Jessica stared down at the prone figure below the sheet. She then tore the shroud away for a complete view, the fabric spiraling away like a fleeing specter.
Below her gaze lay the body of a thin, shapeless woman, not a blemish of any kind save the stitching done by Shockley and his team. Even the woman's nipples, the areola, appeared white and an extension of her breast skin. Her breasts formed two perfect and symmetrical buttons, so small as to make her appear genderless. A gaze into the woman's face, and Jessica felt she must be the most pure-skinned white woman she had ever encountered, dead or alive. Even given the purplish hue from the postmortem pooling of blood as tissues had broken down, even with the bruises caused most likely by the rough handling of the body by so-called professionals, this corpse appeared nearly flawless. “Not so much as a single freckle,” she whispered.
“How were the bodies discovered?” Jessica asked Sturtevante, who, along with James Parry and Kim Desinor, had joined them in the autopsy room. Everyone wore blue surgical masks.
“In every case, the body has been discovered by a friend who'd come looking for the deceased.”
“No, I'm asking in what posture were the bodies found? Facedown, faceup?”
“Facedown, on their stomachs, resting comfortably. Placed in bed or on pillows. Whoever the killer is, he wants the poems seen immediately, so in walks the hapless friend to discover first the poem, then their dead friend-or at least the two simultaneously.”
“She looks like a beautiful young boy,” Kim said matter-of-factly.
“I hadn't noticed,” jested the old coroner at Jessica's side. “Of course! Fact struck me immediately, a thunderbolt in the ass. I mean, how often do you see the human body without a single blemish?” Shockley darted a glance at Sturtevante. 'Tried to tell our lieutenant in charge of the case, but she didn't think it important.”
“I doubt there's a person within an eight-mile radius whose body is without some sort of blemish,” replied Jessica, thinking of her own physical imperfections.
“No such thing as true alabaster skin, they say, and yet here it is,” added James Parry. “Wouldn't you say, Jess- uh, Dr. Coran?”
Other than the brief acknowledgment at their meeting and businesslike exchange in the elevator, these were James's only words to Jessica. Kim Desinor looked like she was about to answer, but she hesitated, allowing Jessica a moment to gather her thoughts.
“As pure as pure gets, it would appear. Not so much as a mole or a birthmark anywhere,” Jessica replied. 'Tell me, Jim, is this true of the other two victims as well?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” Sturtevante stepped closer to the body. “We haven't been getting a whole lot of sun here lately. Fact is, I can't recall what the sun feels like. Either way, we have plenty of pale-skinned people running about.” She stopped talking to watch Kim Desinor. Kim placed her hands over the body and seemed to scan it with her fingertips, ever so lightly, her eyes closed. Jessica placed a finger to her lips to indicate that the others must remain quiet while Kim worked.
Kim's body began a near-imperceptible shiver, and she began to take on a slightly blue tinge like that of the long-frozen corpse. “Blue frost,” she muttered. “Blue frost… cold to the bone.”
Kim came out of the trance she had put herself into, the blue tinge disappearing from her features. “Please, can we turn her over? I'd like to have a go at the back.”
“Can we roll her, Dr. Shockley?” asked Jessica.
“Let me call in a couple of my attendants. Strong young fellows who won't break her neck in the process.”
This done, they all stared at the strange, eerie lettering on the back of the victim. It was one thing to view such an unusual desecration of a body in photos, quite another to look on the real thing. Here it stared back at you as if the words were alive, the color of the ink vivid, the color of the bruising around the cuts gruesome. Hues no photograph could reproduce. Here lay the poem about chance and innocence that ended with flickering life.
“Strange or not, each of the victims had assumed a stage name or at least a changed name,” Sturtevante told them.
Kim wasted no time in fingering the pen markings, trying desperately to learn something from her reading of the body.
Nothing happened until they all realized that the blue cast that had left Kim's skin had returned, the color far deeper this time. “What the hell is-” began Shockley.
