I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing that he had put together.
“I knew young Gordonn only through a class I taught nearly I a year ago; didn't hear from him or about him again until he began working on his Byron project in the film department, you see. He took my course to leam more about Byron and the Romantics; he loved the notions of romantic love, enduring, undying love, but he remained primarily focused on Lord Byron. I took him under my wing, so to speak, and just recently, he began to brag about how he was party to the killings.”
“That's how he would put it?” asked Jessica.
“Precisely, but I blew it off, as they say. Of course, knowing him, even for a short time, I knew this was all a he, bravado, all that. I never for a moment believed George to be guilty, and so when I learned he was under suspicion, I gave him safe haven until the young man should feel secure enough to leave.”
“That's a felony, Dr. Locke,” said Parry, “one which you could be tried for.”
“I realized that at the time, but I felt an overwhelming need to help George. He had that effect on people; people wanted to 'fix' him.”
“And precisely how did you know he was under suspicion, Dr. Locke?”
“That's right,” added Parry. “It wasn't public knowledge “Information I gleaned from Leare, who had it from her lover, Sturtevante. Seems Sturtevante went to apologize to Donatella about all the misunderstanding, the mishandling of the case, all that, and she let it slip that you were zeroing in on George. Leare knew of George through me, and she had had him as a student once as well. I was trying to help George to stay… stable, you know. I knew what he had gone through. But of late, George had begun to seriously worry me.”
“How's that?”
“Even in the face of being arrested for these crimes he professed to have committed, well… not believing him, I paid little attention until recently. I tell you, he went out last evening and returned to my house with a young woman, although Leare and I had told him specifically that he must remain in hiding.”
“He came back with a woman, a stranger to you?”
“A young woman. She looks to be another coed, I fear, but I didn't know her. I immediately protested when I entered the room I'd turned over to George, only to find him and the girl writing out poetry on each other's nude back.
“I was assured by George that it was a mere dalliance on his part, and his interest in body poetry had nothing whatsoever to do with the murders, and then he confessed to having lied about his involvement in the killings, telling me his shrink had said he had an insatiable need for attention.
“When I first met him, in my class, he told me about his parents, that he was in fact the living proof of the urban legend that had started the back-writing poetry fad, and now, that is a few hours ago, he told me how angry he was at this killer, whoever he was, to have turned his poetic 'invention,' as he called it, into a horror of death.
“He then lamented the deaths of all those young people; he said he felt great guilt since the killer had obviously been inspired by his invention, but again he insisted that he had killed no one, and that his earlier confessions to me were simply to gain attention.”
“And you believed him?” asked Jessica.
“I wasn't hearing his cry. I know, I was a fool, and I could have prevented so much death.”
“What happened next?” Parry asked.
“Something made me look in on him around midnight. I found the girl and George both dead in my home, victims of the poisoned pen that each had used on the other, just as George's parents had done. I was horrified, so I called you.”
“You did the right thing,” Jessica assured him, Parry agreeing.
“Poor lamentable George,” Locke proclaimed. “And this other creature he duped into his final trap.”
“Forensics is going to have a long night of it,” said Jessica. “Let's get a team of evidence techs over here. I'll need all the help I can get with the two corpses.”
Parry got on his cell phone and made the call.
It appeared to all involved to be over. All the evidence pointed to one perpetrator, to George Linden Gordonn. All the information collected at Locke's house and later at Gordonn's also bore this out. Finally, the city of Philadelphia could breathe again and would hear no more from the Lord Poet of Misspent Time, George Gordonn, the Killer Poet who, bizarrely, professed his kinship with Lord Byron.
At Gordonn's home, a stash of poetry in George's hand was taken into custody and remanded to evidence lockup. Jessica heard about the poems, which had been scrawled longhand into a notebook. Along with this, Gordonn had kept a diary in which he fantasized about helping people to commit suicide in order to leave this world of “putrid flesh,” as he called it.
Still, something nagged at Jessica. The number of his victims, including himself, amounted to far fewer than the number nineteen, which Kim had seen again and again. But it was more than this. Something wasn't right about the timing and the circumstances surrounding Gordonn's death in the home of the famous dark poet Lucian Burke Locke, whose wife and children were conveniently away at the time.
