… the blood of the moon steeps through me, but you cannot find me, as I have disappeared into your darkness, while seeking out your flesh, only to find instead your deepest secret.
Jessica encouraged Kim to rise to her feet. Together they sized up each other's tolerance level, and without words, each decided she would go on from here to autopsy room number three. “Something in me needs to get this done tonight,” Kim insisted.
“All in one fell swoop? Kim, suppose it puts you out of commission for the duration of the case?”
“I can't tell you what it is; all I can tell you is that I have to… I must see all three victims in quick succession. That is what my intuition is telling me.”
Autopsy room number three housed the third victim, as Shockley had told them. The doctor stood waiting at the door, a grim look on his face, a single wave of the hand inviting them in; the stance and manner of his invitation called to mind a maniacal ringmaster in a circus, but Shockley's little circus had death in all three rings.
The seasoned old ME had prattled on about the increase in crime and the necessity for still more autopsy rooms and MEs to do the work. He moaned over the circumstances, the fact that hospital pathologists knew less today than they had known when butchers and barbers were the local coroners. Then, apropos apparently of murder-minded barbers, he started telling them how he had recently seen a revival of the musical Sweeney Todd at the local opera house. Finally, he muttered to Jessica, “Don't suppose you'd care to come to work for me, heh?” His wrinkles danced with his laughter, the gray-framed eyes twinkling.
The third victim, although male, possessed a soft and beautiful countenance like the deceased women: a pouting mouth, high cheekbones, and skin every bit as flawless as the other two victims. “Beginning to see a pattern here,” Jessica said to the others.
As if wanting to get it over with, Kim had instantly put her gloved hands on the body. From her deep trance, she struggled to say, “This one, like Micellina, thought the killer loved him.”
“How long had he known him?” asked Jessica, fishing for more detail.
“Forever and never, but perhaps only since nineteen.”
Jessica was beginning to feel some of the angst Parry felt around Kim. She always spoke in riddles, because she saw in images, symbols as opposed to facts. Jessica knew it was useless to ask if she meant nineteen days, weeks, years, or since the young man's nineteenth birthday. Instead she asked, “What does he look like?”
“An angel, like Michael, the Messenger… angel on a rampage. The letters arranged spell quark!'
Jessica moaned, but managed to ask, “Quark? As in physics?”
“Astrophysics,” Shockley corrected.
“Like the way rampage came to me; in Ouija-board fashion; now the word quark has arranged itself.”
Jessica felt this line of questioning useless. So she changed her tactics, asking, “Hair color?”
“Like light.”
“Light? Light gray, light brown?”
“Light… like white jewels, like goldenness open to the sky.”
Giving up on hair, Jessica asked, “Eyes?”
“Lime green, radiant, radiating light. A green reflecting pool.”
“Sounds gorgeous, or maybe not… Maybe the SOB wears contacts?”
Jessica knew from experience with Kim that no image could be taken at face value; lime-green eyes might simply mean that the killer saw life through a green lens. Lime suggested bitterness, so perhaps the killer saw the world as green bile, slime even, the opposite of green lawns and green as the color of hope, new life, and growth. She knew that the moment one locked down on the meaning of a psychic image, it was hard to shift the idea. Like interpreting dream images, there was more art to it than science. Certainly, psychic symbols and representations could not be taken on face value.
“How tall is our man?”
“A giant in his eyes.”
“How is he in bed?”
Dr. Shockley gasped, then laughed at this.
“No way to know. He did not sleep with the women; he sees the women as virginal, pure, angelic.”
“Virginal? Are you sure? They're both over twenty.”
“It's how he, the killer, perceived them.”
“And the young man?”
“Virginal as well.”
“A virgin? Are you sure?”
Shockley, shaking his head, put in, “The boy's twenty-three years of age. He's hardly likely to be a virgin at his age, unless of course he was raised a Mormon!”
Kim countered, saying, “It appears… that is, it feels so.”
“Feels so to the killer, you mean?” asked Jessica.
Kim shook her head. “No, feels so to me, here and now.”
