Killer Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  # # #

  Otto Boutine had seen mutilation murder in its every guise throughout his long career in the FBI Psychological Profiling Division and as an advisor before such a division existed; in fact, most of the cases he had handled dealt with some form of body mutilation. He had become the resident dean of mutilation murders, the expert, the Ben “obi-wan” Kenobi of mutilation. It sometimes concerned him that this was how he had spent his life; that he had spent more waking hours—and sometimes the hours in deep sleep—inside the minds of the most brutal killers ever brought to justice, than he had with his wife who was now slipping helplessly away from him. But from the moment he had gone into collaboration with the Bureau, he had learned how to think like a man capable of the most atrocious acts imaginable, but this, the result of the ninth level of torture, was not easily fathomed.

  Intellectually, he could accept the fact there were between three and four hundred so-called real vampires roaming the country, and that while all of them had an unholy need for the taste of blood, few of them actually became serial killers, opting for other and safer means of satisfying their needs; however, emotionally, Otto had great trouble imagining the mind-set of a man capable of actually draining another human being of blood. The slow death process was so torturous, so heinous that it topped the FBI list of worst crimes of torture.

  It was difficult to think like a murderer, much less a sadistic, perverted killer; now to think like a man who believed that he was a child of Satan, a descendent of zombies! That, in order to insure his survival, he must not only feed on human blood, but the rich, warm, heady mixture of a fresh kill? It was difficult even for a man of Boutine's expertise, and yet he had thrown himself into the investigation like a man bent on going over Niagara Falls in a canoe, flying in the face of Raynack, disregarding Leamy's warnings. Did it have something to do with Marilyn? Had Leamy somehow sensed his desperation for work that would take him out of Washington, away from the pale shadow of the woman who lingered on in coma, the one he could not bear to watch any longer? Or was it simply that this tort nine was what his entire career had been about? To stop a cruel and human phantom he alone believed in: a twisted creature of the dark that ingested fresh blood from another in order to accumulate—at least psychologically— supernormal power over life and death. Was it just possible that the satanic bastard believed in his own bloody immortality? The vampire complex: the fixation that gave rise to men like the Marquis de Sade, and women who believed they could stay their beauty by bathing in the blood of virgins. Human lampreys, lusting for the blood of others.

  But this was the first time he'd ever seen the results of such an insane fantasy.

  He stared again at the drained body hanging upside down from the rafters of the ancient log house in Wekosha, Wisconsin. The local authorities had called them in the moment they realized what they had, a bloodless mutilation scene, just as his fax had described.

  Jessica Coran had been like a rock in the face of the horror. Amazing lady, terrific medical mind, incredible skill and control. He knew that he'd have to control the superlatives concerning her field performance in the report he intended to write, that he mustn't make her sound like Joan of Arc or Sister Theresa, but he was impressed, and the report would reflect a commendable job. He went to her, gripped her arm, asking, “How's it going?” She'd been at it full tilt for hours and dawn was approaching.

  “Coming to an end.” Her slurred voice said it all.

  “You're going to need some sleep before doing the autopsy, and it's nearing light out now.”

  An autopsy could take hours, and a complicated one— and this was sure to be complicated—could take eight hours.

  “Don't let them do it without me, Chief.”

  He nodded and changed the subject. “Been some time since I've seen one quite this bad, I admit.” She thought she detected a slight shudder in Boutine's voice. For a moment their eyes met, his shimmering gray darts plunging uninhibitedly into her deep blue-green pools to mesh in a silent bond of understanding. She realized for the First time that he was as profoundly wounded by the outrage committed here as she; at the same time she wondered how it could be otherwise, and how she could have thought it otherwise. Yet, Otto was Otto, so stiff, so muscular, so strongly wired together, and earlier he had seemed so above it all, so much in control—all useful mannerisms she had this night emulated so tenaciously, feeling like a cat with her teeth sunk deep, afraid to let go even in the least, for fear she'd lose the battle with herself.

  But there it was, the hurt in his eyes.

  It was just a flicker, and she was beyond fatigue, yet the flaring ember of a moment's weakness had been there. The gruesome nature of the case had struck him in his soul, just as it had hers. He tried instantly to put it out, and as must usually be the case, it was quickly extinguished, replaced with the steel again, and she half heard his directives to her.

  “Time we get it wrapped up here, so you can get a few hours' sleep.”

  She nodded, saying nothing. But somehow, she knew that they would always hold on to a bond created here amid the carnage.

