Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series)

by Robert W. Walker

“So you continue to maintain that this man was killed by his wife, and that his death has no link to the Queen of Hearts killings?” asked the mayor's man, Leroy David Fouintenac, a regal and robust man who appeared to enjoy Bourbon Street's finest restaurants. He'd obviously been coached long before on what she'd imparted to Captain Carl Landry.

  “Wife, girlfriend, live-in lover,” she muttered absent mindedly as her hands searched for any hot spot on the body. Finding none, she faked it, her hands shaking like a pair of dowsing rods.

  “What is it?” asked Stephens while the others stared on.

  “All the earlier information, all corroborated... nothing new, however...”

  “With such remarkable results,” began the mayor's man, a tall healthy-looking, rugged John Carradine lookalike, “perhaps the good doctor can—”

  “What remarkable results?” Kim asked, staring now through Carl Landry. “I've heard about nothing that has come of my report.”

  “You made a number of major hits on the Lennox body, Doctor,” replied Landry. “I wanted to tell you earlier, but... well, let's just say that we wanted to be sure and these things do take time. We have a woman named Beau Lennox in custody, and she has confessed to her husband's murder. She's being extradited from Texas as we speak.”

  Kim turned to stare at Jessica, silently asking, “Did you know about this?”

  “At any rate,” said Leroy David, as Meade called his political friend, as if nothing of consequence had happened, “might you now be persuaded to do a reading on one of the certain victims of the Heart-Taker? After all, that is the case you are being paid to... to help solve.”

  The comment made her wonder if the mayor's people were out of the true loop here. Perhaps they weren't informed about her actually working for the FBI.

  Dr. Coran came forward from the corner where she'd been standing in shadow. “Well... why not? It's not as if we have to exhume a body for the purpose; we had a victim wash up just yesterday.”

  All the men looked from one to another. “It could look awkward in the press,” suggested Captain Landry. “So, unless we can keep it to this room...”

  “What the hell,” said the P.C. “This is New Orleans. Anything goes, right?”

  “Anything within reason, but this...” Landry began to counter, a certain feeling of un sureness creeping over him.

  Fouintenac stopped Landry cold, staring across at him, sternly saying, “There's no reason the bloody press need get hold of any of this, is there, Carl? I say, give it a try with the last victim, but we do it in complete secrecy.”

  “What about it, Dr. Desinor?” asked the P.C.

  Kim looked about the room at the faces all pinned on her reaction, expectant and hopeful. They all wanted a miracle and she was supposed to supply it. “I'll be happy to... to do my best, but I can't possibly guarantee or promise any startling revelations, as you know. Still, I will go along with whatever you gentlemen and Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw decide.”

  That was how it had ended before Sincebaugh's arrival, the body of the Toulouse Street Wharf victim wheeled in only moments before Alex Sincebaugh had come crashing through the door as if to save her from both herself and the company she found herself in.

  She now found herself thinking only of Alex Sincebaugh, half wishing he'd stayed, glad he'd gone all at once. She wondered what it was about him that so attracted her, despite everything.

  18

  Heartily know. When half-gods go. The gods arrive.

  —Emerson

  Kim Desinor looked from one to the other of the men before her. Landry and Stephens were dissimilarly built, Landry being a short, stocky squared-off cop who hadn't lost the rough edges of his profession. With too much around the middle, his brown hair graying before Kim's eyes, she guessed him to be in his mid-fifties, and from the gnarled little hands to the way he walked, she surmised that his body was riddled with arthritic pains from fingertips to back and leg muscles, all of which he denied, even to himself. He had suffered some injury as a youth, something to do with being in a place he shouldn't have been, and he'd also suffered a knee injury in college, where he played a defensive linesman, no doubt, given his heft and size. She recalled some chance remark he had made with regard to Richard Stephens's ambitions and he'd served up a football metaphor, something to do with an end run that fooled no one.

