“What’s that got to do with conception?” Veronica objected.
“Everything,” he said. “What you conceive of as selfishness isn’t selfishness at all. It’s truth.”
“Truth?” she queried.
“You ended your relationship with Jack in pursuit of your inner sense of truth. You only think it was selfishness because you don’t fully understand yourself. It’s truth, Ms. Polk, not selfishness.”
She felt exhausted now, as her mind strayed over his epigrams. She felt like something taken apart in error and reassembled.
“You did exactly what you had to do to preserve the most vital aspect of truth. You destroyed something that was false. That is what your dream was trying to tell you.”
Veronica gazed at him, damped.
“When the figure of flame entered your dream,” Khoronos went on, “you felt at first afraid. When it touched you, you screamed, yet you admit that those screams were screams of ecstasy. I’ll even dare to say that upon the fire-figure’s touch, you climaxed. Am I right or wrong?”
“You’re right,” she admitted, and this admission came with no reluctance. The fire-lover’s presence had drenched her in sexual anticipation, both times she’d dreamed of it. And when it touched her, she came.
“So what have we revealed?” he asked. “That you’re not selfish but devoted to truth. And in the dream, Jack existed as a symbol of your past.” Khoronos rose from his seat. “The figure of flame is the symbol of your future.”
She felt enlightened now, yet enmeshed with confusion. Suddenly she wanted to plead with him, this doctrinaire, this pundit who had dug into the tumult of her psyche and shown her the most promising image of herself. She groped, speechless, helpless.
“Your future begs your final awakening, Ms. Polk. It begs you to re-embark upon your quest and become what you were put on earth to be. It begs you to discover yourself as completely as you can be discovered.”
“But how?” she pleaded, looking up at him. “I don’t know what to do!”
“As I’ve said, and as you have agreed, creation is born of desire. And what is desire in the uttermost sense?”
“What?” she begged.
“Passion,” came the flat, granite answer.
“Passion for what?”
“Passion for everything.” Khoronos began to walk away, shrinking silently within the room’s enfeebled light. “Delve into your passion, Ms. Polk, and you will discover at last what you really are.”
Chapter 16
“Same M.O., same guy,” Randy said. “Front door locked, nothing ripped off, no signs of struggle. He went out the back.”
Jack walked into the living room. TSD was all over the place, stolid automatons dusting door frames and snapping common areas. Gorgeous morning sunlight poured in through fleckless windows, a mocking affront. Places like this should be dark, sullen, as any place of the dead.
“What’s her—”
“Rebecca Black, thirty-one,” Randy answered. His face told all, a mask cracked by terrible witness. “Paralegal for one of the big firms on the Circle. Good work record, no rap sheet, no trouble. Pest control was doing the complex this morning. They came in with the passkey from condo maintenance and found her.”
Jack’s gaze imagined the killer’s trek, bedroom hall, across the living room, to the slider. “Any TOD?” he asked.
“Beck’s here now. Oh, and the victim’s divorced. We’re gonna—”
“It ain’t the husband,” Jack stated. “We know that.” He made no further inquiries, heading for the bedroom. Karla Panzram followed him in silence.
“You’ll have to bootie up, sir,” a young, brawny uniform told him at the door. “Hair and Fiber’s still working.” Jack nodded. The cop doled them Sirchie plastic foot bags—“booties,” they were called — and two hairnets. Jan Beck did not want her crime scene contaminated by irrelevant hairs and clothing fibers or shoe debris. Jack and Karla put on their booties. If only Dad could see me now, Jack considered, stuffing his long hair into his net.
Karla Panzram was smiling. “Do hairnets make you feel emasculated, Captain Cordesman?”
“Shut up, Doctor,” Jack replied. “As long as they don’t make me wear panties, I’ll be fine.”
What they stepped into then was not a bedroom. Bedrooms were where people slept, dreamed, made love, got dressed in the morning and undressed at night — bedrooms were where people lived. They walked, instead, into a charnel house. Jack’s vision swam in red; he needed to look at nothing in particular to see it. It was simply there — the red—unveiled and hovering. The red figure lay within red walls, red wrists and ankles lashed to the red bed.
Karla Panzram said nothing, made no reaction, and Jan Beck, too, tended to her grisly business denuded of emotion. The spindly woman jotted down ITDs — incremental temperature drop — every five seconds at the sound of a beep, reading digital figures off a Putfor Mark II contact thermometer which had been adhered just below Rebecca Black’s smudged throat. The device, zeroed at a mean of 98.6, gauged how quickly the epidermal temperature decayed.
“Hello, sir,” Jan Beck said without looking up. She wore red polyester utilities, foot bags, acetate gloves, and a hairnet. So did the two techs who roamed the floor on hands and knees with illuminated CRP magnifiers. Polyester was less inclined to drop fibers, but on occasions when that happened the bright red material was easily spotted and rejected as fiberfall. “Feel free to look around,” Jan Beck invited. “But please do not approach the contact perimeter.”
Jack was staring at the back wall. “I need TOD, Jan.”
“Give me a sec.” She punched a thirty-second drop-reading into an integrated field thermometer/barometer made by the same company. The figures were accurate to within 1/100 of a degree. Then she said, “Ballpark, between twelve-thirty and two-thirty a.m. I’ll have a better number for you once I get her into the shop.”
Jack nodded, thinking of the tedious protocol that awaited. Canvass the complex. Check taxi logs and newspaper vehicles. Interview every neighbor. The same thing all over again.
Lampblack and anthracene smudged the door frame, drawer lips, dresser tops, even the toilet seat. The sink drain in the bathroom had been removed; so had the toilet and sink and bathtub handles. The toilet roll and tissue box lay in evidence bags, awaiting iodine fuming. Everything in the wastebasket had also been bagged. Essentially, TSD had dusted, bagged, fumed, or removed all the sundries of this woman’s life. Soon the woman herself would be in a bag.
Jack lowered his gaze and looked at what lay on the bed.
Who knew what she’d looked like in life? In death, she was a red mannequin, tied up, gutted. Her belly had been riven, organs teased out and arranged about her on the mattress. Duct tape covered her eyes, sealed her mouth. Again the scarlet ghosts of the killer’s affections remained: lip prints about her throat, fingermarks about her breasts. Blood had been smoothed adoringly over the inner thighs and down the sleek legs. There were even lip prints on her hands and feet, under the arms, along her sides — myriad red smudges. Rebecca Black had been dressed in kisses of blood.
A massive wet spot darkened the red-stained sheet between her legs. Jack thought of a great fleeing spirit.
Then Karla Panzram muttered: “Oh, no.”
Jack turned. It was just like Shanna Barrington. Odd prismoid configurations muraled the walls along with jagged red glyphs. The three-starred triangle had been drawn above the headboard.
Above it were the words HERE IS MY LOVE.
And below it: AORISTA!
There was something else, on the opposite walclass="underline"