“I didn't bother to look with the women,” Shockley confessed, “whether or not… the question of their virginity…” His shoulders rose as if attached to puppet strings as he stared across the cadaver at Jessica. “It isn't something one goes looking for, not since the late seventies anyway. Once I established that there was no sexual assault, I saw no need to… to search any further, you see.”
“Do it now, for the first victim, the Petryna woman, and I'll check the Mercedes woman,” suggested Jessica.
“But the police told me that each had multiple boyfriends, including our young Mr. Barona Gaitano, here.”
Kim erupted, saying, “Barona? His name was Barona?”
“Changed his name to it, yes. Was Luis. Quite a leap, wouldn't you say? Gaitano's his real name, though.”
“Barona Gaitano… has a showbiz sound to it, doesn't it?” asked Kim.
Ignoring this, Jessica said, “Check on victim one's virginity, Dr. Shockley. See if there is any evidence of sexual activity or assault. I'll do the same for the other woman.”
“Will do.”
Returning to where victim numbers one and two had been stored, Dr. Shockley at their side, Jessica said, “If they could be proven to be virgins, and if we can determine that the young man was saving himself for a true love, it will tell us something about the sort of people the killer targets, and it will hand us one more piece to add to our jigsaw puzzle.”
Kim agreed. “Yes, this could all figure into the killer's game plan. If he selects virgins as his victims, flawless in every way, it tells us something about him.”
The white-haired Shockley nodded all the way down the corridor, muttering, “Virgin sacrifices? Is that what we're dealing with here? It'd be a first for me! Unfortunately, there is no way to prove it.”
They soon had their answer when Shockley examined the first body and Jessica examined the second. The attendant was annoyed to remove the cadaver from its freezer compartment for a second time and wheel it into the room where Shockley worked. Beside him, Jessica quickly examined victim number two for any signs of sexual activity. Kim anxiously looked on, pacing behind her.
“False alarm,” announced Jessica, who felt no surprise in learning that Caterina Mercedes was no virgin. Shockley had come to the same conclusion with respect to Micellina Petryna.
Kim, looking on, said, “I felt it so strongly.”
“No more virgins out there to sacrifice, I'm afraid,” the old coroner said.
“As for the male,” Kim began, “only his friends-”
“Could possibly know,” finished Jessica.
Shockley added, “And they might not tell. Something else Sturtevante needs to run down.”
After some silence, Jessica heaved her shoulders and sighed. “Nothing else to accomplish here. I can listen to Shockley's protocols on tape at my leisure, back at the hotel.”
But a revolving red light went on in Shockley's lab, a sure signal that another corpse was on its way, and a moment later, the doors to the crime lab burst open and an attendant wheeled a corpse through.
“Dear God,” muttered Shockley through grinding false teeth. “We've got another one.” He ought to have been apprised of the body's earlier discovery so he could have sent out an evidence tech unit to sweep the crime scene.
“Dammit,” Jessica muttered. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“We've screwed up is what it means,” Shockley replied as he rushed for a look at the body and to speak with the attendant.
“I left messages, Doctor. Didn't anyone find you?” the attendant was asking when Jessica and Kim joined the ME.
“Not a word. We've been in and out of the autopsy rooms and the freezers,” Shockley replied. Then a second young attendant rushed in shouting, “Dr. Shockley, Tim Brothers somehow stupidly turned off the red-light special, and what with the panic button off, none of us knew. I mean, we just now learned. It's another male victim of that poison-pen guy.”
This was obvious, as the victim lay facedown in the gurney, the glaring, ugly poetry on his back dried with blood, red and rusty. “Damn it all, man, tell me something I don't know. All right, let's have a look at this latest victim, shall we?”
With the three of them in surgical garb, they moved toward the Poet Killer's fourth suspected victim.
“Looks all too familiar.” Kim's remark came with the tones of fatigue and frustration.
Again they found themselves in autopsy room number one, where Jessica read aloud the toe tag, anton pierre, even as she stripped away the sheet to reveal the male corpse. Anton's eyes, wide open and sea blue to emerald green, displayed the usual marble like stare, stony and without life, but the color, like those of the other victims, mesmerized and made one believe some life danced just behind the stillness. Jessica wanted to reach for the stethoscope to make certain this beautiful, untouched victim- untouched but for the now familiar poetic scars on his back-lay just beyond in the realm of sleep, not death.
