After Jessica had assured the waiter he could help them no more, noticing how his eyes roved over Judy and then her, and the man had retreated, she spoke again to Judy. “Let me tell you about Dr. Donna LeMonte.

Onshore, the Miami lights were just blinking on, and in the western skies, the heavens lived up to the word firmament. In blood-orange hues that radiated from the horizon, the sun had painted the whole area an extraordinary red- orange, save for the soft, reflected underbelly of scudding clouds which melted into muted lavenders and purples. From his sailboat, a powerful schooner-class vessel capable of great speed and endurance, Warren Tauman skillfully raised his sails to catch the new wind. The evening before, he had plotted a course that would take him in a south-by-southeasterly direction toward the Keys, and to make time, he’d gone out beyond sight of land, to catch the strongest ocean currents.

A balmy wind had come up, and forecasters had predicted that it would grow in intensity. It was a sign: It was time for him to move on. Besides, moving over the ocean at a fast clip helped reduce his anxiety and depression.

He had a great deal to be depressed about. His plans had gone well only up to a point. His ability to ensnare his victims as Patric Allain had gone wonderfully well, but what of his master plan? The one which would please him to no end, and please his faithful god, Tauto? This plan had not materialized; in fact, there had been another major setback.

Now, even as he worked hemp into tightly twisted knots and brought the ship about to take full advantage of the tropical winds, his mind went over and over his failure, which was down below in the cabin, pinned to a wall there with judicious care so as to have no pierced parts showing, so as to have her appear as lifelike as possible: a Madonna-Mother in her prime…

He now set the wheel, turning the ship for sea and watching Miami slowly, imperceptibly disappear behind his tack.

He screamed at the wind that blasted his face and body. “To hell with the games here! To hell with the FBI and the MPD and all the fools who thought they could catch me or ever understand me.”

They hadn’t come close; they had disappointed him as well. Now, they didn’t deserve his time or energy. Perhaps, elsewhere, he’d be given more attention by the press, be given the respect and awe rightly owed him. He was, after all, death incarnate.

The ship was well away now, the wind doing its work. It was a beautiful clear night in the Devil’s Triangle, where he felt at home. He set the wheel and went below to stare at his last victim once more.

She hung from the wall where the hook he’d placed through her backbone held her in place. From the frontal view, she was perfect in every way, but there was the stench he could not get rid of, and there was the seeping from every orifice, despite the huge amount of absorbent packing material he’d used in the mouth, ears and other openings. He’d discovered only too late that there was seepage out the back, where he’d so meticulously placed the hook and packed the preservative material and plaster of paris about the wound. True, this had been his first attempt at whole-body preservation. But like all the others, this one was hell-bent to refuse preservation. She’d have to be chucked overboard like those before her. “You disappoint me, Madeleine.” He spoke to her, holding up a photo of a young beauty in a wide-brimmed, theatrical hat who looked like the young woman hanging before him. “And you look so much the part… more like Mother than any of the others ever had; in fact, the resemblance to the pictures of young Mother are uncanny. But something in the mixture, perhaps the measurements, perhaps the pervasive moisture, continues to frustrate my every attempt.”

He lifted a mirror from the opposite cabin wall and placed it before the dead girl, whose form was given a lifelike pose by her outstretched and rigid arms, her feet helping to support her via the steel rods he’d fixed from the deck to the soles of her feet. He’d seen it done with the weight of tigers, so why not with her small frame?

Her body was nude. “Look at yourself; you are beautiful, Mother dear, so why do you not come to me now? Do you fear me so much?”

Warren, alias Patric Allain, looked away from the dead girl once known as Madeleine and into the mirror. In the mirror, he saw her eyes blink open and quickly close, teasing him; her fingers twitched, struggling toward life, but again only in the mirror.

Mother wanted so much to come back to him. She was trying, desperately, but now in the mirror, all was still life again, all was solidly, stolidly dead.

