Blind Instinct

FIVE

Somewhere in a dark place in London

He paced before the cross. He knelt at the altar in the gloom of this place and the far deeper gloom of his soul. He stood, paced more, as if pacing might focus thought. He pondered the situation. Pondered on-had pondered for hours on end now: how to present his truth to them, and eventually to every man.

His compatriot in the crucifixions watched him, watched the emotional turmoil, and he tried to ease his friend and mentor's soul, saying, “You tear at yourself with the talons of self-recrimination and perplexity. You should not have any doubts. We are doing the right thing.”

“Self-doubt? Try self-loathing and despair, wonder and waver, ponder and stagger, vacillate and hesitate, distrust and mistrust, suspect and question every step, so unsure of the whether-or-nots, the ifs, ands, ors, nors, yets, fors, sos, and buts of self-recrimination and doubt.”

“You are the right man at the right time to perform God's work here on Earth,” replied the other. “You must not doubt yourself.”

“I doubt my ability to hold the others, to spread the word. I doubt I have any ability with fact, and whether or not I can convey God's truth.”

“Perhaps such truth cannot be conveyed to others, that truth, like God and Christ, lives beyond human understanding and perception.”

“Still we must try to penetrate the obstinate others, to show them the way. Sometimes I dare ask the crucial question: Do the others even matter? Were they really a part of the grand scheme? Were they even real in the sense of reality as being truth, if indeed reality was never the truth to begin with? Perhaps the others have even less corporeal existence than the voices in my head. Perhaps the others are the voices in my head. No one, not even those who purport to understand and follow me, my dear friend, really know what lives are led inside the Crucifier's head.” He laughed and shook his head. “That's what the London press calls me now, the Crucifier. The fools could not be further from the truth.”

The friend agreed. “None of the fools of this Earth know that you were bom fated and ordained, selected as the Chosen One. Bom an archangel, really, someday to be known as both a prophet and a saint.”

“I know this much to be so. For God, and not the many other voices of doubt and dissension, has said so.”

“Perhaps in reliving the crucifixions that have gone before, in submitting each to the microscope of your keen mind, you could then explain to the others. Let them know, bring them to the same realization we hold dear-that failure is part of the process in getting from here to eternity.”

“Well said! Not one single soul has been wasted. Every single one who has gone before us to be crucified, has cleansed his or her soul in the bargain. It has been so with the O'Donahue woman and Lawrence Coibby.”

Lawrence Coibby had been given a more potent dosage of the drug, Brevital. He hadn't squirmed or moaned or whined so much as did Katherine. She'd been a big disappointment. She'd also been half conscious when the stakes were driven in, but Coibby was better about enduring the pain of it all, the drugs having dulled the sting, the suffering discomfort, the ultimate agonizing anguish that must be part of the path toward the ultimate pleasure, delight, joy, and rapture.

The drugs dulled the mind to all fearful sense of imminent danger. Coibby had died without pain, or so they all wanted to believe.

He recalled the exact moment of Coibby's passing. Coibby had simply expired, and not with his last painful breath as everyone would wish to believe. Coibby couldn't capture a last breath to have a last breath. When die man's last breath could not be taken, at the moment when one's breath became God's own breath, that was when he died.

Everyone agreed that Coibby's was a near perfect crucifixion.

Certainly, he flailed some at the end, but he never fully regained consciousness. And the inner peace brought on by the drug-and the knowledge he must go on to a better place-helped ease him over so that his spirit might imbue the dead corpse with a renewed source of power and strength, the strength that comes from knowing Jesus and the resurrection of the soul.

But again, Jesus failed to put in an appearance, and Lawrence's body had remained still and lifeless, as inert as the cross upon which he'd been sacrificed. So there was no corporeal proof of Coibby's resurrection, as there should have been, but then God tested men in mysterious ways.

Once again the all-night vigil grew long and unproductive, and the collective-they-became further disillusioned.

As director and choreographer of the Second Coming, he had much to answer for. His constituents and followers would soon abandon him if they learned the truth about him, that he hardly knew if what he searched for could ever be found in this or another millennium.

