Pure Instinct

17

IAD had advised Alex to remain home until the incident at Tully's was officially declared a righteous bust, and that he was cleared of any wrongdoing in the discharge of his weapon. Still, he reasoned that since no one was so much as grazed by a bullet, and since he'd wounded only a trash can on firing in the line of duty, Sincebaugh took them at their word: Advised meant advised.

He had too damned much to do at headquarters to slack off now, and so at precisely three P.M. the next day, the beginning of his new rotation, he was standing in the middle of the squad room with all eyes upon him. From the cold stares, he knew something was up.

Dr. Jessica Coran had no doubt filled the captain's ear with a lot of technical forensics jargon that he'd need to catch up on, to see what he could learn from her about yesterday's vie. He was anxious to look at Coran's reports on the latest heartless corpse, believed to be the latest victim of the maniac he'd been pursuing since June, hoping she could provide more than Wardlaw had in the past.

He immediately sought out Ben and found him at the coffee machine, where he was on his second caffeine hit and finishing up a Snickers bar.

“ Hey, Alex, how's it hanging? You all right after last night?”

“ Couldn't be better; actually slept. Now where's the goddamned coroner's report on the body fished out at the Toulouse Wharf, which was going to be on my desk when I got in this morning-and I quote?”

“ Complications at the coroner's is all. Slow up, pal, will you?” Ben was sleepy, unaccustomed as he was to the new rotation.

“ What's that supposed to mean?”

“ You ain't heard yet?”

“ Goddamn it, Big, heard what?”

“ They're not so sure anymore that the Gretna vie is one of the Queen of Hearts killings. I thought you were told by now, that Landry would've informed you.”

Sincebaugh recalled the victim. “So what're you saying, Ben? That yesterday's victim wasn't number five?”

“ Not if they're right. If they're right, the Toulouse body's really number five since Gretna was a copycat job.”

“ What're they going on, Ben?”

“ A little of everything, I think. Either way, should make you happy. This means they're going over everything with a fine-tooth comb, going over every word you and me put to paper, and-”

“ You don't write more than a thimbleful, Big.”

DeYampert pretended not to hear. “Every lab report Ward-law's done on the case. Hell, I'd have thought you'd be pleased.”

“ Maybe I am.”

“ Got a queer way of showing it.”

“ So, they're finally thinking the Gretna body's a copycat killing now, huh?”

“ You called it first, Alex. Landry knows that you beat out Wardlaw, the FBI M.E., and the psychic on this.”

“ Sure he does.”

Alex stood there seething, wondering, trying to guess the enemy's next move. Ben tried to make light of it.

“ It's no biggy, Alex, really.”

“ Christ, Ben, are you out to lunch on this? It's time you woke up, partner. They're replacing us on the case and you're doing a tap-dance routine.”

“ Landry wants us to stay on the case. He told me so. Besides, would it be so bad if we were reassigned, Sincy? Hell, we'd both sleep better.”

“ Landry… how long do you think Landry's going to remain in charge of the investigation now that the FBI's involved. Ben? What planet are you living on?”

“ Well, god damnit, Alex…” Ben's voice was an angry whisper. “If they want the case. I say give it to 'em lock, stock and barrel. Would it be so freakin' bad? Hell, you know how it's been like with Fiona, the kids? And what about you and your damnable inability to sleep, pal?”

Sincebaugh stared across at his partner, saying nothing.

“ We're burned out on this one. Alex. We both know it.”

Sincebaugh gave his partner a glare, wondering what was on his mind and with whom he'd been talking. “So, that's the latest opinion poll?”

“ Maybe you'd better just talk to Landry or… or go see this Dr. Coran for yourself.” A strange look flitted birdlike across Ben's eyes.

“ Something's up. What is it? I felt it the minute I walked in.”

