Incubi - Edward Lee.wps (17 page)

"What?"

"Knocking on wood. The Druids believed that knocking on wood appeased the gods and brought luck to the faithful."

"I better start carrying a two-by-four around. No wonder things haven't been going well."

Karla Panzram crossed her legs. "How are the other things going?"

Jack wanted to frown. "What do you mean?"

"I think you know. You've been in the office several minutes already and you haven't even lit a cigarette."

"Thanks for reminding me," Jack said, and lit a cigarette. "But believe it or not, I haven't had a drink in over a day."

"Good. You've decided to quit?"

"No. I've just been too busy to drink. Besides, my liver is like the Rock of Gibraltar."

"Oh? A healthy male liver weighs three pounds. The average alcoholic's liver weighs fifteen.

Alcohol clogs the hepatic veins with cholesterol; the liver distends from overwork."

"I'll keep that in mind when I order my next Fiddich." Jack snorted smoke. He didn't like the idea of having a fifteen-pound liver. "Did you come here just to tell me about livers?"

"No. I have an additional speculation about Charlie. It didn't occur to me until last night."

"I'm ready," Jack said.

"Charlie probably has a magnificent physique. We know he's attractive in a general sense; Shanna Barrington was an attractive woman. But I also suspect he's obsessed with his own physique."

"What makes you think so?"

"Charlie's obsessed with female beauty. Seeing is as important to him as doing. This is a commonplace trait for sex killers on a fantasy borderline. It's called bellamania or beau-idée-fixe. He's seeking an ideal of female beauty in his victims. Therefore he must be beautiful himself or else he won't be worthy to offer and to sacrifice his victim's beauty to whatever structural basis his ritual exists in. Physical beauty is what propels him. His victim's and his own."

Jack stubbed his butt. "Sounds pretty complicated."

"Actually it's not. Like I said, it's a commonplace trait. It's something to consider, at least."

Magnificent physique, Jack pondered. At least no one will be accusing me of the murders.

The phone shrilled, like a sudden alarm.

"Cordesman. City District Homicide," Jack answered. But he felt sinking even before the voice replied.

"Jack?" It was Randy. The pause told Jack everything, its emptiness fielding a root of dread. Aw, Jesus, Jesus...

"We've got another one," Randy said.

Jack scribbled down the address. "I'll be there in ten," he said. He hung up. All he could see for a moment was red.

"Come on," he said to Karla Panzram.

«« »»

"I know," Khoronos claimed. "I heard you screaming too."

But how could he have? Veronica knew he hadn't been in the house when she had her nightmare.

He couldn't have heard.

"But it's something else that's bothering you," he observed.

She'd come in after leaving Amy at the pool. Instead of finding Khoronos, he'd found her in the library. She hadn't asked where he'd been all night, though her curiosity still itched. "You look...discomposed," he'd said almost immediately. "You look separated from yourself. Why?"

The living room was quiet, dark. Khoronos' presence made her feel sequestered. "I can't work,"

she said.

"Before you can be one with your art, you must become one with yourself."

Why did he always suggest her spiritual self was not intact? It seemed like a distant insult. "Tell me what to do," she said half sarcastically. "You have all the answers."

"The answers are within yourself, Ms. Polk, but to reveal them you must realize the full weight of the questions. You haven't done that, you never do. You have profound convictions about your art, but you haven't applied that same profundity to yourself. This, I believe, is your greatest failure."

She felt like shouting at him, or giving him the finger. Who the hell was he to imply her failures?

"Your sense of creation runs deep, so why does your sense of self remain so impoverished?

Synergy, Ms. Polk, must exist between the two. What you create comes from you, yet if you don't know yourself, how can you expect to create anything of worth?"

Veronica couldn't decide if that made sense.

Then he said: "What are you running from?"

She sat back in the couch and frowned.

"Synergy is balance," he continued. "It's equanimity between what we are and what we create. Do you understand that?"

"No," she said.

"All right. Creation is born of desire. Do you agree?"

She shrugged. "I guess."

"To know ourselves as artists, we must know our desires first. Any desire, even potential ones.

