As to the flashes of psychic insight, she didn't entirely know where they had come from. She sensed and heard and saw images which sometimes were letters, road signs, maps leading her from one sensory input to the next, from one intuitive leap to another, and sometimes each led her along a direct line and sometimes quite the opposite. In Lennox's case, it had been a straight arrow shot. She'd heard the mewing, clicking, hum-ming sounds of a barnyard, the distinct noises of a chicken ranch coming out of the muffled, mysterious soundings given off by Lennox's body, that meaningless, whale singsong; then images had grown from the more distinct sounds. She'd seen a child everyone called Billy or Beau chasing terrified chickens, grabbing one and wringing its neck until it was dead. This had led to ugly little scenes, the same faceless girl in a frayed frock playing cruel games with some of the animals, both carnal and unnatural. She'd next seen Billy as a large, awkward girl, and then as a gargantuan woman in her mid-twenties, hard-bitten and tough. As Kim's hands had moved over the dead man-in one time and place-her mind had moved across another time and place, to a wedding, to a fight in a bedroom, to a dark closet and a pair of scissors she'd failed to use on him, to a new honeymoon during which all seemed peaceful and harmonious.
Jessica and Wardlaw had proven that all the wounds were superfluous, even cosmetic, to ape the Hearts Killer, all fabricated to mask the barbital poisoning which might well have been overlooked had not Jessica Coran been asked in on the case. Even the severing of the head had come long after death, Kim had rightly guessed, as Jessica had confirmed.
Still, Sincebaugh and Jessica, even Frank Wardlaw, had gathered as much from a quick perusal of the body and the wounds. So Kim was not surprised that Jessica, like Alex Sincebaugh and most assuredly Frank Wardlaw, knew that she had simply picked up on the same immediate clues as they had when they'd first viewed the body. Just because she possessed psychic power, this was no reason to discard common sense as a tool either.
Still, she desperately wanted Jessica to remain on her side. As for the severing of the head, it'd been the result of a motor blade on a boat, the boat filled with drunken fishermen who'd found the body.
As for Mrs. Lennox in small-town Texas near Austin, and as to her husband's mysterious disappearance, reported weeks before, Kim knew that she might well have recalled some particulars of the case from the hundreds of such cases that crossed her path in the line of duty every working day, but how she knew this was Lennox, and that he had died in the fashion he had, she could only attribute to a power she herself had no control over, nor anywhere near a complete understanding of.
She had learned to live with the power, a power without definition, without boundaries, without reason, or rather outside of the realm of the normal meaning of such words as reason, rationality, sanity, normality. What was normal about speaking to the dead and having them speak back? Yet in a very real sense, it was precisely what Dr. Jessica Coran did with her probes, DNA tests and electron microscopes.
“ Will you do it, Doctor?” asked Stephens again.
“ I would like to see an exhibition of your… your laying on of hands,” added Fouintenac, curious, pressing.
“ I will do what I can,” she began. “I will do my best but can promise nothing, gentlemen…”
The laying on of hands over the last of the Heartthrob victims yielded very little that Kim Desinor didn't already know. Even clutching the killer's strange rosary beads brought little or no new information, although the attempt exhausted her, for in the vision she once again became the killer wielding the knife. She had to be pulled from the cadaver, and so savage did her attack on the corpse become that she broke several ribs that had managed to remain intact until now.
Still, the yield was slim. She tried to explain that while she was the killer, a part of her was not given over to the monster, and did not wish to be. Still, there was so much that remained blocked; so much was shut out.
None of the principals in the room wanted to hear this, however. She finally said in a moment of desperation, “The killer uses a disguise of some sort. It's one of the reasons I can't quite get a fix on what he looks like.”
“ What kind of disguise?”
“ I don't know… something frilly and elaborate, like a stage costume.”
“ Clown costume?”
“ Some sort of Mardi Gras outfit perhaps?” pressed Stephens.
“ That's enough!” Jessica boldly stopped their questions. She had been the one to move in and grab hold of Kim and soothingly talk her down from her vision. She now wrapped her arms around Kim again. “You've already pushed Dr. Desinor to limits no one should have to endure. Allow her time to recover, please.”
“ This just isn't enough,” said Meade, disappointed along with the others.
“ We need more specific details,” added Stephens.
“ There might be another way,” suggested Landry with a pained expression, but then he quickly corrected himself, adding, “No… forget it… too much of the taxpayers' money involved, not to mention the emotional costs.”
“ What?” asked Fouintenac.
“ Go on, Carl,” said Stephens. “Spit it out.”
Jessica knew what Landry was driving at, knew it from her readings of the files, from Alex Sincebaugh's earlier requests, and yet when she spoke Carl Landry's thoughts, no one thought she had mind-reading abilities as they might have if Dr. Desinor had spoken the same words. “Exhume the first body, the first victim.”
“ Oh, I don't know… no, I think exhumation's out of the question,” replied Stephens, suddenly animated. “Papers get hold of that one, the family learns of it… we're talking major lawsuits and legal crap up to our hips.”
“ We can get the family to agree,” countered Jessica, who knew the difficulties inherent in what she said. “And if they refuse, we go ahead anyway. This is a murder investigation. They can't interfere. Nor do they have grounds for legal action. Besides, from what I read, the first victim's body was never claimed.”
“ It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” replied the deputy mayor, halfheartedly agreeing with Stephens.
“ Then we'll leave you out of it, sir,” countered Landry, who now seemed hot on the idea he'd first posited before them.
Jessica took up the slack. “If the killer knew any of his victims, if he's closely connected to any of his victims, it'd most likely be his first victim. A likely hypothesis and one worth checking into.”
“ Then we do the first. What was his name?” asked Meade. “Stimpson… Kenny Stimpson, wasn't it?”
“ Some of us think Stimpson was the second,” countered Landry.
“ You're not seriously thinking of exhuming the Surette corpse,” replied Meade, his eyes going wide while Fouintenac chewed on his lower lip and Stephens's slack-jawed expression displayed his own surprise.
“ And why not?” Jessica said. “We have good reason to believe that there was missed evidence in the case which would have pointed to its being the first Queen of Hearts kill-ing, and that was over a year ago.” Jessica pushed the point. “What is it you're afraid of? That you might've saved some lives if you'd taken this step sooner?” Kim was slowly coming around to the meaning of the words being bandied about the room. All but Wardlaw, who stood stonily against one wall, were heatedly debating whom to exhume for her to psychometrically read, but Jessica wanted her shot at the Surette body also, while Wardlaw likely wanted his mistakes to remain buried.
“ Somebody want to ask me if I want to do this?” Kim finally asked.
“ You are getting paid well for your services,” said Landry with a grim poker face.
“ There would be very little disturbance to the grave or the coffin,” countered Jessica, “since we're talking New Orleans, where everyone's buried aboveground; we merely have to unseal the crypt, and I don't truly see that family would be involved since he was buried in a paupers' yard, right? Why would there be objection now, a year later?”