The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Michael Connelly THE THIRD PANEL ^{from Alive in Shape and Color}

Detective Nicholas Zelinsky was with the first body when the captain called for him to come outside the house. He stepped out and pulled the breathing mask down under his chin. Captain Dale Henry was under the canopy tent, trying to protect himself from the desert sun. He gestured toward the horizon and Zelinsky saw the black helicopter coming in low under the sun and over the open scrubland. It banked and he could see FBI in white letters on the side door. The craft circled the house as if looking for a place to land in tight circumstances. But the house stood alone in a gridwork of dirt streets where the planned housing development was never built after the big bust a decade earlier. They were in the middle of nowhere seven miles out of Lancaster, which in turn was seventy miles out of L.A.

“I thought you said they were driving out,” Zelinsky called above the sound of the chopper.

“The guy I talked to—Dixon—said they were,” Henry called back. “Probably realized that would take them half the day driving up here and back.”

The helicopter finally picked a landing spot and came down, kicking up a dust cloud with its rotor wash.

“Dumb shit,” Henry said. “He lands upwind from us.”

One man got out of the chopper as the pilot killed the turbine and the rotor started free-spinning. The man wore a suit and dark aviator glasses. With one hand he held a white handkerchief over his mouth and nose to filter the dust. With the other he carried a tube used to carry blueprints or artwork. He trotted toward the canopy.

“Typical fed,” Henry said. “Wears a suit to a multiple-murder scene.”

The man in the suit made it to the canopy. He put the tube under one arm so he could shake hands and still keep his handkerchief over his mouth and nose.

“Agent Dixon?” Henry asked.

“Yes, sir,” Dixon said. “Sorry about the dust.”

They shook hands.

“That’s what happens when you land upwind from a crime scene,” Henry said. “I’m Captain Henry, L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. We spoke on the phone. And this is our lead detective on the case, Nick Zelinsky.”

Dixon shook Zelinsky’s hand.

“Do you mind?” Dixon said.

He pointed to a cardboard dispenser on one of the equipment tables containing breathing masks.

“Be our guest,” Henry said. “You might want to put on the booties and a spacesuit along with the mask. A lot of chemicals floating around in the house.”

“Thank you,” Dixon replied.

He went to the table and put the tube down as he swapped his handkerchief for a breathing mask. He then took off his jacket and pulled on one of the white plastic protection suits, followed by the paper booties and latex gloves. He pulled the suit’s hood up over his head as well.

“I thought you were driving out,” Henry said.

“We were, but then I got a window on the chopper,” Dixon said. “But it’s a short window. They need it this afternoon for a dignitary surveillance. So should we go in, see what you’ve got?”

Henry gestured toward the open door of the house.

“Nick, give him the grand tour,” he said. “I’ll be out here.”

Dixon stepped through the threshold into a small entranceway that had been remodeled as a mantrap with fortified doors on either end. It was typical of most drug houses. Zelinsky stepped in behind him.

“I assume the captain filled you in on the basics when you talked,” Zelinsky said.

“Let’s not assume anything, Detective,” Dixon said. “I’d rather get the rundown from the case lead than the captain.”

“Okay, then. This place was a sample house built before the crash in ’08. Nothing else was ever built out here. Made it perfect for cooking meth.”

“Got it.”

“Inside we have four victims—all in different parts of the house. Three cooks and a guy you would call the house security man. There are several weapons in the house, but it looks like nobody got off a defensive shot. It looks like they were taken out by fucking ninjas, to tell you the truth. All four are heart-shot with arrows. Short arrows.”

“Crossbow?”

“Most likely.”

“Motive?”

“It doesn’t appear to be robbery, because there are bags and full pans of product in all the rooms and all of it readily visible for the taking. It just looks like a hit-and-run. And there is something else we didn’t put out on the bulletin that I think you’ll want to see.”

“On the phone I think the captain mentioned this is a Saints and Sinners operation.”

“That’s right. Lancaster and Palmdale is their territory and this is their place, so it’s not looking like a turf thing either.”

“Okay, let’s see the rest.”

“First, your turn. What made the FBI jump on the bulletin we sent out?”

