Bitter Instinct jc-8

by Robert W. Walker

  Jim Parry, to his credit, did not know of Sturtevante's personal involvement with Donatella Leare until well after the arrest, learning of it only during interrogation sessions with the suspect.

  Since then, Leare had posted bond and was released easily and quickly. From all accounts, she had made a great adjustment to her newfound notoriety. Her books were selling like hotcakes, according to Marc Tamburino, who was heard to exclaim, “Man, you can't buy that kind of publicity. Not even Donald Trump can buy that kind of publicity. The news media can't even manufacture that kind of story, I tell you.” Jessica had passed word along to Sturtevante that she- Leanne-had, however unwittingly, given Leare's career the proverbial shot in the arm, that people all over Philadelphia were vying for copies of her poems, and that Leare was being asked to speak publicly at functions all across the state. The detective had taken the news badly, as a slight, a lousy joke. She had pointed the finger at Leare, had arranged for her arrest, and now she felt like a fool. She had taken the action against Leare in spite of Jessica's better judgment, and Parry had sided with her; now both had come to the realization that Leare was not the Poet Killer after all. All three of them-Jessica, Sturtevante, and Parry-knew that Sturtevante's personal involvement with Leare had impaired her judgment. This fact, unspoken among them, colored every word now of their discussions of the case, and made them all intensely uncomfortable.

  Parked alongside Gordonn's rambling, aged house, atop a cracked and weed-choked driveway, a battered beige late-model Oldsmobile had been waiting. Once the suspect had gotten into the car, and once he sped off, disappearing around the comer, an unmarked police vehicle took off after him.

  Inside the surveillance van, Parry told Jessica, “We can't wait any longer. We go in now while he's out.” He started for the door, stooped and cramped in the small interior with Jessica, Leanne Sturtevante, and a technician named Jake Towne. “Go in without paper?” protested Sturtevante.

  “If we miss this chance, we may not have another to bug the place before he decides to scratch his itch again,” Towne warned the others, taking Parry and Jessica's side.

  “We need the warrant, Jim,” Sturtevante cautioned. “We've already made one mistake. Let's not compound it with another.”

  Parry protested. “You made the mistake, Leanne; you were so convinced of Leare's guilt that you convinced me, and now that we have a viable suspect, it's time you owned up to your error. But I have to agree with Towne, this guy could return at any time.”

  Leanne checked with the team that now followed Gordonn. She spoke to them on a closed line. Then she told Parry and Jessica, “According to the team that's on him, Gordonn appears to be driving aimlessly about the city.”

  “In the vicinity of Second Street?” Jessica asked.

  “No, he's wandering around the warehouse district.”

  “Looking for new prowling grounds, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “All right, then. I say we go in and hope the warrant arrives before we leave the premises,” Parry said, his hand on the door.

  Jessica readily agreed. “I'm with you, Jim.”

  Sturtevante warned, “Any word of this gets out, no matter what you collect from bugging the place, Jim, it'll be tossed. I know the system in Philly, and that kind of thing will get you nothing but a reprimand. The prosecutor's office won't touch tainted evidence or evidence gathered by criminal means, and that's what you two are talking about.”

  Parry looked Jessica in the eye. “Are you sure you want in on this?”

  “I am.” Jessica took it as a challenge.

  “It could backfire, Jess.” I'll take that risk.”

  “Like you did in Hawaii?”

  “Yeah, guess so.”

  He turned to Sturtevante. “Stay on Dr. Desinor to get the paperwork to us ASAP.”

  “I just want it noted that your action is-”

  “So noted, Lieutenant Sturtevante, so noted. In the meantime, why aren't you on the phone to your contacts, getting a local warrant?”

  “We're doing the best we can. I've gotten the mayor out of bed.”

  “Good, he wanted results, right? Where're all those clowns in their three-piece suits when you need them? Where's your boss, Roth?”

  “Hospital. Family emergency. Wife's been fighting cancer.”

