Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “What do you think of old Dr. Shockley?” Kim asked.

  As the elevator descended, Jessica replied, “I think he's good for my ego.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “But he's also shrewd, and I believe at some point he'll declare himself.”

  “Declare himself?”

  “Show his true colors, make his professional move. He has great acumen. That much he proved with the tear find.” 'True enough, but you've got to believe that some of us co-inhabitants on the planet are genuine, Jess.”

  “Some few, sure.” Jessica placed a hand on Kim's shoul­der, reassuring her. “You know I'd trust you with my life, as I have in the past.”

  “Same here.”

  SEVEN

  Instinct is the express train—no stops, no de­tours, no layovers nor delays... Instinct is knowing without knowing why.

  —from the casebooks of Dr. Jessica Coran, ME

  Like everyone else entering the murder scene at 1102 South Street, Suite 3-35, Jessica felt an eerie sensation of disbelief that anyone here lay dead, much less mur­dered. The music and odors coming from the room were pleasing to ear and nose. A Loreena McKennitt CD had been set on continual play—presumably set in motion by the deceased or his killer—and one haunting melody after another softly caressed the ear. As sandalwood incense burned, McKennitt's dulcet voice and heartfelt lyrics sounded like the wail of the dead man's spirit, the sad Celtic strings and flute filtering through the window and onto the street below.

  This strange feeling came from what was missing at the scene of the murder of Maurice Deneau. The place proved to be chillingly pleasant, normal and calm; nothing ap­peared out of the ordinary, nothing the least disturbed in the apartment, and the body lay posed, facedown so that anyone discovering Maurice would first be struck by the etched poem on his back. The body, thus posed, appeared in deep, comfortable slumber. Beside the dead man, on his nightstand, lay a book of poetry, a gilded marker inserted three-quarters of the way through Lord Byron's Childe Harold, Canto II, and the book was dog-eared at the open­ing of his famous long poem, Don Juan. Other books on a nearby shelf showed Maurice to be a lover of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, as well as Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Milton, and two of Jessica's favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning. Two modern poets graced the bookshelf as well, one named Lucian Burke Locke and the other named Donatella Leare, the poet and professor at the university, Jessica recalled, that Leanne Sturtevante was using as an expert and consultant.

  Jessica was taken by the dark, layered cover art on both Leare's and Locke's books, a gut-wrenching Hieronymus Bosch landscape of hell on Leare's cover, the dark and sin­ister wasteland of a bleak cityscape on Locke's.

  The walls were lavishly hung with large prints by the fa­mous Edward Burne-Jones, G. W. Waterhouse, and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. In the hallway, a tearful male friend, Thomas Ainsworth, who had discovered Maurice's body when he had let him­self in with a key, kept up a constant, heart-wrenching wailing, like an ancient requiem, over the death of “May­onnaise”—as he called the victim. When pressed to ex­plain why he called Maurice Mayonnaise, he said the term was his on-line moniker. From all appearances, Thomas loved Maurice and would not harm him for the world, and he knew no one who had any reason whatsoever to harm Maurice.

  “We'll confiscate the computer and any disks,” declared Parry, guiding a pair of FBI agents to the machine. “Have them checked for anything that might help determine when, why, and how Maurice came to this end.”

  “Why Mayo as a moniker?” Jessica wondered in a near whisper to Parry.

  “I dunno. Maybe he 'spread' for everybody?”

  “Not if he's anything like the other victims,” replied Sturtevante, who had left Ainsworth for now, joining them in the death room. “All the victims kept tight rein on who they slept with, according to all and everyone who knew them. Ainsworth is saying the same about Maurice here.”

  Ainsworth's wailing rose to a frightening level. “I'd bet­ter stay with the friend,” Sturtevante said.

  “Question him further for any word the victim might have had about a rendezvous with a sponsoring poet,” sug­gested Parry. “He's got to have told someone of his great achievement.”

  Kim and Jessica turned their attention to the clean and perfectly healthy-looking dead man on the bed, his beauti­ful hair and skin at odds with his condition. Looking about the room, Jessica's trained eye saw nothing untoward, nothing out of place, knocked over, or shattered. This tidi­ness was reflected in the bureau mirror across from the bed, along with the image of Maurice's cadaver.

