Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Kim now appeared confused and disoriented. Unsure of her surroundings, she asked Jessica, “Wh-where are we?”

  Jessica informed her.

  The others watched as a strange, rust-colored rash that had shown up on Kim's cheeks and arms began to dissi­pate, these “stigmata like” signs disappearing as quickly as they appeared.

  Kim looked about the kitchen area where they sat, nod­ded, and then complained, “Have a nasty, strange, rust like taste in my mouth.”

  “That's Sturtevante's coffee,” said Parry, making light of it.

  “No, this isn't coffee. It's something Maurice tasted be­fore he died. It's metallic, like... like sulfur, only worse, coppery sulfuric taste.” She began nervously switching the coffee cup from one hand to the other, back and forth. “My stomach... doesn't feel so good. Tingling sensation in all my extremities, particularly these,” she said, holding her fingers up to the light as if they were on fire. She placed the coffee cup aside. “I fear I'll drop it. My fingers feel so numb.”

  “Where you've been, I don't wonder,” said Jessica, sip­ping at her coffee.

  “Exactly where is that?” asked Parry, one of Maurice's books in his hand. “Where precisely were you just then, Dr. Desinor. I mean when you were, forgive the phrase, 'in bed' with the... the victim.”

  “Go ahead, say it,” Kim replied, “in bed with the dead.”

  “All this morbid poetry, it's rubbing off on you, Kim,” Jessica joked.

  “Judging from his diary entries,” Parry commented, “Maurice fancied himself a poet. He's written a lot of verse in his private journal. It's pretty maudlin stuff, about how he is too much put upon by the forces of this world, but I'll wade through it. Who knows... maybe it'll reveal some­thing about him or his killer.”

  Sturtevante insisted, “You going to tell us what you saw when you were in trance, Dr. Desinor?”

  “Didn't see a thing, sorry.”

  “Nothing? Not a thing?” the detective repeated.“Felt a great deal, but no, my mental eyes were closed. I saw no images, no faces, no visual revelations. Too over­whelmed, I suspect, by the feelings of the moment—which I suspect is how Maurice felt.”

  “Then what did you feel?” pressed Sturtevante “Feel... what did I feel? Felt a gnawing, rat like pain in my abdomen; felt surprise, amazement, if you will.”

  “Go on.”

  “I felt dry-throated, my—or Maurice's—entire body went cold—cold as a parched desert in winter; felt my throat go arid as sand, like... like I was choking on dust, but this dust was laden with sulfur, or some such chemi­cal. Next, I felt nausea and numbing and tingling all at once, especially in the hands and feet—fingers and toes, actually.”

  “Anything else?” urged Sturtevante, clearly taking men­tal notes.

  “Toward the end, I felt an overwhelming sense of calm replace the painful cold; the calm flooded over me, replac­ing any sensations of pain or discomfort. I was left with no sensations any longer. The ultimate sensation—peace and unfeeling.”

  “Who said, 'Only the dead are at peace'?” asked Parry.

  “The quote is 'Only the dead know peace.' Old Mexican saying, I think,” replied Jessica. “Else it came from an old John Wayne western.”

  Jessica saw Jim smile at this. His boyish grin brought on flashes of memory for her—memories of times when each of them noticed every small detail about the other, from the way her hair fell across her cheek to the way he traced her lifeline on her palm. She recalled how, at one time, they could not get enough of each other, how the wine of endor­phins fed their love—”the true nectar of the gods,” she had once told him. She wondered how they might begin to relax around each other after so much had happened between them. She wondered if it was possible to work a case along­side Jim, or if the two of them were foolish to try.

  Sturtevante continued to interrogate Kim. “Then you're telling us that you saw nothing about the murder?” The de­tective's voice carried an edge like a knife blade. “You can't even tell us who wrote the poem left beside the body, or the poem on the body? If the two were or were not writ­ten by the same person?”

  “I didn't say that.”

  “What can you tell us, then, about the poetry on the parchment?”

