Bitter Instinct

EIGHT

Maurice Deneau had bought into the killer's con, hook, line, and sinker. The party of detectives sat in silence for some time, contemplating the nature of the beast they pursued. Taken to its logical conclusion, they realized, he must be a creature pleasing to the eye and ear, to all the senses, in fact; he must be an evil so cloaked in goodness that no one, not even his victims, know of his evil. Either that or they worship him for his darkness or his twisted ideas and perverted faith.

Jessica could not help but draw correlations between this sociopath and a killer priest she had encountered in London the year before. That psychotic's vision of the Second Coming had gotten a series of people killed, but his victims had also been willing participants in their own crucifixions. And now here she sat in a second-story apartment in Philadelphia, the heart of early America, ostensibly fighting the same fight, racing the same race, and wondering at the familiarity of this evil. If Kim Desinor's psychic impressions could be relied upon, only one of the victims thus far had recognized the evil this killer presented. That had been Caterina Mercedes, but even then it took death to waken her to the evil she had allowed to close in around her and finally envelop her.

Maurice Deneau's friend, Thomas Ainsworth, wanted to stay the night at the crime scene, so Sturtevante had to deal with him, asking him if he had someplace else to crash. Ainsworth was a frail, thin, and pale young man, perhaps anemic, perhaps HIV positive. Otherwise, he looked a great deal like the victim in size, weight, and build, and he proved that the idealistic innocence of youth still existed in modern-day America.

“Can I pack a few of my things? I was staying with Maurice, you see, and… God, if I'd only been here, maybe… maybe I could've done something. We had a fight, you know. No big deal, but I was making him pay… and now this.”

“Sorry, nothing goes in or out until we release the place. Could be a couple of days,” Sturtevante told the young man, whose eyes were fire red from crying. His reaction was to pace the hallway like a nervous cat. “Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?” she repeated.

“Guess I can call my parents.”

“Might be a good idea, son. Maybe go stay with them for a while.”

“Yeah… yeah… ain't safe around here anymore, is it?”

“That's quite the understatement, Thomas.”

Kim had regained enough strength now to stand and walk, and together, she and Jessica headed for the door, while Parry went to officially call in the paramedics to remove the body. With this decision made, they could never go back to the crime scene as they'd found it, so this moment always felt crucial in a stone-cold murder of this sort.

As the team vacated the crime scene, leaving the body to the paramedics for transport to the police morgue, Jessica asked Kim, “Did you get any sensation from Maurice that he knew in the end that he was being murdered?”

“None whatsoever, no.”

“This monster we're dealing with, then, is smooth.”

“Caterina Mercedes's body was a seething cauldron of hatred for what the killer had done to her. At some point, she realized what was happening to her and why. It felt like… it was a horrid betrayal. But the others never knew he'd poisoned them. And they still don 7.”

“You said Caterina Mercedes felt betrayed. Would you say she felt she had been conned into dying?” asked Jessica, feeling the night air wafting up the stairwell from an open door at ground level-as if to beckon them outside.

“Yes, but Maurice Deneau didn't. He never picked up on the con or realized that he was ever in any danger. Whatever poison our man is using, it effectively shuts down rational thought, lulling the victims into a calm acquiescence, but something in Caterina fought back.”

“What made her different?” asked Parry, who'd hurried down the steps, catching up as they stepped out into the predawn darkness. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran? Any medical reason one person would be more immune than another to whatever poison this creep is using?”

They continued on toward the patrol cars that had brought them to this section of town, the famous Second Street off downtown Philadelphia, where the killer moved efficiently and safely among the upwardly mobile, artistic community. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran?” pressed Parry.

“It would help to know the exact nature of the poison. We need to send it out for analysis to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington. The local guys are coming up zip on it.”

Kim suggested, “Perhaps Caterina had a stronger tolerance for the drug.”

“Possibly, but more likely our killer made a mistake. More like the dose was too low or too high, in which case she would have a far different reaction than that of calm acquiescence-what the killer apparently needs in order to leave his deadly poetry for us to read,” Jessica answered, rubbing the soreness from her neck, taking in the crisp yet damp evening air. It smelled of a coppery rain that had turned into a mist, and it touched her cheek with the feel of a sodden cloth.

“Or she was lucid enough to suggest that she do the same to the killer's back, using his inkwell, the same as he had used on her,” suggested Sturtevante. “In a con, that's when things go wrong, when the mark doesn't cooperate as you predict. I worked for the fraud division for several years. We handled con artists, flimflam men, hucksters, and hoaxsters,” she informed the others. “I know how these creeps work to relieve the old and the innocent of their life's savings. I've just never known a con artist who set the stakes at life itself.”

