Bitter Instinct jc-8

by Robert W. Walker

  Kim said, “You mean he was a challenge to you as a therapist?” And your brother?” asked Jessica. “What kind of patient was he?”

  “I pleaded with him to get another, more objective and distanced person to work with; I told him that I could not be both his brother and his shrink, but week after week, he kept coming.”

  “And he showed an interest in how Gordonn's therapy was going?”

  “An inordinate interest, yes.”

  “I ask you again, Dr. Vladoc, did it ever occur to you that Gordonn's bill was being paid by your brother?”

  “Well, frankly, yes, I gave that a lot of thought, and I asked Gordonn about it, but he denied it. After that, I never questioned him about it again, and I am still of the opinion that you two must be wrong.”

  “Will you prepare a full report about the two patients' therapy, Doctor?”

  “I can only reveal such detail on the dead man, not my living brother. Ethics prevent it.”

  “Then do it for yourself, Doctor. Heal thyself,” Kim fairly sneered, and hung up.

  They sped toward Lucian Locke's house with the intent of somehow gathering a DNA sample from the man. To date, he had played the role of a man desperate to help out in the investigation, but now, with the supposed murderer dead and the case supposedly closed, they could not be certain how he would react to their request, and Jessica doubted that he would voluntarily give them a sample of his bodily fluids for analysis.

  “Suppose… just suppose,” she told Kim, “that Locke had become infatuated with the romantic details of the suicide pact, and he learned that the mother believed herself to be the reincarnation of Lord Byron trying on a woman's body. 'Lady' Byron found modern life too wretched for his/her sensibilities, and so s/he had decided first to marry, to conceive a child, and then to convince her husband, Gordonn, to join her in a pact to affirm themselves as progeny of Byron through their art.”

  “Weird theory, yet according to Vladoc, Gordonn believed that his mother thought this possible through her poetry, and that Gordonn's father believed it possible through his painting and photography. With them joining forces, they expected to shake the world. When this failed to occur, and all life became a miserable spiral of financial ruin and frustration, coupled with the agony of life in this dimension, and after they had had the child which Lydia now hated herself for having brought into this world, they hit upon the suicide pact.”

  Jessica came in sight of the Locke home. “I see,” she said. “Sounds strange enough to be true.”

  “Gordonn believed that it had been his father who had spared him, his reasoning being that his mother loved him too much to leave him behind, while his father loved him too much to take his life.”

  “Then Locke becomes his spiritual father; a kid like that is all too easy a mark for the likes of Lucian Locke.”

  Gordonn's revelations to Vladoc during his therapy sessions must have certainly fascinated Locke. Probably he met with Gordonn to hear what Gordonn had learned about himself in therapy. Footing the bill, he likely stipulated that he be privy to the details of Gordonn's progress.”

  Jessica stepped on the accelerator. Outside, the orange glow of sodium vapor lights flooded across the hood and windshield at regular intervals. “Since we're dealing in hypotheses here, I suspect that Locke was particularly fascinated by the genesis of the skin poetry and by the kind of poison on the pen. He could have learned about the use of selenium from the story of Gordonn's father and mother.” And he would have been interested in the reasoning of the mother. Locke began to think in a way similar to Lydia.”

  Outside the cocoon of the car, the world sped by faster and faster.

  Jessica gripped the steering wheel, trying to control the rage growing within her. “He may well have come to believe that the world held a magical secret, that there was some rare race of angelic people, hidden within our race, people so close to ethereality that being born into this existence was a kind of imprisonment.”

  “What if Locke had begun to hear voices that corroborated his gestating beliefs, the voices of angels, encouraging him in his beliefs, imploring him to send their brothers and sisters back to them? What then?”

  Jessica pulled to a stop before Locke's home. “Is that how he embarked on this deadly odyssey? Is this how the Lord Byron Poet Killer was born?”