  “How oddly strange and peaceful it all feels,” she found herself whispering to Kim, who nodded, agreeing.

  “And green,” Kim pointed out. Drapery and floor rug were lime green. “It's a significant hit. The green pool I saw in my last vision.”

  “Yeah, it's almost creepier than walls and windows splattered with blood.”

  None of the usual elements found at a murder scene were in evidence: no blood-drenched sheets or carpets, no walls stained with sputum or brain matter, no overturned furniture, no drawers turned out, and a victim without ugly, gaping gunshot wounds, without the usual missing face or limbs. The crime scene didn't present a mutilated body or deep slash wounds. Why are we here? and what's going on here? were the first reactions of the investigators.

  Sandalwood incense had struck Jessica's nostrils when she'd first entered the crime scene, and she saw fat, squat candelabras hunkered like strange pronged little beasts from a Tolkien novel on each bedside table. In fact, the home was filled with candles—large, small, thin, wide, and of every color. According to the first uniformed officer on the scene, some of the candles in the bedroom had been burning when he arrived, while some had been extin­guished, presumably by the breeze at the open window. This meant that the discovery of the body had come on the heels of death.

  Jessica hardly knew what to do with so pristine a crime scene. She had become used to horror, terror played out on a victim, hours of torture and mutilation. This... this felt more like a wake. Peace, serenity, acceptance seemed to be the rule here, as opposed to battle, chaos, or disharmony of any sort.

  The open window allowed the hum and rhythmic noises of the city to enter along with the night breeze, a kind of beautiful noise of life that wafted through. Large paintings done by Maxfield Parrish, depicting serene and dreamlike worlds, and other paintings depicting medieval knights on horseback, beautiful and ornately dressed maidens, with flowing hair trellising down through tangled briar against a backdrop of raw nature, decorated the bedroom walls. Wild rushing streams, filled with spirits and banked by wildflowers and forests, played with the eye. Mere wall decoration or declaration? Jessica wondered.

  Jessica's eye fell next on the gilded and grand frames that set off the many paintings that made Maurice's home a shrine to the past, or rather a fantasy past. The frames were themselves baroque artworks, which looked as if they might fetch a handsome price at any antique store. The bedroom furniture—as was true of all the furniture in the home—looked out of time, ancient, large and ponderous, yet there remained a certain charm to it. A strangely allur­ing style Maurice had chosen to surround himself with— something a Spanish lord might have owned in a previous century. In one corner stood a full six-foot-tall suit of armor, and from the ceilings chains hung, twisting and spiraling snake fashion to hold innumerable cast-iron-like lanterns. In another comer, Jessica felt a wave of shock come over her, surprised to see a replica of what looked like an iron maiden.

  “Some icebreaker, huh?” asked Kim.

  Sturtevante, who'd rejoined them now, seeing Jessica fix on the ancient weapon of torture, whispered in her ear, “Al­ready checked it out. It's a fake, like the armor, cheaply made in Mexico, only a hundred bucks.”

  Jessica nodded and continued her overview of the place, her attempt to sum up the man by his surroundings. On the ceiling black sheets had been hung to simulat
e the night sky, and on the sheets blinked the stars and the heavens. An enormous, even breathtaking blue moon, shrouded in misty cloud—thanks to a covering of gauze—also stared back at Jessica. The entire effect beckoned any and all to lie back and contemplate the depths of the heavens.

  “Where do you suppose he got all this unusual stuff?” Jessica wondered aloud when James Parry stepped in from another room.

  “Looks positively foreboding. Remember how Lopaka Kowona filled his home with crate like furniture? This kinda reminded me of that, in a twisted sort of way,” he told her.

  “No way, Jim. This stuff may be strange, but much of it is expensive, antique strange. Maurice paid a bundle for most of his things. Believe me.” The sofa and chairs were hardwood and done in the style of pirate furniture aboard a galleon at sea.

