Killer Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Otto was weak with exhaustion and grief. She led him through doors, into the elevator and into her place as if guiding the blind. It wasn't the Otto Boutine she had always known. Once at her place, after he went through a halfhearted walk-through of the apartment, commenting on how it was both warm and bright all at once, he quickly found the sofa, and for the rest of the evening would remain there.

  Jessica broke out a bottle of wine and they drank it and nibbled at cheese and crackers until the wine was gone and he asked if she hadn't something stronger. She returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Scotch, to which he approved, asking for it on ice, neat.

  “What about something to eat?” she asked.

  “The Scotch'11 do.”

  “I'm going to fix myself something. Are you sure—”

  “No, nothing... I couldn't eat.”

  So she settled down with him there, not eating either. He began to talk about Marilyn, about her enthusiasm for her work. She had been a civil case trial lawyer. They had met when he was on a case that took him to California. Her family was in San Diego, some of them flying to Virginia now for the wake and the funeral. As for him, it was true what she had heard—that he was without family. He'd been orphaned at the age of eighteen. Afterward he'd done a stint in the army, where he'd learned self-discipline. He had finally chosen police work at a very early age. He had come up through the system and had made of his life what it was now.

  “Took me away from Marilyn a lot,” he said flatly. “We'd be at a wedding, a party, some other thing—once our own anniversary—and I'd be called away. She was hurt. As understanding as she was, she was hurt.”

  “Otto, people like us, we're on call twenty-four hours a day. That's just the way it is. Don't beat up on yourself.”

  “Just... there was just so much I wanted to say to her,” he said, the usual timbre of his voice cracking.

  She went to him, her arms inviting him into her, and he buried his head in her breasts. They held, swaying in silence for some time that way.

  “You've got to get some rest,” she told him. “And so do I.”

  She got up, located some pillows and a blanket and brought these to him. She turned down the lights and the soft sound of a Strauss waltz she'd earlier placed on the CD player. She removed his shoes and made him lie down beneath the covers, his head on the pillows.

  But he kept talking as if he could not stop. He told her about how he had met Marilyn, about trips they had taken together and things they had shared, from horseback riding and tennis to favorite books.

  “We once went snorkeling in the Florida Keys for a week. What a place... what a time.”

  “Otto, we all feel guilty when we lose someone. We all wonder if we said 'I love you' often enough or with enough conviction and feeling. We all regret some things we've said, done—”

  “What if I did the wrong thing?” he asked point-blank. “Maybe... maybe I should have raced down the damned hall and screamed for help, and maybe—maybe—”

  “No, Otto. You did what you felt was best for her. You didn't do anything wrong in letting her go in peace and with dignity. You know that as well as I.”

  “Do I? Christ, Jess, the night before I... I had a dream about... about you, and about me.”

  “Otto, that's not—”

  “And before that, in Wekosha—”

  ' 'That has nothing to do with your feelings for Marilyn, or what you did, Otto. What you did, you did out of love and tenderness.”

  He began to tell her more about his daily routine with Marilyn, and how he had come to miss that so much since the incident that first took her from him. Since then his life was a misery, a living medical hell of hospital waiting rooms and bills and a growing hopelessness like a cancer that had begun to overtake him and overwhelm him.

  And in the meantime, he had to present himself as Otto Boutine to the rest of the world, as a man without a soft millimeter of flesh. “And now I'm reduced to what you see before you,” he said apologetically.

  “I see a kind and a gentle and a tender and a caring man,” she replied, “and that is all I see.”

  She kissed him and she thanked him.

  “For what?”

  “For being a good man.”

  He started to protest, but she pressed her fingers to his lips. “Sleep now, rest.”

  He closed his eyes and she silently left him and retreated to her bedroom, where she slipped into a nightgown and robe. From there she made her way to the bath and warmed the shower water before stepping in. Under the gentle, pulsating water she felt herself melting, the nerves loosening their tight grip on her. The warm water, growing hotter and hotter as she turned up the tap, relaxed her almost to the point of sleep.

