“ Taking from us?”
“ All they can get, sure… why not? They must feed; it's their nature to feed, as it is in all living things, Alex. I see people every day siphoning off energy and emotion from me, but I gain from the encounter while most of them do not. It's because I gain in giving.”
“ You know, you could be quite scary if I didn't know better.”
“ Last thing I want is to scare you, Alex.”
“ Really?”
“ Really.” She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “Sit quietly for a moment and take from me.”
Alex felt the warmth of her touch and the throbbing life within, heard the heartbeat as it moved along the corridors of her being and into his. The warmth became a radiant heat flowing between them, growing in intensity like the heat from a sun lamp.
“ I'm not a psychological vampiress, Alex. I'm not here to take anything from you. If anything, I'm here to give, not take. I'm no leech, no insect, no worm you need to fear.”
He involuntarily shook with the thought of the worms in his nightmare. “I'll… I'd like to take you home.”
“ Wish you could, but I've got that early morning appointment.”
“ Whoa, I didn't mean my home.”
“ Oh, sorry…misunderstood, I guess.”
“ Well, I mean, I wouldn't mind…” He stopped short and looked curiously at her, his eyes narrowing. “What early morning appointment?”
“ You know, the-”
“ Oh, yeah, the famous or soon-to-be-famous exhumation. Do you really think they'll be going ahead with it, even after what you went through tonight? Isn't there a limit to what you can… reasonably expect to… to give?”
She liked his choice of words and the level of concern in his voice. “I'm okay, really.” She touched a sensitive spot below the bandage to her temple.
“ I just hope it doesn't turn into a circus.”
“ I don't like the idea of exhumation any more than you do, but…”
“ But you have to establish patterns from out of chaos here, right?”
“ Like you, Alex, it's not what I do, it's what I am, and if what I am can indicate a direction, locate a clue, then how can you continue to stand in the way of that? Why won't you let me help you? Is it because I'm a psychic or a woman? Or both?''
“ Me? Stand in your way? How am I standing in your way? You and the others are working right around me, for cryyyy-sake! Everybody saw what happened at the crime scene tonight. No… wouldn't want to be in the way, would we.”
His sarcasm had returned full force, and she gripped the thin edge of the table to remain calm. “Nice try, Alex, but you're hiding again.”
“ Who's hiding? I'm right here, going nowhere.”
“ I have come to believe to a great extent that it is our fears and anxieties that make us who and what we are, or will become, Alex.”
“ Is that supposed to be reassuring, Doctor? Because it isn't.”
In a flashing vision, she saw fat, hungry maggots around him, but ignoring the ugly image, she forced her way through the jungle of his tangled emotions. “We defend the weaker portions of our personalities with an array of defenses, either positive or negative, bright or dreary, such as diplomacy, humor-often macabre humor-patience, self-deceit, temper, clowning and stubbornness.”
“ Ben'll love to hear it. He's the bull-slinging yahoo and I'm the bullheaded mule, right? Nice butter you spread. Doctor.''
“ I think the butter is all yours, Alex, and you're spreading it on thick to cover your true-”
“ That's enough with the psychobabble, Kim. I've heard quite enough, and coming from you, it's doubly rewarding.”
She wasn't sure what he meant by this. “I didn't say I was without fear and anxiety. Quite the contrary.”
“ I'm not going to swap my personality for one you'd like me to try on, Doctor.” He stared across at her, stood and said, “Now, it'll be my pleasure to see you home.”
He threw out a wad of bills onto the table like an angry man who's too upset to count and said, “Are you coming, or do I call a cab?”
“ I'll pay for my own meal, and I'll call my own damned cab, Lieutenant!” she fired back, drawing stares and bawdy laughter from others in the restaurant. Alex's jaw tightened, his face turning red. “All right, fine… suits me.” He then stormed out ahead of her, mumbling something under his breath about women in general. She stared after him disbelieving, yet fully understanding. She'd touched a raw nerve that had been successfully protected for a long time.
