Pure Instinct

14

Jessica Coran marched up to Stephens and said, “I want to see yesterday's victim immediately.”

Stephens turned from the reporters who were pushing forward, attempting to get a word from the woman they only knew as Special Agent Jessica Coran of the FBI. He took her aside while his aides dealt with the press. “Wouldn't you care for a break, something to eat maybe, a chance to unpack?”

“ Right now, no, just yesterday's body. Can you get me to the morgue without a lot of hubbub and press on my heels, Commissioner?”

“ Sure, sure… we can arrange that easily enough. You've got to transport the evidence of this crime scene anyway, right?''

She nodded, agreeing to the protocol that said she must at all times be under guard so long as she was transporting medico-legal evidence.

“ I must say I was a bit disappointed in our psychic friend this morning,” he confided in what seemed an unnecessarily conspiratorial tone.

“ Yes, well… no one bats a thousand, as they say, and being upstaged by the eel… well, it effectively shut down the show, didn't it? What is it actors say about working with animals?'' Jessica immediately regretted the theatrical comparisons, knowing that Kim didn't deserve this and wondering why she felt so compelled to view the psychic detective as her competition.

Stephens now led her to a police car, ordering the uniformed officers there to see that she and her evidence arrived safely and efficiently at the precinct, where every item would become part of a manifest of murder. The integrity of the evidence depended upon a scrupulous cataloging of each article and substance she'd collected at the scene, all of it then placed under lock and key to maintain the integrity of the data.

This was quickly done after a ride across the city, and from the evidence room, it was a short walk to the morgue via a tunnel that ended at the lower depths of the Tulane University Hospital extension, a highly regarded state-of-the-art teaching facility.

Inside an hour and a half, she was standing over a stainless-steel, revolving slab on which yesterday's nameless victim lay cold and earthen to the touch, the flesh and features turned to a claylike caricature of what they had once been. Into the room stepped Dr. Franklin Wardlaw, and for a moment the large man with his piercing, steel-gray eyes simply stared over his mask at Jessica as if she were lost.

“ The autopsy was only begun yesterday when I was interrupted by your superior Meade, P.C. Stephens and a political hack by the name of Fouintenac,” Dr. Ward law began, his voice like a biting metal file in her ear. She'd ostensibly replaced the man in his own hospital.

She didn't know quite what to say, but she could empathize with the scene he described. “Removed while in the middle of an autopsy? That's unconscionable, really.”

“ Fouintenac-whom I've never seen before-did as nice a job on me as this poor slob got.” He indicated the decapitated body lying before them. “I was curious about the decapitation, you know, since it was such a departure from the other victims and-”

She agreed instantly. “My thought too, absolutely.”

“ So here I was, staring down at the wounds, when P.C. Stephens had me bodily removed. My lawyers are fighting that action now, and have gotten a cease-and-desist order against the city and Commissioner Stephens until we go to court. The injunction holds for the time being, Dr. Coran, and so we are stuck with one another, I'm afraid… at least for now.”

She didn't miss a beat, replying, “In the meantime, then, I will assist you as best I can, Dr. Wardlaw.”

This only made him stare even harder at her, as if he suspected her of some false pretense-and to a degree, he was correct. It was a standard line meant to place the local M.E., pathologist or crime lab technician at ease. Still, she felt some compassion for the older medical professional who had slipped from grace. So she continued, saying,”And I can only hope you will accept my presence here in the spirit in which I've traveled here, to offer my full cooperation and that of the FBI.”

“ You have no idea the embarrassment, the shame they've caused me. Well, I'm not taking it lying down, and Stephens will be sorry for the day he sided against me.”

“ I was M.E. in Washington, D.C., some years before I became an agent, Dr. Wardlaw. I know about the ugly political aspects of the M.E.'s office.”

“ You were on staff at what hospital?”

“ Washington Memorial.”

“ As a junior pathologist?”

“ No, no… I was their M.E., the designated city coroner for D.C.”

“ Really? I must say that's impressive for one who looks so young.”

