Pure Instinct

5

Paul Zanek fished into his private stock and came up with a bottle of Jim Beam and some water and ice. He made himself a drink and offered it to Jessica.

“ You know I've sworn off booze, Paul. If I start drinking now, I might not stop.”

“ Sorry, no, I didn't know.”

“ There's a hell of a lot you don't know, Paul, and maybe that's the problem.”

“ Come on…what is this, Jess? I've got eyes. I know what's driving you, but what's all this hostility? I thought we were on the same side of the fence here.” His voice changed dramatically as he added, “You look like…well, you look like you haven't slept in days.”

“ You really know how to flatter a girl, Paul.”

“ I'm sorry, Jess. You know me… shoot from the lip.”

She waved it off. “No apology necessary.”

“ No letup to the nightmares?”

She shrugged in answer and plopped into a chair before him.

He gritted his teeth as if afraid to ask, but forged ahead anyway. “Dr. Lemonte's prescriptions of no use?”

All of the above, she silently replied. “No, no…nothing like that. I've just been maybe working too long in the lab since getting back.”

“ I'm sorry about Oklahoma, that his trail went cold and that there's been no change, but the bastard's leery now. We came real close to plugging him up, and he knows it.”

“ He's had a lot of time to think about when and where he'll next strike, Paul. He went to Oklahoma for a reason, probably to throw us off, but there was someone or something he wanted there. One of the many background files on him said he had been born in Oklahoma in 1948, his family moving to the Chicago area when he was three or four years old. His father became a baker, his mother a factory laborer. The place where they lived in Oklahoma was gone, but he went back there. Why? He has a reason for every step he takes.”

“ Maybe it wasn't a conscious decision, Jess. Maybe he just took off running and, coincidentally, wound up in Oklahoma.”

“ Where he killed three people in two days.” The trail from Philadelphia to Oklahoma was littered with Matisak's leavings. They'd gotten a make and model on the car he was using, a white four-door Mercury sedan stolen from his last Oklahoma victims just outside of Tulsa. They'd run the car down with a chopper and squad cars, hauled the driver out at gunpoint and pushed his face into the dirt, but it wasn't Matisak.

Matisak had sold the car to the fool for a hundred dollars. They'd traced back to where the transaction had occurred: at Mohawk Boulevard where it became Young Street, within walking distance of the North Tulsa Regional Airport-where, it was surmised, Matisak forced a pilot into the air at gunpoint to make his escape. Flight controllers had seen the plane take off without clearance and without logging a flight plan with the tower. It was a friendly little airport where people parked their toys and came out on weekends for recreation, and it was not unusual for a man to take his Cessna up, circle the area and return within an hour or two, without having logged any flight plans. The place was small enough that the good old boys in the tower didn't think anything of it until they were alerted by the FBI, too late, about the fugitive in the area.

Actually, the tower had been alerted long before, but a shift change hadn't gotten the message. By now Matisak had vanished without a trace. Still, an army of agents had gone to work in the area. Planes, trains, buses and terminals had been searched, but the monster had simply disappeared. Still, Jessica, on hand in Tulsa, had had the undeniable feeling even then that Matisak had had a specific reason for coming to the area. Something quite specific, she'd surmised, and the taking of an airplane was no spur-of-the-moment decision. She'd reasoned that Matisak had planned his every step, including the theft of the plane, his getaway. But why? Did he have family there that no one knew about? Did someone harbor him during the brief stay in the area? Did he know the guy with the plane? A background check on the pilot, a man named Norman East-han, revealed nothing unsavory. He seemed just another innocent who'd gotten in the way. Still, she remembered how many people Matisak had used for cover in Chicago, dupes and losers and desperates who'd clung to Matisak for some sense of identity, only to be set up by him.

Was it possible that the madman was still in Oklahoma somewhere? Was it possible that someone was harboring him? Who would harbor such a fiend? It was not entirely impossible, even though every newspaper had carried his photo and every TV set had flashed his face before millions. He'd been highlighted on America's Most Wanted, his story retold anew along with his desperate escape. The famous TV program had never featured such a bloody episode in its history. If he was being harbored by someone, that someone must know about it.

