Pure Instinct

1

Quantico, Virginia

Jessica Coran was not one to believe in the supernatural or visions, quests or even overzealous dream characters who bartered for attention, but there seemed no way to elude the faceless, nameless entity that now nightly climbed into her bed and invaded her mind with its presence. Was it a he, a she, corporeal or cloud, a disguised human image larger than life with a heavily made-up mask? Or was it truly nonhuman, some god of the night, immortal? Too dark, too nebulous in its contours, a shifting outline, detail lacking… too unreal to pinpoint… just out of mental reach, yet threatening… ever threatening. Person, place or thing? She could not know, not for certain.

All she felt was an overwhelming sense of pressure and bulk. The thing took up space, and usually that meant on her chest as she slept. It insisted on being listened to, but the damned thing never spoke a word. Excruciatingly painful, extraordinarily frustrating, it was a mindful creature without a mouth or words to convey its thoughts to her, like a wounded animal unable even to whine, its limbs working as if on strings controlled by a puppeteer.

Was it some sort of supernormal yet real visitor which moved about her room and increased her weight against the bed when it straddled her? Or was it, as her shrink, Donna Lemonte, no doubt would say, some dark portion of herself that had clawed its way from out of her own psyche to the surface?

No telling… at least not from what was known; information sadly lacking… evidence inconclusive… no basis for discovery…

At one moment she thought it the ghost-or at least the vestibuled memory-of Otto Boutine, her first love, who'd died while saving her from a killer's grasp. Then she thought it her father's spirit, or that part of him which lived on in her, come with a warning, a foreboding. But in either case, she ought to be able to make out the features, to reinvent them fully and distinctly, even happily, but this she could not do.

Now, even as she slept and pondered these questions, she believed that a resolution was possible, and that perhaps-just perhaps-the phantom was a conglomerate of faceless victims from the many and various serial-killer cases she'd worked over the years, all come to finally collect…

Hardly scientific or logical, she knew, but dream disturbances weren't exactly something she could pop under her microscope or slice into with her scalpel and examine more closely. Behind her closed eyelids she could only stare at the dark, inky mass which blotted out all light and made the air in her lungs stale with heat and fear. Her visitor spoke out of a blank hole, the face a wall, but only slight, meandering gibberish surfaced, as if the words had too far to travel to live once they found her. The words came out as a meaningless hum like that of a refrigerator, mindless and mechanical; still, it all felt like an ominous, rational warning, something to protect her or send her flying over a cliff, the topmost precipice of which she only narrowly engaged on bare toes.

The idea of flight-any flight-was soothing, inviting, despite the consequences. So she stood, as it were, on the verge of plummeting down into the Grand Canyon of her soul, but what or who waited at the bottom for her? A comforting father? Otto? Love everlasting in Hawaii with Jim Parry? Or would Mad Matthew Matisak be there at the bottom, the vulture's patience rewarded, his talons sunk deep into her throat?

Jessica started from the dream just as her body hurled over the side of both the dream precipice and the bed. She'd once again been earnestly mindful of the blocked and retarded warnings, but that forceful, steady-like-a-tuning-fork message had kept right on, emanating from the deaf and dumb night image that she somehow knew was there to help her, despite the Grim Reaper costume it chose to appear in.

The warm yet fetid feeling emanating from the silent shadow was similar to the one she'd felt not long ago at a mountaintop shrine in Hawaii where a shaman, a psychic of sorts, had foretold her unappetizing future, which had, to a certain strange degree, already come true. The aged shaman had predicted that she would corner her prey in a land of red paths where the glinting sun would bathe all in the hue of blood orange. And then James Parry and she had in fact located Lopaka Kowona, the worst serial killer in Honolulu's history-or what was left of him-after his own people had finished with him, resorting to a primal instinct that had turned her stomach.