  “It's the work of the victim; his parchment, his pen, his words. I got those words again, pressing in on me—ram­page and quark—and another word insinuated itself on my mind as well.”

  “What word?” asked Jessica.

  “Pre/light. “Like a preflight check you do on an airplane?”

  “I can't say, only that it's somehow important. “You're sure the poem on the paper is Maurice's?” re­peated Sturtevante.

  “Yes, I'm sure.”

  “Good guess, I should think,” the detective muttered.

  “Maurice's poem was written to his killer. It was written in praise of his killer. An attempt to honor his own killer.”

  “Then they had a suicide pact?” Jessica perked up at this.

  “I believe so.”

  “You believe so, or you'd decided as much before you ever arrived here?” Sturtevante demanded.

  “Compare the handwriting, Jessica, with Maurice's lines from his diary,” Kim calmly replied, unruffled by the de­tective's skepticism. “The lines on the death poem will, no doubt, render this a moot point.”

  Jessica silently compared the two poems. “I have to agree with Kim's assessment of the difference here in literary qual­ity; one is professional, the other amateurish.”

  “Maurice's poetry is stilted, somewhat clichéd, and filled with awkward, passive constructions,” continued Kim. “No fresh images, nothing to recommend it beyond its mediocrity.”

  Jessica added, “The poet who saw Maurice to his grave does not deal in mediocrity.”

  Kim immediately added, “Or awkward language, clichéd diction, or stilted imagery! This guy, whoever he is, writes more haunting, evocative poetry—in my opin­ion—than anything I've read in years. Take it for what it's worth, Lieutenant.”

  “Then the killer's a professional poet, someone capable in every respect where language is concerned?” asked Parry.

  “Precise and calculated,” Kim replied, “with every word.”

  “Then he doesn't just write this off the top of his head in the throes of murder? He premeditates the entire act, writ­ing draft after draft.”

  “I think it's time we shared a suspicion we hold about the Poet Killer with you two,” Jessica said to Parry and Sturtevante.

  “And what is that?” Sturtevante looked shaken by the di­rection the discussion had taken, but Jessica could not be certain of her expression.

  “We've compared the poems he's left behind thus far, and aside from the opening repetition or chorus of three lines, they all have the theme of flickering life—that is, that the soul is never quite extinguished by death but merely takes on a new form.”

  “We believe the killer is involved in a fantasy that has to do with some sort of migration of souls,” added Kim.

  Jessica continued. “And that he's in the business of help­ing that migration along.”

  “Speculation,” muttered Leanne Sturtevante, staring now at the firmament ceiling motif, which had been carried out even here in the kitchenette.

  “We believe all the poems are linked,” said Kim. “In fact, that each is a part of a whole, a kind of epic poem he's going for.”

  “My God,” said Parry. “Then that means he's premedi­tating more slates to write on, more murders.”

  “Kim keeps coming up with the number nineteen.”

  “That may mean the killer will require nineteen bodies to complete his or her performance art,” added Kim, who sipped again at the steaming coffee in her now-warmed hands.

  The room fell silent as this notion floated like a spectral presence among them.

  “I've compared the handwriting in the diary to that of the poem on the yellowed, fake-but-fun parchment, which Sturtevante suspected had come from the stationer
y store Ink, Line & Sinker,” Jessica began.

  “What's your take on the handwriting, Jess?” asked Parry, standing over her at the table where she sat examin­ing the two documents.

  “With my admittedly limited experience in handwriting analysis, I'd say these two, parchment and diary, are by the same hand.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, we'll know for sure when our specialists in handwriting have a look-see.” Jessica looked up to Sturte­vante and set her jaw firmly. “I think Dr. Desinor has scored a major hit here.” She then put a hand on Kim's arm and asked, “How're you feeling?”

  “Better... much...”

  “Did you get a sense of the killer at all from touching the victim's back, from placing yourself in his... his place?” pursued Sturtevante.

  “Nothing beyond a vague sense of his belief in himself and his actions.”

  “Can you elaborate, Dr. Desinor?”

  “No, I was... fell into the victim's mind-set, not the killer's.”