She found the pay phone and called for a cab. “To hell with him,” Kim told the lady at the cash register.
“ You just go right on stickin' up for yourself, dearie,” suggested the elderly woman behind the counter.
Alex Sincebaugh was angry with himself. He had never in his life walked out on a woman, leaving her stranded in a public place, and it didn't sit well with him now. He'd gone back to the restaurant to apologize, try to start over with Kim Desinor, but she'd already left. He had thought about locating her at her hotel, but then decided that such a move would only widen the rift between them. He didn't know what to say to her anyway, how to build a bridge between them, how he could comfortably work with her feeling as he did, and the thought of an unnecessary exhumation as a media event continued to gnaw at his gut.
He was a practical man who had come up via a tough life with little love or compassion either received or given, and yet he saw the empathy and heart-wrenching love that the families of victims demonstrated every day, and he respected, even admired people who could convey their emotions so openly and honestly, although he himself could not.
His father had been a policeman with all the military bearing of an army officer in all his dealings, including those that concerned his son. His mother had died when he was eleven years of age, and he recalled her as the only loving influence in his life. It was little wonder that he pushed women away when they got too close, when they began to make plans for him, plans for them, plans that included a home, a family, commitments he felt ill-suited for.
He understood pain and isolation, hard reality, toughness. Toughness saved you from any hurt. It had been with this attitude that he'd left his father's house to go out to San Diego, California, to join the Navy, and having shown so much promise during basic, he was asked to go from there to Coronado, California, to begin a twenty-five-week training session that would culminate in his becoming a Navy SEAL. The course work and field work were grueling, but nothing could have prepared him for week number six, Hell Week, considered a hazing which separated the determined from the doubtful. Sincebaugh's Hell Week had been in January of '67, when he was a boy of nineteen. It took a lot of guys two and even three attempts to pass muster at Hell Week, but Sincebaugh made it through his first time, although it nearly killed him.
Instructors, each one a SEAL himself, worked eight-hour shifts in teams of six throughout the week, while trainees were given only three hours' sleep. One instructor named Gahan told them that Hell Week was to see how young men operate under extreme stress, and that he'd be providing the stress. Everything they did for the entire six days was a race of one sort or another, and the winning team won rest time while the losers had to repeat the race. For those who succeeded, it was not just a physical feat, for they were also subjected to mental pressures, mind games and mockery. For twenty-four hours, he and the rest of his crew, Class 127, were each given their own personal 250-pound log to toss, catch, hurl, twirl and kick uphill; they had to kick the damned thing up sand dunes. In a nonstop marathon they had to shoulder their log and race to a stack of deflated rubber rafts, inflate the rafts and row out to markers some ten miles distant and back. They swam relays, scaled rough-hewn wooden walls and ropes dangled from a chopper, which went clear around the bay with each man hanging on until they began falling like flies. They raced in deep sand and when nightfall came, they didn't sleep, for there were night maneuvers to complete.
O
n the second night, Sincebaugh, by now a Navy seaman apprentice, along with the others, was ordered into San Diego Bay. Now recalling the hypothermia he'd suffered that night, he felt a rush of icy panic ripple through him again. For twenty minutes the fully outfitted men were made to swim in the January waters of the bay. He recalled now how the instructor, calling through his bullhorn from atop a warm boat with his Mackinaw on, had shouted the order to remove boots and socks in the water, to stuff socks inside boots and tie them over the shoulders and around the neck.
Alex's hands could hardly function, but he'd made them function. After twenty minutes of mind-numbing cold, they were ordered out to lie on the metal pier, where they were ordered to do one hundred push-ups, “to heat up your sorry-assed bodies,” while the instructor called for the hoses and they were blasted with bay water on the pier.
“ Keep you all from overheatin' too quick,” the instructor called out sarcastically from his vantage point on the now-docked boat.
The man beside Sincebaugh, Slattery, confessed to having lost his boots to the bay. The instructor replied, “What a shame, boys. Slattery here's lost his goddamned Navy issue. Ordinance don't come cheap. All right, everybody dive!”
