Dark Prophecy by Anthony E. Zuiker Read Free Book Online Page A

he was robbing. At least eight—no, nine cases of children shooting other children. And this was just since midnight.
    There are an estimated 1,423 murders in the world every day. That worked out to a murder every 1.64 seconds. Dark did a daily scan of homicide briefs, which included the cruelest words in the English language: Bludgeoned. Slashed. Stabbed. Shot. Gutted. Eviscerated.
    But this morning, Dark found one that practically jumped off the screen.
    The ritual torture-murder of a man named Martin Green.
     
     
    Dark quickly read the story—which had been first broken on a gossip Web site called the Slab. The piece was everything Dark hated about modern crime journalism. It was sensationalistic, vaguely sadistic, gruesome, and yet thinly reported. The writer, Johnny Knack, had woven a story using the thinnest of threads. The paucity of details—that’s what bugged Dark the most. The stuff he did have was misleading and obscured the real story. Most offensive of all, the story had a completely unsupported premise: that a financial adviser named Martin Green had been the targets of a “vigilante death cult.”
    However, Knack did have an exclusive:
    A crime-scene photo, right from Special Circs. Or as Knack put it: “High-level sources close to the investigation.”
     
     
    Dark copied the JPEG from the Slab site and dragged it into a piece of presentation software on his desktop. After a few clicks, the image was projected onto the basement’s lone bare wall. Dark stood up, killed the lights. The bright image of Martin Green’s final moment shined on the white concrete. Nowhere near scale but large enough for Dark to see the smaller details.
    The longer Dark stared, the more it became clear body position didn’t serve any specific torture purpose. This wasn’t like a waterboarding or asphyxiation. The man’s body was staged. It was meant to look like something . This was a ritual.
    Why did your killer do this to you, Mr. Green?
    Why did they burn your head, and nothing else?
    Why cross your legs like that? An upside-down number 4. Did that number mean something to your killer? To you?
    Who were you, Martin Green? Just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong hour? Or did our killer choose you for this grim ritual for a specific purpose. Did he find you, study you, hunt you. Then late one night, blindside you . . .
    The fact there even was a photo amazed Dark. Special Circs took great pains to keep their cases out of the mainstream media. And the photo meant his old friend Tom Riggins had a mole in the department, or at the very least, a greedy support staff member looking to augment his meager government salary. Leaking photos like this wasn’t just a firing offense, in Riggins’s opinion. This was a torture-slowly-then-put-you-in-Gitmo kind of offense. Dark could imagine Riggins’s reaction to something like this. He’d be like a crack-addled shark right about now, making his way through the corridors, sniffing for blood.
    Dark found himself reaching for his cell phone, his thumb almost pressing the auto-dial button—number six—which would connect him with Riggins. Then he stopped. Tossed the phone back onto the morgue table.
    Riggins had made it clear: no more contact. No conversations, not even a cup of coffee and a hearty discussion of the weather. He and Riggins were through.

chapter 11
    The cell buzzed in his pocket. Dark fished it out, recognized the number: his in-laws up in Santa Barbara. A delicate, sweet voice spoke to him: “Hi . . . Daddy?”
    It was his little girl, Sibby. Named for her mother, who had died the day their daughter was born. Little Sibby was five years old, but sounded younger on the phone, somehow.
    “Hi, baby,” Dark said, eyes still on the torture image on his wall. “How are you?”
    “I miss you, Daddy.”
    “I miss you, too, baby. What did you do today?”
    “We went on the swings, oh, and then the slide. I went down the slide thirty