Seven years go by so quickly...

In the interest of keeping things going, I'm going to dig into the Museum's back catalog: Remembering Super Bowl XXXIV.

https://themillenniummuseum.blogspot.com/2013/02/remembering-super-bowl-xxxiv.html

Millennium S1E12: "Loin Like a Hunting Flame"

You've come back for another story, haven't you? Think I'd better start charging for this...

...Well! That'll do just fine. You have excellent taste in bourbon. Yeah...This looks like a damn fine year.

All right. Sit down and let's share a drink. This one comes from Boulder, Colorado. It was a pretty weird case, in that "familiar" kind of weird. In many ways, it reminded me of the one with the Frenchman. So there was this pharmacist...

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"Two souls, alas,

are housed within my breast."

                                                               --Faust

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The 'Group sent me out to Boulder's glorious botanical garden. I tell you, it was just like walking through the Garden of Eden, because there were trees that the voice on the PA system said were authentic to those which grew around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

It even had its very own Adam and Eve, and they certainly didn't belong on this side of paradise. 

A young couple, both in their twenties, as naked as the day they were born, save for the large leaves draped over his and her circumstances. The tableau was beautiful and eerie at the same time.

Boulder PD called in the 'Group that day. Agent Maureen Murphy and I were sent to work with Detective Thomas: middle-aged, cigar-chomping, overworked type.

We introduced each other, and I learned that Thomas had come from LAPD's homicide taskforce. "It wasn't my idea to squeal for help," he sighed. "Not now. Probably not ever." I've heard it so many times before. They only involve us when things get too out-there.

I crouched down and examined the bodies while Maureen asked Thomas a few questions. A flash: I saw them as their killer must have seen them: a little older; a little sexier; about to make love before the camera. Fade to white, and they reverted back to their more youthful selves.

Meanwhile, another detective found an apple with bite marks elsewhere within the garden. I only needed a quick glance at it: "The victims' teeth are going to match the dental patterns on the apple. You'll find pieces of it in their mouths, but nothing in their stomachs."

"What makes you say 'victims’?” Thomas scoffed. "Could have been one of those moony, calf-love teen suicide pacts."

"They were killed somewhere else, then brought here and posed. I've never seen a double-suicide done like this." Maureen chimed in: "The Garden of Eden, the apple with two bites, the nakedness covered--it's atypical, meticulous," "Which is why I think it's a double homicide," I stated.

We quit the conservatory. "So," Thomas grudgingly began, "double homicide. State your case."

"I think killing's new for our perpetrator," I explained. "He's lost his innocence. He's ashamed."

Wanting to quell a battle of wits before it began, Maureen distracted Det. Thomas. "Have you seen anything like this before, detective?" He thought back for a moment. "Couple abducted in a bar. Mighta' been doped. Abductor had 'em..." The tough-guy exterior cracked for a moment. It seems our killer isn't the only one who's ashamed. "...perform sexually," he finished. "It was nothing like this. No murder, no staging." I thought about asking their names, but reconsidered. It sounded like a dead end, anyway.

Later, at the morgue, we joined the young man's parents in an observation room.

"Here's how it's going to work," Thomas explained. "I'm going to tap on the glass. Blind's going to open, and you'll see the face and shoulders." The father was valiantly fighting back the tears. "If...if it's Mel..." he said, shakily.”...Then you just nod and I'll close the blinds." He wasn't putting on an act. He hated doing this just as much as the parents hated being there.

Tap-tap. The blinds opened. They saw his face and broke down in tears. Thomas closed the blinds. "I'm so very, very sorry," he sighed as he pulled out a contact card. "If there's anything I can do for you, here's my number.”

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About 11:30 the next morning, Thomas and I set out for the University of Colorado. Mom and Dad--Mr. and Mrs. Dodd, I should say--told us his name was Mel, and he lived on campus.

"Pathology got the results back," Thomas began as we walked down a hall. "They both took an Ecstasy hybrid orally, unusually pure. Can't tell us what, if anything, was injected into them."

We rounded a corner. "Tell me something, Frank," he continued. "Are you comfortable working a case like this with a woman?" I shot back, “I’m not comfortable working a case like this.” He pushed the matter: “For what it’s worth, they don’t understand male sexuality worth a damn, any more than we do theirs.”

There, in front of us, was the Apache Hall Student Residence. Someone held a door open for us, and we made our way inside.

Dorm number 25. Former residence of Mel Dodd. Thomas pushed the door open, and we were greeted by the sight of two lovebirds on the bed. The former tenant just died a few days ago! Little respect, no?

Obviously, this wasn’t Mel Dodd. Thomas grilled him about Mel’s whereabouts, and the boy told him that Mel and his girlfriend had gone to a club. Didn’t know what it was called. This wasn’t good enough for either of us, so Thomas played the strongest card he knew. “Say, suppose you and your girlfriend were found dead. Would you want Mel to try to remember where you’d gone?”

Turns out the place was called the Rave Zone. We paid them a little visit that night. The owner, clad in a red robe, wasn’t at all happy to see either of us. He freely admitted that he rented the place and paid for all the hoohah, but never sold any drugs. “It’s just a business. It’s safe. If they wanna get high and sex out, hey, it’s their lives. But it’s my living.”

While they got better acquainted, I headed down to the floor. Late teens, early twenties, all writing and dancing and covered in neon paint. Neither of us belonged here, so I took Thomas to one side.

“The person we’re looking for, he provides opportunity, drugs.” Clearly he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Red Robe. “He gives them a window into sexuality, or at least the way he sees it. Perfect, uninhibited, guiltless. His actions’ll follow the development of his fantasies.”

Saturday. A little after nine in the morning. Last night someone was hosting quite the party. Swinger’s party, or so I’d heard. Maureen Murphy and I were in Thomas’ office, where he was grilling a couple of the husbands. Seems their wives had gone out to get some champagne and hadn’t come back from the liquor store that was about a half-mile away from the house.

Poor bastards were pretty embarrassed to ‘fess up like this.

“Wife swapping,” the detective concluded. “Group sex. You two are proud of that, huh?”

“Pride’s not the issue here, detective,” I interjected. Didn’t do a lick of good, though—he was riled up.

