Extreme Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Satan was wise. Satan said he would provide, and he had. He provided Feydor with the perfect escape route and in plain view. There must be a dozen tour buses waiting for passengers to board this morning.

  The tour bus would take him safely out of harm's way.

  What could be simpler?

  Feydor had gone to the rear of the bus, from there he could keep a vigilant eye on anyone and everyone else aboard. Here, at the rear, if there weren't too many pas­sengers, he might stretch out across two seats and finally relax as the coach rocked him to sleep. He felt now he could sleep peacefully, if everyone left him alone.

  He trundled down the aisle, making eye contact with no one. When he got to the seat he picked out, he popped the overhead compartment door. He kept his tools and torch in the briefcase and he placed this in the overhead com­partment, close at hand. Satan would soon give him a sign, and he would again heed the call and would again need the fire.

  An exhaustive manhunt for the killer of Chris Lorentian was massed in Las Vegas. The local FBI office swung immediately into action, using what they knew of victim and killer profiling to make a guesstimate about the killer. The bulletin went out among police officials statewide, saying the killer might be a white male living in the Vegas area, either alone or with his parents, that he was likely in his late twenties or early thirties, but with an emotional age of a late teen, that he likely lived or worked close to the crime scene, had recently acquired a butane torch and other incendiary devices and had shown these items to ac­quaintances, was likely a “spontaneous” person with a quick temper, most likely taking great pride in his vehi­cle—probably a van or pickup.

  More specifically, the report said that the killer may have been in the underground parking lot at the Flamingo Hilton between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. on the day of the kill­ing. The description went on to characterize the actions of the killer since his heinous crime, saying that his eating and drinking habits would suddenly become erratic, along with personal hygiene. He would show an inappropriate interest in the crime and reports about the crime, frequently initiating conversations about the case or fire deaths in gen­eral. He might show signs of burns, seared hair on hands, arms, face, and head. He likely worked with fire or with fire equipment; he had a knowledge of fire. He might sud­denly and unexpectedly leave the area, the report warned.

  Warren Bishop had gotten back to Las Vegas to find his office knee-deep in an investigation centering around Dr. Jessica Coran. He immediately sought her out, calling her at her hotel room and meeting her for breakfast. The hotel was filled to capacity with tourists and conventioneers, coming and going, and this meant a long wait for a table in the coffee shop. Limos, cabs, buses lined the streets outside. The tourist trade was in full summer swing.

  While they waited for a seat in the coffee shop, Jessica repeated her bizarre story to Warren, whose reaction was one of amazement.

  When they finally got a seat, Warren looked intently into her eyes and promised, “I'll see you have carte blanche with my field office, Jess. Whatever support you need, just ask. Meantime, I'll have my best techs wire your phone here, just in case.”

  This remark made her look up from her toast and coffee and into Warren's big brown eyes. “You don't think he'll actually call me here again, do you?”

  “We'll take no chances.” He reached across the table and took her hands protectively into his own. “To date, Jess, you've been extremely lucky. I'm not going to sit idly by and see you get hurt on my watch.”

  Jessica gave a thought to their fleeting romance of years gone by when she was first recruited by the FBI, Warren always throwing a protective mantle about her. It was com­forting, usually, but she also recalled feeling constrained and sometimes smothered by his constant attention.

  “I appreciate all you and your team can do for me, Warren. And I guess you're right about the tap. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Getting a voiceprint on the guy could help tremen­dously later if we ever get him before a jury.”

  True enough, she realized. “Only thing is, Warren, he— the killer—didn't speak a word to me. He forced his victim to call me, and he fooled me into listening to a murder over the wire.”

  “He'll have to talk, sometime.”

  “It appears he prefers to write.” She explained about the message left on the mirror. “Any ideas what 'one is nine' could mean?” she ended with a question.

  He thought about the strange message, but shaking his head, replied, “Not in the least.”

  After that, they reminisced about earlier days, and each brought the other up on their current life outside the agency.

