Blind Instinct

EIGHT

Jessica and Sharpe spent the rest of the day in a frustrating effort to gain access to the recently buried Frank Coibby. When they were finally able to get the paperwork, it was learned that Coibby's body had been misplaced. “By order of the Crown that no bodies be buried in the realm,” due to the terrible overcrowding in British cemeteries. It had been for this reason that O'Donahue's body had been cremated into uselessness. Now Coibby simply appeared misplaced, as mortuary after mortuary was being checked.

“I thought you said there'd be no problem with this,” Jessica asked, her rising voice telegraphing frustration.

Frowning, Sharpe replied, “I ordered the body be held intact, funeral service or no, and-”

“Funeral service?”

“Thrown together affair by the estranged family, out of a sense of duty, I suppose. In any case, the mortuary paid by the family for services rendered, such as they were, simply shipped the body out to another mortuary, I am now told.”

“Odd, isn't it?” Jessica wondered if there might not be some hidden agenda in all this.

“A falling out over the billing costs, I'm told, caused the second mortuary to return the body here, but they have limited storage facilities, just as we do at the Yard.”

“And so?”

“The mortician here has the body at his… home.”

“His homeT

“In a full-sized freezer there. Bugger figured to leave it there until such a time as someone came asking for it back.”

“Well, now we're asking,” she huffed.

“Mr. Coibby's body will be returned to the mortuary by 8 a.m. tomorrow,” came back the promise from the mortician, a Mr. Littelle.

And for tonight, Jessica found herself having dinner with Richard Sharpe at the Trafalgar Square's famous Rules restaurant, known for having fortified English stomachs since 1798. They ate quickly so that Sharpe could show her some of the sights and the famous area within walking distance of her hotel room at the York. Richard offered to take her to see Soho by night as well, and that invitation she found far too enticing to turn down. She planned to return another day to take in the nearby National Gallery.

“We will have to motor to West End, but my car is close at hand,” he informed Jessica.

“Yes, wonderful… Soho. I've heard so much about the area.”

Soho didn't disappoint. Jessica was delighted when she found herself on Oxford Street, London's number one shopping street, which history told her had been a road since Roman times. From there, Richard took her through Soho Square, a brooding place, laid out in the 1680s. “See the church there?” asked Richard, pointing to a spiraling steeple.

“Yes.”

“French Protestant. French Huguenots formed the first wave to settle the district, followed by a melting pot of other nationalities, giving the place its international flair while maintaining a villagelike appearance.”

“Much like Greenwich Village in New York,” she replied. “Exactly. That cosmopolitan flavor.”They strolled Frifth Street to Old Compton Street and on to Charring Cross Road, a place lined with fascinating and quaint bookshops. At Cambridge Circus, Richard pointed out the restored Palace Theatre, a fascinating sight, and soon they were on Gerrard Street, a pedestrian-only area in the heart of China Town. Richard asked if she cared for anything to drink as they stood outside the Dragon Inn.

“Yes, a drink would do me well,” she agreeably replied. “But only one.”

“My limit as well,” he warned with a smile. “What would you like?”

“A whiskey sour, perhaps?”

“Hmmm… lovely. My preference as well.”

Richard waved to the bartender, someone he knew from past visits, the moment they stepped through the red doors and into the dark interior. The Asian bartender smiled and nodded, knowing what Richard meant by his two fingers in the air. They found a table where Jessica put down the few small bags, her purchases amassed during their trek.

“I trust you found some real treasures to take back to the States with you,” he commented on the bags.

“Yes, in fact, I have.”

“Good. I'm glad you're enjoying yourself in my city.”

He said my city as if he'd given birth to it; he stated it with pride and passion.

Jessica had never felt so passionate about a place as this man obviously felt toward London, but she could well understand it.

