The Paradise Prophecy

10

When Callahan stepped through the doorway of Gabriela’s penthouse, the first word that popped into her mind was museum.

She had half expected to find a sleek, postmodern, glass and chrome showroom, and there was certainly some of that. But what surprised her were the collection of artifacts Gabriela had amassed, a juxtaposition of her two worlds-music and religion.

There were enough guitars mounted on one large wall to fill a goodsize Hard Rock Cafe, each one accompanied by an identifying placard: Gibson Les Paul, Paul Reed Smith Golden Eagle, pre-FMIC Strato-caster, Gibson SG, Martin D-28, Taylor 810ce. Callahan couldn’t play these instruments, but she appreciated their beauty. The majority of them were signed by well-known rock stars, which meant this wall was worth a mint.

A Yamaha grand sat in a nearby corner atop a plush white carpet, and mounted above it was just the beginning of Gabriela’s religious collection: a stark, black-and-white etching of a winged Lucifer, cast out of heaven.

A Gustave Dore. And it looked like an original.

Framed copies of Gabriela’s CD covers lined another wall, along with plaques commemorating their gold and platinum status. And just below this were two long glass cases holding more religious artifacts than Callahan had seen outside of the Alexandria National Museum.

Most of the statuary, artwork and jewelry inside these cases looked very old and quite valuable, and the sight of it all gave the young pop star a weight and depth that Callahan hadn’t considered before. No one spent this kind of money, or surrounded herself with this kind of history, without a deep appreciation of both the artistry and message it conveyed. Maybe Gabriela had felt a kind of kinship with its creators-other artists sharing their love of God with the world.

There was something about this notion that saddened Callahan, and her suspicion that Gabriela had been murdered took even deeper root in her mind.

The timeline, she thought. There must be something wrong with the timeline.

Either that, or someone was lying.

Alejandro Ruiz?

The woman who had greeted them in the foyer-a middle-aged housekeeper named Rosa-stepped through a doorway behind them and said, “Mr. Ruiz will be with you in a moment. He’s looking for his phone.”

Martinez turned. “Thank you.”

Rosa was about to leave when she hesitated and looked at Callahan. There was a trace of tears in her eyes. “Please go easy on him. He’s taking this very hard. We all are.”

Callahan wasn’t quite sure why she had been singled out, but she nodded. “Were you at the concert hall when Gabriela died?”

Rosa shook her head. “I was at home. With my children.”

“Do you know if Gabriela had any enemies? People who might want to do her harm?”

Rosa’s eyes widened. “Why do you ask? Do you think someone-”

“I’m just trying to be thorough,” Callahan said. “You were around her a lot, so I assume you know a lot about her private life. Does anyone come to mind?”

“No. No one. We all loved Gabriela. She was a good girl. Treated everyone like family.”

“What about Alejandro? Did she treat him like family, too?”

The implication was clear and the question seemed to catch Rosa by surprise, but she managed not to stutter. “Yes. Of course. They were very fond of each other. Like brother and sister.”

Uh-huh, Callahan thought. “While we’re waiting, could you point me to her bedroom?”

Rosa looked conflicted, as if she were about to violate a trust. “Is that really necessary?”

“I’m afraid it is, yes.”

Rosa glanced at Martinez, then said, reluctantly, “Just down that hall, first room on your right.”

A bedroom tells you more about a person than any other room in the house.

This is where we feel most at ease. Where we keep the things that are most important to us, much of it within arm’s reach. Where we have our most intimate moments.

Alone. With a lover. With our God.

The bedroom is where our secrets are held and revealed. Where we can be ourselves without fear of anyone watching or listening or judging. What’s hidden within its walls is never meant to be seen by uninvited eyes, and Callahan felt a tiny twinge of guilt when she stepped into this one.

First impression: Gabriela was a reader. Voracious, from the looks of it. There was no television in the room and one wall supported several shelves of books. Fiction, nonfiction, hardback, paperback, some neatly vertical, while others were stacked horizontally on the edge of a shelf, as if waiting to be read: The Heart of Catholicism, The Power of Miracles, Chastity and Spiritual Discipline.

This last one suggested that Gabriela may not only have been trying to deepen her understanding of her faith, but was struggling to remain true to it.

