"We might make something of it," Jessica added, "if… when we catch this freaking monster." She thought it an ironic twist on the missing glass slipper in Cinderella. She then turned back to the charred and blackened cave the killer had made of the once lovely room, her eyes traveling about the killer's incinerator. There were familiar indications-tracks-that the same killer had been at work here, the clues all pointing to the same man, all around the room in a constellation of previous activity that left its indelible mark. Jessica began enumerating these for the others to take note.
"Naked wires where the smoke alarm and sprinkler system were disconnected, the stage well set so that the killer would have ample time to walk away from his carnage before others were alerted to the fire, and a message smudged in black soot scrawled across the mirror, different this time, yet quite familiar."
J. T. and Jessica stood side by side at the mirror, reading the words scrawled across it. The familiarity of the message left on the mirror had the power to chill the spine:
#3 is #7-Violents
"What the hell's zat 'spose to mean?" barked McEvetty in Jessica's ear. "Violins? You think he means violins, maybe… hearts and flowers, maybe?"
Means the bastard can't spell ''violence,'' Jessica thought but said nothing. She desperately tried to block McEvetty and the others out while J. T. watched her amazing concentration on the mirror, where her reflection- healthy skin, firm, rich in moisture, few lines, even-toned, supple and smooth brow, all framed by radiant auburn hair-congealed in a bizarre double exposure amid the smoke streaks and the body's unhealthy appearance on the bed-loose, arid, riddled maplike with lines, so uneven in color and hue as to rival the hard, brittle, rough colors of the dark earth, all hair burned away. All this superimposed by the smoke-painted, greasy letters left on the mirror. Her eyes screamed silent, closed over the images for a moment, and opened firm and determined once more.
"I don't know what the Sam Hill the message means, gentlemen, and we might never know, and perhaps it doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter?" asked McEvetty, a note of exasperation in his voice.
"Perhaps no one but the killer will ever know what his numbers and shorthand mean."
J. T. told the two Flagstaff agents what had been left at the kill scene in Las Vegas.
"As for meaning in a madman's head," Jessica said now, "perhaps the hellion will take it to his grave with him."
Still, she found herself examining each character, each loop and dip in the madman's hand, sizing him up as she did so, using what little she had learned about handwriting analysis against the unseen enemy. But the process told her little that she didn't already know, given his telephone fetish, and his fire fetish, and his liking for turning human flesh into fire-blackened, dehydrated cardboard. So what if his damnable lettering screamed that he rationalized beyond all reason as normal human beings understood reasoning? That he held a bizarre and fantastic worldview that excused him from his actions, from meting out suffering, pain, and death on others so he might feel the power of holding their lives in his hands, so he might feel good and godlike? She already knew this much. Handwriting analysis might have helped them to understand the movements and actions of the Night Crawler in Florida waters. But this guy? She doubted that what few scraps he was leaving would be of any service, even if they found the best handwriting expert on Earth to decode it; only in deciphering the madman's code, its meaning, the numerical game, the puzzle of words he left behind might the firebrand's death notices serve her and other authorities. But suppose it had no meaning, that it was simply what it appeared to be, gibberish, nonsense?
"Filthy business," muttered Kam, who was on her right, also intently studying both the words and numbers, and her reaction to them.
From the killer's own handwritten message, Jessica's eyes moved coolly, somehow independently of her brain, to drift to the reflected image of the awful handiwork of the brutal monster and her own superimposed image standing over the body. Somehow, given the flood of sun rays, the morning mist, and the charred and still-smoldering room, no one else but Jessica Coran and the body were reflected in the mirror from the angle at which she now stood.
Like the message on the mirror, the body on the bed also looked familiar.
"I just don't get it," complained J. T. of the message in the mirror, the sound of her friend's voice shattering Jessica's reverie, almost as if shattering the mirror.
She turned on him. "Get what?"
"These damnable numbers make no sense. One is nine, three is seven? I mean, what's that?"
"Hell, if the world made sense, men would ride side-saddle," Jessica automatically responded, recalling a favored feminist line, making McEvetty scratch his head while Kaminsky lightly chuckled. J. T. only frowned, causing her to continue, "Wake up, J. T. None of it makes any damned sense whatsoever." She ran a hand through her thick hair. "If it made sense, this madman wouldn't be telephoning me where to pick up the bodies; if it made sense, he wouldn't be out there." She waved a birdlike hand before them. "He'd have been long ago committed, safely put away; if it made sense, he'd have committed himself or killed himself or accidentally caught fire himself."
"Then we'll start with asylums and institutions. See if anyone in the head game can make out any of this cryptology of his," returned J. T. "After all, at the first killing in Vegas, he left the number sequence one equals nine. Now he skips to three? Three equals seven? Numerically, it doesn't compute, but somebody, somewhere's got to recognize this… aberrant"-he searched for a word- "chronology."
"Yeah, where's number two?" asked McEvetty.
Jessica's eyes bored into J. T. ''What meaning can a maniac take from numbers, J. T.? Quit looking for meaning and method in this madness. Even if there were any, which I seriously doubt, you and I can only guess at such meaning and likely never fathom it, and at the moment, any speculation could lead us in an entirely wrong direction."
"There's got to be a message in there somewhere," Kam insisted.
McEvetty, nodding, agreed and persisted with his inquiry intact. "The first killing is given number one, the second number three? What happened to number two? Who knows? Maybe this guy is some sort of Zodiac killer, you know, killing by the stars, astrological crap, numerology, shit like that…"
Perhaps it was the fact that they were all men, all bent on understanding one of their own, all bent on making sense of murder so foul as this, or perhaps it was simply the fact that there were three of them and one of her, but she refused to let these men have their way so easily.
"McEvetty," she replied, "at the moment, we've got our hands full with reality; let's don't get into numerology and shit like that, okay?"
"But Jess," continued J. T., "he might be telling us what his next message will be."
"How's that?" asked Kam.
J. T. turned to the other man and explained, saying, "It may be in the sequence. One equals nine, three equals seven would be followed by five equals five, you see? He skips one number on the first part of each equation and two digits on the second part."
J. T. began jotting down his notion on a notepad for the other two men to see more clearly what he meant.
Jessica feared they were all looking in the wrong place. Still, from what little of handwriting analysis she'd gleaned from Eriq Santiva, her boss at Quantico and an expert in documents and graphology, Jessica knew she had to start some record keeping of her own, that mentally she had already gathered much information about the killer by the killer's own confused script. She knew:
1. He was in many ways creative, perhaps evilly imaginative, possibly well read, literate despite the error on the spelling of ''violence.''