Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series)

by Robert W. Walker

  Not twenty-four hours earlier she and Ed had had a quarrel, and he had since sent flowers and a note of apology for being a complete ass, as he'd put it, pleading that she might give him another chance, see him again, claiming that he'd gone to great difficulty to arrange to stay on later in New Orleans so that he might see her again, to patch things up, as he'd put it. Now things—Ed Sand in particular—would never be patched up again. She had ignored Ed and his Humpty-Dumpty plea, knowing that she was not interested, that she wanted to remain faithful to Jim Parry. She had innocently used Ed to get a rise out of Kim that morning on the plane, but since then she had ignored Ed... until now. “The bastard killed Ed.”

  Kim instinctively tugged at Jessica where she had slumped half in and half out the door. “Get back inside here, Jess. Your instincts were right, then. Matisak is stalking you.” Kim knew enough about the monster to understand the rising fear within her own being was a healthy one, one of self-preservation. She slammed the door behind them.

  Jessica, however, suddenly did a 180-degree turn, pulling away from Kim, snatching the door wide open and pushing past the decapitated head, her .38 raised and ready, all to a chorus of disagreement from Kim. Searching the hallway for any sign, any movement, she shouted in each direction, “Show yourself, you son of a bitch! Show yourself, Matisak!”

  “Jess, there's something here...my God... in the mouth.”

  Jessica returned to see that Mad Matthew Matisak had sent her a note. She shakily reached for the paper that'd been plunged into Ed Sand's mouth.

  Special delivery...“What is it? What does it say?” asked Kim, still shaking, disturbed to her core that such horror could be so easily and readily visited upon her doorstep. She wished now that she'd fought Zanek and had remained in her lab behind the safe confines of Quantico, but Jessica, she surmised, felt quite differently. Jessica wanted to race out into the street as she'd foolishly, recklessly, bravely done at 34 East Canal Street, find Matisak and do war with the demon.

  Jessica peeled apart the paper and read the stained message:

  Come midnight alone

  to join me

  at Metairie Necropolis

  to find eternity and bliss.

  “What the hell's he talking about? What's Metairie?” Jessica wanted to know.

  “It sounds like he's talking about the Metairie Cemetery.”

  “A cemetery?”

  “Yeah, aboveground cemetery; a rather large and easy place to hide, in fact. You can't go there, Jess. He's laying the trip we spoke of.”

  “But if I don't go... what's the result... where does it end? Poor Ed. He... he didn't deserve to get mixed up in this, and now... now he's dead. Everybody around me is in danger, Kim, including you, so long as that fiendish, satanic creature roams free. And I'm the only one who has a shot at stopping his crazed brain from hatching his sick plans, and this is one heart I intend to put an end to.”

  “It's too dangerous, Jess.”

  “It's more dangerous going on the way I have. Poor Ed; he must've seen Ed with me. Must've stalked Ed, then killed him, just to hurt me. Damn him... damn that evil bastard.”

  “We've got to call someone,” said Kim, going for the phone.

  “Didn't matter one damn to Matisak one way or another if Ed was a friend or just my pilot, did it? All that madman knows is that he wants to hurt me any way he can. Hell, he killed four others in Oklahoma for me—to send me a message. Now this...”

  Jessica kept her gun and her eyes alert to the possibility that Matthew Matisak might materialize at any moment from any direction. Then she closed the door on the horrid sight of Sand's dangling head. She next went to the balcony and searched there for any sign of the killer, despite the fact they were some twelve stories up. She even looked overhead, in case the sky was falling. In the distance she saw lightning flashes and heard the rumble of a storm. The TV newscast had warned of possible high winds due to an approaching hurricane out in the Gulf of Mexico. But Jessica's concern was on another force of nature, Matisak.

  Before anyone else arrived, Jessica gripped Kim by the wrist hard and exacted a promise from her. “You're not to tell anyone about the note Matisak left behind, do you understand? Do you? Promise me you won't. Just promise.”

  “I can't do that.”

  “Damnit, it's got to be kept between us. Damnit, Kim, I need your promise on this. If you say a word to anyone about it, our friendship is over before it's begun.”