Along their stroll, he'd pointed out places of historical significance and interest, such as the House of St. Barnabas, a 1746 structure that reminded all Londoners of Soho's aristocratic beginnings. He had also pointed out a now charming small hotel named the Hazlitt on Frifth Street, where essayist William Hazlitt died. Richard noted a nearby inn where once Karl Marx and his family lived in abject poverty as well. The area, now cleaned up for the tourist trade, still somehow conveyed the feeling of a place where starving artists and idealists came to die. This lent a melancholy mood to the place, like that found in a cemetery, despite the modem veneer.

When Jessica voiced her feelings, Richard laughed and said, “Are you interested in visiting Soho Cemetery? Quite a few famous chaps buried there.”

Their drinks had arrived, and seeing no ice in either of them, Jessica recalled the custom. Liquor in London was taken at room temperature. She stirred her drink with a swizzle stick, staring into the brown liquid. 'Truth be known, I do enjoy a good cemetery search,” she confided, “but-”

“Cemeteries abound in London, some with quite impressive permanent Londoners as we call them.”

“Which do you suggest as the best, if I've only time for one?” she asked.

“That's difficult to say. St. Marylebone, perhaps. Westminster and the Tower of London have, of course, the most to see, but they've become such traps for the tourists. Although there are magnificent carved stones and statues to see. But for the real enthusiasts, they should see Bunhill Fields.”

“Bunhill Fields?”

“Probably a bastardization of bone field.” He laughed lightly and sipped at his drink.

“No doubt,” she agreed with his assessment.

“John Wesley's buried there. An enormous likeness of him as you enter the gates. John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake-”

“A regular writers' colony!”

“John Milton is entered at nearby St. Giles Cripplegate.”

“Charming name, Cripple-gate?”

He raised his shoulders. “Not sure how a gate can be crippled, you mean? Likely as not a busted affair.”

The terms busted affair and Cripplegate made Jessica again think of James Parry and her crippled relationship with him. Their busted affair.

“Is there anything wrong?” he asked.

She realized he'd read the dark shadow that'd eclipsed her features as she'd given thought to James and their beleaguered love, a love beset and plagued by problems of distance and practicalities, a love tormented and besieged by loneliness. When last she'd spoken to Jim Parry, he wanted her to mull over the idea that they begin to see other people. He had needs that she could not fulfill from half a globe away, he'd complained. To Richard now, she simply said, “Nothing, really. Just… a memory.”

“I see. Yes, I have a few bad memories of my own.” She forced a smile, realizing that he must be well-attuned to people to be the inspector that he was.

“I'm not one to pry, but should you wish to talk about it, about anything at all, you'll find me a good listener.”

She smiled in return. “Thank you, Richard. I may take you up on that someday.”

They parted at Jessica's door with an exchange of handshakes, eye contact, and smiles, Richard ever the gentleman. Jessica spent the rest of the evening alone with her longing to telephone James Parry. Her emotions ran the gamut from wanting to rub Parry's face in the fact that she had just spent the day with a wonderful British gentleman to whom she felt attracted, to hoping against hope that James had had a change of heart, that he would reconsider their relationship and the decision to end it. Richard Sharpe had awakened feelings in her she had suppressed for too long now. She needed James's reassurance that all between them would and could be worked out. But her analytical side, her unemotional scientific side knew that any reconciliation with James Parry was unlikely at this point.

Sometime later-in a nightgown that James had purchased for her in an exotic little shop their last time on Maui-Jessica lay on her back, unable to sleep, thinking intently about the last time she had heard James's voice. She wondered if it would prove to be the very last time she would ever hear his voice. That telephone call had been a connection made between Quantico, Virginia, and Honolulu, Hawaii, during a rushed moment before the trip to London-typical of her lifestyle. Even in the midst of trying to hold on to James, she was packing and racing away.

She thought now of Hawaii, where they had first met in 1994, six years ago, and where they had continued a longdistance love affair since. It had been a good run, she now told herself, knowing that the intensity and passion of their feelings had waned to the point of estrangement, the kind of deeply sad estrangement only former lovers who still felt warmth for one another could know. Through no fault of Jim's or her own, things had gone the way of so many relationships. Given the distance between them, given their egos, given their high-powered careers-he a field chief special agent with the Bureau, she a much-in-demand medical examiner-the oddsmakers in the FBI family had them down for a year, two at best. But such people didn't know James Parry, nor did they know Jessica Coran, not really.

