Pure Instinct

6

New Orleans

A few days' decay, the elements and the animals had conspired to create a grotesque tapestry over the corpse. Two, possibly three days in the Louisiana heat was enough to turn even the freshest meat into a wormy muck. Internal gases had been baked inside the decomposing corpse, had bloated the body, finally exploding through the skin at unaccountable locations: the cheek turned to the earth, the leg with the most lividity, the forearm where the boy-man had been gnawed at by raccoons or wild dogs.

Degeneration to the once-fine features had created a hideous, repulsive mask which no Hollywood makeup artist could hope to capture. What lay here before Lieutenant Detective Alex Sincebaugh didn't seem human, or rather was a horrid mockery of a once-sentient, lively, active young person. What remained seemed more akin to soiled rags, discarded cardboard, leftovers-”toast,” as the MTV generation might more aptly put it.

“ You think it's Surette?” Ben asked.

“ Can't tell for sure, can you?” Alex replied to the hulking figure standing over him and the body. Sincebaugh hadn't remembered going to his knees over the victim, but now he found himself staring up at his partner. DeYampert's large eyes looked on the verge of tears, but that expression was one Big Ben carried with him everywhere: the sad, doughy eyes of a basset hound. And like the irises of a calf or a St. Bernard, the glistening, moist eyes meant to reveal no more than a resigned acceptance. Ben, like most cops, kept his feelings tightly balled up. Alex knew that his partner of so many years now had gone to the edge on this one, a missing persons case that had looked to be solved, only to become a murder case.

Sincebaugh too had allowed himself a brief moment of hope that they would locate twenty-one-year-old Victor “Vicki” Surette-but not like this. They'd had every reason to believe they'd find the cross-dresser quite well, alive and unharmed, panhandling or doing johns along the dingy periphery of Bourbon Street. After all, they'd gotten a lead about “Vicki” from Gilreath, a transvestite and a snitch they often pulled over for a mock arrest and street news.

“ If this here do be Vic Surette,” Ben deYampert drawled in his native Louisiana tongue, “he ain't so much a looker no more.”

“ It's going to take some time to ID him; take prints, maybe get some dental records to match what's in his mouth-if we can get any records out of the family vault…”

Some families of gay men, cross-dressers and transvestites were extremely reluctant to cooperate with police, even when they loved their offspring, despite the circumstances. And Victor Surette was rumored to have no family, or one so steeped in Old New Orleans values and traditions that no relative would come within speaking distance of him. Gilreath had hinted at old money and modern business holdings. Gilreath had also hinted at a deep-seated hatred there, and since most victims of crime were victims of family, friends and acquaintances, this could not be ignored. But a search of the missing man's apartment days before the location of his body had turned up not one scintilla of information about his family. Gilreath had said that Vicki, as he was known to his dearest friends, wanted it that way. Still, Alex could hardly believe how clean the kid's apartment had been of paper, and without paper, there was no trail back to family, unless one of them picked up a newspaper or heard about Surette's fate on the nightly news and then came forward to claim the body.

“ You think it's him, don't you, Sincy?” pressed Ben.

“ I'd say the clothes appear to match the last known description.” Sincebaugh breathed heavily, his stomach churning, his head reeling from the stench of the corpse, which lay sprawled on its stomach, limbs akimbo.

No one had touched the body, knowing it was Alex Sincebaugh's call since he was detective in charge on this rotation.

He had waited long enough for the M.E., he decided. Wanting to know more now, he slipped on a pair of surgical gloves and turned the body over, his hands instinctively repulsed by the Jell-O-like pressure against his touch. Rigor had come and gone, the body now relaxed and rapidly emulsifying thanks to the heat of a record-breaking week in New Orleans.

“ Sincy, you sure we shouldn't wait for Wardlaw?”

Sincebaugh slowed a bit at the use of the nickname his partner had saddled him with, but he bawled in response, “For Chris sake, Big… waited long enough for that damned souse.”

“ Miss Old Doc Whitaker, don't you?”

“ Sure as hell do.”

