Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series)

by Robert W. Walker

  But the cunning, cool fiend had first ordered the new man to disrobe and toss his orderly whites aside before Matisak took his pleasure with the orderly, slicing through the jugular and carotid arteries. The infirmary had been instantly steeped in blood, which Matisak, at some point, had gone on all fours to lap up in dog fashion. He'd left hand and knee and even tongue prints on the floor in crimson detail, and he'd also left behind the disgusting poem meant for Jessica and written in Arnold's blood across the wall.

  Before Matisak was finished with Dr. Arnold, there remained not a drop of blood in his cadaver. The monster had made fiendishly wicked use of a nearby dialysis machine. He'd no doubt planned its use on Arnold all along, and enjoyed watching the blood empty from his body through the transparent polyethylene tube and into the beaker from which Ma-tisak drank his fill, leaving only what he could not consume or take with him. An autopsy had clearly shown that Matisak had used the IV tube and the dialysis machine to pump the blood from Arnold's throat after laying the bound and gagged man across a stretcher. What troubled Jessica most was the thought that Arnold was conscious long enough to watch his own blood streak through the tube, into the machine and out into the waiting beakers.

  She held at bay a mental image of the monster hoisting a beaker of blood to his lips before Arnold's crazed eyes.

  A reckless trail of victims left in Matisak's wake had led FBI authorities to Oklahoma, and by the time Jessica got there from Hawaii, the manhunt had concentrated on the Tulsa area. It was one of the largest manhunts in recent history. But Matisak had remained elusive, and once the trail had gone cold in Oklahoma, Jessica and Paul had gone back to the federal facility in Philadelphia where Arnold had so hideously died. There she had examined the scene of the murders, which by then had been cleaned and tidied up. Still, she had learned what she could from others who'd swept the actual scene, piecing together the probable string of events that had led to Arnold's death and Matisak's escape.

  Once sated, the monster had next assumed the identity of the orderly, named Kenneth Bowden, wearing the young man's lab coat and ID tag. He'd taken the man's car keys, casually strolled out to the car, pulled up to the gate, where he'd blithely signed himself out as Bowden, and proceeded through the gate with a wave of his hand.

  Lights came up now in the small screening room behind Zanek's office, and the final film, dated only the day before, ended with Dr. Desinor rushing from the room as if her life depended upon getting off camera. She was neither shaken nor up set by her reading of a ransom note brought her by authorities in Decatur, Georgia.

  “She's everything I told you, isn't she? What about it, Stephens?” asked Zanek, who'd returned through his office door at the rear, surprising both Stephens and Jessica. “Tell 'im, Jess.”

  P.C. Richard Stephens ran thick, freckled fingers through his thinning mop of red hair and allowed it to settle on the bald pate at the back. “She is remarkable, but I had already come to that conclusion just reading of her work from the material you forwarded.”

  “I think she's exactly what you need in New Orleans,” Zanek told him. “Jessica here, well... she's got so many duties here at Quantico, it just wouldn't do for us to lose her right now. You understand?”

  Stephens, who'd originally requested help in the forensics arena from the F B I, and from Jessica Coran in particular, had heard a great deal about Dr. Coran and how she got results, and all of it had proven to be true. But Zanek had had him waffling between the pathologist and the psychic for a week now, wondering if he should get help in the form of science or seance. All he knew for sure was that his NOPD had its collective hands full with a bizarre string of murders that no one seemed capable of getting a handle on.

  “Jessica, you haven't said anything,” Zanek pressed, placing a friendly hand on her shoulder. “What do you think of Dr. Desinor? Doesn't she make David Copperfield look pitiful by comparison?”

  “I'll admit she's very good.”

  “Dr. Desinor gets results. She was dead-on in Georgia.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “Got word just this morning: a major development in the Sendak case. Mr. Stephens here asked specifically for your assistance, Jess, but I've explained to him that you're needed here for the time being. Hell, we've got requests for Jess's help from a dozen different police agencies across the continent at the moment, and I've had to turn them all down, Stephens. Nothing personal. It's just important right now for Jess, for Dr. Coran, to remain close at hand. Now, our Dr. Desinor'll be a fine stand-in, I can assure you, especially on this sort of case, a case involving few clues. Dr. Desinor's your man, if you'll pardon the expression, on a case that requires an instinctive ability to get at the truth.”

  “She puts on a damned good show,” Stephens admitted, “if they have indeed come up with a solution in Georgia based on her reading of that note.”

  “They have Sendak's daughter in custody, the daughter he never had, and she's told authorities where the body is,” replied Paul, obviously impressed not only by what he'd witnessed on the screen but also by the subsequent developments in the Sendak case.

  “I'm most impressed,” Stephens said. “Dr. Desinor puts on quite a show, but then so do you, Dr. Coran. I read about how—with no more than an arm coughed up from the sea in Hawaii—you were able to reconstruct the awful string of murders there which had gone undetected for years.”

  “I had a great deal of help there, a support team of the first caliber, and as for detecting the undetected... well, James Parry was really the one who broke the case wide open.”

  “Modesty becomes you, Jess,” said Zanek.

  “Parry and his team were superb,” she insisted, her stare hard.

  “Yes, well, in any event, I wanted to show Stephens here what I've seen in Desinor, and I wanted to show you, since you'll be stepping aside this go-round so as to catch up on your duties here, and since I've long wanted you to evaluate Dr. Desinor's whole operation to see if the Profiling sector might not wish to avail themselves of her services in the future—possibly even think of her department as a new arm, so to speak.”

  An interesting idea, Jessica thought. She'd heard of Dr. Desinor's intriguing work. Not many in the upper echelon of the F B I network hadn't. However, Desinor's work was classified top secret, not for public consumption; consequently, Kim Desinor and her small team had kept a low profile themselves. Their budget, it was rumored, was pretty shabby as well.

  “Paul, I'd like to talk to you alone for a moment, if you don't mind,” Jessica requested.

  Stephens flashed a perfunctory frown, his bulbous nose and red cheeks flaring—both frown and drinker's rouge part of his office, she decided—but he quickly recovered, nodded and left the screening room.

  5

  Her heart is like an outbound ship

  That at its anchor swings.

  —Whittier

  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 rep
lied. “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.”