“I wager we know what the M.E.'s going to say. It'll be like the rest,” moaned Copperwaite's dream personae.
Sharpe's soothing voice took hold again, lulling her back to dream, a silly dream actually, in which they examined her dead body, dead by the hand of the Crucifier.
“We can't overlook anything, Stuart. Suppose this isn't a fourth victim but a first, a copycat killing? Toxicology tests have to be made to rule out every contingency.”
“Wretched business… So, what do we do? Wait for results until a fifth victim bobs up at yet another body of water somewhere?”
“We're in a rather awkward position, which often dictates a man do nothing. But I rather fancy we must act and act now.”
“How so?”
“We go find this Dr. Coran, and we bring her back to England with us. We begin with her superiors.”
“We've a problem with that, Sharpie.”
“Oh? And what's that?”
“Dr. Jessica Coran is already here. This is her body, Richard! Don't you recognize her?”
Suddenly, Jessica started at the full sight of her face at their feet, and she instantly felt the weight of Holcraft's book on her lap back here in the plane, in the real world. Her dream was instantly replaced when she opened her eyes and focused on the pages opened to asphyxia deaths.
Jessica couldn't recall having opened the book to these pages, only marking them for later reading. But she also realized that she had been lulled into sleep by the sound of wind over a wing at her ear; an airplane-induced sleep on one side, Richard Sharpe's voice on the other.
She felt awful, having fallen asleep to the sound of Sharpe's tale. She'd been battling and failing miserably, with an ongoing case of insomnia using every cure known to modem science.
Now she wondered how much of her dream of Copperwaite and Sharpe had come of their words and how much her imagination. Either way, they had a most fascinating case on their hands, and she hoped to play a major role in its resolution.
“So, Doctor, you're back with us,” Sharpe said matter-of-factly.
“Please, accept my sincerest apology. I haven't had much sleep lately, and the plane hum and your voices conspired to lull me to sleep. I do feel awful.”
“Not at all.”
She wondered how much she had injured his pride. He pretended that nothing of consequence had happened, while she wondered what he and Copperwaite had said of her while she'd dozed.
“Coihby's and Burton's bodies were snatched from the water,” Copperwaite ventured.
Sharpe glared at his partner.
“That's where Richard left off with you,” Copperwaite explained himself.
Sharpe frowned and gave in. “Katherine O'Donahue was meant to be left in water. We surmised that the killer was interrupted, frightened off, really, before he could complete the job, you understand.”
She nodded. “I see.”
“That's when the bridgeman hit the body.”
“Poor chap thought he had killed the woman,” Copperwaite added with a bit of a snicker.
Sharpe finished with, “New Scotland Yard forensics has determined that our first victim had the same toxic level of barbiturates, and that she was long dead before the Jetta ever touched her.”
Fatigue bom of insomnia stalked Jessica.
She had once kiddingly told her psychic friend and fellow FBI agent, Dr. Kim Desinor, “I fear that I am insomnia-stalked”
Kim, quick to remind Jessica of their work together in New Orleans some years back, had replied, “Better stalked by insomnia than some human monstrosity like Mad Matthew Matisak.”
True enough, Jessica now thought. Still, as a result of her insomnia, at times when she least expected, the fatigue washed floodlike over her, and Jessica found her mind and body shutting down with her tired eyes.
It-the fatigue that wouldn't be denied-came on her again like some pixie-dust-laden gnome. The jet engines, the monotony of aircraft against air current, the battering of the hull created the same lulling sound as a ship at sea… It all conspired like shadowy alchemy to make it impossible to keep her eyes open. “I'm going to sleep on it now, gentlemen, if you don't mind,” she announced in a slurred tone before placing Holcraft's volume aside altogether and closing her eyes again. She nodded off to visions of crucifixions and tattoos.
FIVE
… he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.
Somewhere in a dark place in London
He paced before the cross. He knelt at the altar in the gloom of this place and the far deeper gloom of his soul. He stood, paced more, as if pacing might focus thought. He pondered the situation. Pondered on-had pondered for hours on end now: how to present his truth to them, and eventually to every man.
His compatriot in the crucifixions watched him, watched the emotional turmoil, and he tried to ease his friend and mentor's soul, saying, “You tear at yourself with the talons of self-recrimination and perplexity. You should not have any doubts. We are doing the right thing.”
“Self-doubt? Try self-loathing and despair, wonder and waver, ponder and stagger, vacillate and hesitate, distrust and mistrust, suspect and question every step, so unsure of the whether-or-nots, the ifs, ands, ors, nors, yets, fors, sos, and buts of self-recrimination and doubt.”
“You are the right man at the right time to perform God's work here on Earth,” replied the other. “You must not doubt yourself.”
“I doubt my ability to hold the others, to spread the word. I doubt I have any ability with fact, and whether or not I can convey God's truth.”
“Perhaps such truth cannot be conveyed to others, that truth, like God and Christ, lives beyond human understanding and perception.”
“Still we must try to penetrate the obstinate others, to show them the way. Sometimes I dare ask the crucial question: Do the others even matter? Were they really a part of the grand scheme? Were they even real in the sense of reality as being truth, if indeed reality was never the truth to begin with? Perhaps the others have even less corporeal existence than the voices in my head. Perhaps the others are the voices in my head. No one, not even those who purport to understand and follow me, my dear friend, really know what lives are led inside the Crucifier's head.” He laughed and shook his head. “That's what the London press calls me now, the Crucifier. The fools could not be further from the truth.”
The friend agreed. “None of the fools of this Earth know that you were bom fated and ordained, selected as the Chosen One. Bom an archangel, really, someday to be known as both a prophet and a saint.”
“I know this much to be so. For God, and not the many other voices of doubt and dissension, has said so.”
“Perhaps in reliving the crucifixions that have gone before, in submitting each to the microscope of your keen mind, you could then explain to the others. Let them know, bring them to the same realization we hold dear-that failure is part of the process in getting from here to eternity.”
“Well said! Not one single soul has been wasted. Every single one who has gone before us to be crucified, has cleansed his or her soul in the bargain. It has been so with the O'Donahue woman and Lawrence Coibby.”
Lawrence Coibby had been given a more potent dosage of the drug, Brevital. He hadn't squirmed or moaned or whined so much as did Katherine. She'd been a big disappointment. She'd also been half conscious when the stakes were driven in, but Coibby was better about enduring the pain of it all, the drugs having dulled the sting, the suffering discomfort, the ultimate agonizing anguish that must be part of the path toward the ultimate pleasure, delight, joy, and rapture.