Now the old shaman's words rang anew in her ears during every silent moment, as if he had not been speaking of Hawaii at all, but of Oklahoma, U.S.A., where the red earth mingled with a bloody sun and an even bloodier new manhunt for the escaped madman, Matthew Matisak. The manhunt had come to a dead end after the initial find of an assortment of bloodless bodies in Oklahoma, Matisak having drained his victims of their precious heart's milk.

Using an ordinary surge machine found in a nearby barn, the monster had only become more hideous and resourceful since his original captivity two and a half years before.

“ Alone with the Devil,” she mourned aloud. “At three in the morning anyone's allowed a little madness,” she continued aloud, as if speaking were an antidote, an autonomous reaction like a shiver to cold. Maybe she could find the timbre in her voice to chase off the demons.

She'd been reading before bed from a volume of Mark Twain's writings still on the table just above her head. Maybe she'd try to go back to Samuel Clemens's witticisms for respite. Three in the morning and she couldn't sleep. Was it the Prozac? Some people had a marked increase in insomnia as a side effect. Or was it the disturbing, unseeable, untouchable visitor now nightly in bed with her? “Fuck this,” she shouted to the room, still sitting on the floor beside her bed. She drew up her knees and rocked back and forth, tears freely coming even as her father's faraway words whispered in her ear: “Be strong, Jess… be brave, but don't ignore informed fear.”

Outside, both at her door and below in the lobby, armed and ready, special agents of the FBI guarded her as if she were the First Lady. This annoyed her no end. It was a condition placed on her by Bureau Chief Paul Zanek, and she was damned sick of it altogether after the first week, much less now after six agonizing months-the length of time Matisak had remained at large.

She was sick of playing the victim; sick of being the hunted instead of the hunter; sick of Matisak's having turned her life inside out; sick of the games and the psychological toying he performed with each murder, leaving word at each slaughterhouse that it was all done for her, so that he would be strong, healthy and in control when he came for her. Sick of other agents thinking she had somehow been responsible for the fiend's latest kill spree.

What was worse yet was the fact that her once-pleasant, protective apartment had now become her compound, her cage. Working sporadically on cases at the lab with bodyguards over each shoulder hadn't helped the situation.

She snatched at the bedside table, foolishly grabbing a handful of wires and turning over her clock and telephone, sending up a cacophony of metallic noise and crying out, “Dammit! I want out of this bloody Hell!”

Instantly her bedroom was invaded by two armed men in neatly attired suits and ties, prepared to blow away all evil, but quite literally unable to do so, their steady eyes and guns searching for the invisible intruder that never was, save in her mind.

“ Take it easy, Sims, damnit all!” Her arms waving, she told Loydd Sims, shift commander this watch, “Just a bad night.”

“ Sorry, ma'am, but when we heard you shout-”

“ Please, just get the hell out of my place. Go back to Zanek and tell him for me that I've given you notice. You're relieved of command. Go find a movie, sports or rock star to protect, or a goddamned thoroughbred or show dog insured by Lloyds of London to cover. Go on, do it!”

“ I have my orders, Dr. Coran,” replied Sims with an unbecoming frown. He was a tall, strong young man, and his arms far more than his guns might have comforted her, but his and his partner's gung-ho presence did little to help her disposition.”Your orders, huh? Your orders are my fucking life, Sims! Do you and Zanek know that?”

“ You'll have to take that up with the Chief, Dr. Coran.” He jerked his head toward the door, an indication to his partner that they'd best leave.

She threw a shoe at the door as it closed. Then she cried in great, heaving sobs. “I'm a goddamned prisoner here. In my own goddamned apartment, I'm a prisoner.”

She determined to go over Zanek's head, take her argument to the new division commander, Santiva, to see what a higher authority could do for her. She didn't particularly want to piss Zanek off, however, so she'd have to do what was necessary in the discreetest of political fashion. Once she convinced the new guy to look at things from her point of view, she'd ask him to give it to Zanek in such a way as to provide Zanek with an out, and at the same time perhaps make Zanek think that it was his idea in the first place. Santiva could manipulate Paul Zanek to recognize that it was in the best interest of all involved that Dr. Jessica Coran be returned to field-assignment duties immediately. She even had a case in mind, something that'd been brewing for some time now in New Orleans.

