“You got no idea what you're talking about, Dr. Coran, so don't start on me, okay?”
“We've got a lot in common, you and me.”
“Jesus God,” he moaned.
She downed what remained of her double and stared hard across at him. “You're a walking raw nerve, Alex, but you can't treat everyone like... like...”
“Look, if I want a dressing-down, I'll call Ben back in here.” Ben had put it to him much in the same way as she was doing now. “What I don't need at this point is another wife” His icy glare was unmistakable. He wanted to be left alone. When she held her ground, he got up, returned to his own booth and snatched open one of the files he'd been look-ing through earlier, tilting it toward what little light he could find and leaning back in pretended peace.
But something told him that Coran wasn't going to go away, and in fact he felt the dagger of her stare penetrating deeper and deeper into him, twisting just enough to make him squirm. He looked up to find her standing over him.
“What?” he asked.
“I saw the way you two were looking at one another. You could work well together, if you gave her a chance.”
“Are you kidding? She knows I have no regard for the black arts and no respect for the way she earns a living.”
Jessica tensed visibly, the veins in her neck throbbing. She wanted to set him straight about Kim; she wanted to tell Sincebaugh the truth about their relationship. Perhaps it would bring him around if he knew that they both worked out of Quantico. And since Paul Zanek had lied to her, she wanted to hurt the bastard too, and this might be a way, but it could also backfire and hurt Kim as well.
“That's bullshit, Alex. She does the same kind of work as you. I know about that tape of you in the diner and frankly—”
“Damn that Landry. What's he doing, holding a daily screening for everybody at the precinct?”
“He had Kim look it over. She was impressed by your psychic guesswork prior to the robbery attempt. She wants to work with you, not against you... and she's...”
“She's what?”
“Sincere.”
“Sincere... sincere? What're we playing at here, Dr. Coran? Is sincerity supposed to make everything in New Orleans all right tonight?”
“You are insufferable, aren't you? Meade tried to warn me.”
He tossed aside the file and raised his hands as if shot through the heart, apologizing all at once. “It's me, I guess. It's my life right now... it's an unholy mess and...”
“You're maybe letting this case overtake your life?”
He declined to answer, granting her a brooding stare instead.
“Listen,” she said, “I happen to know how that goes, and trust me. Somewhere, somehow, you've got to hold onto some corner where you can get away from it.”
“So, you ever take your own advice, Dr. Coran?”
“Sometimes... not often enough, but sometimes.”
“As with this Matisak thing? That's what the press conference was all about, wasn't it?”
“The press conference was on the Hearts Killer, and I'd like you to be present at my next conference for questions.”
“Everybody wants me around and for what? Window dressing?”
“No one knows this case like you do. We both... we all know that from just looking over your meticulous case file notes.”
“Look, Dr. Coran, you know the score; you've been to hell and back; you know what it's like to be given a case, to get involved in it heavily only to see it snatched away. It's my case, they tell me, my responsibility from the outset, right? But every time I turn around someone else's nose is in it and her nose... this ridiculous miracle approach... well...”
“I pushed for the Surrette exhumation, and so did Landry. Kim was against it.” She slipped into the dark booth.
“Yeah, Carl's a great one for going along with whichever way the wind blows these days.”
“Look, if nothing else, it'll give me an opportunity to compare the scars on the Surette corpse with the more recent ones. You may well be vindicated in your own hunch that Surette was the first victim.”
He nodded, conceding the point. “Maybe something good could come of it. I just hope the press doesn't get wind of it.”
“They will. But there's no foundation to your belief that Kim Desinor is a charlatan, now is there? What're you basing your opinion on? Past experience? Kim's not like anyone I've ever known or met.”
“What, you think because someone puts the word psychic after her name that she's automatically directed by some divine light?”
“No, I'm thinking you've got a hell of a lot to learn about women, and one woman in particular.”
“Ask Ben, my partner.”