“ What?”
“ Oh, shit!”
“ That's an order! Till we solve Slattery's little mystery and locate them damned boots, nobody's dry!”
Slattery was sincerely and universally hated after that night. Everyone returned to the water, bitching under his breath, until Gahan, the drill instructor, ordered silence.
They dived until they found Slattery's fucking boots, which fortunately had remained tied to one another. It was the cold and the darkness out there which had stolen Slattery's footwear from him. Frigid temperatures and frozen fingers and darkness had a way of taking things, and by then the SEAL would-bes and wanna-bes had been reduced to children fearful of what their own bodies might do against them. Slattery, had he not been stopped by Sincebaugh, would have taken his own hand off at the wrist with his bayonet.
Slattery didn't last the week. Nor did many others. During Hell Week, the recruits were almost constantly wet and cold. They lost toenails, were rubbed raw in places, losing huge patches of skin. Their joints were swollen like melons. Sincebaugh learned early never to remove his boots unless ordered to do so, since getting them back on was hell, and some guys never did get them back on, having to continue barefooted. A constant sight was of exhausted men fainting, vomiting and hallucinating, sometimes all at once.
It was the toughest military training in the United States, and all for the privilege of becoming a sea-air-land commando. Over half of those enrolled failed to complete the week-long intensive training and torture. Sincebaugh only made it by turning a corner in his mind, which left him with a strange aloofness in which he felt he literally sucked up pain, went looking for it, enjoyed it. It was what had gotten him through the ten-times-worse tortures of Vietnam when he became a prisoner of war.
So why was he afraid to sleep now?
Instead, he drove around his city, New Orleans, at night. The place had everything any other large American city had and more, yet it was unique. A blend of Spanish, French, Louisiana, Creole, Cajun and American. Street corners were lined with storefronts, fast-food restaurants, dry cleaners, taverns and hardwares, billboards and free-standing signs; sections of the city were grimy and lousy, rotten little holes into which children were born, areas completely at odds with Bourbon Street and the museums and shopping malls along the rivers and lakes of beautiful downtown Orleans.
He drove down to the district he guessed that Kim Faith Desinor most likely grew up in. He kept driving through it, around it, about it, staring, wondering how she'd gotten so good, so smooth, so well educated, coming from this cesspool. Had she been born with the gift of a great mind, or were drive and determination beaten into her at an early age as he'd had them beaten into him?
Either way, she was intriguing, and he wished that he had met her under different circumstances. He'd pulled over to the curb now, staring out at St. Domitilla's, its small enclosure, church and reformatories for boys and girls looking like a prison yard with ten-foot-high wrought-iron fencing going the length of the concrete grounds. He'd done a little checking of his own, and records showed a Kim Faith Desinor had spent time here, that in fact her father had placed her here after the death of her mother.
It was a far cry from New Orleans' ornate and world-renowned St. Stephen's Cathedral, with its huge pinnacles reaching into the night sky, its lavish spires and colored lights piercing the fog cloud which almost nightly descended over the darkened city this time of year. By comparison, the fog here at the poor parish church lay like a confining canvas over an open grave, reflecting only the neon and orange vapor lights of the street sign and lamp.
“ Where are the answers?” he asked the empty interior of his unmarked squad car.
Big Ben was home with his family. Sincebaugh had no one but an uncommunicative, uncaring father, a father whose only response to his having completed the SEAL training course was, “Will that get you more on your paycheck?”
His father didn't know him.
Who really did, for that matter? How could anyone truly know the heart of another, isolated as each man and woman was from another?
Being a SEAL still meant something to him, but it meant nothing to anyone else. But she knew he was a SEAL, knew all about him, respected him. She'd read his record, thanks to Landry, who'd forked it over without a thought. She knew his history… but Kim Desinor knew even more than that. She knew of his fear, and this fact most of all had caused him to run from her.
