Absolute Instinct

TWO

Milwaukee, Wisconsin November 12, 2004

“Mothers… you gotta back pain in dem joints? Den back outta dem joints.”

“I'd say the cure was worse than the patient.”

“Yeah, surefire way to get rid of that pesky ol' sciatica…” muttered Special Agent in Charge, Xavier Darwin Reynolds to the others from the crime-scene unit, who were gathered about the victim, each in turn taking a verbal joust at the impossibly insane crime scene.

Not only had the victim's back been splayed wide open by an as-yet-undetermined blade, but her insides looked out at the detectives-shyly hiding, peeking out through a bloody rectangle in her back the size of a French-louvered window.

All surrounding tissue and remaining bones had collapsed inward on organs untouched by the killer and the bone cutter used to extract the spinal column from its calcified moorings. And so the back window stood open like some bizarre pirate's chest, literally plundered as if an archeological dig, and the plunderer had made off with a strange treasure indeed, leaving all the rest. He had not cored out her eyes. Had not taken any teeth. Had taken nothing of her features, asked nothing of her breasts, nothing of her genitalia. Only the serpent of bone.

An enormously disturbing sight for which the only defense seemed stark, grim humor which now, thanks to the lead investigator's having joined in, opened the floodgate wide.

“Least she had-with an emphasis on had-backbone.”

“Somebody really had a boner on for her.”

“Gonna need one helluva big pot to flavor the ol' bisque with that ham-bone!”

“Ham-bone, ham-bone!” sang a tall female agent.

“Gone are the days of spine and roses,” said a photographer.

“Gives new meaning to the old spinal tap, don't it?” came another.

“Render unto us a few bars, Jerry, 'Take me BAAAAACK to ol' Virginy

“Guy needs serious back up.”

“All right, enough with the vertebral backgammon,” said FBI Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran, who stood staring from the small foyer leading into the apartment. Jessica had just arrived from the airfield, her auburn hair burnished and gleaming in the light filtering through the apartment windows. Jessica's keen eye immediately crossed swords with the awful wound done the victim, when a large policewoman stepped between her and the body-cutting off her line of vision. Jessica silently thanked the woman, wondering if it were intentional or otherwise.

The small army of men and women of the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, FBI field office crime-scene unit fell silent. The others watched this guru of forensics who'd flown in from Quantico, copiloting the FBI Lear Jet from Virginia to oversee their case.

Jessica quickly donned a hair net over her ample hair, which had been pulled tight in a ponytail for the work. She slipped a pair of gloves over her smooth, suntanned fingers and worked them over each hand. She wondered if any of the others could read what was going on behind her shining eyes. Eyes now sending messages to a brain that truly didn't want to cooperate with the image she'd seen only photos of until now. She stalled for time, swallowing back the bile that threatened to erupt on her first sight of the god-awful hacking the victim had taken.

“Ever see anything like this in the D.C. area?” asked one of the field ops, a strikingly large young woman with a blue jacket over her vomit-stained business suit. It appeared from her nonchalance that she'd been in and out of the crime-scene area, and that she'd popped something akin to Prozac. Her dangling name tag read Amanda Petersaul.

She extended a gloved hand and Jessica pumped it. “I'm Agent Petersaul. Everyone just calls me Pete.”

“You mean the boy's've decided you're OK, so they graced you with a nickname.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you make of it so far?” Jessica indicated the deceased.

“You can't be in this crime scene without steppin' in it, so you'd best-”

“Put on the booties, I can see that,” replied Jessica. A curving river of blood painted the carpet all round them there in the foyer. They stood on the dried stuff and it felt crunchy beneath Jessica's shoes. She placed on the booties and tied them about her ankles.

Jessica looked toward the body a second time. Agent Pete's considerable size continued to act as a kind of blind from which Jessica could safely view it without anyone seeing her pained wince. She'd been trained not to show emotion under any circumstance at a crime scene. Her number of years and experience had taught her the only way to gain the trust and authority required to take control in mutilation murder cases was via an aloofness and professional acumen that could not be questioned.

“This is like looking at a war wound,” commented Agent Petersaul.

“You come to us through the military?” asked Jessica.

“How'd you guess?”

“Psychic powers and that pendant around your neck, GI issue.”

“Had it made at great expense.” She fingered the golden numbers: 101st Airborne. “First in, last out.”

“You see duty in Iraq?”

