Matisak next lowered a second tenterhook. The hooks had held an ancient carriage in the air which he'd earlier lowered and rolled to the rear of the barn. There were four hooks, one for each axle of the carriage, but he had only two bodies to drain.
Maybe he'd wait for those Res cops the old man had warned him about....
While he hadn't quite enough jars to accommodate the two additional blood-givers, he believed leaving four bodies rather than two dangling here would surely make a greater and more lasting impression on Jessica Coran and send her racing back like a yo-yo to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, area in search of him. And as she hunted, so too would he....
He was ready for her to make her appearance this time, for he'd located the coins, a small sack of gold eagles, circa 1879. He'd have enough ready cash to do a complete and thorough job on Jessica. His thoughts continued to race as his hands busily worked to remove the old woman's clothing, revealing her leathery skin.
He now tied a small-link chain around Hillary's ankles as he had with Earl, and then he attached her to the J-hook and hoisted her wizened old body up. She dangled like a slaughter animal, her morning chores and dinner preparations going unattended forever now.
“No more care in the world,” he assured her pliant form. But even as he hoisted her up, he realized she'd have to wait a bit, until he finished bleeding old Earl first. There was only one bucket in the place sterile enough for his needs, unless maybe he could find something new in the kitchen to assist in his endeavor here.
Serendipity had played its pixieish part in his vampiric orchestration of events. He'd been wondering and even worrying how he was going to get Jessica to come to him, while doubly worrying about what sort of containers he'd use to bleed his host and hostess. All senseless worries now, he thought. All things to those who wait, he told himself, and then the old man had shown up with his shiny new, silvery bucket, still fresh with the red and blue Chickasaw brand-name label along its front.
With Hillary now secure, the blood rushing to her head, Matt Matisak now began dipping the mason jars he'd confiscated from the old lady's fruit cellar into the bucket. He quickly filled each and screwed on the lids as he went, until Earl had no more to give. Hillary was coming around.
He emptied the remaining fluid from the bucket and into another jar, using a Rubber Maid ladle he'd stolen from the kitchen earlier, until the bucket was completely drained of Earl Redbird's blood. He then looked into Hillary's upside-down eyes as they blinked open in confusion and terror, which spread through her quivering old frame. He smiled in a kindly manner and said, “I didn't get a chance to thank you and Earl, ma'am, for all your kindness. I'm doing that now.”
“You bastard! You god awful son-of-a-creature of Satan, you son-of-a—”
Her words were cut short when he severed the jugular, and the rest of her epithets came out in a spittle of gibberish and gurgling and blood.
Matisak stepped back to watch the action of the blood as it pumped itself snakelike down into the silver bucket. He again calculated he had enough jars.
“It's not the best of blood, but it's carried you two a long way,” he said to the now-silent corpses. He marveled a bit at the way Hillary's corpse flinched and jerked toward the end. Earl had gone much more quietly, but then he'd had a rather bad contusion to the head. A lot of the blood was spilt over the straw and dirt floor, which was a shame, he felt. There was little to do for it; he hadn't the kinds of controls he would prefer. Bleeding a person ought to be more an exact science, as it had been with Dr. Gabriel Arnold back in Philly. Now that dialysis machine, he thought, that was control. He meant to purchase or steal a portable one of his own, no matter what. He meant to be ready for Jessica when she at last came to him.
But here in the rickety old barn, given the conditions, the fact he was a fugitive, the primitive tools he had to work with, he hadn't done so badly. His former care and technique over his victims would, in time, return to him. “Just give it time,” he assured himself, patting and jingling the little canvas bag filled with precious coins, “and I'll be back, stronger than ever.”
He drank down one of the pint jars filled with Earl's blood now, gulping, feeling sated for the first time since his arrival in Tahlequah. The blood fix soothed his frayed edges, calmed his mind, lulled him.
He knew he couldn't stay. The Redbird farm was seen by people going by every day. They'd look at it and instantly feel something odd, sense something out of kilter, see the lack of smoke in Hillary's chimney, smell no baking odors and sense a hundred other things out of sync here. Pretty soon the flies would come and the all-too-natural odor of the corpses would waft out over the little patch of corn that Earl had planted in the spring.
He'd been with the Redbirds for nearly a month now, and they'd finally accepted his story that he was indeed related to them. Some of the neighbors wondered about him, asked nosy questions, but no one recognized him or seemed to want to recognize him. He had altered his appearance, growing a full beard, coloring his hair, sporting glasses, but still he'd imagined that someone might be smart enough to figure him out. If no one else, then Earl.
He knew the lay of the land and the customs here, but old Earl was no more related to him than was the President of the United States. But his grandfather had lived in this old house built of stone to last the ages, and the Redbirds had bought the place, Grandfather first deeding it over to Matisak's parents in the final, feeble moments of his life, as a favor to his son and daughter-in-law, whose idea it was to sell the worthless place. Matisak recalled how his mother, gaining access to the property at last, had talked of better days for them at last. Now, for the Redbirds, their transaction with the Matisak family had come full circle.
