Pure Instinct

23

On the drive from the hospital Alex talked about how much he loved and hated New Orleans. “Food and jazz drives the urban soul here,” he told her with a short laugh that withheld any true humor.”The chefs here are like gods, feeding the soul-satisfying food of the earth and sea, and the musicians walk on water, and you can go down some streets here in full daylight and you'll find less-than-half-dressed whores in the doorways and windows, waving you up, many of them men. There's no place like New Orleans for a cop, no. All the chefs, the jazz musicians and the whores all have one commonalty: They all whip up their unique brand of appetite-suppressant by using their inbred intuition to improvise. The transvestite community's no different. You'll find more outrageous clothing per capita here than on any block in San Francisco, I assure you.”

“ I've seen quite enough between my hotel room and your precinct, thank you.”

They were traversing the large, long bridge spanning huge Lake Ponchartrain, heading for a favorite restaurant that seemed miles off the tourist routes, a place Alex called Leopold's.

The city of 1.2 million was wide awake, bustling, threatening to never sleep. The city had maintained, after all these years, its heavy European, eighteenth-century air-as if the same air breathed in by the pirate Jean Lafitte were still available for the modern visitor to inhale. It was a place for the rich to party, to bask in their wealth, as it had always been a haven for the sophisticated and worldly; but for the poor, many of whom were black, Spanish, Creole and Cajun, the city's lack of a manufacturing and industrial base extended very little hope of improvement, elevation or advancement over the years. Alex talked of these matters in a grim tone.

She tried to lighten him up a bit by saying, “When a Creole goes to heaven, first thing he asks Saint Peter is, 'Where's the jambalaya right?”

He laughed at the familiar saying. “Either that or file gumbo.” But he lapsed back into his somber concern. “We pay homage to the past here; the past is our bread and butter; it's what brings in the tourists, the Old South in all her radiant splendor. The New Orleans port on the Mississippi was once second only to New York, but now it only supports an interest in the arcane and tourism.”

“ The past is a double-edged sword here. That's for sure,” she agreed.

“ Give me that old-time religion and that Old South drowsiness in the shade. Shame that the same mint-julep mentality which gives New Orleans its mystic flavor, old charms and her iron-lace balconies is also the same kind of thinking that has allowed poverty and homelessness to flourish at her core.”

“ But they got religion and Carnivale!”

“ Yeah, Carnival Season… begins shortly after Christmas and winds down with Mardi Gras.”

“ Fat Tuesday, I know, ends on Ash Wednesday.”

“ Then you haven't forgotten New Orleans altogether since leaving?''

“ Not at all. Laissez les bon temps rouler/” He translated for her. “Let the good times roll.”

“ One hundred and fifty years of tradition..”

“ Of spontaneous street parades and displays.”

They both knew the history well, that in 1857 a group of locals banded together to form the first Carnivale parading organization, the Mystick Krewe of Comus, and that after that other private clubs, picking up the notion, sprouted up, and the elaborateness of the balls which spilled out into the streets and became madcap parades had become a tradition. Kings and queens were still chosen from among the krewe membership, and in some Carnivale clubs, the balls still served as “coming out” parties for debutantes. It all culminated in floats, marching bands, enormous balloons, jazz bands and wildly decorated flatbed trucks. Souvenir doubloons, cups, saucers, painted coconuts and beaded necklaces were tossed to onlookers from the parading masses. All this while in the French Quarter there was the annual costume competition for the best-looking transvestites, who so colorfully and spectacularly jammed the corners of Burgandy and St. Ann Streets.

“ There's no other place like it on earth,” she said.

Alex nodded, checking his rearview as he pulled into a turn lane on the other side of the bridge. “Shame, isn't it, that such a place, known worldwide for its jazz funerals and tunes like “Didn't He Ramble” and “I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal,” and such legends as Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden, Joe 'King' Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and… and gaiety-in every sense of the word-has such crime problems as well.”

She smiled at this, remembering aloud another song title. “ 'If You Ain't Gonna Shake It, What Did You Bring It For?' Goes back to what I was saying before about a victim for every four households, I guess.”

Alex turned the car into a gravel lot in front of a bright sign announcing “Leopold's on the Wharf.”

“ Shame of it is that in the most technologically advanced nation on earth, in the history of all mankind, almost every single person in America will be the victim of one crime or another in his lifetime.”