After all the protocol work on Gordonn's remains and those of Ariana Dupree, his final victim, Jessica found a moment to confer with Kim Desinor. Kim had taken time to read through Gordonn's diary and poems, and she'd shown copies to Dr. Wahlbore, who fed them into Rocky. Kim's gut reaction to Gordonn's poetry told her the poems didn't match with those of the killer, and Rocky bore her out. Kim had telephoned with this information, saying she was coming right over to discuss what this meant.
Kim showed up at Jessica's office, slipped into a chair, and exasperatedly asked, “How did the quality of Gordonn's poetry go from the junk I found in the notebooks to what he supposedly wrote on the backs of his victims? Did he somehow sprout poetic wings when he had a back to compose on?”
“From what you and Wahlbore say, I would have to assume, as Vladoc suggests, that Gordonn killed under another personality altogether, obviously one who could write a sight better than his regular self.”
“Sounds ludicrous; sounds like Vladoc's interested in covering his ass, Jess. A dual personality explains away how the good doctor could be treating a man and not know a goddamn thing about him.”
“What're you talking about, Kim?”
“I've seen what was collected at the Gordonn home, and I'm telling you, it doesn't cut the mustard. It's not… it didn't come out of the same mind. “I see. Doesn't compare well with the killer's verse. You think Parry and Sturtevante and Roth and the city are going to want to hear that?”
“I'm only telling you what you already know in your heart to be true.”
“That we've tagged the wrong man for the killings?”
“I fear so.”
“But what about all those psychic hits that had to do with his profession?” Jessica countered.
“They may well have been pointing to this, that one day we'd have the wrong man, a technical film specialist, in custody for murder, only he isn't here to tell us so or to refute it.”
“Have you ever known cases of dual personality-both being writers-but who write in totally different ways?”
“I just don't buy it. Vladoc says Gordonn may have been a dual personality, in which case perhaps one of the personalities was a poet, the other not. I just think it's too pat, too easy a way out.” Kim was adamant about this. “His poetry was not up to the standard of the killer's. Was he then inspired when he wrote on the back of his victims but not before?” She repeated her earlier question.
“Everyone has laid the case to rest. Parry, Roth, and Sturtevante are happy to turn it over to the DA's office.”
“While you and I, dear, remain skeptical,” said Kim. “I just have a gut feeling about it. Call it-”
“Instinct? Combine your gut feeling with mine, and we have one hell of a big gut feeling between us,” finished Jessica
“I hate to think that our killer is slipping through legal hands, and that Gordonn was set up by the obvious candidate, Lucian Burke Locke.”
“We need more to go on than a gut feeling,” Jessica countered. What about warming up your cold hypothesis with this?” a male voice interrupted.
Both Jessica and Kim swung around to see Dr. Leonard Shockley, holding a manila folder overhead and slapping it against the dooijamb where he stood.
“And what's this?” Jessica asked the ME.
His hands slightly shaking, Shockley spread the contents of the folder before her where she sat. 'Take a look.” He gave Jessica time to read the information from his work on the final corpse, Ariana Dupree.
Jessica stood, came around the desk, and kissed Dr. Shockley, while Kim asked, “What? What is it?”
Jessica announced, “DNA… the killer's DNA from the tears… doesn't match up with Gordonn's DNA.”
“Then the last two victims were killed to cover the real killer's tracks.”
Jessica kissed Shockley again and started out on the first step in a long journey, one that now had a specific goal: to nail Lucian Burke Locke, the strange little man with the picture-perfect home and the picture-perfect-but only in appearance-family.
“A closer look at Locke is in order,” she announced.
The closer look into the life of Lucian Burke Locke revealed that he was the product of a home dominated by an alcoholic father who had made life a nightmare for Lucian and his mother. It was Dr. Harriet Plummer who provided this information, all the while defending Lucian to the detectives when they suggested that he was not telling the entire truth the night of Gordonn's death. The police also talked about Locke with Garrison Burrwith, who was only too happy to inform them that he had learned from campus rumors and word of mouth that Locke had always been fascinated with the urban legend that turned out to have originated with Gordonn's family. There were even students who swore that Locke referred to the story of the Gordonn family deaths in his lectures as an example of the power and influence of the Byronic image nearly two centuries after the poet's death.
“But no one knew at the time that George Gordonn was part of the ill-fated family,” Burrwith explained, “no one except Professor Locke, I suspect. I suspect the boy informed his revered instructor when Locke spoke of the story as an urban legend. George was extremely shy, you know. He would never have announced such a thing in public, no more than he would tell a classroom full of people that he had been the first to disrobe and display a poem etched on his back.”