“The arrows. The crossbow. If it connects to something else we have working, I will tell you once I confirm it.”

Dixon stepped through the second door and paused to look at the front room of the house. It was furnished like a normal living room with two leather couches, two other stuffed chairs, a coffee table, and large flat-screen television on the wall. There was another, smaller screen on the coffee table and it was quadded into four camera views of the scrubland and desert surrounding the house.

There was a dead man sitting on the couch in front of the security screen, his body turned to the left, his right arm reaching across his body toward a side table where a sawed-off shotgun waited. He never got to it. A black graphite arrow had pierced his torso back to front, a heart shot, as Zelinsky had said, penetrating the leather vest he wore with the Saints & Sinners motorcycle club logo—the grinning skull with devil horns and angel halo tilted at a rakish angle. There was very little blood because the arrow had struck with such high velocity that the entrance and exit wounds sealed around its shaft.

“We have this guy as victim number one,” Zelinsky said. “Name is Aiden Vance, multiple arrests for drugs and acts of violence—ADWs and attempted murders. Did a nickel up in Corcoran. Your basic motorcycle gang enforcer. But it looks like they got the drop on him here. He apparently didn’t see them coming on the monitors, didn’t hear them pick the lock or come through the mantrap. Until it was too late.”

“Neat trick,” Dixon said.

“Like I said, ninjas.”

“Ninjas? More than one?”

“Doesn’t feel like a one-man op, you ask me.”

“The cameras—are there digitized recordings?”

“No such luck. Purely for live monitoring. I guess they didn’t want digital evidence of their own goings and comings here. It could have put them away.”

“Right.”

They proceeded further into the house. There were several evidence technicians, photographers, and detectives working throughout. Yellow evidence markers were placed on the floor, on furniture, and on walls everywhere Dixon looked. The place had been used as a cook house for crystal meth, which was the main income stream for the Saints & Sinners. Zelinsky explained that this was only one of several such houses operated by the group and scattered through the desert northeast of Los Angeles, where the finished product was shipped to and distributed to dealers and then to the hapless victims of the devastatingly addictive drug.

“The starting point,” Dixon said.

“Starting point of what?” Zelinsky asked.

“The trail of human misery. What was cooked in this house destroyed lives.”

“Yeah, you could say that. A place like this—it was probably producing seventy, eighty pounds a week.”

“Makes it hard to feel sorry for these people.”

It was a three-bedroom house, and each bedroom was a separate cook room that was probably in operation twenty-four hours a day, with two or three shifts of cooks and security men. In each cook room there was another body pierced by an arrow and sprawled on the floor. Each one a man in a protection suit and wearing a breathing mask. No blood, just a clean heart shot each time. Zelinsky gave Dixon their names and criminal pedigrees as part of the tour.

Dixon didn’t seem to care who they were, just how they died. He squatted down and studied the arrows protruding from each of the bodies, seemingly attempting to find some clue or confirm something from the markings on each shaft.

Zelinsky took Dixon into the master bedroom last because here was the only anomaly and the only visible blood. The victim here was on the floor on his left side. The sleeve of his protection suit had been pulled back and the right hand was cleanly severed at the wrist.

“Guys,” Zelinsky said. “Give us some space.”

Two forensic technicians stepped back from the wall where they had been working. There above a meth drying pan on a folding table was the victim’s severed hand, pinned to the wall by the long-bladed knife most likely used to hack it off the body. The fingers had been manipulated. The thumb and first two fingers were up and tightly together, the second two were folded down over the palm. On the wall surrounding the hand was a circle drawn in the victim’s blood.

“Seen anything like that before, Agent Dixon?” Zelinsky asked.

Dixon didn’t answer. He leaned down and in close to the wall and studied the hand. Blood had dripped down the wall into the drying pan below.

“Kind of like the Cub Scout salute, if you ask me,” Zelinsky added. “You know, two fingers up?”

“No,” Dixon said. “It’s not that.”

Zelinsky was silent. He waited. Dixon straightened up and turned to him. He held his hand up, making the same gesture as the hand pinned to the wall.

“It’s the gesture of divinity often seen in the paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance period,” Dixon said.