“ I started young, and believe me, all my life I've witnessed how narrow and stupid the bureaucrats can be.” She quickly recalled for Wardlaw's benefit a time when even her father was “let go” by a city as its M.E. In this respect, New Orleans was far behind the times; no municipal employee, including the mayor of the city, ought to have the right to summarily fire the city medical examiner. It smacked crisply of conflict of interest. An M.E. should answer to only one god-scientific truth. Knowing little of Wardlaw other than what she'd read in his reports, Jessica withheld any personal judgments about the doctor. However, it was true that his paperwork, at least on the Hearts case involving Victor Surette, was lacking. Her attitude seemed to have surprised Wardlaw, who was prepared with an angry, hell-raising speech but had not prepared a conciliatory word. He hemmed and hawed a moment before Jessica added, “Dr. Wardlaw, I'm glad to see that you've chosen to fight. There're too few of us M.E.'s in the country willing to fight for our basic rights as is.”

“ Your concern, Doctor, is deeply touching.” His bitterness had dissolved, any earlier sarcasm now dispelled by her charms. Now only his annoying smoker's cough and drinker's breath filled the room.

“ It was never my intent to have you removed, sir, I promise you that.”

“ Very well, then. Shall we go to work before that snake doctor they hired comes poking around?”

She smiled behind her own mask at his theatrical allusion to Kim Desinor. “My sentiments exactly.” In fact, she'd rushed here to get to the body before Kim had a chance to do her psychometric reading.

“ Science can't possibly outmaneuver the ramblings of a psychic, and certainly we can't hope to outpace the witch,” continued an irate Wardlaw. “Science and truth take too much time for the press, the public and the powerful concerned with holding office.”

“ I don't know her well enough to call her a witch, Dr. Wardlaw,” replied Jessica. “However, it was my intention to get as far and as fast as possible here before she arrived, yes.”

“ Then we agree on something.”

“ I hope that we can agree on many some things here today.”

“ Hmmmm…” He contemplated this, then reached out and snatched the dull white sheet from the cadaver with one even thrust, the sheet spiraling up and away like a ghost. “Then examine the neck wounds and tell me precisely how this fellow lost his head.”

She smiled at the challenge. Wardlaw was tall with hard-edged lines, an Abe Lincoln cast in granite, sorrow molded to him like some stone shroud. He was weary of seeing the kinds of atrocities that big city crime had routinely to show him, and she could well believe that the recent flurry of unholy terror which came to him in the form of cut-up young men whose hearts had been removed for God knows what unnatural cause or ritual might easily have thrown the man into a tailspin of self-destruction.

His surgeon's hands were as large as a pair of cast-iron skillets, thick blunted fingers, dark, gray, sensitive and cold as the casket itself, she thought. She guessed from his features, particularly the flat, flaring nose and natty hair, that he was certainly as much African-American as he was white, perhaps some Creole or Cajun blood there.

He pointed with his scalpel to a camera on the ceiling which had been activated with the push of a button. “We're on, Dr. Coran. Want to smile for Big Brother?”

She wondered if one of Stephens's lackeys was watching at the other end of the TV monitor somewhere; wondered if the commissioner had Dr. Wardlaw on video film in an inebriated state here in his own operating room-not that he could do much harm to the “patient patient,” though he could easily harm the evidentiary proceedings. If so, Wardlaw might well save his lawyers' fees.

Jessica rattled off the requisite information for the camera: time of day, cadaver tag, age, height, weight and sex of the victim, finishing with the victim's name, John Doe for the moment. After only a few minutes of close scrutiny over the neck wounds, she saw that the greatest gash was to the rear of the neck at the base of the skull rather than below the chin, so that if the killer had used a meat cleaver, he'd chopped at the head in execution style, from the rear. But it was by no means a clean cut; in fact it was a ghastly tear that'd made several strange rents, none of them looking like clean incisions. Either the killer had used a very dull blade and had had to repeatedly hack at the victim's neck, or something entirely different had occurred to John Doe.

“ This looks like the work of a… a machine of some sort,” she said.

“ Go on, Doctor,” he urged her.

“ A… like a propeller… a small but powerful, three-bladed propeller.”

