“I can't be sure of his or her motives just yet, but it would appear the killer took great pains to select a method of murder that is not the choice of your usual sociopathic chain saw murderer,” she insisted. “I don't think we're dealing with a heartless, unfeeling person here, but quite possibly the opposite.”
“The opposite? What is the opposite of such a person, Dr. Coran?”
“Someone who is subconsciously acting on some… some delusion of grandeur, that he is some sort of… saint, and that what he does is indeed an act of mercy on the one hand…”
“But, on the other hand…?”
“A thrill, a conquest, a victory. Dr. Desinor has said that she felt the killer was on some sort of crusade.”
“Precisely the definition of a sociopath of the sort we find in religious zealots, my dear, wouldn't you say?”
“Someone whose aims are glorified to a pathological intensity, working out of a sense of mission or a sense of a destiny ordained by God. That would make our killer a complicated nutcase, whose vision and fantasy are religious in nature, like Jim Jones in Guyana and David Koresh in Waco, Texas.”
“Yes, well, if you believe so.” Dr. Shockley lifted his brow, a shrewd look on his face. “Isn't such a man always more frightening than all the chain saw killers combined?”
“Yes, of course, especially if he is preaching such distortions as I heard in the case of the Crucifier in London.”
“Read all about it in the journals. You really should write that case up for the benefit of the rest of us, Jessica.” And then he abruptly added, “So, where have all the others gone off to?”
“No need for them to baby-sit here. They'll do just as well to follow leads independently of us.”
Shockley nodded, looking to her like the actor who played Santa Claus in the original Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street. He plopped wearily into the chair across from her, the desk she'd been given between them. “I heartily agree. That man Parry looked quite anxious to end his stay in my little death chamber. Behind my back, the PPD personnel, all of them, call this place 'Shock Theater,' where the 'Shock Doc'-that'd be me-operates like some ghoulish Dr. Frankenstein.” He laughed at the image, his white hair falling over one eye, and for a moment, Jessica thought he might drop off to sleep where he sat.
“I'm 'Shocky' to my friends,” he told her, “and I would be pleased to count you, my dear, among them. You needn't call me uncle. You're hardly the child I knew when your father was alive.”
Hearing footsteps, Dr. Shockley turned, and Kim Desinor showed up in the doorway, asking, “Which way to the second autopsy room and victim number two?”
“Are you sure you can handle that now, Kim?” asked Jessica.
“I am. Let's have at it.”
Jessica stood. Shockley, taking more time to get to his feet, joined the women, both of whom were already halfway down the corridor, en route to the waiting body.
Jessica had already begun to relax in her new surroundings, but she felt a great deal more at ease without James Parry in the room. A momentary and fleeting thought, like a scuttling bug, reminded her she had yet to contact Richard Sharpe in England to tell him of the case, and that she'd “run into” James Parry as a result. She wondered if he'd believe such a sequence of events, or if she simply ought to tell him the truth. But what was the truth? she now asked herself.
Standing over the second victim, banishing such concerns from her mind for the moment, she concentrated instead on the corpse. She and Kim both immediately saw the surface similarities: although the two women looked quite different, each had flawless skin and trailing, curling black hair, flowing freely, a dark ribbon of it, the effect pure and beautiful. In fact, each looked like the stereotype of the Pre-Raphaelite woman, the woman of poetry and song made famous by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Kim then waved her wand like hands over the prone body.
“Her name was Caterina Mercedes,” Shockley said softly. Both beautiful names, Jessica thought. Beautiful women, beautiful and flawless skin; hair like winding vines; pouting, large but soft lips; high cheekbones; statuesque; perfectly proportioned; yet their most striking feature other than the smooth and flawless skin had to be their slim, even boyish physiques. Something about the eyes in this one, too, reminded Jessica of the other victim; aside from the crystal blue green of the orbs, there seemed a hint of the piercing life hiding deep within the corneas, like seeds, somehow reflecting light even in their dormancy. How incredible those eyes must have been in life, she surmised.
As much to shake herself from the unreasonable feelings welling up in her as to learn anything, Jessica broke the stillness, asking Kim, “Are you getting any feeling from this one?”
“Anger… pure and unadulterated anger. She hates him passionately.”
“As passionately as the other loves-loved him?”
“Even more so. Nothing so transcendent as hatred. She feels used, conned. Not at the time, not while he was in the act of poisoning her, but now she feels the hatred so strongly that she hasn't completely left this plane of existence.”
“That's pretty scary. Anything else?” Jessica coaxed.
“Only that this one's not cold; this one's on fire.”
Jessica only now realized that the blue aura surrounding Kim had turned to a red glow, and that Kim found herself afire. She was again faint, and Jessica grabbed her where she stood beside Dr. Shockley, who flinched at the heat coming off the psychic. “Please, help me to sit,” Kim begged, nodding toward a nearby stool.
With Kim recuperating, Jessica asked Shockley, “How do you see these killings, Doctor? Did your protocol first link the killings?”
“The killer did that for us.”
“The poems, you mean. His MO.”
“Fairly obvious about himself, wouldn't you say?”
Poems, left on each victim like tablet writings, of course, not that he was kind enough to leave a signature in the literal sense, but this was, in police parlance, quite a John Hancock after all. Still, he did leave another signature of a sort: the poison in their systems. If only they could decipher the message…
Shockley got on the intercom, called for his attendants, and saw to the careful return of the body to its freezer compartment. Jessica stepped nearer to the old man and asked, “Had to've been a potent poison to work as it did in the slight wounds he opened with… with a pen.”
“What we've managed to determine is that the killer used a quill pen, the old-fashioned sort you dip into an inkwell. It certainly cuts more deeply than your typical fountain pen.”
“Clever of you to come up with the type of pen he used,” she complimented.
He shrugged it off. “Wasn't hard for me to detect this fact alone, although I've been stumped by the exact nature of his poison. It has contradictory elements.”
“Contradictory elements?”
“It may act as both a stimulant and a downer. A real downer in the end, of course. At first exciting the victim, then leaving her to languish.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Wouldn't you have to be high to allow someone to cut your flesh to this extent? He may even tell them the anesthetic is in the ink, for all we know, and they being young and trusting souls… who knows.”
“I see. But why has it been so bloody difficult to isolate the exact nature of the poison?”
'Trace amounts of this and that, from boric acid to retinol. None in a lethal enough dosage in and of itself to kill has been isolated out, but the base poison continues to elude detection.”
“You isolated boric acid and retinol in the system?”
“Well, not I. And not surprising, actually. Boric acid is used in baths, and retinol-vitamin A skin conditioning- has become a common enough over-the-counter wrinkle cream. Our toxicologist, Dr. DeAngelos, did the work on that, but as it turns out, Mercedes's doctor had prescribed retinol for a recurrent problem she thought she was having with bags under her eyes. Of course, it was a pure figment, as there are and have never been any flaws beneath her eyes, but her doctor prescribed it, he says, as a way to calm her down.”