Killer Instinct

EIGHTEEN

Even before she got to Indianapolis, Jessica learned that a task force of hundreds of law enforcement officials had been set to work on the killer of the Zion nurse. Every conceivable lead, every telephone call, every scrap of information, was being pursued tirelessly, around the clock. No call was too absurd or fantastic to respond to. The only problem was that the calls outnumbered even the hundreds upon hundreds of police officials called in on the case.

Joe Brewer had brought her up-to-date on these developments as they helicoptered to Indianapolis. He also had a lab report on the capsule found at the Zion death site. Oddly, the drug had turned out to be a potent dose of cortisone, the kind that could be had only through a prescription. Jessica knew that such a dosage was for no ordinary measure, that it meant the killer-if it belonged to him-had a serious disorder. This made her recall what Teresa O'Rourke had surmised about the killer.

“ What about a print? Anything?” She knew it was unlikely.

“ Not enough.”

“ A partial?”

“ More like a smudge. A few points of reference.”

She knew this fact meant an unlikely chance at any sort of computer match. Long shots seldom paid off in real life.

She returned to her thoughts about O'Rourke's uncanny assertion that the killer might well suffer from some nasty disorder of a serious physiological nature. She had to consult a medical book to determine the uses for such a dose of cortisone, and in the meantime, she asked Brewer and his people to keep this tidbit of information in the strictest of confidence.

“ In other words,” she said to Brewer point-blank, “let's don't let it get around like the stories circulating about Otto and me, okay?”

“ Christ, Dr. Coran, I've heard nothing but the best about you, really. I never meant to hurt you or to imply-”

“ Forget about it, Inspector.”

“ Call me Joe.”

“ Fine, I'll do that. So what's the word from Otto? Will he be waiting for us in Indianapolis, or what?”

“ Something's come up that'll detain him, but he promises to make it.”

“ Something's come up?” She was curious, but she doubted he knew any more than what he was told to repeat.

But Brewer volunteered, “Seems they got a letter which he has reason to believe is from the killer.”

“ Really?” She tried to picture a scenario in which the killer could have gotten the late edition of the Chicago papers, read about himself and his heinous crimes there and then responded as Otto had wanted him to. No, it was impossible, given the state of the U.S. mails, and not even Federal Express was that good. Unless the killer was responding to stories he had read dealing with the Wekosha killing, stories that had been wired to every newspaper office in the country, but stories that had precious little information in them, especially about the nature of the brutal killings or the maniac behind them.

She shared her thoughts with Brewer, who had had his share of dealings with brutal, sadistic killers over the years. Brewer was almost Otto's age. Joe told her that there was no second-guessing a madman, and that using the media to taunt a cold-blooded killer was a lot like juggling flaming knives, or toying with Satan, or worse, God. He did not entirely agree on the steps that Quantico was taking, and he flatly said that they might in effect be jeopardizing citizens in his territory. FBI headquarters was far from Chicago, and Joe feared that the Bureau sometimes forgot how easily innocent lives could be lost.

Still, the present killing spree could have nothing to do with the story placed in the Chicago papers the night before. The last two killings had been perpetrated before the story was filed, if the Indiana slaying was done by the same man.

Even before they touched down in a field across from the latest victim's house, she sensed that it was the same killer. Something about the house would have appealed to her killer. It was relatively isolated, and it had the look of a beaten-down little place. She wondered if there was something even in the homes of the victims that attracted the “vampire.”

The view from the chopper revealed a broken-down, scavenged relic of a car in the rear, an old, tired shed, a weed patch where once there might have been a flourishing garden, some scattered barrels for burning refuse, the yard littered with trashy items, the grass in need of shearing. The house itself was a hodgepodge of construction, what had been a simple bungalow with an ill-conceived second-story addition. TTie Zion woman's place had had a similar, ratty appearance, old and tattered, with a porch that sagged below the men, some of whom were playing with the creaky boards as if betting on who could make the loudest squeak, when she came up the stairs, her presence silencing the talk.