“He doesn't see himself as pulling a hoax, I don't think,” said Jessica, “not from all that we've surmised.”

Kim immediately agreed, bolstering Jessica's notion. “He doesn't see it as a game or a flimflam; he doesn't enjoy killing for the sake of killing. It's a means to an end. To the transmigration of the soul into what he believes is a higher form, I suspect. It is the only way he can get his victims to quickly and efficiently cross over. His endgame, if you will, is to return them to some otherworldly force, or forces, that he sees or hears in his head. That would be my guess.”

“Apparently his victims don't see him as any kind of threat whatsoever,” Jessica agreed.

“Fact is, they likely gravitate to him as heroic.”

“Heroic?” asked Parry, perplexed.

“He's a grim, dark figure who seems to incarnate all they aspire to and surround themselves with. Look closely at Maurice's surroundings, his choice of habitat, the very things on his walls,” Kim explained.

“And look as closely at what he has to say in his diary,” added Jessica. “Somewhere in it he may tell you what he most loves in life, and I suspect it is the belief that one day he will die.”

“A death wish?”

“More closely aligned with the notion that there's a better world beyond. Possibly a parallel universe far better and into which he ought to have been born,” said Kim. “It's less a death wish per se than a desire to transcend life as we mortals know it.”

Jessica added, “So his savior, even if temporary, is the man who can both see and understand the desperately melancholy youth, and so becomes the young person's hero.”

She saw Parry's eyes bore into her, questioning.

“I noticed a book of Byron's works on the nightstand, the pages marked,” Jessica said.

“Got it right here,” said Parry. “I'll look it over, see if it uncovers anything, along with the diary entries. Got some confidential stuff here that might prove helpful down the road. Listen to this.”

Parry began to read from the diary. “ 'I chose the name Mayonnaise because I like licking it off my sexual partner. Learned early in life that the only way to keep people close is through sex. I've always had a hard time making friends, but even a harder time sustaining friendships. I know people tire of me, that I whine too much, but I also know that I'm worthy of someone's unconditional love, if only I could find it.' “

“Doesn't exactly sound as if he's into abstinence,” Sturtevante quipped. “Sounds like the usual teen angst stuff,” said Jessica.

Jim Parry continued to scan the diary, resting it on the volume of Byron. Jessica filled her lungs and stared at the crowd that had gathered about the crime scene. Uniformed policemen held people in check at a temporary barricade.

As she was about to slide into the patrol car, James said, “Listen to this part.”

As much as she wanted to object to his reading aloud the victim's private words here on the street at this moment, Jessica said nothing. Jim read, “ 'I am lousy at maintaining and cultivating a friend, or at least a worthwhile one. What's the point of trying? In the end, it only causes pain and suffering. They all die off like neglected weeds. I have allowed the weeds to infest my garden. It's all my own fault. I am a poor gardener in the field of friendships.' “

“Like I said, the usual teen angst, heartache, and suffering.”

“But listen to this,” he insisted.

“Hey, that's private, personal stuff there!” shouted someone who'd bolted from the crowd, having gotten past the police tape and uniformed cops. “Give me that!”

They looked up to find a pretty young woman of perhaps twenty glaring at them. “That's mine!” She snatched at the diary, but Parry held it overhead, too high for her to grasp.

“Sorry, no, young lady. This belonged to the victim, and as such, it is evidence in a crime.”

“God damm it all to hell, I knew Maurice would wind up like this one day!”

“Like what?” asked Sturtevante, trying to calm her.

“Cops pouring over his life, his apartment, and his stuff! Damn fool, Maurice.”

Lieutenant Sturtevante introduced herself. “I'm the one who left a message on your answering machine to get over here. Got your number out of Maurice's Rolodex. I'm a homicide detective with the PPD.” But the words homicide detective did not appear to register with the young blond woman, who remained distraught. 'Tell me, miss, exactly what kind of relationship did you have with Maurice?”

“He was my brother, dammit. My fucking, wide-eyed, idiot brother. He liked to pretend otherwise, that he was my sister, and he liked to believe that the fucking world was filled with goodness and light-that is, when he wasn't so depressed he couldn't drag himself out of bed. But he thought the best of everyone and everything. Opened his door to anything off the street. 'Helping out,' he called it.”

“I see.”

Jessica thought it quite likely a different view of Maurice than that held by the person who had killed him.

The sister shouted now, “Where is he? Have you sent him to the hospital? How badly is he hurt? One of those creeps he let stay with him hurt him, didn't they?”

She thought he'd been beaten but was still alive. No one had informed her of her brother's death.

“Where can I catch up to him? What hospital did you send him to?”

“He's… I'm afraid you can't,” said Sturtevante.

