Darkest Instinct

SIX

The Following Day

C. David Eddings looked once again over the obituary news of the day, the page for which he was responsible. All looked well except for the column on George T. Flagler, a descendent of the great Flagler who had brought the railroad to Florida when Miami was just a trading post on the great waterway, a speck on the map. It was hardly enough space for a relative of this great man who had opened up a wilderness to the outside world, the wilderness which was Florida in the late 1800s. True, from what he read of the reporter’s notes, the third-generation Flagler had done little to distinguish himself in his own lifetime, living off the fortunes won by his forebears. All the same, some show of respect was required and the young reporter, Dabney, hadn’t understood the importance of the history behind the man’s name, that this man’s ancestor had brought the first tentative signs of civilization to Ormond Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and even Key West with his railroad. For his part, Junior had sold shares in a fledgling and faltering land development company, so maybe placing the man’s obit at the top, first column on the page, smacked a bit of the “old boy” syndrome the South was already so well- known for. But Eddings didn’t think so.

“ Be damned if C. David Eddings’ll ever add to that total fabrication by bowing to it! I’m not in the business of fostering misconceptions or carrying on stereotypes, no,” he mumbled to himself, as was his habit while he worked.

The habit was so well-worn now that only the greenest of office workers and reporters might stare; everyone else took it in stride, along with the noise of several hundred computer monitors, all humming their chorus of meaningless gibberish.

C. David Eddings was the obit page editor and the last man to be called into an editorial board meeting, but today he looked up to see that Merrick, the editor in chief of the Miami Herald, was gesturing him to follow the pack into the boardroom.

“ Wonder what’s up,” he said to himself, checking the wall clock and seeing that it’d just turned 8:06 a.m.

“ We got another sweetheart letter from this freak who’s killing girls up and down the goddamn coast,” said Bill Lawrence as he whizzed by. “Come on, Eddings, you don’t wanna miss this.”

There was something ugly and unsettling, yet terribly exciting about what was going on with this serial killer everyone was calling the Night Crawler. Unsettling was the best word for it, like someone had taken a cold, coarse, rusty pair of pliers and reached into Eddings’s stomach and torn at the core of him, at the soul of his being, rocking his world on its axis-mainly because he found that he enjoyed the excitement of it; something like a strange, prurient interest had hold of him, and since the paper had begun reporting the disappearances and the subsequent discoveries of the bodies, he found himself unable really to get enough. This fact and his reflection over it disturbed him greatly. It was a side of himself he had not known existed. He found himself sitting up nights, wondering what the killer was like, who he was, where he was at that moment, why he was doing it, how he did it-curious about each gory detail. He dared not share his newfound fascination with anyone, but keeping it bottled within had become more and more difficult.

He saw death every day in his obits, dealt with it as a sausage grinder might sausage, but there was something sotitillating, so invitingly dirty about this whole Night Crawler affair that it must be like what was at the heart of most illicit love affairs, he guessed. Yet this was far different, at the other end of the spectrum of emotions, he reasoned, and it had continued to confuse and agitate him, this dangerous, pseudonymous side of himself that he’d discovered, this sick interest he had taken both in the case of the Night Crawler and in the monster himself, as well as in what he did to the women. What kind of man was he? Was he of the same species as Eddings? The same race? How could he do such terrible and vicious things to lovely young women? What did it do for him? Did it make him forget who he was? Did it make him feel taller, larger, stronger, immortal-what? And why was he sending newsy little tidbits about himself to the Heraldl

The short, stubby obit page editor snatched at the loops on his suspenders and straightened his pants, hitching them up before he threw on his coat and stepped toward the big boardroom. He was conscious of the stares and the chattering going on all around the bull pen. Word had leaked, as it always does across a newsroom floor, and everyone knew what the emergency meeting was all about. Eddings felt like a snoop, a prurient meddler, his guilt rising as he moved from his desk to the juicy information which awaited him inside the newspaper boardroom.

