Killer Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  In fact, Jessica felt the room was thick with old resentments. Everyone was on hand to either prove or disprove something. Young Janel's death had, apparently, been a case that had harmed some reputations, embarrassed some people and agencies, and even now she had a lot of important men scrambling and jockeying for position around her. The case was one of the biggest in Iowa City history, and it still stood on the books as an unsolved homicide. Police and the D.A.'s office had been crucified in the press.

  There'd been allegations made by the black community of Iowa City that said in essence that if the murdered girl had been white instead of black, the city authorities would have acted more quickly to apprehend the killer. State law enforcement officials also came under some pretty heavy fire. And so had some of the medical men who had done the original autopsy. Now enters a woman from out of state, an FBI coroner, disinterring the almost forgotten embarrassment to the system, about to quite possibly embarrass that system and the people in it again.

  The old M.E. said harshly but slowly into the stenographer's face, so that she could get every word, “Why in the fuck do we need an army in here?” His eyes surveyed Kaseem's uniform as he frowned.

  “Dr. Balsam,” said the D.A., “I think you know everyone here, except Captain Kaseem with the AFIP and Dr. Coran with the FBI.”

  “Ahh, yes, the young lady who has stirred up the hornet's nest.”

  She was sterile, so they did not shake hands. She thought his remark a little like President Lincoln's to Harriet Beecher Stowe, blaming the outbreak of civil war on her book.

  “I am going to get on with what I came for, Doctors,” said Jessica. “I intend to be out of your town by noon.” She hadn't meant it to sound like the script for a bad western, but it had.

  “You will have to work fast, then,” said Lewis, a slim man of perhaps thirty-five.

  “From the look of her, Lewis,” began Balsam, “I'd say Dr. Coran's usual style is fast.”

  She accepted a smile from the devilish old man.

  He said conspiratorially, “I was an admirer of your father's, you know.”

  She looked more closely at Balsam, the most seasoned veteran of the autopsy room here. “If you know my father's reputation, then, sir, you have my admiration. But I think you know that.”

  “If my autopsy is to be questioned, I'd rather it was your father's assessment, or Dr. Holecraft's.”

  “I worked under Holecraft,” she said.

  “So I've heard.”

  “Heard?” She wondered about the source. Like Kaseem, he'd done his homework. Was there a dossier?

  He quickly cleared up her confusion. “I inquired, and I have a few friends in Washington. Otto Boutine is one of them.”

  “Dr. Balsam, I have not come here to disprove anything.”

  “But an exhumation—you don't exhume a body if you trust the forensics report, and I, and some of these men in this room, we signed that report.”

  “Your report said that Janel died of blood loss from a severe wound to the throat, Dr. Balsam. I am here to either confirm that or introduce a new possibility.”

  “A new possibility. Hmmmmmmph! Do you hear that, Lewis? The girl's head was barely attached, the wound was so large, and this one's going to find another cause of death? Proceed, Dr. Coran.”

  She breathed deeply, the odor of the body filling her nostrils, despite the specially designed air-conditioned room. She said, “Thank you, one and all. Now, if you will give me some space, I accept your challenge, Dr. Balsam.”

  When the mortuary assistants had opened the coffin, they had found Janel McDonell remarkably well preserved. The black skin had a pink cast to it against the pink crinoline dress she had been buried in. The dress was still crisp, still clean. Over her breast lay a large silver cross and a withered rose, gifts from her grieving parents, the only people other than the doctors who had seen the gash in her throat that had ended her life. These items were now laid at the bottom of the coffin. The dryness within the coffin had preserved everything. The organs and tissues could be analyzed. Jessica felt a great wave of relief rush over her.

  Earlier, the doctors had all agreed that, despite, or because of, all the factions in the room, the tissues would be divided among the pathologists and the M.E.s to do all the toxicology tests they wished for the city, for the county, for the state. Kaseem even wanted in on the divvying up of the tissues.

  The dry, metal coffin had also preserved the girl's eyes. The eyes were particularly important in looking for poisons, and some of the others wanted to take some of the eye fluid for such tests. She knew that this would appease the others, that the eye contained about a tablespoon of fluid, like a little bag of water, and that since the eye itself was a hollow organ, the fluid decomposed slowly.

  She allowed the others in to collect their samples, but not before she had the photographer snap close-ups of the eyes. Only Dr. Balsam seemed curious about her attention to the eyes.

  “You suspect strangulation, Doctor?” he asked her.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why, then, slash her throat, if he has strangled her to death?”

  “She was not strangled to death,” Jessica assured him.

  “The day I can't see a strangulation murder, I will retire,” he replied.

  She smiled and carried on. The two mortuary men had had enough and were gone for a smoke. Over her shoulder was Kaseem, who was being pushed out by the D.A. There was no one in the room, including Jessica, who did not feel slighted. Some had been feeling slighted since Janel McDonell had died. It was an Iowa City city case; it was the jurisdiction of the county; no, the state. And here come the federals and the military. Kaseem's uniform lent an air of respectability about him, and it helped to keep peace, perhaps, but it was just one more symbol of the numbers of jurisdictional levels at play in the crowded room where Janel McDonell's empty shell mocked their petty concerns.