“Shhhh,” Jessica cautioned him.
Jessica watched Kim with great intensity; she saw the tears begin to form in her eyes, tears that instantly turned into frozen little pearls. “She's freezing cold. Get her out of here, away from the body. Now!” Jessica ordered.
James and Jessica guided a weakened Kim Desinor from the autopsy room to Shockley's office, Lieutenant Sturtevante opened doors along the way. There Shockley pointed to a leather couch, saying, “Lay her down here.”
The others gathered around Kim to watch the blue tint disappear and the tears turn again to liquid. “She loved him,” Kim said aloud. “Loved him?” asked Sturtevante. “Who loved whom?” asked Parry. Talking over the other two, Jessica asked, “For whom did she die, Kim?”
Kim's reply came like the whisper of a child. “She loved him, he loved her… her killer. The number nineteen… keeps coming at me, insistent, along with some letters which… which I haven't been able to understand just yet. I think I'll have to arrange them. They're some sort of call letters or insignia.”
“Nineteen? Nineteen what?” asked Parry.
“She loved him?” Sturtevante repeated. “Then that ought to make our search easy. We go after the boyfriend with more fervor.”
“Boyfriends, you mean,” corrected Parry. “She had a lot of male friends, as well as female friends, all of whom tell us the same story, that she was a lovely, open, caring person who got dumped on a lot because she was a good listener. And all of her so-called boyfriends claim to have had a platonic relationship with her-no sexual involvement- but if you believe that one, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.”
“But she did not sleep around,” Sturtevante added to correct any false impression Jim may have left. “All the friends say the same: they know no one who would have wanted to harm her.”
“You don't understand,” complained Kim, still lying prone. “Their love was transcendent… transcendental. Not your normal boy-girl relationship, not based on sex.”
'Transcendental? I always took that to mean finding a way to get out of your dental bills, or that it was an insurance company-Occidental Transcendental, something like that,” quipped Parry.
The others, glad for something to laugh at, laughed at Parry's lame joke, except for Kim, who remained stonily silent, and Jessica, clearly remaining aloof from any joke Parry had to make about anything.
What then?” asked Parry. “Did they cut into one another with this poison pen in a pact of some sort? Did they read poetry together, only he chickened out and bailed? That doesn't explain the other two deaths.”
“No, it's not a suicide pact, since the killer obviously isn't willing to include himself in it,” countered Sturtevante, vigorously shaking her head.
“But it might explain how he gets them to this point,” suggested Jessica. “Conning them into a pact, then bailing.”
“Perhaps the victims went first, and were under the impression he would follow, but once the poison is introduced, our man steps off,” added Shockley. “Not a bad theory.” Kim shook her head. “He loved her, too.”
“Loved her, yeah, enough to kill her,” Sturtevante commented. “I've seen it before. Love kills.”
“Got that right,” Parry agreed.
“No, no. He loved her too much, too much to allow her a moment's suffering,” insisted Kim. “At least in his head.”
“What suffering?” asked Parry. “She was in perfect health, according to Shockley. Right, Doctor?”
Shockley nodded repeatedly, saying, “Perfect health, yes.”
Kim remained a
damant about the feelings she'd received from the corpse. “All I know is that he… he killed her, poisoned her, out of love, and the suffering she felt was of the soul, not the body.”
“Loved her right into her grave? Is that what you're saying?” asked Sturtevante.
Parry gritted his teeth. “Do you really expect us to believe that?”
Jessica wanted to tell him a thing or two about love, but she held back. Kim clawed her way to a sitting position and replied, “Believe what you will, but I haxe to follow what my intuition tells me.”
“He killed her because he loved her? You psychics are all alike; you deal in double-talk.”
Kim shot back, “These are my honest impressions, Chief Parry. Not double talk.” Kim made it clear Parry's position as Philly's top-ranking FBI field operative didn't intimidate her.
“Lieutenant Sturtevante,” began Parry, “you buying any of this? You think this guy killed three people because he loved them?”
