Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

“Could be lounging in a bath and can't hear the bell with that music turned up so loud,” Parry suggested.

  Kim had joined Leanne in her cruiser, and they arrived behind Jessica and Parry. Leanne now rushed toward the house, a look of dread etched on her features. Jessica ap­prised them of the situation.

  “God, she's taken that creep in, and he's killed her!” Leanne cried. “I just know it!”

  “Break down the door,” Jessica told Parry.

  “No,” said Sturtevante. “I still have a key. I'll go in.”

  “She's likely in the shower, but you tell her if she's aid­ing and abetting Gordonn, she's in trouble,” said Parry. “Make it clear to her that she has to tell us where he is.”

  The detective nodded. “Will do.” She then entered the premises, calling out to her former girlfriend, while the others waited outside. In the time it took for Leanne Sturtevante to walk from the front room to the master bedroom and bath, all they could hear was the soft music and an occasional shout of “Donatella! Donatella!” Then a sudden scream sent a horrid ice pick into Jessica's spine. Sturtevante shouted hysterically that her friend Leare was dead.

  The others raced in to find Donatella Leare lying face­down on her bed, rather haphazardly so. On the poet's back were the now familiar blood-orange words of the Poet Killer, carved into her skin with the selenium-laced ink. The poem on Leare's back stared back at them like a laughing skull, Jessica thought.

  She wondered now if Gordonn or Tamburino or both of them together were not having fun with them all, PPD and FBI alike.

  “Bastard! Bastard's killed Dona!” wailed Sturtevante, distraught and on her knees, her gun beside her.

  “Locke—Locke and Burrwith!” shouted Jessica. “We've got to get to Lucian Locke's place, and to Garrison Burrwith's, and now! If the Poet Killer has targeted Leare for death, then he'll try to kill his other instructors as well.”

  “Come on, Jessica. We'll let Kim take care of Leanne, and the crime scene will take care of itself,” said Parry. “Let's go. We've got to get a radio car dispatched to both locations. Someone close at hand.”

  “Someone close to the investigation,” she muttered. “Who... who close to the investigation has given up our every move to the killer?”

  “Vladoc,” shouted Sturtevante.

  “Vladoc? But why?”

  “He drinks, he talks. Someone knows this, uses him. Gor­donn is shrewd. Doubled back on us all and escaped, didn't he? And we thought him a pitiful slob who had a miserable beginning and would have a miserable end, and left it at that. Meantime, he's busy killing... killed Donatella.”

  Parry's cell phone went off. He lifted it and barked, “What is it?”

  “Dispatch, sir. Another urgent for Dr. Coran, sir. Patch him through, now!”

  “It's for you,” he told Jessica, his eyes bulging. “Says it's Lucian Burke Locke.”

  Strange coincidence, she thought, taking the phone in hand. She repeated the garbled words she heard coming through for the benefit of the others. “Says he knows where we can find George Linden Gordonn.”

  The strange little man, Locke, said clearly into the phone, “I have information as to where George can be found, or rather where what remains of him can be found.”

  Parry snapped the button to place the cell phone on speaker so that the others could hear the conversation. “What do you mean, the remains of him?”

  “He's dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Ready for burial, yes.”

  “Can't you be a little more descriptive? How did he die? Where are you?”

  “He's lying dead alongside another of his victims,” Locke shouted into the phone, making Parry jump back.

  “Where are the bodies, Dr. Locke?”

  “My house.”

  “We'll be right over. Don't touch a thing, do you under­stand?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  He hung up and said, “We should still send a cruiser to Burrwith's place, have them look in on him. Meantime, we'd best get over to Locke's.”

  Kim had been holding Sturtevante's hand as the other woman continued to cry over the loss of her friend. “I'll stay here with Leanne. You two go.”

  “Be certain to maintain the integrity of the scene,” Jes­sica told her. “Call for Shockley to get over here and walk the grid.” Willdo.”