  Jessica hated such ridiculous jockeying, but she was also practical and realistic. Lewis had warned her about the situation, and he had been right. It was an election year in Iowa, and the D.A. might be running for governor. Distrust, along with the fetid corpse, turned the air in the room thick. Perhaps the only way to dispel all the distrust was to have the autopsy done in the open, in full view of everyone connected with the case, and yet she had orders not to divulge information about the condition of Janel McDonell's throat to anyone but Otto.

  She wasn't likely to get out of this room with that secret fully intact, she realized.

  Dr. Lewis did the honors of opening up the mortician's stitches. All of the internal organs were still intact and the toxicologist and the others were anxious to get at them in order to reaffirm their original findings and put this case back to rest, back into the grave.

  While they took their samples, pairing off over organs they felt particularly important, Jessica felt into the throat through the deep well of the chest for any damage done in the area of the larynx.

  Dr. Balsam stared at her in deep consternation and curiosity. He said in a near whisper, “You came looking for something very specific, I see. What is that?”

  She removed her hand from the location and quickly cut away that part of Janel's throat that might tell them if her killer was the same man as the Wekosha blood-taker.

  “What're you doing?” asked Balsam.

  “I have to take a section of the jugular back to Quantico with me,” she told him.

  He stared into her eyes. “Yes, I see that you do.”

  She realized that Balsam had accepted her among a special company of doctors—as his equal. He said nothing more, and the others knew to follow his lead.

  “You can put her back away now,” she told Balsam. “I'll see to it. I'll also report what you've taken from the body in my report, send it on to Boutine. Meanwhile, you've got a plane to catch—”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “—and a killer,” he added.

  She'd made arrangements for a military transport back to
Quantico, if she could be at the airfield by noon. She told Kaseem of her plans, but he had gotten carried away with slicing samples from the liver, stomach and other organs to pay her much mind. He definitely had not learned much either about exhumations or the FBI case she was building. He had especially not learned about the case.

  On her way to the airfield in a police car, she wondered if J.T. had had any of the various problems she had faced today.

  TWELVE

  The news broke in Washington and all over the country, thanks to United Press International, and everyone who could read, and everyone who owned a TV or radio, knew the nasty secret of the bloodthirsty killer of Wekosha, Wisconsin: that he bled his victim to death, drank his victim's blood in a ghoulish, vampiristic manner and carried the rest of her blood off with him. The newspaper painted as lurid a tale as they could with a few powerful images and details they'd so diligently scrounged for in the Copeland girl's case.

  Boutine had been right, and they had been fortunate to have the almost forty-eight hours granted them before the story went public. At least they had made some headway on the physical evidence. They had quietly gone about the two additional evidence-gathering forays into Illinois and Iowa.

  J.T. was late in returning with the specimen from the Trent girl, and thus far it hadn't been analyzed; however, the McDonell specimen was a definite match. Jessica had run the tests herself, using the SEM, which destroyed the specimen but preserved on print the images necessary to compare with those made on the Copeland girl. The match was unmistakable, down to the depth of the incision, the circular “pucker” of the wound to the jugular, all of it, including the severe but cosmetic throat slash which more or less masked the true cause of death. Like Candy Copeland's, Janel McDonell's life had been syphoned off with her blood through some sort of tube that fed the vampire that had killed her, and that filled his containers for any future “brews” he might like to drain.

  She wondered how many more had suffered and died at the hands of this methodical, plodding, diabolical killer who left so few signs of himself. She wondered how they were ever going to catch him, since they had nothing but microscopic clues to his identity.

  She got on the phone and telephoned a doctor friend and asked him twenty questions.

  “Can you get for me a sample of any and all tubes and equipment you use to drain off a patient's blood? Say from a wound.”

  “Suction devices, you mean, or syphoning devices.”

  “That, and anything else you can think of that would drain off or take away unwanted fluids.”

  “Hell, you've just described a dialysis machine.”

  “Only if they've created a hand-held model, lightweight and portable.”

  “Now it's all fluids?” he asked, a little exasperated.

  “Any bodily fluid, yes, Mark.”

  “Like in the case of a cancer patient whose lungs have filled with fluid?”

  “Yes, anything at all that would act as a catheter, a drain to release blood, urine, anything.”

  “That's a tall order, Dr. Coran.”

  “It's important. It could help save a life.”

  “I read about your Wisconsin vampire. This has to do with him, doesn't it?”

  “Please, Mark, keep this between us... please.”

  “Sure, sure. Nice to see your name in print, I should think. Dr. Jessica Coran! Sounded like you're Dick Tracy, and that with you on the case, the killer's days are numbered.”

  “Wish it were so.”

  “At least they got your name spelled right.”

  “How soon can you get the stuff to me?”

  “Tell you what.”

  “Yes?”

  “I've got surgical equipment catalogues that're filled with all kinds of gadgets. You might save yourself some time—”

  “Good idea. Send them over first, and I'll try to narrow the field from the books.”

