Killer Instinct

TWENTY-THREE

The discovery of a body on Chicago's near North Side rocked the city, its police force and the FBI. From all appearances, the fearsome Chicago-Wekosha vampire was dead of his own hand, a suicide note written in blood beside him, and he had been an aged, white-haired old man, just like the original Count Dracula of Bram Stoker's novel. The man's body was found by a neighbor who often played chess with him in the evenings. Maurice Lowenthal was a retired medical instruments specialist with a firm called Balue-Stork Medical Supply of Chicago, and except for his age, he very nearly fit the PPT profile the FBI had created in its attempt to locate and end the career of this vampiristic sadist. He lived alone. He had never married. He had buried his parents. He was a man of few friends, none beyond the man in the building who enjoyed a game of chess. He had been something of a loner in his work with Balue-Stork, something of a model worker. Never complained, never a claim for workmen's compensation. Had worked steadily for over eighteen years.

The suicide note told the whole story, and it was on the midnight news even before it was confirmed. The note read: “I cannot any longer live with my guilt and my evil inner self. I killed those poor women and boys for their blood. I now take my own.”

It was signed once more, Teach.

It was even in the same flourishing print, and in the man's stuffy little apartment, inside the refrigerator was found ajar of blood, labeled Renee. The blood would test out as belonging to the Zion woman; of this, Jessica was certain. Other, empty jars were found lying about. There was amid Lowenthal's sprawled body and his own blood, on the carpeting, a saucer and a teacup. The suicide note itself was on the coffee table, glued there by a pool of blood beneath. There were additional blood splotches on the note.

The CPD swore that nothing was handled, and that nothing was moved, and that the blue coats who'd first come on scene had called it in as an FBI matter the moment they saw it. So, presumably, they had a virgin death scene.

Joe Brewer was ecstatic. “When the newspapers work for us, it is a pleasure doing business with them, isn't it?”

Otto Boutine accepted Brewer's slap on the back as tacit approval for the course they had taken. In one corner of the room a stack of Tribunes and Sun-Times papers told them that Lowenthal had been keeping tabs on himself through the press and media. He obviously had been “touched.”

There seemed little else to do but bag the vampire and cart his body off, and that was the consensus. Everyone wanted to celebrate. Everyone but Jessica Coran. She wondered about the fact that no cortisone was found among the various drugs in the man's house, and she had come to believe the killer was a bigger, stronger man.

“ Something's not entirely right here. Otto,” she confided in a whisper.

He frowned but said, “I understand your misgivings. It just goes against everything we thought we knew about this madman to have him suddenly feeling remorseful, sitting down over a cup of tea and guilt, to slash his wrists this way. But downstairs we've got the tools and weapons, even the goddamned spigot!”

She had herself rushed down to see the little shop of horrors, especially curious about the spigot. While in the basement, she had noticed the telltale signs of dried, stringy tissue on the teeth of one electric saw. She'd taken the matter into a cellophane bag to be matched with the body tissue of one of the vampire's victims, one of Lowenthal's victims. But now she had focused her entire attention on the suicide note where it lay in the blood, and it was not quite right.

“ What is it about the note that bothers you, Jess?”

“ The writing for one, exactly the same as the letter he sent to me at Quantico. He was certainly not in a suicidal mood then.”

“ So?”

“ If he knew he was going to die, why'd he print?”

“ Habit. He always prints?”

“ But there's no sign of suicide in the writing.”

“ It's right before you, in the words.”

“ Yes, the words say suicide like a well-rehearsed play, but there's no tremble in the hand holding the pen.”

“ I lay you odds the blood he used for the note will belong to Fowler or one of his other victims.”

“ If not Lowenthal's.”

“ You're not buying into this at all, are you?”

“ I may… after microscopic tests, and I may not, after-”

“ After lab tests,” he finished for her. “Don't your eyes tell you anything?”

“ As a matter of fact, they do. Notice the blood below the paper?”

“ What of it?”

“ A shade darker, thicker, drier and older than that on top.”

Otto looked at her queerly. “Go on, I'm listening.”

“ The blood below dried much earlier than the blood here on top.”

He just stared back at her, not understanding.

“ Don't you see? If Lowenthal had killed himself with the note here in front of him, the blood on either side of the note would be equally dry. As it is, someone placed the note on the table after the first pool of blood on the table had pretty much dried. After the note was placed here, additional blood accumulated on this side of the paper. It stands to reason.”

“ I think you had better save this talk for the lab,” he said curtly. “I think we've got our killer, and that's what's important here, Jess.”

“ I'm not trying to make some grandstand play, Otto. I'm telling you what my experience and training suggest.”

“ And I'm saying, you could be wrong… couldn't you?”