  “She's tired, Lieutenant. Give it a rest,” Jessica said, her voice clear and final. “Allow Dr. Desinor to regain her strength now, please.”

  “Sure, sure.” Sturtevante raised her hands in the univer­sal gesture of truce, but her eyes registered a sad defeat. Like everyone else in the room, she had wanted answers to questions plaguing the investigation, answers that eluded them all.

  Seeing this and Jim's dejection as well, Jessica pulled out a large magnifying glass and said to the other two, “Come with me. I have something additional to share with you.”

  They left Kim at the kitchen table and returned to the bedroom and the body. Jessica asked Parry to help her to gently turn the body face up. This done, she held a high-intensity flashlight in her teeth, the magnifying glass in one hand, and supported herself over the body with the other. “Bingo!” she declared.

  “What? What is it?” asked Sturtevante.

  'Teardrops on his forehead, just as we discovered on the Anton Pierre corpse.”

  “What does this mean, Jess?” asked Parry, perplexed.

  “It's his DNA, the killer's DNA. Unless there's evidence that Anton and Maurice stood on their heads while crying, or were strung up by their heels, they're not going to have tears on their foreheads. No, these near-invisible tracks were left by the killer.”

  “Excellent... excellent find,” muttered Sturtevante. “Now we can find out some characteristics of the killer— race, sex even.”

  “Exactly, and it'll be a direct match once we make an ar­rest.”

  'Terrific find, Jess,” Parry complimented.

  “Can't take all the credit for this one. Dr. Shockley iden­tified the marks after I pointed them out on Pierre's fore­head.” And as for the other bodies?”

  “Too degenerated to tell, but two in a row now, that tells us something.”

  “Imagine, the guy kills them and then sheds tears over them.”

  “Not altogether unusual,” countered Jessica. “Signifies a certain amount of remorse in most cases.”

  “Not here, not this time,” said Kim, standing now in the doorway, looking at the others. “These tears are green tears... green with hope and love and rekindling life, green with life and regeneration, don't you see?” Sturtevante again appeared shaken by Kim's words, as if the psychic had somehow unmasked her, digging into her mind. She showed her agitation by pacing the room and then rushing out.

  “What's with her?” asked Parry.

  Jessica shrugged. “Isn't this case enough to get to any­one?”

  “I suspect that she thinks she may know someone who might fall victim to the Poet Killer,” replied Kim. “At least, I think she fears as much.”

  “Thanks for sharing the good news of the teardrop find,” Parry said to Jessica. “How long before it can be processed?”

  “DNA testing takes time, but Shockley has it on the front burner. Still, it will take at least ten days, maybe more.”

  “He'll kill again before then.”

  “I don't know how to speed up the process any more than we have, but at least we're confident the tearstain pat­tern points to the perpetrator and not the victim. In time, we will have a DNA profile of the killer.”

  Parry instantly snapped, “Finally! A break. Maybe the one that will nail this bastard.”

  EIGHT

  You can go for a walk with them, see a movie with them, go swimming, eat dinner, even ride in a car with them while they are driving, but the sociopathic among us are quite literally different in every respect. They merely look like us. It is the ultimate disguise, making them an alien race within our own, and they know how to play us all for fools.

  -from the casebooks of Dr. Jessica Coran, ME

  Maurice Deneau had bought into the killer's con, hook, line, and sinker. The party of detectives sat in silence for some time, contemplating the nature of the beast they pursued. Taken to its logical conclusion, they realized, he must be a creature pleasing to the eye and ear, to all the senses, in fact; he must be an evil so cloaked in goodness that no one, not even his victims, know of his evil. Either that or they worship him for his darkness or his twisted ideas and perverted faith.

  Jessica could not help but draw correlations between this sociopath and a killer priest she had encountered in London the year before. That psychotic's vision of the Sec­ond Coming had gotten a series of people killed, but his victims had also been willing participants in their own cru­cifixions. And now here she sat in a second-story apart­ment in Philadelphia, the heart of early America, ostensibly fighting the same fight, racing the same race, and wondering at the familiarity of this evil. If Kim Desinor's psychic impressions could be relied upon, only one of the victims thus far had recognized the evil this killer presented. That had been Caterina Mer­cedes, but even then it took death to waken her to the evil she had allowed to close in around her and finally envelop her.

