could do far worse damage in the Big Easy than she might have in refusing an assignment offered her by a superior of Zanek's rank.
Suppose the psychic trail was now too cold to follow. Suppose the killer had moved from the area. Had been arrested on other charges and was serving time far from the city sprawled crescentlike along the winding Mississippi. Suppose she could get nowhere on the case. Suppose this hardly heartless monster went into some den to hibernate. Say, an asylum in Louisiana's up-country area. She could come up pitifully wanting, unable to detect useful clues or any information whatsoever, and such a poor showing, leaving everyone dissatisfied, would only bring unwanted attention and notoriety to her department, and from this all would crumble. The FBI funding would dry up and they could all pack their bags; the powers-that-be were already paranoid over knowledge of the FBI's research into the use of psychic detection falling into the wrong hands. Either way, Paul Zanek might actually have manipulated her into a corner that she didn't deserve to be in. God forbid the newshounds got wind of the story; if so, her work and her place within the safe confines of Quantico would be history, especially if she wound up on 20/20, 48 Hours or, God certainly forbid, Hard Copy.
She tried to get comfortable in her seat, the roar of the engine like a banshee wail, a warning, an unclear yet persistent premonition of tumult yet to be sensed, seen, heard, swallowed and felt internally as well as externally- to be fully realized both physically and psychically.
She settled back as the plane began its desperate race to meet the wind; lifting, it took on the weightlessness that always made her a bit disoriented yet exhilarated, not unlike the first pangs of fear on a descending roller coaster. She rested her eyes and felt foolish to be the only passenger aboard the six-seater, momentarily wondering about the cost in jet fuel and manpower to the taxpaying public she secretly served.
Soon cruising at thirty thousand feet toward home, she wondered what she would find in New Orleans. She'd been away from the Mardi Gras capital of the world for almost eight years now, and nothing changed faster during one's absence than a major American city. “You can't go home again” was a very real and poignant experience for most people, but for her it meant little, for going home was the last thing she wanted to do. She'd been remarkably successful at closing out that part of her life, hiding her Cajijn blood and even her childhood from herself; you only remember what you want to remember. In fact, her childhood was little more than a big, dark screen with an occasional gray image wafting across from a broken-down projector. She supposed that a shrink-someone other than herself-might help her to deal with that inner wasteland of the soul that she'd battled to ignore her entire adult life, but she really didn't want to go home. Her conscious mind had successfully and thoroughly blocked out her subconscious mind on this score, the two in a quiet, even contest, holding one another at bay, grappling in that inner cosmos, each with a headlock on the other and no way to continue the combat. But going back could change all that, and she had reason to fear the outcome, knowing that some awful creature from the dark past lurked there, waiting for her return.
Not wishing to think of the possible consequences, she opted to dig through the case files left her by Richard Stephens, who'd gone back to Louisiana with Jessica Coran the day before to pave her way by preparing an elaborate hoax to keep her attachment with the FBI concealed. She kept coming back again and again to those minutely detailed and thorough police reports by Lieutenant Alex Sincebaugh. She had searched the stack for a file on the Surette case, but there was none, for as Commissioner Stephens had said, this case was not considered a relative of the others, despite frequent references to it which Sincebaugh had made by way of comparison. He seemed the only one who'd kept an open mind to the possibility of a connection.
As she continued going through the files and photos left her by Stephens, she also thought about how she might be a disruption to Sincebaugh and others working the case. She'd faced resistance to psychic detection before many times when she'd had her own psychic detection agency in Florida. A part of her wanted no role in the absurd concealment of her true identity as a psychologist and paranormal investigator with the FBI, but it was politically incorrect these days to spend the taxpayers' money on frivolity, and unfortunately, too many Americans still believed that anything to do with the psychic world was frivolous.
