horror could be so easily and readily visited upon her doorstep. She wished now that she'd fought Zanek and had remained in her lab behind the safe confines of Quantico, but Jessica, she surmised, felt quite differently. Jessica wanted to race out into the street as she'd foolishly, recklessly, bravely done at 34 East Canal Street, find Matisak and do war with the demon.
Jessica peeled apart the paper and read the stained message:
Come midnight alone to join me at Metairie Necropolis to find eternity and bliss.
“ What the hell's he talking about? What's Metairie?” Jessica wanted to know.
“ It sounds like he's talking about the Metairie Cemetery.”
“ A cemetery?”
“ Yeah, aboveground cemetery; a rather large and easy place to hide, in fact. You can't go there, Jess. He's laying the trip we spoke of.”
“ But if I don't go… what's the result… where does it end? Poor Ed. He… he didn't deserve to get mixed up in this, and now… now he's dead. Everybody around me is in danger, Kim, including you, so long as that fiendish, satanic creature roams free. And I'm the only one who has a shot at stopping his crazed brain from hatching his sick plans, and this is one heart I intend to put an end to.”
“ It's too dangerous, Jess.”
“ It's more dangerous going on the way I have. Poor Ed; he must've seen Ed with me. Must've stalked Ed, then killed him, just to hurt me. Damn him… damn that evil bastard.”
“ We've got to call someone,” said Kim, going for the phone.
“ Didn't matter one damn to Matisak one way or another if Ed was a friend or just my pilot, did it? All that madman knows is that he wants to hurt me any way he can. Hell, he killed four others in Oklahoma for me-to send me a message. Now this…”
Jessica kept her gun and her eyes alert to the possibility that Matthew Matisak might materialize at any moment from any direction. Then she closed the door on the horrid sight of Sand's dangling head. She next went to the balcony and searched there for any sign of the killer, despite the fact they were some twelve stories up. She even looked overhead, in case the sky was falling. In the distance she saw lightning flashes and heard the rumble of a storm. The TV newscast had warned of possible high winds due to an approaching hurricane out in the Gulf of Mexico. But Jessica's concern was on another force of nature, Matisak.
Before anyone else arrived, Jessica gripped Kim by the wrist hard and exacted a promise from her. “You're not to tell anyone about the note Matisak left behind, do you understand? Do you? Promise me you won't. Just promise.”
“ I can't do that.”
“ Damnit, it's got to be kept between us. Damnit, Kim, I need your promise on this. If you say a word to anyone about it, our friendship is over before it's begun.”
Kim bit her lower lip, dropping her gaze and considered this and the state that Jessica Coran was in. “I wasn't aware we had a friendship.”
Jessica was still waving her. 38 around. “Please, promise me, Kim… promise me.”
“ All right… all right, Jess.”
“ All right, what?”
“ All right, I promise.”
Inside fifteen minutes the hallway was cordoned off as a crime scene, uniformed police and detectives everywhere, including Carl Landry and Lew Meade from the FBI. Word was buzzing that Alex Sincebaugh and Ben deYampert could not be located.
Ed Sand's head was bagged as evidence. Kim kept her promise about the note from Matisak. Frank Wardlaw did the forensics honors, and he kindly assured the two women that the perpetrator was nowhere to be found, but neither was the rest of Ed Sand's body.
A distraught Jessica Coran was told a half hour later that Sand's body was found in his hotel room at the Hilton, a floor up from her own room, blood everywhere from the decapitation. Jess had had no inkling that Sand even had a room at the Hilton. There was also found a briefcase in Sand's possession filled with surveillance devices, wiretaps, bugs. Jessica realized too late that Ed Sand had bugged her room and was shadowing her, and that his interest in her was part of his job as an FBI undercover man. He'd been handpicked by Zanek to protect Jessica.
Jessica and Kim had been followed from her room to Kim's by the stalking Matisak.
Landry confided that Lew Meade had led them to Sand's body, having known all about Sand. “When my men got there, they found a Do Not Disturb sign on Sand's doorknob outside. Inside, they found Sand's torso and limbs stretched across the bloody bedding.”
25
An honest heart is hard to find.
The morning found all of New Orleans in a silver veil of haze, fog and drizzle, an occasional groundswell of rumbling thunder electrifying the gravestones, reminding everyone of the approaching hurricane and the fragility of life as a handful of ghostly people walked amid the desolation of the city-maintained Cemetery #27 in the Uptown district. They'd gotten a late start due to the murder of Ed Sand, and the disruption it had caused both Dr. Coran and Dr. Desinor, but both women had steeled themselves to continue on with the manhunt for the Hearts killer. Unfortunately, there were people milling about the ancient cemetery and some would definitely notice the unpleasantries. It was nine A.M. and Alex Sincebaugh had long given up on anyone meeting him here, so he'd come and gone and come back again, learning belatedly of the goings-on at Kim's hotel room. He was kicking himself now at not having followed a strong desire to go to her hotel after their fight at the restaurant, but he and his partner had found a trail which smelled keen, so deYampert and he had pursued it hotly the night before. They had gone to a gay nightclub where Alex intended to shake some information from the patrons one way or another. Ben had had several off-color jokes in response to that, but Ben was also uneasy with traipsing through gay bars, and he'd registered his concern plainly enough, along with his concern that maybe the whole direction they were taking, hinging as it did on the words of a creep named Pigsty Gilreath and the Surette killing, might be leading them down the wrong path.
Surette had been one of the better-liked performers in the French Quarter shows; he'd played nightly at the Blue Heron just off Bourbon Street. Sincebaugh had never caught his act, but he'd heard that Surette had been impressive, that Horny Vicki Surette had had them on their knees-both male and female. And it was there that Davey Gilreath, otherwise known as Pigsty, had met Surette. This was old news, all gleaned on the first sweep of interrogrations and interviews with suspects in the wake of Surette's death. In the newspapers at the time, Surette had merited a two-inch column and an obit in the crowded pages of the Sunday Picyune.
Alex had been frustrated and stymied on the investigation after Gilreath had disappeared without a trace; no one, not even the streetwise, knew of Pigsty's whereabouts. It was as if he'd fallen into the Gulf.
As they pursued leads the night before, Alex had reminded Ben of all that they knew of Davey Gilreath, that he'd been raised on a farm somewhere in northern Louisiana, that he was an addict, a snitch and that he had once been Surette's lover.
“ Guys like that come and go with the wind, Alex. He could be in Alaska or Maine or on a merchant marine ship getting it on with all the boys there. I tell you, it's a dead end,” Ben assured him. “Besides, we ruled him out as a murderer long time ago.”
“ I don't suspect him of killing Surette.”
“ Well, then… why're you pursuing it?”
“ I'm uneasy with his disappearance. He seemed quite contented here before…”
“ Before people like him started getting bumped off daily? Hell, I see nothing strange in his getting out of New
