Over the following three days, he buried himself in the case, sensing Christian was linked to the murders. But how? Was he a victim, or somehow involved? The latter seemed impossible. Still, he remembered the madman at the memorial service. Could Christian have been drugged, maybe brainwashed by some murderous cult, and turned into a monster?
Needing answers, Arthur started his investigation with the orchids, but too many of the city’s flower shops sold them. He showed around the picture of Christian from Wayne’s flyer, but none of the shopkeepers remembered any particular customers buying those orchids around the times of the murders. It was no surprise. It was summer, and orchids were in demand for the dances of the upper class, those lofty creatures of wealth far removed from the men who lived on the streets or in squat houses or died holding one in their hands.
He touched base with Officer Miller every day, hoping for any news. All the while, the city held its breath for the next murder. Arthur learned from Miller that the latest victim, like the others, had also received his orchid on the morning of his death. It had been delivered to Louis May’s stoop, and twelve hours later the young man was dead.
With morning coffee in hand, Arthur contemplated this cruelty, this promise of death delivered to a doorstep. He climbed to his rented room and returned to his cluttered workspace.
There, resting on the keys of his typewriter, was a single white bloom.
A Brassocattleya orchid.
“LOOK, MR. CRANE,” Officer Miller said. “I can imagine you’re spooked, but folks around here think this might be as a publicity stunt. To sell more papers.”
Arthur stared dumbfounded across Miller’s desk into the crowded squad room. He had come straight here after finding the orchid. Right now it lay on the battered metal desk in front of him. “You can’t think—”
Miller held up a beefy hand. “I don’t. I trust you plenty, but I can’t help you. My hands are tied.”
Arthur’s stomach sank. He’d been fighting the police for hours, hoping for some kind of protection, but no one took him seriously. “How about I just sit in the police station then? Just for twenty-four hours?”
“I can’t allow you to do that.” Miller’s freckled face looked concerned, but his chin was firm. He wouldn’t give in.
“Then arrest me.”
Officer Miller laughed at him. “On what charge?”
Arthur punched him right in his freckled face.
IT TOOK THREE days for the Times to bail Arthur out. In the interim, a fourth victim had received an orchid and had been murdered. The new death further convinced the police that Arthur either had been lying about the orchid or someone had played a cruel prank on the British reporter.
Arthur knew better.
Still, what did it mean? Had the killer passed him by? Or was he just biding his time to make the kill?
Not knowing for sure, Arthur spent his first night of freedom in Sparky’s twenty-four-hour diner, afraid to go home. He brought a giant pile of notes and used the time to outline a book, a treatise about the murders. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood had come out two years ago, and the narrative of those killers had mesmerized him. He wanted to do something similar, to find some way of making sense of these deaths, to nail them down between the cold, dispassionate pages of a book.
Seated at a corner table of the diner, with a clear view to all the exits, he nibbled on his third piece of apple pie and downed his umpteenth cup of coffee. All night long, he had refused to give up his table, despite the jaundiced glances from the waitress.
But now the sky had pearled to a pale gray, and he knew it was time to move on. He could not live inside the diner forever. So he packed up his things, left a generous tip for the waitress, and trudged toward his apartment. As he walked, he rubbed the grit from his exhausted eyes. He squinted at the sun breaking over a boarded-up and abandoned storefront ahead. The five-story building had become the home of squatters. It was regularly raided, emptied, only to fill again.
As he crossed along it, he hefted his satchel of notes. He knew he could get a book out of these murders, something dark and fascinating and significant, the kind of thing that could make his career.
A few meters away, a figure stepped out of the door of the dilapidated store, sticking to the shadows. Even though he was barely visible in the gloom, Arthur recognized him and stopped, stunned and incredulous.
“Christian . . . ?”
Before he could react, his brother was upon him, pulling him tightly in an embrace that was both intimate and frightening. Fingers dug into his shoulders, his elbow, hard enough to find bone.
Arthur gasped, tried to pull away, but it was like trying to unbend iron. Pain weakened him further, forcing him to drop his bag.
Lips moved to ear. “Come with me.”
The breath was icy, smelling of sour meat and rot. The tone was not one of invitation but of demand. Arthur was lifted off his feet and dragged away, as easily as a mother with an errant child.
In a moment, they were through the doorway and up a flight of rickety stairs to an upper room. Refuse littered the floor. Old ratty blankets bunched along the walls, abandoned by their former dwellers. The only place of order was a thick oak table in the center, its surface polished to a high sheen, so out of place here.
As was the smell.
Past the reek of sweat, waste, and urine came the wafting sweetness of honeysuckle and gardenia. The scent rose from a spray of white orchids, all Brassocattleya.
If Arthur had any doubts as to the role Christian played in the recent murders, they were dispelled at this sight. The table looked like a shrine or an altar to some dark god.
Arthur tried to struggle out of that iron grip, but he could not escape the hand clamped to this forearm. For his efforts, he was slammed against a wall, hard enough to bruise his shoulder, and pinned there. Fearing for his life, he searched for his only weapon, the same weapon that once drove the two brothers apart in the past.
His words.
But what could he say?
Arthur looked at his attacker, dismayed by what he found there. Christian looked exactly the same—yet completely changed. His face and bearing were as they always had been, but now he moved with a speed and strength that defied reason. Worst of all, his gentle expression had turned hard and angry. Malice shone in eyes that were once bright and full of joy.
Arthur knew this dreadful condition must be secondary to some kind of drug. He remembered the madman in the church, recalled the horror stories he had read of addicts on a new pharmaceutical called PCP. The drug had arrived in the Haight-Ashbury district just last year.