Killer Instinct

TWENTY-FOUR

There was an almost perceptible, tangible sigh of relief from all of Chicago when the evening news reported an end to the vampire killings. Lowenthal's picture was flashed on every news network, and he was described as the cruel, sadistic killer that had a taste for blood. One enterprising young reporter had even learned that Lowenthal had been sent to various hospitals and places such as Wekosha, Wisconsin, as part of his job. The times of his business visits didn't entirely mesh with the time frame of the killings, but it was felt that he must have gone back to these locations on his own. A spokesperson for Balue-Stork downplayed his connection with the company, saying that he was a low-level employee who had a gift for instrument design, but that he had retired some time ago.

His retirement, Jessica had learned, was the November before the Wekosha killing. She remained skeptical, and when reporters confronted her she kept a chill distance, saying over and over, “No comment, no comment.”

When pushed outside the Chicago Crime Laboratory to disclose her feelings about the case's coming to a close, she said bluntly, “It isn't closed until it's scientifically closed. The FBI does not close a case until it has the stamp of forensic proof required to close it. Is that understood?”

At his home, where he seldom watched TV, Matt Matisak glared now at the replay of events surrounding Lowenthal's death. The chief of police in Chicago had said it was the surest thing he had ever seen; that they had gotten their man. An FBI guy named Brewer said practically the same thing, but here was this bitch holding out as if she knew something no one else knew. She was smug about it, too. So cocksure.

Teach stewed about it. He thought about it all evening long. Suppose she did find something; suppose she did know the truth? Was she that good? She'd been a thorn in his side since Wekosha. She alone seemed to know about him, enough so that he felt a strange bond with her, as if they had an ongoing relationship from the moment he had read about her in the newspapers. It was as if she were reaching out to him, wanting desperately to touch him, to sit down and really communicate with him.

He wondered how he could make her wish come true…

There were ways of finding out where she was staying.

There were ways of attracting her attention, of luring her out.

There were ways… and when she fell into his trap, she'd become his next victim.

But it must be done right.

And he would need an accomplice who was a fool.

He knew the perfect fool.

He knew the perfect place.

He had the perfect plan.

“ Yes, yes… time we met, sweetheart,” Teach said to the film image of Dr. Jessica Coran. “I'll make all the arrangements.”

He then made a phone call, but quickly slammed the phone down. No, he mustn't contact Gamble by phone. Phone company records could give him away.

Gamble was a retarded employee at Balue-Stork's busy, cluttered mailroom. He was easily manipulated. He could be the perfect stand-in for Teach, and so if Lowenthal wasn't enough for the bastards, Lowenthal's associate in crime, Gamble, would be.

“ Of course,” he told himself, “the Chicago vampire is really two people. They'll love it.”

He quickly dressed. His adrenaline was pumping. This might be the best after all, doing Jessica Coran. He'd have to have some of her blood. He knew he'd be unable to walk away from her blood as he had Lowenthal's. She was classy, so sure of herself, and so very intelligent. Her blood was worth something. But he knew he'd have to leave the majority of her blood in jars all about Gamble's place, after he killed both Gamble and Coran.

The plan would take every ounce of willpower he possessed, and to help it along, he'd bring some of Fowler's blood to stave off the urges that were sure to come under the circumstances.

Fully dressed, his plan coming to full fruition, he began to locate the necessary items he must take to Gamble's place. He began packing the van in the dark. His neighbor with his damned dog stopped to chat about the pleasant breeze, about the brilliance of the stars and the clear night overhead, and then he moved on to the awful condition of some of the fences in the area and something to do with an altercation with Mrs. Philbin at the end of the street-something to do with his dog and her dog.

“ I'm sorry but I can't talk just now,” he told the neighbor.

“ Never hardly ever see you, and when I do, it's usually when you're going out. But you usually go out early. Why so late?”

“ Work… emergency. You know the routine.”

The man's dog growled as if he smelled something foul on Matisak's pants leg.

“ Stop that! Stop it, Toby. Sorry,” he apologized. “Don't know what gets into him.”

“ Prob'ly smells the cat on me.”

“ Oh, yes, you're a cat person, aren't you?”

“ Really have to go now.”

“ Sure. I'll stop in sometime for coffee, maybe.”

“ Sure… sometime.”

He watched the nosy bastard move off with his terrier, glad to see them go. He quickly finished loading the van with the cooler, the briefcase and the power tools that had been Lowenthal's. If he left them with Gamble, he'd have to make some new purchases. Sears was currently running a sale on Craftsman tools.

He climbed into the van, closed the garage door with the automatic and slowly drove out into the night, the green dash lights splashing the pockmarked features of his face.

Once this Coran woman was dead, and after some time passed, he'd go back to his vampiring; until then, however, he'd feed on blood packs he might pick up from hospital banks as he did with the cortisone. Once things died down a bit, he'd return to the alluring hunt for prey and he'd get his blood the way he preferred.

# # #

“ We can leave the details and cleanup to Brewer's boys,” Otto was telling her over lunch at Berghoff’s in downtown Chicago, “and you and I can be back at Quantico this afternoon, if you'll just accept the fact that it's over, Jess. You're going to have to sooner or later, and it may as well be-”

“ 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 my 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.?