Pure Instinct

34

Alex crashed through the door on hearing shots fired from a direction he could not determine. He went directly for the stone tile floor, skidding across it and coming up on his knees, his own weapon extended and ready, when, from behind a metallic cupboard door, she suddenly appeared. He saw her too late.

Her knife embedded in him, caught up in the metallic web of the bullet proof Kevlar vest which Landry had insisted they all wear under their jackets emblazoned with the word POLICE. The vest allowed for little penetration. Still, the impact and shock from the sheer force his attacker put into it jolted Alex over and onto his back.

At the same instant, madly determined to finish what she'd started, she'd snatched the knife back, and it came flashing down at Alex again.

Alex's gun had fallen, and he was dazed when the knife entered his body a second time in his upper left quadrant, just shy of his heart, but the Kevlar vest again proved its worth.

Alex grabbed onto the knife hand and felt the enormity of Dominique's power as Emanuel. She was reaching for some other weapon even as she fought him, tearing at something above Alex on the oven. Her hands extended like the claws of a bird of prey, she only half-grasped the boiling pot above her, and it came crashing down around them, burning Alex's unprotected arm and sending spikes of hot liquid toward his eyes, but he instinctually arched away, the fiery brew bringing welts to his neck and chin instead.

Stewed tomatoes and mixed vegetables in a thick gumbo sauce had made the tiles beneath the killer slick, so now she was having trouble keeping a firm footing and a hold on him, but once again she was reaching upward for some hidden weapon atop the chopping block. The stench of the stew, which Mother Raveneaux had called bisque, filled Alex's nostrils, and he wondered if he'd die here with the unhealthy odor in his brain.

Now, suddenly, she had a huge meat cleaver in her left hand. Even as she held firm to the knife they continued to fight for control over, Dominique-having some demonic strength he had never known before-brought the shimmering cleaver blade at his face like a pendulum, missing. him by inches when he jerked to one side.

Alex could hear help on the way, Stephens and Meade, having heard the shots and the commotion, but the witch atop him wasn't waiting. Again the cleaver was over her head and about to descend when a single gunshot rang out and Dominique came crashing down over Alex's body, her dead weight slamming into him with a great thud.

From over the dead killer's shoulder, Alex saw Jessica Coran, her gun still raised, and beside her stood Kim and Mrs. Raveneaux, who was caught up in Kim's arms when she fell away in a faint.

Alex fought to extricate himself from the killer's dead weight while the others ran into the kitchen. Alex shouted for Stephens and Meade to help Landry who'd shouted from the freezer while he went to Jessica Coran, meeting her gaze. “Thanks… you saved my life just then.”

“ Is she dead?”

“ The way you shoot, you needn't ask.”

Jessica now sat on the stairs with Kim beside her, Kim holding onto the old woman. Kim squeezed Jessica's hand and said, “You did what you had to do.”

“ It's not as if I've never killed anyone before.”

“ But it is the first time you've shot and killed a woman.” Kim managed to place her free arm around Jessica.

“ All in the line of duty,” Jessica mused, “for the FBI

“ No, you did it for Alex.”

General Raveneaux, who had rushed in behind Stephens and Meade, went to his knees over his maniacal daughter, softly blubbering, his anguish deep-felt and eternal. “First my son… and now Dommie… oh, poor long-suffering, afflicted, imperfect child…Dommie…”

Mrs. Raveneaux had come to, and was now staring at the pitiful sight of her dead daughter and distraught husband. From her half-prone position on the stairwell, she spoke to her husband in a harsh whisper, saying, “I told you, Maurice… I told you it would come to this…told you we should've never let her come back from Europe, Maurice. I told you she wasn't ready… I told you so… “

“ But she was… acting so… normal…”

“ How… how long've you known, really known, about my connection with the FBI?” Kim asked Alex.

“ I didn't know for sure until tonight, when Meade gave you away, but I'd wondered about it last time I saw you and Dr. Coran together. Something about your relationship. The way the two of you worked together; maybe 'cause you were working too hard to appear to dislike one another. I don't know.”

“ She was cured, you know,” Mrs. Raveneaux said, “by her doctors in Stockholm. She even lived in Europe with one of her doctors, a man she claimed to love, and they were happy for a time… just before she showed up on our doorstep again.”