  With that. Parry and Jessica rushed to the home of Lu­cian Burke Locke in search of George Gordonn... or what remained of him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneel­ing beside the thing that he had put together.

  —Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein

  “I knew young Gordonn only through a class I taught nearly I a year ago; didn't hear from him or about him again until he began working on his Byron project in the film depart­ment, you see. He took my course to leam more about Byron and the Romantics; he loved the notions of romantic love, en­during, undying love, but he remained primarily focused on Lord Byron. I took him under my wing, so to speak, and just recently, he began to brag about how he was party to the killings.”

  “That's how he would put it?” asked Jessica.

  “Precisely, but I blew it off, as they say. Of course, knowing him, even for a short time, I knew this was all a he, bravado, all that. I never for a moment believed George to be guilty, and so when I learned he was under suspicion, I gave him safe haven until the young man should feel se­cure enough to leave.”

  “That's a felony, Dr. Locke,” said Parry, “one which you could be tried for.”

  “I realized that at the time, but I felt an overwhelming need to help George. He had that effect on people; people wanted to 'fix' him.”

  “And precisely how did you know he was under suspi­cion, Dr. Locke?”

  “That's right,” added Parry. “It wasn't public knowledge “Information I gleaned from Leare, who had it from her lover, Sturtevante. Seems Sturtevante went to apologize to Donatella about all the misunderstanding, the mishandling of the case, all that, and she let it slip that you were zeroing in on George. Leare knew of George through me, and she had had him as a student once as well. I was trying to help George to stay... stable, you know. I knew what he had gone through. But of late, George had begun to seriously worry me.”

  “How's that?”

  “Even in the face of being arrested for these crimes he professed to have committed, well... not believing him, I paid little attention until recently. I tell you, he went out last evening and returned to my house with a young woman, although Leare and I had told him specifically that he must remain in hiding.”

  “He came back with a woman, a stranger to you?”

  “A young woman. She looks to be another coed, I fear, but I didn't know her. I immediately protested when I en­tered the room I'd turned over to George, only to find him and the girl writing out poetry on each other's nude back.

  “I was assured by George that it was a mere dalliance on his part, and his interest in body poetry had nothing what­soever to do with the murders, and then he confessed to having lied about his involvement in the killings, telling me his shrink had said he had an insatiable need for atten­tion.

  “When I first met him, in my class, he told me about his parents, that he was in fact the living proof of the urban legend that had started the back-writing poetry fad, and now, that is a few hours ago, he told me how angry he was at this killer, whoever he was, to have turned his poetic 'in­vention,' as he called it, into a horror of death.

  “He then lamented the deaths of all those young people; he said he felt great guilt since the killer had obviously been inspired by his invention, but again he insisted that he had killed no one, and that his earlier confessions to me were simply to gain attention.”

  “And you believed him?” asked Jessica.

  “I wasn't hearing his cry. I know, I was a fool, and I could have prevented so much death.”

  “What happened next?” Parry asked.

&nb
sp; “Something made me look in on him around midnight. I found the girl and George both dead in my home, victims of the poisoned pen that each had used on the other, just as George's parents had done. I was horrified, so I called you.”

  “You did the right thing,” Jessica assured him, Parry agreeing.

  “Poor lamentable George,” Locke proclaimed. “And this other creature he duped into his final trap.”

  “Forensics is going to have a long night of it,” said Jes­sica. “Let's get a team of evidence techs over here. I'll need all the help I can get with the two corpses.”

  Parry got on his cell phone and made the call.

  It appeared to all involved to be over. All the evidence pointed to one perpetrator, to George Linden Gordonn. All the information collected at Locke's house and later at Gordonn's also bore this out. Finally, the city of Philadel­phia could breathe again and would hear no more from the Lord Poet of Misspent Time, George Gordonn, the Killer Poet who, bizarrely, professed his kinship with Lord Byron.