Ben frowned, looking as if he'd been caught in a lie. “Seems the captain's called in our medium to lay hands on the body, and yesterday Alex, she told 'em all that the Gretna guy was poisoned by someone close to him and hacked up later. Said his head was cut off after death too.”

“ She put it on record, just like that? When?”

“ Late yesterday.” Alex looked away, shaking his head in disbelief. “At least you two agree… seem to be on the same, you know, wavelength. Coran's report's going to back her contention too. Least that's what Carl Landry told me.”

“ What the hell do we know about this Dr. Desinor, Ben?”

“ What, you want a full background check? She's a psychic… a trance medium… a psychic detective out of Florida… Miami area…” Ben watched him closely as he continued to speak, waiting for any sign of an explosion.

“ What else?”

“ Has her own detective agency it seems… an independent, freelances, you know. Did you really get any sleep last night, Sincy?”

“ Will you quit staring at me, for Christ's sake. Ben?” Alex moaned the words. “I don't need your mothering or your psychobabbling to add to this goddamn three-ring circus we already have here, okay?”

He rushed off for the nearby hospital police morgue in the basement at Tulane where Dr. Coran must have done her work beneath blinding fluorescent tubes in rooms without windows. Alex went for the stairs that would take him down and through the lonely tunnel, too impatient and upset to take the elevator. When he got there, the dingy old facility, normally empty and silent save for a wandering technician or two, was packed full with people. Captain Landry at the center along with the police commissioner, someone from the mayor's office-that deputy mayor by the name of Fouintenac-and the New Orleans FBI Bureau Chief, Lew Meade, a man who'd hounded Sincebaugh for months now on details about the Hearts case but would give nothing back, preferring to deal at a higher administrative level that kept him from getting his hands the least dirty.

Dr. Coran stood in the rear beside Dr. Wardlaw, the medical examiners both obviously distraught and displaced by the psychic, Dr. Desinor, who was center stage amid the dignitaries, all hovering over the latest corpse, the one snatched from the Toulouse Wharf section of the Mississippi. It took Alex a moment to realize that Dr. Kim Desinor's hands were actually inside the open chest wound of the latest victim. Obviously, she'd gotten over her fear of eels, the slimy intestines causing her no compunction. She looked in a state of raw ecstasy.

“ Captain Landry,” Alex began. “What the hell's going on here, Captain?” He heard the others shushing him, and he now saw the strangest light dancing deep within Kim Desinor's luminous eyes. She didn't look like the same woman.

Her eyes-which were not hers at the moment-rose from the corpse to him with shimmering intensity, a magnetic surge going between the psychic and the cop, a terrific fire which he could not fully comprehend, and yet he felt that she'd taken something from him.

“ Shhhhh!” Landry placed both hands on Alex's chest and hustled him back through the double doors of the autopsy room. “I thought you were advised by IAD to stay out for a while.”

“ You know damned well I've got too much invested on this case to slack off now or to-”

“ That's enough, Alex. You don't own this case anymore. It's gotten too big!”

“- or see it turned over to Stephens”-he didn't slow down or hear his captain-”and… and some psychic clown he's brought with him.”

“ Lower your voice or shut up, Alex, now!”

“ To hell with it, Captain! What's going on and why wasn't I advised about your bringing in a damned psychic in the first place, and by God, if you're going to hold a frigging seance in the morgue-”

“ You were advised!”

“ Bullshit.”

“ When's the last time you took a reality check, Alex? What the hell'd you think I was talking about to you in my office the other day or when I sent you out to the airport to pick her up? This isn't a game of backgammon, and it goes without saying that we don't work in a goddamned vacuum either. We've got the eyes of the nation on us now.”

“ So Stephens calls in a psychic and the press? Then he holds a… a bloody seance over a dead guy in the morgue with Wardlaw and Coran displaced and looking on?”

“ She's made significant hits, Alex. She's extremely good!”

