Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  She called a meeting with Sturtevante's boss, Chief Aaron Roth, to air her complaints about the PPD's toxicol­ogy lab. When she entered the room, she wasn't surprised to see the old coroner, Shockley, and his toxicologist, Frank DeAngelos, allied against her.

  Chief Roth, clearly a man of few words, said, “Let's hear it, Dr. Coran.”

  She decided it would not do to mince words with these men. 'Toxicology on all previous victims has netted us nothing substantial, and so we remain in the dark as—”

  Dr. DeAngelos, PPD's top toxicologist, immediately shot to his feet to defend himself and his department. “It always proves difficult to test for a mystery substance.” The thin man's black mustache twitched mouse like over his lip as he spoke. “Not knowing what to test for, and un­able to test for all the myriad possibilities—almost any substance can be turned into a poison—we don't know where to begin.”

  Jessica calmly sat down here in the operations room, where the photos of all the victims had been pinned on every wall, their dead eyes now looking down on the liv­ing in what looked like accusation. Earlier in the day, this room had been filled with the men and women on the citywide task force that was working to crack the case.

  Jessica said evenly, “May I suggest—”

  “No, you may not suggest how to run my department,” said DeAngelos.

  “Frank, let's hear Dr. Coran out, please,” scolded the chief.

  “May I suggest, Dr. DeAngelos, that your people begin with anything that works like an anesthetic. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that our killer might be an anes­thesiologist. He knows how to quickly and efficiently put people to sleep for a long time.”

  “We've tested for the usual barbiturates, such as Brevitol,” said DeAngelos.

  “Then what about the unusual; what was used com­monly before Brevitol?”

  Jessica had been after DeAngelos since Maurice's body had been brought in, desperately trying to get some fix on the toxins found in the victims. She had also attempted to understand DeAngelos's perspective, and to remain open to any educated conjecture about the type of poison or drug the killer used. In fact, she had all but camped on his doorstep and badgered his people for results, for all the good it had done her.

  Disappointed now with the lack of progress, her blood pressure rising, Jessica was angry and upset. She put DeAngelos on the defensive, confronting him. “I just learned that your people have still not forwarded samples of the ink poison to D.C. Is that true?”

  “My people are busy, Dr. Coran, and we are all doing our damnedest to solve this mess.”

  You're only testing for household chemicals and over-the-counter drugs.”

  “We've tested for PCP, heroin, cocaine, all the usual street crap.”

  “Dammit, Doctor, test for everything. Every known sub­stance, if you must.”

  “Do you know what you're asking?” he grumbled back.

  “I can't approve that kind of overtime for my people. We have to work within a strict budget, Dr. Coran. Postmortem investigation doesn't come cheap. This isn't the god­damned FBI; here in Philadelphia, we don't collect taxes the way the feds do. We aren't funded to—”

  It was maddening. “Dr. DeAngelos, we are stymied in this case until we can identify the drug or poison the killer uses.”

  “I am quite aware of that.”

  “The poison must be exotic, colorless perhaps, certainly odorless, with the possibility of a metallic taste or after­taste. We have told you that we suspect it produces a reddish-colored rash, which dissipates after time.”

  DeAngelos defended himself before Police Chief Aaron Roth and Dr. Shockley. “Whatever it is, our mystery poi­son isn't the standard text, and as for these symptoms, all of them you learned from Dr. Desinor's suppositions about the nature of the poison. A woman who holds no creden­tials in toxicology—or even pharmacology, as far as I know.”

  “She enumerated the suspected symptoms while under trance, and once again I can tell you—”

  Dr. DeAngelos demanded, “How can she possibly de­scribe symptoms of a poison we have not as yet identified? This is sheer madness, Chief. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.”

  Finally, Jessica blurted out, “Dr. Desinor's psychic abil­ities are well documented, sir.”

  “Ah, and we're all to jump to the orders of your pet sor­ceress, I suppose?”

