J. T. told the two Flagstaff agents what had been left at the kill scene in Las Vegas.
"As for meaning in a madman's head," Jessica said now, "perhaps the hellion will take it to his grave with him."
Still, she found herself examining each character, each loop and dip in the madman's hand, sizing him up as she did so, using what little she had learned about handwriting analysis against the unseen enemy. But the process told her little that she didn't already know, given his telephone fetish, and his fire fetish, and his liking for turning human flesh into fire-blackened, dehydrated cardboard. So what if his damnable lettering screamed that he rationalized beyond all reason as normal human beings understood reasoning? That he held a bizarre and fantastic worldview that excused him from his actions, from meting out suffering, pain, and death on others so he might feel the power of holding their lives in his hands, so he might feel good and godlike? She already knew this much. Handwriting analysis might have helped them to understand the movements and actions of the Night Crawler in Florida waters. But this guy? She doubted that what few scraps he was leaving would be of any service, even if they found the best handwriting expert on Earth to decode it; only in deciphering the madman's code, its meaning, the numerical game, the puzzle of words he left behind might the firebrand's death notices serve her and other authorities. But suppose it had no meaning, that it was simply what it appeared to be, gibberish, nonsense?
"Filthy business," muttered Kam, who was on her right, also intently studying both the words and numbers, and her reaction to them.
From the killer's own handwritten message, Jessica's eyes moved coolly, somehow independently of her brain, to drift to the reflected image of the awful handiwork of the brutal monster and her own superimposed image standing over the body. Somehow, given the flood of sun rays, the morning mist, and the charred and still-smoldering room, no one else but Jessica Coran and the body were reflected in the mirror from the angle at which she now stood.
Like the message on the mirror, the body on the bed also looked familiar.
"I just don't get it," complained J. T. of the message in the mirror, the sound of her friend's voice shattering Jessica's reverie, almost as if shattering the mirror.
She turned on him. "Get what?"
"These damnable numbers make no sense. One is nine, three is seven? I mean, what's that?"
"Hell, if the world made sense, men would ride side-saddle," Jessica automatically responded, recalling a favored feminist line, making McEvetty scratch his head while Kaminsky lightly chuckled. J. T. only frowned, causing her to continue, "Wake up, J. T. None of it makes any damned sense whatsoever." She ran a hand through her thick hair. "If it made sense, this madman wouldn't be telephoning me where to pick up the bodies; if it made sense, he wouldn't be out there." She waved a birdlike hand before them. "He'd have been long ago committed, safely put away; if it made sense, he'd have committed himself or killed himself or accidentally caught fire himself."
"Then we'll start with asylums and institutions. See if anyone in the head game can make out any of this cryptology of his," returned J. T. "After all, at the first killing in Vegas, he left the number sequence one equals nine. Now he skips to three? Three equals seven? Numerically, it doesn't compute, but somebody, somewhere's got to recognize this… aberrant"-he searched for a word- "chronology."
"Yeah, where's number two?" asked McEvetty.
Jessica's eyes bored into J. T. ''What meaning can a maniac take from numbers, J. T.? Quit looking for meaning and method in this madness. Even if there were any, which I seriously doubt, you and I can only guess at such meaning and likely never fathom it, and at the moment, any speculation could lead us in an entirely wrong direction."
"There's got to be a message in there somewhere," Kam insisted.
McEvetty, nodding, agreed and persisted with his inquiry intact. "The first killing is given number one, the second number three? What happened to number two? Who knows? Maybe this guy is some sort of Zodiac killer, you know, killing by the stars, astrological crap, numerology, shit like that…"
Perhaps it was the fact that they were all men, all bent on understanding one of their own, all bent on making sense of murder so foul as this, or perhaps it was simply the fact that there were three of them and one of her, but she refused to let these men have their way so easily.
"McEvetty," she replied, "at the moment, we've got our hands full with reality; let's don't get into numerology and shit like that, okay?"
"But Jess," continued J. T., "he might be telling us what his next message will be."