She wouldn't dwell on the fact that no matter where she was assigned, she'd be standing bait for the menacing, escaped madman who was stalking her. It was the only way left to draw the bastard out, she believed, to bait him into the open and to face him down once and for all and for good. Either way, an end, a closure to this nightmare was required if she were ever to enjoy sanity and peace in her life again.

She grabbed the brown clasp envelope J.T. had pushed on her, telling her it was given him by the police commissioner of New Orleans. She poured its contents over her bed and began to read the news clippings on what reporters in the Crescent City were calling the “Have-a-Heart” murders, which were largely centered around the French Quarter, gay and cross-dressing men being the victims. She began to read in earnest, the information making her heart race far more than Mark Twain had.

Good friend and lab partner, J.T., and he was so very right. At least someone understood. He'd told her that she should get back to doing what she did best, that she was right to be upset, and that she should take on the New Orleans case. Her analytical mind told her she was ready, even if the right side of her brain and her emotions were screaming, tolling warning bells that must be keeping up all of Quantico, Virginia.

Richard Stephens, police commissioner in New Orleans, Louisiana, had done the sights and had taken the tours and was about fed up with the arm's-length treatment he'd received from FBI Bureau Chief Paul Zanek here at Quantico. At three in the morning, he was still restless and unable to sleep, so he returned to the files that littered the table in Quantico's only inn, a bed-and-breakfast called the Debonshire. It seemed that lately manila file folders had become a large part of his life, and the longer he stayed in Quantico, Virginia, the more worrisome his mission had become.

Meanwhile, back in New Orleans, party-goers were behaving in as strange and twisted a manner as many L.A. residents during the O.J. Simpson cut-and-run debacle of '94. He knew the diehard New Orleans revelers, and could imagine them singing the Bonnie Raitt song “Have a Heart” and toasting the latest serial killing of a gay man in the Big Easy-four known and linked now. Meanwhile gay activists and human rights groups were calling for a complete overhaul of city government and the NOPD for perceived wrongs and a perceived callousness and indifference on the part of elected officials and city employees such as himself. The heat was enough to have both the mayor and the governor of the state on the phone, chewing out Stephens's ass for circumstances beyond his control. But with Lew Meade's direction, he'd wound himself through and around the FBI bureaucracy from Meade's Louisiana branch office to here, just outside D.C.

The news from Landry at the NOPD was neither forthcoming nor useful when it finally arrived here, and Stephens was feeling like a man who'd crawled out on the limb of a twig blowing in a gale and about to snap. Some damned thing had to be done, and it had to be done soon, tomorrow, and if Zanek couldn't give him satisfaction, he'd take it to a higher level. He had one more chain he might yank.

He nervously fidgeted about the material he'd already read, information about this psychic detective Zanek had been pushing on him, Dr. Kim Desinor, something of an FBI secret, as her files indicated, since the agency did not wish her identity and the fact she was a psychic to be generally known. Her credentials were impressive, if they could be believed, but he wasn't so sure he did believe that the cases in question wouldn't have been solved without her intervention.

He pushed Desinor's file aside and again stared through the case files of Dr. Jessica Coran. He'd read her impressive record with great interest. She'd be a perfect foil and possible temporary replacement for that drunken scoundrel Frank Wardlaw back in New Orleans. Her experience with serial killers far exceeded anything Wardlaw or anyone else on the “Hearts” murder investigation had ever fucking seen. Stephens read of her experience with Mad Matthew Matisak in Chicago, the complex Claw case in New York City, and the equally puzzling Kowona case in Hawaii, in which all she'd had to go on was a single limb from one of the victims!

