“ Both in and out of the lab, I'm afraid.”
“ Damn, so you're taking charge altogether on the forensics end? So we trade off Frank's alcoholic problems for your…press-magnetism?” He pointed to the array of cameras on the bridge, the reporters held back by uniformed cops. “I didn't invite the press, but for the time being, yes to your question, and in particular on this case. Wardlaw's staff will see to the routine calls.” Ben and Alex exchanged a glance. Things were happening fast.
“ So Frank let the Hearts case blow him out of the water,” Alex mumbled to deYampert.
“ Maybe his bleeding heart did him in,” said Ben, and both men laughed at the inside joke.
She knew how callous and jaded cops were, that it came with the territory, but she empathized strongly with the unknown Dr. Wardlaw, who'd fallen prey to the case he was working. She imagined it could happen to any M.E. or pa-thologist who got too emotionally involved in a case, and without thinking, she blurted out, “The man's hurting badly both emotionally and professionally, gentlemen. I don't suppose you two have ever been there?”
“ It's hard to muster any sympathy for Frank, Doctor, so don't even try,” replied Alex curtly.
“ Is he, you know, psychologically impaired over the case, or did the booze do him in?” asked Ben.
“ That's the common belief, yes,” she replied, leaving her response purposefully vague because she didn't herself know all the particulars. The M.E.'s predicament made her wonder if someone would one day be speaking the same epitaph over her when she finally flipped out over a case.
Sincebaugh was now also thinking about Wardlaw's emotional response to the Hearts case, the ramifications of it all. Not only had the case had a powerful emotional effect on Alex, but on others as well. He had given little consideration to its impact on Wardlaw or Landry or even Benjamin deYampert, who'd been beside him the whole time, so wrapped up was he in his own reproach and turmoil and the damnable nightmares plaguing him thanks to the most bizarre case of his tenure as detective in the NOPD.
Something in Jessica's steely, glinting eye made Alex now look over his shoulder at the psychic, Kim Desinor, whom he'd been ordered to fetch and bring here before he and deYampert had even had a chance to view the body. It stuck in his craw that he and Ben were sent like a couple of welcome-wagon ladies to greet the psychic whom Landry had notified them about.
Landry had said that it was out of his hands, that the Department's top people had requested it of the mayor, for Christ's sake, and that the mayor, a superstitious SOB, had readily gone along with the idea of hiring the psychic to come in to do her touchy-feely thing over the case evidence. But nobody had warned him that the psychic would be allowed here at the crime scene, to rummage about as she liked. What the fuck had happened to proper protocol? And what was the famous FBI forensics guru, Jessica Coran, going to think of the Department, or how a backward police precinct in New Orleans conducted a murder investigation? He momentarily thought of all the evidence-gathering he and Ben had done, his thick notebook filled with detailed drawings of the crime scenes, notes and sketches which he'd pored over and stared at at all hours of the night, none of it giving up anything remotely helpful to determining the killer's identity.
Alex was involved in the same process now, drawing a thumbnail sketch of the body where it lay on the pier, noting its condition down to the smallest detail. But as he worked, he continued to think about Kim Desinor and the psychic connection the city had made with her. Word was that Kim Desinor was a doctor, a psychologist, as well as a psychic, which for some made her legitimate, but proved not a thing with Alex. Word also had it that she hailed from the Miami-Dade area, where she'd done some “incredible” work with police agencies. Word had it that she was a psychometrist, that she took readings from the evidence in a case and imaged out possibilities and scenarios, which ordinary cops like Ben and Alex couldn't possibly be expected to do. Word had it that the woman was strikingly good-looking as well as “gifted” with a “sight and vision” beyond normal. Part of the word according to the cop-vine was certainly true: She was a strikingly beautiful woman with an olive tinge to her skin, full red lips and penetrating eyes, her smooth complexion and shoulder-length hair enticing.