  Kim bit her lower lip, dropping her gaze and considered this and the state that Jessica Coran was in. “I wasn't aware we had a friendship.”

  Jessica was still waving her .38 around. “Please, promise me, Kim... promise me.”

  “All right... all right, Jess.”

  “All right, what?”

  “All right, I promise.”

  Inside fifteen minutes the hallway was cordoned off as a crime scene, uniformed police and detectives everywhere, including Carl Landry and Lew Meade from the FBI. Word was buzzing that Alex Sincebaugh and Ben deYampert could not be located.

  Ed Sand's head was bagged as evidence. Kim kept her promise about the note from Matisak. Frank Wardlaw did the forensics honors, and he kindly assured the two women that the perpetrator was nowhere to be found, but neither was the rest of Ed Sand's body.

  A distraught Jessica Coran was told a half hour later that Sand's body was found in his hotel room at the Hilton, a floor up from her own room, blood everywhere from the decapitation. Jess had had no inkling that Sand even had a room at the Hilton. There was also found a briefcase in Sand's possession filled with surveillance devices, wiretaps, bugs. Jessica realized too late that Ed Sand had bugged her room and was shadowing her, and that his interest in her was part of his job as an FBI undercover man. He'd been handpicked by Zanek to protect Jessica.

  Jessica and Kim had been followed from her room to Kim's by the stalking Matisak.

  Landry confided that Lew Meade had led them to Sand's body, having known all about Sand. “When my men got there, they found a Do Not Disturb sign on Sand's doorknob outside. Inside, they found Sand's torso and limbs stretched across the bloody bedding.”

  25

  An honest heart is hard to find.

  —From the Notebooks of Jessica Coran

  The morning found all of New Orleans in a silver veil of haze, fog and drizzle, an occasional groundswell of rumbling thunder electrifying the gravestones, reminding everyone of the approaching hurricane and the fragility of life as a handful of ghostly people walked amid the desolation of the city-maintained Cemetery #27 in the Uptown district. They'd gotten a late start due to the murder of Ed Sand, and the disruption it had caused both Dr. Coran and Dr. Desinor, but both women had steeled themselves to continue on with the manhunt for the Hearts killer. Unfortunately, there were people milling about the ancient cemetery and some would definitely notice the unpleasantries. It was nine A.M. and Alex Sincebaugh had long given up on anyone meeting him here, so he'd come and gone and come back again, learning belatedly of the goings-on at Kim's hotel room. He was kicking himself now at not having followed a strong desire to go to her hotel after their fight at the restaurant, but he and his partner had found a trail which smelled keen, so deYampert and he had pursued it hotly the night before. They had gone to a gay nightclub where Alex intended to shake some information from the patrons one way or another. Ben had had several off-color jokes in response to that, but Ben was also uneasy with traipsing through gay bars, and he'd registered his concern plainly enough, along with his concern that maybe the whole direction they were taking, hinging as it did on the words of a creep named Pigsty Gilreath and the Surette killing, might be leading them down the wrong path.

  Surette had been one of the better-liked performers in the French Quarter shows; he'd played nightly at the Blue Heron just off Bourbon Street. Sincebaugh had never caught his act, but he'd heard that Surette had been impressive, that Horny Vicki Surette had had them on their knees—both male and female. And it was there
that Davey Gilreath, otherwise known as Pigsty, had met Surette. This was old news, all gleaned on the first sweep of interrogrations and interviews with suspects in the wake of Surette's death. In the newspapers at the time, Surette had merited a two-inch column and an obit in the crowded pages of the Sunday Picyune.

  Alex had been frustrated and stymied on the investigation after Gilreath had disappeared without a trace; no one, not even the streetwise, knew of Pigsty's whereabouts. It was as if he'd fallen into the Gulf.

  As they pursued leads the night before, Alex had reminded Ben of all that they knew of Davey Gilreath, that he'd been raised on a farm somewhere in northern Louisiana, that he was an addict, a snitch and that he had once been Surette's lover.