  “She has at least given us some intriguing clues to pur­sue, Dr. DeAngelos.”

  “I do not deal in the intriguing. And I tell you, we are doing everything in our power at this time. In addition, we've tested for iodine, lead, and mercury—all of which leave a metallic taste in the mouth, and all of which tests, thus far, have come back negative.”

  She tried to calm both herself and him. “All right, but have you tested for Flagyl?”

  “Flagyl?”

  “Metronidazole, the antibacterial used to treat vaginal infections,” said Shockley, coming alive at this suggestion, curious at to what Jessica was getting at.

  “Vaginal suppositories. My God, Doctor, at what point do we draw the line? Do you think we can test for every substance in the universe?”

  “Flagyl leaves a metallic taste in the mouth,” Jessica stated flatly.

  “All right. I'll have Heyward test for it. Meantime—”

  “Please, sir, come to some result, some conclusion, and quickly,” Jessica warned, “or else I'll be forced to person­ally scrape together samples for the FBI lab in Washington for processing.”

  DeAngelos busied himself now with stripping off his lab coat, saying he had a luncheon appointment with Sturte­vante and Parry. Putting on his regular coat, he said, “As for our little chat. Dr. Coran, do whatever you like. I am, as I have said, constrained by a budget that has seen no in­crease for over six extremely difficult years. You may want to discuss that with our chief here.”

  “Well, then, why in God's name are you hesitant to pack off a sample of everything to the FBI lab? I should think you'd be pleased to get it off your hands. Can you arrange the transport or not?” Nerves frayed, fatigue overcoming her, Jessica no longer played at politics or pleasantries with DeAngelos. In the back of her head, she wondered why Sturtevante and Parry were having lunch with him, and why she had not been invited. Apparently, lunch meant the case.

  “I'll put my best man, Dr. Heyward, on it, as soon as I get back.”

  “Hold lunch and do it now,” she demanded.

  DeAngelos gritted his teeth, stared at his boss and the chief, read the signals, and with his thin mustache quiver­ing, considered his options while Jessica thought about how uncooperative he'd been since the day they'd met, even going so far as to get her name wrong, calling her Dr. Cohen. He appeared to be one of that breed of men who find it difficult, even painful, to take orders from a woman.

  “All right, then, go see Heyward yourself,” he said, storming out.

  “Good. I'll deal from here on out with Dr. Heyward,” Jessica shouted after the man, then turned and stared at Shockley and Roth, both of whom returned a shrug and a frown.

  Dr. Shockley said, “I've never seen DeAngelos forced so handily into a corner, Dr. Coran. Bravo!”

  As the chief quietly concurred, Jessica bid them good day and went in search of Dr. Heyward.

  Jessica knew Dr. Arnold Heyward only as the even thin­ner, slightly built shadow of DeAngelos. The man was vir­tually joined to the other doctor's hip, ready at a moment's notice to do his bidding, a kind of Igor to his Frankenstein. The relationship, while not unusual in a laboratory situa­tion where democratic principles did not apply, seemed to her worse than usual. It reminded her of a nobleman with a serf.

  Having bid the chief and Dr. Shockley good-bye, she was about to step on an elevator to locate Heyward when DeAngelos, apparently having undergone a change of heart, caught her in the hallway outside the ops room. “Look here, I'm sorry for the defensiveness. It's just that this case has us all unnerved. I'll get word to Heyward for you this minute, befor
e I go to lunch.”

  Taken aback by his sudden reasonableness, Jessica held her tongue while he dialed the toxicology lab from a nearby office. “Heyward!” DeAngelos barked into the phone. “I want you to catalog and box up all items we have on those poison-pen killings for the mail and—”

  “No, no!” Jessica interrupted.

  “You'll find Heyward quite capable of cataloging and boxing up items for the mail.” He then said into the phone, 'Talking to our FBI expert, Coran, here, Heyward. Seems she thinks her people in D.C. can do a better job than we can, so off we ship everything we have. Got that?”