“Please. We just want our wives back,” one of them protested. “So you can trade up,” Thomas snapped. I swear, this guy…

“That’s enough,” I finally declared, very quietly. “Cut ‘em loose, Thomas. They need some time. Their wives are most likely dead.”

You’ve been coming here long enough, listening to me prattle on. You know by now, I hate being right. Sure enough, some poor soul found the two ladies, one blonde; one brunette, both dead but exquisitely posed at a bench so that they were sitting together, their heads just touching. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a black-and-white, when a vision came to me: A man, dressed as a cop, approaching their car with a flashlight…their interaction with him…finally, as he saw the two of them, engaged in a tryst that signified a little more than friendship.

Det. Thomas interrupted my reverie with a rap on the window. He was tapping with—I kid you not—a ball-gag, like the kind found in some pervert’s toy box. It was an image that no amount of drink can ever quite erase.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said, indicating the…device.

“I don’t think that’s important,” I replied. “Same guy as the club—pulled them over, impersonating a police officer. Might want to call Maureen to see what she thinks.”
“I don’t want to know what she thinks,” he huffed.

Back at the station, that afternoon, Red Robe from the rave was sitting with a sketch artist, describing our killer. From what I’d been hearing, this fella was perceptive.

“I know it’s what I described, but it’s not how I described it,” he sighed.

“You’re going to have to go back and start again,” I told him. “I know it’s tedious.”
“This guy’s a jerk,” Thomas whispered to me. “He doesn’t have a clue.”

“The man he’s describing is unremarkable,” I protested. “That’ll make him harder to find. He could look like anybody. See, his victims are unreal to him—erotic figments to be manipulated. He kills them so they won’t exist outside his fantasies.”

Maureen added to this: “Until the two women, the targets were heterosexual couples, conventional activities.”

I saw in Thomas a shade of red I hadn’t seen on a human face in a while. “Wh—bu—You think doping these people, watching them have sex, and then murdering them is…is…conventional?!” he spluttered.

“Maureen is referring to the expansion of his interests into possible gay and lesbian activities.”

“All right, that’s it. This conjecture sounds worse than useless. Tell you what: I’m going to take that lousy description and compare it with all known sex offenders. That’s what we should have been doing all this time.”

Maureen and I went down to the morgue that afternoon. Who should be there before my startled eyes but my friend and colleague, Peter Watts. He’d been doing some toxicology on the two ladies.

“So. We found, in addition to the synthetic ecstasy, trace amounts of triphetamine and dilavtin. Those were so slight as to suggest an inadvertent combination of the three…or deliberate. In the injection, there were some unusual metabolites. Our tentative conclusion: succlynocide. He’d have given them a lethal dose, but, because of how the body breaks it down, it’d be hard to detect.”

“Pretty fancy shooting,” Maureen mused. “He’s a marksman,” I pronounced.

A couple of detectives had tracked us down and asked us some questions. Watts reassured them that a mere bathtub chemist couldn’t have produced these drugs, and that the killer had legal access to them.

“I think he takes them himself,” I offered. “He could have a drug-related paraphilia.” Maureen had to explain to a nonplussed detective that “The violence is drug-related. They allow him to act on recurrent, intensely-arousing sexual fantasies…and then he makes them real. He’s moving toward the consummation of an act that he’s incapable of assuming with anyone, not even his wife.

Thomas expressed genuine wonder at the possibility that this guy could be married. “Possibly for many years,” Maureen continued. “His wife probably blames herself for their lack of sexual consummation. She’s deferential, attentive, supportive, values other qualities in him. Dependability, say…kindness.”

On Sunday morning, Thomas went to a corner pharmacy. Maureen, Peter, a detective, and I followed in a car. He stepped out of the pharmacy, walked across the street, and shared what he’d found.

“Pharmacist’s name is Art Nesbitt. He’s married, and he bought this place eight years ago.” As our detective got out of the car and checked the place out, Thomas asked me what I’d found so far. “We’ve run the names that dispensed dilatvin and triphetamine by pharmacy,” replied I. “Eleven hits so far, but nothing conclusive.”

Watts chimed in: “Nesbitt’s taken receipt of both four times, but hasn’t filed the proper paperwork with the FDA for dispensation by prescription.”

The detective came charging out of the pharmacy. “He left sick this morning. The kid filling in for him thinks he went home.”

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

We paid a visit to the house. Ever had that thrill you get when everything just folds neatly in on itself? It felt like we were weaving the net tighter and tighter, but we couldn’t have done it without Art’s mistake.

Karen answered the door and allowed us inside. Thomas led off, informing her that there was a paperwork error at the pharmacy, and that we were just here to clarify a few things.

She paused for a moment to collect herself and provide an answer. “Well, if Art was here, I’m sure he could straighten this out right away. My husband is a very methodical man. Meticulous, really. Almost to a fault. I think I know my husband. We’ve been married 18 years.” Maureen expressed her admiration at this staying power, and I…I could tell in Karen’s stilted speech-patterns that she was ill at ease. While Maureen had her occupied, Peter and I slipped away inconspicuously.

He went upstairs, and I went to the garage. It was all very neat in there, but I noticed a six-pack of something labeled “ZUX” on top of a cabinet. Could be interesting. I filed it away for later. Meanwhile, Maureen and Karen were otherwise occupied. 

“…and does he have any hobbies?”

“Hobbies? No, no, I don't think he has time with work. Um, we, we watch TV, periodically. And he used to work on the car sometimes. He changed the motor by himself once. A long time ago.”

“How often have you been having relations with your husband, Karen? It’s important.”

“We were going to try again to make it right.”

I sidled in and handed to Karen what Peter had found in the toilet tank: a copy of Snazz magazine, a tawdry jack-rag he’d probably bought at 7-Eleven. The headline next to a leather-clad babe trumpeted: “Tantalizing Tatiana—The Snazz Babe Of The Month.” Except this was from 1978, and it was the only one we found anywhere in the house.

“That’s when we were married,” Karen sobbed. “He’s done something horrible, hasn’t he?” She looked like she had just experienced a genuine emotion for the first time in a long time.

“Do you have any idea where we can find him?” I asked. She replied, “He’s at work. Isn’t he?”

It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself lost for an easy, reassuring answer. My gift can only carry me so far. We had to wait for another lead.