She couldn't imagine anyone in the country who could not know what Mad Matt Matisak looked like. But now, for some unaccountable reason, a notion lodged in her brain, and Paul Zanek stared at her, knowing something was running frantically through her mind and looking for an escape route.

“ What're you hatching, Jess?” he suspiciously asked.

She was wondering why she hadn't considered the possibility when they were in Oklahoma. “The Indian reservations,” she said aloud.

“ What?” he asked. “What Indian reservations?”

“ Oklahoma is full of Indian reserves. Tribes of half the Indian nations live in the state, are you kidding? What if Matisak knew someone who lived on an Indian reservation down there in Oklahoma, someone who read no papers, saw no TVs, had no idea who or what he was?”

Zanek looked across at her. It made sense. “I'll check with law-enforcement agencies in Tulsa, see if there's been any trouble on any of the reserves. It's a long shot, though, Jess. Don't hold your breath.”

“ What a ya think I've been doing since leaving Hawaii, knowing the bastard's stalking me?”

“ That's why I've got agents watching you around the clock, kid. I'm not going to let anything happen to my best forensics expert, you got that?”

“ I got it, all right, and having men following me everywhere I go isn't my idea of freedom. Ticks me off. He's free to victimize me while I'm… well, I'm living in a goddamned box.”

“ Look, so long as he's out there and-”

“ No, Paul, so long as I'm in here, remember? Hiding behind Quantico's walls? I'm trapped in a goddamned rat's maze that he's knowingly created for me; I know he's thought this through chapter and verse, and he knows me better than you do, better than perhaps I do, damnit. I'm no bloody good to anybody this way, including myself.”

“ You're safe, aren't you?”

“ Safe's highly overrated.”

“ What about life? Is that overrated, Jess?”

They stood now, each having risen along with their voices, and now, staring across at one another, each felt as stubborn as the other. Finally, he broke the stalemate, saying, “You've got everything you need here. We've got enough lab work to keep you occupied for as long as-”

“ As long as I like? Well, I don't like, Paul.”

“ And what do you mean,” he countered, “no good to anybody! Why hell, Jess, you're our number-one top field agent. That's the silliest thing I think I've heard outta you yet.”

“ Matisak's put me behind bars, don't you see that? I go between this compound and my apartment, from work to bed. I can't even go shopping without the Hardy-fucking-Boys looking on. Ever try on a dress with Bob Waite and Greg Thatcher looking on, Paul? And Sims! What a dull ass. Can't even play gin rummy because it runs counter to his notion of what's in the line of duty.”

He laughed at this. “No, can't say as I blame you for being frustrated, Jess.” He got a mental picture of Thatcher and Waite in a lady's dressing room, and this led to a grin.

“ Nothing funny about those yo-yos you've plastered to me, Paul, and I tell you, I'm through with this warped lifestyle- through. Hell, on weekends, I used to go into D.C., visit the Smithsonian or just walk the parks and smell the lilacs in bloom, but Waite and Thatcher've made it clear that there'll be no unnecessary risks. I feel like I'm living in a bottle, a goddamned prisoner of some kind of absurd war, and Quantico's become my cell and this… this… compound is getting the hell on my nerves. It's got to end.”

She tossed back her auburn hair, the long strands curling about her neck, and she went to the window to stare out at the same grounds and the same buildings she had been staring at for six months without letup.

“ We're doing everything we can, Jess.” Paul's response to her outburst came off sounding as lame to him as it did to her, making him frown.

“ I know that, Paul, and I appreciate it, but it appears that everything just isn't enough, doesn't it?”

“ I can… I can send you back to Hawaii to continue field work there, if you like. The hearings being held by the State Department to investigate our part in bringing Lopaka Kowona to justice are coming up soon.”

“ No, no… not Hawaii,” she said instantly. “When I go back to Hawaii, it won't be for any damned State Department hearings, you can believe that.” Jim Parry was there, and the idea of Matisak in her paradise-and he would stalk her there, as he would to the ends of the earth-made her almost physically ill. She had lost Otto Boutine to this maniac. The fiend would not get near Jim, ever. If the demon learned of their romantic involvement, he might easily target Jim just to hurt her. He was that sadistic.

