Fatal Instinct

Nine

Rychman suggested an Italian restaurant named Donatel-lo's Greatest Achievements, in the heart of Manhattan. Along the way, she filled him in on what the FBI had been trying to accomplish with Gerald Ray Sims before his suicide, and what they were trying to do with Matisak. Rychman agreed that her bosses were pandering to Matisak, to the point that any information gained from him was suspect. He was sympathetic and very understanding about her earlier outburst. He seemed genuinely concerned about her well-being, she felt. She sensed a gentleness that perhaps only a few were privy to.

“ So what credence do you give to Matisak's theory, if it can be called that? I mean maybe it's not a demonic possession but what about a pair of madmen?”

“ I'm sorry, it's just too early to tell,” she replied, saying nothing of her own suspicions along these lines. “Have you any reason to believe it could be two men instead of one?”

“ No, not really,” he readily admitted.

After arriving at the restaurant and being seated, they ordered a carafe of Chablis and she was soon asking him about his home life. “Any children?”

“ A pair of 'em. Sweet, gentle kids. Raised far from their father's profession, thanks to their mother.”

“ You get to see them on weekends?”

“ When the job doesn't interfere, which isn't often, lately. My ex jokes that I'm a merchant marine and I come around when my ship's in.”

She dipped her head and bit her lip. “It doesn't sound like the perfect amicable divorce, but it takes a special person to understand how important the job is to a dedicated cop, or agent, as in my case.”

“ It's been difficult, to say the least, not seeing the kids when I come home at night, and as for a woman's company… well, let's just say, I miss that, too.”

“ Guess we've got some things in common, Captain.”

“ I think it'd be okay if you called me Alan under the circumstances.”

“ Maybe not. Wouldn't want to slip around your men.”

“ We're not around my men. Go ahead. Try it. A-L-A-N, Alan.”

“ Alan,” she said.

“ You've got it, and you make it sound better than 'Captain.' “

“ I'm starved,” she replied. “Where's that waiter?” In a moment someone was there taking their orders. He opted for a small New York strip steak, she for the red snapper.

She caught him staring at her before he realized what he was doing. To cover, he said abruptly, “I'm given to understand that you're extremely good at reading people, at psychologically dissecting killers; that you have an instinct for it.”

“ I have some talent in that direction, yes.”

“ Then you've already made some judgments about our friend or friends, the Claw?” He seemed to be drawing inward again. Maybe he wanted their relationship to remain on a firm professional footing, too. Perhaps talking about the case would accomplish this.

Or was he slicker than she'd given him credit for? Was this Alan Rychman's way of maneuvering her into talking more openly about her initial impressions and findings than she had intended?

“ I know that the Claw's appetite grows,” she said.

“ Grows? You mean the stepped-up calendar of his kills?”

“ I mean that with each victim, apparently, he has either eaten more or walked off with more of the organs. He's working his way up to feeding jackal fashion on the brains of his future victims.” Rychman stared across at her. “You can tell that from what you've seen in the lab?” The same notion had crossed his mind at the Hamner murder scene.

“ First victim was only lightly hit over the head. Now he's murderously battering the cranial matter, splitting open the skull. He'll take the brains of his next victim, because he has been working his way through the organs, tasting each in turn. He gorges himself on the entrails, disinterested in the intestines themselves, but fascinated with the organ tissues. He's fed on heart, lung, liver and kidney tissues, as well as the eyes of his victims. He's bored now with this and he'll go on to their brains next.”

The waiter gulped back bile as he stood listening to her. She'd been unaware of his presence. Rychman looked up at the man and said, “We're testing dog food materials at the plant. Don't mind us.”

The waiter quickly deposited their meals and backed off, hurriedly asking if they needed anything else, quite anxious to make his exit. Rychman waved the poor man off.

They dug in, both hungry, the aroma of the hot meals and juices swirling about them. Rychman poured them both more wine until she placed a hand up to him.

Jessica's cane slid softly away from the unoccupied chair she'd propped it on, slapping the floor. She reddened and began to reach for it, but Alan was faster, lifting it and laying it gingerly across the arms of the chair.

“ That'll do better there.” He stared at the Irish shillelagh. Its clublike pearl handle had a brass band around it, like the markings on the neck of a wild goose, the rest of the cane a simple black.

“ Nice cane, a real beauty.”

“ A gift,” she said.

“ Oh? From a friend?” He was fishing.

“ From several friends at headquarters.”

“ I'm sorry I'm so nosy.”

She waved it off. “Not necessary, really. As for any more details on the predilections of the Claw, it's going to take a little more time. You'll have to remain patient.”

“ Tell that to everybody that's after my… neck.”

She took a deep breath. “Is this why you asked me to dinner? To interrogate me? To draw at straws?”

“ No, no,” he replied. “I just don't know what else to talk to you about.”

“ Tell me about yourself.”

“ Me? I'd have thought you'd learned all you wanted to know from Lou by now.”

“ I did, but there are a few holes. What do you do to relax?”