  But he was suddenly all business again, throwing the mantle of chief across his brow once again, as if not interested in sharing such emotions with her. She was reminded without so much as a word of his invalid wife, who had remained now for a month in a coma at Bethesda Naval Hospital, a victim of an aneurysm. She remembered that no one got too close to Boutine, that Otto shared only the rudiments of his life and nothing of the core of his being with anyone, least of all a junior officer in the department.

  The only reason he was here was to oversee her performance in fieldwork for the Bureau. He was working on a major overhaul of his profiling team, and she was central to that restructuring effort. He had held nothing back in this regard, telling her precisely what his plans for her were, and nothing about those plans said anything of sharing an emotion, even if it was spontaneous and unintentional.

  Up until this morning. Dr. Jessica Coran had worked assembly-line fashion within the relatively friendly, clean and safe confines of the “store.” But now she was to head up her own assembly line for the follow-through on this case. This time, she was to see the whole picture. And she did; she got it right in her face.

  THREE

  Jessica had given up on getting the sophisticated fingerprint equipment promised them by the Milwaukee field office. She might have had results with an ultraviolet imaging system that intensified light 700,000 times at a crime scene. But she must make do with what she had, a field generator and headlights flooding through the windows and doors. She tried to take it in stride; besides, the chances of actually capturing a print from the killer in the terribly disturbed crime scene was scarce at best. She had noticed that someone had actually picked up one of the dead girl's parts and returned it to her, laying it below the body like an offering, and it wasn't very likely that it had been the killer's doing, but someone who had been moved by the awful scene.

  Still, she had gone through the motions, using the best technology available to her, the MAGNA brush. It was an ingenious device, small enough to carry in her breast pocket. The MAGNA made it possible to develop fingerprints on all kinds of materials, even those that once resisted processing. The locals were making their own prints with conventional tools and seemed to her in the stone age.

  Everything would have to await her return to Quantico, where fluids and stains found at the scene, along with fibers, could be identified, and where DNA results might show them something. But such tests took time.

  The local law guys were getting antsy now, wanting very much to cut the corpse down, close down the death house. She couldn't blame them. It was one of those universal instincts, an urge to tidy up the helpless victim, to right the wrong so far as it could be righted, to at least put the helpless form of the victim in a more natural pose; they wanted someone to clean her wounds, not to measure and poke and take slivers of tissue from her. They wanted to put the ugliness from view.
>
  Along with the urge to clean and tidy up came the accompanying illusion that doing so was not only helpful but the morally right thing to do.

  Her father had told her about such things as this; he had been witness to it countless times, and so had she now. But he also taught her that such urges were both natural and good, despite the harm they often did in destroying evidence and the desired sanctity of a crime scene. Such human urges certainly served the living; they certainly served to “soften” the scene, but thankfully, and somehow, Otto's long-distance proviso that the corpse not be touched by anyone had prevailed, amazing as it seemed. Once again, she guessed it was the sheriffs doing, a man named Stowell. She knew that to these men she appeared hard, perhaps even perverted, to have kept them so long from releasing the body from its silent torment, its bonds and its unholy position. The kind of well-intentioned mentality that caused no end of problems at crash sites where victims of burning Boeing 707s were too soon lifted off and placed all in neat little rows, creating a nightmare of identification problems for the medical examiner.

  She had been called in on such a case with the terrible fate of Pan Am flight 929. It had been her first mass-death site and it would prove a massive undertaking in more ways than one. Identifying mangled and charred bodies, fitting limbs torn and hurtled about a debris field of some hundred and fifty yards, was enough of a challenge for any forensics specialist. She had been an assistant M.E. on call at Washington Memorial when the news of the crash came over. Such an announcement is like an invitation to a frat party, and so within the hour all roads leading to the crash site were congested with off-duty cops, reporters, camera crews, voyeurs of every stripe. Anyone with the remotest excuse to be on hand converged on the site, including politicians prepared to be interviewed.

  Fire engines lined the way along with ambulances, along with more cops than necessary. The terrible secret amid the mayhem and confusion was the looting which was typically blamed on the local population. At a busy airport like Dulles International the first on scene were those whose job it was to rescue the living and protect the bodies of those who'd died. At the Pan Am crash the first to arrive were the Port Authority police, followed by the WPD, the firemen and the emergency medical supply teams, nurses, doctors, morticians and then nearby residents. The amount of looting was unforgivable.

