quite different, each had flawless skin and trailing, curling black hair, flowing freely, a dark ribbon of it, the effect pure and beautiful. In fact, each looked like the stereotype of the Pre-Raphaelite woman, the woman of poetry and song made famous by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Kim then waved her wand like hands over the prone body.
“Her name was Caterina Mercedes,” Shockley said softly. Both beautiful names, Jessica thought. Beautiful women, beautiful and flawless skin; hair like winding vines; pouting, large but soft lips; high cheekbones; statuesque; perfectly proportioned; yet their most striking feature other than the smooth and flawless skin had to be their slim, even boyish physiques. Something about the eyes in this one, too, reminded Jessica of the other victim; aside from the crystal blue green of the orbs, there seemed a hint of the piercing life hiding deep within the corneas, like seeds, somehow reflecting light even in their dormancy. How incredible those eyes must have been in life, she surmised.
As much to shake herself from the unreasonable feelings welling up in her as to learn anything, Jessica broke the stillness, asking Kim, “Are you getting any feeling from this one?”
“Anger… pure and unadulterated anger. She hates him passionately.”
“As passionately as the other loves-loved him?”
“Even more so. Nothing so transcendent as hatred. She feels used, conned. Not at the time, not while he was in the act of poisoning her, but now she feels the hatred so strongly that she hasn't completely left this plane of existence.”
“That's pretty scary. Anything else?” Jessica coaxed.
“Only that this one's not cold; this one's on fire.”
Jessica only now realized that the blue aura surrounding Kim had turned to a red glow, and that Kim found herself afire. She was again faint, and Jessica grabbed her where she stood beside Dr. Shockley, who flinched at the heat coming off the psychic. “Please, help me to sit,” Kim begged, nodding toward a nearby stool.
With Kim recuperating, Jessica asked Shockley, “How do you see these killings, Doctor? Did your protocol first link the killings?”
“The killer did that for us.”
“The poems, you mean. His MO.”
“Fairly obvious about himself, wouldn't you say?”
Poems, left on each victim like tablet writings, of course, not that he was kind enough to leave a signature in the literal sense, but this was, in police parlance, quite a John Hancock after all. Still, he did leave another signature of a sort: the poison in their systems. If only they could decipher the message…
Shockley got on the intercom, called for his attendants, and saw to the careful return of the body to its freezer compartment. Jessica stepped nearer to the old man and asked, “Had to've been a potent poison to work as it did in the slight wounds he opened with… with a pen.”
“What we've managed to determine is that the killer used a quill pen, the old-fashioned sort you dip into an inkwell. It certainly cuts more deeply than your typical fountain pen.”
“Clever of you to come up with the type of pen he used,” she complimented.
He shrugged it off. “Wasn't hard for me to detect this fact alone, although I've been stumped by the exact nature of his poison. It has contradictory elements.”
“Contradictory elements?”
“It may act as both a stimulant and a downer. A real downer in the end, of course. At first exciting the victim, then leaving her to languish.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Wouldn't you have to be high to allow someone to cut your flesh to this extent? He may even tell them the anesthetic is in the ink, for all we know, and they being young and trusting souls… who knows.”
“I see. But why has it been so bloody difficult to isolate the exact nature of the poison?”
'Trace amounts of this and that, from boric acid to retinol. None in a lethal enough dosage in and of itself to kill has been isolated out, but the base poison continues to elude detection.”
“You isolated boric acid and retinol in the system?”
“Well, not I. And not surprising, actually. Boric acid is used in baths, and retinol-vitamin A skin conditioning- has become a common enough over-the-counter wrinkle cream. Our toxicologist, Dr. DeAngelos, did the work on that, but as it turns out, Mercedes's doctor had prescribed retinol for a recurrent problem she thought she was having with bags under her eyes. Of course, it was a pure figment, as there are and have never been any flaws beneath her eyes, but her doctor prescribed it, he says, as a way to calm her down.”
Jessica took a deep breath, sighed heavily, and released her pent-up frustration all in what seemed a single, flowing movement. “The choice of American women everywhere these days, yes.”
SIX
… the blood of the moon steeps through me, but you cannot find me, as I have disappeared into your darkness, while seeking out your flesh, only to find instead your deepest secret.
Jessica encouraged Kim to rise to her feet. Together they sized up each other's tolerance level, and without words, each decided she would go on from here to autopsy room number three. “Something in me needs to get this done tonight,” Kim insisted.
“All in one fell swoop? Kim, suppose it puts you out of commission for the duration of the case?”
“I can't tell you what it is; all I can tell you is that I have to… I must see all three victims in quick succession. That is what my intuition is telling me.”
Autopsy room number three housed the third victim, as Shockley had told them. The doctor stood waiting at the door, a grim look on his face, a single wave of the hand inviting them in; the stance and manner of his invitation called to mind a maniacal ringmaster in a circus, but Shockley's little circus had death in all three rings.
The seasoned old ME had prattled on about the increase in crime and the necessity for still more autopsy rooms and MEs to do the work. He moaned over the circumstances, the fact that hospital pathologists knew less today than they had known when butchers and barbers were the local coroners. Then, apropos apparently of murder-minded barbers, he started telling them how he had recently seen a revival of the musical Sweeney Todd at the local opera house. Finally, he muttered to Jessica, “Don't suppose you'd care to come to work for me, heh?” His wrinkles danced with his laughter, the gray-framed eyes twinkling.
The third victim, although male, possessed a soft and beautiful countenance like the deceased women: a pouting mouth, high cheekbones, and skin every bit as flawless as the other two victims. “Beginning to see a pattern here,” Jessica said to the others.
As if wanting to get it over with, Kim had instantly put her gloved hands on the body. From her deep trance, she struggled to say, “This one, like Micellina, thought the killer loved him.”
“How long had he known him?” asked Jessica, fishing for more detail.
“Forever and never, but perhaps only since nineteen.”
Jessica was beginning to feel some of the angst Parry felt around Kim. She always spoke in riddles, because she saw in images, symbols as opposed to facts. Jessica knew it was useless to ask if she meant nineteen days, weeks, years, or since the young man's nineteenth birthday. Instead she asked, “What does he look like?”
“An angel, like Michael, the Messenger… angel on a rampage. The letters arranged spell quark!'
Jessica moaned, but managed to ask, “Quark? As in physics?”
“Astrophysics,” Shockley corrected.
“Like the way rampage came to me; in Ouija-board fashion; now the word quark has arranged itself.”
Jessica felt this line of questioning useless. So she changed her tactics, asking, “Hair color?”
“Like light.”
“Light? Light gray, light brown?”
