Killer Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “I've got to be certain. Otto.”

  “What's that supposed to mean? That I don't have to be certain?”

  “I didn't say that. I've got access to the Chicago Crime Lab, one of the best in the country, and given a little more time, maybe I can convince myself that you and Brewer and the rest of the country are right. I want to check that partial print from the pill we found in Zion against Lowenthal's print to—”

  “You sound like Captain Ahab after the white whale, or Captain Kaseem after this Rosnich person.”

  “I just have to be certain. There're just too many loose ends, and the way that suicide was... I don't know... staged, like a setup. I can't bear the thought of this creep's getting away and sitting back and having a good laugh at our expense.” He almost spilled his drink when he said, “Christ, Jess! Nobody's gotten away with shit. Lowenthal is our man.”

  “Nobody's dug enough around Lowenthal. We don't know enough about the man, or his friends and coworkers.”

  “Brewer's building that evidence now. He's talking to everyone who knew him at Balue-Stork, former employers, high school teachers, you name it. By the time he's through—”

  “Brewer's idea of investigating this is to nail the dead guy.”

  He calmed when he saw that she was getting angry. “All right... okay... how long'll you need?”

  “Two days tops and maybe I can satisfy myself that Lowenthal and the Wekosha vampire are one and the same man.”

  Otto pulled at his face as if checking to see if he needed a shave. Then he said, “I'm going to miss you.”

  She breathed deeply and reached across, taking his hand in hers, squeezing. “When I get back, we'll have lots of time, Otto.”

  He gave her a reassuring smile. “Maybe more than you know.”

  Her eyes pinned his. “What're you saying?”

  “I've been politely asked to retire. Nearing the age anyway, and Leamy—”

  “For Christ's sake, Otto! It was your work that led to Chicago and to Lowenthal.”

  “No, not really. It was your work, and Leamy wants more 'fresh blood' in the department.”

  “Hell, Leamy's only a few years younger than you himself.”

  “Well, dear, it goes a lot deeper than age alone. That's just the P.R. phrase for losing politically.”

  “Who're they... who is Leamy replacing you with?”

  “O'Rourke.”

  “O'Rourke? That back-stabbing bitch!”Whoa, hold on there. I suggested O'Rourke. She's good and—”

  “She's been working behind your back, with Raynack, and—”

  “I've known about that for a long time.”

  “And you did nothing about it?”

  “She's good.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “She's got the instincts of a barracuda, and that's what it takes in the department. As for me, I think I've missed out on enough living. I think I'll take the long vacation.”

  “That's crazy, Otto. You're the best in the FBI. We all know that. This just can't be true.”

  “I've weighed it all over and again, and I thank God I'm alive and that a woman like you could be interested in what I've become. But, kid, I'll understand it if you now decide that it's over between us.”

  “What? Dammit, Boutine, you can be insufferable.”

  “What did I say?”

  She stood up, about to leave, but he stopped her. “I don't want to lose you, Jess, but—”

  “But you think I've been chasing you because of what you are instead of who you are, that I'm no better than O'Rourke? I don't need that kind of judgment call at a time like this. Otto. Now, please, let me by.”

  He stood aside, staring after her, shaken by the sudden turn in their relationship. He had made a terribly wrong assumption about her. Just because O'Rourke was sleeping with Leamy...

  He was interrupted by a waiter with a telephone, saying, “You are Inspector Boutine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Telephone, sir.”

  The waiter hooked up the phone at the table and after a series of clicks, Joe Brewer came on. “Otto, you may want to cancel your flight back.”

  “What's that?” Something's come up. May be nothing, but who can tell? I'd like to hit you with it, see what you think.”

  “This to do with Lowenthal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You saying that maybe Jess is right about him?”

  “Could be. Any rate, he may just be half of a duo.”

  “A team? He had help?”

  “Maybe, Otto—it's a strict maybe.”

  “Comes from where?”

