Killer Instinct

TWENTY-ONE

Jessica Coran had had to spend another day and night in Chicago, poring over the list of pharmaceutical companies and hospital supply companies in the Chicagoland area. The list was endless. Pages upon pages, and none of the names-in and of itself-was of help. Still, she narrowed the firms down to the several hundred who either distributed or made their own surgical equipment.

She had telephoned HQ in Quantico and had gotten J.T., who sounded a little strange, but when she asked him what was going on, all he said was, “Be careful out there, Jess.”

She tried to get him to talk, but he dove into the case with some new twist that might have been the cause of the shakiness in his voice. “Robertson says the semen samples taken from Wekosha are definitely from a different man than those you sent from Zion.”

“ What about the Indiana killing? I sent the samples earlier today. You get them?”

“ Just got in the door, but from first scoping, I'd have to say no connection with Wekosha. That means no DNA match. That means-”

“ I know what it means, John!” She sounded more caustic than she meant to. “I think I know what it means.”

“ Sound tired.”

“ That's an understatement. Look, J.T., suppose for a moment that the guy who did the Copeland killing, the Trent and the McDonell killings was the same guy as our Zion guy. It's not a sex-lust killing in the usual sense with this guy, since his lust is not to fulfill any sexual fantasy but a fantasy of blood-harvesting. He simply has no need of sex.”

“ Then why the semen at all?”

“ To keep people like you and me going around in circles.”

“ So he gets the semen from other men? I don't get it.”

“ Goddammit, he's impotent. He's in and out of hospitals until he becomes a known fixture. We know he's likely using medical apparatus-tourniquets, tubes maybe, cortisone in potent dosage, and quite possibly narcotics. He knows his way around hospitals. So he knows where the sperm bank is.”

“ Ahhhh, gotcha.”

“ Men.”

“ What?”

“ You can be so thick.”

“ Thick?”

“ So he doesn't like playing with girls in that way, only killing them by syphoning away their lives through a tube.” The thought of such a killer made her feel once more for his various victims, and with the body count spiraling upward, she feared for his next victim. Her hatred of the killer grew by steady leaps.

She asked if he could transfer her to Boutine's office, complaining she'd heard nothing from him.

He said he'd transfer the call, but came on again complaining that Boutine was unavailable at the moment. She said goodbye to J.T., who seemed reluctant to hang up.

That had been at 4 P.M., sometime after she and Joe Brewer had gotten back to the Chicago bureau. Now she was back at the Lincolnshire Inn, where she had a message waiting from Boutine. He was flying in. He left the number on the jet where he could be reached.

She telephoned from her room immediately.

It was wonderful to hear the strong timbre of Otto Boutine's voice again, but after the amenities, she learned why J.T. was acting so strangely, and why Otto had been kept tied up at Quantico. A letter had arrived there addressed to her, a letter which may have come from the killer. J.T. had taken receipt of the letter, and finding it odorous and suspicious, he had taken it to Boutine, who had ordered it opened. Boutine had an instant impression that it was genuine, and so he and J.T. had run it through Documents for any clues to the identity of the killer. Dried flecks of blood from the lettering had accumulated like rust in the bottom of the envelope, and these were cross-matched with those of the known victims, and the blood had been matched with Candy Copeland's after other chemical components had been separated out.

“ What other chemical components?”

“ Ahhh, blood had been mixed with an anticoagulating agent, so as to have more of an inky quality.”

“ Mixed with India ink?”

“ Not quite.”

“ What, then?”

“ Same components as in correction fluid, nail polish.”

Jessica took this all in with full gulps of air. “Tell me about the paper it was written on. Any clues there?”

“ Cheap, ordinary office stock.”

“ Copier paper?”

“ Yeah, nothing special about it.”

“ And the handwriting?”

“ Printing. Our boy's crafty.”

“ The pen?”

“ Done with an old-style quill pen.”

“ Want to hear it, or wait until I get there?”

She knew the original would not leave Quantico; that he had a copy. “Go ahead,” she said, although she didn't want to hear it. Over the phone, from the jet. Otto's reading of it was not enough, even verbatim. She listened intently, trying to penetrate beyond the words, to read between the lines. But she needed to see every word before her. Even so, each word took on its own chilling new meaning for her. And when the killer ended by saying that perhaps one day they might meet, that he might one day take a little of her blood, she had heard enough, and she understood why J.T. was acting as he had at the other end of the phone. He'd been ordered to say nothing of this to her, obviously by Boutine, who, as it appeared, wished to break it to her his way. He hadn't wanted her to spend the day with this additional monkey on her back; and he had wanted the letter completely analyzed before she learned about it.

