Dantes' Inferno Read online

  In slow-blink motion Church’s eyelids dropped like a curtain, then lifted again. His words, a reluctant gift of information, were expelled with a sighing sound. “We’ve got the end cap from the pipe—blew off in most of one piece.”

  “Show me.”

  Church turned heel, resigned, his uneasiness channeled into manic movement as he led the other man up the short incline to the damaged stairway, past emergency personnel, past the investigative team. He came to a standstill. Sweetheart stopped a half step behind.

  Balanced below the edge of the terrace where the wall had been peppered by shrapnel, both men now stood at the inner perimeter of the scene. Behind them gardens filled the shallow canyon. Sweetheart registered the view, abstractly appreciating its formal symmetry, but his attention was on the twisted cap of metal twelve inches from his shoes. Amid chunks of wood, contorted steel, and other explosive debris, a small orange evidence marker with the numeral 1 had already been placed next to the cap. Sweetheart squatted, his thighs spreading until the linen fabric of his slacks pulled taut over highly developed quadriceps. His fingers contracted, exposing the tension in his body.

  The eight-inch-diameter, half-inch-thick metal cap was blackened, the lip stretched back in places as if it were a lid chewed off a can. The force of the blast had left pits and scratches in the surface. Balancing on the balls of his feet, Sweetheart eased closer, eyes intent and straining, mind blocking distractions. His breathing softened; he seemed almost asleep.

  Detective Church remained standing, shifting nervously on the balls of his feet. He murmured, “It’s scratched to all hell—but maybe something’s there.” His watchful stare landed on two ATF agents examining numbered evidence ten feet away. Would Sweetheart’s attendance be challenged? Fortunately, the professor’s presence was a badge of sorts.

  Church squatted down beside the bigger man and said, “The bomb came in a pretty package, but our perp—or perps—packed the casing with nails, scraps, made sure there was plenty of effective shrapnel, enough to rip the head off—”

  With horror, Church registered his own words, but he glanced swiftly at Sweetheart and saw no reaction. That blank face was worse than any display of rage, the detective thought, swallowing hard.

  After a moment, Church continued: “Until we reconstruct the device, this could be the work of a hundred different scumbags. The closest witnesses were kids—they’re totally freaked out. No usable descriptions, but the Bureau’s psychologist is going to keep working with them.”

  Sweetheart knew Church was talking; he paid scant attention. Instead he studied the rough lines on the cap, fairly certain now that they predated the explosion. He allowed their arrangement to guide his thoughts, noting the associations triggered by familiar configurations that dissolved immediately into unfamiliarity; it was like gazing at the clouds overhead as they created form and identity, then evanesced, all in a matter of seconds. The complexity of communication was on his mind; almost daily he studied symbols as arranged to build language—from morphology to lexicon to syntax, the process of word formation, meaning, and structure in a larger context.

  Deftly, Sweetheart pulled a pencil and a small pad of paper from his jacket pocket. With his large body still perfectly balanced on the soles of his feet, he executed lines very slowly on the page. He reminded Church of a man playing a solitary game of hangman. Marks appeared in a pattern that seemed simultaneously random and ordered.

  Why the hell couldn’t he get it? Church wondered, looking closely at the end cap, studying the scratches until they did coalesce into a rough language, albeit one he didn’t comprehend.

  “C—a—n—t—o—l—l,” Sweetheart said deliberately.

  “Who the hell is Cantoll?”

  “Try what.”

  “I’ll bite.” Church nodded restlessly. “What the hell is Cantoll?”

  “A letter, or a numeral, is missing, here at the end—where the metal was particularly twisted,” Sweetheart said, closing his eyes. “If we take canto, then we . . .” He ran his index finger through air, marking three strikes.

  Church shook his head, expelling frustration with a harsh whisper. “You lost me.”

  “It’s famous poetry, Detective. The third canto,” Sweetheart said deliberately, as if speaking to a thick-skulled schoolboy. “‘Through me you enter into the woeful city, through me the way into eternal pain . . . ’ A work originally composed in fourteenth-century Italian, and posthumously retitled the Divine Comedy. In Commedia, the inscription over the gates to hell.”

