fact, she has given me many insights into the killer. I'll leave her notes with you.”
“That would be helpful. Thanks.”
“Shall we visit the next victim?” asked Kim, standing now on wobbly feet.
“Not you. You've had enough.”
“I've only just begun. Out of my way, Coran.” Kim pushed past her friend and colleague, asking Shockley, “Will you please lead the way, Doctor?” One step, however, and Kim nearly fainted; the session had taken more of a toll on her strength than she cared to admit. Jessica helped her back down to a sitting position. “Get her some water, a Coke, something.”
Parry rushed out to do her bidding to a chorus of “Sorry, sorry,” coming from Kim.
Jessica now sat hunched over a desk, staring at Dr. Leonard Shockley's protocols on each of the victims. The others had all disappeared, each, in a sense, off to follow his or her own nose, his or her own separate leads. Jessica's instincts told her that more could be learned through the patterns left behind by the killer, and any similarities she could find or infer among his victims. These could only be ascertained by studying the reams of paper. Research was mining for small nuggets of information that led to a shock of recognition, nuggets of details and specifics that, taken altogether, might point in a direction. The first step in any journey is the hardest, but it may also be the step most filled with discovery. She recalled how her father had put it. Her mentor in forensics, Dr. Asa Holcraft, had put it more succinctly: “Baby steps. Go lightly. Crawl if you have to.”
Neither Leanne Sturtevante nor James Parry needed to remain at the crime lab morgue, and Kim had been physically and emotionally drained by her earlier experience with the deceased. She had a time-out coming, but she refused to leave the building, remaining on Shockley's ottoman. There she now rested with the intention of finding out what she could from the second victim before leaving altogether. Jessica had begun studying the paperwork in anticipation of Kim's return.
Jessica was secretly glad that Kim had not revealed that they believed the poem on each victim somehow connected, as if they were part of one long dirge that had been divided into discrete sections. After everyone had gone, Jessica suggested to Kim that they keep this theory between themselves for the time being. She had also told Kim that perhaps the number nineteen, which kept insinuating itself into her visions, might be the number of victims or sections of the poem, or both. Kim agreed that this could indeed be a possibility.
Going over the bodies and the protocols Dr. Shockley had created, Jessica again drew a bead on the absolutely healthy condition of the victims, each a sad loss-of the sort doctors hated to see-for none of them, male or female, had so much as a gallstone to worry their insides, and not so much as a mole to worry their outsides. Excellently proportioned, artistically so, their lithe, sculptured bodies reminded her of marble statues in a museum.
“They'd have no need of me or any doctor,” she said to the silent room, “except for the fact that they are all murdered.”
Shockley so quietly appeared in the doorway that his voice, breaking the utter silence, startled her. “You're here to discover and proclaim the deeper cause of death, beyond the weapon-poison-the thinking of the poisoner, which may or may not lead us in a direction that could put an end to his sociopathic behavior. Isn't that the essence of a criminal profile?”
“In a nutshell, yes, but, Doctor, I'm not sure our killer is a sociopath, not in the strictest sense.”
“Really, now? That's rather novel, isn't it? I have heard it said the word sociopath is interchangeable with serial killer, and our man is a serial killer.”
“Not all sociopaths kill,” she countered.
“They're just more prone to murder than the rest of us?”
“Not all serial killers are sociopaths. In fact, the serial mercy killer is working out of the deepest of human emotions, which makes him or her the antithesis of the sociopath.”
Shockley smiled and nodded like a shaggy dog. “Sociopaths can't empathize or sympathize with the pain and suffering of others, I know that much.”
“Fact is they only live for the brief duration of self-gratification they find in controlling others, bringing others to tears, to a state of demoralization, to bloodletting and torture. This alone in all the universe fulfills their perverse needs; for many, what is abnormal is the norm.”
“Chancy word indeed, normal. But tell me, do you think our killer of these young people with his poison and his flowers and music and poetry, do you think he gets any less of an erection than your run-of-the-mill lust murderer, who can only ejaculate if he tortures and mutilates?”
“Are you asking me if I think our poisoner is working out of something other than a sense of mercy?” She considered this idea, knowing the old man was using his best Aristotelian technique on her. He poses a series of questions so that she might unearth a truth that might eventually determine the depth of his own conclusions.
“Can you be sure of the Poet's motives yet?”
“I can't be sure of his or her motives just yet, but it would appear the killer took great pains to select a method of murder that is not the choice of your usual sociopathic chain saw murderer,” she insisted. “I don't think we're dealing with a heartless, unfeeling person here, but quite possibly the opposite.”
“The opposite? What is the opposite of such a person, Dr. Coran?”
“Someone who is subconsciously acting on some… some delusion of grandeur, that he is some sort of… saint, and that what he does is indeed an act of mercy on the one hand…”
“But, on the other hand…?”
“A thrill, a conquest, a victory. Dr. Desinor has said that she felt the killer was on some sort of crusade.”
“Precisely the definition of a sociopath of the sort we find in religious zealots, my dear, wouldn't you say?”
“Someone whose aims are glorified to a pathological intensity, working out of a sense of mission or a sense of a destiny ordained by God. That would make our killer a complicated nutcase, whose vision and fantasy are religious in nature, like Jim Jones in Guyana and David Koresh in Waco, Texas.”
“Yes, well, if you believe so.” Dr. Shockley lifted his brow, a shrewd look on his face. “Isn't such a man always more frightening than all the chain saw killers combined?”
“Yes, of course, especially if he is preaching such distortions as I heard in the case of the Crucifier in London.”
“Read all about it in the journals. You really should write that case up for the benefit of the rest of us, Jessica.” And then he abruptly added, “So, where have all the others gone off to?”
“No need for them to baby-sit here. They'll do just as well to follow leads independently of us.”
Shockley nodded, looking to her like the actor who played Santa Claus in the original Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street. He plopped wearily into the chair across from her, the desk she'd been given between them. “I heartily agree. That man Parry looked quite anxious to end his stay in my little death chamber. Behind my back, the PPD personnel, all of them, call this place 'Shock Theater,' where the 'Shock Doc'-that'd be me-operates like some ghoulish Dr. Frankenstein.” He laughed at the image, his white hair falling over one eye, and for a moment, Jessica thought he might drop off to sleep where he sat.
“I'm 'Shocky' to my friends,” he told her, “and I would be pleased to count you, my dear, among them. You needn't call me uncle. You're hardly the child I knew when your father was alive.”
Hearing footsteps, Dr. Shockley turned, and Kim Desinor showed up in the doorway, asking, “Which way to the second autopsy room and victim number two?”
“Are you sure you can handle that now, Kim?” asked Jessica.
“I am. Let's have at it.”
Jessica stood. Shockley, taking more time to get to his feet, joined the women, both of whom were already halfway down the corridor, en route to the waiting body.
Jessica had already begun to relax in her new surroundings, but she felt a great deal more at ease without James Parry in the room. A momentary and fleeting thought, like a scuttling bug, reminded her she had yet to contact Richard Sharpe in England to tell him of the case, and that she'd “run into” James Parry as a result. She wondered if he'd believe such a sequence of events, or if she simply ought to tell him the truth. But what was the truth? she now asked herself.
Standing over the second victim, banishing such concerns from her mind for the moment, she concentrated instead on the corpse. She and Kim both immediately saw the surface similarities: although the two women looked
