Pure Instinct

2

Quantico, Virginia, FBI Headquarters

Young Tom Benton watched in awe while Dr. Kimberly Faith Desinor placed her thumb and index finger onto the ransom note as it was lifted from its cellophane sheath between tweezers held by Special Agent Neil Parlen of Georgia. Dr. Faith, as she was sometimes called by those who knew her well enough to joke, was now the only person to make human contact with the document since it had been handled by the kidnapper or kidnappers. She must touch the note, feel its weight, bond and weave, its every fiber. It was her job to manhandle the evidence.

Unlike most law-enforcement officials trained to keep their grubby, enzyme-secreting hands off, she was uniquely qualified for a hands-on experience with the incriminating evidence-once all traditional avenues of detection had failed. And failed they had, miserably.

They stood in a semi-darkened room, much preferred by Dr. Desinor whenever she went into trance. She'd known absolutely nothing of the case in Georgia save what she'd read in the papers, which was very little, and even the application Parlen had made to Dr. Desinor's psychic detection unit of the FBI had had to travel through a paper labyrinth the size of a botanical maze in order for Parlen to gain paranormal assistance for his investigation. The application itself was intentionally sketchy, seeming just a routine application for Headquarters assistance, no one wanting to draw undue attention to the fact the FBI was in any way involved in paranormal studies or psychic detection.

Even before touching the note, which she'd never seen before this moment, Desinor knew the perpetrator was an amateur. The note was a patchwork of large and small words, cutout block letters from slick magazines, tabloids and the Ladies Home Journal, telltale signs of a poor education and weak grammar showing through nonetheless, such as the use of a double negative in the third sentence, and a subject-verb-agreement error in the last sentence. Of course, the errors might well have been put in on purpose, to throw the police off. A linguist would be looking for a poorly educated man, possibly an unskilled laborer, possibly of Southern origin and a low socioeconomic background. Hardly facts which would nail a suspect.

The bad guy or guys had foolishly used Scotch tape, which left a variety of prints from several fingers and thumbs, but none of these had found a match in the world's largest fingerprint bank here at Quantico, further proof of the cherry quality of the culprits.

Now that all the usual FBI measures had failed, Parlen had come to Kim Desinor. And why not? What did he have to lose? No one would even know, so there was no chance for embarrassment. The ransom notes had stopped. Leads were now gone as dry as Sahara soil. The prints remained useless without a match. The ransom note itself was now only an annoying reminder to Parlen that his field office in Georgia had failed miserably in Decatur.

A last-resort, last-ditch effort that Parlen had little belief in was what it had all come down to, in the person of Dr. Desinor, a Ph. D. in psychology and sociology who also juggled psychic powers here in the Behavioral Science Division of the FBI. Psychic powers were ostensibly not part of her working repertoire, however, or so the public was to be made to believe. For the past ten years, use of psi powers under any FBI umbrella had been not only downplayed but denied outright. There didn't appear to be any change in this policy on the horizon, so funding continued by the grace of the budgetary gods above, and lately, they weren't looking too kindly on Dr. Faith and her small office.

“ Back away from me, both of you,” she instructed the two men in the room with her-Benton, her aide and student, and Parlen, the skeptical agent. Benton was studying under her, while Parlen was following orders, transporting the goods from Decatur, Georgia, where the manhunt for the missing bank executive, Harold Michael Sendak, continued under a cloud of criticism and hopelessness. The abductors had been so frightened off, it appeared, that Sendak must be dead by now, the case now eleven weeks old.

Kim Desinor felt the ransom note speak to her immediately. There was something about the weave and fiber that was quite alive with energy, although it was simple copier paper with no special qualities about it. Still, it sent out an image, sharp and piercing, into her mind. A life force had left an indelible mark on the paper, and it was desperately but haltingly attempting to speak to her.

Dr. Desinor took in a deep gasp of air, breathing in the life force, taking it inside her, filling her mind with its resolute images while the more amorphous, peripheral images floated off like flotsam on a river. She forced herself to ignore the smoke and unfocused mirror images for the main event.

The room, with its stark white walls, was sealed to prevent any undue noise or disturbance while she worked, although there remained one thick glass window looking into Dr. Desinor's crowded office, where the shelves were overflowing with volumes dealing with psychiatry and psychology and psychic powers. The room was soundproof and a camera was mounted near the ceiling which recorded every session, including today's. Here there were no phones, no buzzing intercoms or other office disturbances. There wouldn't even be any other people, save Benton, if Parlen hadn't insisted on being here. His damned negative thoughts rose like heat off a Texas-Louisiana highway during a drought, further obscuring her grasp of the images fighting for dominance in her psyche.

When she felt a breakthrough, all other sensory paths were completely shut down, sometimes for only a moment, sometimes for minutes at a time. She felt no other bodies or heat sources in the room, and she could not hear anyone's whisper and she saw no faces. Nor did she see the camera or the walls or the window or the light flashing on her phone in the office next door.

