“ Anyway, this tough old Texas babe gets it into her head that she could kill hubby, remove the heart and privates with no flinching, and when the serial killer was caught, she'd be home free with a hell of an inheritance in insurance bucks.”
“ If it was so well planned, why'd she fold so quickly when confronted with the information?”
“ Who knows… crime makes you stupid. The word psychic to some people is instant truth and enlightenment… who knows?”
“ So, you're impressed by Desinor.”
“ I damned sure am, and Coran for that matter.”
Alex wanted to argue, to tell his captain that there was more to it than met the eye, that perhaps Jessica Coran and Wardlaw and Desinor were cohorts, in some magic show together now. Maybe Coran had studied Wardlaw's files on each case from top to bottom, seen the oversights and the sloppy work, talked with Desinor, and the two of them had cut Wardlaw in. Then they had all conjured up Samuel Wayne Lennox, whose name had most likely surfaced some time before, since the killer herself had put out a missing-persons report on the man she had killed. Somehow Alex had to put a rational spin on the scenario, as he had with the incident at Tully's.
“ What's so hard for you to accept, Alex?” Landry finally said.
“ Look, the business of the body's not having been destroyed in quite the fashion of the other victims… the rib cage intact, the fact it was a different sort of weapon used to open Lennox's chest, all pointed to another perp. Hell, even I knew that. As to the Beau Lennox story, Kim Desinor could easily have read about the disappearance of the Texas man, in a state right next door, and from the general description put two and two together. As any good detective might, she bluffed and won.”
“ She's on the case, Alex. Get used to it.”
“ I'm out of here for now. Maybe I'll just take that time off that IAD suggested. I'm beginning to feel unnecessary. Besides, all this has got me feeling like I need to find the closest bar.”
“ I'm conducting a meeting this evening, my office. Be there at six.”
Alex didn't reply, and Landry's leathery face creased into a look of concern and worry, the wrinkles dancing across his forehead. He wondered if Alex, whose instincts were better than excellent, could be right about Dr. Desinor after all. He'd never believed in psychic hocus-pocus himself before Desinor's recent revelations, which Alex had somewhat effectively fired silver bullets through.
Still, Bolinda Lennox was behind bars in Kansas thanks to Kim Desinor, and so far, in New Orleans, Alex had made no score with respect to the Heart-Taker. Results were what City Hall and P.C. Stephens were now after, results before the next Mardi Gras season, results that would reassure a nation of potential tourists that New Orleans was a safe fantasy land into which they might securely snuggle for a while, long enough to unload their ready cash; that it was a wondrous place to spend their money and enjoy the local pleasures with complete peace of mind, a commodity that seemed all too rare in the city these days.
Landry couldn't blame Stephens and Meade and Leroy David Fouintenac and all the other politicians, not really. All they wanted was for New Orleans to return to the days of Huey Long, to be left unmarred by the terror of a sadistic lunatic roaming the same streets where lovers strolled arm-in-arm to the strains of Louis Armstrong's jazz legacy, which poured out into the street from the numerous bars. They wanted New Orleans to be free again, free from the barbarism of an illness that was supposed only to grip bigger cities such as L.A., Chicago, Miami or New York. They wanted their gleaming cash-cow touristy world back the way it had always been before-before some maniacal butcher with an enormous appetite and an even larger blade had begun to stalk his unique prey for the pleasure of taking human hearts from their cradling homes.
All the brass wanted was a return to normalcy, a return to sanity-so far as sanity could be mustered-in the Big Easy.
While lunacy of the Mardi Gras sort was tolerated, while excessive drinking and nudity were played out on the streets of the French Quarter nightly, this other sort of lunacy simply had to end. A return to normalcy in a place where there was no norm seemed a contradiction in terms, and Landry wondered if such a day would ever come again in this town.
Kim Desinor had seen something frightening in Alex Sincebaugh, something that had brought her from her trance state, something that had also taken her breath away, all in that instant when he'd entered the autopsy room. A fire went around the man, a fire of energy and life naked to most people's perceptions but blinding to her own.
It was more than the noisy interruption, more than the anger and frustration enveloping him and dispelling the trance state she was in, sending her hurtling back to real time and place. She had sensed his presence before she had seen him; in a room full of men, she had felt him.
She now recalled where she was, finding herself surrounded by the men who had brought her here, men who'd been frightened and awed by her recent revelations. Even Jessica Coran, the other single woman in the room, the one to whom she'd hoped to become allied, perhaps even find a binding friendship with, was now hesitant with her, uncertain and distrustful of her.
Even when they believe in you, they don't accept you. She heard an inner voice giving her familiar notice, to take heed. No one here any longer saw her as one of them. And maybe that was why she liked Alex Sincebaugh, despite his obvious disdain for her in particular and for psychic investigation in general; because he wasn't about to treat her as special or unusual or as some sort of freak, she admired his genuineness.
She had previously I.D.'d the victim and given authorities a pair of names to search for, an unusual “gift” to receive from a corpse murdered so long before, but Lennox had a strong will that his killer be known and somehow that information was implanted in his every cell, the tissues crying out with their own decaying march toward oblivion, his permeating plea rising from every pore. Lennox was unusual, or at least his corpse was; the man's cadaver was a fluke, a fount of information, giving up information in such a cascading tide that she could not take it all in at once, as it was offered, as if there were a time limit involved.
Kim had suspected the single name she kept getting from Lennox was the endearment used for a girlfriend or possibly a wife… and she had told Landry to follow up, and later that night she'd telephoned Captain Landry again with the name Lennox, which came to her in a dream sequence, a kind of “aftershock” to the initial reading. But no one, Landry included, had as yet today confided anything to her about what had been done with the information.
A second “reading” of Lennox's body might reveal more evidence, or so P.C. Stephens had hoped, aside from wishing to be on hand when such revelations occurred, perhaps to show her off to the mayor's man, who'd come expressly to see the reading of the body. However, with the flood of information released initially to her, the corpse had turned stony and remained now stubbornly silent, like a granite mass, still and cold and suddenly lacking all the psi energies so powerful just the day before.
Still, with the P.C. on hand, alongside the mayor's stooge, the “show” had to go on in order to clearly determine if there was any connection to the other deaths.
At one point she was asked directly, “So, what do you think, Dr. Desinor?” It was the balding, broad- shouldered Lew Meade, New Orleans FBI Bureau Chief and one of the few men in the city who knew that she too worked for the FBI.
“ Nothing… coldness… emptiness… loneliness and isolation. This man has no connection to the other victims,” she said before Sincebaugh had burst into the room, “and my feeling is that neither did his killer, as I've earlier informed Captain Landry.”
“ So you continue to maintain that this man was killed by his wife, and that his death has no link to the Queen of Hearts killings?” asked the mayor's man, Leroy David Fouintenac, a regal and robust man who appeared to enjoy Bourbon Street's finest restaurants. He'd obviously been coached long before on what she'd imparted to Captain Carl Landry.
“ Wife, girlfriend, live-in lover,” she muttered absent mindedly as her hands searched for any hot spot on the body. Finding none, she faked it, her hands shaking like a pair of dowsing rods.
“ What is it?” asked Stephens while the others stared on.
“ All the earlier information, all corroborated… nothing new, however…”
“ With such remarkable results,” began the mayor's man, a tall healthy-looking, rugged John Carradine lookalike, “perhaps the good doctor can-”
“ What remarkable results?” Kim asked, staring now through Carl Landry. “I've heard about nothing that has come of my report.”