  “Shhheeesh, sorry to hear that.”

  Parry threw open the surveillance van doors. “You with me, Jess?” he asked, extending a hand.

  “I want inside,” she replied, following him out.

  “No radio contact,” said Sturtevante, who remained inside the van, bent up like a yogi on a bad day. “Towne, you got that?”

  “Got it,” replied the technician.

  The three exchanged glances, all of them knowing that radio contact meant that the exact timing on this would be recorded. No radio contact meant an ambiguous time line later if anyone should ask. Don't ask, don't tell would be the rule of the day. “It'll keep us all a little more… honest,” said Sturtevante. “Just a little.”

  “Good thinking,” Parry told her.

  “Good hunting,” Sturtevante said. “I'll watch your backs. If Gordonn makes a move anywhere near here, I'll break radio silence with a single word.”

  “And what would that be?” Rampage.”

  The other task-force members, watching Gordonn's movements, kept in constant radio contact with Detective Sturtevante while Jessica and Parry entered Gordonn's home. Parry had brought along his lock-picking tools, and it took him only a few minutes to gain entry. He broke in like a pro, disturbing nothing.

  Once inside, Parry expertly wired the place, setting taps on Gordonn's phones and placing bugs in his walls.

  Meanwhile, Jessica wandered about freely until she came upon a collection of photo albums. She opened one after another in search of the incriminating evidence-Exhibit A.

  “Even if you found something, without that warrant we can't produce if for a jury; no prosecutor would touch it.” Parry was telling her what she already knew, but he also knew that she, like himself, felt an insatiable need to learn if they were or were not on the right trail.

  “I just want to find out if it is him, if we're really onto the right man here,” she confessed, now telling him what he already knew. She continued to thumb through Gordonn's photos and books, private papers and file boxes in an attempt to at last discover the truth.

  Then Jessica came across a photo of Gordonn as a child with his mother and father. She noticed that his father was separated from his wife and son, who huddled together as if in a shared cocoon, as if they were protecting each other. Perhaps for good reason? she silently asked, her eyes searching every detail, every nuance of the snapshot.

  In another photo, mother and child were captured in the nude, and their obvious delight at playing whatever game they were playing again suggested how terribly close they were, maybe a bit too close, Jessica caught herself thinking.

  Jessica wondered who had taken the photo-Gordonn's father, perhaps? Flipping to yet another photo, she gasped. “My God, Jim, he's got to be the Poet Killer. Look at this photo.”

  Parry came to her side and looked at the strange photograph. What he saw caused him to gasp as well. The words Happy 6* Birthday in an angry, burnt-orange color seemed to scream at him from little George's back, where they had apparently been scrawled. Evidence or sheer coincidence? the detectives wondered, their eyes meeting.

  “God bless me,” said Parry, swallowing his own words. The message written across the child's back looked like a banner; these words were followed by the lines of a poem: Spirit child of my spirit/Soar to the estate/Of star and moon/To return to us soon… On his sixth birthday, either Gordonn's mother, Lydia Byron Gordonn, or his father had written lines of poetry on the child's back, as if to carve them into his flesh.

  This single photo spoke volumes in and of itself, Jessica believed, but photos of Gordonn's victims would prove absolutely damning. It all gave her pause, and her thoughts fl
uttered like so many nervous pigeons now as she considered the mother's maiden name of Byron and her married name, Gordonn. It was yet another damning apparent coincidence, for the Romantic Poet Lord Byron, Jessica knew, had been bom George Gordon, the same name minus an n.

  She wondered if the mother had perhaps been a failed poet, and a failed person as well, and if she meant more by these words on her son's back than anyone knew, if she had been the one who penned them. She wondered about the relationship between mother and son, and between father, Harold Gordonn, and son. She wondered just how balled up and twisted up with Byron's dark and somber personality the relationship between father and mother had become. Myths and legends had grown up around Lord Byron, both during his scandalous lifetime and after; Jessica even remembered hearing it said that he had become a vampire, or simply a person who lived the life of a vampire in some ways. Yet his poetry was as beautiful as it was disturbing. Some considered him a fallen angel, and there was evidence in his reported conversations and poetry to suggest that he himself had started this particular bit of folklore.

