found to match one identified at an earlier scene, then it did tell them that they were dealing with the same beast. All such attempts and effort had to be made, so Detectives Sincebaugh and deYampert went about the business of evidence-gathering and note-taking and measuring.
At the door the police photographer waved his way in, a good man whom Alex and Ben had worked with on countless other cases. Yancy Rosswell was his name, and he'd photographed most of the handiwork of the Queen of Hearts killer. Whenever he was unavailable, Alex had done his own photos, which Rosswell had once called functionally okay but lacking in artistic merit. Rosswell's walls at home were hung with crime-scene photos dating back as early as the 1890s.
He was long and lean and his every bone was just below the surface, prepared to create an angle on his body somewhere. He had a Clint Eastwood edge to him and a Jack Palance profile. He was as tall as the two actors as well.
“ Damn…damn… damn.” He punctuated every shot with the expletive.
“ Get plenty of shots,” Alex instructed, unnecessarily, just wanting to hear himself, to see if his vocal cords were still operational after looking at the sight before him. “We make it the same bastard, Rosswell. Whataya think? From a cameraman's point of view, that is.”
“ The camera don't lie unless you lie to yourself,” he said with a philosophical wheeze.
As had been the case with all the Hearts victims found indoors, and those caught up in the confluence of river or lake, the body had been left in a “posed” position by the killer. All of his outdoor victims had been placed facedown, requiring police to turn the body to discover the hole cut into the chest, while those killed indoors were always laid unceremo-niously and indignantly across their beds, no matter what room they were killed in, with their faces and chests facing straight up, with a sheet or a blanket gently pulled up over the hideous wounds, hardly hiding them since blood matted the sheet to the wounds in an indigo pool. It was as if the killer held some sort of odd fetish about tucking them into their beddy-bys when he killed them indoors.
These were the few strands or patterns the killer had left them until now, with the blood message on the wall. It was indeed a departure from the killer's usual reserve and caution.
“ Queer of heart.” Alex curiously read the words aloud as if aloud would make more sense of them.
“ Bastard has a sense of play, doesn't he,” said Ben.
“ Yeah, maybe, but we've never seen this before.”
“ Must've really been pissed off by the copycat killing maybe, wouldn't you say?”
“ Maybe… yeah…” Alex considered this thoughtfully. “So perhaps, after all he's done, he wants us to know that he can laugh at himself? Or he just wants recognition for his handiwork? I don't know, partner.”
“ What aya saying, that it is another copycat? But there's the card. If it is another copy, Alex, it's far better than the Lennox Xerox. Nobody but us knows about the cards.”
“ Yeah, you're right… has to be the same freak. We've searched all over New Orleans for those kinda cards in every novelty shop. Has to be him.”
“ So, it just doesn't set well, the whole message-on-the-wall thing, huh?”
“ No, it doesn't. And if it is him, he's… evolving.”
“ Evolving?”
“ I read in the police bulletin once about how some killers' M.O. s evolve, change with the evolution of the fantasy that the guy's working out, you know. This could be something like that, Big.”
“ You think so, Sincy?”
Alex nodded. “Yeah, maybe, Ben.” Alex turned to the photographer and called for him to get the wall shot. “Can you get the whole thing in a wide lens?”
“ Sure, no problem, Lieutenant.” He coughed into a handkerchief he'd been holding against his nose. He was also wiping sweat from his brow. It was an ugly kill and he'd had to do his artistic best with it.
He worked like a pro, however, and soon had shot after shot of the message on the wall, from every angle.
“ How you doing, Rosswell?” asked a second cameraman who'd suddenly gotten past the police barricade at the door.
“ Who the hell're you?” Sincebaugh blocked the man's path, taking him for a reporter.
“ I'm with the FBI-Dr. Coran. She's right behind me, coming up the stairs.”
“ Really. What, she doesn't trust us to do the fuckin' job?” Sincebaugh shouted.
“ I got the call, was told to be here, guys. What can I say?”
“ One way or another, looks like Lew Meade's going to wrench this case loose,” said Ben. “Just waiting for us to fumble, Alex.”
The FBI photographer shrugged. “I only take orders, gentlemen.” He then went straightaway to work. He talked as he fired away over both the body and the wall, commenting on the grotesque nature of the crime, saying he'd thought that he'd seen everything until now. He seemed to need to talk in order to work; it seemed to be a way of calming his nerves.
The FBI fingerprint guy and Dr. Coran followed, and she went straight to the detectives, saying, “You were wearing gloves the whole time, I hope, so we don't pick up any unnecessary prints, gentlemen?” Satisfied, she went to work without looking at the body because she was stopped stone cold by the bloody writing on the wall. Alex watched her for a moment before he and Ben moved off, deciding to comb the little two-room apartment in the meantime, checking into cupboards, drawers, the refrigerator, staring at photos of friends, family, anything they could find.
Finding little of use, Sincebaugh returned to the bedroom to find a jittery Dr. Coran seemingly unable to concentrate on her work. She dropped a vial, swore and began a procedure over. From time to time, she stared up at the message on the wall. This seemed only to further upset her. Meanwhile, the fingerprint man said he'd done all he could, and so he began huddling with the two photographers, who knew one another from previous engagements. Each man promised to have prints of one sort or another to Sincebaugh before his shift was over tomorrow. The two photographers and the dust man left together, speaking of locating a watering hole after each dumped his evidence at lockup.
Alex went to Jessica Coran and asked if she were okay. She looked up into his eyes and said,”Nobody said anything about the writing on the wall. It took me by surprise.”
“ Yeah, us too.”
“ It's him, Alex… Matisak.”
“ What? Whataya mean?”
“ It's his new thing. He writes poetry in blood on walls after each of his kills.”
“ But his M.O. is completely different from this. He wasn't here, Jessica.” He tried his most reassuring tone.
“ You don't put anything past Matisak. He may've killed this boy just to get me here to see this!” She pointed to the blood message on the wall. “That's his doing, his handwrit-ing.”
“ You can't know that.”
“ It's his way of telling me that he's here, close by, watching me.”
“ You're jumping to conclusions not in evidence, Jessica.”
“ Get hold of myself, right?” She glared up at him. “He shadowed my every move on the Claw case in New York from his jail cell. This…this would be a cakewalk for him. I'm telling you he's been here, in this room. I can sense him. Hell, I can smell him.”
It was then Sincebaugh heard a clamor from outside in the hallway and going toward the noise, he saw Dr. Kim Desinor pushing forward through the crowded hallway, followed by Lew Meade and Captain Landry. Alex could only drop his gaze and shake his head in a gesture of defeat. He had one badly shaken M.E. working the scene, and now he'd be forced to deal with a psychic on the premises.
“ Stand aside, Alex,” ordered Carl Landry at the doorway, and Alex dutifully did so, casting a worried glance in Ben's direction. Kim Desinor followed his eyes for a moment before going toward the bed and body, noticing immediately the blood communique over the bed. When the psychic stepped away from the horrid scene at the bed, she went toward the kitchen, trying to come up for air. She came face-to-face with Alex instead. He hoarsely whispered into her ear, “Doesn't look like we'll need an exhumation now, Dr. Desinor. We got a body right here for you to psi over.”
She captured his gaze and drew it into her own for a millisecond, finding a firm strength in this man, some