  She didn't remember stepping from the shower or brushing her hair when she found herself climbing into bed. Her head, still damp, touching the pillow, seemed to drift off on its own, away from her body. A part of her had wanted to find Otto in her bed when she stepped from the shower; another part of her was glad that he was in the other room. He would need time. He was wounded, in much pain, feeling such guilt. If anything happened between them tonight, it would only add to his pain and guilt. She didn't want to add injury to the wound he already felt, despite her certainty that Otto had nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about.

  She dreamed of Wekosha as she had every night since examining the dead Copeland girl. All the ugly details she expected to see in her dream were replaced, however, with a soft, hazy glow, shading the horror, and in the place of the horror stood Otto. Otto was reaching out to her amid the surrounding carnage, his expression like that of a little boy who had lost his way. She reached out, taking his hand and wondering what kind of a future they might have together when the hand she held, and the arm that held it, came loose from Otto with the sound of soft suction.

  “He makes fools of us all,” Otto's dream presence said in a resonating voice while her dream self tried desperately to replace his arm where it had come off at the socket.

  THIRTEEN

  “You were right! God, you were right all along, Jess, and now we've got the killer's signature on all three victims!” J.T. danced about Jessica while giving her the results of the final analysis. “Same identical cut, almost invisible with the deterioration, but damned if it isn't there.”

  “The tube cut, like a straw mark? Show me.”

  He did so and they were both silent for a long time. It was like finishing a marathon. She felt as if her energies were scattered and J.T., up all night, felt spent, that he could go no further, despite the apparent victory. “We've got to show this to Boutine and his P.P. team, but it'd be a hell of a lot more effective if we could pinpoint exactly what kind of weapon the bastard used. What caused the circle cut in the jugular?”

  “I've got to get some sleep,” J.T. said flatly. She saw from the pallor of his skin that he truly did need some rest, and perhaps a decent meal.

  “Yeah, J.T.,” she offered, “you'd better get some sack time. You did great, both in Illinois and here.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” he countered, brushing his dirty hair from his forehead with a heavy hand, his eyelids half-closed. “Somebody's going to have to reimburse me for unexpected expenditures on the trip.” He slurred the big words with his drowsy delivery.

  “What expenditures?”

  Yawning, he replied, “I told you about the mix-up in the coffins, right? Anyhow, I had to replace the price of a casket out-of-pocket.”

  “What?”

  “Without going into the details, I had to use plastic money to make restitution for a damaged casket.”

  “The Trent girl's?”

  “That'd be too easy. No, it was for the other one they dug up by mistake.”

  “That's going to take some creativity on the requisition form.”

  “Just so I get it off my VISA!” he shouted as he rushed out.

  She chased a bit of the way down the hall after him. “Can you imagine Hardy? He'll quote me chapter
and verse from the agency code book of purchasing practices and—”

  J.T. shouted from between closing elevator doors, “Tell Hardy he can jam his actuary tables up his ass!”

  She laughed along with anyone else in the hall who had heard. Everyone knew Hardy's reputation and so J.T.'s words were not wasted; they would likely be repeated throughout the day.

  But she was the one who had to deal with the likes of Albert Hardy. She knew how very difficult it was going to be to get J.T.'s money back. The agency could tie it up forever if the bow-tied Hardy decided to question and point a finger, claiming that the gravediggers and local authorities were in error, and not the FBI agent.

  Still, she found the image of Hardy exploding over a bill for a casket purchased in Illinois by John Thorpe humorous, and it cheered her, an emotion she had been in short supply of for a long time.

  John had been so tired when he'd torn away his lab coat and ambled out that she wondered at his having found the elevator at all. She had not gotten much sleep herself, having talked most of the night away with Otto, mostly about the pain and difficulty he had suffered since his wife's aneurysm, and the anguish of having now lost her for good. This morning, she had left ahead of him, jotting down a note, telling him to use the apartment for as long as he needed, and promising to be on hand at the ceremony planned for his wife. It was to be a simple, quiet affair, the body being cremated.

  She tried to get her mind back onto the case. She wanted to have every conceivable angle covered for the next day when Otto would return to work. She wanted to bowl him over with their findings and blow away his team.

