Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  The sound of spurting, gurgling water led them to the kitchen. There they located a door that led to the base­ment, and the moment they opened this door, they knew they'd found the source of the gurgling. It was a busted pipe Going cautiously down the steps, their guns extended along with the flashlight, they were stopped when the light hit the prone figure of a man with a noose around his neck. It was Locke, small and misshapen, lying below the busted pipe, which spewed water over him. His pitiful suicide at­tempt had apparendy failed not once but twice. His back was etched with a poem, and his throat was raw and swollen from his attempted hanging, but he was still alive. Somehow the selenium had not killed him and the pipe he hanged him­self from had torn loose, sending him falling to the concrete floor and saving his miserable life.

  “Kill me... kill me,” he pleaded, lying over a gutter and holding his hands over his eyes.

  “We'll let the state decide whether or not you live, Locke. Not our job,” replied Jessica.

  “Put me out of my misery. Send me over.”

  Sturtevante and Parry rushed into the now cramped basement, bringing with them a floodlight. The light made the little man on the floor look all the more disgusting and ugly and pitiable.

  “The children?” asked Parry.

  “Dead, along with their mother.”

  “Angels one and all,” muttered Locke.

  At that moment. Parry lost control, kicking out at the lump of tortured flesh on the cold floor, sending him reel­ing over. “You lousy sonovabitchingmotherfucking child killer!” Again Parry kicked him, this time in the teeth. Jes­sica and Sturtevante pulled and shoved Parry into a corner, shouting for him to cool down, when suddenly an explo­sion filled the small room, and they all saw Kim Desinor standing over Lucian Locke, a bullet hole through his head and a shocked look in his eyes. “He... he grabbed out at my gun!” Kim shouted. “He took hold of the barrel. I didn't mean for it to go off, but it did. It all happened in the blink of an eye. It was an acci­dent.”

  “Good riddance,” Parry said in a raspy whisper, patting Kim on the back, as if to congratulate her. “Imagine what the literati of this country would turn him into if he lived to a ripe old age in prison, writing poems from his cell, given his own Web site like Charlie Manson. He'd proba­bly become the most celebrated poet of his generation.” Parry then turned and rushed up the noisy, wooden stair­well to the kitchen, where backup cops had turned on lights.

  Kim kept repeating, “It was an accident. The gun went off when he grabbed the barrel. He yanked at it with my linger on the trigger. I was distracted by you guys and Parry, all the fighting, and then the explosion.”

  “We believe you,” said Sturtevante. “No one will dispute your need to kill that piece of shit.”

  Jessica put her arm around Kim, telling her that it would be all right. “It will be investigated and there will be no charges of wrongful death. You did what you had to do.”

  “It wasn't like that, Jess. Truly, he grabbed the gun and pulled it straight at himself, but I had a strong grip on it, and it went off, all quite unintentionally.”

  “Perhaps not on your part, but what about his? He asked us to put him down, and when we didn't respond in the manner he wanted, he created the circumstance in which you had to end his life. Simple as that.”

  “It's such a horror for me, taking a life. I feel less of a human being for it.”

  “He left you with no choice; he wanted you to act in­stinctively, intuitively, and you did. You did for him what the rope over the pipe couldn't do... and I'm getting wetter'n than the proverbial drenched rat in here, so let's va­cate this place for now. Come on upstairs with me into the light-

  Kim nodded weakly and allowed Jessica to lead her away from the body and this place. “And for the sake of protocol,” Jessica added as they turned to go, “since I was on hand when the perpetrator of this bloodless slaughter was shot to death, I'd best call Shockley and his ETs in to collect evidence and to deal with the bodies.” Jessica led her friend and colleague out of the death grid, neatly defined here in the basement to await Shockley. “It's always difficult to take a life, but if he'd gotten firm hold on that gun and turned it on all of us, well... suffice to say, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”

  “He didn't want to fire the gun on any of us; he wanted it for himself, and he managed to use me to that end, didn't he? Clever SOB, I'd say, very clever indeed.”