“ Yes,” she agreed, “and in spite of strides in forensic investigative techniques, electronic surveillance, colossal and complex fingerprint files and other modern means, the percentage of crimes solved by arrest has remained appreciably unchanged since, what, the early seventies?”

“ Hey, compared to other heavily populated areas of the country, the NOPD's doing a hell of a job.”

“ No need to get defensive, Lieutenant. But the fact remains that New Orleans, like Chicago, L.A., Miami, New York and Atlanta, has actually seen a decrease in arrests made in violent crimes.”

“ Maybe that's because-just-because, as they say.”

“ What's that? Southern-style philosophical equivocation and sophistry to avoid the issue?”

“ It helps when it helps.”

She laughed. “More of the same.”

His tone grew serious again. “There's been such an enormous increase in violent crime that it makes me weak to give it too much thought. If that's equivocating, then that's equivocating. I call it gettin' by.”

“ With drugs, child molestation, rape and murder on the rise, public anxiety about the effectiveness of both local and federal police agencies to serve the public has steadily grown, while manpower and monies haven't kept up,” she conceded.

“ That's why everyone's so ready to turn to psychics for help, and thanks in large measure to the media saturation of stories dealing with freaks like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and the Queen of Hearts killer…”

“ You like to think you've got a ready answer for everything, Detective Sincebaugh, all life's problems, don't you?”

“ It helps, but no… not by a long shot do I have all the answers, but I have one for you. People latch onto your kind of magic and voodoo-”

“ What I do is not voodoo or magic!” She raised her voice for the first time.

“ People need you like they need Dear Abby, to tell them it's okay to believe in something that's not present, to hold onto something that's not there. So society appears to be going to hell. It has always appeared to be going to hell and it always will, but conjuring acts aren't going to change that.”

“ Most cops are superstitious, but not you, right?”

“ That's right.”

“ You worked Missing Persons for a long time, didn't you, before you got into Homicide?”

“ That's right, and I don't appreciate your going through my file.”

“ So, it was there you used psychics?”

“ It was never my idea to use a psychic on any case, no.”

“ But the Department did?”

“ That's right.”

“ So, you had a bad experience with a psychic, so you now judge all psychics by that one experience, and you say you're not superstitious?”

He fell silent, the verbal jousting taking its toll on him. After a moment, he said, “I thought we agreed to talk about things other than this bloody case.”

“ Sony, guess we did, but I'm also talking about stressful situations, a stressful job, like a cop's. It brings out a need to tidy up the world, to seek answers, find control amid the chaos, an explanation for the void. A psychic worth her salt wants the same thing, Alex.”

“ If it wasn't for missing-persons cases, your kind would be out of business. You're like bounty hunters, coming in on a case for the money it can afford you.”

“ That's bullshit.”

“ How much're they paying you? My year's salary? For your consulting fee?”

“ I get paid by the day, same as a P.I., and I don't collect the consultation fee if there're no direct results stemming from my participation.”

“ Stemming from your participation, sure…” He let it drop, not speaking his mind. She knew what he was thinking, however.

“ I'm no fool, Dr. Desinor. I know Stephens and Captain Landry aren't fools either, but we had strict guidelines we followed in Missing Persons when we dealt with psychic de-tectives called in on cases. From what I've seen and from what I've deduced, it's apparent to me that Meade, or someone, has provided you with far more than the type of crime, the name of the individuals involved, the dates and items lifted from the scene, like those beads. The sensitive, as we called him then, filed a report immediately on the basis of that scant information alone. You, you've been given access to all the police reports, all the coroner's reports, in essence my complete case file on the murders. Then you expect me to be dazzled when you come out with information you couldn't possibly know?”

“ The more information I have, the more I can learn from the psychometric evidence.”

“ You got that right. Well, you just go right on dazzling deYampert and the others, Doctor. Just don't expect me to fall in line, okay?”

“ Tell you what,” she said, “you're right.”

“ Right?”

“ About my coming in with full disclosure. I won't work a case without it and when… when Landry called me in on the case…”

“ Landry called you in on the case?”

“ He's in charge of it, isn't he?” Yeah, yeah… sure he is.”

“ When he called, I made it clear I wouldn't work blind, that the more I know, the more I can reveal.”

“ Exactly my point.”

“ The Harkness boy's case must've hurt you very deeply. I'm sorry for your pain, Alex, and I can easily sympa-”

“ That's got nothing to do with it.”

“ I can sympathize completely. I had my own such heart-wrenching cases, the Hughes case I told you about.”