“Pakistan and Iraq. Fucked up place in a fucked up world, yeah.”

“Fucked up? Which one?”

“Both.”

“Oh, yes, of course. How're we doing there in the Mideast now? Think we'll win the post-war economic crisis?”

“The natives have gone ape-shit for American goods, means and ways. They love all things Western and are embracing apple pie, Elvis, McDonald's and Fox News Network.”

“Sounds like Japan.”

“Been there? Tokyo?”

“Yeah, that and Beijing, China-worlds apart. Beijing is 1930 America, while Tokyo is futuristic America-Minority Report time.” Jessica looked into the hefty agent's wide face, and the full-figured Pete smiled back. “Best I get to work, Agent,” Jessica added now.

Petersaul nodded and stepped aside. “Yeah, best, but”- she broke into an Elvis oldie- “didja-eva, eva get, eva get one, eva get one-a-those girls boys…”

Smacks of a virgin to such horror and trying to compensate, Jessica thought, likely her first year out of the academy with a lot of questions and horror ahead of her, unless she dropped out of this line of work. Jessica calmly replied, “I believe I've seen every kind of iced and diced corpse, male and female, in the book, thanks to my boss at Quantico, Agent Petersaul.”

“So I've been told by Darwin. Sexual mutilation murders, hearts ripped out, vaginas and breasts butchered, cranium's opened and brains scooped out.”

Others listened in with interest.

“However, I can safely say that I've never come across a victim with so horrid a gash of flesh removed from her body as this unfortunate woman.”

Unfortunate, she rolled the word over in her mind. The understatement of the century, for this crime rivaled even the Skull-digger's work. Where he robbed his victims of their gray matter, cannibalizing it, whoever had done this latest, most-warped atrocity had robbed his victim of her entire vertebral column.

“Whataya suppose he does with the spine?” asked the young lady agent.

Darwin craned to hear Jessica's reply.

“I couldn't begin to speculate at this moment. Some kind of voodoo soup calling for backbone… who knows?” Jessica moved closer to the corpse, taking in the scene around the body, her gaze following the hardened, dark brown and bristled flow of blood radiating outward from the deceased toward the door-a river true to current, origin the body. “I can tell you this much, the knife he used was no bowie or other hunting knife, but a precision instrument. Whoever he is, he's done this sort of work before. Perhaps not as extensively as this, but he's trained on precision cutting tools, possibly started as a kid on small animals, insects even, rodents, working his way up to cats, dogs, rabbits, anything he could save his lunch money up for.”

The tall, black and mustached Xavier Darwin Reynolds, the local special agent in charge, was the man who had personally lobbied to put the crime scene on hold until Dr. Jessica Coran could get there from FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. “Sick but slick sonofamotherlessslut whore… He used that mop.” He pointed to a bristling-with-blood mop resting in a corner. “Used it to cover his shoe prints, as he backed from the crime scene and out the hallway, but we got a partial bloody scuff on the outside hallway carpeting.”

“Yeah, I saw the cutaway patch,” she replied.

“It isn't much, but we're doing our damnedest to make something of it, maybe get it blown up, find some sort of shoe sole markers.”

“But no one saw this guy coming or going?” she asked, knowing the answer. “He had to have been covered in blood.”

“We suspect he brought a change of clothes,” countered Agent Reynolds.

His badge read X. Darwin Reynolds. Jessica thought the man in the wrong time, age, and profession. He ought to be a sixth-century king of Nubia as he towered over everyone in the place, his skin beautiful and onyx. Jessica had to crane her neck to make eye contact with the man. She imagined him at home on the streets where he grew up here in Milwaukee, at the neighborhood bar, likely a gold necklace bulging below his dark dress shirt and tie, and yet he somehow fit in here at the gruesome crime scene, too. Perhaps the blood of kings, that genetic seed, did reside in Darwin, the genes of African royalty transplanted to the small kingdom of an FBI field office in a midsize, Midwestern Mecca.

Reynolds had the bearing of a man aloof and in absolute control of his own emotions and circumstances, even giving off the illusion of controlling the environment immediately around him. She imagined him to be one of those men who somehow remained dry even in a thunderstorm. Yet the wisp of a shadow of a tear formed in his eye for Joyce Olsen, which he quickly wiped away with a harsh utterance designed to cover the emotion. Jessica liked that. She knew now that the man who had called Quantico and had specifically requested her help cared deeply about this victim. Why? Had he known her? Or had the sheer horror of the crime perpetrated against the woman moved him? Either way, he'd scored points with this FBI medical examiner and profiler. Jessica felt an instant rapport and bond with X. Darwin, her very own Samuel L. Jackson look-alike if you shaved off twelve, maybe thirteen years.

