Blind Instinct jc-7

by Robert W. Walker

  As they came within view of London's cathedrals, Jessica immediately made out the gargoyles. The cathedrals were littered with phallic-shaped gargoyles hanging far out over the pinnacles, some at heights no doubt impossible to make out from the ground. The whole effect made the city below appear almost hostile to those flying over, like a kingdom ever vigilant, ever expectant of enemies from without, ever ready for war. The buildings, taken as a whole, crafted a giant bed of nails in the gloom of twilight. Government buildings, castles, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, St. George's Cathedral, St. Martin's and others, all jutting skyward with their arrowlike turrets, shone beautiful in the fresh morning light. The River Thames ran through the city like a huge, lacy ribbon or like an uncoiled snake, depending upon one's mood.

  Jessica's mood had come full circle. Her arrival in London filled her soul with excitement. From Heathrow Airport to downtown London, she had an opportunity to see the choking pollution, congested roads, ugly factories, and blighted areas of the city-the necessary evils upon which all bustling, great cities rest. Far from the splendid, rolling, and majestic hills of England she'd witnessed by air. However, in forty minutes, she and the others entered the frenetic downtown city, which was filled with history and cemeteries. It had been the home of such notables as Rudyard Kipling, Samuel and Ben Johnson, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Tennyson, Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Carroll, Shakespeare, Disraeli, Churchill, Shaw, Newton, and Darwin-all men who had shed light onto the world. It had also been home to Jack-the-Ripper and other infamous killers.

  She was “on the old sod” so to speak, and the official New Scotland Yard car, sent to greet them, traveled lanes that had been traveled by Boswell and Bacon, Raleigh and Drake, kings and queens, and so many others in history and literature. The place swept her imagination and played games with her heart.

  “We're nearing the York at York's Gate, where you will be staying, Dr. Coran,” Richard Sharpe informed her. “We've got you a room there. It's central, close to the Yard, and coincidentally looks out over the Victoria Gardens Embankment where the first body was discovered.”

  “All rather a neat package, all in the City,” added Copperwaite.

  “The business district,” Sharpe clarified for her. “We will drop you at your hotel, allow you to settle in, and motor round to pick you up, say at eleven?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “As officers of Scotland Yard, we're duty-bound to report in before all else.” Sharpe then requested that the driver take Dr. Coran to the York by way of Savoy Place where a room awaited her arrival. But Jessica, seeing the now-famous revolving square sign that signaled New Scotland Yard headquarters, the modem structure at odds with all its ancient surroundings such as the Royal Horseguard and the Ministry of Defence, balked at separating so soon, saying, “No, I'd like to see what you have so far in your ready room before I go on to the hotel.”

  “Ready room? Ahh, you mean our operations room-the ops! But really, we have so very little there,” apologized Copperwaite.

  “You've seen the bulk of what we have in the files,” assured Sharpe.

  “I want to have a look at the bodies as soon as possible, then.”

  “It's rather early,” countered Sharpe, “and you must take into account jet lag. It was a long crossing. You may wish to acclimate to our-”

  “I rested on the plane!”

  “So you did. Yes, of course, then if you're sure…”

  “I'm sure. Take me to your corpse,” she said, trying a joke to loosen Sharpe up a bit.

  “That would be Chief Inspector Boulte.” Copperwaite quickly plugged into her joke with his own. “He's likely white as a corpse by now.”

  Even the driver laughed at Copperwaite's remark.

  “Well, yes,” agreed Sharpe, amused. “Likely pulled the few remaining hairs from his head since we left.” There was some disturbance at the parking lot entrance leading to the rear of the Yard, so Sharpe told the driver to let them off where they waited before the building. “Shall we alight here?” he suggested to Jessica, opening her car door.

  Jessica wondered if the man had a rude bone in his body. He behaved far more like a choirboy than a cop. “So your Chief Inspector Boulte, I take is as his name implies-rather tightly wound? And from what I gather, he isn't so sure of my joining forces with the investigative team? Is that it?”

