Now, suddenly, she had a huge meat cleaver in her left hand. Even as she held firm to the knife they continued to fight for control over, Dominique-having some demonic strength he had never known before-brought the shimmering cleaver blade at his face like a pendulum, missing. him by inches when he jerked to one side.
Alex could hear help on the way, Stephens and Meade, having heard the shots and the commotion, but the witch atop him wasn't waiting. Again the cleaver was over her head and about to descend when a single gunshot rang out and Dominique came crashing down over Alex's body, her dead weight slamming into him with a great thud.
From over the dead killer's shoulder, Alex saw Jessica Coran, her gun still raised, and beside her stood Kim and Mrs. Raveneaux, who was caught up in Kim's arms when she fell away in a faint.
Alex fought to extricate himself from the killer's dead weight while the others ran into the kitchen. Alex shouted for Stephens and Meade to help Landry who'd shouted from the freezer while he went to Jessica Coran, meeting her gaze. “Thanks… you saved my life just then.”
“ Is she dead?”
“ The way you shoot, you needn't ask.”
Jessica now sat on the stairs with Kim beside her, Kim holding onto the old woman. Kim squeezed Jessica's hand and said, “You did what you had to do.”
“ It's not as if I've never killed anyone before.”
“ But it is the first time you've shot and killed a woman.” Kim managed to place her free arm around Jessica.
“ All in the line of duty,” Jessica mused, “for the FBI
“ No, you did it for Alex.”
General Raveneaux, who had rushed in behind Stephens and Meade, went to his knees over his maniacal daughter, softly blubbering, his anguish deep-felt and eternal. “First my son… and now Dommie… oh, poor long-suffering, afflicted, imperfect child…Dommie…”
Mrs. Raveneaux had come to, and was now staring at the pitiful sight of her dead daughter and distraught husband. From her half-prone position on the stairwell, she spoke to her husband in a harsh whisper, saying, “I told you, Maurice… I told you it would come to this…told you we should've never let her come back from Europe, Maurice. I told you she wasn't ready… I told you so… “
“ But she was… acting so… normal…”
“ How… how long've you known, really known, about my connection with the FBI?” Kim asked Alex.
“ I didn't know for sure until tonight, when Meade gave you away, but I'd wondered about it last time I saw you and Dr. Coran together. Something about your relationship. The way the two of you worked together; maybe 'cause you were working too hard to appear to dislike one another. I don't know.”
“ She was cured, you know,” Mrs. Raveneaux said, “by her doctors in Stockholm. She even lived in Europe with one of her doctors, a man she claimed to love, and they were happy for a time… just before she showed up on our doorstep again.”
“ When was that, Mrs. Raveneaux?” asked Alex.
“ Ohh… ohhh…maybe a little over a year ago And you know Victor had been gone by then, and we… the general and I didn't have anyone else, you know, not really… not family, that is… and we did love her so. We loved both our children very, very much, but neither of them were ever completely… all right, you realize? Victor always seemed the feminine one and dear Dominique was so dastardly toward him, so mannish. We tried to break her of it, especially after the… the incident…”
“ When Dominique hurt Victor that first time, you mean?”
“ Sweet Victor, such a sweet-hearted boy, really… did the authorities ever find him? Completely disappeared. Isn't that right, Maurice?”
The general let go of his dead daughter, laying her gently down amid the spoiled bisque she'd earlier prepared, reaching up now for his infirm wife instead. The two older people held fast to one another.
“ She was doing so well,” he muttered into her ear before he continued sobbing.
Jessica surveyed the complete mess that had been made of the once-spotless kitchen. Landry was being helped from the freezer, but the frozen-handed cop wouldn't let go of something he had carried out with him. Jessica and Alex joined the captain and together they stared down at a solidly frozen human heart.
“ Thommie Whiley?” asked Kim from across the room, voicing all their thoughts.
A shivering Landry replied, “C-c-could be, but there're're two o-o-others inside.” His teeth still chattered on after his words were finished.
