Bitter Instinct jc-8

by Robert W. Walker

  A team of evidence techs were sent to his university office, and they, too, came up empty. But a third team, sent to his Second Street apartment, hit the mother lode. Pinned on the walls were the photos Jessica had been looking for, shots of each of the victims who had preceded his final rampage. These, combined with the photographic record of the poems etched in poisoned ink, proved irrefutable.

  Vladoc showed up at the scene of the crime now, and as he walked among the living scurrying about doing their work, he looked like a dead man. “Poor Evey, and those children, I loved them as if they were my own,” he repeatedly told anyone who would listen, as if saying the words over and over would make them sound more true. How could Vladoc not have known that his brother was so deeply disturbed?

  “I had no idea, I swear to you all,” he finally said. “I was as much in the dark as you. He… Lucian always appeared happy, pleased with his life. He only spoke on occasion of minor problems in his marriage, his desire to be free of all the responsibilities of work and fatherhood and being a husband, but nothing serious, you see. He always worked things out in his head, I was certain. Obviously, I never heard his cry. He never allowed me to.”

  “He may well have thought you blind to the reality he lived,” Jessica suggested in an attempt to ease Vladoc's obvious pain.

  “Such a waste of human life and potential…” Vladoc, unable to stand another moment in the house, tearfully made his way out into the night. Jessica feared he would blame himself for the rest of his life, not only for what had happened here, but for all the victims of his brother's quiet madness.

  Jessica had to fight off the recurring image of the children upstairs. Locke's two children, aged six and seven, along with his beautiful wife, had returned early from a trip to the Florida Keys, all suntanned and healthy-looking, but now all were quite dead, each with a poem scrawled across his or her back.

  From the basement, Shockley shouted for Dr. Coran to come downstairs. She reluctantly complied, taking the steps down to the blinding field of lights that had been set up in the basement. Water sloshed around her ankles as the drains fought a losing battle with the leaking pipes. “We were in the process of moving the body out of this damned deluge when this floated by.” He extended a handwritten note.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Read it. It's his last remarks. Quite incriminating.” Jessica read the note scrawled in the killer's shaky hand.

  I loved them all. Even poor George. I loved each and every one of them. They were all broken-winged fairy angels, not of this world, certainly not needing to endure life on this plane a moment longer. I love all of those whom I have sent over. There was no other choice.

  The note ended with Lucian Locke's familiar signature. Jessica looked up to see Kim and a retinue of uniformed police standing nearby, everyone watching as Locke's body was hoisted onto a stretcher. Only now did she see the words written in blood orange along his arms and chest.

  “He tried to write himself to death,” Shockley lamely joked. “Get it? But he appears to have run out of ink. Used it all up on everyone else.”

  “We found leather straps around the wife's legs and wrists,” commented one of the evidence techs who'd taken charge of the scene in the room where Evey Locke had been found. Apparendy she had not willingly complied with her husband's plan to send her to a better world. According to the ETs who worked the upstairs room, the children had been drugged into a stupor before the quill pen dug into their flesh.

  “In the end, he pulled out all the stops,” said Jessica. “He didn't have time for the niceties, like convincing his victims that to have a Lucian Locke poem emblazoned on their backs was their ticket to paradise.”

  Locke, his body misshapen and his hair matted and disheveled, was carried up the stairs and to one of the two waiting emergency vans, their strobe lights having wakened the entire neighborhood. As one of the ETs plunked out a rendition of “Chopsticks” on the piano next to Evey Locke, the old ME, Shockley, made his way upstairs to the children. “I want a firsthand look at the boy and girl,” he said sadly.

  “Angels he had called them.” Jessica shook her head. “I'll go with you.”

  “Thanks. I'll need your help.”

  “We know now how he kept abreast of the investigation.”

  “Yes, I heard. Through his brother, Vladoc. Don't you find it strange, though, that Vladoc didn't recognize his own brother's handwriting and poetry? After all, he was studying it, he made pronouncements on it, told us all about that Enochian thing, and yet he had no idea his brother was so deeply into this warped philosophy?”

  “I've wondered the same, yes,” said Kim, who had come into the room and overheard them. “But while subconsciously he may have known, consciously I'm not so sure. I just spent time with him outside, and he's a broken man. He could not have taken part in his brother's actions. His brother's DNA will tell the story, and I don't believe he was involved from afar, like some master puppeteer.”

  “Locke was the only puppeteer here,” Jessica returned. “Still, now that he's dead, we should confiscate all of Vladoc's records on his patient.”

  “Just to be sure,” Shockley agreed.

  “He could not have accepted such a truth; only now has he been able to, now that the evidence is irrefutable,” Kim assured them. “I held his hand, and I tell you he is horrified at what has happened to the only family he has.”

  With the final evidence gathered and the last photograph of the death scenes at the Locke house taken, Jessica rushed outside to the predawn air, breathing it in deeply several times, attempting to clear her head. Nothing so affected the death investigator as the unnecessary death of a child, and here were two innocents taken. Leanne Sturtevante and James Parry had returned to the scene, and Parry asked her how she was holding up.

