“Or she was lucid enough to suggest that she do the same to the killer's back, using his inkwell, the same as he had used on her,” suggested Sturtevante. “In a con, that's when things go wrong, when the mark doesn't cooperate as you predict. I worked for the fraud division for several years. We handled con artists, flimflam men, hucksters, and hoaxsters,” she informed the others. “I know how these creeps work to relieve the old and the innocent of their life's savings. I've just never known a con artist who set the stakes at life itself.”
“He doesn't see himself as pulling a hoax, I don't think,” said Jessica, “not from all that we've surmised.”
Kim immediately agreed, bolstering Jessica's notion. “He doesn't see it as a game or a flimflam; he doesn't enjoy killing for the sake of killing. It's a means to an end. To the transmigration of the soul into what he believes is a higher form, I suspect. It is the only way he can get his victims to quickly and efficiently cross over. His endgame, if you will, is to return them to some otherworldly force, or forces, that he sees or hears in his head. That would be my guess.”
“Apparently his victims don't see him as any kind of threat whatsoever,” Jessica agreed.
“Fact is, they likely gravitate to him as heroic.”
“Heroic?” asked Parry, perplexed.
“He's a grim, dark figure who seems to incarnate all they aspire to and surround themselves with. Look closely at Maurice's surroundings, his choice of habitat, the very things on his walls,” Kim explained.
“And look as closely at what he has to say in his diary,” added Jessica. “Somewhere in it he may tell you what he most loves in life, and I suspect it is the belief that one day he will die.”
“A death wish?”
“More closely aligned with the notion that there's a better world beyond. Possibly a parallel universe far better and into which he ought to have been born,” said Kim. “It's less a death wish per se than a desire to transcend life as we mortals know it.”
Jessica added, “So his savior, even if temporary, is the man who can both see and understand the desperately melancholy youth, and so becomes the young person's hero.”
She saw Parry's eyes bore into her, questioning.
“I noticed a book of Byron's works on the nightstand, the pages marked,” Jessica said.
“Got it right here,” said Parry. “I'll look it over, see if it uncovers anything, along with the diary entries. Got some confidential stuff here that might prove helpful down the road. Listen to this.”
Parry began to read from the diary. “ 'I chose the name Mayonnaise because I like licking it off my sexual partner. Learned early in life that the only way to keep people close is through sex. I've always had a hard time making friends, but even a harder time sustaining friendships. I know people tire of me, that I whine too much, but I also know that I'm worthy of someone's unconditional love, if only I could find it.' “
“Doesn't exactly sound as if he's into abstinence,” Sturtevante quipped. “Sounds like the usual teen angst stuff,” said Jessica.
Jim Parry continued to scan the diary, resting it on the volume of Byron. Jessica filled her lungs and stared at the crowd that had gathered about the crime scene. Uniformed policemen held people in check at a temporary barricade.
As she was about to slide into the patrol car, James said, “Listen to this part.”
As much as she wanted to object to his reading aloud the victim's private words here on the street at this moment, Jessica said nothing. Jim read, “ 'I am lousy at maintaining and cultivating a friend, or at least a worthwhile one. What's the point of trying? In the end, it only causes pain and suffering. They all die off like neglected weeds. I have allowed the weeds to infest my garden. It's all my own fault. I am a poor gardener in the field of friendships.' “
“Like I said, the usual teen angst, heartache, and suffering.”
“But listen to this,” he insisted.
“Hey, that's private, personal stuff there!” shouted someone who'd bolted from the crowd, having gotten past the police tape and uniformed cops. “Give me that!”
They looked up to find a pretty young woman of perhaps twenty glaring at them. “That's mine!” She snatched at the diary, but Parry held it overhead, too high for her to grasp.
“Sorry, no, young lady. This belonged to the victim, and as such, it is evidence in a crime.”
“God damm it all to hell, I knew Maurice would wind up like this one day!”
“Like what?” asked Sturtevante, trying to calm her.
“Cops pouring over his life, his apartment, and his stuff! Damn fool, Maurice.”
Lieutenant Sturtevante introduced herself. “I'm the one who left a message on your answering machine to get over here. Got your number out of Maurice's Rolodex. I'm a homicide detective with the PPD.” But the words homicide detective did not appear to register with the young blond woman, who remained distraught. 'Tell me, miss, exactly what kind of relationship did you have with Maurice?”
“He was my brother, dammit. My fucking, wide-eyed, idiot brother. He liked to pretend otherwise, that he was my sister, and he liked to believe that the fucking world was filled with goodness and light-that is, when he wasn't so depressed he couldn't drag himself out of bed. But he thought the best of everyone and everything. Opened his door to anything off the street. 'Helping out,' he called it.”
“I see.”
Jessica thought it quite likely a different view of Maurice than that held by the person who had killed him.
The sister shouted now, “Where is he? Have you sent him to the hospital? How badly is he hurt? One of those creeps he let stay with him hurt him, didn't they?”
She thought he'd been beaten but was still alive. No one had informed her of her brother's death.
“Where can I catch up to him? What hospital did you send him to?”
“He's… I'm afraid you can't,” said Sturtevante.
The young woman stared at them as if they were all mad aliens. Her head began a slight shaking, her lip quivering. She eyed the window of Maurice's bedroom, where what looked like an innocent game of shadow play was going on. The attendants wrapping the body for transport. The sister rushed for the stairs leading up to the apartment. She hadn't gotten far when a uniformed cop restrained her and she saw Thomas Ainsworth coming slowly out of the building, dejected and trembling. She tore loose from the officer holding her and rushed toward the boy, tearing into him with her nails and screaming, “You did it! You got Maurice into big-time trouble this time! Didn't you? Didn't you?”
The sister ranted until she was pulled off, and then she suddenly froze, petrified at the entryway, seeing the prone body on the gurney. “Where the fuck are the medics? Why aren't you resuscitating him? Why're you all standing around doing nothing, reading his private papers?”
Jessica went to her, put an arm over her shoulder, and simply pronounced her brother dead.
“No, nooooooo!” the girl cried, and tore at the cold, black, and unyielding polyethylene body bag. “Open it! Open it! I don't believe it,” she wailed. “Not unless I see it, I won't believe it.”
“Open it,” Jessica ordered the ambulance attendants. One of them, biting his lower lip, zipped the bag open, and the sister screamed, her wail penetrating the night sky. She fell prostrate across her brother's form, clutching him.
As Jessica pulled her away, the distraught sister nearly pulled Maurice's entire head from the bag, as if attempting to drag him back into life from his eternal sleep.
“I loved him so much,” she cried out.
Jessica guided her up the stairs, and snatching away yellow crime-scene tape from the door, she found the only privacy that might be had. The others followed. Jessica pulled up a chair and sat Maurice's sister at the table where they had all sat earlier. She poured the young woman a cup of leftover, lukewarm coffee and offered it to her, but the sobbing, heaving girl refused it. Her eyes had become black concentric circles, her blond hair a tangle of thin noodle-shaped snakes.