Jessica stared at the frozen heart, and then past it into the freezer. “Forensics'll have to match each one through DNA tests.”
“ What the hell was she doing with the hearts? Why keep 'em in the freezer?” Stephens's astounded question came out in tentative fashion.
“ Keepin”em on ice, obviously,” Jessica said, Meade staring now over her shoulder into the fog of the freezer.
“ But for what?” Meade asked.
“ Her secret ingredient in the gumbo bisque stew, would be my guess,” replied Jessica, who now turned and lifted a pointed stiletto kitchen knife, then bent and jabbed one of the chunks of meat from the stew which had discolored the tiles when Dominique had pulled the boiling liquid over onto herself and Alex during their struggle.
“ What is that?” asked Stephens, squinting.
Meade turned his attention to the red chunk of flesh as well.
Jessica simply replied, “It's nothing I've ever eaten.”
The general's eyes had widened on seeing the frozen heart come from his freezer, and now his eyes widened further. He softly pushed away from his wife, telling her to go upstairs now. “You don't want to hear any more of this, Cor-etta…Coretta dear, just go on ahead.”
She did as instructed, the docile puppy once again, glancing back only once at her dead child on the kitchen floor. When she was out of earshot, the general said, “She couldn't've been using the hearts of dead men in her cooking. She just couldn't've been.”
“ Well, our lab people will determine that soon enough, Maurice,” said Richard Stephens, who placed a shaky and awkward hand on the old man's shoulders. “Determine what, that my insane child killed her brother, cut out his heart and fed it to me! God damn you all for imagining such a thing! No, she loved us, Coretta and me… she loved us, despite any sickness she endured over the years, and she loved her brother with a pure love like nothing I have witnessed in all my years.”
The general's lawyer tried to pull him away, but the old man snatched free and shouted, “She had a bad heart as a child, a deficiency, but she was never evil toward anyone except, at times, her brother. Yes, I admit she was at one time extremely envious of her brother, but with therapy she had worked through all that and had in fact learned to love Victor and us very, very much. She spoke of him fondly always, and she treated Mother and me with great respect and admiration, always… always. She loved us. She wouldn't've harmed Victor. 1 knew that from the beginning, and that was how I knew she couldn't've done the terrible things attributed to the Queen of Hearts killer. You'll never… ever convince me otherwise.”
“ Alex was right all along. She killed her brother for a reason,” Jessica shouted. “Don't you see? All of you men who've been in one way or another shielding the truth? She took that first heart for a reason, General!”
Stephens tried to motion her into silence; Meade shushed her, so Kim continued on Jessica's behalf. “A reason, General, you know full well. She wanted to be Victor; she wanted to possess his heart-the heart you and her mother most loved. She wanted to be the kind of son you never had, so she became a man for you and Mrs. Raveneaux, and in her deranged state, that meant she had to be 'of good heart,' and how better to be of good heart than to consume the one heart you and your wife doted most over.”
“ That's enough of your psychoanalysis, Doctor,” Meade said to Kim, the order to stand down clearly unmasked now.
“ You men brought Dr. Desinor here for the truth,” Jessica countered, defending her friend. “It's time these people
in their ivory-tower mansion, so far removed from the deaths in New Orleans, yet so close to them, hear the truth for once.”
“ The truth won't accomplish anything here, not now,” shouted Stephens.
“ Neither of you ever for a moment thought this case had anything to do with New Orleans gentility, did you, Meade?” asked Alex, his wrath growing steadily.
Jessica continued, saying, “No, to you men it was about gays living in a gay ghetto in New Orleans, and you all wanted it confined there. You never expected Surette's death, the subsequent cover-up to keep the family name untarnished and the payoffs ever to surface again, did you?”
Kim added, “You ruined Frank Wardlaw's career, you dirtied Ben deYampert, and then when calling in Coran and me backfired on you, and it looked as if not only would the general be exposed, but your little parts in the sordid game also might surface, you forced Wardlaw into body-snatching.”