  Warren stirred his coffee and sifted through his thoughts before saying, “I returned to the single life about two years ago, when my divorce came through; got a fourteen-year- old son and a twelve-year-old daughter whom I see when­ever possible, which isn't often enough.”

  She informed him of her ongoing relationship with James Parry in such a way as to make it clear that she was not interested in renewing any former flame between them.

  “Well, I'd best get your room upstairs set up.” He stood up, his six-four frame as muscular and as attractive as ever, only his thinning and graying hair giving any hint that time had touched him. “I've got my best electronics man stand­ing by. And Jess, don't worry. At least if this creep does call back, you won't be entirely alone with him. Your line'll be monitored at all times.”

  “Monitor this guy Charles Fairfax, too.”

  “Fairfax?”

  “He's seeing to getting some laser-lifting fingerprint tests performed. Seems the killer wrote his message in the fried grease of his victim on the mirror. Stuck his hand in it. He either has a high tolerance for heat or blackened fingers.”

  “Grease from the burning victim? God... what a sicko.”

  The waitress, overhearing their conversation, grimaced, thought better of asking after them, and eased off.

  “I'll keep after Fairfax,” Warren promised. “Soon as we have the prints, we'll run a nationwide search on them.”

  “Thanks, Warren, for everything. You're a true friend.”

  “I'd still like to show you the desert sky at night.”

  “I'd like that, really.”

  “Plan on it. I'll pick you up at, say, eight?”

  He was a hard man to say no to. “All right,” she finally said, “see you then.”

  He said his good-byes and left Jessica to her day.

  FIVE

  Silent as the sheeted dead.

  —Anonymous

  Hours later, Jessica felt an overwhelming despondency re­garding the lack of progress in the Chris Lorentian case. Despite all the FBI input and the heat put on the investi­gation into the heinous murder, nothing had come of all the time put in. Pictures of the young woman remained hard to obtain. Witnesses were nonexistent, and people who knew and saw Chris in the hours before her death were similarly hard to find. Her father, a wealthy hotelier with something of a shady reputation, had gone into a ter­rible depression on learning of his daughter's fate and was placed on medication.

  Still, the newspapers and TV newscasts carried her photo and an artist's sketch of a red-haired man with whom she supposedly had been staying at the hotel. Her car and a rifled bag were located in the underground lot, but this discovery netted zero clues.

  A reward for the capture and conviction of the man re­sponsible for the horrid death of Chris Lorentian came from the family. Meanwhile, Jessica located John Thorpe, and together they decided to catch a cab to Lester Os­borne's office to determine what, if anything, the autopsy had revealed.

  The city crime lab and morgue occupied space with the largest police precinct in Las Vegas, taking up an entire city block, but getting to it would take time, as it was across town.

  They talked in the cab as the city that never slept seemed to be yawning in the morning sunlight, street cleaners run­ning up and down.

  “So, how did you sleep last night after all th
e excite­ment, Jess?” J.T. asked.

  “About as well's could be expected. How about you?”

  “Well, I admit, I was up pretty late,” he replied, seeing a glint of deprecation in her sparkling eyes. “I mean, after I left you to rest in your room, I joined some of the other revelers at the reception for the convention, but... got to admit... I had little fun without you, dear.”

  “It's okay, honey,” she shot back with a smile.

  “Tell you what, though: News of what happened on the seventeenth floor spread like wildfire through our little community of forensics experts.”

  “Is that so? And how much did you blow on the fire?”

  He tried his best to look offended. “Hey, I didn't have to say a word.”

  “But you did?”

  He shook his head and added, “Those guys were putting the pieces together as if playing a whodunit puzzle, for the sport of it all, and by the time I got downstairs, everyone— and I mean everyone with an M.E. at the end of his or her name—had heard about your involvement—you know, the phone call—and that Lester Osborne and Karl Repasi were principal M.E.s on the case, and the poor victim, this Chris Lorentian, she'd been painted as some kind of shadowy figure somehow connected to Vegas's equally shadowy underworld.”

