Dark Prophecy by Anthony E. Zuiker Read Free Book Online

couldn’t place it. Knack had been raised a good Catholic boy, and it looked like the torture of a saint. You had saints who were stabbed in the head. Saints who were flayed alive then tossed into salt mines. Saints who had their eyes and tongues removed and then were forced to eat them. Forget torture-porn flicks. You want the real hard-core stuff, you read Lives of the Saints .
    So who was the saint of the upside-down torture snuff? If only he’d kept in touch with Sister Marianne. She could help him sort this out in a minute.
    Knack suddenly remembered where he was—in the rental car of some unidentified Federal agent of some sort. He gets caught in here, he might be breathing through a hood in a secret Cuban prison later tonight. Keeping the printout in his lap, he gingerly slid the folder back into the duffel bag, stepped out of the car, closed the door. Calmly strolled back toward his own car, wondering where he could find a scanner.
     
     
    At a local copy shop, waiting for the image to scan, Knack thought about how he could put himself in a position to see what was on that legal pad. In the meantime, he pecked away on a netbook, Googling this mysterious Tom Riggins. Guy turned out to be a lifer at something called Special Circs, which was notable only because it wasn’t noted very often. Special Circs seemed to be tied into the FBI, but Riggins’s name also popped up in relation to the DOJ. Interesting. So Paulson had to be Special Circs, too. Why had he been summoned to the Green murder?
    Within the hour Knack e-mailed a follow-up about Green being the target of a “vigilante death cult” (oooh, yeah, he liked the sound of that) according to “well-placed anonymous sources.” He buttressed this assertion with a blind quotes from the local cops, as well as innocuous quotes from friends and neighbors that, with just the right framework, could read as sinister and despairing. For instance:
    Green kept to himself —which could also mean he was hiding.
    Green drank occasionally —which could also mean he was drowning his guilt in single-malt.
    Green was divorced —even his family couldn’t stand to be around him. By extension, he deserved to die.
    The trick wasn’t to say these things overtly. You let the “facts” and the quotes hang out there. Readers were good at connecting their own dots. Readers just wanted a few surface details that would help them categorize a guy like Green and then file it away. It was shorthand for real thinking.
    Green = Greedy Money Man = Racked With Guilt Over Something = Green Became the Target of Vigilantes.
    Simple.
    This “death cult” was designed to provoke a reaction from the Feds. They’d want to know his sources. Well, fellas, tit for motherfucking tat. Besides, Knack had the best thing: the crime-scene photo.

chapter 10
    West Hollywood, California
     
     
    Another night, another panicked wake-up. Another frenzied sweep through the house, checking doors and windows, lingering on his daughter’s half-finished room. Another series of hours to kill before dawn.
    So Dark surfed through murder stories.
    He knew he shouldn’t. He had promised himself that he’d pull his mind out of murders. For his daughter’s sake, if nothing else. Even reading about this stuff was like an alcoholic just browsing at the local liquor store or a heroin addict pricking the crook of his arm with a syringe, you know . . . just to remember what it felt like.
    Dark knew this.
    He read the stories anyway.
    The early morning roundup included a mother who killed her husband in a ritzy $3,500-a-night Fort Lauderdale hotel. It had been their anniversary. Her suicide note claimed she’d endured thirteen years of hell. A father in Sacramento had suffocated his two-year-old daughter. Turned himself in. Asked to be put to death immediately. An accountant had been stabbed on a street in Edinburgh, Scotland. A bandit who claimed his pistol fired accidentally when he held it to the temple of the kid