“ You don't have any basis in fact to back that claim up in the least,” Meade declared.
“ The general and his wife were just glad to get the body back-or at least the general was-but it was minus one heart,” added Jessica. “Little did the general know that the heart had come home a lot sooner, and had most likely been consumed by three remaining Raveneauxs with wine in bisque gumbo. And since then, there've no doubt been many unusual dishes served up by your Dominique.”
“ Get out of my house!” shouted the general. “I want you all out of my house!” He was on the verge of tears and collapse.
“ I'm afraid we can't do that, at least not until there's a complete evidence-gathering taken here, General. That will mean some time,” Alex explained.
Stephens exchanged stares with Alex and nodded to his political friend, resigned to what Alex Sincebaugh had said.
“ I'm going to have your heads for this, Meade, Stephens!” The old man stormed from the room, likely in search of his wife and some respite from the horror of the moment.
Landry suddenly collapsed from his wound. Alex and Jessica rushed to him, Alex shouting for someone to get to one of the units outside and call for medical assistance, while Jessica did what she could to staunch his wound.
Landry's color had bleached from his face, crystallized shards still hanging in his hair. His wound was now openly bleeding. Jessica worked to stop the bleeding, tying off the shoulder. As she did so, Landry, seeing the bloodstains and the fiery welts about Sincebaugh, asked, “You okay, Sincy?”
“ No serious damage.”
“ Two real tough guys, huh?” Jessica muttered at them.
Landry managed to say to Alex, “Why don't you get on the radio; see what you can do about getting Dr. Coran all the help and equipment she'll require here.”
“ You got it, Captain.” With that Alex went for Landry's car and the radio, pushing past Hodges and his men, who'd been staring in on the scene, their mouths hanging open.
“ You up for this, Jessica? This could be an all-nighter,” said Kim, who came close to her friend.
“ Actually, no… I'd just about made up my mind to get on a plane for Hawaii, chuck it all.”
“ I can well understand how you feel after seeing what went on at that warehouse and now this. You've gone through hell.”
“ As have we all. What about you? You gonna be okay?”
Kim managed a wane smile and a nod. “Yeah, matter of fact. Think I found out what I'm made of, in great part thanks to you. But I tell you honestly, I'm not so sure I don't prefer the safety of a laboratory to all this.” She indicated the body of Dominique Emanuel Raveneaux and the scattered remains of life that were pieces of people about the floor. “You have any doubt whatsoever that we have the Queen of Hearts killer here, Dr. Coran?” asked Landry in a near-whisper. “No… no doubt, sir.”
“ Dr. Desinor?” asked Landry.
“ None whatever, and I sense something else.”
“ Oh? What's that?”
“ This is the only peace Dominique has ever had in her unhappy life.”
“ Maybe that'll put your General Raveneaux at peace with himself, Commissioner, Chief Meade,” said Jessica. “Maybe death holds more meaning for his daughter than life ever did.”
EPILOGUE
Unto the pure all things are pure.
— The Epistle of Paul to Titus. 1:15
A sordid picture of old family money and madness began to come together once the Raveneaux family was examined more closely.
Dominique had attempted to murder her brother at the age of seven. She'd been secreted away to doctors for several years and on return, she'd again showed tendencies of hatred toward her little brother. When the barrier between anger and murder burst again, the general had had her locked up in a pretty cell he'd created for her in the basement while he searched the world for doctors who might possibly fix her.
At times she'd spent long months and even years of her childhood in such places as New York's prestigious Psychiatric Center for the Mentally Disturbed, Menninger's Clinic in Stockholm and a special hospital in Brussels.
She was declared mentally competent and had the papers to prove it, so when she returned home under her own steam in July of the previous year, no one had ever connected her with the strange mutilation death of a young man she'd lived with for a time in Brussels. The man's heart had been carved from his chest. He'd been an intern at the hospital in Brussels, and had been instrumental in Dominique's recovery. Interpol had been interested in locating the former patient, but had lost contact with her. She'd been placed in the institution under a false name, and records were intentionally sketchy.