“Really?” Zelinsky said.

“Have you ever heard of Hieronymus Bosch, Detective Zelinsky?”

“Uh, no. What or who is that?”

“I’ve seen enough here. Let’s go outside and talk.”

Under the canopy they cleared space on a table and Dixon took the end cap off the cardboard tube. He slipped out a rolled print of a painting and stretched it out on the table, using the boxes of latex gloves and paper booties to weight the ends.

“This is a to-scale print of the third panel of a painting that hangs in the Prado in Madrid, Spain,” Dixon said. “The original is five centuries old, and the artist who painted it was named Hieronymus Bosch.”

“Okay,” Zelinsky said, his tone betraying in the one word that he knew that an already weird case was about to go weirder.

“It’s part of a triptych—three panels—considered to be Bosch’s masterwork. The Garden of Earthly Delights. You may never have heard of this guy, but he was sort of the dark genius of the Renaissance. While Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were painting angels and cherubs down in Italy, Bosch was up in northern Europe creating this nightmare vision.”

Dixon gestured to the print. It was a tableau of vicious creatures torturing and maiming humans in all kinds of religious and sexually suggestive ways. Sharp-toothed animals moved naked men and women through a dark labyrinth leading toward the fires of hell.

“Have you seen this before?” Dixon asked.

“Fuck no,” Zelinsky said.

“Fuck no,” added Captain Henry, who had stepped over to the table.

“The first two panels, which I don’t have here, are bright and blue because they are about earthly matters. The first is a depiction of Adam and Eve and the garden and the apple and so forth, the Creation story from the Bible. The second—the centerpiece—is about what came after. The debauchery and life without moral responsibility and respect for the word of God. This, the third panel, is about Judgment Day and where the wages of sin lead.”

“All I can say is, this guy had one hell of a warped mind,” Henry said.

Dixon nodded and pointed to a face at the center point of the panel.

“That’s supposedly the artist there,” he said.

“Pious son of a bitch,” Henry said.

“Okay,” Zelinsky said. “So he was a dark fucking guy and all of that, but he’s been dead five hundred years and is not our suspect. What are you telling us? What do we have here?”

“You have the third panel uprising,” Dixon said.

“What the fuck is that?” Henry asked.

“Dixon tapped his finger on several images on the print.

“Let’s start with the arrows,” he said. “As you can see, the weapon of choice here is the arrow. Supposedly the arrow in Bosch’s work symbolized a message. This is what the scholars tell us. The arrow shooting from one individual to another meant the sending of a message. So there is that, and there is this.”

Now Dixon tapped heavily on a specific point on the print. Both Zelinsky and Henry leaned down over the table to see the tiny detail. Depicted in the lower left quadrant of the panel was a man being pressed against what looked like the slab of a tomb by a demon animal with a round blue shield on its back. A knife piercing a severed hand was stabbed into the shield. The fingers of the hand were configured like those of the hand attached to the wall inside the cook house behind them.

“So what are we talking about?” Zelinsky asked. “Religious zealots, end-of-the-world nut jobs, what? Who exactly are we looking for?”

“We don’t know,” Dixon said after a pause. “This is our third scene like this in fifteen months. The commonality is the targets are purveyors of human misery.”

He gestured toward the house.

“They make meth here,” he said. “This starts the trail to addiction and human misery. In March we found a similar scene in a warehouse in Orange County used by human traffickers. Three dead there. Graphite arrows. Purveyors of human misery.”

“Sending a message,” Zelinsky said.

Dixon nodded.

“Four months before Orange County we were in San Bernadino, where four members of a Chinese triad were slaughtered in the kitchen of a noodle restaurant. They were involved in extortion and smuggling in workers from mainland China to work in kitchens as slave labor while the triad held family members hostage back home. Three scenes, eleven dead, all of it tied together by this painting and this panel specifically. A piece of it re-created at all three scenes.”

“By who?” Zelinsky asked. “You have any suspects?”

“No identified suspects,” Dixon said. “But it’s a group that calls itself T3P. Short for ‘the third panel.’ Within a day, maybe two, they will reach out to you in some way to take responsibility for this and to vow to continue the work they believe law enforcement is failing to do.”