  “Something in the apartment. Some things said by co-workers.”

  “At Balue-Stork?”

  “Right.”

  “Anything concrete, or is this just backscatter?”

  “He used a typewriter most of the time, but the few scraps we've found in his hand don't match the handwriting at all.”

  “It was printed, remember?”

  “He didn't habitually print, but when he did, it was not the same.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Some co-workers claimed he said he would one day stick it to Balue-Stork; that he was going into business with a partner to patent a new product. Sound familiar?”

  “So he was talking about himself, a second personality. The guy was a split-brain! You've seen the type—signing with his other self, this Teach character.”

  “But he went so far as to talk to a lawyer about drawing up papers between himself and his partner, to keep his partner from exploding, he told the lawyer.”

  “You got the lawyer with you?”

  “Can you come over?”

  “Will do.”

  For the first time. Otto considered the fact that perhaps the wizardry of Dr. Jessica Coran had once again been right—or at least half right.

  # # #

  Boutine canceled his flight from Brewer's office. The jagged pieces of the puzzle had been forced to make a fit, and he had been happy with the notion that his last case would be closed with his boxing up his personal items back at Quantico, and he could leave with his head up. But the truth was, they'd dropped some of the puzzle pieces, allowing them to hide about their feet.

  Everyone, that was, except Jess.

  And she had touched off something in Brewer, sending him off on his own to scrounge up new, additional information, such as the fact Lowenthal's lawyer had gotten a sudden phone call only hours before his death, asking if he could arrange for papers to be drawn up between himself and a partner he had which declared them equal partners in a venture that involved some sort of medical invention that he was having patented.

  “The idea,” explained Jeff Eastfal, Lowenthal's lawyer, “belonged, Maurice said, to this second party; the other individual had come to Maurice with the idea. Maurice, while still under Balue-Stork's roof, began toying with the idea at night in his home lab, he said, evenings, weekends, refining it.”

  “Did he tell you the name of this partner?” asked Boutine.

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything to you to indicate who this man was?”

  “Nothing.”

  Boutine bellowed, “Christ.”

  “Except that they had once worked together.”

  “Worked together? At Balue-Stork?”

  “He didn't say.”

  “What did he say?”

  Eastfal put up a hand, gesturing for the FBI man to calm down, refusing to go on if he did not. Brewer muttered a few whispered words into Boutine's ear. Boutine settled into a chair.

  Eastfal continued at Brewer's nod. “I got the general impression it was Balue-Stork, but honestly, he did not say. And while we're on the subject of honesty, Maurice was, so far as I knew him, an honest man, and I can't believe for a moment that he had anything whatever to do with—with murdering for blood.”

  “He designed the bloody murder weapon!” shouted Boutine.

  “I am aware of that, but it's m
y considered opinion, sir, that he did not know to what uses his—his so-called partner was putting it.”

  # # #

  Outside the lawyer's prestigious downtown offices where the halls were marbled wall and floor, with mahogany finishings and stairwells, the two FBI men stood wondering what Eastfal's story meant.

  “We've got to go back to Balue-Stork, Otto,” Brewer told him. “Look at this.”

  Brewer showed him a letter addressed to Eastfal from Maurice Lowenthal. Otto had to agree, the handwriting was light-years away from the blood letters that'd been written by Teach.

  “Still, if Teach was a second personality—”

  “I know, I know... wouldn't the handwriting reflect that?”

  “And isn't it feasible—just feasible—that Maurice's so-called partner was his other self, this Teach? And maybe this would explain why he was afraid to give his lawyer a name.”

  “This case could drive me wacko,” admitted Brewer. “Look, we go to Balue-Stork. Do a little snooping, say in personnel, records—”

  “Sales. We hit sales records,” said Boutine. “See if they've got anyone who regularly visits hospitals in Wekosha; Iowa City; Paris, Illinois; Indianapolis—”And Zion.”