  The core task-force team felt a great weight lifted off their collective shoulders, knowing now for certain that the se­rial killer called the Poet had finally been identified and his career ended.

  Jessica remained close to Kim while both the PPD's In­ternal Affairs cops and the FBI's own Internal Affairs peo­ple asked questions about the death of the suspect, Lucian Locke.

  Everyone found the scene gruesome, and emotionally painful to process, especially the room where the two chil­dren lay in bed, faces down, their backs revealing the final verses of the poem Locke had written. By now all the verses had come together to make a whole.

  Jessica felt little pleasure in having been proven right, that each of the poems was a section of one large, ambi­tious work. She supported Kim's version of the shooting one hundred percent, telling the IAD guys that she had seen the shooting go down exactly as Dt. Desinor de­scribed it.

  Meanwhile, Sturtevante and Parry, their services no longer being required, had gotten a federal warrant for search and seizure at Dr. Lucian Locke's office, club locker, Second Street apartment, and home. Parry meant to go by the book, to create an airtight, hermetically sealed case against the now dead poet.

  The news of the Lockes' deaths following so quickly on the heels of Leare's, and the even more lurid news that Locke had murdered Leare—everyone agreed that such news was tailor-made to increase dramatically the appeal of their poetry to young people fascinated with death and the trappings of death.

  Parry, Sturtevante, and a small army of white-gloved de­tectives combed the house for incriminating evidence that might explain Locke's behavior, explain why he had killed his wife and children, and the series of people who had come before them. Nothing came of the search, not a shred of useful information, not even from his locked desk drawer in the spacious den.

  A team of evidence techs were sent to his university of­fice, and they, too, came up empty. But a third team, sent to his Second Street apartment, hit the mother lode. Pinned on the walls were the photos Jessica had been looking for, shots of each of the victims who had preceded his final rampage. These, combined with the photographic record of the poems etched in poisoned ink, proved ir­refutable.

  Vladoc showed up at the scene of the crime now, and as he walked among the living scurrying about doing their work, he looked like a dead man. “Poor Evey, and those children, I loved them as if they were my own,” he re­peatedly told anyone who would listen, as if saying the words over and over would make them sound more true. How could Vladoc not have known that his brother was so deeply disturbed?

  “I had no idea, I swear to you all,” he finally said. “I was as much in the dark as you. He... Lucian always appeared happy, pleased with his life. He only spoke on occasion of minor problems in his marriage, his desire to be free of all the responsibilities of work and fatherhood and being a husband, but nothing serious, you see. He always worked things out in his head, I was certain. Obviously, I never heard his cry. He never allowed me to.”

  “He may well have thought you blind to the reality he lived,” Jessica suggested in an attempt to ease Vladoc's ob­vious pain.

  “Such a waste of human life and potential...” Vladoc, unable to stand another moment in the house, tearfully made his way out into the night. Jessica feared he would blame himself for the rest of his life, not only for what had happened here, but for all the victims of his brother's quiet madness.

  Jessica had to fight off the recurring image of the chil­dren upstairs. Locke's two children, aged six and seven, along with his beautiful wife, had returned
early from a trip to the Florida Keys, all suntanned and healthy-looking, but now all were quite dead, each with a poem scrawled across his or her back.

  From the basement, Shockley shouted for Dr. Coran to come downstairs. She reluctantly complied, taking the steps down to the blinding field of lights that had been set up in the basement. Water sloshed around her ankles as the drains fought a losing battle with the leaking pipes. “We were in the process of moving the body out of this damned deluge when this floated by.” He extended a handwritten note.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Read it. It's his last remarks. Quite incriminating.” Jessica read the note scrawled in the killer's shaky hand.

  I loved them all. Even poor George. I loved each and every one of them. They were all broken-winged fairy angels, not of this world, certainly not needing to en­dure life on this plane a moment longer. I love all of those whom I have sent over. There was no other choice.