  As for Police Commissioner Stephens, while not so tall as Alex Sincebaugh, he stood extremely tall beside Landry, and while he was not a slim man by any stretch, against Landry's bulk he appeared so. Still, Stephens's single most distinguishing characteristic remained his obviously dyed full head of flaming red strands which entwined one another in a series of wild dance moves. Where Landry's jaw was set in what seemed a perpetual, teeth-gnashing, concrete half snarl, PC Stephens sported a painted grin, born of campaigning. Stephens's henna-colored temples and fine features marked him as the best choice for higher office—more politician than cop and obviously made for the office. It seemed he'd go to any length to protect his personal citadel. Maybe he'd long since made up his mind that he would sit out his last years in office, content yet ever watchful, ever fearful of events that might topple him, such as this case.

  Stephens's tailored beige suit gave him the image of a modern-day Huey Long, replete with suspenders beneath the stylishly rumpled suit, in a breezy New Orleans way an expensive item in anyone's estimation, yet relaxed and loose-fitting. Stephens's nails were professionally done. But then, so were those of the guy from the mayor's office, who actually wore red suspenders and a checked tie with an angora-sweater poofiness to it which marked him as not only politically correct, but far more up on fashions, even down to the ridiculous sideburns. There was little else to distinguish the thin man named Leroy Fouintenac who'd been throwing his title—deputy mayor—around the room along with the hungry, darting eyes and the beaked and sniffing nose which led Kim to the image of a kind of malnourished buzzard, a sickly scavenger bird, as opposed to one who successfully hunted. He was thin and priggish, in imitation of a David Niven character she'd once seen in an old black-and-white movie.

  Rounding out the foursome was the staid FBI bureau chief, Lew Meade, a stony observer who seemed detached from everything but the arrangements and connections, always at the ready with the introductions, however, and always anxious to know the latest. He'd obviously called in the mayor's man, since they shared many more whispers than P.C. Stephens enjoyed with Fouintenac. Meade had an army of agents to see that Dr. Coran was made comfortable for her stay, while he'd totally ignored Kim, in keeping with the incognito approach she was to take here, her detachment from the FBI seemingly complete.

  She suspected that it had been Meade's idea to have Alex Sincebaugh pick her up at the airport, obviously to rub salt into Sincebaugh's wounded ego. She'd sensed the animosity Meade held for the lieutenant even at the crime scene the day before, but even more so here when Alex had entered the room.

  Meade was an observer, a watchful man who kept his cards extremely close to his chest. And Kim had no notion of what Meade meant to accomplish with his presence here. But Lew Meade's closemouthed approach had already alienated Kim and only made his blandness of character the more bland.

  Dr. Jessica Coran, by comparison, was a woman of color in every sense of the word, but her mysterious eyes held no warmth or clue at the moment as to what lay behind them. What did she think of all this talk of doing a psychometric reading of the last victim's body? It had been taken now from its refrigerated tomb by Wardlaw's young, female assistant, who'd wheeled the cadaver into the autopsy room and efficiently replaced the Lennox body with the nameless, hapless true victim of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Hearts Thief—as one newscaster that moming had called the killer.

  Kim herself was immediately worried by the idea put forth by Fouintenac and heralded now by Stephens. In fact, she hadn't particularly cared for the idea of doing a hands-on reading of the other so-called latest victim of the Heartthrob Killer—as others in the press had dubb
ed the phantom monster.

  She had to go along with it, she knew. Hell, Stephens and the others had taken a giant step forward with regard to her work. They accepted her “gift” unreservedly now, accepted the fact that extraordinary, extrasensory perceptions and detection were possible. Perhaps even Wardlaw and Coran had grudgingly accepted to some degree that some things which science had no answer for must be taken on faith alone, by sheer instinct alone. Kim was a purely instinctive individual, working out on a frontier which science might never fully comprehend or explore, a frontier of emotion and mind over matter which galled most scientists and pragmatists. Given their imperatives and natural liking only for that which proved empirical, she well understood why both the doctors in the room were far from convinced of her often startling and uncanny abilities.

  She unnerved people, she knew. People in general feared her, which was a far cry from admiration or awe. She sensed fear in Wardlaw and something akin to fear in Jessica.