Later that evening, at almost 8:30, Thomas joined Maureen and me at Delmonico’s Restaurant. It was a family-style road diner, pleasant enough, but the three of us were determined to sully the gentle atmosphere. Thomas especially.

“…Did he know we were on to him?” he asked. “He can’t have. So he must have, uh, took himself off for work for another reason. Did he grab someone? Where the hell does this guy go to?”

Maureen tried to quietly excuse herself, but the seating was too tight. She had to discreetly get our portly friend’s attention so that she could make an exit.

He cradled his head in his hands. His next admission didn’t come easily.

“I think I got off on the wrong foot with you. Well, well, with both of you. I mean, I can see that she’s a pretty good investigator. I mean, I can see that.”

A long pause.

“I…haven’t exactly been comfortable working this case. Worked a lot of sex crimes when I was on the job in LA. Some of that stuff got pretty rough. I was….I was married then.”

“But no more.”

“I felt…uh…contaminated or something. And then, uh, and then I found out that I couldn’t make love to my wife. It started driving me nuts. She didn’t say anything about it…”

Another pause, this one almost too long.

“…and then, you know, I started going to, uh, porno movies and such, trying to cure myself. It got worse. I got a divorce, and then I moved here. We don’t get much sex crime here.”

For all I cared, he could have been listing a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. My mind was elsewhere—not because he was boring, but because I’d just thought of something. I’d just put the pieces together when Maureen came back to our table. “Something Karen Nesbitt told you about her husband,” I said to her, “they hadn’t had sex for the last eighteen years, and now he wants to try again.”

“Do you think he’s going back there?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Thomas interjected. “I’ve got men all over the area.”

I shook my head ‘no.’ “I think he’s way ahead of us.”

We left the restaurant, not having actually ordered anything, and made like a Formula One driver back to the Nesbitt house.

Maureen explained her theory: “It all fits. His anniversary’s functioning as a stressor.”

I translated for Thomas: “He’s recreating sexual experiences he feels he should have had before marriage. He killed, froze his victims in death at what he believes to be the happiest, most perfect moment of their lives.” I glanced at Thomas as the headlights’ glare faded to black. “I know that look, Thomas. ‘What makes you think he’ll be here?’ Well….I don’t know where else he’d go if he’s trying to make his marriage work.”

We opened the side garage door to find Karen’s car, as cold as a car with nowhere in particular to go. My hunch told me he was here, but his car wasn’t. Why not? I wondered.

Of course. The old trap-door trick. I grabbed a bottle of something from a countertop and poured right where I was standing. The liquid pooled on the ground, dripping into a crevice. Finding a crowbar within arm’s reach, I hacked at the concrete until I found an iron loop. Immediately picking up on the clue, Thomas handed me a big iron hook attached to a winch. I threaded the hook through the loop and gave him the go-ahead.

Crank, crank, crank. The trapdoor—a wooden pallet with a concrete covering—led to a narrow tunnel. There, I saw a teenage boy trying to revive his girlfriend. Both were naked.

“We’re going to need an ambulance.”

Maureen shined her light, prompting him to cry out, “Let us go! Please! Let us go.” He thought we were his captors.

“It’s all right,” I said, calmly, as I climbed down the ladder. “You’re safe. We’ll get you out. No-one’s going to hurt you now.”

When I finally reached them, I checked the girl’s neck for a pulse. Weak but steady.

“She’s alive. You two are freezing.”

“He—He gave us pills. We thought we’d die here.”

A flash. I could see Art behind his camera, forcing these two to re-enact a scene of two high-school sweethearts after prom night. “Call him Art. Call her Karen.” Even with the drugs he’d given them, it must have been too surreal to comprehend.

I found two blankets on a shelf. As I wrapped them around him, he told me it had been an hour since he saw Nesbitt. “There’s a door over here,” he added. Sure enough, there was a door. “It’s an old bomb shelter. He probably added the tunnel on. This must lead to the house.”

Maureen and I found Detective Kent in the living room. “Call Thomas,” she ordered him. “Nesbitt’s upstairs.”

I kicked in the bedroom door to find Art and Karen, seemingly in marital bliss. Seemingly because he was about to put a syringe into her neck. Pure instinct kicked in as I slapped the syringe out of his hand and pulled Karen away from him and toward Maureen.

His eyes and voice were full of a mixture of panic and fury. “No! No! You don’t understand! That is my wife! I am married now!”

He grabbed the syringe and stabbed it into his thigh. As the yellow poison coursed through his femoral artery, it looked like he’d found heaven at last.

“Karen…I’ll be there. I’ll wait for you. I’ll be faithful. We’re married now……”

He was beyond hope even before he’d put the plunger in. He’d been beyond hope for over eighteen years. Poor Art…He was no deviant. If anything, he was too good, too pure, so much so that it spilled over into murder.

Thomas took me back to the motel I was staying at.

“So Maureen’s staying a few days,” he mused. “She married?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” Nope, nope. Playing matchmaker is above my pay grade.

“I didn’t tell you everything about working in LA. Besides my marriage breaking up and all, I had this reaction to the squalor, the carnage of the work. Instead of working up a drinking problem like any normal guy, I had a nervous breakdown.”

I’d consider the nervous breakdown to be the more normal of the two. It’s the sign that tells you something’s very, very wrong, and the drinking’s what you do to silence that, but that just makes it worse.

“Something’s wrong, Frank. You know, in this day and age, people are carrying on as wild as ever, maybe more so. Regular folks, they’re doing drugs, acting nuts.”

“Sex and death have commingled in one inseparable impulse,” I rejoined. “Risk feeds sensation. Sensation makes risk acceptable. We’re heading toward……..something perhaps we’d do better to avoid.” I stepped out of the car when it had reached the motel.

“Take care, Thomas.”

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COMMENTARY

A mixed bag, this one! I can’t say I particularly enjoyed watching it or coming up with the Narrative entry, because the episode felt a little pedestrian. “Hunting Flame” does get the show going in style with the opening and that striking reinvention of Adam and Eve, but then it meanders.

The idea of the pop-up rave was inventive as a concept, but somewhat risible in execution, and not nearly as well-done as the Mardi Gras setting of Dracula 2000, in which it served a point of contrast between the vampires and the revelers. Here, it just seemed there to go “HEY, LOOK! IT’S THE MID-NINETIES!”

