olivia answered. "It's the ending of a word. The rest translates, 'is at the gates.'" Tiny lines formed between her brows. "Someone is at the gates, I think, and 'est' is singular, so the person at the gates is singular."
"I am at the gates?" Jack guessed.
"No, that'd be 'sum,'" Olivia answered. "It's third-person singular, and masculine, so it'd have to be… " Her eyes widened dramatically. "Deus!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "'God is at the gates.' That's what it says! That makes sense."
Jack wrote the translation on his note pad. "The message with the two lions, then, is a warning, 'As fierce a lion as possible attacked the beast-fighter' and 'God is at the gates.'"
"And if a section of the note in the cub is left out, there could've been a 'but' in between the two notes: 'As fierce a lion as possible attacked the beast-fighter, but God is at the gates,'" Olivia concluded.
"That makes sense to me," Jack said.
"That's good," Slater grumbled, "because it makes no sense at all to me."
Olivia took the paper from Jack's hand. "You know what it sounds like to me," she said staring at the writing. "Sounds like his messages sort of evolved. The first one was lost, maybe a warning about infidelity, maybe not. But the second one about hell is general, almost like he was trying to get attention rather than send a message."
"He got our attention, all right," Jack said. "But the rest are specific to the victims. What about that?"
She held up her hand. "Just hear me out. The killer was learning his craft as he continued to murder. By the time he got to the latter victims, the notes make more sense because he became more efficient in his delivery. The last two notes are more sophisticated than the first ones."
"What about the other kinds of deaths?"
"In ancient times crucifixion was reserved for criminals or political prisoners," Olivia murmured.
Slater raised his eyebrows. "The lawyer? The way they twist the law around – that's gotta be a crime." He laughed ruefully.
"And the beatings?" Jack asked.
Olivia thought a moment. "The Roman legions had a practice called decimation. They instilled discipline by beating every tenth legionnaire to death. Brutal, but effective."
Jack stood abruptly and looked out the front window, his back to the other two. "I know what he's doing. They're all warnings." Turning around, he continued, "The son of a bitch is punishing the victims for supposed crimes and he's warning them. But after the fact. After he's already killed them."
The Avenger was sure she knew, that he could read the knowledge in those bright green eyes as surely as he read a storm brewing on the California horizon. He'd seen the emotions flit across her face – speculation, mistrust, suspicion. Clever girl that she was, she'd soon fit the puzzle pieces together.
And if his cohort were arrested, further chaos would ensue. He didn't think his trusted accomplice would crumble under the thug-like interrogation methods of the police, but one never knew.
Now the Avenger had a dilemma. He wanted to destroy the woman, but the man was learning too much about him. They both were clever enough in their own way. The woman was a corruptible vessel. The man possessed knowledge that could damn the Avenger.
Because panic was alien to his nature, psychiatrists would claim he was incapable of normal, human empathy, but they were wrong. The first bubble of alarm wormed its way into his mind. He ignored it. Fear of being trapped belonged to the lower species. He had no intention of being caught. This time, however, he'd be required to draw on the full force of his foresight and intelligence to extricate himself from this tangle.
To eliminate his two primary concerns.
The Avenger pulled his car off the highway and onto the winding, dirt road that led to his refuge – the only place where he could gather his wits about him, refresh his soul, and rejuvenate himself. He turned off the ignition of his McLaren F1 sports car, pulled the side hatch, and jumped out. He wouldn't use the driver this time.
Before he walked up the short steps to the wide double doors etched with stained glass windows on either side, his butler swung open the doors and ushered him into the Penteli marble-floored entry. He tossed his coat to the man and stormed up the circular staircase to the main suite on the second floor. Then he made his way through the passage hidden at the end of the master suite's walk-in closet and upward to the third-level gable-fronted dormer room.
The secret chamber – his Holy of Holies.
He lit seven white candles, one for each day of the week. Seven was the perfect Biblical number. The venerable number of ancient creation. His mother had taught him well.
Mounted on heavy pewter candlesticks, each candle varied in height from votive to a twenty-inch taper. The other relics lay scattered on a velvet cloth of a rich, blood-red hue. He fingered the items one by one and then gently repositioned them in their exact individual places.
One of his favorite artifacts was the watch that had belonged to the lawyer. An old-fashioned pocket watch with a 14k gold chain and tiny diamonds to mark the hours of the clock face, it was a fitting memento for one who made his living by inflating the billable hours in a case. He scrutinized the item religiously before putting it down.
Henry Walker, the first male sacrifice, was an attorney by profession. The Avenger hated lawyers. What was it Shakespeare had said about killing all the lawyers first? The man chortled and continued his work. He'd certainly fulfilled the Bard's suggestion.
He pulled the thick, white, leather-bound album from a free-standing closet under the alcove and sat in a wing chair positioned by the dormer window. Maintaining the scrapbook was a worrisome burden, but a record was the heart of religiosity and common sense told him he couldn't continue his work forever. No one could sustain this frenetic pace. Pulled so many directions with work and special work. He carefully pasted in the latest entry. This would, in fact, be the final entry: Olivia Grace Morse Gant.