Killer Instinct

EIGHT

Jessica saw by her watch that it was late, and that she could no longer wait for J.T. and the enlarged SEM photos he was supposed to have met her with at the door. Inside, she could hear Boutine's booming voice, getting the meeting started, and no doubt wondering where the devil she was. Irritated, she was about to step through when she heard J.T. shout the length of the corridor, racing toward her, waving the slides in his hand. “I'm sorry, Jessie, really!”

“ Forget sorry, just get in there and set up the shots.”

He nodded sheepishly, grinning in an attempt to further apologize. “Madhouse around here,” he muttered, but she pushed through to the conference room.

Boutine instantly welcomed them, his voice cordial. Around a large oak table some of the sternest-looking men and women she had ever seen gathered in one place stared at her. She knew some of them by name, others by reputation. They were all top-notch agents brought together as a think-tank team to brainstorm what had happened at Wekosha. One job they had to do was to determine if in fact the Wekosha killer was a serial killer or not.

Jessica stared back at the eyes pinned on her. Some of these people must surely resent the intrusion her presence represented. It was a break with the way things were normally done, and they must wonder why. Boutine began by introducing her, a completely unnecessary gesture, since they'd all heard that she was coming to the meeting. Earlier her presence at such a meeting was purely absentee, representation only through forensics reports. Boutine had been around for enough years to remember the time when coroners and pathologists were called in much more often, when physical evidence and psychological profiling were more closely aligned. He was speaking of that now.

“ We're trying an old approach, and we're calling it psychological autopsy. Psychological autopsies have been done since Marilyn Monroe's death, to determine the psychological state of the victim by behavioral scientists, but we're going to twist that a bit and add to our behavioral scientists in this team, a medical examiner, so that the 'autopsy' in psychological autopsies isn't forgotten. Enter Dr. Coran, who, by the way, did the field forensics work we've been discussing. I trust she has more for us to ponder. Jessica,” he finished, gesturing for her to take the floor.

She breathed deeply, noticing for the first time that Chief William Leamy was among those at the table. “I've brought you some items that may assist you in the Wekosha case, some slides in particular which are quite revealing.”

“ We've seen the photos,” said Ken Schultz, one of the field agents at the table.

“ You've seen nothing like these,” she countered. “I assure you.”

“ From what we've seen, some of us are thinking ritual murder, satanism,” said Stan Byrnes. “The condition of the body, the staging, the draining of blood, ropes and-”

“ I think we're satanism-happy lately,” said Teresa O'Rourke. O'Rourke had a quiet yet powerful style, and she'd chalked up enough wins to turn heads, make people listen. “If you read the photos and the reports closely enough, the fact the body parts were removed after death, and that a kind of 'staging' went into it all… well, most satanic ritual staging of one kind or another goes on before the actual death blow. They like to prolong the suffering of a sacrificial lamb.”

“ True, but-” one of the men started to counter. “Agent O'Rourke is right,” said Jessica quickly, trying to seize back control of the meeting, and to gain the other female's support in the bargain. Everyone fell silent to hear her explanation.

“ You all know as well as I that all murders are not equal… that someone has to decide on the level of viciousness. In the past it was easy-if a jury decided you were guilty, you were executed. Now, much to our horror, there are nuances and calibrations beyond any nightmare concocted in any film or fiction. One way to measure the heinousness of a crime is by the pain and suffering of the victim.”

Everyone was nodding, a good sign. Boutine signaled her with his eyes to continue.

“ Was the victim conscious? For how long? What was done during that period of time to inflict pain, suffering? I can tell you this much…” She slowed, pausing, gathering speed. “The killer took most of her blood away with him.”

“ What?” asked Byrnes.

“ In jars or packs or Tupperware, I don't know… but he carried most of it off with him. Indications and information tell us that the cabin where the murder occurred was not occupied long enough by the killer to allow him sufficient time to consume the blood before he left, and having not found it on the premises, I've assumed-”

“ But to carry it away?”

“ For what, future use?”

“ All I know is that it'd be difficult to consume two-and-a-half liters of blood in one sitting. Given the victim's body weight, the killer would've likely taken her blood in two sittings, hours apart… possibly three sittings. He didn't stay long enough in the area to do that, so he had to have packed it and carried it off with him.”

“ This Bud's for you,” said O'Rourke dryly.