Desire is the ultimate stimulus of what we are creatively, and the authenticity of the impetus can only dawn on us through an unyielding love of ourselves."

Veronica contemplated this, then thought of what Amy Vandersteen and Ginny had said at the pool. They were all saying the same things. Suddenly Veronica felt like the child among them.

"But the root." Khoronos lifted a finger. "We must now reveal the root of the impediment."

"Fine," she muttered. She felt stupid, inept.

"Tell me about the nightmare you had."

Her face blanked. At once the images lurched back, and when she squeezed her eyes shut the nightmare only came more precisely into focus. She saw it all again, in razor-sharp, searing imagery.

"Tell me everything," Khoronos said.

She spoke in the darkest monotone, the voice she heard didn't even sound like her own; it was someone else's, some dark confessor removed from her. The voice recounted everything, every detail of the dream, like sludge pouring out of her mind into the blackest fosse. The confession and that's what it was, really seemed to gnaw the flesh off hours.

At the monologue's end, Khoronos smiled, or seemed to. "Dreams are the mirrors of our souls.

They tell us what we don't realize about ourselves, and often what we don't want to realize.

Dreams make us confront what we refuse to confront." His eyes assayed her. "You feel guilty.

That's what's obstructing your work. That's what you're running from. Guilt."

"Bullshit," Veronica replied.

"You don't know what to do," he professed. "So your dream has told you. Your dream has shown you the answer."

"The dream hasn't shown me anything," she dissented. Her temper seemed to pulse, testing itself.

"The dream is the answer, Veronica. The figure of Jack isn't really Jack; it's a symbol of the love of your past, a death symbol."

"Meaning my past is dead," she stated rather than asked to emphasize her sarcasm.

"Exactly," he said.

Veronica smirked.

"But you don't want to confront that. It makes you feel guilty, because when you ended your relationship with him, you hurt him. Society teaches us not to hurt people. When we hurt people we produce a negative reflection of ourselves. You feel that selfishness is what compelled you to break up with Jack. Am I right or wrong?"

Veronica gulped. "You're right."

"You've been taught that selfishness is bad. You ended your relationship because of selfishness.

Therefore, you are bad. That is your conscious conception of the entire ordeal."

"All right, maybe it is!" she now succeeded in raising her voice, "Maybe I am bad! Maybe I'm nothing but a selfish bitch who shits all over people! So what?"

Khoronos sat back and smiled. "Now we're getting somewhere."

But Veronica wouldn't hear of it. She stood up quickly, pointed her finger like a gun. "I know what you're going to tell me, goddamn it! You're going to tell me some egotistical garbage like the true artist must be selfish in order to produce true art! You're going to tell me that art is the pinnacle of culture and the only way to achieve it is to completely disregard other people, and it's okay to disregard other people because art is more important!"

Total silence distended the wake of her outburst. She trembled before him, heat reddening her face.

"It's not my intention to tell you any such thing," he responded. He seemed lackadaisical, even amused. "Sit back down, Ms. Polk. Collect yourself, and we can go on."

Veronica retook her opposing seat. Her heart slowed back down.

"What we're really talking about here is conception and misconception. Art is the ultimate proof of mankind's superiority, not politics, not feeding the poor and disarming the world of its nuclear weapons. Those are but mechanics. The sum of the parts of all mankind, all that we have risen to since we crafted the first wheel, is what we create to symbolize what we are."

"What's that got to do with conception?" Veronica objected.

"Everything," he said. "What you conceive of as selfishness isn't selfishness at all. It's truth."

"Truth?" she queried.

"You ended your relationship with Jack in pursuit of your inner sense of truth. You only think it was selfishness because you don't fully understand yourself. It's truth, Ms. Polk, not selfishness."

She felt exhausted now, as her mind strayed over his epigrams. She felt like something taken apart in error and reassembled.

"You did exactly what you had to do to preserve the most vital aspect of truth. You destroyed something that was false. That is what your dream was trying to tell you."

Veronica gazed at him, damped.

