“We'll confiscate the computer and any disks,” declared Parry, guiding a pair of FBI agents to the machine. “Have them checked for anything that might help determine when, why, and how Maurice came to this end.”
“Why Mayo as a moniker?” Jessica wondered in a near whisper to Parry.
“I dunno. Maybe he 'spread' for everybody?”
“Not if he's anything like the other victims,” replied Sturtevante, who had left Ainsworth for now, joining them in the death room. “All the victims kept tight rein on who they slept with, according to all and everyone who knew them. Ainsworth is saying the same about Maurice here.”
Ainsworth's wailing rose to a frightening level. “I'd better stay with the friend,” Sturtevante said.
“Question him further for any word the victim might have had about a rendezvous with a sponsoring poet,” suggested Parry. “He's got to have told someone of his great achievement.”
Kim and Jessica turned their attention to the clean and perfectly healthy-looking dead man on the bed, his beautiful hair and skin at odds with his condition. Looking about the room, Jessica's trained eye saw nothing untoward, nothing out of place, knocked over, or shattered. This tidiness was reflected in the bureau mirror across from the bed, along with the image of Maurice's cadaver.
“How oddly strange and peaceful it all feels,” she found herself whispering to Kim, who nodded, agreeing.
“And green,” Kim pointed out. Drapery and floor rug were lime green. “It's a significant hit. The green pool I saw in my last vision.”
“Yeah, it's almost creepier than walls and windows splattered with blood.”
None of the usual elements found at a murder scene were in evidence: no blood-drenched sheets or carpets, no walls stained with sputum or brain matter, no overturned furniture, no drawers turned out, and a victim without ugly, gaping gunshot wounds, without the usual missing face or limbs. The crime scene didn't present a mutilated body or deep slash wounds. Why are we here? and what's going on here? were the first reactions of the investigators.
Sandalwood incense had struck Jessica's nostrils when she'd first entered the crime scene, and she saw fat, squat candelabras hunkered like strange pronged little beasts from a Tolkien novel on each bedside table. In fact, the home was filled with candles-large, small, thin, wide, and of every color. According to the first uniformed officer on the scene, some of the candles in the bedroom had been burning when he arrived, while some had been extinguished, presumably by the breeze at the open window. This meant that the discovery of the body had come on the heels of death.
Jessica hardly knew what to do with so pristine a crime scene. She had become used to horror, terror played out on a victim, hours of torture and mutilation. This… this felt more like a wake. Peace, serenity, acceptance seemed to be the rule here, as opposed to battle, chaos, or disharmony of any sort.
The open window allowed the hum and rhythmic noises of the city to enter along with the night breeze, a kind of beautiful noise of life that wafted through. Large paintings done by Maxfield Parrish, depicting serene and dreamlike worlds, and other paintings depicting medieval knights on horseback, beautiful and ornately dressed maidens, with flowing hair trellising down through tangled briar against a backdrop of raw nature, decorated the bedroom walls. Wild rushing streams, filled with spirits and banked by wildflowers and forests, played with the eye. Mere wall decoration or declaration? Jessica wondered.
Jessica's eye fell next on the gilded and grand frames that set off the many paintings that made Maurice's home a shrine to the past, or rather a fantasy past. The frames were themselves baroque artworks, which looked as if they might fetch a handsome price at any antique store. The bedroom furniture-as was true of all the furniture in the home-looked out of time, ancient, large and ponderous, yet there remained a certain charm to it. A strangely alluring style Maurice had chosen to surround himself with- something a Spanish lord might have owned in a previous century. In one corner stood a full six-foot-tall suit of armor, and from the ceilings chains hung, twisting and spiraling snake fashion to hold innumerable cast-iron-like lanterns. In another comer, Jessica felt a wave of shock come over her, surprised to see a replica of what looked like an iron maiden.
“Some icebreaker, huh?” asked Kim.
Sturtevante, who'd rejoined them now, seeing Jessica fix on the ancient weapon of torture, whispered in her ear, “Already checked it out. It's a fake, like the armor, cheaply made in Mexico, only a hundred bucks.”
Jessica nodded and continued her overview of the place, her attempt to sum up the man by his surroundings. On the ceiling black sheets had been hung to simulate the night sky, and on the sheets blinked the stars and the heavens. An enormous, even breathtaking blue moon, shrouded in misty cloud-thanks to a covering of gauze-also stared back at Jessica. The entire effect beckoned any and all to lie back and contemplate the depths of the heavens.
“Where do you suppose he got all this unusual stuff?” Jessica wondered aloud when James Parry stepped in from another room.
“Looks positively foreboding. Remember how Lopaka Kowona filled his home with crate like furniture? This kinda reminded me of that, in a twisted sort of way,” he told her.
“No way, Jim. This stuff may be strange, but much of it is expensive, antique strange. Maurice paid a bundle for most of his things. Believe me.” The sofa and chairs were hardwood and done in the style of pirate furniture aboard a galleon at sea.
“Maybe he got a discount. According to his friend Ainsworth, he worked for Moulin Rouge,” said Lieutenant Sturtevante. “Says he was their order specialist, their interior designer, computer wizard, and he did all the floor and window displays. I called his boss, who says he was really an artist. 'Shame to lose him,' the man said.”
Aside from the curious and interesting surroundings, Jessica's eyes finally focused on the sheaf of feathery paper, like ancient parchment, that lay on the bed beside the deceased. On it someone had roughly scrawled the lines of a poem in black ink, written in the hand of Maurice's killer-or was it Maurice's handwriting on the yellowed parchment? The paper looked antique, like so much else in Maurice's domain, a sort of anachronism in reverse. Jessica wondered if there was a name for such relentlessly perverse taste. Pathological antiquarianism?
“I suspect he got the yellowed parchment through the store.”
“Moulin Rouge?”
“Either that or Ink, Line amp; Sinker, a stationery store, or Darkest Expectations, a bookstore a few doors down on Second Street,” said Sturtevante, seeing Jessica study the paper. “I've seen reams of the stuff in the shops around here.”
“We need to get a sample of Maurice's handwriting. Locate a handwritten note, a laundry list, anything usable. We'll check it against the lines on the parchment, rule him in or out.”
Parry began a search for the needed sample. Jessica lifted the parchment with tweezers and asked Kim to have a look at it. 'Tell you anything?” she asked the psychic.
Kim came around Jessica, her eyes also focused on the parchment with the tightly controlled lettering. She caused a hush in the room as she lifted the poem and read it aloud:
Black empty
Soliloquy of soul,
Come for all
Who know
Of ill-spent hours
Before the Lord Poet
Of Misspent Time
And Careless Youth,
To claim forsooth,
Dominion over the us
And the ours,
Of selfish lives that rot
On the vine Such as yours,
Such as mine…
“Doesn't have quite the resonance or verve of the earlier poems,” Kim declared.
“Now you're a critic?” Jessica laughed. “All right, you're right. It stinks. Something certainly missing in this poem that makes it feel unlike the killer's voice. Feels-”