Pure Instinct

3

New Orleans, Louisiana

Some goddamned vacation, Alex Sincebaugh thought as he finished roll one, exposure eight, calmly noting this in his notepad alongside the crude but detailed sketch he'd made of the body, its position both in relation to fixed objects at the crime scene and anatomically. His partner, Ben, always kidded him about the amount of detail he put into his thumbnail crime-scene sketches, saying, “You don't gotta do Gray's friggin' Anatomy here, Alex.”

“ Hey, a d'tail is a d'tail,” he'd respond, thinking he ought to have left town, maybe gone to the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, someplace where headquarters couldn't have so easily located him. What good was he doing anyway? There were better men in the department who ought to have control of the case, but in the NOPD things didn't work that way. You take a call here and you're the detective of record and it stays that way unless the brass steps in and pulls you off.

Ben continued the good-natured ribbing. “Only d'tail I'd like to see is my Fiona's-and mine right beside her… in bed… at home!”

Alex held a year-round pass to the University of New Orleans's sporting events, for all the good it would do, trying to match his schedule with the UNO's. Lately, it had become an impossibility. He'd also scrounged tickets to the pre-season Saints game for Saturday night, had managed to find a date, and had had to back out at the last minute due to the pressing caseload, thanks to a faceless, conscienceless creature stalking the New Orleans area like some cave-dwelling cannibal with an appetite for human hearts.

Alex's days in pre-med at Trinity at long last were being put to the test now as a detective with the New Orleans Police Department. What he didn't know about the human heart, he was quickly finding out from the library of medical books he kept in his apartment. And the skill required to sketch human organs and bodies in various stages of death had come in handy as well. All this only dismayed his father, who believed that he'd simply thrown his life down the toilet pipes by going to work for the NOPD. His father seemed incapable of understanding how much being a detective on the force meant to Alex. He knew the terrain in and around New Orleans like the rooms of the house he grew up in; he was equally comfortable on the West Bank with its elevated West Bank Expressway, General de Gaulle Drive, Terry Parkway and the old span of the Crescent City Connection to which all arteries eventually led. He knew the outlying counties like Beau Chene, each called parishes, and he had once maintained an apartment in Kenner in the East Jefferson Parish. He had family in St. Charles Parish, where the school system had been crippled by mismanagement when its surplus of $9.3 million mysteriously dwindled to a mere $150,000 two years before. Thanks to the new “Shareware” policy and computers, Alex was no stranger to St. John the Baptist Parish, where right-to-lifers, wanting someone's head on a plate, picketed daily outside the hospital named for the county and the saint. In St. Bernard Parish there appeared to be an overachieving arsonist on the loose. Closer to home, in St. Tammany Parish the enor-mous, three-hundred-foot gambling boat, Jewel of the Pon-chartrain, on beautiful Lake Ponchartrain near Interstate 10, had suspiciously slipped its moorings, disturbing all at the gaming tables but the true diehards, who'd played on oblivious of the “titanic” nature of their drift, which had very nearly led them into the bridge pylons before some capable someone fired her engines and moved her back to the safety of the pier.

Not surprisingly, the new approach-spending money- meant for die first time ever, cops could get information before CNN and the Enquirer. Thank God for technology, he now thought.

Alex had investigated homicides, suicides, accidental deaths and deaths by natural causes in every part of the city. Precinct lines in the Crescent City were seldom a deterrent for a cop, and frequently, what with the Mardi Gras mentality of the population-a parade at the drop of a hat and some sixteen officially slated affairs for the spring and summer months alone-one precinct helped out another when there was a need, and no one was complaining.

Alex knew that in such cities as Chicago, L.A. and New York precinct lines were never crossed. To Alex's way of thinking, the laid-back manner in which the NOPD encouraged precincts to support one another foretold a day when more would be accomplished all across the country with such artificial barriers erased.

Here in the Big Easy, the homicide detective who arrived on scene first, no matter what the precinct, was immediately in charge of the body and the case. It was a system that had its good points and its bad, but cooperation among precincts was never a problem, despite the petty squabbles and bets placed on who was going to catch this Queen of Hearts “asshole” first. A little friendly competitiveness was the lifeblood of the NOPD, but cooperation and collaboration kept that life-blood primed and pumped.

