“ Now that I can help you with,” Wainwright proudly piped up. “Know one, do you?”
“ We know and use several, but Jabez Reiley, he’s the best, though expensive.”
“ Never mind the expense. Where can we get in touch with Mr. Reiley?” Jessica asked.
Eriq put up a cautionary hand to her, taking her aside and whispering, “But Jessica, won’t you need help around here, maybe to keep that dragon lady off your back?”
She returned the whisper. “I can handle the crone, and you’d just be in the way.” She then turned to Dr. Wainwright, telling him, “I want to see every single body part your people have discovered.”
“ No problem.”
“ And I want each one photographed from every conceivable angle; have you a good man for that?”
“ Aron Porter here is an excellent photographer. One of his gifts.”
“ Good… good… Then I’ll want some, if not all, of the body parts collected, boxed and protected with your best absorbent material, okay? I’ll want to take everything back to Miami with us.” Dr. Lois Insley had gone white by this time and had found a stool upon which to perch; she now leaned against one wall, making the noises of one about to hyperventilate. Jessica quickly approached the older woman and offered her a brown paper bag to breathe into, from a supply she kept in her black valise for reasons other than sickness. Brown bags were useful for certain types of evidence gathering, items such as blood spatters on cloth, items you didn’t want to smear or to have drying out in too rapid a fashion.
Dr. Insley graciously accepted the bag, opened it wide and began breathing from it, inhaling deeply, gathering herself up. No one in the place seemed the least concerned or helpful, Jessica thought as she returned to Wainwright and said, “You want to take care of Dr. Insley first?”
“ Sure… sure… although I’d rather get Reiley on the phone for you.” But instead he went over to Dr. Insley, placed a hand on her shoulder and marched her down a corridor, where, presumably, he had her lie down to rest. Jessica hadn’t time to wonder long about their obviously strained relationship. She rocked on the balls of her feet before what remained of Precious, her attention riveted on the torn and ugly limb and the bracelet beside it.
From down the hall, a gentle sobbing welled up from the woman named Insley. Jessica thought the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown; she’d certainly overreacted to their intrusion on her private little world here- or had Precious simply gotten to her?
While Eriq did a cursory stroll about the facility, Jessica continued her examination of the would-be evidence, the two students curiously watching her.
Soon Wainwright appeared and assured Jessica that the other woman was quite all right. “Mood swings, a hormonal thing,” he whispered in Jessica’s ear-the archetypal male response to any female emotional venting too complicated for the male mind, Jessica irritated thought.
She wondered how much plotting and politicking went on in this little research hothouse. With their lives so wrapped up in this place, so focused on their jobs that their identities-who they were-had long since become inextricably mixed up with what they did. It was obvious the work was everything to them, with their whole world and worldview shaped by it. Jessica gave a thought to what Donna LeMonte so often warned her about, that she should not obsessively become Jessica Coran, FBI, ME. She worried momentarily that she might have a lot more in common with Dr. Lois Insley than she cared to admit.
Jessica had seen a look of animal fear in Dr. Insley’s eyes when they’d arrived. She had also seen the sudden loss of color in the woman’s face, replaced by a doughy pallor which reminded Jessica of how Santiva’s naturally dark, Cuban skin had gone two shades lighter by the time he’d returned to his plane seat over North Carolina on the long journey coming down. And now, as Wainwright began bringing out the accumulated body parts, each tagged and dated, and as Jessica rolled up her sleeves to go to work over each errant body part collected by Wainwright, she thought back to the plane trip down. With her hands, eyes and mind busy at her current task, she considered just how her relationship with Santiva was shaping up, even as her mind wandered back to what they knew of the killer they’d come in pursuit of.
She recalled now the killer’s taunting note to the authorities and what Eriq had revealed to her about it through the handwriting analysis-a kind of magic-he performed.
