“ How so, the wrong way?”
Otto sighed deeply. “The killings had all the earmarks of satanic ritual, and what with all that's been going on in the papers and the news lately… well, like Jess says, this guy is shrewd. So-”
“ So he has the FBI, with all its manpower and equipment and communications network, wasting valuable time and personnel on running down leads to every local satanic cult in the midsection of the country. I get the picture.”
“ Until now, we haven't had any information pointing to one perpetrator. We knew they were taking the blood, but we had made up our collective minds that it was the work of a pack of satan worshippers. One reason is the fact we already knew that one man could not drink the blood of a full-grown person at one sitting, and these were strike-and-run slayings.”
“ And you're convinced now that Dr. Coran is on the right track?”
“ Absolutely.”
“ And you. Dr. Coran… you wish to dig up some mottled old corpses from grave sites here, and here, and here,” he said, pointing consecutively at Missouri, Illinois and Iowa.”
“ That is correct, sir, and it would help greatly if you could get the court orders on each.”
“ Now you want me to do your paperwork for you?”
“ You have great influence, sir,” she replied. He frowned. “I'll see what I can do. Have the details to me before five.”
“ Yes, sir.”
“ Thank you for coming, Chief,” said Otto as Leamy rushed away.
When the door closed on them, she hugged Otto and shouted, “We did it. We've got him on our side. Isn't that why you asked him to the meeting, really?”
He held onto her, enjoying the touch of the woman, savoring the moment. “You know, you're too smart for your own good. I ought to have the right to some secrets.”
Her laughter filled the room and amid it both of them heard J.T.'s intentional noise with the projector. He was still puttering about with the slides. He had been in the projection room the entire time.
Otto instantly let her go, and she lightly blushed and quickly asked J.T. to get the details of time and place on the earlier deaths to Leamy's office.
J.T. said, “Sure, soon as I put these irreplaceable slides into the safe. See you both later. Chief Boutine, Dr. Coran.”
There was an awkward moment between them now. Otto reached out a hesitant finger toward her cheek and said, “I'm sorry if I embarrassed you with J.T. It was-”
“ No, no need to apologize… really.”
“ I'm sure he got the wrong idea.”
“ He has… well, an active imagination. It's what makes him a good lab man.”
“ Maybe it's more than imagination,” said Otto, staring deeply into her eyes.
“ Yes, perhaps…”
She thought he was going to take her in his arms and kiss her, but instead, he reached past her for the door, snatched it open and turned out the lights, rushing out ahead of her as if he were suddenly afraid of her. She stood in the hallway a moment wondering about her success with the P.P. team, and wondering if she had not inadvertently upset Otto, and wondering about the sudden emotions that they had shared like juggling burning knives, too hot and sharp to handle. She wondered how much J.T. had heard and seen; she wondered if J.T. had felt anything in the room. She certainly had.
Otto was vulnerable; his wife an invalid, in a coma at Bethesda. Jessica had no right to him, she told herself, and he truly had no interest in her in that direction. It was just the elation of the moment, the hours upon hours of working together. That was all, and that was all that J.T. needed to know.?
NINE
When alone, he went by the name he called himself when he took their blood: Teach. He often thought of himself as a teacher. Certainly, every day he taught. It was part of the job he held, to instruct. And when he killed, he taught unforgettable lessons, after all. Teach… he liked that. When he bathed, sometimes Teach used blood instead of water.
He was well read, and he had taught himself all there was to know about blood, and not just what modern medicine had to say about the substance, but what the ancients used it for, how they used it and why.
He'd read widely about the curative powers of blood, how it was a skin softener, how it restored hair. So, he lay back now in his blood-filled tub, heated by the tap water that helped to fill it. He had used up almost all of his supply, but the idea of the bath was too exciting to pass up. And it didn't fail him. He lay back, imagining the power it sent through his pores, imagining that he was inside his victim in a sense, here lying amid her, and she going through his pores, that she was her blood and her blood was her, and that it all belonged to him and him alone. Remarkable feelings rummaged about his being and his psyche, feelings of warmth and a heady feeling of belonging. He had never truly belonged anywhere… but here, with himself and his victim, like a circle without beginning, without end…
Thought was suspended, his mind arrested by the feel of her blood, the smell of it, the taste of it, for he had kept some pure, and it filled a Pepsi bottle at his side. Languid in the liquid.
He had read of great rulers like Vlad the Impaler and Genghis Khan who bathed in the blood of the people they enslaved. He supposed that he was as close to such greatness as he would ever get. The emotional impact was enough to bring a tear to his eye. He wanted no ordinary bath, and no ordinary life.
Virgin blood was hard to come by, but according to the books, it had the most curative powers. It was used as a healing agent in the diseases like leprosy and syphilis. The afflicted parts and organs had to be washed in it, and this application of blood to the skin caused it to glow with supernatural beauty. He had read of how the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory in the early 1600s had murdered over six hundred girls to have them drained of their blood so that she might bathe nightly in blood and thereby remain forever beautiful and healthy. She, too, preferred virgins.
“ Of course, there were a lot more of them in those days,” he said, chuckling and splashing.
Blood was, after all, the source of life, he reasoned. His medical knowledge told him it was the source of two life-sustaining liquids: milk, which was blood filtered through the breasts; and semen, blood filtered through the testes.
Blood had great magnetic power, and it fascinated him. Gods and demons alike were attracted to the smell of it, just as Teach was attracted by it, especially shed blood… the blood of those violently slain. It was not killing and murder itself that attracted him, but the shedding of blood. The ancients who sacrificed blood to the gods were foolishly wasteful. He was not.
He had scoured occult literature for every word written on blood, and he had found that some occultists believed as he did, that the vital essence of life was actually an invisible and intangible vapor, and the medium for that vapor was blood. As far as he was concerned, modern medicine was full of shit. It was not the heart that caused the blood to flow, but the spirit within the blood. It connected the material and the spiritual spheres like a cosmic, astral tissue. The Bible said it best, Teach thought: The life of the flesh is in the blood.
“ Leviticus 17:11,” he said with a sigh as he dipped into the blood with his cupped hands and poured it over his head, laughing.
The phone rang. He cursed it, let it ring. No doubt the office. Bastards. Hardly back from being on the road for them, and they can't give him a few hours peace and solitude.
“ I am the blood and the life,” he said.
The answering machine clicked on and he lay back to the sound of his own voice. Then came his boss's grating voice like a serrated knife over his brain.
“ We've got orders to fill down here!” shouted his boss. “Where the hell've you been? Time is money, mister! Want to see your ass at HQ by three!”
Christ, he thought, if he had to go in in the middle of the day, he'd have to cover up, wear the wide-brimmed