  “Maybe he got a discount. According to his friend Ainsworth, he worked for Moulin Rouge,” said Lieutenant Sturtevante. “Says he was their order specialist, their inte­rior designer, computer wizard, and he did all the floor and window displays. I called his boss, who says he was really an artist. 'Shame to lose him,' the man said.”

  Aside from the curious and interesting surroundings, Jessica's eyes finally focused on the sheaf of feathery paper, like ancient parchment, that lay on the bed beside the deceased. On it someone had roughly scrawled the lines of a poem in black ink, written in the hand of Mau­rice's killer—or was it Maurice's handwriting on the yel­lowed parchment? The paper looked antique, like so much else in Maurice's domain, a sort of anachronism in reverse. Jessica wondered if there was a name for such relentlessly perverse taste. Pathological antiquarianism?

  “I suspect he got the yellowed parchment through the store.”

  “Moulin Rouge?”

  “Either that or Ink, Line & Sinker, a stationery store, or Darkest Expectations, a bookstore a few doors down on Second Street,” said Sturtevante, seeing Jessica study the paper. “I've seen reams of the stuff in the shops around here.”

  “We need to get a sample of Maurice's handwriting. Lo­cate a handwritten note, a laundry list, anything usable. We'll check it against the lines on the parchment, rule him in or out.”

  Parry began a search for the needed sample. Jessica lifted the parchment with tweezers and asked Kim to have a look at it. 'Tell you anything?” she asked the psychic.

  Kim came around Jessica, her eyes also focused on the parchment with the tightly controlled lettering. She caused a hush in the room as she lifted the poem and read it aloud:

  Black empty

  Soliloquy of soul,

  Come for all

  Who know

  Of ill-spent hours

  Before the Lord Poet

  Of Misspent Time

  And Careless Youth,

  To claim forsooth,

  Dominion over the us

  And the ours,

  Of selfish lives that rot

  On the vine Such as yours,

  Such as mine...

  “Doesn't have quite the resonance or verve of the earlier poems,” Kim declared.

  “Now you're a critic?” Jessica laughed. “All right, you're right. It stinks. Something certainly missing in this poem that makes it feel unlike the killer's voice. Feels—”

  “Unfinished,” said Kim, stepping to the window and peering out on a light drizzle that had made the streets slick, the sheen reflecting the city lights. “I think it's Mau­rice's; maybe it's his attempt to impress his killer.”

  'To impress his lover, who killed him?”

  “That'd be my guess. ”Jessica and Kim now studied the lines etched into the victim's back. “Poem and victim posed for our benefit per­haps? To shock authorities, to shock society, to send a mes­sage, or all of the above?” she asked.

  “Or none of the above?” Kim returned. “Like I said ear­lier, I believe the killer sees both his poetry and the result­ing death of his 'host' body as being quite a private matter between killer and victim.”

  The poem, longer than previous ones left by the killer, snaked from the base of the neck down Maurice's back like a series of tattoos. Stating the obvious, Jessica said, “Now, this is the work of our killer poet. This guy writes fluidly and well.”

  “Now you 're the critic?”

  “Hey, this poem's got bite, at least as deadly a bite as any cobra.”

  Jessica then began to read the poem aloud.

  Chance... whose desire

  is to have a meeting

  with stunned innocence...

  waiting on pools of sensation

  that swirl in brilliant orange

  to swallow and overflow

  in the center where

  toucher becomes touched,

  texture vibrating chords

  of the unconfined delicate.

  Deliberate and graceful,

  the moods eddy and flow

  over my hands, your closed eyes

  undulating within a seashell sigh,

  entwining in airy depths,

  waning in flickering light.

  “Whaddaya make of it?” asked Parry, who'd returned on hearing Jessica's voice bring the poem to life.

  “What do I make of it?” asked Jessica. “I make it out surreal that we're all standing here reading a poem off the back of some kid who's been murdered.” Her frustration mirrored the feelings rising in the investigators. All the detectives stared now at the poem tattooed on Maurice's back.

  Kim startled the others by going to her knees at the bedside of the deceased. Her eyes had closed as she heard the final words of the poem as if to enfold the lines into her psyche, and now her hands, one on the body, the other clutching the yel­lowed parchment paper, trembled. Jessica watched her for any change in expression, any look of anguish that might signal a need for her to be brought out of her trance. At the same time, she made a mental note to get a good handwrit­ing analysis of the paper script and the body script.