Soon he'd come full circle with Jessica Coran too, soon after she received his latest poem to her, after news of how the old Earl and Hillary had ended their days together on this hardscrabble plot of land. She'd come to have a firsthand look at his handiwork; she'd have to. She wouldn't be able to keep away, not even if she wanted to. He was as much in her blood as she was in his, he reasoned.
And when she came ... he'd be waiting....
He was angry with Jessica for having left Oklahoma in the first place, for having given up hope of their reunion. Where was she now? Why hadn't she stayed in Oklahoma to hunt him down as she'd promised in the press? Where was the bitch whose blood he most savored now? He'd once again been wronged by the one person whose blood he most wished to devour, and she called him evil, her with her torturing innocence. Always filled with that sickening sense of righteous indignation; the self-righteousness of the pampered and pedigreed, as if she were completely innocent, as if she had nothing whatever to do with his obsessions and his blood lust.
Still, he must admit that she didn't know evil quite so intimately as he'd like her to know it.
But by the god of all that was perverse, she had excited and inspired him. She'd been the catalyst to stimulate him to new heights, since his first contact with her, his first all-too-brief taste of her blood, when she'd first hunted him across the Midwest and throughout all of Chicago. She was the reason Dr. Arnold had to die; she was the reason he himself had to escape, so that he might see her again, touch her again, listen to that melodic voice once more, but this time without cameras or recorders or bars or six-inch-thick glass partitions between them.
He now dipped his index finger into the last jar of crimson fluid extracted from Hillary, and in her blood he wrote across a smooth #2 pinewood board he'd nailed to the joists beside Earl and Hillary his latest sentiment toward Dr. Jessica Coran. He started by drawing a scarlet T, the first line reading:
Time to renew, Jess
Soon he was entranced by his own poetic vision, the words and blood flowing in tandem, as if inspired, his finished product reading:
Time to renew, Jess
All devotion to you, Jess...
Come to renew
Our love which grows here
With each drop that flows here ...
Then he was sated for the moment, sipping on more of Earl's blood from one of the mason jars, when he heard a dull rumble-against-stone noise coming from outside, either a faraway plane or a car coming along the hardscrabble surface of the dirt road. A peek out into the bright day hurt his eyes, but he made out the black and white trappings of the Res Police car fast approaching.
Matisak grinned in the darkness.
He had the res cops in his sights now the entire way. They pulled to within six yards of Hillary's kitchen window, one of them shouting from the car while the other hammered the horn. When they got no response, each man got out, both looking trim and muscular in their green serge uniforms.
One went for the house, the other coming directly toward the barn and other outhouses.
Matisak's grin widened. He felt like the ghoul beneath the bridge, prepared to pounce, his eyes wandering back toward the carnage over his left shoulder where the two remaining tenterhooks and halters begged for weight. He raised the blood-caked spade he'd used on Earl.
His single worry was where to find more mason jars and an additional cooler.
10
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
—Kipling
Quantico, Virginia
She was damned if she did, damned if she didn't, and she bloody well knew it. Even getting on the Lear jet provided her by Paul Zanek and the Air Force at Quantico, she knew there was no hope for it.
If Kim had said no to Paul and the New Orleans assignment, she would have handed Chief Zanek the first official stake to drive into her heart—or the heart of her fledgling division. Insubordination still weighed heavily at the unofficial “court-martials” carried out all the time at Quantico. It would take more than a disagreement about assignments to do her completely in, but it would be a start, a first blot on the record to inevitably lead to another and another until the “evidence” indicted her.
And if not New Orleans, he'd find another “bazaar” for her to be banished to. Still, in accepting the dual challenge brought her by Commissioner Richard Stephens and the presence of Jessica Coran, Kim knew that she could do far worse damage in the Big Easy than she might have in refusing an assignment offered her by a superior of Zanek's rank.
Suppose the psychic trail was now too cold to follow. Suppose the killer had moved from the area. Had been arrested on other charges and was serving time far from the city sprawled crescentlike along the winding Mississippi. Suppose she could get nowhere on the case. Suppose this hardly heartless monster went into some den to hibernate. Say, an asylum in Louisiana's up-country area. She could come up pitifully wanting, unable to detect useful clues or any information whatsoever, and such a poor showing, leaving everyone dissatisfied, would only bring unwanted attention and notoriety to her department, and from this all would crumble. The FBI funding would dry up and they could all pack their bags; the powers-that-be were already paranoid over knowledge of the FBI's research into the use of psychic detection falling into the wrong hands. Either way, Paul Zanek might actually have manipulated her into a corner that she didn't deserve to be in. God forbid the newshounds got wind of the story; if so, her work and her place within the safe confines of Quantico would be history, especially if she wound up on 20/20, 48 Hours or, God certainly forbid, Hard Copy.
She tried to get comfortable in her seat, the roar of the engine like a banshee wail, a warning, an unclear yet persistent premonition of tumult yet to be sensed, seen, heard, swallowed and felt internally as well as externally—to be fully realized both physically and psychically.