He'd been so sure with the schoolteacher.

He'd been equally sure with the car salesman, Coibby. And for a moment, he was absolutely sure it must be Coibby. But all hope failed when Coibby's corpse could not be enticed to show signs of resurrection after death, despite all prayer and all the power and life force coming from the collective.

They had simply miscalculated. All of them, including their leader. 'Too many voices in your head?” asked one follower.

“How is it possible that the Chosen One is not to be the Chosen One?” queried another.

“We must absolutely not become disillusioned,” he cautioned the others. “We must! Absolutely must continue to look elsewhere…”

“Look elsewhere?”

“Indeed.”

“For what, exactly, pray tell?” rallied the voices.

“For answers… enlightenment, of course. Holy enlightenment, indeed… exactly… pray tell…”

The Crucifier thought of that night when Coibby had gone over. He reviewed it in his head again and again, trying to get it right. Then he thought of the third Chosen One, Burton, and he again felt the doubts crowding into his mind, as he reexamined every step, every ritualistic moment of Burton's agonizing time on the cross. He heaved with the heavy burden on his shoulders and collapsed against a natural stone chair in this dark place where they must hide away their deeds until the world should come to enlightenment. His comforting friend placed an arm around his shoulders, gave him a warm hug, and said, “You must, like all the rest, be patient. The accurate millennium marks the Second Coming. We will see Christ resurrected through our combined will.”

Jessica awakened just as the plane came in sight of what appeared to be a mammoth island lying just off the coast of mainland Europe: Great Britain-England, Scotland, and Wales. From her window seat, Jessica could make out the Isle of Wight. The coastline, jagged and steep, gave the appearance of a great plateau rising from the ocean like some bloated giant's clenched fist. Small English villages rose out of the landscape as the plane descended, each looking like the small Christmas villages found in novelty shops, Jessica thought, delighting in the beauty of this place as the plane floated over moors and marshes toward the spirals of London, making her feel like a modem-day Peter Pan.

The plane descended further, now over an area known as the Whitleyern Highlands where fertile valleys alternated with chalk and limestone hills. Jessica knew that by any standard, Great Britain's overcrowded population had begun to bulge at the seams, and that ninety percent or more of its people lived in cities and towns. She'd read somewhere that in all of Europe, only tiny Belgium had a higher percentage of people in urban areas. The lowlands, especially in southeastern, central, and northern England, by comparison remained among the most thickly populated places on the globe, and nothing bred crime and murder like overpopulation. Yet, at the same time, the cemeteries of England were filled to capacity even stacked tier upon tier and there was no more room for the dead.

Jessica's insomnia awakened her while the cabin remained dark and everyone else asleep. Her insomnia had her reading facts from guidebooks she'd shoved in her overnight bag. Now Jessica, fully “up” on the country, knew that Great Britain had 232 persons per square kilometer as opposed to France's 100 per square kilometer, the USA's 26 per square kilometer, and Australia's 2 per square kilometer.

She had found Copperwaite dozing while Sharpe, like her, sat upright, having come awake some time before her. Both of them fully awake, she engaged Sharpe in conversation, telling him bits of her recently acquired knowledge of his homeland.

He instantly wanted to hear what she'd learned, and so she plied him with the facts most tourists received every day on incoming flights. She finished with a dark twist, however, saying, “I hate to be the pessimist, but there's no doubt that England, and London in particular, will see growing crime of the heinous kind most people think reserved only for America in the coming years and through the coming decades, millennium wishes to the contrary or not…”

He nodded appreciatively. “I have no doubt of it.”

“I believe it inevitable and unavoidable, that perhaps the overwhelming crime rate of America is, after all, linked to the growing numbers who feel alienated in an increasingly technological age.”

“Hramm, interesting theory. I've heard it before, in fact.”

“Do you doubt it?” she pressed. “Not in the least, as one of many contributing factors, of course.” He then ruminated about England's growth and progress, slurring the two words as if they were dirty, saying, “Greater London has-the last I looked at figures-a population of 6,775,000.”