Thematically, the episode is heady. Det. Thomas, the lawman, and Art Nesbitt, the “heel” of the story, are linked by the common thread of sexual shame. Typical network TV of the time usually presents sexuality—tawdry strip clubs, seedy bars, and such—as a background for evil, but Millennium quietly takes the opposite tack: Repression of sexuality leads to greater evil. Art Nesbitt is so repressed and so ashamed that he can’t make love with his wife, so he looks elsewhere for a vicarious thrill in his unsuspecting victims, whom he then kills in order to preserve the fantasy. Unusually, his victims never suffer: He gives them a swift, peaceful death, but never once does he stop to think about the ones who are left to suffer and grieve.

His inverse is Detective Thomas, who as a vice cop indulged so heavily in the seedy, sexual underground of society that he found himself repulsed by it, and this shame led to him becoming a  moral crusader. Neither extreme is healthy, and both men suffer imbalanced lives for repressing their shame.

One thing’s for sure, society is to blame this time. Judging from Art’s dialogue within the episode, he seems to have bought the usual marriage/honeymoon/happily-ever-after fairy tale that’s spoon-fed to us from childhood on, and has found disappointment when the mundane realities of life entered. He turns out to want the happily-ever-after so badly that he’s willing to poison himself and his wife in order to attain it. 

I thought he was too nice, too sweet, too normal to carry the episode, yet that’s precisely the point: Sometimes they’re not Silence of the Lambs material. Sometimes they’re quite average people with misapplied gifts. If, for example, Art Nesbitt had channeled his shame and emotion into a direction that didn’t involve drugging people, he’d have made quite a name for himself as an artistic photographer. I tip my hat to him for the Adam and Eve display at the beginning: The lengths he went to took real talent and a unique eye.

Detective Thomas is right when he says things are getting worse, but not for the reasons he thinks: Shame and loneliness make people turn to drugs, turn to sex addiction, turn to something to feed that emptiness, but it never stops being empty.

(EDIT, 1/11/22: Having re-read this entry, I only just realized the "This Side of Paradise" pun. I wish I'd thought of it the first time 'round!)

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(Millennium copyright Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All screenshots are property of Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Millennium--This Is Who We Are for episode transcripts, which helped me adapt the episodes.)

Millennium S1E13: :Force Majeure"

That was some good bourbon you brought last time. I think you might need some for the story I’m about to relate. This is some real end-times stuff, Heaven’s Gate territory, something I hadn’t encountered up to that point. Little did I know at the time that it would end up being a child’s game compared to how my life would end up…

“You remember a single deluge only, 

but there were many previous ones.” –Plato

I was babysitting Jordan while the news was on. There’d been some freak storms throughout the week, and, as they say, where there’s rain, there’s flooding. The reporter on the screen told me that there’d been twenty-five inches in three days. Where’s Noah when you need him?

The phone rang. It was Catherine, telling me she was running late. She didn’t need to tell me, but, given what was on the TV, I was glad to hear her voice. I figured it’d be the flooding, but no, it was the case she was working on. “I’m with the parents of a grad student who lit herself on fire.”

I shot up like a bolt at her words. “Did she survive?”

“No, and the parents keep saying she’d never kill herself, so it’s pretty intense here. Your guy has been a real comfort to them, though.”

That’s funny. You’d think the ‘Group would have told me about this, and that they’d be sending someone out to take a look. They’re normally pretty good about keeping us in the loop.

“What guy?” I asked, totally blindsided.

“Dennis something. He said he worked with you—I thought from the Group.”

I put on my best “casual” act. “I probably just haven’t met him yet. Make sure you get his name.”

“I will. I have to get back to the parents now. Love you.”

Jordan looked up from her coloring. “Was that Mommy? What did she say?”

I picked her up and chuckled, “I have a secret plan that I can’t tell to any spies unless they’re in their PJ’s.” When I put her back down onto the floor, she toddled off as fast as she could to change.

She was a million laughs back then.

The news was still on, but now they were talking about that girl Catherine told me about. There was footage, taken from the scene on a student’s camcorder.

“…Some think this self-immolation, if that’s what it was, had the trappings of a political act. But none of the students we interviewed had any idea what she may have been protesting.”

Down in the basement, I reviewed the footage from the broadcast on the Millennium computer. Their advanced software allowed me to go frame by frame to look for any clues, anything that might be a lead.

At the top of the stairs, someone cleared her throat. Cath had gotten home safely!

“She reminds me of those Buddhist monks protesting the Vietnam War,” she mused.

“Ritualistic pose, focused beyond herself, somehow,” I confirmed.

“Maybe that’s why the parents kept saying someone else had to be responsible.” If there’s one thing my wife’s very good at, it’s teasing a train of thought out of an idle comment. When I pressed her to explain herself, she continued: “They had no idea, so I took it as a defense mechanism…find someone out there to blame. Honestly, that guy who knew you actively encouraged them.”

If I hear one more mention of him, whoever he may be, I’m going to break out in hives.

I felt her hand on my shoulder. “It’s got to be worse when it’s an only child.” With that, she went to check up on Jordan, and I logged in to confer with the Millennium Group.

The familiar message filled the screen as I pressed “Enter.”

MG WELCOME FRANK BLACK.

When the communication menu popped up, I selected “Phone” and punched in Peter Watts’ number.

“Hi, Peter, it’s Frank.”

“So you weren’t washed away?” What a way to greet a guy.

“Nope, still here. Did you see the grad student on the news?”

“It was pretty grim.”
“Do we have someone working on that? Dennis something?”

“No-one. Should we?”

“Catherine spoke to the family. They say it wasn’t a suicide.”

“Well, if I were the parents, I’d be telling myself that too. If you want, I can do a little research.”

“Thank you.”

[click]

Peter’s research led me to Washington Polytechnic. The drab, gray concrete perfectly matched the drab, gray sky of that morning.

My first lead was the girl’s friend, Maura. She was in her early twenties, auburn hair, glasses, and, strangely given what she’d been through, a ciggie in her hand. After I introduced myself, she said, “Could you close the door, please, I’m not allowed to smoke in here.” With a sigh, she continued: “You’d think I’d quit after yesterday.”