“ Firing range helps me, sometimes.”

She nodded. “Me, too.”

“ You a good shot?”

Grinning, she replied, “The best.”

“ You're on, anytime.”

“ How about after dinner?”

“ All right… you're on!”

She could feel his tension easing.

“ What do you do for fun?” he asked.

“ Recently learned to scuba dive.”

“ Really? That's a kick, isn't it?”

“ You dive?”

“ Since I was seventeen, sure.”

“ I love the feeling of freedom it offers.”

He nodded knowingly and their eyes met. “We do have something in common, after all.”

“ I'm not what you're used to, I know. Not your typical M.E.”

He thought of Perkins and some others he'd worked cases with and this made him laugh. “No, you sure aren't.”

“ Lot of men have a hard time dealing with a woman who isn't easily intimidated,” she said.

“ A lot of women are easily intimidated,” he countered.

“ By you, I'm sure.”

“ But not you.”

“ No, not me.”

“ Good.”

The food beckoned, and they drifted into other areas of discussion as they ate. She talked passionately about hunting deer and bear in Minnesota, Canada and Alaska. He had hunted deer in northern New York but hadn't gone after larger game. She talked about her father and how he had brought her up to be proud and independent and a capable gunwoman. The evening seemed to evaporate around them, and when she looked at her watch, it was nine forty-five.

“ I guess the range is out, huh?” she asked.

“ Closes at ten, but I've got a little pull. Come on.”

He took her to his former precinct headquarters where they rode an elevator down to the sub-subbasement to find an enormous indoor shooting range unnaturally silent and unlit. He shouted an order to the cop on duty to bring up the lights.

“ Captain!” came the quick reply. “Been a while. Hope you're not turning into a full-time desk jock. Just lock up when you go,” said the sergeant as he tacked a pair of targets to the electronic runners and sent them on their way.

“ How many yards?”

“ Make it fifty,” he said.

“ Seventy-five,” she countered.

“ A hundred, Pete. Make it one hundred.”

“ Wanta make up your mind?” Pete, a wizened, leathery-faced man, lightweight and short enough to pass as a jockey, stared first at Rychman and then at Jessica, his eyes twinkling with mischief. “Havin' a little contest, huh?”

“ Just put 'em up, Pete.” Rychman whipped out his Police Special, a standard. 38, and she pulled out hers, a near identical Smith amp; Wesson, but hers was a. 44-caliber.

“ Nice-looking weapon,” he complimented her.

“ Put up or shut up,” she replied, turned and without hesitation drilled the target at a hundred yards with successive rounds until she had emptied the chamber.

He was impressed and she knew it. “Your turn,” she said.

He took a casual stance and clicked off bullet after bullet as quickly as she had.

Pete had been about to drift out, but was held back by their display of shooting. “I want to see this,” he said, punching the buttons that returned the targets to their owners. As they approached, the two targets looked almost identical in every detail, every bullet hole. It was impossible to tell which of them was the better shot; both had several shots going through the same hole.

Pete was bug-eyed, stammering.

“ I knew you were good, Captain, but… wow… Young lady, you're quite a shot.”

“ Thanks, Pete.”

“ Come on, I'll drive you home,” Alan said.

“ That'd be some drive. Home's in Virginia.”

“ Your hotel, then. Pete,” he said, turning at the elevator door, “log these for us, will you? I need the points.”

When they got into the elevator and were going up, he said, “So, you relaxed a little now? Got some of that stress out?”

“ It feels great, getting a few rounds off. Relieves a lot of tension.”

He came across the elevator toward her and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately. She pushed him away.

“ Stop it, Captain, stop,” she said, and he backed off.

“ Sorry, I shouldn't have done that. Too much wine lingering in the brain, I suppose, but… well, dammit, you are-”

“ Captain Rychman, we… we are going to be working together, and I don't think it's wise to get involved in… in any other fashion until our work together is… is complete.”

She was feeling the effects of the wine, too, and finding it hard to put into words what her exact feelings and thoughts were. It seemed odd to her that a little alcohol gave her a sharp edge as a shooter, but that it dulled her emotional senses. She wasn't sure how she felt at having him kiss her. She wasn't sure if she had invited or allowed it, whether she enjoyed or disliked it. It had been a long time since she'd been touched-either physically or emotionally-by a “sane” man.

And the big, strong Alan Rychman, although very different in appearance, so reminded her of Otto. In his mannerisms, in the fact he was trying so hard to hide the little boy curled up deep within him.

“ I'd still like to take you to your hotel.”

“ Hotel, yes, hotel room, no.”

It had been nice having Alan Rychman escort her to the hotel, and he had no idea how much she had honestly wanted him to stay. She dreaded nights alone, especially away from her Virginia home in Quantico, the only place she felt completely and wholly safe. But even home had been invaded by her night visions and the shadows.