  The two men stared into each other's eyes. “If there is another killer out there taking blood—'' began Brewer.

  “It could be Kaseem's vampire.”

  “It could also be the one who likes to write to Dr. Coran, too.”

  At that moment, Otto knew he would not be leaving Chicago without Jessica beside him. “Let's get over to this medical supply. You know the quickest route?”

  “It's damned far from here; located in the suburbs. We'll have to use the siren, make it down the Eisenhower. Come on.”

  It was nearing 5 P.M., which was just as well. They'd go in after most of the employees were off the premises, and they'd dig all night if it was necessary.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jessica Coran set up a number of tests which would separate the blood splotches on the letter both on the front and the back to determine the exact amount of time they had been on the paper. If there was a significant lag time, it would be logical to assume that the blood on top of the suicide note was different in some regard from that found below. At the crime scene she had drawn extensive diagrams for the trajectory of the blood from Lowenthal's wounds. If the suicide note had been lying on the coffee table before he cut his wrists, the splatters would be less like splotches and more like exclamation points in a series, as the vein would have spurted. The tracks on the table beneath the note had this significant shape, but the tracks on the face of the paper did not.

  It was clear to her that either (1) the dead man had placed the note gently onto the table after he had slashed both his wrists, or (2) someone else was kind enough to do it for him. There was no doubt in her mind that the wounds inflicted were of such a brutal nature that no one could be calm under the circumstances, or clearheaded enough to locate and place that note on the table just before keeling over. She'd had Lowenthal's blood and serums checked for LSD or any other drug that might account for the unusual sequence of events surrounding his death, but the lab had found no trace of drugs, and certainly no cortisone. As for the print left on the cortisone capsule, there was simply not enough to be sure either way. She spent hours over Lowenthal's body, his wrists to be exact, using an exacting method of measurement about the wounds, determining that the left was indeed cut by a right hand, and the right was indeed cut by a left hand. Only the most cunning, methodical of killers would think to change hands with the scalpel as he sliced each wrist, to create the illusion of suicide.

  It looked rather hopeless, except for the blood evidence, and all too often, blood evidence was ignored, despite the incredible accuracy of the scientific field. To prove her point, she'd have to get a world-renowned blood specialist. Not even Robertson back at Quantico, with all of his background, would be enough to support what she was saying, and the cost factor, and the logistics of getting a man like T. Herbert Leon, or her old mentor, Holecraft, to fly to Chicago to look over the evidence... Well, it was not likely she'd get the okay from Otto, not in his present mood, and as for getting “permission” from O'Rourke, that'd stick in her craw like a chicken bone.

  But maybe she'd have to put her personal feelings aside. She thought of all the professionals who had put in so many grueling hours on the Tort 9 case, from J.T. to Byrnes and Schultz, O'Rourke herself, even Raynack, with their pro bono work going to Kaseem and Forsythe. She wondered momentarily if the man who had staged the “death” of the vampire killer here in Chicago was not the same man who had eluded the military for so many years. Was it possible?

  She was tired, exhausted, and while she had the killer's bloody tools to examine against what she knew of the wounds inflicted on the flesh of his victims, tests on the tissue that had come off of these blades had already confirmed a match with Tommy Fowler in Indiana.

  How did Lowenthal lure his victims in? An old man who often used a cane. What Scarborough, the only so-called witness had seen was a younger man. They'd found no hairpieces or makeup kit. Yet, his spigot, under magnification, was clearly the nasty weapon used at the jugular on the Cope-land girl and all the others. And if there was another vampire working with Lowenthal, he'd never give up this device.

  But suppose, she stopped herself with a thought, suppose there were more than one; suppose Lowenthal had made two or three or more?