Alex was forty-seven years old and had made lieutenant sergeant in Vice, doing gainful decoy and undercover work, before transferring to Homicide the year before. Vice operatives got around to all parts of the city, and so he had gotten to know men in the other precincts quite well. Now he was up for a clean lieutenant's rank, and his rise through the departmental hoops and ladders had been steady and appreciated by everyone but his father, the career beat cop.

It was the last thing in the world his father had wanted for him. The disappointment was like a huge bell that tolled in their ears and hearts, standing between them, ringing out its dull anthem each time they shared space. The ringing of the bell had just increased in density as Alex moved up in rank, and it became solid granite after his mother's death two years before.

Sincebaugh now labeled the exposed film, put it away and began another roll. While he photographed the corpse from every conceivable angle and then some, and while he dusted for prints, his partner, Ben deYampert, with the help of a uniformed officer, was pacing off the tape measure to triangulate the exact position of the body, so that Alex could insert more numbers onto his sketch the moment this was determined.

Ben had already measured from the edge of a shoal marker on huge Lake Ponchartrain to the big toe pointing due south, and was now pacing off the distance from the left foot to a nearby road sign that warned of a $500 fine for littering. Tri-angulation in the woods was a difficult proposition: You couldn't use a tree or a boulder or a road sign; you'd be nailed in a court of law. Even the damned lake might be called into question by a legal-beagle who wanted to talk tides just to play havoc with the prosecution.

“ Got to get a more fixed point of reference, Ben!” he yelled out.

“ Like what? The fuckin' ruts in the mud?”

“ Do the best you can, but vandals or a roadwork crew comes along and we got no sign, and you know what that means.”

DeYampert muttered something unintelligible behind his massive form. “You got a rule book up your ass, Alex. Don't that ever pain you, son?”

“ Everything strictly by the book, Big.”

“ Yeah, sure… follow rule number one: don't touch a goddamned thing, and then proceed to rule number two-”

“ Don't touch a goddamned thing,” Alex said, finishing the old cop wisdom for him, quietly laughing at the line, realizing just how unworkable it was.

Alex knew it was impossible to follow the rules here, especially since it was his job to search for any conceivable sign of evidence as well as identification of the victim. They'd found signs of someone's having dragged the body to this isolated, dark and remote location. Someone had less than tenderly covered the body with shrubbery cut from nearby, possibly using the same blade that had felled the victim, since bloodstains had been found on the palmetto stems.

The victim was yet another young, well-tanned, soft-featured male, hardly more than a boy in age, nineteen at the most, more likely seventeen.

They'd found scattered bits of clothing and footprints belonging to a heavyset killer who wore flat, wide sneakers that had made an interesting pattern in the mud, something for the forensics guys to make a cast of along with some fresh tire marks. But neither Alex nor Ben held out much hope of either cast ever being of any particular use. They'd found signs of animal leavings about the body, defecation to mark the kill in the wild. There was some evidence the corpse had been ripped apart a bit further by animals, but since the insect activity was not too terribly far along yet, the corpse was marked as having come to rest here some twelve to twenty-four hours before a group of blue-haired, retired ladies and gents on a bird watchers' safari had ingloriously discovered the body, reporting it to the local precinct Crimes Against Persons office. The precinct police had put it on the wire, and since it smelled like another Queen of Hearts murder, Sincebaugh had been given a wake-up call and pulled from his vacation.

When Alex responded to the call, he drove a few miles north of downtown New Orleans and just north of Lakefront Airport, along an unnamed artery off Hayne Boulevard, almost at its terminus, where Hayne became Paris Road. It had already been decided for him that he would take charge of the body and the subsequent investigation and paperwork. It certainly looked related to Sincebaugh's ongoing investigation.

Everything at the scene had been happily turned over to him by a detective out of the local precinct, a guy Sincebaugh knew and disliked named Lyle Kellerman. Kellerman's parting shot was: “You can have all my fag meat cases, Sincebaugh. It ain't my kinda case. Don't even wanna be in the morgue with it.”

“ This meat, as you call the kid, had a name, a history, a past, emotions, a family, Kellerman,” Alex had replied as the other man backed off with a pugnacious grin marring his otherwise handsome features.

“ Some things you never had or ever will have, Kellerman,” Ben had added for good measure.