“As I said, crowded, most in ghettos.”

He ignored her, going on, “Birmingham has 1,004,000, Leeds 711,000, Sheffield 534,000, Glasgow 725,000, and Scotland's capital, Edinburgh 438,000; while the capital and largest city in Wales, Cardiff, has a population of 280,000.”

“You must have a photographic memory,” she replied.“I'm good with numbers. Photographic, I'm not so sure. At any rate,” he continued, “in between these larger urban areas, a host of small towns and villages-all having one main street and one main shopping area-now flourish and grow.”

Again the emphasis on “grow,” the way it rolled bitterly from his throat, seemed a sure sign of how Sharpe felt about urban sprawl. Jessica said, “I take it, you don't care for progress as it is typically defined?”

“Look at it this way. Since the late forties, say about 1946, some twenty-one new towns were established in England, five in Scotland, and two in Wales. Some two million live in these small communities. In Great Britain alone, some six million dogs and almost as many cats also live as household pets, all with little or no room to scratch much less grow. So you can well imagine how the people feel about one another.”

Jessica was about to reiterate her fear that violent crime in England would only increase when she found herself becoming lost in his powerful, potent, green-eyed stare, so instead she turned and studied the rolling green landscape below. The airplane began passing over great expanses of wheat fields, the number one crop in all of England. She marveled at the beauty unfolding beneath them.

Jessica could just make out the small white dots along all the hillsides, the countryside peppered with sheep and cattle. The land rose up a deep, plush carpet of green, a startlingly deep, abiding green that Jessica had never before seen.

TTiey were above and to the right of Southhampton, and soon after, they reached sight of the enormous city that had begun as a Roman seaport.

As they came within view of London's cathedrals, Jessica immediately made out the gargoyles. The cathedrals were littered with phallic-shaped gargoyles hanging far out over the pinnacles, some at heights no doubt impossible to make out from the ground. The whole effect made the city below appear almost hostile to those flying over, like a kingdom ever vigilant, ever expectant of enemies from without, ever ready for war. The buildings, taken as a whole, crafted a giant bed of nails in the gloom of twilight. Government buildings, castles, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, St. George's Cathedral, St. Martin's and others, all jutting skyward with their arrowlike turrets, shone beautiful in the fresh morning light. The River Thames ran through the city like a huge, lacy ribbon or like an uncoiled snake, depending upon one's mood.

Jessica's mood had come full circle. Her arrival in London filled her soul with excitement. From Heathrow Airport to downtown London, she had an opportunity to see the choking pollution, congested roads, ugly factories, and blighted areas of the city-the necessary evils upon which all bustling, great cities rest. Far from the splendid, rolling, and majestic hills of England she'd witnessed by air. However, in forty minutes, she and the others entered the frenetic downtown city, which was filled with history and cemeteries. It had been the home of such notables as Rudyard Kipling, Samuel and Ben Johnson, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Tennyson, Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Carroll, Shakespeare, Disraeli, Churchill, Shaw, Newton, and Darwin-all men who had shed light onto the world. It had also been home to Jack-the-Ripper and other infamous killers.

She was “on the old sod” so to speak, and the official New Scotland Yard car, sent to greet them, traveled lanes that had been traveled by Boswell and Bacon, Raleigh and Drake, kings and queens, and so many others in history and literature. The place swept her imagination and played games with her heart.

“We're nearing the York at York's Gate, where you will be staying, Dr. Coran,” Richard Sharpe informed her. “We've got you a room there. It's central, close to the Yard, and coincidentally looks out over the Victoria Gardens Embankment where the first body was discovered.”

“All rather a neat package, all in the City,” added Copperwaite.

“The business district,” Sharpe clarified for her. “We will drop you at your hotel, allow you to settle in, and motor round to pick you up, say at eleven?”

“Where are you going?”