  The note ended with Lucian Locke's familiar signature. Jessica looked up to see Kim and a retinue of uniformed police standing nearby, everyone watching as Locke's body was hoisted onto a stretcher. Only now did she see the words written in blood orange along his arms and chest.

  “He tried to write himself to death,” Shockley lamely joked. “Get it? But he appears to have run out of ink. Used it all up on everyone else.”

  “We found leather straps around the wife's legs and wrists,” commented one of the evidence techs who'd taken charge of the scene in the room where Evey Locke had been found. Apparendy she had not willingly complied with her husband's plan to send her to a better world. Ac­cording to the ETs who worked the upstairs room, the chil­dren had been drugged into a stupor before the quill pen dug into their flesh.

  “In the end, he pulled out all the stops,” said Jessica. “He didn't have time for the niceties, like convincing his vic­tims that to have a Lucian Locke poem emblazoned on their backs was their ticket to paradise.”

  Locke, his body misshapen and his hair matted and di­sheveled, was carried up the stairs and to one of the two waiting emergency vans, their strobe lights having wak­ened the entire neighborhood. As one of the ETs plunked out a rendition of “Chopsticks” on the piano next to Evey Locke, the old ME, Shockley, made his way upstairs to the children. “I want a firsthand look at the boy and girl,” he said sadly.

  “Angels he had called them.” Jessica shook her head. “I'll go with you.”

  “Thanks. I'll need your help.”

  “We know now how he kept abreast of the investiga­tion.”

  “Yes, I heard. Through his brother, Vladoc. Don't you find it strange, though, that Vladoc didn't recognize his own brother's handwriting and poetry? After all, he was studying it, he made pronouncements on it, told us all about that Enochian thing, and yet he had no idea his brother was so deeply into this warped philosophy?”

  “I've wondered the same, yes,” said Kim, who had come into the room and overheard them. “But while subcon­sciously he may have known, consciously I'm not so sure. I just spent time with him outside, and he's a broken man. He could not have taken part in his brother's actions. His brother's DNA will tell the story, and I don't believe he was involved from afar, like some master puppeteer.”

  “Locke was the only puppeteer here,” Jessica returned. “Still, now that he's dead, we should confiscate all of Vladoc's records on his patient.”

  “Just to be sure,” Shockley agreed.

  “He could not have accepted such a truth; only now has he been able to, now that the evidence is irrefutable,” Kim assured them. “I held his hand, and I tell you he is horri­fied at what has happened to the only family he has.”

  With the final evidence gathered and the last photograph of the death scenes at the Locke house taken, Jessica rushed outside to the predawn air, breathing it in deeply several times, attempting to clear her head. Nothing so af­fected the death investigator as the unnecessary death of a child, and here were two innocents taken. Leanne Sturte­vante and James Parry had returned to the scene, and Parry asked her how she was holding up.

  “I've been better. It's horrible what's happened here.”

  Parry and Sturtevante confessed to having had the same discussion as the others regarding Vladoc. They all agreed that his brother had used him, duped him.

  Sturtevante remained with Jessica while Parry stepped back inside for a final look around the murder/suicide house. Locke's death had been ruled as suicide in that he had caused it knowingly and willingly, when he realized the poison he'd used on himself had not been a toxic enough dosage and his attempt to hang himself also failed. Jessica now learned from Sturte­vante how she had discovered Marc Tamburino in the final throes of death.

  “Before he died he told me it was Locke. It was the only word he managed to speak before he choked and expired. From the mouth of a dying man. I knew it couldn't be ig­nored. Tamburino's back had been turned into a grid of death by Locke's letters.”

  “What's amazing to me,” Jessica said, “is that he would go off like this after so carefully constructing a scapegoat in the person of George Gordonn. I suppose we can only infer that after he manipulated things so that no suspicion could fall on him, the irrational powers and forces driving Locke proved stronger than his logical mind.”