I glanced at the desk. “It was Lauren’s, but…not anymore,” she sighed. I didn’t take it personally. Her snide demeanor was just a cover for what she’d seen. A book caught my attention. “Point-Set Topology.”

“Oh, yeah, she was mutant bright.” The way college kids speak today escapes me. “She was offered a faculty appointment at Oxford last year, but her parents wouldn’t let her. Nice people…they were like ‘Uh, Great Britain? Isn’t that somewhere near England?’”

“What do you think, Maura?” I asked. “Were there any signs before yesterday?”

With a flick of her hair and one of the biggest eye-rolls I’d ever seen, she let loose. “Like what? Little fires flaring up? I’m sorry, but I thought you people compared notes or something. I mean, this is a complete Xerox of what your partner asked me!”

Aha. We’re getting somewhere. “Someone was here?”

“Yeah, Dennis Hoffman. You know, the snappy dresser.” Finally! A name! “You know, the only reason I was willing to go through this all over again is ‘cause he said you would be able to tell me what happened.”

There, on the windowsill, was a model of the solar system, its sun and nine planets, aligned on armatures. “He said you’d be interested in that.” Little did she know that I was more interested in raising some hell with Mister Dennis Hoffman.

Figured if I could get a few more interviews in, I’d get a bigger picture. While out on a stroll, I found a little memorial for Lauren. Pretty girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Obviously, this was the very spot where they found her. All around me, there were men working on the lamps that light the campus at night. One, two, three….seven in total from my vantage point, and by turning and taking a couple of steps back, the spot perfectly aligned itself with the lamps. I couldn’t help but think of that planetary model from earlier.

A voice broke me out of the image. “Frank Black? I’d have come sooner, but I wanted you to see for yourself.” This must be the famous Dennis Hoffman. A small, academic-looking guy (in truth, he looked like he was suited for nothing but academia), complete with chalk-dusted tweed jacket and pullover. Probably mid-forties by the look of him.

“I’m glad we’re teamed up on this,” he said. To me it sounded like the biggest, sickest joke I’d ever heard, told in complete earnestness. “The girl? The alignment? Boom…boom. Doesn’t get any clearer than that.” I just gave him the look of a complete idiot, to draw him out a little further.

He even had the nasal, pedantic academe act down pat. “On May 5^th, 2000, seven inner planets align for the first time since the Great Flood. Uranus at the meridian of its epicenter. Earth, the focus of the biggest gravitational tug-of-war in six thousand years. Catastrophic Earth changes on alignment day, preceded by abnormal weather patterns now as stresses build. Hurricanes: Edouard, Andrew, Andhra Pradesh, Bay of Bengal. The Sahara Desert advancing 70.7 meters per year. Lima earthquake; 7.3; Loma Prieta, 7.1; Irian Jaya, 8.0...the hailstorm, exactly as predicted.” Not to mention human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, and all that Biblical razzle-dazzle.

He clarified, as if he knew what I was thinking. “This isn’t prophecy, but scientific fact. Alignment every six thousand years. Lauren knew.”

“So she killed herself because…a hailstorm confirmed that the world was about to end?” I laid the playing-dumb act on pretty thick, just to see if he’d actually take the bait.

He shook his head. “Nobody kills themselves over something that happens three years from now. She was protesting something else.” Too smart to take the bait. “But what?” I demanded. “People close to her have no idea what that might be.”

“Someone does,” he asserted. “Obviously there’s others involved behind this.” Finally I could take no more. Time to set Mr. Junior Detective straight. “You know, you’ve been telling people we work together.” His reply? “Only those with a need to know. Ask Peter Watts. He’ll confirm. There are others involved.”

Have I mentioned that I really didn’t like this guy?

================================================

Peter called me a little later that evening and asked to meet me in the parking lot somewhere on campus. “Thanks for helping me out with this one, Peter,” I said as I got into his car and closed the passenger-side door.

“It wasn’t exactly a pleasure dealing with Dennis Hoffman again, but I think I impressed upon him the need to leave you and Catherine alone.” Good to know someone else hated him just as much as I did.

“How’d you find him?” “He emailed us,” Peter explained. “He likes to talk. Couple of years before you came along, he came forward on a zodiac-cult investigation. Once he found out about the Group, it took us a year to get him off our backs. But don’t worry. He’s only dangerous if you listen to him.”

He pulled a thick manila envelope from the fold-down visor. “I got some pertinent information on the girl. Or rather, a lack of pertinent information. There’s no birth certificate. Subsequent public documents list her as the Padilla’s genetic child, but that’s all but impossible. There are too many recessive traits.”

“Adopted, you think?”

“No, not formally. There’s no record of her biological parents. But there’s something else: Scholarships, appointments, an endless list of special programs starting at an early age.”

“I gathered that the Padillas weren’t this sophisticated.”

“There’s been a pattern of positive interference in her life—from outside.”

I reached the only available conclusion. “Her genetic parents, then.” This was shaping up to have more twists and turns than a strong Mai Tai being sipped with a three-looped crazy straw.

“Whoever it is, is taking pains to remain anonymous. But there are definitely others involved.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Hoffman.” Peter did a priceless double-take when he heard that one. 

=============================================================

The next morning, I joined Peter and the Millennium Group’s coroner, Cheryl Andrews, at the Snohomish County morgue. You remember Cheryl from a while ago, right? The one at the gated community? All these old stories kind of run together after a while. I’m glad you’re coming along to record them, 'cause that's the only way to get them straightened out.

Anyway, the autopsy. I found the tape a while ago, so let’s hear what she had to say.

“…Cheryl Andrews, MD, conducting autopsy under the auspices of Snohomish County Coroner. Subject of reported self-immolation: grad student Lauren Padilla, P-A-D-I-L-L-A. White female, age 25, elevated carboxy hemoglobin confirms cause of death was hypoxia and severe thermal injuries.”

And there she was, on the slab, like a way-overdone barbecue.

“…Bone shrinkage and fourth-degree burning of extremities consistent with use of acetone accelerants. Body posture consistent with acetone accelerants as well.” The girl was in a kind of kneeling position that Cheryl called “the pugilistic attitude,” which is caused by the muscles contracting under intense heat. Remember Rasputin, Czar Nicholas II’s vizier? I read that, when they went to cremate him, they forgot to cut the tendons, and when he was put near the heat of the oven, he sat bolt upright on account of the same principle!

