Alex was involved in the same process now, drawing a thumbnail sketch of the body where it lay on the pier, noting its condition down to the smallest detail. But as he worked, he continued to think about Kim Desinor and the psychic connection the city had made with her. Word was that Kim Desinor was a doctor, a psychologist, as well as a psychic, which for some made her legitimate, but proved not a thing with Alex. Word also had it that she hailed from the Miami-Dade area, where she'd done some “incredible” work with police agencies. Word had it that she was a psychometrist, that she took readings from the evidence in a case and imaged out possibilities and scenarios, which ordinary cops like Ben and Alex couldn't possibly be expected to do. Word had it that the woman was strikingly good-looking as well as “gifted” with a “sight and vision” beyond normal. Part of the word according to the cop-vine was certainly true: She was a strikingly beautiful woman with an olive tinge to her skin, full red lips and penetrating eyes, her smooth complexion and shoulder-length hair enticing.
Yes, the word was right about her features; she was a good-looking woman, as was Dr. Coran, who continued to kneel over the body, her gloved hands busily working, her black case beside her. Coran certainly looked to be a lot more in control than Wardlaw had ever been on any of the Hearts cases. Coran was taking little pieces of the victim and putting them in tubes and vials and below glass on slides; she was cutting nails and hair samples, taking scraps of flesh from here and there.
Alex watched her work over the corpse. The pier had long since come to life. Fishing boats went by in convoys, the deckhands curiously staring as each boat headed for open sea. In the distance, birds sent up a screeching racket as they followed the shrimpers. All around the death scene were signs of humming, buzzing life as cars sped across the big bridge overhead, and squealing children-like birds at play-scrambled after one another between their parents' legs amid an anxious, restless crowd waiting to board the ferryboats, some of the families now leaving for a less dubious adventure, thus causing consternation among the boat personnel, who'd pleaded with officials earlier to hasten their cleanup before the crowds arrived. But all had remained intact for Jessica Coran and for Kim Desinor's plane to touch down clear across the city.
But there was also around the crime scene an aura of ancient bloodletting, the people on the bridge and at the yellow tape line ever the Roman spectators, crying for more intensity and shock and gut-wrenching horror so they could investigate death in all its guises from the safe distance of the armchair enthusiast. Add to this the sickening sight of the mutilated corpse and the pungent aroma of the wharf itself, a place which saw the slaughter of fish and blood with every incoming fishing vessel-a demonstration which the crowd also appreciated on a daily basis here-and what did Alex expect. An aroma of decay and death forever sniffed at by people and roaming cats, like the one now representing its wild brethren as it slinked silently and unseen to the body for a curious sniff and inhale, making Jessica Coran shout, “Will somebody get this freakin' contaminating cat out of the crime scene area?”Ben deYampert reacted immediately, chasing the cat off with a kick, which gained a wave of sympathy from the onlookers, a few elderly women hissing at Ben something about cruelty.
13
Fiend behind the fiend behind the fiend…
Mastodon with mastery, monster with an ache At the tooth of the ego. the dead drunk judge: Where so ever Thou art our agony shall find Thee Enthroned on the darkest altar of our heartbreak Perfect, Beast, brute, bastard. O dog my God!
Dr. Kim Desinor recalled the last time she'd come down to the Toulouse Street Wharf area, barely thirteen years old. She was in the company of a busload of others from the two schools at St. Domitilla's, the boys' and the girls' reformatories. It was a rare occasion, an event, a field trip. They had been given an opportunity to go aboard and take an excursion on a paddle wheeler like the one now over her shoulder, only hers was called the Creole River Princess and was far less elegant, and along with her was a young man whose features and sexual proclivities were not completely unlike those of the victim over which Jessica Coran was now working. The young man's name was Edward Mantleboro, and he had his sister in tow, a strange and silent girl who stared not at you but through you. Edward had introduced her as Edwina, a twin sister, although they didn't look very much alike. Edwina was unpleasantly swollen, her skin wrinkled badly for one so young, her eyes puffy, as if some fluid were below the surface, but it was her distant irises which seemed lacking soul that had most disturbed and intrigued the young Kim. She'd forgotten about the queer girl, along with so much else in this city, until now, and she wondered, why now? What brought such fragments of memory to the surface? Was it her surroundings. New Orleans, the wharf, the steamboat or the vacancy in the dead man's eyes? Perhaps it was a combination of them all.
