“I've wondered the same, yes,” said Kim, who had come into the room and overheard them. “But while subconsciously he may have known, consciously I'm not so sure. I just spent time with him outside, and he's a broken man. He could not have taken part in his brother's actions. His brother's DNA will tell the story, and I don't believe he was involved from afar, like some master puppeteer.”
“Locke was the only puppeteer here,” Jessica returned. “Still, now that he's dead, we should confiscate all of Vladoc's records on his patient.”
“Just to be sure,” Shockley agreed.
“He could not have accepted such a truth; only now has he been able to, now that the evidence is irrefutable,” Kim assured them. “I held his hand, and I tell you he is horrified at what has happened to the only family he has.”
With the final evidence gathered and the last photograph of the death scenes at the Locke house taken, Jessica rushed outside to the predawn air, breathing it in deeply several times, attempting to clear her head. Nothing so affected the death investigator as the unnecessary death of a child, and here were two innocents taken. Leanne Sturtevante and James Parry had returned to the scene, and Parry asked her how she was holding up.
“I've been better. It's horrible what's happened here.”
Parry and Sturtevante confessed to having had the same discussion as the others regarding Vladoc. They all agreed that his brother had used him, duped him.
Sturtevante remained with Jessica while Parry stepped back inside for a final look around the murder/suicide house. Locke's death had been ruled as suicide in that he had caused it knowingly and willingly, when he realized the poison he'd used on himself had not been a toxic enough dosage and his attempt to hang himself also failed. Jessica now learned from Sturtevante how she had discovered Marc Tamburino in the final throes of death.
“Before he died he told me it was Locke. It was the only word he managed to speak before he choked and expired. From the mouth of a dying man. I knew it couldn't be ignored. Tamburino's back had been turned into a grid of death by Locke's letters.”
“What's amazing to me,” Jessica said, “is that he would go off like this after so carefully constructing a scapegoat in the person of George Gordonn. I suppose we can only infer that after he manipulated things so that no suspicion could fall on him, the irrational powers and forces driving Locke proved stronger than his logical mind.”
“Marc Tamburino didn't know Locke was the killer until it was too late. He figured it out as he lay dying, about the time I found him in his apartment this evening. Locke rushed out before I got there, leaving Marc still alive. I must have frightened Locke as I approached.”
Kim, who had been standing nearby listening to Sturtevante describe the path that had led her to Locke, offered her thoughts. 'Tamburino no doubt thought it a great honor to be wearing an original Lucian Locke poem emblazoned across his body to the clubs last night, I suppose.”
“Who wouldn't?” Sturtevante said. “Even Donatella thought it'd be cool to display an original Locke on her back. It's what's gotten all of them killed.”
Jessica asked for more of the details surrounding Tamburino's death.
“I carried him down to my car rather than wait for any ambulance, and I rushed him to Cellmark, the closest hospital with a poison center, but we were simply too late. An attempt to save him from the selenium, even though I could identify the poison coursing through his body, fell short. Time was not on Marc's side.”
“Didn't he die en route to the hospital?” Jessica asked.
“No, no, we had him almost stabilized when his heart stopped and no amount of effort on the part of the medical team could bring him back.”
“You did all you could for him,” said Jessica.
“I realized immediately that Dr. Harriet Plummer, who'd been seeing Locke, might well be another target, guessing that Marc was killed as much for his nosing around and asking one too many questions as anything else. He hardly fit the victim profile, and neither did Plummer, but on a hunch, I telephoned Dr. Plummer to warn her.”
“But it was too late for her as well?”
“ 'Fraid so. She was alive but just barely. Somehow she lifted the phone, and I identified myself and she simply babbled, 'I… could never… not love… Lucian. Could never say no… to him. Never could not love him.' She sounded drugged.”
“What did you do next?”
“I shouted for her to stay on the phone, to keep talking to me, and at the same time, I got someone on the line so that I could dial 911 and get a cruiser over there immediately with instructions to treat her for selenium poisoning. Plummer dropped the phone before I could get help. I made the calls and raced to her location from the hospital. “I figured that Locke had killed her, too. The man was on a rampage, just as you said, Jessica. As I drove to the Plummer location, I contacted Jim, and he met me there. The result was another corpse filled with Locke's poison and poetry. The two of us realized that the man was on a kill spree now, probably fearing that he'd be identified as the Poet Killer-that he had framed George Gordonn. At least that's my guess.”
“It sounds about right to me,” Jessica told her.
“So Jim and I asked ourselves who else might he harm? And Jim remembered the children and his wife. That's when we heard from you, and we raced to this location direct from Plummer's.”
“And Burrwith? Was he killed, too?”
“No, just disturbed to be awakened in the middle of the night, or so the officers who rushed to his home said.”
“Thanks for filling us in, Leanne, and again, my sincerest regrets over your loss of Donatella.”
“Dona was never one to play it safe; imagine, allowing Lucian Locke to write across her back.”
“Likely with the promise that he'd let her do him. A pact of sorts, to prove to each other that neither was the killer.”
“She so admired Locke's work. She knew the killer's hand was inspired by her and Locke's poetry. She confessed that much to me once.”
Jessica and Kim went toward their waiting vehicle, tired and exhausted, talking about hot baths, body oils, warm candlelight, and distancing themselves from the horror of this time and place. Jessica had left the formalities of the crime-scene investigation and the chain-of-evidence duties to Shockley, who appeared to be basking in his supervisory role in the mop-up effort. All that remained now was to make a DNA match between Lucian Locke and the teardrops left on the earlier victims. That kind of scientifically irrefutable evidence would put to rest any and all speculation about Vladoc or anyone else's having taken part in the killings.
EPILOGUE
Predicting human behavior is really about recognizing the play from just a few lines of dialogue.
No one doubted the innocence of Dr. Peter Flavius Vladoc in the murders committed by his brother, but his gullibility in the matter and his total failure to recognize that a man he was treating was so seriously disturbed resulted in his ruined reputation as a psychiatrist. Finally, he had no choice but to pack his things and vacate his office at the PPD. He told Jessica that henceforth he'd concentrate on private practice, but he would have to do so elsewhere, somewhere far from Philadelphia, the city he loved.
“It's the price I must pay for being blind, but in the end, I fear that it will be Philadelphia that will pay a far greater price,” he declared, not a little pompously.
The DNA match on Vladoc's brother, Locke, was made, and there was no longer any doubt as to who the killer had been.
“What price is that, sir?” Jessica couldn't help asking.
“The final act in this morbid play of good and evil, Dr. Coran, I fear, has yet to be performed.”