“Strange that someone you call shy could do that.”
“Some say he did it at the urging of a psychiatrist, who was helping him to face his fears.”
“Vladoc,” muttered Kim.
Burrwith continued, his bow tie bobbing as he spoke. “I suspect the boy told Locke every detail, down to the fact that he was seeing a shrink.”
“If so, Locke would have to know not only Gordonn's secret, but what was going on in his mind-now,” said Kim.
“The diary entries,” Jessica said, thinking aloud. “Gordonn wrote about his fantasy to kill and be killed in the manner of his parents. Said he had recurring dreams about it.”
Kim nodded. “The diary entries alone would likely have ensured life imprisonment, but Locke didn't count on the chips falling as they have.”
“I hope you nail that brash, arrogant SOB,” said Garrison Burrwith, which brought Jessica sharply back from her thoughts. She thanked Burrwith for his time and help.”
“You're going to put him away for life, aren't you?”
“We will if he is our killer, yes.”
“Then you don't believe Gordonn did those horrible things.” At the moment, we are not a hundred percent certain of it, no, but we must ask you to keep this to yourself. Word of our suspicions gets out, and, as we said to Dr. Plummer, anything could happen. We don't want to damage a man's reputation without airtight evidence, you see.”
“Of course, like you people did with poor Donatella.”
They left abruptly then.
“Vladoc isn't telling us everything he knows, Jessica,” Kim said as they located the car in the lot outside the building, a bright Philadelphia sun momentarily blinding Jessica before she slipped on her dark glasses.
“What do you think Vladoc is hiding?”
“I don't know exactly. But something's not right. For one thing, how could Gordonn afford Vladoc's rates for therapy?”
“You think the shrink was using the boy? How and for what?”
“I don't know. I just know that on Gordonn's salary, he could ill afford a downtown shrink like Vladoc, unless they had cut some other deal.”
“Like access free and clear to the kid's story?”
“You mean for a book or something? Who knows?”
“That night at the club, when I spoke to Gordonn, before I knew who he was, when he was videotaping the nude poets…”
“Yes…” Kim leaned over the hood of the car so as to hear over traffic.
“He said he had been hired by the owners of the club, and that he got free copies of the tapes for his own use.”
“Go on.”
“Suppose Vladoc had cut a deal with the owners in order to put George to work doing what George wanted to do, and making money in the bargain. Each video sold to the clubs to create a kind of library, which they could use to create their ads.” Yeah, I've seen a few while flipping through channels in the hotel room. They're enticing in a crude way. And their makers must get well paid.”
“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 that 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 shadows 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.
The sound of spurting, gurgling water led them to the kitchen. There they located a door that led to the basement, and the moment they opened this door, they knew they'd found the source of the gurgling. It was a busted pipe Going cautiously down the steps, their guns extended along with the flashlight, they were stopped when the light hit the prone figure of a man with a noose around his neck. It was Locke, small and misshapen, lying below the busted pipe, which spewed water over him. His pitiful suicide attempt had apparendy failed not once but twice. His back was etched with a poem, and his throat was raw and swollen from his attempted hanging, but he was still alive. Somehow the selenium had not killed him and the pipe he hanged himself from had torn loose, sending him falling to the concrete floor and saving his miserable life.
“Kill me… kill me,” he pleaded, lying over a gutter and holding his hands over his eyes.
“We'll let the state decide whether or not you live, Locke. Not our job,” replied Jessica.
“Put me out of my misery. Send me over.”
Sturtevante and Parry rushed into the now cramped basement, bringing with them a floodlight. The light made the little man on the floor look all the more disgusting and ugly and pitiable.
“The children?” asked Parry.
“Dead, along with their mother.”
“Angels one and all,” muttered Locke.
At that moment. Parry lost control, kicking out at the lump of tortured flesh on the cold floor, sending him reeling over. “You lousy sonovabitchingmotherfucking child killer!” Again Parry kicked him, this time in the teeth. Jessica and Sturtevante pulled and shoved Parry into a corner, shouting for him to cool down, when suddenly an explosion filled the small room, and they all saw Kim Desinor standing over Lucian Locke, a bullet hole through his head and a shocked look in his eyes. “He… he grabbed out at my gun!” Kim shouted. “He took hold of the barrel. I didn't mean for it to go off, but it did. It all happened in the blink of an eye. It was an accident.”