“ When was that, Mrs. Raveneaux?” asked Alex.

“ Ohh… ohhh…maybe a little over a year ago And you know Victor had been gone by then, and we… the general and I didn't have anyone else, you know, not really… not family, that is… and we did love her so. We loved both our children very, very much, but neither of them were ever completely… all right, you realize? Victor always seemed the feminine one and dear Dominique was so dastardly toward him, so mannish. We tried to break her of it, especially after the… the incident…”

“ When Dominique hurt Victor that first time, you mean?”

“ Sweet Victor, such a sweet-hearted boy, really… did the authorities ever find him? Completely disappeared. Isn't that right, Maurice?”

The general let go of his dead daughter, laying her gently down amid the spoiled bisque she'd earlier prepared, reaching up now for his infirm wife instead. The two older people held fast to one another.

“ She was doing so well,” he muttered into her ear before he continued sobbing.

Jessica surveyed the complete mess that had been made of the once-spotless kitchen. Landry was being helped from the freezer, but the frozen-handed cop wouldn't let go of something he had carried out with him. Jessica and Alex joined the captain and together they stared down at a solidly frozen human heart.

“ Thommie Whiley?” asked Kim from across the room, voicing all their thoughts.

A shivering Landry replied, “C-c-could be, but there're're two o-o-others inside.” His teeth still chattered on after his words were finished.

Jessica stared at the frozen heart, and then past it into the freezer. “Forensics'll have to match each one through DNA tests.”

“ What the hell was she doing with the hearts? Why keep 'em in the freezer?” Stephens's astounded question came out in tentative fashion.

“ Keepin”em on ice, obviously,” Jessica said, Meade staring now over her shoulder into the fog of the freezer.

“ But for what?” Meade asked.

“ Her secret ingredient in the gumbo bisque stew, would be my guess,” replied Jessica, who now turned and lifted a pointed stiletto kitchen knife, then bent and jabbed one of the chunks of meat from the stew which had discolored the tiles when Dominique had pulled the boiling liquid over onto herself and Alex during their struggle.

“ What is that?” asked Stephens, squinting.

Meade turned his attention to the red chunk of flesh as well.

Jessica simply replied, “It's nothing I've ever eaten.”

The general's eyes had widened on seeing the frozen heart come from his freezer, and now his eyes widened further. He softly pushed away from his wife, telling her to go upstairs now. “You don't want to hear any more of this, Cor-etta…Coretta dear, just go on ahead.”

She did as instructed, the docile puppy once again, glancing back only once at her dead child on the kitchen floor. When she was out of earshot, the general said, “She couldn't've been using the hearts of dead men in her cooking. She just couldn't've been.”

“ Well, our lab people will determine that soon enough, Maurice,” said Richard Stephens, who placed a shaky and awkward hand on the old man's shoulders. “Determine what, that my insane child killed her brother, cut out his heart and fed it to me! God damn you all for imagining such a thing! No, she loved us, Coretta and me… she loved us, despite any sickness she endured over the years, and she loved her brother with a pure love like nothing I have witnessed in all my years.”

The general's lawyer tried to pull him away, but the old man snatched free and shouted, “She had a bad heart as a child, a deficiency, but she was never evil toward anyone except, at times, her brother. Yes, I admit she was at one time extremely envious of her brother, but with therapy she had worked through all that and had in fact learned to love Victor and us very, very much. She spoke of him fondly always, and she treated Mother and me with great respect and admiration, always… always. She loved us. She wouldn't've harmed Victor. 1 knew that from the beginning, and that was how I knew she couldn't've done the terrible things attributed to the Queen of Hearts killer. You'll never… ever convince me otherwise.”

“ Alex was right all along. She killed her brother for a reason,” Jessica shouted. “Don't you see? All of you men who've been in one way or another shielding the truth? She took that first heart for a reason, General!”

Stephens tried to motion her into silence; Meade shushed her, so Kim continued on Jessica's behalf. “A reason, General, you know full well. She wanted to be Victor; she wanted to possess his heart-the heart you and her mother most loved. She wanted to be the kind of son you never had, so she became a man for you and Mrs. Raveneaux, and in her deranged state, that meant she had to be 'of good heart,' and how better to be of good heart than to consume the one heart you and your wife doted most over.”