  Aside from the results on the Iowa and Illinois exhumations, she had a mammoth stack of medical supply catalogues to crawl through. Besides the catalogues provided by Mark, there were some tubes and hard plastic items, any one of which might be the killer's tool. She'd have to narrow the field considerably, and then, selecting what proved probable, take SEM photos of the tips of these in search of a likely matchup with the strange and deadly wounds made to the throats of three small-town, midwestern women.

  She went into her office and saw the stacks of calls and files, all work that needed doing, all items she had back-shelved since the night she had left for Wekosha for her first encounter with Candy Copeland and the phantom they sought to expose.

  Necessary budgetary forms, charts and files that needed her attention, had fallen by the wayside, along with the departmental efficiency rating this month. This was going downhill so fast she felt as if ensnared in a California mud slide. Going the way of the toilet, she thought, and she knew she was leaving herself wide open with the Hardys of the agency. However, she reminded herself, she was now working for Boutine, one of the most influential division heads in the agency. No one, she hoped, expected her to do the work of three.

  Scratch that, she thought, coming to a halt in her thinking. Yes, they did expect from her the work of three, and if she came up short, no one would shed a tear for her when they closed the door behind her. She was no novice to the squeeze plays and maneuvering that went on in an investigatory agency. She had once been the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., and she lasted in the job for only as long as she could stand the political bonds that repeatedly tied her hands, making demands of her to twist and distort the truth to suit the D.A.'s office, the police or some other constituent.

  She dug into the waiting morass of work. But the catalogues Mark had brought kept tugging at her.

  She then put aside everything to concentrate on the hefty books.

  There were indeed many strange devices that medicine put to use, but she found nothing that came close to the weapon used by the killer. Twice she thought she might have it; both times the item she was looking at was a form of the tracheotomy tube. Could the killer have used such a tube on his victim? If helpless, her hands bound, with the insertion of such a tube to the jugular, blood would stream out and leap across the room. There had been no blood trails, no trajectory patterns; instead the surge of the Copeland girl's blood was controlled from the outset. There had been the soft chokehold around the victim's neck which had almost gone undetected. Then there were the slashes to the throat, purely cosmetic, some of the blood syphoned from the dead girl, more or less painted on the wound, after death, smeared on by a pair of gloved hands or, quite possibly, a brush.

  Dr. Stephen Robertson, her blood specialist, had come to her door only an hour before with news that his microscopic examination of the photos Jessica had taken of the victim's throat at close range had shown a bizarre pattern of dried lines in the blood, and in the blood itself a single sable brush hair. Robertson hadn't a doubt that the cosmetic wound had been “touched up” with a paintbrush.

  “Three-quarter-inch, red sable,” he had said, taking a seat as they shared the mental image of a killer so methodical as this. “So the guy's an artist?” she replied, sounding cooler than she felt over the new revelation.

  “Not too many loonies stop to paint the victim's wounds.”

  “To make them look ordinary, don't you see? To cover the tubular wound to the jugular. Make us miss it. But he didn't count on us; doesn't know who he's dealing with. Thinks we'll all fall for his stage tricks.”

  “A little of the artist, a little of the theatrical scamp.”

  “And a lot of medical know-how,” she finished for him. “Look, I want you to go to work studying the photos made in the McDonell and Trent cases. See if we can make another point of comparison on these brush marks.”

  “If we ever get a suspect, he'll be nailed six ways to Sunday, sure... understood, Chief.” But he was staring at the other files, the ones she hadn't hefted to him. “And the others?”

  “Let's concentrate on the two we've managed to get on exhumation for now.”

  “How long, Jess? How long do you figure this creep's been getting away with this?”

  “Not sure... no way to tell.”

  “But you have a suspicion?”

  “A year, maybe. Maybe more.”

  “Good God.” He seemed deflated a moment before bouncing back. “You doing any good with those catalogues?”

  “So far? No.”

  “My guess would be some sort of glass tube, bevel-pointed. One side of the wound is a millimeter deeper than the other.”