Edward, the young boy, by contrast to his odd sister, seemed to possess all that his sister lacked: health, vitality, soul, charm, wit, sensitivity, and he liked and flirted with young Kim, in fact spending most of the trip hanging and hovering about her, often apologizing for having been saddled with his sister, while Edwina spent most of the trip either staring out at the river or at Kim, as if she'd like to set fire to her. Kim found it both disturbing and interesting that the other girl, without really knowing her, harbored such an unreasonable hatred for her. It had been a memory that Kim had successfully put away until now, but here it came galloping back at her like an angry Headless Horseman, like an indelible mark that had never gone from her memory at all.
She wondered what had ever become of Edward and the girl, who had both also attended St. Domitilla's, he in the boys' school, she in the girls' school. Kim had thought them both odd when Edward, perhaps fifteen at the time, had confided that they weren't parentless or abandoned, but that their parents had placed them into the orphanage to be “straightened out.” He'd muttered something about it all having been “bought and paid for.”
The memories were vague and confusing now, but the Toulouse Street Wharf brought back vivid images. She hadn't exactly been on a date with Edward Mantleboro. It had been more like two desperate young people looking for someone to be with and cling to. That was how their friendship had begun, before it turned into something bigger and more confusing, and before Edwina had attacked Kim with a broken bottle in the shower.
Kim still had the scar from the deepest wound to her upper back, which had required eight stitches. Edwina had later disappeared, no explanation given, and life at St. Domitilla's had gone grinding along without her, much to Kim's relief.
As for Edward, one day after her fourteenth birthday, she'd agreed to secretly meet him in the anteroom off the cafeteria located between the two buildings. Far into the night, refugees from a painful world, they'd lain in one another's arms, oblivious to the hardwood floor, and Edward had made love to her. But soon after, he too had vanished from the school, never to be seen or heard from again. She'd never told anyone about the incident except for her aunt, the only friend she could trust.
She had since had relationships with men, but most were frightened off by her powers of “darkness.” Men, for the most part, didn't want a complicated woman, and being gifted or cursed with psi energies was one hell of a complication in a relationship. Looking around the pier now, she recalled a similar romance and an excursion boat in Florida when she lived in the Miami-Dade area. John Keys was his name, and he was her watch commander when she was a police detective there, when she'd been fairly successful at masking her potent ESP. At first John was delightful, a real prince whose acerbic wit never failed to make her laugh, and he was so good to her and so very shy about asking her out that first time. Once they had arranged their schedules and gone out, it was necessarily a daylight cruise out and back in the cerulean waters leading toward the placid Caribbean, because neither of them could get an evening free. It had been one of those blindingly bright, brilliant days only found off the waters of Florida, a lingering ocean breeze sweeping over the blue calm, the only clouds far off to the east, menacingly aligned against the crystal clarity of blue on blue sky all around them, the huge army of clouds awaiting the call to battle, yet strangely holding back for them and them alone. The battle came later that night when a terrible tropical depression brought on a downpour the likes of which the city hadn't seen since Hurricane Andrew in '92. But that day, as they'd disappeared like a pair of Huckleberry Finns aboard the cruise ship Sun God's Dream, floating slowly beyond sight of Miami's crime-ridden streets and its golden skyline, she had felt closer to John Keys than anyone she had ever known, and his embrace had been so very warm and comforting. She had fallen deeply in love with Jack, as she'd come to call him, but rumors had started circulating about the Department after an unusual bust and collar-not rumors about them, but rumors about her; rumors about how she'd conducted herself, how she'd second-guessed her partner and how bloody accurate she'd been, and how she could read minds.