  Copperwaite came around and joined them on the curb. “Wasn't all for it, calling in help from the colonies, you know,” he conspiratorially told Jessica.

  “Has a hard time accepting the fact we lost the war to you Yanks. Asking for outside help, especially from Yanks, well, there you have it,” added Sharpe. “ 'Fraid I played a bit of a game with him. Gave the newshounds the impression he meant to seek out your help, you see, rather than it being my idea. He didn't care for the gesture, but it did assure us of getting you in on the case.”

  She could not help but wonder about the twists and turns that had placed her here beside Richard Sharpe. Copperwaite added over her thoughts, “You can well imagine the sum total of collar work on Richard's part to bring this about, Dr. Coran.” Copperwaite then addressed his senior partner directly, adding, “Got your bloody neck in the harness now for it, Sharpie, and that's likely the only reason Boulte ever came round to the idea. Wants to tighten his reins on you, he does.”

  “Quiet now, Stuart.”

  “The man can be an absolute sticky wicket.”

  “I said stuff it, Coppers.”

  Copperwaite bit back his lip, his features taking on a more serious appearance, his hair still disheveled from the plane ride.

  “Chief Inspector Boulte simply thinks of himself as above the salt,” Sharpe said in near apologetic tone to his partner.

  “Aye, true.”

  Jessica had no idea what they meant, and her eyes registered this fact with Sharpe, who added, “In olden days, the salt cellar at the dinner table was a huge affair, as tall as a pedestal, the size “of a typical vase, you see, and it marked where the upper-and lower-class citizens sat at the table. Old stout Boulte is somewhat highborn.”

  Copperwaite added, “He's no alehouse politician.”

  “Don't know that I've ever seen him take a drop.”

  “Sounds like what we in the States call a tight-ass,” Jessica said, joining them.

  “Oh, that he is,” agreed Copperwaite, now openly laughing. “And that thing he does, talking about how he gives charitably to all the poor-all my eye and Betty Martin, he does! The man's as cold as false charity, that's what!”

  “Coppers, you're as near to the man as damnit is to swearing. Your skills of observation have improved tremendously to be sure, but to be fair, the man's facing an all-rounder here-a triple homicide,” cautioned Sharpe.

  “Oh, I've got 'im down, I do. As near as makes no odds. And the man's personality, well, it's all the fun of the fair, right Sharpie?” Copperwaite continued in levity. “And if I hear the man say, 'It won't answer' once more, I shall bloody run from the building screaming.”

  “And how is that the answer?” joked Sharpe. “Still, you do yourself a sad disservice speaking ill of superiors before such as the driver. Some in the department are paid bonuses to repeat what you and I have to say, Stuart. Believe me.”

  Jessica studied the modem edifice before them, staring at the entranceway to the famous Scotland Yard, and she asked, “Will your Chief Inspector Boulte be on duty this early?”

  “He's lost a good deal of sleep over the Crucifier thing, and he knows we're returning. So yes, he'll likely be here. He'll want a full report. Very proper chap, as they say. Strictly by the book, you see.”

  “Really?” asked Jessica in a lilting tone. “More so than you?”

  “Why, I'm not at all proper, not once you get to know me. Under the right conditions, some would call me a hell-raiser.”

  “Really?”

  London bustled with life all around them, people on the street passing them, cars and double-decker
buses blaring anger and resentment, making Jessica wonder if the cops here had as much difficulty with traffic quarrels as those in major cities in America. She guessed they must.

  Looking about, Jessica found herself feeling downright naked without an umbrella. Everyone on the street carried a proper umbrella, it appeared. And everywhere, in shops, in doorways, in windows, in the hands of men and women, she saw flowers. Flowers simply abounded here.

  “Shall we?” asked Sharpe, indicating the way.

  Jessica followed Sharpe through an archway that led to the gleaming glass doors of the modem facility. As in America, the British taxpayer must pay dearly for crime, she thought; her understanding of the tax structure had the average Britisher paying three times as much as the American taxpayer. Back home, she herself paid enough in taxes to finance most third world countries; she felt some pity for the British taxpayer.