He hadn't been deep-frozen and thawed out, she silently told herself. Not like the others. He hardly looked dead; it hardly seemed possible that the healthy-looking person on the slab could be a corpse. “Perfection,” muttered Kim.
“Once again,” Jessica agreed. “Now it's even; two women, two men, for a total of four victims.”
Shockley added, “Another perfectly proportioned man at that. Look at those pecs.”
“Forget the pecs. Look at the rest of him,” said Kim, with a slight shake of the head.
Jessica added, “And his skin.”
“More darkly tanned than the others.”
“Hardly what you'd call a sun worshiper, however.”
“Not a freckle or a mole on him.”
“It's as if it's a prerequisite-a flawless complexion-to die in this manner,” finished Jessica.
Although the victim's skin in this case was several shades darker than the women and the other man, the body itself, displayed as it was, showed not a single blemish, save for the normal discoloration to the frontal areas, face, chest, and legs, where the blood had settled. Obviously, once again the victim had been left facedown to display the handiwork of the Poet Killer to authorities. Thus gravity had caused the blood to pool in areas of the front, creating large purplish splotches on the skin.
Jessica stared across the cadaver and into Kim's eyes. “Is it only coincidence that Anton Pierre, Barona Gaitano, Micellina Petryna, and Caterina Mercedes all have such extraordinary features? It must fit into the killer's fantasy, whatever that fantasy might be.”
“Agreed,” Kim replied, staring at Anton Pierre's perfectly proportioned body and beautiful face. “Some people would kill for a body that looks like these.”
“And obviously someone has,” Shockley put in.
“Think you want to try a 'deep read' on Pierre?”
Kim bit her lip, sighed heavily, and nodded. “I'll do what I can.”
Jessica stared across the cadaver at her colleague and friend, Kim Desinor, whose complexion rivaled those of the two dead women for purity. Kim had shoulder-length hair these days, the natural flip framing her large, energy-filled eyes and accentuating her high cheekbones. “Fearful you'll use up all your magic our first day?” asked Shockley, who remained skeptical of Kim's psychic abilities.
Kim didn't answer, her gloved hands now moving like two markers over a Ouija board as she gritted her teeth in concentration. Jessica again thought how perfectly beautiful she was.
“It is rather a radical, even alien idea nowadays, but regardless of their sexual proclivities, our killer may well have seen these four as virginal in some context only he fully understands. We may rule it out as a fact, but we shouldn't rule it out as a fantasy, part of the killer's fantasy,” Kim suggested.
“Yeah, he may have so strongly wanted it that way that he saw them as such, regardless of facts,” agreed Jessica. “It's the kind of designation or imprinting a madman might stamp on his victims.”
“I recently had a case of murder after months of stalking,” said Shockley, “and the shooter did just that. He saw his victim as pure, put her on a pedestal, and when she inevitably fell off it, he killed her.”
Jessica had learned to put aside the horror of such moments, that so much human potential and life itself had been snuffed out as one might crush a caterpillar underfoot. So much waste. All the victims were young, with so much lying ahead of them, each barely out of the teen years. Wasted… the single word said it all, a waste of human promise and potential. No one could imagine what might have burgeoned from these beginnings.
Jessica realized that the image of the virginal soul, or the state of actual virginity, might not fit here, but the appearance of it-that is, the physical appearance of purity displayed by each body-might have a great deal to do with the killer's choice of victims. That it might well play into his selection process. “Perhaps the Poet wanted a perfectly unblemished 'slate' to write on. It might be that the killer, while not strictly interested in virgins in the literal sense of the word, did find people who gave the appearance of purity in one form or another.”
“While not virgins, they may have easily given that impression of innocence and naive that proved, in the end, the most alluring trait of the virginal or celibate life,” agreed Kim. “Virginal behavior, virginal by nature, virginal appearing, or a combination of all three.”
Jessica silenced herself as Kim's psychic persona took center stage once again.