  “Not the U.S. mail,” protested Jessica.

  He finally slowed to hear her objection.

  Jessica had flushed red by this time. “Don't waste time with the mail. Send it to the Bureau office here in Philly, to James Parry's attention. They'll helicopter it to the FBI lab direct.”

  “There you have it,” he said. “Did you hear that, Hey­ward?”

  Jessica heard the disembodied phone voice snap back with, “Yes, sir!”

  “So now, Dr. Coran, you see it comes down to the almighty dollar.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You have a bottomless budget to work with; we do not. My apologies for the municipal legislators and the state legislators, all of whom routinely find it more fashionable and politically useful to spend dollars on AIDS fund­raisers, cancer research, tourism, baseball, football, and yet another new sports facility—anything other than the field of death investigation, Doctor.”

  “I quite understand, Dr. DeAngelos.”

  “Do you really?” He sneered as if there was no way on God's green earth that she could understand. She calmly replied, “Yes, matter of fact, I understand completely.”

  “In your rarefied air of governmental budgeting, I'm not so sure you do.”

  “I wasn't always with the government, sir. At one time, I was chief medical examiner for the city of Washington, DC.”

  “Really? I congratulate you. Then you do understand my circumstances after all, don't you?”

  He had her cornered. As much as she disliked the toxicologist's attitude, she knew he was right. The last area for which local government granted funds was death inquiry. It had been so twelve years ago when she worked the trenches of D.C. as pathologist for Washington Memorial Hospital, and it remained so today.

  “Not unlike the attitude toward nursing-home laws and improvements in care for the aged,” she agreed, and for the first time, they seemed to fall into mutual civility.

  DeAngelos apologized. “I'm sorry for my jaded appear­ance; one has to develop a thick skin to survive around here. But inside, I am as appalled by these killings, and as upset about them, as anyone on the task force.”

  “I'm quite sure of it,” she managed to say, not at all be­lieving him. DeAngelos seemed far more concerned about his department, its political standing, and its financial woes than he was about the victims in the case.

  “Although it is hard for me to muster complete sympa­thy for people who are foolish enough to unwittingly court their own end. People who live the lives of victims, victims to the end. Perfect victims.”

  Jessica thought of all the cynical medical professionals she had seen over the years; their number rivaled that of the police professionals she'd known, men and women who, having seen so much of human wickedness, having worked over the bodies of countless victims of trauma and murder, had become apathetic and spent. Dr. Frank DeAn­gelos needed a long vacation and possibly a career move. Perhaps Philadelphia would do well to promote him to a job where he could do less harm.

  Still, in some deep recess of her own being, Jessica, too, hated people who set themselves up for murder, and it cer­tainly appeared that the poisoned Philadelphia children had this in common.

  “You have to agree,” he softly said.

  “Still, I wonder if such thoughts get in the way of our professional judgment, Doctor.”

  Dr. DeAngelos said a curt good-bye and rushed off to the elevator. He moved like a man who feared being late for a rendezvous with a lover.

  By five in the afternoon, Jessica had logged in more time in the autopsy area and adjacent labs than was necessary, but it felt good—productive. After the verbal struggle with DeAngelos, the more time she spent with the most recent victims the calmer she became, and the more certain she felt of her ground.

  As always in her experience, being in the forensics lab had a calming effect on her; solutions, even minuscule ones, had a way of restoring her. She was doing everything in her power to learn as much as possible about the killer.

  After Jessica completed her final protocol on Maurice Deneau and had filled out the last piece of paperwork, she sat down and listed all the similarities she had noticed among the victims. They certainly seemed all of a type. Something in their appearance or manner, perhaps their dif­fidence, aroused the killer's interest, of this she had no doubt. She knew this to be common among serial killers. Generally speaking, she had found the serial killer to be a creature of habit. This had been so with other monsters she had tracked over the years, and it appeared true here. This need to repeat an experience, to prey on a given type, was often a killer's undoing, and in cases where the killer chose random victims, victims without a scintilla of commonality, authorities had far greater difficulty reaching any definitive conclusion. Often they did not at first see the resemblances among victims, but once these were pinpointed, the infor­mation spoke volumes, especially to anyone trained in forensic psychology.

