“George does the work, George obtains free psychiatric help, Vladoc gets paid—the old barter system at work.”
“I hope that's all Vladoc is hiding.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
They drove to Locke's place, Jessica telling Kim, “We need to get a sample of his DNA any way we can, from a beer glass to a cigarette, anything he has recently touched.”
“You distract him, and I'll filch something.”
“It has to be in plain sight, and preferably something he hands over, to please the court.”
“Sheeeeesh.”
“Obviously he knew of the urban legend long before the night George Gordonn supposedly killed himself and his supposed final victim.”
“Are you going to confront him with it? Tell him we know he shared the particulars of the so-called legend with his students, discussing it as yet another example of Lord Byron's mythic legacy, further evidence of a poetic voice and legend that defy death and the passage of time?”
“Burrwith hinted at a bond between Locke and George Gordonn, after Gordonn had become his student. The bond may well have been the poet Byron.”
“A poet out of time,” said Kim.
“I'm going to tell him that we know that Gordonn had approached him—his professor at the time—that Gordon told him that the story Locke had repeatedly used over the years in his lectures was in fact a true story and not merely an urban legend, as Locke had thought. That Locke became extremely interested in Gordonn as a result. Learning that the legend was in fact true, seeing Gordonn's clippings, and learning that Gordonn had been the forlorn child who survived his parents' suicide, Locke becameobsessed with the why of it all, delving into the depths of Gordonn's mind for answers.”
“I'd certainly like to get my hands on Vladoc's records on Gordonn, see what shakes out there. Suppose out of the goodness of his heart, Locke began to pay Gordonn's psychiatric bills?”
“You're really hung up on the cost of therapy, aren't you?”
As they passed a row of small antique stores while searching for the Interstate, Kim replied, “At one-fifty an hour, I'm telling you, Gordonn could not afford Vladoc. Perhaps the video thing paid for a portion of his bill, but it couldn't have covered all of it.”
Jessica picked up the radio and asked dispatch to put her through to Dr. Vladoc. When he came on the line, she held nothing back, telling him they were onto Locke, and then she asked, “How did Gordonn pay your rates on his salary and go to classes at the same time? Did Locke have anything whatever to do with George's therapy?”
“I can only tell you that when... after his bill became too high and I cut him off from any further sessions, he came to me with the full amount and then some, asking to continue his therapy.”
“Did he empty his bank account, cash in annuities, what?”
“He never said. He would have the money in an envelope, white and unmarked, but all the money ready and up front after that.”
“You never questioned him further about his newfound income?”
“He once said that he'd gotten the money from the Lord Poet of Misspent Time.”
“Who was... ?”
“I swear to you, he never said.”
“Did you have any suspicions?” About Locke giving him the money? No, not until now. They knew each other, passed one another in my office when I would take a breather. One going out, one coming in.”
“What were sessions with Locke like?”
“A pain, a real headache. A man with an ego the size of Pennsylvania. He liked to hear the sound of his own voice, and he liked taking over the sessions, in a sense doing all the work he paid me to do. As to his subsidizing or floating George a loan, I can't be sure, but I was sure that Locke had a special—how would you put it?—attraction for the boy, yes, he acted hopelessly attracted to George and George's story.”
“His family history?”
“That and how George had so heroically pulled himself out of the state of depression which for years had engulfed him.”
“And the videotaping for the club owners, Dr. Vladoc; was that your idea or Gordonn's?”
“Ah, well, it was Gordonn's.”
“Was it Gordonn's idea or Locke 'si If we dig a bit more, will we learn that Locke owns a half interest in one of the clubs? Or will we learn that you, sir, do?”
There was a long pause filled with a bit of static over the police radio. Then Vladoc said, “Silent partner; it was an exciting investment. That's all.”
“And Locke?”
“Also a co-owner.”
“He had a special reason to be at the clubs, just as you and George had a reason, so much so that you all became fixtures, and no one took much notice of you after a while. WTiy didn't you inform us of this sooner? Why have we had to pry it from you?”
