Landry couldn't blame Stephens and Meade and Leroy David Fouintenac and all the other politicians, not really. All they wanted was for New Orleans to return to the days of Huey Long, to be left unmarred by the terror of a sadistic lunatic roaming the same streets where lovers strolled arm-in-arm to the strains of Louis Armstrong's jazz legacy, which poured out into the street from the numerous bars. They wanted New Orleans to be free again, free from the barbarism of an illness that was supposed only to grip bigger cities such as L.A., Chicago, Miami or New York. They wanted their gleaming cash-cow touristy world back the way it had always been before-before some maniacal butcher with an enormous appetite and an even larger blade had begun to stalk his unique prey for the pleasure of taking human hearts from their cradling homes.
All the brass wanted was a return to normalcy, a return to sanity-so far as sanity could be mustered-in the Big Easy.
While lunacy of the Mardi Gras sort was tolerated, while excessive drinking and nudity were played out on the streets of the French Quarter nightly, this other sort of lunacy simply had to end. A return to normalcy in a place where there was no norm seemed a contradiction in terms, and Landry wondered if such a day would ever come again in this town.
Kim Desinor had seen something frightening in Alex Sincebaugh, something that had brought her from her trance state, something that had also taken her breath away, all in that instant when he'd entered the autopsy room. A fire went around the man, a fire of energy and life naked to most people's perceptions but blinding to her own.
It was more than the noisy interruption, more than the anger and frustration enveloping him and dispelling the trance state she was in, sending her hurtling back to real time and place. She had sensed his presence before she had seen him; in a room full of men, she had felt him.
She now recalled where she was, finding herself surrounded by the men who had brought her here, men who'd been frightened and awed by her recent revelations. Even Jessica Coran, the other single woman in the room, the one to whom she'd hoped to become allied, perhaps even find a binding friendship with, was now hesitant with her, uncertain and distrustful of her.
Even when they believe in you, they don't accept you. She heard an inner voice giving her familiar notice, to take heed. No one here any longer saw her as one of them. And maybe that was why she liked Alex Sincebaugh, despite his obvious disdain for her in particular and for psychic investigation in general; because he wasn't about to treat her as special or unusual or as some sort of freak, she admired his genuineness.
She had previously I.D.'d the victim and given authorities a pair of names to search for, an unusual “gift” to receive from a corpse murdered so long before, but Lennox had a strong will that his killer be known and somehow that information was implanted in his every cell, the tissues crying out with their own decaying march toward oblivion, his permeating plea rising from every pore. Lennox was unusual, or at least his corpse was; the man's cadaver was a fluke, a fount of information, giving up information in such a cascading tide that she could not take it all in at once, as it was offered, as if there were a time limit involved.
Kim had suspected the single name she kept getting from Lennox was the endearment used for a girlfriend or possibly a wife… and she had told Landry to follow up, and later that night she'd telephoned Captain Landry again with the name Lennox, which came to her in a dream sequence, a kind of “aftershock” to the initial reading. But no one, Landry included, had as yet today confided anything to her about what had been done with the information.
A second “reading” of Lennox's body might reveal more evidence, or so P.C. Stephens had hoped, aside from wishing to be on hand when such revelations occurred, perhaps to show her off to the mayor's man, who'd come expressly to see the reading of the body. However, with the flood of information released initially to her, the corpse had turned stony and remained now stubbornly silent, like a granite mass, still and cold and suddenly lacking all the psi energies so powerful just the day before.
Still, with the P.C. on hand, alongside the mayor's stooge, the “show” had to go on in order to clearly determine if there was any connection to the other deaths.
At one point she was asked directly, “So, what do you think, Dr. Desinor?” It was the balding, broad-shouldered Lew Meade, New Orleans FBI Bureau Chief and one of the few men in the city who knew that she too worked for the FBI.
“ Nothing… coldness… emptiness… loneliness and isolation. This man has no connection to the other victims,” she said before Sincebaugh had burst into the room, “and my feeling is that neither did his killer, as I've earlier informed Captain Landry.”
“ So you continue to maintain that this man was killed by his wife, and that his death has no link to the Queen of Hearts killings?” asked the mayor's man, Leroy David Fouintenac, a regal and robust man who appeared to enjoy Bourbon Street's finest restaurants. He'd obviously been coached long before on what she'd imparted to Captain Carl Landry.
“ Wife, girlfriend, live-in lover,” she muttered absent mindedly as her hands searched for any hot spot on the body. Finding none, she faked it, her hands shaking like a pair of dowsing rods.
“ What is it?” asked Stephens while the others stared on.
“ All the earlier information, all corroborated… nothing new, however…”
“ With such remarkable results,” began the mayor's man, a tall healthy-looking, rugged John Carradine lookalike, “perhaps the good doctor can-”
“ What remarkable results?” Kim asked, staring now through Carl Landry. “I've heard about nothing that has come of my report.”
“ You made a number of major hits on the Lennox body, Doctor,” replied Landry. “I wanted to tell you earlier, but… well, let's just say that we wanted to be sure and these things do take time. We have a woman named Beau Lennox in custody, and she has confessed to her husband's murder. She's being extradited from Texas as we speak.”
Kim turned to stare at Jessica, silently asking, “Did you know about this?”
“ At any rate,” said Leroy David, as Meade called his political friend, as if nothing of consequence had happened, “might you now be persuaded to do a reading on one of the certain victims of the Heart-Taker? After all, that is the case you are being paid to… to help solve.”
The comment made her wonder if the mayor's people were out of the true loop here. Perhaps they weren't informed about her actually working for the FBI.
Dr. Coran came forward from the corner where she'd been standing in shadow. “Well… why not? It's not as if we have to exhume a body for the purpose; we had a victim wash up just yesterday.”
All the men looked from one to another. “It could look awkward in the press,” suggested Captain Landry. “So, unless we can keep it to this room…”
“ What the hell,” said the P.C. “This is New Orleans. Anything goes, right?”
“ Anything within reason, but this…” Landry began to counter, a certain feeling of un sureness creeping over him.
Fouintenac stopped Landry cold, staring across at him, sternly saying, “There's no reason the bloody press need get hold of any of this, is there, Carl? I say, give it a try with the last victim, but we do it in complete secrecy.”
“ What about it, Dr. Desinor?” asked the P.C.
Kim looked about the room at the faces all pinned on her reaction, expectant and hopeful. They all wanted a miracle and she was supposed to supply it. “I'll be happy to… to do my best, but I can't possibly guarantee or promise any startling revelations, as you know. Still, I will go along with whatever you gentlemen and Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw decide.”
That was how it had ended before Sincebaugh's arrival, the body of the Toulouse Street Wharf victim wheeled in only moments before Alex Sincebaugh had come crashing through the door as if to save her from both herself and the company she found herself in.