  “All that, huh? Damn it, I'd hoped to keep my involve­ment—my tenuous connection with the killer—to our­selves, J.T. Now look what you've done.”

  He held up his hands. “I swear to you, Jess. Everybody in the community had already heard before I got down­stairs, really, honestly.”

  “You're sure of that?”

  “I swear, Jess. I wouldn't lie to you about that. Most everyone I talked to had the story already.”

  “Repasi, you suppose? You suppose he spread it?”

  “All it would've taken was a call to one of his pals. As for Chris Lorentian, most are chalking her death up to some sort of Mob-related revenge hit, not so much on young Chris as her father, whose business contacts are said to be serpentine. Odds makers are making book on it.”

  “Jesus, is there anything in this town they don't bet on?”

  “No, no, there isn't.”

  The cab pulled around a line and double-parked along­side the civic center and city government building they had come in search of. J.T. and Jessica climbed from the cab and stood in the desert sun as it reflected from the blinding mirrored glass here.

  Deep inside the building's multileveled basement, Jes­sica and J.T. found Osborne and Repasi working dili­gently over the dead girl's cranial cavity, where they'd cut her open to reveal the brain. “Fluids completely gone...”

  “Dehydrated,” they confirmed for the tape-recorded au­topsy report.

  Both Repasi and Osborne looked as if they'd gotten even less sleep than had J.T. Each man was tired and exasperated, perhaps as much with one another as with the body, from the sound of things. A third man, a young assistant to Osborne, tried to stay out of the cross fire.

  Osborne, his bow tie dangling like a dead bird below his open collar, fired a fresh volley at Repasi. “Do you really, honestly, think cutting open her chest and snatching out her rack of vital organs is necessary, Dr. Repasi, when we know for a fact she was alive when she was put to the torch?”

  “Thoroughness is my watchword, Doctor,” replied Repasi, whose wild shock of hair hung in his face. He'd long since dispensed with his hairnet.

  J.T. understood the tension, knowing its creator was in fact the mummified corpse itself, black and cloth like to the touch. Osborne gritted his teeth, released pent-up air, and re­plied, “We have corroboration now. It's no longer just Dr. Coran's word. We have hard evidence she died of her burns! There's the killer's message, left in his own hand...”

  Repasi coolly replied, a touch of his Polish-Romanian accent creeping in. He'd worked to control it over the years, but his obvious weariness now got the better of him. “What about the blow to the temple that I found? I believe in being thorough, and if my name is to be on this autopsy report, then—”

  “Then by all means, don't put your bloody name on it. I'll take full responsibility. It is my jurisdiction.”

  “And you invited my help, sir!”

  “Is that what you call it when you invite yourself in on an autopsy, Doctor?”

  Jessica cleared her throat to announce her and J.T.'s presence. They had both gowned up and wore surgical masks and gloves, their shoes wrapped in surgical booties. “Doctors, how are you?” she asked, not expecting an an­swer. “I trust all necessary information has been relayed to FBI headquarters? I put in a call to Eriq Santiva last night, left him a complete and detailed message about what's going on here,” she white-lied, having told Santiva nothing yet about how the killer had contacted her. It wasn't the sort of information one left on an answering machine. “He's expecting crime-scene pho—”

  “All done, Jessica, dear,” assured Karl, his eyes nar­rowing in mock consternation with her. “You know I keep my promises. And as for Dr. Osborne and me .. . well, we are finished here, according to Osborne. What do you say, Jessica?” asked Repasi. “Are we finished?”

  “Toxicological reports?”

  “Indicate sedatives, a heavy dose,” replied Repasi.

  “Don't suppose you could possibly tell me if there were any needle marks below the scorched skin?”

  “Impossible with the equipment here,” Repasi apolo­gized, but it didn't sound apologetic. “Still, I found a bruise to the temple after noticing a slight indention.”

