to the one tattoo that killed them?”
“Our guy has to be quite persuasive. To be blunt, any corpse candidate not deemed 'proper' or 'worthy' by his standard wouldn't get his backside poetry.”
“Anything else strike you?”
Jessica told him of her growing belief that the killer preyed on people who, for whatever reason, looked the part and played the part of willing victims. “The dead are men and women who fell under the spell of a kind of old- world charm and beauty of spirit-all romantics who saw the world through ideal-clouded eyes-even here, in a place that supposedly enshrines the opposite of such notions.”
“Interesting. Our killer is into charm and beauty, then?”
“Actually, the vies are perfectly androgynous. The males could pass for female, and vice versa. I think that's the physical look that attracts our guy, while the mind-set is that of mystical romanticism.”
Eriq sounded like a big brother when he asked, “Are you alone there in the lab? Where's everyone else?”
“Yeah, pretty much for the moment.”
“Go get some dinner and rest. That's an order.”
“One I happily accept.”
“Everything go okay between you and Parry?”
“Sure, why wouldn't it? You hear anything to the contrary?”
“No, no… just asking. I'll check in later, Doctor. Good night.”
“ 'Night, Chief.”
“Damn,” she cursed herself after hanging up. Why had she made such a to-do over his question about Parry? She looked around the lab and other offices. “This place is like a morgue,” she gently joked, wanting to hear herself speak. Everyone on the day shift was long gone, leaving the lab area as abandoned as the proverbial country cemetery, and the lights in areas not in use had been dimmed. Jessica felt a sense of aloneness begin to creep into her skin, and again she wondered why she had seen and heard so little from James Parry.
“We're not making much of a team,” she lamented aloud.
Kim, too, had confided that she had seen little of Parry in the days since their visit to Maurice Deneau's flat.
It didn't help matters to learn that Parry and Sturtevante were independently scheduling meetings with the toxicologist DeAngelos.
She toyed with the idea of calling Jim, forcing things. She lifted the phone, put it back, lifted it again, finally returned it. She paced the room, thinking, angry that Parry had excluded her from his lunch meeting with DeAngelos; then she wondered if DeAngelos had called the meeting to “report” on her?
Jessica looked at the clock, seeing the hour hand inch toward six p.m. She again wondered why she was still in the lab. She knew why. Something nagged at her, something about the deaths and the manner of the killer's writing, something trying to get out, something trying to talk clearly to her, but she couldn't read the garbled signs. She felt so damnably handicapped, as if some vital fact floated just out of reach. All the parts were here, before her, yet they refused to coalesce into a larger configuration, like a puzzle with all of its hundreds of pieces present, but each an ill fit.
“What am I missing?” she asked herself over and over. Frustration weighed heavy on Jessica's shoulders, while anxiety watched in the background, whispering, “The Poet Killer's going to strike again and soon… very soon, but when, where, how, and why? Why indeed does he kill, and why in such a manner as this?”
TEN
Like a fiend in a cloud, With howling woe. After night I do crowd. And with night will go…
Jessica lifted the phone on her desk in the makeshift office that had been provided by the Philly ME's office and asked the operator to put her in touch with Dr. Arnold Heyward. When he came on the line, she said, “Dr. Heyward, this is Dr. Coran. 1 fear I won't sleep tonight without some assurances that-”
“Thought I was the only one left in the building,” he said, cutting her off. “I mean other than the maintenance crew.”
“Had some loose ends to tie up,” she replied dryly. “Did you get it all out to Parry's people?” She needn't explain what it was to Heyward, not since DeAngelos had given the order.
“It's done, Dr. Coran, and might I say that I think your decision to forward samples to D.C. appropriate, under the circumstances.”
It sounded pretty lame and perfunctory, and well rehearsed to boot, but Jessica simply said, “Thank you, Dr. Heyward. I only hope it nets us some results. I've asked an associate in D.C. to place it on a front burner as soon as it arrives. We've done the same with the DNA samples taken by Shockley. I hope your department isn't taking this personally.”
“You understand, Doctor, that these things take time. I'm only sorry we could not find any concentrated poison to have been of use.”
“Yes, well, thanks. Did you test the wineglasses?”
“We did, of course, and found nothing other than… wine, a Pinot Noir, actually.”
“Appellation and year?”
“We're not that good.”
“Was it the same at every crime scene?”
“I think our guy brings it with him; certainly it's his preference.”
“Our FBI lab has a high-tech device that separates out every chemical. Those glasses will be tested for everything conceivable. They're bound to hit on something.”
“Yes, I've read about the Super-Separator, as they call it, but sorry to say we could hardly afford it at a two-mil price tag.”
Once again, the economics of death investigation, she thought. She'd heard it in hamlets small and large, and Philly by any standard was a large, complex city, filled with as much crime as any major city in America. “Yeah, I know, Dr. Heyward. People give lip service to fighting crime, but they don't want to spend any money on it.”
“You got that right.”
They said their good nights and Jessica saw that it had grown late, nearing seven p.m., almost four days since the discovery of Maurice Deneau's body. Why had James Parry not involved her more in the day-to-day investigation? What had he gotten from the young man's diary and annotations in his books? The idea the chief special agent on the case was avoiding her grew to enormous proportions in her mind. Troubling, if it were true. She told herself that he must be extremely busy, but that sounded like excuse making for him. Still, if he weren't extremely busy, then what? Busy as hell or else… It was the or else that worried her the most.
She imagined he might be in turmoil over their having to work together, that their being thrown into this situation was more crippling for him than for her. Perhaps Parry felt as much frustration with the case and the failure of the toxicology lab to isolate the poison in the ink as she had felt; in fact, this was likely. Perhaps he had called a luncheon meeting with DeAngelos to take a crack at the self-important ass himself, wanting Sturtevante in his corner instead of Jessica.
Perhaps this was reason enough to telephone Jim, tell him she had gotten DeAngelos's department off their asses-and get Jim's reaction. Reason enough, she told herself. Perhaps if she made the first move, this awkward game of hide-and-seek between them might end; in the long run, their not dealing with each other on a professional level was not good for the case. She guessed that he was thinking the same thing.
Tired and frustrated, she dialed Parry's office, only to leam that he had left for the day, and that she had missed him by some fifteen or twenty minutes, this according to another agent who sounded tired of hearing his ringing phone. “Any messages, Dr. Coran?”
“No, none. I'll try again tomorrow.”
When she looked up, Jim Parry stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. “Looking for me?” he asked,