  They went through a series of brightly lit corridors, down which the blip-blip-buzz and drone of noisy offices careened, as if manic to escape the building. They next passed through a door, past cubicles and several glassed in partitions where suspects in various crimes were being rigorously interrogated. Sharpe quipped, “We call that assisting the police. Problem is, most of these back-enders speak only back-slang, you know, that peculiarly British pastime of making words up by turning them round, like ecilop for police. It's how the term slop for police came to be.”

  Finally they stepped into a larger, open area in which ongoing murder cases were “displayed” to anyone in official capacity and interested in the cases set forth. Each case had its own “booth”-not unlike the booths set up at state fairs and in state capitals to display the work of Jaycee and Booster clubs. But here the subject matter presented a grim portrait of the various horrors dreamed up by mankind, so that the Scotland Yard operations room took on the quality of a house of horrors. The walls were papered with gory crime-scene photos, the tables were littered with the paraphernalia of murder- any and all clues to the identity of the victim, the killer, and the murder weapon. All of it lay before her like the artifacts dug from a recently unearthed archaeological site. Sharpe and Copperwaite left Jessica and went on to Chief Inspector Boulte's office down the hall. Left alone for the first time since leaving America, Jessica studied the objects on a table below the heading of Crucifixion Murders.

  The Scotland Yard detectives hadn't exaggerated. They had nothing to go on. As Copperwaite had put it the day before, “We've nothing, down to the bloody heirs and assigns who stood to gain from the deaths of these three victims, nothing what-bloody-ever”

  Victim number one had no living relatives. Victim number two had been estranged from his family, and despite child support and alimony payments, none of the family had heard a word from him in over eleven years. Number three had children, but like number two, he had had nothing to do with his children after a particularly nasty divorce, save sending the assistance checks, which he did like clockwork until his sons came of age and the money dried up.

  Obviously, the usual methods, such as following the money trail, proved fruitless in the case of the Crucifier. All money leads had led the detectives nowhere, since in each case the only parties to benefit were each victim's favorite charitable organization. Each left explicit directions, in wills found in their bank vaults, as to how their estates were to be divvied up.

  Jessica briefly wondered if, on the whole, Britons took more care with such postmortem matters than did the average American. Victim number one left her meager savings, amounting to 24,000 pounds, to the Church of Christ's Divination; number two left his entire savings, amounting to 36,000 pounds, to the Church of Our Lady of Merciful Tears, while number three ironically left a far greater sum, 170,000 pounds, ironically to the First Church of the Crucifixion.

  According to records, each church benefactor had been closely scrutinized, but no collusion or duress raised its ugly head with respect to the various churches to benefit from the deaths of the victims.

  The monies all being nontaxable, as they'd gone to charitable organizations, no one in government was interested save the watchdogs who saw to it that the organizations actually did charitable work.

  So there appeared no money motive for killing these three individuals. Unless, Jessica facetiously thought, you just happened to be a mad priest capable of knowing what a person's last wishes might be, or capable of accessing their records, say electronically. After a mild, inward laugh, Jessica dismissed money as a motive, just as Copperwaite and Sharpe had done before her. Her eyes went over the minutia of murder laid out before her. Each item was labeled with a crime-scene number that corresponded to each victim.

  Since the bodies were all found nude, early identification of the first two had been nearly impossible; while the third, a relatively well-known radio commentator, had been easier. The bodies had no pockets, a phrase in police parlance that meant IDing the victim would require great effort; this also meant that anything lying about the body had either been there before the body was dumped or had belonged to the killer.

  As she stared down at the objects lying before her, Jessica realized that the killer may or may not have dropped a lapel button, may or may not have left a cigarette packet found at the scene, may or may not have left prints on the discarded candy-bar wrapper, or on the Essex Hotel ballpoint pen found near one of the bodies. A railway spike labeled “possible” murder weapon lay alongside the items found at the scene, but this had been introduced by the coroner whose guesswork led him to believe the hands and feet were pinned to the cross with something similar in size and weight. The railway spike then had not been recouped from the crime-scene area at all.