Even so… Even accepting the fact that their love had cooled, creating an emotional chasm between them larger than the miles separating them, Jessica found herself in a quandary. She didn't know whether to cherish or to fend off all the myriad and power-filled memories of this love, the memories of this man, memories of them together. She still battled with the feeling of abandonment and emptiness, so bitter and gut-wrenching; still fought the needs, the tugging pull like an invisible cord in her abdomen somehow still connected between them.

'Talk about physical pain,” she told herself and the empty room. She still felt-if she allowed herself to feel-his breath in hers whenever they had made passionate love. She still closed her eyes and saw the patterned beauty of his salt-and-pepper hair up close, while her chin lay against his forehead. She still felt the soft warmth of his gentle touch against her skin, the sweet smell of him lingering in her mind along with the way his laughter filled her with a giddiness she'd not known since childhood, and the thousand other small memories that went into building the whole memory of him that she so cherished. Let it go? Give it over to the grave? Bury it? Put it by with mourning? The sad irony in such intense passion remained at once to hold firm to that rarity, and at the same time control it. “So it does not destroy you,” she pleaded with herself again. Control it, control it, control it. An internal memo she had to resend to her heart, back to her brain, then relay again to her soul, with the intent of gaining acceptance and balance in the trio of spirit.

Try as she might, it all came crashing back. She recalled that last, unfulfilling conversation…

Jim came on, asking, “Jessica? Is that you? How are you? Where are you calling from?” He sounded groggy as if climbing from sleep. She realized too late the time difference between them. I'm home, but I'm off to London. I was hoping that perhaps you could join me there for a few days?”

“I'm actually in the midst of one hell of a political shake-up in the islands at the moment, and to add to my troubles, we've got a serial killer stalking striptease dancers over here.”

“I see.”

“He's already killed four without any sign of giving himself away. Uses a garrote to practically cut their heads off. Full of rage, this one.”

“A garrote? Rather a specialized weapon. Have you considered the possibility it's a woman doing the killing?”

“Why do you say so?”

“Garroting is a backdoor approach, and one has to gain the near total acceptance of the victim, make her feel there's nothing whatever to fear. Of course, a Ted Bundy could talk a victim into completely relaxing around him, but the Bundy type is rare. Most women do not feel threatened by other women.”

“Well, there's no sexual contact, no lust-murder elements, merely a clean, thin, cut line around the entire throat.”

“It's entirely possible the murder weapon could appear as a harmless necklace. Garrotes are as thin as wire.”

“Amazing,” he muttered. “Some of us here have given thought to the possibility it's a woman doing the killing.”

“No signs of struggle? Nothing under the victim's nails? No way to get at the killer if he or she approached from behind,” she said.

“That's exactly what we've got. The killer leaves a scented handkerchief at every scene, a feminine touch.”

The conversation shifted to their relationship and to precisely what they both knew they must talk about.

“All right, James. Time for the truth. Truth is we aren't talking about what's really on our minds anymore. Not like we used to talk …”

He had agreed, saying, 'Truth is, we're… we've drifted apart, Jess, and I… I've become involved.”

“Involved? With someone else?”

“You know how it is. Working late hours on an intense case. Only natural to turn to someone, someone close at hand, not thousands of miles away.”

“I can't say that you didn't warn me.” She dared not ask how long Parry had been seeing this new person in his life.

James finally admitted, “I could no longer maintain our- my-side of our relationship, despite all my attempts to make it work.”

“Greece, the Mediterranean, that was a beautiful attempt, James.”

“It's over, Jess. You made the choice for us, not me.”

“What choice are you talking about? I've had no… It seems to me that you're the one who has made the choices here, James.”

“You chose your work over everything, Jessica. Over me, over us, over your own happiness. And that's where it's at for you, isn't it? Isn't it?” He'd begun to shout.