Dominique had learned of her brother's whereabouts from her father, the general, who had told her that her brother's once-pure and innocent heart had become-in her absence- demoralized, depraved and tainted. He'd explained her brother's absence away in this manner, by blaming it on his lifestyle.
She'd been a model daughter at the time, at least by day, discharging all the kitchen staff and insisting on providing her parents with only the healthiest and freshest of meals, a talent she had learned while in Europe. She'd talked of starting her own catering business, saying that if she couldn't cook for someone, she'd become so bored to distraction that she'd be quite depressed. The general and his wife had acquiesced, al-lowing their daughter to indulge herself, despite the unseemly appearance of having her running the kitchen and preparing food.
By night, she would become a Hyde creature, anxious and bloodthirsty in her relentless search for her brother. She began frequenting the bars and clubs in and around Bourbon Street until she found Victor. When she and Victor clashed, it was for control of that innocent, so-well-loved heart now gone from her parents' life, the same heart she detested, her brother's heart. Victor never saw it coming, didn't know what hit him. And as for Dominique, who'd become Emanuel when she went on her quest, that single heart did not fulfill her needs entirely, and so, when that first taste of murder and heart-taking wore thin, she went after the hearts of others, repeating the process in an endless need to feed on the very thing she could not have, a pure heart.
Among the many skills she'd learned during her long years of “captivity” were sewing, darning and embroidery, and she never forgot the pure-white doilies her mother made and spread about her basement cell room-and her upstairs room, where she was allowed only if she were good.
The general's little princess, Dommie also formed a passion for the image of queens, thinking herself quite the little princess all her life, believing that she would one day grow into the role of a queen. She'd learned lace embroidery with colored silk string first from her mother, and had improved her talents with the help of a kindly nurse in Stockholm, and she never forgot her lessons.
A more thorough search of Dommie's current living quarters at Raveneaux-which turned out to have originally been Victor's room, not the child's room Jessica and the others were escorted to-unearthed all the materials Emanuel had used in creating her calling cards.
As authorities and an ar
my of lawyers took over the case, to put to rest the Queen of Hearts killer and all the destruction left in her wake, each day more details of the bizarre story exploded onto the pages of the Times-Picayune. Every awful thought anyone had ever had about inbreeding and family secrets in the Deep South was brought to life in the Raveneaux story, and each day became a painful reminder of how madness and insanity and dysfunctional elements visited all families at one time or another, in one generation or another.
And finally, Victor Surette might at last stop walking across Alex Sincebaugh's dreamscape.
Kim Desinor revisited the remnants of her past and found that St. Domitilla's was a sad, much smaller place now, a shell of its former self. And she cried long and hard, but she forgave as well, and in the forgiving, she found release, freedom, sanctuary and peace; while Meade, Stephens and Wardlaw faced charges of misconduct.
Jessica looked out over the runway at the New Orleans Lake-front Airport, and in the dusk she saw Kim and Alex Sincebaugh's embracing bodies silhouetted against the terminal glass where they were saying their final good-byes. Kim would be last to board the plane returning Jessica and her to their Virginia headquarters and home. In the terminal, Jessica had said her good-byes with a firm handshake and a smile for Carl Landry and Alex, but Kim was having a heart-wrenching time. She and Alex continued to exchange long, sensual kisses, their pending separation painful and prolonged, a heady reminder to Jessica of the bond she and James Parry had shared in Hawaii the year before.
She had contacted James from Kim's hotel room to inform him of her success in routing the awful soul of Mad Matthew Matisak to the grave and to the bottom rung in the seven circles of Hades. James had been sick with worry, and had been trying desperately to get in touch with her when he'd learned that she was in New Orleans and possibly facing Matisak there. He'd gotten word through the FBI grapevine, and had been poised to get on a plane to locate her there, to do whatever was in his power to help and to protect her.
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