“ It's no easy matter living with the knowledge that someone is stalking you.” Dr. Donna Lemonte, her psychiatrist, had tried to be reassuring the last time they'd spoken. “Someone who wants more than just your life. Your life's just a symbol to this guy.”
“ Don't you think I know that? This sonofabitch wants to drain me of my goddamned blood, and drink it before my dangling corpse.”
Mad Matthew Matisak, imprisoned for life for the blood-drinking, torture deaths of countless young women and men, had made a daring and intelligent escape from the maximum security asylum that had only held him for a goddamned total of two and a half years. His escape had left a trail of dead and discarded people, like so many empty containers. And that was exactly how he thought of people-containers, buckets of blood, to leave drained in his gruesome wake. The dead included the head of security and psychiatric treatment at the federal facility in Philadelphia, Dr. Gabriel Arnold, who had never understood Matisak.
Jessica had done countless interviews with Matisak, gaining information about where all the bodies were buried. For the past year, Dr. Arnold, head of forensic psychiatry at the facility, had worked with Matisak, and recently he'd begun to make outlandish and foolish claims about small victories scored against his number-one patient: the zookeeper pleased with his most prized possession. Arnold had claimed that the mass murderer had actually become cooperative during sessions with him, that Matisak had become talkative with him, that he had put away all demands and had finished with his “head games” and was a willing subject of study for the FBI.
She might have guessed on hearing such reports that Matisak was playing yet another game out to its conclusion, but she'd had no idea that this time it would end in death.
Jessica recalled now having warned Arnold of her suspicions, that Matisak was not to be trusted, ever, that the fiend cared not a whit for the suffering of the families of his victims. Arnold had only become defensive and angry, sure that she wanted to “keep Matisak breakthroughs” all to herself. Since Paul Zanek had taken over the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, Dr. Arnold had been feeling more and more put upon and isolated at the facility, which, Jessica had no doubt, had further contributed to his death.
Now her predictions had come true tenfold, with the madman's having so completely checkmated Dr. Arnold, making mincemeat of his remains after divesting him of every ounce of blood via a dialysis machine. The madman had made a fool of Arnold, whose so-called “cumulative progress” had amounted to psycho-nonsense.
Cunning and satanically wise, Matisak had not tried to fake an illness, but rather had induced an attack from one or several of the afflictions which wracked his body. He'd done so by not taking his medications, which he'd undoubtably been hiding either in his laundry or on his food tray, if not feeding the stuff to the occasional mouse visiting him in the night. These were medications Matisak had been on for the past two and a half years, medications-supplied via federal funds-which not only controlled his mood swings but his physical abnormalities as well. He had a potpourri of illnesses to choose from. Faking any one of them would have ended in disaster from the start, and knowing this, he'd instead invited a true attack. A calculated risk of his own life. It had all been carefully planned and thought out. Matisak had lingered in the sick ward for almost a week, biding his time, regaining strength as his weakened condition faded. Security there was tight, but he was out of his cage, and only a short walk down the corridor freedom stood waiting. At precisely the right time of day, using an orderly's robe and badge, the so-called madman-incapable of knowing right from wrong according to some human rights activists who'd fought to keep him from the death penalty-would make the easy walk to deliverance, unafraid of his captors.
So he had waited, and each day had brought a visit from the now-trusting Dr. Arnold, and after the physical therapy sessions, Dr. Arnold would try his uniquely asinine brand of psychotherapy on the killer.
Matisak had cunningly chosen the precise moment of opportunity, when Arnold had filled a syringe and pumped the serum that Matisak needed into his arm. Matisak had grabbed the empty syringe and plunged it deep into Arnold's throat. This had sent the doctor staggering back as Matisak grabbed a scalpel from Arnold's lapel pocket. After a moment's macabre dance with Whalen, the security guard, Matisak had turned the scalpel on Whalen, sluicing through his thick neck in one instantaneous movement.
After wrestling the dying security guard to the floor, Mad Matthew Matisak had easily overpowered an orderly who was new to asylum work and who, frozen in place, had waited for death to easily come.
