unreasonable fear. Yet as Luc Sante said, the subconscious knew all.
She couldn't stand still. She felt an enormous energy battling a desire to lay prostrate here on the darkened church steps where she might easily sleep. Between the insomnia and the case, she hadn't been getting must… no much… no any rest, and toss, no turn, no push, no pile on the red, red wine… the blood of Christ… the crumpets
… the wafer… the body of Christ…
Holding firmly to the stone stairwell, feeling the eyes of the army of gargoyles atop St. Albans like so many birds of prey, waiting for her to stumble and become theirs, Jessica forced herself down to street level where she paced catlike, fighting her sudden disorientation and enormous desire for sleep, until her pacing left her standing before an alleyway. A noise in the alley alerted her. A look down the alleyway beside the cathedral and the small noise became a train rumble, and then the pounding of mad hooves. In the cloak of black shadow, a half block away, at the back of the cathedral, a huge coal truck downloaded its contents onto a rattling metal conveyor, the cathedral literally eating up the tons of coal fed it. “My God,” she exclaimed aloud, her mind still at racehorse speed, “the killers could be in any underground cellar in the city. It's virtually impossible to pinpoint the actual murder site. Certainly not without more clues.” Now the bastards have me talking to myself, she thought. Further had her asking, Just where in St. Albans does the coal bin lead?
Her mind suddenly settled, but her stomach felt a quivering nausea. A cab turned a comer and slowly made its way toward her. She mentally chastised herself for even momentarily suspecting Father Luc Sante and his grand cathedral of hiding the darkest secret in recent English history along with its coal.
She felt a surge of unremitting self-hatred, the disgust taking on a brilliantly red hue; she couldn't help being angry with herself for being so damnably cynical. Hadn't she formerly suspected Richard?
The cabby's sudden barking question, “Do ya want a ride or not, lass?” broke her from her reverie. She hurriedly climbed into the cab, inhaled its stale, cigarette-sodden interior, and asked to be taken to the York.
“Aye, just down from the Savoy,” muttered the heavyset driver to himself as if to re-familiarize himself with the area into which he must forge. She looked back at St. Albans as the cab pulled away. In the darkness, the gargoyles had gone from their appointed posts, no doubt wandering purposefully in search of their enemies.
In the lonely backseat of the musty, smelly cab, even as she rolled the window down, catching London's damp night air, she recalled what Richard Sharpe had told her about paranoia: Sometimes a healthy dose of paranoia was called on by the subconscious for good reason; that sometimes those you thought were out to get you, were indeed out to get you. For some reason, this night, she had felt as if a thousand eyes had watched her, or one huge eye, the eye of some unknowable, mysterious, inscrutable god.
Then in an eye-blink, she learned why she felt she'd been watched all evening long when the cab came to an abrupt halt a block away from St. Albans.
“What's going on here?” she said, clutching the weapon in her purse at the same time.
“Easy, mum! The gent's with Scotland Yard. Pulled me over on my way to the church. Told me to bring you right to him.”
Jessica saw the parked car across from them bring up its headlights and then switch them off. She then saw Richard Sharpe climb from the car and come toward the cab.
The bastard's been following me all night, she snarled to herself in seething silence. She didn't like it in the least. It smacked of stalking, possessiveness, control, all the things she hated in men.
He came to the window all smiles. “Thought you'd like to know. There's been another body discovered.”
Relief flooded her. She'd just come from Luc Sante and she had seen Strand as well, and so she grasped at the notion that Father Luc Sante could not be involved in the crucifixion murders, despite her earlier suspicions. She had even begun to suspect that Strand and Luc Sante had planned to drug her with their blasted tea and crumpets. Once again she felt angry with herself, at the suspicious creature she had become. Still, her scientific side whispered, this new victim may well have been dumped hours or even days before.
“Another crucified body?”
“Regent's Park this time, actually not far from here. Come along.” Richard efficiendy paid the cabby and tipped the man who gave him a thumb's-up and said, “Right, Guv,” and drove off.
Jessica realized now she stood amid a silent, black street with Sharpe who had obviously trailed her all evening, and she was about to climb into his car with him and go ostensibly to a crime scene in her smudged evening gown with no medical supplies and no flat shoes or aprons.
“Can we return to the hotel first, so I can change and get my medical bag?”
“I've got a change of clothes for you, jeans and a blouse, and I've got your medical bag-to save time.”
“You went into my room at the York?”
“How else?”
“What is it you British call that?”
“Pardon?”
“Cheeky, damned cheeky of you, Richard, I'd say.”
“I'm sorry if it offends you. I certainly didn't mean to.”
“When were you in my room? While I was at dinner?”
“No.”
“While I was at St. Albans?”
“I got the call when you were inside. I had no idea how long you'd take.” And you've had me and Father Luc Sante under surveillance all evening. Why?”
“I can't explain it. I just felt I needed to keep you in my sights tonight, that it was important. Call it intuition.”
She shook her head. 'Take me somewhere where I can change.” Her tone hammered him over the head, firm and focused and nail-driving.
He silendy did as told, and soon she had changed in the ladies' room of a restaurant calling itself the Chicago Pizza Factory only a few blocks away from where they'd met on the street. From there, they raced to Regent's Park, north of St. Albans, the opposite direction of the Thames and where all the other bodies had been found discarded.
Regent's Park, already alight with police activity and equipment-dead stock, the Scotland Yard fellows called such things as generators and night-lights-buzzed with both the number of police and the crowd that had gathered. A small pond in the park marked the place where the body had been located. Jessica and Sharpe were waved over by Stuart Copperwaite who stood alongside the nude body of a man, a much younger man than any the Crucifier had discarded before now.
“They're getting younger in age,” Copperwaite announced. “Perhaps a pattern developing?”
“Christ was only twelve, maybe thirteen when he began preaching in the temple,” suggested Jessica. “Maybe you're on to something, Stuart.”
Copperwaite nodded but let it go at that. He said a firm, if strained hello to Richard, who acted as though there existed no problem between them, Sharpe's entire focus already on the corpse, his professional acumen taking over.
After searching for clues and closely examining the body, Jessica looked up and into Richard's eyes. For a moment she flashed on the wonderful time they had had when pub-crawling London, and she wished they were at it again. After she and Richard had made love, she had slept the sleep of the contented. It had been a long time since she'd actually rested fully, and he had given her that gift. The sure knowledge that Richard could not be the killer, that he harbored no secrets from her that might kill her, that she could fully and unreservedly trust him felt like the greatest gift of all. “What're you thinking, Jessica?” he asked.“I'll have to tell you that later, when we're alone,” she whispered. He smiled a moment, relieved, she guessed, that she had not allowed her anger with him to linger. Finally, he said, “I mean about the body.”
“Something wrong here,” she announced, sensing it, feeling a resignation to wholly trust herself. “I think we may well this time have that copycat killing we've all been expecting along the spectrum; someone masquerading as the Crucifier merely to rid the world of this poor slob.”
“Could be I agree with you. Nail marks haven't the usual pattern.”
“First thing I noticed,” she agreed. “Likely he was dead before the nails were driven in.” She shone a flashlight on the palm wounds. “Notice the lack of coloration about the wound itself? Not the sort of reaction expected from the living. No bruising.”