Yes, the word was right about her features; she was a good-looking woman, as was Dr. Coran, who continued to kneel over the body, her gloved hands busily working, her black case beside her. Coran certainly looked to be a lot more in control than Wardlaw had ever been on any of the Hearts cases. Coran was taking little pieces of the victim and putting them in tubes and vials and below glass on slides; she was cutting nails and hair samples, taking scraps of flesh from here and there.
Alex watched her work over the corpse. The pier had long since come to life. Fishing boats went by in convoys, the deckhands curiously staring as each boat headed for open sea. In the distance, birds sent up a screeching racket as they followed the shrimpers. All around the death scene were signs of humming, buzzing life as cars sped across the big bridge overhead, and squealing children-like birds at play-scrambled after one another between their parents' legs amid an anxious, restless crowd waiting to board the ferryboats, some of the families now leaving for a less dubious adventure, thus causing consternation among the boat personnel, who'd pleaded with officials earlier to hasten their cleanup before the crowds arrived. But all had remained intact for Jessica Coran and for Kim Desinor's plane to touch down clear across the city.
But there was also around the crime scene an aura of ancient bloodletting, the people on the bridge and at the yellow tape line ever the Roman spectators, crying for more intensity and shock and gut-wrenching horror so they could investigate death in all its guises from the safe distance of the armchair enthusiast. Add to this the sickening sight of the mutilated corpse and the pungent aroma of the wharf itself, a place which saw the slaughter of fish and blood with every incoming fishing vessel-a demonstration which the crowd also appreciated on a daily basis here-and what did Alex expect. An aroma of decay and death forever sniffed at by people and roaming cats, like the one now representing its wild brethren as it slinked silently and unseen to the body for a curious sniff and inhale, making Jessica Coran shout, “Will somebody get this freakin' contaminating cat out of the crime scene area?”Ben deYampert reacted immediately, chasing the cat off with a kick, which gained a wave of sympathy from the onlookers, a few elderly women hissing at Ben something about cruelty.
13
Fiend behind the fiend behind the fiend…
Mastodon with mastery, monster with an ache At the tooth of the ego. the dead drunk judge: Where so ever Thou art our agony shall find Thee Enthroned on the darkest altar of our heartbreak Perfect, Beast, brute, bastard. O dog my God!
— George Barker
Dr. Kim Desinor recalled the last time she'd come down to the Toulouse Street Wharf area, barely thirteen years old. She was in the company of a busload of others from the two schools at St. Domitilla's, the boys' and the girls' reformatories. It was a rare occasion, an event, a field trip. They had been given an opportunity to go aboard and take an excursion on a paddle wheeler like the one now over her shoulder, only hers was called the Creole River Princess and was far less elegant, and along with her was a young man whose features and sexual proclivities were not completely unlike those of the victim over which Jessica Coran was now working. The young man's name was Edward Mantleboro, and he had his sister in tow, a strange and silent girl who stared not at you but through you. Edward had introduced her as Edwina, a twin sister, although they didn't look very much alike. Edwina was unpleasantly swollen, her skin wrinkled badly for one so young, her eyes puffy, as if some fluid were below the surface, but it was her distant irises which seemed lacking soul that had most disturbed and intrigued the young Kim. She'd forgotten about the queer girl, along with so much else in this city, until now, and she wondered, why now? What brought such fragments of memory to the surface? Was it her surroundings. New Orleans, the wharf, the steamboat
or the vacancy in the dead man's eyes? Perhaps it was a combination of them all.
Edward, the young boy, by contrast to his odd sister, seemed to possess all that his sister lacked: health, vitality, soul, charm, wit, sensitivity, and he liked and flirted with young Kim, in fact spending most of the trip hanging and hovering about her, often apologizing for having been saddled with his sister, while Edwina spent most of the trip either staring out at the river or at Kim, as if she'd like to set fire to her. Kim found it both disturbing and interesting that the other girl, without really knowing her, harbored such an unreasonable hatred for her. It had been a memory that Kim had successfully put away until now, but here it came galloping back at her like an angry Headless Horseman, like an indelible mark that had never gone from her memory at all.
