Stephens nervously stepped away from the window and paced the room. He'd been told in no uncertain terms by the governor himself that if the “Have-a-Heart” killer was not located and behind bars soon, then P.C. Stephens might as well turn in his shield, that he had no future in New Orleans. The city needed a show; the city needed a scapegoat, a diversion, even a three-ringed circus if it took that. He had to make the right choices from here on out, and to hell with what the detectives and the captains back home wanted.
He found the booze that had traveled with him all the way from New Orleans. He imagined himself in a new line of work, maybe that of a smuggler, getting the best from Bourbon Street, say, into Mexico or Canada, where they'd pay top dollar for the stuff. He laughed at the notion, but he had been thinking about going into another line of work when this was over, pulling up stakes, maybe retiring, who knows? Hell, he was nearing fifty-seven, a fine record up until recently… What did he have to lose? What did he have to gain? Maybe keep what hair he had left and hold back the wrinkles a bit longer, settle that bleeding ulcer…
He poured himself a half-tumbler of the bourbon over ice- a potion he had to have, despite doctor's orders. He stared momentarily into the deep, brown liquid as he swirled it around. It was difficult these days to take pleasure even in the simplest indulgence. God, how long had it been since he'd been with a woman? he silently asked himself.
New Orleans had had 389 homicides the past year, a fifty-eight-percent increase over the 246 in 1989. On a per-capita basis-and damn per-capita statistics anyway, he thought- that placed
his city ahead of Washington, D.C., and goddamned Detroit! As of May 28th, Washington had reported 146 homicides, while New Orleans had had 184.
Stephens was sick of hearing excuses from his captains, as when Carl Landry, defending his department and detectives, had said that the crime rate climbs significantly in the oppressive heat of a New Orleans summer. The year before thirty-one people were slain in June, forty-seven in July and forty-three in August. All Stephens knew was that, at the present rate, the city was headed for an all-time record in the neighborhood of five hundred homicides this year, and that averaged out at over one hundred victims per 100,000 citizens. Little wonder the higher-ups were concerned and skittish about their vital tourism and convention business, for although attacks on tourists were rare, and the French Quarter maintained the greatest concentration of police and boasted one of the lowest crime rates, soaring kill ratios and sensationalized stories-particularly about the “Heartthrob” killer who had killed in the French Quarter-had garnered nationwide attention.
“ Jesus H. Christ,” Stephens uttered between sips of his bourbon, taking a seat. Was it his fault or the fault of the police or the system when some 235 of those 389 people slain last year had been dispatched by someone they knew, mostly family members, and 131 of the killings had involved arguments, usually over trivial and stupid items? As of now ll0 remained unsolved, the victim-killer relationship as yet unknown, but only forty-nine of the victims were known to have been killed by strangers. And 174 of the victims were kids between fifteen and twenty-four. Kids killing kids. Kids without any values or sense of morality or sense of life's sanctity.
He lifted Jessica Coran's folder off the coffee table before him, and he again stared at her photo. She was a strikingly beautiful woman with eyes as hard as steel. He toyed with the idea of contacting her directly, perhaps to set up a breakfast meeting, get his wishes out in the open, see how she might respond, but he immediately thought better of the notion. After all, the FBI functioned as a paramilitary operation, and if Zanek got wind of his meeting alone with his agent, it could blow the whole deal.
Still, he had it on good authority that she had gotten the materials he'd forwarded, a thorough set of clippings and files that recounted the list of victims in New Orleans, and anything new was E-mailed to him on an hourly basis. He had worked through a fellow he'd met at the FBI laboratory only the day before, a Dr. John T. Thorpe, who had assured him that Jessica Coran would get the information. The younger man had even said that it was the kind of case Dr. Coran could get excited about.
“ Dear God, I hope so,” he said to the empty room, tossing Jessica's file back onto the table and going back to the disarray that was his bed, praying now he might get some sleep. Beside his bed, a second bottle of bourbon awaited his grasp. He poured a final nightcap, shut off the light and lay still, hopeful and anxious.