Some of the local cops in tight-fitting brown outfits, and one burly biker in particular, assured Jessica that she didn't want to see what was on the inside. Others mistook her for a reporter. But she flashed her FBI badge and stepped through, asking if the coroner had been in yet.

He had, but they'd gotten word from the FBI to hold on any evidence gathering, and so they had. The coroner was busy enough that he didn't in the least mind the FBI interest, she was told.

She stepped into the dark interior, steeling herself. She felt her backbone stiffen at the sour odors, now familiar to her. Like the Zion house, there was the distinct odor of mildew, rotten wood and decaying flesh. Walking into a corridor that had become a death trap to the young man they'd called Fowler was like walking into a gallery room created by the Devil, and on this wall hangs the Fowler hody, and beside it in the anteroom, the McDonell body, and in the drawing room, the Trent body followed by the Copeland shell. Lovely only to the killing mind, this satanic gallery of death, filled with its awful sights and sickening odors. For a moment, she felt all alone with the black shape in the dark, silhouetted against the stairwell behind it, where it dangled: Fowler.

She could see the skinny-boy form of the body, hanging from the banister in the hallway that led to the second floor. “We got any lights?” she asked, and they instantly came up to reveal the ugly situation. The men were learning from Joe Brewer exactly who she was, about the fact she had been tracking a vampire killer since the incident in Wekosha, and that they had had another, similar case in Zion, Illinois, only the night before.

“ What's known about this young man?” she asked the crowd of policemen and investigators.

“ Not much,” volunteered one.

“ Dispatcher,” said another, heavier man with a notebook that he flipped pages in, “gay, hung out at a place called Shinnola on Fourteenth and Redding in the heart of-”

“ What kind of dispatcher? Trucks?”

“ Trucks, ambulances-”

“ Ambulances?”

“ Yeah, worked at St. Luke's Hospital. Was a good worker, so everybody there says.”

“ Anyone see him leave the hospital with another man?”

“ Negative.”

She saw the familiar mutilation wounds and the lack of blood on the stairwell, the runner carpet, the wood floor and the walls. She saw the familiar hitching knot, the throat slash. It all looked on the surface like a ghastly replay, a flashback, a macabre d6ja vu.

She called for Brewer who came nearer. “I'll need everything I brought in the helicopter, all the cases, all the equipment.” She had borrowed Chicago's imaging system, but even with the best equipment, the search over the body and premises would take hours. Once again, the killer was far out ahead of them, still free to do this awful thing again.

Again she wondered what had precipitated the killer's sudden spree. Spree killing was not the usual serial killer's way. A spree typified the sudden snap, the leap from rational to irrational, and it typified the disorganized killer, but no amount of labeling or statistics could corner this maniac with a tracheotomy tube and a tourniquet, with his empty Pepsi bottles waiting to be refilled, with his vials of semen that he placed into his victim's orifices by hand.

She wished it were Boutine with her now instead of Brewer. She wondered what had been so important as to keep Otto. She needed his support, his strength, his nagging questions.

The place was like Wekosha in that there were too many cops freely roaming about. She had to ask Brewer to keep control of the place. She thought of what Otto had said about the killer's likely response to reading about the details of the killings in print, that it would excite him to some action which might give them a lead, however small. She silently prayed that the stories in the papers would have this effect, but some nagging doubt clung to the thought like a lamprey, sucking the life from the hope of the psychological profiling team. Whoever this guy was, she guessed that he wasn't going to “respond” as if he were a statistical symbol, that he wouldn't so easily allow them to push his buttons.

Whoever this fucking maniac was, she thought, he wasn't going to be run by any normal rules, even “normal” by deviant behavior “models.”

“ Standards.” Still, he remained a meticulous, careful bastard before, during and after he calmly took the life's blood from his victims. It made her wonder if the capsule found at the Zion murder site hadn't, after all, been planted there by the bastard, just to further confuse and confound them. Anyone who created cosmetic wounds to cover the true cause of death, anyone who intentionally faked both the sexual attack and the mutilation murder in so cool a manner, would find planting a certain drug at the scene child's play.