She settled back as the plane began its desperate race to meet the wind; lifting, it took on the weightlessness that always made her a bit disoriented yet exhilarated, not unlike the first pangs of fear on a descending roller coaster. She rested her eyes and felt foolish to be the only passenger aboard the six-seater, momentarily wondering about the cost in jet fuel and manpower to the taxpaying public she secretly served.
Soon cruising at thirty thousand feet toward home, she wondered what she would find in New Orleans. She'd been away from the Mardi Gras capital of the world for almost eight years now, and nothing changed faster during one's absence than a major American city. “You can't go home again” was a very real and poignant experience for most people, but for her it meant little, for going home was the last thing she wanted to do. She'd been remarkably successful at closing out that part of her life, hiding her Cajijn blood and even her childhood from herself; you only remember what you want to remember. In fact, her childhood was little more than a big, dark screen with an occasional gray image wafting across from a broken-down projector. She supposed that a shrink—someone other than herself—might help her to deal with that inner wasteland of the soul that she'd battled to ignore her entire adult life, but she really didn't want to go home. Her conscious mind had successfully and thoroughly blocked out her subconscious mind on this score, the two in a quiet, even contest, holding one another at bay, grappling in that inner cosmos, each with a headlock on the other and no way to continue the combat. But going back could change all that, and she had reason to fear the outcome, knowing that some awful creature from the dark past lurked there, waiting for her return.
Not wishing to think of the possible consequences, she opted to dig through the case files left her by Richard Stephens, who'd gone back to Louisiana with Jessica Coran the day before to pave her way by preparing an elaborate hoax to keep her attachment with the FBI concealed. She kept coming back again and again to those minutely detailed and thorough police reports by Lieutenant Alex Sincebaugh. She had searched the stack for a file on the Surette case, but there was none, for as Commissioner Stephens had said, this case was not considered a relative of the others, despite frequent references to it which Sincebaugh had made by way of comparison. He seemed the only one who'd kept an open mind to the possibility of a connection.
As she continued going through the files and photos left her by Stephens, she also thought about how she might be a disruption to Sincebaugh and others working the case. She'd faced resistance to psychic detection before many times when she'd had her own psychic detection agency in Florida. A part of her wanted no role in the absurd concealment of her true identity as a psychologist and paranormal investigator with the FBI, but it was politically incorrect these days to spend the taxpayers' money on frivolity, and unfortunately, too many Americans still believed that anything to do with the psychic world was frivolous.
Psychic detection had a long and lurid history, dating back to the time of Solomon, who, many scholars were now convinced, had a psychic power of his own. Some had gone so far as to suggest that Christ and John the Baptist were both gifted psychics, not to mention other world-renowned religious leaders such as Buddha. Psychic surgeons and fortune-tellers from the famous Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus to the infamous Rasputin, along with an array of charlatans, frauds and freaks, all made for a fantastic and colorful history of psychic phenomena, a history which left many people more comfortable with herpes or hemorrhoids.
She was by no means convinced that all psychics throughout the ages were true blue-sense people, that they actually possessed the gift that had been granted her, but she was certain that psychics came in all shapes and sizes, that many were indeed frauds and charlatans, and that while the history of occult phenomena was also a history of criminal activity, scams and hoaxes, there always emerged that rare psychic or seer who could actually perceive with indelible clarity the details of events yet to come, or reconstruct time and events from some netherworld inside the cranium. It was rare to find the true psychic who could reveal details of a murder which had occurred in the past—post-cognition—and rarer still to locate a seer, one who could foretell the future—precognition. But it was that singular individual who gave credence to the fact that there existed, somewhere in the vastness of that inner universe of the human mind, the ability to tap into an undeniable sixth sense.
“What do you prefer?” she asked herself in the empty cabin, feeling terribly alone. “Unnatural resentment?” To a suspiciously regarded psychic there really wasn't any difference.
She tried to concentrate instead on the kind of rage the victims of the Queen of Hearts killer had faced in their last moments on earth. Whoever the killer was, the level of sheer hatred for the victims was shockingly extreme and intense; given the sheer number of stab wounds, the evisceration of the heart muscle and the mutilation of the private parts, it was no great leap of faith to ascertain that the killer was exceedingly and agonizingly enjoying his knife work. An extraordinary, killing energy fueled by dementia had left the bodies hacked apart by an enormous blade.
“Why a blade?”
A large blade; a hefty meat-cutter's blade, something that was made for cutting upward, like a butcher's specially designed, serrated knife for cutting and deboning carcasses. At least that was what the coroner, a man named Wardlaw, was suggesting in his reports. Perhaps more importantly, why was he taking their hearts? She recoiled from the obvious, that he cannibalized the hearts, both because it was repugnant and because it was obvious. Were there secret reasons that only a madman might have to fulfill, a longing no one in his right mind could possibly ever understand, even if the maniac were willing to share such reasons? Furthermore, did it matter what this alien mind did with the hearts, since the end result was always the same, a vicious mutilation murder with lustful, sexual overtones? She thought of a line from a long-forgotten poem which she must look up again, a line that spoke of the heart in relationships between men and women that went something like:
Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series) Page 12