“ I remember reading about it,” he admitted.

“ I wasn't much more than a rookie that year.”

“ Ever regret giving up being a cop?”

She hesitated before responding. Thus far, she'd not had to lie to him directly, and was able to excuse this necessary lie by omission since she was working for the FBI, for Meade. “Yeah, sure…sometimes I miss it, but I've learned I can do far more good as a sensitive.”

“ Let's eat,” he said, and got quickly out of the car.

She waited to see if he'd open her door, and she was pleased when he did.

Over dinner she said, “You hate my being here, don't you?”

“ What?”

“ And you're uneasy with yourself, your own intuition, if you wish?”

“ Whoa, whoa, wait a minute.”

She barreled forward. “You're a tough guy, a former Navy SEAL. You don't have a sensitive bone in your body, or so you want the world to think, but-”

“ Hey, I don't hafta sit here and take this kinda ridicule and verbal abuse, Doctor, and I don't hate your being here, no.”

“ I mean in New Orleans, on your case.”

He hesitated before answering. “Eat, stay healthy.”

“ You really do make quite a sparring partner.”

“ What's that suppose to mean?”

“ You're very good at deflecting direct questions, Lieutenant.”

“ I've had a good trainer.”

“ Your father.” It wasn't posed as a question.

“ What a surprising and fortuitous guess. How did you ever come up with him, of all people?” Sarcasm had seeped back into his voice. “What exactly are those lovely eyeballs made of anyway? Transylvanian crystal? Or are you just an ex-tremely lucky guesser, huh?”

“ All right, okay, so much of what I do is instinctive, but that doesn't lessen the fact I know what I'm doing. Lieutenant, I'm the best.”

The restaurant's atmosphere was steeped in a French motif, a sidewalk cafe on a grander scale in a semi-casual and darkened series of rooms with quaint street-comer lamps posted every four feet, the windows overlooking the huge lake. It was in the heart of some smaller town outside the big city, far from Bourbon Street and the concerns of the French Quarter. It seemed a place where a different breed of people dined, natives not of New Orleans but elsewhere. Still, on the menu alongside the traditional French dishes were traditional New Orleans dishes from jambalaya to such specialties as shrimp Creole and Cajun gator tail. Alex was eating the gator, while she'd opted for vegetarian veal parisien.

He finally said, “I have every reason to suspect you're having us all on, Dr. Desinor.”

“ And you resent the implication that others, seeing me come in on the case, might construe you as a fool?”

“ I don't give a damn what others think, but think they do and the appearance of im-impropriety in a case is as bad as the real McCoy, Doctor. And we both know that your coming in on this high-profile case is going to feather your cap no matter the outcome while making the NOPD look like it's… well, jacking off.”

She bit back a snide smile and shook her head. “If the hand fits, Alex.”

“ Very clever, Doctor, but nothing's changed.”

“ Oh, I think a lot has changed. And it's about time you called me Kim.”

“ Such as what has changed, Kim?”

“ How we view one another for one, Alex. I think we can work together and not at odds, if you will just give me a chance. Your partner Ben's willing to, Jessica Coran, P.C. Stephens, your own Captain Landry.”

“ Yeah, so why do I get the feeling I'm the last holdout in The Invasion of the Body Switchers? Ben's got a wife and children to go home to. He can turn the case off when he wants, he's gotten so used to partitioning off the separate lives he leads. Me, I'm on my own, so maybe the case is a little more important to me than-”

“ Is it importance or self-importance and a little obsession thrown in for good measure?” she asked quickly, stopping him.

“ I'm no more obsessive about my work than most cops.”

“ Bullshit. You're as bad as… as… as Jessica Coran. You're a workaholic from what I can see.”

“ There are worse things in life.”

“ Your father's nearby. Why don't you spend more time with your family?”

The muscles of his jaw tightened. “That's really none of your business, now, is it?” He wondered from whom she had learned that tidbit of information with which she thought she could astonish him.

“ He's a former cop. Someone you could share your thoughts and feelings with on the case.”

“ I got Ben for that.”

“ And that's enough?”

“ It is.”

She nodded. “Your father hurt you very badly, didn't he.”

“ What the hell's with you, lady? I'm not in the market for psychoanalysis, not even your brand, so let it go.”

“ My father hurt me very badly too, when I was young. He pretty much destroyed all faith I had in him. Took me a long time to get over it, and I'm still not sure I am. Over it, I mean. He gave me up to the state for safekeeping. How do you like that?''

