face, chest, and legs, where the blood had settled. Obviously, once again the victim had been left facedown to display the handiwork of the Poet Killer to authorities. Thus gravity had caused the blood to pool in areas of the front, creating large purplish splotches on the skin.
Jessica stared across the cadaver and into Kim's eyes. “Is it only coincidence that Anton Pierre, Barona Gaitano, Micellina Petryna, and Caterina Mercedes all have such extraordinary features? It must fit into the killer's fantasy, whatever that fantasy might be.”
“Agreed,” Kim replied, staring at Anton Pierre's perfectly proportioned body and beautiful face. “Some people would kill for a body that looks like these.”
“And obviously someone has,” Shockley put in.
“Think you want to try a 'deep read' on Pierre?”
Kim bit her lip, sighed heavily, and nodded. “I'll do what I can.”
Jessica stared across the cadaver at her colleague and friend, Kim Desinor, whose complexion rivaled those of the two dead women for purity. Kim had shoulder-length hair these days, the natural flip framing her large, energy-filled eyes and accentuating her high cheekbones. “Fearful you'll use up all your magic our first day?” asked Shockley, who remained skeptical of Kim's psychic abilities.
Kim didn't answer, her gloved hands now moving like two markers over a Ouija board as she gritted her teeth in concentration. Jessica again thought how perfectly beautiful she was.
“It is rather a radical, even alien idea nowadays, but regardless of their sexual proclivities, our killer may well have seen these four as virginal in some context only he fully understands. We may rule it out as a fact, but we shouldn't rule it out as a fantasy, part of the killer's fantasy,” Kim suggested.
“Yeah, he may have so strongly wanted it that way that he saw them as such, regardless of facts,” agreed Jessica. “It's the kind of designation or imprinting a madman might stamp on his victims.”
“I recently had a case of murder after months of stalking,” said Shockley, “and the shooter did just that. He saw his victim as pure, put her on a pedestal, and when she inevitably fell off it, he killed her.”
Jessica had learned to put aside the horror of such moments, that so much human potential and life itself had been snuffed out as one might crush a caterpillar underfoot. So much waste. All the victims were young, with so much lying ahead of them, each barely out of the teen years. Wasted… the single word said it all, a waste of human promise and potential. No one could imagine what might have burgeoned from these beginnings.
Jessica realized that the image of the virginal soul, or the state of actual virginity, might not fit here, but the appearance of it-that is, the physical appearance of purity displayed by each body-might have a great deal to do with the killer's choice of victims. That it might well play into his selection process. “Perhaps the Poet wanted a perfectly unblemished 'slate' to write on. It might be that the killer, while not strictly interested in virgins in the literal sense of the word, did find people who gave the appearance of purity in one form or another.”
“While not virgins, they may have easily given that impression of innocence and naive that proved, in the end, the most alluring trait of the virginal or celibate life,” agreed Kim. “Virginal behavior, virginal by nature, virginal appearing, or a combination of all three.”
Jessica silenced herself as Kim's psychic persona took center stage once again.
Kim's energies, however, had been drained like a used-up battery from the earlier readings. She received little from Anton Pierre, save the overwhelming sense of confusion, mixed with a bit of awe. She concluded in a few flat words: “He never knew what hit him. Didn't see it coming. Innocence sums him up, innocence and perplexed ignorance of how he came to be dead.”
“And as for being, as Madonna says, 'like a virgin'?”
“The overwhelming trait I get coming through is confused innocence, like a child who has been lied to. Again the number nineteen and the words rampage and quark returned during my reading. Something insistent there.”
“You think the killer is nineteen and on a rampage, his mind 'quarked'?”
“Such a direct interpretation would only lead us in a wrong direction. No, the nineteen is a symbol for something greater than age. And as for the word rampage… again it may hold some other meaning we are not aware of or do not normally associate with the word. The same will likely be true of quark. We need to pursue these words and the symbolic meanings ascribed to the number nineteen. I'll set myself that task.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Our killer's MO is certainly not one of a man on a rampage, so I must assume it stands for something other than our normal interpretations would allow.” Jessica's eyes lit up with a notion. “Perhaps its opposite, then, rampage equals peace, serenity, perhaps what serenity betokens? Absolute peace?”
“Possibly, but I'm not at all certain at this point.”
While Jessica and Kim were talking, Dr. Shockley had been on his cell phone, taking heat for having not responded to the call at the murder scene. Jessica imagined that a nearby hospital pathologist or someone on Parry's team had had to be called in to walk the grid and to pronounce the victim dead before authorities ordered it shipped off to Shockley.
Dr. Shockley now said, “Couldn't tell you for a certainty, but I'm suspicious that my superiors are pissed off. Meantime, I am tired and I am retiring-for the night at least. Jessica and Kim, good night. Carl will be nearby to help you out and to lock up.”
The sound of the closing door reverberated throughout the lab when the old man disappeared. Jessica said, “I agree. Let's save our sanity and get out of here for now. Come at it fresh in the a.m.”
“Agreed. Bed is waiting.”
The women made their way out of the semidarkened crime lab, secure in the belief that they had done all that was possible for the night, and that Carl would put Anton Pierre's body on ice; they found the elevator and took it to the ground floor.
“If we extrapolate from one body to the next, all that appears before us is a series of fine, hairless, flawless young specimens.” You are your father's daughter, Jessica, she heard herself say to this. Reducing a life to the word specimen had been an ongoing argument between them when he was alive. He maintained that an ME must be as objective and emotionally controlled as his scalpel. She maintained that the more the ME knew about the personality of the victim, the more he or she could tell with a scalpel.
“You were right, Jessica, to suggest that our victims have, if not the actual and physical status of virgins, then the mental state of virgins. Petryna's soul was virginal on exiting this life in the sense that she and the others never harmed a living thing, ever. They were the kind of people who, as they say, couldn't harm a fly. I get that much from my readings.”
“Are you sure they all had this sort of nature?”
“I'm quite sure of that much.”
“Meaning the killer may have liked them that way?”
“Perhaps…” Kim muttered. “I couldn't say for a certainty.”
“A big maybe.” In the cramped car of the elevator, Jessica bit her lower lip as she went over what she had seen so far. Her thoughts felt at odds, a bewildered one combating with a chaotic one, the clash creating only larger confusion. She threw in a healthy dose of anger and frustration at having missed out on Anton Pierre's crime scene. She imagined how angry James and Sturtevante must be at the forensics team at this moment-missing in action during a key crime-scene investigation. She excused her absence on the grounds of complete exhaustion as the elevator doors opened at ground level, and she and Kim made their way to the hotel on foot, taking in the night air.
Once they reached the brightly lit hotel, they staggered to the lobby elevator and rode it up to their rooms. They said their good-nights when Jessica, her room on a lower level, stepped off the elevator. Jessica imagined that Kim, like herself, would fall directly into bed and into a deep silence and weariness called sleep.
The following day at Shockley's morgue
“Sad to see such healthy people die so uselessly,” Dr. Shockley muttered. “When I think how useless my old bones have gotten… Sad to see these bodies go to the crematorium or the grave. Waste of excellent cadavers, which we could use around here for instructing the med students.”
“You're not into the body-snatching business now, are you?” Jessica asked, knowing what a great demand existed for such excellent specimens as the three corpses now in Shockley's care.
“If I thought I could talk the next of kin into it, I'd split the proceeds,” he said, and cackled again.
“Well, you routinely hand them the papers to sign for permission to harvest body parts, so why not pursue it
