“Sharpe and Copperwaite had the ferry traffic held up for over an hour when they arrived, and a thick fog covered them. Finally, neither Sharpe nor Copperwaite or any police remained behind once the body was carted off, so how did the so-called killers see them from the ferTy as it pulled from the dock? I'll tell you how: through gross imaginings.”
“Quite,” agreed Boulte.
“That single detail in error is large enough to tell anyone those two were lying, that they were not in the proximity of the corpse, the boat, or anything to do with the killing since they quote 'watched from the ferry as it left the dock to see how the detectives treated the body.' “
On hearing the lie during his interrogation of the confessing pair, Richard Sharpe had quickly asked, “Oh, you must, of course, mean the return ferry, just coming in, since we held up the outgoing ferry.”
“Yes, yes, that's the one,” volunteered the confessor.
There had been no incoming ferries from across the Thames that time of morning. Even the ferry that Sharpe had heard that gloomy, fog-laden morning was the ferry crossing downriver at another bridge.
When this was pointed out to the confessing couple, both pleaded to be executed together. They wanted the Crown to kill them. That had been their intent all along.
Now this second murder duo of males, Periwinkle and Hawkins, a pair of seedy losers, had become altogether mad, angry, and frustrated in their sad little lives. Jessica, listening in on the interview from behind the one-way, realized immediately that the press, while useful if constructively involved in and committed to the ending of a serial killer's career, failed often to serve a case for a number of reasons, not the least being that a little bit of information in the wrong hands or head, could lead too many people down the primrose lane. Offering a reward often resulted in the same end. Except in this case the reward meant national attention, great notoriety as when People magazine editors chose to splash cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer's face across a cover. “I'm going in there. I have a few questions for these two,” Jessica told Boulte. He did not question her motive, even though she'd just told him that interrogating these men represented a gross waste of time and a wrong direction for the investigation to take. Just as she left the observation room, the thin, dark-haired public prosecutor entered via another door, and Boulte's entire attention went to her. “Ellen!” he falsely beamed.
Once inside the interrogation room, Jessica saw Sharpe's eyes, at first disappointed, as if throwing up a barrier to tell her This is no place for you; it's not safe or right for you to be here. This he quickly replaced with a quick nod, a half-smile, and an urging for her to come in. The moment she entered the interrogation room, she felt the palpable evil here, perhaps the reason that Richard wanted at first to stop her at the door. Evil in all its most excruciatingly toady ugliness resided in one comer in the pockmarked face of Periwinkle, who leaned over to whisper in the cauliflower ear of Hawkins. It were as if they shifted the evil back and forth between them, as if it were a salacious animal or insect. The sensation of it as a palpable, breathing entity here riveted first her sense of smell. Evil cast a noxious odor. It permeated her mouth where it tasted foul, and then found its way through the canals of her ears. Rude and disquieting words were coming from each of the desperate men. Each asked crude questions regarding Jessica's body and presence: “Why is the bitch here? Who is this whore kidding? We know what she wants, four wangs in the room. Wants us all to do her here and now while some other wang the other side of that mirror watches. Don't-cha, whore, bitch, cunt? Answer me, you fucking sweet-and-sour whore bitch.”
Sharpe lashed out at Periwinkle, threatening bodily harm if he didn't “Shut up!” Then he warned Hawkins, followed by a chair he threw across the room.
Jessica now felt the present evil crawl along the epidermal layer of her skin. It crept everywhere about her body at once. It made her feel like the victim in some sickening horror show, and the sight of the two men claiming to be the Crucifiers disgusted her, brought up in her a twisting, coiling hatred. Hissing hatred. Hatred wanting to unleash its venom on them.
Jessica wondered at the sheer depth of her own rage: unreasonably wild, natural, blind, primal, pure, dark, and fatal in the end. Such hatred existed as a natural survival signal for Jessica and other law-enforcement people, but it formed a reason for living for such monsters as Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, and countless others, including the Crucifier.
