a/n ; wow my first review! Thank u
I'm in a crisis.
The leering difficulty in processing the wrenching proclamation is like sludge and sewage seeping through my veins; I think, will this be my fatal hadiwist? Will I have yearned to possess the ability to go back in time and warn myself that putting so much trust and invested infatuation into this man will surely lead to my death, my disappearance? I seem to have looked before I jumped, though: how am I supposed to trust a madman, some shambling ex-detective who let it all get to his head? Maybe this is nothing more than a personal vendetta. It would be so satisfying to decree Dr. Lecter the cause of all of this, because, after all, Will must surely feel like it was his therapist's shortcomings that led to this misery he now wallows in.
I put far too much thought into it, I forgot that I'm to only take Will's opinion and empathetic "insights" with a grain of salt. The theatrics may have worked with Crawford, but it doesn't work with me. I see no tangible connection, I could—in no universe—draw a visible conclusion. There are suspicions, there are interpersonal feuds, but there is no evidence to interpret, and that's all I care about.
His conclusion lingers like nothing more than the annoyance of a mosquito bite. The further I go from him and the hospital is the closer I venture to my typical stance: indifferent, aloof, unshakable. The mise en cine of that disgusting place must have torn a hole in the ethos that I so proudly adorn as a cape, a crown, a shawl: Will knows how to get into people's heads and reaffirm his delusions with their reactions. My only voyage into the strangeness of empathy, of understanding and relation to another human, will surely be my last.
I don't like the idea of anyone getting into my head. How clearly he knew to strike for my Achilles' heel worries me.
When I return to the lab, the heavy white sterility helps associate my thoughts, flip through the deck of cards and slip them back into order. I understand, now—after all, with everything so immaculate, I'm certain to notice if anything is amiss and out of the ordinary. The environment truly does influence me: not because I am malleable, but because my thoughts are so contained within me, that contamination is my worst nightmare. I want to be a solemn island, a hateful, stubborn isle with no uninvited guest: I want to be completely alone. This isn't a superiority complex speaking, some stupid profession of me hating to learn from others, but a precaution.
My thoughts get less molded and more mangled. I shake my head and try not to consider the possibility of pride being my hamartia, that I should fall victim to a big ego and a bad case of overshot hubris.
This case is eating me alive unlike any other. I can't even tell why.
"Details on the autopsy report—spick and span, I'd say, not a single hair, fingerprint or any other recognizable trace of DNA left." Beverly Katz maintains an aura that I would say is only rivaled by Dr. Lecter's: I wouldn't say its micawber, not at all, nor macabre. It's simply sturdy; indisputably solid, she seems as if she is an unshakable solidity that cannot be swayed by anything but the felled swoop of truth: the erosion wearing away at her ankles of personal relation and suspicion will never make her falter.
I admire her. I nod, offer her a careful smile, and I take the report from her and politely thumb through it, though I've already got a few discrepancies to go over. Jack looks sullen as ever, mouth wide and eyes squinted, Vince's black and blue body drained of fluids and stiff as a board.
"Definitely not a ripper victim," I say, crossing my arms as I so carefully observed Will doing when he lost his patience and was made to explain what he believed to be inherent, "just look at the wound. Jagged, uneven, unprofessional—I doubt the ripper would regress in his precision. It's just a shoddy job, but it's not like it was on purpose. I'd suspect this was a separate killer."
A careful breath, drawn and bated, held in my lungs until it gets stale and my alveoli begin to split at the seams, only released when Katz and Crawford both nod approvingly. Distinguished that all without a sliver of imagination, I looked at the text and the gaudy wound and the evidence and used the variables to generate an answer from my equation: no play-pretend, no acting out Vince's death, no closing my eyes for a dramatic jolt from the tangible world back into his last moments. Clean and simple, professional work that doesn't interfere with me. I'll go home and do as I please; Vince's specter will not follow me.
"It'd be a good guess. I mean, we haven't had any evidence that the ripper works with hallucinatory drugs." She looks at me, and then Jack, and then Vince, and her brilliance seems dimmed when she realizes we have no idea what she's talking about. "The powder, found all over his face? It's obvious that he inhaled plenty of it—it registered as a plant-based hallucinatory drug. It's called yoyotli, and it's hard to find outside of Mexico."
It's as if a fishing line snapped: I immediately see a discourse of thoughts after thoughts, so many sources to pull that it's basically a bookshelf toppling over me, and I'd sooner drown in my unspoken information than be able to properly convey it. Somehow, I manage. I'm not sure how, but I get the first word out, and it paints their faces with hideous masks that I can only presume they similarly adorned when Graham said outlandish, freakish hypotheses that were later proven right.
"Obsidian," I say, my hands gesticulating quickly at the red tear etched in his muscle and flesh, "there's obsidian in the wounds. Right? A chip of jadestone in his mouth? Says right here in the file."
Katz parts her lips and her arched brows raise towards her hairline, before she nods, hesitantly. There's that same sort of distant worry clouding her eyes like cream in coffee, and I'll have to explain that I came to this conclusion due to knowledge and evidence, no empathy necessary.
"Jadestone in his mouth, obsidian to carve him open—yoyotli isn't really used as a drug for, say, recreational implementation, it's ritualistic. It's something that sort of inebriates you, calms you down and lessens the pain. It was a sacrifice, obviously, these things are—well, they were—practical procedure for Mexica sacrifices."
"Aztec," Jack supplies, and I feel like running him over with a truck.
"No." I wish Dr. Lecter was here, somehow, his aloof air of intelligence and otherworldly knowledge making everyone feel bad before they even opened their mouth. He could let you know your folly before you even conjured the thought, and his piety just made you want to learn more from him. "Mexica. Tenochtitlan. Aztec is the incorrect term; the Mexica originated from the Aztec, but they've got a deep schism in culture." Though no one is impressed with my tight knowledge of Mesoamerican history, I shakily nod and continue on, "human sacrifices were performed with often semi-willing participants and yoyotli was used to subdue them. Obsidian was the go-to blade because other metals were nonexistent and difficult to come by, jadestone was placed in the mouth or the palm for the deceased to take to the afterlife as payment to entering heaven. Since they were sacrificed, of course, they were spared from Mictlan—which is, I guess, a sort of purgatory—but they still can't just get in. This was even done with sacrifices destined for Tlalocan, which, y'know, is almost their version of heaven, but only in water related deaths. The jadestone was necessary to ensure their death wasn't a waste: it was an exchange." I stop, draw a breath, lick my dry lips and try to avoid eye contact with Beverly or Jack.
They stare at me with a sense of reverent awe that I despise. Don't confuse my practical knowledge and ability to remember what I read out of some dusty volumes at public libraries with some otherworldly, half-assed magic ability to crawl into the killer's head and realize he's some Aztec-obsessed fanatic of maintaining the sacrifice-quo. I knew this because I knew the facts, not because I knew how to make up some arguments. I wonder what Graham would have said—lacking all precise nomenclature and terminology, maybe he would have said "the gem represents an exchange, man, they want to repay him for giving up his life and it was his way of letting us know he's sorry. He's a remorseful killer. Look for someone who fits this criteria: …" and then he'd go on forever.
"Jadestone Ripper," Beverly muses, a small smile gracing her pursed lips, and I laugh a little, shaky tremors vibrating from my throat like a cellist's bow coaxing a flat note out of an untuned cello.