“ That's enough of your psychoanalysis, Doctor,” Meade said to Kim, the order to stand down clearly unmasked now.

“ You men brought Dr. Desinor here for the truth,” Jessica countered, defending her friend. “It's time these people in their ivory-tower mansion, so far removed from the deaths in New Orleans, yet so close to them, hear the truth for once.”

“ The truth won't accomplish anything here, not now,” shouted Stephens.

“ Neither of you ever for a moment thought this case had anything to do with New Orleans gentility, did you, Meade?” asked Alex, his wrath growing steadily.

Jessica continued, saying, “No, to you men it was about gays living in a gay ghetto in New Orleans, and you all wanted it confined there. You never expected Surette's death, the subsequent cover-up to keep the family name untarnished and the payoffs ever to surface again, did you?”

Kim added, “You ruined Frank Wardlaw's career, you dirtied Ben deYampert, and then when calling in Coran and me backfired on you, and it looked as if not only would the general be exposed, but your little parts in the sordid game also might surface, you forced Wardlaw into body-snatching.”

“ You don't have any basis in fact to back that claim up in the least,” Meade declared.

“ The general and his wife were just glad to get the body back-or at least the general was-but it was minus one heart,” added Jessica. “Little did the general know that the heart had come home a lot sooner, and had most likely been consumed by three remaining Raveneauxs with wine in bisque gumbo. And since then, there've no doubt been many unusual dishes served up by your Dominique.”

“ Get out of my house!” shouted the general. “I want you all out of my house!” He was on the verge of tears and collapse.

“ I'm afraid we can't do that, at least not until there's a complete evidence-gathering taken here, General. That will mean some time,” Alex explained.

Stephens exchanged stares with Alex and nodded to his political friend, resigned to what Alex Sincebaugh had said.

“ I'm going to have your heads for this, Meade, Stephens!” The old man stormed from the room, likely in search of his wife and some respite from the horror of the moment.

Landry suddenly collapsed from his wound. Alex and Jessica rushed to him, Alex shouting for someone to get to one of the units outside and call for medical assistance, while Jessica did what she could to staunch his wound.

Landry's color had bleached from his face, crystallized shards still hanging in his hair. His wound was now openly bleeding. Jessica worked to stop the bleeding, tying off the shoulder. As she did so, Landry, seeing the bloodstains and the fiery welts about Sincebaugh, asked, “You okay, Sincy?”

“ No serious damage.”

“ Two real tough guys, huh?” Jessica muttered at them.

Landry managed to say to Alex, “Why don't you get on the radio; see what you can do about getting Dr. Coran all the help and equipment she'll require here.”

“ You got it, Captain.” With that Alex went for Landry's car and the radio, pushing past Hodges and his men, who'd been staring in on the scene, their mouths hanging open.

“ You up for this, Jessica? This could be an all-nighter,” said Kim, who came close to her friend.

“ Actually, no… I'd just about made up my mind to get on a plane for Hawaii, chuck it all.”

“ I can well understand how you feel after seeing what went on at that warehouse and now this. You've gone through hell.”

“ As have we all. What about you? You gonna be okay?”

Kim managed a wane smile and a nod. “Yeah, matter of fact. Think I found out what I'm made of, in great part thanks to you. But I tell you honestly, I'm not so sure I don't prefer the safety of a laboratory to all this.” She indicated the body of Dominique Emanuel Raveneaux and the scattered remains of life that were pieces of people about the floor. “You have any doubt whatsoever that we have the Queen of Hearts killer here, Dr. Coran?” asked Landry in a near-whisper. “No… no doubt, sir.”

“ Dr. Desinor?” asked Landry.

“ None whatever, and I sense something else.”

“ Oh? What's that?”

“ This is the only peace Dominique has ever had in her unhappy life.”

“ Maybe that'll put your General Raveneaux at peace with himself, Commissioner, Chief Meade,” said Jessica. “Maybe death holds more meaning for his daughter than life ever did.”