“Ask him what?”
“He'll tell you straight. I haven't been fit company for anyone since... since...”
“Since the first Hearts victim, I know. But together we can help you get through this, Alex, if you'll let us.”
“You've been talking to that damned deYampert, haven't you?”
“Yes, about you,” she confessed. “He's very—”
“Nosy, an old washerwoman, I know.”
“Concerned is what he is.”
“I know. The big bastard.”
“Ben's your friend and so am I. What's so wrong about accepting help where it's offered, Alex? No one... no one should be in this... alone.”
“Is that how it is with you, Dr. Coran? You feel out there... alone?''
She forced a phony smile and lied. “No, not really. I have the backing of the entire FBI, remember?”
“Yeah, right... the entire FBI.”
“Thanks Alex,” she said, getting up. “I'm glad we had this little talk. Thanks for listening.”
He thought he saw a tear drop, but she turned her head away as she made for the door. He started to call her back, but she was bent on racing out. Stubby frowned from behind the bar and shook his head in wonderment.
“No luck with the ladies today, huh, Lieutenant?” he called out. This made others in the room laugh. “What gives?”
“None of your goddamned business, Stubby.”
“Sure, sure... Lieutenant.”
“Thanks for understanding, Stubby.”
“Hey, Alex, no problemo, sure...” Stubby went back to wiping glasses and picking up loose change and refilling the pretzel dishes while humming “Achy-Breaky Heart.”
Alex thought about how he'd alienated Dr. Desinor; he thought about how he'd alienated others recently, including, to some degree, his partner, Ben, whom he hadn't wanted to trust with the truth about his nightmares—and now he knew why he'd waited so long to even mention them.
“See the Department shrink,” Ben had advised.
He had told Ben to go to hell, so Ben, being the wise guy that he was, took his partner's problems to Jessica Coran!
Christ, everything was scfewed around. He thought about pulling himself off the Hearts case, putting in for some time off, getting the hell out of New Orleans altogether, taking his father up on the offer of a fishing expedition, renting a house boat maybe, lying in the sun for days on end.
“Where would you go if you did?” Ben had earlier asked.
“Don't know... maybe the peninsula. Anyplace with lots of water, sand, sun, someplace where they've got only one cop, and he rides a bicycle.”
“No cops, huh?”
“No cops.”
“You trying to tell me something, pard?”
“No cops.”
Maybe the notion wasn't so wild after all, he now thought.
Just then Big Ben rushed into the bar, his eyes darting in every direction until he nailed his partner at the phone, where he was about to dial his father, make plans. “We got a call, Alex. Could be another vie.”
“Oh, Christ... where? “East Canal Street apartment, just above Robert E. Lee Boulevard.”
“Indoors, you mean?”
“Indoors.”
“Thank God for small favors. The us
ual M.O.?”
“That's the message received, yeah.”
“Better get the hell over there.”
“I brought the squad around.”
Stubby, watching and listening from behind the bar, shouted to the retreating figures as they barged out, “See ya later, fellas. Don't go wearin' your hearts on your sleeves.”
22
Man with the head, and woman with the heart.
—Tennyson
Sincebaugh and deYampert uneasily stepped into a completely new yet familiar, expected nightmare at 34 East Canal Street, which was in an older section of the city where unkempt, weedy courtyards dominated along with boarded-up windows and going-out-of-business signs. The streets here were dirty and narrow, but quaint with cobblestone pathways. Here the old stone buildings had French windows that cranked by hand and hung out over the street, black wrought-iron gates in sad need of repair about each front and rusted-out terraces leaning out overhead. Sincebaugh thought that while it was not the loveliest area in the city, neither was it the most squalid. The racial mix here was predominantly black, Cajun and Spanish, and if you blinked you might see the ghost of a Conquistador standing in one of the dark courtyards.