The Indiana victim was a male, approximate age was placed at nineteen or twenty. Her thoughts were macabre: that the killer must have read somewhere, perhaps in a medical journal, that he could get five to ten more ml./kg. of blood from a man as from a woman.

Around her she heard the investigators and Brewer discussing the matter.

“ One sick puppy, this one.”

“ Damnedest thing I've seen in all my years.”

“ What's he do with the blood?”

“ Could just be a copycat.”

She'd know soon enough if it was a copycat killing. The straw cut to the jugular had not been in any newspaper, so if it was found in Fowler's jugular, as it had been in the Zion woman's, she knew that it was the same killer with his unique killing tool.

The men around her continued to talk and she half listened in order to keep a foot in the world of the sane as she worked in the closest of range about Fowler's throat, taking the necessary section she required for the nearest scanning electron microscope. She learned this was at the university medical complex two hours away.

Brewer was asking questions in rapid fire of the locals. “You check out all the asylums in the area?”

“ Sure, first thing.”

“ Bring in anyone?”

“ Seventeen, so far.”

“ Known what? Child molesters?”

“ Sex offenders, deviants, cross-dressers.” Again, thought Jessica, they're looking for a sex offender. They were looking in the wrong place.

“ I want you to go back to this St. Luke's and canvass the hospital, top to bottom, anyone who knew him, anyone who spoke to him yesterday, anyone who knows anything about him, even if it's just the color of his socks. Our killer picks his victims up at hospitals, we believe,” Brewer told the others.

“ Sure, sure… we'll go back over that trail.”

Brewer had obviously gotten Otto to open up about the case, giving him what he needed to proceed. She went back to her evidence gathering, roping in some of Joe's men to help her set up the imaging equipment. In a matter of ten minutes the place was lit up like a white hospital corridor. The intense light made the corpse look so placidly white that it became unreal if stared at.

The meticulous work now began in earnest.

# # #

She didn't have to go to the SEM microscope to know what her senses told her, that Fowler had died at the hands of the killer they had pursued from Wekosha to here. She wanted instead to go to this hospital where Fowler worked, St. Luke's. She asked for an escort there.

Along the way, she put everything she had learned about the killer into a mental file and she scanned that file now. What kept jumping out at her was the salesman aspect, and the medical supply company possibility. Had the killer come to St. Luke's ostensibly to sell medical wares, he would have come in a van carrying his supplies and samples, possibly a gray van, but the person most likely to tell them about this was Fowler, and he was the victim.

She and Brewer, along with other FBI agents, went over the same ground as the police had earlier, pursuing any small bit of information, annoying the hospital staff, upsetting others and being asked to leave by the administrator of the hospital. The news of Fowler's tragic and horrible fate had unnerved the entire staff, and the FBI's being there only aggravated the situation, according to the officious hospital administrator, who had insisted she and Brewer be seated in his office.

“ We want your records on suppliers coming into the hospital yesterday,” said Brewer, not allowing the man another word.

“ That would be impossible. Have you any idea how many vendors come through our doors in a given day?”

“ I don't give a damn how many.”

She jumped in. “You can narrow it to Chicago medical supply companies.”

“ That does little to help, as most of our suppliers, even those based in Indianapolis, have corporate offices in Chicago, Dr. Coran.”

“ Then give us a complete list.”

“ I don't believe there is one.”

Brewer was fuming by now. “Then give us what you goddamned have!”

“ Stamping about like a bull isn't going to get you anywhere with me, Inspector,” said the man. “We are a hospital, and we have hospital business to conduct, and such a request-”

“ Hospital business, huh? Tell me, Dr. Marchand, is it? Tell me this: Could your hospital stand an IRS audit? Could it stand an audit of credited accounts, and what about your medicine chest? Tell me, any cortisone capsules missing? Any morphine, LSD, cocaine, heroin or-”

“ All right, all right,” he replied shakily. “It may take some time, but I'll put my assistant to work on it immediately.”

Within an hour they had a computer list that was plopped on the desk before them, as thick as a telephone book.

“ You asked for them all.”?