“He... Lucian is... well, my brother.”
Jessica was silent for a moment, taking in the revelation. “Your spiritual brother?”
“No, my actual brother. He changed his name the day he turned eighteen. Parry's doorman saw a short man, and he assumed him a boy.”
Jessica recalled the bartender at one of the coffeehouses telling him of a man of extremely short stature, an older man, who had left with a young woman on his arm. Jessica had figured it was Vladoc, when, in fact, it might well have been Lucian Locke.
Kim, hearing all this, yanked the receiver from Jessica's hand and shouted at Vladoc, “Are you blinded by the fact that he's your brother? Go over your records for Gordonn's psychiatric care, and compare them to what you know of your brother's problems, why he comes to you. There will be innumerable correlations between Gordonn's fantasy life and your brother's real life. Your brother has been acting out Gordonn's fantasies, and both men at some point knew this, and in the end—”
It was as if Kim's outburst suddenly startled her into silence, and Jessica completed her thought. “Gordonn so trusted Locke that he believed Locke knew what was best for him, and so he allowed Locke to take him from this life without argument, as did most of the other victims. They so trusted him that it did not matter what the ultimate result might be.”
“I... I had thought George was doing remarkably well. It came as a shock to me when I began to suspect that he could be doing the killings, but I confronted him with my suspicions, and he laughed in my face, said he only wished he were capable of taking such action, but that he could not, that it wasn't in him to take another life. Years of therapy had brought George around to a level of acceptance of what had happened to him as a child, and to this day I believe that the boy's progress toward mental health simply admirable.”
Kim said, “You mean he was a challenge to you as a therapist?” And your brother?” asked Jessica. “What kind of patient was he?”
“I pleaded with him to get another, more objective and distanced person to work with; I told him that I could not be both his brother and his shrink, but week after week, he kept coming.”
“And he showed an interest in how Gordonn's therapy was going?”
“An inordinate interest, yes.”
“I ask you again, Dr. Vladoc, did it ever occur to you that Gordonn's bill was being paid by your brother?”
“Well, frankly, yes, I gave that a lot of thought, and I asked Gordonn about it, but he denied it. After that, I never questioned him about it again, and I am still of the opinion that you two must be wrong.”
“Will you prepare a full report about the two patients' therapy, Doctor?”
“I can only reveal such detail on the dead man, not my living brother. Ethics prevent it.”
“Then do it for yourself, Doctor. Heal thyself,” Kim fairly sneered, and hung up.
They sped toward Lucian Locke's house with the intent of somehow gathering a DNA sample from the man. To date, he had played the role of a man desperate to help out in the investigation, but now, with the supposed murderer dead and the case supposedly closed, they could not be certain how he would react to their request, and Jessica doubted t
hat he would voluntarily give them a sample of his bodily fluids for analysis.
“Suppose... just suppose,” she told Kim, “that Locke had become infatuated with the romantic details of the suicide pact, and he learned that the mother believed herself to be the reincarnation of Lord Byron trying on a woman's body. 'Lady' Byron found modern life too wretched for his/her sensibilities, and so s/he had decided first to marry, to conceive a child, and then to convince her husband, Gordonn, to join her in a pact to affirm themselves as progeny of Byron through their art.”
“Weird theory, yet according to Vladoc, Gordonn believed that his mother thought this possible through her poetry, and that Gordonn's father believed it possible through his painting and photography. With them joining forces, they expected to shake the world. When this failed to occur, and all life became a miserable spiral of financial ruin and frustration, coupled with the agony of life in this dimension, and after they had had the child which Lydia now hated herself for having brought into this world, they hit upon the suicide pact.”
Jessica came in sight of the Locke home. “I see,” she said. “Sounds strange enough to be true.”
“Gordonn believed that it had been his father who had spared him, his reasoning being that his mother loved him too much to leave him behind, while his father loved him too much to take his life.”
