Otto was vulnerable; his wife an invalid, in a coma at Bethesda. Jessica had no right to him, she told herself, and he truly had no interest in her in that direction. It was just the elation of the moment, the hours upon hours of working together. That was all, and that was all that J.T. needed to know.?
NINE
When alone, he went by the name he called himself when he took their blood: Teach. He often thought of himself as a teacher. Certainly, every day he taught. It was part of the job he held, to instruct. And when he killed, he taught unforgettable lessons, after all. Teach… he liked that. When he bathed, sometimes Teach used blood instead of water.
He was well read, and he had taught himself all there was to know about blood, and not just what modern medicine had to say about the substance, but what the ancients used it for, how they used it and why.
He'd read widely about the curative powers of blood, how it was a skin softener, how it restored hair. So, he lay back now in his blood-filled tub, heated by the tap water that helped to fill it. He had used up almost all of his supply, but the idea of the bath was too exciting to pass up. And it didn't fail him. He lay back, imagining the power it sent through his pores, imagining that he was inside his victim in a sense, here lying amid her, and she going through his pores, that she was her blood and her blood was her, and that it all belonged to him and him alone. Remarkable feelings rummaged about his being and his psyche, feelings of warmth and a heady feeling of belonging. He had never truly belonged anywhere… but here, with himself and his victim, like a circle without beginning, without end…
Thought was suspended, his mind arrested by the feel of her blood, the smell of it, the taste of it, for he had kept some pure, and it filled a Pepsi bottle at his side. Languid in the liquid.
He had read of great rulers like Vlad the Impaler and Genghis Khan who bathed in the blood of the people they enslaved. He supposed that he was as close to such greatness as he would ever get. The emotional impact was enough to bring a tear to his eye. He wanted no ordinary bath, and no ordinary life.
Virgin blood was hard to come by, but according to the books, it had the most curative powers. It was used as a healing agent in the diseases like leprosy and syphilis. The afflicted parts and organs had to be washed in it, and this application of blood to the skin caused it to glow with supernatural beauty. He had read of how the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory in the early 1600s had murdered over six hundred girls to have them drained of their blood so that she might bathe nightly in blood and thereby remain forever beautiful and healthy. She, too, preferred virgins.
“ Of course, there were a lot more of them in those days,” he said, chuckling and splashing.
Blood was, after all, the source of life, he reasoned. His medical knowledge told him it was the source of two life-sustaining liquids: milk, which was blood filtered through the breasts; and semen, blood filtered through the testes.
Blood had great magnetic power, and it fascinated him. Gods and demons alike were attracted to the smell of it, just as Teach was attracted by it, especially shed blood… the blood of those violently slain. It was not killing and murder itself that attracted him, but the shedding of blood. The ancients who sacrificed blood to the gods were foolishly wasteful. He was not.
He had scoured occult literature for every word written on blood, and he had found that some occultists believed as he did, that the vital essence of life was actually an invisible and intangible vapor, and the medium for that vapor was blood. As far as he was concerned, modern medicine was full of shit. It was not the heart that caused the blood to flow, but the spirit within the blood. It connected the material and the spiritual spheres like a cosmic, astral tissue. The Bible said it best, Teach thought: The life of the flesh is in the blood.
“ Leviticus 17:11,” he said with a sigh as he dipped into the blood with his cupped hands and poured it over his head, laughing.
The phone rang. He cursed it, let it ring. No doubt the office. Bastards. Hardly back from being on the road for them, and they can't give him a few hours peace and solitude.
“ I am the blood and the life,” he said.
The answering machine clicked on and he lay back to the sound of his own voice. Then came his boss's grating voice like a serrated knife over his brain.
“ We've got orders to fill down here!” shouted his boss. “Where the hell've you been? Time is money, mister! Want to see your ass at HQ by three!”
Christ, he thought, if he had to go in in the middle of the day, he'd have to cover up, wear the wide-brimmed hat, the dark glasses. Light hurt him. Light hurt him like it hurt a fucking vampire. It all had to do with his disorder, a disorder he had kept hidden from everyone. But should he get too much sun…
He prayed for a cloud cover, prayed for rain. He had used up every excuse. He'd have to turn on the shower and rinse down and get out of the tub. He hated wasting the blood, so he decided to keep the plug in and reheat it when he returned, after seeing Mr. Sarafian about the goddamned orders.
# # #
“ Why can't we get the body shipped here? If we could do the work here-”
“ The best we can do, Jess! Truth is we were lucky to get this much.”
She stood in the middle of Boutine's office, pacing. “Weren't there others you were suspicious of?”
“ One we can't even locate. Nobody seems to know where she was buried.”
“ And the other?”
“ They won't let the body out of town, much less the state. Families can be very-”
“ Stupid-”
“ No, Jess, not stupid.” His voice slurred. “Thing is, I understand exactly why they feel the way they do.”
She realized he was referring to his wife. She sat down across from him and said, “I'm sorry… just so frustrating. If we can do some good here, stop this maniac… Whatever it takes, we have to do it. You know what kind of conditions we're likely to find in these rural places. It'll be like Wekosha all over again.”
“ You found the evidence of the tube in Wekosha, Jess. You can do it again.”
“ With a decomposed body? In an unsafe and poorly arranged lab?”
“ You can do it.”
She thought of the waste of room C upstairs. “All right, what about the second one? Which one do I go see first?”
“ Afraid there's another problem there.”
“ Oh, no.”
“ The order is for the same time period. Someone else'11 have to go to the second location.”
She dropped her tired head forward, her long hair burying her face, all in a gesture of desperation. He came around to her and sat on the edge of his desk, as if simply wishing to get closer. “I figure J.T. is the best choice for the Illinois site. What do you think?”
“ We're running multiple tests on the Copeland samples, the semen, the DNA.”
“ You've got capable lab people for that.”
“ All right, all right.” She looked into his eyes, saw a glimmer of the earlier, dagger like stare before he broke away for the window to glance over the field outside. She got up and went to him “Otto. “Yes?”
“ Something… I think we ought to talk about what happened earlier today.”
“ Nothing to talk about. I'll see you when you get back; army transport's the best I can do for you this time, Jess.”
“ That'll be fine.”
“ Leaves in two hours. I'll call Iowa City, have the papers waiting for you. Return trip'll have to be Greyhound if you can't work something out with the guys at the military base.”
“ I'll get home, don't worry. You'll do the same for J.T. so he can get to Illinois?”