“ New Orleans,” she firmly barked as she turned to face Zanek. She was as tall as he, her creamy skin taut and strained with her decision. “I want the New Orleans case.”

“ Come on, Jess, we've talked already about this. You can't seriously want to risk your-”

“ It's my goddamned life, Paul.”

“ You're in the Bureau, and that means it's also our goddamned life you're proposing to waste out there. This organization has invested a fortune in you, you realize, and-”

“ Oh, damnit, Paul, don't feed me that crap now. We've been through too damned much together for you to suddenly become J. Edgar on me.”

“ Hey, nobody does J. Edgar better'n me,” he joked.

“ I need a field assignment. I'm no good to anyone the way I am. I want the New Orleans case, this Queen of Hearts thing, okay? I can be effective there. I need to get back to work; I need to know I'm still effective, and I need to know I'm in charge of my life; that I run me, not Matisak.”

“ But that'd be suicidal.”

“ Do you understand me? You do, don't you? You'd hate being run around by a creep like this. Confess it. Say it. You wouldn't stand for it if it were you, would you?”

“ But Jess, New Orleans would mean opening yourself up to attack. He'll know you're there the moment tomorrow's papers hit the street.”

“ I'm willing to risk it; I'm willing to bait the bastard at this point, and if that doesn't make you salivate for his head on a platter, Paul, then maybe you'd best get out of this business.” She stomped about the room now like a caged animal, her pacing finally making his eyes follow her about. “Besides, you need Waite and Thatcher and Sims and all the others on more important duties. You can't continue to justify the outlay in man-hours to your superiors anymore. We both know that. All those taxpayer dollars so Thatch can stare through binoculars at my bedroom window? Come on, Paul, be reasonable. Come on, whataya say? Let's give Stephens his first choice.”

Zanek ran both hands through his thick mat of dark hair and shook his head. It was his turn to pace the room. “It's too damned risky, Jess. I care too much for you to knowingly put your life in danger.”

“ That's not what I want to hear from you, Paul!”

He drummed his fingers on his desk and finally bellowed, “Damnit, Jess, I don't know. I've been promising Kim… Dr. Desinor a shot, you know, to put her theories into practice.”

“ If that's all you're worried about, don't be. Just send us both-as a team. How better to determine if science and psi can work together?”

“ You're so damned competitive, Jess.”

“ You wouldn't have it any other way. So, what do you say?”

“ I can't make this decision without input from above. You know that, Jess.”

“ But they'll go along with your recommendation. I also know that.”

“ Do you also know you've talked me into a goddamned corner? I guess you do.”

She beamed, her eyes going wide. “Then you'll go to bat for me?”

He gave her a pretended angry glare. “No guarantees but one, Jess.”

“ What's that?”

“ You travel down there with a guard. At least two specially trained agents.”

“ No, not Thatch and Waite; please, no one, Paul. It'd only defeat us. Matisak won't tip his hand if he smells a trap, and no way can those bozos avoid being spotted.”

“ You either go with a guard, or you don't go.”

She breathed deeply, thinking that she could convince Santiva of the foolishness of this step later on. For now, she must allow Paul to play Marshal to her Saloon Girl.

“ Whatever,” she muttered. “But I want you to keep me posted on anything happening in Oklahoma,” she quickly added. “I can easily get there from New Orleans, if there's reason to.”

“ All right, then we're agreed. Now we just have to sell Santiva on the idea, and there's the little matter of selling the notion to Dr. Desinor as well.”

“ I thought you said she wanted to field-test her work? What's to sell?”

“ Let's just say she's not anxious to be proven wrong out of the gate, and now with you on board, she might be frightened off; besides, she's very selective about what cases she'll take on. Some, she says, leave her cold.”

“ I can imagine.”

“ You think what she does is a hoax?”

“ No, I didn't say that.”

“ What do you think of her work, honestly?”

“ The older I get, the longer I live, the more I see in this world… the more superstitious I get, I'm afraid to admit.”

“ But what Dr. Desinor does has nothing to do with superstition.”