Suddenly, she was no longer truly in the little cubicle; she was several hundred miles away, in Decatur. She first heard the whispering of voices, not from Benton or Parlen, but from Georgia. Meaningless back-scatter, jabbering gibberish, the mumblings, grumblings and ravings of maniacs-ghost voices, some psychics insisted. She believed them to be the emanations of the past, imprinted on the object, in this case the ransom note, now being replayed in her head via the antennae of her fingertips. Nothing mystical or supernatural about it, so far as she was concerned. Simply a heightened sixth sense of higher awareness, like the higher memory of a computer.

The voices sounded at first like a foreign tongue, but they just needed to be adjusted, tuned into, so to speak.

She believed her “power” an inborn instinct that gave its owner the ability to increase or heighten all the normal senses into one forcefully focused laserlike sense, a gift or a curse, however one chose to look at it, however one chose to use it, or be used by it.

The voices sounded like tolling bells without harmony, clanging into one another, disjointed and chaotic at first; the images welling up from the paper made no direct sense either. Usually, if anything formed, it was symbolic, which in and of itself would remain pointless, like the cradle she now saw… What was the cradle, and why was it so still and flat and unable to rock?

“ Cradle… I see a cradle…” she said aloud.

Parlen's eyes widened and he muttered, “Cradle? What kind of cradle?”

“ Strange cradle… cradle of death, not life…”

“ What do you mean, cradle of death?”

“ Stone cradle… stones and cradle…”

Parlen's eyes widened and he said in a near-whisper, “You mean Craddle…Craddle Storage? What about it?”

Benton shushed the agent.

Kim Desinor was coming clear on two salient points: Sendak had been buried alive but aboveground, possibly in a crypt, and the ransom note had been handled by more than one person before she herself had touched it. Whether an eager investigator or an accomplice, she could not yet say. Even so, the number 1 kept insinuating itself like a brand across her brain. It was so persistent that she decided there must only be one criminal mind at work. But then, who else had handled the document?

Was the picture cluttered by an overzealous officer of the law, perhaps Parlen himself? Everyone at the FBI had been extremely careful to provide an unbreakable chain of custody for the Georgia document.

Still, she sensed the ransom note had been handled by a large man with evil intentions and someone smaller, milder, someone leaning toward the color green, a person with a rainbow aura around… her. She had something to do with the number /. It was definitely a female, and she held a deep-seated remorse, powerful frustrations and guilt capped tightly in a bottle, her heart trapped in a bottle, a vessel of some sort. The bottle was her body.

Then it came to Dr. Desinor.

It came like a candle being lit; not in a word, not in a single image, but in a wide, encompassing hunch that gave her a warm feeling of closure. It was an alUencompassing instinct, an intuitive, educated guess based on a raggedy-looking toy doll with a dirty face and ill-fitting clothes, the image of the second perpetrator.

“ Well?” said Parlen, impatient now.

“ It's the daughter.”

“ The daughter? What daughter? There is no-”

“ Sendak's daughter.”

“ Goddamned waste of time.” Parlen tweezered the ransom note, uselessly returning it to its protective bed of polyethylene. “Sendak doesn't have any daughters. Two sons, no daughters, sorry, and thanks for your time. We'll check at Craddle's Storage out on Highway 1 just the same.” For all the good it'll do, she read his unspoken thought.

“ Beside Craddle's Storage out there, there's a company where they make pre-stressed concrete,” Parlen added as he prepared to leave. “You said something about stones and cradles… But I rather doubt there's any connection whatsoever… I won't hold out much hope.”

Parlen was about to leave when she said, “Oh, but he did have a daughter, and she played a role in his death. He wasn't meant to suffocate, but he did, and she is his only daughter, and she works at a place that has something to do with the number one. Maybe even works for this Craddle Storage place?”

“ And those places look like mausoleums, don't they,” added young Benton excitedly before Dr. Desinor put up a hand to stop him.

Unimpressed, Parlen continued in the same vein. “I'm telling you, Doctor, the man has no daughters. We talked to everyone involved and-”

“ Illegitimate…other side of the tracks… didn't want any part of the kidnapping… tried to stop her boyfriend or a possible husband who'd found out about the family connection…”

“ No one like that has surfaced in our investigation in Decatur.”

“ Not necessarily in Decatur. Elsewhere, perhaps. Have you talked to Mrs. Sendak about-”

“ Of course! She's been repeatedly grilled!”

“- about the other woman? Mr. Sendak's activities outside the home?”

“ Well, no… not exactly, not so far as I know…” She took in a great breath of air, trying to regain her fix on the here and now. “I suggest you return to Decatur and do so, Mr. Parlen.” Young Tom Benton's impudent, full lips curled into a smile. Kim Desinor looked past him and through the glass partition to the blinking light on her phone. She rushed from the darkened room into the office where the noise of marching cadets on the Quantico drill grounds beat out a rhythm with foot and song. It sounded like an old song the nuns had made her learn in the orphanage in New Orleans when she was a child, except that this was more boisterous, perhaps a bit bawdy even. Behind her, she heard Parlen saying to Benton, “There's all kinda businesses and restaurants out on Highway 1 we could check; half a dozen or more use the number one on their logos and in advertising, like the US-1 Grill, Number 1 Golf, Tap One.”