"How's that?" asked Kam.
J. T. turned to the other man and explained, saying, "It may be in the sequence. One equals nine, three equals seven would be followed by five equals five, you see? He skips one number on the first part of each equation and two digits on the second part."
J. T. began jotting down his notion on a notepad for the other two men to see more clearly what he meant.
Jessica feared they were all looking in the wrong place. Still, from what little of handwriting analysis she'd gleaned from Eriq Santiva, her boss at Quantico and an expert in documents and graphology, Jessica knew she had to start some record keeping of her own, that mentally she had already gathered much information about the killer by the killer's own confused script. She knew:
1. He was in many ways creative, perhaps evilly imaginative, possibly well read, literate despite the error on the spelling of ''violence.''
2. He walked that fine line between genius and madness.
3. He showed signs of an internal war, a great struggle turned outward and dangerous now.
4. He liked numbers and word games, games involving a puzzle; possibly he had a mathematics or scientific background.
5. He liked yanking their chains, and had likely spent much time in isolation, perhaps prison, perhaps someplace closer to what J. T. believed, what McEvetty would call a loony bin.
6. He held them and all other authority figures in great, abiding contempt.
7. He killed as opportunity presented itself after selecting a victim.
Still, she kept all this speculation to herself. She'd write it up in a report, fax it off to the team of profilers working the case from remote Quantico, Virginia. She might also send it to OPS-1 in D.C., where it would be brainstormed; along the way a cross-reference would be made between what she believed she knew of the killer and VICAP's computer banks.
She believed her suppositions about the murderer to be true, for his lettering showed great, sweeping flourishes, uncontrolled loops and swirls, reminiscent of the Night Crawler's handwriting the year before. But with the Night Crawler, they had had so much more to analyze. He'd written whole letters and poems for publication to the newspaper. The Phantom, by comparison, must be far more introverted, shy of the light; his cryptic messages were meant for quick consumption by law enforcement only, with little or no concern for attention from the media. In fact, his words were darts meant for a singular target, for Dr. Jessica Coran, it appeared.
She stared longer at the handwriting, giving it her full attention. His hand revealed much anger and art, quite a mixed bag, actually.
J. T. could see that she was studying the lettering again, and he asked, "What's the handwriting telling you, Jess?"
She wisely withheld taking the deep breath her body wanted to take. She then answered J. T., saying, "His center line is nonexistent, which rules out any stability, and his letters roam freely about below the center line, indicating a powerful but twisted sexual drive, which likely means he got off on watching his victims burn, likely ejaculating in his pants if not over the victim. We're not likely to find much evidence of this given the fire, but we'll search nonetheless. It may be that he left a drop here or there of his secretions, which may or may not reveal something through DNA tests."
"Whataya saying, Dr. Coran? That he jacked off over the victims while they burned alive?" asked McEvetty.
"That'd be my guess. Pure spec
ulation at this point, but yeah, such violence is often the only avenue for such a man to vent his psychosexual lust."
Kam whistled and said, "Even while… I mean while the victim was burning alive?"
"That's why it's called a psychosexual lust murder." McEvetty shook his head, adding, "Even though the heat in here must've been searing his own skin?"
"Some like it hot." She tried a joke on the men, but this only got her a series of frowns. ''Might even find some evidence of ejaculation and the killer's DNA on the body, if it hasn't entirely burned away," she added louder for the others, "the bedclothes, the carpet if we're lucky, if he didn't keep it in his pants."
J. T. stared hard at her, biting his lip. "He's got to be the sickest bastard I've ever dealt with."
"To him it's apparently become normal, casual behavior. Sick is in the eye of the beholder." She continued, pointing to the handwriting. "Other lines race above the center line, indicating a faith in his own superiority."
"Yeah? Anything else?"
McEvetty and Kam had shut up on hearing about the psychosexual, lust-killing aspect of the murders as Jessica portrayed it, likely wondering how she could dismiss numerology but accept graphology and her own leap to this conclusion about the killer's masturbating over the victim's burning flesh.