“I've done all I could to maintain an exclusive, longdistance relationship with you, James. I've done that and more. I have committed to you.”

“Well, Jess, you have a funny definition of commitment. I can't accept what you call a commitment any longer. I'm forty-eight years old, Jessica, and one day I want to have children. I'm sorry, but I can't do this anymore. Not anymore.”

“James, let's hold on, all right? Give me time to come over. We'll talk. We'll work something out, we'll-”

“No, I'm sorry, Jess, but-”

“What's the harm in giving it more time, so that we can discuss it like two intelligent adults faced with a problem. So we can find a solution?”

“Jess, you made a choice-your career over me. It's that simple. Problem resolved.”

“You want me to give up everything-my job, my friends, everything I know-to join you in Hawaii, but you're not willing to give up a single thing.” Love makes fools of us all, she thought.

“We've had this argument before, Jess.” He spoke in a near-whisper. She could feel his pain coming through. She whispered in return, “What are you willing to give up for me, James?”

“What we had… while beautiful, Jess, it's now clearly… over.”

Jessica had felt all her inner resolve and strength drain from her body through bare-knuckled hands and fingertips that wrapped themselves tightly about the solid phone receiver, as if they could hold back James's determination. Her fingers lingered over the phone as if independent of her. Her hands felt and looked like someone else's. She calmly studied the flawless white skin and hardly noticed when her right hand simply dropped the phone on its cradle, her eyes filling with remorse and bittersweet tears. She was apart from herself, unable to feel a thing.

She hadn't even said good-bye; nor had he. Fitting ending. She felt angry and frustrated. There seemed no pleasing him. While he offered no compromise, Jim expected her to completely overhaul her life and lifestyle on the altar of their spoken bond. It would be easier to give into mad emotions now. Make demands of her own. Simply to say Fuck Jim Parry, and to hell with all his ultimatums. She was no one's property, goods, assets, belongings. “I'm no man's belongings, nor will I ever be,” she told herself.

She could live without Jim, she rationalized now, and then she cried more deeply, not believing a word of it.

And now here she lay in a London suite paid for by Scotland Yard. Gulping back her grief at the loss of her lover, Jessica quietly fell asleep thinking of a line from a familiar song, one that had become a way of life for her: Alone again, naturally.

At 2 a.m. Jessica gave up any hope of sleep. Insomnia, that old devil, stalked her anew. With the full discomfort of inability to find restful sleep, Jessica turned to Father Jerrard Luc Sante for help, hefting his self-published book Twisted Faiths onto her lap where she sat up in bed.

She read halfway through the opus and determined that while Dr. Luc Sante's conclusions lived an inspired life unto themselves, and while he went way out on the cutting edge of a psychotherapy few people dared discuss much less examine at so close a range, his style and choice of words were too often uninspired.

Still, the conclusions seemed inspired by some supra-human voice seemingly not of this Earth. Actually, the book's many conclusions surpassed anything she had ever read in psychotherapy journals or volumes.

At the same time, she clearly understood why Luc Sante could not find a publisher for his work. No one would pay money to read the convoluted thinking of what some might assume to be a mad priest gone on verbal rampage against the evil among us. Throughout her reading, she was forced to stop and reread for clarity, and, frankly, she found Luc Sante's crippled prose generally wooden and lacking in luster.

While she was no editor or grammarian, she judged his sentences as awkwardly constructed, his phraseology too often linear and syllogistic, while his annoying terminology-laden, for-psychotherapist-only approach stuttered every step of the way over the rhetoric of his own field: religion. Still, his “truths” were fascinating: Satan lives in the human breath and organs. Evil flourishes in the disease vials we call our bodies. Evil flourishes in our weak and hopelessly ruled brains, and yet we have children whom we teach and inspire. How many of us inspire hatred, racial prejudice, ignorance, poverty, and murder? We are Satan. Satan is us. And from generation to generation, we propagate evil through our children, and will continue to do so until the cycle of Satanism is broken and until psychotherapists join with religious leaders to both recognize and combat evil in its purest form-mankind. The same mankind that crucified Christ.