“ And you may recall that the body was found by a group of fishermen, and fishermen do as much drinking as fishing, and they're not always careful about watching where they're headed, and none of them follow the speed rules, striking floating manatees and gators all the time.”

“ A boat propeller… the propeller severed the head,” she decided.

“ Not completely, but damned near, and the poor handling of the body from water to shore did the rest, but like the fishermen who left out the fact they'd hit the body where it bobbed in the water, no one wanted to own up to the fact that the head later tore loose. Honesty's hard to come by.”

“ Well, they might've saved your office a lot of time and effort, and nobody wanted that.” Her sarcasm, which he seemed very much to appreciate, was met with a hearty laugh on his part. Not likely that he'd had much to laugh about lately.

“ Nobody much thinks about the demands of my office, Doctor. You don't actually know anyone who really, truly gives a damn out there, do you, Dr. Coran?”

“ No, I'm no longer gullible about people, not any more than you are, Doctor.” She breathed in deeply the pungent odors of the room. “No… leastways, I shouldn't be.”

“ Still, truth dies hard…”

“ Okay, so the victim wasn't beheaded by the killer.” Score one up for science over seance, she thought. Although Dr. Desinor hadn't been up to bat on this one yet, both M.E. s were confident that the psychic couldn't possibly know how the head was severed from the body. Jessica silently and secretly felt good about this, that only science could clearly show the way to truth. She recalled an old and wise saying that went: In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.

“ Would you care to wager that this fellow is not one of the Queen of Hearts victims?” asked the grinning, eccentric Wardlaw, whose single gold tooth shone brightly beneath the tensor lamp where they worked.

“ That's quite a leap.”

“ Don't tell me you didn't have instant doubts yourself when you heard about the head being severed.”

“ Yes, but now we know the killer didn't sever the head, had nothing to do with the decapitation, so… so why're you still contending that this one died differently than the others? The heart was taken, after all.”

He only grinned at her like a nebbish.

“ What else do you have?”

“ I wouldn't want to prejudice you, Doctor, but give some consideration for this man's age and the semen found adhering in the throat. Just minute traces, but rather interesting since none of the other transvestite and gay victims were sexually molested.”

“ He's older, maybe early to mid-thirties?”

“ Precisely.”

“ Someone killed him and tried very hard to cover the murder by using the Queen of Hearts cases as a model? A copy cat killing? But this killer didn't count on the beheading, and only guessed at the semen since he knew all the victims were gay.”

“ In my estimation, all true, yes.”

“ Interesting premise.”

“ More than a premise.”

“ Really?”

“ The seminal fluid found in the mouth has been matched.”

“ Matched? Matched to whom?”

“ To the John Doe here.”

“ You're telling me that the semen in his mouth was his own?”

“ That's right. Now you must ask yourself who was close enough to this poor SOB to have that kind of access and control of the man's own semen?”

“ Someone damned close to him, I'd imagine.”

“ You play this game well, Doctor.”

“ Now if we only knew who he was. Fingerprints turn up anything?''

“ Not so far, but I think they will.”

“ Really, how can you be so sure?”

Wardlaw pointed out a cheap, half-botched tattoo on the man's right biceps with the word “Beau” spelled out across a heart. “A prison tattoo perhaps?” she asked.

“ Almost appropriate, heh?” asked Wardlaw.

“ Just be careful, Dr. Wardlaw. If they're out to get you, just remember that an error is more dangerous the more truth it contains.”

“ An ancient proverb?”

“ Call it the M.E.'s creed nowadays.”

Settled into the bustling downtown hotel room with its balustrade balcony overlooking beautiful Lake Ponchartrain, where a late afternoon sun painted broad-stroked shadows over the water, Kim Desinor had managed to shake the jet lag and the unsettled stomach which the eel had left her with. A pleasant shower and a leisurely nap had helped restore her scattered energies, and thankfully yet strangely, no one had interrupted her here with a phone call.

The very authorities who'd gotten her here weren't particularly anxious to spend time with her; at first she'd thought perhaps she was being overly sensitive, paranoid, but now she knew better. Stephens and Meade had purposely avoided her, casting their lot with the known commodity, Dr. Jessica Coran. Whether they wished to be or not, apparently she and Jessica were in some sort of competition here.

