Dantes' Inferno Read online

  “DANTES’ INFERNO has everything readers crave: a full-throttle plot, top-notch psychological suspense, and—as always with author Lovett—gorgeous prose. And to top it off, the book features one of my all-time favorite characters, Dr. Sylvia Strange. Welcome back, Doctor.

  Good to see you again.”

  —Jeffery Deaver, author of The Stone Monkey and Speaking in Tongues

  PRAISE FOR SARAH LOVETT AND DANTES’ INFERNO

  “Lovett creates some of the most mesmerizing serial killers since Hannibal Lecter.”

  —Library Journal

  “[A] wild saga . . . [Lovett’s] forte has always been a darkly fertile imagination untrammeled by the focus or discipline that could harness it.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “An exhilarating read.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A scorching tale.”

  —Booklist

  Thank you for purchasing this Pocket Book eBook.

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  Contents

  Part 1st Circle . . .

  Chapter One

  Part 2nd Circle . . .

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part 3rd Circle . . .

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part 4th Circle . . .

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Part 5th Circle . . .

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Part 6th Circle . . .

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Part 7th Circle . . .

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part 8th Circle . . .

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Part 9th Circle . . .

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Dark Alchemy Excerpts

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to

  David Rosenthal and Marysue Rucci • Theresa Park, Julie Barer, and Peter McGuigan • Miriam Sagan • Julia Goldberg • Sharon Neiderman • Carolyn Guilliland • Michael Mariano • Maggie Griffin • Brian Wiprud • Charles Knief • Bruce Mann, M.D. • Reid Meloy, Ph.D., A.B.P.P. • James Eisenberg, Ph.D., A.B.P.P. • Russ “Dynamite” Deal • S.A. John Hoos, FBI • LA County Flood Control • Paul Cooper • Jad Davis • Peter Miller Alan Zelicoff • March Kessler • Don Opper • Tom Johnson • Dorothy Bracey • Phil Schnyder and “AskSam” • Peter Schoenburg, Esq. • Alice Sealey • Reilly Johnson • Jill Ryan • Anne Pederson • Mark Donatelli, Esq. • Sandy MacGregor • Marilyn Abraham • Jim, Katie, Stephanie, and Jim Jr. Gallegos • Pat Berssenbrugge • Michael Gelles • Larry Renner • Jacqueline West • Peter Miller • Ron Schultz • Hope Atterbury • Tuko Fujisaki • Ana Matiella • Stephanie Marston • Rod Barker • Donald Fineberg, M.D. • Rich Feldman • Loretta Denner • Lew Thompson

  and, of course, Tim Thompson

  For Lew, Miriam & Michael

  1st Circle . . .

  INFERNAL MACHINES—Contrivances made to resemble ordinary harmless objects, but charged with some dangerous explosive. An innocent looking box or similar receptacle is partly filled with dynamite or other explosive, the rest of the space being occupied by some mechanical arrangement, mostly clockwork, which moves inaudibly, and is generally contrived that, when it has run down at the end of a predetermined number of hours or days, it shall cause the explosive substance to explode.

  Dick’s Encyclopedia, 1891

  Another gunpowder plot. A gift of Greek fire for ancient Babylon of the New World. Know each of these missives as infernal machines.

  Anonymous letter to the Los Angeles Times, March 2001

  April 23, 2000—11:14 A.M. Los Angeles was wearing her April best: cerulean sky, whipping cream clouds, rain-washed air that whispered promises of orange blossoms and money. An LA day of sweet nothings.

  Wanda Davenport, schoolteacher and amateur painter, expertly gripped the T-shirt of ten-year-old Jason Redding just as he was about to poke a grimy finger between the sculptured buttocks of a 2,500-year-old Icarus. Antiquities were the thing at the Getty Center. And so were toilets. The lack of toilets. Four of her fifth-graders needed to pee, and her assistant was nowhere in sight.

  “Line up, guys,” Wanda barked with practiced authority. “Jason, you get to hold my hand.”

  The boy moaned and rolled his eyes, but his face was glowing with excitement. Her class had been planning this trip for six months. Given a choice between Universal Studios and the Getty, they’d gone with art. Fifth-graders! Who woulda thunk?

  But then again, Wanda Davenport wasn’t your everyday teacher. She was so passionate about Art a wee bit of her passion rubbed off on just about anyone who spent a few weeks under her tutelage. She loved the realists, the impressionists, the dadaists—from the classical artists to the graffiti artists, she was a devoted fan.

  She smiled to herself as she gave the command to march. Jason caused her a lot of grief, but secretly he was one of her favorites. He was smart, hyper, and creative. One of these days he could be a famous artist, architect, inventor, physicist, whatever.

  “Turn right!” Wanda should’ve had a night job as a drill sergeant.

  Jason nearly tripped over his own two feet, which were audaciously encased in neon green athletic sneakers, one size too big. Wanda knew that his mother, Molly Redding, was a recovering substance abuser; she was also a single mom supporting her only child by waiting tables. These were rough times in the Redding household, but there was love and hope, and Jason was a terrific kid.

