“Whaddaya mean? Like you want a list of names?”
“Yes, that could be helpful.”
“You want me to be some sort of whaddayacall'ems? A snitch?”
“Snitches get paid.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
She located a twenty in her purse and handed it to him. When he balked, she asked him to name a price. He took a moment to consider. “A hundred?” She brought forth two fifties and added it to the twenty. He in turn jotted down a list of names. There were several characters who fit the bill. One of these was Dr. Harriet Plummer, Dean Plummer of the University of Philadelphia.
The sight of this name hit Jessica like a freight train. She knew now that she must look a great deal closer at Dr. Harriet Plummer.
James Parry produced a janitor in the last building where a victim had died; the superintendent's assistant, as he called himself, had been persuaded to come forward to ID someone leaving the crime scene. The description was of a young man, not a woman-a young man perhaps in his mid to early twenties, ordinary looking, the sort no one would pay the least attention to. The artist sketch that was ordered resulted in a likeness so generic as to be useless. This did not strengthen the case against either Locke or Leare, who, whatever one might say about them, were not ordinary looking.
Meanwhile, Jessica pursued information about Harriet Plummer, all to a dead end, but she did learn that Plummer held Locke in great esteem, and that the poet had not, until recently, produced any significant new work in years. Plummer and Locke had an ongoing affair, much of which was devoted to her efforts to bolster his ego. Locke and his wife were estranged, although he continued to live with her and the children. He and Plummer maintained an apartment on Second Street. Again the PPD brass sent undercover teams into every pub and coffeehouse in the area, flooded already by people who'd read about the murders and wanted a glimpse of the grisly “scene” from which so many had “disappeared.” Jessica found this morbid curiosity ironic and yet typical of human beings. Open-mike night brought everyone out, and it brought on as well a party atmosphere as one by one the young performers stood up, pranced to the stage, and raised their arms in the gesture of a winner even before they began to read their poems. Some used well-placed mirrors to read the poems on their bodies, while others relied on their sponsor poet. Often the performer was the actual poet.
To the last, every poem depicted a dismal future for mankind, and their utter grimness and grayness felt disturbing. None of them were as good as those on the backs of the murder victims; none were so well conceived or executed as the killer's, and none so hopeful. For the killer's words spoke of a new beginning for the deceased. In the coffeehouse poems, many of the lines were bursting with violent words. Some sounded like rip-offs of Clive Barker and Stephen King themes, what with devils roaming the earth in search of just the right woman to spawn a son, while others, far more personal, were geared to push all the right buttons on a listener who was undergoing teen angst at age twenty-seven.
Most of the night's poets had used erasable Magic Marker on their backs, but some had had the words cut into their flesh. These, Jessica had been told by those in the know, were the true artists.
Jessica had informed everyone to be on the lookout for anyone with a camera, anyone overly interested in photographing the poets on display or the other patrons. “Detain for questioning anyone doing so,” came the order. Meanwhile, they looked high and low for George Gordonn, the photographer they'd met the last time they'd come down to the Second Street coffeehouses and bars, the young man who'd been hired to film the night's activities, but he was nowhere to be found.
While the other investigators listened, trying to distinguish the truly disturbed from the merely troubled, Jessica kept vigilant for any photographer/poet matching the general description given them by their lone, admittedly weak witness.
Jessica realized now that their killer could be someone behind the counter at the Brick Teacup, where she and Kim had wound up this night. Kim agreed, saying, “Someone in a position to see these poetry shows each night, and to learn the likes and dislikes of the poets, down to finding out where they lived, down to weaseling into their homes, seeing the layout, and continuing to weasel into their lives until the young people felt at ease with the wolf at the threshold.”
“They paid in the end with their lives.” Jessica sipped at her coffee, trying to stay awake.
After an hour of listening to what amounted to, in her estimation, drivel and brain snot purporting to be art, Jessica wanted to run out screaming; she felt absolutely certain that she could easily kill a few so-called poets herself.
To add insult to injury, the few people detained by the police tonight, from bars up and down the Second Street area, netted them nothing new. In fact, now that Leare was in custody, the police presence had slackened considerably, and the reasons for arrests were far more mundane than seeking out a serial killer.
The following day, Jessica and Kim again canvassed the pubs and coffeehouses along Second Street, and Jessica, knowing now of Locke's apartment in the vicinity, felt an eerie sensation of being watched from the many windows that looked down on the strip.
In each closed business establishment they badgered their way into, the women asked after anyone coming in to do photo shoots of patrons, or attempting to lure people away with promises of a professional photo shoot. Most of the leads turned out to be “photo-shoot Casanovas,” but not a one of them could be linked to the killings. The day's work then led to several weak leads and zero arrests, and Jessica knew that the longer Leare remained in lockup, and the longer the killer remained silent, the stronger Leanne Sturtevante's conviction that her former live-in lover-as Leare turned out to be-was guilty of premeditated murder by poisoning.
“Whoever the guy is, he must blend into the walls. No one knows anything; no one has seen anything,” Jessica told Kim as they once again pored over the files on each victim. “Frustrated at every turn,” she added from her seat at the desk they shared. “I'm at my wit's end.”
Kim didn't answer. In her hands, she held a crystal wrapped in tight brilliant wire, the wire twisted into knots about the blue stone and attached to a keychain, a possession of one of the victims. Kim had gone into a trance while holding on to the item that had come out of a box taken from the evidence room, a box labeled victim #3321-micellina petryna. Jessica watched as Kim writhed in something other than agony, something that appeared more than pleasant; indeed, the sounds coming out of her mouth were those of a person at the peak of ecstasy. Then in a blink, it was over, and Kim looked as if she'd been shocked into consciousness, her color returning, her eyes no longer glazed or shadowed. “I think I got something, a hit that may mean something, Jess.”
“What is it?”
“Earlier, in the earliest reading, I kept seeing the crime scene, but in a blindingly bright light that eventually coalesced into letters, spelling out the single word rampage. This alongside the number nineteen, sometimes transposed as ninety-one. I just saw another flashing, blinding light that not only spelled out rampage, but the other words I've been getting, too. Remember I saw the word quark and pre/light?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Add to them the word output. It wasn't outing, but output coming through.”
“Is that it? Any additional words that cropped up around your reading?”
“None… that's it.”
“Could these words have something to do with poetry?”
“More likely quantum mechanics,” Kim replied, her shoulders heaving.
“What about photography?” Jessica considered this possibility and balling up her fists, she added, “Imagine… if they have something to do with photography?” She grabbed the phone and dialed Marc Tamburino at Darkest Expectations.