Kim's energies, however, had been drained like a used-up battery from the earlier readings. She received little from Anton Pierre, save the overwhelming sense of confusion, mixed with a bit of awe. She concluded in a few flat words: “He never knew what hit him. Didn't see it coming. Innocence sums him up, innocence and perplexed ignorance of how he came to be dead.”
“And as for being, as Madonna says, 'like a virgin'?”
“The overwhelming trait I get coming through is confused innocence, like a child who has been lied to. Again the number nineteen and the words rampage and quark returned during my reading. Something insistent there.”
“You think the killer is nineteen and on a rampage, his mind 'quarked'?”
“Such a direct interpretation would only lead us in a wrong direction. No, the nineteen is a symbol for something greater than age. And as for the word rampage… again it may hold some other meaning we are not aware of or do not normally associate with the word. The same will likely be true of quark. We need to pursue these words and the symbolic meanings ascribed to the number nineteen. I'll set myself that task.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Our killer's MO is certainly not one of a man on a rampage, so I must assume it stands for something other than our normal interpretations would allow.” Jessica's eyes lit up with a notion. “Perhaps its opposite, then, rampage equals peace, serenity, perhaps what serenity betokens? Absolute peace?”
“Possibly, but I'm not at all certain at this point.”
While Jessica and Kim were talking, Dr. Shockley had been on his cell phone, taking heat for having not responded to the call at the murder scene. Jessica imagined that a nearby hospital pathologist or someone on Parry's team had had to be called in to walk the grid and to pronounce the victim dead before authorities ordered it shipped off to Shockley.
Dr. Shockley now said, “Couldn't tell you for a certainty, but I'm suspicious that my superiors are pissed off. Meantime, I am tired and I am retiring-for the night at least. Jessica and Kim, good night. Carl will be nearby to help you out and to lock up.”
The sound of the closing door reverberated throughout the lab when the old man disappeared. Jessica said, “I agree. Let's save our sanity and get out of here for now. Come at it fresh in the a.m.”
“Agreed. Bed is waiting.”
The women made their way out of the semidarkened crime lab, secure in the belief that they had done all that was possible for the night, and that Carl would put Anton Pierre's body on ice; they found the elevator and took it to the ground floor.
“If we extrapolate from one body to the next, all that appears before us is a series of fine, hairless, flawless young specimens.” You are your father's daughter, Jessica, she heard herself say to this. Reducing a life to the word specimen had been an ongoing argument between them when he was alive. He maintained that an ME must be as objective and emotionally controlled as his scalpel. She maintained that the more the ME knew about the personality of the victim, the more he or she could tell with a scalpel.
“You were right, Jessica, to suggest that our victims have, if not the actual and physical status of virgins, then the mental state of virgins. Petryna's soul was virginal on exiting this life in the sense that she and the others never harmed a living thing, ever. They were the kind of people who, as they say, couldn't harm a fly. I get that much from my readings.”
“Are you sure they all had this sort of nature?”
“I'm quite sure of that much.”
“Meaning the killer may have liked them that way?”
“Perhaps…” Kim muttered. “I couldn't say for a certainty.”
“A big maybe.” In the cramped car of the elevator, Jessica bit her lower lip as she went over what she had seen so far. Her thoughts felt at odds, a bewildered one combating with a chaotic one, the clash creating only larger confusion. She threw in a healthy dose of anger and frustration at having missed out on Anton Pierre's crime scene. She imagined how angry James and Sturtevante must be at the forensics team at this moment-missing in action during a key crime-scene investigation. She excused her absence on the grounds of complete exhaustion as the elevator doors opened at ground level, and she and Kim made their way to the hotel on foot, taking in the night air.
Once they reached the brightly lit hotel, they staggered to the lobby elevator and rode it up to their rooms. They said their good-nights when Jessica, her room on a lower level, stepped off the elevator. Jessica imagined that Kim, like herself, would fall directly into bed and into a deep silence and weariness called sleep.
The following day at Shockley's morgue
“Sad to see such healthy people die so uselessly,” Dr. Shockley muttered. “When I think how useless my old bones have gotten… Sad to see these bodies go to the crematorium or the grave. Waste of excellent cadavers, which we could use around here for instructing the med students.”
