guile. The charming mad priest put me under his spell, even as he put people to excruciating deaths. Strange, isn't it, how Bunwith looks and acts the very antithesis of the self he created in his artistic work.” Again Jessica wondered about the dean's dark suspicions of the man. “Setting aside what he looks and sounds like, to your psychic sense, what does he feel like to you, Kim?”
“Feels as harmless as he looks to me.” Still, she shook her head. “But then, perhaps his dark side, the Poe within, is channeled into his art, his poetry, and so he shows only his light side to the universe.”
“According to him, he's not even a part of the universe outside these hallowed walls. Are you suggesting that he has it in him to murder people, that he's perhaps a dual personality?”
“I don't believe our killer sees his acts as murder,” said Kim, brushing hair from her eyes. “And neither do you. This guy we're after kills allegedly for the sake of the victim, you see-any means to the end. Murder, no; assisting them to reach another world, assisting them over-¦”
“Like poetic euthanasia?”
Kim frowned. “Perhaps, but I didn't get a whiff of it on 'reading' him when I shook his hand.”
“Yeah, some handshake, huh?”
“If you can call it that.”
“Dead fish…”
Bunwith returned, all obviously insincere apologies. A tone of contempt and annoyance filtered through each word he spoke now, as if he were angry that he'd had to send a student off merely to bother with the two FBI detectives. “All right, now that I'm free, I can give you the rest of the day. Fire away with your questions. Would you like me to go downtown with you? Take a lie-detector exam, what?”
“No need for a lie detector, Dr. Burrwith,” said Kim. “I'm a walking, talking he detector.”
Burrwith stared into Kim's beautiful Creole features, his face scrunched in confusion as he asked, “What do you mean by that?”
“I'm a psychic, Dr. Burrwith, a psychometrist to be exact. When you and I shook hands, I got a reading on you.”
“Really… really?”
“A sure reading…”
Kim's face remained impassive while Burrwith squirmed in the seat into which he had fallen, the air escaping the cushioned seat as if to mock his own loss of breath. “So, have I passed your litmus test? How presumptuous of you-both of you-to come in here and… and attempt to… what would a lawyer call it? Entrap me? I think our interview is over. It's really too bad. I may have been able to help you, but not so long as I'm being treated as a suspect.”
“You're hardly being treated as a suspect, sir,” Jessica assured him.
“No matter what sort of spin you put on it, I am being treated shabbily. Now good day.”
He had done a sudden about-face since speaking to the student outside, and Jessica thought perhaps he was something of a manic-depressive himself. “Yes, well, I think we're done here, Dr. Burrwith. Thank you for your time.” With that, she guided Kim out the door.
“What was that all about?” she asked when they had gotten out of earshot of the man. “Do you think telling him you're a psychic at this stage was a smart thing to do?”
“I wanted to see his response, see if it elicited a reaction.”
“That kind of information always elicits a reaction.”
“Yeah, I know, and I wanted to see his. See if I could get some sense of him from it. I think he may be hiding something, that he's very practiced at being duplicitous.”
“Wanted him to sweat it out, huh?”
“Whoever our killer is, I suspect he believes quite strongly in psychic powers, is heavily into the afterlife and New Age thinking, and if he knows we have a psychic on his tail, he might give something away. But I fear it didn't work with Burrwith. I got nothing beyond the feeling that he's hiding something. I just don't know what that thing might be.”
“Believe me, I've had the same reaction to some of the sociopaths I've run across. Do you have antennae strong enough to pick up the unfeeling, unemotional psychos among us?”
“I know when a soul is ugly, and I don't get that off Burrwith.”
“But then perhaps our killer's soul is not ugly. We're not dealing with the usual maniac here.”
“Touche. You're right, of course.”
As they exited the dark vaulted-ceilinged corridors of the neo-Gothic building, Dean Harriet Plummer again located them, a young woman in tow. She said, “You might wish to talk to Johnnie.”
“Johnnie?”
“My student assistant here. She knew your last victim.”
“Please allow me to buy you coffee at the commissary,” said the dean, pointing to a cafe-front window across the way. “Sit down with Johnnie. Hear what she has to say about Burrwith and this business.”
Taking a deep breath, Jessica said, “AJ1 right.”
Young Johnnie Haley told them that a lot of students around the campus thought Dr. Burrwith might possibly be the pen-wielding poisoner.
“Why is that, Johnnie?” asked Kim, seated across from her. “He's just weird. All the poems and stories we study in class are about gruesome stuff, child abuse, molestation, incest, death, disease, horror… you name it. Lotsa kids call him Dr. Death.”
'Tell us what you know about his habits. Ever see him at nightclubs or bars or the coffeehouses down on Second Street, or anywhere else for that matter?”
“Only once, the time he had a fight with Dean Plummer.”
Plummer had left them alone with the student. “The dean was at a local nightclub?”
“The Brick Teacup, checking out the action with Dr. Locke-”
“Locke?”
“Another professor. He's won awards for his poetry and stuff, I hear. Anyway, the three of them got into some sorta shouting match, but no one could make it out since the place is so-”
“Loud, we know,” said Kim.
'Tell us what you knew about Maurice Deneau,” asked Jessica.
“Not much, really. Just saw him around, you know. He was just a kid, you know, a big kid. They were just kids, like me. Kids nowadays, we just wanna have fun, you know. Nothing about any of this makes any sense to me.” Despite more digging, they got very little else from Johnnie; clearly, using the girl to incriminate Burrwith was a desperate measure on Plummer's part. They learned that she had once slept over at Maurice Deneau's house, and that she knew Thomas Ainsworth, Deneau's friend. “Both the boys were nice, sensitive young men,” she told them, tears welling up now. “Just sweet, sensitive guys, you know. Could use more of their type in the world, you know?”
The coffee left a bitter taste in Jessica's mouth, as did Plummer's overly helpful coaching of the girl to point the finger at Burrwith. After fifteen minutes of listening to basically useless and superficial information, they sent the student on her way.
As they were about to leave the English department building, where they had walked with Johnnie, once again the chairman of the English department clung to them as if she were afraid to be left so close to Burrwith. “You should speak to a Dr. Donatella Leare, also an expert in literature here.”
“But let me guess, she's also had some run-ins with Burrwith?” Jessica said.
“She has, but she's never confided the details. She has excellent insight into poetic expression, far more than anyone on my staff. I have given over the information I received from the FBI to her, and she has shown a great deal of interest in the case. You may find her at home late tonight or early tomorrow. Here is her card.” She had escorted them to the parking lot now.
“Thank you. Dr. Plummer. You have been a great help,” replied Jessica, tiring of the woman's overbearing manner.
“We wish to cooperate as much as possible. This is a horrible blot on our community, these awful killings.”
Jessica's police instincts made her suspect Dr. Plummer herself, perhaps not of the murders per se but of some connection to them. She was too eager to be of help, going out of her way, so far as to dig up a student