“As officers of Scotland Yard, we're duty-bound to report in before all else.” Sharpe then requested that the driver take Dr. Coran to the York by way of Savoy Place where a room awaited her arrival. But Jessica, seeing the now-famous revolving square sign that signaled New Scotland Yard headquarters, the modem structure at odds with all its ancient surroundings such as the Royal Horseguard and the Ministry of Defence, balked at separating so soon, saying, “No, I'd like to see what you have so far in your ready room before I go on to the hotel.”

“Ready room? Ahh, you mean our operations room-the ops! But really, we have so very little there,” apologized Copperwaite.

“You've seen the bulk of what we have in the files,” assured Sharpe.

“I want to have a look at the bodies as soon as possible, then.”

“It's rather early,” countered Sharpe, “and you must take into account jet lag. It was a long crossing. You may wish to acclimate to our-”

“I rested on the plane!”

“So you did. Yes, of course, then if you're sure…”

“I'm sure. Take me to your corpse,” she said, trying a joke to loosen Sharpe up a bit.

“That would be Chief Inspector Boulte.” Copperwaite quickly plugged into her joke with his own. “He's likely white as a corpse by now.”

Even the driver laughed at Copperwaite's remark.

“Well, yes,” agreed Sharpe, amused. “Likely pulled the few remaining hairs from his head since we left.” There was some disturbance at the parking lot entrance leading to the rear of the Yard, so Sharpe told the driver to let them off where they waited before the building. “Shall we alight here?” he suggested to Jessica, opening her car door.

Jessica wondered if the man had a rude bone in his body. He behaved far more like a choirboy than a cop. “So your Chief Inspector Boulte, I take is as his name implies-rather tightly wound? And from what I gather, he isn't so sure of my joining forces with the investigative team? Is that it?”

Copperwaite came around and joined them on the curb. “Wasn't all for it, calling in help from the colonies, you know,” he conspiratorially told Jessica.

“Has a hard time accepting the fact we lost the war to you Yanks. Asking for outside help, especially from Yanks, well, there you have it,” added Sharpe. “ 'Fraid I played a bit of a game with him. Gave the newshounds the impression he meant to seek out your help, you see, rather than it being my idea. He didn't care for the gesture, but it did assure us of getting you in on the case.”

She could not help but wonder about the twists and turns that had placed her here beside Richard Sharpe. Copperwaite added over her thoughts, “You can well imagine the sum total of collar work on Richard's part to bring this about, Dr. Coran.” Copperwaite then addressed his senior partner directly, adding, “Got your bloody neck in the harness now for it, Sharpie, and that's likely the only reason Boulte ever came round to the idea. Wants to tighten his reins on you, he does.”

“Quiet now, Stuart.”

“The man can be an absolute sticky wicket.”

“I said stuff it, Coppers.”

Copperwaite bit back his lip, his features taking on a more serious appearance, his hair still disheveled from the plane ride.

“Chief Inspector Boulte simply thinks of himself as above the salt,” Sharpe said in near apologetic tone to his partner.

“Aye, true.”

Jessica had no idea what they meant, and her eyes registered this fact with Sharpe, who added, “In olden days, the salt cellar at the dinner table was a huge affair, as tall as a pedestal, the size “of a typical vase, you see, and it marked where the upper-and lower-class citizens sat at the table. Old stout Boulte is somewhat highborn.”

Copperwaite added, “He's no alehouse politician.”

“Don't know that I've ever seen him take a drop.”

“Sounds like what we in the States call a tight-ass,” Jessica said, joining them.

“Oh, that he is,” agreed Copperwaite, now openly laughing. “And that thing he does, talking about how he gives charitably to all the poor-all my eye and Betty Martin, he does! The man's as cold as false charity, that's what!”

“Coppers, you're as near to the man as damnit is to swearing. Your skills of observation have improved tremendously to be sure, but to be fair, the man's facing an all-rounder here-a triple homicide,” cautioned Sharpe.

“Oh, I've got 'im down, I do. As near as makes no odds. And the man's personality, well, it's all the fun of the fair, right Sharpie?” Copperwaite continued in levity. “And if I hear the man say, 'It won't answer' once more, I shall bloody run from the building screaming.”