C. David Eddings, no matter what his small stable of reporters called him behind his back, would be at that meeting, just as he’d been involved in the first such meeting. He’d be there because death was involved, and death reporting was very much a part of what he did; he and the city desk editor were in constant contact, because today’s headline, Youth Shot in Drive-by on US1, was tomorrow’s obituary column. As Merrick was fond of saying, “One hand’s gotta know what the other’s doing at all times.” Eddings routinely countered with, “One foot in the grave had to know where the other foot was at, at all times,” after which he’d snort and laugh. Perhaps it was for this reason that other journalists considered him a ghoul, an undertaker who used words rather than a shovel. Still, he was in. In on the biggest, breakingest story to come along in years. How many others could say they were on the inside of the biggest manhunt in the history of the city?

Instinct, however, had told him to again, like the last time, keep his mouth shut and his eyes open during the meeting. The letter from the killer was passed through everyone’s hands that last time-even the cooking and accent page editors-before it had finally reached C. David Eddings’s fingertips. He didn’t expect any change in the pecking order today. Still, he was in; he was part of it all. How many men in Miami could say that?

As he filed into the room behind the other editors, C. David Eddings saw that Glenn Merrick’s secretary, Sally Hodges, a busty, middle-aged woman for whom Eddings had nursed a crush since coming to the paper, stood in back of Merrick with an overhead projector, replacing a blown light, it appeared. And next Eddings noted that there were strangers among them-very stem and serious looking customers, a dark-skinned handsome man and a strikingly interesting woman with silky auburn hair which created a fishnet and lattice effect about her shoulders, hooding a pair of dark, alluring eyes.

Sally looked up from what she was doing to give Eddings one of her bejeweled smiles. Eddings wondered if she was smiling out of politeness or genuine interest. He’d never gotten up the nerve to find out.

Merrick began by introducing their guests: Eriq Santiva, chief investigator for the FBI, and Dr. Jessica Coran, M.E., FBI. Merrick informed them all that Santiva and Coran were now spearheading the manhunt for the Night Crawler.

“‘ Bout time we got some clout in on this.”

“ Damn sure not going to see any results from the Miami morons in uniform,” said another.

“ Welcome to our city,” said the lone female editor. “I hope you don’t judge us by what’s going on out there in the streets, or by what’s said in this room.”

“ Of course not,” Santiva said, nodding and smiling at the assembled editors. “I wish to thank you all, and especially your editor-in-chief, Mr. Merrick, for showing such civic duty, calling me the moment anything having to do with the killer broke.”

Even Eddings got the underlying message, that Santiva and Merrick had had a serious talk at some previous point, and that Merrick dare not screw around with Santiva on this matter.

Jessica Coran quickly added, “Without your cooperation, gentlemen, catching this fiend will be far more difficult.”

“ What’re the chances he’ll be stopped?”

“ Just how far along are you in the investigation?”

“ Got any suspects? Anyone good?”

The questions were like live ammo coming at the FBI people. “We’re not here for a news briefing, gentlemen!” shouted Glenn Merrick over his people. Nancy Yoder, the accent page editor, replied with an explosive, “Oh, pooh!” Merrick next announced what they all already knew, then asked that Jessica hold up the note from the killer for all to see. She reached into her black valise and pulled forth a plate of glass which had been sealed to a second plate. Between the two plates lay the now flattened communique, the second to have been sent to the Herald by the Night Crawler. The ridges where it had been folded and stuffed into an envelope could still be seen. Jessica held up a cellophane bag which housed the envelope. The editors studied both the note and the envelope from their seats.

The killer’s note was on ordinary white bond typing paper; nothing special or of particular importance there, and certainly no helpful, easy or telltale clues such as a mast or letterhead, though the postage seal on the envelope told them it had been forwarded from Key Biscayne, extremely close to the location of the last two missing girls believed to have fallen prey to the killer, a girl by the name of Tammy Sue Sheppard and another named Kathy Harmon.

“ This time we don’t piss off the authorities, right, Agent Santiva?” suggested Merrick. “We work with you, in full cooperation, not against you.” He eyeballed his people and added, ‘ That means we keep our goddamned mitts off the note, and-”

“ Whataya getting in return for our-” began Lawrence, who was instantly cut off by Merrick.

“ And there’s no time lapse between when one of these damned notes appears on the city desk and when we contact Agent Santiva here. Understood, gentlemen? This is how we react to a city emergency. Understood, everyone?”

