Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “Yes, and this very same pattern emerges in each case. Also, Millbrook, Minnesota, is only three hundred miles from Milwaukee.”

  “But Portland... That's over half a continent away, and you think this guy in Oregon innocent, wrongly convicted—”

  “Towne, Robert Towne.”

  “You believe him innocent. That it's all a mistake. His arrest, trial, conviction?”

  “Larger mistakes have happened in the judicial system of Portland, Oregon, especially where black men are concerned.”

  “Then Towne is black?”

  “Yes, he is as black as... as me.”

  “But suppose Towne did it to copycat the Minnesota killing? And by extension, suppose someone here did it to copycat Towne for some sick, perverted reason?”

  “Three separate guys tearing out backbones? I don't buy it.”

  “Stick to your guns, Agent. I like that in a man,” Jessica said.

  “There's more than happenstance and coincidence at work here. I feel it in my bones. No pun intended.”

  “Trust me, none taken.”

  Two photographers were snapping pictures now, one centered on the body and everything in relation to it, every stationary point of reference. The other cameraman fired off shots of the bloody mop propped against the wall beside the door where presumably the killer exited, leaving his wake of blood. Photographic shots from all angles exploded one after another, the photographers having latched on to competition as a way to get past the horror of their subject.

  From somewhere down the hall, the sad melody of a Hank Williams tune droned on, the words a surreal fit: “the mooooon just went be-hind a cloud to hiiiiide its face and cry... I'm so lonesome I-ah could die...”

  More shots of the body from all angles. The second photographer now took shots of the swirls of blood on the carpet. She looked from the busy photographers and back to Reynolds, but he had stepped away. Special Agent X. Darwin Reynolds now stood alongside Dr. Ira Sands, the Milwaukee M.E., and together they studied several cellophane-wrapped charcoal sketches.

  At first, Jessica assumed the sketches were created by a police artist, but Darwin informed her, “We believe her killer drew them and left them behind.”

  Now everything about the case felt surreal, even her thumbing through these lovely charcoal sketches. Sketches left by the Spine Thief himself. “Why'd he do it? Take the time to do all these?”

  “And when did he do them?” asked Reynolds.

  “Are they telling us something? Are they his con? How he wormed his way past the threshold?” Jessica mused aloud.

  “Dr. Coran... like to introduce you to Dr. Ira Sands.” Reynolds stood between them, the obvious message being that she and Sands should work together.

  Sands instantly shot out his hand and took hers, pumping it in a vise grip, his smile wide and welcoming. “We are so lucky to have you, Dr. Coran, so very fortunate indeed. I've read all your abstracts and bulletins.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Sands. I've heard only good things about your crime lab.” Jessica knew that paying him this compliment was the highest praise he sought, as it was with any M.E.

  “My lab is at your disposal, of course.”

  “That's wonderful to hear. Thank you, Dr. Sands.” Like every FBI field lab boss, Sands thought the government-issue lab was his and his alone. She prayed he was being genuine and not simply politically correct.

  The short, stocky Dr. Sands said, “Beginning with these”—Sands pointed at the sketches of a dog and the dead woman in Jessica's hand— “we are covering every base.”

  Nodding, Jessica again examined the finely drawn, beautifully wrought charcoal drawings of the victim, three in all, one of a frolicking golden retriever chasing birds and two depicting the same dog with the victim in different poses, kissing and hugging one another.

  “Where's the dog?” she asked.

  “Animal control took him out,” said the heavyset Wyatt Abrams, the Milwaukee police chief, who'd introduced himself downstairs where he'd been taking a smoke break. “Poor dog had matted blood all over him from sleeping up against her for a week. 'Fraid he... ahhh... gnawed on some of the flesh cutaway from the woman, too, but you can't blame the animal.”

  “Animal instinct,” she muttered.

  “No, the SOB of a landlord let the dog howl for days before he decided to check on things, and even then only after the stench caught his attention.”

  Darwin Reynolds took the sketches from Jessica and handed her another set, but these additional six were faxes. “From the other two cases, and I'd bet my pension it's the same artist leaving his calling card.”