They were in a wood on a clear, humid New Orleans night. Nearby, egrets silently stalked the shallows even in darkness, until one broke the silence by piercing the water, spiking a fish with its beak. Alex and Ben were working over a body lying beside the indigo waters of huge Lake Ponchartrain; they weren't in New Orleans proper anymore but had come all the way out to Slidell as soon as it was recognized that this was a murder victim. They'd been out of their jurisdiction, doing a routine rundown on a case involving a pair of high rollers who'd been pumping the area with a new, synthetic drug that was leaving users in various stages of paraplegia and vegetative comas, when the call came over, and since they were so close and Slidell was undermanned, they took it, swinging the car around just before entering the bridge traffic which would've taken them back to downtown New Orleans.

Both men were feeling the tension on the streets in Slidell, where race relations hadn't been so grand lately, and where they felt ill at ease anyway because it was so far from their home jurisdiction and base of operations in New Orleans.

There'd been a riot of a different color than race “o'er t' Biloxi, Mississippi,” as Ben had put it in his best Cajun tongue. “At one-a-dem grand 'Sippi casinos der on't da river.”

It was a floating palace the size of four football fields, called the Royal Flush. TTie ballroom/concert hall had gotten in the Granite Psycho rock band to add a little allure to the gambling tables, as if there were a need, and things had gotten out of control. Since the gambling casino boat was moored between Biloxi and New Orleans, and the Mississippi legislature had allowed a two-day blue-flu walkout when negotiations failed there, New Orleans police were prevailed upon to respond. So while almost every cop within a six-county radius of Biloxi, including two precincts from New Orleans, had turned out in full riot gear there, Alex and Ben had agreeably driven out to Slidell to follow a lead on Kenny Alvarez and Terrell Foreman, the pushers, only to get the coincidence call of the century, should this work out to be Victor Surette's body, since they'd been doing the M.P. work on him up till now. Ben called it “i-ron-knee.”

Dispatch had spoken of a badly decomposed body found at a dump site on a lonely stretch of sand disguising itself as a path. The weeds here were as large as cattails. It was a place that even Alex was unfamiliar with. Alex and Ben had immediately decided as they pulled into the thicket that whoever killed the victim knew the region intimately.

The man reporting the carnage had driven in here to dump a mattress, had spotted something odd among the brush and debris and decided to investigate until he realized that his find was human. After getting the man's statement, Ben had threatened to levy a fine on the fool if he didn't take his damned mattress to a dump, threatening to impound his Nissan pickup as further inducement.

Little good Ben's efforts would do here. The clutter of humanity's leavings hereabouts served to remind Sincebaugh of his father's near-constant drone on how things used to be along the backwaters, amid the swamps and lakes of the region. His father said their great loss was due to shoddy city planning, overwhelming urban sprawl, greedy developers and boating communities now hugging the shores, as well as a general lack of concern for wildlife areas. His father constantly harped on the death of the Old Louisiana, an Emerald City he'd returned to in 1945 after a four-year tour of duty in Eu-rope during World War II. The developers had swallowed up everything his father had remembered in a mad effort to satisfy the rising appetite of the ugly creature called New Orleans. His father called it a travesty of justice whenever he'd had a few too many.

Today, the cityscape was an alien world to the old man. But not to Alex. Alex knew the terrain and felt a certain sense of safety even in its worst neighborhoods.

Still, there was common ground here for father and son to agree on, that pollution in all its ugly guises flourished here, that the gulf waters were losing the battle against industrial waste, that the growing scarcity of game animals in the region was alarming. Now the alarming cavity flapping open when Alex turned the body over startled him. Even with the surgical gloves on, Alex snatched his hands away from the body; repulsed by a spreading, moving, living creature that undulated inside the enormous, gaping chest wound, which showed clearly how the killer had taken great glee in spreading wide the flesh, the knifing giving the appearance of a lust killing, one in which rage had created an uncontrollable urge to mutilate the boy's corpse. The entire episode, from the moment Alex had touched the corpse and turned it, played over and over in his head at a snail's pace, making him physically ill.

