“ Don't move!”
The kid froze. “Whatchu want with me, man? I don't go that way.”
“ You know the word on the street about the Hearts Killer, though, don't you? Don't you?”
“ Christ, you… you ain't him, are you?”
“ What's being said? Who knows what?”
“ Nothing… nobody knows nothing… I don't hear a word. Everybody's stone cold on it, man.”
“ Stone cold, huh?” replied Sincebaugh. “Tell you this, man… if you don't talk, you're going to be stone cold.”
“ Whatchu mean, man? I'm tellin' you, there's nothing on it that's goin' round, except now they got a psychic on the case and the guy doing the killing, his time's runnin' out.”
“ Who knew the victims? Give me a name, kid.”
“ Philly.”
“ Philly? A guy from Philadelphia? What's his real name?”
“ You the fuzz, aren't you?”
“ What's his goddamned real name?”
“ Don't know. All I know is he's a transvestite; sings in one of the bars. Calls himself Phyllis and ain't got nothing to do with Philly. Now, that's all I hear or know.”
“ Phyllis… okay, kid, get out of here and get a productive life.”
“ Sure, sure, dickhead, maybe I'll work on that degree.” The kid disappeared the way he came, like a ghost, materializing and dematerializing amidst the landscape he knew so well. A powerful wind began to sweep through the area, lifting drooping tree limbs and blasting here and there in drafts. Alex gave another thought to Kim Desinor as a child inside the prison compound of St. Domitilla's with its paper refuse rising in a miniature tornado and flying about the courtyard as bits and shards and fragments of ghosts. The old place had been condemned years before, its doors closed forever, awaiting the wrecking bail.
Alex heard no refrain of long-ago laughter in her walls.
24
The light that lies In woman's eyes. Has been my heart's undoing.
Kim Desinor had seldom met a man so infuriating as Detective Lieutenant Alexander Sincebaugh, yet he posed an interesting challenge for her. What did it take with him? she wondered. A little more time perhaps? Perhaps not; it was quite possible that all the time in the world wouldn't change his obdurant, bullheaded and fearful notions about psychic investigators in general and her in particular. Still, for a brief while there in the restaurant, gazing over at him through the candlelight, she had sensed that deep, abiding need in him to confess and be consoled, to shout out his needs, his desires, his most intimate fears and wants. It was then she saw the bevy of human maggots clawing at him, the symbolic representation of an abiding agony which he'd unwittingly and psychically conveyed to her.
The symbolism was clear enough, she believed. And although she had wanted to come away a friend, this obviously wasn't to be, it appeared. He had made that much painfully clear.
She'd been attracted to him, had let down her own guard, revealed to him that she too had fears and anxieties and needs that daily went unfulfilled, the same sort of needs that had caused her to dig herself into a hole in which she found herself helplessly mired, thanks in large measure to Chief Paul Zanek. Though if she were totally honest with herself-one of life's impossibilities? — she knew that she alone was to blame for the Zanek affair regardless of Paul's role in it. Maybe it took coming to New Orleans and running into Alex Sincebaugh to reveal this much to herself.
She thought about her seemingly endless nightmare of days and nights and overwhelming loneliness at St. Domitilla's, wondered if she dared go see the damned dungeon sometime before leaving New Orleans, to manfully face down her fears as she always told others to do; wondered momentarily about her father's last days in an emphysema ward in some small town called Corinth in Mississippi, which had sent word to the school, the head nun breaking the news to her, explaining to her what the strange medical term meant, saying, “It's a defect in the lung system.”
“ Christ,” she moaned as she undressed and found her way into the shower, ignoring the phone messages left her by Zanek throughout the evening. “Now there's a real and not an imagined parasite,” she told herself, wondering what was on his mind.
The hot and pulsating spray of the shower was soothing to her aching muscles. It had been a taxing day in so many ways. If she could relax completely, she knew that her subconscious would play over the events of the day in a mysterious and subtle fashion, refashioning them, cutting and stitching and embroidering them into a whole cloth of meaning. She let the hot water play over her head, neck and shoulders, turning up the heat in increments until the room was filled with a velvety, warm and enveloping fog. She found herself thinking anew of Sincebaugh, even his name alluring, different, curious. He was a handsome man, filled with kinetic energy of his own, much of it left untapped. She'd felt it pulsating through him when she'd boldly taken his hand in hers, stared into his midnight-blue eyes and aura, which sent showers of silvery sparks out whenever he grew enraged; with no regrets now, she replayed the moment slowly in her head. He had been intrigued, glued to her, at that moment, and he had been frightened at the same time-afraid of what she might reveal about him to others? Or did he fear what she might reveal about him to Alex Sincebaugh? Her psychic eye had pierced him, peered beneath the layers and held for a brief moment his heart in her hands, and that touch had made him draw back even further than before. Had made him doubly, triply suspicious.
Even shaken and distraught, he remained handsome, a firm gentleness always kept at bay, just below the surface, despite his outward rancor. It was something about him being just the opposite of her father, a man who still dominated her own worst nightmares whenever she broke down and allowed nightmares back into her life, that drew her. For years now she'd somehow controlled her own night visions, dreams and excursions into the fears that had haunted her as a child. How she did it, she could not tell, not even to herself; however, at odd times of stress, a huge shadow descended over her like a living liquid cloud of tar, and in it she found her father's eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hands, all crushing her, taking the air from her, torturing her and beating her.
Her father had never once beaten her in the real world, not physically at least. The nightmares were symbolic, like Sincebaugh's, and they told of a more sinister torture that she had participated in with her father, one she had all these years hidden from herself. But more and more now the specter of that terrible and formless horror stalked her.
She might more readily face the old reform school into which he had cast her than face him, to learn exactly what kind of man he was. He'd been a failure in so many ways. That much she knew. He'd been a heavy drinker, and he wasn't a pleasant drunk who curled up on the couch, but one who lashed out at unseen, invisible demons that provoked him into violence. She remained very shady on precisely how her mother had died, but some corner of her brain kept a caged thought that said it was his fault and he knew it. Her mother's death was the beginning of the end for him and them.
She shook loose from the disturbing core of memories she'd so successfully locked away years and years before. She stepped from the hot shower, toweled herself off and pulled on her thick white robe. She found a dry bar and poured herself a glass of wine and nibbled on some crackers, trying desperately to think of anything other than her father when a knock at the door shook her.
Sincebaugh? she wondered, intrigued. As unable to get me out of his mind as I've been unable to get him from mine? It was a delightful thought that drove her to the door, causing some disappointment when she heard Jessica Coran's whiskey voice from the other side. “Open up. We've got to talk.” She pulled the latch and opened the door wide, allowing Jessica in, catching the perfume of alcohol as it wafted past with her. Jessica was filled with a nervous energy and her speech was nonstop. But she was more frightened than drunk.
“ He's here… he's in New Orleans. Crazy… isn't it? I bait him to get him here and now he's here and now I'm