  Jessica lifted the hefty, metal stake and imagined for a moment what it must feel like as it penetrated flesh and bone at the extremities. The thought gave her a chill. She imagined a helpless victim with three such stakes hammered in to pinion her body to some rough-hewn, splintery surface.

  “Unfortunately, we don't have the actual murder weapons used by the killer or killers in this case. They seem cagey, these two. Not so stupid as to leave their prints on the stakes lying about for us to find.” It was Chief Inspector Paul Boulte, Jessica assumed since he'd come in the company of Richard Sharpe.

  Boulte stood huge and round, a white James Earl Jones: broad-shouldered, full-faced, a painted grin, and he stood a head taller than Jessica. He appeared to like looking down on her-perhaps all women-from his high eyeball perch. Gargoyle eyes, she registered.

  'Tidy killers, actually,” the big man continued. “Very little blood involved, naturally, given the method of murder, but then that might say something about the prissiness of the killers, mightn't it?”

  “Perhaps, but I hardly call staking someone to a cross prissy.”

  “I merely meant the killer or killers might feel squeamish about blood, that's all,” continued the man Jessica had assumed to be Chief Inspector Boulte. He stood fingering some of the artifacts on the death table and quietly introduced himself, shaking her hand.

  “Then you gentlemen are of the opinion there is more than one Crucifier?”

  “That has become, we feel, apparent.”

  The Chief Inspector spoke in circles, Jessica realized. “But you are still surmising. No hard evidence of two DNA trails, two hair samples-nothing of a forensic nature to back your suppositions, I take it.”

  “No, not as yet. But then, that's what you're here for, isn't it?”

  Jessica nodded and said, “You won't be disappointed Chief Boulte, not by the FBI.” She was, after all, here on his buck. Still, forensic science did not set out to prove a previously established theory; it set out to prove the truth without any taint of preconceived notions. “I suspect that with each new kill, if he follows the pattern of most serial killers, our Crucifier will become more and more brash,” she suggested. “Stupid mistakes will follow, I assure you, Chief Inspector.”

  Impressed by her assuredness, the man extended his hand once again, saying, “And when the
killer's big mistake appears, you will be on him, or them, like a terrier, I'm sure.”

  “You know me better than I'd thought. When it comes to murder I can be a Jack bull terrier, sir.”

  The frank response took Boulte by surprise, forcing a nervous laugh from him, while Sharpe hid his own amusement. Jessica realized that Sharpe, who had stood aside to watch the sparks, had brought his superior to meet her here in order to show Boulte that Dr. Coran was already earning her keep.

  Chief Inspector Boulte now smiled at her, finding her aggressive response to his liking, enough to take her hand hostage again amid his sweaty palms. He said, “I certainly meant no disrespect, nor to imply, Doctor, anything unsavory. Pardon my clumsiness with words. Are you finding London to your liking, Dr. Coran?”

  “I hope to see a good deal more of it. I've only just come from the plane.”

  “So Sharpe here tells me how eager you are to see the results of the Crucifier's maiming. Perhaps you will be my guest tonight for dinner? Allow me to show you the fairer side of our beautiful city, get your mind off this horrid business for a time, once you've finished up with Burton's body, of course.”

  “Sorry, not tonight,” she said automatically. “I'm going to be quite busy tonight. I want to do my own examination of all three of the victims right away.”

  “Burton, perhaps, but not the other victims, I'm afraid,” he replied. 'Two of them have been released. We don't like to hold on to them too long. Public opinion, PR, all that, you understand.”

  “I thought they were pretty much without family.”

  “Well, the first one, yes, but our freezer compartments are jammed this time of year, and she was getting fairly… ripe, if you follow.” He brought a guttural laugh from his larynx to spill out over his lips, but he didn't, thank God, drag it out.

  Almost in apology for his superior, Sharpe said, “We do have limited space, and Whitehall hasn't seen fit to improve the situation for the past several years now, not to mention the problem with burial plot space, and true to form, division tells us that if we fail to use what space we have left, we shall lose it. The commonwealth will seize it, as it were.”