“ But she was… acting so… normal…”
“ How… how long've you known, really known, about my connection with the FBI?” Kim asked Alex.
“ I didn't know for sure until tonight, when Meade gave you away, but I'd wondered about it last time I saw you and Dr. Coran together. Something about your relationship. The way the two of you worked together; maybe 'cause you were working too hard to appear to dislike one another. I don't know.”
“ She was cured, you know,” Mrs. Raveneaux said, “by her doctors in Stockholm. She even lived in Europe with one of her doctors, a man she claimed to love, and they were happy for a time… just before she showed up on our doorstep again.”
“ When was that, Mrs. Raveneaux?” asked Alex.
“ Ohh… ohhh…maybe a little over a year ago And you know Victor had been gone by then, and we… the general and I didn't have anyone else, you know, not really… not family, that is… and we did love her so. We loved both our children very, very much, but neither of them were ever completely… all right, you realize? Victor always seemed the feminine one and dear Dominique was so dastardly toward him, so mannish. We tried to break her of it, especially after the… the incident…”
“ When Dominique hurt Victor that first time, you mean?”
“ Sweet Victor, such a sweet-hearted boy, really… did the authorities ever find him? Completely disappeared. Isn't that right, Maurice?”
The general let go of his dead daughter, laying her gently down amid the spoiled bisque she'd earlier prepared, reaching up now for his infirm wife instead. The two older people held fast to one another.
“ She was doing so well,” he muttered into her ear before he continued sobbing.
Jessica surveyed the complete mess that had been made of the once-spotless kitchen. Landry was being helped from the freezer, but the frozen-handed cop wouldn't let go of something he had carried out with him. Jessica and Alex joined the captain and together they stared down at a solidly frozen human heart.
“ Thommie Whiley?” asked Kim from across the room, voicing all their thoughts.
A shivering Landry replied, “C-c-could be, but there're're two o-o-others inside.” His teeth still chattered on after his words were finished.
Jessica stared at the frozen heart, and then past it into the freezer. “Forensics'll have to match each one through DNA tests.”
“ What the hell was she doing with the hearts? Why keep 'em in the freezer?” Stephens's astounded question came out in tentative fashion.
“ Keepin”em on ice, obviously,” Jessica said, Meade staring now over her shoulder into the fog of the freezer.
“ But for what?” Meade asked.
“ Her secret ingredient in the gumbo bisque stew, would be my guess,” replied Jessica, who now turned and lifted a pointed stiletto kitchen knife, then bent and jabbed one of the chunks of meat from the stew which had discolored the tiles when Dominique had pulled the boiling liquid over onto herself and Alex during their struggle.
“ What is that?” asked Stephens, squinting.
Meade turned his attention to the red chunk of flesh as well.
Jessica simply replied, “It's nothing I've ever eaten.”
The general's eyes had widened on seeing the frozen heart come from his freezer, and now his eyes widened further. He softly pushed away from his wife, telling her to go upstairs now. “You don't want to hear any more of this, Cor-etta…Coretta dear, just go on ahead.”
She did as instructed, the docile puppy once again, glancing back only once at her dead child on the kitchen floor. When she was out of earshot, the general said, “She couldn't've been using the hearts of dead men in her cooking. She just couldn't've been.”
“ Well, our lab people will determine that soon enough, Maurice,” said Richard Stephens, who placed a shaky and awkward hand on the old man's shoulders. “Determine what, that my insane child killed her brother, cut out his heart and fed it to me! God damn you all for imagining such a thing! No, she loved us, Coretta and me… she loved us, despite any sickness she endured over the years, and she loved her brother with a pure love like nothing I have witnessed in all my years.”
The general's lawyer tried to pull him away, but the old man snatched free and shouted, “She had a bad heart as a child, a deficiency, but she was never evil toward anyone except, at times, her brother. Yes, I admit she was at one time extremely envious of her brother, but with therapy she had worked through all that and had in fact learned to love Victor and us very, very much. She spoke of him fondly always, and she treated Mother and me with great respect and admiration, always… always. She loved us. She wouldn't've harmed Victor. 1 knew that from the beginning, and that was how I knew she couldn't've done the terrible things attributed to the Queen of Hearts killer. You'll never… ever convince me otherwise.”
“ Alex was right all along. She killed her brother for a reason,” Jessica shouted. “Don't you see? All of you men who've been in one way or another shielding the truth? She took that first heart for a reason, General!”
Stephens tried to motion her into silence; Meade shushed her, so Kim continued on Jessica's behalf. “A reason, General, you know full well. She wanted to be Victor; she wanted to possess his heart-the heart you and her mother most loved. She wanted to be the kind of son you never had, so she became a man for you and Mrs. Raveneaux, and in her deranged state, that meant she had to be 'of good heart,' and how better to be of good heart than to consume the one heart you and your wife doted most over.”
“ That's enough of your psychoanalysis, Doctor,” Meade said to Kim, the order to stand down clearly unmasked now.
“ You men brought Dr. Desinor here for the truth,” Jessica countered, defending her friend. “It's time these people in their ivory-tower mansion, so far removed from the deaths in New Orleans, yet so close to them, hear the truth for once.”
“ The truth won't accomplish anything here, not now,” shouted Stephens.
“ Neither of you ever for a moment thought this case had anything to do with New Orleans gentility, did you, Meade?” asked Alex, his wrath growing steadily.
Jessica continued, saying, “No, to you men it was about gays living in a gay ghetto in New Orleans, and you all wanted it confined there. You never expected Surette's death, the subsequent cover-up to keep the family name untarnished and the payoffs ever to surface again, did you?”
Kim added, “You ruined Frank Wardlaw's career, you dirtied Ben deYampert, and then when calling in Coran and me backfired on you, and it looked as if not only would the general be exposed, but your little parts in the sordid game also might surface, you forced Wardlaw into body-snatching.”
“ You don't have any basis in fact to back that claim up in the least,” Meade declared.
“ The general and his wife were just glad to get the body back-or at least the general was-but it was minus one heart,” added Jessica. “Little did the general know that the heart had come home a lot sooner, and had most likely been consumed by three remaining Raveneauxs with wine in bisque gumbo. And since then, there've no doubt been many unusual dishes served up by your Dominique.”
“ Get out of my house!” shouted the general. “I want you all out of my house!” He was on the verge of tears and collapse.
“ I'm afraid we can't do that, at least not until there's a complete evidence-gathering taken here, General. That will mean some time,” Alex explained.
Stephens exchanged stares with Alex and nodded to his political friend, resigned to what Alex Sincebaugh had said.
“ I'm going to have your heads for this, Meade, Stephens!” The old man stormed from the room, likely in search of his wife and some respite from the horror of the moment.
Landry suddenly collapsed from his wound. Alex and Jessica rushed to him, Alex shouting for someone to get to one of the units outside and call for medical assistance, while Jessica did what she could to staunch his wound.
Landry's color had bleached from his face, crystallized shards still hanging in his hair. His wound was now openly bleeding. Jessica worked to stop the bleeding, tying off the shoulder. As she did so, Landry, seeing the bloodstains and the fiery welts about Sincebaugh, asked, “You okay, Sincy?”
“ No serious damage.”