“ We get an exclusive, Glenn? I mean when the case is solved, right?” asked Lee Blake, the city desk editor.

“ We have had assurances to that effect, and I’m not going to jeopardize that in any way. That means no leaks from here, either. I mean you don’t tell your wives, your lovers, your mothers, your fathers, your priests or your bookies; you got that?” Merrick fairly screamed the order.

“ What’re they saying, Glenn? That it’s somehow our fault this creep’s still at large? Screw that shit.” muttered Blake from around his cigarette, his small eyes sunken amid the heavy face and leathery skin.

“ Wasn’t your fault that last time, Glenn,” soothed Lawrence. “None of us had any reason to believe the authenticity of that first letter when it arrived on Blake’s desk that day.”

“ Are we any surer of the authenticity of this one?” asked Nancy Yoder, her hands rising skyward.

“ Well, it’s definitely the; ame handwriting; we’ve had an expert-Santiva here-tel. us so, and since the cops and the FBI are operating as if the first communique is indeed from the Night Crawler, we’re doing the same here,” explained Merrick.

“ Why not copy the damned thing so we can all have a working copy, Glenn?” asked city editor Blake.

“ Yeah,” agreed some of the others.

“ What’s with you people?” Merrick barked. “Do I have to paint a picture for you?”

“ That might help,” replied a belligerent Blake. “It’s our story, Glenn.” “G’dam’it to hell, I don’t want copies of this thing getting all over the freakin’ building and finding its way over to the bloody Times like the other bastard thing did before we’re given the go-ahead from Agent Santiva to print it, all right, Lee? And God save the son of a bitch who’s selling us out if I ever catch ‘im.”

“ Paranoia becomes you, Glenn.”

“ It’s got me this far.”

“ Where’s the letter postmarked from?” asked Nancy Yoder.

“ Yeah,” agreed Lawrence. “Last one was from goddamn Palm Coast.”

“ This one’s in our backyard-actually, our front yard, if you want the truth,” replied Merrick.

“ Where, damnit?”

“ Key Biscayne, across the bridge.” Merrick’s blunt reply sobered the editors. The bridge was right outside their window. “Christ,” muttered Lawrence. Yoder took a deep breath, grabbed for her water glass and gulped.

Blake began to grind his teeth, gnashing like an angry woodchuck before saying, “Isn’t that where that teen disappeared from the other night, Key Biscayne, out at Razzles?”

“ That’s right. We’re speaking to witnesses on that situation now,” Santiva assured them.

“ Eye witnesses?”

“ Anyone actually see this guy?”

“ Can we talk to the witnesses?”

The reporters’ questions rifled anew.

“ We haven’t as yet determined the reliability of those involved; they’re emotionally involved-young friends of the missing girl,” Santiva explained, holding his hands up as if under arrest. “But as soon as we know something worthwhile… useful, that is… we promise to cooperate with you as you have cooperated so generously with us.”

“ That’s our deal, gentlemen, lady,” said Merrick to his people.

While the chatter continued, Jessica carefully resettled the glassed-in note into her black valise along with the cellophane bag holding the envelope.

It was earmarked to travel, within the hour and by jet, to Quantico, where the psychic fingertips of Dr. Desinor would pass over the physically and psychically “clean” document before it was to be turned over to the Documents Division for further graphoanalysis and scientific analysis. Santiva had taken extreme care in his preliminary and cursory viewing of the note to establish its genuine nature, keeping it under glass the whole time. It was duplicated through the glass for Merrick’s secretary Sally, who’d created a single opaque replica.

Sally now closed the curtains, dimmed the lights and flicked on an overhead projector, the beam creating a square window of light against the north wall. She next placed the opaque replica of the letter onto the overhead and the alleged words of the killer were beamed against the wall. It read:

“ Whataya all make of it?” asked Merrick.

Lee Blake studied it and sighed heavily before pronouncing the little ditty, as he called it, in incredibly bad taste, “and even worse poetry.”

“ Looks like something maybe Jeffrey Dahmer might’ve penned before he was wasted in prison last year,” suggested Nancy Yoder. ‘“Cept he’d have said boys instead of whores.”

“ Wrong,” muttered Eddings, unable to keep silent a moment longer. “I know this poem, and the killer’s use of it is really quite… quite… ingenious.”