  Parry cursed first under his breath, and then aloud. “Fucking A-these shots of little George ought to come in handy at trial, once we can get our hands on them again, but for now, darlin', they have to stay put. Place them back exactly as you found them. We don't want Gordonn to have the slightest inkling we've been here or that we're onto him.”

  “I need to search for photos of his victims. These won't convince a jury that he's guilty of murder. It's far too circumstantial and could be presented as mere coincidence, chance, by a good defense lawyer.” She began a frantic search through the remaining albums on the shelf but stopped when several clippings from the Philadelphia Inquirer fell onto the dirty carpet.

  Jessica now knelt, dirtying her skirt and knees, to reclaim the clippings, ecstatic, certain they had located more incriminating evidence. But her bubble burst when her eyes lit on the date of the clippings: May 4, 5, 6, and 10, 1969. Another clipping was dated a year later, 1970. The clippings dealt with the suicide pact of Gordonn's mother and father, and with the surviving child, who had been turned over to Child Protective Services, a child with a strange poem emblazoned on his back. Jessica only had time to scan the clippings when Parry shouted, “We've got to get out of here-now!”

  “Just a minute.”

  “We're out of time. Leanne's calling 'rampage.' “ Jessica could hear the word like a mantra over the police band. “Get moving, Jess. It's the warning we agreed upon earlier. Gordonn's returning home.”

  “Then we take these with us,” she said, pointing to the photos and clippings.

  “No, we can't take a thing; we've already disturbed too much here. If he knows we've been inside, he'll know the place is bugged, and all our efforts will have been for nothing. No, you can't leave the premises with a thing. As for the clippings, they're public record. We can duplicate them at the Inquirer's microfiche library.”

  “But, Jim, the photos, these could disappear; he could bum them at any time.”

  “He hasn't burned them in all these years. Why would he do it now?”

  “If he feels threatened, he might.”

  “We'll just have to take that chance.”

  “And I still want to locate victim photos.”

  “You don't even know if they exist. It's just something Kim Desinor thinks she knows, another trance image.”

  Jessica and Parry were still arguing when Sturtevante pushed through the door and shouted, “He's only a block away. Get out of here-now!”

  “Put everything back the way you found it, Agent Coran. That's an order!” shouted Parry.

  “Going to pull rank on me now, Jim?” Jessica bit her lip but did as he ordered, tucking the loose photos back into the album from which they had spilled, her hands steady but her nerves pulled taut.

  Parry said, “Sorry, Jess, but we haven't enough evidence on the guy to get a warrant, obviously, so how're we going to justify taking stuff out of his home?”

  Jessica replaced the albums on the shelf where they had sat gathering dust, dust that she had disturbed. She had wanted to find a stash of victim shots, a diary perhaps, a running tally of his victims, maybe some newspaper clippings that referred to the ongoing investigation, but none of these had surfaced, only the telltale shots of the child with the writing on his back.

  Parry continued his tirade. “And to prematurely abscond with anything from the house will open up a legal hole in a later trial that any defense lawyer could run a tractor trailer through.”

  “Allow the creep time to incriminate himself fully,” Sturtevante said, putting her hand on Jessica's shoulder to emphasize her words. “It's time you took your own advice, Jessica. I wish I had heeded it earlier.”

  Parry tugged at her now, losing patience. “We've already broken the law by being here and bugging his place. Let's not compound that. This gets out and my next assignment will be in Podunk.”

  “It's the first break we've had, and you're asking me to just walk away from it?” Jessica demanded. “Suppose he bums all the stuff tonight?”

  “We all want to nail this bastard, Jessica,” soothed Sturtevante, “but we need to do it by the book to make it stick. Desinor has the warrant in hand, but she isn't here, and it isn't kosher until she gets here with it. Besides, we've bugged the place. Jim's right. Let's do the rest of this by the book.”