I was more curious about her hands. Peter took one look and determined that they were in the Mandala position, a Buddhist gesture denoting offering. Meanwhile, I’d found something else: a self-inflicted wound consisting of a circle with a straight line running through it.

Once again, Peter gave up the goods. “It’s an astronomical symbol meaning alignment, conjunction.”

May 5^th, 2000…I can get you there if you’re very careful.

Outside in the parking lot, he and I mulled over the significance of the alignment symbol. I remembered the planetary model on the desk. Peter shrugged it off, suggesting that Dennis had not only planted it, but aligned the planets.

As the old saying goes, “Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.” Parked right next to my red Jeep, was Dennis Hoffman’s car, and its driver standing next to it.

“We had an agreement!” Peter barked.

“Well, yes, we did,” Dennis smirked. “But you’ve found something on the body, haven’t you?”

“Yes, now get in your car and go,” Peter hissed. I wasn’t done with the little dork, so I drew the symbol from before onto the grimy trunk of his car.

“May 5^th. I knew it.” The two of us rolled our eyes as he went into his rehearsed spiel about his prophecy. Finally, he said something new: “Seven planets align. Seven people survived with Noah. Seven separate prophecies by Nostradamus predicting the apocalypse in May. This is the beginning of the Thousand Days. When the first trumpet sounds there came hail mixed with fire and blood.” I got into my Jeep and quietly started her up as he blathered on. When at last I’d had my fill, I threw her into reverse and just left him to babble at empty air.

As much as I hated that little twerp, he still had a strong argument. I needed to look something up on my office computer. The Palomar Electronic Observatory seemed the best place to start. After punching in the necessary conditions—solar system, planetary alignment, 5/5/2000—an illustration of an erupting volcano in a nearby book caught my eye.

Within a minute, the observatory gave me the results. On that date, there will indeed be an extremely rare alignment. Another book on my desk had illustrations for “The Plague of Hail” and “The River of Blood.” Well, there’d already been a plague of hail. Might as well check for a river of blood. I punched that into a search engine and was rewarded with Oregon’s Riverside Gazette. The summary read: “Malheur River turns red—Scientists Baffled—Pyroclastic Surge.” A picture had a caption reading “River Water Turns Blood Red.”

Another article greeted me as I scrolled down further. “Local Girl Missing. National Merit Scholar Carlin Mather Disappears.” Since this was the same newspaper, it wasn’t a stretch to conclude that Carlin and the Malheur River were somehow connected. I called Peter and Cheryl with instructions to meet me and the local sheriff at the dam overlooking the river.

By the time we got there and met up, the police had already dredged the Malheur, found Carlin, and got her into a body-bag. Sheriff Camden was still incredulous at my accuracy.

It wasn’t a pretty sight by any stretch of the imagination.

The autopsy took place at Malheur General Hospital in Riverside, at 12:15 in the afternoon.

As I suspected, there was some kind of volcanic soil on her. “The river bed ruptured just below the dam,” the sheriff interjected. “The fish never knew what hit ‘em.” Peter brought up a little ancient history: “They speculate that volcanic ash from Santorini turned the Nile red in ancient Egypt.”

The sheriff filled us in. “She disappeared about three days ago. I figured she was murdered elsewhere and dumped over the dam.” Cheryl took note of Carlin’s striking blue eyes, as blue as Lauren’s were. Two young women, both blue-eyed blondes, both with that symbol somewhere on them, both dead in symbolic circumstances. What’s the connection?

A frantic shriek interrupted my train of thought. A woman, whom I assumed to be Carlin’s adoptive mother, burst in, demanding to see her. Quick as a flash, the sheriff took her into his arms and led her out of the room. All I overheard was, “I’m asking you, as a friend, let us clean her up first.” She sobbed for a while, until she noticed me.

“You knew where she’d be. You’re one of them.” I shook my head to say ‘no.’ Sheriff Camden asked her, “Who are ‘they?’ The ones who brought her to you?”

“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I never knew. My perfect baby, and they took her.”

We took a break to clear our heads, and reconvened at around 3:30.
===============================================

I have the other side of that tape.

“…There were needle marks in her buttocks, and a slight abscess of the surrounding adipose tissue suggests repeated intramuscular injections. The angle of the needle indicates that she was injecting herself. Strangely, both of them show high post-mortem estrogen levels.”

There was a brief pause as she peeled back the skin.

“I assumed a false positive on Lauren’s due to the extreme heat, but seeing Carlin’s, I conclude they were both injecting menotropins—fertility drugs.” Cheryl drew a deep breath and clucked her tongue. “A high-school senior, by all indications a virgin, and she’s super-ovulated.”

“Seven,” I blurted out, for no reason in particular. “Seven mature egg follicles where there should be one,” Cheryl confirmed. “They’ve got to be sisters.”

“No,” I said. “Identical twins. Seven years apart; identical offspring being readied for the cataclysm on May 5^th, 2000. Like Noah preparing for the flood. Seven planets, seven egg follicles.”

Cheryl led us to a computer monitor and showed us a process called ‘blastomere separation.’ It’s used in livestock, more specifically cattle. As she explained: “Take one fertilized egg and let it divide in vitro. When you tease the cells apart, you have new embryos identical to the original. Freeze a few for later, and you could have identical girls, seven years apart. Cows can usually yield 20 copies, and humans can probably yield the same. Any gynecologist could do it, though none would ever admit.”

Peter gave an expression of disgust. “Pretty ugly breeding experiment. Think the ones who killed themselves wanted out?” I had to disagree. “If they stayed in, they’d survive on May 5^th.” He concentrated, going back to Carlin’s mother. “Both sets of parents said someone forced them. Think they might have been removed from the program?”

“If you’ve got the genes, you don’t need the people,” Cheryl mused. Peter slumped down in his chair. “20 identical human beings, no longer needed, no birth records, all scattered over fifty states. We’re going to need all the luck we can get.”

I had an unscheduled appointment with the twerp at his motel room. He had a little singing to do. He was staying in room number 7. With any luck, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” will be on TV. Of course, that’d be pushing it too far.

