turned twenty, before she had an opportunity to turn his life into a shambles. He wanted her when she was not much more than a child. He wanted most to kill her at a time in her life before she had given birth to him.
The corpse he’d just thrown overboard was now out of sight, flushed from the wake of his ship like so much refuse. He wondered what authorities would make of this last one, all those chemicals pumped into her… the hook in her back…
It would be such a deviation from the others. He had experimented on some of the others’ limbs, a hand here, a leg there, but this was the first time he had left one whole, preserved body. It would serve only to confuse and anger the faceless people who pursued him. The recent papers carried a photograph of a pair of FBI investigators, one a man, the other a woman, who were in dogged pursuit of clues leading to his whereabouts, or so the reporter said. A total exaggeration, so far as Warren could make out. Still, he knew that when his skin told him to get, he should get, and so he had instinctively decided to flee.
He returned now to the wheel and steered his ship, the ocean pleased with his work, in harmony with him. He was one of two beings in the universe which the ocean smiled upon. The other was his god.
He returned in his mind to those first killings in London. He had enjoyed each better than the one before, his ritual of humiliating and creating suffering in his victims becoming more and more elaborate as he went, more exciting and satisfying as he continued building onto the ritual labyrinth of inducing pain and horror in his prey. They were all so easy to kill; but it took some imagination to torture them, and so his imagination grew.
After his thirteenth victim, he began to keep a record of his activities-”perversions,” the press called them. His diary chronicled his methods of torture, but also his work in attempting to perfectly preserve one of his victims-a thing which if accomplished, he could stop killing, he was sure. If he could find a way to capture Mother’s soul and keep it captive inside a perfectly preserved double of her, then he wouldn’t have to go on killing; there would be no point, and he would be at peace with Tauto.
When he’d first started killing, most of the women, at first, little resembled his mother except in age and habit- they were all whores. The London Times and other newspapers in England had called him a modern-day Jack the Ripper because he worked the infamous White Chapel District where the Ripper had done his work. But he was no ripper. He took no delight in mutilating the beautiful female form, and he detested the odor and the sight of blood. He didn’t cut the bodies open. In fact, other than suffocating and drowning them, he barely touched his victims during his first forays into murder. At first, he was rather shy about it, actually, rushing it and running quickly from the deed.
The elaborate scheme to somehow fetch his mother from the nether regions into which he himself had sent her, to return her to himself so that he might inflict eternal suffering on her, only evolved over long time and experience with murder.
Those first fledgling attempts at feeling something, of making contact with his own soul, with which he had become unfamiliar, were important bridges. They were bridges leading to the soul of his dead mother as well, although he had been awkward, crude and blind in his murdering meanderings. Only when he found the teachings of Tauto and read them, understanding that all things in life carried a spiritual double, did he realize that it might be possible to recapture the moment of murdering his mother through the soul of a stand-in. Rudimentary as they were, those first killings became the cornerstone upon which he had built a relationship with his god and his deceased mother.
Tauto, in his great wisdom, told Warren to leave London and to seek his mother’s image in younger women, women who in every way mirrored her as she was the year of Warren’s birth. He calculated that she was between sixteen and eighteen when she gave birth to him, so he had sailed from England to America in search of a fresh start and a fresh approach to his problem. Now, in the land of milk and honey, along the sun-drenched coasts of Florida, he had found what he had come in search of many times over…
Still, he remained unfulfilled, his need insatiable, so long as Mother remained aloof and out of reach, capable of tormenting him at will.
He brought his pleasure craft into the wind and looked forward to his return trip to the Keys and beyond, perhaps a little trip to the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of Florida. He’d heard that Tampa Bay and the Naples area were both beautiful this time of year…
Jessica yawned even as she worked over her microscope at the crime lab this morning. She hadn’t gotten much in the way of sleep the night before, tossing and turning due to her earlier argument with Eriq and a late-night phone call from Dr. Kim Desinor which only solidified the fact that their killer was a sailor, and an elusive one at that. The psychic’s take on the killer told Jessica she was looking for a man with a frightful multiple personality disorder, possibly schizophrenic, with a brain full of voices, certainly delusional and possibly hallucinating. “This man convinces people to go off with him, Kim,” she’d challenged Desinor. “How can he be hallucinating and in control at the same time?” “I get the picture of a complex personality-complex.”
“ Say that again.”
“ I mean, he plots out his actions against his victims, Jess, but he’s also quite mad, not unlike your old friend Matisak.”
“ I get the picture.”
“ And he’s a man of many disguises who has seawater for blood.”
Jessica pictured the pretty psychic at the other end of the line. She was sharp and intelligent and quick, and most of the time, in one fashion or another, she was right, her instincts dead-on. However, Jessica had learned to take what Kim said with caution. She saw signposts and symbols as often as she saw actualities, so every word had to be weighed in the context of its possibly being a reflection of some other meaning.
“ Your killer has many ties, but he has no ties.” Enough with the riddles, Jessica thought, but kept silent.
“ He is tied to his past. He is filled with venomous anger, a fiery rage, and he is on some sort of bizarre quest to locate something he lost as a child-some great object he must regain.”
“ He’s murdering young women to regain something he’s lost. Now that’s a bulletin, Kim,” Jessica replied, unable to hold back on her sarcasm any longer. “That hardly narrows my search.”
“ There is one other thing.”
It sounded as if Kim was about to give out with the good stuff. “Go on.”
“ The letter T which he signs with…”
“ Yes, well, we’ve come to expect tea with this crumpet.”
Kim paused before saying, “Cute, Jess. I read about the accent, and that maybe the guy is British. You’re thinking there may be some validity to it, but be cautious. He’s a player, a thespian if you get my drift, so the accent could well be part of his act.”
“ Are you saying he’s a pro?”
“ If not, very close to it, yes. Now, back to the cross-T signature.”
“ What can you tell me about it?”
“ It’s actually the sign of the Tau Cross; a cross in the shape of a T. I had a friend in the department, Peter Ames, an expert on ancient markings, look it over.”
“ And?”
“ He says it has an ancient and rather mysterious history. It has a history as a Christian marking, but there’s also an offshoot religion called the Tau which keeps coming up in the literature.”
“ And? What about it?”
“ Well, very little is known about it, but he says one thing is sure.”
“ What’s that, Kim?”
“ Human sacrifice was part of the deal.”
“ Why am I not surprised?”
“ One other thing, Jess.”
“ Yes?”
“ He’s like a confused or wounded animal-he’s extremely dangerous.”
“ We know that much.”
“ He makes love to the dead; he’s a necrophile.”
“ There’s no way to know that scientifically since all evidence of such… such perversion was washed away by the sea. We know the women were raped, but how can you be sure he… he does their bodies?”
