But a revolving red light went on in Shockley's lab, a sure signal that another corpse was on its way, and a moment later, the doors to the crime lab burst open and an attendant wheeled a corpse through.
“Dear God,” muttered Shockley through grinding false teeth. “We've got another one.” He ought to have been apprised of the body's earlier discovery so he could have sent out an evidence tech unit to sweep the crime scene.
“Dammit,” Jessica muttered. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“We've screwed up is what it means,” Shockley replied as he rushed for a look at the body and to speak with the attendant.
“I left messages, Doctor. Didn't anyone find you?” the attendant was asking when Jessica and Kim joined the ME.
“Not a word. We've been in and out of the autopsy rooms and the freezers,” Shockley replied. Then a second young attendant rushed in shouting, “Dr. Shockley, Tim Brothers somehow stupidly turned off the red-light special, and what with the panic button off, none of us knew. I mean, we just now learned. It's another male victim of that poison-pen guy.”
This was obvious, as the victim lay facedown in the gurney, the glaring, ugly poetry on his back dried with blood, red and rusty. “Damn it all, man, tell me something I don't know. All right, let's have a look at this latest victim, shall we?”
With the three of them in surgical garb, they moved toward the Poet Killer's fourth suspected victim.
“Looks all too familiar.” Kim's remark came with the tones of fatigue and frustration.
Again they found themselves in autopsy room number one, where Jessica read aloud the toe tag, anton pierre, even as she stripped away the sheet to reveal the male corpse. Anton's eyes, wide open and sea blue to emerald green, displayed the usual marble like stare, stony and without life, but the color, like those of the other victims, mesmerized and made one believe some life danced just behind the stillness. Jessica wanted to reach for the stethoscope to make certain this beautiful, untouched victim- untouched but for the now familiar poetic scars on his back-lay just beyond in the realm of sleep, not death.
He hadn't been deep-frozen and thawed out, she silently told herself. Not like the others. He hardly looked dead; it hardly seemed possible that the healthy-looking person on the slab could be a corpse. “Perfection,” muttered Kim.
“Once again,” Jessica agreed. “Now it's even; two women, two men, for a total of four victims.”
Shockley added, “Another perfectly proportioned man at that. Look at those pecs.”
“Forget the pecs. Look at the rest of him,” said Kim, with a slight shake of the head.
Jessica added, “And his skin.”
“More darkly tanned than the others.”
“Hardly what you'd call a sun worshiper, however.”
“Not a freckle or a mole on him.”
“It's as if it's a prerequisite-a flawless complexion-to die in this manner,” finished Jessica.
Although the victim's skin in this case was several shades darker than the women and the other man, the body itself, displayed as it was, showed not a single blemish, save for the normal discoloration to the frontal areas, face, chest, and legs, where the blood had settled. Obviously, once again the victim had been left facedown to display the handiwork of the Poet Killer to authorities. Thus gravity had caused the blood to pool in areas of the front, creating large purplish splotches on the skin.
Jessica stared across the cadaver and into Kim's eyes. “Is it only coincidence that Anton Pierre, Barona Gaitano, Micellina Petryna, and Caterina Mercedes all have such extraordinary features? It must fit into the killer's fantasy, whatever that fantasy might be.”
“Agreed,” Kim replied, staring at Anton Pierre's perfectly proportioned body and beautiful face. “Some people would kill for a body that looks like these.”
“And obviously someone has,” Shockley put in.
“Think you want to try a 'deep read' on Pierre?”
Kim bit her lip, sighed heavily, and nodded. “I'll do what I can.”
Jessica stared across the cadaver at her colleague and friend, Kim Desinor, whose complexion rivaled those of the two dead women for purity. Kim had shoulder-length hair these days, the natural flip framing her large, energy-filled eyes and accentuating her high cheekbones. “Fearful you'll use up all your magic our first day?” asked Shockley, who remained skeptical of Kim's psychic abilities.
Kim didn't answer, her gloved hands now moving like two markers over a Ouija board as she gritted her teeth in concentration. Jessica again thought how perfectly beautiful she was.
“It is rather a radical, even alien idea nowadays, but regardless of their sexual proclivities, our killer may well have seen these four as virginal in some context only he fully understands. We may rule it out as a fact, but we shouldn't rule it out as a fantasy, part of the killer's fantasy,” Kim suggested.
“Yeah, he may have so strongly wanted it that way that he saw them as such, regardless of facts,” agreed Jessica. “It's the kind of designation or imprinting a madman might stamp on his victims.”
“I recently had a case of murder after months of stalking,” said Shockley, “and the shooter did just that. He saw his victim as pure, put her on a pedestal, and when she inevitably fell off it, he killed her.”
Jessica had learned to put aside the horror of such moments, that so much human potential and life itself had been snuffed out as one might crush a caterpillar underfoot. So much waste. All the victims were young, with so much lying ahead of them, each barely out of the teen years. Wasted… the single word said it all, a waste of human promise and potential. No one could imagine what might have burgeoned from these beginnings.
Jessica realized that the image of the virginal soul, or the state of actual virginity, might not fit here, but the appearance of it-that is, the physical appearance of purity displayed by each body-might have a great deal to do with the killer's choice of victims. That it might well play into his selection process. “Perhaps the Poet wanted a perfectly unblemished 'slate' to write on. It might be that the killer, while not strictly interested in virgins in the literal sense of the word, did find people who gave the appearance of purity in one form or another.”
“While not virgins, they may have easily given that impression of innocence and naive that proved, in the end, the most alluring trait of the virginal or celibate life,” agreed Kim. “Virginal behavior, virginal by nature, virginal appearing, or a combination of all three.”
Jessica silenced herself as Kim's psychic persona took center stage once again.
Kim's energies, however, had been drained like a used-up battery from the earlier readings. She received little from Anton Pierre, save the overwhelming sense of confusion, mixed with a bit of awe. She concluded in a few flat words: “He never knew what hit him. Didn't see it coming. Innocence sums him up, innocence and perplexed ignorance of how he came to be dead.”
“And as for being, as Madonna says, 'like a virgin'?”
“The overwhelming trait I get coming through is confused innocence, like a child who has been lied to. Again the number nineteen and the words rampage and quark returned during my reading. Something insistent there.”
“You think the killer is nineteen and on a rampage, his mind 'quarked'?”
“Such a direct interpretation would only lead us in a wrong direction. No, the nineteen is a symbol for something greater than age. And as for the word rampage… again it may hold some other meaning we are not aware of or do not normally associate with the word. The same will likely be true of quark. We need to pursue these words and the symbolic meanings ascribed to the number nineteen. I'll set myself that task.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Our killer's MO is certainly not one of a man on a rampage, so I must assume it stands for something other than our normal interpretations would allow.” Jessica's eyes lit up with a notion. “Perhaps its opposite, then, rampage equals peace, serenity, perhaps what serenity betokens? Absolute peace?”