The young woman stared at them as if they were all mad aliens. Her head began a slight shaking, her lip quivering. She eyed the window of Maurice's bedroom, where what looked like an innocent game of shadow play was going on. The attendants wrapping the body for transport. The sister rushed for the stairs leading up to the apartment. She hadn't gotten far when a uniformed cop restrained her and she saw Thomas Ainsworth coming slowly out of the building, dejected and trembling. She tore loose from the officer holding her and rushed toward the boy, tearing into him with her nails and screaming, “You did it! You got Maurice into big-time trouble this time! Didn't you? Didn't you?”

The sister ranted until she was pulled off, and then she suddenly froze, petrified at the entryway, seeing the prone body on the gurney. “Where the fuck are the medics? Why aren't you resuscitating him? Why're you all standing around doing nothing, reading his private papers?”

Jessica went to her, put an arm over her shoulder, and simply pronounced her brother dead.

“No, nooooooo!” the girl cried, and tore at the cold, black, and unyielding polyethylene body bag. “Open it! Open it! I don't believe it,” she wailed. “Not unless I see it, I won't believe it.”

“Open it,” Jessica ordered the ambulance attendants. One of them, biting his lower lip, zipped the bag open, and the sister screamed, her wail penetrating the night sky. She fell prostrate across her brother's form, clutching him.

As Jessica pulled her away, the distraught sister nearly pulled Maurice's entire head from the bag, as if attempting to drag him back into life from his eternal sleep.

“I loved him so much,” she cried out.

Jessica guided her up the stairs, and snatching away yellow crime-scene tape from the door, she found the only privacy that might be had. The others followed. Jessica pulled up a chair and sat Maurice's sister at the table where they had all sat earlier. She poured the young woman a cup of leftover, lukewarm coffee and offered it to her, but the sobbing, heaving girl refused it. Her eyes had become black concentric circles, her blond hair a tangle of thin noodle-shaped snakes.

Jessica asked, “Do you know of anyone, anyone at all, who may have wanted your brother dead?” Even as she asked the stock question, she knew it hardly began to cover the circumstances here. Perhaps none of the conventional questions applied, and she feared that perhaps she might never know the right questions to ask.

“No, no one. But it had to be one of his strays. I warned him. So many times I warned him.”

“You warned him?”

“And he'd just call me mommy in that sassy tone of his, and I just went on warning him.” Her entire frame shook, racked with grief. “He didn't damn deserve this!”

“Did he speak of anyone staying with him here, recently or otherwise?”

“No, no one but Ainsworth. Worthless is what I call him.”

“Maurice mentioned no one else that he may have recently become infatuated with?” she pressed.

“No, but he stopped talking to me about anything to do with his personal life. He couldn't take the least criticism, crumbled under it the way a butterfly might. He so… so liked being needed, and he had such a need to be loved.”

“So you think your brother Maurice may have brought this on himself?” asked Jessica, now seeing the resemblance in brother and sister. “What precisely did you mean by that?”

“It was his way of doing good for his 'karma,' he thought. But it was really self-indulgent in a peculiar way.”

“How so?”

“He was a fool, taking pity on every stray animal, and taking in runaways, street people, all that, and I told him how dangerous it was, like playing Russian roulette, but it made him feel, I don't know, angelic and above all the rest of us. Some such shit. A shrink could've had a field day with Maurice, could've made him into one of those whacha macall its, a case study.”

“So, he brought home stray humans?” Jessica asked of the sobbing teenager.

“Human strays, yeah… God damn it all.”

“We're going to need to ask you some questions, Miss Deneau,” said Sturtevante.

“Deneau was Mayo-Maurice's name, not mine. I'm Harris, Linda Sue Harris.” She said this with a proud defiance.

“Big surprise, a fake name?” asked Parry, standing in the doorway now.

“No, not fake,” Linda Sue countered. “He had changed his name to Deneau legally.”

“Man, this kid sounds confused. First he has his name legally changed to this highfalutin moniker, and then he puts it out he wants to be called Mayonnaise?”

“He was confused! Unclear what he wanted, what he wanted to be, all of it. He was forever preoccupied with the questions the rest of us eventually let go of. You know how it is. Still believed fairy tales and myths were true. He never fucking grew up.”

“What kind of questions?” asked Jessica.

“You know, the usual claptrap about who am I, what am I, where did I originate from, where am I going to after this life, all of it. Went from one belief system to the next, trying to tie it all together, but nothing ever really satisfied him.”

“What did the family think of the name change?” asked Parry.

“Not much, but then they didn't give Maurice much thought anyway. They didn't approve of his lifestyle.”

“Then his family name was-”

“Harris. Maurice's real name was Patrick William Harris-Pattie, I grew up calling him-but that was too… too standard issue for him.”