At the same time, she hated Milwaukee, hated having taken on this horrid mutilation murder, hated Darwin for dragging her away from the ranch she and Richard Sharpe now cohabited just outside Quantico among the dogwood in the Virginia hills. The case had literally pulled her from their bed, from Richard's embrace in fact. Not to mention all the safety of all that comforted her both physically and emotionally. The call had pulled her from several ongoing, urgent cases as well-cases she'd had to dump on John Thorpe's shoulders.

Staring again at the godforsaken, god-awful evil and butchery done the victim, Jessica wondered why she continued in this line of work, why she didn't take early retirement, return to private practice and save her sanity.

“Playing safe cases for insurance fraud scoundrels?” Richard had asked in his most biting sarcasm, tinged all the more since he had a British accent. “Right you are, Jess.”

“I could. And I'd be damn good at it. Like a Sue Grafton character,” she quipped.

“Or rather become another in the new breed of ex-coroners selling their expertise to the highest bidder.”

“You mean like the fellow-what was his name? Bayless, Baydum, Baylor-who testified for the O.J. defense?”

“Balden?”

“Always going to sue people for blackening his name when he's done such a good job of it himself…”

“Like the M.E. who did the same in the Blake trial, and then the Peterson trial?”

“I couldn't live with myself.” She knew herself too well to ever settle into such a life. “But I could take up where I left off before I was invited into the FBI by Otto Boutine- God, so long ago.”

“Back to the pain and turmoil of running the D.C. Coroner's Office? How wonderful that they're offering you your old job, but their facilities have not changed in twenty odd years!”

“The State of Virginia Medical Examiner's Office is state-of-the-art, and they want me there.”

“Take early retirement and take up a hobby. Read all those J.A. Konrath suspense novels you've been hoarding and start one of your own, as you keep threatening to do.”

“If you think an autopsy is hard, try writing a novel…. I'm just not talented at juggling a thousand decisions at once.”

“The hell your aren't! You absolutely write circles around that Madeleine Cromwell person, and you could easily knock her silly ass off the bestseller list,” he said, adding, “and I so loved that short story you did, The Unread.”

“I'll never write a bestselling novel. I can't write that much cheese into it.”

He laughed at this. Nowadays, with Richard at her side, she was seriously contemplating the possibility of a writing career. She'd already written two successful nonfiction titles mixing forensics and philosophy, harrowing true-crime tales and hard-won pearls of wisdom. Still, to do a fullblown crime novel with the intricacies of characterization, setting, dialogue, to keep twenty plates in the air at once while riding the unicycle of plot across a high-wire of tension? Book reviewers had a lot of balls to complain about anyone capable of putting a novel together, perhaps the most complex piece of artwork on the planet, not unlike sculpting images from stone. She so admired authors like Matheson, Bloch, Konrath, Castle, Weinberg, Jens, Bonansinga, Geoffrey Caine and Evan Kingsbury. She only dared dream she could replicate their success if given the freedom and time to write, drawing on the cases she had worked over the years as backdrop to her fiction. “No one would believe my cases if I dressed them up as fiction,” she'd told Richard. “They're hard enough to believe as truth.”

“No one could make the graceful lie sing so articulately as you, Jess,” Richard, ever encouraging, encouraged. “Go, do it!”

“Perhaps after this thing in Milwaukee is put to bed,” had been her final reply.

“And after Milwaukee? What? Another and another. The calls won't stop until you decide they will stop, Jess.”

“You are sounding more the husband every day.”

“Is that such a bad thing? I'm only concerned for you, dear, not the bureau and certainly not the state of evil on the planet. You are not a Marvel comic character in one of those Edgar deGeorge fantasies.”

Virginia's forensics lab wanted her badly at their state-of-the-art facility in Richmond. The drive would be horrendously long, but Richard-a helicopter nut-had the perfect solution there, too, if she wished to make that career choice. “Why we'd purchase a helicopter, of course.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she'd chided back.

“But it's that simple.”

“And do you have any idea how foolish that'd make me look?”

“Foolish?”