  “I've been better. It's horrible what's happened here.”

  Parry and Sturtevante confessed to having had the same discussion as the others regarding Vladoc. They all agreed that his brother had used him, duped him.

  Sturtevante remained with Jessica while Parry stepped back inside for a final look around the murder/suicide house. Locke's death had been ruled as suicide in that he had caused it knowingly and willingly, when he realized the poison he'd used on himself had not been a toxic enough dosage and his attempt to hang himself also failed. Jessica now learned from Sturtevante how she had discovered Marc Tamburino in the final throes of death.

  “Before he died he told me it was Locke. It was the only word he managed to speak before he choked and expired. From the mouth of a dying man. I knew it couldn't be ignored. Tamburino's back had been turned into a grid of death by Locke's letters.”

  “What's amazing to me,” Jessica said, “is that he would go off like this after so carefully constructing a scapegoat in the person of George Gordonn. I suppose we can only infer that after he manipulated things so that no suspicion could fall on him, the irrational powers and forces driving Locke proved stronger than his logical mind.”

  “Marc Tamburino didn't know Locke was the killer until it was too late. He figured it out as he lay dying, about the time I found him in his apartment this evening. Locke rushed out before I got there, leaving Marc still alive. I must have frightened Locke as I approached.”

  Kim, who had been standing nearby listening to Sturtevante describe the path that had led her to Locke, offered her thoughts. 'Tamburino no doubt thought it a great honor to be wearing an original Lucian Locke poem emblazoned across his body to the clubs last night, I suppose.”

  “Who wouldn't?” Sturtevante said. “Even Donatella thought it'd be cool to display an original Locke on her back. It's what's gotten all of them killed.”

  Jessica asked for more of the details surrounding Tamburino's death.

  “I carried him down to my car rather than wait for any ambulance, and I rushed him to Cellmark, the closest hospital with a poison center, but we were simply too late. An attempt to save him from the selenium, even though I
could identify the poison coursing through his body, fell short. Time was not on Marc's side.”

  “Didn't he die en route to the hospital?” Jessica asked.

  “No, no, we had him almost stabilized when his heart stopped and no amount of effort on the part of the medical team could bring him back.”

  “You did all you could for him,” said Jessica.

  “I realized immediately that Dr. Harriet Plummer, who'd been seeing Locke, might well be another target, guessing that Marc was killed as much for his nosing around and asking one too many questions as anything else. He hardly fit the victim profile, and neither did Plummer, but on a hunch, I telephoned Dr. Plummer to warn her.”

  “But it was too late for her as well?”

  “ 'Fraid so. She was alive but just barely. Somehow she lifted the phone, and I identified myself and she simply babbled, 'I… could never… not love… Lucian. Could never say no… to him. Never could not love him.' She sounded drugged.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I shouted for her to stay on the phone, to keep talking to me, and at the same time, I got someone on the line so that I could dial 911 and get a cruiser over there immediately with instructions to treat her for selenium poisoning. Plummer dropped the phone before I could get help. I made the calls and raced to her location from the hospital. “I figured that Locke had killed her, too. The man was on a rampage, just as you said, Jessica. As I drove to the Plummer location, I contacted Jim, and he met me there. The result was another corpse filled with Locke's poison and poetry. The two of us realized that the man was on a kill spree now, probably fearing that he'd be identified as the Poet Killer-that he had framed George Gordonn. At least that's my guess.”

  “It sounds about right to me,” Jessica told her.

  “So Jim and I asked ourselves who else might he harm? And Jim remembered the children and his wife. That's when we heard from you, and we raced to this location direct from Plummer's.”

  “And Burrwith? Was he killed, too?”

  “No, just disturbed to be awakened in the middle of the night, or so the officers who rushed to his home said.”

  “Thanks for filling us in, Leanne, and again, my sincerest regrets over your loss of Donatella.”

  “Dona was never one to play it safe; imagine, allowing Lucian Locke to write across her back.”

  “Likely with the promise that he'd let her do him. A pact of sorts, to prove to each other that neither was the killer.”

  “She so admired Locke's work. She knew the killer's hand was inspired by her and Locke's poetry. She confessed that much to me once.”

  Jessica and Kim went toward their waiting vehicle, tired and exhausted, talking about hot baths, body oils, warm candlelight, and distancing themselves from the horror of this time and place. Jessica had left the formalities of the crime-scene investigation and the chain-of-evidence duties to Shockley, who appeared to be basking in his supervisory role in the mop-up effort. All that remained now was to make a DNA match between Lucian Locke and the teardrops left on the earlier victims. That kind of scientifically irrefutable evidence would put to rest any and all speculation about Vladoc or anyone else's having taken part in the killings.

  EPILOGUE

  Predicting human behavior is really about recognizing the play from just a few lines of dialogue.