But Eddings was being talked over by the others, ignored by the others. Bill Lawrence had been visibly shivering in reaction to what he’d read across the beige wall. Merrick looked for responses from each of the three additional editors around the table, but none were speaking in sentences, just a lot of grunts and “jeezes.” Each followed suit until Merrick was left again to look to C. David Eddings, a man he’d been trying to build a case against so he might fire the twerp before any chance of a pension kicked in.

“ Well, damnit, what’re you trying to say, Eddings? Eddings?” pressed Merrick while he smelled blood. Eddings took a moment for a second glance at the enlarged document on the wall. Even Jessica and Santiva, outsiders, could sense the tension between Merrick and Eddings.

Bill Hynek, the sports editor, attempted to reprieve Eddings by clearing his throat and saying, “Looks like the guy’s a loony, Glenn, a real crazoid, if you ask me.”

“ You mean the author of this trash or Eddings?” teased Merrick in a cold and irreverent manner.

Eddings mouthed the words off the wall a third time, ending with, “I know these words… this poem. I know it, Glenn. It’s familiar to me…”

Merrick’s voice filled with venomous rancor now. “What in hell’re you talking about, Eddings?”

“ Hellering,” replied the small, balding man.

The others instantly attacked the little man.

“ Who’s hell-raising?”

“ What’s a hellering?”

“ Is that anything like a herring?”

“ A red herring in this case, no doubt.”

Lee nervously laughed and said, “Eddings is a hell- raiser, aren’t you, C. David? Eddings, you got to lay off those liquid breakfasts.”

“ What would you know about herrings?” Nancy Yoder nastily remarked, causing more laughter.

“ Hellering,” he repeated. “I’m telling you this is a poem, circa something like 1938 and written by e. j. hellering, who was first to use no capitals, even before our American counterpart, e. e. cummings, did it. He was what you might call a little-understood, little-read English poet, but in his day, he had a large underground following. His poetry was not considered fit for polite society.”

“ I can see why,” replied Hynek as the others stared down the long table at C. David Eddings.

“ A little-known English poet,” chanted Lawrence and Yoder together.

“ Oh, yeah,” chimed another as if he’d known all along.

Merrick said, “You mean this guy can’t even be original? He’s copying a poem out of a book?”

“ All I know is that it’s from an entirely lowercase poem by e.j. hellering, one I think entitled ‘all sacrifice to the stars.’ “

Jessica and Eriq were instantly interested in what C. David Eddings had to say, each on edge now, Jessica asking Eddings to continue. “Well… what I remember of it…” Eddings caught the look of pride in Sally’s eyes, glinting in the semidark- ened room. “I mean, I believe it has four verses, maybe five.”

“ You think you can get your hands on a copy?” asked Santiva.

“ Sure… sure, the library’s full of hellering.”

Nancy Yoder twittered again at this.

Merrick ordered, “Do it then, now.”

“ Try the Internet, Eddings,” suggested Blake. “It’s the quickest way to information.”

“ Not bloody likely,” replied C. David. “If they’ve got any of hellering listed, it’d probably be his more-favored poems. This one’s fairly arcane and a little too strange for even the ditto heads-the Internet dudes and dudettes.”

Eddings stiffly stood and marched from the room, daring only a quick glance back at Sally as Santiva and Jessica followed the little round man out, Jessica wondering if the romance was just blossoming or if it had been kindled earlier.

“ I was a student of e.j. hellering’s work and dark style when I was at the university,” explained Eddings.

“ Oh, and where was that?”

“ Northwestern, just north of Chicago… very elitist, snobbish place really, unless you happened to be in a fraternity or sorority, neither of which I qualified for, of course. At any rate, I studied modern British literature, which meant anything after 1899. Hellering falls under that umbrella, and I became quite enamored with the man’s poignant ability with words; quite lovely, really, and I suppose the use of the lower-case letters-which he’d come to be known for-piqued my curiosity.”

Jessica nodded, saying, “I remember now… e. j. hellering.”

“ Wasn’t at all hellering’s idea, you know…”

“ What’s that?” asked Eriq.

“ Using lower-case letters throughout his poetry.”

