The taunting started all over again, but this time they were much closer to the truth than they had been before. Jack didn't know from personal experience that Rebecca was sensitive and special, but he sensed it, and he wanted to be closer to her. He would have given just about anything to be with her — not merely near her; he'd been near her five or six days a week, for almost ten months — but really with her, sharing her innermost thoughts, which she always guarded jealously.
The biological pull was strong, the stirring in the gonads; no denying it. After all, she was quite beautiful.
But it wasn't her beauty that most intrigued him.
Her coolness, the distance she put between herself and everyone else, made her a challenge that no male could resist. But that wasn't the thing that most intrigued him, either.
Now and then, rarely, no more than once a week, there was an unguarded moment, a few seconds, never longer than a minute, when her hard shell slipped slightly, giving him a glimpse of another and very different Rebecca beyond the familiar cold exterior, someone vulnerable and unique, someone worth knowing and perhaps worth holding on to. That was what fascinated Jack Dawson: that brief glimpse of warmth and tenderness, the dazzling radiance she always cut off the instant she realized she had allowed it to escape through her mask of austerity.
Last Thursday, at the poker game, he had felt that getting past Rebecca's elaborate psychological defenses would always be, for him, nothing more than a fantasy, a dream forever unattainable. After ten months as her partner, ten months of working together and trusting each other and putting their lives in each other's hands, he felt that she was, if anything, more of a mystery than ever….
Now, less than a week later, Jack knew what lay under her mask. He knew from personal experience. Very personal experience. And what he had found was even better, more appealing, more special than what he had hoped to find. She was wonderful.
But this morning there was absolutely no sign of the inner Rebecca, not the slightest hint that she was anything more than the cold and forbidding Amazon that she assiduously impersonated.
It was as if last night had never happened.
In the hall, outside the study where Nevetski and Blaine were still looking for evidence, she said, “I heard what you asked them — about the Haitian.”
“So?”
“Oh, for God's sake, Jack!”
“Well, Baba Lavelle is our only suspect so far.”
“It doesn't bother me that you asked about him,” she said. “It's the way you asked about him.”
“I used English, didn't I?”
“Jack—”
“Wasn't I polite enough?”
“Jack—”
“It's just that I don't understand what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” She mimicked him, pretending she was talking to Nevetski and Blaine: “Has either of you noticed anything odd about this one? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything strange? Anything weird?”
“I was just pursuing a lead,” he said defensively.
“Like you pursued it yesterday, wasting half the afternoon in the library, reading about voodoo.”
“We were at the library less than an hour.”
“And then running up there to Harlem to talk to that sorcerer.”
“He's not a sorcerer.”
“That nut.”
“Carver Hampton isn't a nut,” Jack said.
“A real nut case,” she insisted.
“There was an article about him in that book.”
“Being written about in a book doesn't automatically make him respectable.”
“He's a priest.”
“He's not. He's a fraud.”
“He's a voodoo priest who practices only white magic, good magic. A Houngon. That's what he calls himself.”
“I can call myself a fruit tree, but don't expect me to grow any apples on my ears,” she said. “Hampton's a charlatan. Taking money from the gullible.”
“His religion may seem exotic—”
“It's foolish. That shop he runs. Jesus. Selling herbs and bottles of goat's blood, charms and spells, all that other nonsense—”
“It's not nonsense to him.”
“Sure it is.”
“He believes in it.”
“Because he's a nut.”
“Make up your mind, Rebecca. Is Carver Hampton a nut or a fraud? I don't see how you can have it both ways.”
“Okay, okay. Maybe this Baba Lavelle did kill all four of the victims.”
“He's our only suspect so far.”
“But he didn't use voodoo. There's no such thing as black magic. He stabbed them, Jack. He got blood on his hands, just like any other murderer.”
Her eyes were intensely, fiercely green, always a shade greener and clearer when she was angry or impatient.
“I never said he killed them with magic,” Jack told her. “I didn't say I believe in voodoo. But you saw the bodies. You saw how strange—”
“Stabbed,” she said firmly. “Mutilated, yes. Savagely and horribly disfigured, yes. Stabbed a hundred times or more, yes. But stabbed. With a knife. A real knife. An ordinary knife.”
“The medical examiner says the weapon used in those first two murders would've had to've been no bigger than a penknife.”
“Okay. So it was a penknife.”
“Rebecca, that doesn't make sense.”
“Murder never makes sense.”
“What kind of killer goes after his victims with a penknife, for God's sake?”
“A lunatic.”
“Psychotic killers usually favor dramatic weaponsbutcher knives, hatchets, shotguns…”
“In the movies, maybe.”
“In reality, too.”
“This is just another psycho like all the psychos who're crawling out of the walls these days,” she insisted. “There's nothing special or strange about him.”
“But how does he overpower them? If he's only wielding a penknife, why can't his victims fight him off or escape?”
“There's an explanation,” she said doggedly. “We'll find it.”
The house was warm, getting warmer; Jack took off his overcoat.
Rebecca left her coat on. The heat didn't seem to bother her any more than the cold.
“And in every case,” Jack said, “the victim has fought his assailant. There are always signs of a big struggle. Yet none of the victims seems to have managed to wound his attacker; there's never any blood but the victim's own. That's damned strange. And what about Vastagliano-murdered in a locked bathroom?”
She stared at him suddenly but didn't respond.
“Look, Rebecca, I'm not saying it's voodoo or anything the least bit supernatural. I'm not a particularly superstitious man. My point is that these murders might be the work of someone who does believe in voodoo, that there might be something ritualistic about them. The condition of the corpses certainly points in that direction. I didn't say voodoo works. I'm only suggesting that the killer might think it works, and his belief in voodoo might lead us to him and give us some of the evidence we need to convict him.”
She shook her head. “Jack, I know there's a certain streak in you..”
“What certain streak is that?”
“Call it an excessive degree of open-mindedness.”
“How is it possible to be excessively open-minded? That's like being too honest.”
“When Darl Coleson said this Baba Lavelle was taking over the drug trade by using voodoo curses to kill his competition, you listened… well. you listened as if you were a child, enraptured.”