  — Gavin De Becker

  No one doubted the innocence of Dr. Peter Flavius Vladoc in the murders committed by his brother, but his gullibility in the matter and his total failure to recognize that a man he was treating was so seriously disturbed resulted in his ruined reputation as a psychiatrist. Finally, he had no choice but to pack his things and vacate his office at the PPD. He told Jessica that henceforth he'd concentrate on private practice, but he would have to do so elsewhere, somewhere far from Philadelphia, the city he loved.

  “It's the price I must pay for being blind, but in the end, I fear that it will be Philadelphia that will pay a far greater price,” he declared, not a little pompously.

  The DNA match on Vladoc's brother, Locke, was made, and there was no longer any doubt as to who the killer had been.

  “What price is that, sir?” Jessica couldn't help asking.

  “The final act in this morbid play of good and evil, Dr. Coran, I fear, has yet to be performed.”

  “Whatever do you mean, Dr. Vladoc?”

  “You've been too busy with your lab work and your crucifying my brother to notice that others are in the business of doing just the opposite-deifying him.”

  “Really? And who are these fools?”

  “The youth of this city. While you have been busily working behind these walls, tying up all the usual loose ends-and I include myself in the category of loose end- making it unequivocally clear that my brother was a vicious serial killer, the youth of Philadelphia have also been talking about Lucian Locke. They have, in fact, apotheosized the man as their light and savior.”

  Jessica was horrified. “I had no idea.”

  “And they continue to pen poems on the bodies of friends and on themselves, carrying on the tradition bom of the suicide pact of 'Lady Byron' and Harold Gordonn, continued by their spiritual son, Lucian Burke Locke. I fear nothing good can come of it.”

  “We can't dictate lifestyles or faiths, beliefs in fetish objects or cults, Dr. Vladoc. All we can do is make sure that anyone turning such things into crime and murder is stopped.”

  “Meanwhile, Jessica, I have felt it an honor to have worked closely with you and Dr. Desinor. Please give her my regards. I understand she is taking some R amp;R in Baltimore? Of all places to vacation… well, to each his own.”

  “Where will you go now, Dr. Vladoc?”

  “China perhaps…” He chuckled at his own joke. “At least as far away as China. I'm thinking perhaps people in Anchorage or Seatde might have me.”

  “You've done nothing to deserve what has befallen you, sir, and without your help, we would still be stumbling about in the dark.”

  “Yes, well, stumbling about in the dark is sort of the way the PPD brass put it to me. Not to worry. They offer a generous retirement package.”

  Jessica saw a kindness in him she hadn't glimpsed before, his eyes as he smiled suddenly causing her to think of the actor/director/writer Peter Ustinov.

  As they shook hands and said their final good-byes, she said, “If ever I'm involved in a case in the Pacific Northwest, I'll call on you.”

  “Please do, by all means.”

  Jessica turned her attention back to the labs where Shockley and DeAngelos and others were busy finishing work on the Poet Killer case. Through the glass partitions she saw that James Parry was on his way to bid her goodbye, knowing she was scheduled to return to Quantico that night.

  “Jessica,” he said. “Couldn't let you go without saying so long.”

  “This time face-to-face.”

  “I thought we had hashed that out?”

  “Yeah… yeah, we did. Sorry for the cattiness.”

  “Without the cattiness gene, what kind of woman would you make?” he joked.

  “How are you doing-I mean with your new digs and Philadelphia post, Jim?”

  “It's not going to be so bad after all. We've come out of this shining, Jess, and it's largely due to your being here.”

  “Don't be foolish. It was a team effort, all-almost all the way.”

  “Give my regards and thanks to Kim when you see her. She was right on with her psychic hits all along. We've got to learn how to better read her”

  “And tell Leanne thanks from us. It was a rocky start, but we did get the job done after all.”

  “She's taken some time off, reassessing her life. Losing her lover, Donatella, has been an incredibly debilitating blow to her. She's not even sure she wants to come back to the force, but a lot of us are urging her to do so. She's too good to lose.”

  “If you think that highly of her, why don't you send her to Quantico for basic training and put her on in your shop?” He
y, nota bad idea at that.” He paused, thinking. “I'll give her a call. See what she thinks of the offer. I'm sure it can be arranged. We've lost a couple of people to retirement.”

  “Go for it, Jim.” Jessica smiled warmly at him.

  When they shook hands, Jim held on to hers, squeezing it with obvious feeling, and smiling. “I sometimes so miss what we had together, Jess. I really, really do.”

  “I know, Jim, believe me.”

  “I wish the best for you, you know, even if it's with that Englishman.”

  “Richard is his name.”

  “Yes, well… settled our differences, then… I'll be off. Don't be a stranger when-if you're ever back this way.”

  “You, too, whenever you're in D.C. or anywhere near Quantico, Jim. I mean that.”

  Parry leaned forward to give her a peck on the cheek, but she pulled back.

  “Bye now, Jim, and good luck here.”

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