“ You know how this already looks to the press, Captain? How's it going to look when word leaks out about her doing a reading of the corpse down here, huh? Answer that one, Carl. You, me, all of us are going to look like we're freaking out, that we're so fucking desperate that-”

“ We are desperate, Alex… we are!” Landry, a stocky man with a large neck and broad shoulders and smoldering, yet sad gray eyes, gritted his teeth and said, “You don't get it, do you, Lieutenant. This case is going into a new phase. Now you can either be a part of that new phase, or you can be phased out, all right?”

“ No way you're taking me off the case, Captain.”

“ Well, that's a relief! What a change of heart, Lieutenant. Believe me, at this stage, that decision is not entirely up to you anymore, Alex.”

There was a long moment of silence between them. Alex held his jaw firmly set.

Captain Landry continued hollowly. “IAD brought me some interesting footage today in which you play a major role.”

“ It was a simple bust, Captain.”

“ Simple? You read those guys like a book, presupposed their actions and stopped them cold before they committed an unlawful act, Alex. Now call that what you want, IAD could make trouble for you. Hanson and Hirschenfeldt wanted to bust your ass the moment you walked through the door today, believe me.”

“ Those clowns? That's bull and you-”

“ They think they've got the crime of the century in their possession, Alex, and you are the star. I convinced them to let it be for now; I convinced them good.”

Alex calmed a bit. “I suppose this is where I say thanks?”

“ And I showed the tape to Dr. Desinor in there.”

“ What? You had no right to-”

“ And she was as impressed as I was with your… your foresight about those punks. She wants very much to work with you, Alex, and I think you ought to graciously accept her invitation to do so.”

“ Or else?”

“ Or else, damnit, that's right.”

“ You'd sic those snot-nosed IAD punks on my ass? You'd see to it I was forcibly yanked from this case, and maybe from the Department?”

Landry's fists were balled up now, and he breathed heavily through dragonlike nostrils. “I hope it won't come to that, but yes… if I have to… yes.”

“ This case has blown a lot of relationships to hell, Landry. I guess one more is just one more.”

“ Hold on, Alex. Just think about it, damnit. And give Dr. Desinor a chance. She's good…she's damned good,” Landry self-consciously admitted.

“ Real good, huh? Is she really telling you any more than what Wardlaw has already leaked to the press?”

“ Considerably more.”

“ Is that right?” Alex countered.

“ That's right.”

“ She's just snowing you, the commissioner, Meade, all of you.”

“ She's revealed to us that the Gretna victim was, like you said, a copycat killing.”

“ Information circulating about since I suggested it, yes.”

“ That the heart was taken only after the man was poisoned, which has now been confirmed by Dr. Coran's preliminary tissue and blood tests.”

“ A wild guess, maybe.”

“ She even gave us a name this morning, said it came to her in her sleep afterward.”

“ A name… came to her in her sleep…”

“ Lennox, she said, and it checks out with Missing Persons in Texas where a Marie B. Lennox reported her husband as missing six weeks ago. According to Dr. Coran, the body was between six and eight weeks dead, kept in a frozen state for some time and only recently dumped in our territory in an attempt to make it look like one of the Hearts killings. The killer, Dr. Desinor says, knew the victim well. The victim knew his killer as either Billy or Beau. The wife's middle name is Bolinda with two nicknames, Beau or Billie. Kansas police this morning confronted her with the fact a psychic identified her as her husband's killer, and guess what?”

“ She crumpled, no doubt.”

“ She was told his body had been fished from the Mississippi in New Orleans.”

“ And I suppose she confessed on the spot?”

“ She did, and interviews subsequently place her in our area, driving a van, about the time the body would have been disposed of here. Hell, she sent postcards to the folks back home, the cards dating her trip, placing her extremely close to the Toulouse Wharf area. Photos have given us a definite I.D. on the victim as one Samuel Wayne Lennox, who had some heavy-duty insurance policies taken out on him in the past year. Asked about the beheading, she told authorities in Kansas that she hadn't cut off her husband's head, only his penis, in keeping with what she knew of the ruthless Heart-Taker in New Orleans; she claimed not to know how his head was severed from the body.”