  “Guys like that come and go with the wind, Alex. He could be in Alaska or Maine or on a merchant marine ship getting it on with all the boys there. I tell you, it's a dead end,” Ben assured him. “Besides, we ruled him out as a murderer long time ago.”

  “I don't suspect him of killing Surette.”

  “Well, then... why're you pursuing it?”

  “I'm uneasy with his disappearance. He seemed quite contented here before...”

  “Before people like him started getting bumped off daily? Hell, I see nothing strange in his getting out of New Orleans,” Ben countered, laughing. “What I find strange are the transies we've seen tonight who damned sure ought to've gotten out of this area till we catch this creep.”

  Ben, always the voice of reason, did make sense. Alex still felt compelled to say, “Yeah, but what if the little bastard knew more than he was telling?”

  Ben next breathed in a deep breath of night air and gave his best patience-in-action glare as he said, “Listen, Sincy, let me pose a slim but possible theory here, okay?”

  “Shoot! Be my guest.”

  “Supposing our dim-witted Pigsty—chosen, mind you, as a snitch for his fine propensities in ratting out his friends and selling his mother on the street—just supposing this piece of human filth got some sort of Phantom of the Opera syndrome, and with—”

  Alex's laughter cut Ben off. “Phantom of the Opera syndrome? Is... is that something you got from Dr. Longette?''

  Ignoring the interruption, Ben continued. “And with all of New Orleans his stage, Gilreath suddenly lashes out and strikes back at some festering cancer within him and—”

  Again came Alex's laughter, turning to tears with a mental image of Pigsty in tights and cape.

  It was then that Alex pulled the car to a stop across from the third gay nightclub they'd visited that night, The Warm Fuzzy.

  Ben just kept rattling on as they stepped from car to bar. “Striking out at his own gayness, maybe... or the fact he was powerless, always the puny runt, pushed aside by life, people, siblings, always of no consequence, always sucking hind tit.”

  “You think he sucked hind tit with Vicki Surette?”

  “Last one on, last one in ... I'd bet my last dollar on it.”

  “Maybe you've got something, there, Ben. But I'm having a hard time seeing Gilreath in the role of—”

  “Don't you get it? Maybe Gilreath decided to be of consequence for once in his miserable life, to prove a villain since he can't prove a hero, so to speak, another Lee Harvey Oswald, only his anger is directed toward those resembling him.”

  “You maybe ought to become a shrink, Ben.” Alex stepped through the doorway and into The Warm Fuzzy, his eyes instantly alert and searching. He was also instantly made as a cop along with his nervous, fidgeting partner beside him. But Alex also spotted a known male prostitute and sometime snitch known among his street friends as Ricky Aspen for his physical attributes. He was tall, slender and firm, but the aspen in Aspen was a mere willow at the moment. If anyone knew anything about Pigsty's whereabouts, it might be Ricky. Alex's thoughts were now brought to a jarring halt when finally the officiating grave-keepers started up the noisy back-hoe, which began to hungrily, greedily chew at the huge stone over the aboveground city plot paid for and maintained by the taxpayers. Here lay Victor Surette's body as it had rested since the year before.

  Jessica Coran, holding together like a person bound in baling wire, no doubt had popped a Valium, Alex decided staring across at her. But she was tough, strong, even in her voice as she spoke to Landry.

  “Given the conditions of the cemetery and the fact he was buried by the state in a pine box inside a moldy old above-ground crypt with cracks about the seal,” Jessica began, “I wonder at the possible condition of the body.” She had obvious plans to run her own tests and make of this a chance to autopsy the man whom Sincebaugh had become convinced was the first victim of the Queen of Hearts killer.

  The umbrellas were of little help, the rain slanting inward as if it consciously knew it must work around the obstacles to get at people. It beat a soft chorus against them. The crypt, thankfully, did not have to be pried from the earth as might be expected in most any other place, because in New Orleans the eternal rest for all souls was aboveground, due mainly to the fact that the water level was so close to the surface and the city itself was below sea level. Cremation was often the first choice in cases involving unclaimed bodies such as Surette's; however, for some unaccountable reason, the authorities had chosen burial instead in this case. When Jessica asked about this, no one seemed to know the reason why, until Alex Sincebaugh reminded them that Dr. Frank Wardlaw had suggested the arrangement in the unlikely event that an exhumation might become necessary should someone claim the body at a later date, or if further forensic review of the body became necessary—as coincidentally it had.