  “Perhaps we should allow Dr. Coran and Dr. Wardlaw time to prepare their findings on the victim before I—”

  She was instantly cut off by Fouintenac. “If we wait for laboratory reports and findings, it could be weeks. Please, Dr. Desinor, do what it is you do.”

  “The deputy mayor came here to see you work, Doctor,” added Stephens. She read into his remark that he'd confided in Fouintenac exactly who she was and how he himself had witnessed firsthand what she was capable of. Obviously, due to her psychic hits on the Lennox body, she'd made believers out of some in the room. Still, Kim felt the air in the morgue close in on her; there was a stifling anger welling up from Wardlaw which Jessica perhaps contributed to.

  But Fouintenac and the others waited with eager eyes and ears, with obvious disregard for the delicate nature of such an undertaking, without regard to the two M.E.s in the room, without concern for protocol, without fear of the concerns of family, friends of the deceased, without much thought given to possible negative outcomes—so dazzled had they become with her gifts, little suspecting that half or more of her insight came through normal means: intuition bom of education.

  She'd had ready access to knowledge of the previous victims—enough to fake what she must—thanks in large measure to Alex Sincebaugh's absolutely thorough and meticulous examinations of the crime scenes and Wardlaw's forensic examination records and subsequent discussions she'd had with Jessica, Stephens and Landry. Jessica's detailed report on this victim in particular, and those earlier reports made by Detective Sincebaugh, had been invaluable, so much so that it was obvious to her, as it must be to coroner and cop, that the supposed victim with the severed head was out of the ordinary for the killer, possibly a setup of some sort.

  As to the flashes of psychic insight, she didn't entirely know where they had come from. She sensed and heard and saw images which sometimes were letters, road signs, maps leading her from one sensory input to the next, from one intuitive leap to another, and sometimes each led her along a direct line and sometimes quite the opposite. In Lennox's case, it had been a straight arrow shot. She'd heard the mewing, clicking, hum-ming sounds of a barnyard, the distinct noises of a chicken ranch coming out of the muffled, mysterious soundings given off by Lennox's body, that meaningless, whale singsong; then images had grown from the more distinct sounds. She'd seen a child everyone called Billy or Beau chasing terrified chickens, grabbing one and wringing its neck until it was dead. This had led to ugly little scenes, the same faceless girl in a frayed frock playing cruel games with some of the animals, both carnal and unnatural. She'd next seen Billy as a large, awkward girl, and then as a gargantuan woman in her mid-twenties, hard-bitten and tough. As Kim's hands had moved over the dead man—in one time and place—her mind had moved across another time and place, to a wedding, to a fight in a bedroom, to a dark closet and a pair of scissors she'd failed to use on him, to a new honeymoon during which all seemed peaceful and harmonious.

  Jessica and Wardlaw had proven that all the wounds were superfluous, even cosmetic, to ape the Hearts Killer, all fabricated to mask the barbital poisoning which might well have been overlooked had not Jessica Coran been asked in on the case. Even the severing of the head had come long after death, Kim had rightly guessed, as Jessica had confirmed.

  Still, Sincebaugh and Jessica, even Frank Wardlaw, had gathered as much from a quick perusal of the body and the wounds. So Kim was not surprised that Jessica, like Alex Sincebaugh and most assuredly Frank Wardlaw, knew that she had simply picked up on the same immediate clues as they had when they'd first viewed the body. Just because she possessed psychic power, this was no reason to discard common sense as a tool either.

  Still, she desperately wanted Jessica to remain on her side. As for the severing of the head, it'd been the result of a motor blade on a boat, the boat filled with drunken fishermen who'd found the body.

  As for Mrs. Lennox in small-town Texas near Austin, and as to her husband's mysterious disappearance, reported weeks before, Kim knew that she might well have recalled some particulars of the case from the hundreds of such cases that crossed her path in the line of duty every working day, but how she knew this was Lennox, and that he had died in the fashion he had, she could only attribute to a power she herself had no control over, nor anywhere near a complete understanding of.