  Kim's hands began to relax now, and a peaceful calm came over her. She revealed nothing audibly or otherwise to those around her, until suddenly her countenance took on the look of a person in the throes of great and abiding pleasure, ecstasy even. In the next moment, she collapsed, her body now draped over the deathbed. The others, aston­ished, reacted in knee-jerk fashion. Sturtevante gasped and said, “Help her up!”

  At the same instant, Jim rushed to Kim's aid in a gen­tlemanly attempt to do exactly what Sturtevante suggested. However, Jessica sternly whispered, “No!” and put her body between Parry and Kim. “Allow her to finish her reading.”

  “I thought she had.”

  “Look at her.”

  Jim and Sturtevante stared at Kim's prostrate form. One of her hands remained on the poisonous poem while the other had let go of the parchment poem.

  Jessica cautioned in a raspy whisper, “She's clearly in a trance state. You don't jerk a person back from where she is; it could cause serious problems.”

  “But she's contaminating the crime scene,” muttered Parry.

  “I'm responsible for the integrity of the crime scene, and I say let her fucking be.”

  Approximately five minutes passed, during which they watched Kim's face and body for indications that she was going deeper and deeper into repose. Kim's body language clearly said that she was shutting down, simulating the state of the victim beside her. Jessica feared that if Kim simulated death too closely, she could fall into a comatose state from which she might never return.

  Parry must have felt the same fear, as he whispered into Jessica's ear, “Maybe we ought now to carefully bring her around?” Jessica agreed. “Yes, perhaps we should revive her.”

  Jessica drew nearer to the bed. Placing a hand over Kim, she was preparing to calmly urge her friend back into con­sciousness when she noticed the dizzyingly fast movement of the eyes beneath Kim's eyelids. What had appeared peaceful slumber was in fact filled with agitation. Her sleep proved fitful beneath the outward calm, as if dis­turbed by nightmare images. None of the others could guess t
he nature of Kim's journey into the mind of the vic­tim, and none could know what clues she might carry back from her psychic journey.

  Even though she was a scientist, Jessica believed in Kim Desinor's psychic powers because she had seen the mirac­ulous work Kim had done in the past; she had learned from Kim that there truly were more things between heaven and hell than were dreamed up in scientific circles.

  “Is she... is she okay?” asked Sturtevante.

  “I've never seen her work before, but I've read of cases she's solved by tapping into the consciousness of living victims,” said Parry. “Like the one in Houston a few years ago. But this... tapping into the mind of a dead man; this looks damned dangerous.”

  “Rest assured, she's the best,” Jessica replied.

  Suddenly Kim's body began an epileptic-seizure-like paroxysm that first set her teeth gnashing and then chatter­ing with the extreme cold she felt. Jessica felt the cold as well when Kim gripped her wrist, and her own body trem­bled in response. Jessica hugged her friend, providing the warmth that Kim's nonverbal gestures screamed out for.

  “Are you... all right... Kim?” she asked between gasps, feeling the tip-of-the-iceberg effect, and at the same moment wondering how much cold Kim could withstand.

  Kim could not for the moment reply.

  “Get some blankets, hot coffee!” Jessica shouted. “And close that window!”

  Sturtevante and Parry rummaged through the place for these items, Sturtevante making the coffee. Meanwhile, Jessica, still trembling, struggled to get Kim on her feet. Once she was standing, Jessica walked her in circles to get her circulation going, saying, “Keep moving, dear; walk with me.” The longer she held on to Kim, the colder she herself became, until her own teeth began to chatter.

  In another few minutes, Kim and Jessica, wrapped in blankets, moved into the other room, far from the body. Here they drank steaming-hot coffee out of hefty mugs that once belonged to Maurice Deneau. The others stood by, their eyes telling Jessica how anxious they were for any tidbits of information that Kim might reveal, but Parry re­mained silent, hesitant about asking. Seeing is believing, and they had seen the psychic suffer during her time spent in trance.