There was an acoustic guitar tucked into a corner. A no-name brand, battered and scarred. A relic of her past, no doubt, and probably more valuable to her than any of the guitars in her living room.

On the neatly made bed was an open UPS box. Callahan checked the label and saw that it had come from the Garanti Auction House, Istanbul, Turkey. Probably another artifact. Pushing back the flaps, she reached inside and removed a small stone figurine of an angel fighting a dragon. She had no idea what it signified, but it was a beautiful piece and probably worth more than her yearly salary.

The opposite side of the room featured a window that overlooked the city, a wash of skyscrapers disappearing into the horizon. To the left of it was a walk-in closet, two overstuffed suitcases sitting near the open doorway. The timeline had shown that Gabriela had arrived back in Sao Paulo the day of her death, and it looked as if she hadn’t unpacked before heading off to the auditorium to prepare for her last show.

That the bags had been left untouched suggested to Callahan that the housekeeper’s role here was limited to cleaning only. While Gabriela may have enjoyed some of the comforts of money, she was self-sufficient enough to deal with her own luggage, and for reasons Callahan couldn’t quite explain, this made her like the girl.

Those untouched bags, however, also meant that Martinez and his team had once again proven their ineptitude. The suitcases should have been thoroughly searched for any possible evidence pointing to Gabriela’s killer-assuming he existed. A letter, a notation, a diary, a photograph. Anything that might steer them in the right direction.

But nobody had bothered.

In fact, as Callahan looked around, it seemed as if the room itself had barely been touched. Was Martinez so convinced that Gabriela’s death was some kind of otherworldly phenomenon that he’d decided to forego any real police work?

Maybe Callahan should simply step away and let the man tell his ridiculous cover story about the poor girl’s spiral into drug addiction.

Why should it matter to her?

But it did matter. There were too many unanswered questions surrounding this case and she couldn’t let them stand. Not without at least trying to figure them out.

Which was probably what Section was counting on.

Returning the figurine to its box, she moved around the bed, pulled the suitcases out of the closet doorway, and lay them flat on the carpet. Neither of them was locked, and when she opened the first one all she found was underwear. Tanks and socks and bras and enough frilly thongs and short-shorts to raise the eyebrows of even Gabriela’s most progressive followers.

The second bag held pairs of neatly folded jeans and cutoffs, along with several printed T-shirts carrying messages like Faith Inside and Pray It Like You Mean It and Property of God.

One well-worn shirt carried a phrase that Callahan vaguely recognized:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n

True enough, but she’d be damned if she could remember where she’d heard it.

Continuing through the bag, she found more of the same, then did a quick check of all the pants pockets, hoping to come up with something interesting.

All she managed was a pack of spearmint gum and a few balls of lint.

Oh well, it had been worth a try.

As she closed the suitcases, her attention was drawn to the walk-in closet. She saw a tiny sliver of light in the darkness there, coming from the very back-like the light from beneath a door.

Was there another room back there?

Curious, she got to her feet, moved into the closet doorway and flicked on the light. The closet was paneled in bleached maple, with built-in shelves, drawers and shoe racks, but surprisingly few clothes hanging from the rods. Judging by the contents of the suitcases, Gabriela hadn’t cared much about her offstage attire.

Callahan had expected to see a door along the back wall, but instead found more built-in shelves, divided into three columns.

So where had the light come from?

She certainly hadn’t imagined it.

Flicking off the overhead, she crouched in the darkness for a different angle, and sure enough, a thin crack of light ran along the bottom of the center column, just about the width of a door.

A hidden door.

Getting to her feet again, Callahan crossed to the shelf, put her palms against it and pushed. She’d seen these types of doors before and wasn’t surprised when it swung inward, a swath of sunlight spilling into the closet from the room beyond.

A small, private sanctuary. Not much bigger than your average bathroom.

The sunlight came from a solar tube high in the ceiling, and fell directly across an old wooden prie-dieu-or prayer desk-at the center of the room, which was essentially a narrow table with a padded kneeler in front.

A couple of half-melted altar candles flanked a small wooden cross atop the desk, and on the wall facing it was another symbol, this one far more elaborate than the one at the crime scene. It had been hand-painted in a deep cobalt blue, possibly by Gabriela herself:

Another occult sign?