It must seem a wild leap to them, but Jessica had seen and interviewed so many killers behind bars over the years whose sexual aberrations ranged from getting off via strangulation and stabbing women repeatedly to ripping out their entrails. Fire and sex seemed as easy to equate as murderous hands, knives, guns, or torture instruments and sexual gratification. More brutal and sadistic murder was committed in the name of sexual gratification than any other motivating conception. For some men and women, aberrant sexual behavior was a way of life, a bodily need, a religion, and she saw no reason to doubt that the Phantom was practicing his religion at full tilt on this, his kill spree. Most assuredly, his religion had evolved from an early age, his childhood spent in dark corners, shying from the light of others, from what society deemed normal and acceptable behavior, like a griffin or a Grendel creature, ugly and unwelcomed and unloved, kept at bay by his own proclivities and awful habits, and it likely involved small, helplessly pinned life forms, fire, and his penis.
Jessica continued to answer J. T. regarding what she saw in the lettering. "So far, I've found all the signs Santiva told me to watch for in the Phantom's hand. See the pressure he places on the ends of lines? The killer uses the clubbing common to aggressive, angry, out-of-control people in which letters are given large, bulbous endings, but remember what materials he's working with."
"The greasy fat of his victims," supplied J. T. for the other two men, who both swallowed hard at this revelation.
Jessica continued, saying, "He's testing us, J. T.; testing me, in particular. No sane person would leave so methodical and organized a crime scene, assuring no clues, only to knowingly douse his ungloved fingers in the victim's burning tissue to leave his prints on a mirrored surface."
"Leaving his voice on tape, placing his handwriting on the wall, and his prints," J. T. agreed, nodding. "Maybe he wants us to stop him."
"So far he hasn't used a single word with the lowercase letter d in it, so it is impossible to know if he uses the maniac d, which Santiva, during our hunt for the Night Crawler in Florida last year, taught me to watch for. Still, his long-stemmed letters are like black roses."
"Say again?"
"They're forced tersely ahead of one another, and like daggers, they stab toward the right, as if barbed, ripping to get at the object or end letter. There's plenty here to mark him as insane.. and he's right-handed."
J. T. placed a firm hand on her shoulder and, reading her mind, added, "Insane, as if his actions haven't already told us as much. Always room for one more lunatic under the sun, hey, Jess?"
"Always the master of understatement and quiet imagery, J. T.," she replied, moving away, stepping closer to the body on the blackened bed.
Staring directly now at the murder victim, no longer using the mirror to soften the sight or ease her way toward it via the route of reflection, Jessica now looked straight into the desiccated features of Mel Martin outside the mirror.
Jessica now felt the blow, absorbing it with her entire body and mind as her eyes clearly conveyed the message of the real image of horrid death left her by the killer: the shriveled corpse, mummified remains, the limbs pulled inward, hardened by the temperature of the fire, which had created in the body its own instantaneous, solidified rigor mortis.
She read the familiar patterns present, seeing flashes of metal about the body. She saw that the killer had used items at hand to tie his victim, a blackened belt buckle dangling from the victim's hands, likely the victim's own; something like a western-style string tie about her feet, the string tie's metal nubs winking back at her, despite their having been blackened. Oddly, her feet were in good shape, not quite burned beyond recognition, like the rest of her. In fact, the feet were largely okay, and large and thick. Mannish, Jessica thought. The condition of the feet and ankles recalled the scourged body of a woman many years ago, in Yellowstone National Park, whom Jessica had been asked to render an opinion on. The woman was burned over 90 percent of her body, but the feet and ankles were not touched by the fiery liquid that had boiled her to death, a hot spring she'd purportedly fallen into that measured 202 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a sudden flash of realization, Jessica saw that there was something extremely different about this victim from the earlier hotel fire death victim. Mel Martin's fire-blackened, nude body clearly showed her to be a him, that "she" lacked breasts, and that he had male genitals hidden deep in the folds of his now fire-scourged body.