“Take my word for it. It'd go over real big with the people I'd be supervising. Me dropping in from the sky each morning onto the roof like… like some cross between Tinkerbell and… and-”

“Superwoman, of course, and why not, like an avenging angel each day, still fighting crime yet capable of maintaining a stable-well, almost stable-home life. It would befit you, descending on the state crime lab,” he had quipped.

“As an angel of vengeance?”

“We'll arrange for wings to go with your lab coat.”

They had begun to talk more frequently of marriage, but as yet they had not set a date. Things were simply too good between them to spoil or to risk spoiling, and so they remained lovers and friends rather than man and wife. Although they had passed the ongoing test of having lived together now, happily, for six months, each felt a reserve of emotion that feared the litmus test of actual marriage vows. Vows changed things. Upped the ante. And for now, they were happy and having fun, something Jessica hadn't known for a long time, and she feared losing that even to a marriage certificate.

Richard's own consulting work had made a diplomat of him, taking him to the far corners of the earth on various missions for the State Department-missions cloaked in secrecy. He primarily trained other intelligence forces across the globe in the tactics of Scotland Yard and the FBI. And while he was busy at the far-flung corners of the planet, Jessica's work sent her to such holes-in-the-wall and armpits as Paris, Texas; Rome, Georgia; Corinth, Mississippi; and even Hong Kong, New Jersey-with its claim to a six-story, Disneyesque McDonald's with a decidedly Asian theme replete with the two-headed dragon Ferris wheel.

And now, Portland, Oregon, or Millbrook, Minnesota, might well be her next stopovers if Darwin had his way. If the killing here in Milwaukee appeared the work of a maniac some years back who had dispatched someone else in the very same manner. In the Portland, Oregon, case, the victim's husband now awaited lethal injection for her murder. As with the Milwaukee case, the salient feature of the crime, of course, was the missing spinal cord that'd been literally ripped from the Portland woman's back, the rack of bones stolen and never recovered. Something similar had occurred in a small town in Minnesota as well, and Darwin appeared bent on building a reputation for himself by tying the cases together and hunting down the real killer, a serial killer in his mind, someone other than the man on death row in Oregon.

On meeting the enthusiastic Darwin at the airport, the huge black agent had begun to spout on about how he had read the FBI bulletins and the Journal of Forensic Sciences relating every detail of every case Jessica had ever worked, and he had been loud about it, his voice booming across the tarmac as he shouted her name in a mantra of praise, “Jessica Coran! I can't believe it. Jessica Coran, here, in Milwaukee. Jessica Coran. I cut my eyeteeth on your crime-scene techniques book! God, Jessica Coran. I'm working with Jessica Coran!”

His enthusiasm was infectious. She blushed and accepted his praise.

Later, in the car on the way to the crime scene, he leaned into her and near whispered, “I tell you, I am so absolutely and instinctively certain of my ground-that these cases are related.”

“Let me be the judge of that, Darwin. It's what I'm here to determine, remember?”

Now they were here in the death room, and the noise and chatter around Jessica rose and fell with the predominantly male crime-scene unit people giving voice to feelings similar to Jessica's own. No one had ever seen such inhuman injustice done to a victim. The corpse did not always have everyone's sympathy, such as the Diamondback, Louisiana, father who had brutalized and raped his own children and had been murdered by his children and son-in-law when they schemed to get him into a New Jersey junkyard with mad dogs they had infected with rabies. The murder had worked but the cover-up had not, and while no one in Diamondback mourned the monster's passing, the responsible parties were brought to trial.

No, the corpse seldom had every man and woman in the place wanting vengeance for her. But this one did, as if her ghost had plunged a cold dagger into each detective's heart to make even the jaded feel again-even if it was a sharp iciness. Even the hesitancy with which the official FBI photographer's camera clicked, unlike the usual frenetic snap-snap-snap of each frame, spoke volumes about the awful horror and sheer awe that this killing engendered. Jessica tried to imagine worse, but she simply could not. Perhaps at an inquest in 1888 London during which the mutilated body of a Ripper victim was displayed before the gallery, literally hooked to a wall for all to see the brutality. At least today, authorities treated the body with the professional courtesy and reverence it deserved, taking all precaution to preserve the dignity and to keep it in as intact a form as humanly possible under the rigors of an autopsy. In fact, laws had been enacted since the days of Jack the Ripper to safeguard and maintain that very integrity.

Reynolds came to stand near her, and he said, “Are you all right, Dr. Coran?”