  She knew she must send her findings to such an expert once she had something concrete. Another trained person, someone other than Kim Desinor, who had up to this point agreed with Jessica's speculations—someone removed from the case, without emotional involvement, might help Jessica hone in on the killer's thinking and motivation. This could have a great impact on the task force's success in identifying and locating the Poet Killer.

  This murderer preyed upon men and women of a distinct body type and look. If the investigators learned the killer's habits, they could begin to follow the right path to a logi­cal conclusion. There was no scientific certainty in such procedures, but years of experience had taught Jessica truths that others either did not see or ignored.

  She entered her findings on a computer, saved them to disk, and was wondering exactly who to send them to when the phone rang beside her. Lifting the receiver, she heard Chief Santiva say, “You're working late.”

  “Yeah, well, I think it's called for. The Poet has been busy.”

  “Anything give in the case so far?”

  “Aside from my nerves?”

  “Anything we can hang our hats on?”

  “Who wants to know, Eriq?”

  “We all have people we have to answer to, Jess.”

  “They don't really expect anything this soon, do they?”

  “I told them we have our best working on it, so they have high expectations. Tell me what you've got. I'll take it from there.”

  “Watch for a packet of photos I put in overnight for your attention, boss. I want you to tell me what you can extrap­olate from the handwriting.”

  “Photos of the latest poems?”

  “Straight off the backs of the vies, yes.”

  “I'll give them my fullest attention and get back to you. Meanwhile, do you or Desinor have any general impres­sions I should know about?”

  Jessica's assessment of the killer thus far initially left Eriq silent. Then he asked, “Are you both getting the no­tion that this guy kills people so as to save them from liv­ing 'trashed lives'?”

  She looked down at the list she'd composed of the vic­tims' characteristics. “Not sure. At least one of the vies was homosexual, they were all Caucasian, no crossbreeds but one cross-dresser. No people of foreign origin, no drug users, no addicts, no drug dealers, pimps, prosti­tutes, deviants with records, nothing unsavory so far as I can see.”

  “You don't make a cross-dresser out a deviant?”
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br />   “Just a confused kid looking to establish a sense of his own identity. They—all the victims—had that in common, I'm beginning to believe. They were into playing musical chairs with their names, for instance.”

  “What about musical body art? Were they into that scene?”

  “Sturtevante tells us they frequented the clubs that catered to the body poetry fad going on here, yeah, but previous to their deaths, so far as autopsy shows, none of them were into tattoos or body piercing; no tongue or nose piercings—”

  “But they all would have known of the urban legend, the roots of the fad, and they all would have consented to the one tattoo that killed them?”

  “Our guy has to be quite persuasive. To be blunt, any corpse candidate not deemed 'proper' or 'worthy' by his standard wouldn't get his backside poetry.”

  “Anything else strike you?”

  Jessica told him of her growing belief that the killer preyed on people who, for whatever reason, looked the part and played the part of willing victims. “The dead are men and women who fell under the spell of a kind of old-world charm and beauty of spirit—all romantics who saw the world through ideal-clouded eyes—even here, in a place that supposedly enshrines the opposite of such notions.”

  “Interesting. Our killer is into charm and beauty, then?”

  “Actually, the vies are perfectly androgynous. The males could pass for female, and vice versa. I think that's the physical look that attracts our guy, while the mind-set is that of mystical romanticism.”

  Eriq sounded like a big brother when he asked, “Are you alone there in the lab? Where's everyone else?”

  “Yeah, pretty much for the moment.”

  “Go get some dinner and rest. That's an order.”

  “One I happily accept.”

  “Everything go okay between you and Parry?”