It was as if Kim's outburst suddenly startled her into silence, and Jessica completed her thought. “Gordonn so trusted Locke that he believed Locke knew what was best for him, and so he allowed Locke to take him from this life without argument, as did most of the other victims. They so trusted him that it did not matter what the ultimate result might be.”
“I… I had thought George was doing remarkably well. It came as a shock to me when I began to suspect that he could be doing the killings, but I confronted him with my suspicions, and he laughed in my face, said he only wished he were capable of taking such action, but that he could not, that it wasn't in him to take another life. Years of therapy had brought George around to a level of acceptance of what had happened to him as a child, and to this day I believe that the boy's progress toward mental health simply admirable.”
Kim said, “You mean he was a challenge to you as a therapist?” And your brother?” asked Jessica. “What kind of patient was he?”
“I pleaded with him to get another, more objective and distanced person to work with; I told him that I could not be both his brother and his shrink, but week after week, he kept coming.”
“And he showed an interest in how Gordonn's therapy was going?”
“An inordinate interest, yes.”
“I ask you again, Dr. Vladoc, did it ever occur to you that Gordonn's bill was being paid by your brother?”
“Well, frankly, yes, I gave that a lot of thought, and I asked Gordonn about it, but he denied it. After that, I never questioned him about it again, and I am still of the opinion that you two must be wrong.”
“Will you prepare a full report about the two patients' therapy, Doctor?”
“I can only reveal such detail on the dead man, not my living brother. Ethics prevent it.”
“Then do it for yourself, Doctor. Heal thyself,” Kim fairly sneered, and hung up.
They sped toward Lucian Locke's house with the intent of somehow gathering a DNA sample from the man. To date, he had played the role of a man desperate to help out in the investigation, but now, with the supposed murderer dead and the case supposedly closed, they could not be certain how he would react to their request, and Jessica doubted that he would voluntarily give them a sample of his bodily fluids for analysis.
“Suppose… just suppose,” she told Kim, “that Locke had become infatuated with the romantic details of the suicide pact, and he learned that the mother believed herself to be the reincarnation of Lord Byron trying on a woman's body. 'Lady' Byron found modern life too wretched for his/her sensibilities, and so s/he had decided first to marry, to conceive a child, and then to convince her husband, Gordonn, to join her in a pact to affirm themselves as progeny of Byron through their art.”
“Weird theory, yet according to Vladoc, Gordonn believed that his mother thought this possible through her poetry, and that Gordonn's father believed it possible through his painting and photography. With them joining forces, they expected to shake the world. When this failed to occur, and all life became a miserable spiral of financial ruin and frustration, coupled with the agony of life in this dimension, and after they had had the child which Lydia now hated herself for having brought into this world, they hit upon the suicide pact.”
Jessica came in sight of the Locke home. “I see,” she said. “Sounds strange enough to be true.”
“Gordonn believed that it had been his father who had spared him, his reasoning being that his mother loved him too much to leave him behind, while his father loved him too much to take his life.”
“Then Locke becomes his spiritual father; a kid like that is all too easy a mark for the likes of Lucian Locke.”
Gordonn's revelations to Vladoc during his therapy sessions must have certainly fascinated Locke. Probably he met with Gordonn to hear what Gordonn had learned about himself in therapy. Footing the bill, he likely stipulated that he be privy to the details of Gordonn's progress.”
Jessica stepped on the accelerator. Outside, the orange glow of sodium vapor lights flooded across the hood and windshield at regular intervals. “Since we're dealing in hypotheses here, I suspect that Locke was particularly fascinated by the genesis of the skin poetry and by the kind of poison on the pen. He could have learned about the use of selenium from the story of Gordonn's father and mother.” And he would have been interested in the reasoning of the mother. Locke began to think in a way similar to Lydia.”
Outside the cocoon of the car, the world sped by faster and faster.
Jessica gripped the steering wheel, trying to control the rage growing within her. “He may well have come to believe that the world held a magical secret, that there was some rare race of angelic people, hidden within our race, people so close to ethereality that being born into this existence was a kind of imprisonment.”
“What if Locke had begun to hear voices that corroborated his gestating beliefs, the voices of angels, encouraging him in his beliefs, imploring him to send their brothers and sisters back to them? What then?”
Jessica pulled to a stop before Locke's home. “Is that how he embarked on this deadly odyssey? Is this how the Lord Byron Poet Killer was born?”
The answers were housed somewhere deep within the recesses of Lucian Locke's mind and possibly hidden someplace in this house as well. The answer, for example, to the question of why he had chosen to kill Leare. Was it something beyond his control, an order he could not refuse, or had she gotten too close to the truth, threatening to expose him? If it were the latter, he had to have rationalized her death by seeing her as one of his chosen, despite everything against such a view, from her appearance to the profanity that she liberally used in speaking. Leare hardly matched the victim choice, although a case could be made for Gordonn and the young woman he had died alongside.
Jessica and Kim had stepped halfway out of the cruiser, their eyes pinned to the professor's car, which was parked in front of the house, telling them that he was home, when radio dispatch called with an urgent message from Leanne Sturtevante. It was obvious that Locke wasn't going anywhere, so Jessica sighed, dropped back into the unmarked cruiser, and took the call. Kim sat beside her.
“What's up, Leanne?”
“There've been two Poet Killer murders tonight-two!”
“My God, when, who?”
“At the bookstore, Darkest Expectations, Marc Tamburino, dead in his upstairs apartment. Same MO as Gordonn's. Someone's decided to take up where he left off.”
So Tamburino wouldn't be collecting that snitch money after all, Jessica thought. She tried to put this new information together with Locke, who was now their primary suspect.
Sturtevante, her voice shaky, added, “He was alive when I found him, but before he could be gotten to a hospital, the poison did its work. I had gone to check out a few details with him; when I found the place locked, I tried his apartment. He didn't answer, so I got the super of the building to open it up. I heard music inside, and when I saw him, I thought he might have overdosed, until I saw the poem cut into his back. Began with the same three lines as the others.”
“You said there was a second victim?”
“Yes… Dr. Harriet Plummer.”
Jessica and Kim exchanged a shocked look. “Plummer?” Jessica exclaimed. “We just spoke to her earlier today.”
“Garrison Burrwith found her at her place; her back was cut with a poem. Same MO.”
“The man's on a rampage,” Jessica said. “Now he's murdering anyone his fevered mind perceives as a threat.”
“He needs nineteen angels, Jessica,” Kim reminded her.