Sharpe simply nodded. Luc Sante simply smiled. Jessica said, “We'll end the career of the Crucifier soon, Chief Inspector. He will make a mistake. He will slip up sometime, somewhere.”
“Soon, I pray.” And Boulte was gone in search of his office.“I have paperwork to my eyeballs,” Sharpe said, “and Stuart has some phone calls to make, and we have some interrogations to take. Getting some anonymous dps, mostly bogus, but we have to follow through.”
“Dr. Coran is in good hands, Inspector,” Luc Sante assured Richard. “We have much to discuss, don't we, Dr. Coran?”
“About our year 2001 theories? Yes, we do.”
“Good, then share a cab with me back to my humble cathedral. I must get back to my office on time or my secretary, Eeadna, will have my head.”
Before she could answer Luc Sante, Richard interrupted, extending his good-bye, which Jessica thought sweet. Then the somewhat subdued Copperwaite followed Sharpe out the door. Copperwaite's body language told Jessica that somehow he knew about Richard and her. It might account for his awkward standoffishness.
“I want you to come back to St. Albans with me, Dr. Coran,” requested Father Jerrard Luc Sante again as they climbed aboard the elevator and pushed for the main floor.
“I really can't, not just now. I have far too much awaiting my attention in the lab this morning,” she countered, “but I do wish to pursue this cult notion and the millennium question with you. Perhaps later?”
He smiled and nodded. “I certainly understand how very busy you must be, Dr. Coran. Forgive me my persistence, and yes, perhaps later. Call me, but for now, do walk with me out to the cab stand. I must share my views with you.”
“Absolutely,” she agreed as the elevator doors opened. Jessica walked him past security and through the glass doors.
Outside, the stark sun burned their eyes. Luc Sante hailed a cab with his black walking stick. He opened the cab door but hesitated getting in. “I do wish to consult with you on this madman you and Sharpe are pursuing.”
“Your input is much appreciated, sir, really.”
“Oh, you needn't stroke me, my dear. I'm beyond having any ego whatsoever when it comes to needing a compliment fix. No, what I need from you is a sounding wall, a confidant. You see, I've been having these hellish, nightmarish dreams of late, all having to do with this maniac. I see him as a shadow, quite vague, but quite clearly intent on a mission, a religious test or quest if you will, to please God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, all of it. To set right what is wrong in the world. Does that sound foolish?”
“Not at all, Dr. Sante.”
“Luc Sante,” he corrected her. “It is said as one name.”
Jessica felt agreement between them on the killer's motives and fantasy, but when she brought up the notion that there might be two killers rather than one, Luc Sante quickly shook his head and said, “No, not two. But perhaps an entire congregation, a cult following, along the order of any church, you see… There is always a congregation.”
“Yes, that would make sense, but convincing that many people that crucifying innocent people is a good approach to… to-”
“To inspire the Second Coming, yes. There is literally no limit to the numbers on this planet who would gladly involve themselves in a ritual designed to reanimate Christ, my dear. My God, look at what else people involved themselves with during the year 2000. When December 31, 1999, gave way to midnight, Iceland lit bonfires, England gave a nationwide pealing of bells, and your New York turned Times Square into a circus; an extravaganza of TV screens and lights, showing festivals and feasts in all twenty-four time zones, but the suicides and the cult ritual deaths followed in the news as did the orgies.”
“It stands to reason that, thanks to the X-Filing of America, most Americans will be expecting Christ to descend over the New Jersey Meadowlands in the mothership again come this January 1, 2001.”
“Right you are. The psychological countdown began long ago, and the psychological fallout from the enormity of the disappointment-should Christ not show up, should the world not end or be punished… Well, imagine it. All those religious leaders marching their followers off to seaside shores, mountaintops, holy lands, and valleys. All those survivalists in your Utah and Idaho mountains for the Day of Judgment. It may well be devastating to us all, I fear. My French grandmother had a term fitting such extravagances, fin de siecle, now a synonym for the 2000 bridge to the 2001 disillusionment.”
“Fin de siecle? End of a cycle?” she guessed.
“Quite.”
The cab stood idling, the driver growing anxious to move on, anxious for the next fare, “Father, I'm dyin' here,” he called out, sounding more like a Brooklyn cabdriver than a British one.
Father Luc Sante ignored the rude ruffian, gently reached into his inside pocket, and from deep within the folds of the cloth, he brought forth his business card, extending it toward Jessica. “Do ring me up when you can, dear. We have much to discuss.” Jessica nodded and tucked the card away in her own pocket. She shook his hand again and felt the warmth and energy coursing through his hand to hers.
She waved to the old man as he ambled into the cab, fighting with his knobby black walking stick. She wondered at the dedication of such a man, after so many years, that he should still enjoy his work, after seeing so much of the dark underbelly of humankind. This gave way to the fleeting thought that the old man himself must hold enormous fears for his clients and congregation both in the church and in his psychiatric practice. The old priest must also behold the turn of the true millennium with great trepidation, as did Jessica.
ELEVEN
If evil is an illness, then why fear approaching it as an object of scientific study, as with any mental illness?
After a long, disappointing day in the laboratory in which she found herself in a holding pattern-waiting for the results of tests from experts on matters such as the DNA findings- Jessica felt bored and anxious. She kept returning to Father Luc Sante's words both at the meeting earlier today and from his findings in his book, which she had as yet to finish reading. Richard and Shakespeare had taken up all of her time the night before. She gathered an inward, delighted smile at the memory of her enchanted evening with the dashing, handsome inspector and former colonel. He proved to be a caring, kind, gentle man. When she'd brought up his children he had gone into a kind of beatific reverie, speaking of their beautiful faces, moments of happiness snatched with them between job and visitations. He had nicknames for the two girls, Pixie-snow and Pixie-cream, he called them. “Enchanting creatures, both with diametrically opposed personalities. Neither of them are the least like me. Sweet, the two of them. Bloody treacherous we have to bring such innocence into this world.”
She hadn't pried into the causes of his breakup with his wife. She could imagine the underlying reasons, what had caused the underpinnings of the relationship to be removed. Most likely his story would prove similar to how she and James Parry had drifted apart. At first in subtle ways that go unnoticed, and then came the wrecking ball at the end of a chain, she thought.
Shaking herself from her reverie, Jessica scanned the victims' files once again. She looked up at the clock and found that time had become fleet-footed as usual. It was pushing four in the afternoon. She felt a twinge of pouting come over her, combined liberally with a dash of anger that Richard hadn't made contact. Her eye fell on Father Luc Sante's professional card which read beneath his name, Minister and Psychotherapist of the Jungian School.
Not all therapists declared themselves so openly and blatantly Jungian. This meant that Luc Sante believed in the power of the subconscious mind, that the voice of dream held potent sway over individual lives and decisions, and that-if dream therapy was right-dreams foretold, foreshadowed, and reexamined events of the waking world. Jessica knew from her own reading in the area that Carl Jung had believed dreams to be a kind of god-voice, the overseer of personal protection and good, not unlike votive god statues in primitive people's homes, not unlike praying to rosary beads or a statue of the Virgin Mary or to Christ on the cross. Jung believed the dream-god-voice to be the god of truth spoken of in the admonition “to thine own self be true.” This god was also known as intuition and instinct from within, the one voice that never lied to the individual. The voice spoke in highly charged, loaded symbols. Many of them were archetypal symbols from avatars to zoo animals, from fish, water, and womb to the death's head. Nonetheless, if the dream could be decoded as one that denied or confirmed, then the individual could safely interpret the dream one way or the other.