2
Her heart is like an ordered house
Good fairies harbor in.
— Christina Rossetti
Quantico, Virginia, FBI Headquarters
Young Tom Benton watched in awe while Dr. Kimberly Faith Desinor placed her thumb and index finger onto the ransom note as it was lifted from its cellophane sheath between tweezers held by Special Agent Neil Parlen of Georgia. Dr. Faith, as she was sometimes called by those who knew her well enough to joke, was now the only person to make human contact with the document since it had been handled by the kidnapper or kidnappers. She must touch the note, feel its weight, bond and weave, its every fiber. It was her job to manhandle the evidence.
Unlike most law-enforcement officials trained to keep their grubby, enzyme-secreting hands off, she was uniquely qualified for a hands-on experience with the incriminating evidence-once all traditional avenues of detection had failed. And failed they had, miserably.
They stood in a semi-darkened room, much preferred by Dr. Desinor whenever she went into trance. She'd known absolutely nothing of the case in Georgia save what she'd read in the papers, which was very little, and even the application Parlen had made to Dr. Desinor's psychic detection unit of the FBI had had to travel through a paper labyrinth the size of a botanical maze in order for Parlen to gain paranormal assistance for his investigation. The application itself was intentionally sketchy, seeming just a routine application for Headquarters assistance, no one wanting to draw undue attention to the fact the FBI was in any way involved in paranormal studies or psychic detection.
Even before touching the note, which she'd never seen before this moment, Desinor knew the perpetrator was an amateur. The note was a patchwork of large and small words, cutout block letters from slick magazines, tabloids and the Ladies Home Journal, telltale signs of a poor education and weak grammar showing through nonetheless, such as the use of a double negative in the third sentence, and a subject-verb-agreement error in the last sentence. Of course, the errors might well have been put in on purpose, to throw the police off. A linguist would be looking for a poorly educated man, possibly an unskilled laborer, possibly of Southern origin and a low socioeconomic background. Hardly facts which would nail a suspect.
The bad guy or guys had foolishly used Scotch tape, which left a variety of prints from several fingers and thumbs, but none of these had found a match in the world's largest fingerprint bank here at Quantico, further proof of the cherry quality of the culprits.
Now that all the usual FBI measures had failed, Parlen had come to Kim Desinor. And why not? What did he have to lose? No one would even know, so there was no chance for embarrassment. The ransom notes had stopped. Leads were now gone as dry as Sahara soil. The prints remained useless without a match. The ransom note itself was now only an annoying reminder to Parlen that his field office in Georgia had failed miserably in Decatur.
A last-resort, last-ditch effort that Parlen had little belief in was what it had all come down to, in the person of Dr. Desinor, a Ph. D. in psychology and sociology who also juggled psychic powers here in the Behavioral Science Division of the FBI. Psychic powers were ostensibly not part of her working repertoire, however, or so the public was to be made to believe. For the past ten years, use of psi powers under any FBI umbrella had been not only downplayed but denied outright. There didn't appear to be any change in this policy on the horizon, so funding continued by the grace of the budgetary gods above, and lately, they weren't looking too kindly on Dr. Faith and her small office.
“ B
ack away from me, both of you,” she instructed the two men in the room with her-Benton, her aide and student, and Parlen, the skeptical agent. Benton was studying under her, while Parlen was following orders, transporting the goods from Decatur, Georgia, where the manhunt for the missing bank executive, Harold Michael Sendak, continued under a cloud of criticism and hopelessness. The abductors had been so frightened off, it appeared, that Sendak must be dead by now, the case now eleven weeks old.
Kim Desinor felt the ransom note speak to her immediately. There was something about the weave and fiber that was quite alive with energy, although it was simple copier paper with no special qualities about it. Still, it sent out an image, sharp and piercing, into her mind. A life force had left an indelible mark on the paper, and it was desperately but haltingly attempting to speak to her.
Dr. Desinor took in a deep gasp of air, breathing in the life force, taking it inside her, filling her mind with its resolute images while the more amorphous, peripheral images floated off like flotsam on a river. She forced herself to ignore the smoke and unfocused mirror images for the main event.