“Then Locke becomes his spiritual father; a kid like that is all too easy a mark for the likes of Lucian Locke.”
Gordonn's revelations to Vladoc during his therapy sessions must have certainly fascinated Locke. Probably he met with Gordonn to hear what Gordonn had learned about himself in therapy. Footing the bill, he likely stipulated that he be privy to the details of Gordonn's progress.”
Jessica stepped on the accelerator. Outside, the orange glow of sodium vapor lights flooded across the hood and windshield at regular intervals. “Since we're dealing in hypotheses here, I suspect that Locke was particularly fascinated by the genesis of the skin poetry and by the kind of poison on the pen. He could have learned about the use of selenium from the story of Gordonn's father and mother.” And he would have been interested in the reasoning of the mother. Locke began to think in a way similar to Lydia.”
Outside the cocoon of the car, the world sped by faster and faster.
Jessica gripped the steering wheel, trying to control the rage growing within her. “He may well have come to believe that the world held a magical secret, that there was some rare race of angelic people, hidden within our race, people so close to ethereality that being born into this existence was a kind of imprisonment.”
“What if Locke had begun to hear voices that corroborated his gestating beliefs, the voices of angels, encouraging him in his beliefs, imploring him to send their brothers and sisters back to them? What then?”
Jessica pulled to a stop before Locke's home. “Is that how he embarked on this deadly odyssey? Is this how the Lord Byron Poet Killer was born?”
The answers were housed somewhere deep within the recesses of Lucian Locke's mind and possibly hidden someplace in this house as well. The answer, for example, to the question of why he had chosen to kill Leare. Was it something beyond his control, an order he could not refuse, or had she gotten too close to the truth, threatening to expose him? If it were the latter, he had to have rationalized her death by seeing her as one of his chosen, despite everything against such a view, from her appearance to the profanity that she liberally used in speaking. Leare hardly matched the victim choice, although a case could be made for Gordonn and the young woman he had died alongside.
Jessica and Kim had stepped halfway out of the cruiser, their eyes pinned to the professor's car, which was parked in front of the house, telling them that he was home, when radio dispatch called with an urgent message from Leanne Sturtevante. It was obvious that Locke wasn't going anywhere, so Jessica sighed, dropped back into the unmarked cruiser, and took the call. Kim sat beside her.
“What's up, Leanne?”
“There've been two Poet Killer murders tonight—two!”
“My God, when, who?”
“At the bookstore, Darkest Expectations, Marc Tamburino, dead in his upstairs apartment. Same MO as Gordonn's. Someone's decided to take up where he left off.”
So Tamburino wouldn't be collecting that snitch money after all, Jessica thought. She tried to put this new information together with Locke, who was now their primary suspect.
Sturtevante, her voice shaky, added, “He was alive when I found him, but before he could be gotten to a hospital, the poison did its work. I had gone to check out a few details with him; when I found the place locked, I tried his apartment. He didn't answer, so I got the super of the building to open it up. I heard music inside, and when I saw him, I thought he might have overdosed, until I saw the poem cut into his back. Began with the same three lines as the others.”
“You said there was a second victim?”
“Yes... Dr. Harriet Plummer.”
Jessica and Kim exchanged a shocked look. “Plummer?” Jessica exclaimed. “We just spoke to her earlier today.”
“Garrison Burrwith found her at her place; her back was cut with a poem. Same MO.”
“The man's on a rampage,” Jessica said. “Now he's murdering anyone his fevered mind perceives as a threat.”
“He needs nineteen angels, Jessica,” Kim reminded her.
“What is your location?” Parry asked suddenly over the police radio. Jessica assumed that Leanne had called him to the crime scene at Plummer's residence. We're sitting outside Lucian Locke's house; we have good reason to believe him the Poet Killer. We were wrong about Gordonn, dead wrong.”
“Wait for backup. This guy's flipped out, and he's extremely dangerous. Hold on until we get there.”
“We were just about to call for backup, Jim.”