  Sweetheart’s jet black hair was pulled back from his face; he fingered the knot with unadorned hands. As he waited, impatient for the obvious connection to be made, he turned to canvass the architecture of the building, in particular the graceful arched gate fronting the damaged terrace. His gaze moved with the linear curves, and the final line of the stanza returned to memory.

  “Through me the way to the population of loss.”

  His mind—always running, mining data, sorting—made connections: a pipe bomb as antipersonnel signature device; a pattern of secondary antiproperty explosives capable of massive structural damage; a linguistic clue that would implicate a bomber.

  Sweetheart’s body stiffened. “The gates of hell,” he whispered harshly. He lifted his eyes to the massive columns marking the entrance to the public courtyard. A synthesis of pipe bomb and a more powerful antiproperty device . . .

  He pivoted to face Church. “Have you checked for additional devices?”

  “We’re still searching the grounds—”

  “The columns? Those pillars,” Sweetheart interjected. “Did you check the internal structure for bombs? It’s been two hours since the explosion. If there’s a second device targeting response personnel—” Sweetheart broke off, barking out a command: “Move everybody away from the scene. Now.”

  Church hesitated only an instant, then the decision to act telegraphed across his face, and he wheeled around to head off an ATF agent. The alarm went up. The evacuation of investigative and emergency personnel took less than four minutes.

  Sweetheart and the others were five hundred yards away—at the bottom of the hill—when detonation occurred. The explosion was deep and sharp, and it shot tons of concrete, rock, steel—the flesh and bone of the structure—in a quarter-mile trajectory. Immediately, a cloud of dust debris swirled up, almost as if it were deliberately covering such obscene devastation. The whole thing seemed to occur in an instant, while everyone dropped for cover.

  Everyone except Edmond Sweetheart, who stood immovable, staring into the eye of the beast. He didn’t even flinch when a ten-pound marble missile missed his left ear by inches.

  Instead he recognized the quickening, the potent cocktail of adrenaline and dread; he’d come to identify it as a chemical threshold, a gateway to the altered state of terror. It was as pungent as the chemicals that make a bomb. It happened on the inside. Outside, all around him, the signs of disaster were familiar: panic on the faces and in the eyes, a heightened surreal atmosphere of smoke, gas, and fumes.

  The reverberation of the blast faded as emergency crews and investigators went into high gear for the second time in two hours. The worst of the damage had knocked out three pillars, but the building face was intact. Through the smoke, the cries, the chaos, Sweetheart remembered other words of the great poet.

  “Perched above the gates I saw more than a thousand of those whom heaven had cast out like rain, raging: ‘Who is this approaching? Who, without death, dares enter the kingdom of the dead?’”

  He felt, rather than saw, Detective Church at his side. When he turned to stare at the man, his eyes were dull, unnerving. He spoke in a lifeless monotone. “Six centuries ago, Dante Alighieri wrote the Inferno, the most famous book of the three-part Commedia.”

  Confusion showed on Church’s sunburnt, freckled face. “Are we talking about Dantes’ Inferno?” he asked, taking a logical mental leap to the four-hundred-page manifesto written in the 1990s, publishe
d in 1999. He was referring to its author, John Dantes, a twenty-first-century fugitive bomber who had claimed responsibility for a dozen crimes spanning more than a decade, causing immense property damage and, most important, taking lives.

  Forget long-dead Italian poets, however famous; unless you believe in ghosts, they don’t set bombs.

  “Yes,” Sweetheart said grimly. “We’re talking about John Freeman Dantes.”

  “Maybe.” Church looked skeptical. “Dantes has been known to leave a secondary device—”

  “He’s killed before.”

  “It’s not his style to target schoolkids—he hasn’t been tied to a bombing for three, almost four years.”

  “He went underground,” Sweetheart said sharply. “Now he’s resurfacing.” Nodding toward the scene of the destruction, he reached down to scoop up a handful of sandy soil. “He wants everyone to know it.”

  He gazed past Detective Church to see a young woman staring back at him. She wore a stricken expression, and she looked frail as a crushed honeysuckle blossom. His belly hollowed. His breath disappeared, his mind went blank as slate. It took him several seconds to put a name to her face. Molly Redding. His own niece. She was holding a child’s tennis shoe, clutching it against her breasts, swaying on her feet. A thin, keening wail escaped her lips.