“ I'm just speaking of my prejudices,” she continued, pacing the room again now. “And the older I get, the more sense I make of the old line that states there's more between heaven and earth than dreamt of in your little philosophy, or science, Jessica Coran. And”-she stopped short, seeing that he was concerned, that a crease had formed along his forehead-”and the older I get, Paul, the more limbs I crawl out on, saying things like, I think Paul Zanek's a man of vision for backing psychic detection in the agency, and-”

“ You've said that? To whom?”

“ And I also think you could take a great fall, Humpty-Dumpty, if she should fail, so I have to believe you're a courageous-type guy to back Desinor.”

He smiled at this. “I didn't know you'd formed an opinion. But as I said, Dr. Desinor could be uncomfortable with the idea of working in tandem with you at this stage. We'll have to break it to her gently, in the best possible manner.”

“ Well, if she's unwilling, then she's unwilling. But I'm going to New Orleans with or without her, you got that?”

“ I used to think I made the decisions around here. Celebrity does not become you, Dr. Coran.”

Jessica caught a look of deep concentration behind his otherwise smiling eyes. “Tell, me, Paul, is there something going on between you and Dr. Desinor I should know about?”

“ No, no… nothing between us but a professional relationship. How can you ask such a question? You know I'm a happily married man.”

Rumor has it your marriage has been on the skids, she thought, and it was easy to believe that rumor. “Hasn't stopped you from hitting on me,” she said.

“ Well, Jess, that was at a low ebb in my life, and I've apologized how many times now?”

“ Sorry… shouldn't have brought it up.”

“ Don't mention it… ever again,” he joked, and led her from his office and back into the screening room. “Guess we'd better break the latest news to Stephens. I'm quite sure he'll be overjoyed you're going back with him.”

“ You're kinda taken now with the idea of our baiting Matisak, aren't you, Paul?”

“ Hey, what kind of thing is that to say to your boss and your friend, Jess?''

“ Come on, admit it.”

“ Admit it, hell. I'll admit to only one thing, Jess.”

“ What's zat?”

“ After the way you took out Archer from the top of this building two years ago, let's just say that I wouldn't want to be Matisak when you draw a bead on the bastard.”

“ Well, maybe it's time we turned the tables on him, the way that creep keeps baiting us, leaving those sick, blood-penned notes for us to find…”

“ I know it's got to be difficult for you,” he said, his mind racing on, “with a maniac like him pining for you like a lovesick calf, only this animal's bleeding others in some unholy exhibition of perverted love… delivering his prizes for your approval… giving you his twisted valentines.”

She thought of the despicable notes, usually in verse, left at the scene of each killing now, written across a mirror, a tile floor or some other surface. All of them were different, but all were the same: Matisak wanted to again taste her blood, to drink her blood. No surrogate would do. It was an acquired taste-she'd heard the joke that was going around about her relationship to the convicted vampire killer.

She momentarily thought of his victims, all butchered like swine only after he'd drained off their blood in a controlled fashion from the throat. The precious liquid of life was put up in mason jars like tomatoes, placed in a cooler brought for the task and carried off by the sadistic monster to feed on at his convenience. Jessica had lost self-esteem, confidence and the one man whom she'd loved without reservation up to that point, Otto Boutine, to this madman. Futilely, she had then fought from a wheelchair to see him placed on death row; she had even contemplated avenues of murdering the soulless son-ofabitch herself, but now all that was yesterday's remorse.

While Matisak was incarcerated along with other criminally insane monsters, she had managed to regain not only her physical well-being, the scars from his attack on her healing, but also her mental stamina, and had since proven herself in New York on the Claw case with Alan Rychman, and in Hawaii on the Trade Winds killings with Jim Parry. But since Matisak's escape, her life had taken a different and ugly turn. The in-visible scars had come back like stigmata. And no matter where she was, who she was with or what she was engaged in doing, the signs of those ugly stigmata were always present, just below the surface, always pressing to get out again and overwhelm her again. Even now, standing in the corridor outside the screening room, shaking hands with Stephens from New Orleans again, she was uncomfortably aware of the scars others could not see. She wondered if Dr. Desinor, the psychic, would be able to see Jessica Coran's psychic scars, the thought frightening in itself, for she'd worked so long to keep them invisible to all but the man she loved, James Parry. And even he did not know what awful depths those scars had reached…

New Orleans Police Commissioner Richard Stephens stood dumbfounded just outside the screening room door when he learned from Jessica of his good fortune, that not one FBI operative, but two, would be returning with him to his Crescent City. Both the famous Jessica Coran and Dr. Kim Desinor would each, from her own unique perspective, be looking squarely at the most challenging case in the history of the city.