She wondered how many good and faithful so-called Christians felt this sort of viperlike hatred toward those who did not practice their belief. Wondered if the real Crucifier had this in mind, to bring the nonbeliever into believing, to teach by demonstration and by example, the example being the crucified remains of those who mocked his religion, whatever vision of that religion existed in the killers' heads.
In any event, she felt the cold, hungry, animal hatred pacing Interrogation Room A. It permeated the room. Perhaps part of it belonged to Richard, part of it to Copperwaite-as well as being part of the two men they interrogated. Perhaps hatred fed off all of them, one and the same cowardly jackal, growing in strength as one man's hatred matched the other's, until the jackal became a two-headed, winged beast with homs and hooves and talons. “We become the thing we hate, if we chase it long enough.” How often Asa Holcraft had warned her, and recently Luc Sante had said the same thing to her. Nothing new in the old belief, dating far before the character of Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula, going back to biblical story and the beginning of time: Pursue evil long enough with enough determination, and you become it, and doesn't it become you? she darkly jested somewhere deep within the regions of her multilayered soul. For part of the evil crouching in the comer resembled Jessica herself.
“I like driving in the nails,” said Sheldon Hawkins, drooling over the image as he spoke the words. “Ja-see, that's my job. Jake here, he bleedin' prays over 'em, after we do 'em. Curly bastard, that's what Jake here is.”
“Prayer wounds all heels!” joked Jacob Periwinkle, a small, obnoxious weasel whose body odor, something akin to hair and hide of the rat, preceded him. Hawkins's most prominent feature filled his face-an enormous beak nose, falconlike in size and appearance. Jessica thought them stark caricatures of the sort that Jim Henson's company portrayed in the Muppetland Band. Both men needed bathing, scrubbing, and grooming. They were like a pair of stray dogs who'd learned to live with their own lice.
“What is the purpose behind your crucifying people?” she asked them. “Why kill people in so brutal a manner? If, in fact, you two committed these horrible acts.”
“Acts? Acts is it, all right, look it up in the Acts of the Apostles six something. Says it all right there,” replied Perwinkle.
“Bloody curly it is, too,” replied Hawkins.
Jessica put it to Perwinkle. “Why don't you educate us, Mr. Perwinkle? Elucidate.”
“All right, I will. Says there in Acts, why's it so hard for you to believe that your God can raise the dead? We wanted to see if God could… raise the dead.” He barked out his laughter. “Come to find out, The Old Fellow wasn't innerrested, I bloody guess.” He laughed more.
“Keep a civil tongue, you animal!” shouted Copperwaite.
“In the name of Christ,” said Periwinkle with a facetious tone as his hand did a flourish and his head gave a slight bow. “That's why we done what we done, right, Hawkins?”
“Codswallop and bullshit, Jake, bullshit. Tell them the real reason,” shouted his partner.
“We don't reveal secrets God 'imself has provided.”
“God speaks to you, then?” asked Jessica.
“Not exactly God,” corrected Hawkins.
“Who then?”
“It's 'im, the bloody one on the cross, it is,” shouted Periwinkle.
Hawkins shouted, “Christ, it's from Christ, you damned fool cuntie! Like to see you all done up on the cross, dearie!”
“Shut that flapper of yours, Hawkins! One more foul word, and I swear I'll strike you dumb,” shouted Sharpe, approaching menacingly with fists clenched and the veins popping out of his neck like taut rope.
Hawkins ignored Sharpe's gallant attempt to spare Jessica foul words. He let out his own shout. “He's coming back! He's come back. He's here, among us now! And this world ain't seen no havoc like what He-the Son of God- will bring down round us all, that's what.” He'd so lost his breath that his last words came out as mere tire-screech utterances.
Rat-boy had begun screaming over Beak-nose, chorusing the words, “Shut up! Shut up, Hawkins! Shut your hole!”
“Christ told us to do it. Christ wants revenge on the Jews for what they did to 'im. That's why we did Burtie Burton. That's it, pure and simple, and He's come to show us what goddamn revenge is really, really like in the first