“ Really?” Jessica explained to Eriq that e. j. hellering had used lower-case letters in his signature as well as throughout his poetry as a kind of trademark, the same way that e. e. cummings had.

“ It was a publisher’s idea, something to put a spark into a dying art form-or rather to gather in more sales,” explained Eddings. “Same publisher, two sides of the Atlantic.”

They were inside the mammoth Miami Public Library, where the solemnity of the place was at direct odds with the bright, even blinding sunshine pouring through overhead skylights. The architecture reminded her of the airport. The large, open area at the center of the library was filled with palmetto plants and palm trees, basking beneath the skylights. People going about their interests created a tapestry of tap-dancing noises along the marble floor. Eddings went directly for the nearest unoccupied computer terminal. He brought up the screen he wanted and began his search through the mammoth archives for the long-forgotten poet. Jessica held her breath for a moment, believing hellering would have so much dust on him, there would be no way he could be brought to light.

But in the next instant, with C. David Eddings pounding rapidly from one key to the next, his mouse going at lightning speed, he announced, “Aha! Ahh, here it is.”

Eddings was obviously enjoying his sudden and surprising celebrity as the poetry guru or Obi Wan Kenobi of the moment. He gathered the call numbers with his Citizen pen, scrawling them down on a scrap of paper, and again they were off, this time for the basement and the stacks.

Eddings went directly to the book, as if this entire moment had been choreographed many times over. He smiled up at them as he flattened out the book of poems, and went right to the exact page to reveal the full poem and its title. Jessica and Eriq stared for a full five minutes at the complete poem, entitled “to breathe as’t’.”

“ This is incredible. Let’s make a copy,” suggested Santiva.

Jessica, annoyed, trying to read the verses, shushed him and returned to the poem. It read: to breathe as’t’ by e.j. hellering son of t whilst t feeds on feeds the soul those hungry of woman for touch, in the theatre… t requires little much: in the theatre your sweet jasmine of want gone sour, and sacrifice, your sweet belle whilst t strikes gone dully silent out for the highest in her last hour calibre of moment: sacrificed twice when breath and thrice and life are one. and given power each sacrificed unto t in her final breath as he deems as t deems all the whores to be… all the whores to be… t gives back t tenderly floats all the little girls all the little girls in the sea in the sea an opportunity… as opportunity… opportunity to be opportunity to be if only for a singular if only for one magnificent moment inclusive moment the daughter of t the daughter of t and to breathe as he… and to breathe as he… when audience cries, lungs full with venom and foam and lies, moments before she dies, an applause, a bow, arise! for t smiles down from taurus’s distant eyes! as t deems them all to be flush with his breath, so washed by his empowering hand they will be flowering and cleansed.

“ Jeez, and you say this was written in 1930?” asked Jessica.

“ Late thirties, thirty-seven or — eight.”

“ Here I thought sheer hatred toward women was a more modern development, along with gang rapes, wife battering and nasty lyrics out of rap groups like 2 Live Crew,” Jessica confessed.

“ A man ahead of his time, perhaps,” suggested Eriq.

“ Oh, no… no… no, hellering was a gentle man, a kindhearted man. This hardly reflects his feelings, but rather is a lament of twisted souls which he simply crystallized in a moment of artistry.”

“ You’re saying he could write this stuff objectively? That he didn’t feel the rage that he wrote about? Or that he was in control of that rage?”

“ I’m saying all of the above.” Eddings nervously wiped sweat from his brow. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”

“ Yes, it is uncomfortable,” Jessica agreed.

“ You’re a very lovely woman, Dr. Coran,” he near- whispered.

“ Tell me more about this guy hellering.”

“ He was a small man in stature, extremely bookish, not… not unlike myself; thin, however. A quiet man, no doubt, extremely controlled-tightly wired, as they say… but he had fun, his own brand of fun…”

“ Really? Then you see this poem as an exception to his major work?”

“ Oh, quite certainly. Although no doubt every man feels some rage toward women, as every woman feels some rage against men-and deservedly so, wouldn’t you say?”

The remark caught Jessica’s breath as she contemplated Jim Parry, how much she both loved and hated him at the moment. “Yes, I suppose I might say as much.”

“ But you are in control of your faculties, and you would not murder a man because of the arrogance or stupidity of his sex, am I right?”