Jessica got into bed and sat up reading a recent report put together by one of the best psychological profiling teams at the FBI. The report served a double purpose: to induce a sound sleep, along with the pills given her by her shrink, and to bring her up-to-date on the most recent advice in dealing with killer couples. She knew that reading had lately become a way to avoid thinking about her continuing insomnia and what amounted to fear.

She concentrated on the cold, explicit, factual report in her lap, desperately trying to stay on her train of thought. It was well known in violent crime cases that there was often a dominant-subservient partnership involved, in which two killers formed a symbiotic bond of need and lust that led to mutual gratification through torture and murder. Killer couples weren't always a man/man team; quite often it was two women, and much more often, a man and a woman. Often one was so infatuated with the other that he felt a “spell” had been cast over him.

It wasn't a new notion; in fact, there were many such case histories available at the FBI Academy. She had read many of them while researching killer couples for a paper that had won her high marks. There were instances throughout history in which one person was so dominated by another that he or she would act out any unlawful or immoral act put to him or her.

The brutal Jack the Ripper murders in London in the fall of 1888 might have been the work of more than one man. In the early part of the twentieth century there were Leopold and Loeb, and since then there had been multiple examples of killer couples, making them almost commonplace. There were Bywaters and Thompson, Snyder and Gray, Brady and Hindley, Bonnie and Clyde, Fernandez and Beck. Killer couples, as in the Aileen Wournos lesbian killer case, were not as common as the lone-wolf serial-killer type, however they were on the rise along with cult murders.

If her time in the FBI had taught her anything, it was that a man and a woman, teamed for the murder of a third person, were one of the deadliest combinations known. Between them they had a powerful arsenal to bring to bear against their intended prey: cunning, deceit, sex appeal, physical strength, boldness, resolve and amorality. Few victims of such teams survived such an unholy assault.

Usually, such teams were only caught as the result of a sure erosion of trust between the two murderers, the erosion beginning after the first murder, because each partner was by then the sole witness to the other's crime. The relationship steadily crumbled under the weight of such responsibility. They would begin to suspect each other, begin to doubt and question every move, and would soon be unable to live from moment to moment without fearing one another.

“ You're afraid of your own shadow by now, aren't you? Aren't you?” she asked the empty room, trying to imagine the state of mind of the killer or killers at this time. Even if the Claw was an individual, she reasoned, he would eventually begin to fear himself as he might an accomplice, the way that Gerald Ray Sims feared his shadow self, Stainlype.

She had come to believe, since the death of Otto Boutine, with whom she'd shared so many intimacies, that everyone, herself included, had dark second selves within, doubles or dopplegangers, as the Germans called them. The trauma she had gone through had revealed to her the dangerous double held in check at all times by her more dominant personality. The dark double was a frightful being, a creature that truly disturbed its owner to her core, one that rattled sabers that turned into snakes that fed on the good and wishing-to-be-good self.

Jessica believed meeting the shadow within-not just glimpsing it from a distance-could cause a person either to become whole by facing down the murderous impulses that raged below the still volcano, or to become fragmented, as in the case of Gerald Ray Sims, and quite possibly Matthew Matisak. She had long been accustomed to the power of the dark side in killers, but had always denied it in herself, until she had been maimed by Matisak, until she had wanted vengeance against the maniac. She knew about her undesirable other self now, her less than pretty side, the shadow within. At times she now experienced something that felt like her two selves crossing, and it frightened her. The dark brute was, in its way, so much more powerful, as if negative energy drained off positive impulses at every turn.

It was what the shrinks called an intrapsychic “problem” that could evolve into a “conflict” if she didn't get control of it. It was one of the scars left her by Matisak, part of a legacy of fear and self-doubt created in her by the vampiristic madman. It was worse than any nightmare or replay of the events that brought her near death at his hands, because this creature was like Matisak, and yet it was her.

Her lady shrink, Dr. Lemonte, had told her it was dangerous, at this point, to ignore her “shadow” shelf.

“ Or to fear one's own shadow?” she had replied. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“ Face it… recognize it for what it is.”

“ And what is that?”

“ Another and legitimate aspect of your self. The self that as a child you allowed vent to, that escaped when you picked up an object and hurled it across a room.”

She thought of Rychman hurling objects about his office and wondered if he ever had any shadow fears. Perhaps her psychiatrist was right.

“ How do I let it out safely?” she had asked.

“ Play with it.”

“ Play with it? I don't want to play with it. I'm afraid of it.”

“ Play out harmless aspects of your rejected self-”

She was shaking. “Suppose it, this rejected self, takes hold. Hell, it already has begun to!”

“ You're intelligent, levelheaded, and from what I've read of your record, Jessica, you're a very brave woman. All you need do is face this as you would one of your cases. Investigate intelligently.”

“ But this isn't a case; this is me… me.”

Donna Lemonte had then leaned forward, uncharacteristically took Jessica's hands into her own and stared hard into her eyes. “You can beat this thing; you can shake it, Jess, but in order to heal the split between what you've come to know and accept as your true persona and your shadow persona, you must face the shadow, recognize it for what it is and put it back in its place.”