I could tell from the way he hesitated with the door that he was scared. Still, he let me in.

“The river of blood happened, just as you said it would. How’d you know?”

“I read Exodus. Would you like some water?”

“Thank you. Dennis, there are others. There will be more deaths.”

His little rat-face twisted up into some blend of indignation and indigestion. “Are…are you mocking me?” he demanded. “Is that what you’re doing?”

“I wish I were. But someone else believes in May 5^th. He’s responsible for two deaths already. I need to know who else believes in Earth changes.”

“Einstein did.” Wiseass.

“I mean today. Where would that person be?”

He thought, but didn’t respond. I tried a different tack.

“Where would you be? Where will you be on May 5^th, 2000?”

A long pause. “I really thought that, when I finally found someone who believed, they’d be good. That the future would be better. I reserved a hotel room—more of a motel room, really—in Pocatello, Idaho.”

Get your voice ready, twerp. Your little aria’s about to continue at the police station.

Peter Watts grilled him at the same computer terminal from earlier. “Pocatello,” Dennis began. “531 miles from the nearest coast; 4,448 feet above sea level. Compared to here, it’s a seismic oasis.” Peter pulled up a graphic on the computer while our canary tweeted on. “Forget the ‘Big One’ in L.A. When the Cascadia subduction zone shifts, Seattle’s looking at a nine-plus. You want Starbucks, you’ll have to go scuba diving.”

Peter thought about something for a moment. “I don’t believe in telepathy, so our two girls must have had prior contact. Turns out they did, but not directly. Here’s their calling patterns.” With a few keystrokes, he pulled up a 3-D graphic of his findings. There was one contact point in the middle, with each connection radiating from it like sewing pins in a pincushion. In the upper right-hand corner, another box showed the phone numbers leading to each connection.

“Just before they died, they called this number.”

“So the guy in the middle is pushing the buttons?” I asked. Peter didn’t seem to know, but he pulled up two more sets of connections, all connecting with that central point. “Twenty calls, just like Cheryl said,” he confirmed.

He rattled off a checklist.

“Missouri, blue-eyed blonde…AWOL. Colorado, the same…missing two days. California…missing 24 hours. Each an only child. We could end up with a real mess on our hands.”

The final number appeared on the screen. “208-555-1024—THE ATRIUM, SERVICE LEVEL—13275 COLEBROOK ROAD—POCATELLO, IDAHO.”

Two possibilities crossed my mind: Either Dennis is in on this, or the real mastermind came to the same conclusion independent of him. Whatever the result, we had to keep the songbird caged. I hated it, but he had to come with us to Pocatello.

Pete and I took him and a few of Idaho’s finest down to the service level of the Atrium. When we first went into the main lobby, I couldn’t help but notice that the whole place was themed like Noah’s Ark, from the décor to the shape of the building.

All the way down, the manager spluttered his protestations. “I know my building. I’ve got emergency generators, pumps, elevator equipment, but no elves! No one has access to this area without my knowledge!” The police lieutenant interrupted him: “Look, bottom line is, we’ve got two dozen people missing and they’re all focused on this place.” Amid all the action, cops were opening doors and shouting “Clear!” until they found one they couldn’t open. The manager was surprised: “Someone changed the cylinder.” I grabbed a crowbar from one of the cops and pried the door open. Peter’s flashlight played in an empty room, empty save for one of the walls, which had that alignment symbol spray-painted onto it, and a big junction box on another wall.

My friend is either a brave man or a fool. As he opened the box, I expected him to get fried, but nothing happened; it was a dummy box. Dummy, that is, except for the hidden phone connection and keypad. The manager looked as surprised as any of us…clearly, he hadn’t had anything like this put in.

There were three lights on the control box: STANDBY, ACTIVE, and LINE SHIFT. The light next to ACTIVE was on and steady, and the STANDBY light was blinking. A phone switcher. That explains how the numbers went to one central point…but our man was one or two steps ahead of us. I admire ingenuity.

Dennis and I asked, almost at the same time, who designed the building. “A local woman,” the manager explained, “who worked out of an office on a ranch about an hour from here. I forgot her name, but I have her phone number. It’s 5-5-5—” “—2000,” I interrupted him. It’s like a parody of James Bond—the bad guy has shell companies and all kinds of stuff built around a specific keyword or logo. I dunno, it’s almost like they want to be found.

We found the ranch in the dead of night. It wasn’t too hard to miss from the cars parked near it, with license plates ranging from Oregon to Nevada. We were staking the place out from a long way away with fancy night-vision scopes and everything. The impatient lieutenant was having none of it. “I know you couldn’t care less, but I got a dozen guys about to go into golden time. I say we knock on the door with a domestic disturbance complaint.”

Fool. They’d just say “We’re not causing any disturbance,” so I corrected him. “This could get volatile fast. There’ve been two deaths already.”

A young woman came out of the house and made her way toward one of the cars. Another woman followed her down the stairs…and then she stopped and looked right at me. How could she see us from so far away?

“They made us,” the lieutenant barked into his radio. “Everyone in! Go! Go! Go!”

Well, I tried as hard as I could to forestall a potential Waco, but clearly this gung-ho specimen had other ideas. Now that that had blown up in my face, all I could do was damage control, so I went in after them. A few young women and girls caught my eye as they ran through a kitchen door and shut it behind them. I discovered that it led to the basement, where I found girls and women of different ages with nowhere to go. They huddled, praying, terrified.

“Don’t worry,” I said to all of them, as quietly and gently as I could. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

A few minutes later, I heard the rumblings of a big diesel engine. The lieutenant had called in a couple of Idaho Department of Corrections buses. “What is this?” I demanded as I stormed over to him.

“Protective Custody,” he coolly replied. “Those ten-year-olds found out today that they’re about as individual as ants. I’m not taking any chances.” “You’re only making things worse!” I hissed. “Sorry, Frank, but I don’t want another Jonestown on my watch.”

Dennis came over to us, all quiet like. “Frank? He wants to talk to you upstairs. I told him you understood.” I turned to him: “I don’t want to understand.” Still, it was time to meet the mastermind of this operation and bring him to justice.

I ascended the stairs to the upper room. There he was: a dying old man encased in an iron lung, with frizzy white hair and big, crazy eyebrows. He looked equal parts terrifying and pathetic.