“For his soul, you mean?” Kim interjected.

“That's right, for his friggin' too sensitive soul! I loved him for it, his sensitivity, but I also hated him for it-for the depth of it, for the obsessiveness of it, and now for this.”

“For getting himself killed over it?” asked Jessica.

“For doing this, for hurting me and our parents. I know it has to do with his personality. He was a victim waiting to happen.”

Jessica offered her a shoulder to cry on. She took it, and after some long moments of sobbing, the young woman sat back again, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief Parry had provided earlier. “I hate him for what he's done.”

“Did he think he was born at the wrong time and place?” Kim asked. “I mean, judging from his paintings and furnishings…”

'Try wrong dimension,” she countered. “Maurice was a misfit in this life; always had been.”

“Can you explain that further?” pressed Jessica.

Linda Sue looked into Jessica's eyes. “Pattie, he once told me he thought he'd been born with the heart and soul of a butterfly, that he'd somehow gotten his wires crossed and ought to be in life as a butterfly, said his life as a human would be as short as a butterfly's life as a result. Said he was born in the wrong time and place and with the wrong name, so he dreamed up Maurice Deneau. Been going by it since he turned old enough to vote.”

“And how old is… was Maurice?”

“All of twenty-four going on thirteen. Never wanted to grow up. Damn you, Pattie,” she finished with a fist to the sky, as if cursing his spirit.

Parry knelt beside her now and said, 'Tell me, was Maurice… Pat… was he-”

“Gay! Spit it out, and what's that got to do with anything? Damn people, damn people for condemning my brother. Yes, his sexual orientation was gay, but he wasn't loose. He didn't sleep around, and I doubt he'd give you a second look, mister.” Jessica stifled a laugh at this.

The girl continued: “He remained true to anyone who was man enough to remain faithful to him. That was Maurice, and for the time being that jerk Tom Ainsworth was it, but they were having problems, you can bet, but Maurice and Tom've been together for the past three years, you know?”

“Sounds like your brother was a caring person,” offered Jessica.

“Caring as we humans get, but what did it get him but killed? He took people in, people who were in need. Tom got tired of it. Maurice lent them money and gave them things, and as a result he had people coming and going through his life all the time, and secretly, I think he liked it that way, regardless of what he told himself in that diary, or what he told me.” She dropped her head, sobbed further. “The Good Samaritan, that was Maurice, and Jesus but he liked the role he played.”

Jessica gently urged Linda Sue to go on.

“He believed in a pure and saving-grace kinda love that he had been searching for since his birth, but Ainsworth wasn't it, and he looked for it in all the wrong places. Said he'd recognize it when… whenever it came along. He was a fucking romantic; absolutely addicted to it.”

“Why do you think Thomas Ainsworth got him killed?”

“That idiot kept hurting Pattie. Ainsworth slept around. He… Pattie knew that Ainsworth had just been using him these past months. It sent Pattie into a grave… grave depression. Sent him out nights looking.”

She wrung her hands and dabbed at her eyes. “ 'Course, it wasn't all Tom's fault that it ended in failure. Nobody could measure up to Maurice's standards. The perfect partner would have to be from another era, like one of those freaks in the paintings all over his place. Crazy bastard.” She burst into tears once more. Sturtevante now held up the parchment with the poem they suspected to have been written by Maurice, and she asked point-blank, “Ever see anything like this before around your brother's place?”

The girl stared. “The Poet Killer. I saw it on the news. My brother was killed by the Poet?” News people had not been told that the killer left his poems emblazoned on the backs of his victims.

“Do you know this handwriting? Ever see it before?”

“Never.”

“Then it's not your brother's?”

“No… no… well, I mean, isn't it the killer's handwriting?”

Jessica took Linda Sue's hands in her own. “We need you to be clear on this, Linda. We have reason to believe that this particular poem may have been written by your brother.”

“He didn't, you know, kill himself, did he?” she asked.

Jessica shook her head emphatically. “No, of that much we are certain.”

The sister stared at the poem, reading its every line. “Sounds like Pattie's prattle. Yeah, looks like his handwriting.”

Sturtevante said, “I'd like you to come back to the station house with me, Miss Harris.”

“What for?”

“Routine questions. Get a fix on your brother's acquaintances, his routine, that sort of thing. Any bit of information, you know, could lead to something else, which in turn could uncover something new in the case, you see.”

“Until the trail leads to his killer, you mean? You have no idea the times I told him the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” She sniffed back sobs. “I won't let you all treat this as a typical death, do you understand me?” Sturtevante put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Of course.”

Jessica reassured her. “There's nothing typical about what's happened here.”

“No, dear,” added Kim, “there's nothing typical at all about this case. You're not to worry on that score.”