Callahan had no idea what it meant, but seeing as this was a prayer room, there was obviously religious significance to the symbol, a notion bolstered by the lines of verse written directly below it in bold black letters:

Darkness ere Dayes mid-course, and Morning light

More orient in you Western Cloud that draws

O’re the blew Firmament a radiant white

And slow descends,with somthing heav’nly fraught..

11:204-07

A biblical verse?

Callahan didn’t think so.

She was reminded of the quote on Gabriela’s T-shirt and again had that vague sense that she knew it from somewhere. Not so much the words themselves, but the sound of the language. Its rhythm and tone.

Pulling out her phone, she took several shots of the room, including close-ups of the symbol and the lines of verse, and added them to Gabriela’s dossier.

Section would undoubtedly want to see them, so she immediately uploaded the additions to the server and flagged them a priority. Since she was obviously operating in need-to-know territory, she wondered if she’d get any kind of reaction.

With Section you could never tell.

Moving to the prayer desk, she studied the altar atop it. A thin leather strap hung from the cross, a small, circular medallion attached, about the size of a quarter.

Feeling a small stab of pain in her chest, Callahan took hold of the medallion and rubbed it between her fingers. Her father had given her a necklace very similar to this one for her fifth birthday. She’d worn it almost every day that year, until about three months after Dad died, when her stepmother had tossed it out, along with half of everything Callahan had owned.

This one was old, however, and probably a lot more valuable-monetarily, at least. Etched into its surface was the figure of a man carrying a child on his shoulders.

Saint Christopher. Patron of safe travel.

Turning it over, Callahan found another etching on the back-a beetle with the intials CSP engraved beneath it.

So who or what was CSP? Was this just another artifact Gabriela had procured, or was it more personal than that?

Making a mental note to check into the initials, Callahan released the medallion and shifted her gaze to a shelf beneath the top of the prayer desk.

There was a small stack of books there, their spines jumping out at her: The Lesser Key of Solomon, Forbidden Rites, Angels, Incantations and Revelation . . .

All of these seemed like unusual choices-especially in a prayer room-but it was the book at the very top of the stack that most caught Callahan’s attention. A battered, well-thumbed paperback she remembered from one of her college literature classes. And all at once she knew where the lines of verse on the wall-and the quotation on Gabriela’s T-shirt-had come from.

Paradise Lost.

Callahan’s memory of the book was spotty. It was considered a classic and had something to do with God and Satan, but in college she had found it extremely difficult to read, its language so impenetrable that she’d been forced to seek out the CliffNotes version just to make sense of it all.

Picking it up, she stared at the cover, which featured the same Gustave Dore etching that hung above the piano. She leafed through the pages and toward the end of the book she found that several of the numbered passages had been carefully highlighted, notes scribbled in its margins.

Shifting her gaze to the verse on the wall, she checked the citation-11:204-07-then quickly found the passage.

Sure enough, those same lines were highlighted in blue. And in the margin next to them, written in black ink, were two words:

Defende eam.

Callahan’s Latin was a bit lacking, and the best translation she could come up with was . . . “protect her.”

A curious little notation, but what did it mean? Who did Gabriela think needed protection? Was she concerned about someone she knew, or-

“That book was her obsession,” a voice said.

Startled, Callahan turned to find a young man with bloodshot eyes standing in the doorway. He wore a robe, cinched at the waist.

Alejandro Ruiz.

“She took it everywhere we went,” he said. “Every country, every city. Was always telling me what a work of genius it is. A gift from God, second only to the Bible.” His eyes shifted, staring at nothing. “A lot of good it did her.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Ruiz.” She offered a hand to shake. “I’m Agent Callahan.”

Ruiz didn’t seem to notice the offer. He was looking around the room, taking it in. “She didn’t know I knew about this place. Thought she could hide it from me, but she didn’t even bother to put on a lock on the door.” He paused. “The knowledge always felt like a betrayal, yet here you stand, exposing her secrets.”

Callahan ignored the jab. “Maybe she trusted you.”

He smiled. “Gabriela had high hopes for humanity, and a lot of big plans, but her trust was reserved for the voices inside her head.”

“Voices?”

“God. Angels. She was regular Joan of Arc.”

“She told you this?”

He nodded. “Late one night, in a moment of weakness. But when I pressed her about it, she pulled away as if she realized she’d just revealed some sort of state secret.” He paused. “Things were never the same between us after that.”