  A child and his teacher had died in the first blast . . .

  The air stopped. Nothing entered Sweetheart’s lungs, and nothing left. For however many seconds in time the tragedy registered, Sweetheart stopped breathing, poised between life and death.

  Hakkeyoi—he commanded himself—move!—get going!

  The dam holding back his emotions broke suddenly, and all his rage and pain washed through the canyons of his complex psyche. As denial gave way, information flooded the synapses of his brain: the dead child was Jason Redding, his own grandnephew. Molly Redding was Jason’s mother.

  Sweetheart’s honeyed skin blanched white. The dirt in his hand ran through his fingers until only dust remained.

  Jikan desu. Time is up.

  His burning gaze settled on the detective’s face. He said, “Let’s bring in John Dantes, or I swear I’ll track him down and kill him myself.”

  2nd Circle . . .

  Utopia in the classic sense defies humanness in its necessary and constant striving for homeostasis. City, the built environment, with all its flaws, its dust and grime, its chaos of lies and secrets, must stand in for any dream of perfection. I’m a grown man crazy in love with LA and all her beauty, all her faults.

  John Dantes, Dantes’ Inferno (Athena Press, 1999), excerpt published in the LA Times, November 7, 2001

  April 16, 2001—Monday—7:59 A.M. One Year Later A ziggurat rose above the shimmering sands of downtown Los Angeles.

  Sylvia Strange slid ebony-framed sunglasses over her pronounced cheekbones and brown eyes. Seen through Polaroid glass, the morning glare of rush hour traffic retreated, the desert sands coalesced into a mishmash of urban high-rises fading from a half century’s wear and tear; nomadic caravans were transformed into commuter lanes on the Harbor northbound; the ziggurat redefined itself as the terraced pyramidal tower atop City Hall.

  The twenty-eight-story structure was just a stone’s throw from her destination: Metropolitan Detention Center—aka MDC—home of the mad and the bad.

  So much for visions of the Holy Land.

  Still, it was hot enough to be the Negev desert. Even with air-conditioning, sweat dampened Sylvia’s neck and trickled between her breasts. She punched up climate control settings and aimed arctic air at her throat. Almost instantly her skin raised goose bumps. No such thing as a happy medium this Monday morning.

  Nudging unruly shoulder-length auburn strands away from her face, she took a deep breath, checking her reflection in the mirror. Olive skin a little wan, lips chapped and bare of lipstick, pupils dilated behind dark glasses. She knew she needed more than blush, eyeliner, and a jolt of chutzpah to pass for a member of the psychological-profiling elite. Welcome to the majors, Strange. You hit the big league, the chance to contribute to the biggest forensic profiling study of bombers—ever. The chance to tag along while the FBI and ATF, LAPD and UCLA—all under the elitist and watchful eye of Rand Corporation—take an up-close-and-personal look at members of the Notorious Bombers’ Club: McVeigh, Ramzi Yousef, Richard Johnson, Theodore K.

  And John Freeman Dantes.

  Reaching automatically into the pocket of her briefcase, she pulled out a cigarette, squeezing it gently between plain fingers, sliding the filter between her lips. Waiting for the lighter to heat, she cracked the window as a concession to the Hertz no-smoking policy. The lighter finally popped, and she held the hot red coil to tobacco, inhaling greedily. The smoke seared her throat, felt dense in her lungs. Trapping the nicotine, she picked a speck of tobacco off her lip, flicked nonexistent ashes out the window, then finally exhaled the cancerous air.

  John Dantes . . . the man who wrote the book Dantes’ Inferno: City of Angels in the 21st Century. Chapter one: “The Boy Who Was Raised by Wolves in the City.”

  Sylvia inhaled smoke again. In his Inferno, Dantes had dissected the yin and yang of LA: the male represented by technology imposed as superstructure over the female, the natural and functional evolution of village to postmodern megalopolis. For Dantes, it all added up to greed, ambition, and fantasy destroying the heart of the true Los Angeles, the city that belonged to the people.