“ Hey, Rockefella man! Lookin' for some action, mi amigol Compadre comprende?” It was a pimply-faced Spanish boy barely out of his pre-teens. “I know where you can get your fantasy come true, bro.”
Sincebaugh lifted his. 38 and jammed it into the kid's face, making the boy shake in the shadow of the cathedral. “Who've you got in mind, son, your sister?”
“ Hey, man, I'm gone. I'm outta here, out-cho face gone!”
“ Don't move!”
The kid froze. “Whatchu want with me, man? I don't go that way.”
“ You know the word on the street about the Hearts Killer, though, don't you? Don't you?”
“ Christ, you… you ain't him, are you?”
“ What's being said? Who knows what?”
“ Nothing… nobody knows nothing… I don't hear a word. Everybody's stone cold on it, man.”
“ Stone cold, huh?” replied Sincebaugh. “Tell you this, man… if you don't talk, you're going to be stone cold.”
“ Whatchu mean, man? I'm tellin' you, there's nothing on it that's goin' round, except now they got a psychic on the case and the guy doing the killing, his time's runnin' out.”
“ Who knew the victims? Give me a name, kid.”
“ Philly.”
“ Philly? A guy from Philadelphia? What's his real name?”
“ You the fuzz, aren't you?”
“ What's his goddamned real name?”
“ Don't know. All I know is he's a transvestite; sings in one of the bars. Calls himself Phyllis and ain't got nothing to do with Philly. Now, that's all I hear or know.”
“ Phyllis… okay, kid, get out of here and get a productive life.”
“ Sure, sure, dickhead, maybe I'll work on that degree.” The kid disappeared the way he came, like a ghost, materializing and dematerializing amidst the landscape he knew so well. A powerful wind began to sweep through the area, lifting drooping tree limbs and blasting here and there in drafts. Alex gave another thought to Kim Desinor as a child inside the prison compound of St. Domitilla's with its paper refuse rising in a miniature tornado and flying about the courtyard as bits and shards and fragments of ghosts. The old place had been condemned years before, its doors closed forever, awaiting the wrecking bail.
Alex heard no refrain of long-ago laughter in her walls.
24
The light that
lies In woman's eyes. Has been my heart's undoing.
— Thomas Moore
Kim Desinor had seldom met a man so infuriating as Detective Lieutenant Alexander Sincebaugh, yet he posed an interesting challenge for her. What did it take with him? she wondered. A little more time perhaps? Perhaps not; it was quite possible that all the time in the world wouldn't change his obdurant, bullheaded and fearful notions about psychic investigators in general and her in particular. Still, for a brief while there in the restaurant, gazing over at him through the candlelight, she had sensed that deep, abiding need in him to confess and be consoled, to shout out his needs, his desires, his most intimate fears and wants. It was then she saw the bevy of human maggots clawing at him, the symbolic representation of an abiding agony which he'd unwittingly and psychically conveyed to her.
The symbolism was clear enough, she believed. And although she had wanted to come away a friend, this obviously wasn't to be, it appeared. He had made that much painfully clear.
She'd been attracted to him, had let down her own guard, revealed to him that she too had fears and anxieties and needs that daily went unfulfilled, the same sort of needs that had caused her to dig herself into a hole in which she found herself helplessly mired, thanks in large measure to Chief Paul Zanek. Though if she were totally honest with herself-one of life's impossibilities? — she knew that she alone was to blame for the Zanek affair regardless of Paul's role in it. Maybe it took coming to New Orleans and running into Alex Sincebaugh to reveal this much to herself.
She thought about her seemingly endless nightmare of days and nights and overwhelming loneliness at St. Domitilla's, wondered if she dared go see the damned dungeon sometime before leaving New Orleans, to manfully face down her fears as she always told others to do; wondered momentarily about her father's last days in an emphysema ward in some small town called Corinth in Mississippi, which had sent word to the school, the head nun breaking the news to her, explaining to her what the strange medical term meant, saying, “It's a defect in the lung system.”
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