  “Turn left!” Wanda ordered her students, watching as Maria Hernandez accepted a fireball from Suzie Brown; the bright pink candy disappeared between white teeth.

  Twenty minutes earlier, Wanda had herded her troop of ten- and eleven-year-olds onto the white tram car for transport to the hilltop. The 1.4-mile drive had provided a startling view of Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. The moneyed view. The new J. Paul Getty Center was situated in Brentwood, nuzzled by Santa Monica, nosed in by mountains.

  From the tram and the marble terrace fronting the museum at the hilltop, Wanda had called out city names for her children: Ocean Park, Venice, LA proper (the downtown heart of the metropolitan monster, with its constant halo of smog), San Pedro’s south-end industrial shipyards, a tail in the d
istance . . . then back to Santa Monica and the ocean pier extending like a neon leg into blue waters . . . and last but not least, up the coast to movie-star Malibu, which had incorporated just as mud slides devoured great bites of earth and forest fires grazed the landscape down to bare, charred skin.

  With that lesson in geographic and economic boundaries, the kids had marched into the reception building; Wanda barely had time to glance at the program provided for the tour; her students demanded 110 percent of her energy. No matter—she knew this place by heart. In her mind the architectural design was Greek temple married to art deco ocean liner. She’d wandered Robert Irwin’s chameleon gardens for hours; each season offered new colors, new scents, new shapes and shades. Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus ran straight to the grounds. She’d lost count of her visits. Nobody had believed Culture could draw a crowd in LA. Well, just look at her kids!

  With one expert swipe, Wanda removed a wad of gum from behind the ear of one of her oldest charges while simultaneously comforting the youngest, who was complaining of a stomachache. She couldn’t wait to get them into the garden, her very favorite part of the facility. They began the trek across the first exterior courtyard. Water ran like glass between slabs of marble. The children shuffled and slid their shoes across the smooth stones.

  “Hey, guys, remember the name of the architect? We covered this in class.”

  She barely caught Jason’s mumbled response: “Meier.”

  “Richard Meier. That’s correct, Mr. Redding.”

  They were almost to the stairway leading to the museum café and the outdoor dining deck. Within seconds, the central garden would rush into view. Lush with primary color and geometric form (chaos and pattern all at once), it overflowed the space between the multilevel museum and the institutes.

  Wanda felt a tug at her sleeve and turned in surprise, looking down at the agitated face of another of her kids.

  “Please, Miss Davenport, I have to go,” a small voice announced.

  “Break time, guys,” Wanda called out cheerfully. “When we reach the bottom of these stairs, we’ll use the rest rooms and regroup for the garden. Carla, hands to yourself. Thank you. No running, Hector.”

  They turned the corner, only to be welcomed by the sight of bougainvillea, jacaranda, orchid, daisy, iris, wild grasses, each as lovely and as ephemeral as a butterfly.

  Wanda Davenport’s last view in life consisted of the gardens she loved so much.

  Jason Redding discovered the treasure chest beneath the stairwell. He opened it curiously, saw an intricate, whimsical, handmade collage—an infernal machine constructed of polished wood, ivory, colored wire, and spiked metal pipe filled with black powder.

  The puzzled child heard a hissing sound, saw smoke and soft petals, twisting and turning, floating upward: initiation.

  One neon green sneaker survived unscathed.

  1:03 P.M. Edmond Sweetheart didn’t look at the bodies. He had nothing to offer the dead except his ability to focus—on the living, on an unknown bomber or bombers, on the wreckage that awaited him a hundred yards uphill. If he lost his center at this particular moment in time, his world would shatter.

  Swift and surefooted, he moved through the garden on muscles that were taut and flexible, with arms held close, spine erect, with steps measured instinctively. His senses were painfully alert, ears filled with the implacable cry of sirens, dark eyes wide to the brightness reflected from the cloud-covered sky.

  Los Angeles has a taste; here at the Getty, between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, Sweetheart registered an alkaline palate tinged heavily with carbons. There was comfort in the order of chemical compounds; he took no such comfort in the chaos of human motivation, action, reaction. The destructive evidence—now just a stone’s throw away—was all too visible.

  Out of choice, he rarely attended active crime scenes. Instead, his life was spent poring over printouts, comparing and contrasting data sets—a day’s currency to linguistic morphology, four days to chemical compounds, an entire week to geographic spatial patterns. A dry exchange that made your eyes go red, your vision myopic. Unless it happened to represent both your passion and your sanity.

  Sweetheart had spent more than a decade tracking terrorists and consulting with various federal and international agencies—he maintained research privileges at UCLA; he had an office at Rand Corporation—but because he was both practical and paranoid, his most delicate jobs were undertaken from his own home in the Hollywood Hills, where he could control the flow of information.