“That he so loved them that he killed them for it?” She mulled over the idea for a moment. “My team has looked into the boyfriend and the ex-boyfriend, and both of 'em have come up clean with solid alibis.”
“What about other acquaintances?” asked Jessica.
“Of course we're looking into every acquaintance we learn about, but getting information out of people takes time. So far, nothing has shaken out.”
“I want to see the other bodies,” Jessica replied. “See what, if anything, they have to tell us. Kim, you can rest here, regain your energies.” Got a little cold inside her. Strange… I again kept getting the single word rampage, as in the other reading.”
“Rampage,” Jessica repeated. “I wonder what it is, this rampage…”
“Micellina,” said Shockley.
“What's that?” asked Kim.
“Her name… Micellina Petryna.”
“Even her name is beautiful,” Jessica said.
“As was-is-her soul,” Kim added.
“She was striking,” Jessica agreed, “in her near perfection.”
Parry stared longer at the body.
“If you like that body type,” Sturtevante said to Jessica.
Jessica nodded. “Apparently our killer does… like that long, lean look.”
“Whoever's doing this, he writes to each victim, creates a new poem for each,” said Sturtevante, “and an expert in poetry I'm working with says the poems are excellent examples of what's going on among the young nowadays, that typically adolescent interest in the dark side, in death and the beyond, and a search for absolute perfection and peace, and maybe the meaning of life.”
“But the result is death,” Jessica countered. ^, r Who is this expert you're working with?”
“A friend at the University of Philadelphia who teaches poetry and writes it as well, a Dr. Donatella Leare. In fact, she has given me many insights into the killer. I'll leave her notes with you.”
“That would be helpful. Thanks.”
“Shall we visit the next victim?” asked Kim, standing now on wobbly feet.
“Not you. You've had enough.”
“I've only just begun. Out of my way, Coran.” Kim pushed past her friend and colleague, asking Shockley, “Will you please lead the way, Doctor?” One step, however, and Kim nearly fainted; the session had taken more of a toll on her strength than she cared to admit. Jessica helped her back down to a sitting position. “Get her some water, a Coke, something.”
Parry rushed out to do her bidding to a chorus of “Sorry, sorry,” coming from Kim.
Jessica now sat hunched over a desk, staring at Dr. Leonard Shockley's protocols on each of the victims. The others had all disappeared, each, in a sense, off to follow his or her own nose, his or her own separate leads. Jessica's instincts told her that more could be learned through the patterns left behind by the killer, and any similarities she could find or infer among his victims. These could only be ascertained by studying the reams of paper. Research was mining for small nuggets of information that led to a shock of recognition, nuggets of details and specifics that, taken altogether, might point in a direction. The first step in any journey is the hardest, but it may also be the step most filled with discovery. She recalled how her father had put it. Her mentor in forensics, Dr. Asa Holcraft, had put it more succinctly: “Baby steps. Go lightly. Crawl if you have to.”
Neither Leanne Sturtevante nor James Parry needed to remain at the crime lab morgue, and Kim had been physically and emotionally drained by her earlier experience with the deceased. She had a time-out coming, but she refused to leave the building, remaining on Shockley's ottoman. There she now rested with the intention of finding out what she could from the second victim before leaving altogether. Jessica had begun studying the paperwork in anticipation of Kim's return.
Jessica was secretly glad that Kim had not revealed that they believed the poem on each victim somehow connected, as if they were part of one long dirge that had been divided into discrete sections. After everyone had gone, Jessica suggested to Kim that they keep this theory between themselves for the time being. She had also told Kim that perhaps the number nineteen, which kept insinuating itself into her visions, might be the number of victims or sections of the poem, or both. Kim agreed that this could indeed be a possibility.
Going over the bodies and the protocols Dr. Shockley had created, Jessica again drew a bead on the absolutely healthy condition of the victims, each a sad loss-of the sort doctors hated to see-for none of them, male or female, had so much as a gallstone to worry their insides, and not so much as a mole to worry their outsides. Excellently proportioned, artistically so, their lithe, sculptured bodies reminded her of marble statues in a museum.
