Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  She extended a gloved hand and Jessica pumped it. “I'm Agent Petersaul. Everyone just calls me Pete.”

  “You mean the boy's've decided you're OK, so they graced you with a nickname.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do you make of it so far?” Jessica indicated the deceased.

  “You can't be in this crime scene without steppin' in it, so you'd best—”

  “Put on the booties, I can see that,” replied Jessica. A curving river of blood painted the carpet all round them there in the foyer. They stood on the dried stuff and it felt crunchy beneath Jessica's shoes. She placed on the booties and tied them about her ankles.

  Jessica looked toward the body a second time. Agent Pete's considerable size continued to act as a kind of blind from which Jessica could safely view it without anyone seeing her pained wince. She'd been trained not to show emotion under any circumstance at a crime scene. Her number of years and experience had taught her the only way to gain the trust and authority required to take control in mutilation murder cases was via an aloofness and professional acumen that could not be questioned.

  “This is like looking at a war wound,” commented Agent Petersaul.

  “You come to us through the military?” asked Jessica.

  “How'd you guess?”

  “Psychic powers and that pendant around your neck, GI issue.”

  “Had it made at great expense.” She fingered the golden numbers: 101st Airborne. “First in, last out.”

  “You see duty in Iraq?”

  “Pakistan and Iraq. Fucked up place in a fucked up world, yeah.”

  “Fucked up? Which one?”

  “Both.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. How're we doing there in the Mideast now? Think we'll win the post-war economic crisis?”

  “The natives have gone ape-shit for American goods, means and ways. They love all things Western and are embracing apple pie, Elvis, McDonald's and Fox News Network.”

  “Sounds like Japan.”

  “Been there? Tokyo?”

  “Yeah, that and Beijing, China—worlds apart. Beijing is 1930 America, while Tokyo is futuristic America—Minority Report time.” Jessica looked into the hefty agent's wide face, and the full-figured Pete smiled back. “Best I get to work, Agent,” Jessica added now.

  Petersaul nodded and stepped aside. “Yeah, best, but”— she broke into an Elvis oldie— “didja-eva, eva get, eva get one, eva get one-a-those girls boys...”

  Smacks of a virgin to such horror and trying to compensate, Jessica thought, likely her first year out of the academy with a lot of questions and horror ahead of her, unless she dropped out of this line of work. Jessica calmly replied, “I believe I've seen every kind of iced and diced corpse, male and female, in the book, thanks to my boss at Quantico, Agent Petersaul.”

  “So I've been told by Darwin. Sexual mutilation murders, hearts ripped out, vaginas and breasts butchered, cranium's opened and brains scooped out.”

  Others listened in with interest.

  “However, I can safely say that I've never come across a victim with so horrid a gash of flesh removed from her body as this unfortunate woman.”

  Unfortunate, she rolled the word over in her mind. The understatement of the century, for this crime rivaled even the Skull-digger's work. Where he robbed his victims of their gray matter, cannibalizing it, whoever had done this latest, most-warped atrocity had robbed his victim of her entire vertebral column.

  “Whataya suppose he does with the spine?” asked the young lady agent.

  Darwin craned to hear Jessica's reply.

  “I couldn't begin to speculate at this moment. Some kind of voodoo soup calling for backbone... who knows?” Jessica moved closer to the corpse, taking in the scene around the body, her gaze following the hardened, dark brown and bristled flow of blood radiating outward from the deceased toward the door—a river true to current, origin the body. “I can tell you this much, the knife he used was no bowie or other hunting knife, but a precision instrument. Whoever he is, he's done this sort of work before. Perhaps not as extensively as this, but he's trained on precision cutting tools, possibly started as a kid on small animals, insects even, rodents, working his way up to cats, dogs, rabbits, anything he could save his lunch money up for.”

  The tall, black and mustached Xavier Darwin Reynolds, the local special agent in charge, was the man who had personally lobbied to put the crime scene on hold until Dr. Jessica Coran could get there from FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. “Sick but slick sonofamotherlessslut whore... He used that mop.” He pointed to a bristling-with-blood mop resting in a corner. “Used it to cover his shoe prints, as he backed from the crime scene and out the hallway, but we got a partial bloody scuff on the outside hallway carpeting.”