  The results of forensic analysis of physical evidence (extortion notes, digitized threat calls, re-creations of bombs and incendiary devices, blood spatter patterns—a criminal’s work product) were far removed from the location of the destructive action.

  But this midday in April, Sweetheart was present at a crime scene for personal reasons—however mentally contained, however psychically encased those reasons might be—and it was vital that he keep his emotional, if not physical, distance.

  He’d left his car parked at the end of the fire road alongside various emergency response vehicles. The half-mile jog hadn’t begun to test his lungs. As he navigated the last fifty yards to the scene of the bombing, a familiar-looking man in an FBI jacket passed by, moving swiftly down the path toward a mobile forensic van. The agent glanced with wary suspicion at Sweetheart, who kept his focus on a living, breathing target at the base of the damaged stairwell ahead: a red-haired man named Church, who was wearing an LAPD vest and a fierce expression.

  Barely two hours ago, a child and his teacher had died when a pipe bomb exploded. No one had claimed responsibility. No clues to the identity of the terrorist or terrorists. Not yet. Sweetheart knew that much from a telephone message.

  Now his heartbeat fluttered dangerously as containment threatened to fail. His pace slowed; he almost faltered. A child had died . . .

  Cleanse the mind of all emotional distractions.

  He picked up speed again, shallow breath quickening, inhaling through his nose, exhaling through his mouth, the athlete’s nonverbal mantra. When he was ten yards from the stairwell, he willed law enforcement to make eye contact.

  LAPD’s Detective Frederick “Red” Church gazed intently back at Sweetheart. The detective was one of a cluster of investigators that included FBI and ATF cowboys; they had gathered at the base of the damaged stairwell and were engaged in the early stages of crime scene analysis, a laborious process that included the documentation and collection of forensic evidence. Breaking from the group and cutting quickly downhill over carefully shaped earth, the LAPD detective couldn’t mask his discomfiture—shock, even—at the sight of Sweetheart.

  When he was within tackling range, Church whispered harshly, “You shouldn’t be—” But he didn’t finish the sentence, breaking off as he sensed the wild emotions trapped in the other man’s eyes.

  “My niece called,” Sweetheart said distinctly. “I drove straight from LAX.”

  Twelve hours on Nigeria Airways, most of that time spent on the ground in hundred-degree heat, 90 percent humidity; twenty hours on Japan Airlines, much of that spent in transit, first class, oh-so-fully insulated from the famine, disease, poverty that plagued the rest of the world. Then the emergency phone call as they were circling LA’s international airport.

  “I need access now. Before all these bastards trample the scene. It’s already turning into a circus.” Sweetheart’s voice was ominously controlled; no expression showed through the mask of his handsome face.

  “I heard you were in Africa,” Church said, ignoring the declaration, using his body like a closed door. He kept a wary distance from the larger man; there was no way he could head off 280 pounds of solid muscle mass.

  “Nigeria was pathetic.” Sweetheart was eyeing the scene possessively, as if it were his own private treasure. “Another embassy bombing.” Taking one step toward Church, he finished in a quiet voice. “Seventy dead, twice that injured. Nothing but rubble and bodies.
”

  “Bin Laden?” the detective asked, not budging. He was curious. He was adrenalized. He was also stalling. He didn’t have the time or the strength for a confrontation—not with Edmond Sweetheart.

  “We should send him a gift—a couple of Tomahawks.” Sweetheart waved one hand abruptly, perhaps deflecting the emotional impact of tragedy past and present—almost making the detective jump. He was too damn calm, too controlled as he gazed straight at Church. “We should do what we did in Afghanistan six months ago—turn the rebel camp to dust.”

  He didn’t have to add that the Afghanistan attack—which, in addition to wiping out a terrorist training camp, had also caused the death of an international fugitive—had been based on his intelligence. Antiterrorist circles were small and incestuous; players knew one another’s business. Just like today, present circumstances, news would be circulating swiftly, Sweetheart thought, anger rising like a tide inside his chest.

  Sensing movement, the detective stepped forward just as Sweetheart contracted his muscles. Church said quickly, “You aren’t authorized to be here, Professor.”

  Sweetheart’s black-brown eyes glittered with a sheen not unlike compressed metal. His mouth was a flat line against smooth, naturally bronzed skin.

  “I’m asking you to leave,” Church insisted in a low voice.

  “No.” Sweetheart might have been a tree or a structural column, so rooted, so embedded was his energy. For all his mass, he was powerfully agile, dauntingly strong, a formidable and athletic opponent. He said, “I’m not going anywhere, Red.”

  Church heard his nickname used as a warning—he also heard the hard note that communicated Sweetheart’s frightening level of self-control. The detective’s blue eyes reflected tiny images of the surrounding world, including this man he knew as a hotshot data junkie, a free agent sought after by federal and international agencies. For the dozen times their paths had crossed, Edmond Holomalia Sweetheart remained a total fucking enigma.

  If he—Red Church—had been in the other man’s shoes . . .