“Involved? With someone else?”
“You know how it is. Working late hours on an intense case. Only natural to turn to someone, someone close at hand, not thousands of miles away.”
“I can't say that you didn't warn me.” She dared not ask how long Parry had been seeing this new person in his life.
James finally admitted, “I could no longer maintain our- my-side of our relationship, despite all my attempts to make it work.”
“Greece, the Mediterranean, that was a beautiful attempt, James.”
“It's over, Jess. You made the choice for us, not me.”
“What choice are you talking about? I've had no… It seems to me that you're the one who has made the choices here, James.”
“You chose your work over everything, Jessica. Over me, over us, over your own happiness. And that's where it's at for you, isn't it? Isn't it?” He'd begun to shout.
“I've done all I could to maintain an exclusive, longdistance relationship with you, James. I've done that and more. I have committed to you.”
“Well, Jess, you have a funny definition of commitment. I can't accept what you call a commitment any longer. I'm forty-eight years old, Jessica, and one day I want to have children. I'm sorry, but I can't do this anymore. Not anymore.”
“James, let's hold on, all right? Give me time to come over. We'll talk. We'll work something out, we'll-”
“No, I'm sorry, Jess, but-”
“What's the harm in giving it more time, so that we can discuss it like two intelligent adults faced with a problem. So we can find a solution?”
“Jess, you made a choice-your career over me. It's that simple. Problem resolved.”
“You want me to give up everything-my job, my friends, everything I know-to join you in Hawaii, but you're not willing to give up a single thing.” Love makes fools of us all, she thought.
“We've had this argument before, Jess.” He spoke in a near-whisper. She could feel his pain coming through. She whispered in return, “What are you willing to give up for me, James?”
“What we had… while beautiful, Jess, it's now clearly… over.”
Jessica had felt all her inner resolve and strength drain from her body through bare-knuckled hands and fingertips that wrapped themselves tightly about the solid phone receiver, as if they could hold back James's determination. Her fingers lingered over the phone as if independent of her. Her hands felt and looked like someone else's. She calmly studied the flawless white skin and hardly noticed when her right hand simply dropped the phone on its cradle, her eyes filling with remorse and bittersweet tears. She was apart from herself, unable to feel a thing.
She hadn't even said good-bye; nor had he. Fitting ending. She felt angry and frustrated. There seemed no pleasing him. While he offered no compromise, Jim expected her to completely overhaul her life and lifestyle on the altar of their spoken bond. It would be easier to give into mad emotions now. Make demands of her own. Simply to say Fuck Jim Parry, and to hell with all his ultimatums. She was no one's property, goods, assets, belongings. “I'm no man's belongings, nor will I ever be,” she told herself.
She could live without Jim, she rationalized now, and then she cried more deeply, not believing a word of it.
And now here she lay in a London suite paid for by Scotland Yard. Gulping back her grief at the loss of her lover, Jessica quietly fell asleep thinking of a line from a familiar song, one that had become a way of life for her: Alone again, naturally.
At 2 a.m. Jessica gave up any hope of sleep. Insomnia, that old devil, stalked her anew. With the full discomfort of inability to find restful sleep, Jessica turned to Father Jerrard Luc Sante for help, hefting his self- published book Twisted Faiths onto her lap where she sat up in bed.
She read halfway through the opus and determined that while Dr. Luc Sante's conclusions lived an inspired life unto themselves, and while he went way out on the cutting edge of a psychotherapy few people dared discuss much less examine at so close a range, his style and choice of words were too often uninspired.
Still, the conclusions seemed inspired by some supra-human voice seemingly not of this Earth. Actually, the book's many conclusions surpassed anything she had ever read in psychotherapy journals or volumes.
At the same time, she clearly understood why Luc Sante could not find a publisher for his work. No one would pay money to read the convoluted thinking of what some might assume to be a mad priest gone on verbal rampage against the evil among us. Throughout her reading, she was forced to stop and reread for clarity, and, frankly, she found Luc Sante's crippled prose generally wooden and lacking in luster.