  “In all that crinkled flesh? Good work,” Jessica com­plimented Repasi.

  “Blood indicated the same high level of sedatives,” added Osborne. “Some consolation in that nerve endings would've been dulled when it happened. And time of death was as indicated by the fire call.”

  “Her nerve endings weren't so dull she didn't scream, Lester,” Jessica countered.

  He curtly returned with, “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do, and I agree with Lester, Karl. We know what killed her. She sounded doped up when she spoke to me. I doubt the internal organs can tell us a thing more than we already know, and given the state of the body... well, it's already disfigured beyond recognition, wouldn't you say?”

  “Not entirely,” replied Osborne's quiet assistant as he put away some instruments he'd just cleaned. “Her father identified her around four this morning.”

  “That's what held up the autopsy,” explained Repasi, speaking over the assistant. “We're given to understand that everyone and everything in Las Vegas waits on this tyrant named Frank Lorentian. As for the autopsy, I think we'd best be complete and thorough. I thought thorough was your trademark, Jessica.”

  She ignored this, continuing, “And I'm sure the family is anxious for Lester to release the remains to them, right, Lester?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Mr. Lorentian's quite unhappy with us all.” J.T. added, “So, she was related to this big casino family.”

  “Closely, I'm afraid.”

  “The big man's daughter,” added Repasi. “Read as much in this morning's paper.”

  Lester said sadly, “She'd been in the process of running away, it appears.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Nineteen, dressed older but quite... immature, I'm given to understand. Frank Lorentian's known for being a doting father,” Lester replied. “Lavished everything on her but what she truly needed, I suppose.... At any rate, she was rebellious, wanted to make a life on her own, outside Vegas, you see, away from her father's lifestyle, so she disguised herself, struck out on her own, but didn't get very far, as you see.”

  “How long had she been reported missing?'' asked Jes­sica.

  “Four days, according to Missing Persons.”

  “I'm sure Lorentian has a few enemies,” suggested J.T.

  “He isn't buying that theory,” Repasi replied. “A kid­napping for ransom, he believes maybe, but not a hit to hurt him. He and the types he runs with, according to Lor­entian, kno
w not to mess with family, if you get my drift.”

  “But he could be wrong,” J.T. replied.

  “But there were no ransom notes, no demands?'' asked Jessica.

  “No, none forthcoming.”

  “Then it tracks back to me,” she said, stepping closer now to the shriveled body of the dead woman. From the look of her, she'd been tall, about Jessica's own height. Her bone structure told Jessica that she was curvaceous, but what remained of her features left no clue as to her beauty or lack thereof. All that remained was a blackened, red- and brown-splotched mask of mottled and fire- bronzed cardboard, the epidermal layer of skin as burned away as the woman's clothes, all to feed the smoking in­ferno. Her eyes had, of course, been reduced to sockets, the soft tissues having sizzled away like bacon on a hot griddle, the oils easily feeding the flames. Still, somehow, the ugly, eyeless mask looked as if she were crying—im­possible and quite unscientific, of course, yet very arrest­ing. Of course, it was simply fatty tissues frozen in a moment of time—at the flash point of superheated air— intermingling with the natural bodily decay. There was no crying corpse here.

  “Bring me up to date, gentlemen, please,” Jessica re­quested.

  “Well, no gunshot wounds, no contusions, abrasions, or hammer blows to the skull, nothing to indicate death be­fore the fire reached her,” answered Osborne.

  “Except the single sharp blow to the temple, which I detected,” corrected Repasi.

  “I was getting to that, Karl,” said Osborne with a moan. “The temple blow may've stunned her, but it wasn't a killing blow. That's clear.”

  “Fire investigation team found traces of butane, just as Fairfax had predicted, along with the gasoline.” Repasi spoke in a near whisper in Jessica's ear. “Fairfax has quite a nose for such things. What do you think that might sug­gest?”

  J.T. shrugged. “What do you mean, Fairfax's nose or a butane lighter? Neither fact is of much help.”