“ Then how the hell did his head get separated from his body?” Alex had listened intently, unsure where to attack next.

Captain Landry informed him of how Wardlaw and Jessica Coran had put that piece of information to bed.

“ Sounds like the interlocking pieces of the puzzle fell very neatly into place then.”

“ Yes, yes, they did.”

“ And you're satisfied with this Lennox woman's confession?”

“ Completely, and it all tied in with your theory, Alex, that the Gretna victim didn't fit. I tell you, it gave me the shivers. Desinor's… well… uncanny.”

“ So was my prediction, based on what my eyes and my gut told me, only I couldn't prove it.”

“ Maybe your reading up on those Headless Horseman murders in New York last year had your nose twitching.”

“ So Mrs. Lennox took the heart and the private parts to simulate the Queen of Hearts killings, not knowing that some drunken fishermen would hit the corpse with their propeller. She poisoned and butchered her husband for the insurance bucks.”

“ And because she could no longer stand the wimp, or so she says,” Landry added.

“ Impressive of Desinor and Coran to put this all together,” Alex admitted with a heavy release of air.

“ Frank played a large hand in it too. He figured out how the head was severed.”

“ I thought Frank was out of the picture, Captain.”

“ Ever hear of an injunction? He won't go quietly.” Landry walked Alex a little way down the institutional-green cinder-block hallway. “But you're still skeptical, aren't you, Alex?”

“ Nature of the beast, I guess…”

“ Seems Mr. and Mrs. Lennox had vacationed here when she first read of the Queen of Hearts cases, and later when she saw the latest Hearts case break into print back in Texas, she began to concoct a copycat killing. She'd read Canon's piece, the one that speculated there would be more killings, remember?”

“ Who could forget that piece of journalistic masturbation.”

“ Anyway, this tough old Texas babe gets it into her head that she could kill hubby, remove the heart and privates with no flinching, and when the serial killer was caught, she'd be home free with a hell of an inheritance in insurance bucks.”

“ If it was so well planned, why'd she fold so quickly when confronted with the information?”

“ Who knows… crime makes you stupid. The word psychic to some people is instant truth and enlightenment… who knows?”

“ So, you're impressed by Desinor.”

“ I damned sure am, and Coran for that matter.”

Alex wanted to argue, to tell his captain that there was more to it than met the eye, that perhaps Jessica Coran and Wardlaw and Desinor were cohorts, in some magic show together now. Maybe Coran had studied Wardlaw's files on each case from top to bottom, seen the oversights and the sloppy work, talked with Desinor, and the two of them had cut Wardlaw in. Then they had all conjured up Samuel Wayne Lennox, whose name had most likely surfaced some time before, since the killer herself had put out a missing-persons report on the man she had killed. Somehow Alex had to put a rational spin on the scenario, as he had with the incident at Tully's.

“ What's so hard for you to accept, Alex?” Landry finally said.

“ Look, the business of the body's not having been destroyed in quite the fashion of the other victims… the rib cage intact, the fact it was a different sort of weapon used to open Lennox's chest, all pointed to another perp. Hell, even I knew that. As to the Beau Lennox story, Kim Desinor could easily have read about the disappearance of the Texas man, in a state right next door, and from the general description put two and two together. As any good detective might, she bluffed and won.”

“ She's on the case, Alex. Get used to it.”

“ I'm out of here for now. Maybe I'll just take that time off that IAD suggested. I'm beginning to feel unnecessary. Besides, all this has got me feeling like I need to find the closest bar.”

“ I'm conducting a meeting this evening, my office. Be there at six.”

