EIGHT
You can go for a walk with them, see a movie with them, go swimming, eat dinner, even ride in a car with them while they are driving, but the sociopathic among us are quite literally different in every respect. They merely look like us. It is the ultimate disguise, making them an alien race within our own, and they know how to play us all for fools.
Maurice Deneau had bought into the killer's con, hook, line, and sinker. The party of detectives sat in silence for some time, contemplating the nature of the beast they pursued. Taken to its logical conclusion, they realized, he must be a creature pleasing to the eye and ear, to all the senses, in fact; he must be an evil so cloaked in goodness that no one, not even his victims, know of his evil. Either that or they worship him for his darkness or his twisted ideas and perverted faith.
Jessica could not help but draw correlations between this sociopath and a killer priest she had encountered in London the year before. That psychotic's vision of the Second Coming had gotten a series of people killed, but his victims had also been willing participants in their own crucifixions. And now here she sat in a second-story apartment in Philadelphia, the heart of early America, ostensibly fighting the same fight, racing the same race, and wondering at the familiarity of this evil. If Kim Desinor's psychic impressions could be relied upon, only one of the victims thus far had recognized the evil this killer presented. That had been Caterina Mercedes, but even then it took death to waken her to the evil she had allowed to close in around her and finally envelop her.
Maurice Deneau's friend, Thomas Ainsworth, wanted to stay the night at the crime scene, so Sturtevante had to deal with him, asking him if he had someplace else to crash. Ainsworth was a frail, thin, and pale young man, perhaps anemic, perhaps HIV positive. Otherwise, he looked a great deal like the victim in size, weight, and build, and he proved that the idealistic innocence of youth still existed in modern-day America.
“Can I pack a few of my things? I was staying with Maurice, you see, and… God, if I'd only been here, maybe… maybe I could've done something. We had a fight, you know. No big deal, but I was making him pay… and now this.”
“Sorry, nothing goes in or out until we release the place. Could be a couple of days,” Sturtevante told the young man, whose eyes were fire red from crying. His reaction was to pace the hallway like a nervous cat. “Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?” she repeated.
“Guess I can call my parents.”
“Might be a good idea, son. Maybe go stay with them for a while.”
“Yeah… yeah… ain't safe around here anymore, is it?”
“That's quite the understatement, Thomas.”
Kim had regained enough strength now to stand and walk, and together, she and Jessica headed for the door, while Parry went to officially call in the paramedics to remove the body. With this decision made, they could never go back to the crime scene as they'd found it, so this moment always felt crucial in a stone-cold murder of this sort.
As the team vacated the crime scene, leaving the body to the paramedics for transport to the police morgue, Jessica asked Kim, “Did you get any sensation from Maurice that he knew in the end that he was being murdered?”
“None whatsoever, no.”
“This monster we're dealing with, then, is smooth.”
“Caterina Mercedes's body was a seething cauldron of hatred for what the killer had done to her. At some point, she realized what was happening to her and why. It felt like… it was a horrid betrayal. But the others never knew he'd poisoned them. And they still don 7.”
“You said Caterina Mercedes felt betrayed. Would you say she felt she had been conned into dying?” asked Jessica, feeling the night air wafting up the stairwell from an open door at ground level-as if to beckon them outside.
“Yes, but Maurice Deneau didn't. He never picked up on the con or realized that he was ever in any danger. Whatever poison our man is using, it effectively shuts down rational thought, lulling the victims into a calm acquiescence, but something in Caterina fought back.”
“What made her different?” asked Parry, who'd hurried down the steps, catching up as they stepped out into the predawn darkness. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran? Any medical reason one person would be more immune than another to whatever poison this creep is using?”
They continued on toward the patrol cars that had brought them to this section of town, the famous Second Street off downtown Philadelphia, where the killer moved efficiently and safely among the upwardly mobile, artistic community. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran?” pressed Parry.
“It would help to know the exact nature of the poison. We need to send it out for analysis to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington. The local guys are coming up zip on it.”
Kim suggested, “Perhaps Caterina had a stronger tolerance for the drug.”
“Possibly, but more likely our killer made a mistake. More like the dose was too low or too high, in which case she would have a far different reaction than that of calm acquiescence-what the killer apparently needs in order to leave his deadly poetry for us to read,” Jessica answered, rubbing the soreness from her neck, taking in the crisp yet damp evening air. It smelled of a coppery rain that had turned into a mist, and it touched her cheek with the feel of a sodden cloth.
“Or she was lucid enough to suggest that she do the same to the killer's back, using his inkwell, the same as he had used on her,” suggested Sturtevante. “In a con, that's when things go wrong, when the mark doesn't cooperate as you predict. I worked for the fraud division for several years. We handled con artists, flimflam men, hucksters, and hoaxsters,” she informed the others. “I know how these creeps work to relieve the old and the innocent of their life's savings. I've just never known a con artist who set the stakes at life itself.”
“He doesn't see himself as pulling a hoax, I don't think,” said Jessica, “not from all that we've surmised.”
Kim immediately agreed, bolstering Jessica's notion. “He doesn't see it as a game or a flimflam; he doesn't enjoy killing for the sake of killing. It's a means to an end. To the transmigration of the soul into what he believes is a higher form, I suspect. It is the only way he can get his victims to quickly and efficiently cross over. His endgame, if you will, is to return them to some otherworldly force, or forces, that he sees or hears in his head. That would be my guess.”
“Apparently his victims don't see him as any kind of threat whatsoever,” Jessica agreed.
“Fact is, they likely gravitate to him as heroic.”
“Heroic?” asked Parry, perplexed.
“He's a grim, dark figure who seems to incarnate all they aspire to and surround themselves with. Look closely at Maurice's surroundings, his choice of habitat, the very things on his walls,” Kim explained.
“And look as closely at what he has to say in his diary,” added Jessica. “Somewhere in it he may tell you what he most loves in life, and I suspect it is the belief that one day he will die.”
“A death wish?”
“More closely aligned with the notion that there's a better world beyond. Possibly a parallel universe far better and into which he ought to have been born,” said Kim. “It's less a death wish per se than a desire to transcend life as we mortals know it.”
Jessica added, “So his savior, even if temporary, is the man who can both see and understand the desperately melancholy youth, and so becomes the young person's hero.”
She saw Parry's eyes bore into her, questioning.
“I noticed a book of Byron's works on the nightstand, the pages marked,” Jessica said.
“Got it right here,” said Parry. “I'll look it over, see if it uncovers anything, along with the diary entries. Got some confidential stuff here that might prove helpful down the road. Listen to this.”
Parry began to read from the diary. “ 'I chose the name Mayonnaise because I like licking it off my sexual
