Killer Instinct

TWELVE

The news broke in Washington and all over the country, thanks to United Press International, and everyone who could read, and everyone who owned a TV or radio, knew the nasty secret of the bloodthirsty killer of Wekosha, Wisconsin: that he bled his victim to death, drank his victim's blood in a ghoulish, vampiristic manner and carried the rest of her blood off with him. The newspaper painted as lurid a tale as they could with a few powerful images and details they'd so diligently scrounged for in the Copeland girl's case.

Boutine had been right, and they had been fortunate to have the almost forty-eight hours granted them before the story went public. At least they had made some headway on the physical evidence. They had quietly gone about the two additional evidence-gathering forays into Illinois and Iowa.

J.T. was late in returning with the specimen from the Trent girl, and thus far it hadn't been analyzed; however, the McDonell specimen was a definite match. Jessica had run the tests herself, using the SEM, which destroyed the specimen but preserved on print the images necessary to compare with those made on the Copeland girl. The match was unmistakable, down to the depth of the incision, the circular “pucker” of the wound to the jugular, all of it, including the severe but cosmetic throat slash which more or less masked the true cause of death. Like Candy Copeland's, Janel McDonell's life had been syphoned off with her blood through some sort of tube that fed the vampire that had killed her, and that filled his containers for any future “brews” he might like to drain.

She wondered how many more had suffered and died at the hands of this methodical, plodding, diabolical killer who left so few signs of himself. She wondered how they were ever going to catch him, since they had nothing but microscopic clues to his identity.

She got on the phone and telephoned a doctor friend and asked him twenty questions.

“ Can you get for me a sample of any and all tubes and equipment you use to drain off a patient's blood? Say from a wound.”

“ Suction devices, you mean, or syphoning devices.”

“ That, and anything else you can think of that would drain off or take away unwanted fluids.”

“ Hell, you've just described a dialysis machine.”

“ Only if they've created a hand-held model, lightweight and portable.”

“ Now it's all fluids?” he asked, a little exasperated.

“ Any bodily fluid, yes, Mark.”

“ Like in the case of a cancer patient whose lungs have filled with fluid?”

“ Yes, anything at all that would act as a catheter, a drain to release blood, urine, anything.”

“ That's a tall order, Dr. Coran.”

“ It's important. It could help save a life.”

“ I read about your Wisconsin vampire. This has to do with him, doesn't it?”

“ Please, Mark, keep this between us… please.”

“ Sure, sure. Nice to see your name in print, I should think. Dr. Jessica Coran! Sounded like you're Dick Tracy, and that with you on the case, the killer's days are numbered.”

“ Wish it were so.”

“ At least they got your name spelled right.”

“ How soon can you get the stuff to me?”

“ Tell you what.”

“ Yes?”

“ I've got surgical equipment catalogues that're filled with all kinds of gadgets. You might save yourself some time-”

“ Good idea. Send them over first, and I'll try to narrow the field from the books.”

“ Consider it done.”

She hung up, taking a deep breath, realizing the day had disappeared and her neck was getting as stiff as a board. She'd not been contacted by Boutine or anyone else since her return, and once when she called Boutine, she was told curtly that he was out and would not be returning all day. She left a message with the secretary for him to get in touch with her as soon as possible. She then called his home number. He'd told her to call there whenever necessary. Again, she got the answering machine and her frustration with him was rising.

She had heard from J.T. at noon, grousing long distance about how he planned on never going back to Paris again. He found her now in the lab, coming as he did straight from the airstrip with the specimen from the Trent girl in a cooler. It was 8:30 P.M. by the wall clock.

“ Devil of a time, Jess,” he said.

“ Welcome home.” She went to him, taking his coat. “You look like hell.”

“ Murphy's law in triplicate.” He told her of the frightful night he'd spent, finishing with, “And it's only through my Job-like patience that I didn't murder someone-Forsythe for one.”

“ Pain in the ass. So was Kaseem, but the man did lend an air of respectability and military bearing to the proceedings without even trying.”

“ I don't think we've seen the last of those two, Jess, really. Something fishy-smelling about the whole setup, like big brother is watching.”

“ Maybe… maybe not.”

“ What else could it be?”