“And how is that the answer?” joked Sharpe. “Still, you do yourself a sad disservice speaking ill of superiors before such as the driver. Some in the department are paid bonuses to repeat what you and I have to say, Stuart. Believe me.”

Jessica studied the modem edifice before them, staring at the entranceway to the famous Scotland Yard, and she asked, “Will your Chief Inspector Boulte be on duty this early?”

“He's lost a good deal of sleep over the Crucifier thing, and he knows we're returning. So yes, he'll likely be here. He'll want a full report. Very proper chap, as they say. Strictly by the book, you see.”

“Really?” asked Jessica in a lilting tone. “More so than you?”

“Why, I'm not at all proper, not once you get to know me. Under the right conditions, some would call me a hell-raiser.”

“Really?”

London bustled with life all around them, people on the street passing them, cars and double-decker buses blaring anger and resentment, making Jessica wonder if the cops here had as much difficulty with traffic quarrels as those in major cities in America. She guessed they must.

Looking about, Jessica found herself feeling downright naked without an umbrella. Everyone on the street carried a proper umbrella, it appeared. And everywhere, in shops, in doorways, in windows, in the hands of men and women, she saw flowers. Flowers simply abounded here.

“Shall we?” asked Sharpe, indicating the way.

Jessica followed Sharpe through an archway that led to the gleaming glass doors of the modem facility. As in America, the British taxpayer must pay dearly for crime, she thought; her understanding of the tax structure had the average Britisher paying three times as much as the American taxpayer. Back home, she herself paid enough in taxes to finance most third world countries; she felt some pity for the British taxpayer.

They went through a series of brightly lit corridors, down which the blip-blip-buzz and drone of noisy offices careened, as if manic to escape the building. They next passed through a door, past cubicles and several glassed in partitions where suspects in various crimes were being rigorously interrogated. Sharpe quipped, “We call that assisting the police. Problem is, most of these back-enders speak only back-slang, you know, that peculiarly British pastime of making words up by turning them round, like ecilop for police. It's how the term slop for police came to be.”

Finally they stepped into a larger, open area in which ongoing murder cases were “displayed” to anyone in official capacity and interested in the cases set forth. Each case had its own “booth”-not unlike the booths set up at state fairs and in state capitals to display the work of Jaycee and Booster clubs. But here the subject matter presented a grim portrait of the various horrors dreamed up by mankind, so that the Scotland Yard operations room took on the quality of a house of horrors. The walls were papered with gory crime-scene photos, the tables were littered with the paraphernalia of murder- any and all clues to the identity of the victim, the killer, and the murder weapon. All of it lay before her like the artifacts dug from a recently unearthed archaeological site. Sharpe and Copperwaite left Jessica and went on to Chief Inspector Boulte's office down the hall. Left alone for the first time since leaving America, Jessica studied the objects on a table below the heading of Crucifixion Murders.

The Scotland Yard detectives hadn't exaggerated. They had nothing to go on. As Copperwaite had put it the day before, “We've nothing, down to the bloody heirs and assigns who stood to gain from the deaths of these three victims, nothing what-bloody-ever\”

Victim number one had no living relatives. Victim number two had been estranged from his family, and despite child support and alimony payments, none of the family had heard a word from him in over eleven years. Number three had children, but like number two, he had had nothing to do with his children after a particularly nasty divorce, save sending the assistance checks, which he did like clockwork until his sons came of age and the money dried up.

Obviously, the usual methods, such as following the money trail, proved fruitless in the case of the Crucifier. All money leads had led the detectives nowhere, since in each case the only parties to benefit were each victim's favorite charitable organization. Each left explicit directions, in wills found in their bank vaults, as to how their estates were to be divvied up.

Jessica briefly wondered if, on the whole, Britons took more care with such postmortem matters than did the average American. Victim number one left her meager savings, amounting to 24,000 pounds, to the Church of Christ's Divination; number two left his entire savings, amounting to 36,000 pounds, to the Church of Our Lady of Merciful Tears, while number three ironically left a far greater sum, 170,000 pounds, ironically to the First Church of the Crucifixion.

