Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  He has exactly the words for her. He has them memo­rized and with a blink summons them to his ear. Words like angels have a life of their own for him, and the words speak to him now.

  Chance... whose desire

  is to have a meeting

  with stunned innocence...

  is eminent like wind,

  earth, fire, water,

  or the cool fall breath

  when it comes even,

  unrushed, surrendered

  like an ink mark to a page;

  one dot is all that is said.

  Flickering light haunts

  a chamber formed

  of delirium left to feel

  out the evening, while

  an operaof soft words

  etch across a mile of skin

  TWELVE

  On a dark theme I trace verses full of light, touching all the muses'charm.

  —Lucretius (99-55 B.C.)

  Two days later

  Eriq Santiva forwarded a detailed analysis of the killer's handwriting to Jessica, along with a note to see a Pro­fessor Stuart Wahlbore at the University of Philadelphia's linguistics department. Apparently, a search of experts in the FBI files had settled on Wahlbore because he had a computer program that analyzed handwriting.

  Jessica reread the most important portions of Santiva's report even as she and Kim made their way to the univer­sity to meet with Wahlbore. For Kim's benefit, Jessica read aloud the document, which Santiva had written out in long­hand.

  ... killer is obsessive-compulsive; he will be neat to a fault. If he works at a desk, everything on it will be organized and aligned; if he works on a con­struction site, there will be no trash outside the Dumpster. In short, he's a neat freak. Upright anal-retentive are your watchwords. He plans ahead and he colors rigorously within the lines, never varying. This is evident in the control he wields with the poi­son pen—he writes on skin as if he were writing on ruled paper. No letter leans forward, none back. He's methodical and supremely organized. He pre­meditates his every step. In his handwriting, the lack of high points above the median line, and of low points and loops below said line, make it safe to as­sume this fellow has the sex life of a eunuch.

  “So we're in search of a tight-assed eunuch possibly suf­fering a big identity crisis,” Kim said as they pulled onto the university campus's tree-lined, weaving paths. In a mo­ment, they pulled to within inches of a sign that pro­claimed a little house as the linguistics department. Professor Wahlbore stood on the steps, awaiting their ar­rival, an ear-to-ear grin making him look like Ichabod Crane in thick glasses, complete with bobbing Adam's apple.

  “Welcome, welcome you are.” He spoke like the Star Wars character Yoda, Jessica thought, or was it merely because he was Hungarian and his English was imperfect? She took his outstretched hand in hers, and they shook, introductions all around. Seeing that Jessica was staring at him, he informed her, “Each summer takes me to archaeological dig, a wonder­ful site in Arizona on a Navajo reservation.” He wore a typical western-style shirt, a string tie fastened by a Navajo turquoise brooch. He also wore western-style boots and vest, all at odds with his scholarly appearance and Middle European accent.

  “Coffee I have inside with biscuits my Grete makes. Come, talk we must. I took liberty to run Rocky against samples forwarded by FBI.”

  “Rocky?”

  “Name of my computer program; suggests like bull strong, yes? Sylvester Stallone, yes? But actual fact, it is flying-squirrel cartoon person I name him for.”

  Jessica followed, making eye contact with Kim, each telegraphing her skepticism. Kim's shoulders and eye­brows lifted with her frown.

  Soon they were seated before Professor Wahlbore's computer, and he demonstrated his alleged mathematically accurate handwriting analysis program. “I've used it to conclusively prove that Shakespeare was in fact Christo­pher Marlowe.”

  “Really?” Jessica asked. “Have you conclusive proof of that?”

  “No one wants to believe it, of course, especially others with ax to grind, in particular descendants of the Earl of Sussex, and the Sir Francis Bacon believers, but writings of Marlowe's and those of the Bard are identical on twenty-nine comparison points. I can show you, if you like.”

  “Perhaps some other time. For now, what does Rocky say about the Killer Poet?”

  “Rocky has no one to compare him to, of course, but I have continuously running program searching for compar­ison points, you see, so in time—”

  “How much time?”

  “Could be a day, a week, a month. Certain I can't be, no, as it is a tedious process, not unlike fingerprint-match search like I'm sure you use at FBI all the time. Saw it once in a Clint Eastwood movie. In the Line of Fire!'

  “Does the program make any pronouncements on the killer's handwriting sample?” asked Kim.

  “Yes, of course, but it does not know if subject has mur­dered anyone. Still, it senses a confused person, he is, under great stress with a disintegration of the self, an iden­tity neurosis. This I suspect.”

  “You got neurosis from a look at his handwriting?”

  “Not me; Rocky. Programmed Rocky I did with every known variable in handwriting analysis—graphology if you like.”

  Kim asked, “Are you saying, sir, that it—the program— can make assessments far more accurately than a hand­writing expert?”

  “Yes, because all the expert perspectives are seen atonce by Rocky; weighs them all up and makes his—its pronouncements, you see.”

  “Perhaps the FBI ought to have a look at your program, Dr. Wahlbore.”

  “One of my greatest fantasies, that your FBI will scruti­nize my program and how effective it is they will learn in due course. Had it been used in the JonBenet Ramsey case, for instance—”

  “What's this icon?” Kim pointed to the screen, where a stylized winged female free-floated, carrying a huge cross and an olive branch.