There was muted, nervous laughter in response. “But there's more,” she said, “and worse information for you to swallow.”

She indicated to J.T. that she was ready for the slide presentation. When the first slide came up, no one aside from Jessica Coran and John Thorpe knew what they were looking at. The super-magnified photo of the throat section she had taken from Candy Copeland looked like an enormous spongy landscape on some barren planet, pockmarked and dune-covered. The photo was three-dimensional and in color, state-of-the-art.

“ What're we looking at, Dr. Coran?” Boutine asked for the others.

“ A close-up of the dead girl's jugular at the exact center.” She moved closer and using a pointer she located the geographic center of the jugular. “You will see here the perfectly formed circle like a Cheerio. This is not a normal aberration, but a wound, a wound that takes a great deal more precision to make than any slash to the throat such as the one you saw in the photos of the victim.”

“ But what does it mean?” asked O'Rourke, nearly off her seat with curiosity.

“ The killer used some sort of control mechanism-a device for gauging the flow of the victim's blood from her body.”

There was a long silence in the room before Byrnes said, “What kind of device?”

“ I don't know.”

“ Christ, you don't suppose it's a… a fang incision, a bite?” asked Ken Schultz.

O'Rourke said, “Don't be ridiculous.” Everyone else remained silent.

“ You must have some idea, a guess?” persisted Byrnes.

“ A valve, a tube… something to tap into the… well, her blood supply…” She hesitated.

“ Before the bastard got around to lapping up the remainder,” finished Boutine. “This guy's bad news… real bad news, people.” Chief William Leamy cleared his throat in the darkened room and asked, “Dr. Coran, do you know of any device used in medicine to drain away blood?”

“ Certain catheters working on a syphoning principle are used to draw off unwanted liquids from the lungs, but no. This is like putting a T-section in the blood vessel and rerouting the blood flow. No such device I know of in medicine works this way.”

“ How long did she suffer?”

“ Between twenty and thirty minutes. Lower extremities would have gone numb first, while the muscles in the head, eyes, and mouth would've continued to function, as blood was getting to these areas. Death would have ensued before all the blood was drained, but it would have been a slow death, and a death in which the victim would feel her life virtually running out of her. As to the crime scene itself, sir, a true crazy quilt of clues which were intentionally scattered-in more ways than one.”

Will Leamy spoke for them all when he said, “We can all agree on the heinousness of the crime. We've got to locate and put this madman away, before he strikes again.”

Everyone in the room knew that this was no simple task. Even if they could determine a suspect, so far they had nothing but DNA evidence from the semen to connect him to the scene. Furthermore, it had been determined that the semen possessed a virtual plethora of common elements, and so far nothing even remotely striking about it. Further analysis would be done, but Jessica was skeptical that J.T. would find anything additional, much less useful. It was like having the fingerprint but no suspect to match it with.

Jessica was pleasantly surprised by the warm looks and the nods and a few handshakes the others offered when the lights came up and Boutine called an end to the meeting. The method of proceeding from this point was to give the evidence presented time to saturate, for the PPT people to form some opinions about the kind of killer they were dealing with. Jessica had expected that the think-tank psycho-profiling team would be cooler toward her than they were. She had pictured people more interested in statistical probabilities like so many accountants over actuary tables. Boutine had tried to tell her otherwise, and it appeared he was right. They were highly intelligent, very experienced, instinctive players, this team of four that included Boutine. They would go to work now to create a profile of the most probable sort of man to do the horrendous deeds they'd only just heard about from Dr. Jessica Coran and Boutine.

Otto's team enjoyed a reputation of being the best in the PPT business. Jessica had always believed this was due to the leadership, to Otto. But the meeting had been a revelation to her as well as Otto's people, for she found them far from cautious, far from halting about making great leaps, and a great deal more curious than she'd imagined they would be. And she had gotten through to them. They had seen her worth. Hopefully, so had Chief Leamy.

The psychological profiling team appeared to have been won over by the slides J.T. had made of the wound, and her explanations to the team. She gave a smile, a nod and a twinkle in her eye to J.T. for having saved her from a tough fight. Without the slides, she doubted anyone would have believed her about the killer's modus operandi. It had given the hounds a scent and fascinated them with the cruel new twist on murder that the killer had developed.

Teresa O'Rourke, in particular, was fascinated. She held back, asking questions of Jessica. “What're your plans? What steps will you now take?”