  She glanced at her wristwatch, and the silvery face finally came into focus: one minute before eight. Trapped in an endlessly looping countdown, the tiny black hand clicked off intervals. She was late, getting later with each breath, and traffic was at a standstill.

  Shouldn’t be a problem, she thought. Dr. Strange, student of dark and disordered moods, knew how to use reverse psychology. Over the past five years, working in prisons and hospitals, she’d come face-to-face with some of the world’s worst criminals. She’d earned a reputation among her colleagues as a forensic psychologist with a knack for connecting with the hardest of the hard cases. Exactly the reason she’d been summoned to LA.

  Behind the wheel of the Lincoln, she settled into calfskin upholstery that was soft as butter. Her shoes rested beside her on the passenger seat and her coral-painted toe-nails encased in slippery hose hugged the brake pedal. She eased the seam of her panty hose from her crotch; as soon as the job was completed, she’d burn the torturous garment and fly back home to New Mexico, where a person could walk barefoot on desert earth and watch cumulus clouds form over the Sangre de Cristo mountain range—

  Before the first sharp ring faded, Sylvia had her cell phone cradled to her ear. The call jarred her back in time, and for the hundredth time she heard the echo of the words that had split her world down the middle just four weeks ago.

  Dr. Strange? This is Mona Carpenter. I called to say goodbye.

  A real voice asked, “Sylvia, are you there?”

  “Leo?”

  “Metro just went under lockdown,” psychiatrist Leo Carreras announced. His voice was clouded with concern.

  “Bomb threat?”

  “The official line is ‘heightened security.’”

  “My session with Dantes is still on”—half statement, half question.

  “So far, so good. Nervous, Dr. Strange?”

  “You jumped through hoops to get my security clearance,” she said quickly.

  Leo had brought her in as the psychometric expert—a fancy way of saying she would administer the psychological tests, the inventories, the batteries. Even though she had all the proper credentials, the profiling project was as political as any primary. Leo and UCLA were one faction, the Feds were another, and so was the LAPD; Rand had its own agenda. But the truth was, final approval belonged to John Dantes. He had agreed to cooperate with Dr. Strange on the tests.

  Celebrity inmates with the visibility of John Dantes carried their clout like a big stick.

  “You’ll have all day to administer tests,” Leo said
. “Unless you get interrupted by security—so keep the initial interview short . . .”

  Barely listening, Sylvia sighed. Just six weeks ago, she’d leapt at this chance to work on such a high-profile project. She had been certain she could snag Dantes where others had failed. But that was before her client killed herself.

  Dr. Strange, there will be a board inquiry, of course.

  “Sylvia? Are you all right?”

  She came to suddenly, knowing Leo had asked something. She nudged her sunglasses to the bridge of her nose.

  “I’m here.” She found the bottle in record time—cap off—and tossed a tiny blue pellet into her mouth. The tablet stuck to the back of her throat.

  “ . . . go with a projective warm-up to establish rapport,” Leo was saying. “Then the MMPI.”

  “I’m more comfortable starting with the objective inventories,” Sylvia said. What was she doing in this city of noise, glare, smog, and concrete? “The MMPI first, then the Millon.”

  “I know it’s time-consuming, but the Rorschach will give us a wealth of information.” After a brief silence, Leo said, “Just consider my suggestion.”

  “Of course.”

  “Extend today’s session,” Leo added. “Push for whatever you can get. You may not have another opportunity.”

  “Yes, Mother.” The jocularity fell flat.

  “Dantes’s oppositional as hell—don’t think he’ll give you any breaks just because he likes the way you look. He’ll take control, try to bait you or just shut down altogether.”

  “I’ll bait him back. Piece of cake.”

  “Remember, I want all the dirty details. Dinner at the Lobster, Santa Monica Pier. By the way, how was your flight?”

  Mona—is the baby there with you? Is Nathan with you?

  “The Lobster. I’ll call you when I’m finished,” she managed. “The flight was turbulent.”

  “Sylvia, I know I got you into this—I have no doubts you’re the one for the job.” Leo’s tone sobered abruptly. “Just don’t forget who you’re dealing with; Dantes is dangerous.”