Killer Instinct

FOURTEEN

Otto Boutine stood just outside the glass partition surrounding the lab, staring at her. She'd worked straight through lunch, and she'd for a time put him and the night before out of her mind. Apparently he meant to keep in touch with his people, and obviously he would continue with the 2 P.M. meeting regardless of all that was on his mind. She waved him in to learn that he was anxious for any new results on the exhumations or any of the 101 tests being run on samples taken. He seemed agitated, as if once more he had to prove himself to Leamy, the chief of operations. She led him back into her office, where he said, “I'm sorry about last night… really.”

“ No need to apologize for being human, Otto. Christ, as much as you've been through.”

“ I had no right to drag you down with me.”

“ Otto, really, I was glad that I could be there for you. Someday, you may be able to repay the kindness.”

“ No, I'll never be able to quite repay you.”

“ Now you're getting me mad with this silliness.”

“ Just accept my thanks, Jess.”

“ Consider it done.”

After a few words about the wake and how he must leave by four, he got around to the questions on his mind. “What did the exhumations prove, if anything? I just saw Zach Raynack, and he was actually civil, said something about his part in unmasking the Wekosha vampire. What did you tell him?” She explained in some detail what the exhumations had shown, and she explained to him what she had said to Raynack, and why.

He laughed. It was the first time she'd seen him smile in several days. His laugh was genuine and strong. “I take it all back, Jess, you do know how to be tactful when you want to be.”

“ I think he's calmed his brain at least to a simmer.”

“ Ahhh, Jess, you're doing so well for me here, and you're a good friend.”

She blushed in response.

“ Maybe,” he continued, “after a decent interval, I mean, maybe we could see each other outside of our official cloaks.

She smiled. “I'd like that, Otto.”

“ So, sounds like we've got something to continue our psychological autopsy with, and I think you're in for a few surprises. My people have put together a preliminary profile on our man. You're in for a treat.”

She picked up all the information she needed, including a hospital tourniquet that Robertson had placed on her earlier, tightened and removed, after which he had photographed the slight discoloration about her throat. The control mechanism of the killer? Possibly. She also carried a trach tube with a razor-sharp, beveled cutting edge. “Show-and-tell time,” she said.

J.T. met them at the conference room with a medical teaching tool, a see-through clinical model of a man's throat, some of the organ pieces spilling across the table when he placed it on the slick surface. Byrnes picked one up and shoved it back across at J.T. Ken Schultz examined the plastic voice box with curious fascination, asking J.T., “What gives with the dummy?”

“ A little reenactment of the murder according to Dr. Coran, I assume,” said Teresa O'Rourke. “This should be interesting.”

And it was. The P.P. team were glued to their seats when Jessica lowered the lights and displayed on a screen the rudiments of a tracheotomy. The trach tube was displayed in a profile view, in relation to the cricoid cartilage and the trachea. The short film explained how a tracheotomy was performed. Then the lights came up and she directed their attention to the see-through bust on the table before them. She carefully placed a tourniquet around the unwieldy shape of the see-through plastic model and after tightening it, she held up a trach tube to her eyes for them to see clearly. She then quickly and surely plunged the tube into the transparent tube that represented the see-through man's jugular, just to the right of the trachea.

The trach tube stuck and wobbled in the throat of the model, hanging there like a straw. “If there was blood passing through the jugular, it would shoot through this tube,” said Jessica. “We believe the tourniquet somewhat controlled the flow, but it would have to be a hell of a tourniquet to control it all. Still… this is how he did it, we believe.”

“ Using these exact tools?” asked O'Rourke.

“ Or something very similar.”

The team sat below a pall of silence for a long moment. Byrnes, the heftier of the two men, said, “Looks kind of awkward. Can the tourniquet be held in place, or do you have to keep hold of it?''

“ This model requires a hand be on it,” said J.T., “but there are others that do not. These are calibrated and notched.”

“ We believe the killer used the most sophisticated equipment, and that he is very knowledgeable-”

“- of anatomy, yes,” said O'Rourke. “Yes, he'd have to know exactly where the artery was located… precisely how deep to go with the cutting tube.”

“ Fits… all fits,” said Byrnes.

Jessica showed them slides of the left-handed slash wound to the throat and pointed out the blown-up pattern that indicated that the killer had painted blood on the body after she was dead and after he had slit the throat. AH these steps he took after draining all the blood he could get from the corpse.

The darkened room filled with a combined awe and a few groans.