“And this didn’t worry you? Make you wonder if she had mental problems?”

Ruiz shook his head. “A lot of people hear voices when they pray, Agent Callahan. Especially people as blessed as Gabriela was. These last few months, she had a glow about her that’s hard to describe. A sense of purpose.”

“I can tell that you loved her very much.”

“Ever since she was seventeen years old,” he said. “Back when I had my own ministry. I still remember when she was busking on street corners, playing her music for spare change, struggling to overcome her addiction. I often thought she was in too deep to ever find the light. But she did.”

Callahan thought of Martinez’s cover story. “Do you think her addiction may have played a part in her death?”

“Not a chance. I saw how devastated she was when her friend Sofie died. She would never go back to that. Not after everything we’d accomplished.”

“So what do you think happened to her?”

“I wish I knew. I just know she couldn’t have done this to herself.”

Callahan nodded. “In your statement to the police, you said you smelled gasoline, right before you and her bodyguards found her.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“This was just before you heard Gabriela’s screams, right?”

He closed his eyes. “Yes.”

“How long had she been missing at that point?”

He thought about it a moment. Shrugged. “Three, maybe five minutes. Nothing more.”

“And between the time you heard her screams and found her in the storage room?”

“No more than thirty seconds or so. And by that time she was already . . .” He stopped himself and stared at the floor, looking as if he were about to be sick.

“I’m sorry to keep pushing, Mr. Ruiz, but I want to be absolutely certain that you smelled gasoline.”

He looked up sharply. “You think I’m lying?”

“I think you could be confused. How far away were you when you smelled it?”

“Pretty far. Gabriela was down a long hallway, around a corner. But there’s no confusion.”

Gas fumes are strong, Callahan thought, but would Ruiz have been able to smell them from that distance? And why hadn’t any of the bodyguards corroborated his statement?

Could he have imagined it?

Ruiz slumped against the door frame, and she could see that grief was weighing him down. “Can we be done with this, please?”

“Just a few more questions,” she said, then gestured to the wall behind the prayer desk. “You say you’ve been in here before. Do you have any idea what that symbol represents?”

Ruiz glanced at it and shook his head. “I probably should, but I don’t recognize it. I’m sure it meant something special to Gabriela. Her faith was deep.”

“I think that’s a pretty safe assumption,” Callahan said, then showed him the highlighted passage in Paradise Lost. “You say she was obsessed with this book. What about this note in the margin-is this Gabriela’s handwriting?”

“Yes.”

“Defende eam means ‘protect her.’ Do you have any idea who she was talking about?”

Another shrug. “Could be anyone, I suppose. Gabriela dealt with a lot of people. Fans. Charity volunteers. Bible students.”

“What about crew members?”

He nodded. “We’re well staffed.”

“Do you know if any of them practice the occult?”

He seemed affronted by the idea. “Of course not. Everyone on Gabriela’s team has found the Way, including her bodyguards. Why would you ask such a thing?”

So he hadn’t seen the mark on the floor.

And nobody had bothered to mention it to him.

“My job is to look at all of the possibilities,” she told him. “Do you know anyone with the initials CSP?”

He thought about it and shook his head.

Callahan dropped the book to the prayer desk and gestured to the Saint Christopher medallion. “Any idea who gave her this?”

He looked at it. “It’s probably just one of her trinkets from the auction house. Are we finished yet?”

“Just one more thing. What about your cell phone? Were you able to find it?”

He nodded and reached into his robe pocket, pulling out an iPhone. “I spend half my life on this thing, but I haven’t touched it since Gabriela died.”

“Then you haven’t checked your voice mail?”

He waved a hand, dismissing the notion. “I’m sure there are dozens of messages. People calling with condolences. But I haven’t had the energy.”

“What about the one from Gabriela?”

His gaze snapped to Callahan’s. “What are you talking about?”

“The outgoing calls on her cell phone show that she dialed your number just before she died. She may have left you a message.”

His face went pale. “What?”

He looked down at the phone and, as Callahan watched, he immediately touched the screen, pulling up his voice mail application. He quickly scrolled through several dozen messages until he came to one marked Gabriela.

He stopped. Stared at it.

“Oh my God,” he said quietly. “Oh my God.”