  At Gordonn's home, a stash of poetry in George's hand was taken into custody and remanded to evidence lockup. Jessica heard about the poems, which had been scrawled longhand into a notebook. Along with this, Gordonn had kept a diary in which he fantasized about helping people to commit suicide in order to leave this world of “putrid flesh,” as he called it.

  Still, something nagged at Jessica. The number of his victims, including himself, amounted to far fewer than the number nineteen, which Kim had seen again and again. But it was more than this. Something wasn't right about the timing and the circumstances surrounding Gordonn's death in the home of the famous dark poet Lucian Burke Locke, whose wife and children were conveniently away at the time.

  After all the protocol work on Gordonn's remains and those of Ariana Dupree, his final victim, Jessica found a moment to confer with Kim Desinor. Kim had taken time to read through Gordonn's diary and poems, and she'd shown copies to Dr. Wahlbore, who fed them into Rocky. Kim's gut reaction to Gordonn's poetry told her the poems didn't match with those of the killer, and Rocky bore her out. Kim had telephoned with this information, saying she was coming right over to discuss what this meant.

  Kim showed up at Jessica's office, slipped into a chair, and exasperatedly asked, “How did the quality of Gor­donn's poetry go from the junk I found in the notebooks to what he supposedly wrote on the backs of his victims? Did he somehow sprout poetic wings when he had a back to compose on?”

  “From what you and Wahlbore say, I would have to as­sume, as Vladoc suggests, that Gordonn killed under an­other personality altogether, obviously one who could write a sight better than his regular self.”

  “Sounds ludicrous; sounds like Vladoc's interested in covering his ass, Jess. A dual personality explains away how the good doctor could be treating a man and not know a goddamn thing about him.”

  “What're you talking about, Kim?”

  “I've seen what was collected at the Gordonn home, and I'm telling you, it doesn't cut the mustard. It's not... it didn't come out of the same mind. “I see. Doesn't compare well with the killer's verse. You think Parry and Sturtevante and Roth and the city are going to want to hear that?”

  “I'm only telling you what you already know in your heart to be true.”

  “That we've tagged the wrong man for the killings?”

  “I fear so.”

  “But what about all those psychic hits that had to do with his profession?” Jessica countered.

  “They may well have been pointing to this, that one day we'd have the wrong man, a technical film specialist, in custody for murder, only he isn't here to tell us so or to re­fute it.”

  “Have you ever known cases of dual personality—both being writers—but who write in totally different ways?”

  “I just don't buy it. Vladoc says Gordonn may have been a dual personality, in which case perhaps one of the per­sonalities was a poet, the other not. I just think it's too pat, too easy a way out.” Kim was adamant about this. “His po­etry was not up to the standard of the killer's. Was he then inspired when he wrote on the back of his victims but not before?” She repeated her earlier question.

  “Everyone has laid the case to rest. Parry, Roth, and Sturtevante are happy to turn it over to the DA's office.”

  “While you and I, dear, remain skeptical,” said Kim. “I just have a gut feeling about it. Call it—”

  “Instinct? Combine your gut feeling with mine, and we have one hell of a big gut feeling between us,” finished Jessica

  “I hate to think that our killer is slipping through legal hands, and that Gordonn was set up by the obvious candi­date, Lucian Burke Locke.”

  “We need more to go on than a gut feeling,” Jessica countered. What about warming up your cold hypothesis with this?” a male voice interrupted.

  Both Jessica and Kim swung around to see Dr. Leonard Shockley, holding a manila folder overhead and slapping it against the dooijamb where he stood.

  “And what's this?” Jessica asked the ME.

  His hands slightly shaking, Shockley spread the con­tents of the folder before her where she sat. 'Take a look.” He gave Jessica time to read the information from his work on the final corpse, Ariana Dupree.

  Jessica stood, came around the desk, and kissed Dr. Shockley, while Kim asked, “What? What is it?”

  Jessica announced, “DNA... the killer's DNA from the tears... doesn't match up with Gordonn's DNA.”

  “Then the last two victims were killed to cover the real killer's tracks.”