Alex dropped his gaze and said, “I'm sorry to hear it.”

“ You can rationally rid yourself of a thing like that, but emotionally it's like a growth or a virus that's still very much within, biding its time, waiting for you to slip and when you do, it'll be there to take you into the depths of pain stored up over the years. Out of sight but not out of mind, or is it stored in the human heart?”

“ My problem with my father is not the issue here, Kim, nor is it a matter for discussion, do you understand? And while we're on it, my every waking moment isn't predicated on how I view my relationship with him, understood?”

“ Perhaps…perhaps I do understand more than you know.”

He stared across at her and felt her eyes probing into and through him. “You don't understand anything about me.”

“ I understand your anger, your frustration and even your fear.”

Now he gritted his teeth and pulled back, as if physically severing the eye contact between them would help his cause, before he said, “I'm not afraid of a damned thing. Lightning doesn't scare me; dying doesn't scare me. So, what's left? I've faced death in a goddamned jungle a world away from home, and here on the streets as a cop. No, there's nothing I'm afraid of.”

'You're afraid of the small things.”

He shook his head and frowned, pushing away his plate.

“ Dark spaces from which you cannot retreat?”

“ You're crazy, you really are.”

“ Relationships from which you can't hide.”

Shut up-his thought leaped but did not cross the table, yet she caught it as if on some sort of telepathic tractor beajn, yanking it into her.

“ I'll shut up, Lieutenant, when you aecept me for what I am, and while you're at it, accept the fact there are black holes in everyone's mind.”

“ Exactly what you count on.”

“ Perhaps.”

“ Both as a shrink and as a snoop.”

“ Touche. If we could leave it at that. But the dark little holes into which you tumble and lose your way and all control, these need to be explored, not run from.”

Christ, he thought, she's been talking to Ben deYampert, but then he realized that not even Ben had knowledge of the exact nature or details of his recurring nightmares of recent months. He'd had nightmares for years as a child, and now again, awakened in him by the first Hearts victim, Surette. And here was this all-seeing, all-knowing being staring through him, revealing him to himself here over table scraps.

“ Waiter! Clear these dishes away, will you?” he called out, his thoughts tumbling on. It was as if Kim Desinor had climbed inside his head and had watched a film there, a film about his agony, as if it were being played over and over for her private screening. The feeling was one of invasion which sent a shiver through him, making him add one more item to his fears-fear of her.

The waiter rushed their dishes away, asking about dessert, which both of them declined, Alex calling for the bill. Then he turned to her and said, “How… how the hell could you-”

“ You're surrounded by parasites, Alex, on all sides. You even see me as a parasitic creature, someone or some thing that's come to chew away at you and your precious case, someone who will eat you alive if you're not careful. Then, of course, you've got Ben, Frank Wardlaw, Landry and IAD, Meade, every one trying to siphon off a piece of you in order to feed themselves.''

“ This is all nonsense. You don't know what the hell you're talking-”

“ But I do. Men like you, men who have so much strength bottled within, so powerful… people gravitate to your power, your confidence, wanting to touch it, Alex. They want to touch me too, all the time. People like you and me… we're appealing on many, many levels. Think of the old saying, Alex, how two separate people with differing worldviews look at a glass of water.” She placed a forefinger on the glass before him, which was half full.

“ People like you and me?” she said. “We see it as half full. Others who see it differently are also emptied by their unfulfilled relationships, and when they see people like you and me who are absolutely comfortable in who we are, they come to us for a drink, and they work to fill their empty souls with us. Because they never see our unfulfilled needs, the emptiness within us, because we guard that place like hell.”

“ Taking from us?”

“ All they can get, sure… why not? They must feed; it's their nature to feed, as it is in all living things, Alex. I see people every day siphoning off energy and emotion from me, but I gain from the encounter while most of them do not. It's because I gain in giving.”

“ You know, you could be quite scary if I didn't know better.”

“ Last thing I want is to scare you, Alex.”

“ Really?”

“ Really.” She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “Sit quietly for a moment and take from me.”

Alex felt the warmth of her touch and the throbbing life within, heard the heartbeat as it moved along the corridors of her being and into his. The warmth became a radiant heat flowing between them, growing in intensity like the heat from a sun lamp.

“ I'm not a psychological vampiress, Alex. I'm not here to take anything from you. If anything, I'm here to give, not take. I'm no leech, no insect, no worm you need to fear.”

