animals went mad for it.”
Deitze stood up and wandered to his window, looking down on the courtyard below where the less dangerous patients were allowed an hour a day.
Jessica was getting messages from the man's body language. “Has Cahil been in touch with you, Dr. Deitze?”
He hesitated a hair. “No… and I've lost track of him. He's disappeared from the home and job we placed him in.”
“ Morristown? Where did he work?”
“ Baby land Furnishings.”
“ My God… you placed him in a job involving children?”
“ He is cured, I tell you, and he is not your killer.”
“ Dr. Deitze… Jack… it's one thing to do a case study and put forth a theory of rehab never before tried, but it's foolish to maintain that we should not take a close look at this guy, unless you have some irrefutable evidence that he is innocent.”
Jessica thought of their initial profile of the killer, and she asked, “And if he's disappeared from where he was placed, that only points up the fact he's roving. Possibly roaming the coast from Jersey to Florida.”
“ I know Cahil is cured of feeding on-”
“ On the real thing? Look, we're not excluding other leads, but the mark left on the victims is identical to this man's drawings of his Rheil tissue. You won't mind if I take one or two of his drawings with me, will you?”
“ No… go right ahead. But I wish to caution you about Maxwell Strand. He only wants one thing: to see Cahil killed.”
“ These drawings are more than coincidence, Doctor. They're quite compelling. As for Strand, I'm sure I understand his biases.”
“ Read the rehabilitation paper in its entirety, Dr. Coran,” he called after her as she left.
Strand had waited on a hallway bench. He stood and came alongside her. She wanted to get out of this building full of horrors and bad memories.
“ Did he feed you that line about how he's cured Cahil of his cravings for cannibalizing brains?”
“ He told me about it, yes, along with the story of how Cahil only wanted a small portion of the brains of his victims.”
“ Yeah… the Rheil tissue.”
“ You know about that?”
“ I was there at his elocution, and I've read Dr. Blowhard's case study. I told you, I'm an expert on Daryl Thomas Cahil.”
“ Then tell me,” she asked, slowing her pace so that he might keep up. “Where do these sickos come up with their fantastic rationalizations?”
“ Adolf Hitler rationalized genocide right along with Osama bin Laden.”
“ So they place him in Morristown and provide him with a job at a kid's store? I can't shake this inconceivable idiocy.”
He countered sharply. “But it made a warped kind of sense-bureaucratic nonsense.”
“ How crazy is the system?”
“ Has this harmless job by day, and cracking open and feeding on young women's brains by night,” said Strand.
Jessica felt an urgency to find and put Cahil behind bars for the sake of his next victim. Something about Cahil's working around children convinced her that maybe she ought to be pursuing this man exclusively and full throttle.
They passed the security check, waved to the guards and were out the door. Jessica breathed in great breaths of air. Strand, at her side, said, “Santiva told me about what you found in the victim's heads, that picture of the Rheil cross. It corresponds with the pictures that Cahil drew while in prison, and the one he has up on his website.”
“ Website? Whataya mean, website?”
“ Don't you know? It's all in Deitze's case study, part of his rehab program for poor little misunderstood Cahil. While he was incarcerated, Cahil was set up with a computer and was given access to the Internet as part of his therapy.”
“ You're kidding.”
“ Read the report Deitze gave you. It's all there.”
“ Damn…” She thought of Lorena combing through the computer trails for any connections between or among the Manning girl and the other victims. Could it be Cahil's website? If so, it was a connection that could not be ignored.
Still, Jessica heard her father's voice caution her as they left the prison for the parking lot. Careful, Jess, what at first appears suspicious coincidence is often only a disguised version of wishful thinking.
“ You coming back to Morristown with me?”
“ I had no such plans, no.” Jessica was taken aback by the question.
“ Santiva and his agents are closing in on Cahil in Atlantic City. I can feel it. Your boss said something about getting his best forensic people to go over the man's dwelling. Search warrants are in the works. I'm working closely with your field operatives in Jersey.”
“ If you don't mind, Detective Strand, I think I'll wait for orders before I go racing off to Morristown.”
He nodded, took her hand, shook it firmly and left her at her rental car. Jessica wondered who was stranger, Strand or Deitze, and she opted for the latter. She felt anxious now to get to her hotel room in Philadelphia and look over Deitze's paper for information on this website of Cahil's. She hoped it would be the noose that would slide around the killer's throat. She thought she now knew what Deitze had been holding back. And yet he had handed it to her and asked her to read the paper in its entirety-and she would.
She opened the door to the rental, a strange feeling coming over her. She looked up to where Deitze's office window reflected the fading sunlight back at her, and the man was standing there in the orange glow, staring out at her. She climbed inside the car, tossing the case study on the seat next to her.
She revved up the car, barked its tires in reverse and rushed to the gate, wanting to get off the grounds.
SEVEN
In the one hand he is carrying a stone, while he shows the bread in the other.
Wichita, Kansas Same time
Wanda Rae Hamilton ran her fourteen-year-old fingers over the keyboard at the Wichita Public Library, searching for religious meaning from the Internet. All her life her parents had pressed religion on her, and she wanted to know what the rest of the world thought about it. She thought she might write a book on it one day.
However, the articles she had found so far proved boring until she put in “mind” and “soul” as her keywords. Suddenly the screen was alive with choices. She made her selection and the screen filled with:
Spirit or soul is like God, androgynous, without a sexual element and so in a class by itself, and it cannot be derived from any other field of knowledge. The soul has preexisted, having had its beginning in God, before its earthly and bodily time. It is the God-element within man. It rules over the earthly body as the nucleus or inmost center of man's being. “This rules,” muttered Wanda Rae. She read on:
Some believe it resides in the heart, but most concur it resides in the brain at the center of the mind. Partaking of the brain leads to partaking of the soul, and to partake of the soul, one arrives at the cosmic soul.
To learn more about the mind inside your own body and its relationship to the soul therein, and the cosmic soul of the universe, read on…
Wanda Rae Hamilton looked away from what she'd read, trying to digest it. Somehow, tearing her eyes away