Neighbors had heard nothing, seen nothing. The entire scene reminded Sincebaugh of the Murders in the Rue Morgue, down to the dapper little man with mustache and suspenders who called himself the superintendent and who had discovered the body when, after two days, he had not seen Miss Marie Dumond, a light-skinned mulatto/Cajun, in or out of the building. When he'd begun to notice a foul odor coming from within, he'd used his pass key and found the blood-spattered scene. Even then, perhaps due to the hysteria that overtook him, he still had no clue as to the true nature of his tenant.
Lying half on, half off the bed was a young man. Mademoiselle Dumond was no more a woman than deYampert, although he was far prettier and frailer. The corpse was a man whose fine features and torn underclothes marked him as extremely interested in his own feminine side: He was a cross-dresser.
Eyes closed in what seemed a peaceful sleep were at horrid odds with the mutilation played out over his body. The chest was splayed open as if some enormous bird of prey had settled atop him and begun ripping with talons, painting the bedclothes and walls with his blood. In fact, there was a message scrawled across one wall in blood, presumably in the victim's blood, presumably penned by the killer—a sure departure from the monster's earlier M.O. as he'd not left anything of himself behind before, save the now-familiar calling card.
The two cops stared at the blood message for some time before turning away, each recalling how the beheaded victim of two days before had turned out to be a copycat killing. Over the bedposts the letters, snaking trails of dripping blood, formed three words:
Queer of Heart
This was an absolute departure for the usually reserved, cautious killer, sending a warning signal that this again could be the work of a fiendish copycat killer, another mooncalf altogether. But peeking out from the victim's rib cage, deep in the heart cavity where the large red organ was missing, was the familiar doily card displaying a bloodied, fouled queen of hearts. It seemed to leer up at them in a mocking fashion as if miming a single word: Gotcha.
“I thought you said she... he... was a woman?” Ben teasingly asked the superintendent, desperately seeking a way to lighten the moment when the super had crept in behind them, curious as a muskrat and about to lose his lunch.
The man was dumbfounded. “But she... she was a woman.”
“Not anymore,” Ben said in his driest tone as he removed the bloodied sheet farther down the torso to reveal the young man's severed private parts.
“Oh ... my dearLordy God' n Heaven 'bove Jesus,” moaned the super.
“Don't need to ask if the husband did it, do we?” Sincebaugh said to Ben, eliciting a belly laugh from his partner, further disturbing the superintendent. Others from the building had begun to jam the doorway, so Alex shouted for the uniformed officer there to keep everyone out.
“Let's start the routine, Ben,” Alex said.
Both men knew the importance of the appearance of dedicated police work, even if they also knew that usually nothing came of the measures they took at the scene. Ben dispatched two uniformed officers to do a neighborhood search for any discarded knife or hatchet that might have been carelessly tossed away by the killer—doubtful since this had not occurred in any of the previous Queen of Hearts killings. This in essence meant the uniformed cops had to sift through trash cans and in sewer grates, a task few but rookies threw themselves into.
A second pair of uniforms were sent out to canvass the building, asking questions about the deceased and his relationships to others. Since he was a transvestite, Alex held out little hope that others in the building had much to do with him or that he actually had a family that kept in touch. Later, after all the canvassing, Ben and Alex would ask the officers who did the initial legwork if they had spoken to anyone who had seemed unusually rattled or nervous, or seemed to have known more about the victim's personal habits than the super obviously did. Such steps would build public confidence in the Department, if nothing else, to show that they were moving on the case.
Interviewing witnesses was a contradiction in terms on such a closed-door homicide as this, an oxymoron. If you interviewed a witness in a case of out-and-out brutal murder carried out in such a cold-blooded, calculated fashion behind closed doors or in a dark place, you were in effect interviewing the killer or killers, the only witness being the killer. Still, someone might have heard something, might have seen a stranger in the hallway, on the front doorstep. Dusting for prints would likely reveal nothing useful; even if a usable print were found, if it didn't match one on file with the Department or the FBI, it remained useless until an arrest match was made. Still, if a print were found to match one identified at an earlier scene, then it did tell them that they were dealing with the same beast. All such attempts and effort had to be made, so Detectives Sincebaugh and deYampert went about the business of evidence-gathering and note-taking and measuring.
