Killer Instinct

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, Robertson 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.

She had long known that even though she was his superior now, Raynack considered her one of his more ignorant colleagues, and she suspected that it didn't help her case to be female.

Raynack was a small man in stature, but his years with the department and his uncanny record of convictions gave him more clout than he may have had a right to. He was a close personal friend of Leamy's; they had been through much together over the years. While Boutine was her superior, Raynack was her elder and Leamy her commander, and it could all get very tacky and sticky quickly if Dr. Zach wished to make life hard for her. At the moment, from the look in his eye, he wanted her to shrivel up before him and die.

“ You, Doctor,” he said haltingly, as if he might choke before he got it out. “You go to dig up my mistakes, I hear.”

There were no secrets in the department. ' 'Not a mistake, sir,” she began, but was cut off.

“ No? Are you saying you don't think it a bit extreme? Exhuming not one, but two of my postmortems?”

“ If you will let me explain.”

“ No, no. Doctor, you needn't explain. I understand Boutine is behind this. That is explanation enough. You've been charmed by Otto, quite understandable. So what do you do? Otto suggests that you awaken an old case-”

“ Those two deaths are connected to a murder in Wisconsin that occurred four days ago, Dr. Raynack, and Boutine may charm you, sir, but he does not charm me\”

“ Everyone knows he is using you to claw together more power. The man is an egomaniac.”

“ Doctor, I think your judgment is clouded by personality issues-”

“ Personality issues is what the FBI is about, young woman, and if you are smart, you will learn this, and if not, you will be sucking up scum for the rest of your life.”

“ Do you have any interest in why I went to Iowa, Dr. Raynack? Or are you here just to lobby for your own personality? Christ,” she finished with a mutter.

“ I know what you went to Iowa for. To embarrass me, to send a signal to chief of operations that Boutine is right and that I should go.”

“ Christ, is everyone paranoid?” she asked, standing now and pacing her office. “This divisive attitude toward one another, Doctor, must go. We can't divvy up the damned department. It's all or nothing. We're all working for truth, or we're all working on building lies. What's it to be?”

“ Under your direction the divvying has already started, Dr. Coran,” he countered. “Forensics teams should be divvied up and placed under various other departments? As a scientist, my dear, you of all people should know what that might result in! Biased, coerced information supplied by our scientific divisions in order to fit cases they make! Pure science cannot work that way.”

“ I think you're wrong about Otto's motives and plans,” she said succinctly. “And frankly, I don't agree with you. We can't isolate ourselves with a microscope and ignore the facts-”

“ Facts! Boutine doesn't give a damn about facts.”

“- the facts of a case, locked away in here!” She indicated the labs with a flourish of her hands. “Never smelling the blood.”

“ Ahhh, yes, the blood… Like this vampire killer that you two have cooked up for the publicity?”

“ We didn't create the psycho. Doctor!”

“ But you and the press will embellish him to grand, superhuman characteristics, so that when Boutine locates this pathetic sonofabitch in some hole out there he will be the hero, and you will have placed the pedestal under his feet.”

“ Are you at all interested in the evidence in this case?” she shouted.

Politics and personalities, she thought with a rumbling fear welling up inside. Damn them all. Boutine included. Boutine had been smart enough and careful enough to have called it a confession when he told her to her face that he indeed was using her.

Now Raynack, a man who could have her job if he played his cards carefully, was making sounds like there had been some improprieties taken by Boutine where Dr. Coran was concerned. It smacked of Bledsoe's thoughtless remarks on the shooting range, but Zach was no harmless Bledsoe. Raynack could make things uncomfortable.

She tried to calm him down and she tried lies. “Dr. Raynack, it was your reports on the McDonell and Trent cases that initially stirred us up when we saw what had happened in Wekosha. You did fine work-”

“ Then why're you digging up the bodies to have another go at them?”

“ Something new surfaced. It had to be checked on the other two women, and there was only one way to do that.”

He seemed somewhat mollified, falling into a chair, taking a deep breath. “Then Boutine recognizes my contribution to the case?”

“ Absolutely.”

He thought about this for a moment. And for that moment she felt as if she were teetering on a tightrope between Boutine and Dr. Zach. Part of Raynack's concern was keeping the forensics arm of the FBI intact, and to keep it “pure,” apart from the political wrangling, to keep it as an “untouchable” and unapproachable temple, forbidden to the likes of the nonscientists and the novice. He had many times said there was no place in the “service” for the armchair forensics dick; that it was the equivalent of giving a loaded. 45 to a three-year-old. He considered Boutine, despite his years of training and experience in the field, just such a novice in the exacting science that went on in the crime labs.

Boutine, on the other hand, wanted the crime lab people more involved in what went on in the field and behind the closed doors of the brainstorming sessions held by the PPT.

It seemed that Raynack was the more unreasonable and unbending of the two men; Raynack with his desire to keep some kind of monastic mystery around the day-to-day of the labs. They had all played that game for a long time, and even she was guilty of it, she knew. But as policy? The days of cloaking such devices as the gas chromatograph in mystery were long gone.

So, too, perhaps, were the days of keeping people in her position in the dark about essential elements of on-scene evidence and information necessary to making a full analysis of the crime scene rather than making assumptions and long-distance guesswork do. By allowing her to work on the sum rather than the parts of the bomb, she might just have more insight than before. What harm in trying something new and bold? To hell with Zach and his but-we've-always-done-it-that-way mentality. It had no place in a modem crime lab.

Maybe Raynack's way was best for his time, through the Eisenhower years, through the Nixon debacle and the Reagan fiasco, but now, today, the FBI must seek a better operational base, and it seemed to her that only Otto Boutine had the foresight to see this.

“ If we are through, Doctor,” she told him, “I do have a great deal to do.”

He glanced over the scattered medical catalogues strewn about, some with dog-eared pages, others with markers sticking out. “You might at least extend me the courtesy of telling me just what it was that my reports… flagged.”

“ You had shown that the wound to the jugular in each case, from photos taken at the scene, was the work of a scalpel-sure and neat.”

“ Then the Wisconsin killer used a scalpel?”

“ Yes.”

“ A particular kind of scalpel, I suppose.”

“ Yes.” She wished to say as little as possible.

“ That's the reason for the catalogues, then?”

“ Searching for a match, a particular model, yes.”

“ Left-handed grip scalpel,” he said.

“ Sorry?” She was confused.

“ For doctors who're left-handed. As I recall, the slash was made from right to left across the throat. The work of a lefty.”

In all the information she'd absorbed over the last three days and nights, she had seen this but she had paid little heed to it. At least, for now, Raynack was mollified. And before leaving, he even said that he was sorry for having stormed in the way he had.

Jessica, who hated pettiness and whining and old-fashioned thinking, went back to scanning the catalogues for any sign of the instrument used to kill three confirmed cases of murder.?