“ Damn you!” He slammed the mirror down onto a countertop, and although it cracked, it did not break. “Damn you for taunting me and playing these bloody games, Mother!” His anger rose, a torrential sea swell, and caught up in it, he grabbed hold of the dead girl and ripped her from her hook and the super-strength glue that held her shoulders and backside to the wall. He dragged the stiff body up the stairs to the staccato beat of its stiff limbs against the ladder.

“ It isn’t as if I were asking for the moon; it seems a bloody simple enough desire, a plain enough wish to preserve a human body without completely gutting it!”

He’d tried the mortician’s way, to no avail; it was good for only so long. He had then tried the taxidermist’s method, plying the body with the chemicals of the fish trophy people. He had apprenticed with them, had learned all their secrets-so why wasn’t it working now? Because humans aren’t fish, common sense told him. Each organ decayed at its own pace and in its own time. Maybe it would be necessary to gut the body-but then it wouldn’t be ready for Mother to inhabit and reanimate when she finally arrived. It would be a mere shell. Could all his work, all his earlier attempts, all his experimenting truly have come to this dead end?

He had done all that his god had asked of him; he had caught his mother’s spirit again and again, had made her suffer in ways even he had not dreamed possible. He had made her beg and plead for her life countless times; he had repeatedly and pleasingly humiliated her. He had raped her again and again, and still she resisted coming to him and remaining as his permanent trophy. As he struggled to get the body above deck, he cursed, “If you had any character, any character at all, you’d have come to me long ago to end the suffering I must continue to bring down upon the innocent. Mother, you putrid bitch!” He had released the three bodies at once, sacrifices to his demon god, so he had truly expected better; he’d expected Her to come to him. But this was only followed by another day and night of being unable to fill the need that drove him. And now another day had passed in which he’d had no opportunity to kill, not anyone. His god counseled patience, that the right time and opportunity would present itself, and soon, but the frustration of doing nothing-of accomplishing nothing-was overwhelming, boxing him up, making him feel small and useless and helpless and irritable and memory-ridden, so much so that he’d begun to wonder if he had been foolish to cut loose three of the dead at once-one of which he hadn’t had the use of for very long at all. A deepening depression continued to enshroud Warren.

Still, there was meaning and reason to his rash act, since he was assured by the voice of the deity driving him-a twofold purpose, in fact. He would taunt authorities for proof of the sheer fact that he could, yes, but in addition, by releasing the rotting corpses of those he’d kept in limbo, he’d be forced to go after more, to harvest others, replace those lost… to seek a higher plane, a better union with the one power capable of returning Mother to him so that he might hurt Her for all eternity.

Substitutes were no longer enough.

It hadn’t been a completely conscious path he had followed to come to this plateau of understanding, no more so than had been the decision to release three victims of his insatiable need at once. In fact, he hardly recalled cutting the ropes, and he certainly didn’t recall deciding to leave the ropes dangling from the bodies, although he did recall leaving the rope attached to their hands and throats. Was it purposeful? Was it to give authorities a taste of the fox, so to speak? He knew the authorities wanted him so badly that they might do anything to stop him, but he did not believe them capable of learning about him, locating him or stopping him. In fact, releasing three bodies at once was a slap in their collective faces, the bloody bastards. Give them not one body to ponder but three at once. It was a stroke of irrepressible genius, if he could take credit for it; but no doubt the idea had been deposited by Tauto.

Now that the collective they had the FBI working the case, Warren-or some part of him, perhaps his Tauto, his god-had decided to be more playful, to exact a higher price from those who virtually allowed his ravagings to go on, to give them more to chew on and nightmare over. Three killings were better than one. The newspapers couldn’t ignore it. The TV cameras couldn’t ignore it. The world couldn’t ignore it.

But it seemed they had pretty much ignored it. They gave it a minute and twenty-nine seconds of airtime on Channel 3; the Herald positioned it on page two while turning page one over to the President’s arms embargo of a third-world country, a big trade agreement with Japan and the death of a local politician by suicide.

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