# # #

He knew he needed more blood if he wished to continue doing blood baths. And the boss had sent him out to the Baptist Hospital in Zion, Illinois, on a special order, and there he met a mousy, bespectacled, brown-haired nurse who was left without a ride home. He gave her a ride in his van with the cooler in the back and the briefcase on the floor. He talked her into a nightcap, and before the night was over, he had capped off the night with some of her blood.

Zion was a little close to home, but the opportunity was just too perfect. The woman lived alone at the end of a street where several houses were abandoned and up for sale. He knew that no one had seen him pull into her driveway. She was so anxious for company. It was all too easy to pass on.

Her name was Renee. And now he had jars labeled Renee. Janel was gone forever, and so was Toni and so was Melanie.

He was home safe now, enjoying Renee. It could be days before the shell of her was found; meanwhile he had captured her essence, her soul, in his jars, syphoned out with her blood through his instruments.

He had once wanted to be a doctor, and when that dream ended, he had tried teaching for a while. The kids called him Teach, and he had allowed it. He taught biology but not for long. When he taught, he liked to use the real thing, and this upset some of the more immature of his students who preferred specimens to come in neatly wrapped, formaldehyde-soaked packages. He personally could not stand the stench of the stuff, but the odor of fresh blood-now, that was a different story.

He bullied the boys into being macho enough to be cut for blood samples. They responded just as he expected them to. When he pushed a girl into the same kind of corner, someone came to her defense, and there was a bit of a nasty scene, and afterward he was called into the boss's office and the principal put him on notice.

By the end of the term, he knew his contract would not be renewed. Just another person with power over his life putting it to him.

He was in his late twenties, nearing thirty, and what did he have to show for it? He had been a failure at everything he did. It was just as his father had told him all his life, that everything he touched turned to shit. The old man hadn't been any help, a failure himself, dying of the hereditary disease that he had passed on to his son. He could only look to his grandfather's notebook and his collection of medical books for comfort. His father had been a fool, but his grandfather was a great man, a great doctor.

Teach sat before an old Victrola record player, which had also been his grandfather's. It was spinning in lazy whorls the strings of a Mozart concerto, the record without a scratch, but still some static chipped up from the diamond stylus. Getting parts for the old player had become near impossible, but he had found a shop in a small town on Main Street in Wekosha, Wisconsin, that was wonderful. It was like walking back into the past. The shop had some vintage 78s which he had gotten at a steal. He had also picked up some singles at Pernell's Music Emporium in Wekosha. It had cost him a month's pay, but listening to the lovely strings now made it all worthwhile. It soothed his taut nerves, this simple hobby of his, his love of music of a far-gone world, the world of Strauss, of Mozart, and sometimes he'd play music from Benny Goodman and the big-band era. He believed he had been born in the wrong time. He detested the music he heard today blaring from the radio.

The old Vic was sometimes used to listen to Hamlet, Lear and other Shakespearian plays, a collection of which he had gotten at a bargain rate in Paris, Illinois, where a Catholic monastic order had shut its doors and had sold off all of its library assets and holdings. He had gotten Olivier and Barrymore doing Shakespeare, along with a full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Royal Victorian Symphony Theatre in London, England. These, along with his freezer filled with blood, were his most prized possessions, which he shared with no one.

He turned up the volume as loud as it would go and returned to his red bath. Nude, he slid into the reheated blood bath. He had had to use more jars. His supply was getting dangerously low, and he believed in the domestic truth: one off the shelf, replace it yourself

In the warm crimson bath now, he resumed where he left off before they'd called him into the office that morning. He'd have to be on the road the following day early, but tonight, he had all evening to enjoy himself with Renee.

Listening to classical music and reading his favorite passage from the Bible, he heard his cat mew. The cat, a big, black torn, was left often to fend for itself, put on the street whenever he was gone. But Snuffy-so named for a chronic congestive disorder-always returned. He liked the smell of blood, too, and whenever he could get it, he'd lap it up.

“ The vital essence of a living thing… the life of the flesh is in the blood,” he read aloud to Snuffy. The cat came near enough for his extended hand to pet. But it wasn't interested in a caress, turning back on his hand and licking frantically at the bloody moisture there.

The cat knew. It somehow knew what he knew and what the Bible said was true, that the way to health, to a cure, to longer life-quality time-was through the intake of blood, orally, through the pores, any way you could get it. He rubbed the blood into the animal's thick, black coat violently and it came back for more. This made him laugh and say, “You like it, don't you… don't you, boy?”