  The crypt opening was, however, taking undue time, the graveyard attendants noticeably delaying. During this delay, Jessica Coran asked about the seal, which looked to have been broken before they had arrived.

  “We knew you were coming,” replied the chief caretaker, a wizened little man named Oliver Gwinn whose liking for the bottle was well illustrated in his complexion and nose. “So we started early.”

  When finally Captain Landry blared a few obscenities into the man's ear, the lid was further pried loose by the backhoe, and a second cemetery caretaker signaled the man in the machine to shut it down. The two attendants worked with thick gloves, crowbars and a butane torch, which burned off the final remnants of the seal. Inside they found what the city of New Orleans called a coffin, a simple unfinished white pine box discolored by a grimy, green mildew on all sides, microscopic life having taken up residence on the wood long before it was sealed and now growing in complete darkness.

  “Pop the lid?” asked one of the attendants.

  “No, we'll take it to Morrison's nearby,” said Landry to the men. “Just load it in the van, okay?”

  The two attendants, with Gwinn backing off and looking on, lowered thick, coiled ropes through metal brackets on each side of the coffin and worked the ropes below it with some difficulty. The problem was the lack of space between coffin and crypt sides. Soon, however, the box and body were up and straddling the crypt, and in the next few minutes loaded on the waiting van.

  Alex's mind wandered again to the previous night. Could Ben have been right about Gilreath? Pigsty was the product of a dysfunctional home, his father ever ready with a belt and a backhand. Maybe something inside the weasel did snap. But Alex had pursued Aspen, who'd attempted to leave via a back door down a passageway. Alex caught the boot-licking, freckled creep just as he was about to exit, and he got rough with him, shoving him against a bathroom door and then into the room itself.

  “Whataya want from me? I ain't done nothing.”

  “Shut up and listen! I want you to tell me how to get in touch with Pigsty.”

  “Pigsty, hell, man, Sincebaugh! I ain't seen that mother and he owes me a hundred and—”

  Alex lost his cool at that point, bodily picking Ricky up and ramming him into the wall, making him cry like a little girl. Ricky also lost it in his pants, and Alex was disgusted at the same time that he was taken aback. He let the other man ease
down the wall, but he kept the pressure on by pulling out his .38 and shoving it into Ricky's cheek.

  “Don't hurt me, please, man! Don't hurt me,” Ricky pleaded, his face a mask of fear now, wet all over.

  “Then tell me what I want to hear.”

  “I don't know where that fag is, man! I swear it on my mother's grave, God! God, I hate you! God, I swear, 1 don't know!” he pathetically blubbered.

  Alex felt a moment's weakness and was about to relent, but instead screamed, “Then who the hell does know?”

  “I don't know!”

  “Give me a name now, Ricky, or I do your pretty face. You'll be marred for life.”

  “You... you can't threaten me like this. It's not right. I know my rights.”

  “In here you don't have any fucking rights, Ricky! They're all flushed down the toilet! Now give it up!”

  “Sue Socks, man... go see Sue.”

  “Where?”

  “She... she works at the Pink Anvil.”

  “Who is she to Gilreath?”

  “I don't know. They're... they're family or something... cousins, I think. Now, let me outta here.”

  Alex let go of the man, who stank now of urine. Ricky wiped at his tears with his sleeves, speaking like a woman, saying, “I just hate you. I hate you.”

  “Here, take this for your troubles,” Alex replied, pushing a pair of twenty-dollar bills at him.

  “I don't want your fucking money.” Alex tossed the bills at him and watched them feather-fly toward the urinals. When he looked back, Ricky was snatching the bills from the floor. Alex found Ben outside, waiting in the car, talking to his wife on the radio, something about bringing home some groceries and a lottery ticket. Alex told Ben that he had a line on Gilreath, explained how Ricky Aspen had given up a cousin who worked at the Pink Anvil.