All the same, only occasionally on paper did Luc Sante's magnificent speaking voice come through. Consequently, the pace of the book became as turgid as a pollution-choked industrial canal. Still, the book filled Jessica with dread shivers. It held much rare information doled out like so many golden nuggets, she thought, all on a subject seldom to never touched on. Luc Sante's running thesis said: True evil as it is created in society among people, as it is given life and breath in this world, is altogether so mundane and day-to-day as to be all but invisible to us, and in being so invisible, it gained in strength and cunning thanks to our blatant ignorance of it.

She believed what Luc Sante said to be clearly correct in a sense, fitting into of her own experiences with twisted minds. Jessica began to believe that perhaps evil did indeed infest and infiltrate and find succor in the most mundane of human hearts and minds through the genetic makeup. That much of the pitiable state of the human condition, and the ferocity of the creature called man, was predetermined through a fate as biochemically fundamental as the DNA of apes, despite the outward veneer of civility, progress, and technological marvels.

Certainly mankind remained, throughout the ages and present day, an incubator for evil experiments as well as all manner of disease and disability. She imagined a world in which the worst of mankind, the most evil among us, were subjects of a cloning experiment, that had, in the later part of the twentieth century, blindly and unwittingly cloned its own dark side, so that the modem-day serial killer could indeed be explained. She imagined that nature had done the cloning for us with the hand of Satan in the mix. She pulled back, short of putting full stock into the religious man's words. “We've had the messages in the bubblegum wrapper defense, we've had the Devil-made-me-do-it defense, the talking dog from Son of Sam, and now we're to have the DNA-made-me-do-it defense?” she asked the room. Still Luc Sante's book had one fine result: It had put her under. She had fallen asleep at last, with his compilation of dark and sinister thoughts on her lap, and she dreamed of the many guises of evil he'd so elegantly described in his comprehensive work on the nature of evil and the duty of every psychotherapist to engage the diabolical, all malfeasance and malignancy wherever he or she found it, and to struggle in real-time combat with it at every turn.

“We fight the same enemy.” Luc Sante's voice wafted over her dreams…Lawrence Coibby, used car salesman, loner, without a friend in the world, having never actually been buried, had spent the last few weeks in storage in a stranger's freezer in a garage in Kensington. Jessica was told this with such calm that she marveled anew at the ability of the British to understate any situation. Consequently, there having been no actual burial, due in part to the absence of burial sites, there was no true exhumation of the body. However, over the last twenty-four hours, the “hunt” for Coibby's body had continued, and once properly identified and located, the cadaver had been taken to a nearby hospital, St. Stephen's Parish Hospital, where Dr. Coran oversaw the evidence gathering-specifically the evidence gathered from under Lawrence Coibby's tongue.

Staring through the high-powered magnifying glass brought in for the job, Jessica found the tongue in remarkably good shape due more to the deep freezing of the body than to the embalming.

“There it stands, gentlemen,” she told Sharpe and the others, Copperwaite, Chief Inspector Boulte alongside Dr. Schuller. “Have a look, Richard. It's the same message, letter for letter, word for word.”

Sharpe eagerly took her place at the magnifying glass, finding just the right focus for himself. “As if the killer has a brand, and he keeps using it over and over.”

'Two out of three, technically,” agreed Copperwaite.

“It's clear enough.”

Jessica took a last look at the message, inscribed in the flesh, burnt into the flesh by a micro-brand. “I confess, I've never seen the like of it before,” she told the men.

“It's clearly the work of a serial killer now, one wishing to taunt police with a hideous method of torturous death for his victims,” suggested Chief Inspector Boulte. “We'll keep this out of the communique you wish to forward the media, Richard.”

“We'd like a good deal more said about the killings, Chief Inspector.”

“I've reviewed your suggestions and those of our American colleague, Richard. I'm sorry, but it all seems a bit premature at this time to alarm the public with this information about…about the tongues being seared on top of all this other nastiness, you see?”