He involuntarily shook with the thought of the worms in his nightmare. “I'll… I'd like to take you home.”

“ Wish you could, but I've got that early morning appointment.”

“ Whoa, I didn't mean my home.”

“ Oh, sorry…misunderstood, I guess.”

“ Well, I mean, I wouldn't mind…” He stopped short and looked curiously at her, his eyes narrowing. “What early morning appointment?”

“ You know, the-”

“ Oh, yeah, the famous or soon-to-be-famous exhumation. Do you really think they'll be going ahead with it, even after what you went through tonight? Isn't there a limit to what you can… reasonably expect to… to give?”

She liked his choice of words and the level of concern in his voice. “I'm okay, really.” She touched a sensitive spot below the bandage to her temple.

“ I just hope it doesn't turn into a circus.”

“ I don't like the idea of exhumation any more than you do, but…”

“ But you have to establish patterns from out of chaos here, right?”

“ Like you, Alex, it's not what I do, it's what I am, and if what I am can indicate a direction, locate a clue, then how can you continue to stand in the way of that? Why won't you let me help you? Is it because I'm a psychic or a woman? Or both?''

“ Me? Stand in your way? How am I standing in your way? You and the others are working right around me, for cryyyy-sake! Everybody saw what happened at the crime scene tonight. No… wouldn't want to be in the way, would we.”

His sarcasm had returned full force, and she gripped the thin edge of the table to remain calm. “Nice try, Alex, but you're hiding again.”

“ Who's hiding? I'm right here, going nowhere.”

“ I have come to believe to a great extent that it is our fears and anxieties that make us who and what we are, or will become, Alex.”

“ Is that supposed to be reassuring, Doctor? Because it isn't.”

In a flashing vision, she saw fat, hungry maggots around him, but ignoring the ugly image, she forced her way through the jungle of his tangled emotions. “We defend the weaker portions of our personalities with an array of defenses, either positive or negative, bright or dreary, such as diplomacy, humor-often macabre humor-patience, self-deceit, temper, clowning and stubbornness.”

“ Ben'll love to hear it. He's the bull-slinging yahoo and I'm the bullheaded mule, right? Nice butter you spread. Doctor.''

“ I think the butter is all yours, Alex, and you're spreading it on thick to cover your true-”

“ That's enough with the psychobabble, Kim. I've heard quite enough, and coming from you, it's doubly rewarding.”

She wasn't sure what he meant by this. “I didn't say I was without fear and anxiety. Quite the contrary.”

“ I'm not going to swap my personality for one you'd like me to try on, Doctor.” He stared across at her, stood and said, “Now, it'll be my pleasure to see you home.”

He threw out a wad of bills onto the table like an angry man who's too upset to count and said, “Are you coming, or do I call a cab?”

“ I'll pay for my own meal, and I'll call my own damned cab, Lieutenant!” she fired back, drawing stares and bawdy laughter from others in the restaurant. Alex's jaw tightened, his face turning red. “All right, fine… suits me.” He then stormed out ahead of her, mumbling something under his breath about women in general. She stared after him disbelieving, yet fully understanding. She'd touched a raw nerve that had been successfully protected for a long time.

She found the pay phone and called for a cab. “To hell with him,” Kim told the lady at the cash register.

“ You just go right on stickin' up for yourself, dearie,” suggested the elderly woman behind the counter.

Alex Sincebaugh was angry with himself. He had never in his life walked out on a woman, leaving her stranded in a public place, and it didn't sit well with him now. He'd gone back to the restaurant to apologize, try to start over with Kim Desinor, but she'd already left. He had thought about locating her at her hotel, but then decided that such a move would only widen the rift between them. He didn't know what to say to her anyway, how to build a bridge between them, how he could comfortably work with her feeling as he did, and the thought of an unnecessary exhumation as a media event continued to gnaw at his gut.

He was a practical man who had come up via a tough life with little love or compassion either received or given, and yet he saw the empathy and heart-wrenching love that the families of victims demonstrated every day, and he respected, even admired people who could convey their emotions so openly and honestly, although he himself could not.

His father had been a policeman with all the military bearing of an army officer in all his dealings, including those that concerned his son. His mother had died when he was eleven years of age, and he recalled her as the only loving influence in his life. It was little wonder that he pushed women away when they got too close, when they began to make plans for him, plans for them, plans that included a home, a family, commitments he felt ill-suited for.