“You're not into the body-snatching business now, are you?” Jessica asked, knowing what a great demand existed for such excellent specimens as the three corpses now in Shockley's care.
“If I thought I could talk the next of kin into it, I'd split the proceeds,” he said, and cackled again.
“Well, you routinely hand them the papers to sign for permission to harvest body parts, so why not pursue it with the families?”
“One in a million can walk away from the remains of a loved one. Forget about it. Still, just look at this Adonis. Hardly looks dead, does he? Am I right? What a specimen of Homo sapiens.”
“Fact is he looks like that statue of David,” Jessica observed.
“Michelangelo's David?” Kim asked. “I don't see the resem-”
“No, no, not Michelangelo. The infamous one that looks like the boy David most likely looked like, the one by the sculptor Donatello.”
“Oh, yes, I know the piece you mean. A portrayal of David at the time of his slaying of Goliath, presented as the pubescent child he had to have been at the time rather than a muscular Hercules.”
“Donatello, living in the mid-fifteenth century, defied conventional wisdom. He believed in being true to nature and history. I've always admired his perfectly horrifying rendition of the street prostitute Mary Magdalen as well.”
They had come back fresh to examine Anton Pierre's body, and Jessica, staring hard at the handsome face through a high-intensity magnifying glass, noticed an unusual pattern. “I see a blemish or the faint remains of a rash, I believe, on his forehead.”
They had found small areas of patchy redness on all the victims caused, Jessica believed, by the toxin.
“Just another rust-colored rash?” asked Shockley, coming closer to have a look.
“No, no discoloration. Rather a faint shadow under the scope. Take a look.”
'Teardrops,” said Shockley.
'Teardrops? No way. Teardrops form a line as they drop down the face. These are polka-dot fashion. Besides, they're above the eyes.”
“Let me put some infrared light on the subject,” Shockley suggested. “Hit the light switch on the wall beside you, Dr. Desinor.”
Kim did so, and except for the red glow of the infrared light Shockley held over the dead man's striking features, pitch darkness surrounded them. Their white lab coats turned a Day-Glo purple.
Studying the supposed rash more closely now, Jessica could clearly see a pattern of small circles with rivulets running away from each, all under the red glow, all about the young man's forehead.
'Teardrops,” Shockley again said.
“But the splatter pattern is… all wrong, as if…”
“Yes, I agree. Jessica, dear, we finally have something the killer left behind.”
“Then the tears are his; the killer's left his secretions on the victim?” asked Kim.
“We'll have to lift his DNA with great care. I have just the fixative and gel for the job,” Shockley assured her.
“Are you sure? We damage it, it's gone. Are you sure we shouldn't simply do an electron bombardment photo?”
“And destroy the only evidence we have?”
“We'd have the photos.”
“Photos will tell us nothing. We can't test the photos for human DNA properties. These teardrops, if we can lift and fix them, can tell us if our killer is male or female, his approximate age, skin color, what kind of secretor he is, possible blood type. Of course, this will take some time.”
“The green,” said Kim, taking Jessica's arm. “It was green tears that I saw. The green reflecting pool. He cries in the color green.”
“Green tears?” asked Jessica, her voice giving way to confusion.
“I didn't recognize it before, but the green pool I saw- he cries in green for all the lost hopes, dreams, intentions of this world that have never come to fruition. He cries for the loss of angelic aspirations.”
An attendant in blue surgical garb stuck her short-cropped head through the door and said, “Pardon, Dr. Shockley, but the red light is spinning again, and there's a call for Dr. Coran and Dr. Desinor. The caller says it's urgent.”
“I'll take it,” said Jessica.
Kim followed Jessica back toward her temporary office to take the call, but Kim said she had to find some caffeine and sugar quickly or she would keel over, so they parted near the elevators. Jessica took the call alone.
Detective Sturtevante's voice rang out. “Sorry to disturb you there, but this is about the case Jessica thought she detected a tinge of sarcasm. “Go ahead.”
“Then you haven't heard? I thought Parry and you were tight.”
“Heard what? I haven't seen or heard from Parry since you left together, yesterday.”
“Unfortunately, we think we may have victim number five already. If it's true, this guy's really stepped up his timetable in a big way.”