But the cunning, cool fiend had first ordered the new man to disrobe and toss his orderly whites aside before Matisak took his pleasure with the orderly, slicing through the jugular and carotid arteries. The infirmary had been instantly steeped in blood, which Matisak, at some point, had gone on all fours to lap up in dog fashion. He'd left hand and knee and even tongue prints on the floor in crimson detail, and he'd also left behind the disgusting poem meant for Jessica and written in Arnold's blood across the wall.
Before Matisak was finished with Dr. Arnold, there remained not a drop of blood in his cadaver. The monster had made fiendishly wicked use of a nearby dialysis machine. He'd no doubt planned its use on Arnold all along, and enjoyed watching the blood empty from his body through the transparent polyethylene tube and into the beaker from which Ma-tisak drank his fill, leaving only what he could not consume or take with him. An autopsy had clearly shown that Matisak had used the IV tube and the dialysis machine to pump the blood from Arnold's throat after laying the bound and gagged man across a stretcher. What troubled Jessica most was the thought that Arnold was conscious long enough to watch his own blood streak through the tube, into the machine and out into the waiting beakers.
She held at bay a mental image of the monster hoisting a beaker of blood to his lips before Arnold's crazed eyes.
A reckless trail of victims left in Matisak's wake had led FBI authorities to Oklahoma, and by the time Jessica got there from Hawaii, the manhunt had concentrated on the Tulsa area. It was one of the largest manhunts in recent history. But Matisak had remained elusive, and once the trail had gone cold in Oklahoma, Jessica and Paul had gone back to the federal facility in Philadelphia where Arnold had so hideously died. There she had examined the scene of the murders, which by then had been cleaned and tidied up. Still, she had learned what she could from others who'd swept the actual scene, piecing together the probable string of events that had led to Arnold's death and Matisak's escape.
Once sated, the monster had next assumed the identity of the orderly, named Kenneth Bowden, wearing the young man's lab coat and ID tag. He'd taken the man's car keys, casually strolled out to the car, pulled up to the gate, where he'd blithely signed himself out as Bowden, and proceeded through the gate with a wave of his hand.
Lights came up now in the small screening room behind Zanek's office, and the final film, dated only the day before, ended with Dr. Desinor rushing from the room as if her life depended upon getting off camera. She was neither shaken nor up set by her reading of a ransom note brought her by authorities in Decatur, Georgia.
“ She's everything I told you, isn't she? What about it, Stephens?” asked Zanek, who'd returned through his office door at the rear, surprising both Stephens and Jessica. “Tell 'im, Jess.”
P.C. Richard Stephens ran thick, freckled fingers through his thinning mop of red hair and allowed it to settle on the bald pate at the back. “She is remarkable, but I had already come to that conclusion just reading of her work from the material you forwarded.”
“ I think she's exactly what you need in New Orleans,” Zanek told him. “Jessica here, well… she's got so many duties here at Quantico, it just wouldn't do for us to lose her right now. You understand?”
Stephens, who'd originally requested help in the forensics arena from the F B I, and from Jessica Coran in particular, had heard a great deal about Dr. Coran and how she got results, and all of it had proven to be true. But Zanek had had him waffling between the pathologist and the psychic for a week now, wondering if he should get help in the form of science or seance. All he knew for sure was that his NOPD had its collective hands full with a bizarre string of murders that no one seemed capable of getting a handle on.
“ Jessica, you haven't said anything,” Zanek pressed, placing a friendly hand on her shoulder. “What do you think of Dr. Desinor? Doesn't she make David Copperfield look pitiful by comparison?”
“ I'll admit she's very good.”
“ Dr. Desinor gets results. She was dead-on in Georgia.”
“ You know that for sure?”
“ Got word just this morning: a major development in the Sendak case. Mr. Stephens here asked specifically for your assistance, Jess, but I've explained to him that you're needed here for the time being. Hell, we've got requests for Jess's help from a dozen different police agencies across the continent at the moment, and I've had to turn them all down, Stephens. Nothing personal. It's just important right now for Jess, for Dr. Coran, to remain close at hand. Now, our Dr. Desinor'll be a fine stand-in, I can assure you, especially on this sort of case, a case