"Damn… he's a man?" she muttered.
"Excellent observation," replied an amused Kam.
"Last time I looked, yes, ma'am, ahhh, Doctor," added McEvetty, giving his partner a wink.
But Jessica was mentally adding an eighth item to her list of what she suspected was true about the Phantom, what she'd report to headquarters about the Hell-bound bastard:
8. He killed indiscriminate of sex.
Jessica felt a sudden need to sit down somewhere. Seeing her sudden loss of composure, J. T. whisked her outside and found a nearby room, where a Spanish maid was busily cleaning the bathroom. J. T. sat Jessica on the bed, slipped the maid a twenty, and flashed his credentials, telling the maid he was a doctor and that they would need the room for a half hour. "Come back then," he instructed.
The maid gave him a wink and a cynical smile, said something in Spanish, and disappeared.
"How can he be a man?" Jessica asked.
"Maybe Mel in there had an unusually high voice, and besides, fear can constrict the vocal cords, Jess. Let me get you some water."
"You don't have enough water, J. T."
NINE
… as surely as a passion grows by indulgence and diminishes when restrained; as surely as a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one that is obeyed active; as surely as there is any meaning on such terms as habit, custom, practice; so surely must the human faculties be moulded unto complete fitness for the social state; so surely must evil and immorality disappear, so surely must man become p erfect.
— Herbert Spencer
When Jessica and J. T. returned to the odorous death room, they found a big-boned, stout, black-haired man in a flannel shirt and rubber gloves crawling about the floor, sniffing at things in bird-dog fashion. McEvetty shushed them on entering, saying, "Fire investigator. He was here earlier, but went out for a smoke."
The chief fire investigator, from whom a series of hems, haws, and hums now steadily flowed as he crawled about the floor and examined all sides of the room and the bed, suddenly leaped elflike to his feet, coming face-to-face with Jessica.
"Just checking my earlier findings," he told her.
McEvetty quickly introduced Jessica and J. T. as principal investigators on the case to Page's fire marshal
. The fire investigator's name was Roy Brightpath, yet he looked like a man chiseled from the granite of this place, his skin the color of bronze. Jess realized immediately that he was part Native American.
"We at first thought it was just a guy fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand, but moment we come in, we could smell the accelerants. Dog couldn't place it anywhere but over the bed. Lennie, my lab guy, came over, took one whiff, and said it was a mix of gasoline and butane. 'Course, we'll verify that with analysis sometime late today, but Lennie's the best, and I'm pretty sure, pretty sure." He extended a gloved hand, and they shook. She saw by his bars that he was a captain, which meant some years of experience.
"I wasn't expecting the victim to be… male, that the victim's a man. I mean, I spoke to him on the phone moments before he died, and he… he sounded like a woman," replied Jessica, pirouetting about and staring, still shaken at this turn of events.
"Whoa up, there," said Brightpath. "Whataya mean, you spoke to him?"
"Just before he was murdered," she confessed. "J. T., will you explain?" she asked.
J. T. brought Brightpath and the others up to date on what had occurred between the killer and Jessica thus far. When he finished, Jessica asked, pointing to Martin's body, "Who was he? Does anyone know anything about the victim?"
"An older gentleman on vacation, late sixties, alone from what the detectives can gather," replied Brightpath, whose skin, tinged with a red hue, made him a walking, talking ironic twist on the word "fireman." Jessica guessed his roots must be somewhere in the vast family of the Navajo or Hopi. He was short and stout with a wide face that, under better circumstances, appeared to enjoy a white-toothed grin. She guessed as much from the smile lines and wrinkles.
"Smoked Camels without filters," continued Brightpath, ''carried a billfold full of pictures of his grandkids, beautiful children."
Kam took up Brightpath's slack, adding, "Recently widowed, kids got together money to send him on this trip to see the West, the great natural resources of the national parks, or so his co-travelers have told us. So, he's on this trip, which is the dream of a lifetime, and whammo! This happens."
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