“ Splendid, splendid,” he repeatedly said, shaking Zanek's hand after releasing hers.

Zanek glared at Jessica for her having released such information so soon. He still had as yet to speak to Santiva and the upper echelon of the Bureau. Zanek was trying to tell Stephens this now, but Jessica pretended it was merely a matter of protocol at this point, and after saying so to Stephens and catching Paul's unhidden fury, she asked Stephens, “How is New Orleans this time of year? Less crowded, now that Mardi Gras is over?”

“ Hot, just like the food, and plenty crowded. There're always parades, no matter what time of year. We celebrate life year-round in New Orleans,” he continued.

“ Celebrate life, huh.” I'm sure it's well-staged for the tourism industry, she thought.

Stephens didn't miss a beat. “That's why this monster and these horrendous deaths must end and quickly.”

Uh-huh, agreed, Jessica thought, her mind wandering back to Dr. Faith while Zanek escorted Stephens away from her, talking buddy-buddy to the other man, leaving her standing alone, the way Paul wanted it. He must be in control, even if it meant leaving Jessica Coran standing alone in a hallway.

She only hoped that Santiva would have half the luck she'd had with him.

Now Jessica made for her lab, having neglected work waiting for her there. As she went, she curiously wondered how the two of them, Desinor and she, would get on. She'd never worked with a psychic before, and at one time she would have thought Zanek a madman for starting such a program within the confines of the FBI. Otto Boutine certainly would not have allowed it in his division. Still, this woman Desinor seemed gifted, touched by some power both invisible and divine, something that Jessica would not mind exploiting, or at least understanding better and employing. Science had always been her strength, and yet there was a limit to what science could do, and there was always that line beyond which you needed a leap of faith, intuition, instinct. Maybe Dr. Desinor simply had more instinct and intuition than others. Either way, Jessica wondered if she could not learn from the other woman some vital information.

No, Otto Boutine would not have championed a seer, an Edgar Cayce-type in his unit. Still, Otto wasn't here and the world was spinning as madly, or more so, than ever on its axis, and the number of brutal killings, serial murders, spree murders, rapes and other brands of evil in this world had hardly diminished; in fact, violent crime was up as never before, even among children. Maybe law-enforcement agencies needed the assistance of the supernatural and the supernormal if they were ever to stem the growing tide of murderous rage in America.

Jessica had never been overly superstitious or concerned with matters of superstition, at least not until recently, but events and coincidence had played heavily in her life, and now with Matisak a werewolf on the prowl, capable of seducing people at his will, a Jeykll and Hyde of the first order, the more store she placed in fatalism and common-sense values born of experience, and the more she'd become interested in what she used to dismiss as superstition.

Perhaps she'd just become more superstitious herself since Hawaii. The beautiful island world had had its effect on her; there she'd discovered a world founded on a faith most took for fairy-tale absurdity about the gods of the sea, the imps of the coral reefs, deities of the volcano and forests and mango trees. Yet as superstitious as that quaint faith was, it had become the real dragon-slayer when it came to ending the career of Hawaii's most notorious serial killer, Lopaka Kowona.

Jessica had once believed that she had seen the future of police detection in DNA fingerprinting, serum and tissue matching. Maybe the real future lay instead in Dr. Desinor's psychic detection. Perhaps police agencies in the twenty-first century, on remote outposts in the galaxy, would be manned by psychics and empaths. Maybe the world would be a better place for it.

Maybe… a big maybe, but no one was making any guarantees, and certainty was an illusion no one believed in any longer, not the holy men, not the community leaders, not the politicians, not the government and certainly not the criminologists or those who projected into the future of law enforcement.

Arriving at her lab, she gave J.T. a big hug and a thank-you for putting Stephens and her together.