"When the figure of flame entered your dream," Khoronos went on, "you felt at first afraid. When it touched you, you screamed, yet you admit that those screams were screams of ecstasy. I'll even dare to say that upon the fire-figure's touch, you climaxed. Am I right or wrong?"

"You're right," she admitted, and this admission came with no reluctance. The fire-lover's presence had drenched her in sexual anticipation, both times she'd dreamed of it. And when it touched her, she came.

"So what have we revealed?" he asked. "That you're not selfish but devoted to truth. And in the dream, Jack existed as a symbol of your past." Khoronos rose from his seat. "The figure of flame is the symbol of your future."

She felt enlightened now, yet enmeshed with confusion. Suddenly she wanted to plead with him, this doctrinaire, this pundit who had dug into the tumult of her psyche and shown her the most promising image of herself. She groped, speechless, helpless.

"Your future begs your final awakening, Ms. Polk. It begs you to re-embark upon your quest and become what you were put on earth to be. It begs you to discover yourself as completely as you can be discovered."

"But how?" she pleaded, looking up at him. "I don't know what to do!"

"As I've said, and as you have agreed, creation is born of desire. And what is desire in the uttermost sense?"

"What?" she begged.

"Passion," came the flat, granite answer.

"Passion for what?"

"Passion for everything." Khoronos began to walk away, shrinking silently within the room's enfeebled light. "Delve into your passion, Ms. Polk, and you will discover at last what you really are."

| |

"Same M.O., same guy," Randy said. "Front door locked, nothing ripped off, no signs of struggle.

He went out the back."

Jack walked into the living room. TSD was all over the place, stolid automatons dusting door frames and snapping common areas. Gorgeous morning sunlight poured in through fleckless windows, a mocking affront. Places like this should be dark, sullen, as any place of the dead.

"What's her "

"Rebecca Black, thirty-one," Randy answered. His face told all, a mask cracked by terrible witness. "Paralegal for one of the big firms on the Circle. Good work record, no rap sheet, no trouble. Pest control was doing the complex this morning. They came in with the passkey from condo maintenance and found her."

Jack's gaze imagined the killer's trek, bedroom hall, across the living room, to the slider. "Any TOD?" he asked.

"Beck's here now. Oh, and the victim's divorced. We're gonna "

"It ain't the husband," Jack stated. "We know that." He made no further inquiries, heading for the bedroom. Karla Panzram followed him in silence.

"You'll have to bootie up, sir," a young, brawny uniform told him at the door. "Hair and Fiber's still working." Jack nodded. The cop doled them Sirchie plastic foot bags "booties," they were called and two hairnets. Jan Beck did not want her crime scene contaminated by irrelevant hairs and clothing fibers or shoe debris. Jack and Karla put on their booties. If only Dad could see me now, Jack considered, stuffing his long hair into his net.

Karla Panzram was smiling. "Do hairnets make you feel emasculated, Captain Cordesman?"

"Shut up, Doctor," Jack replied. "As long as they don't make me wear panties, I'll be fine."

What they stepped into then was not a bedroom. Bedrooms were where people slept, dreamed, made love, got dressed in the morning and undressed at night bedrooms were where people lived.

They walked, instead, into a charnel house. Jack's vision swam in red; he needed to look at nothing in particular to see it. It was simply there the red unveiled and hovering. The red figure lay within red walls, red wrists and ankles lashed to the red bed.

Karla Panzram said nothing, made no reaction, and Jan Beck, too, tended to her grisly business denuded of emotion. The spindly woman jotted down ITDs incremental temperature drop every five seconds at the sound of a beep, reading digital figures off a Putfor Mark II contact thermometer which had been adhered just below Rebecca Black's smudged throat. The device, zeroed at a mean of 98.6, gauged how quickly the epidermal temperature decayed.

"Hello, sir," Jan Beck said without looking up. She wore red polyester utilities, foot bags, acetate gloves, and a hairnet. So did the two techs who roamed the floor on hands and knees with illuminated CRP magnifiers. Polyester was less inclined to drop fibers, but on occasions when that happened the bright red material was easily spotted and rejected as fiberfall. "Feel free to look around," Jan Beck invited. "But please do not approach the contact perimeter."