  Maurice Deneau's friend, Thomas Ainsworth, wanted to stay the night at the crime scene, so Sturtevante had to deal with him, asking him if he had someplace else to crash. Ainsworth was a frail, thin, and pale young man, perhaps anemic, perhaps HIV positive. Otherwise, he looked a great deal like the victim in size, weight, and build, and he proved that the idealistic innocence of youth still existed in modern-day America.

  “Can I pack a few of my things? I was staying with Maurice, you see, and... God, if I'd only been here, maybe... maybe I could've done something. We had a fight, you know. No big deal, but I was making him pay... and now this.”

  “Sorry, nothing goes in or out until we release the place. Could be a couple of days,” Sturtevante told the young man, whose eyes were fire red from crying. His reaction was to pace the hallway like a nervous cat. “Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?” she repeated.

  “Guess I can call my parents.”

  “Might be a good idea, son. Maybe go stay with them for a while.”

  “Yeah... yeah... ain't safe around here anymore, is it?”

  “That's quite the understatement, Thomas.”

  Kim had regained enough strength now to stand and walk, and together, she and Jessica headed for the door, while Parry went to officially call in the paramedics to remove the body. With this decision made, they could never go back to the crime scene as they'd found it, so this moment always felt crucial in a stone-cold murder of this sort.

  As the team vacated the crime scene, leaving the body to the paramedics for transport to the police morgue, Jessica asked Kim, “Did you get any sensation from Maurice that he knew in the end that he was being murdered?”

  “None whatsoever, no.”

  “This monster we're dealing with, then, is smooth.”

  “Caterina Mercedes's body was a seething cauldron of hatred for what the killer had done to her. At some point, she realized what was happening to her and why. It felt like... it was a horrid betrayal. But the others never knew he'd poisoned them. And they still don 7.”

  “You said Caterina Mercedes felt betrayed. Would you sa
y she felt she had been conned into dying?” asked Jes­sica, feeling the night air wafting up the stairwell from an open door at ground level—as if to beckon them outside.

  “Yes, but Maurice Deneau didn't. He never picked up on the con or realized that he was ever in any danger. What­ever poison our man is using, it effectively shuts down ra­tional thought, lulling the victims into a calm acquiescence, but something in Caterina fought back.”

  “What made her different?” asked Parry, who'd hurried down the steps, catching up as they stepped out into the predawn darkness. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran? Any medical reason one person would be more immune than another to whatever poison this creep is using?”

  They continued on toward the patrol cars that had brought them to this section of town, the famous Second Street off downtown Philadelphia, where the killer moved efficiently and safely among the upwardly mobile, artistic community. “Any suggestions, Dr. Coran?” pressed Parry.

  “It would help to know the exact nature of the poison. We need to send it out for analysis to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington. The local guys are coming up zip on it.”

  Kim suggested, “Perhaps Caterina had a stronger toler­ance for the drug.”

  “Possibly, but more likely our killer made a mistake. More like the dose was too low or too high, in which case she would have a far different reaction than that of calm acquiescence—what the killer apparently needs in order to leave his deadly poetry for us to read,” Jessica answered, rubbing the soreness from her neck, taking in the crisp yet damp evening air. It smelled of a coppery rain that had turned into a mist, and it touched her cheek with the feel of a sodden cloth.

  “Or she was lucid enough to suggest that she do the same to the killer's back, using his inkwell, the same as he had used on her,” suggested Sturtevante. “In a con, that's when things go wrong, when the mark doesn't cooperate as you predict. I worked for the fraud division for several years. We handled con artists, flimflam men, hucksters, and hoaxsters,” she informed the others. “I know how these creeps work to relieve the old and the innocent of their life's savings. I've just never known a con artist who set the stakes at life itself.”