He'd slowly turned the corpse, but it had begun to take on its own momentum, its soupy weight and bones like rolling potatoes in a burlap bag, bursting at the seams. A moment of remorse had flashed through

Sincebaugh's mind. He knew that something had ruptured. He'd even heard a faint twig like snap. Most likely the bone at the base of the neck had just popped, causing what the M.E. would term an undertaker's fracture. Careless handling of a corpse caused breaks, rents and tears. He'd forgotten to cushion the head as one might a newborn's.

Not that he wanted forgiveness, but it was his first mutilation-style murder investigation, and his stomach was doing far more thinking at the moment than his head. Yet his concern for the neck fracture was instantly forgotten now that his penetrating, icy green eyes found the victim's chest splayed open by some awful instrument of destruction, a pool of writhing maggots where the guy's heart ought to have been at peaceful rest.

The fist-sized red organ that once pumped the fluid of life through Victor Surette was missing, only a gaping cavity and the maggots left behind.

“ Son of a mother fuck in bitch in heat, Sincy!” lamented deYampert in that curiously poetic tempo that swearing in his melodic tongue took on. Ben's olive and bronze complexion blanched by rapid degrees, his natty but thick hair seeming to stand on end. “Christ on a stick! Geezus, turn 'im back over. Leave 'im for Wardlaw.”

“ Can't… can't do that…” Alex heard himself saying as if for the hundredth time, as if from far away.

“ Hell you can't,” cried Big Ben.

“ He's my responsibility, Ben. I'm in charge here, not the M.E., not you, nobody but me, you got that?” This meant it was Sincebaugh's call, Slidell or no Slidell. It was his bloody ugly case, because he was first detective on call, and it was his rotation, and he hadn't bargained it away with Ben or anyone, and therefore it was his call all the way. Any glory to be had out of the case was his, and by the same token, any disgrace would stick to him far longer. Ben knew this as well as Alex.

“ Be damned if I'm going to turn the body over before I investigate the scene thoroughly,” Alex now muttered.

Ben knew that he was still smarting from a previous investigation into the death of a little boy not yet seven years old who'd been abducted, sodomized and strangled and finally dumped at a site not unlike this lonely place. That case had gone unsolved now for eight months, and Sincebaugh still blamed himself, believing that he'd not been thorough enough that first night at the scene, that he had somehow missed some vital clue. He more than made up for it these days, Ben thought, exasperated with his partner at times.

“ I'll let you know when,” Sincebaugh muttered now, but even as he said it, he involuntarily turned his eyes away from the gruel in which the maggot life swam within the chest cavity. Doing so, he realized for the first time that the genital area was caked in coagulated blood, and that the genitals had been removed via the same butchery carried out over the chest.

“ Wardlaw'll be pleased,” he heard Ben saying.

Christ, what a thing to say, he thought.

“ Wardlaw loves maggots. Says they speak volumes about time of death.”

The insects, still in their larval state, would tell Wardlaw the approximate time of death. “Too bad Wardlaw can't be as timely about getting here as the fucking maggots,” Sincebaugh said, struggling to keep his composure.

When he turned to look again on the awful hole in the dead kid, Alex suddenly tumbled into it, somehow losing his footing over Victor Surette's form, and losing his grip on reality. Sincebaugh's entire body had somehow plunged into the pool of mindless, writhing insect life, and he found himself swarmed over by the decay-eaters, found him self being eaten by them as well. He tried to pull himself back, tried desperately to find Big, to scream and throw his hand back up for Big to grab onto and haul him from the cesspool into which he'd descended. It was a cesspool worse than the bamboo cell in the water in Nam in which he had endured life for two grueling months, when he had seen the epidermal layer of his skin begin to slough off in cascading ringlets.

To this day, he couldn't stand water; in fact, he had an unnatural aversion to it. He got the shakes just being in a boat. If he went fishing, it was from a bridge or shore. And to this day, he still had no idea how he had survived the treatment of his cruel captors in Vietnam, except that he'd held onto a shred of hope that one day they'd get careless and he'd crawl up at night and slit their throats while they slept, as he and several other POWs actually did during one of those nights of eternity, he alone finally making his escape stick, finding his way into a neutral country and eventually getting word out of his whereabouts.

His father and the U.S. Marines had long before given him up for dead, and in some ways he was.