  “Two other cases not here in Milwaukee?” commented Sands, rolling his aged eyes.

  Chief Abrams exploded with, “I think Reynolds is reaching.”

  “Never discount gut instincts,” Jessica countered, coming to Reynolds's defense. “My own have served me well over the years.”

  Smiles all around except for the stodgy chief, his forehead a road map of confusion. “Unfortunately, the law doesn't work that way, and neither does it put a man away for no good reason. We gotta trust the authorities in Oregon are every bit as competent as we are.”

  “And just how competent is that?” joked Sands, laughing lightly to himself.

  Reynolds's eyes showed rage, but he spoke with cool reserve. “Competent? Like the Smollen case, and the Byrd case before that? Competent? Try incompetent nincompoops. I tell you, Wyatt, they've got the wrong man on death row for this, and now it's a certainty. Given this murderer's robbing his victim of her spine.”

  Reynolds had peaked Jessica's curiosity, but Dr. Sands said, “Look, Darwin, for the moment, we have our hands full with this fucking mess”—he indicated the horrid mangled body a few feet from them—”and we're losing light, and I haven't eaten anything since my morning coffee roll, so if you don't mind. Dr. Coran, let's get down to business, shall we?” Sands swept his arm out in a gesture that said, You first.

  Jessica went to the body and knelt beside it. Dr. Ira Sands did likewise across from her. She saw that the hefty local coroner wanted to get nearer. “Darwin,” he near whispered to Jessica, “is on a tear to prove this is the third such death in a series, but I've seen nothing to convince me of it. Regardless, we have enough in hand for the moment, wouldn't you agree?”

  “I do indeed.” Jessica steeled her own spine as she viewed the enormous gash in the dead woman's back. She'd seen disemboweled victims, dismembered victims, victims with eyes removed, god-awful drowning and burn victims, but this went beyond the pale, beyond any hope of speculation. With disembowelments came necrophilia and even cannibalism, which served as motivation, albeit a sick one, something in the human experience and collective psyche hanging on from cave-dwelling days. And even with mutilations brought about by lust murder, there resided some modicum of explanation a profiler might work with to assuage her own guilt at being human. With dismemberments, there usually followed facts uncovering a perpetrator's pure hatred of the victim, or an attempt to reduce the very real problem of body disposal—a hatchet job borne of fear of discovery. Even a butcher who butchered for the sake of butchering at least had a “reason”—even if it was as despicable as “I just love the feel of a cleaver going through bone.”

  With an eye-gouger—in the end, at interrogation—he'd say the fear of the victim's eyes staring at him, even in death, drove him to his brutal act. But often, after a little judicious questioning, he will confess to having been at it for some time, beginning with the eyes of dolls. Working his way up to wanting Jessica's eyes even as they spoke of it across a table in the federal facility for the criminally insane. “What can I say? I like eyes,” he'd confess after months and sometimes years of incarceration.

  One madman named Gerald Ray Sims, who did much more than take the eyes, told Jessica, before taking his own life, that the dead girl's eyes could see him even in death, and that after he cut them out, he realized that they were not dead but the all-knowing, all-seeing
eyes of God Himself. “And the only way to stop them staring at me,” Sims had added, “was to put them into my pockets.”

  Even Sims had a reason for his mutilations, albeit a lunatic's expedient answer to the ever-present need of his interrogator to know why.

  “Her eyes kept coming back open, even though she was dead,” Zachary Durning—the Daylight Stalker of Starkville, Mississippi—had chanted in mantra fashion throughout his arrest procedure when taken into custody. Jessica later recovered the eyes found in a pickle jar on a shelf in the Bar None Grill that Durning ran for the tourists trade, catering to their insatiable curiosity of the antique remnants of the kind of Wild West Mississippi saloon Durning kept. The tourists came off the Mississippi River excursion and casino boats, and Zach Durning's place had long been a fulcrum for strange disappearances over a period of years—as his father had begun the first killings as robberies gone bad. Zachary's last victim had been a tourist, and the daughter of a U.S. senator, who never returned to the boat. As serial killers went, the man proved a sad bore, rather more the recluse spider who struck only if you got too close to the center of his web. He never stalked a single victim. He didn't have to.