Her nod was a lie. “In the old days… not so old, really, a hundred and fifty odd years ago, when something of this nature occurred, people in the immediate vicinity… anyone who'd had anything whatsoever to do with the deceased-friends, relatives, neighbors, landlords-came to the inquest. Only thing missing was the popcorn.”

“Yeah, it was like a public forum, a hearing?”

“Like, no… It was a public forum, an inquiry into cause of death. Conducted much like a trial today.”

“We sure don't need an inquest here.” He indicated the body. “Fairly obvious here, wouldn't you say?” Reynolds's Midwestern twang made him a native, and his tall frame placed him a head taller than Jessica. He had black-on-blue eyes, piercing, questioning. Any woman could get lost in them. A powerful build, he stood at just over six-foot-four, and his close-cropped hair accented a wide, intelligent forehead.

“Here, you oughta put this on.” She handed him a hair net from her bag.

As Jessica searched her valise for a pair of gloves for him, she added, “I've read about the bizarre proceedings at the death inquiries in the cases of Jack the Ripper.”

Accepting the hair net and a surgical mask and a set of gloves, Reynolds replied, “Ol' Jacko's got nothing on our Milwaukee, Wisconsin, boy… least not in the butchery department.”

“Agreed, but why the spine?”

“That's why you're here, Dr. Coran, to tell us exactly that. You're the profiling expert.”

“Thanks, but this… this defies any profile on record.”

“Not quite. There're two other cases that we know of in which women have literally lost a backbone.”

“Yes, Oregon… the guy on death row. And the other? Some Minnesota woman?”

“Yes, and this very same pattern emerges in each case. Also, Millbrook, Minnesota, is only three hundred miles from Milwaukee.”

“But Portland… That's over half a continent away, and you think this guy in Oregon innocent, wrongly convicted-”

“Towne, Robert Towne.”

“You believe him innocent. That it's all a mistake. His arrest, trial, conviction?”

“Larger mistakes have happened in the judicial system of Portland, Oregon, especially where black men are concerned.”

“Then Towne is black?”

“Yes, he is as black as… as me.”

“But suppose Towne did it to copycat the Minnesota killing? And by extension, suppose someone here did it to copycat Towne for some sick, perverted reason?”

“Three separate guys tearing out backbones? I don't buy it.”

“Stick to your guns, Agent. I like that in a man,” Jessica said.

“There's more than happenstance and coincidence at work here. I feel it in my bones. No pun intended.”

“Trust me, none taken.”

Two photographers were snapping pictures now, one centered on the body and everything in relation to it, every stationary point of reference. The other cameraman fired off shots of the bloody mop propped against the wall beside the door where presumably the killer exited, leaving his wake of blood. Photographic shots from all angles exploded one after another, the photographers having latched on to competition as a way to get past the horror of their subject.

From somewhere down the hall, the sad melody of a Hank Williams tune droned on, the words a surreal fit: “the mooooon just went be-hind a cloud to hiiiiide its face and cry… I'm so lonesome I-ah could die…”

More shots of the body from all angles. The second photographer now took shots of the swirls of blood on the carpet. She looked from the busy photographers and back to Reynolds, but he had stepped away. Special Agent X. Darwin Reynolds now stood alongside Dr. Ira Sands, the Milwaukee M.E., and together they studied several cellophane-wrapped charcoal sketches.

At first, Jessica assumed the sketches were created by a police artist, but Darwin informed her, “We believe her killer drew them and left them behind.”

Now everything about the case felt surreal, even her thumbing through these lovely charcoal sketches. Sketches left by the Spine Thief himself. “Why'd he do it? Take the time to do all these?”

“And when did he do them?” asked Reynolds.

“Are they telling us something? Are they his con? How he wormed his way past the threshold?” Jessica mused aloud.

“Dr. Coran… like to introduce you to Dr. Ira Sands.” Reynolds stood between them, the obvious message being that she and Sands should work together.

Sands instantly shot out his hand and took hers, pumping it in a vise grip, his smile wide and welcoming. “We are so lucky to have you, Dr. Coran, so very fortunate indeed. I've read all your abstracts and bulletins.”

“Thank you, Dr. Sands. I've heard only good things about your crime lab.” Jessica knew that paying him this compliment was the highest praise he sought, as it was with any M.E.

“My lab is at your disposal, of course.”

