possibly know how the head was severed from the body. Jessica silently and secretly felt good about this, that only science could clearly show the way to truth. She recalled an old and wise saying that went: In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.
“ Would you care to wager that this fellow is not one of the Queen of Hearts victims?” asked the grinning, eccentric Wardlaw, whose single gold tooth shone brightly beneath the tensor lamp where they worked.
“ That's quite a leap.”
“ Don't tell me you didn't have instant doubts yourself when you heard about the head being severed.”
“ Yes, but now we know the killer didn't sever the head, had nothing to do with the decapitation, so… so why're you still contending that this one died differently than the others? The heart was taken, after all.”
He only grinned at her like a nebbish.
“ What else do you have?”
“ I wouldn't want to prejudice you, Doctor, but give some consideration for this man's age and the semen found adhering in the throat. Just minute traces, but rather interesting since none of the other transvestite and gay victims were sexually molested.”
“ He's older, maybe early to mid-thirties?”
“ Precisely.”
“ Someone killed him and tried very hard to cover the murder by using the Queen of Hearts cases as a model? A copy cat killing? But this killer didn't count on the beheading, and only guessed at the semen since he knew all the victims were gay.”
“ In my estimation, all true, yes.”
“ Interesting premise.”
“ More than a premise.”
“ Really?”
“ The seminal fluid found in the mouth has been matched.”
“ Matched? Matched to whom?”
“ To the John Doe here.”
“ You're telling me that the semen in his mouth was his own?”
“ That's right. Now you must ask yourself who was close enough to this poor SOB to have that kind of access and control of the man's own semen?”
“ Someone damned close to him, I'd imagine.”
“ You play this game well, Doctor.”
“ Now if we only knew who he was. Fingerprints turn up anything?''
“ Not so far, but I think they will.”
“ Really, how can you be so sure?”
Wardlaw pointed out a cheap, half-botched tattoo on the man's right biceps with the word “Beau” spelled out across a heart. “A prison tattoo perhaps?” she asked.
“ Almost appropriate, heh?” asked Wardlaw.
“ Just be careful, Dr. Wardlaw. If they're out to get you, just remember that an error is more dangerous the more truth it contains.”
“ An ancient proverb?”
“ Call it the M.E.'s creed nowadays.”
Settled into the bustling downtown hotel room with its balustrade balcony overlooking beautiful Lake Ponchartrain, where a late afternoon sun painted broad-stroked shadows over the water, Kim Desinor had managed to shake the jet lag and the unsettled stomach which the eel had left her with. A pleasant shower and a leisurely nap had helped restore her scattered energies, and thankfully yet strangely, no one had interrupted her here with a phone call.
The very authorities who'd gotten her here weren't particularly anxious to spend time with her; at first she'd thought perhaps she was being overly sensitive, paranoid, but now she knew better. Stephens and Meade had purposely avoided her, casting their lot with the known commodity, Dr. Jessica Coran. Whether they wished to be or not, apparently she and Jessica were in some sort of competition here.
She changed and called for an escort to the morgue. She wanted more time and privacy with the murdered man she had seen at the wharf.
When the unmarked police car carrying her across town arrived at the morgue, she learned that Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw were just finishing up an autopsy on the victim of the day before. She heard scuttlebutt that this particular victim of the Queen of Hearts killer might not be another Hearts case at all, but rather a coverup, what they called a copycat killing, in which the murderer masked his moves by duplicating those of a previous murderer.
She asked around and located the autopsy room where the two doctors were just emerging. Not wishing to see or confront anyone at the moment, wishing to remain in a calm and undisturbed state, Kim ducked into an adjacent, empty room where cold-storage freezers lined the wall. Hearing the doctors pass by, she bided her time, and then surreptitiously entered the autopsy room from which they'd emerged.
A tag hung limp from the dead man's toe, the only visible portion of the body below the Dacron-sheet shroud. She moved closer, knowing that at any moment a lab assistant might walk in to claim the body for one of the freezers in the next room.
It was cold in here, a constant seventy-two, the hum of the A.C. and the outtake fans, which kept a steady, healthy flow of air uniformly and continually moving through, doing nothing to dispel the odors of death which permeated the walls. She lifted out the curling, black rosary beads which seemed to have a life of their own, wishing to slither from her grasp, the shining crystal cross blinking at her. She clutched the beads tightly to her chest in a firm ball made of her fist. With her other hand, she reached out and lightly placed her fingertips atop the dead man's chest, feeling the prickly sutures beneath the sheet, placed there by Jessica Coran. Even the light force she next placed against the chest caused it to sag a little. The touch was like that of a worn beanbag.
Wait a moment, she silently told herself, an ugly image of a headless man flashing before her mental eyes. “This isn't today's victim, but yesterday's.”
She pulled back the sheet far enough to reveal the truth of her belief. She had gotten the distinct impression from all she'd read and heard about yesterday's beheaded victim that he was somehow different, but aside from the severed head, she didn't know what about him was so unusual until now.
Sincebaugh and Coran had both discovered differences, following along varied paths. She sensed the truth of this. She concentrated, moving toward trance state, asking the dead man to reveal to her these differences.
It became a mantra in her mind: What's different… what's different… what's different…
She knew that Alex and perhaps deYampert had seen that this one was dissimilar to the others, especially since the victim's head had been severed, but there were other peculiarities as well. Her brief and curtailed reading over the other dead man on the wharf had conjured up images of furious rage and sexual repression, lust killing and mutilation, but here with her hands firmly against this John Doe, she was getting a quiet despondency, a despair and a disbelief that rose off the corpse like the saddest of whale songs.
Despite the obvious similarities, this man's means of death was not at all the same as the death faced by the victims of the Hearts killer. This fellow had died peacefully, calmly, not knowing his fate, his wounds and mutilations coming long after death had set in, no doubt as the pathologists' combined reports would be reflecting. This man had not seen the eyes of his killer or the knife as it was wielded. He'd been astonished at his killer, amazed, overwhelmed in a deep, psychic sense, completely awed far more than he was frightened, and he'd died in disbelief at the actions of his killer. While there'd been no suffering like the brutalization played out over the other victims, his death being a relatively easy one for he'd been poisoned by an overdose of barbituates, the victim remained confused and painfully inconsolable at what she had done to him. His killer was a woman, a woman he'd loved. Something Coran's thorough autopsy could hardly show. Kim wondered who here would believe her.
She peeled the sheet back further, indulging her eyes at the line of neat sutures that had put head and torso back together again, the stitches creating a patchwork mosaic against the alabaster skin. All the king's horses and all the king's men, she thought, couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. She didn't know why, but she had the sensation that he was kiddingly referred to by his friends as an egghead or thin-shelled.
She studied the body further, examining it with eyes and fingers until she was stopped by the tattoo on the biceps.