“Good riddance,” Parry said in a raspy whisper, patting Kim on the back, as if to congratulate her. “Imagine what the literati of this country would turn him into if he lived to a ripe old age in prison, writing poems from his cell, given his own Web site like Charlie Manson. He'd probably become the most celebrated poet of his generation.” Parry then turned and rushed up the noisy, wooden stairwell to the kitchen, where backup cops had turned on lights.
Kim kept repeating, “It was an accident. The gun went off when he grabbed the barrel. He yanked at it with my linger on the trigger. I was distracted by you guys and Parry, all the fighting, and then the explosion.”
“We believe you,” said Sturtevante. “No one will dispute your need to kill that piece of shit.”
Jessica put her arm around Kim, telling her that it would be all right. “It will be investigated and there will be no charges of wrongful death. You did what you had to do.”
“It wasn't like that, Jess. Truly, he grabbed the gun and pulled it straight at himself, but I had a strong grip on it, and it went off, all quite unintentionally.”
“Perhaps not on your part, but what about his? He asked us to put him down, and when we didn't respond in the manner he wanted, he created the circumstance in which you had to end his life. Simple as that.”
“It's such a horror for me, taking a life. I feel less of a human being for it.”
“He left you with no choice; he wanted you to act instinctively, intuitively, and you did. You did for him what the rope over the pipe couldn't do… and I'm getting wetter'n than the proverbial drenched rat in here, so let's vacate this place for now. Come on upstairs with me into the light-
Kim nodded weakly and allowed Jessica to lead her away from the body and this place. “And for the sake of protocol,” Jessica added as they turned to go, “since I was on hand when the perpetrator of this bloodless slaughter was shot to death, I'd best call Shockley and his ETs in to collect evidence and to deal with the bodies.” Jessica led her friend and colleague out of the death grid, neatly defined here in the basement to await Shockley. “It's always difficult to take a life, but if he'd gotten firm hold on that gun and turned it on all of us, well… suffice to say, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”
“He didn't want to fire the gun on any of us; he wanted it for himself, and he managed to use me to that end, didn't he? Clever SOB, I'd say, very clever indeed.”
The core task-force team felt a great weight lifted off their collective shoulders, knowing now for certain that the serial killer called the Poet had finally been identified and his career ended.
Jessica remained close to Kim while both the PPD's Internal Affairs cops and the FBI's own Internal Affairs people asked questions about the death of the suspect, Lucian Locke.
Everyone found the scene gruesome, and emotionally painful to process, especially the room where the two children lay in bed, faces down, their backs revealing the final verses of the poem Locke had written. By now all the verses had come together to make a whole.
Jessica felt little pleasure in having been proven right, that each of the poems was a section of one large, ambitious work. She supported Kim's version of the shooting one hundred percent, telling the IAD guys that she had seen the shooting go down exactly as Dt. Desinor described it.
Meanwhile, Sturtevante and Parry, their services no longer being required, had gotten a federal warrant for search and seizure at Dr. Lucian Locke's office, club locker, Second Street apartment, and home. Parry meant to go by the book, to create an airtight, hermetically sealed case against the now dead poet.
The news of the Lockes' deaths following so quickly on the heels of Leare's, and the even more lurid news that Locke had murdered Leare-everyone agreed that such news was tailor-made to increase dramatically the appeal of their poetry to young people fascinated with death and the trappings of death.
Parry, Sturtevante, and a small army of white-gloved detectives combed the house for incriminating evidence that might explain Locke's behavior, explain why he had killed his wife and children, and the series of people who had come before them. Nothing came of the search, not a shred of useful information, not even from his locked desk drawer in the spacious den.
A team of evidence techs were sent to his university office, and they, too, came up empty. But a third team, sent to his Second Street apartment, hit the mother lode. Pinned on the walls were the photos Jessica had been looking for, shots of each of the victims who had preceded his final rampage. These, combined with the photographic record of the poems etched in poisoned ink, proved irrefutable.
Vladoc showed up at the scene of the crime now, and as he walked among the living scurrying about doing their work, he looked like a dead man. “Poor Evey, and those children, I loved them as if they were my own,” he repeatedly told anyone who would listen, as if saying the words over and over would make them sound more true. How could Vladoc not have known that his brother was so deeply disturbed?