He understood pain and isolation, hard reality, toughness. Toughness saved you from any hurt. It had been with this attitude that he'd left his father's house to go out to San Diego, California, to join the Navy, and having shown so much promise during basic, he was asked to go from there to Coronado, California, to begin a twenty-five-week training session that would culminate in his becoming a Navy SEAL. The course work and field work were grueling, but nothing could have prepared him for week number six, Hell Week, considered a hazing which separated the determined from the doubtful. Sincebaugh's Hell Week had been in January of '67, when he was a boy of nineteen. It took a lot of guys two and even three attempts to pass muster at Hell Week, but Sincebaugh made it through his first time, although it nearly killed him.

Instructors, each one a SEAL himself, worked eight-hour shifts in teams of six throughout the week, while trainees were given only three hours' sleep. One instructor named Gahan told them that Hell Week was to see how young men operate under extreme stress, and that he'd be providing the stress. Everything they did for the entire six days was a race of one sort or another, and the winning team won rest time while the losers had to repeat the race. For those who succeeded, it was not just a physical feat, for they were also subjected to mental pressures, mind games and mockery. For twenty-four hours, he and the rest of his crew, Class 127, were each given their own personal 250-pound log to toss, catch, hurl, twirl and kick uphill; they had to kick the damned thing up sand dunes. In a nonstop marathon they had to shoulder their log and race to a stack of deflated rubber rafts, inflate the rafts and row out to markers some ten miles distant and back. They swam relays, scaled rough-hewn wooden walls and ropes dangled from a chopper, which went clear around the bay with each man hanging on until they began falling like flies. They raced in deep sand and when nightfall came, they didn't sleep, for there were night maneuvers to complete.

On the second night, Sincebaugh, by now a Navy seaman apprentice, along with the others, was ordered into San Diego Bay. Now recalling the hypothermia he'd suffered that night, he felt a rush of icy panic ripple through him again. For twenty minutes the fully outfitted men were made to swim in the January waters of the bay. He recalled now how the instructor, calling through his bullhorn from atop a warm boat with his Mackinaw on, had shouted the order to remove boots and socks in the water, to stuff socks inside boots and tie them over the shoulders and around the neck.

Alex's hands could hardly function, but he'd made them function. After twenty minutes of mind-numbing cold, they were ordered out to lie on the metal pier, where they were ordered to do one hundred push-ups, “to heat up your sorry-assed bodies,” while the instructor called for the hoses and they were blasted with bay water on the pier.

“ Keep you all from overheatin' too quick,” the instructor called out sarcastically from his vantage point on the now-docked boat.

The man beside Sincebaugh, Slattery, confessed to having lost his boots to the bay. The instructor replied, “What a shame, boys. Slattery here's lost his goddamned Navy issue. Ordinance don't come cheap. All right, everybody dive!”

“ What?”

“ Oh, shit!”

“ That's an order! Till we solve Slattery's little mystery and locate them damned boots, nobody's dry!”

Slattery was sincerely and universally hated after that night. Everyone returned to the water, bitching under his breath, until Gahan, the drill instructor, ordered silence.

They dived until they found Slattery's fucking boots, which fortunately had remained tied to one another. It was the cold and the darkness out there which had stolen Slattery's footwear from him. Frigid temperatures and frozen fingers and darkness had a way of taking things, and by then the SEAL would-bes and wanna-bes had been reduced to children fearful of what their own bodies might do against them. Slattery, had he not been stopped by Sincebaugh, would have taken his own hand off at the wrist with his bayonet.

Slattery didn't last the week. Nor did many others. During Hell Week, the recruits were almost constantly wet and cold. They lost toenails, were rubbed raw in places, losing huge patches of skin. Their joints were swollen like melons. Sincebaugh learned early never to remove his boots unless ordered to do so, since getting them back on was hell, and some guys never did get them back on, having to continue barefooted. A constant sight was of exhausted men fainting, vomiting and hallucinating, sometimes all at once.

It was the toughest military training in the United States, and all for the privilege of becoming a sea-air-land commando. Over half of those enrolled failed to complete the week-long intensive training and torture. Sincebaugh only made it by turning a corner in his mind, which left him with a strange aloofness in which he felt he literally sucked up pain, went looking for it, enjoyed it. It was what had gotten him through the ten-times-worse tortures of Vietnam when he became a prisoner of war.

So why was he afraid to sleep now?