  The answers were housed somewhere deep within the recesses of Lucian Locke's mind and possibly hidden someplace in this house as well. The answer, for example, to the question of why he had chosen to kill Leare. Was it something beyond his control, an order he could not refuse, or had she gotten too close to the truth, threatening to expose him? If it were the latter, he had to have rationalized her death by seeing her as one of his chosen, despite everything against such a view, from her appearance to the profanity that she liberally used in speaking. Leare hardly matched the victim choice, although a case could be made for Gordonn and the young woman he had died alongside.

  Jessica and Kim had stepped halfway out of the cruiser, their eyes pinned to the professor's car, which was parked in front of the house, telling them that he was home, when radio dispatch called with an urgent message from Leanne Sturtevante. It was obvious that Locke wasn't going anywhere, so Jessica sighed, dropped back into the unmarked cruiser, and took the call. Kim sat beside her.

  “What's up, Leanne?”

  “There've been two Poet Killer murders tonight-two!”

  “My God, when, who?”

  “At the bookstore, Darkest Expectations, Marc Tamburino, dead in his upstairs apartment. Same MO as Gordonn's. Someone's decided to take up where he left off.”

  So Tamburino wouldn't be collecting that snitch money after all, Jessica thought. She tried to put this new information together with Locke, who was now their primary suspect.

  Sturtevante, her voice shaky, added, “He was alive when I found him, but before he could be gotten to a hospital, the poison did its work. I had gone to check out a few details with him; when I found the place locked, I tried his apartment. He didn't answer, so I got the super of the building to open it up. I heard music inside, and when I saw him, I thought he might have overdosed, until I saw the poem cut into his back. Began with the same three lines as the others.”

  “You said there was a second victim?”

  “Yes… Dr. Harriet Plummer.”

  Jessica and Kim exchanged a shocked look. “Plummer?” Jessica exclaimed. “We just spoke to her earlier today.”

  “Garrison Burrwith found her at her place; her back was cut with a poem. Same MO.”

  “The man's on a rampage,” Jessica said. “Now he's murdering anyone his fevered mind perceives as a threat.”

  “He needs nineteen angels, Jessica,” Kim reminded her.

  “What is your location?” Parry asked suddenly over the police radio. Jessica assumed that Leanne had called him to the crime scene at Plummer's residence. We're sitting outside Lucian Locke's house; we have good reason to believe him the Poet Killer. We were wrong about Gordonn, dead wrong.”

  “Wait for backup. This guy's flipped out, and he's extremely dangerous. Hold on until we get there.”

  “We were just about to call for backup, Jim.”

  “You've got it. I'll radio the nearest cruiser to join you, and we're on our way. And remember, you don't need a warrant if you at all suspect his children to be in danger from him… if you know what I mean.”

  “His angels, he called them,” Jessica replied, realizing only now what a target this made of the two children, and possibly of their mother, Locke's wife, if the three had returned to the house from wherever it was that they had gone.

  “We've got to get in there, Jess. If the children have been poisoned, and if we're not too late, perhaps we can do for them what Sturtevante was unable to do for Tamburino- get them to a poison center for treatment.”

  “Agreed.”

  “We can't sit idly waiting for backup knowing what we know.”

  Jessica agreed, lifting h
er. 38 automatic from her ankle holster below her slacks. Kim, too, found her weapon. They advanced on the house quickly but cautiously, and as they did so, the dim lighting became dimmer and dimmer until only a great darkness awaited them inside.

  When they got to the front porch, Jessica put a hand on Kim's shoulder. “I'm going to need you to direct traffic when backup arrives. We have to get medics in here, immediately, so hold this position.”

  “Oh no you don't. If you go in, it isn't alone.”

  Jessica tried reasoning with her friend, but Kim remained adamant. As they argued, the lights inside flickered and died again, leaving the place as black and still as a mausoleum.

  “It's so quiet here my ears are ringing,” Jessica commented. “Far too quiet.”

  “Where's the requisite music, the obligatory candlelight? His vat of selenium? All of the rest?”

  “I think he's spotted us out here.”

  “What's he going to do? Kill us with a pen?”