  Or was she being paranoid? She had plenty of reason to be; and hadn't J.T. said that it was, after all, a healthy enough emotion if it kept you from cold, shocking surprise blows to the blind side? Like O'Rourke's sudden power grab. Like Otto's uncharacteristic tent-folding act. She wanted to scream at him for letting it all happen. The forces had been aligned against him while his wife was dying, and they said sharks lived only in oceans. And then Otto had had the audacity to say that he more or less admired O'Rourke for her cunning and her timing. Was that because Otto himself was a well-timed, cunning devil himself? Like his showing up the night before when she would never have turned him away?

  She was still angry with him for implying that her interest in him had only to do with her ambition.

  These thoughts crowded out her attention to her work, and she realized that she was becoming too fatigued to carry on. She'd performed the autopsy on Lowenthal as well as arranging for the various tests she'd wanted done. She now looked at her watch, and lunch felt like a distant vacation taken years before, save for the hurt she'd felt at Otto's thoughtless remark.

  She peeled away her lab coat. Most of the areas of the lab were dark, the graveyard shift kept to a minimum along with the lights. She stretched and realized that a lab assistant in another room was staring through the glass at her and pointing to the phone. She only now realized the buzz in a nearby office was for her. She went to the phone and picked it up.

  “Call for Dr. Coran,” said a female voice.

  “Yes, this is she.”

  “Go ahead, sir.” After a moment's hesitation and the disappearance of the operator, a raspy voice came choking through, sounding nervous.

  “I saw you onnnnn TV. You... you are pretty.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I... I'm the vampire.”

  “Look, I'm in no mood for a crank—”

  “I take the blood in jars.”

  “Yes, well, thanks to the papers, everybody knows that.”

  “I use a modified tracheotomy tube and a tourniquet to control the blood flow, usually after severing the Achilles tendon.”

  She shivered from deep within her soul. “The vampire killer is dead. Maurice Lowenthal—”

  “I killed Maurice. You know that... You're the only one who knows that.”

  So you want me dead, she told herself. “Why're you telling me this?”

  No one outside FBI circles knew of the tourniquet or the slashed heels.

  “/ want some of your blood.'''

  She tried to breathe
normally, but found it near impossible. Now he was quoting from the letter he had written in Copeland's blood. Either she was speaking to Candy Copeland's killer, the man who treated his victims like swine to be bled, or someone was playing the kind of cruel, sick and senseless joke that police personnel loved the most.

  “I... I could give you some,” she said, unable to know where she found the words or the nerve.

  “You'll never know how happy you've made me to hear that.”

  “I mean... you could get blood from me when... whenever you needed, so-so”—she forced herself to control the fear-induced stuttering—”y-you wouldn't have to go on killing—”

  “You'd do that for me?”

  “For Teach, yes. I know you're ill, and you need help. I know you've got a disease.”

  “I know that you know. You know all about me.”

  “So we know all about each other. So where can I find you?”

  “No... no. I'll have to give this some thought.”

  He hadn't expected her to react this way when he had planned the call. She could tell this from the inflection in his voice.

  “Don't hang”—he was gone—“up!”

  She stood in the darkened office, fear gripping her on all sides. How did he get through to her? She felt defiled just having spoken with the perverted killer, as if he had touched her in some secret place.

  Her hands were trembling; every nerve in her body felt as if touched by a hot wire, but she fought to remain in control. She drew on her training as an FBI agent. She had to contact someone about the phone call. It was too much to keep to herself, for any reason.

  She rang for the operator, shouting her need.' 'The call to me just now. I need a tracer on that to determine the source. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, but it will take some time.”

  “Do it. It's very important, very.”

  “I'll get on it. We've got the new system that—”

  “Just do it, please.”

  “Yes, Dr. Coran.”

  She was still trembling, feeling as if she needed a stiff drink, wishing that Otto was here with her now, someone she could throw herself at; she wanted to cry and to kick all at once. The very thing she hated most in this world had just spoken to her in what his bloody mind must constitute as intimacy. She wanted to snatch her .38 from its holster and hold onto it for dear life, stretch it before her like a deadly shield of protection to ward off the evil.