  “My sentiments exactly, but how did he control the surge? Blood would have been coming through that tube like a punctured dam, given her position, upside down—the amount of pressure.”

  “Then you decrease the pressure.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Tourniquet. Valve of some sort. ”Tourniquet,” she repeated. “Remember the marks to the throat that 1 mentioned?”

  “Like a gloved strangulation.”

  “Fainter even than that. Could a tourniquet cause such a wound?”

  He looked thoughtfully across at her. “We need to get hold of one, try it out. I should think if it was tight enough, a simple hospital tourniquet could cause such bruising below the surface.”

  “Get hold of one, and we'll test it out.”

  “On who?”

  “On you.”

  “Me?”

  “One of us!”

  “We'll flip a coin.”

  “You're on.”

  He did so, saying, “You call it.”

  “You know, I could just order you. You know that, don't you?”

  “Yeah, but you won't. Call it,” he repeated.

  She frowned. “Heads.”

  He showed her the coin. “Sorry.”

  Her frown deepened. “All right, you happy? You get to put me in a chokehold.”

  “Hey, even us married guys have our fantasies.”

  They laughed good-naturedly at this.

  But behind her laughter, she wasn't so sure she wanted to be used as a guinea pig, no matter the cause. She'd have to submit to the test, unless she could find a stand-in. Before he could race away, she looked up tourniquets in the catalogues beside and around her, Roberts
on pitching in according to his nature, and they found the most portable and the most innocuous-looking hospital tourniquets, the sort that wouldn't frighten a prostitute, that might look a bit kinky in a bedroom, but just might excite anyone into autoerotic behavior. They even learned that some tourniquets were used in surgery to slow the flow of blood to an area. It had been at this point that Robertson had seen enough and had left, and Jessica began to think about Otto. Boutine's P.P. team was scheduled to meet at two, but this may have been canceled, given Boutine's personal situation. The wake was this evening, the funeral service the following morning. Still, she had been working as if the meeting would come to pass, trying desperately to put as many of the pieces together as possible.

  She was engrossed in the med tech catalogues when Albert Hardy, huffing and puffing about the costs incurred on J.T.'s trip to Paris, burst into her office. Hardy was a beefy man with red cheeks and a drinker's red nose, and when he got excited and overheated, he looked like a man about to explode. She spent ten minutes calming him down and another ten minutes explaining that she hadn't time to go into the details for the expenditures incurred in Paris, Illinois, that she had an important, high-level meeting that she had to prepare for and that he would, for the moment, have to deal with the problem on his own.

  Hardy fumed. “I'll just see what Chief Leamy has to say about all this.”

  “Good idea,” she responded coolly, “do that.” She then ushered him to and through the door, but no sooner was he gone than in stepped Dr. Zachary Raynack, an M.E. with more years on the force than anyone, and a man who had been passed over when she was given direction of the forensics division. Raynack held deep-seated animosities toward her for this reason, and it hadn't been lost on her that the McDonell girl in Iowa and the Trent girl in Illinois had been his cases, and that he had done various tests on the tissues and samples forwarded to the FBI from these remote places. There had never been an opportunity for him to see the entire truth of these deaths, not long-distance.

  He slammed her lab door behind him.

  Raynack had dark features giving way to a gray, peppery look about both the bushy eyebrows and the head. Still, at almost fifty, he had a full head of hair. He wore thin wire-rim glasses over a wide face that was pockmarked from some childhood affliction, it seemed. He was known as one of the sharpest minds in criminal investigation. The reputation was well deserved, but in the past several years his health and his professionalism had fallen off, or so it seemed to Jessica. Zachary had always had a low tolerance for what he considered his “ignorant” colleagues, and this “professional intolerance” hadn't slacked off in the slightest, but had rather grown to cancerous proportions. And it had been for this reason that few people could work with Dr. Zach, as he was known about the building, and it was for this reason that his work had been curtailed. He had not been given anything to do with the Wekosha killing. The McDonell and Trent cases had come in as separate cases without any relation to each other; it had been Otto, tipped by J.T., who had made the connection. Meanwhile, Raynack, studying the minutiae of each case under his scope, had seen no similarities.