“Unfinished,” said Kim, stepping to the window and peering out on a light drizzle that had made the streets slick, the sheen reflecting the city lights. “I think it's Maurice's; maybe it's his attempt to impress his killer.”
'To impress his lover, who killed him?”
“That'd be my guess. ”Jessica and Kim now studied the lines etched into the victim's back. “Poem and victim posed for our benefit perhaps? To shock authorities, to shock society, to send a message, or all of the above?” she asked.
“Or none of the above?” Kim returned. “Like I said earlier, I believe the killer sees both his poetry and the resulting death of his 'host' body as being quite a private matter between killer and victim.”
The poem, longer than previous ones left by the killer, snaked from the base of the neck down Maurice's back like a series of tattoos. Stating the obvious, Jessica said, “Now, this is the work of our killer poet. This guy writes fluidly and well.”
“Now you 're the critic?”
“Hey, this poem's got bite, at least as deadly a bite as any cobra.”
Jessica then began to read the poem aloud.
Chance… whose desire is to have a meeting with stunned innocence… waiting on pools of sensation that swirl in brilliant orange to swallow and overflow in the center where toucher becomes touched, texture vibrating chords of the unconfined delicate.
Deliberate and graceful, the moods eddy and flow over my hands, your closed eyes undulating within a seashell sigh, entwining in airy depths, waning in flickering light.
“Whaddaya make of it?” asked Parry, who'd returned on hearing Jessica's voice bring the poem to life.
“What do I make of it?” asked Jessica. “I make it out surreal that we're all standing here reading a poem off the back of some kid who's been murdered.” Her frustration mirrored the feelings rising in the investigators. All the detectives stared now at the poem tattooed on Maurice's back.
Kim startled the others by going to her knees at the bedside of the deceased. Her eyes had closed as she heard the final words of the poem as if to enfold the lines into her psyche, and now her hands, one on the body, the other clutching the yellowed parchment paper, trembled. Jessica watched her for any change in expression, any look of anguish that might signal a need for her to be brought out of her trance. At the same time, she made a mental note to get a good handwriting analysis of the paper script and the body script.
Kim's hands began to relax now, and a peaceful calm came over her. She revealed nothing audibly or otherwise to those around her, until suddenly her countenance took on the look of a person in the throes of great and abiding pleasure, ecstasy even. In the next moment, she collapsed, her body now draped over the deathbed. The others, astonished, reacted in knee-jerk fashion. Sturtevante gasped and said, “Help her up!”
At the same instant, Jim rushed to Kim's aid in a gentlemanly attempt to do exactly what Sturtevante suggested. However, Jessica sternly whispered, “No!” and put her body between Parry and Kim. “Allow her to finish her reading.”
“I thought she had.”
“Look at her.”
Jim and Sturtevante stared at Kim's prostrate form. One of her hands remained on the poisonous poem while the other had let go of the parchment poem.
Jessica cautioned in a raspy whisper, “She's clearly in a trance state. You don't jerk a person back from where she is; it could cause serious problems.”
“But she's contaminating the crime scene,” muttered Parry.
“I'm responsible for the integrity of the crime scene, and I say let her fucking be.”
Approximately five minutes passed, during which they watched Kim's face and body for indications that she was going deeper and deeper into repose. Kim's body language clearly said that she was shutting down, simulating the state of the victim beside her. Jessica feared that if Kim simulated death too closely, she could fall into a comatose state from which she might never return.
Parry must have felt the same fear, as he whispered into Jessica's ear, “Maybe we ought now to carefully bring her around?” Jessica agreed. “Yes, perhaps we should revive her.”
Jessica drew nearer to the bed. Placing a hand over Kim, she was preparing to calmly urge her friend back into consciousness when she noticed the dizzyingly fast movement of the eyes beneath Kim's eyelids. What had appeared peaceful slumber was in fact filled with agitation. Her sleep proved fitful beneath the outward calm, as if disturbed by nightmare images. None of the others could guess the nature of Kim's journey into the mind of the victim, and none could know what clues she might carry back from her psychic journey.
Even though she was a scientist, Jessica believed in Kim Desinor's psychic powers because she had seen the miraculous work Kim had done in the past; she had learned from Kim that there truly were more things between heaven and hell than were dreamed up in scientific circles.
“Is she… is she okay?” asked Sturtevante.
“I've never seen her work before, but I've read of cases she's solved by tapping into the consciousness of living victims,” said Parry. “Like the one in Houston a few years ago. But this… tapping into the mind of a dead man; this looks damned dangerous.”
“Rest assured, she's the best,” Jessica replied.
Suddenly Kim's body began an epileptic-seizure-like paroxysm that first set her teeth gnashing and then chattering with the extreme cold she felt. Jessica felt the cold as well when Kim gripped her wrist, and her own body trembled in response. Jessica hugged her friend, providing the warmth that Kim's nonverbal gestures screamed out for.
“Are you… all right… Kim?” she asked between gasps, feeling the tip-of-the-iceberg effect, and at the same moment wondering how much cold Kim could withstand.
Kim could not for the moment reply.
“Get some blankets, hot coffee!” Jessica shouted. “And close that window!”
Sturtevante and Parry rummaged through the place for these items, Sturtevante making the coffee. Meanwhile, Jessica, still trembling, struggled to get Kim on her feet. Once she was standing, Jessica walked her in circles to get her circulation going, saying, “Keep moving, dear; walk with me.” The longer she held on to Kim, the colder she herself became, until her own teeth began to chatter.
In another few minutes, Kim and Jessica, wrapped in blankets, moved into the other room, far from the body. Here they drank steaming-hot coffee out of hefty mugs that once belonged to Maurice Deneau. The others stood by, their eyes telling Jessica how anxious they were for any tidbits of information that Kim might reveal, but Parry remained silent, hesitant about asking. Seeing is believing, and they had seen the psychic suffer during her time spent in trance.
Kim now appeared confused and disoriented. Unsure of her surroundings, she asked Jessica, “Wh-where are we?”
Jessica informed her.
The others watched as a strange, rust-colored rash that had shown up on Kim's cheeks and arms began to dissipate, these “stigmata like” signs disappearing as quickly as they appeared.
Kim looked about the kitchen area where they sat, nodded, and then complained, “Have a nasty, strange, rust like taste in my mouth.”
“That's Sturtevante's coffee,” said Parry, making light of it.
“No, this isn't coffee. It's something Maurice tasted before he died. It's metallic, like… like sulfur, only worse, coppery sulfuric taste.” She began nervously switching the coffee cup from one hand to the other, back and forth. “My stomach… doesn't feel so good. Tingling sensation in all my extremities, particularly these,” she said, holding her fingers up to the light as if they were on fire. She placed the coffee cup aside. “I fear I'll drop it. My fingers feel so numb.”
“Where you've been, I don't wonder,” said Jessica, sipping at her coffee.
“Exactly where is that?” asked Parry, one of Maurice's books in his hand. “Where precisely were you just then, Dr. Desinor. I mean when you were, forgive the phrase, 'in bed' with the… the victim.”