She lifted the phone and just caught Paul Zanek about to hang up at the other end while her recorded voice was asking that he please leave a message. “Don't you people ever answer your damn phones down there anymore, Doctor?” he said.

“ Maybe if you could keep a secretary…”

He'd begun calling her “Doctor” again, which meant, for the time being, he was holding her at arm's length, shy of getting burned. “I was in a session with Parlen from Georgia, or don't you recall?”

“ Parlen? Georgia?”

“ Special Agent Neil Parlen? The Sendak case?”

“ Oh, yeah… sure… how'd it come out? You able to dig anything out of that piece of trash he calls evidence?”

“ A little something I think'll be useful for him, yeah, Paul.”

He hesitated at the mention of his name. “Get up here to my office pronto, will you? I want to run something by you.”

“ Sure, what's up?”

“ Never mind, just get up here.” He hung up.

Left holding the phone and wondering what the call was for, she realized that lately he could speak about anything and everything but what was on both their minds: What was to become of her and her little department now that he'd gone back to his wife?

Paul Zanek had lost all the allure and mystery and luster, all the romantic overtones she'd once ascribed to him. Every woman had a right to be wrong about a man, even a psychic detective on the U.S. payroll. Still, she wondered how she could've been so entirely wrong about Paul. She'd been blind, foolish, childish even. Maybe it had all been because of the death of her Aunt Aileen, the last vestige of her immediate family. Her aunt, only a few years older than she, had grown up in the care of the nuns too, and had taken punishments for Kim. Aileen had always faithfully held to the belief that one day her little niece would become an important person, and she'd encouraged Kim to strike out for her goals. She'd died of a rare, debilitating disease, and she'd died bravely, proud to the end that Kim had become an “important” person.

Kim's loss had sent her into a tailspin of grief, spiraling regrets, depression and self-pity, and Paul had played skillfully on those unhappy feelings. He'd been an easy man to turn to, to seek comfort from.

He had recently separated from his wife of eleven years, and Kim had found herself working late over cases with him one night, and in the solitary hours past 2 A.M. everyone needed someone to hold, she told herself now. Their love-making had not been so therapeutic as it had been insanely boundless, reckless beyond anything she might've envisioned. Still, his presence had for a time dissipated the darkness that she'd feared coming in on all sides.

She had a right, she'd told herself, to find some comfort, some security and warmth. And hadn't she taken from him as much as he had taken from her?

But that was then…and this is now, she reminded herself. “Now I'm an embarrassment to the bastard.” She had expected better from him.

She feared most for the foothold she'd gotten for psi studies and psychic investigation within the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI. Paul was in a position to either rubber-stamp it or deep-six it.

Benton was now showing Parlen the door. Thomas Benton was one of a handful of select young psychics recruited to round out the program. He had hardly begun the usual rigorous duties of a cadet in training when Kim had lifted him for duties in her department. According to his file, he was an unusually gifted sensitive.

Now Benton and the others in her department were all threatened, and all because of her. She'd thought Paul above the usual male traits that so often turned a beautiful affair into an ugly nightmare. But now he was doing that bitter danse macabre over the grave of the affair so typical of the male ego-stomping down the dirt. Lovemaking had ricocheted, taking out the innocent with the guilty. Lovemaking had transformed in reverse from butterfly to worm, changing into a guilt-ridden, twisting thing called remorse, poisoning Paul's memory of the incident into something to be ashamed of or hidden from. It became his fall from grace. It was as if she had had nothing to do with it, and yet, she was to blame. He set out trying to fix blame in that arrogant fashion reserved for top-level executives.

Did he fear for his position here or at home? Was he still twisting on the lance, heartbroken like she was, or was he just trying to cover his ass, wondering how much Kim had done to harm his career and his family?

The questions crested, rose and crested again like an unrelenting ocean inside her brain. What did Paul Zanek want now of her? What had he convinced himself of during his isolation from her? Why wouldn't he talk to her? Had he concluded that she had seduced him? That she had manipulated him? That perhaps she had used some psychic's spell on him for Chrissake? Sure, his attraction for her had somehow been used against him to lure him into bed, and she was some black widow spider capable of tying him in an invisible but powerful cocoon to become her helpless morsel. Yeah, right… Bastard, she now thought. How will he do it? How will he rid himself of me? Is this it, she wondered, will this call on the carpet put an end to all that I've built here?

Her fear drove her to the elevator and his office even as it wanted to find an excuse to dodge the SOB. All this while young Tom Benton looked after her with growing concern, sensing that all was not right in her world.