“ I know there's a push on from Leamy to put a wrap on this thing, Otto, but I don't think we ought to let the bloody killer make the decision for us.” She also believed Otto's job depended on closing this case.

“ You're going to need a lot more than some dried blood to convince anyone that this creep isn't our man!”

“ Then I'll find it,” she insisted, promptly going to work, searching for additional information to support her gnawing suspicion that Teach was toying with them again, out to teach them all another good lesson in foolishness. She was tired of being made the fool, of being outmaneuvered by this controlled maniac. The killer was quite clever and cunning, a gamesman, perhaps a chess player like herself, and as Lowenthal had been, but a player who used deadly means to reach his ends. Perhaps Lowenthal was a helpless dupe, a pawn on the deadly chess board?

“ I'm sending in a report to Chief Leamy within the hour, Jess,” Otto told her.

She replied, “I'll need a hell of a lot more time than that, Otto.”

They both saw that Captain Lyle Kaseem had entered and had been listening to their conversation. He smiled his near perfect white teeth at them and said, “A little difference of opinion?”

“ So, what's it with you, Kaseem?” asked Otto, ticked. “Lowenthal's obviously not your man, Rosnich, so you automatically agree with her?” he finished, indicating Jessica.

“ Let's just say, I have my doubts, too.”

“ Why? What possible-”

“ He's an old man.”

“ How old do you have to be to use one of these damned devices?” Otto held up the spigot in a plastic container.

Jessica cut in. “The man would still have to truss them up, Otto, and… and haul them up over his-” She stopped herself, realizing that it was bad form for them to argue with Kaseem staring on.

Kaseem simply said, “I agree with Dr. Coran.”

Otto looked from one to the other of the doctors, not wanting to accept any ripple in what on the surface appeared an open-and-shut case. He was tired of it, fatigued with the pressures that had been coming down on him from above. He wanted it over; and he wanted it bad enough that he was willing to deny Jessica this time.

Joe Brewer came in shouting. “We've got a safe-deposit key for Lincoln National Bank, Otto. Want to be on hand when we open it?”

“ Kaseem?” asked Otto.

Kaseem chewed a bit nervously on the inner wall of his cheek, thinking it over, torn between staying-on the off chance he might learn something from Jessica Coran-and going, on the chance he might learn something from the locked box. He was like the man in the fable who had to choose between three doors to open.

“ Well?” pressed Otto.

“ Yeah, yeah, I'd like to be on hand.”

Otto looked over his shoulder as they were exiting, giving her a wink, telling her he'd done her a favor to get Kaseem out of her way. Down deep, he must believe that if she was on to something, she'd want privacy with the scene and the corpse to determine the full extent of her suspicions.

With the others gone, she drew on some of Brewer's men to assist in the evidence gathering. During her intense investigation, she found that Lowenthal's wrists had been slashed in such a way that it did appear the man had done it to himself. This would have to stand up under more intense scrutiny, measurements and lights, but on the surface, it seemed reasonable to conclude that Lowenthal had indeed cut his own wrists. This did not help her theory.

She next looked closely at Lowenthal's body for any telltale sign of Addison's disease. Cortisone pills had not been found, nor had she seen any apparent indications that Lowenthal had the disease. She looked very closely at the skin in an effort to find symptoms of the vampire disease, porphyria. She found none whatever.

Try as she may, she could not shake the feeling that Lowenthal's death had been somehow “staged” down to the smallest detail. It would take lab time to determine and prove what even Otto was unprepared to accept. But the blood evidence alone indicated to her that there was a second party in the room who had placed the suicide note on the table after the initial blood splatters.

And given the fact the note was signed Teach, it had to be the same man who had written a letter to her in Virginia and had mailed it from Hammond, Indiana, on his way to kill Tommy Fowler in Indianapolis.

She was, by the end of her exhaustive scanning of the body and the physical evidence of the bloody note, convinced that the man calling himself Teach was still very much alive.

Then Boutine and Brewer noisily arrived, proclaiming irrefutable evidence that Lowenthal was Teach.

They had unearthed the most telling, incriminating evidence in the man's private lockbox. He was undeniably Otto's Tort 9 monster. For not only had the man designed the spigot, but here were papers of the design showing that he had recently applied for a patent with the U.S. Government Patent Office in D.C.

“ Imagine that, imagine that,” Brewer was saying, “to be that nuts, that you go out and get a patent on the murder weapon you use. One for the books.”

Kaseem had not returned with them, perhaps accepting this new information as the final word on the Chicago vampire.

“ You can't deny what's before your eyes, Jess,” Otto said to her as she scanned the schematics of the deadly little straw that Lowenthal had created.

No one, not even she, could deny that Maurice Lowenthal was indeed involved with the vampire killings, yet some nagging doubts remained. Was the vampire really dead??