“Can you send a squad car for Dr. Desinor and me?”
“It's waiting for you outside the lab, east exit of the building.”
“Thanks. See you when we arrive and we're all sorry about the confusion of the other-”
“And Dr. Coran…”
“Yes?”
“Good to have you on the case. Don't think I had the opportunity to say so before.”
“ 'Predate it, Lieutenant.”
“I know we need all the support we can muster on this one.” Leave it to Sturtevante to call me support staff, Jessica thought. “Right. Male or female?” she asked.
“Come again?”
“The victim, male or female?”
“Male, but he pretends otherwise.”
“Come again?”
“Likes dressing up in women's clothes. He's something of a… let's say an androgynous sort.”
“I see.”
“Might have something to do with all this, you think? This look of the victims? To me, they all appear to be rather difficult to pinpoint as to sex. The men are as pretty as the women.”
“Perhaps, could be. We've been remarking on the same thing here. I mean to say that their lifestyles, all of the victims, were…” She hesitated. “In one fashion or another, they were atypical, sexually speaking.”
“Agreed. And they dressed the part, playing down which sex they belonged to, playing down their sexual characteristics. Add to that the thin, lithe bodies, none of them dating in the normal sense, all looking for some spiritual answer to the sexual dilemma.”
“You've given this some thought.”
“I have, yes.”
“I did notice the asexual nature of the bodies, both the two females and the feminine males. Long, slender, no telling them apart from the back, even difficult from the front, such small breasts on the women.”
“Yes, the killer's body type of choice.”
“Could have a great deal to do with what's going on inside his head.”
“We'll never know if he decides one of these days to take his own medicine.”
“You think he may be suicidal?”
“His poetry leads me to think so, yes.”
“We've duplicated the poems and have had them forwarded to every teacher and professor in the area and beyond, to see if anyone recognizes the handiwork,” Jessica told her.
“Good thinking. As you know, I'd already started down that road with the local professors at the university. Listen, I must rush off. I'm glad we've had this chat.” The detective abruptly cut the connection, and Jessica wondered for a moment if the androgynous nature of all the victims had spoken more to Lieutenant Leanne Sturtevante than to others working the case. She wondered momentarily about Sturtevante's sexual orientation. Then she admonished herself for the thought.
“Kim!” she called out to Desinor as her Mend passed by the office, a cup of steaming coffee in one hand, a half-eaten Snickers bar in the other. Kim poked her head inside, asking between chews, “What was the call about? Who was it, Parry?”
Jessica stepped around the desk and walked over to Kim, taking the coffee and sipping from it. “Thanks, I needed that.”
“Hey, go get your own.” Kim retrieved the cup.
“There's been another killing, Kim.”
“Oh, Jesus. Our boy has gotten busy since our arrival, hasn't he?”
“Yeah, I'm afraid he's been bad again-”
“Damn him-or her,” Kim corrected herself. “Damn.”
“In any case, the killer has struck again, and we're up to bat.”
“What about Shockley?”
“This one's our house call. I think Shockley knows it. They already have a car waiting on us at the east exit of the building. Let's go.” Jessica grabbed her medical bag and a lab coat.
“Right behind you.”
Shockley saluted them as they passed by his office and found the elevator. Jessica got the distinct impression Dr. Leonard Shockley looked upon all the care and political tiptoeing being done around him as so much silly cloak-and-dagger.
“Have a good time at the show,” he called out to the two ladies standing before the elevator.
Jessica and Kim smiled. The elevator arrived and they stepped aboard.
“What do you think of old Dr. Shockley?” Kim asked.
As the elevator descended, Jessica replied, “I think he's good for my ego.”
“That goes without saying.”
“But he's also shrewd, and I believe at some point he'll declare himself.”
“Declare himself?”
“Show his true colors, make his professional move. He has great acumen. That much he proved with the tear find.” 'True enough, but you've got to believe that some of us co-inhabitants on the planet are genuine, Jess.”
“Some few, sure.” Jessica placed a hand on Kim's shoulder, reassuring her. “You know I'd trust you with my life, as I have in the past.”
“Same here.”