So he had waited, and each day had brought a visit from the now-trusting Dr. Arnold, and after the physical therapy sessions, Dr. Arnold would try his uniquely asinine brand of psychotherapy on the killer.
Matisak had cunningly chosen the precise moment of opportunity, when Arnold had filled a syringe and pumped the serum that Matisak needed into his arm. Matisak had grabbed the empty syringe and plunged it deep into Arnold's throat. This had sent the doctor staggering back as Matisak grabbed a scalpel from Arnold's lapel pocket. After a moment's macabre dance with Whalen, the security guard, Matisak had turned the scalpel on Whalen, sluicing through his thick neck in one instantaneous movement.
After wrestling the dying security guard to the floor, Mad Matthew Matisak had easily overpowered an orderly who was new to asylum work and who, frozen in place, had waited for death to easily come.
But the cunning, cool fiend had first ordered the new man to disrobe and toss his orderly whites aside before Matisak took his pleasure with the orderly, slicing through the jugular and carotid arteries. The infirmary had been instantly steeped in blood, which Matisak, at some point, had gone on all fours to lap up in dog fashion. He'd left hand and knee and even tongue prints on the floor in crimson detail, and he'd also left behind the disgusting poem meant for Jessica and written in Arnold's blood across the wall.
Before Matisak was finished with Dr. Arnold, there remained not a drop of blood in his cadaver. The monster had made fiendishly wicked use of a nearby dialysis machine. He'd no doubt planned its use on Arnold all along, and enjoyed watching the blood empty from his body through the transparent polyethylene tube and into the beaker from which Ma-tisak drank his fill, leaving only what he could not consume or take with him. An autopsy had clearly shown that Matisak had used the IV tube and the dialysis machine to pump the blood from Arnold's throat after laying the bound and gagged man across a stretcher. What troubled Jessica most was the thought that Arnold was conscious long enough to watch his own blood streak through the tube, into the machine and out into the waiting beakers.
She held at bay a mental image of the monster hoisting a beaker of blood to his lips before Arnold's crazed eyes.
A reckless trail of victims left in Matisak's wake had led FBI authorities to Oklahoma, and by the time Jessica got there from Hawaii, the manhunt had concentrated on the Tulsa area. It was one of the largest manhunts in recent history. But Matisak had remained elusive, and once the trail had gone cold in Oklahoma, Jessica and Paul had gone back to the federal facility in Philadelphia where Arnold had so hideously died. There she had examined the scene of the murders, which by then had been cleaned and tidied up. Still, she had learned what she could from others who'd swept the actual scene, piecing together the probable string of events that had led to Arnold's death and Matisak's escape.
Once sated, the monster had next assumed the identity of the orderly, named Kenneth Bowden, wearing the young man's lab coat and ID tag. He'd taken the man's car keys, casually strolled out to the car, pulled up to the gate, where he'd blithely signed himself out as Bowden, and proceeded through the gate with a wave of his hand.
Lights came up now in the small screening room behind Zanek's office, and the final film, dated only the day before, ended with Dr. Desinor rushing from the room as if her life depended upon getting off camera. She was neither shaken nor up set by her reading of a ransom note brought her by authorities in Decatur, Georgia.
“ She's everything I told you, isn't she? What about it, Stephens?” asked Zanek, who'd returned through his office door at the rear, surprising both Stephens and Jessica. “Tell 'im, Jess.”
P.C. Richard Stephens ran thick, freckled fingers through his thinning mop of red hair and allowed it to settle on the bald pate at the back. “She is remarkable, but I had already come to that conclusion just reading of her work from the material you forwarded.”
“ I think she's exactly what you need in New Orleans,” Zanek told him. “Jessica here, well… she's got so many duties here at Quantico, it just wouldn't do for us to lose her right now. You understand?”
Stephens, who'd originally requested help in the forensics arena from the F B I, and from Jessica Coran in particular, had heard a great deal about Dr. Coran and how she got results, and all of it had proven to be true. But Zanek had had him waffling between the pathologist and the psychic for a week now, wondering if he should get help in the form of science or seance. All he knew for sure was that his NOPD had its collective hands full with a bizarre string of murders that no one seemed capable of getting a handle on.
“ Jessica, you haven't said anything,” Zanek pressed, placing a friendly hand on her shoulder. “What do you think of Dr. Desinor? Doesn't she make David Copperfield look pitiful by comparison?”
“ I'll admit she's very good.”
“ Dr. Desinor gets results. She was dead-on in Georgia.”
“ You know that for sure?”
“ Got word just this morning: a major development in the Sendak case. Mr. Stephens here asked specifically for your assistance, Jess, but I've explained to him that you're needed here for the time being. Hell, we've got requests for Jess's help from a dozen different police agencies across the continent at the moment, and I've had to turn them all down, Stephens. Nothing personal. It's just important right now for Jess, for Dr. Coran, to remain close at hand. Now, our Dr. Desinor'll be a fine stand-in, I can assure you, especially on this sort of case, a case involving few clues. Dr. Desinor's your man, if you'll pardon the expression, on a case that requires an instinctive ability to get at the truth.”
“ She puts on a damned good show,” Stephens admitted, “if they have indeed come up with a solution in Georgia based on her reading of that note.”
“ They have Sendak's daughter in custody, the daughter he never had, and she's told authorities where the body is,” replied Paul, obviously impressed not only by what he'd witnessed on the screen but also by the subsequent developments in the Sendak case.
“ I'm most impressed,” Stephens said. “Dr. Desinor puts on quite a show, but then so do you, Dr. Coran. I read about how-with no more than an arm coughed up from the sea in Hawaii-you were able to reconstruct the awful string of murders there which had gone undetected for years.”
“ I had a great deal of help there, a support team of the first caliber, and as for detecting the undetected… well, James Parry was really the one who broke the case wide open.”
“ Modesty becomes you, Jess,” said Zanek.
“ Parry and his team were superb,” she insisted, her stare hard.
“ Yes, well, in any event, I wanted to show Stephens here what I've seen in Desinor, and I wanted to show you, since you'll be stepping aside this go-round so as to catch up on your duties here, and since I've long wanted you to evaluate Dr. Desinor's whole operation to see if the Profiling sector might not wish to avail themselves of her services in the future-possibly even think of her department as a new arm, so to speak.”