“ AFIP has been wanting to get better training in this area. Our guys stationed all over the world have a guy like Forsythe or Kaseem doing autopsies in places like Manila, Germany, Guam… Well, maybe anything they can learn from us-”

“ Nahh, that's too simple. Besides, what can they learn on an exhumation?”

“ More than you might think. Are you sure we're not just being paranoid a bit here?”

“ Paranoia is a healthy emotion, despite the bad rap it gets.”

She thought again of Boutine, wondering if he had known about the AFIP's involvement, wondering again where he was.

“ Look,” she told J.T., spreading out the new images on the McDonell SEM photos, laying them alongside the Copeland shots. “Can hardly tell them apart. You couldn't if you didn't know one of them was buried for six months. Look at the configuration, here, about the center. Big as a bull's eye. She got the killer's ugly spigot jammed into her jugular, too.”

“ It'd take a guy who really knew what he was doing to hit the mark twice,” he replied. “Now, what about thrice?” His eyes lit up with the cooler he held to her eyes. “My damnable vacation into prairie hell best not have been for nothing.”

“ You've got to be bushed, John. Hell, it's almost nine and you've gone through an exhumation, an autopsy and what must've been the longest flight in history from Illinois to here-”

“ Three stopovers, and when the military says stopover, you get a real stopover! But I won't rest until I know. You go on. I'll just see what this tells us.”

“ You sure?”

“ Determined is the operative word.”

She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Makes it all worthwhile, and my life complete,” he said.

This made her laugh. “Good night, and keep all this under lock and key.”

“ Now who's paranoid?”

“ Better safe than sorry's all.” She left for her office, leaving J.T. to finish up. One match was nice, but the findings could be refuted if interpreted wrongly by others, a thing that happened more often than not in forensic science. But two, if J.T. could pull it off, would be unassailable. They could then begin to search for the kind of awful weapon that the killer had used. The investigators could then see the hacksaw for what it was.

In her office she hung up her lab coat, looked about her desk, wondering if there were any reports she needed to take home with her. She lifted a couple of files she'd been meaning to rummage through, some early work on the Tort 9 killer type. She wanted to see what research had been done. It was indeed scant from the size of the files.

Suddenly, there was someone at her door. She saw the shadow cross her desk, and she was startled when she looked up to find Boutine leaning against the dooijamb, looking shaken, his clothes looking as if slept in, his hair wild, the normally focused eyes unable to look at her.

“ Otto? Are you all right? I've been trying to reach you and-”

“ It's Marilyn… my wife…”

She came to him, her breath coming in short gasps. “She… she's gone, isn't she?”

“ Odd how it happened,” he croaked. “She… she came out of her coma, just briefly… asking for me. When they got hold of me, I raced to Bethesda. Got there and she was gone back into coma. I stayed and stayed, trying to bring her back around, and for a brief moment, I felt her hand squeezing mine. Doctors said it was just a convulsion, a spasm, but I knew it was… was more than that… and then she just… just left… went… flatline.”

She took him into her arms, holding him. Over her shoulder, he said, “Hospital staff was busy, and for a time no one noticed the flatline, no one but me, of course. I… I sensed she wanted to go… had to go. I didn't call for anyone. I just let her go.”

His frame rumbled with pent-up tears. She held onto him. After a while, she suggested, “You shouldn't be alone tonight, Otto. Why don't you come home with me?”

He pulled away from her. He never looked confused or out of control. It was difficult for her to believe this was the same man, and yet the depth of his feeling for his wife touched her. “Come on… to hell with appearances,” she ordered him.

“ I don't want to impose on you any longer.”

“ Then why'd you come to me?”

He could say nothing.

“ Impose. That's what friends are for, especially at times like this.”

He allowed her to lead him away.

# # #

Otto was weak with exhaustion and grief. She led him through doors, into the elevator and into her place as if guiding the blind. It wasn't the Otto Boutine she had always known. Once at her place, after he went through a halfhearted walk-through of the apartment, commenting on how it was both warm and bright all at once, he quickly found the sofa, and for the rest of the evening would remain there.

Jessica broke out a bottle of wine and they drank it and nibbled at cheese and crackers until the wine was gone and he asked if she hadn't something stronger. She returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Scotch, to which he approved, asking for it on ice, neat.

“ What about something to eat?” she asked.

“ The Scotch'11 do.”

“ I'm going to fix myself something. Are you sure-”

“ No, nothing… I couldn't eat.”

