she heard Parlen saying to Benton, “There's all kinda businesses and restaurants out on Highway 1 we could check; half a dozen or more use the number one on their logos and in advertising, like the US-1 Grill, Number 1 Golf, Tap One.”
She lifted the phone and just caught Paul Zanek about to hang up at the other end while her recorded voice was asking that he please leave a message. “Don't you people ever answer your damn phones down there anymore, Doctor?” he said.
“ Maybe if you could keep a secretary…”
He'd begun calling her “Doctor” again, which meant, for the time being, he was holding her at arm's length, shy of getting burned. “I was in a session with Parlen from Georgia, or don't you recall?”
“ Parlen? Georgia?”
“ Special Agent Neil Parlen? The Sendak case?”
“ Oh, yeah… sure… how'd it come out? You able to dig anything out of that piece of trash he calls evidence?”
“ A little something I think'll be useful for him, yeah, Paul.”
He hesitated at the mention of his name. “Get up here to my office pronto, will you? I want to run something by you.”
“ Sure, what's up?”
“ Never mind, just get up here.” He hung up.
Left holding the phone and wondering what the call was for, she realized that lately he could speak about anything and everything but what was on both their minds: What was to become of her and her little department now that he'd gone back to his wife?
Paul Zanek had lost all the allure and mystery and luster, all the romantic overtones she'd once ascribed to him. Every woman had a right to be wrong about a man, even a psychic detective on the U.S. payroll. Still, she wondered how she could've been so entirely wrong about Paul. She'd been blind, foolish, childish even. Maybe it had all been because of the death of her Aunt Aileen, the last vestige of her immediate family. Her aunt, only a few years older than she, had grown up in the care of the nuns too, and had taken punishments for Kim. Aileen had always faithfully held to the belief that one day her little niece would become an important person, and she'd encouraged Kim to strike out for her goals. She'd died of a rare, debilitating disease, and she'd died bravely, proud to the end that Kim had become an “important” person.
Kim's loss had sent her into a tailspin of grief, spiraling regrets, depression and self-pity, and Paul had played skillfully on those unhappy feelings. He'd been an easy man to turn to, to seek comfort from.
He had recently separated from his wife of eleven years, and Kim had found herself working late over cases with him one night, and in the solitary hours past 2 A.M. everyone needed someone to hold, she told herself now. Their love-making had not been so therapeutic as it had been insanely boundless, reckless beyond anything she might've envisioned. Still, his presence had for a time dissipated the darkness that she'd feared coming in on all sides.
She had a right, she'd told herself, to find some comfort, some security and warmth. And hadn't she taken from him as much as he had taken from her?
But that was then…and this is now, she reminded herself. “Now I'm an embarrassment to the bastard.” She had expected better from him.
She feared most for the foothold she'd gotten for psi studies and psychic investigation within the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI. Paul was in a position to either rubber-stamp it or deep-six it.
Benton was now showing Parlen the door. Thomas Benton was one of a handful of select young psychics recruited to round out the program. He had hardly begun the usual rigorous duties of a cadet in training when Kim had lifted him for duties in her department. According to his file, he was an unusually gifted sensitive.
Now Benton and the others in her department were all threatened, and all because of her. She'd thought Paul above the usual male traits that so often turned a beautiful affair into an ugly nightmare. But now he was doing that bitter danse macabre over the grave of the affair so typical of the male ego-stomping down the dirt. Lovemaking had ricocheted, taking out the innocent with the guilty. Lovemaking had transformed in reverse from butterfly to worm, changing into a guilt-ridden, twisting thing called remorse, poisoning Paul's memory of the incident into something to be ashamed of or hidden from. It became his fall from grace. It was as if she had had nothing to do with it, and yet, she was to blame. He set out trying to fix blame in that arrogant fashion reserved for top-level executives.
Did he fear for his position here or at home? Was he still twisting on the lance, heartbroken like she was, or was he just trying to cover his ass, wondering how much Kim had done to harm his career and his family?
The questions crested, rose and crested again like an unrelenting ocean inside her brain. What did Paul Zanek want now of her? What had he convinced himself of during his isolation from her? Why wouldn't he talk to her? Had he concluded that she had seduced him? That she had manipulated him? That perhaps she had used some psychic's spell on him for Chrissake? Sure, his attraction for her had somehow been used against him to lure him into bed, and she was some black widow spider capable of tying him in an invisible but powerful cocoon to become her helpless morsel. Yeah, right… Bastard, she now thought. How will he do it? How will he rid himself of me? Is this it, she wondered, will this call on the carpet put an end to all that I've built here?
Her fear drove her to the elevator and his office even as it wanted to find an excuse to dodge the SOB. All this while young Tom Benton looked after her with growing concern, sensing that all was not right in her world.
3
A heart is like a fan, and why?-
Twill flutter when a beau is nigh;
Oft times with gentle words he'll take it;
Play with it for a while, then break it.
New Orleans, Louisiana
Some goddamned vacation, Alex Sincebaugh thought as he finished roll one, exposure eight, calmly noting this in his notepad alongside the crude but detailed sketch he'd made of the body, its position both in relation to fixed objects at the crime scene and anatomically. His partner, Ben, always kidded him about the amount of detail he put into his thumbnail crime-scene sketches, saying, “You don't gotta do Gray's friggin' Anatomy here, Alex.”
“ Hey, a d'tail is a d'tail,” he'd respond, thinking he ought to have left town, maybe gone to the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, someplace where headquarters couldn't have so easily located him. What good was he doing anyway? There were better men in the department who ought to have control of the case, but in the NOPD things didn't work that way. You take a call here and you're the detective of record and it stays that way unless the brass steps in and pulls you off.
Ben continued the good-natured ribbing. “Only d'tail I'd like to see is my Fiona's-and mine right beside her… in bed… at home!”
Alex held a year-round pass to the University of New Orleans's sporting events, for all the good it would do, trying to match his schedule with the UNO's. Lately, it had become an impossibility. He'd also scrounged tickets to the pre-season Saints game for Saturday night, had managed to find a date, and had had to back out at the last minute due to the pressing caseload, thanks to a faceless, conscienceless creature stalking the New Orleans area like some cave-dwelling cannibal with an appetite for human hearts.
Alex's days in pre-med at Trinity at long last were being put to the test now as a detective with the New Orleans Police Department. What he didn't know about the human heart, he was quickly finding out from the library of medical books he kept in his apartment. And the skill required to sketch human organs and bodies in various