  Alongside Jessica now, Sands spoke into a tape recorder. “The female victim, one Joyce Olsen, is in her late forties hideously stripped of her spine. Noting the deep, wide canyon created along the length of her back, this was done with a certain precision and knowledge of depth and length measurements required. In my opinion... a practiced cut. Exact measurements of the wound will be taken to determine this further, of course, along with the precise extent of damage. Blood loss is considerable. Apparent cause of death: hemorrhagic shock due to this wound. Blow to the head caused a serious fracture, but it appears an unlikely death blow. Alongside the corpse, we see the window of flesh that the killer opened in order to get at the spine.”

  Jessica now reached out to lift the single large, long piece of flesh that'd been cut from the dead woman's back—a large trout-sized piece of flesh, discarded by her killer. Jessica meant to secure it in a sterile polyethylene bag for later microscopic analysis for fiber and hair evidence, perhaps traces of fluids not belonging to the victim, a DNA sample perhaps. But latching on to this big fish with her two gloved hands, Jessica found herself in a tug of war. The tussle was between her and the dried blood pool the back section had lain in for so long. The fleshy bottom wall of the thing had dried hard and fast to the stained light gray carpet below, bonded as it were.

  Angry at this killer and his awful leavings, Jessica whipped out her scalpel, the gold-plated one given to her by her father upon her graduation from medical school. Agent “Pete” Petersaul, holding the bag open to receive the enormous tissue sample that Jessica meant to pry from the carpet, stared fixedly at the shining scalpel for something to concentrate on. Jessica used the edge of the blade to free the flesh from the carpet piling. Carpet fiber clung like a sticky web to the flesh. This made it necessary for Jessica to work slowly and with care all along the length of the fleshy prize.

  “It's little wonder I sometimes feel like the ogre in all this,” Jessica muttered to Petersaul and Sands, who also stared and gulped at the work she'd begun.

  Finally, she freed the bile-inducing, sumptuous and serpentine block of flesh and fat and dropped it into the bag held wide by Agent Petersaul, who stilled her own quaking hands to get the job done.

  “Some three-foot-long party sandwich this'd make for a cannibal killer, you know, like that guy you put away in New York, the Claw,” said Agent Reynolds.

  “That was over a decade ago, and he ripped open abdomens and fed on the intestines and organs like a frenzied mad dog, but he didn't take any bones off with him to bury someplace.”

  Sands stated the obvious, “This case is not about cannibalizing flesh, otherwise he'd never have left this.” He hefted the snake of flesh in the bag.

  Sands gave Petersaul instructions, “See that our several pounds of flesh go with the body to the lab for autopsy.”

  “If he's not a cannibal, what the fuck is this freak? A blood drinker?” demanded Petersaul.

  “From the amount of blood spilled here, again, I'd say no,” said Jessica. “Matisak was a blood drinker, and he controlled the bloodletting to maximize his treasure with each killing. No, this Spine Thief is something new, something I've not encountered, nor do I know of anything like it in all the literature of police science and police history.”

  “Whataya think he does with the spines?” pressed Petersaul, her curiosity palpable.

  Jessica looked at Darwin Reynolds, seeing his own need to know there in the black depths of his eyes. “Bone marrow perhaps. Perhaps he feeds on the marrow he can can extract from the vertebral column.”

  Petersaul uttered a string of expletives and added, “Uggh... euuuu, no... ykkk!”

  “Maybe he has some fucked-up notion that spinal fluid has life-giving properties... wants to feed his immune system to keep trim and forever young,” Jessica continued. “Or he thinks it replenishes his own spinal fluids to do so, to vampire off someone else's manna. Or some such ridiculous notion, since ingesting the stuff can only send it out his ass.”

  “Kinda like a spine vampire maniac, isn't he?” said Darwin.

  “You might argue that... That he likes his blood thick and congealed. Consomme as opposed to bisque, cold as opposed to liking it fresh and hot.” “But why? Where... I mean how does any man ever get such a notion?” Darwin asked.