  Jessica kissed Shockley again and started out on the first step in a long journey, one that now had a specific goal: to nail Lucian Burke Locke, the strange little man with the picture-perfect home and the picture-perfect—but only in appearance—family.

  “A closer look at Locke is in order,” she announced.

  The closer look into the life of Lucian Burke Locke re­vealed that he was the product of a home dominated by an alcoholic father who had made life a nightmare for Lucian and his mother. It was Dr. Harriet Plummer who provided this information, all the while defending Lucian to the de­tectives when they suggested that he was not telling the en­tire truth the night of Gordonn's death. The police also talked about Locke with Garrison Burrwith, who was only too happy to inform them that he had learned from campus rumors and word of mouth that Locke had always been fas­cinated with the urban legend that turned out to have orig­inated with Gordonn's family. There were even students who swore that Locke referred to the story of the Gordonn family deaths in his lectures as an example of the power and influence of the Byronic image nearly two centuries after the poet's death.

  “But no one knew at the time that George Gordonn was part of the ill-fated family,” Burrwith explained, “no one except Professor Locke, I suspect. I suspect the boy in­formed his revered instructor when Locke spoke of the story as an urban legend. George was extremely shy, you know. He would never have announced such a thing in pub­lic, no more than he would tell a classroom full of people that he had been the first to disrobe and display a poem etched on his back.”

  “Strange that someone you call shy could do that.”

  “Some say he did it at the urging of a psychiatrist, who was helping him to face his fears.”

  “Vladoc,” muttered Kim.

  Burrwith continued, his bow tie bobbing as he spoke. “I suspect the boy told Locke every detail, down to the fact that he was seeing a shrink.”

  “If so, Locke would have to know not only Gordonn's secret, but what was going on in his mind—now,” said Kim.

  “The diary entries,” Jessica said, thinking aloud. “Gor­donn wrote about his fantasy to kill and be killed in the man­ner of his parents. Said he had recurring dreams about it.”

  Kim nodded. “The diary entries alone would likely have ensured life imprisonment, but Locke didn't count on the chips falling as they have.”

  “I hope you nail that brash, arrogant SOB,” said Garri­son Burrwith, which
brought Jessica sharply back from her thoughts. She thanked Burrwith for his time and help.”

  “You're going to put him away for life, aren't you?”

  “We will if he is our killer, yes.”

  “Then you don't believe Gordonn did those horrible things.” At the moment, we are not a hundred percent certain of it, no, but we must ask you to keep this to yourself. Word of our suspicions gets out, and, as we said to Dr. Plummer, anything could happen. We don't want to damage a man's reputation without airtight evidence, you see.”

  “Of course, like you people did with poor Donatella.”

  They left abruptly then.

  “Vladoc isn't telling us everything he knows, Jessica,” Kim said as they located the car in the lot outside the build­ing, a bright Philadelphia sun momentarily blinding Jessica before she slipped on her dark glasses.

  “What do you think Vladoc is hiding?”

  “I don't know exactly. But something's not right. For one thing, how could Gordonn afford Vladoc's rates for therapy?”

  “You think the shrink was using the boy? How and for what?”

  “I don't know. I just know that on Gordonn's salary, he could ill afford a downtown shrink like Vladoc, unless they had cut some other deal.”

  “Like access free and clear to the kid's story?”

  “You mean for a book or something? Who knows?”

  “That night at the club, when I spoke to Gordonn, before I knew who he was, when he was videotaping the nude poets...”

  “Yes...” Kim leaned over the hood of the car so as to hear over traffic.

  “He said he had been hired by the owners of the club, and that he got free copies of the tapes for his own use.”

  “Go on.”

  “Suppose Vladoc had cut a deal with the owners in order to put George to work doing what George wanted to do, and making money in the bargain. Each video sold to the clubs to create a kind of library, which they could use to create their ads.” Yeah, I've seen a few while flipping through channels in the hotel room. They're enticing in a crude way. And their makers must get well paid.”