her she felt the coldness closing in, and only when she blacked out did she feel any comfort. But she didn't black out; rather she woke to the voices of two Scotland Yard detectives seated beside her.
“And rather tidy, for a serial killer, wouldn't you say, Stuart? Concerns himself with washing the wounds.”
“Washing the wounds, yes?”
“So to speak, what with disposing of the bodies in water. Wouldn't you say?”
“That just makes him all the more oddly weird, if that's his intention.”
“His or theirs, either way, we're bloody sure to spend out that budget given us for calling international help. In any case, to whom do we turn now? How best to spend our money on this situation, Stuart? You know if we don't spend it, they'll find another use for the funds elsewhere.”
“Interpol, the French, yes… If anybody's had any experience with something so gruesome as this, it'd have to be the French, French law enforcement, right?”
“Coran will do, Coppers. I've read her casebooks. And if the bulletins can be believed, and they generally don't go in for hyperbole, she's just the sort we need on this case.”
“You're sure it's not just another way to piss off the boss, Sharpie?”
“That, too, of course,” joked Sharpe.
“Then we've done well to get her this far.”
“She has a great investigative mind. She'll do as Sherlock to my Holmes, what? Whatever the cost to the division, these dreadful murders can't continue…”
“I suspect Boulte will see the wisdom of it in the end,” suggested Copperwaite. “Else the gentlemen of the Times' 11 have us all for breakfast, my friend, but if they see we've taken the extreme step of calling Coran on board, why then…”
“Now you're thinking like a bureaucrat, Coppers.”
Jessica only half heard their conversation. Long hours in the lab, the excitement of the evening, and a bout with insomnia had taken their toll. She fell asleep beside Sharpe.
Two figments of Jessica's imagination now gathered fog-laden air into their “land of nod” lungs. The sun had as yet to show itself, and the darkness clutched their shoulders where they knelt over Jessica's body, her dream self, which had been laid out at a kind of watery crossroads here-below a trellis train-track bridge, a sign reading Grosvenor Bridge, someone saying it wasn't far to Battersea Park from here. Jessica's body, snatched now from the water, lay in a dirty sand beach that saw little to no traffic save for young teens in search of a place to drink, shoot up, and neck.
“I wager we know what the M.E.'s going to say. It'll be like the rest,” moaned Copperwaite's dream personae.
Sharpe's soothing voice took hold again, lulling her back to dream, a silly dream actually, in which they examined her dead body, dead by the hand of the Crucifier.
“We can't overlook anything, Stuart. Suppose this isn't a fourth victim but a first, a copycat killing? Toxicology tests have to be made to rule out every contingency.”
“Wretched business… So, what do we do? Wait for results until a fifth victim bobs up at yet another body of water somewhere?”
“We're in a rather awkward position, which often dictates a man do nothing. But I rather fancy we must act and act now.”
“How so?”
“We go find this Dr. Coran, and we bring her back to England with us. We begin with her superiors.”
“We've a problem with that, Sharpie.”
“Oh? And what's that?”
“Dr. Jessica Coran is already here. This is her body, Richard! Don't you recognize her?”
Suddenly, Jessica started at the full sight of her face at their feet, and she instantly felt the weight of Holcraft's book on her lap back here in the plane, in the real world. Her dream was instantly replaced when she opened her eyes and focused on the pages opened to asphyxia deaths.
Jessica couldn't recall having opened the book to these pages, only marking them for later reading. But she also realized that she had been lulled into sleep by the sound of wind over a wing at her ear; an airplane-induced sleep on one side, Richard Sharpe's voice on the other.
She felt awful, having fallen asleep to the sound of Sharpe's tale. She'd been battling and failing miserably, with an ongoing case of insomnia using every cure known to modem science.
Now she wondered how much of her dream of Copperwaite and Sharpe had come of their words and how much her imagination. Either way, they had a most fascinating case on their hands, and she hoped to play a major role in its resolution.
“So, Doctor, you're back with us,” Sharpe said matter-of-factly.
“Please, accept my sincerest apology. I haven't had much sleep lately, and the plane hum and your voices conspired to lull me to sleep. I do feel awful.”
“Not at all.”
She wondered how much she had injured his pride. He pretended that nothing of consequence had happened, while she wondered what he and Copperwaite had said of her while she'd dozed.
“Coihby's and Burton's bodies were snatched from the water,” Copperwaite ventured.
Sharpe glared at his partner.
“That's where Richard left off with you,” Copperwaite explained himself.
Sharpe frowned and gave in. “Katherine O'Donahue was meant to be left in water. We surmised that the killer was interrupted, frightened off, really, before he could complete the job, you understand.”
She nodded. “I see.”
“That's when the bridgeman hit the body.”
“Poor chap thought he had killed the woman,” Copperwaite added with a bit of a snicker.
Sharpe finished with, “New Scotland Yard forensics has determined that our first victim had the same toxic level of barbiturates, and that she was long dead before the Jetta ever touched her.”
Fatigue bom of insomnia stalked Jessica.
She had once kiddingly told her psychic friend and fellow FBI agent, Dr. Kim Desinor, “I fear that I am insomnia-stalked”
Kim, quick to remind Jessica of their work together in New Orleans some years back, had replied, “Better stalked by insomnia than some human monstrosity like Mad Matthew Matisak.”
True enough, Jessica now thought. Still, as a result of her insomnia, at times when she least expected, the fatigue washed floodlike over her, and Jessica found her mind and body shutting down with her tired eyes.
It-the fatigue that wouldn't be denied-came on her again like some pixie-dust-laden gnome. The jet engines, the monotony of aircraft against air current, the battering of the hull created the same lulling sound as a ship at sea… It all conspired like shadowy alchemy to make it impossible to keep her eyes open. “I'm going to sleep on it now, gentlemen, if you don't mind,” she announced in a slurred tone before placing Holcraft's volume aside altogether and closing her eyes again. She nodded off to visions of crucifixions and tattoos.
FIVE
… he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.
Somewhere in a dark place in London
He paced before the cross. He knelt at the altar in the gloom of this place and the far deeper gloom of his soul. He stood, paced more, as if pacing might focus thought. He pondered the situation. Pondered on-had pondered for hours on end now: how to present his truth to them, and eventually to every man.