  She had learned to live with the power, a power without definition, without boundaries, without reason, or rather outside of the realm of the normal meaning of such words as reason, rationality, sanity, normality. What was normal about speaking to the dead and having them speak back? Yet in a very real sense, it was precisely what Dr. Jessica Coran did with her probes, DNA tests and electron microscopes.

  “Will you do it, Doctor?” asked Stephens again.

  “I would like to see an exhibition of your... your laying on of hands,” added Fouintenac, curious, pressing.

  “I will do what I can,” she began. “I will do my best but can promise nothing, gentlemen....”

  The laying on of hands over the last of the Heartthrob victims yielded very little that Kim Desinor didn't already know. Even clutching the killer's strange rosary beads brought little or no new information, although the attempt exhausted her, for in the vision she once again became the killer wielding the knife. She had to be pulled from the cadaver, and so savage did her attack on the corpse become that she broke several ribs that had managed to remain intact until now.

  Still, the yield was slim. She tried to explain that while she was the killer, a part of her was not given over to the monster, and did not wish to be. Still, there was so much that remained blocked; so much was shut out.

  None of the principals in the room wanted to hear this, however. She finally said in a moment of desperation, “The killer uses a disguise of some sort. It's one of the reasons I can't quite get a fix on what he looks like.”

  “What kind of disguise?”

  “I don't know... something frilly and elaborate, like a stage costume.”

  “Clown costume?”

  “Some sort of Mardi Gras outfit perhaps?” pressed Stephens.

  “That's enough!” Jessica boldly stopped their questions. She had been the one to move in and grab hold of Kim and soothingly talk her down from her vision. She now wrapped her arms around Kim again. “You've already pushed Dr. Desinor to limits no one should have to endure. Allow her time to recover, please.”

  “This just isn't enough,” said Meade, disappointed along with the others.

  “We need more specific details,” added Stephens.

  “There might be another way,” suggested Landry with a pained expression, but then he quickly corrected himself, adding, “No... forget it... too much of the taxpayers' money involved, not to mention the emotional costs.”

  “What?” asked Fouintenac.

  “Go on, Carl,” said Stephens. “Spit it out.”

  Jessica knew what Landry was driving at, knew it from her readings of the files, from Alex Sincebaugh's earlier requests, and yet when she spoke C
arl Landry's thoughts, no one thought she had mind-reading abilities as they might have if Dr. Desinor had spoken the same words. “Exhume the first body, the first victim.”

  “Oh, I don't know... no, I think exhumation's out of the question,” replied Stephens, suddenly animated. “Papers get hold of that one, the family learns of it... we're talking major lawsuits and legal crap up to our hips.”

  “We can get the family to agree,” countered Jessica, who knew the difficulties inherent in what she said. “And if they refuse, we go ahead anyway. This is a murder investigation. They can't interfere. Nor do they have grounds for legal action. Besides, from what I read, the first victim's body was never claimed.”

  “It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” replied the deputy mayor, halfheartedly agreeing with Stephens.

  “Then we'll leave you out of it, sir,” countered Landry, who now seemed hot on the idea he'd first posited before them.

  Jessica took up the slack. “If the killer knew any of his victims, if he's closely connected to any of his victims, it'd most likely be his first victim. A likely hypothesis and one worth checking into.”

  “Then we do the first. What was his name?” asked Meade. “Stimpson... Kenny Stimpson, wasn't it?”

  “Some of us think Stimpson was the second,” countered Landry.

  “You're not seriously thinking of exhuming the Surette corpse,” replied Meade, his eyes going wide while Fouintenac chewed on his lower lip and Stephens's slack-jawed expression displayed his own surprise.

  “And why not?” Jessica said. “We have good reason to believe that there was missed evidence in the case which would have pointed to its being the first Queen of Hearts kill-ing, and that was over a year ago.” Jessica pushed the point. “What is it you're afraid of? That you might've saved some lives if you'd taken this step sooner?” Kim was slowly coming around to the meaning of the words being bandied about the room. All but Wardlaw, who stood stonily against one wall, were heatedly debating whom to exhume for her to psychometrically read, but Jessica wanted her shot at the Surette body also, while Wardlaw likely wanted his mistakes to remain buried.