Now, here in safe New Orleans he was a prisoner again, having tumbled into the open wound of a murder victim whose heart was replaced by maggots. He'd fallen so deep that his horrid screams couldn't even be heard, and there were no guards to laugh at him and taunt him back to reality. He wasn't so sure he wouldn't trade today's cage for yesterday's, and his screams became one, long, unending shriek.

The howl turned into a shrill ringing noise inside his brain. It would not go away, and he could not climb from out of the living quicksand of the army of maggots that were devouring him alive.

Still, the shrill scream raced through his fevered brain. It would not be silenced so long as he could feel the insect life devouring him along with Surette's corpse.

Then the sound of the telephone beside his bed reached into his vicious nightmare and lifted him from the maggot pool. He found himself shivering in a cold sweat, his hands covering his chest as if to protect his heart, the beads of perspiration running off in snakelike rivulets. Beside his bed was the open copy of Gray's Anatomy that he'd been studying for any useful information concerning the human heart.

He pounced on the phone and just held it tightly in its cradle for some time, feeling the vibration and noise run through him, swallowing in its solid surface, holding on to the reality of it. Relieved to be out of his previous misery, he now drank in the piercing, keening machine sound, thankful that it did not writhe at his touch, that it was genuine and corporeal.

Finally, he lifted the receiver, and out of breath, he spoke weakly and haltingly into it. “Who…who the hell's calling… at this hour?” All the while his mind screamed, Thank God you called!

“ Sincebaugh?”

“ Yeah, this is me!” he barked now, realizing it was Captain Carl Landry on the other end.

Even as he cradled the phone against his ear, leaning back against the headboard, he realized that his nightmare had told him something important about that hot June morning a little over a year before when they'd discovered Victor Surette's body, that his was not only the first of the Hearts murders- despite what Frank Wardlaw and others believed-but that the proof, missing as it was, had been staring them in the face the entire time. Surette's crime scene had been missing a key element: the boy's missing heart had not been replaced by a playing card because the fucking maggots had devoured the lace. And Wardlaw's protocol had proclaimed the heart muscle ripped away by animals.

Landry said, “You and Ben're up to bat.”

“ Another heartless one?” He tried to sound as casual as he could without being vulgar about it.

Landry ignored the pun. “I'll be there to run interference for you guys with the press. It's across U.S. 10 over Big Muddy this time.”

“ Gretna? Why not? He's done everywhere else.”

“ Well, we won't know for sure till you and Ben check it out and Wardlaw agrees, but we got a body washed up near Gretna's Chantilly Pier looks suspiciously like more work by same mother. Leastways, that's the way it came to me.”

Landry sounded tired and depressed.

“ Got you outta bed too, huh, Captain?” Alex was still trying to regain his own composure, and stating the obvious seemed only to help. “God help us, Captain Landry.”

“ I'll light another candle.”

Ever the good and faithful Catholic, Sincebaugh thought, wishing he had half the faith Landry took for granted. “I figured out why Surette didn't get one of those lacy playing cards left inside him, Captain.”

“ Really? And how's that, Alex?”

“ The maggots, sir.”

“ What about the maggots?”

“ Maggots'll feed on just about anything, including cloth. The playing cards're made of flimsy cloth. They ate the queen of hearts before we ever got to the body, so the killer's calling card wasn't present, so we never knew that Surette was victim number one.”

“ Hnmmm, now why didn't anybody else think of that?” Landry's sarcasm was so thick it hardly made it through the cables. “That bit of Sherlockian wisdom, Alex, doesn't ex-plain why the killer took over a year off and started up again. And besides, Doc Wardlaw indicated the heart was eaten away by animals, not maggots, that the missing heart in that case-”

“ That's just it. Wardlaw was too goddamned busy worrying about the missing heart. Remember? Wardlaw had theorized that animals had gotten to the body, rooted around in the open wound, snatched the organ and run. But Wardlaw was going under the assumption the body was found faceup, remember? But Captain, I-”

“ Alex, you've got to get control here.”

