“ I have my orders, Dr. Coran,” replied Sims with an unbecoming frown. He was a tall, strong young man, and his arms far more than his guns might have comforted her, but his and his partner's gung-ho presence did little to help her disposition.”Your orders, huh? Your orders are my fucking life, Sims! Do you and Zanek know that?”
“ You'll have to take that up with the Chief, Dr. Coran.” He jerked his head toward the door, an indication to his partner that they'd best leave.
She threw a shoe at the door as it closed. Then she cried in great, heaving sobs. “I'm a goddamned prisoner here. In my own goddamned apartment, I'm a prisoner.”
She determined to go over Zanek's head, take her argument to the new division commander, Santiva, to see what a higher authority could do for her. She didn't particularly want to piss Zanek off, however, so she'd have to do what was necessary in the discreetest of political fashion. Once she convinced the new guy to look at things from her point of view, she'd ask him to give it to Zanek in such a way as to provide Zanek with an out, and at the same time perhaps make Zanek think that it was his idea in the first place. Santiva could manipulate Paul Zanek to recognize that it was in the best interest of all involved that Dr. Jessica Coran be returned to field-assignment duties immediately. She even had a case in mind, something that'd been brewing for some time now in New Orleans.
She wouldn't dwell on the fact that no matter where she was assigned, she'd be standing bait for the menacing, escaped madman who was stalking her. It was the only way left to draw the bastard out, she believed, to bait him into the open and to face him down once and for all and for good. Either way, an end, a closure to this nightmare was required if she were ever to enjoy sanity and peace in her life again.
She grabbed the brown clasp envelope J.T. had pushed on her, telling her it was given him by the police commissioner of New Orleans. She poured its contents over her bed and began to read the news clippings on what reporters in the Crescent City were calling the “Have-a-Heart” murders, which were largely centered around the French Quarter, gay and cross-dressing men being the victims. She began to read in earnest, the information making her heart race far more than Mark Twain had.
Good friend and lab partner, J.T., and he was so very right. At least someone understood. He'd told her that she should get back to doing what she did best, that she was right to be upset, and that she should take on the New Orleans case. Her analytical mind told her she was ready, even if the right side of her brain and her emotions were screaming, tolling warning bells that must be keeping up all of Quantico, Virginia.
Richard Stephens, police commissioner in New Orleans, Louisiana, had done the sights and had taken the tours and was about fed up with the arm's-length treatment he'd received from FBI Bureau Chief Paul Zanek here at Quantico. At three in the morning, he was still restless and unable to sleep, so he returned to the files that littered the table in Quantico's only inn, a bed-and-breakfast called the Debonshire. It seemed that lately manila file folders had become a large part of his life, and the longer he stayed in Quantico, Virginia, the more worrisome his mission had become.
Meanwhile, back in New Orleans, party-goers were behaving in as strange and twisted a manner as many L.A. residents during the O.J. Simpson cut-and-run debacle of '94. He knew the diehard New Orleans revelers, and could imagine them singing the Bonnie Raitt song “Have a Heart” and toasting the latest serial killing of a gay man in the Big Easy-four known and linked now. Meanwhile gay activists and human rights groups were calling for a complete overhaul of city government and the NOPD for perceived wrongs and a perceived callousness and indifference on the part of elected officials and city employees such as himself. The heat was enough to have both the mayor and the governor of the state on the phone, chewing out Stephens's ass for circumstances beyond his control. But with Lew Meade's direction, he'd wound himself through and around the FBI bureaucracy from Meade's Louisiana branch office to here, just outside D.C.
The news from Landry at the NOPD was neither forthcoming nor useful when it finally arrived here, and Stephens was feeling like a man who'd crawled out on the limb of a twig blowing in a gale and about to snap. Some damned thing had to be done, and it had to be done soon, tomorrow, and if Zanek couldn't give him satisfaction, he'd take it to a higher level. He had one more chain he might yank.
He nervously fidgeted about the material he'd already read, information about this psychic detective Zanek had been pushing on him, Dr. Kim Desinor, something of an FBI secret, as her files indicated, since the agency did not wish her identity and the fact she was a psychic to be generally known. Her credentials were impressive, if they could be believed, but he wasn't so sure he did believe that the cases in question wouldn't have been solved without her intervention.
He pushed Desinor's file aside and again stared through the case files of Dr. Jessica Coran. He'd read her impressive record with great interest. She'd be a perfect foil and possible temporary replacement for that drunken scoundrel Frank Wardlaw back in New Orleans. Her experience with serial killers far exceeded anything Wardlaw or anyone else on the “Hearts” murder investigation had ever fucking seen. Stephens read of her experience with Mad Matthew Matisak in Chicago, the complex Claw case in New York City, and the equally puzzling Kowona case in Hawaii, in which all she'd had to go on was a single limb from one of the victims!
No doubt about it, Coran was something of a miracle worker when it came to laboratory work and minutiae-from fibers to blood samples taken at the scene. Of the two, scientific sleuth or psychic detective, Stephens clearly had his own preference. He would continue to argue for Dr. Coran's help tomorrow morning in Zanek's office.
He went to the window and looked out over the green and manicured villagelike Quantico, Virginia. It was an extremely small town with a population of a mere 690-with a nearby marine corps base and FBI Headquarters, both of them with many thousands of people who otherwise had minimal contact or ties with the town. What few high-rise buildings there were in the area had cropped up as government-subsidized housing for base and FBI personnel who preferred to live on the other side of the fences but very near the compounds and the action. Dr. Coran lived in one of these nearby residences, and he'd made some minimal contact with her through a secondary, not Zanek.
Stephens cranked open the small French window and filled his lungs with the clear Virginia night air. The place was in stark contrast to his city of jazz and nightlife; Quantico was by comparison the quietest place on earth, but in the distance he could see the lighted towers of the newest buildings on the FBI grounds where men and women worked around the clock at the largest crime lab in the world. Stark contrasts seemed the order of the day.
The town, the military base and the FBI compound, which looked for all outward appearances like a large, red-bricked private college, were all nestled together in an idyllic Virginia hills setting where the greatest depravity seemed to be crimes of fashion, or the occasional grammatical infraction, parking violation or unpaid ticket-and even these were rare.
Still, Washington was twenty minutes away via the turnpike, and the nearby FBI Headquarters with its compound and gates remained a constant reminder that crime in all its guises was a nationwide, problem in America, a problem so out of proportion that the president, in his last speech, had called it the greatest civil war fought on the continent since the War Between the States.
New Orleans was having it out with crime on the streets, like any other major American city, and always had. But recently, the statistics had been rising to the point that no breathing space was left for the drowning citizenry-or the authorities, for that matter. In one tavern window in the French Quarter, where thousands of tourists passed by in any given afternoon, a sign had been put up by the bar owner which read: