They left Kim at the kitchen table and returned to the bedroom and the body. Jessica asked Parry to help her to gently turn the body face up. This done, she held a high-intensity flashlight in her teeth, the magnifying glass in one hand, and supported herself over the body with the other. “Bingo!” she declared.
“What? What is it?” asked Sturtevante.
'Teardrops on his forehead, just as we discovered on the Anton Pierre corpse.”
“What does this mean, Jess?” asked Parry, perplexed.
“It's his DNA, the killer's DNA. Unless there's evidence that Anton and Maurice stood on their heads while crying, or were strung up by their heels, they're not going to have tears on their foreheads. No, these near-invisible tracks were left by the killer.”
“Excellent… excellent find,” muttered Sturtevante. “Now we can find out some characteristics of the killer- race, sex even.”
“Exactly, and it'll be a direct match once we make an arrest.”
'Terrific find, Jess,” Parry complimented.
“Can't take all the credit for this one. Dr. Shockley identified the marks after I pointed them out on Pierre's forehead.” And as for the other bodies?”
“Too degenerated to tell, but two in a row now, that tells us something.”
“Imagine, the guy kills them and then sheds tears over them.”
“Not altogether unusual,” countered Jessica. “Signifies a certain amount of remorse in most cases.”
“Not here, not this time,” said Kim, standing now in the doorway, looking at the others. “These tears are green tears… green with hope and love and rekindling life, green with life and regeneration, don't you see?” Sturtevante again appeared shaken by Kim's words, as if the psychic had somehow unmasked her, digging into her mind. She showed her agitation by pacing the room and then rushing out.
“What's with her?” asked Parry.
Jessica shrugged. “Isn't this case enough to get to anyone?”
“I suspect that she thinks she may know someone who might fall victim to the Poet Killer,” replied Kim. “At least, I think she fears as much.”
“Thanks for sharing the good news of the teardrop find,” Parry said to Jessica. “How long before it can be processed?”
“DNA testing takes time, but Shockley has it on the front burner. Still, it will take at least ten days, maybe more.”
“He'll kill again before then.”
“I don't know how to speed up the process any more than we have, but at least we're confident the tearstain pattern points to the perpetrator and not the victim. In time, we will have a DNA profile of the killer.”
Parry instantly snapped, “Finally! A break. Maybe the one that will nail this bastard.”
EIGHT
You can go for a walk with them, see a movie with them, go swimming, eat dinner, even ride in a car with them while they are driving, but the sociopathic among us are quite literally different in every respect. They merely look like us. It is the ultimate disguise, making them an alien race within our own, and they know how to play us all for fools.
Maurice Deneau had bought into the killer's con, hook, line, and sinker. The party of detectives sat in silence for some time, contemplating the nature of the beast they pursued. Taken to its logical conclusion, they realized, he must be a creature pleasing to the eye and ear, to all the senses, in fact; he must be an evil so cloaked in goodness that no one, not even his victims, know of his evil. Either that or they worship him for his darkness or his twisted ideas and perverted faith.
Jessica could not help but draw correlations between this sociopath and a killer priest she had encountered in London the year before. That psychotic's vision of the Second Coming had gotten a series of people killed, but his victims had also been willing participants in their own crucifixions. And now here she sat in a second-story apartment in Philadelphia, the heart of early America, ostensibly fighting the same fight, racing the same race, and wondering at the familiarity of this evil. If Kim Desinor's psychic impressions could be relied upon, only one of the victims thus far had recognized the evil this killer presented. That had been Caterina Mercedes, but even then it took death to waken her to the evil she had allowed to close in around her and finally envelop her.
Maurice Deneau's friend, Thomas Ainsworth, wanted to stay the night at the crime scene, so Sturtevante had to deal with him, asking him if he had someplace else to crash. Ainsworth was a frail, thin, and pale young man, perhaps anemic, perhaps HIV positive. Otherwise, he looked a great deal like the victim in size, weight, and build, and he proved that the idealistic innocence of youth still existed in modern-day America.
“Can I pack a few of my things? I was staying with Maurice, you see, and… God, if I'd only been here, maybe… maybe I could've done something. We had a fight, you know. No big deal, but I was making him pay… and now this.”
“Sorry, nothing goes in or out until we release the place. Could be a couple of days,” Sturtevante told the young man, whose eyes were fire red from crying. His reaction was to pace the hallway like a nervous cat. “Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?” she repeated.
“Guess I can call my parents.”
“Might be a good idea, son. Maybe go stay with them for a while.”
“Yeah… yeah… ain't safe around here anymore, is it?”
“That's quite the understatement, Thomas.”
Kim had regained enough strength now to stand and walk, and together, she and Jessica headed for the door, while Parry went to officially call in the paramedics to remove the body. With this decision made, they could never go back to the crime scene as they'd found it, so this moment always felt crucial in a stone-cold murder of this sort.
As the team vacated the crime scene, leaving the body to the paramedics for transport to the police morgue, Jessica asked Kim, “Did you get any sensation from Maurice that he knew in the end that he was being murdered?”
“None whatsoever, no.”
“This monster we're dealing with, then, is smooth.”
“Caterina Mercedes's body was a seething cauldron of hatred for what the killer had done to her. At some point, she realized what was happening to her and why. It felt like… it was a horrid betrayal. But the others never knew he'd poisoned them. And they still don 7.”
“You said Caterina Mercedes felt betrayed. Would you say she felt she had been conned into dying?” asked Jessica, feeling the night air wafting up the stairwell from an open door at ground level-as if to beckon them outside.
“Yes, but Maurice Deneau didn't. He never picked up on the con or realized that he was ever in any danger. Whatever poison our man is using, it effectively shuts down rational thought, lulling the victims into a calm acquiescence, but something in Caterina fought back.”
“What made her different?” asked Parry, who'd hurried down the steps, catching up as they stepped out into the predawn darkness. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran? Any medical reason one person would be more immune than another to whatever poison this creep is using?”
They continued on toward the patrol cars that had brought them to this section of town, the famous Second Street off downtown Philadelphia, where the killer moved efficiently and safely among the upwardly mobile, artistic community. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran?” pressed Parry.
“It would help to know the exact nature of the poison. We need to send it out for analysis to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington. The local guys are coming up zip on it.”
Kim suggested, “Perhaps Caterina had a stronger tolerance for the drug.”
“Possibly, but more likely our killer made a mistake. More like the dose was too low or too high, in which case she would have a far different reaction than that of calm acquiescence-what the killer apparently needs in order to leave his deadly poetry for us to read,” Jessica answered, rubbing the soreness from her neck, taking in the crisp yet damp evening air. It smelled of a coppery rain that had turned into a mist, and it touched her cheek with the feel of a sodden cloth.