At the door the police photographer waved his way in, a good man whom Alex and Ben had worked with on countless other cases. Yancy Rosswell was his name, and he'd photographed most of the handiwork of the Queen of Hearts killer. Whenever he was unavailable, Alex had done his own photos, which Rosswell had once called functionally okay but lacking in artistic merit. Rosswell's walls at home were hung with crime-scene photos dating back as early as the 1890s.
He was long and lean and his every bone was just below the surface, prepared to create an angle on his body somewhere. He had a Clint Eastwood edge to him and a Jack Palance profile. He was as tall as the two actors as well.
“Damn...damn ... damn.” He punctuated every shot with the expletive.
“Get plenty of shots,” Alex instructed, unnecessarily, just wanting to hear himself, to see if his vocal cords were still operational after looking at the sight before him. “We make it the same bastard, Rosswell. Whataya think? From a cameraman's point of view, that is.”
“The camera don't lie unless you lie to yourself,” he said with a philosophical wheeze.
As had been the case with all the Hearts victims found indoors, and those caught up in the confluence of river or lake, the body had been left in a “posed” position by the killer. All of his outdoor victims had been placed facedown, requiring police to turn the body to discover the hole cut into the chest, while those killed indoors were always laid unceremo-niously and indignantly across their beds, no matter what room they were killed in, with their faces and chests facing straight up, with a sheet or a blanket gently pulled up over the hideous wounds, hardly hiding them since blood matted the sheet to the wounds in an indigo pool. It was as if the killer held some sort of odd fetish about tucking them into their beddy-bys when he killed them indoors.
These were the few strands or patterns the killer had left them until now, with the blood message on the wall. It was indeed a depa
rture from the killer's usual reserve and caution.
“Queer of heart.” Alex curiously read the words aloud as if aloud would make more sense of them.
“Bastard has a sense of play, doesn't he,” said Ben.
“Yeah, maybe, but we've never seen this before.”
“Must've really been pissed off by the copycat killing maybe, wouldn't you say?”
“Maybe... yeah...” Alex considered this thoughtfully. “So perhaps, after all he's done, he wants us to know that he can laugh at himself? Or he just wants recognition for his handiwork? I don't know, partner.”
“What aya saying, that it is another copycat? But there's the card. If it is another copy, Alex, it's far better than the Lennox Xerox. Nobody but us knows about the cards.”
“Yeah, you're right... has to be the same freak. We've searched all over New Orleans for those kinda cards in every novelty shop. Has to be him.”
“So, it just doesn't set well, the whole message-on-the-wall thing, huh?”
“No, it doesn't. And if it is him, he's... evolving.”
“Evolving?”
“I read in the police bulletin once about how some killers' M.O.s evolve, change with the evolution of the fantasy that the guy's working out, you know. This could be something like that, Big.”
“You think so, Sincy?”
Alex nodded. “Yeah, maybe, Ben.” Alex turned to the photographer and called for him to get the wall shot. “Can you get the whole thing in a wide lens?”
“Sure, no problem, Lieutenant.” He coughed into a handkerchief he'd been holding against his nose. He was also wiping sweat from his brow. It was an ugly kill and he'd had to do his artistic best with it.
He worked like a pro, however, and soon had shot after shot of the message on the wall, from every angle.
“How you doing, Rosswell?” asked a second cameraman who'd suddenly gotten past the police barricade at the door.
“Who the hell're you?” Sincebaugh blocked the man's path, taking him for a reporter.
“I'm with the FBI—Dr. Coran. She's right behind me, coming up the stairs.”
Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series) Page 28