  “Yeah, I saw the cutaway patch,” she replied.

  “It isn't much, but we're doing our damnedest to make something of it, maybe get it blown up, find some sort of shoe sole markers.”

  “But no one saw this guy coming or going?” she asked, knowing the answer. “He had to have been covered in blood.”

  “We suspect he brought a change of clothes,” countered Agent Reynolds.

  His badge read X. Darwin Reynolds. Jessica thought the man in the wrong time, age, and profession. He ought to be a sixth-century king of Nubia as he towered over everyone in the place, his skin beautiful and onyx. Jessica had to crane her neck to make eye contact with the man. She imagined him at home on the streets where he grew up here in Milwaukee, at the neighborhood bar, likely a gold necklace bulging below his dark dress shirt and tie, and yet he somehow fit in here at the gruesome crime scene, too. Perhaps the blood of kings, that genetic seed, did reside in Darwin, the genes of African royalty transplanted to the small kingdom of an FBI field office in a midsize, Midwestern Mecca.

  Reynolds had the bearing of a man aloof and in absolute control of his own emotions and circumstances, even giving off the illusion of controlling the environment immediately around him. She imagined him to be one of those men who somehow remained dry even in a thunderstorm. Yet the wisp of a shadow of a tear formed in his eye for Joyce Olsen, which he quickly wiped away with a harsh utterance designed to cover the emotion. Jessica liked that. She knew now that the man who had called Quantico and had specifically requested her help cared deeply about this victim. Why? Had he known her? Or had the sheer horror of the crime perpetrated against the woman moved him? Either way, he'd scored points with this FBI medical examiner and profiler. Jessica felt an instant rapport and bond with X. Darwin, her very own Samuel L. Jackson look-alike if you shaved off twelve, maybe thirteen years.

  At the same time, she hated Milwaukee, hated having taken on this horrid mutilation murder, hated Darwin for dragging her away from the ranch she and Richard Sharpe now cohabited just outside Quantico among the dogwood in the Virginia hills. The case had literally pulled her from their bed, from Richard's embrace in fact. Not to mention all the safety of all that comforted her both physically and emotionally. The call had pulled her from several ongoing, urgent cases as well—cases she'd had to dump on John Thorpe's shoulders.

  Staring again at the godforsaken, god-awful evil and butchery done the victim, Jessica wondered why she continued in this line of work, why she didn't take early retirement, return to private practice and save her sanity.

  “Playing safe cases for insurance fraud scoundrels?” Richard had asked in his most biting sarcasm, tinged all the more since he had a British accent. “Right you are, Jess.”

  “I could. And I'd be damn good at it. Like a Sue Grafton character,” she quipped.

  “Or rather become another in the new breed of ex-coroners selling their expertise to the highest bidder.”

  “You mean like the fellow—what was his name? Bayless, Baydum, Baylor—who testified for the O.J. defense?”

  “Balden?”

  “Always going to sue people for blackening his name when he's done such a good job of it himself...”

/>   “Like the M.E. who did the same in the Blake trial, and then the Peterson trial?”

  “I couldn't live with myself.” She knew herself too well to ever settle into such a life. “But I could take up where I left off before I was invited into the FBI by Otto Boutine— God, so long ago.”

  “Back to the pain and turmoil of running the D.C. Coroner's Office? How wonderful that they're offering you your old job, but their facilities have not changed in twenty odd years!”

  “The State of Virginia Medical Examiner's Office is state-of-the-art, and they want me there.”

  “Take early retirement and take up a hobby. Read all those J.A. Konrath suspense novels you've been hoarding and start one of your own, as you keep threatening to do.”

  “If you think an autopsy is hard, try writing a novel... . I'm just not talented at juggling a thousand decisions at once.”

  “The hell your aren't! You absolutely write circles around that Madeleine Cromwell person, and you could easily knock her silly ass off the bestseller list,” he said, adding, “and I so loved that short story you did, The Unread.”