Boutine was busy with Leamy, but he cast a wary glance in her direction. She wasn't sure how much she should share with O'Rourke beyond what was said to the group. She certainly didn't want to talk about exhumations to anyone other than Boutine. “That'll be up to Otto. Most assuredly, we'll be working day and night in the laboratory.”

“ The semen samples tell us anything about this guy?”

“ DNA results have confirmed he's white. That's-” she hesitated, studying O'Rourke's gaze “-not about to help us much.”

“ Bears out the statistical average.” O'Rourke's voice suddenly took on a raspy, piratical tone when she added, “Look, we're both women on a man's mountain here, Jessica. You mind if I call you Jessica?”

“ Not at all, Teresa.”

“ Good. Look, I understand you actually isolated some trace elements of blood that's most likely that of the killer's.”

“ He must've nicked himself, but yes. We… I found trace elements of blood other than the victim's in Wekosha.”

O'Rourke smiled. “I was told you had an eagle's eye and a deft touch.”

“ Oh, really?” She wondered who O'Rourke had been talking to. J.T.? This was cleared up with her next words.

“ Thorpe tells me you got enough to run tests on.”

“ That's right. Just enough, however.”

“ I suggest you look for any blood deficiencies, any illnesses which might show up in the bastard's blood.”

“ We are working on that already.”

“ Of course. It's just that, well, you may not know that this class of killer, a bloodtaker, is usually working out of some demented need which, strangely enough, has first manifested itself in some form of physical torment-a lack of red blood corpuscles, an illness, some deformity maybe. And if we could focus in on that aspect, who knows, maybe we'd at least be able to narrow the search, halve the haystack, all that.”

Jessica had read about effects of bodily deformities and illness on the minds of murderers. She understood where O'Rourke was coming from, but she wondered why the inspector hadn't brought it up at the meeting, why the 'lobbying' for Jessica's attention?

Leamy gave O'Rourke a perfunctory hello, taking Jessica a side. “I believe, Dr. Coran, your remarks were extremely useful. I know Otto thinks so.”

“ Thank you, Chief.”

His eyes lingered over her just long enough to make her uncomfortable when Otto stepped between them, saying, “I told you she was remarkable, and that we need her for an early profile creation of this Wekosha vampire.”

Leamy acted as if Otto was not in the room, his eyes returning to Jessica's as he asked, “You agree without reservation with Boutine? That these deaths are absolutely the work of one man with some kind of blood thirst?”

Jessica wanted to be firmer, but her words didn't sound very firm. “I… I'm leaning in that direction, yes sir.”

“ Leaning, huh? How do you account for the long delay between the killings Boutine here is trying his damndest to tie together? I mean most serial nuts of this sort may let a week or two go between slayings, but we're talking about months of elapsed time here.”

Jessica didn't hesitate this time. “There may've been no delay.”

“ Pardon?”

“ There's quite possibly many more undiscovered bodies.”

Boutine nodded in agreement. “If this guy's been working his way up to his present modus operandi, there's no telling how many bodies he's left in shallow graves all over the heartland.”

“ What is our next step, Otto?” asked Leamy.

“ Exhumations,” she blurted out.

“ Exhumations?” he asked, looking around at Otto.

Otto shrugged. “Jess, what've you got in mind?”

She shared her suspicions with the two men. “If we find the identical scar in the throats of the earlier victims, then we can be sure that we are dealing with the same man.”

“ Makes a lot of sense,” said Otto.

“ The reason for the slides,” she added. “Suffice it to say, the killer is very knowledgeable and shrewd. No ordinary butcher. His efforts to appear brutal were to mask his skill with a scalpel and a specialized instrument of some kind.”

“ The tube you spoke of,” Leamy said.

“ A spigot, through which he drained her blood, in a very controlled fashion.”

“ Yes, well… a medical man, a doctor?”

“ Why not?” asked Boutine. “Or a medic.”

“ Or a nurse,” she finished.

“ Any number of people with specialized knowledge of anatomy. A medical student, a mortician.”

“ Anyone who knows incisions,” added Leamy.

“ It was an incision of a very specialized kind, like… like a tracheotomy, except that instead of the windpipe, the killer punctured her jugular with a tubular instrument. Now, I've studied the autopsies on the earlier victims and not a word about this came out, because, I believe, the larger, superficial wound to the throat masked the truth, and in all previous cases a local man did the autopsying… and we all know how that goes.”