Jessica took several deep breaths of air, allowing her disappointment clear vent. Sharpe bit his lip and nodded to his superior, saying, “Whatever you judge best, Chief Inspector. It is, after all, your show.”

Sharpe abruptly turned from his superior and rained compliments on Jessica. “You've done a fine job for us. Dr. Coran, in the startlingly brief time you've been on the case.”

Copperwaite eagerly added, “Yes, she's already proven her worth to the case quite dramatically, I'd say.”*

Copperwaite's compliment hardly left his lips when Sharpe laughed aloud. Whether Copperwaite knew it or not, he'd hit upon the true reason why Chief Inspector Boulte did not wish to go public with this information. It had come not from the Yard's efforts or findings, but from the American, the colonist, Jessica Coran. Boulte only showed a politically correct smile and agreed with his men, saying, “Yes, Dr. Coran, your contribution to the case, thus far, has been most impressive. Keep up the good work.” Dr. Karl Schuller, however, remained displeased, his dour expression as frozen as the dead Coibby's, and he left without a word to anyone. Boulte followed after him.“Where do we go from here?” she asked Sharpe.

“How about lunch?” he replied.

“Bonzo,” agreed Copperwaite. “I'm starved.”

“There's a little pub not far from here, called Groton's, if it's not full. Old favorite,” said Sharpe. “Let's have a go at it, shall we?”

“We shall,” Jessica agreed.

“Over lunch, we can talk about our next move. If we have one.”

“What do you mean by that?” she asked. “ 7/ we have one?”

“Chief Inspector Boulte's pushing for a new investigative team to come on.”

“What? What kind of thinking is that?”

“Administrative.”

“Is that how New Scotland Yard works? If so, it smells like yesterday's fish.”

“Boulte used a fishy metaphor as well,” replied Sharpe, a bit amused at her anger. “Says we're rowing a leaking boat.”

“He's always saying crap of that sort. 'Gain on swings, lose on roundabouts,' he says ten times a day,” reported Copperwaite as they continued to the bar. “Gawd 'elp us. The man doesn't know the geography of his own house.”

Sharpe laughed uproariously at this, leaving Jessica to wonder what she'd missed. He quickly explained, “It means he can't find the john in his own home.”

She joined in their laughter. “I've a Geordie friend from Tynsdale knows more than that man,” said Copperwaite.

“Boulte doesn't rise to the level of a Geordie, a George perhaps…” Sharpe's summation brought on more laughter. Copperwaite explained for Jessica that a George in Britain meant the automatic-pilot mechanism on an airplane or the cruise mechanism on a car. “Let the hamster onto the wheel,” added Sharpe, chewing now on an unlit pipe.

“Still, isn't it rather a bit premature to call in a new investigative team at this point?” she asked.

Sharpe shrugged. “Oh, I don't know. He has to have someone to play the goat. Short of having someone in the greenhouse-ahh, the lock-up-he has to point a finger in some direction. To be fair, he has a hell of a political Rube Goldberg balanced on his shoulder right now, and-”

“Ahh, you're daft, Sharpie. You make too many excuses for the man.”

Sharpe ignored Copperwaite as they continued along a tree-lined street, children playing in nearby yards. “Boulte's right about one thing. We haven't amassed a thing on the killer, and now we may simply have to wait for the killer to strike again before we can learn any more about him or them. This is a sorry state of affairs, but it happens to be the circumstances we're now faced with, as you know.”

“We're just to sit about like bumps to wait for a… another killing?” asked Copperwaite.

Jessica complained as well. “That's a bit like the tail wagging the dog, don't you think?”

“What steps then would you have us take?”

“Use the Times and the BBC. Get word out on this killer. Tell the public what you've found, what to look for.”

“That might flush him out,” agreed Copperwaite.

“Or send him packing,” suggested Sharpe.

Jessica looked into his eyes. “Either way, don't you think people should be forewarned? If there's anyone out there who knows anything about this branding for instance, it could lead to a break in the case. As it is, you have no suspects and no direction. Sometimes you need to manufacture a direction.”