She wondered what had ever become of Edward and the girl, who had both also attended St. Domitilla's, he in the boys' school, she in the girls' school. Kim had thought them both odd when Edward, perhaps fifteen at the time, had confided that they weren't parentless or abandoned, but that their parents had placed them into the orphanage to be “straightened out.” He'd muttered something about it all having been “bought and paid for.”
The memories were vague and confusing now, but the Toulouse Street Wharf brought back vivid images. She hadn't exactly been on a date with Edward Mantleboro. It had been more like two desperate young people looking for someone to be with and cling to. That was how their friendship had begun, before it turned into something bigger and more confusing, and before Edwina had attacked Kim with a broken bottle in the shower.
Kim still had the scar from the deepest wound to her upper back, which had required eight stitches. Edwina had later disappeared, no explanation given, and life at St. Domitilla's had gone grinding along without her, much to Kim's relief.
As for Edward, one day after her fourteenth birthday, she'd agreed to secretly meet him in the anteroom off the cafeteria located between the two buildings. Far into the night, refugees from a painful world, they'd lain in one another's arms, oblivious to the hardwood floor, and Edward had made love to her. But soon after, he too had vanished from the school, never to be seen or heard from again. She'd never told anyone about the incident except for her aunt, the only friend she could trust.
She had since had relationships with men, but most were frightened off by her powers of “darkness.” Men, for the most part, didn't want a complicated woman, and being gifted or cursed with psi energies was one hell of a complication in a relationship. Looking around the pier now, she recalled a similar romance and an excursion boat in Florida when she lived in the Miami-Dade area. John Keys was his name, and he was her watch commander when she was a police detective there, when she'd been fairly successful at masking her potent ESP. At first John was delightful, a real prince whose acerbic wit never failed to make her laugh, and he was so good to her and so very shy about asking her out that first time. Once they had arranged their schedules and gone out, it was necessarily a daylight cruise out and back in the cerulean waters leading toward the placid Caribbean, because neither of them could get an evening free. It had been one of those blindingly bright, brilliant days only found off the waters of Florida, a lingering ocean breeze sweeping over the blue calm, the only clouds far off to the east, menacingly aligned against the crystal clarity of blue on blue sky all around them, the huge army of clouds awaiting the call to battle, yet strangely holding back for them and them alone. The battle came later that night when a terrible tropical depression brought on a downpour the likes of which the city hadn't seen since Hurricane Andrew in '92. But that day, as they'd disappeared like a pair of Huckleberry Finns aboard the cruise ship Sun God's Dream, floating slowly beyond sight of Miami's crime-ridden streets and its golden skyline, she had felt closer to John Keys than anyone she had ever known, and his embrace had been so very warm and comforting. She had fallen deeply in love with Jack, as she'd come to call him, but rumors had started circulating about the Department after an unusual bust and collar-not rumors about them, but rumors about her; rumors about how she'd conducted herself, how she'd second-guessed her partner and how bloody accurate she'd been, and how she could read minds.
Jack began to wonder at first, and soon after he confronted her, and when she confided in him her strange, unexplainable power, he soon began a somber campaign to distance himself from her. It started slowly at first, like a rape victim's partner who was unable to cope with the situation, but step by painstaking step, he sure footedly waltzed away and into the background of her life without giving her the courtesy of an honest explanation. When she confronted him, it became achingly clear that he was unable to deal with the new reality that lay before them like a granite stone in a Dali desert vision. There was no reviving the lost life of their relationship. Put simply, he was frightened off.
It wasn't long after that she was unofficially drummed out of the Department and off the force, and this compelled her to go into private practice as a psychic while she finished up her doctorate in psychology. She'd gone from a member of the force, where she'd been accepted, to a lone wolf, called in on cases all over the country, but seldom if ever in Florida, and never in the Miami vicinity.
