dreamlike worlds, and other paintings depicting medieval knights on horseback, beautiful and ornately dressed maidens, with flowing hair trellising down through tangled briar against a backdrop of raw nature, decorated the bedroom walls. Wild rushing streams, filled with spirits and banked by wildflowers and forests, played with the eye. Mere wall decoration or declaration? Jessica wondered.
Jessica's eye fell next on the gilded and grand frames that set off the many paintings that made Maurice's home a shrine to the past, or rather a fantasy past. The frames were themselves baroque artworks, which looked as if they might fetch a handsome price at any antique store. The bedroom furniture-as was true of all the furniture in the home-looked out of time, ancient, large and ponderous, yet there remained a certain charm to it. A strangely alluring style Maurice had chosen to surround himself with- something a Spanish lord might have owned in a previous century. In one corner stood a full six-foot-tall suit of armor, and from the ceilings chains hung, twisting and spiraling snake fashion to hold innumerable cast-iron-like lanterns. In another comer, Jessica felt a wave of shock come over her, surprised to see a replica of what looked like an iron maiden.
“Some icebreaker, huh?” asked Kim.
Sturtevante, who'd rejoined them now, seeing Jessica fix on the ancient weapon of torture, whispered in her ear, “Already checked it out. It's a fake, like the armor, cheaply made in Mexico, only a hundred bucks.”
Jessica nodded and continued her overview of the place, her attempt to sum up the man by his surroundings. On the ceiling black sheets had been hung to simulate the night sky, and on the sheets blinked the stars and the heavens. An enormous, even breathtaking blue moon, shrouded in misty cloud-thanks to a covering of gauze-also stared back at Jessica. The entire effect beckoned any and all to lie back and contemplate the depths of the heavens.
“Where do you suppose he got all this unusual stuff?” Jessica wondered aloud when James Parry stepped in from another room.
“Looks positively foreboding. Remember how Lopaka Kowona filled his home with crate like furniture? This kinda reminded me of that, in a twisted sort of way,” he told her.
“No way, Jim. This stuff may be strange, but much of it is expensive, antique strange. Maurice paid a bundle for most of his things. Believe me.” The sofa and chairs were hardwood and done in the style of pirate furniture aboard a galleon at sea.
“Maybe he got a discount. According to his friend Ainsworth, he worked for Moulin Rouge,” said Lieutenant Sturtevante. “Says he was their order specialist, their interior designer, computer wizard, and he did all the floor and window displays. I called his boss, who says he was really an artist. 'Shame to lose him,' the man said.”
Aside from the curious and interesting surroundings, Jessica's eyes finally focused on the sheaf of feathery paper, like ancient parchment, that lay on the bed beside the deceased. On it someone had roughly scrawled the lines of a poem in black ink, written in the hand of Maurice's killer-or was it Maurice's handwriting on the yellowed parchment? The paper looked antique, like so much else in Maurice's domain, a sort of anachronism in reverse. Jessica wondered if there was a name for such relentlessly perverse taste. Pathological antiquarianism?
“I suspect he got the yellowed parchment through the store.”
“Moulin Rouge?”
“Either that or Ink, Line amp; Sinker, a stationery store, or Darkest Expectations, a bookstore a few doors down on Second Street,” said Sturtevante, seeing Jessica study the paper. “I've seen reams of the stuff in the shops around here.”
“We need to get a sample of Maurice's handwriting. Locate a handwritten note, a laundry list, anything usable. We'll check it against the lines on the parchment, rule him in or out.”
Parry began a search for the needed sample. Jessica lifted the parchment with tweezers and asked Kim to have a look at it. 'Tell you anything?” she asked the psychic.
Kim came around Jessica, her eyes also focused on the parchment with the tightly controlled lettering. She caused a hush in the room as she lifted the poem and read it aloud:
Black empty
Soliloquy of soul,
Come for all
Who know
Of ill-spent hours
Before the Lord Poet
Of Misspent Time
And Careless Youth,
To claim forsooth,
Dominion over the us
And the ours,
Of selfish lives that rot
On the vine Such as yours,
Such as mine…
“Doesn't have quite the resonance or verve of the earlier poems,” Kim declared.
“Now you're a critic?” Jessica laughed. “All right, you're right. It stinks. Something certainly missing in this poem that makes it feel unlike the killer's voice. Feels-”
“Unfinished,” said Kim, stepping to the window and peering out on a light drizzle that had made the streets slick, the sheen reflecting the city lights. “I think it's Maurice's; maybe it's his attempt to impress his killer.”
'To impress his lover, who killed him?”
“That'd be my guess. ”Jessica and Kim now studied the lines etched into the victim's back. “Poem and victim posed for our benefit perhaps? To shock authorities, to shock society, to send a message, or all of the above?” she asked.
“Or none of the above?” Kim returned. “Like I said earlier, I believe the killer sees both his poetry and the resulting death of his 'host' body as being quite a private matter between killer and victim.”
The poem, longer than previous ones left by the killer, snaked from the base of the neck down Maurice's back like a series of tattoos. Stating the obvious, Jessica said, “Now, this is the work of our killer poet. This guy writes fluidly and well.”
“Now you 're the critic?”
“Hey, this poem's got bite, at least as deadly a bite as any cobra.”
Jessica then began to read the poem aloud.
Chance… whose desire is to have a meeting with stunned innocence… waiting on pools of sensation that swirl in brilliant orange to swallow and overflow in the center where toucher becomes touched, texture vibrating chords of the unconfined delicate.
Deliberate and graceful, the moods eddy and flow over my hands, your closed eyes undulating within a seashell sigh, entwining in airy depths, waning in flickering light.
“Whaddaya make of it?” asked Parry, who'd returned on hearing Jessica's voice bring the poem to life.
“What do I make of it?” asked Jessica. “I make it out surreal that we're all standing here reading a poem off the back of some kid who's been murdered.” Her frustration mirrored the feelings rising in the investigators. All the detectives stared now at the poem tattooed on Maurice's back.
Kim startled the others by going to her knees at the bedside of the deceased. Her eyes had closed as she heard the final words of the poem as if to enfold the lines into her psyche, and now her hands, one on the body, the other clutching the yellowed parchment paper, trembled. Jessica watched her for any change in expression, any look of anguish that might signal a need for her to be brought out of her trance. At the same time, she made a mental note to get a good handwriting analysis of the paper script and the body script.
Kim's hands began to relax now, and a peaceful calm came over her. She revealed nothing audibly or otherwise to those around her, until suddenly her countenance took on the look of a person in the throes of great and abiding pleasure, ecstasy even. In the next moment, she collapsed, her body now draped over the deathbed. The others, astonished, reacted in knee-jerk fashion. Sturtevante gasped and said, “Help her up!”
At the same instant, Jim rushed to Kim's aid in a gentlemanly attempt to do exactly what Sturtevante suggested. However, Jessica sternly whispered, “No!” and put her body between Parry and Kim. “Allow her to finish her reading.”
“I thought she had.”