  “Marc Tamburino didn't know Locke was the killer until it was too late. He figured it out as he lay dying, about the time I found him in his apartment this evening. Locke rushed out before I got there, leaving Marc still alive. I must have frightened Locke as I approached.”

  Kim, who had been standing nearby listening to Sturte­vante describe the path that had led her to Locke, offered her thoughts. 'Tamburino no doubt thought it a great honor to be wearing an original Lucian Locke poem emblazoned across his body to the clubs last night, I suppose.”

  “Who wouldn't?” Sturtevante said. “Even Donatella thought it'd be cool to display an original Locke on her back. It's what's gotten all of them killed.”

  Jessica asked for more of the details surrounding Tam­burino's death.

  “I carried him down to my car rather than wait for any ambulance, and I rushed him to Cellmark, the closest hos­pital with a poison center, but we were simply too late. An attempt to save him from the selenium, even though I could identify the poison coursing through his body, fell short. Time was not on Marc's side.”

  “Didn't he die en route to the hospital?” Jessica asked.

  “No, no, we had him almost stabilized when his heart stopped and no amount of effort on the part of the medical team could bring him back.”

  “You did all you could for him,” said Jessica.

  “I realized immediately that Dr. Harriet Plummer, who'd been seeing Locke, might well be another target, guessing that Marc was killed as much for his nosing around and asking one too many questions as anything else. He hardly fit the victim profile, and neither did Plummer, but on a hunch, I telephoned Dr. Plummer to warn her.”

  “But it was too late for her as well?”

  “ 'Fraid so. She was alive but just barely. Somehow she lifted the phone, and I identified myself and she simply babbled, 'I... could never... not love... Lucian. Could never say no... to him. Never could not love him.' She sounded drugged.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I shouted for her to stay on the phone, to keep talking to me, and at the same time, I got someone on the line so that I could dial 911 and get a cruiser over there immedi­ately with instructions to treat her for selenium poisoning. Plummer dropped the phone before I could get help. I made the calls and raced to her location from the hospital. “I figured that Locke had killed her, too. The man was on a rampage, just as you said, Jessica. As I drove to the Plummer location, I contacted Jim, and he met me there. The result was another corpse filled with Locke's poison and poetry. The two of us realized that the man was on a kill spree now, probably fearing that he'd be identified as the Poet Killer—that he had framed George Gordonn. At least that's my guess.�
��

  “It sounds about right to me,” Jessica told her.

  “So Jim and I asked ourselves who else might he harm? And Jim remembered the children and his wife. That's when we heard from you, and we raced to this location di­rect from Plummer's.”

  “And Burrwith? Was he killed, too?”

  “No, just disturbed to be awakened in the middle of the night, or so the officers who rushed to his home said.”

  “Thanks for filling us in, Leanne, and again, my sincerest regrets over your loss of Donatella.”

  “Dona was never one to play it safe; imagine, allowing Lucian Locke to write across her back.”

  “Likely with the promise that he'd let her do him. A pact of sorts, to prove to each other that neither was the killer.”

  “She so admired Locke's work. She knew the killer's hand was inspired by her and Locke's poetry. She con­fessed that much to me once.”

  Jessica and Kim went toward their waiting vehicle, tired and exhausted, talking about hot baths, body oils, warm candlelight, and distancing themselves from the horror of this time and place. Jessica had left the formalities of the crime-scene investigation and the chain-of-evidence duties to Shockley, who appeared to be basking in his supervisory role in the mop-up effort. All that remained now was to make a DNA match between Lucian Locke and the teardrops left on the earlier victims. That kind of scientifi­cally irrefutable evidence would put to rest any and all speculation about Vladoc or anyone else's having taken part in the killings.

  EPILOGUE

  Predicting human behavior is really about recog­nizing the play from just a few lines of dialogue.

  —Gavin De Becker