“ Agreed.”

“ Like the artist, you do something constructive with the rage,” Eddings continued, going to a nearby copy machine to make duplicates of the poem.

She followed while Eriq, tiring of the little obit man, began to wander the lush stacks and stare at the old pictures on the walls.

Jessica shadowed Eddings and asked, “Do you mean then that the artist releases his anger in the process of, say, sculpting, painting, writing?”

“ The true artist works with his emotions-all of them, the entire cascade of feelings, don’t you see? Both light and dark are released through and reflected in his art.”

“ Released… reflected?”

“ Yes… placed through a prism, released out into the world and out of himself, perhaps to save or at least hold on to his sanity.”

She nodded and probed further. “And you’re saying this is a healthy exercise?”

“ Oh, extremely… like writing out one’s anger or fears for the purpose of releasing the demons. Excellent and cheap therapy, if only people knew.”

She thought of her sessions with Dr. Donna LeMonte, which had come to an abrupt end when Donna decided that seeing her any longer would only turn the psychiatrist’s couch into a crutch. At first Jessica had been infuriated, but it had actually proven beneficial when they struck a compromise and Donna began accepting her letters as therapy, an outpouring of all her grief, guilt, remorse and anger over the years since she’d become an FBI agent.

“ The criminally insane, however, don’t know what to do with art; they must have a real time forum, a tangible medium, something other than clay to carve on, is that it?” she asked.

“ Uncontrolled, unfettered madmen make poor music, the Mozarts and the van Goghs notwithstanding. The criminally insane take artistic license beyond sanity.”

“ And therefore are no longer involved in pure art but in a tainted, compromised danse macabre wherein victim becomes medium, weapons tools and materials to reach not creation but destruction?”

“ Creation is turned inside out, yes; destruction becomes the demented means to creation, and that is why he is no longer a true artist, for now he is working less with art and the stuff of dream and nightmare to mirror his soul as he is with real time and real victims, and art becomes skewered on the lance of insanity.”

“ You’ve given a lot of thought to this, haven’t you?” she asked.

“ I have…” He hesitated. “Since these killings began, yes, I have.”

“ So, if I’m understanding you… the artist on a subconscious level may feel, for instance, that his mother was a victim to his father all his life, and this incenses him as much toward his mother as his father?”

The final copy Eddings needed required another dime, but he didn’t have it. Jessica fished in her purse for change and came up with a quarter, which the machine gobbled down.

“ Every monster has to have a willing victim,” Eddings agreed. “The artist has a powerful sense of justice”-the hum and flash of the Minolta copier punctuated his words-”and the fact that the monster’s mother, the creature who brought him into this world, nurtured or neglected him, the fact that she allows herself to be humiliated and whipped like a dog all the child’s life then leads him to ambivalence, yes. By the same token, a parent, mother or father, who physically or sexually abuses a child sows the same sort of seeds of hatred, which in later years spring forth full-blown as rage.”

She wondered how much Eddings was speaking of their phantom killer and how much of himself. He seemed turned inward for the moment, as if searching in some secret looking glass of his own.

“ By ambivalence, you mean he finds himself in the unenviable position of having to both protect and cherish his mother right alongside detesting and hating her?”

“ She asks for it! She steps right up to it; she allows herself to be a victim, and this feeds his rage toward all women.”

“ I see, I think…” “Instead of going out to victimize other women as some men would do, the artistic-minded among us resolve the conflict in more creative endeavors, from building a business to writing a poem-creativity is born of pain, no matter the pleasure it gives…”

“ Do you write poetry, Mr. Eddings?”

“ I don’t, no, but I have a novel I’ve been shopping around for years.”

“ By fashioning a world or a poem inside which women are brutalized, you’re saying no harm but rather good comes?”

“ In the fictive world, we are in constant control of the props, the staging, the curtains, all the strings, my dear, so that it is safe to unleash these passions, however evil, however bleak and destructive or raw to the bone, perhaps so that we do not act on these same impulses in the real world as the Night Crawler obviously has.”

So this explains the little man’s interest in the killer, she thought. “And you think all men have such ingrained feelings toward women?”