“I had no idea, I swear to you all,” he finally said. “I was as much in the dark as you. He… Lucian always appeared happy, pleased with his life. He only spoke on occasion of minor problems in his marriage, his desire to be free of all the responsibilities of work and fatherhood and being a husband, but nothing serious, you see. He always worked things out in his head, I was certain. Obviously, I never heard his cry. He never allowed me to.”
“He may well have thought you blind to the reality he lived,” Jessica suggested in an attempt to ease Vladoc's obvious pain.
“Such a waste of human life and potential…” Vladoc, unable to stand another moment in the house, tearfully made his way out into the night. Jessica feared he would blame himself for the rest of his life, not only for what had happened here, but for all the victims of his brother's quiet madness.
Jessica had to fight off the recurring image of the children upstairs. Locke's two children, aged six and seven, along with his beautiful wife, had returned early from a trip to the Florida Keys, all suntanned and healthy-looking, but now all were quite dead, each with a poem scrawled across his or her back.
From the basement, Shockley shouted for Dr. Coran to come downstairs. She reluctantly complied, taking the steps down to the blinding field of lights that had been set up in the basement. Water sloshed around her ankles as the drains fought a losing battle with the leaking pipes. “We were in the process of moving the body out of this damned deluge when this floated by.” He extended a handwritten note.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Read it. It's his last remarks. Quite incriminating.” Jessica read the note scrawled in the killer's shaky hand.
I loved them all. Even poor George. I loved each and every one of them. They were all broken-winged fairy angels, not of this world, certainly not needing to endure life on this plane a moment longer. I love all of those whom I have sent over. There was no other choice.
The note ended with Lucian Locke's familiar signature. Jessica looked up to see Kim and a retinue of uniformed police standing nearby, everyone watching as Locke's body was hoisted onto a stretcher. Only now did she see the words written in blood orange along his arms and chest.
“He tried to write himself to death,” Shockley lamely joked. “Get it? But he appears to have run out of ink. Used it all up on everyone else.”
“We found leather straps around the wife's legs and wrists,” commented one of the evidence techs who'd taken charge of the scene in the room where Evey Locke had been found. Apparendy she had not willingly complied with her husband's plan to send her to a better world. According to the ETs who worked the upstairs room, the children had been drugged into a stupor before the quill pen dug into their flesh.
“In the end, he pulled out all the stops,” said Jessica. “He didn't have time for the niceties, like convincing his victims that to have a Lucian Locke poem emblazoned on their backs was their ticket to paradise.”
Locke, his body misshapen and his hair matted and disheveled, was carried up the stairs and to one of the two waiting emergency vans, their strobe lights having wakened the entire neighborhood. As one of the ETs plunked out a rendition of “Chopsticks” on the piano next to Evey Locke, the old ME, Shockley, made his way upstairs to the children. “I want a firsthand look at the boy and girl,” he said sadly.
“Angels he had called them.” Jessica shook her head. “I'll go with you.”
“Thanks. I'll need your help.”
“We know now how he kept abreast of the investigation.”
“Yes, I heard. Through his brother, Vladoc. Don't you find it strange, though, that Vladoc didn't recognize his own brother's handwriting and poetry? After all, he was studying it, he made pronouncements on it, told us all about that Enochian thing, and yet he had no idea his brother was so deeply into this warped philosophy?”
“I've wondered the same, yes,” said Kim, who had come into the room and overheard them. “But while subconsciously he may have known, consciously I'm not so sure. I just spent time with him outside, and he's a broken man. He could not have taken part in his brother's actions. His brother's DNA will tell the story, and I don't believe he was involved from afar, like some master puppeteer.”
“Locke was the only puppeteer here,” Jessica returned. “Still, now that he's dead, we should confiscate all of Vladoc's records on his patient.”
“Just to be sure,” Shockley agreed.
“He could not have accepted such a truth; only now has he been able to, now that the evidence is irrefutable,” Kim assured them. “I held his hand, and I tell you he is horrified at what has happened to the only family he has.”
With the final evidence gathered and the last photograph of the death scenes at the Locke house taken, Jessica rushed outside to the predawn air, breathing it in deeply several times, attempting to clear her head. Nothing so affected the death investigator as the unnecessary death of a child, and here were two innocents taken. Leanne Sturtevante and James Parry had returned to the scene, and Parry asked her how she was holding up.
“I've been better. It's horrible what's happened here.”
Parry and Sturtevante confessed to having had the same discussion as the others regarding Vladoc. They all agreed that his brother had used him, duped him.