“Jesus Christ,” Henry said.

“We believe they are an offshoot of something that started in Europe two years ago. It was the five hundredth anniversary of Bosch’s death and his work was displayed in a Holland exhibition that drew tens of thousands and probably sparked the uprising. Since then there have been similar multideath attacks in France, Belgium, and the U.K.—all of them targeting the purveyors of human misery.”

“It’s sort of like they’re terrorists against the bad guys,” Henry said.

Dixon nodded.

“An international meeting with Interpol and Scotland Yard is scheduled for early next month,” Dixon said. “I’ll make sure you get the details.”

“What I don’t understand is why you haven’t gone public with this,” Henry said. “There’s gotta be people out there who have to know who these people are.”

“We most likely will after the international meeting,” Dixon said. “We’ll be forced to. But up until now we hoped the two cases were it and we’d have the chance to quietly identify and move in on them.”

“Well, this one is going to go public,” Henry vowed. “We are not going to wait around for fucking Interpol.”

“That’s a decision above my pay grade,” Dixon said. “Right now I just came out to confirm the connection and I need to get the heli­copter back. The special agent in charge of the Los Angeles Field Office will be reaching out to the sheriff’s department to discuss task-force operations locally.”

Dixon turned toward the helicopter. The reflection off the cockpit windows made it impossible to see the pilot. Dixon raised his arm and twirled a finger in the air. Almost immediately the turbine engine turned over and the rotor blade began to slowly turn. Dixon started peeling off the protection suit.

“Do you want to keep the print?” he asked. “We have others.”

“I would, yes,” Zelinsky said. “I want to study the fucking thing.”

“Then it’s yours,” Dixon said. “I just need the tube—my last one.”

The helicopter blade started kicking dust up again. Zelinsky reached up and grabbed one of the canopy’s cross struts when the tent threatened to go airborne. Dixon put his suit jacket back on but kept the mask on to guard against breathing the dust. He picked up the empty tube and recapped it, then tucked it under his arm.

“If you need anything else, you know where to reach me,” he said. “We’ll talk soon, gentlemen.”

Dixon shook their hands, then trotted back toward the helicopter as the turbine began to obliterate all other sound. Soon he was inside the cockpit and the chopper lifted off. As it rose Zelinsky saw that the F in the FBI decal was starting to peel off in the downdraft from the rotor.

The craft banked left and headed south, back toward L.A.

Zelinsky and Henry watched it go, keeping a steady altitude of no more than 200 feet above the hardscape. As it headed toward the horizon the sheriff’s men then noticed the kickup of dust from an approaching vehicle. It had lights in its grille that were flashing, and it was moving fast.

“Now who the hell is this?” Henry asked.

“They’re in a hurry, that’s for sure,” Zelinsky added.

The vehicle took another minute to get to them, and when it arrived it was clear it was a government vehicle. It pulled to a halt behind the other vehicles scattered on the road in front of the cook house. Two men in suits and sunglasses got out and made their way to the canopy tent.

They pulled badges as they approached, and Zelinsky recognized the FBI insignia.

“Captain Henry?” one of them said. “Special Agent Ross Dixon with the Bureau. I believe we spoke earlier? This is my partner, Agent Cosgrove.”

“You’re Dixon?” Henry said.

“That’s right,” Dixon said.

“Then who the hell was that?” Henry said.

He pointed toward the horizon, where the black helicopter was now about the size of a fly and still getting smaller.

“What are you talking about, Captain Henry?” Cosgrove asked.

Henry kept his arm up and pointing at the horizon as he began to explain about the helicopter and the man who had gotten off it.

Zelinsky turned to the equipment table and looked at the print of the third panel. He realized that the only thing the man from the helicopter had touched before gloving up was the cardboard tube and he had taken it with him. He moved the boxes that weighted the print and flipped it over. On the back there was a printed message.

Zelinsky stepped out from the cover of the canopy and looked off toward the horizon. He scanned and then sighted the black heli­copter. It was flying too low to be picked up on FAA radar. It was no more than a distant black dot against the gray desert sky.

In another moment it was gone.