“ Given our genes? Given our race, our heredity, our primal instincts or that leftover-from-another millennium beginner’s brain we all started with and still carry around inside here like a ticking bomb?” He ended by poking his cranium. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Even those of us who deny it in both appearance and deed are saddled with it. yes.”

“ So you are yourself a writer, other than at the newspaper, I mean?” she asked.

“ I’m working on my second novel, yes. Working toward publication.”

“ Oh, really? And what’s it about?”

“ It’s something of a nasty little mystery coiled around the newspaper business, the spiraling injustices one young reporter faces at the hands of his superiors, one of whom is a woman not unlike the owner of the Heralds rival paper, for which I used to work. If it ever sees the light of day, I’m through in this town, certainly at the Herald, you can bet on that.”

She wondered just how deep his anger toward this woman ran. “But the writing keeps you sane?”

“ Precisely.”

She momentarily wondered who was the real victim here in this little obit man’s world, where he had squirreled away his hatred and anger only to resolve it amid black ink markings hidden like glyphs in an undiscovered cavern, an unpublished book, a poem like hellering’s. Or was the true victim the target of C. David Eddings’s venom, the mystery woman he mentioned? She further wondered if Eddings was sleeping with the woman he hated so much, and if so, what made him so full of rage. Her control over him? His need for her? Or the fact that he was the leak at the Herald, giving away the trust of his current bosses, and perhaps that of a woman he truly loved? In any case, he seemed a walking basket of nerves strolling along a needlepoint of stress as a result, all in the name of love, or hate. In that moment she caught a glint in his eye that told her he had seen the understanding in her eye, and in that instant, she saw a reserve of anger leaving a trail just for her.

Santiva noisily rejoined them, remarking on how nudity in paintings by the old masters like Rubens was perfectly acceptable in libraries like this, but that a brown paper wrapper had to go around the cover of Penthouse. He got no response from either Jessica or Eddings, who instead extended a sheaf of paper to him. Santiva accepted a copy of the hellering poem. “Ahh, good,” he crooned. “Now each of us is armed with words which we share with the killer…”

“ And thoughts and emotions, Eriq,” she replied as Eddings reached for her change at the bottom of the copier.

Eddings had gone silent. He extended fifteen cents to Jessica, and in the exchange she felt a well of emotions firing the little man’s spirit.

“ Do you think the Night Crawler is insane then, because he acts on his hatred?” she asked Eddings.

Eddings removed his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief and nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“ Then he’s no artist.”

“ No doubt in my mind. He may think of himself as an artist; he may have once been an artist, but once the killing started in this world, the artist in him no longer existed, you see. If Picasso were ever to have killed anyone before he painted out his bare emotions of slaughter and rage in Guernica, then the depiction of raw murder and carnage of that awful war would have fallen flat. As it is, it moves anyone who sees it. Why? Because he emptied the vessel from which the emotions flowed directly into the painting, and not into a world without a frame… Had he gone out and killed someone in retaliation for the real Guernica debacle, he could not have brought the passion to bear on a world both confined and radiated by form.”

“ How did we get to Picasso?” asked Eriq.

Eddings ignored Eriq. “Art both confines passion and crystallizes it. So neither a van Gogh, a Picasso, a Michelangelo, a Kipling or a Sartre, nor a Twain or a hellering, could ever have proved murderers… Look through the history of the world, the history of murder in particular- and being an obituary man, I know something of murder. How many true artists have been murderers? There have been far more doctors who’ve become murderers than writers and painters, I assure you.

” Eddings’s voice had risen on the final words as he warmed to his subject, and this brought a snarling librarian from behind the counter to ask them to please be quiet. Santiva nudged Jessica and said, “Let’s get out of here, shall we? This place is giving me a case of indigestion.”

“ Everything gives you indigestion.”

“ I was the kid in school who always got caught talking in the library and sent to the principal’s office for talking back to the librarian.”

“ I’ll bet, and you were always talking about books, too, right?” “You got me… girls.”

“ That would figure.”