According to records, each church benefactor had been closely scrutinized, but no collusion or duress raised its ugly head with respect to the various churches to benefit from the deaths of the victims.

The monies all being nontaxable, as they'd gone to charitable organizations, no one in government was interested save the watchdogs who saw to it that the organizations actually did charitable work.

So there appeared no money motive for killing these three individuals. Unless, Jessica facetiously thought, you just happened to be a mad priest capable of knowing what a person's last wishes might be, or capable of accessing their records, say electronically. After a mild, inward laugh, Jessica dismissed money as a motive, just as Copperwaite and Sharpe had done before her. Her eyes went over the minutia of murder laid out before her. Each item was labeled with a crime-scene number that corresponded to each victim.

Since the bodies were all found nude, early identification of the first two had been nearly impossible; while the third, a relatively well-known radio commentator, had been easier. The bodies had no pockets, a phrase in police parlance that meant IDing the victim would require great effort; this also meant that anything lying about the body had either been there before the body was dumped or had belonged to the killer.

As she stared down at the objects lying before her, Jessica realized that the killer may or may not have dropped a lapel button, may or may not have left a cigarette packet found at the scene, may or may not have left prints on the discarded candy-bar wrapper, or on the Essex Hotel ballpoint pen found near one of the bodies. A railway spike labeled “possible” murder weapon lay alongside the items found at the scene, but this had been introduced by the coroner whose guesswork led him to believe the hands and feet were pinned to the cross with something similar in size and weight. The railway spike then had not been recouped from the crime-scene area at all.

Jessica lifted the hefty, metal stake and imagined for a moment what it must feel like as it penetrated flesh and bone at the extremities. The thought gave her a chill. She imagined a helpless victim with three such stakes hammered in to pinion her body to some rough-hewn, splintery surface.

“Unfortunately, we don't have the actual murder weapons used by the killer or killers in this case. They seem cagey, these two. Not so stupid as to leave their prints on the stakes lying about for us to find.” It was Chief Inspector Paul Boulte, Jessica assumed since he'd come in the company of Richard Sharpe.

Boulte stood huge and round, a white James Earl Jones: broad-shouldered, full-faced, a painted grin, and he stood a head taller than Jessica. He appeared to like looking down on her-perhaps all women-from his high eyeball perch. Gargoyle eyes, she registered.

'Tidy killers, actually,” the big man continued. “Very little blood involved, naturally, given the method of murder, but then that might say something about the prissiness of the killers, mightn't it?”

“Perhaps, but I hardly call staking someone to a cross prissy.”

“I merely meant the killer or killers might feel squeamish about blood, that's all,” continued the man Jessica had assumed to be Chief Inspector Boulte. He stood fingering some of the artifacts on the death table and quietly introduced himself, shaking her hand.

“Then you gentlemen are of the opinion there is more than one Crucifier?”

“That has become, we feel, apparent.”

The Chief Inspector spoke in circles, Jessica realized. “But you are still surmising. No hard evidence of two DNA trails, two hair samples-nothing of a forensic nature to back your suppositions, I take it.”

“No, not as yet. But then, that's what you're here for, isn't it?”

Jessica nodded and said, “You won't be disappointed Chief Boulte, not by the FBI.” She was, after all, here on his buck. Still, forensic science did not set out to prove a previously established theory; it set out to prove the truth without any taint of preconceived notions. “I suspect that with each new kill, if he follows the pattern of most serial killers, our Crucifier will become more and more brash,” she suggested. “Stupid mistakes will follow, I assure you, Chief Inspector.”

Impressed by her assuredness, the man extended his hand once again, saying, “And when the killer's big mistake appears, you will be on him, or them, like a terrier, I'm sure.”

“You know me better than I'd thought. When it comes to murder I can be a Jack bull terrier, sir.”

The frank response took Boulte by surprise, forcing a nervous laugh from him, while Sharpe hid his own amusement. Jessica realized that Sharpe, who had stood aside to watch the sparks, had brought his superior to meet her here in order to show Boulte that Dr. Coran was already earning her keep.