The note was written out in lean but large and hard strokes, the aggressive longhand having a character of its own, and it read:
When Jessica had looked up from the note, Santiva began working with her, explaining, spending great effort in carefully filling her in on what hidden and subconscious messages the killer had given them. “Notice he signs in the name of his god, not unlike the Zodiac Killers we’ve seen over the years.”
She nodded. “Yeah, he’s from a long line of upstanding killers. Hell, it’s easy to kill if you can pass the buck along to some demonic force within you which you conveniently have no control over. Lets you and your murderous hands off the hook, so to speak. Gives you reason and motive, and removes all personal guilt. That’s my personal favorite. What a bastard.”
“ The big excuse,” Santiva agreed, the plane having finally leveled out above the storm. “Takes away your inhibitions. Greatest excuse in the world.”
“ Ranks right up there with ‘a woman made me do it,’ ‘the Devil made me do it* and ‘God talks to me.’ Son of a — bitch.”
“ You see these little clubs at the end of each long letter, the L here, and F here and here?’’ Santiva pointed to each letter he mentioned. Jessica quick-studied them, knowing he had come up through the ranks as a documents and handwriting analysis expert. “Yeah, I see them.” “See the thin tight lines? A lot of letters you and I would loop, he makes straight up and down. See here, the G? And notice the force with which he crosses his Ts? The long extension across the page?”
“ Yeah, I see.” The lines were overlong, overdone, overwhelming, thrusting forward like lances.
Eriq continued, “The drive behind any line going forward can show excitement, energy or a lack of energy. In our man’s case, we see energy in the extreme-not a positive sign of energy, but rather in this case aggressive and unrestrained energy, sexually motivated, potent energy, even hostility, rage.”
Jessica immediately felt the truth of what Santiva was saying and sensed that Eriq was indeed a gifted handwriting analyst and interpreter, although she didn’t have much firsthand evidence to base this conclusion on. Still, she was hoping to learn more about this interesting “science” that had years ago been adopted by military authorities, police agencies and the FBI. She believed that Eriq could teach her a great deal about what he called “graphology” as they worked this case together.
“ It is a rare murderer who writes notes, letters or poetry to the press, although a surprising number do write to authorities: the Zodiac Killers, both the New York and the California one; the Son of Sam; and Jack the Ripper, to name a few,” Eriq continued. “They do so for a simple reason: they must convey their feelings about their kills- conquests-to someone. Is it safer to vent such feelings in a bar with buddies or to write authorities and taunt police? Either way, the phenomenon reveals the killer’s need to tell the world what he has done, to validate it, because he craves validation, and in this perverse validation there comes a twisted absolution. It underscores the killer’s original need to first control and then destroy other living beings, in order to convince himself and the world that he is better than the role life has meted out for him, that he isn’t a hapless nobody, that he is in fact somebody, somebody with an identity. The killing becomes a vicious circle so as to cyclically codify and warrant his own bloody identity: / kill… therefore I am. I kill therefore I am a killer… therefore I kill… thus, I become a more efficient killer… therefore I kill again… and again kill…
“ Law enforcement authorities count on this need for self-actualization, which causes men locked in cells to spill their guts to strangers in lockup with them. Writing letters that claim responsibility for brutal murders is another cry, not so much for help in most cases as a cry for recognition, a cry that shouts, ‘Look at me! I did it, and I’m somebody important for having done it.’
“ Jessica, nodding the whole time, agreed. “The thinking isn’t far removed from that of an assassin who kills merely for the purpose of seeing a picture of himself in the newspapers, or to be able to say that he’s become one with his god as a result of fulfilling his god’s wish.” Because of Jessica’s keen understanding of this and the killing mind, she squarely sided with the prosecution whenever the blood and DNA evidence was overwhelming. Given the Night Crawler’s liking for the pen, and Eriq Santiva’s genius, Jessica looked forward to a case which might prove extremely interesting while also proving or disproving some of Santiva’s theories regarding “hand- reading,” as he liked to call it.
Santiva reached from his seat to take her hand in his, guiding her fingers to one of the letters on the killer’s
