4
A flinty heart within a snowy breast
Is like base mold lock'd in a golden chest.
Quantico, Virginia
Dr. Jessica Coran, Medical Examiner for the tactical field unit of the Psychological amp; Pathological Profiling sector of the Behavioral Sciences Division of the FBI, was on twenty-four-hour call to drop everything and go anywhere Chief Paul Zanek sent her at a moment's notice. For this reason, she had a ready bag packed and waiting in her closet at all times. But for the past six months, she hadn't gone anywhere, and obviously she wasn't going anywhere so long as Paul Zanek was the one making the decision.
She had awakened after fitful sleep to her own decision, and first thing after showering and dressing in her most businesslike manner, her lab glasses on the end of her nose, she had sought out Eriq Santiva, Zanek's boss.
She found Santiva surprisingly clear on her point of view, understanding her position, nodding throughout and finally agreeing with her. He still wanted special agents with her- to watch her back, as he said-but she argued passionately that this would only harm any chance at luring Matisak back out into the open.
Santiva wanted Matisak badly. He'd just come on as new head of the division when Matisak had escaped.
“ Will you clear New Orleans for me?” she asked. “Will you make the whole idea palatable to Paul Zanek? If not, I'm walking out of here, resigning and going back into private practice.”
Her threat was taken seriously along with her concerns. She liked, admired and trusted Santiva, who had a sparkling record in the Bureau. He was a lean, tall man with striking dark features.
Santiva shook on it with her. “You'll have New Orleans. Zanek has kept me informed about their wishes, and I think they'll be happy to have you, but you're one hundred percent right about Paul. He'll need to think it's his idea. Keep leaning on him, pressuring him from where you're at, and I'll put it to him from where I sit. Between us, I think we can win Paul over.”
She thanked Santiva and left with a sense of accomplishment, a sense that she was finally taking a step in the right direction. She followed this up with a visit to Paul Zanek's office, but there she learned that Paul was as adamant as ever about her staying close to home plate, Quantico.
Zanek, and the others in a position to make choices for her, had stonewalled her since Oklahoma, where the trail for Mad Matthew Matisak had gone cold. Since then, she had been in a kind of “protective custody,” bodyguards surrounding her and friends like Zanek shielding her by keeping her cloaked at Quantico. Meanwhile, her life was no longer her own.
Not a single word on Matisak since Oklahoma, no leads, not a clue. The few possibilities had turned out to be false. It was as if the lunatic had disappeared off the face of the earth, and thank God if he had gone down in the light plane he had commandeered at a small Oklahoma airport. Neither plane nor pilot had ever been found again, no wreckage reported, nothing. If they'd run out of fuel somewhere in the southwestern desert, it was possible the monster had died a slow and torturous death, the sort he was famous for inflicting on his own victims. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord, and more power to You, she thought now.
She had more than once reveled in the idea of Matisak's dying of slow dehydration, so fitting for a killer that craved the liquid of life, blood. If it had happened, it had not likely occurred before the fiend had fed on the blood of the unfortunate pilot.
She now sat in the darkened projection room, thanks to a busy Paul, who'd come and gone and come back in again. She sat watching the frame-by-frame images of the so-called psychic detective, Dr. “Faith” or Desinor, as she was alternately called by Paul Zanek, whose interest in the woman seemed a bit more than professional. Jessica had pretended she knew nothing of Police Commissioner Stephens of New Orleans, or that he was at Quantico, personally requesting help with the Queen of Hearts killings. She knew now that P.C. Stephens had personally requested her, but that Zanek was doing his level best to sell the man on the psychic detective instead. It was as if Paul had a personal motive in it all, and one that went beyond protecting Jessica from herself.
Paul stopped the camera and in the darkened room, Jessica realized that he'd brought someone else in to view the tape, a tall, older man with piercing green eyes and dyed red hair that she guessed to be Stephens.
Stephens who'd been guided to them by the FBI in Louisiana, was thick-chested, trim at the waist, a man with thinning red hair and a superior attitude that Jessica didn't like in the least on meeting him.
Zanek, a big man, filled the little screening room with his personality and baritone voice. He now said, “We have film on every psychic hit that Dr. Desinor has made since becoming an FBI agent. The woman is nothing short of miraculous. Isn't that right, Dr. Coran?” Paul leaned over and whispered in Jessica's ear, “Back me up on all I say.”
He then turned to Stephens while the still shot of Dr. Desinor, larger than life, stared down on them. “I'm sending Dr. Desinor on an experimental basis, rather than Agent Coran here, Mr. Stephens, for reasons already explained to you. Nothing's changed.”
“ Dr. Desinor,” Jessica said, instantly rebelling, “the psychic we're supposed not to have on our payroll? How're you going to get around that? Come on, Paul. It looks to me like they need scientific help down there in Cajun country, not more voodoo.” Even as she said it, she was sorry. She knew that the psychic arm of the Behavioral Science Unit was from its inception Paul Zanek's innovation, and besides, she had heard only positive, glowing reports on Dr. Desinor.
“ Come off it, Jess,” Paul said. “You'd be waving a bloody flag at yourself down there. The press'd be all over the story when they got wind you were pulling into town. Matisak would be at you like a tiger on a kill.”
“ The last time you used his name, you assured me he was most likely dead! Which is it, Paul?”
“ Damnit, Jess, until we find a body…”
“ And when will that be, Paul? A year, two, three, five? I'm done living this way. I'm through hiding. Do you understand that?”
“ I've got a meeting with Santiva I have to get to. We'll discuss this later today. Say about three?”
“ All right, all right,” she seethed.
Before Zanek retreated, he said, “There's more tapes of Dr. Desinor in action. One in particular you must see, so please, continue without me. Leonard, resume the screening,” he told an assistant, and the film began anew.
Jessica wasn't having any of it.
She caught Paul just outside the door. “So, what do you need me here for?”
“ To help me convince the man. Jess, we've got a chance to show the combined division chiefs, and the head of the FBI, that psychic detection makes sense here, especially on this one.”
“ On psycho weird-out cases, you mean?”
“ It's just bizarre enough, and I don't know, I just feel it. Will it hurt you to watch the film I've pulled for Stephens on Dr. Desinor?”
Jessica had trouble focusing in on the film now, willing to take Paul Zanek's word for Desinor's feats of acumen and talent in the field of psychometric readings of objects found at the scene of a crime.
On screen, Dr. Desinor, a handsome woman with full features, tall with a proud bearing, now held a ransom note in one hand, lightly moving her fingertips over the surface and going into a trance state. A skeptical agent from Georgia named Parlen had his back to the camera now; he'd come seeking her help in a months-old case involving a kidnapped financier. Dr. Desinor's suggestions came as a surprise, even a shock to Agent Parlen, who doubted her credibility. Jessica could read his doubt in his voice. Nonetheless, Parlen promised to look into the possibility of involvement by an illegitimate daughter and perhaps her husband or live-in boyfriend.
Jessica's mind was filled with its own ongoing film, memories of a soul-warming Hawaii, and gentle James Parry and his touch, flooding in, only to be swamped by the ever-present fear she now lived with: that at any moment, any day now, an escaped maniac whom she had once put away would turn up at her doorstep to seek his long-awaited, carefully planned revenge.