“You've got it. I'll radio the nearest cruiser to join you, and we're on our way. And remember, you don't need a warrant if you at all suspect his children to be in danger from him... if you know what I mean.”
“His angels, he called them,” Jessica replied, realizing only now what a target this made of the two children, and possibly of their mother, Locke's wife, if the three had returned to the house from wherever it was that they had gone.
“We've got to get in there, Jess. If the children have been poisoned, and if we're not too late, perhaps we can do for them what Sturtevante was unable to do for Tamburino— get them to a poison center for treatment.”
“Agreed.”
“We can't sit idly waiting for backup knowing what we know.”
Jessica agreed, lifting her .38 automatic from her ankle holster below her slacks. Kim, too, found her weapon. They advanced on the house quickly but cautiously, and as they did so, the dim lighting became dimmer and dimmer until only a great darkness awaited them inside.
When they got to the front porch, Jessica put a hand on Kim's shoulder. “I'm going to need you to direct traffic when backup arrives. We have to get medics in here, immediately, so hold this position.”
“Oh no you don't. If you go in, it isn't alone.”
Jessica tried reasoning with her friend, but Kim remained adamant. As they argued, the lights inside flickered and died again, leaving the place as black and still as a mausoleum.
“It's so quiet here my ears are ringing,” Jessica commented. “Far too quiet.”
“Where's the requisite music, the obligatory candlelight? His vat of selenium? All of the rest?”
“I think he's spotted us out here.”
“What's he going to do? Kill us with a pen?”
Jessica's joke notwithstanding, they approached with extreme caution, guns held at the ready. The door was not locked, and within they now heard the faint sound of music coming from somewhere upstairs. Faint sounds other than music could also be heard—rustling, the pitter-patter of someone in slippers moving casually about, ghostlike sounds that mixed with the shadow
s and played pranks on the ear, making Jessica wheel and bring up her gun only to realize that what she heard was only the faint meowing of a cat.
In the living room, she saw the piano and the pictures of Locke and his adopted children, cute urchins at play, she could see, even in the darkened room, one as adorable as the other. Jessica and Kim could also see a pair of large adult eyes, the penetrating eyes of Evey, Locke's wife, but this image staring back at them, Jessica suddenly realized, was propped up in a chair, and it was no photograph.
The corpse of Evey Locke sat upright in the chair across the room. From her pose, she seemed to have been tied there, but closer inspection revealed that this was not so. She was dead, but she was sitting up. From the impressions on the deep-piled rug, picked up by a flashlight Kim had grabbed from the glove compartment of the car, it appeared that she had crawled to this, her last resting place in this life. No blood trail, only a dead body, naked and stiff. Jessica stood over Mrs. Locke now, and placing a hand on her cold form, pronounced her dead.
Kim, standing next to Jessica, flashed the light on the woman's back and said, “Look at this. More proof that we're right about Locke.”
Jessica looked, and seeing the familiar cuts, nodded. “He did her, all right.”
“The children've got to be upstairs.”
Jessica turned and headed for the stairwell, Kim directly behind her. Fearing the worst, they made their way up the stairs, cautious and not very hopeful about the children.
The master bedroom was empty, so they made their way down the hall toward the children's rooms. Passing a large guest room, again they saw nothing. The first child's room was empty of all but stuffed animals. In the second child's room, they located the children, huddled together, their backs covered with the words of the Poet Killer.
Apparently, after both children died, killed by the powerful poison selenium, their mother had somehow found the strength to get downstairs. The impression on the bed where she had been lying clearly indicated this to be the case.
But where was Papa Locke? The mastermind of this mayhem?
As if in answer to their thoughts, a creaking, groaning sound, followed by a thwacking sound rose up from downstairs. Jessica and Kim rushed out of the chamber of death that the children's room had become, hearing police sirens and the squeal of tires outside. They moved toward the apparent source of the strange noises that welled up from somewhere in the bowels of the large house.
Bitter Instinct Page 34