“That's wonderful to hear. Thank you, Dr. Sands.” Like every FBI field lab boss, Sands thought the government-issue lab was his and his alone. She prayed he was being genuine and not simply politically correct.

The short, stocky Dr. Sands said, “Beginning with these”-Sands pointed at the sketches of a dog and the dead woman in Jessica's hand- “we are covering every base.”

Nodding, Jessica again examined the finely drawn, beautifully wrought charcoal drawings of the victim, three in all, one of a frolicking golden retriever chasing birds and two depicting the same dog with the victim in different poses, kissing and hugging one another.

“Where's the dog?” she asked.

“Animal control took him out,” said the heavyset Wyatt Abrams, the Milwaukee police chief, who'd introduced himself downstairs where he'd been taking a smoke break. “Poor dog had matted blood all over him from sleeping up against her for a week. 'Fraid he… ahhh… gnawed on some of the flesh cutaway from the woman, too, but you can't blame the animal.”

“Animal instinct,” she muttered.

“No, the SOB of a landlord let the dog howl for days before he decided to check on things, and even then only after the stench caught his attention.”

Darwin Reynolds took the sketches from Jessica and handed her another set, but these additional six were faxes. “From the other two cases, and I'd bet my pension it's the same artist leaving his calling card.”

“Two other cases not here in Milwaukee?” commented Sands, rolling his aged eyes.

Chief Abrams exploded with, “I think Reynolds is reaching.”

“Never discount gut instincts,” Jessica countered, coming to Reynolds's defense. “My own have served me well over the years.”

Smiles all around except for the stodgy chief, his forehead a road map of confusion. “Unfortunately, the law doesn't work that way, and neither does it put a man away for no good reason. We gotta trust the authorities in Oregon are every bit as competent as we are.”

“And just how competent is that?” joked Sands, laughing lightly to himself.

Reynolds's eyes showed rage, but he spoke with cool reserve. “Competent? Like the Smollen case, and the Byrd case before that? Competent? Try incompetent nincompoops. I tell you, Wyatt, they've got the wrong man on death row for this, and now it's a certainty. Given this murderer's robbing his victim of her spine.”

Reynolds had peaked Jessica's curiosity, but Dr. Sands said, “Look, Darwin, for the moment, we have our hands full with this fucking mess”-he indicated the horrid mangled body a few feet from them-”and we're losing light, and I haven't eaten anything since my morning coffee roll, so if you don't mind. Dr. Coran, let's get down to business, shall we?” Sands swept his arm out in a gesture that said, You first.

Jessica went to the body and knelt beside it. Dr. Ira Sands did likewise across from her. She saw that the hefty local coroner wanted to get nearer. “Darwin,” he near whispered to Jessica, “is on a tear to prove this is the third such death in a series, but I've seen nothing to convince me of it. Regardless, we have enough in hand for the moment, wouldn't you agree?”

“I do indeed.” Jessica steeled her own spine as she viewed the enormous gash in the dead woman's back. She'd seen disemboweled victims, dismembered victims, victims with eyes removed, god-awful drowning and burn victims, but this went beyond the pale, beyond any hope of speculation. With disembowelments came necrophilia and even cannibalism, which served as motivation, albeit a sick one, something in the human experience and collective psyche hanging on from cave-dwelling days. And even with mutilations brought about by lust murder, there resided some modicum of explanation a profiler might work with to assuage her own guilt at being human. With dismemberments, there usually followed facts uncovering a perpetrator's pure hatred of the victim, or an attempt to reduce the very real problem of body disposal-a hatchet job borne of fear of discovery. Even a butcher who butchered for the sake of butchering at least had a “reason”-even if it was as despicable as “I just love the feel of a cleaver going through bone.”

With an eye-gouger-in the end, at interrogation-he'd say the fear of the victim's eyes staring at him, even in death, drove him to his brutal act. But often, after a little judicious questioning, he will confess to having been at it for some time, beginning with the eyes of dolls. Working his way up to wanting Jessica's eyes even as they spoke of it across a table in the federal facility for the criminally insane. “What can I say? I like eyes,” he'd confess after months and sometimes years of incarceration.

One madman named Gerald Ray Sims, who did much more than take the eyes, told Jessica, before taking his own life, that the dead girl's eyes could see him even in death, and that after he cut them out, he realized that they were not dead but the all-knowing, all-seeing eyes of God Himself. “And the only way to stop them staring at me,” Sims had added, “was to put them into my pockets.”