She changed and called for an escort to the morgue. She wanted more time and privacy with the murdered man she had seen at the wharf.

When the unmarked police car carrying her across town arrived at the morgue, she learned that Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw were just finishing up an autopsy on the victim of the day before. She heard scuttlebutt that this particular victim of the Queen of Hearts killer might not be another Hearts case at all, but rather a coverup, what they called a copycat killing, in which the murderer masked his moves by duplicating those of a previous murderer.

She asked around and located the autopsy room where the two doctors were just emerging. Not wishing to see or confront anyone at the moment, wishing to remain in a calm and undisturbed state, Kim ducked into an adjacent, empty room where cold-storage freezers lined the wall. Hearing the doctors pass by, she bided her time, and then surreptitiously entered the autopsy room from which they'd emerged.

A tag hung limp from the dead man's toe, the only visible portion of the body below the Dacron-sheet shroud. She moved closer, knowing that at any moment a lab assistant might walk in to claim the body for one of the freezers in the next room.

It was cold in here, a constant seventy-two, the hum of the A.C. and the outtake fans, which kept a steady, healthy flow of air uniformly and continually moving through, doing nothing to dispel the odors of death which permeated the walls. She lifted out the curling, black rosary beads which seemed to have a life of their own, wishing to slither from her grasp, the shining crystal cross blinking at her. She clutched the beads tightly to her chest in a firm ball made of her fist. With her other hand, she reached out and lightly placed her fingertips atop the dead man's chest, feeling the prickly sutures beneath the sheet, placed there by Jessica Coran. Even the light force she next placed against the chest caused it to sag a little. The touch was like that of a worn beanbag.

Wait a moment, she silently told herself, an ugly image of a headless man flashing before her mental eyes. “This isn't today's victim, but yesterday's.”

She pulled back the sheet far enough to reveal the truth of her belief. She had gotten the distinct impression from all she'd read and heard about yesterday's beheaded victim that he was somehow different, but aside from the severed head, she didn't know what about him was so unusual until now.

Sincebaugh and Coran had both discovered differences, following along varied paths. She sensed the truth of this. She concentrated, moving toward trance state, asking the dead man to reveal to her these differences.

It became a mantra in her mind: What's different… what's different… what's different…

She knew that Alex and perhaps deYampert had seen that this one was dissimilar to the others, especially since the victim's head had been severed, but there were other peculiarities as well. Her brief and curtailed reading over the other dead man on the wharf had conjured up images of furious rage and sexual repression, lust killing and mutilation, but here with her hands firmly against this John Doe, she was getting a quiet despondency, a despair and a disbelief that rose off the corpse like the saddest of whale songs.

Despite the obvious similarities, this man's means of death was not at all the same as the death faced by the victims of the Hearts killer. This fellow had died peacefully, calmly, not knowing his fate, his wounds and mutilations coming long after death had set in, no doubt as the pathologists' combined reports would be reflecting. This man had not seen the eyes of his killer or the knife as it was wielded. He'd been astonished at his killer, amazed, overwhelmed in a deep, psychic sense, completely awed far more than he was frightened, and he'd died in disbelief at the actions of his killer. While there'd been no suffering like the brutalization played out over the other victims, his death being a relatively easy one for he'd been poisoned by an overdose of barbituates, the victim remained confused and painfully inconsolable at what she had done to him. His killer was a woman, a woman he'd loved. Something Coran's thorough autopsy could hardly show. Kim wondered who here would believe her.

She peeled the sheet back further, indulging her eyes at the line of neat sutures that had put head and torso back together again, the stitches creating a patchwork mosaic against the alabaster skin. All the king's horses and all the king's men, she thought, couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. She didn't know why, but she had the sensation that he was kiddingly referred to by his friends as an egghead or thin-shelled.

She studied the body further, examining it with eyes and fingers until she was stopped by the tattoo on the biceps.