While she was no editor or grammarian, she judged his sentences as awkwardly constructed, his phraseology too often linear and syllogistic, while his annoying terminology-laden, for-psychotherapist-only approach stuttered every step of the way over the rhetoric of his own field: religion. Still, his “truths” were fascinating: Satan lives in the human breath and organs. Evil flourishes in the disease vials we call our bodies. Evil flourishes in our weak and hopelessly ruled brains, and yet we have children whom we teach and inspire. How many of us inspire hatred, racial prejudice, ignorance, poverty, and murder? We are Satan. Satan is us. And from generation to generation, we propagate evil through our children, and will continue to do so until the cycle of Satanism is broken and until psychotherapists join with religious leaders to both recognize and combat evil in its purest form-mankind. The same mankind that crucified Christ.
All the same, only occasionally on paper did Luc Sante's magnificent speaking voice come through. Consequently, the pace of the book became as turgid as a pollution-choked industrial canal. Still, the book filled Jessica with dread shivers. It held much rare information doled out like so many golden nuggets, she thought, all on a subject seldom to never touched on. Luc Sante's running thesis said: True evil as it is created in society among people, as it is given life and breath in this world, is altogether so mundane and day-to-day as to be all but invisible to us, and in being so invisible, it gained in strength and cunning thanks to our blatant ignorance of it.
She believed what Luc Sante said to be clearly correct in a sense, fitting into of her own experiences with twisted minds. Jessica began to believe that perhaps evil did indeed infest and infiltrate and find succor in the most mundane of human hearts and minds through the genetic makeup. That much of the pitiable state of the human condition, and the ferocity of the creature called man, was predetermined through a fate as biochemically fundamental as the DNA of apes, despite the outward veneer of civility, progress, and technological marvels.
Certainly mankind remained, throughout the ages and present day, an incubator for evil experiments as well as all manner of disease and disability. She imagined a world in which the worst of mankind, the most evil among us, were subjects of a cloning experiment, that had, in the later part of the twentieth century, blindly and unwittingly cloned its own dark side, so that the modem-day serial killer could indeed be explained. She imagined that nature had done the cloning for us with the hand of Satan in the mix. She pulled back, short of putting full stock into the religious man's words. “We've had the messages in the bubblegum wrapper defense, we've had the Devil-made-me-do-it defense, the talking dog from Son of Sam, and now we're to have the DNA-made-me-do-it defense?” she asked the room. Still Luc Sante's book had one fine result: It had put her under. She had fallen asleep at last, with his compilation of dark and sinister thoughts on her lap, and she dreamed of the many guises of evil he'd so elegantly described in his comprehensive work on the nature of evil and the duty of every psychotherapist to engage the diabolical, all malfeasance and malignancy wherever he or she found it, and to struggle in real-time combat with it at every turn.
“We fight the same enemy.” Luc Sante's voice wafted over her dreams…Lawrence Coibby, used car salesman, loner, without a friend in the world, having never actually been buried, had spent the last few weeks in storage in a stranger's freezer in a garage in Kensington. Jessica was told this with such calm that she marveled anew at the ability of the British to understate any situation. Consequently, there having been no actual burial, due in part to the absence of burial sites, there was no true exhumation of the body. However, over the last twenty-four hours, the “hunt” for Coibby's body had continued, and once properly identified and located, the cadaver had been taken to a nearby hospital, St. Stephen's Parish Hospital, where Dr. Coran oversaw the evidence gathering- specifically the evidence gathered from under Lawrence Coibby's tongue.
Staring through the high-powered magnifying glass brought in for the job, Jessica found the tongue in remarkably good shape due more to the deep freezing of the body than to the embalming.
“There it stands, gentlemen,” she told Sharpe and the others, Copperwaite, Chief Inspector Boulte alongside
