“Light… like white jewels, like goldenness open to the sky.”
Giving up on hair, Jessica asked, “Eyes?”
“Lime green, radiant, radiating light. A green reflecting pool.”
“Sounds gorgeous, or maybe not… Maybe the SOB wears contacts?”
Jessica knew from experience with Kim that no image could be taken at face value; lime-green eyes might simply mean that the killer saw life through a green lens. Lime suggested bitterness, so perhaps the killer saw the world as green bile, slime even, the opposite of green lawns and green as the color of hope, new life, and growth. She knew that the moment one locked down on the meaning of a psychic image, it was hard to shift the idea. Like interpreting dream images, there was more art to it than science. Certainly, psychic symbols and representations could not be taken on face value.
“How tall is our man?”
“A giant in his eyes.”
“How is he in bed?”
Dr. Shockley gasped, then laughed at this.
“No way to know. He did not sleep with the women; he sees the women as virginal, pure, angelic.”
“Virginal? Are you sure? They're both over twenty.”
“It's how he, the killer, perceived them.”
“And the young man?”
“Virginal as well.”
“A virgin? Are you sure?”
Shockley, shaking his head, put in, “The boy's twenty-three years of age. He's hardly likely to be a virgin at his age, unless of course he was raised a Mormon!”
Kim countered, saying, “It appears… that is, it feels so.”
“Feels so to the killer, you mean?” asked Jessica.
Kim shook her head. “No, feels so to me, here and now.”
“I didn't bother to look with the women,” Shockley confessed, “whether or not… the question of their virginity…” His shoulders rose as if attached to puppet strings as he stared across the cadaver at Jessica. “It isn't something one goes looking for, not since the late seventies anyway. Once I established that there was no sexual assault, I saw no need to… to search any further, you see.”
“Do it now, for the first victim, the Petryna woman, and I'll check the Mercedes woman,” suggested Jessica.
“But the police told me that each had multiple boyfriends, including our young Mr. Barona Gaitano, here.”
Kim erupted, saying, “Barona? His name was Barona?”
“Changed his name to it, yes. Was Luis. Quite a leap, wouldn't you say? Gaitano's his real name, though.”
“Barona Gaitano… has a showbiz sound to it, doesn't it?” asked Kim.
Ignoring this, Jessica said, “Check on victim one's virginity, Dr. Shockley. See if there is any evidence of sexual activity or assault. I'll do the same for the other woman.”
“Will do.”
Returning to where victim numbers one and two had been stored, Dr. Shockley at their side, Jessica said, “If they could be proven to be virgins, and if we can determine that the young man was saving himself for a true love, it will tell us something about the sort of people the killer targets, and it will hand us one more piece to add to our jigsaw puzzle.”
Kim agreed. “Yes, this could all figure into the killer's game plan. If he selects virgins as his victims, flawless in every way, it tells us something about him.”
The white-haired Shockley nodded all the way down the corridor, muttering, “Virgin sacrifices? Is that what we're dealing with here? It'd be a first for me! Unfortunately, there is no way to prove it.”
They soon had their answer when Shockley examined the first body and Jessica examined the second. The attendant was annoyed to remove the cadaver from its freezer compartment for a second time and wheel it into the room where Shockley worked. Beside him, Jessica quickly examined victim number two for any signs of sexual activity. Kim anxiously looked on, pacing behind her.
“False alarm,” announced Jessica, who felt no surprise in learning that Caterina Mercedes was no virgin. Shockley had come to the same conclusion with respect to Micellina Petryna.
Kim, looking on, said, “I felt it so strongly.”
“No more virgins out there to sacrifice, I'm afraid,” the old coroner said.
“As for the male,” Kim began, “only his friends-”
“Could possibly know,” finished Jessica.
Shockley added, “And they might not tell. Something else Sturtevante needs to run down.”
After some silence, Jessica heaved her shoulders and sighed. “Nothing else to accomplish here. I can listen to Shockley's protocols on tape at my leisure, back at the hotel.”
But a revolving red light went on in Shockley's lab, a sure signal that another corpse was on its way, and a moment later, the doors to the crime lab burst open and an attendant wheeled a corpse through.
“Dear God,” muttered Shockley through grinding false teeth. “We've got another one.” He ought to have been apprised of the body's earlier discovery so he could have sent out an evidence tech unit to sweep the crime scene.
“Dammit,” Jessica muttered. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“We've screwed up is what it means,” Shockley replied as he rushed for a look at the body and to speak with the attendant.
“I left messages, Doctor. Didn't anyone find you?” the attendant was asking when Jessica and Kim joined the ME.
“Not a word. We've been in and out of the autopsy rooms and the freezers,” Shockley replied. Then a second young attendant rushed in shouting, “Dr. Shockley, Tim Brothers somehow stupidly turned off the red-light special, and what with the panic button off, none of us knew. I mean, we just now learned. It's another male victim of that poison-pen guy.”
This was obvious, as the victim lay facedown in the gurney, the glaring, ugly poetry on his back dried with blood, red and rusty. “Damn it all, man, tell me something I don't know. All right, let's have a look at this latest victim, shall we?”
With the three of them in surgical garb, they moved toward the Poet Killer's fourth suspected victim.
“Looks all too familiar.” Kim's remark came with the tones of fatigue and frustration.
Again they found themselves in autopsy room number one, where Jessica read aloud the toe tag, anton pierre, even as she stripped away the sheet to reveal the male corpse. Anton's eyes, wide open and sea blue to emerald green, displayed the usual marble like stare, stony and without life, but the color, like those of the other victims, mesmerized and made one believe some life danced just behind the stillness. Jessica wanted to reach for the stethoscope to make certain this beautiful, untouched victim- untouched but for the now familiar poetic scars on his back-lay just beyond in the realm of sleep, not death.
He hadn't been deep-frozen and thawed out, she silently told herself. Not like the others. He hardly looked dead; it hardly seemed possible that the healthy-looking person on the slab could be a corpse. “Perfection,” muttered Kim.
“Once again,” Jessica agreed. “Now it's even; two women, two men, for a total of four victims.”
Shockley added, “Another perfectly proportioned man at that. Look at those pecs.”
“Forget the pecs. Look at the rest of him,” said Kim, with a slight shake of the head.
Jessica added, “And his skin.”
“More darkly tanned than the others.”
“Hardly what you'd call a sun worshiper, however.”
“Not a freckle or a mole on him.”
“It's as if it's a prerequisite-a flawless complexion-to die in this manner,” finished Jessica.
Although the victim's skin in this case was several shades darker than the women and the other man, the body itself, displayed as it was, showed not a single blemish, save for the normal discoloration to the frontal areas,