No doubt about it, Coran was something of a miracle worker when it came to laboratory work and minutiae-from fibers to blood samples taken at the scene. Of the two, scientific sleuth or psychic detective, Stephens clearly had his own preference. He would continue to argue for Dr. Coran's help tomorrow morning in Zanek's office.

He went to the window and looked out over the green and manicured villagelike Quantico, Virginia. It was an extremely small town with a population of a mere 690-with a nearby marine corps base and FBI Headquarters, both of them with many thousands of people who otherwise had minimal contact or ties with the town. What few high-rise buildings there were in the area had cropped up as government-subsidized housing for base and FBI personnel who preferred to live on the other side of the fences but very near the compounds and the action. Dr. Coran lived in one of these nearby residences, and he'd made some minimal contact with her through a secondary, not Zanek.

Stephens cranked open the small French window and filled his lungs with the clear Virginia night air. The place was in stark contrast to his city of jazz and nightlife; Quantico was by comparison the quietest place on earth, but in the distance he could see the lighted towers of the newest buildings on the FBI grounds where men and women worked around the clock at the largest crime lab in the world. Stark contrasts seemed the order of the day.

The town, the military base and the FBI compound, which looked for all outward appearances like a large, red-bricked private college, were all nestled together in an idyllic Virginia hills setting where the greatest depravity seemed to be crimes of fashion, or the occasional grammatical infraction, parking violation or unpaid ticket-and even these were rare.

Still, Washington was twenty minutes away via the turnpike, and the nearby FBI Headquarters with its compound and gates remained a constant reminder that crime in all its guises was a nationwide, problem in America, a problem so out of proportion that the president, in his last speech, had called it the greatest civil war fought on the continent since the War Between the States.

New Orleans was having it out with crime on the streets, like any other major American city, and always had. But recently, the statistics had been rising to the point that no breathing space was left for the drowning citizenry-or the authorities, for that matter. In one tavern window in the French Quarter, where thousands of tourists passed by in any given afternoon, a sign had been put up by the bar owner which read:

A Tale of Two Cities…

Total murders to date this year:

New Orleans, pop. 475, 000-184

Boston Mass., pop. 565, 000-34

January 1, 1995, thru May 28, 1995

(150 days)

The wire services had picked up the story and run photos of the freaking sign, and the soaring murder rate had placed Stephens's city into the dubious race for the “Nation's Murder Capital,” replacing the “Nation's Mardi Gras Capital” in the minds of many. Tourism and industry and the city's economy were at jeopardy. Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and boozy Bourbon Street aside, there was an important billion-dollar deal in the works with the prospect of a government contract being offered to the city.

“ Christ,” Stephens said aloud. Zen and the art of politics. The Big Easy was now being called the Big Uneasy and entire neighborhoods were arming themselves, hiring private guard patrols; men and women alike were purchasing the new handbags and carryalls which allowed them to hold firmly to the trigger of a gun inside the bag at all times. It was a gun dealer's delight, and alarm companies were thriving as well.

A recent classified ad in the Times-Picayune had offered a New Orleans Murder Map, a tricolored, eleven-by-seventeen deal showing areas with highest crime rates, noting the most widely publicized and sensational cases-as with the Japanese exchange student who was blown away by a frightened home owner a few years back. Stephens had purchased copies of the damnable ugly map himself, had taken them down to each of his precinct captains, had blown it out their asses and had the bloody things posted in every freaking squad room in the city as a constant reminder of what every foot soldier and every sergeant, lieutenant and captain in this war had to remember. The battle lines were drawn and there was more than one front.

It was a national disgrace for New Orleans and its police force when people in New Jersey and Chicago were saying, “Everyone's heard that you can't raise children in New Orleans, that you all are murdering one another at top speed there.”

