After a shower, Jessica emerged in a powder-blue business suit, and feeling an urge to be alone, she found the elevator and rode it to the building's roof. She often went there after an autopsy, to fill her lungs with fresh air and to clear her head. In the back of her mind, the tune “Up on the Roof' softly played.
The roof remained her secret hideaway, and she stood now looking down over the edge to the very spot where, years before, she'd taken a shot at a man escaping her lab after attempting to kill her. She'd been injured, but her FBI weapons training stood her in good stead. Jessica had sent a bullet down the length of the building. Some saw it as a lucky shot, but she knew better. In either case, the cannibal who'd been known as the Claw died as he deserved-slowly, made a vegetable by her single “lucky” shot.
She looked out over the Quantico, Virginia, compound of the FBI, a collection of Jefferson-style Colonial buildings nestled into the back side of the Virginia hills. Springtime filled the trees with blossoms, and the hills around sported dogwood in bloom, while the grass had turned from brownish ochre to pale green, which would soon become an opulent black green in the shadow of the dense forest surrounding the hills. Birds chased each other amid the trees, their songs reaching up to where Jessica stood, a breeze playing about her hair and cheeks.
One thing appeared certain. She felt a fierce, dry, desert like void in her life; she missed Richard Sharpe, and she could hardly wait for his retirement from Scotland Yard. He'd promised to join her here in Quantico; they had spoken of making a life together. She daydreamed about their coming reunion, and how they would mold their future. Perhaps this time would be the charm; perhaps this time she had gathered in the golden prize, that of complete and whole companionship of the sort she had sought all her adult life.
She dared not think it true. She feared to hope.
Too many rugs-hell, whole carpets-had been pulled out from under her before; she had had to endure too many disappointments with men. And Sharpe, for all his gallantry, his compassion and goodwill, his promises and kisses, remained a man. She had never before known a man who had not in one way or another disappointed or left her. Why should Richard be any different?
“Ah, there you are, Dr. Coran! Jessica!” shouted her immediate supervisor, Eriq Santiva, a dark-skinned Cuban-American with the lively step of a tango dancer and the infectious smile of a boy. The wind tore at his long-flowing black hair, and it whipped his expensive suit jacket like a cape; had he a sword, she might imagine him a swashbuckler. She could barely hear him over the piercing spring wind and her thoughts.
Closer now, he shouted, “So this is your hideaway?”
Jessica loved Eriq's Cuban accent. “How did you find me?”
“You forget. I'm not just the director of the Behavioral Science Unit, I'm a detective. BesidesJohn Thorpe does not stand up well under interrogation.”
“So… what brings you to my secret office?”
“I know you have your hands full with this date rape/murder case you're on, but we have another and more mysterious case in Friendship City.”
“Friendship City? Where the hell's that? Iowa?”
“No, no. The City of Brotherly Love.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Bingo, go to the head of the class.”
“What've I missed?”
“Nothing. It hasn't been our case, and for good reason, until now.” He leaned out over the parapet, his dark eyes taking in the grounds below. “Philly authorities thought they could handle it on their own, but finally they want FBI input, and they requested our best. I told them that would be you.”
“Thanks for the buttering-up, Chief, but what sort of case are we talking about?”
“Seems we have a multiple murderer, a guy who leaves no trace, except for some writing, which I've had a chance to examine. Weird kind of poetry, actually.”
“Given your expertise with graphology, I have no doubt you've come to some conclusions about the killer. Did you bring the poems with you?” She looked at a manila folder in his hand, which the wind threatened to rip away.
“No, not exactly. This poet doesn't use paper.”
“Then what does he use? He writes on the wall over the vic's bed, the mirror in the bathroom, what?”
'Try the body.”
She looked squarely at him. “The body? What part of the body? Chest? Abdomen?”
“Back-from neck to buttocks-is how I'm getting it.” He lifted the photo from the file, showing her some of the killer's handiwork. “Deep grooves. Victim shows no sign of ligature marks, no evidence whatsoever of being tied down for this. They seem to be… well, conned into it.”
“What's the method of murder?” she asked, trying to read the writing from the photo of the victim's back at the same time, but finding it impossible to concentrate as the wind continued to tear the photo from her grasp.
“Poison.”
“Really? Interesting.”
“Poisoners are like terrorists, as far as I'm concerned,” he told her firmly. “Less interesting than cowardly.”
“Yeah, point taken.”
“This case is a regular Agatha Christie whodunit, actually.”
“Exactly how is the poison ingested, and what kind of poison are we talking about here, Chief?”
“Something in the ink, the coroner in Philly suggests, since the throat and larynx are clear of any heavy concentrations. Goes directly to the bloodstream via the cuts carved into the back.”
“Needle marks?”
“Philly coroner couldn't find a single puncture mark anywhere on the bodies, nothing but the scratches-words cut precisely into the flesh with what appears to be a quill pen.”
“Cuts carved into flesh introduce the poison…” Jessica tried to imagine the preliminaries of such a murder. She knew that Eriq wanted her to become so fascinated over the particulars that she'd accept the assignment. “Intriguing case. Why don't you take it, since you're the handwriting expert?”
'Too much going on here right now for me to step off the plate. Wish I could, and I intend to write up all my thoughts on this guy and forward them to you in Philly, if you'll take the case.”
“Literally a poisoned-pen death. Does sound like an old British kind of whodunit. What a quaint and old-fashioned yet weird way to dispatch someone.”
“A strange poem left across the victims' backs,” he added, agreeing. “Likely without their suspecting a thing.” Santiva's dark Cuban eyes studied her for a fleeting moment, seeming to measure her interest in the case.
“But what kind of fool lets you write a poem across his-or is the victim a her? — back? Can't tell from this view, man or woman?”
“We have victims of both sexes, all young and somewhat frail of build, and as for back writing, it appears to have become a fad of epidemic proportions among the young.”
“A fad-really?”
“Bored with the usual tattoo thing, rings and piercings, the coffeehouse rock-club set, especially around Philadelphia, have moved on to this as a new adventure. Some say it's based on one of those urban legends.”
“Really? I've not heard that one.”
“About a family that committed mass suicide using poison via a pen into the flesh.”
“So the local authorities think somebody is acting out this urban legend?”
“Local poets are hiring kids to display their poems, which are scrawled across their bodies, calling it Living Poetry and sometimes Live Art; then these kids disrobe during an open-mike night at a local pub or coffeehouse and their poems are read by the patrons. It has, of course, graduated to frontal view and full frontal nudity in some places, but I'm given to understand from detectives working the case that it began as strictly a rearview thing.”
“An excuse to moon the crowd?” she asked.
“In the best tradition of the comedian Jimmy Carrey, yeah. Nowadays, boobs and genitalia have been introduced so as to… to…”