The others had to agree. The other cases hadn't been handled well. On each, the FBI had been called in long after the crime scenes had been disturbed and the pathology reports filed.

“ There is one thing they all have in common,” said Boutine. “It's what got me going originally. And that's the geography.” They all understood the geography of death. Most killers, even serial killers, worked within the confines of a strict geographical location, a certain area in a city, a certain town. This pattern was only broken when the killer moved away, and then it was repeated elsewhere, as in the Ted Bundy case. “This guy, if it is one guy, really gets around.” Boutine went to a map of the United States on the wall and he pointed out the various states where young women and one young boy had been found bound and hanging from their heels, their blood drained. He pointed to Wisconsin, Iowa, southern Illinois and Missouri. “A midwestern kind of guy, huh?” asked Leamy.

“ We've alerted every law enforcement agency in the country to be on the lookout for anything smacking of a Tort “You seem to have gotten off the mark on this rather slowly. Otto,” said Leamy. “Why?”

“ My people have been on it from the beginning, but we've been looking in the wrong place, in the wrong way. Now, with Dr. Coran-”

“ How so, the wrong way?”

Otto sighed deeply. “The killings had all the earmarks of satanic ritual, and what with all that's been going on in the papers and the news lately… well, like Jess says, this guy is shrewd. So-”

“ So he has the FBI, with all its manpower and equipment and communications network, wasting valuable time and personnel on running down leads to every local satanic cult in the midsection of the country. I get the picture.”

“ Until now, we haven't had any information pointing to one perpetrator. We knew they were taking the blood, but we had made up our collective minds that it was the work of a pack of satan worshippers. One reason is the fact we already knew that one man could not drink the blood of a full-grown person at one sitting, and these were strike-and-run slayings.”

“ And you're convinced now that Dr. Coran is on the right track?”

“ Absolutely.”

“ And you. Dr. Coran… you wish to dig up some mottled old corpses from grave sites here, and here, and here,” he said, pointing consecutively at Missouri, Illinois and Iowa.”

“ That is correct, sir, and it would help greatly if you could get the court orders on each.”

“ Now you want me to do your paperwork for you?”

“ You have great influence, sir,” she replied. He frowned. “I'll see what I can do. Have the details to me before five.”

“ Yes, sir.”

“ Thank you for coming, Chief,” said Otto as Leamy rushed away.

When the door closed on them, she hugged Otto and shouted, “We did it. We've got him on our side. Isn't that why you asked him to the meeting, really?”

He held onto her, enjoying the touch of the woman, savoring the moment. “You know, you're too smart for your own good. I ought to have the right to some secrets.”

Her laughter filled the room and amid it both of them heard J.T.'s intentional noise with the projector. He was still puttering about with the slides. He had been in the projection room the entire time.

Otto instantly let her go, and she lightly blushed and quickly asked J.T. to get the details of time and place on the earlier deaths to Leamy's office.

J.T. said, “Sure, soon as I put these irreplaceable slides into the safe. See you both later. Chief Boutine, Dr. Coran.”

There was an awkward moment between them now. Otto reached out a hesitant finger toward her cheek and said, “I'm sorry if I embarrassed you with J.T. It was-”

“ No, no need to apologize… really.”

“ I'm sure he got the wrong idea.”

“ He has… well, an active imagination. It's what makes him a good lab man.”

“ Maybe it's more than imagination,” said Otto, staring deeply into her eyes.

“ Yes, perhaps…”

She thought he was going to take her in his arms and kiss her, but instead, he reached past her for the door, snatched it open and turned out the lights, rushing out ahead of her as if he were suddenly afraid of her. She stood in the hallway a moment wondering about her success with the P.P. team, and wondering if she had not inadvertently upset Otto, and wondering about the sudden emotions that they had shared like juggling burning knives, too hot and sharp to handle. She wondered how much J.T. had heard and seen; she wondered if J.T. had felt anything in the room. She certainly had.

Otto was vulnerable; his wife an invalid, in a coma at Bethesda. Jessica had no right to him, she told herself, and he truly had no interest in her in that direction. It was just the elation of the moment, the hours upon hours of working together. That was all, and that was all that J.T. needed to know.?