“ You made a number of major hits on the Lennox body, Doctor,” replied Landry. “I wanted to tell you earlier, but… well, let's just say that we wanted to be sure and these things do take time. We have a woman named Beau Lennox in custody, and she has confessed to her husband's murder. She's being extradited from Texas as we speak.”
Kim turned to stare at Jessica, silently asking, “Did you know about this?”
“ At any rate,” said Leroy David, as Meade called his political friend, as if nothing of consequence had happened, “might you now be persuaded to do a reading on one of the certain victims of the Heart-Taker? After all, that is the case you are being paid to… to help solve.”
The comment made her wonder if the mayor's people were out of the true loop here. Perhaps they weren't informed about her actually working for the FBI.
Dr. Coran came forward from the corner where she'd been standing in shadow. “Well… why not? It's not as if we have to exhume a body for the purpose; we had a victim wash up just yesterday.”
All the men looked from one to another. “It could look awkward in the press,” suggested Captain Landry. “So, unless we can keep it to this room…”
“ What the hell,” said the P.C. “This is New Orleans. Anything goes, right?”
“ Anything within reason, but this…” Landry began to counter, a certain feeling of un sureness creeping over him.
Fouintenac stopped Landry cold, staring across at him, sternly saying, “There's no reason the bloody press need get hold of any of this, is there, Carl? I say, give it a try with the last victim, but we do it in complete secrecy.”
“ What about it, Dr. Desinor?” asked the P.C.
Kim looked about the room at the faces all pinned on her reaction, expectant and hopeful. They all wanted a miracle and she was supposed to supply it. “I'll be happy to… to do my best, but I can't possibly guarantee or promise any startling revelations, as you know. Still, I will go along with whatever you gentlemen and Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw decide.”
That was how it had ended before Sincebaugh's arrival, the body of the Toulouse Street Wharf victim wheeled in only moments before Alex Sincebaugh had come crashing through the door as if to save her from both herself and the company she found herself in.
She now found herself thinking only of Alex Sincebaugh, half wishing he'd stayed, glad he'd gone all at once. She wondered what it was about him that so attracted her, despite everything.
18
Heartily know. When half-gods go. The gods arrive.
Kim Desinor looked from one to the other of the men before her. Landry and Stephens were dissimilarly built, Landry being a short, stocky squared-off cop who hadn't lost the rough edges of his profession. With too much around the middle, his brown hair graying before Kim's eyes, she guessed him to be in his mid-fifties, and from the gnarled little hands to the way he walked, she surmised that his body was riddled with arthritic pains from fingertips to back and leg muscles, all of which he denied, even to himself. He had suffered some injury as a youth, something to do with being in a place he shouldn't have been, and he'd also suffered a knee injury in college, where he played a defensive linesman, no doubt, given his heft and size. She recalled some chance remark he had made with regard to Richard Stephens's ambitions and he'd served up a football metaphor, something to do with an end run that fooled no one.
As for Police Commissioner Stephens, while not so tall as Alex Sincebaugh, he stood extremely tall beside Landry, and while he was not a slim man by any stretch, against Landry's bulk he appeared so. Still, Stephens's single most distinguishing characteristic remained his obviously dyed full head of flaming red strands which entwined one another in a series of wild dance moves. Where Landry's jaw was set in what seemed a perpetual, teeth-gnashing, concrete half snarl, PC Stephens sported a painted grin, born of campaigning. Stephens's henna- colored temples and fine features marked him as the best choice for higher office-more politician than cop and obviously made for the office. It seemed he'd go to any length to protect his personal citadel. Maybe he'd long since made up his mind that he would sit out his last years in office, content yet ever watchful, ever fearful of events that might topple him, such as this case.
Stephens's tailored beige suit gave him the image of a modern-day Huey Long, replete with suspenders beneath the stylishly rumpled suit, in a breezy New Orleans way an expensive item in anyone's estimation, yet relaxed and loose-fitting. Stephens's nails were professionally done. But then, so were those of the guy from the mayor's office, who actually wore red suspenders and a checked tie with an angora-sweater poofiness to it which marked him as not only politically correct, but far more up on fashions, even down to the ridiculous sideburns. There was little else to distinguish the thin man named Leroy Fouintenac who'd been throwing his title-deputy mayor- around the room along with the hungry, darting eyes and the beaked and sniffing nose which led Kim to the image of a kind of malnourished buzzard, a sickly scavenger bird, as opposed to one who successfully hunted. He was thin and priggish, in imitation of a David Niven character she'd once seen in an old black-and-white movie.
Rounding out the foursome was the staid FBI bureau chief, Lew Meade, a stony observer who seemed detached from everything but the arrangements and connections, always at the ready with the introductions, however, and always anxious to know the latest. He'd obviously called in the mayor's man, since they shared many more whispers than P.C. Stephens enjoyed with Fouintenac. Meade had an army of agents to see that Dr. Coran was made comfortable for her stay, while he'd totally ignored Kim, in keeping with the incognito approach she was to take here, her detachment from the FBI seemingly complete.
She suspected that it had been Meade's idea to have Alex Sincebaugh pick her up at the airport, obviously to rub salt into Sincebaugh's wounded ego. She'd sensed the animosity Meade held for the lieutenant even at the crime scene the day before, but even more so here when Alex had entered the room.
Meade was an observer, a watchful man who kept his cards extremely close to his chest. And Kim had no notion of what Meade meant to accomplish with his presence here. But Lew Meade's closemouthed approach had already alienated Kim and only made his blandness of character the more bland.
Dr. Jessica Coran, by comparison, was a woman of color in every sense of the word, but her mysterious eyes held no warmth or clue at the moment as to what lay behind them. What did she think of all this talk of doing a psychometric reading of the last victim's body? It had been taken now from its refrigerated tomb by Wardlaw's young, female assistant, who'd wheeled the cadaver into the autopsy room and efficiently replaced the Lennox body with the nameless, hapless true victim of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Hearts Thief-as one newscaster that moming had called the killer.
Kim herself was immediately worried by the idea put forth by Fouintenac and heralded now by Stephens. In fact, she hadn't particularly cared for the idea of doing a hands-on reading of the other so-called latest victim of the Heartthrob Killer-as others in the press had dubbed the phantom monster.
She had to go along with it, she knew. Hell, Stephens and the others had taken a giant step forward with regard to her work. They accepted her “gift” unreservedly now, accepted the fact that extraordinary, extrasensory perceptions and detection were possible. Perhaps even Wardlaw and Coran had grudgingly accepted to some degree that some things which science had no answer for must be taken on faith alone, by sheer instinct alone. Kim was a purely instinctive individual, working out on a frontier which science might never fully comprehend or explore, a frontier of emotion and mind over matter which galled most scientists and pragmatists. Given their imperatives and natural liking only for that which proved empirical, she well understood why both the doctors in the room were far from convinced of her often startling and uncanny abilities.
She unnerved people, she knew. People in general feared her, which was a far cry from admiration or awe. She sensed fear in Wardlaw and something akin to fear in Jessica.
“ Perhaps we should allow Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw time to prepare their findings on the victim before I-”