I motioned for the officer standing guard to leave us for a moment.

“They’re being put on a bus and shipped off somewhere,” I began. “Do you know? Do you even care?”

There was a pneumatic hiss as he drew a breath in. “I….want you to….understand,” he said in a fine, strong voice, as fine and strong as a preacher forty years younger. “Noah was…insane. Until…the rains came. The day the flood began, all the people who had jeered showed up. Imagine the chaos, the…the violence. They ta…taunted him hours before, and now willing to commit any vile act possible to get aboard. I contemplated that scene for years, finally accepted that the people I wanted to see in the next world, people who would care for each other as brother and sister…did not exist.” Another deep breath. “I would have…have to make them. When I saw the results, how perfect they are to each other, I knew that the next world would be better.”

The thing Cheryl showed me earlier disgusted me enough, but this topped even that.

“Your daughters are crying down there. What arrogance, not to take responsibility.”

He let out a piteous sob. “No…the humility to accept my place in the universe.”

“You want to take God’s place.”

“I accept on May 5^th that the planets will align, and massive Earth changes will occur. Not as a referendum on Mankind’s wickedness, but as part of the eternal order of the cosmos. We cannot stop this. It is not about us.” I still hated him for all this, but finally things were starting to click together.

“Once you accept this, Mr. Frank Black, your responsibility, as a human being, is to do everything you can to preserve what is good about humanity. I was hoping for the future that you would understand.”

“Those two girls—your daughters. You told them something a while ago. What was it?”

“The truth. The Thousand Days have begun, and I’m dying. I won’t make it to them on the other side. Oh, my children. I pray they’ll be all right.”

I took my leave of him and headed downstairs. There, Peter was going through dozens of scrapbooks, each belonging to one of the clones, filled with pictures of them with their adoptive families, newspaper clippings, achievements, scholarships, and similar mementoes. “A chance to remake the world in your own image,” Peter sighed. “You’d be crazy not to take it.” I shook my head. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.”

The lieutenant came into the room and told us that things were just about wrapped up. Something crossed my mind. “Where’s Dennis?”

“He…was out front when they were being loaded onto the bus,” Peter remembered.

“They’re gone,” I murmured. “All gone. That bus will never get to where it’s going.” Snapping to action, the lieutenant called to his men. “Mason! Baker! Get after that bus! Now!”

Suddenly the lights went out. Power outage. I ran back up to that upper-floor room, flashlight in hand, only to find the man in the iron lung dead. At least he went peacefully, and that’s all a guy could hope for. The quiet gave me a better chance to look around the room to see if I’d missed anything. Sure enough, there was a model of the planets, all aligned in a neat little row, and a framed picture.

“The power was deliberately cut,” Peter’s voice drifted in from afar. “They found the bus empty, and Dennis is still at large.” I reassured him: “He’ll be with them, wherever he’s gone.” I showed him the picture I’d found, an architect’s rendering of the Atrium, whose internal structure looked just like a boat…or an ark.

We paid the place one more visit the next day. “At least we know where they’ll be on May 5^th, 2000,” I said with a faint smile.

“A lot harder to dismiss when it’s not just Dennis ranting,” Peter smirked.

“Oh, he didn’t know what to do with the knowledge. Obviously these people have a plan. Still, they don’t know how the Great Cataclysm starts, only how it ends.” As I noticed a nearby gift shop, I said, “I’m going to get something for Jordan.”

“…This is our solar system,” I said with a big smile as I opened the box. This one was made of plastic, with differently-colored planets so that children could identify and tell them apart.

“See, this is the Sun,” I indicated the sun, “and this is us, the Earth.”

“We live in a ball?” she concluded. She did indeed say the darnedest things back then.

“Shall I tell Daddy the good news?” Catherine said. “She got in! Green Valley Day School. They accepted her for next fall.”

All I could muster was a “Good,” because I didn’t know quite what to make of that.

“Frank, this is more than good. She’s set for the twelfth grade! We’re home free until 2010.”

She kissed our daughter on the cheek. “Daddy and I think you’re the smartest little girl and you’re going to grow up to be a smart big girl.”

Meanwhile, I was miles away in my head. Set for 2010? If Dennis’ predictions come true, that’ll be cold comfort, I thought. Still, it’s comforting to know that the future is in good hands. All she has to do is make the best of whatever’s to come.

 ===========================================================

COMMENTARY

“Force Majeure” was a pretty creepy episode, but a fun one to adapt. I notice a correlation: The creepier the episode, the easier it is for me to inject a healthy amount of “film-noir detective” into it. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I cracked one of those stories open (four years since I read Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest in preparation for the Millennium episodes), but the tone stays with me.

One really good detail in this episode was the “May 5th” date. All too often, the plot concerns itself with a race against time before New Year’s Eve (as did Doctor Who: The Movie and End of Days), but here it was refreshing to see something that 1) was not going to happen on New Year’s Eve and 2) was three years away at the time. And had a legitimate scientific rationale

The best part, though, was how Millennium took the doomsday-cult plot, which was in vogue at the time thanks to the Branch Davidian debacle in Waco, Texas, and took it a step further with a story that at first glance would seem to belong in the realm of science-fiction, but is instead grounded within real-world science. I was reminded of Moonraker, and how Hugo Drax wanted to create a master race to repopulate the Earth after he killed off everyone with toxin-filled missiles…but here, we have no cackling supervillain; instead, it’s a dying old man, trying to be a modern-day Noah with children created from his own genes—geniuses all of them. Uniquely, he was also self-aware enough to recognize that it wasn’t all about himself, and, better still, he does have a point: the world has gotten to become a meaner and crueler place of late.

The only issue I had is that the inciting incidents in Acts One and Two—the deaths of the two girls—sort of go unexplained. Why did they kill themselves? Was it just a way to get Frank and Dennis into the right place at the right time? The only explanation offered is the unsatisfying “they were removed from the program.”

Still, it’s good to have an episode where there isn’t another serial killer on the loose, and it’s good to have an apocalyptic cult that doesn’t fall back on the usual “cult of personality” tropes.

(Millennium copyright Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All screenshots are property of Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Millennium--This Is Who We Are for episode transcripts, which helped me adapt the episodes.)