  “Rather, how does any man act on such a notion?”

  Sands's voice, as he continued to tape, interrupted their conversation, “Serious blow to the head appears to have been caused by a blunt instrument, possibly a tool such as a hammer, given the diameter of the wound.”

  SOME time had passed as they processed the crime scene when Ira Sands shattered the silence. “With what we now have, Dr. Coran, I believe we can begin thinking of closing this crime scene down.”

  “I'm in agreement.”

  “And back at the morgue, if you will follow my lead, I feel we can get most, if not all, necessary tests under way. Unless you care to lead this dance.”

  “Generous of you to offer, Dr. Sands, but no, I am happy to follow your lead, sir.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “You look a bit peaked. Airline food, perhaps?”

  “No, I came by FBI jet. I will be fine, really.”

  “That was some operation you performed, separating flesh from carpet. Enough to excuse anyone a bit of queasiness, my dear.”

  Jessica had again been staring at the enormous gash to Joyce Olsen's backside, the missing serpentine section of flesh that left a gaping hole large enough for a small animal to climb into. She thought of the dog trapped with the dead woman for over a week. Out of one eye, she saw the bag with the flesh in it being forced down into a large Tupperware container, the lid snapped and patted down by Agent Petersaul.

  “Tupperware party?” joked another agent with Petersaul.

  “I'm hosting a big one,” she snapped back.

  Light laughter followed.

  “Is it all right?” Ira Sands was saying to Jessica. She only half heard him. “Do you understand?” he continued in her ear.

  Jessica could not recall the last time the sight of a wound had so disturbed her to the core. Jaded, having seen so much, it crept up on little cat feet, this dizzying combination of clamminess, perspiration, and nausea. Surprised she could still get this affected, her thoughts returned to her first FBI case: the body of a young woman called Candy found hanging by her ankles, the fly infested leavings of Mad Matthew Matisak after he'd jammed his now-infamous handheld Spigot into her jugular, in order to control the flow of her blood as he robbed her of every ounce.

  It had been Jessica, the novice FBI M.E. who had discovered the small, telltale hole made by the spigot within the massive throat slashing, which had been done to mask the mark of the spigot. But while she eventually put him away, it had been at a dear price, losing her first real lov
e to Matisak's madness.

  He had maimed her physically, too. She'd had to use a cane for almost two years following his attack on her. To this day, the psychological scars he'd inflicted remained.

  She felt some strange and eerie connection here but could not make it out. Just a feeling, a foolish one, as foolish as Darwin's notion that the killer was like the Claw. This maniac was no Matisak, either. Still, she felt the same iciness and fear of this demon as she had with Matisak. She felt it in her throat, her chest, her heart and her stomach.

  “Come now, Dr. Coran,” said Sands in a bid to help color return to her face. “I've read your book. You've seen bodies without hearts, others missing their brains even.”

  “All... all the... same, not... notwithstanding, I fear, Dr. Sands, I'm feeling just a might... light-headed.” She finished with a little gasp.

  “Go out and come back in. No one else need know. Go,” he encouraged her.

  She stared into his kind eyes, studying them, as another voice inside her head advised she stand her ground—her father's voice. Her tough, uncompromising military father's old advice. He, too, had seen some awful deaths—horrid battlefield wounds—and in his days as a medical examiner for the military, he had learned discipline and mental toughness, but she could safely say that not even her father had ever seen anything like this. Nor had her mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft who'd done thousands of autopsies. How was one to combat such a sight as this?

  Sands placed a hand on hers and said, “Would you like us to step out together?”

  She heeded his advice, getting to her feet. To hell with what the men at the crime scene thought, she told herself. She announced clearly, “Yes, Dr. Sands, I'm sorry, but I need to take a moment.”

  He pointed toward the balcony off the bedroom. She stepped out into the November breeze, and she watched as the others, including Sands, filed out and into the light. They had merely needed someone to say “uncle” and to lead the way.

  THREE

  Is God himself a detective in the dark void, trailing a killer the deity himself created, trying to uncover the unknowable unknown created from the whole cloth of his own inner tensions?