  Jessica knew they were right, yet she found it difficult to let go of the only incriminating evidence in the case anyone had seen. On their way out of Gordonn's bungalow residence, she told Sturtevante, who hadn't taken the time to look, what she had shown to Parry.

  “Then at least we know we have the right suspect this time,” the detective replied. “We won't let him out of our sight.”

  “Or hearing,” Parry added. They climbed into the surveillance van and closed the doors just as Gordonn pulled into sight.

  “It sure was hard to leave those photos behind,” Jessica said in frustration.

  “You didn't leave much behind, Jessica,” Parry said, one eye on the returning Gordonn. Carrying a small plastic grocery bag, he stepped casually up to his door, unlocked it, took a moment to glance about to see if anyone was watching his comings and goings, and then disappeared through the door.

  Parry continued to soothe Jessica. “What those photos represent is… well, it's just too nebulous, and a strong defense-team shrink could paint it as a healthy sign that Gordonn was strong enough, despite the trauma he suffered, to go back to research how his parents died.”

  “And the part he played in their deaths?”

  “He had no part in it. He was a child.”

  “The dysfunctional family on overdrive involves every member.”

  Parry shook his head. “The child was an innocent victim in a suicide pact made by his parents.”

  “I am talking about the sordid, twisted family matrix of these three people. No, the child did not have any conscious part in it, but the parents were motivated by the child's being… just being, in every sense of the word. Existing in innocence, his angelic nature. They did it for him, seeing themselves as heroically saving the boy. His very innocence set his parents on the deadly path. And by now he knows this.”

  “Sounds like a candidate for some serious psychoanalysis,” said Sturtevante.

  “According to the story, each of them, including the child, had a poem incised on their back.”

  “We'll have to get copies of the articles from the newspaper library.” Said that the mother wrote the poem into the back of her husband, and the husband into the back of the mother.”

  “And the child?”

  “No way to tell for certain which of the parents wrote on the child's back, but whichever parent it was, he or she intentionally withheld the poison, allowing the son to survive the suicide pact.”

  “And the poems are similar to the ones the killer is using today,” added Parry.

  “Whoever did the writing had not given the child the poison
. Therefore, one of the parents must have balked at ending the child's life. Possibly as the partner lay dying, making the decision to allow the child to live at the last moment, possibly while feeling the first effects of the poisoned ink himself or herself.”

  “Mother or father?” wondered Sturtevante, echoing Jessica's theory.

  “And what difference does this make to Gordonn?” Parry asked.

  “Possibly the answer to the question, the answer he is so desperately searching for. But for us, the more important question to our case, now that we're seeing victims all being poisoned in exactly the same manner, is why Gordonn sees a need to reenact such killings. I say there's enough evidence to involve the DA's office, maybe get an indictment,” Jessica told Parry.

  “No, not necessarily,” Sturtevante said. “This story is public knowledge. Likely can be accessed through on-line sources-hell, likely isn't the word, absolutely can be accessed via the Inquirer's dot-com.”

  Parry scratched his chin. “If Gordonn has shared this tale of the suicide pact of his parents and his own near death at their hands with people around him, any one of them could have taken the idea and run with it, including our friends at the college, Locke and Leare, or for that matter someone in the photography department, or Harriet Plummer, Professor Burrwith, anyone with whom George Gordonn may have had any dealings.”

  “Or it could be Gordonn himself, acting out, repeating the twisted logic of his parents, who set him on this path as an infant,” Jessica insisted.

  Parry calmed her, placing a gentle hand on each shoulder. “Remember your profiler training, Jess.”

  “Of course I remember it. What about it?”

  “It taught you that a killer will have a circle of attachments, acquaintances, friends or people he thinks are friends, relatives. Any one of these people could be using Gordonn, or Gordonn's story, for his own twisted ends.”