  “Religion or religious icons your killer is interested in particular. Icons, particularly art depicting divine beings. Narrowing that”—he stroked the keys and added—”angels come up. Angels and the angelic, it holds a peculiar, per­haps perverse interest for him.”

  “How can your program get that from his handwriting?” Jessica asked.

  “Analyzes content as well as the handwriting. Each of poems speaks of flickering life, and many of symbols and images used are to do with life in another dimension. Rec­ognized and pinpointed the symbolic language as pertain­ing to magic and angels.”

  “Michael, Raphael, Gabrielle,” said Kim, remembering her Catholic upbringing in an orphanage in New Orleans. “None of the archangels are mentioned in the poems. How can your program say they are alluded to?”

  “A fixation it appears for him, your killer, according to Rocky. In images speaks Rocky. Images of the transmigra­tion of souls, the ones your killer takes.”

  “Anything else?” asked Jessica.

  “Without someone's poetry to compare and contrast it to, no. 'Fraid not.”

  Jessica studied the program's analysis of the killer's hand­writing. It gave them a list of characteristics of the writing from the size of letters to the degree of coherence and legi­bility. The program also told them some of the character traits they might look for, but nothing proved conclusive. Without a suspect to match the writing to, it was impossible to summon up much excitement for Dr. Wahlbore's findings. Still, Jessica was more impressed than she'd imagined possi­ble. Should they narrow the field and come up with a suspect, this information might be used in an interrogation. If shown that a machine had outwitted him, an intellectually arrogant person, as the killer seemed to be, might conceivably break down and confess. Such an approach had been used in many an investigation, using far less sophisticated machines, from lie detectors to Xerox copiers to fool suspects into confessions.

  “The analysis does point to a highly educated, intelli­gent killer,” said Kim.

  “We have that task-force meeting to get
back to. Dr. Desinor,” Jessica reminded her. “We'll certainly keep your suggestions in mind and pass them along, Dr. Wahlbore.” She stood to leave, again shaking the linguistics profes­sor's hand.

  “Correct Dr. Desinor is, as my Rocky is accurate, that killer is a highly polished individual, well educated, gifted in fact with words. He is, and he will be, cunning, and as for themes and patterns, recurrent in the work, there are a number of these: reflecting pools, mirrors, flickering light, which Rocky takes as metaphor for fragility of life, you see. Here, look at the lines Rocky has culled as repetition, the same nails being hammered by the author.”

  He showed them a printout of the lines the program had selected as revealing “high-level figurative language,”

  “symbolic resonance and depth,” and “complex associative clustering.”

  From poem #1...

  ……The cut of it

  against my back

  marks time

  ... the time it takes

  to retell a new breath.

  From #2

  ... luminescent green

  ... color of script,

  ... ice-blue hues

  embrace... images.

  They make skin

  crawl with miniature

  electric devotions...

  From #3

  Beneath it all: a bed

  a fibrous dictation.

  I am drawn forth, found out...

  Speaking to a mirror

  sparkling with never-

  before phrases,

  all against the marble

  life flickering.

  From #4

  ... to fall into the mirror pool,

  through meshes of metaphor...

  The breath that exhales

  across the candle fails,

  and so it remains, flickering.

  From #5

  ... Pools of sensation

  ... swirl... orange to

  swallow and overflow

  in the center where

  toucher becomes touched,

  texture vibrating chords

  of the unconfined delicate.

  ... closed eyes

  undulating within a seashell sigh,

  entwining in airy depths,

  waning in flickering light.

  From #6

  ... surrendered

  like an ink mark to a page;

  one dot is all that is said.

  Flickering light haunts

  a chamber formed

  of delirium left to feel

  out the evening, while

  an opera of soft words

  etch across a mile of skin...

  Jessica could readily see the mystical-romantic themes and patterns that emerged, particularly the combination of cutting into flesh to rend a swirling eddy of delirium, and the idea of a flickering soul, whose light, even in death, could not be wholly extinguished, as its fairy light trans­migrated to another form. Mirrors held up to mirrors, time endless and boundless. The green luminescence and icy-blue hues paralleled Kim Desinor's psychic hits.

  “What do you suppose the Poet means by unconfined delicate Kim asked of Jessica. “Private parts unfet­tered?”

  “Actually sounds to my ear more an oblique reference to his victims, that they, while always delicate, were now re­leased—no longer constrained by this life and dimension.”

  “They are freed through their death.”

  “That's be my guess.”

  Dr. Wahlbore began to obsess over a single line, going over it repeatedly as if to choke some useful information from it.”Opera of soft words is like his meshes of metaphor; he thinks a great deal about how language has a powerful connection to all that we consider psychic phenomena.”

  Jessica tried to imagine being a student in this man's “Language Is Thought” class, listening to his foreign syn­tax and trying to translate while taking notes. “I would like to take a copy of all your results. Dr. Wahlbore,” she said. “They may well prove useful for our investigation.” She was not simply humoring the older man. What if the lin­guistics professor and his strange program were right on? she found herself wondering.