After an hour's languishing in the heated bath, he pulled the plug, rinsed off under the shower head, toweled himself down and went into the next room, and down the corridor of the old house he had inherited from his father when his mother died. For sixteen years he had seen to the needs of his ailing parents, and he had watched them both wither and die, and it had both sickened and terrified him. At the end of the corridor, he went into what was once his grandfather's study, which was now his study. The old man had been a general practitioner in the days when doctors worked out of their homes, and beside his den there was a small examining room. He had wanted him to be a doctor as well, and he tried to be what he wanted to be, but it just was not to be. There were too many people in the world set against him: his teachers for one, his superiors, the doctors who made the decisions in medical school, the ones who created hurdles for him to jump over, and then there were his parents. Their illnesses had come on like a fire but then lingered for years, sapping the family of finances just as it sapped him of any compassion he might have otherwise felt for his essentially weak father and dominating mother.

So he had turned to teaching, because those who can, do; and those who can't, teach. But he learned quickly that teaching itself was yet another science-an art really-like being an actor, and only the best actors with great inward confidence and the best scripts survived teaching. His too soft approach, his too gentle demeanor and his essentially introverted nature and lack of confidence, along with the fact he had never acted, never scripted anything in his life, had failed him in this as it had failed him in medicine.

Finally, three years ago, he had turned to the want ads in the Chicago Tribune and in the Sun Times, and he searched for any jobs having to do with medicine that he might qualify for. He went through a series of such jobs before becoming a salesman for a Chicago firm specializing in medical supplies, from new pills to new forceps. The only sort of supplies they didn't supply was linens.

Into the den he carried with him his large Bible, but he now placed it aside, and below the student lamp on the oak desk, he picked up the Old World pen from the inkwell before him and now he dabbed off the feather quill in the inkwell and watched the blood drip from its end.

He had a letter to write, a response to the misrepresentations of the news coming out of Wekosha, Wisconsin, that he was some sort of vampire. He was far more than any fictional nightmare. He was quite real, and his purpose should not be confused with cinematic nonsense or lurid novels.

Using the blood of Candy, mixed with an anticoagulating agent in the inkwell, he wrote out his first line which he intended to send to a woman named Coran at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. He had already used an ordinary red Bic pen for the envelope, finding the address easily enough in the Registry of Law Enforcement Agencies at the library. He had read the feeble accounts of the so-called slash-and-drink vampire killer of Wekosha, now making the rounds of the various papers from USA Today to the Enquirer. None of them had the story right. He felt relatively secure about keeping his identity and his home safe from all the people who would enjoy getting at his throat with a scalpel.

Although careful to print, Teach wrote with a flourishing hand where once he had written with a pinched and tiny hand the words he so wanted to convey to Dr. Jessica Coran. She proposed to corner him, to bring him to what they called justice. We will see, he thought as he wrote:

Dear Dr. Coran,

Read Leviticus and you will understand me. I am far from a vampire, and do not consider myself one.

Candy was sweet; that is, her blood was sweet, but I am once more reduced in my supply. As you see from this note, I use blood for every little thing. Perhaps someday I will be fortunate enough to have some of your blood? Please, don't let the newspapers disparage me again. Put your mind at ease. My thirst is, from time to time, quenched. So I will not take any more than my needs dictate. I am fundamentally an environmentally conscious person, and do not squander blood. You know this from your own experience, do you not? So rest assured.

Perhaps someday we can meet, and perhaps you will give me some of your blood? I believe women have much more character than men, don't you? At any rate, you can never hope to catch me before I catch you.

Sincerely,

Teach, the one you seek.

The fools hadn't a single shred of evidence to link him to the deaths. They hadn't even placed Candy Copeland in the hospital where he had first met her in the cafeteria, sipping on a big milkshake. He had seen her in the hospital before on his trips, usually doing the scut work of mopping floors and taking out bedpans, but recently she'd been given more responsibility and she hadn't been able to cope with it. So her days were numbered, and she talked of having to go back on the streets, back to a pimp who kept her. She'd been feeling sorry for herself, and he saw his chance and he took it. He offered her some relief from her sorrows, pointing out some of the types of drugs he peddled for his company. She wanted relief from her life, her pain, and ultimately she felt no pain.

She had liked the candy cane uniform. She had liked being known as a candy striper. She took on the name “Candy” as a result, casting off “Annie.”

Now that he'd finished his letter, Snuffy, who had followed him into the den and had so calmly sat over his feet for the duration of the letter, suddenly snuggled against his leg. The torn then leapt up onto the desktop in a blink and was going for the inkwell and the feather pen and the smell of blood.

He dabbed a bit on his finger and fed it to the cat. “Reach out and touch someone, heh, kitty?” he asked.?