  “I'll never write a bestselling novel. I can't write that much cheese into it.”

  He laughed at this. Nowadays, with Richard at her side, she was seriously contemplating the possibility of a writing career. She'd already written two successful nonfiction titles mixing forensics and philosophy, harrowing true-crime tales and hard-won pearls of wisdom. Still, to do a fullblown crime novel with the intricacies of characterization, setting, dialogue, to keep twenty plates in the air at once while riding the unicycle of plot across a high-wire of tension? Book reviewers had a lot of balls to complain about anyone capable of putting a novel together, perhaps the most complex piece of artwork on the planet, not unlike sculpting images from stone. She so admired authors like Matheson, Bloch, Konrath, Castle, Weinberg, Jens, Bonansinga, Geoffrey Caine and Evan Kingsbury. She only dared dream she could replicate their success if given the freedom and time to write, drawing on the cases she had worked over the years as backdrop to her fiction. “No one would believe my cases if I dressed them up as fiction,” she'd told Richard. “They're hard enough to believe as truth.”

  “No one could make the graceful lie sing so articulately as you, Jess,” Richard, ever encouraging, encouraged. “Go, do it!”

  “Perhaps after this thing in Milwaukee is put to bed,” had been her final reply.

  “And after Milwaukee? What? Another and another. The calls won't stop until you decide they will stop, Jess.”

  “You are sounding more the husband every day.”

  “Is that such a bad thing? I'm only concerned for you, dear, not the bureau and certainly not the state of evil on the planet. You are not a Marvel comic character in one of those Edgar deGeorge fantasies.”

  Virginia's forensics lab wanted her badly at their state-of-the-art facility in Richmond. The drive would be horrendously long, but Richard—a helicopter nut—had the perfect solution there, too, if she wished to make that career choice. “Why we'd purchase a helicopter, of course.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she'd chided back.

  “But it's that simple.”

  “And do you have any idea how foolish that'd make me look?”

  “Foolish?”

  “Take my word for it. It'd go over real big with the people I'd be supervising. Me dropping in from the sky each morning onto the roof like... like some cross between Tinkerbell and... and—”

  “Superwoman, of course, and why not, like an avenging angel each day, still fighting crime yet capable of maintaining a stable—well, almost stable—home life. It would befit you, descending on the state crime lab,” he had quipped.

  “As an angel of vengeance?”

  “We'll arrange for wings to go with your lab coat.”

  They had begun to talk more frequently of marriage, but as yet they had not set a date. Things were simply too good between them to spoil or to risk spoiling, and so they remained lovers and friends rather than man and wife. Although they had passed the ongoing test of having lived together now, happily, for six months, each felt a reserve of emotion that feared the litmus test of actual marriage vows. Vows changed things. Upped the ante. And for now, they were happy and having fun, something Jessica hadn't known for a long time, and she feared losing that even to a marriage certificate.

  Richard's own consulting work had made a diplomat of him, taking him to the far corners of the earth on various missions for the State Department—missions cloaked in secrecy. He primarily trained other intelligence forces across the globe in the tactics of Scotland Yard and the FBI. And while he was busy at the far-flung corners of the planet, Jessica's work sent her to such holes-in-the-wall and armpits as Paris, Texas; Rome, Georgia; Corinth, Mississippi; and even Hong Kong, New Jersey—with its claim to a six-story, Disneyesque McDonald's with a decidedly Asian theme replete with the two-headed dragon Ferris wheel.

  And now, Portland, Oregon, or Millbrook, Minnesota, might well be her next stopovers if Darwin had his way. If the killing here in Milwaukee appeared the work of a maniac some years back who had dispatched someone else in the very same manner. In the Portland, Oregon, case, the victim's husband now awaited lethal injection for her murder. As with the Milwaukee case, the salient feature of the crime, of course, was the missing spinal cord that'd been literally ripped from the Portland woman's back, the rack of bones stolen and never recovered. Something similar had occurred in a small town in Minnesota as well, and Darwin appeared bent on building a reputation for himself by tying the cases together and hunting down the real killer, a serial killer in his mind, someone other than the man on death row in Oregon.