Maggots mucking out the empty shell…

“ But I turned the body, Captain. It was facedown and I turned it before Wardlaw ever got there, and I don't know of any raccoon capable of turning a body, and Wardlaw would've known that from lividity alone had he not been stoned that night.”

Landry firmly replied, “Stick to the present, Alex. The past'll take care of itself. Hell, Surette was fifteen months ago, a missing persons call at that.”

“ Who turned into a murder, an unsolved murder.”

“ And you're still obsessing over it? Nobody holds you responsible on either the Surette or the Tommy Harkness cases, Alex, no one. There was insufficient crime-scene evidence in both cases, and you exhausted every lead. Now, you have to put this in proper perspective or you'll wind up in Jyl Muller's whatever-happened-to-so-and-so column or on Dr. Longette's foam-rubber couch. Nobody wants that.”

“ But Captain, if I'm right, then these killings could date back to even before Surette disappeared, and if that's the case-”

“ Hell, Alex…” He sighed heavily into the phone. “There's not one shred of evidence to link Surette's death to the others.”

“ Only because I didn't want to see it; I blocked it out, that whole damned night, but it came back to me, Captain. Came back tonight, clear as-”

“ All right, all right. If you can find any connection with Surette, move on it, but let me know first. And if not, Sincebaugh, I want you to move on!”

“ But it's related. And maybe it wasn't the first, and if Surette was the first, then he should be the one we're concentrating on. I feel it. I know it is.”

“ I know you've got good instincts, Alex, that your intuition is above the norm, but I gotta tell you, Lieutenant, without something more solid soon-very soon-we're looking at a call for help.”

“ F B I? Fine, I welcome the help. They can take over the whole damned case file for all I care. I'll happily go back to domestic violence cases, drug killings and tavern shoot-'em-ups, if that's what you'd like, Captain.”

“ I'd like you to remain on the case, Alex, to show these bastards upstairs what we're made of, but I'm getting more pressure every day on this one from all sides.”

“ I understand, Carl.”

“ The hell you do. You might think you do, but no way. You just get me some kind of a pattern in this friggin' case that has more weight than… than playing cards and hearts. What else is going on here besides fags getting bumped off by some maniac with a hatred for gay guys in a city full of gay guys?”

“ I'm trying, Captain. I've checked with departments in California, San Francisco and L.A. in particular, New York, Chicago, Miami and Key West, Flordia, as well as Panama City, Florida. I've wired Interpol and Euronet, as well as the FBI's crime computers. You name it, I've asked for information on high rates and/or unusual murder rates among the homosexual population, anything at all resembling our case here.”

“ Any luck along those lines?”

A long, exasperated breath of air was his immediate answer. “A few similar cases reported, one very similar one in Brussels, Belgium, of all places, but nothing of a serial nature until now.”

“ Oh, and what's zat?”

“ A report in from New York. An obvious serial killer there doing gay guys, dismembering them.”

“ Really?”

“ Except whoever this guy is, he's not taking their hearts, just slaughtering them and bagging them and scattering their parts all over the damned city.”

“ How many victims and how recent?”

“ So far, six over a period of two years. I'll get a report to you later today.”

“ Good, meantime, meet with deYampert at the Chantilly Pier.”

“ I know the place. I'm on my way.”

“ Sorry you didn't get away before all this shit hit the fan, kid, but nobody knows these cases like you do.”

“ And I don't know shit.”

“ You're doing fine. Hang in.”

Captain Carl Landry hung up and left Alex alone again with his perspiration, his nerves and his fear. He sensed he had more to fear than his too vivid, too sensual nightmares nowadays. Captain Landry wouldn't have brought up the possibility of FBI involvement unless he knew something, and Alex's nonchalance toward the subject had hidden an even deeper fear than he held of maggots and memories of holes into which he had fallen, his fear of failure.

He drummed nervous fingers across his copy of Gray's Anatomy, forced himself up and rushed to dress, feeling like a reluctant schoolboy, rushing to a destination he loathed. Gray's had only been helpful up to a point. It did make clear to him how, with a little study, anyone might learn to remove a human heart.

“ Now that narrows the suspect list down considerably,” he told the empty room as he hastened into a pullover sweatshirt and jeans. It was no time for formal attire.