She only felt a cold, hard-eyed creature staring back from afar, and beyond these ice green eyes indistinct and distant images of a rough-hewn log cabin and a woman who was several hundred miles away. Who was the woman, where was the cabin? It wasn't in or around New Orleans, possibly not even in the state. She was sure of only one thing, and to set Alex Sincebaugh on his ass, maybe she ought to confide it to him now.

She heard someone behind her start and gasp, taken by surprise at her being in the room. The young assistant looked too frail and juvenile-her hair done up in a ponytail-to be here doing this kind of work. But the young woman found her nerve and demanded, “Just whoooo are you? No one's 'spos-ed to be in here without proper authorization.” She came directly into the room now and thrust the sheet back over the cadaver, asking again, “Who are you?”

The spell was broken but not before Kim knew who the killer was and what her relationship to the dead man had been. She wondered if sharing her newfound knowledge with Alex Sincebaugh might not help their already teetering relationship. Listen here, Lieutenant, she wanted to shout, yesterday's victim, the headless one… “Yeah, what about it?” he'd gruffly reply.

“ You can't be here!” The M.E.'s technician was pulling her away from the body now. “Do you know the deceased?” she asked. “We've been unable to identify him. You'd better talk with Dr. Wardlaw.”

“ I am Dr. Kim Desinor. I was told that I could do a psychometric reading over the body of the Hearts victim. I was given clearance to do so.”

“ Nobody told us down here a thing about it, Dr… ahhh-''

“ Desinor, Dr. Kim Desinor. I'm going to be on the case for a while, and I'd like your-and everyone's-help and cooperation, Miss… ahhh-”

“ Penwarren, ma'am, Amy. Still, I think you should come away with me to Dr. Wardlaw's office.”

“ That'll be just fine, Amy. I think I've got what I've come for.” She found Jessica Coran in Wardlaw's labyrinthian laboratory located just off his office, the two of them finishing up reports, prepping tissue and blood samples, discussing the case like old friends, obviously having formed some common bond, M.E. to M.E. she gathered.

“ The Hearts killer didn't do yesterday's victim,” she announced to them. “Someone answering to the name of Beau, a woman, killed him, very likely someone who placed a missing person's report on him. I'm calling Sincebaugh to ask him to follow that lead.”

The two medical doctors stared at her, wondering. The technician spoke behind Kim, saying, “I found Dr. Desinor in with yesterday's John Doe when I went in for the body. She was… examining it.”

Jessica's look of astonishment dimmed quickly. “Ahhh, you saw the tattoo, then.” Jessica paused long enough to introduce Wardlaw and Kim to one another.

“ I did more than read the man's tattoos, believe me,” Kim said now. “You'll find that he was poisoned by his live-in lover or wife. She did the rest of the damage after death, all meant to cover her tracks.”

Wardlaw's jaw went slack and Jessica's awe crept back across her face. Wardlaw said, “There's no way you can know either fact.” “There is one way. The dead man told me so. Can I use your phone, Dr. Wardlaw?”

It was late afternoon now, and Kim was told that Alex Sincebaugh had gone off duty and wasn't likely to return. So she asked for his captain.

Later, in his office, Landry was polite, listening to what she had to say, and he promised to follow up on her information, saying that he'd get Missing Persons on it immediately.

“ I think you'll find some surprising results,” she promised.

“ You're convinced then that the man pulled from the river at Gretna yesterday has no bearing on the Hearts case other than in gross and superficial similarities?”

“ Absolutely and well put, Captain.”

“ Interesting…”

She heard more in this single word than he'd wished to convey, she was sure. “You've theorized as much already?” she asked now.

“ Not me… Alex Sincebaugh.”

“ Really? He does sound like a remarkably intuitive detective, Captain.”

“ That he is…that he is…”

“ I'm sure the age difference and the decapitation must have instantly alerted him.”

“ Yes, but what alerted you, Doctor?”

“ Of course, I saw the same when I looked in on the body this afternoon.”

“ We'd already put out a call to Missing Persons, knowing of the tattoo and other distinguishing marks,” he told her, which explained why he'd been so calm about her revelations.

“ Yes, understandable,” she replied, “but did you also know that the man was poisoned?”

“ Poisoned?”