  On meeting the enthusiastic Darwin at the airport, the huge black agent had begun to spout on about how he had read the FBI bulletins and the Journal of Forensic Sciences relating every detail of every case Jessica had ever worked, and he had been loud about it, his voice booming across the tarmac as he shouted her name in a mantra of praise, “Jessica Coran! I can't believe it. Jessica Coran, here, in Milwaukee. Jessica Coran. I cut my eyeteeth on your crime-scene techniques book! God, Jessica Coran. I'm working with Jessica Coran!”

  His enthusiasm was infectious. She blushed and accepted his praise.

  Later, in the car on the way to the crime scene, he leaned into her and near whispered, “I tell you, I am so absolutely and instinctively certain of my ground—that these cases are related.”

  “Let me be the judge of that, Darwin. It's what I'm here to determine, remember?”

  Now they were here in the death room, and the noise and chatter around Jessica rose and fell with the predominantly male crime-scene unit people giving voice to feelings similar to Jessica's own. No one had ever seen such inhuman injustice done to a victim. The corpse did not always have everyone's sympathy, such as the Diamondback, Louisiana, father who had brutalized and raped his own children and had been murdered by his children and son-in-law when they schemed to get him into a New Jersey junkyard with mad dogs they had infected with rabies. The murder had worked but the cover-up had not, and while no one in Diamondback mourned the monster's passing, the responsible parties were brought to trial.

  No, the corpse seldom had every man and woman in the place wanting vengeance for her. But this one did, as if her ghost had plunged a cold dagger into each detective's heart to make even the jaded feel again—even if it was a sharp iciness. Even the hesitancy with which the official FBI photographer's camera clicked, unlike the usual frenetic snap-snap-snap of each frame, spoke volumes about the awful horror and sheer awe that this killing engendered. Jessica tried to imagine worse, but she simply could not. Perhaps at an inquest in 1888 London during which the mutilated body of a Ripper victim was displayed before the gallery, literally hooked to a wall for all to see the brutality. At least today, authorities treated the body with the professional courtesy and reverence it deserved, taking all precaution to preserve the dignity and to keep it in as intact a form as humanly p
ossible under the rigors of an autopsy. In fact, laws had been enacted since the days of Jack the Ripper to safeguard and maintain that very integrity.

  Reynolds came to stand near her, and he said, “Are you all right, Dr. Coran?”

  Her nod was a lie. “In the old days... not so old, really, a hundred and fifty odd years ago, when something of this nature occurred, people in the immediate vicinity... anyone who'd had anything whatsoever to do with the deceased—friends, relatives, neighbors, landlords—came to the inquest. Only thing missing was the popcorn.”

  “Yeah, it was like a public forum, a hearing?”

  “Like, no... It was a public forum, an inquiry into cause of death. Conducted much like a trial today.”

  “We sure don't need an inquest here.” He indicated the body. “Fairly obvious here, wouldn't you say?” Reynolds's Midwestern twang made him a native, and his tall frame placed him a head taller than Jessica. He had black-on-blue eyes, piercing, questioning. Any woman could get lost in them. A powerful build, he stood at just over six-foot-four, and his close-cropped hair accented a wide, intelligent forehead.

  “Here, you oughta put this on.” She handed him a hair net from her bag.

  As Jessica searched her valise for a pair of gloves for him, she added, “I've read about the bizarre proceedings at the death inquiries in the cases of Jack the Ripper.”

  Accepting the hair net and a surgical mask and a set of gloves, Reynolds replied, “Ol' Jacko's got nothing on our Milwaukee, Wisconsin, boy... least not in the butchery department.”

  “Agreed, but why the spine?”

  “That's why you're here, Dr. Coran, to tell us exactly that. You're the profiling expert.”

  “Thanks, but this... this defies any profile on record.”

  “Not quite. There're two other cases that we know of in which women have literally lost a backbone.”

  “Yes, Oregon... the guy on death row. And the other? Some Minnesota woman?”