He had no idea she had gotten an inkling of it through Brewer. And she kept it that way.

She had never been directly addressed by a maniac before, and this one was a level 9 torturer, a blood-drinker. Otto's Tort 9 who wanted some of her blood. It was like hearing his ugly voice and being touched by his ugly hand, as if she were one of his victims. The letter was a vile document, and yet it seemed to excite Boutine; for him, it was the most important single clue to finding the killer yet; for him, the killer had finally made a mistake, exposing himself for the first time.

“ If he writes once, he'll write again, just as he'll kill again,” said Boutine with certainty.

She didn't want to tell Boutine that she didn't want any more love letters from a human vampire. She instead told him of what they had found in Indiana and about the cortisone clue found in Zion.

“ Both killings match up with our guy?”

“ No doubt in my mind.”

“ I'll call Hector Rodriguez at the Tribune to print another story, and this time we'll tell the world the guy is gay, that he's a momma's boy, anything we can think of to keep him on edge.”

“ I'm not convinced that using the press is going to rattle this guy. He wrote that letter to me before he read anything of any substance in the Tribune. All they had was the useless info coming out of Wekosha, and that was pretty paltry stuff.”

“ The team's decided, Jess. This is the best way to go now.”

“ Then why not go all the way? Really shake him up.”

“ How do you mean?”

“ Give it out that the killer is suffering from a rare disease-”

“ Rare disease? What rare disease?”

“ I've talked to several doctors here that agree with me that the level of dosage this guy's taking in the form of cortisone can be for any number of illnesses, but the one disease that would fixate our boy on a vampire obsession might be Addison's disease. This means he's very sensitive to cold, and that he's probably got large, lumpy areas on his back and buttocks. That's pretty personal shit. He's likely to have a large, oval face, big jowls.”

“ Symptoms of the disease?”

“ Exactly.”

“ Yeah, I can see where this might shake this guy loose a bit, put a dent in his methodical armor.”

“ And there's something else.”

“ Shoot.”

“ He really is impotent.”

“ How do you know that for certain, Jessica?”

“ He's stealing sperm from other men.”

“ What? Say again.”

“ He's using other men's semen-”

“ The semen of other men? The lab tell you that?”

“ In each case, the semen has been different, so there's no way we can get a DNA match on this guy's semen sample. The semen he's smearing into the orifices by hand is coming out of… test tubes or something. Taken from sperm banks or something.”

“ He's getting drugs and semen samples from hospitals he visits,” said Boutine. “Then why not simply steal the blood he needs and wants from the same source?”

“ It's not just blood he wants.”

“ Of course not.”

“ He wants power, supreme power over others. He wants to enjoy the blood-taking the old-fashioned way, and he can't do that by rifling blood banks.”

“ A real throwback, huh?”

“ You got it. And Otto, we may's well really stick it to this creep.”

“ How so?”

“ Give the papers the tube; the fact he plunges a nasty little straw into the victim's jugular and sucks out the blood through a tube and carries off most of the blood in jars.”

“ How do we know it's jars?”

“ Easier to handle than packs in the situation. Mason jars, I suspect.”

“ Be as specific as we dare, huh?”

“ The jars alone will unnerve the bastard, and possibly make him do something to flash who he is.”

“ But we're giving away a lot, and it'll draw the cranks like flies.”

“ We're holding back enough to discredit any professional confessors,” she said. “Besides, stories about his manhood aren't going to bother this guy. He's sexless. His only sex is getting off on the torture and the blood he swallows, don't you see? So attacking his manhood isn't going to bother him in the least. And one more thing.”

“ Yeah?”

“ He's targeted me, and he's going to know that I'm the one saying these things about him.”

“ Yeah, that worries me, Jess.”

“ Worries hell out of me, too, but I don't see we have much of an alternative. This guy's really stocking up for Christmas in his personal blood bank account. We've got to make an offensive move, lead with our knight.”

“ Suppose you're right. I'll see to it.”

“ How soon will you arrive?”

“ Before dawn. I'll meet you there. Get some rest.”

“ You, too. And good night. Otto.”

“ Good night, Jess.” The news of the letter left Jessica shaken, but she hadn't wanted Otto to sense this, and so she covered it well. She was just relieved that he was coming to her.

In the meantime. Brewer's Chicago task force had every available law enforcement officer in the city looking into hospital records and asylum releases, and by way of the P.P. team's suggestion, all medical supply companies. Still, there were so bloody many in the area, it might take months to narrow it down to just the right one where their killer worked.?