That was why Paul Zanek was so damned attractive to her when he'd first proposed that she go through FBI training and become an agent. He'd been in Miami on a case in which FBI assistance was needed, and somehow he'd gotten wind of the woman who, in cop circles, had come to be known variously as a Psi-co cop, a Private Psi, 3rd Eye Psi, Cop Hazel, Spooky K.D., Taro-Cop, Ol' Faithful or the Psi-clops cop.
Given the circumstances and the time element, Paul Zanek dared not speak of a psychic division being contemplated by the FBI, but it was obvious he both knew of her reputation and was not put off by it. Little wonder, a year later, she was in his arms.
Now this, she thought: New Orleans and a bloodthirsty killer feeding on hearts, and Paul thousands of miles away, getting his staid life back in order while her own was once again a shambles. Even before the plane had landed and the limousine filled with dignitaries sent for Jessica Coran, with Sincebaugh sent to bring her along as an afterthought, she'd sensed trouble in the air over New Orleans, that this bright morning would find a large and ugly stain upon the sun drenched mecca for party-goers.
“ Bastard seems insatiable and the guys at headquarters have placed odds on what the creep's doing with the hearts,” said Alex Sincebaugh, who'd drifted from Dr. Coran to her now. “Ten to one down at the precinct says he's doing a Jeffrey Dahmer thing with them, 'fry pan and biscuit gravy,' you know.”
“ I'm not so sure,” Kim managed, her mind elsewhere. She now forced herself to think about her first impression of the body. She'd had to lean far out over the dock to stare down at the cold spot in the water where-she'd been informed- the body had bobbed like a bloated cork for an hour before they could get a diving team prepped and in the water to place the halter over and around it. He was nude from the waist up, his chest cavity picked clean by feeding fish, the heart long since gone. The pasty, white skin had sloughed away, leaving only the dermis layer, which would make fingerprinting more difficult for Jessica, but thanks to new technology, not impossible. The body was in one piece, and the teeth also might help in identifying the victim.
No mean trick for the divers earlier in the water to handle the body with any gentility, even here in the Old South, Kim thought now, wondering how many of the psychic emanations had been bled off by both the watery environ and the earlier handling of the body. At the same time, she was wondering just how difficult it was going to be working with Jessica Coran, wondering what kind of miraculous expectations the woman anticipated from Kim, and if Kim's calls should fall short of Jessica's expectations what the other woman's reaction might be. And again Kim helplessly wondered if Jess'd be reporting daily back to Chief Paul Zanek.
Agent Coran had already said she'd become desperate, that Kim was something of a last resort. But Kim knew she had to shake loose from these constric
ting, petty concerns if she was to be of any use whatsoever here this morning. She worked hard now to mentally compose herself, to locate the necessary serenity required within her self to receive whatever slight message or messages she might from the corpse. Now that Jessica and the evidence-gatherers were out of her way, she came closer to the body.
The victim's features were larger than in life, as the facial skin had bloated to blowfish size, along with the fattened limbs. The torso was flat, not at all swollen, more in the man-ner of a deflated balloon, what with the huge gash there. While Kim hadn't been present at the time, she was receiving playback images of the body as it was removed from the river: The total effect when the body was raised on the crane's cables was that of a hideous, grotesque crab, a lifeless marionette.
The body was judged to be tall, rangy in life, and like the previous victims, he'd been young, early twenties, late teens maybe. He'd likely prove-once they learned who he'd been-a lively, vivacious and good-natured young man, liked by all who knew him, with family of one kind or another who loved him, either despite or because of his lifestyle. All previous victims, save yesterday's, had been identified as known gays living in and around the city.
It all reminded Kim of a case she'd worked some years before in Florida, where a madman had decided that seven women had to die to pay the price of his having been born a seventh son. In each case the heart had been removed, but jammed into the victim's mouth in a sinister twist on an old cliche about one's heart rising to one's throat.
Another psychic photo from the more recent past now rushed in at her: Envisioning the crane lowering the body too quickly onto the wharf, Kim felt a sudden wave of revulsion on a primal level sweep over her as the body slipped and came to rest with a splat, like a tarpon hauled off a boat and onto the dock.
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