Sturtevante remained with Jessica while Parry stepped back inside for a final look around the murder/suicide house. Locke's death had been ruled as suicide in that he had caused it knowingly and willingly, when he realized the poison he'd used on himself had not been a toxic enough dosage and his attempt to hang himself also failed. Jessica now learned from Sturtevante how she had discovered Marc Tamburino in the final throes of death.
“Before he died he told me it was Locke. It was the only word he managed to speak before he choked and expired. From the mouth of a dying man. I knew it couldn't be ignored. Tamburino's back had been turned into a grid of death by Locke's letters.”
“What's amazing to me,” Jessica said, “is that he would go off like this after so carefully constructing a scapegoat in the person of George Gordonn. I suppose we can only infer that after he manipulated things so that no suspicion could fall on him, the irrational powers and forces driving Locke proved stronger than his logical mind.”
“Marc Tamburino didn't know Locke was the killer until it was too late. He figured it out as he lay dying, about the time I found him in his apartment this evening. Locke rushed out before I got there, leaving Marc still alive. I must have frightened Locke as I approached.”
Kim, who had been standing nearby listening to Sturtevante describe the path that had led her to Locke, offered her thoughts. 'Tamburino no doubt thought it a great honor to be wearing an original Lucian Locke poem emblazoned across his body to the clubs last night, I suppose.”
“Who wouldn't?” Sturtevante said. “Even Donatella thought it'd be cool to display an original Locke on her back. It's what's gotten all of them killed.”
Jessica asked for more of the details surrounding Tamburino's death.
“I carried him down to my car rather than wait for any ambulance, and I rushed him to Cellmark, the closest hospital with a poison center, but we were simply too late. An attempt to save him from the selenium, even though I could identify the poison coursing through his body, fell short. Time was not on Marc's side.”
“Didn't he die en route to the hospital?” Jessica asked.
“No, no, we had him almost stabilized when his heart stopped and no amount of effort on the part of the medical team could bring him back.”
“You did all you could for him,” said Jessica.
“I realized immediately that Dr. Harriet Plummer, who'd been seeing Locke, might well be another target, guessing that Marc was killed as much for his nosing around and asking one too many questions as anything else. He hardly fit the victim profile, and neither did Plummer, but on a hunch, I telephoned Dr. Plummer to warn her.”
“But it was too late for her as well?”
“ 'Fraid so. She was alive but just barely. Somehow she lifted the phone, and I identified myself and she simply babbled, 'I… could never… not love… Lucian. Could never say no… to him. Never could not love him.' She sounded drugged.”
“What did you do next?”
“I shouted for her to stay on the phone, to keep talking to me, and at the same time, I got someone on the line so that I could dial 911 and get a cruiser over there immediately with instructions to treat her for selenium poisoning. Plummer dropped the phone before I could get help. I made the calls and raced to her location from the hospital. “I figured that Locke had killed her, too. The man was on a rampage, just as you said, Jessica. As I drove to the Plummer location, I contacted Jim, and he met me there. The result was another corpse filled with Locke's poison and poetry. The two of us realized that the man was on a kill spree now, probably fearing that he'd be identified as the Poet Killer-that he had framed George Gordonn. At least that's my guess.”
“It sounds about right to me,” Jessica told her.
“So Jim and I asked ourselves who else might he harm? And Jim remembered the children and his wife. That's when we heard from you, and we raced to this location direct from Plummer's.”
“And Burrwith? Was he killed, too?”
“No, just disturbed to be awakened in the middle of the night, or so the officers who rushed to his home said.”
“Thanks for filling us in, Leanne, and again, my sincerest regrets over your loss of Donatella.”
“Dona was never one to play it safe; imagine, allowing Lucian Locke to write across her back.”
“Likely with the promise that he'd let her do him. A pact of sorts, to prove to each other that neither was the killer.”
“She so admired Locke's work. She knew the killer's hand was inspired by her and Locke's poetry. She confessed that much to me once.”
Jessica and Kim went toward their waiting vehicle, tired and exhausted, talking about hot baths, body oils, warm candlelight, and distancing themselves from the horror of this time and place. Jessica had left the formalities of the crime-scene investigation and the chain-of-evidence duties to Shockley, who appeared to be basking in his supervisory role in the mop-up effort. All that remained now was to make a DNA match between Lucian Locke and the teardrops left on the earlier victims. That kind of scientifically irrefutable evidence would put to rest any and all speculation about Vladoc or anyone else's having taken part in the killings.