  “Consider it done.”

  She hung up, taking a deep breath, realizing the day had disappeared and her neck was getting as stiff as a board. She'd not been contacted by Boutine or anyone else since her return, and once when she called Boutine, she was told curtly that he was out and would not be returning all day. She left a message with the secretary for him to get in touch with her as soon as possible. She then called his home number. He'd told her to call there whenever necessary. Again, she got the answering machine and her frustration with him was rising.

  She had heard from J.T. at noon, grousing long distance about how he planned on never going back to Paris again. He found her now in the lab, coming as he did straight from the airstrip with the specimen from the Trent girl in a cooler. It was 8:30 P.M. by the wall clock.

  “Devil of a time, Jess,” he said.

  “Welcome home.” She went to him, taking his coat. “You look like hell.”

  “Murphy's law in triplicate.” He told her of the frightful night he'd spent, finishing with, “And it's only through my Job-like patience that I didn't murder someone—Forsythe for one.”

  “Pain in the ass. So was Kaseem, but the man did lend an air of respectability and military bearing to the proceedings without even trying.”

  “I don't think we've seen the last of those two, Jess, really. Something fishy-smelling about the whole setup, like big brother is watching.”

  “Maybe... maybe not.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “ AFIP has been wanting to get better training in this area. Our guys stationed all over the world have a guy like Forsythe or Kaseem doing autopsies in places like Manila, Germany, Guam... Well, maybe anything they can learn from us—”

  “Nahh, that's too simple. Besides, what can they learn on an exhumation?”

  “More than you might think. Are you sure we're not just being paranoid a bit here?”

  “Paranoia is a healthy emotion, despite the bad rap it gets.”

  She thought again of Boutine, wondering if he had known about the AFIP's involvement, wondering again where he was.

  “Look,” she told J.T., spreading out the new images on the McDonell SEM photos, laying them alongside the Copeland shots. “Can hardly tell them apart. You couldn't if you didn't know one of them was buried for six months. Look at the configuration, here, about the center. Big as a bull's eye. She got the killer's ugly spigot jammed into her jugular, too.”

  “It'd take a guy who really knew what he was doing to hit the mark twice,” he replied. “Now, what about thrice?” His eyes lit up with the cooler he held to her eyes. “My damnable vacation into prairie hell best not have been for nothing.”

  “You've got to be bushed, John. Hell, it's almost nine and you've gone through an exhumation, an autopsy and what must've been the longest flight in history from Illinois to here—”

  “Three stopovers, and when the military says stopover, you get a real stopover! But I won't rest until I know. You go on. I'll just see what this tells us.”

  “You sure?”

  “Determined is the operative word.”

  She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Makes it all worthwhile, and my life complete,” he said.

  This made her laugh. “Good night, and keep all this under lock and key.”

  “Now who's paranoid?”

  “Better safe than sorry's all.” She left for her office, leaving J.T. to finish up. One match was nice, but the findings could be refuted if interpreted wrongly by others, a thing that happened more often than not in forensic science. But two, if J.T. could pull it off, would be unassailable. They could then begin to search for the kind of awful weapon that the killer had used. The investigators could then see the hacksaw for what it was.

  In her office she hung up her lab coat, looked about her desk, wondering if there were any reports she needed to take home with her. She lifted a couple of files she'd been meaning to rummage through, some early work on the Tort 9 killer type. She wanted to see what research had been done. It was indeed scant from the size of the files.

  S
uddenly, there was someone at her door. She saw the shadow cross her desk, and she was startled when she looked up to find Boutine leaning against the dooijamb, looking shaken, his clothes looking as if slept in, his hair wild, the normally focused eyes unable to look at her.

  “Otto? Are you all right? I've been trying to reach you and—”

  “It's Marilyn... my wife...”

  She came to him, her breath coming in short gasps. “She... she's gone, isn't she?”

  “Odd how it happened,” he croaked. “She... she came out of her coma, just briefly... asking for me. When they got hold of me, I raced to Bethesda. Got there and she was gone back into coma. I stayed and stayed, trying to bring her back around, and for a brief moment, I felt her hand squeezing mine. Doctors said it was just a convulsion, a spasm, but I knew it was... was more than that... and then she just... just left... went... flatline.”

  She took him into her arms, holding him. Over her shoulder, he said, “Hospital staff was busy, and for a time no one noticed the flatline, no one but me, of course. I... I sensed she wanted to go... had to go. I didn't call for anyone. I just let her go.”

  His frame rumbled with pent-up tears. She held onto him. After a while, she suggested, “You shouldn't be alone tonight, Otto. Why don't you come home with me?”

  He pulled away from her. He never looked confused or out of control. It was difficult for her to believe this was the same man, and yet the depth of his feeling for his wife touched her. “Come on... to hell with appearances,” she ordered him.

  “I don't want to impose on you any longer.”

  “Then why'd you come to me?”

  He could say nothing.

  “Impose. That's what friends are for, especially at times like this.”

  He allowed her to lead him away.

  # # #