“They'd have no need of me or any doctor,” she said to the silent room, “except for the fact that they are all murdered.”
Shockley so quietly appeared in the doorway that his voice, breaking the utter silence, startled her. “You're here to discover and proclaim the deeper cause of death, beyond the weapon-poison-the thinking of the poisoner, which may or may not lead us in a direction that could put an end to his sociopathic behavior. Isn't that the essence of a criminal profile?”
“In a nutshell, yes, but, Doctor, I'm not sure our killer is a sociopath, not in the strictest sense.”
“Really, now? That's rather novel, isn't it? I have heard it said the word sociopath is interchangeable with serial killer, and our man is a serial killer.”
“Not all sociopaths kill,” she countered.
“They're just more prone to murder than the rest of us?”
“Not all serial killers are sociopaths. In fact, the serial mercy killer is working out of the deepest of human emotions, which makes him or her the antithesis of the sociopath.”
Shockley smiled and nodded like a shaggy dog. “Sociopaths can't empathize or sympathize with the pain and suffering of others, I know that much.”
“Fact is they only live for the brief duration of self-gratification they find in controlling others, bringing others to tears, to a state of demoralization, to bloodletting and torture. This alone in all the universe fulfills their perverse needs; for many, what is abnormal is the norm.”
“Chancy word indeed, normal. But tell me, do you think our killer of these young people with his poison and his flowers and music and poetry, do you think he gets any less of an erection than your run-of-the-mill lust murderer, who can only ejaculate if he tortures and mutilates?”
“Are you asking me if I think our poisoner is working out of something other than a sense of mercy?” She considered this idea, knowing the old man was using his best Aristotelian technique on her. He poses a series of questions so that she might unearth a truth that might eventually determine the depth of his own conclusions.
“Can you be sure of the Poet's motives yet?”
“I can't be sure of his or her motives just yet, but it would appear the killer took great pains to select a method of murder that is not the choice of your usual sociopath
ic chain saw murderer,” she insisted. “I don't think we're dealing with a heartless, unfeeling person here, but quite possibly the opposite.”
“The opposite? What is the opposite of such a person, Dr. Coran?”
“Someone who is subconsciously acting on some… some delusion of grandeur, that he is some sort of… saint, and that what he does is indeed an act of mercy on the one hand…”
“But, on the other hand…?”
“A thrill, a conquest, a victory. Dr. Desinor has said that she felt the killer was on some sort of crusade.”
“Precisely the definition of a sociopath of the sort we find in religious zealots, my dear, wouldn't you say?”
“Someone whose aims are glorified to a pathological intensity, working out of a sense of mission or a sense of a destiny ordained by God. That would make our killer a complicated nutcase, whose vision and fantasy are religious in nature, like Jim Jones in Guyana and David Koresh in Waco, Texas.”
“Yes, well, if you believe so.” Dr. Shockley lifted his brow, a shrewd look on his face. “Isn't such a man always more frightening than all the chain saw killers combined?”
“Yes, of course, especially if he is preaching such distortions as I heard in the case of the Crucifier in London.”
“Read all about it in the journals. You really should write that case up for the benefit of the rest of us, Jessica.” And then he abruptly added, “So, where have all the others gone off to?”
“No need for them to baby-sit here. They'll do just as well to follow leads independently of us.”
Shockley nodded, looking to her like the actor who played Santa Claus in the original Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street. He plopped wearily into the chair across from her, the desk she'd been given between them. “I heartily agree. That man Parry looked quite anxious to end his stay in my little death chamber. Behind my back, the PPD personnel, all of them, call this place 'Shock Theater,' where the 'Shock Doc'-that'd be me-operates like some ghoulish Dr. Frankenstein.” He laughed at the image, his white hair falling over one eye, and for a moment, Jessica thought he might drop off to sleep where he sat.
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