Not wishing to think of the possible consequences, she opted to dig through the case files left her by Richard Stephens, who'd gone back to Louisiana with Jessica Coran the day before to pave her way by preparing an elaborate hoax to keep her attachment with the FBI concealed. She kept coming back again and again to those minutely detailed and thorough police reports by Lieutenant Alex Sincebaugh. She had searched the stack for a file on the Surette case, but there was none, for as Commissioner Stephens had said, this case was not considered a relative of the others, despite frequent references to it which Sincebaugh had made by way of comparison. He seemed the only one who'd kept an open mind to the possibility of a connection.
As she continued going through the files and photos left her by Stephens, she also thought about how she might be a disruption to Sincebaugh and others working the case. She'd faced resistance to psychic detection before many times when she'd had her own psychic detection agency in Florida. A part of her wanted no role in the absurd concealment of her true identity as a psychologist and paranormal investigator with the FBI, but it was politically incorrect these days to spend the taxpayers' money on frivolity, and unfortunately, too many Americans still believed that anything to do with the psychic world was frivolous.
Psychic detection had a long and lurid history, dating back to the time of Solomon, who, many scholars were now convinced, had a psychic power of his own. Some had gone so far as to suggest that Christ and John the Baptist were both gifted psychics, not to mention other world-renowned religious leaders such as Buddha. Psychic surgeons and fortune-tellers from the famous Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus to the infamous Rasputin, along with an array of charlatans, frauds and freaks, all made for a fantastic and colorful history of psychic phenomena, a history which left many people more comfortable with herpes or hemorrhoids.
She was by no means convinced that all psychics throughout the ages were true blue-sense people, that they actually possessed the gift that had been granted her, but she was certain that psychics came in all shapes and sizes, that many were indeed frauds and charlatans, and that while the history of occult phenomena was also a history of criminal activity, scams and hoaxes, there always emerged that rare psychic or seer who could actually perceive with indelible clarity the details of events yet to come, or reconstruct time and events from some netherworld inside the cranium. It was rare to find the true psychic who could reveal details of a murder which had occurred in the past-post-cognition-and rarer still to locate a seer, one who could foretell the future-precognition. But it was that singular individual who gave credence to the fact that there existed, somewhere in the vastness of that inner universe of the human mind, the ability to tap into an undeniable sixth sense.
She found some coffee in a pot at the rear of the plane, poured herself a cup and returned to the case files to study, the steady hum of the plane soothing and tranquil. In her lavish seat in a conference area, with a circular table in front of it, she again began to finger through the files. The more she learned now about the crimes, the victims, their family backgrounds, their circumstances, the more convincing she'd be before a room full of cops who would, more than likely, be hostile toward her entering the investigation months after the first body was discovered. Natural resentment was always difficult to overcome.
“ What do you prefer?” she asked herself in the empty cabin, feeling terribly alone. “Unnatural resentment?” To a suspiciously regarded psychic there really wasn't any difference.
She tried to concentrate instead on the kind of rage the victims of the Queen of Hearts killer had faced in their last moments on earth. Whoever the killer was, the level of sheer hatred for the victims was shockingly extreme and intense; given the sheer number of stab wounds, the evisceration of the heart muscle and the mutilation of the private parts, it was no great leap of faith to ascertain that the killer was exceedingly and agonizingly enjoying his knife work. An extraordinary, killing energy fueled by dementia had left the bodies hacked apart by an enormous blade.
“ Why a blade?”
A large blade; a hefty meat-cutter's blade, something that was made for cutting upward, like a butcher's specially designed, serrated knife for cutting and deboning carcasses. At least that was what the coroner, a man named Wardlaw, was suggesting in his reports. Perhaps more importantly, why was he taking their hearts? She recoiled from the obvious, that he cannibalized the hearts, both because it was repugnant and because it was obvious. Were there secret reasons that only a madman might have to fulfill, a longing no one in his right mind could possibly ever understand, even if the maniac were willing to share such reasons? Furthermore, did it matter what this alien mind did with the hearts, since the end result was always the same, a vicious mutilation murder with lustful, sexual overtones? She thought of a line from a long-forgotten poem which she must look up again, a line that spoke of the heart in relationships between men and women that went something like:
Often with gentle words he'll take it;
Play softly with it, then rudely break it.
Did the killer suffer from a broken heart? Was he trying to rebuild or repair his own, using assembled “parts”? “And what is the significance of the playing card?” she asked aloud to the hum of the Lear. “And what the devil kind of card is it that's made of lacy material?”
Every particular, every item, every article of information she might learn now would help her to convince skeptics-whom she was bound to run headlong into later-that she was a genuine psychic, capable of magical feats of mental agility and supernormal abilities. Dazzle them first; get them off your back, and then you can go to work, she reminded herself.
Going to work, however, wasn't so simple, not for her. Going to work, a phrase that meant boredom on the horizon for most people, a phrase that conjured up a nine-to-five nightmare, was just the opposite for her. Going to work for Dr. Kim Desinor meant both opportunity and anxiety, elation and depression, courage and fear all tenaciously wound together like the strands of a tightly packed baseball below its leather coverlet. It meant she must take that first step beyond, and each time she had to take that step, it was as if it were her first time. She tried to conjure up that first time, but she'd had the sight for so long, since she was so young, that she could not recall ever being without it. Still, she never knew where her second sight might next lead, whether she would find her way or become lost, dead-ended, or if she'd fall over the edge of the labyrinth, or psych herself into a meaningless corner filled with useless images and symbols of no apparent or corporeal value; or if, on the other hand, she might discover revelation. And she never knew going in if she'd return intact and unscathed, for within the netherworld she visited, angry monsters freely roamed, searching for psychic prey of their own. Often psychic scars resulted, invisible to others, but painfully obvious to her, scars which did not heal so easily as fleshly ones. Scars which often must be denied so strongly by the psyche that they were healed over only by forgetfulness, though forgetfulness got in the way during an investigation of this sort. What she'd felt in Paul Zanek's office the previous day, when she had literally become the killer, she wanted more than anything to forget, yet she must court the memory, tease it back, squeeze every detail from it, if she were to crack the case of the Heart-Taker of New Orleans.