The room, with its stark white walls, was sealed to prevent any undue noise or disturbance while she worked, although there remained one thick glass window looking into Dr. Desinor's crowded office, where the shelves were overflowing with volumes dealing with psychiatry and psychology and psychic powers. The room was soundproof and a camera was mounted near the ceiling which recorded every session, including today's. Here there were no phones, no buzzing intercoms or other office disturbances. There wouldn't even be any other people, save Benton, if Parlen hadn't insisted on being here. His damned negative thoughts rose like heat off a Texas-Louisiana highway during a drought, further obscuring her grasp of the images fighting for dominance in her psyche.
When she felt a breakthrough, all other sensory paths were completely shut down, sometimes for only a moment, sometimes for minutes at a time. She felt no other bodies or heat sources in the room, and she could not hear anyone's whisper and she saw no faces. Nor did she see the camera or the walls or the window or the light flashing on her phone in the office next door.
Suddenly, she was no longer truly in the little cubicle; she was several hundred miles away, in Decatur. She first heard the whispering of voices, not from Benton or Parlen, but from Georgia. Meaningless back-scatter, jabbering gibberish, the mumblings, grumblings and ravings of maniacs-ghost voices, some psychics insisted. She believed them to be the emanations of the past, imprinted on the object, in this case the ransom note, now being replayed in her head via the antennae of her fingertips. Nothing mystical or supernatural about it, so far as she was concerned. Simply a heightened sixth sense of higher awareness, like the higher memory of a computer.
The voices sounded at first like a foreign tongue, but they just needed to be adjusted, tuned into, so to speak.
She believed her “power” an inborn instinct that gave its owner the ability to increase or heighten all the normal senses into one forcefully focused laserlike sense, a gift or a curse, however one chose to look at it, however one chose to use it, or be used by it.
The voices sounded like tolling bells without harmony, clanging into one another, disjointed and chaotic at first; the images welling up from the paper made no direct sense either. Usually, if anything formed, it was symbolic, which in and of itself would remain pointless, like the cradle she now saw… What was the cradle, and why was it so still and flat and unable to rock?
“ Cradle… I see a cradle…” she said aloud.
Parlen's eyes widened and he muttered, “Cradle? What kind of cradle?”
“ Strange cradle… cradle of death, not life…”
“ What do you mean, cradle of death?”
“ Stone cradle… stones and cradle…”
Parlen's eyes widened and he said in a near-whisper, “You mean Craddle…Craddle Storage? What about it?”
Benton shushed the agent.
Kim Desinor was coming clear on two salient points: Sendak had been buried alive but aboveground, possibly in a crypt, and the ransom note had been handled by more than one person before she herself had touched it. Whether an eager investigator or an accomplice, she could not yet say. Even so, the number 1 kept insinuating itself like a brand across her brain. It was so persistent that she decided there must only be one criminal mind at work. But then, who else had handled the document?
Was the picture cluttered by an overzealous officer of the law, perhaps Parlen himself? Everyone at the FBI had been extremely careful to provide an unbreakable chain of custody for the Georgia document.
Still, she sensed the ransom note had been handled by a large man with evil intentions and someone smaller, milder, someone leaning toward the color green, a person with a rainbow aura around… her. She had something to do with the number /. It was definitely a female, and she held a deep-seated remorse, powerful frustrations and guilt capped tightly in a bottle, her heart trapped in a bottle, a vessel of some sort. The bottle was her body.
Then it came to Dr. Desinor.
It came like a candle being lit; not in a word, not in a single image, but in a wide, encompassing hunch that gave her a warm feeling of closure. It was an alUencompassing instinct, an intuitive, educated guess based on a raggedy-looking toy doll with a dirty face and ill-fitting clothes, the image of the second perpetrator.
“ Well?” said Parlen, impatient now.
“ It's the daughter.”
“ The daughter? What daughter? There is no-”
“ Sendak's daughter.”
“ Goddamned waste of time.” Parlen tweezered the ransom note, uselessly returning it to its protective bed of polyethylene. “Sendak doesn't have any daughters. Two sons, no daughters, sorry, and thanks for your time. We'll check at Craddle's Storage out on Highway 1 just the same.” For all the good it'll do, she read his unspoken thought.
“ Beside Craddle's Storage out there, there's a company where they make pre-stressed concrete,” Parlen added as he prepared to leave. “You said something about stones and cradles… But I rather doubt there's any connection whatsoever… I won't hold out much hope.”
Parlen was about to leave when she said, “Oh, but he did have a daughter, and she played a role in his death. He wasn't meant to suffocate, but he did, and she is his only daughter, and she works at a place that has something to do with the number one. Maybe even works for this Craddle Storage place?”
“ And those places look like mausoleums, don't they,” added young Benton excitedly before Dr. Desinor put up a hand to stop him.
Unimpressed, Parlen continued in the same vein. “I'm telling you, Doctor, the man has no daughters. We talked to everyone involved and-”
“ Illegitimate…other side of the tracks… didn't want any part of the kidnapping… tried to stop her boyfriend or a possible husband who'd found out about the family connection…”
“ No one like that has surfaced in our investigation in Decatur.”
“ Not necessarily in Decatur. Elsewhere, perhaps. Have you talked to Mrs. Sendak about-”
“ Of course! She's been repeatedly grilled!”
“- about the other woman? Mr. Sendak's activities outside the home?”
“ Well, no… not exactly, not so far as I know…” She took in a great breath of air, trying to regain her fix on the here and now. “I suggest you return to Decatur and do so, Mr. Parlen.” Young Tom Benton's impudent, full lips curled into a smile. Kim Desinor looked past him and through the glass partition to the blinking light on her phone. She rushed from the darkened room into the office where the noise of marching cadets on the Quantico drill grounds beat out a rhythm with foot and song. It sounded like an old song the nuns had made her learn in the orphanage in New Orleans when she was a child, except that this was more boisterous, perhaps a bit bawdy even. Behind her, she heard Parlen saying to Benton, “There's all kinda businesses and restaurants out on Highway 1 we could check; half a dozen or more use the number one on
their logos and in advertising, like the US-1 Grill, Number 1 Golf, Tap One.”
She lifted the phone and just caught Paul Zanek about to hang up at the other end while her recorded voice was asking that he please leave a message. “Don't you people ever answer your damn phones down there anymore, Doctor?” he said.
“ Maybe if you could keep a secretary…”
He'd begun calling her “Doctor” again, which meant, for the time being, he was holding her at arm's length, shy of getting burned. “I was in a session with Parlen from Georgia, or don't you recall?”
“ Parlen? Georgia?”
“ Special Agent Neil Parlen? The Sendak case?”
“ Oh, yeah… sure… how'd it come out? You able to dig anything out of that piece of trash he calls evidence?”
“ A little something I think'll be useful for him, yeah, Paul.”
He hesitated at the mention of his name. “Get up here to my office pronto, will you? I want to run something by you.”
“ Sure, what's up?”
“ Never mind, just get up here.” He hung up.
Left holding the phone and wondering what the call was for, she realized that lately he could speak about anything and everything but what was on both their minds: What was to become of her and her little department now that he'd gone back to his wife?
Paul Zanek had lost all the allure and mystery and luster, all the romantic overtones she'd once ascribed to him. Every woman had a right to be wrong about a man, even a psychic detective on the U.S. payroll. Still, she wondered how she could've been so entirely wrong about Paul. She'd been blind, foolish, childish even. Maybe it had all been because of the death of her Aunt Aileen, the last vestige of her immediate family. Her aunt, only a few years older than she, had grown up in the care of the nuns too, and had taken punishments for Kim. Aileen had always faithfully held to the belief that one day her little niece would become an important person, and she'd encouraged Kim to strike out for her goals. She'd died of a rare, debilitating disease, and she'd died bravely, proud to the end that Kim had become an “important” person.
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