Alex didn't reply, and Landry's leathery face creased into a look of concern and worry, the wrinkles dancing across his forehead. He wondered if Alex, whose instincts were better than excellent, could be right about Dr. Desinor after all. He'd never believed in psychic hocus-pocus himself before Desinor's recent revelations, which Alex had somewhat effectively fired silver bullets through.

Still, Bolinda Lennox was behind bars in Kansas thanks to Kim Desinor, and so far, in New Orleans, Alex had made no score with respect to the Heart-Taker. Results were what City Hall and P.C. Stephens were now after, results before the next Mardi Gras season, results that would reassure a nation of potential tourists that New Orleans was a safe fantasy land into which they might securely snuggle for a while, long enough to unload their ready cash; that it was a wondrous place to spend their money and enjoy the local pleasures with complete peace of mind, a commodity that seemed all too rare in the city these days.

Landry couldn't blame Stephens and Meade and Leroy David Fouintenac and all the other politicians, not really. All they wanted was for New Orleans to return to the days of Huey Long, to be left unmarred by the terror of a sadistic lunatic roaming the same streets where lovers strolled arm-in-arm to the strains of Louis Armstrong's jazz legacy, which poured out into the street from the numerous bars. They wanted New Orleans to be free again, free from the barbarism of an illness that was supposed only to grip bigger cities such as L.A., Chicago, Miami or New York. They wanted their gleaming cash-cow touristy world back the way it had always been before-before some maniacal butcher with an enormous appetite and an even larger blade had begun to stalk his unique prey for the pleasure of taking human hearts from their cradling homes.

All the brass wanted was a return to normalcy, a return to sanity-so far as sanity could be mustered-in the Big Easy.

While lunacy of the Mardi Gras sort was tolerated, while excessive drinking and nudity were played out on the streets of the French Quarter nightly, this other sort of lunacy simply had to end. A return to normalcy in a place where there was no norm seemed a contradiction in terms, and Landry wondered if such a day would ever come again in this town.

Kim Desinor had seen something frightening in Alex Sincebaugh, something that had brought her from her trance state, something that had also taken her breath away, all in that instant when he'd entered the autopsy room. A fire went around the man, a fire of energy and life naked to most people's perceptions but blinding to her own.

It was more than the noisy interruption, more than the anger and frustration enveloping him and dispelling the trance state she was in, sending her hurtling back to real time and place. She had sensed his presence before she had seen him; in a room full of men, she had felt him.

She now recalled where she was, finding herself surrounded by the men who had brought her here, men who'd been frightened and awed by her recent revelations. Even Jessica Coran, the other single woman in the room, the one to whom she'd hoped to become allied, perhaps even find a binding friendship with, was now hesitant with her, uncertain and distrustful of her.

Even when they believe in you, they don't accept you. She heard an inner voice giving her familiar notice, to take heed. No one here any longer saw her as one of them. And maybe that was why she liked Alex Sincebaugh, despite his obvious disdain for her in particular and for psychic investigation in general; because he wasn't about to treat her as special or unusual or as some sort of freak, she admired his genuineness.

She had previously I.D.'d the victim and given authorities a pair of names to search for, an unusual “gift” to receive from a corpse murdered so long before, but Lennox had a strong will that his killer be known and somehow that information was implanted in his every cell, the tissues crying out with their own decaying march toward oblivion, his permeating plea rising from every pore. Lennox was unusual, or at least his corpse was; the man's cadaver was a fluke, a fount of information, giving up information in such a cascading tide that she could not take it all in at once, as it was offered, as if there were a time limit involved.

Kim had suspected the single name she kept getting from Lennox was the endearment used for a girlfriend or possibly a wife… and she had told Landry to follow up, and later that night she'd telephoned Captain Landry again with the name Lennox, which came to her in a dream sequence, a kind of “aftershock” to the initial reading. But no one, Landry included, had as yet today confided anything to her about what had been done with the information.

