“ You're kidding.”
“ Read the report Deitze gave you. It's all there.”
“ Damn…” She thought of Lorena combing through the computer trails for any connections between or among the Manning girl and the other victims. Could it be Cahil's website? If so, it was a connection that could not be ignored.
Still, Jessica heard her father's voice caution her as they left the prison for the parking lot. Careful, Jess, what at first appears suspicious coincidence is often only a disguised version of wishful thinking.
“ You coming back to Morristown with me?”
“ I had no such plans, no.” Jessica was taken aback by the question.
“ Santiva and his agents are closing in on Cahil in Atlantic City. I can feel it. Your boss said something about getting his best forensic people to go over the man's dwelling. Search warrants are in the works. I'm working closely with your field operatives in Jersey.”
“ If you don't mind, Detective Strand, I think I'll wait for orders before I go racing off to Morristown.”
He nodded, took her hand, shook it firmly and left her at her rental car. Jessica wondered who was stranger, Strand or Deitze, and she opted for the latter. She felt anxious now to get to her hotel room in Philadelphia and look over Deitze's paper for information on this website of Cahil's. She hoped it would be the noose that would slide around the killer's throat. She thought she now knew what Deitze had been holding back. And yet he had handed it to her and asked her to read the paper in its entirety-and she would.
She opened the door to the rental, a strange feeling coming over her. She looked up to where Deitze's office window reflected the fading sunlight back at her, and the man was standing there in the orange glow, staring out at her. She climbed inside the car, tossing the case study on the seat next to her.
She revved up the car, barked its tires in reverse and rushed to the gate, wanting to get off the grounds.
SEVEN
In the one hand he is carrying a stone, while he shows the bread in the other.
Wichita, Kansas Same time
Wanda Rae Hamilton ran her fourteen-year-old fingers over the keyboard at the Wichita Public Library, searching for religious meaning from the Internet. All her life her parents had pressed religion on her, and she wanted to know what the rest of the world thought about it. She thought she might write a book on it one day.
However, the articles she had found so far proved boring until she put in “mind” and “soul” as her keywords. Suddenly the screen was alive with choices. She made her selection and the screen filled with:
Spirit or soul is like God, androgynous, without a sexual element and so in a class by itself, and it cannot be derived from any other field of knowledge. The soul has preexisted, having had its beginning in God, before its earthly and bodily time. It is the God-element within man. It rules over the earthly body as the nucleus or inmost center of man's being. “This rules,” muttered Wanda Rae. She read on:
Some believe it resides in the heart, but most concur it resides in the brain at the center of the mind. Partaking of the brain leads to partaking of the soul, and to partake of the soul, one arrives at the cosmic soul.
To learn more about the mind inside your own body and its relationship to the soul therein, and the cosmic soul of the universe, read on…
Wanda Rae Hamilton looked away from what she'd read, trying to digest it. Somehow, tearing her eyes away from the website felt like the right thing to do, that there was something underlying the seemingly benign exterior of the words that wanted to rob her of something… something she could not quite put her finger on but it was there, palpable even. Alive. And dangerous. Yet the words, while confusing, proved so tantalizing to her young mind. She wanted to understand it better. Perhaps by reading on:
The soul is the permanent ground, the continuing ent of each individual.
Wanda wrote down the strange word “ent,” thinking she must look it up later. She read on:
The soul is restored and rejuvenated to true life only after death of the body, but it does not remain long; therefore, if one wishes to 'harvest' the soul, that is by inhaling and consuming another soul, one must do so quickly. When the individual dies there is that brief time-no one knows exactly how long this time period is-when a soul leaves a brain.
Aboriginal tribes who ate the brains of their enemies believed that this soul, once consumed-if still home within the human cortex of the brain-energizes and makes powerful the feeder, so that his soul benefits by glimpses of God, the most ecstatic of all feelings on the planet…
Wanda again pulled her eyes from the text. She clicked back to the Web home page where she had come across this information. It was created by a man named Daryl Thomas Cahil. She wondered if it were true. It must be, she guessed, if it's on the Internet.
Public library, Chimera, Louisiana Same time
Total, pure, transcendent, the cosmic mind is an ocean of light and objectivity opening onto the universe. Fed from this unseen source, the brain has a limitless potential, and it certainly exceeds the capacity of the nervous system. Men like Zoraster, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Lao-tzu, Shakespeare, Blake and Byron-sages, prophets and seers-have tapped the radiance of the cosmic ocean, but these are minds above the ordinary. The rest of us must take our share of the trickle from the cosmic spring.
Greater minds than ours know that the cosmic con-sciousness-the universal soul-has shown itself to men in heightened or altered states, in moments of high intensity as in the presence of death!
Do not hesitate to take that portion of the mind you have a right to.
The fifteen-year-old Chimera high-school student backed his chair away from the computer, puzzling out just what this guy in New Jersey was saying to him. The young man was a straight-A student and a member of the Key Club; he had a civic sense of duty. He had stumbled onto the website while looking for information on how the brain worked for a school paper.
“ What's this guy saying?” he wondered aloud.
He returned to the keyboard and opened on a chat room. In the room, people were talking back and forth about brains-and how to prepare them. Some put forth recipes, and while it was ghoulish and it made the young man squirm in his seat, he imagined it all that brand of stupid humor reserved for the adolescent mind, a demographic that Rick Trewalen sometimes felt ashamed to be a part of. The words on the screen, however, became worse when he encountered a strange section of the site that spoke of the Skull-digger.
Some of the people in the chat room made the Skull-digger out to be a hero, someone capable of doing what the rest of them only dreamed about. While they fed on animal remains for their needs, he had tapped into something these nutcases referred to as the Rheil thing.
“ Can't even spell 'real,'” the kid said to the computer.
He then went to a telephone and called Information for the closest FBI office. An agent named Sorrento asked young Rick if he could forward what he had on his screen to his office.
“ Sure… sure, I can do that.”
After performing the operation, Rick was drawn back to the screen. He wanted to see more. As disgusting as the site was, he felt a strange fascination with it.
When he finally became exhausted with the Web page, he checked to see if he had any incoming messages. A few keystrokes and he was staring at his message board. Two from friends, one from the Mail-Demon. This meant he'd keyed in some wrong digit in the message to the FBI. He'd have to try all over again, and pray he'd written the address correctly. But first, he decided to contact his two friends and clue them into the weird website he'd stumbled onto.