“ To hell with it, Captain! What's going on and why wasn't I advised about your bringing in a damned psychic in the first place, and by God, if you're going to hold a frigging seance in the morgue-”
“ You were advised!”
“ Bullshit.”
“ When's the last time you took a reality check, Alex? What the hell'd you think I was talking about to you in my office the other day or when I sent you out to the airport to pick her up? This isn't a game of backgammon, and it goes without saying that we don't work in a goddamned vacuum either. We've got the eyes of the nation on us now.”
“ So Stephens calls in a psychic and the press? Then he holds a… a bloody seance over a dead guy in the morgue with Wardlaw and Coran displaced and looking on?”
“ She's made significant hits, Alex. She's extremely good!”
“ You know how this already looks to the press, Captain? How's it going to look when word leaks out about her doing a reading of the corpse down here, huh? Answer that one, Carl. You, me, all of us are going to look like we're freaking out, that we're so fucking desperate that-”
“ We are desperate, Alex… we are!” Landry, a stocky man with a large neck and broad shoulders and smoldering, yet sad gray eyes, gritted his teeth and said, “You don't get it, do you, Lieutenant. This case is going into a new phase. Now you can either be a part of that new phase, or you can be phased out, all right?”
“ No way you're taking me off the case, Captain.”
“ Well, that's a relief! What a change of heart, Lieutenant. Believe me, at this stage, that decision is not entirely up to you anymore, Alex.”
There was a long moment of silence between them. Alex held his jaw firmly set.
Captain Landry continued hollowly. “IAD brought me some interesting footage today in which you play a major role.”
“ It was a simple bust, Captain.”
“ Simple? You read those guys like a book, presupposed their actions and stopped them cold before they committed an unlawful act, Alex. Now call that what you want, IAD could make trouble for you. Hanson and Hirschenfeldt wanted to bust your ass the moment you walked through the door today, believe me.”
“ Those clowns? That's bull and you-”
“ They think they've got the crime of the century in their possession, Alex, and you are the star. I convinced them to let it be for now; I convinced them good.”
Alex calmed a bit. “I suppose this is where I say thanks?”
“ And I showed the tape to Dr. Desinor in there.”
“ What? You had no right to-”
“ And she was as impressed as I was with your… your foresight about those punks. She wants very much to work with you, Alex, and I think you ought to graciously accept her invitation to do so.”
“ Or else?”
“ Or else, damnit, that's right.”
“ You'd sic those snot-nosed IAD punks on my ass? You'd see to it I was forcibly yanked from this case, and maybe from the Department?”
Landry's fists were balled up now, and he breathed heavily through dragonlike nostrils. “I hope it won't come to that, but yes… if I have to… yes.”
“ This case has blown a lot of relationships to hell, Landry. I guess one more is just one more.”
“ Hold on, Alex. Just think about it, damnit. And give Dr. Desinor a chance. She's good…she's damned good,” Landry self-consciously admitted.
“ Real good, huh? Is she really telling you any more than what Wardlaw has already leaked to the press?”
“ Considerably more.”
“ Is that right?” Alex countered.
“ That's right.”
“ She's just snowing you, the commissioner, Meade, all of you.”
“ She's revealed to us that the Gretna victim was, like you said, a copycat killing.”
“ Information circulating about since I suggested it, yes.”
“ That the heart was taken only after the man was poisoned, which has now been confirmed by Dr. Coran's preliminary tissue and blood tests.”
“ A wild guess, maybe.”
“ She even gave us a name this morning, said it came to her in her sleep afterward.”
“ A name… came to her in her sleep…”
“ Lennox, she said, and it checks out with Missing Persons in Texas where a Marie B. Lennox reported her husband as missing six weeks ago. According to Dr. Coran, the body was between six and eight weeks dead, kept in a frozen state for some time and only recently dumped in our territory in an attempt to make it look like one of the Hearts killings. The killer, Dr. Desinor says, knew the victim well. The victim knew his killer as either Billy or Beau. The wife's middle name is Bolinda with two nicknames, Beau or Billie. Kansas police this morning confronted her with the fact a psychic identified her as her husband's killer, and guess what?”
“ She crumpled, no doubt.”
“ She was told his body had been fished from the Mississippi in New Orleans.”
“ And I suppose she confessed on the spot?”
“ She did, and interviews subsequently place her in our area, driving a van, about the time the body would have been disposed of here. Hell, she sent postcards to the folks back home, the cards dating her trip, placing her extremely close to the Toulouse Wharf area. Photos have given us a definite I.D. on the victim as one Samuel Wayne Lennox, who had some heavy-duty insurance policies taken out on him in the past year. Asked about the beheading, she told authorities in Kansas that she hadn't cut off her husband's head, only his penis, in keeping with what she knew of the ruthless Heart-Taker in New Orleans; she claimed not to know how his head was severed from the body.”
“ Then how the hell did his head get separated from his body?” Alex had listened intently, unsure where to attack next.
Captain Landry informed him of how Wardlaw and Jessica Coran had put that piece of information to bed.
“ Sounds like the interlocking pieces of the puzzle fell very neatly into place then.”
“ Yes, yes, they did.”
“ And you're satisfied with this Lennox woman's confession?”
“ Completely, and it all tied in with your theory, Alex, that the Gretna victim didn't fit. I tell you, it gave me the shivers. Desinor's… well… uncanny.”
“ So was my prediction, based on what my eyes and my gut told me, only I couldn't prove it.”
“ Maybe your reading up on those Headless Horseman murders in New York last year had your nose twitching.”
“ So Mrs. Lennox took the heart and the private parts to simulate the Queen of Hearts killings, not knowing that some drunken fishermen would hit the corpse with their propeller. She poisoned and butchered her husband for the insurance bucks.”
“ And because she could no longer stand the wimp, or so she says,” Landry added.
“ Impressive of Desinor and Coran to put this all together,” Alex admitted with a heavy release of air.
“ Frank played a large hand in it too. He figured out how the head was severed.”
“ I thought Frank was out of the picture, Captain.”
“ Ever hear of an injunction? He won't go quietly.” Landry walked Alex a little way down the institutional- green cinder-block hallway. “But you're still skeptical, aren't you, Alex?”
“ Nature of the beast, I guess…”
“ Seems Mr. and Mrs. Lennox had vacationed here when she first read of the Queen of Hearts cases, and later when she saw the latest Hearts case break into print back in Texas, she began to concoct a copycat killing. She'd read Canon's piece, the one that speculated there would be more killings, remember?”
“ Who could forget that piece of journalistic masturbation.”