A second “reading” of Lennox's body might reveal more evidence, or so P.C. Stephens had hoped, aside from wishing to be on hand when such revelations occurred, perhaps to show her off to the mayor's man, who'd come expressly to see the reading of the body. However, with the flood of information released initially to her, the corpse had turned stony and remained now stubbornly silent, like a granite mass, still and cold and suddenly lacking all the psi energies so powerful just the day before.

Still, with the P.C. on hand, alongside the mayor's stooge, the “show” had to go on in order to clearly determine if there was any connection to the other deaths.

At one point she was asked directly, “So, what do you think, Dr. Desinor?” It was the balding, broad-shouldered Lew Meade, New Orleans FBI Bureau Chief and one of the few men in the city who knew that she too worked for the FBI.

“ Nothing… coldness… emptiness… loneliness and isolation. This man has no connection to the other victims,” she said before Sincebaugh had burst into the room, “and my feeling is that neither did his killer, as I've earlier informed Captain Landry.”

“ So you continue to maintain that this man was killed by his wife, and that his death has no link to the Queen of Hearts killings?” asked the mayor's man, Leroy David Fouintenac, a regal and robust man who appeared to enjoy Bourbon Street's finest restaurants. He'd obviously been coached long before on what she'd imparted to Captain Carl Landry.

“ Wife, girlfriend, live-in lover,” she muttered absent mindedly as her hands searched for any hot spot on the body. Finding none, she faked it, her hands shaking like a pair of dowsing rods.

“ What is it?” asked Stephens while the others stared on.

“ All the earlier information, all corroborated… nothing new, however…”

“ With such remarkable results,” began the mayor's man, a tall healthy-looking, rugged John Carradine lookalike, “perhaps the good doctor can-”

“ What remarkable results?” Kim asked, staring now through Carl Landry. “I've heard about nothing that has come of my report.”

“ You made a number of major hits on the Lennox body, Doctor,” replied Landry. “I wanted to tell you earlier, but… well, let's just say that we wanted to be sure and these things do take time. We have a woman named Beau Lennox in custody, and she has confessed to her husband's murder. She's being extradited from Texas as we speak.”

Kim turned to stare at Jessica, silently asking, “Did you know about this?”

“ At any rate,” said Leroy David, as Meade called his political friend, as if nothing of consequence had happened, “might you now be persuaded to do a reading on one of the certain victims of the Heart-Taker? After all, that is the case you are being paid to… to help solve.”

The comment made her wonder if the mayor's people were out of the true loop here. Perhaps they weren't informed about her actually working for the FBI.

Dr. Coran came forward from the corner where she'd been standing in shadow. “Well… why not? It's not as if we have to exhume a body for the purpose; we had a victim wash up just yesterday.”

All the men looked from one to another. “It could look awkward in the press,” suggested Captain Landry. “So, unless we can keep it to this room…”

“ What the hell,” said the P.C. “This is New Orleans. Anything goes, right?”

“ Anything within reason, but this…” Landry began to counter, a certain feeling of un sureness creeping over him.

Fouintenac stopped Landry cold, staring across at him, sternly saying, “There's no reason the bloody press need get hold of any of this, is there, Carl? I say, give it a try with the last victim, but we do it in complete secrecy.”

“ What about it, Dr. Desinor?” asked the P.C.

Kim looked about the room at the faces all pinned on her reaction, expectant and hopeful. They all wanted a miracle and she was supposed to supply it. “I'll be happy to… to do my best, but I can't possibly guarantee or promise any startling revelations, as you know. Still, I will go along with whatever you gentlemen and Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw decide.”

That was how it had ended before Sincebaugh's arrival, the body of the Toulouse Street Wharf victim wheeled in only moments before Alex Sincebaugh had come crashing through the door as if to save her from both herself and the company she found herself in.

She now found herself thinking only of Alex Sincebaugh, half wishing he'd stayed, glad he'd gone all at once. She wondered what it was about him that so attracted her, despite everything.