Psychic detection had a long and lurid history, dating back to the time of Solomon, who, many scholars were now convinced, had a psychic power of his own. Some had gone so far as to suggest that Christ and John the Baptist were both gifted psychics, not to mention other world-renowned religious leaders such as Buddha. Psychic surgeons and fortune-tellers from the famous Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus to the infamous Rasputin, along with an array of charlatans, frauds and freaks, all made for a fantastic and colorful history of psychic phenomena, a history which left many people more comfortable with herpes or hemorrhoids.
She was by no means convinced that all psychics throughout the ages were true blue-sense people, that they actually possessed the gift that had been granted her, but she was certain that psychics came in all shapes and sizes, that many were indeed frauds and charlatans, and that while the history of occult phenomena was also a history of criminal activity, scams and hoaxes, there always emerged that rare psychic or seer who could actually perceive with indelible clarity the details of events yet to come, or reconstruct time and events from some netherworld inside the cranium. It was rare to find the true psychic who could reveal details of a murder which had occurred in the past-post-cognition-and rarer still to locate a seer, one who could foretell the future-precognition. But it was that singular individual who gave credence to the fact that there existed, somewhere in the vastness of that inner universe of the human mind, the ability to tap into an undeniable sixth sense.
She found some coffee in a pot at the rear of the plane, poured herself a cup and returned to the case files to study, the steady hum of the plane soothing and tranquil. In her lavish seat in a conference area, with a circular table in front of it, she again began to finger through the files. The more she learned now about the crimes, the victims, their family backgrounds, their circumstances, the more convincing she'd be before a room full of cops who would, more than likely, be hostile toward her entering the investigation months after the first body was discovered. Natural resentment was always difficult to overcome.
“ What do you prefer?” she asked herself in the empty cabin, feeling terribly alone. “Unnatural resentment?” To a suspiciously regarded psychic there really wasn't any difference.
She tried to concentrate instead on the kind of rage the victims of the Queen of Hearts killer had faced in their last moments on earth. Whoever the killer was, the level of sheer hatred for the victims was shockingly extreme and intense; given the sheer number of stab wounds, the evisceration of the heart muscle and the mutilation of the private parts, it was no great leap of faith to ascertain that the killer was exceedingly and agonizingly enjoying his knife work. An extraordinary, killing energy fueled by dementia had left the bodies hacked apart by an enormous blade.
“ Why a blade?”
A large blade; a hefty meat-cutter's blade, something that was made for cutting upward, like a butcher's specially designed, serrated knife for cutting and deboning carcasses. At least that was what the coroner, a man named Wardlaw, was suggesting in his reports. Perhaps more importantly, why was he taking their hearts? She recoiled from the obvious, that he cannibalized the hearts, both because it was repugnant and because it was obvious. Were there secret reasons that only a madman might have to fulfill, a longing no one in his right mind could possibly ever understand, even if the maniac were willing to share such reasons? Furthermore, did it matter what this alien mind did with the hearts, since the end result was always the same, a vicious mutilation murder with lustful, sexual overtones? She thought of a line from a long-forgotten poem which she must look up again, a line that spoke of the heart in relationships between men and women that went something like:
Often with gentle words he'll take it;
Play softly with it, then rudely break it.
Did the killer suffer from a broken heart? Was he trying to rebuild or repair his own, using assembled “parts”? “And what is the significance of the playing card?” she asked aloud to the hum of the Lear. “And what the devil kind of card is it that's made of lacy material?”
Every particular, every item, every article of information she might learn now would help her to convince skeptics-whom she was bound to run headlong into later-that she was a genuine psychic, capable of magical feats of mental agility and supernormal abilities. Dazzle them first; get them off your back, and then you can go to work, she reminded herself.
Going to work, however, wasn't so simple, not for her. Going to work, a phrase that meant boredom on the horizon for most people, a phrase that conjured up a nine-to-five nightmare, was just the opposite for her. Going to work for Dr. Kim Desinor meant both opportunity and anxiety, elation and depression, courage and fear all tenaciously wound together like the strands of a tightly packed baseball below its leather coverlet. It meant she must take that first step beyond, and each time she had to take that step, it was as if it were her first time. She
