The search brought them back to Donatella Leare's home, the suspicion being that she had picked up loose bits of information about Gordonn from Sturtevante or notes Sturtevante may have left about. They found the place dark, but could just make out some music, soft and melodious, playing in one of the rear rooms. Jessica rang repeatedly, but there was no answer. Peeking through the curtained door, she saw the flickering light of candles, and she caught a whiff of incense.
“Could be lounging in a bath and can't hear the bell with that music turned up so loud,” Parry suggested.
Kim had joined Leanne in her cruiser, and they arrived behind Jessica and Parry. Leanne now rushed toward the house, a look of dread etched on her features. Jessica apprised them of the situation.
“God, she's taken that creep in, and he's killed her!” Leanne cried. “I just know it!”
“Break down the door,” Jessica told Parry.
“No,” said Sturtevante. “I still have a key. I'll go in.”
“She's likely in the shower, but you tell her if she's aiding and abetting Gordonn, she's in trouble,” said Parry. “Make it clear to her that she has to tell us where he is.”
The detective nodded. “Will do.” She then entered the premises, calling out to her former girlfriend, while the others waited outside. In the time it took for Leanne Sturtevante to walk from the front room to the master bedroom and bath, all they could hear was the soft music and an occasional shout of “Donatella! Donatella!” Then a sudden scream sent a horrid ice pick into Jessica's spine. Sturtevante shouted hysterically that her friend Leare was dead.
The others raced in to find Donatella Leare lying facedown on her bed, rather haphazardly so. On the poet's back were the now familiar blood-orange words of the Poet Killer, carved into her skin with the selenium-laced ink. The poem on Leare's back stared back at them like a laughing skull, Jessica thought.
She wondered now if Gordonn or Tamburino or both of them together were not having fun with them all, PPD and FBI alike.
“Bastard! Bastard's killed Dona!” wailed Sturtevante, distraught and on her knees, her gun beside her.
“Locke-Locke and Burrwith!” shouted Jessica. “We've got to get to Lucian Locke's place, and to Garrison Burrwith's, and now! If the Poet Killer has targeted Leare for death, then he'll try to kill his other instructors as well.”
“Come on, Jessica. We'll let Kim take care of Leanne, and the crime scene will take care of itself,” said Parry. “Let's go. We've got to get a radio car dispatched to both locations. Someone close at hand.”
“Someone close to the investigation,” she muttered. “Who… who close to the investigation has given up our every move to the killer?”
“Vladoc,” shouted Sturtevante.
“Vladoc? But why?”
“He drinks, he talks. Someone knows this, uses him. Gordonn is shrewd. Doubled back on us all and escaped, didn't he? And we thought him a pitiful slob who had a miserable beginning and would have a miserable end, and left it at that. Meantime, he's busy killing… killed Donatella.”
Parry's cell phone went off. He lifted it and barked, “What is it?”
“Dispatch, sir. Another urgent for Dr. Coran, sir. Patch him through, now!”
“It's for you,” he told Jessica, his eyes bulging. “Says it's Lucian Burke Locke.”
Strange coincidence, she thought, taking the phone in hand. She repeated the garbled words she heard coming through for the benefit of the others. “Says he knows where we can find George Linden Gordonn.”
The strange little man, Locke, said clearly into the phone, “I have information as to where George can be found, or rather where what remains of him can be found.”
Parry snapped the button to place the cell phone on speaker so that the others could hear the conversation. “What do you mean, the remains of him?”
“He's dead.”
“Dead?”
“Ready for burial, yes.”
“Can't you be a little more descriptive? How did he die? Where are you?”
“He's lying dead alongside another of his victims,” Locke shouted into the phone, making Parry jump back.
“Where are the bodies, Dr. Locke?”
“My house.”
“We'll be right over. Don't touch a thing, do you understand?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
He hung up and said, “We should still send a cruiser to Burrwith's place, have them look in on him. Meantime, we'd best get over to Locke's.”
Kim had been holding Sturtevante's hand as the other woman continued to cry over the loss of her friend. “I'll stay here with Leanne. You two go.”
“Be certain to maintain the integrity of the scene,” Jessica told her. “Call for Shockley to get over here and walk the grid.” Willdo.”
With that. Parry and Jessica rushed to the home of Lucian Burke Locke in search of George Gordonn… or what remained of him.
TWENTY-ONE
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing that he had put together.
“I knew young Gordonn only through a class I taught nearly I a year ago; didn't hear from him or about him again until he began working on his Byron project in the film department, you see. He took my course to leam more about Byron and the Romantics; he loved the notions of romantic love, enduring, undying love, but he remained primarily focused on Lord Byron. I took him under my wing, so to speak, and just recently, he began to brag about how he was party to the killings.”
“That's how he would put it?” asked Jessica.
“Precisely, but I blew it off, as they say. Of course, knowing him, even for a short time, I knew this was all a he, bravado, all that. I never for a moment believed George to be guilty, and so when I learned he was under suspicion, I gave him safe haven until the young man should feel secure enough to leave.”
“That's a felony, Dr. Locke,” said Parry, “one which you could be tried for.”
“I realized that at the time, but I felt an overwhelming need to help George. He had that effect on people; people wanted to 'fix' him.”
“And precisely how did you know he was under suspicion, Dr. Locke?”
“That's right,” added Parry. “It wasn't public knowledge “Information I gleaned from Leare, who had it from her lover, Sturtevante. Seems Sturtevante went to apologize to Donatella about all the misunderstanding, the mishandling of the case, all that, and she let it slip that you were zeroing in on George. Leare knew of George through me, and she had had him as a student once as well. I was trying to help George to stay… stable, you know. I knew what he had gone through. But of late, George had begun to seriously worry me.”
“How's that?”
“Even in the face of being arrested for these crimes he professed to have committed, well… not believing him, I paid little attention until recently. I tell you, he went out last evening and returned to my house with a young woman, although Leare and I had told him specifically that he must remain in hiding.”
“He came back with a woman, a stranger to you?”
“A young woman. She looks to be another coed, I fear, but I didn't know her. I immediately protested when I entered the room I'd turned over to George, only to find him and the girl writing out poetry on each other's nude back.
“I was assured by George that it was a mere dalliance on his part, and his interest in body poetry had nothing whatsoever to do with the murders, and then he confessed to having lied about his involvement in the killings, telling me his shrink had said he had an insatiable need for attention.
“When I first met him, in my class, he told me about his parents, that he was in fact the living proof of the urban legend that had started the back-writing poetry fad, and now, that is a few hours ago, he told me how angry he was at this killer, whoever he was, to have turned his poetic 'invention,' as he called it, into a horror of death.