So she settled down with him there, not eating either. He began to talk about Marilyn, about her enthusiasm for her work. She had been a civil case trial lawyer. They had met when he was on a case that took him to California. Her family was in San Diego, some of them flying to Virginia now for the wake and the funeral. As for him, it was true what she had heard-that he was without family. He'd been orphaned at the age of eighteen. Afterward he'd done a stint in the army, where he'd learned self-discipline. He had finally chosen police work at a very early age. He had come up through the system and had made of his life what it was now.

“ Took me away from Marilyn a lot,” he said flatly. “We'd be at a wedding, a party, some other thing-once our own anniversary-and I'd be called away. She was hurt. As understanding as she was, she was hurt.”

“ Otto, people like us, we're on call twenty-four hours a day. That's just the way it is. Don't beat up on yourself.”

“ Just… there was just so much I wanted to say to her,” he said, the usual timbre of his voice cracking.

She went to him, her arms inviting him into her, and he buried his head in her breasts. They held, swaying in silence for some time that way.

“ You've got to get some rest,” she told him. “And so do I.”

She got up, located some pillows and a blanket and brought these to him. She turned down the lights and the soft sound of a Strauss waltz she'd earlier placed on the CD player. She removed his shoes and made him lie down beneath the covers, his head on the pillows.

But he kept talking as if he could not stop. He told her about how he had met Marilyn, about trips they had taken together and things they had shared, from horseback riding and tennis to favorite books.

“ We once went snorkeling in the Florida Keys for a week. What a place… what a time.”

“ Otto, we all feel guilty when we lose someone. We all wonder if we said 'I love you' often enough or with enough conviction and feeling. We all regret some things we've said, done-”

“ What if I did the wrong thing?” he asked point-blank. “Maybe… maybe I should have raced down the damned hall and screamed for help, and maybe-maybe-”

“ No, Otto. You did what you felt was best for her. You didn't do anything wrong in letting her go in peace and with dignity. You know that as well as I.”

“ Do I? Christ, Jess, the night before I… I had a dream about… about you, and about me.”

“ Otto, that's not-”

“ And before that, in Wekosha-”

' 'That has nothing to do with your feelings for Marilyn, or what you did, Otto. What you did, you did out of love and tenderness.”

He began to tell her more about his daily routine with Marilyn, and how he had come to miss that so much since the incident that first took her from him. Since then his life was a misery, a living medical hell of hospital waiting rooms and bills and a growing hopelessness like a cancer that had begun to overtake him and overwhelm him.

And in the meantime, he had to present himself as Otto Boutine to the rest of the world, as a man without a soft millimeter of flesh. “And now I'm reduced to what you see before you,” he said apologetically.

“ I see a kind and a gentle and a tender and a caring man,” she replied, “and that is all I see.”

She kissed him and she thanked him.

“ For what?”

“ For being a good man.”

He started to protest, but she pressed her fingers to his lips. “Sleep now, rest.”

He closed his eyes and she silently left him and retreated to her bedroom, where she slipped into a nightgown and robe. From there she made her way to the bath and warmed the shower water before stepping in. Under the gentle, pulsating water she felt herself melting, the nerves loosening their tight grip on her. The warm water, growing hotter and hotter as she turned up the tap, relaxed her almost to the point of sleep.

She didn't remember stepping from the shower or brushing her hair when she found herself climbing into bed. Her head, still damp, touching the pillow, seemed to drift off on its own, away from her body. A part of her had wanted to find Otto in her bed when she stepped from the shower; another part of her was glad that he was in the other room. He would need time. He was wounded, in much pain, feeling such guilt. If anything happened between them tonight, it would only add to his pain and guilt. She didn't want to add injury to the wound he already felt, despite her certainty that Otto had nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about.

She dreamed of Wekosha as she had every night since examining the dead Copeland girl. All the ugly details she expected to see in her dream were replaced, however, with a soft, hazy glow, shading the horror, and in the place of the horror stood Otto. Otto was reaching out to her amid the surrounding carnage, his expression like that of a little boy who had lost his way. She reached out, taking his hand and wondering what kind of a future they might have together when the hand she held, and the arm that held it, came loose from Otto with the sound of soft suction.

“ He makes fools of us all,” Otto's dream presence said in a resonating voice while her dream self tried desperately to replace his arm where it had come off at the socket.?