“ And that the mutilation occurred after death?”

Landry asked, “Does Coran have any scientific proof to back you on this call?”

“ She will, in time.”

“ She'd told me that it was highly unlikely that the Queen of Hearts killer would suddenly escalate to beheadings and then not repeat the performance on his next victim. Said the usual escalation signs would be repeated, and then when we got this morning's cadaver, well, neither she nor anyone else could tell me which man was killed first, the Gretna body or the Toulouse Wharf body.”

Kim stood up and paced Landry's office, a place filled with bric-a-brac-supplied almost entirely by his wife, he'd said. She took in a deep breath before plunging ahead. “In time, Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw will discover that yesterday's victim was killed by some poison, most likely downers, barbi-tuates ingested with a meal.” Landry could only scratch the back of his head and wonder at the chutzpah shown by this handsome woman before him. She had just climbed out on one hell of a shaky limb, unless she had somehow gotten information out of Wardlaw or one of his assistants as to how they were leaning in the lab. He made a mental note to check with Coran and Wardlaw the moment he was finished with Dr. Desinor. Most likely the so-called psychic had simply picked up some clues from Jessica Coran and had merely extrapolated from something she might have been guessing at or mulling over.

“ We've been running this through our Missing Persons Department since discovery yesterday, but nothing's come of it. As I said, I'll give it a push.”

“ Widen your sweep. Include surrounding states-say, Texas. Something about Texas clicked in earlier, something about a lone star… steers… a Texas penal colony…”

“ All right, will do, Dr. Desinor. Anything else you think I should know about?”

She could hear the skepticism in his voice even as he choked it back.

“ Obviously, you weren't instrumental in getting me on board here, Captain,” she said.

He waved that off, saying, “Now hold on. I've extended you every courtesy.”

“ Crazily enough, you've extended me far more courtesy than those who are paying my fee.”

He raised an eyebrow at this, but only repeated himself, asking, “Is there anything else you'd like to add to your… ahhhh…report, Doctor?''

“ No, that's it, except when your men check, have them look for a Beau, someone answering to that name.”

“ Gotcha, Doctor.”

“ Could be a nickname, and as I said, I believe he was poisoned by a wife or live-in lover. Could be her nick name.”

He waved her out the door, nodding in an officious manner. She stepped out into the squad room, and instantly knew which vacant desk belonged to Alex Sincebaugh. It was far neater than any other in the room. When she raised her eyes, she found herself staring up at Jessica Coran, who was leaning against an entry way door jamb, looking exhausted but pleasantly pleased with herself. She must enjoy her work thoroughly, Kim thought.

“ So, do you think we're all on the same wavelength, Dr. Faith?” asked Jessica.

“ Yes, matter of fact we all are, including our reluctant Lieutenant Sincebaugh.”

“ Really?”

“ Want to get dinner and talk about it?” Kim offered. “I'm buying.”

“ Frankly, I need to get away from it… altogether for a while. Besides, I have a date.”

“ The pilot?”

“ Yeah… so, maybe a rain check?”

“ Jessica.” Kim stopped her colleague as she was about to go. Jessica turned and looked demurely back at her. “Yes?”

“ We're not in any sort of… competition here, are we?”

“ Why, no, of course not. We're on the same side, right?”

“ I had hoped so, but I haven't felt so.”

“ If I've seemed…distant… well, it's for the benefit of the charade actually, to keep your association with the Bureau our little secret, remember.”

She's lying… covering up her true feelings, Kim instantly realized.

Jessica continued, running a nervous hand through her hair. “What would it look like to the others if you and I were… chummy? Well, I've still got to freshen up, meet Ed by eight.”

Kim nodded and breathed deeply. “Yes, you're right, of course. But listen, any time you want, I'd be happy to handle those items you took from Matisak's cell, as a favor to you, Jess.”

“ Maybe tomorrow. Good night, Kim.”

“ Night, Jess.” Now she's so reluctant, Kim thought, when before, on the plane, she was so anxious.

It appeared that Wardlaw had beaten them both out the door, for he was nowhere to be found either, and Kim felt terribly hollow and unconditionally alone.