Even Sims had a reason for his mutilations, albeit a lunatic's expedient answer to the ever-present need of his interrogator to know why.

“Her eyes kept coming back open, even though she was dead,” Zachary Durning-the Daylight Stalker of Starkville, Mississippi-had chanted in mantra fashion throughout his arrest procedure when taken into custody. Jessica later recovered the eyes found in a pickle jar on a shelf in the Bar None Grill that Durning ran for the tourists trade, catering to their insatiable curiosity of the antique remnants of the kind of Wild West Mississippi saloon Durning kept. The tourists came off the Mississippi River excursion and casino boats, and Zach Durning's place had long been a fulcrum for strange disappearances over a period of years-as his father had begun the first killings as robberies gone bad. Zachary's last victim had been a tourist, and the daughter of a U.S. senator, who never returned to the boat. As serial killers went, the man proved a sad bore, rather more the recluse spider who struck only if you got too close to the center of his web. He never stalked a single victim. He didn't have to.

Alongside Jessica now, Sands spoke into a tape recorder. “The female victim, one Joyce Olsen, is in her late forties hideously stripped of her spine. Noting the deep, wide canyon created along the length of her back, this was done with a certain precision and knowledge of depth and length measurements required. In my opinion… a practiced cut. Exact measurements of the wound will be taken to determine this further, of course, along with the precise extent of damage. Blood loss is considerable. Apparent cause of death: hemorrhagic shock due to this wound. Blow to the head caused a serious fracture, but it appears an unlikely death blow. Alongside the corpse, we see the window of flesh that the killer opened in order to get at the spine.”

Jessica now reached out to lift the single large, long piece of flesh that'd been cut from the dead woman's back-a large trout-sized piece of flesh, discarded by her killer. Jessica meant to secure it in a sterile polyethylene bag for later microscopic analysis for fiber and hair evidence, perhaps traces of fluids not belonging to the victim, a DNA sample perhaps. But latching on to this big fish with her two gloved hands, Jessica found herself in a tug of war. The tussle was between her and the dried blood pool the back section had lain in for so long. The fleshy bottom wall of the thing had dried hard and fast to the stained light gray carpet below, bonded as it were.

Angry at this killer and his awful leavings, Jessica whipped out her scalpel, the gold-plated one given to her by her father upon her graduation from medical school. Agent “Pete” Petersaul, holding the bag open to receive the enormous tissue sample that Jessica meant to pry from the carpet, stared fixedly at the shining scalpel for something to concentrate on. Jessica used the edge of the blade to free the flesh from the carpet piling. Carpet fiber clung like a sticky web to the flesh. This made it necessary for Jessica to work slowly and with care all along the length of the fleshy prize.

“It's little wonder I sometimes feel like the ogre in all this,” Jessica muttered to Petersaul and Sands, who also stared and gulped at the work she'd begun.

Finally, she freed the bile-inducing, sumptuous and serpentine block of flesh and fat and dropped it into the bag held wide by Agent Petersaul, who stilled her own quaking hands to get the job done.

“Some three-foot-long party sandwich this'd make for a cannibal killer, you know, like that guy you put away in New York, the Claw,” said Agent Reynolds.

“That was over a decade ago, and he ripped open abdomens and fed on the intestines and organs like a frenzied mad dog, but he didn't take any bones off with him to bury someplace.”

Sands stated the obvious, “This case is not about cannibalizing flesh, otherwise he'd never have left this.” He hefted the snake of flesh in the bag.

Sands gave Petersaul instructions, “See that our several pounds of flesh go with the body to the lab for autopsy.”

“If he's not a cannibal, what the fuck is this freak? A blood drinker?” demanded Petersaul.

“From the amount of blood spilled here, again, I'd say no,” said Jessica. “Matisak was a blood drinker, and he controlled the bloodletting to maximize his treasure with each killing. No, this Spine Thief is something new, something I've not encountered, nor do I know of anything like it in all the literature of police science and police history.”

“Whataya think he does with the spines?” pressed Petersaul, her curiosity palpable.

Jessica looked at Darwin Reynolds, seeing his own need to know there in the black depths of his eyes. “Bone marrow perhaps. Perhaps he feeds on the marrow he can can extract from the vertebral column.”

Petersaul uttered a string of expletives and added, “Uggh… euuuu, no… ykkk!”