Chief Inspector Boulte now smiled at her, finding her aggressive response to his liking, enough to take her hand hostage again amid his sweaty palms. He said, “I certainly meant no disrespect, nor to imply, Doctor, anything unsavory. Pardon my clumsiness with words. Are you finding London to your liking, Dr. Coran?”

“I hope to see a good deal more of it. I've only just come from the plane.”

“So Sharpe here tells me how eager you are to see the results of the Crucifier's maiming. Perhaps you will be my guest tonight for dinner? Allow me to show you the fairer side of our beautiful city, get your mind off this horrid business for a time, once you've finished up with Burton's body, of course.”

“Sorry, not tonight,” she said automatically. “I'm going to be quite busy tonight. I want to do my own examination of all three of the victims right away.”

“Burton, perhaps, but not the other victims, I'm afraid,” he replied. 'Two of them have been released. We don't like to hold on to them too long. Public opinion, PR, all that, you understand.”

“I thought they were pretty much without family.”

“Well, the first one, yes, but our freezer compartments are jammed this time of year, and she was getting fairly… ripe, if you follow.” He brought a guttural laugh from his larynx to spill out over his lips, but he didn't, thank God, drag it out.

Almost in apology for his superior, Sharpe said, “We do have limited space, and Whitehall hasn't seen fit to improve the situation for the past several years now, not to mention the problem with burial plot space, and true to form, division tells us that if we fail to use what space we have left, we shall lose it. The commonwealth will seize it, as it were.”

“Where did the body go for burial?”

“She was buried in a potter's field, ancient place in Southhampton owned by the city of London,” began Sharpe, his apologetic tone getting much work this morning. “Not one of your more exotic London walking tour cemeteries, I assure you.”

“We've got them buried in potter's fields here in layers,” added Chief Inspector Boulte. “Some burial plots house as many as four and five residences, one atop the other.”

Sharpe, paying little heed to Boulte's attempted thunderbolt of information, continued, saying, “Most A.N. Others are cremated, to save on space in the cemetery.” She liked the way he pronounced cemetery as cemel-tree. “Still, as chief investigator, I did insist we at least keep O'Donahue's body intact for the time being in case we need to review anything later.”

“Probably a wise move, Inspector,” she told him, holding the railway stake up to the men. “I'd really like to see what kind of a hole this made in her flesh. But, of course, we'll need more than my curiosity to get an exhumation order. I'm sure your government bureaucracy is at least as prickly as ours in America.”

“I'm sure we've got you Yanks won on that tally,” Boulte replied.

“Second victim's family had a burial plot in Hempstead,” explained Sharpe. 'Took the body there.” She allowed her surprise to color her features. “Really? I thought the family was estranged from him.” Again, Sharpe clarified for her, saying, “Funny how a crisis of this magnitude can break down those artificial barriers people impose on one another. Besides, the tabloid press gets interested and all sorts of roaches crawl out of the woodwork. The Coibbys were no different than the usual run of the mill. Still, blood is thicker than water, they say. And for having not seen the man in so long, the members of the family I spoke with were extremely and understandably shaken at how he met his end, dying as he did, you see.”

“So, do you have victim number three for me to look at, or has someone carted him off, too?” she asked point-blank. “He's here,” assured Sharpe. Then he looked at Boulte for reassurance of the fact. “Right?”

“Yes, of course, as I said earlier to Dr. Coran,” Boulte replied to Jessica even though he answered Sharpe, his eyes lingering as his hand had earlier done. “Knowing that you were on your way, we held tight to Mr. Burton, 'The Mole.' “ Boulte laughed again, annoying her. Then he feebly explained, “That's what the lab guys are calling him, not me.”

“And why are they calling him a mole?”

“His features suggest something of a cross between a ferret, a blind mouse, and a mole.”

“I see, then he was, as they say, a plain man?”

“In every respect, yes… Quite ordinary, really.”

'Take me to see your Mole Man, then, please.”