She did as instructed, the docile puppy once again, glancing back only once at her dead child on the kitchen floor. When she was out of earshot, the general said, “She couldn't've been using the hearts of dead men in her cooking. She just couldn't've been.”
“ Well, our lab people will determine that soon enough, Maurice,” said Richard Stephens, who placed a shaky and awkward hand on the old man's shoulders. “Determine what, that my insane child killed her brother, cut out his heart and fed it to me! God damn you all for imagining such a thing! No, she loved us, Coretta and me… she loved us, despite any sickness she endured over the years, and she loved her brother with a pure love like nothing I have witnessed in all my years.”
The general's lawyer tried to pull him away, but the old man snatched free and shouted, “She had a bad heart as a child, a deficiency, but she was never evil toward anyone except, at times, her brother. Yes, I admit she was at one time extremely envious of her brother, but with therapy she had worked through all that and had in fact learned to love Victor and us very, very much. She spoke of him fondly always, and she treated Mother and me with great respect and admiration, always… always. She loved us. She wouldn't've harmed Victor. 1 knew that from the beginning, and that was how I knew she couldn't've done the terrible things attributed to the Queen of Hearts killer. You'll never… ever convince me otherwise.”
“ Alex was right all along. She killed her brother for a reason,” Jessica shouted. “Don't you see? All of you men who've been in one way or another shielding the truth? She took that first heart for a reason, General!”
Stephens tried to motion her into silence; Meade shushed her, so Kim continued on Jessica's behalf. “A reason, General, you know full well. She wanted to be Victor; she wanted to possess his heart-the heart you and her mother most loved. She wanted to be the kind of son you never had, so she became a man for you and Mrs. Raveneaux, and in her deranged state, that meant she had to be 'of good heart,' and how better to be of good heart than to consume the one heart you and your wife doted most over.”
“ That's enough of your psychoanalysis, Doctor,” Meade said to Kim, the order to stand down clearly unmasked now.
“ You men brought Dr. Desinor here for the truth,” Jessica countered, defending her friend. “It's time these people in their ivory-tower mansion, so far removed from the deaths in New Orleans, yet so close to them, hear the truth for once.”
“ The truth won't accomplish anything here, not now,” shouted Stephens.
“ Neither of you ever for a moment thought this case had anything to do with New Orleans gentility, did you, Meade?” asked Alex, his wrath growing steadily.
Jessica continued, saying, “No, to you men it was about gays living in a gay ghetto in New Orleans, and you all wanted it confined there. You never expected Surette's death, the subsequent cover-up to keep the family name untarnished and the payoffs ever to surface again, did you?”
Kim added, “You ruined Frank Wardlaw's career, you dirtied Ben deYampert, and then when calling in Coran and me backfired on you, and it looked as if not only would the general be exposed, but your little parts in the sordid game also might surface, you forced Wardlaw into body-snatching.”
“ You don't have any basis in fact to back that claim up in the least,” Meade declared.
“ The general and his wife were just glad to get the body back-or at least the general was-but it was minus one heart,” added Jessica. “Little did the general know that the heart had come home a lot sooner, and had most likely been consumed by three remaining Raveneauxs with wine in bisque gumbo. And since then, there've no doubt been many unusual dishes served up by your Dominique.”
“ Get out of my house!” shouted the general. “I want you all out of my house!” He was on the verge of tears and collapse.
“ I'm afraid we can't do that, at least not until there's a complete evidence-gathering taken here, General. That will mean some time,” Alex explained.
Stephens exchanged stares with Alex and nodded to his political friend, resigned to what Alex Sincebaugh had said.
“ I'm going to have your heads for this, Meade, Stephens!” The old man stormed from the room, likely in search of his wife and some respite from the horror of the moment.
Landry suddenly collapsed from his wound. Alex and Jessica rushed to him, Alex shouting for someone to get to one of the units outside and call for medical assistance, while Jessica did what she could to staunch his wound.
Landry's color had bleached from his face, crystallized shards still hanging in his hair. His wound was now openly bleeding. Jessica worked to stop the bleeding, tying off the shoulder. As she did so, Landry, seeing the bloodstains and the fiery welts about Sincebaugh, asked, “You okay, Sincy?”
“ No serious damage.”
“ Two real tough guys, huh?” Jessica muttered at them.
Landry managed to say to Alex, “Why don't you get on the radio; see what you can do about getting Dr. Coran all the help and equipment she'll require here.”
“ You got it, Captain.” With that Alex went for Landry's car and the radio, pushing past Hodges and his men, who'd been staring in on the scene, their mouths hanging open.
“ You up for this, Jessica? This could be an all-nighter,” said Kim, who came close to her friend.
“ Actually, no… I'd just about made up my mind to get on a plane for Hawaii, chuck it all.”
“ I can well understand how you feel after seeing what went on at that warehouse and now this. You've gone through hell.”
“ As have we all. What about you? You gonna be okay?”
Kim managed a wane smile and a nod. “Yeah, matter of fact. Think I found out what I'm made of, in great part thanks to you. But I tell you honestly, I'm not so sure I don't prefer the safety of a laboratory to all this.” She indicated the body of Dominique Emanuel Raveneaux and the scattered remains of life that were pieces of people about the floor. “You have any doubt whatsoever that we have the Queen of Hearts killer here, Dr. Coran?” asked Landry in a near-whisper. “No… no doubt, sir.”
“ Dr. Desinor?” asked Landry.
“ None whatever, and I sense something else.”
“ Oh? What's that?”
“ This is the only peace Dominique has ever had in her unhappy life.”
“ Maybe that'll put your General Raveneaux at peace with himself, Commissioner, Chief Meade,” said Jessica. “Maybe death holds more meaning for his daughter than life ever did.”
EPILOGUE
Unto the pure all things are pure.
A sordid picture of old family money and madness began to come together once the Raveneaux family was examined more closely.
Dominique had attempted to murder her brother at the age of seven. She'd been secreted away to doctors for several years and on return, she'd again showed tendencies of hatred toward her little brother. When the barrier between anger and murder burst again, the general had had her locked up in a pretty cell he'd created for her in the basement while he searched the world for doctors who might possibly fix her.
At times she'd spent long months and even years of her childhood in such places as New York's prestigious Psychiatric Center for the Mentally Disturbed, Menninger's Clinic in Stockholm and a special hospital in Brussels.
She was declared mentally competent and had the papers to prove it, so when she returned home under her own steam in July of the previous year, no one had ever connected her with the strange mutilation death of a young man she'd lived with for a time in Brussels. The man's heart had been carved from his chest. He'd been an intern at the hospital in Brussels, and had been instrumental in Dominique's recovery. Interpol had been interested in locating the former patient, but had lost contact with her. She'd been placed in the institution under a false name, and records were intentionally sketchy.