  Jessica's joke notwithstanding, they approached with extreme caution, guns held at the ready. The door was not locked, and within they now heard the faint sound of music coming from somewhere upstairs. Faint sounds other than music could also be heard-rustling, the pitter-patter of someone in slippers moving casually about, ghostlike sounds that mixed with the shadows and played pranks on the ear, making Jessica wheel and bring up her gun only to realize that what she heard was only the faint meowing of a cat.

  In the living room, she saw the piano and the pictures of Locke and his adopted children, cute urchins at play, she could see, even in the darkened room, one as adorable as the other. Jessica and Kim could also see a pair of large adult eyes, the penetrating eyes of Evey, Locke's wife, but this image staring back at them, Jessica suddenly realized, was propped up in a chair, and it was no photograph.

  The corpse of Evey Locke sat upright in the chair across the room. From her pose, she seemed to have been tied there, but closer inspection revealed that this was not so. She was dead, but she was sitting up. From the impressions on the deep-piled rug, picked up by a flashlight Kim had grabbed from the glove compartment of the car, it appeared that she had crawled to this, her last resting place in this life. No blood trail, only a dead body, naked and stiff. Jessica stood over Mrs. Locke now, and placing a hand on her cold form, pronounced her dead.

  Kim, standing next to Jessica, flashed the light on the woman's back and said, “Look at this. More proof that we're right about Locke.”

  Jessica looked, and seeing the familiar cuts, nodded. “He did her, all right.”

  “The children've got to be upstairs.”

  Jessica turned and headed for the stairwell, Kim directly behind her. Fearing the worst, they made their way up the stairs, cautious and not very hopeful about the children.

  The master bedroom was empty, so they made their way down the hall toward the children's rooms. Passing a large guest room, again they saw nothing. The first child's room was empty of all but stuffed animals. In the second child's room, they located the children, huddled together, their backs covered with the words of the Poet Killer.

  Apparently, after both children died, killed by the powerful poison selenium, their mother had somehow found the strength to get downstairs. The impression on the bed where she had been lying clearly indicated this to be the case.

  But where was Papa Locke? The mastermind of this mayhem?

  As if in answer to their thoughts, a creaking, groaning sound, followed by a thwacking sound rose up from downstairs. Jessica and Kim rushed out of the chamber of death that the children's room had become, hearing police sirens and the squeal of tires outside. They moved toward the apparent source of the strange noises that welled up from somewhere in the bowels of the large house.

  The sound of spurting, gurgling water led them to the kitchen. There they located a door that led to the basement, and the moment they opened this door, they knew they'd found the source of the gurgling. It was a busted pipe Going cautiously down the steps, their guns extended along with the flashlight, they were stopped when the light hit the prone figure of a man with a noose around his neck. It was Locke, small and misshapen, lying below the busted pipe, which spewed water over him. His pitiful suicide attempt had apparendy failed not once but twice. His back was etched with a poem, and his throat was raw and swollen from his attempted hanging, but he was still alive. Somehow the selenium had not killed him and the pipe he hanged himself from had torn loose, sending him falling to the concrete floor and saving his miserable life.

  “Kill me… kill me,” he pleaded, lying over a gutter and holding his hands over his eyes.

  “We'll let the state decide whether or not you live, Locke. Not our job,” replied Jessica.

  “Put me out of my misery. Send me over.”

  Sturtevante and Parry rushed into the now cramped basement, bringing with them a floodlight. The light made the little man on the floor look all the more disgusting and ugly and pitiable.

  “The children?” asked Parry.

  “Dead, along with their mother.”

  “Angels one and all,” muttered Locke.

  At that moment. Parry lost control, kicking out at the lump of tortured flesh on the cold floor, sending him reeling over. “You lousy sonovabitchingmotherfucking child killer!” Again Parry kicked him, this time in the teeth. Jessica and Sturtevante pulled and shoved Parry into a corner, shouting for him to cool down, when suddenly an explosion filled the small room, and they all saw Kim Desinor standing over Lucian Locke, a bullet hole through his head and a shocked look in his eyes. “He… he grabbed out at my gun!” Kim shouted. “He took hold of the barrel. I didn't mean for it to go off, but it did. It all happened in the blink of an eye. It was an accident.”

