good time, to get off, drive her home, and never see or hear from her again. He perfectly fits the definition of a disorganized killer.”
“Yeah, guess he does.”
“Nothing at all like your last major case, JT. The tattooed corpse. Where the victim's daughters and sons used rabid dogs as murder weapons.”
“What a weird odyssey that turned out to be,” he agreed.
“Strangest case of your career, Doctor. You really must write it up for the Forensic Journal of Medical Inquiry. They'd eat it up.”
“You think so?” She could practically see the wheels turning in his head.
“I know so,” she assured him, thinking of the case that had led JT across America in pursuit of, first, a tattoo artist who could identify the mangled body of the victim, and then in pursuit of the killers-the victim's own children, who so despised and feared the father that they had planned his murder for over a year.
As JT put aside the ear-shattering saw, he shouted, “So, what do you hear from Inspector Sharpe of Scotland Yard these days?”
It had been nine months since Jessica returned from a bizarre case that had taken her to London. In that time, she and Richard Sharpe had seen each other on several occasions, but, except for phone calls and e-mails, they had not had contact now for two of those nine months, and she missed him terribly. Still, his retirement from Scotland Yard was imminent, which meant they could be together at last. However, Richard's superiors had asked him to postpone his retirement for a case. Richard had telephoned her about the matter, and while he had, she suspected, already agreed to work the case, he wanted her to tell him it was all right.
Jessica and Richard had worked the Crucifier case together, and somewhere along the way, they had fallen into each other's arms. Jessica's relationship with James Parry by then had become strained, the distance between them finally taking its toll, what with Parry a bureau chief in Hawaii and her in Quantico, Virginia. JT had caustically joked, “So you traded one ocean for another as an obstacle between yourself and a man who shows some interest in you. Quite interesting.”
She had perhaps too readily told Richard Sharpe that he was perfectly correct in continuing his investigation of the case, and so she allowed him to take himself off the proverbial hook, but she wondered if she should not have ranted and railed at him. He'd promised her that they would be together by Christmas. Instead, she had tried to sound as adamant as possible over the phone, shouting, “Solve it and get your sexy self across the Pond. I need you in my life, Richard, and that means close by!”
Still, she wondered why she had not shown more anger over his decision, why she had not pouted and shouted. Why she hadn't let him know he had hurt her in postponing their plans for reunion, plans that had them living together here in Quantico. She second-guessed her reasoning, her motives, her resolve.
“Perhaps people are right about me; maybe I don't want a real relationship, anything smacking of true commitment,” she told JT as she placed a magnifying glass on a swivel arm over the victim's exposed brain. When JT did not answer, she knew why. She could read him like a book. “Perhaps having so much space between Richard and me creates a kind of comfort zone. That's what Dr. Lemonte always said about what James Parry and I had.”
“Did you tell her she was full of shit?” asked JT.
“Yeah, not in quite those words, but yeah, I did.”
“How do you feel, Jess, deep inside? I mean, about having all that distance between you and Richard.”
“I've had separation anxiety since I left England, and I felt the same thing all those years I was separated from James Parry. I did love him. I don't for a moment believe I sabotaged the relationship-either consciously or subconsciously.”
“But if you're feeling separation anxiety over Richard, why aren't you astronomically pissed off at him for taking on another case when he could have come to you?”
“Shoe's on the other foot, I guess,” she replied. “How often did I do exactly that to Parry? Frankly, I don't know why I didn't throw a fit when Richard told me he was staying on at the Yard.”
“Conditioning, I imagine,” replied JT, continuing with the cleanup.
“Conditioning?”
“Daddy's little girl, military brat learns to take it on the chin.”
“Hmm… always with a controlled and professional response? Maybe it's true what they say about our ghosts becoming our teachers,” she finally conceded. She'd been raised by a man who demanded that she do the right thing in any given situation, so she did as her father would have expected; did as her wonderful professor and mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft, expected; did as Otto Boutine, her first FBI mentor, a man who had died saving her, would have expected. All the ghosts were coming back to haunt her.
In London, she had dodged her ghosts, thrown caution to the wind, falling in love with Richard Sharpe while they worked the case of her career, a case the Forensic Journal of Medical Inquiry had pleaded for her to write up and forward to them.
While in England, Jessica-ostensibly there to help Scotland Yard uncover the identity of the Crucifier-had fallen into the arms of Richard Sharpe. While a fiend who killed his victims in the manner of Christ on the Cross roamed London's underground, Jessica Coran had experienced wild abandon with a man for whom she felt a great passion-while withholding her love, the ultimate gift. “Love is not conditional, Jessica!” her psychiatrist friend Donna Lemonte had often scolded.
While a perverted religious lunatic terrorized all of London, Jessica had found a man for whom she dared think pure love a possibility. In fact, she wondered if her soul had been given voice through Richard, telling her that life before him had not truly been a life, and that now a life without Richard would prove to be a living death.
She thought now of the manuscript she had begun writing while lying in Wessex Hospital in London. Jessica had begun tape recording her feelings for a book on the nature of evil, and how evil-like currents through an ocean- worked through mankind, often in a subtle, even banal manner. Certainly since London, Jessica believed she'd never again see the scale of horror she had confronted in Richard's homeland. Then came the worst school massacre in American history in Littleton, Colorado, where evil so disguised itself that no one, not even the shooters' closest friends and relatives, saw it coming, and now this poor young black girl on her autopsy table. Evil lumbered on and lurked in every crevice in the everyday lives of people.
Evil-thinking, evil-plotting, evil-acting malignancy. It pervaded, surrounded, and permeated all comers of life, she now reasoned. Certainly it lay thick and all but palpable inside the human psyche and here in her autopsy room. Here evil grinned back at her like a maniacal foe and a familiar one, perched gargoyle fashion over her autopsy table.
Likely after reading about poisons on the Internet, Lawrence Hampton, the man behind bars, decided to give his date flowers. He now intended to run an insanity defense, and he was giving police nothing. Jessica's line of forensic inquiry might prove him monstrously evil in having beaten a comatose woman to death, or it might prove the accidental overdose killed her. The sequence of events meant everything in this case. Young Hampton had botched his entire ugly plan by ensuring the girl's death from the beginning, because he didn't know what amounted to an unsafe formula or dosage.
Cleaning up, John Thorpe tossed the saw onto a metal table, shattering Jessica's reverie. “You were right, as usual. God, look at the swelling to the brain. Lot of internal injury to the melon. You don't get that kind of reaction from a dead person.”
“She took a hell of a beating.”
“I agree, she went into coma before she died. Given this evidence, he killed her with his hands. Must've gone into a rage after the drug refused to wear off.”
“So we nail his ass in court for the more tortuous death. It'll add fifty years to his sentence by itself. Good work,” she agreed. “Now get some photos of this, log it, and we'll try to put Adinatella back together again.”
Jessica thought about Adinatella's family, her father and mother, who had brought her into this world, how they must have felt when they left the hospital with their infant daughter wrapped in a blanket; how they must have nurtured her and sent her off to college. All the love and attention showered on Adinatella, and in one moment some stranger snuffs out their child's life, and for what? To fulfill an animal lust.
“Shameful waste of a beautiful young woman,” said JT, as if reading Jessica's thoughts.
“It's an awful sorry business we're in, JT.”
After another hour of autopsy work, John Thorpe and Jessica Coran walked from the dissecting room, leaving