Instead, he drove around his city, New Orleans, at night. The place had everything any other large American city had and more, yet it was unique. A blend of Spanish, French, Louisiana, Creole, Cajun and American. Street corners were lined with storefronts, fast-food restaurants, dry cleaners, taverns and hardwares, billboards and free-standing signs; sections of the city were grimy and lousy, rotten little holes into which children were born, areas completely at odds with Bourbon Street and the museums and shopping malls along the rivers and lakes of beautiful downtown Orleans.

He drove down to the district he guessed that Kim Faith Desinor most likely grew up in. He kept driving through it, around it, about it, staring, wondering how she'd gotten so good, so smooth, so well educated, coming from this cesspool. Had she been born with the gift of a great mind, or were drive and determination beaten into her at an early age as he'd had them beaten into him?

Either way, she was intriguing, and he wished that he had met her under different circumstances. He'd pulled over to the curb now, staring out at St. Domitilla's, its small enclosure, church and reformatories for boys and girls looking like a prison yard with ten-foot-high wrought-iron fencing going the length of the concrete grounds. He'd done a little checking of his own, and records showed a Kim Faith Desinor had spent time here, that in fact her father had placed her here after the death of her mother.

It was a far cry from New Orleans' ornate and world-renowned St. Stephen's Cathedral, with its huge pinnacles reaching into the night sky, its lavish spires and colored lights piercing the fog cloud which almost nightly descended over the darkened city this time of year. By comparison, the fog here at the poor parish church lay like a confining canvas over an open grave, reflecting only the neon and orange vapor lights of the street sign and lamp.

“ Where are the answers?” he asked the empty interior of his unmarked squad car.

Big Ben was home with his family. Sincebaugh had no one but an uncommunicative, uncaring father, a father whose only response to his having completed the SEAL training course was, “Will that get you more on your paycheck?”

His father didn't know him.

Who really did, for that matter? How could anyone truly know the heart of another, isolated as each man and woman was from another?

Being a SEAL still meant something to him, but it meant nothing to anyone else. But she knew he was a SEAL, knew all about him, respected him. She'd read his record, thanks to Landry, who'd forked it over without a thought. She knew his history… but Kim Desinor knew even more than that. She knew of his fear, and this fact most of all had caused him to run from her.

“ Hey, Rockefella man! Lookin' for some action, mi amigol Compadre comprende?” It was a pimply-faced Spanish boy barely out of his pre-teens. “I know where you can get your fantasy come true, bro.”

Sincebaugh lifted his. 38 and jammed it into the kid's face, making the boy shake in the shadow of the cathedral. “Who've you got in mind, son, your sister?”

“ Hey, man, I'm gone. I'm outta here, out-cho face gone!”

“ Don't move!”

The kid froze. “Whatchu want with me, man? I don't go that way.”

“ You know the word on the street about the Hearts Killer, though, don't you? Don't you?”

“ Christ, you… you ain't him, are you?”

“ What's being said? Who knows what?”

“ Nothing… nobody knows nothing… I don't hear a word. Everybody's stone cold on it, man.”

“ Stone cold, huh?” replied Sincebaugh. “Tell you this, man… if you don't talk, you're going to be stone cold.”

“ Whatchu mean, man? I'm tellin' you, there's nothing on it that's goin' round, except now they got a psychic on the case and the guy doing the killing, his time's runnin' out.”

“ Who knew the victims? Give me a name, kid.”

“ Philly.”

“ Philly? A guy from Philadelphia? What's his real name?”

“ You the fuzz, aren't you?”

“ What's his goddamned real name?”

“ Don't know. All I know is he's a transvestite; sings in one of the bars. Calls himself Phyllis and ain't got nothing to do with Philly. Now, that's all I hear or know.”

“ Phyllis… okay, kid, get out of here and get a productive life.”

“ Sure, sure, dickhead, maybe I'll work on that degree.” The kid disappeared the way he came, like a ghost, materializing and dematerializing amidst the landscape he knew so well. A powerful wind began to sweep through the area, lifting drooping tree limbs and blasting here and there in drafts. Alex gave another thought to Kim Desinor as a child inside the prison compound of St. Domitilla's with its paper refuse rising in a miniature tornado and flying about the courtyard as bits and shards and fragments of ghosts. The old place had been condemned years before, its doors closed forever, awaiting the wrecking bail.

Alex heard no refrain of long-ago laughter in her walls.