“Maybe he has some fucked-up notion that spinal fluid has life-giving properties… wants to feed his immune system to keep trim and forever young,” Jessica continued. “Or he thinks it replenishes his own spinal fluids to do so, to vampire off someone else's manna. Or some such ridiculous notion, since ingesting the stuff can only send it out his ass.”

“Kinda like a spine vampire maniac, isn't he?” said Darwin.

“You might argue that… That he likes his blood thick and congealed. Consomme as opposed to bisque, cold as opposed to liking it fresh and hot.” “But why? Where… I mean how does any man ever get such a notion?” Darwin asked.

“Rather, how does any man act on such a notion?”

Sands's voice, as he continued to tape, interrupted their conversation, “Serious blow to the head appears to have been caused by a blunt instrument, possibly a tool such as a hammer, given the diameter of the wound.”

Some time had passed as they processed the crime scene when Ira Sands shattered the silence. “With what we now have, Dr. Coran, I believe we can begin thinking of closing this crime scene down.”

“I'm in agreement.”

“And back at the morgue, if you will follow my lead, I feel we can get most, if not all, necessary tests under way. Unless you care to lead this dance.”

“Generous of you to offer, Dr. Sands, but no, I am happy to follow your lead, sir.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look a bit peaked. Airline food, perhaps?”

“No, I came by FBI jet. I will be fine, really.”

“That was some operation you performed, separating flesh from carpet. Enough to excuse anyone a bit of queasiness, my dear.”

Jessica had again been staring at the enormous gash to Joyce Olsen's backside, the missing serpentine section of flesh that left a gaping hole large enough for a small animal to climb into. She thought of the dog trapped with the dead woman for over a week. Out of one eye, she saw the bag with the flesh in it being forced down into a large Tupperware container, the lid snapped and patted down by Agent Petersaul.

“Tupperware party?” joked another agent with Petersaul.

“I'm hosting a big one,” she snapped back.

Light laughter followed.

“Is it all right?” Ira Sands was saying to Jessica. She only half heard him. “Do you understand?” he continued in her ear.

Jessica could not recall the last time the sight of a wound had so disturbed her to the core. Jaded, having seen so much, it crept up on little cat feet, this dizzying combination of clamminess, perspiration, and nausea. Surprised she could still get this affected, her thoughts returned to her first FBI case: the body of a young woman called Candy found hanging by her ankles, the fly infested leavings of Mad Matthew Matisak after he'd jammed his now-infamous handheld Spigot into her jugular, in order to control the flow of her blood as he robbed her of every ounce.

It had been Jessica, the novice FBI M.E. who had discovered the small, telltale hole made by the spigot within the massive throat slashing, which had been done to mask the mark of the spigot. But while she eventually put him away, it had been at a dear price, losing her first real love to Matisak's madness.

He had maimed her physically, too. She'd had to use a cane for almost two years following his attack on her. To this day, the psychological scars he'd inflicted remained.

She felt some strange and eerie connection here but could not make it out. Just a feeling, a foolish one, as foolish as Darwin's notion that the killer was like the Claw. This maniac was no Matisak, either. Still, she felt the same iciness and fear of this demon as she had with Matisak. She felt it in her throat, her chest, her heart and her stomach.

“Come now, Dr. Coran,” said Sands in a bid to help color return to her face. “I've read your book. You've seen bodies without hearts, others missing their brains even.”

“All… all the… same, not… notwithstanding, I fear, Dr. Sands, I'm feeling just a might… light-headed.” She finished with a little gasp.

“Go out and come back in. No one else need know. Go,” he encouraged her.

She stared into his kind eyes, studying them, as another voice inside her head advised she stand her ground-her father's voice. Her tough, uncompromising military father's old advice. He, too, had seen some awful deaths-horrid battlefield wounds-and in his days as a medical examiner for the military, he had learned discipline and mental toughness, but she could safely say that not even her father had ever seen anything like this. Nor had her mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft who'd done thousands of autopsies. How was one to combat such a sight as this?

Sands placed a hand on hers and said, “Would you like us to step out together?”

She heeded his advice, getting to her feet. To hell with what the men at the crime scene thought, she told herself. She announced clearly, “Yes, Dr. Sands, I'm sorry, but I need to take a moment.”

He pointed toward the balcony off the bedroom. She stepped out into the November breeze, and she watched as the others, including Sands, filed out and into the light. They had merely needed someone to say “uncle” and to lead the way.