  “Good riddance,” Parry said in a raspy whisper, patting Kim on the back, as if to congratulate her. “Imagine what the literati of this country would turn him into if he lived to a ripe old age in prison, writing poems from his cell, given his own Web site like Charlie Manson. He'd probably become the most celebrated poet of his generation.” Parry then turned and rushed up the noisy, wooden stairwell to the kitchen, where backup cops had turned on lights.

  Kim kept repeating, “It was an accident. The gun went off when he grabbed the barrel. He yanked at it with my linger on the trigger. I was distracted by you guys and Parry, all the fighting, and then the explosion.”

  “We believe you,” said Sturtevante. “No one will dispute your need to kill that piece of shit.”

  Jessica put her arm around Kim, telling her that it would be all right. “It will be investigated and there will be no charges of wrongful death. You did what you had to do.”

  “It wasn't like that, Jess. Truly, he grabbed the gun and pulled it straight at himself, but I had a strong grip on it, and it went off, all quite unintentionally.”

  “Perhaps not on your part, but what about his? He asked us to put him down, and when we didn't respond in the manner he wanted, he created the circumstance in which you had to end his life. Simple as that.”

  “It's such a horror for me, taking a life. I feel less of a human being for it.”

  “He left you with no choice; he wanted you to act instinctively, intuitively, and you did. You did for him what the rope over the pipe couldn't do… and I'm getting wetter'n than the proverbial drenched rat in here, so let's vacate this place for now. Come on upstairs with me into the light-

  Kim nodded weakly and allowed Jessica to lead her away from the body and this place. “And for the sake of protocol,” Jessica added as they turned to go, “since I was on hand when the perpetrator of this bloodless slaughter was shot to death, I'd best call Shockley and his ETs in to collect evidence and to deal with the bodies.” Jessica led her friend and colleague out of the death grid, neatly defined here in the basement to await Shockley. “It's always difficult to take a life, but if he'd gotten firm hold on that gun and turned it on all of us, well… suffice to say, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”
>
  “He didn't want to fire the gun on any of us; he wanted it for himself, and he managed to use me to that end, didn't he? Clever SOB, I'd say, very clever indeed.”

  The core task-force team felt a great weight lifted off their collective shoulders, knowing now for certain that the serial killer called the Poet had finally been identified and his career ended.

  Jessica remained close to Kim while both the PPD's Internal Affairs cops and the FBI's own Internal Affairs people asked questions about the death of the suspect, Lucian Locke.

  Everyone found the scene gruesome, and emotionally painful to process, especially the room where the two children lay in bed, faces down, their backs revealing the final verses of the poem Locke had written. By now all the verses had come together to make a whole.

  Jessica felt little pleasure in having been proven right, that each of the poems was a section of one large, ambitious work. She supported Kim's version of the shooting one hundred percent, telling the IAD guys that she had seen the shooting go down exactly as Dt. Desinor described it.

  Meanwhile, Sturtevante and Parry, their services no longer being required, had gotten a federal warrant for search and seizure at Dr. Lucian Locke's office, club locker, Second Street apartment, and home. Parry meant to go by the book, to create an airtight, hermetically sealed case against the now dead poet.

  The news of the Lockes' deaths following so quickly on the heels of Leare's, and the even more lurid news that Locke had murdered Leare-everyone agreed that such news was tailor-made to increase dramatically the appeal of their poetry to young people fascinated with death and the trappings of death.

  Parry, Sturtevante, and a small army of white-gloved detectives combed the house for incriminating evidence that might explain Locke's behavior, explain why he had killed his wife and children, and the series of people who had come before them. Nothing came of the search, not a shred of useful information, not even from his locked desk drawer in the spacious den.