  As they found their way to the door, Dr. Wahlbore asked, “About Rocky, my program, what?”

  “What 'what'? I don't understand.” Jessica looked at him in bewilderment.

  “Whatabout my program? Will FBI be interested only if it cracks case wide open?”

  “I'll report your findings and how you arrived at them to my superiors, sir,” she assured him as she lifted a handker­chief and sneezed into it. The little office of the professor was mildew-ridden and dust-laden. Jessica decided the en­vironment must be hell on the man's computer, if not his sinuses. “We must be off to a task-force meeting, Doctor.”

  Outside, Kim asked, “What task-force meeting?”

  “I just had to get out of there.”

  “Then you don't believe his findings?”

  “I'm not sure, but it was so stuffy and dusty in there, I felt an allergy attack coming on. Can you imagine being a student in that man's linguistics class?”

  “Yeah, and I'd cut my throat,” Kim replied.

  “A case like this, all the kooks come out of the wood­work.” Still, I see what he means by the poetry's imagery; it speaks of life passing into another form, and it speaks of angels. A close look at the poems will reveal that that little Rocket J. Squirrel computer program may well be right.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think so. I'll go back over the lines, try to look at it from the program's perspective. Hopefully see what I didn't see the first time around,” Kim said.

  “I think we need an outside opinion from a forensic psy­chologist.”

  “What am I, chopped liver?”

  “Someone totally removed from the case, Kim.”

  “There's a guy in the Philly police department named Vladoc, Dr. Vladoc.”

  “I'll send a request that he analyze the poems for mean­ing and hidden meaning. See if he comes up with anything more substantially helpful than did the squirrel.”

  “Good move.”

  They saw that Wahlbore stood again on the steps of the little house that was headquarters for the linguistics de­partment; he waved them off as they drove from the cam­pus back into the real world.

  When they returned to PPD headquarters, Jessica learned that there was indeed a task-force meeting scheduled for later in the day. She and Kim showed up for it after lunch along with everyone involved in the case. Sturtevante directed the meeting, telling everyone that those closest to the investiga­tion feared the killer would strike again. “Within the week,” she emphasized. “The killer's quiet attacks on people via poisoning typically happen over weekends. So we expect to see another victim, likely in the proximity of the others, in the low-rent student district surrounding Second Street.” Jessica had learned that Second was a two-mile-long strip of renovated shops that ranged from specialty bou­tiques to funky furniture stores, all upscale and hip; the neighborhood had become a showplace for the outrageous and bizarre along with a safe haven for gays and lesbians. While the area could not be called posh, it certainly was the in place for the chronologically young and the inveterately youthful, catering to their interests along with those of the artistic crowd. While the rents still weren't high, all the renovations going on made it a safe bet that they soon would be. Coffeehouses with browsing libraries, renovated neighborhood bars and nightclubs abounded in the area.

  Sturtevante told the task force that this geographical area, which Parry now blocked out with red marker on an enlarged map, had been home base for all the victims. Their faces were familiar to many of the shopkeepers in this relatively small community just off Philadelphia's downtown business district. All the victims had been con­sumers and renters here. The circumstances reminded Jes­sica of the case she and Kim had solved in New Orleans, where the killer had targeted transvestites living in and around the French Quarter.

  Sturtevante f
inished with, “Somewhere in this same area, the killer prowls, possibly lives.”

  Next, James Parry took the floor, and he described in meticulous and tedious detail the similarities in each crime scene—information they had already gone over again and again, and it left Jessica feeling drained. Something was still missing, something important, perhaps the linchpin that held all the killings together, but what was it?

  Jessica was asked to comment after Jim Parry. She de­scribed the condition of each body in relation to both the crime scene and the corpses that had preceded. “We obvi­ously have a serial killer on our hands, ladies and gentle­men, but we believe now that he thinks of himself as a benign being, helping these poor souls to exit this life in as gentle a fashion as possible. At least, that's how it ap­pears to be shaping up. As for the handwriting, allow me to read what our resident expert on graphology in Quan­tico has to say.” Here Jessica read Eriq Santiva's faxed report.

  The room had fallen silent and it remained so. Jessica did not share anything she and Kim had learned from Pro­fessor Wahlbore, not wishing at this point to cloud the issue with angel talk and what she felt to be a great deal of supposition. Eriq's interpretation of the handwriting was supposition enough for one meeting.

  Besides, she wanted to hold in reserve the information that Wahlbore had shared with Kim and her. She certainly didn't want it getting out of house and into the press. She'd decided also to keep the information pertaining to the killer's tears, and any subsequent DNA obtained from the tears, between her and anyone else she considered to be on a need-to-know basis in the case. It was the kind of evi­dence that broke suspects in interrogation, and it was the kind of evidence that locked men away for life. But if it be­came widely known, it could prove useless, a burden in­stead of a boon, as every nutcase in the city and state would come in claiming the tearstains belonged to him. No investigation proceeded without attracting its array of sad souls who would step forward to claim responsibility for crimes they did not commit. To publicize such information as the tearstains only fed into this fact, and only through withholding such information from the general public might it become useful as a tool in nailing a real suspect— once one had been found.