falls out.”
“Jim, Vladoc has given us some useful insights into the mind of the killer. Now we must match a person to those insights, and I don't see Burrwith fitting in here.”
“Vladoc's pretty strange, Jess. Sturtevante filled me in on where he's headed with the case. You buy any of it?” She told him about Vladoc's visit and his strange but eerily on-target conclusions about the killer, drawn from his reading of the poems. “Kim and I think he's right on with this magical-thinking business being at the bottom of the killings.”
“Even more reason to follow up on our concrete leads. We need to talk to this Leare and Locke about Burrwith from my perspective, you know, one grounded in his reality.”
'Tonight-now?”
“Let's stay on the university poets,” replied Parry, after considering all that she'd passed along from the psychiatrist, Vladoc. “You got those addresses handy?”
Jessica hesitated a moment, wishing to go back to her hotel, call Richard, shower, and sleep. But she relented, saying, “No time like the present. All right. You're the boss.”
“I'll meet you out front of the crime lab in fifteen minutes with a sack of burgers and chili.”
“Sounds good. I'm starved. Bring enough for Kim, too. See you then.”
“She there?”
“Yeah.”
“You're on.”
But when Jessica hung up, she could not find Kim; the psychic had literally disappeared, but she had left a note on her office door for Jessica.
Dear Jess,
Took all my stuff to the hotel. In view of Dr.
Vladoc's findings, I'm going to retrace my steps, go back over all my notes on the psychometric readings to see what, if anything, jumps out. Need a quiet, secure, safe place to work.
Yours, Kim
“Dr. Plummer did say that Leare was out of town,” Jessica told Parry. They stood outside the professor's home on the northern outskirts of the city. Several days' worth of newspapers adorned Dr. Donatella Leare's doorstep. A weak light illuminated little of the interior, but to Jessica it looked dark and grim.
On the way to Dr. Leare's place, Jessica had confided in Pany exactly what Vladoc had told her. “I suspect the dwarf is onto something,” said Parry, “I just have trouble with such notions. I'm a pragmatic realistic myself. Can't believe a grown man or woman could buy into such thinking to the degree he kills-albeit benignly-over it.”
“Come on, Jim, it's not so different from Lopaka Kowona's trade winds god telling him to mutilate young women in the islands, or have you forgotten his magical thinking, his god, Ku, talking through the winds? And as for the strange little Vladoc, I don't think he's actually a dwarf, Jim, merely stunted. As to his theory, it plugs into our own theories about the killer rather well, perhaps too well.”
“It does fit with the known clues pretty neatly. What do you mean, too well?”
“I'm not sure, but Vladoc sees a lot of mentals; maybe he actually knows this guy and is bound by, you know, patient-client confidentiality.”
“That old twisted ethical argument that the doctor protects his Frankenstein at all costs, despite the fact that the insane monster is on the loose and killing people? I never understood that. Talk about magical thinking.”
“If it's true, we need to look at Vladoc's patient list, see who's on it. I don't know about you, but I'm generally skeptical of theories that fit too neatly.”
“Agreed. All the same, I suppose we have to entertain the notion that Vladoc's information is… well informed. Else, if it is not Que, then the killer wants us to believe that it is?”
“Perhaps to point the finger at someone else?”
“Perhaps. We'll have to keep an open mind to all possibilities. “Yes, as we should.”
Parry picked up a stone and threw it into the trees. “Don't you find it strange that both Locke and Leare are out of town at the same time?”
“You mean at the same time that the killings have stopped?” she asked.
“That, too, yes. You say the two are returning from some sort of conference in Texas?”
“College and university teachers' conference, yes.”
“And have been there for what-two days and nights?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“And from what you tell me, everyone in the English department is sleeping around. These two might be off screwing their intellectual brains out, mightn't they?”
“I have no idea if there's anything between them, Jim, other than a love of poetry. Any suspicions you have are all rather hypothetical, wouldn't you say?”
“Agreed. ”hey'd already tried Dr. Lucian Locke's residence, and had found it equally abandoned and nearly as dark.
Jessica took a deep breath. “I say we get out of here.”
“Where to?” he asked.
“That bookstore, Darkest Expectations, on Second Street. I understand it's open till midnight.”
“All right, I'm game if you are.”
As they climbed into Parry's official car, Jessica realized only now what Jim had hinted at earlier. “You're not suggesting that we might possibly have two killers, two poets poisoning kids, are you?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“And you're betting on Locke and Leare as the bloody-minded duo?”
“Not necessarily, no, but Leanne knows Leare personally, you see.”
“Oh, yeah, I do remember her mentioning Leare as a friend the university to whom she was talking, an expert in poetry.”
Parry continued speaking as he drove toward Second Street. “And she's had discussions with her about the murders, you see, and when she spoke to Vladoc about the killings, well, she got it in her head that Donatella Leare knows something. Fact is, this Leare woman is one of Vladoc's private patients, and so is Harriet Plummer. He has a lot of female patients, according to Leanne.”
“It's a reach, Jim. The whole thing is a real reach. I've seen nothing to indicate two perpetrators here. Are you thinking Leare and Plummer, two women, could be the Killer Poet?”
“Other than your tearstained evidence, Shockley had found trace elements of two sets of DNA on one of the victims, and neither set matches the victim, or any known person on the evidence-gathering team.”
“Then the meeting with DeAngelos was meant to ask him to be on the lookout for two contradictory sets of information, and he was informed by Dr. Shockley of these suspicions? Suspicions I'm only now hearing about?”
“DeAngelos and Shockley have been working the case together far longer than we have, Jess. Don't go crazy over this little mix-up. The notion had life breathed back into it by Sturtevante, who, while she's looking at this poet Leare as a possible suspect, does not want to believe her friend is our killer.”
“I see, and when were you and Sturtevante going to inform Kim and me of all this?”
“When we got some evidence; we have DeAngelos looking into the possibility of separating out two kinds of poisons. One of Leare's poems is about someone poisoned twice, by two separate lovers. What more can I say?”
“Nothing… not a word.” he interior of the car remained icily silent the rest of the way to Second Street.
When they entered the bookstore called Darkest Expectations, they weren't prepared for the amount of dust and mildew, or for the prevailing motif-Early Draconian meets the Orgone Box. Fake blood wept from the walls and clotted in the iron maiden in the comer, the same one they'd seen in Maurice Deneau's apartment.
“Got her for seventy percent off at the Louvre, a furniture place around the comer,” said the young man covering the register. “Really brightens up the place, don't you think?”
Jessica stepped up to the guy, a bald, plump, earringed, postapocalyptic beatnik with a lot of facial hair and beady eyes; his nose had been buried in an Owl Going back horror novel before the jingle of a bell hanging on the entry-way door had disturbed him. When James Parry, standing beside Jessica, flashed his FBI badge, he said,