Stephens nervously stepped away from the window and paced the room. He'd been told in no uncertain terms by the governor himself that if the “Have-a-Heart” killer was not located and behind bars soon, then P.C. Stephens might as well turn in his shield, that he had no future in New Orleans. The city needed a show; the city needed a scapegoat, a diversion, even a three-ringed circus if it took that. He had to make the right choices from here on out, and to hell with what the detectives and the captains back home wanted.

He found the booze that had traveled with him all the way from New Orleans. He imagined himself in a new line of work, maybe that of a smuggler, getting the best from Bourbon Street, say, into Mexico or Canada, where they'd pay top dollar for the stuff. He laughed at the notion, but he had been thinking about going into another line of work when this was over, pulling up stakes, maybe retiring, who knows? Hell, he was nearing fifty-seven, a fine record up until recently… What did he have to lose? What did he have to gain? Maybe keep what hair he had left and hold back the wrinkles a bit longer, settle that bleeding ulcer…

He poured himself a half-tumbler of the bourbon over ice- a potion he had to have, despite doctor's orders. He stared momentarily into the deep, brown liquid as he swirled it around. It was difficult these days to take pleasure even in the simplest indulgence. God, how long had it been since he'd been with a woman? he silently asked himself.

New Orleans had had 389 homicides the past year, a fifty-eight-percent increase over the 246 in 1989. On a per-capita basis-and damn per-capita statistics anyway, he thought- that placed

his city ahead of Washington, D.C., and goddamned Detroit! As of May 28th, Washington had reported 146 homicides, while New Orleans had had 184.

Stephens was sick of hearing excuses from his captains, as when Carl Landry, defending his department and detectives, had said that the crime rate climbs significantly in the oppressive heat of a New Orleans summer. The year before thirty-one people were slain in June, forty-seven in July and forty-three in August. All Stephens knew was that, at the present rate, the city was headed for an all-time record in the neighborhood of five hundred homicides this year, and that averaged out at over one hundred victims per 100,000 citizens. Little wonder the higher-ups were concerned and skittish about their vital tourism and convention business, for although attacks on tourists were rare, and the French Quarter maintained the greatest concentration of police and boasted one of the lowest crime rates, soaring kill ratios and sensationalized stories-particularly about the “Heartthrob” killer who had killed in the French Quarter-had garnered nationwide attention.

“ Jesus H. Christ,” Stephens uttered between sips of his bourbon, taking a seat. Was it his fault or the fault of the police or the system when some 235 of those 389 people slain last year had been dispatched by someone they knew, mostly family members, and 131 of the killings had involved arguments, usually over trivial and stupid items? As of now ll0 remained unsolved, the victim-killer relationship as yet unknown, but only forty-nine of the victims were known to have been killed by strangers. And 174 of the victims were kids between fifteen and twenty-four. Kids killing kids. Kids without any values or sense of morality or sense of life's sanctity.

He lifted Jessica Coran's folder off the coffee table before him, and he again stared at her photo. She was a strikingly beautiful woman with eyes as hard as steel. He toyed with the idea of contacting her directly, perhaps to set up a breakfast meeting, get his wishes out in the open, see how she might respond, but he immediately thought better of the notion. After all, the FBI functioned as a paramilitary operation, and if Zanek got wind of his meeting alone with his agent, it could blow the whole deal.

Still, he had it on good authority that she had gotten the materials he'd forwarded, a thorough set of clippings and files that recounted the list of victims in New Orleans, and anything new was E-mailed to him on an hourly basis. He had worked through a fellow he'd met at the FBI laboratory only the day before, a Dr. John T. Thorpe, who had assured him that Jessica Coran would get the information. The younger man had even said that it was the kind of case Dr. Coran could get excited about.

“ Dear God, I hope so,” he said to the empty room, tossing Jessica's file back onto the table and going back to the disarray that was his bed, praying now he might get some sleep. Beside his bed, a second bottle of bourbon awaited his grasp. He poured a final nightcap, shut off the light and lay still, hopeful and anxious.