The discovery was sometime after twilight, the bird watchers, having done their damnedest to log the large-necked, white-ribboned loon here, getting ready to bag all expectations and return home empty-handed. Now it was day watch, definitely the wrong time for Alex and Ben. Alex would have to break Ben's heart; he'd have to put them in for the night shift if they were ever to learn more about this plague of dead boys. Four now that they knew of for certain, and a fifth that Alex clung to as a possible which had occurred over a year before.

They'd been told by Captain Landry that it had been an otherwise dull rotation, only eleven deaths had come on the evening watch, and only a handful were violent deaths, the bulk of them alcohol-related motor-vehicle accidents.

“ You'd think Kellerman would've been pleased to get a murder investigation after a night like the one he just had,” said Ben, returning to the body now. “What's he afraid of, AIDS?”

“ Kellerman's afraid of gays.”

“ Maybe he's got some latent tendencies toward that direction?” Ben laughed to hear himself say it aloud. “Or maybe he's just got good reason, Alex. Maybe he picked one of those Bourbon Street cross-dressers up once, and he didn't find it too amusing when he got her-him-into bed.” Ben chuckled even louder, pleased with himself.

“ Maybe. Then again, maybe he's just ignorant.”

They worked by the book, the tight-fitting surgical gloves masking their palms. Ben watched his partner's painstaking, careful work. Sincebaugh was officer in charge of the investigation the press had dubbed variously as the “Have-a-Heart,” the “Heartthrob” and the “Queen of Hearts” murders. The first two victims had lived in the French Quarter, in the heart of New Orleans, just around the corner from Bourbon Street. An earlier homicide, nearly a year old now, might possibly be linked with the same killer, since the victim too had been a male with a decidedly homosexual lifestyle. No heart had been found in the boy's chest there either, but as the decomposition of the body had progressed and maggots had gotten into the open chest cavity, the illustrious Dr. Frank Wardlaw had proclaimed that the heart had been devoured by maggots. Alex no longer thought so.

The first two acknowledged Hearts victims had actually known one another, and this newest soft-skinned youth looked like the others in all salient features: long, unkempt, blond to sandy hair, big eyes, powdery flecks of freckles about the cheeks, small-boned, perhaps five-nine or ten, weighing in at a mere 130 or 135 pounds. Not much of a match for the assailant, Alex was sure.

Bruises about the face and forearms and lacerations to the same areas spoke of a beating and a knifing, defensive wounds everywhere. The awful carnage had come clear when they'd rolled the body onto its back. The private parts had been butchered. The chest was splayed open, carved up surgically, and missing from the cavity was the boy's heart, replaced by an unusual diamond-shaped playing card made of a lacy material. Even blood-soaked, the card looked like something found only in a world long gone, at a time when people made lace doilies and lace trinkets, very Old World, European-looking workmanship in the weaving of it. The queen's ornate costume and lurid features would be found stitched in a rainbow of colorful twine after the thing was soaked and cleaned of impurities, marking it as the same as those before it. Nowhere, not even in New Orleans, had either detective seen anything like it. The killer's “calling card,” had been wedged below the ribs. As before, the bold single eye of the queen of hearts stared back at them.

Was the card a message or a plea? If the bastard wanted to send a message, why didn't he use Western Union? If a message, what message was the son of a bitch sending? That hearts were meant to be broken? That gay men had no right to life, no right to their own heartbeats? That their being gay gave the killer a genuine rationale, that he was somehow warranted in stealing the warm hearts from other human beings? That he had a justifiable right to be heartless? And why the queen of hearts? Queen suggested that the killer himself might well be gay-a drag queen-and that he hated himself for the hand fate had dealt him, and so he was striking out at other gay men in rage and uncontrolled fury. Certainly, enough rage was played out on the bodies to warrant this theory, as well as half a dozen other “hate crime” scenarios, such as perhaps that the killer was a neo-Nazi who hated gay men so much that he had to vent his anger.

Then again, if leaving the playing card was some sort of plea and not a message, what was the killer pleading for? What did he want Alex-or the NOPD in general-to know? What significance did the queen of hearts hold for the bastard? And just how damned arcane could he remain and for how goddamned long?

