“It wasn't like that, Jess. Truly, he grabbed the gun and pulled it straight at himself, but I had a strong grip on it, and it went off, all quite unintentionally.”
“Perhaps not on your part, but what about his? He asked us to put him down, and when we didn't respond in the manner he wanted, he created the circumstance in which you had to end his life. Simple as that.”
“It's such a horror for me, taking a life. I feel less of a human being for it.”
“He left you with no choice; he wanted you to act instinctively, intuitively, and you did. You did for him what the rope over the pipe couldn't do… and I'm getting wetter'n than the proverbial drenched rat in here, so let's vacate this place for now. Come on upstairs with me into the light-
Kim nodded weakly and allowed Jessica to lead her away from the body and this place. “And for the sake of protocol,” Jessica added as they turned to go, “since I was on hand when the perpetrator of this bloodless slaughter was shot to death, I'd best call Shockley and his ETs in to collect evidence and to deal with the bodies.” Jessica led her friend and colleague out of the death grid, neatly defined here in the basement to await Shockley. “It's always difficult to take a life, but if he'd gotten firm hold on that gun and turned it on all of us, well… suffice to say, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”
“He didn't want to fire the gun on any of us; he wanted it for himself, and he managed to use me to that end, didn't he? Clever SOB, I'd say, very clever indeed.”
The core task-force team felt a great weight lifted off their collective shoulders, knowing now for certain that the serial killer called the Poet had finally been identified and his career ended.
Jessica remained close to Kim while both the PPD's Internal Affairs cops and the FBI's own Internal Affairs people asked questions about the death of the suspect, Lucian Locke.
Everyone found the scene gruesome, and emotionally painful to process, especially the room where the two children lay in bed, faces down, their backs revealing the final verses of the poem Locke had written. By now all the verses had come together to make a whole.
Jessica felt little pleasure in having been proven right, that each of the poems was a section of one large, ambitious work. She supported Kim's version of the shooting one hundred percent, telling the IAD guys that she had seen the shooting go down exactly as Dt. Desinor described it.
Meanwhile, Sturtevante and Parry, their services no longer being required, had gotten a federal warrant for search and seizure at Dr. Lucian Locke's office, club locker, Second Street apartment, and home. Parry meant to go by the book, to create an airtight, hermetically sealed case against the now dead poet.
The news of the Lockes' deaths following so quickly on the heels of Leare's, and the even more lurid news that Locke had murdered Leare-everyone agreed that such news was tailor-made to increase dramatically the appeal of their poetry to young people fascinated with death and the trappings of death.
Parry, Sturtevante, and a small army of white-gloved detectives combed the house for incriminating evidence that might explain Locke's behavior, explain why he had killed his wife and children, and the series of people who had come before them. Nothing came of the search, not a shred of useful information, not even from his locked desk drawer in the spacious den.
A team of evidence techs were sent to his university office, and they, too, came up empty. But a third team, sent to his Second Street apartment, hit the mother lode. Pinned on the walls were the photos Jessica had been looking for, shots of each of the victims who had preceded his final rampage. These, combined with the photographic record of the poems etched in poisoned ink, proved irrefutable.
Vladoc showed up at the scene of the crime now, and as he walked among the living scurrying about doing their work, he looked like a dead man. “Poor Evey, and those children, I loved them as if they were my own,” he repeatedly told anyone who would listen, as if saying the words over and over would make them sound more true. How could Vladoc not have known that his brother was so deeply disturbed?
“I had no idea, I swear to you all,” he finally said. “I was as much in the dark as you. He… Lucian always appeared happy, pleased with his life. He only spoke on occasion of minor problems in his marriage, his desire to be free of all the responsibilities of work and fatherhood and being a husband, but nothing serious, you see. He always worked things out in his head, I was certain. Obviously, I never heard his cry. He never allowed me to.”
“He may well have thought you blind to the reality he lived,” Jessica suggested in an attempt to ease Vladoc's obvious pain.
“Such a waste of human life and potential…” Vladoc, unable to stand another moment in the house, tearfully made his way out into the night. Jessica feared he would blame himself for the rest of his life, not only for what had happened here, but for all the victims of his brother's quiet madness.
Jessica had to fight off the recurring image of the children upstairs. Locke's two children, aged six and seven, along with his beautiful wife, had returned early from a trip to the Florida Keys, all suntanned and healthy-looking, but now all were quite dead, each with a poem scrawled across his or her back.
From the basement, Shockley shouted for Dr. Coran to come downstairs. She reluctantly complied, taking the steps down to the blinding field of lights that had been set up in the basement. Water sloshed around her ankles as the drains fought a losing battle with the leaking pipes. “We were in the process of moving the body out of this damned deluge when this floated by.” He extended a handwritten note.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Read it. It's his last remarks. Quite incriminating.” Jessica read the note scrawled in the killer's shaky hand.
I loved them all. Even poor George. I loved each and every one of them. They were all broken-winged fairy angels, not of this world, certainly not needing to endure life on this plane a moment longer. I love all of those whom I have sent over. There was no other choice.
The note ended with Lucian Locke's familiar signature. Jessica looked up to see Kim and a retinue of uniformed police standing nearby, everyone watching as Locke's body was hoisted onto a stretcher. Only now did she see the words written in blood orange along his arms and chest.
“He tried to write himself to death,” Shockley lamely joked. “Get it? But he appears to have run out of ink. Used it all up on everyone else.”
“We found leather straps around the wife's legs and wrists,” commented one of the evidence techs who'd taken charge of the scene in the room where Evey Locke had been found. Apparendy she had not willingly complied with her husband's plan to send her to a better world. According to the ETs who worked the upstairs room, the children had been drugged into a stupor before the quill pen dug into their flesh.
“In the end, he pulled out all the stops,” said Jessica. “He didn't have time for the niceties, like convincing his victims that to have a Lucian Locke poem emblazoned on their backs was their ticket to paradise.”
Locke, his body misshapen and his hair matted and disheveled, was carried up the stairs and to one of the two waiting emergency vans, their strobe lights having wakened the entire neighborhood. As one of the ETs plunked out a rendition of “Chopsticks” on the piano next to Evey Locke, the old ME, Shockley, made his way upstairs to the children. “I want a firsthand look at the boy and girl,” he said sadly.
“Angels he had called them.” Jessica shook her head. “I'll go with you.”
“Thanks. I'll need your help.”
“We know now how he kept abreast of the investigation.”
“Yes, I heard. Through his brother, Vladoc. Don't you find it strange, though, that Vladoc didn't recognize his own brother's handwriting and poetry? After all, he was studying it, he made pronouncements on it, told us all about that Enochian thing, and yet he had no idea his brother was so deeply into this warped philosophy?”