“ I like a good figure…” Jessica realized only now that like many men, Santiva saw little use for poetry, that it was about as significant to his life as was a little man like C. David Eddings. Eriq showed his boredom in his face; it appeared he felt the direction they had taken was costing them too much time and energy for whatever dividend they might reap. For this reason, Eriq had already stepped away from Eddings once, and now he wanted farther away from the round obituary editor, without even fully knowing why. Jessica, too, wanted away from the small man at her side whose dream of becoming a satirical novelist revealed an ambiguous creature filled with copious, venomous and passionate secrets all of his own making. He had in effect told her that so long as he regarded himself as an artist, he would remain sane, but that should that self-image ever be shattered, he, rightly or wrongly, would blame others-specifically female others; he had told Jessica that one day she could well be hunting him. She wondered how many other men balanced their sanity on such a flimsy, egoistic scale. Then she thought of Adolf Hitler, the failed painter, and Manson, the failed performer.

Jessica and Eddings followed Eriq toward the huge en- tryway and foyer of the library, but Eddings stopped at the desk, whipped out his library card and asked for assistance in checking out the book from which he’d made copies.

“ What’s he doing now?” asked Eriq, who had found himself going through the checkout gate alone and having to return to Jessica. As she stared across at Eddings, he asked, “Is it me, or does this guy give you the creeps, too?”

“ He reminds me of Burgess Meredith in that old Twilight Zone episode-you know, he’s the last man on earth, surrounded by books, but he breaks his prescription glasses.

” Eriq only guffawed and said, “Let’s get some air.”

They waited just outside at the Grecian columns and the huge stone staircase, a place where Charlton Heston in robe and sandals might have played a scene out of Ben Hur if only the traffic noise, the overhead airplanes and the constant buzz of city construction and electricity could be silenced.

“ Here you are,” said Eddings when he joined them.

Jessica looked up to see that he was offering hellering’s book of poems to her. “I’m not sure-”

“ There’s two weeks on it. Return it to me when you can. I’ll pay any late fees.” He was adamant. “Who knows, you might learn something valuable-something that might help you with the case, I mean.”

“ Thank you, Mr. Eddings.”

“ If anything comes of it, you can thank me then.” Just what she’d hoped to avoid, she thought-ever seeing him again. He obviously wanted it otherwise, however. They parted company back at the newspaper, the original note from the killer safely tucked away in Jessica’s valise. From there, they drove to FBI Headquarters in Miami, where Jessica ceremoniously turned over the evidence to Eriq. “You’ll make sure, then, that Kim Desinor sees this immediately? Are we agreed?”

“ Consider it done. I read all about how she helped you in N’awlins last year.”

“ You have no idea.”

I have every confidence that our psychic sector will flourish in the coming years. Say, Jessica, do you think that Eddings was any help? He sure was a sad sack.”

“ Yeah, something melancholy about him, that’s for sure, Eriq. As for being a help, who knows. Although in a sense, he’s predicted for us what the Night Crawler’s next love note will contain.”

“ The second stanza?”

She nodded, a chill running up her spine.

“ Spooky, huh? And the guy was kinda spooky, too. You don’t suppose he’s the Night Crawler, do you? That would tie in with the Herald connection.”

“ Sure, he chooses to send his murder messages to his own paper, then identifies the source for us. No, I don’t think so.”

“ Strange little guy in a way, kind of a mix between Peter Lorre, Wally Cox and Bela Lugosi, wouldn’t you say?”

This made her laugh, which felt good. There hadn’t been much to laugh about in a long time.

“ Did I hear him say something about writing a book?” Eriq asked between laughs.

“ As a matter of fact-”

“ What could a guy like that have to say that anyone would want to hear?”

“ Well, it takes a certain amount of arrogance on the part of anybody to write a book, to believe they have enough to say to the world and that people-strangers to them- are going to actually be riveted to ink markings on a page. But you’ve got to admit, he was the only one in that room who knew about hellering’s bizarre little poem, if you remember,” she defended, not knowing why.

“ Yeah, yeah… I stand corrected. He wasn’t like, you know, hitting on you, was he?”

“ And what is it with you men who feel threatened by a little man like Eddings, or… or a woman with a brain, anyway?”

“ Threatened? Who feels threatened?” Eriq threw up his hands.

“ Forget it. Just get me back to Miami Crime Lab; I’ve got lots to do there. You promise now to get the killer’s note, the original, off to Kim as-” “Like I said”-he was annoyed-”consider it done.”