After photoing close ups on the grisly wounds-bodily sites of destruction-and the blood-spattered playing card, both familiar and unusual at once, Sincebaugh carefully lifted the killer's notice-or was it a receipt? — with tweezers. He held the drooping card up to his perplexed eyes for a silent moment, Ben looking on, frowning, no doubt wondering what was going on behind Alex's eyes.

Alex studied the curled and soiled card front and back without touching it or wiping any of the blood away. “It's the same as the others, unique, as if tailor-made for the victim, like the others before.”

“ Embroidered playing cards. Thought I'd seen it all till now,” Ben replied.

“ Nothing like you're going to find at the corner dime store or cigar stand.”

It was the fourth queen of hearts found in the open chest of victims in as many months. It clinched the fact that this boy was done by the same sadistic killer.

“ Damned spooky, Alex… damned spooky.”

“ Son of a bitch's got it bad for young gay men, that's for sure.”

“ He's also got four spoilt decks of cards by my calculation,” Ben dryly pointed out. “And hey, what the hell's he doing with the other fifty-one, or the hearts for that matter? That's what I'd like to know, Alex. No evidence the guy hung around long after, so he must be taking the hearts off with him. Why's he taking the hearts, Alex? And why's he cutting out their hearts to begin with? And why's he chopping off their balls and dongs and leaving these damned beer coasters behind? You think he's eatin' the hearts, Alex? You think he's some kinda fuckin' cannibal or something? You think we're going to find a Frigidaire somewhere that's been stocked with human hearts or what, Sincy?”

“ Don't go squirrelly on me, Ben. I think this guy just does queens. He's not buying the cards in decks or in coaster sets. I think he makes 'em.”

Ben considered this for a moment, each detective aware of what the suggestion meant. The guy selects someone to kill, creates the lacy card and stalks his prey. Ben cleared his throat and said, “Squirrelly, me? What's that s'pose to mean?”

“ Means we don't sweat the whys and wherefores, remember? We go after how. How does he choose his victim? How does the victim fall into his trap? How'd they come together? How'd this kid get here? What was he doing during the last hours of his life to lead him to this dump site? Who was he with and what'd they talk about? Where'd he have his last meal and with whom? And what'd he eat and where'd he eat it?”

“ Sure, sure, I know the routine, Alex, but this… this isn't in any way your routine homicide. These mutilations… they're… they're…”

“ Hate killings? Lust murders? You going to tell me why before you tell me how, Ben? You're already off track.”

“ But Alex, if we understood why, then maybe it'd be easier to investigate-”

“ And sleep at night?”

“- and we could come up with a faster solution in these particular cases.”

“ You want to go after it that way? All right, then take a good look at the boy's crotch, Ben. Go ahead, take a closer look.”

Ben shuddered even as his eyes went a second time to the area where the boy's sexual organs had been cleaved off, the discarded items lying bloody between his legs like the remains of a gutted chicken. Sincebaugh snapped another picture, this time with Ben in the foreground.

“ Something you can show your grandkids, Ben.”

“ You sick son of a bitch, Sincy. You got a real mean streak in you too.”

“ Comes of serving with you.”

“ Let's get outta here.”

“ Can't, not till Wardlaw or one of his stooges arrive.”

“ Where in hell're those guys? We called 'em an hour ago.”

An ambulance from the NOPD morgue had arrived, but Dr. Franklin T. Wardlaw, M.E. for New Orleans, was nowhere to be seen.

“ Call the bastard again. He probably fell asleep somewhere.”

Journalists were arriving on the scene now and were being held at bay by the uniformed officers. They wanted all the dirt, and they wanted to know what the NOPD was going to do about the Queen of Hearts killer, and they wanted to know- as always-now. Sincebaugh squarely reckoned that if the killings were ordinary slayings of gay men-without the extraordinary high profile due to the missing hearts-the press would be asleep on the case.

For now, however, the Fourth Estate had cornered Sincebaugh's captain, Carl Landry, along with Lew Meade, the local FBI chief, who'd been dragged from their beds to come down to have a look. All for the sake of the press. What they could accomplish here was zip, save for public relations, but even saving face and saving grace were unlikely at this point with nothing whatever to go on.

“ Here comes the circus,” said Ben.

“ Where the fuck's that drunken coroner?” asked Sincebaugh.