“He then lamented the deaths of all those young people; he said he felt great guilt since the killer had obviously been inspired by his invention, but again he insisted that he had killed no one, and that his earlier confessions to me were simply to gain attention.”
“And you believed him?” asked Jessica.
“I wasn't hearing his cry. I know, I was a fool, and I could have prevented so much death.”
“What happened next?” Parry asked.
“Something made me look in on him around midnight. I found the girl and George both dead in my home, victims of the poisoned pen that each had used on the other, just as George's parents had done. I was horrified, so I called you.”
“You did the right thing,” Jessica assured him, Parry agreeing.
“Poor lamentable George,” Locke proclaimed. “And this other creature he duped into his final trap.”
“Forensics is going to have a long night of it,” said Jessica. “Let's get a team of evidence techs over here. I'll need all the help I can get with the two corpses.”
Parry got on his cell phone and made the call.
It appeared to all involved to be over. All the evidence pointed to one perpetrator, to George Linden Gordonn. All the information collected at Locke's house and later at Gordonn's also bore this out. Finally, the city of Philadelphia could breathe again and would hear no more from the Lord Poet of Misspent Time, George Gordonn, the Killer Poet who, bizarrely, professed his kinship with Lord Byron.
At Gordonn's home, a stash of poetry in George's hand was taken into custody and remanded to evidence lockup. Jessica heard about the poems, which had been scrawled longhand into a notebook. Along with this, Gordonn had kept a diary in which he fantasized about helping people to commit suicide in order to leave this world of “putrid flesh,” as he called it.
Still, something nagged at Jessica. The number of his victims, including himself, amounted to far fewer than the number nineteen, which Kim had seen again and again. But it was more than this. Something wasn't right about the timing and the circumstances surrounding Gordonn's death in the home of the famous dark poet Lucian Burke Locke, whose wife and children were conveniently away at the time.
After all the protocol work on Gordonn's remains and those of Ariana Dupree, his final victim, Jessica found a moment to confer with Kim Desinor. Kim had taken time to read through Gordonn's diary and poems, and she'd shown copies to Dr. Wahlbore, who fed them into Rocky. Kim's gut reaction to Gordonn's poetry told her the poems didn't match with those of the killer, and Rocky bore her out. Kim had telephoned with this information, saying she was coming right over to discuss what this meant.
Kim showed up at Jessica's office, slipped into a chair, and exasperatedly asked, “How did the quality of Gordonn's poetry go from the junk I found in the notebooks to what he supposedly wrote on the backs of his victims? Did he somehow sprout poetic wings when he had a back to compose on?”
“From what you and Wahlbore say, I would have to assume, as Vladoc suggests, that Gordonn killed under another personality altogether, obviously one who could write a sight better than his regular self.”
“Sounds ludicrous; sounds like Vladoc's interested in covering his ass, Jess. A dual personality explains away how the good doctor could be treating a man and not know a goddamn thing about him.”
“What're you talking about, Kim?”
“I've seen what was collected at the Gordonn home, and I'm telling you, it doesn't cut the mustard. It's not… it didn't come out of the same mind. “I see. Doesn't compare well with the killer's verse. You think Parry and Sturtevante and Roth and the city are going to want to hear that?”
“I'm only telling you what you already know in your heart to be true.”
“That we've tagged the wrong man for the killings?”
“I fear so.”
“But what about all those psychic hits that had to do with his profession?” Jessica countered.
“They may well have been pointing to this, that one day we'd have the wrong man, a technical film specialist, in custody for murder, only he isn't here to tell us so or to refute it.”
“Have you ever known cases of dual personality-both being writers-but who write in totally different ways?”
“I just don't buy it. Vladoc says Gordonn may have been a dual personality, in which case perhaps one of the personalities was a poet, the other not. I just think it's too pat, too easy a way out.” Kim was adamant about this. “His poetry was not up to the standard of the killer's. Was he then inspired when he wrote on the back of his victims but not before?” She repeated her earlier question.
“Everyone has laid the case to rest. Parry, Roth, and Sturtevante are happy to turn it over to the DA's office.”
“While you and I, dear, remain skeptical,” said Kim. “I just have a gut feeling about it. Call it-”
“Instinct? Combine your gut feeling with mine, and we have one hell of a big gut feeling between us,” finished Jessica
“I hate to think that our killer is slipping through legal hands, and that Gordonn was set up by the obvious candidate, Lucian Burke Locke.”
“We need more to go on than a gut feeling,” Jessica countered. What about warming up your cold hypothesis with this?” a male voice interrupted.
Both Jessica and Kim swung around to see Dr. Leonard Shockley, holding a manila folder overhead and slapping it against the dooijamb where he stood.
“And what's this?” Jessica asked the ME.
His hands slightly shaking, Shockley spread the contents of the folder before her where she sat. 'Take a look.” He gave Jessica time to read the information from his work on the final corpse, Ariana Dupree.
Jessica stood, came around the desk, and kissed Dr. Shockley, while Kim asked, “What? What is it?”
Jessica announced, “DNA… the killer's DNA from the tears… doesn't match up with Gordonn's DNA.”
“Then the last two victims were killed to cover the real killer's tracks.”
Jessica kissed Shockley again and started out on the first step in a long journey, one that now had a specific goaclass="underline" to nail Lucian Burke Locke, the strange little man with the picture-perfect home and the picture-perfect-but only in appearance-family.
“A closer look at Locke is in order,” she announced.
The closer look into the life of Lucian Burke Locke revealed that he was the product of a home dominated by an alcoholic father who had made life a nightmare for Lucian and his mother. It was Dr. Harriet Plummer who provided this information, all the while defending Lucian to the detectives when they suggested that he was not telling the entire truth the night of Gordonn's death. The police also talked about Locke with Garrison Burrwith, who was only too happy to inform them that he had learned from campus rumors and word of mouth that Locke had always been fascinated with the urban legend that turned out to have originated with Gordonn's family. There were even students who swore that Locke referred to the story of the Gordonn family deaths in his lectures as an example of the power and influence of the Byronic image nearly two centuries after the poet's death.
“But no one knew at the time that George Gordonn was part of the ill-fated family,” Burrwith explained, “no one except Professor Locke, I suspect. I suspect the boy informed his revered instructor when Locke spoke of the story as an urban legend. George was extremely shy, you know. He would never have announced such a thing in public, no more than he would tell a classroom full of people that he had been the first to disrobe and display a poem etched on his back.”
“Strange that someone you call shy could do that.”
“Some say he did it at the urging of a psychiatrist, who was helping him to face his fears.”
“Vladoc,” muttered Kim.
Burrwith continued, his bow tie bobbing as he spoke. “I suspect the boy told Locke every detail, down to the fact that he was seeing a shrink.”