“No, no!” Jessica interrupted.
“You'll find Heyward quite capable of cataloging and boxing up items for the mail.” He then said into the phone, 'Talking to our FBI expert, Coran, here, Heyward. Seems she thinks her people in D.C. can do a better job than we can, so off we ship everything we have. Got that?”
“Not the U.S. mail,” protested Jessica.
He finally slowed to hear her objection.
Jessica had flushed red by this time. “Don't waste time with the mail. Send it to the Bureau office here in Philly, to James Parry's attention. They'll helicopter it to the FBI lab direct.”
“There you have it,” he said. “Did you hear that, Heyward?”
Jessica heard the disembodied phone voice snap back with, “Yes, sir!”
“So now, Dr. Coran, you see it comes down to the almighty dollar.”
“Pardon?”
“You have a bottomless budget to work with; we do not. My apologies for the municipal legislators and the state legislators, all of whom routinely find it more fashionable and politically useful to spend dollars on AIDS fundraisers, cancer research, tourism, baseball, football, and yet another new sports facility-anything other than the field of death investigation, Doctor.”
“I quite understand, Dr. DeAngelos.”
“Do you really?” He sneered as if there was no way on God's green earth that she could understand. She calmly replied, “Yes, matter of fact, I understand completely.”
“In your rarefied air of governmental budgeting, I'm not so sure you do.”
“I wasn't always with the government, sir. At one time, I was chief medical examiner for the city of Washington, DC.”
“Really? I congratulate you. Then you do understand my circumstances after all, don't you?”
He had her cornered. As much as she disliked the toxicologist's attitude, she knew he was right. The last area for which local government granted funds was death inquiry. It had been so twelve years ago when she worked the trenches of D.C. as pathologist for Washington Memorial Hospital, and it remained so today.
“Not unlike the attitude toward nursing-home laws and improvements in care for the aged,” she agreed, and for the first time, they seemed to fall into mutual civility.
DeAngelos apologized. “I'm sorry for my jaded appearance; one has to develop a thick skin to survive around here. But inside, I am as appalled by these killings, and as upset about them, as anyone on the task force.”
“I'm quite sure of it,” she managed to say, not at all believing him. DeAngelos seemed far more concerned about his department, its political standing, and its financial woes than he was about the victims in the case.
“Although it is hard for me to muster complete sympathy for people who are foolish enough to unwittingly court their own end. People who live the lives of victims, victims to the end. Perfect victims.”
Jessica thought of all the cynical medical professionals she had seen over the years; their number rivaled that of the police professionals she'd known, men and women who, having seen so much of human wickedness, having worked over the bodies of countless victims of trauma and murder, had become apathetic and spent. Dr. Frank DeAngelos needed a long vacation and possibly a career move. Perhaps Philadelphia would do well to promote him to a job where he could do less harm.
Still, in some deep recess of her own being, Jessica, too, hated people who set themselves up for murder, and it certainly appeared that the poisoned Philadelphia children had this in common.
“You have to agree,” he softly said.
“Still, I wonder if such thoughts get in the way of our professional judgment, Doctor.”
Dr. DeAngelos said a curt good-bye and rushed off to the elevator. He moved like a man who feared being late for a rendezvous with a lover.
By five in the afternoon, Jessica had logged in more time in the autopsy area and adjacent labs than was necessary, but it felt good-productive. After the verbal struggle with DeAngelos, the more time she spent with the most recent victims the calmer she became, and the more certain she felt of her ground.
As always in her experience, being in the forensics lab had a calming effect on her; solutions, even minuscule ones, had a way of restoring her. She was doing everything in her power to learn as much as possible about the killer.
After Jessica completed her final protocol on Maurice Deneau and had filled out the last piece of paperwork, she sat down and listed all the similarities she had noticed among the victims. They certainly seemed all of a type. Something in their appearance or manner, perhaps their diffidence, aroused the killer's interest, of this she had no doubt. She knew this to be common among serial killers. Generally speaking, she had found the serial killer to be a creature of habit. This had been so with other monsters she had tracked over the years, and it appeared true here. This need to repeat an experience, to prey on a given type, was often a killer's undoing, and in cases where the killer chose random victims, victims without a scintilla of commonality, authorities had far greater difficulty reaching any definitive conclusion. Often they did not at first see the resemblances among victims, but once these were pinpointed, the information spoke volumes, especially to anyone trained in forensic psychology.
She knew she must send her findings to such an expert once she had something concrete. Another trained person, someone other than Kim Desinor, who had up to this point agreed with Jessica's speculations-someone removed from the case, without emotional involvement, might help Jessica hone in on the killer's thinking and motivation. This could have a great impact on the task force's success in identifying and locating the Poet Killer.
This murderer preyed upon men and women of a distinct body type and look. If the investigators learned the killer's habits, they could begin to follow the right path to a logical conclusion. There was no scientific certainty in such procedures, but years of experience had taught Jessica truths that others either did not see or ignored.
She entered her findings on a computer, saved them to disk, and was wondering exactly who to send them to when the phone rang beside her. Lifting the receiver, she heard Chief Santiva say, “You're working late.”
“Yeah, well, I think it's called for. The Poet has been busy.”
“Anything give in the case so far?”
“Aside from my nerves?”
“Anything we can hang our hats on?”
“Who wants to know, Eriq?”
“We all have people we have to answer to, Jess.”
“They don't really expect anything this soon, do they?”
“I told them we have our best working on it, so they have high expectations. Tell me what you've got. I'll take it from there.”
“Watch for a packet of photos I put in overnight for your attention, boss. I want you to tell me what you can extrapolate from the handwriting.”
“Photos of the latest poems?”
“Straight off the backs of the vies, yes.”
“I'll give them my fullest attention and get back to you. Meanwhile, do you or Desinor have any general impressions I should know about?”
Jessica's assessment of the killer thus far initially left Eriq silent. Then he asked, “Are you both getting the notion that this guy kills people so as to save them from living 'trashed lives'?”
She looked down at the list she'd composed of the victims' characteristics. “Not sure. At least one of the vies was homosexual, they were all Caucasian, no crossbreeds but one cross-dresser. No people of foreign origin, no drug users, no addicts, no drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, deviants with records, nothing unsavory so far as I can see.”
“You don't make a cross-dresser out a deviant?”
“Just a confused kid looking to establish a sense of his own identity. They-all the victims-had that in common, I'm beginning to believe. They were into playing musical chairs with their names, for instance.”
“What about musical body art? Were they into that scene?”
“Sturtevante tells us they frequented the clubs that catered to the body poetry fad going on here, yeah, but previous to their deaths, so far as autopsy shows, none of them were into tattoos or body piercing; no tongue or nose piercings-”
“But they all would have known of the urban legend, the roots of the fad, and they all would have consented