  The relatives of the dead were in an impossible situation, Kafkaesque in its nightmarish proportions. They saw evidence of the police, the firemen and the medical teams rushing in to save or identify their loved ones. How then might they question a missing broach, a lost diamond, a wallet? Without recourse, there was no way to accuse anyone or even prove that something had been stolen.

  Pan Am 929 had been a “rich” flight, coming in from Buenos Aires, the passenger list reading like the social register of Washington, D.C. But by the time Jessica had arrived on scene, it looked like a planeload of paupers. Another reason to put the bodies all in a row, she guessed, in order to frisk them for rings and things—things that might quickly identify the charred and mutilated remains.

  She overheard one policeman say to a distraught young woman, “You say your mother always wore this ring? But can you say you actually saw it on her hand when she boarded the plane in Buenos Aires?''

  An archbishop on his way back to Rome via D.C. was located, his body intact, but his gold and amethyst ring and cross, along with a Rolex, had vanished without a trace. Outraged, one police lieutenant ordered all wallets and jewelry removed from the bodies under the watchful eyes of his men, and these items were tagged with a number corresponding to a number given each body, and placed in plastic bags sent to the police property room so that no further thievery would occur. It was at this point that Jessica and other M.E.s had come on the scene, having battled rush-hour traffic to get there. By then there was not much personal property left, and the bodies, all neatly numbered and assembled in a row, and covered over by a green tent, had been stripped of whatever personal effects might identify them.

  As a medical examiner, Jessica's main concern was to identify unrecognizable bodies. The easiest, quickest and least painful method of doing so was through the use of personal effects and the passenger list, with its seat number for every passenger. At the untouched “pristine” scene, the M.E. could see patterns of injury, relationships of body parts, enabling her to work out the exact details of what happened, and why one passenger's head was severed and another's left intact.

  While she was working over the bodies at the crash site, Jessica had been painfully aware that influential people at the FBI had their eyes on her, as she was awaiting an appointment to the academy. The tragedy of Flight 929 became a litmus test for her. Two of the passengers aboard had been with the Bureau. She got the appointment, but she reserved the right to maintain a little contempt for all those who had profited in one form or another from the tragedy, including herself, all those superlatives about ambition notwithstanding.

  Now in Wekosha, Wisconsin, with a single body to work with, she was expected to have all the answers, but without the necessary lab time, all she could manage was the same as Stowell or Lumley: guesswork. However, one clear fact in all of this stood out. Without a doubt the killer had literally “milked” the dead girl of her blood. She pictured an enormous vampire bat at the girl's throat, huddled there, lapping up her life with a vile tongue and incisors.

  Otto returned from outdoors, looking controlled and tightly wired once again. He extended a hand to help her to her feet from her kneeling position there at the throat.

  “I've got all I need,” she told Otto, “and I'm ready to leave.”

  Lumley lost some saliva and tobacco when he blurted out, “You mean we can cut her down now?” His tone was sarcastic and brittle.

  Sheriff Stowell fixed him with a stare.

  Jessica said simply, “Yes, but do so very carefully and gently. We don't want any mortician wounds confusing anyone later.

  “We'll be careful,” said one of the Wekosha cops.

  Jessica left quickly, now anxious to breathe the crisp, cold air of the Wisconsin countryside, filling her lungs with it while the car was loaded with her equipment and findings.

  The night here had a silence that seemed impenetrable, the stillness like cold lead leeching into her bones. The darkness of the deep woods was complete and mysterious. It was such an isolated place, both peaceful and dangerous at once. It reminded her of a hundred hunting camps she had visited with her father on excursions for deer. The end result of their hunt was a gutted carcass, and when she heard the grunting and noise of the men inside as they released the dead girl from her bonds, she thought of the horror that she had somehow put on hold for these many hours. She could hardly blame men like Lumley who looked at her as if she were a ghoul.

  “We're ready to roll, Jess,” said Otto, who'd come from the cdr with her overcoat, placing it over her shoulders. “You're shivering,” he said.

  “Thank you. Didn't realize just how cold it was.”

  In a moment she was leaning into the soft, clean upholstery in the back of Stowell's squad car. Stowell reached into his glove compartment and offered her a pull on a Jack Daniel's bottle, which she hesitantly took only after Otto gave her a nod.

  Sheriff Stowell turned the car around, nearly throwing them into a ditch, before righting the car onto the overgrown dirt road which would take them to the highway. Otto took the whiskey from her, pulling on it twice before returning it to Stowell with a “thanks.”

  “Sheriff Stowell has agreed to keep a lid on the more gruesome aspects of the crime, Jess,” Otto was saying, while all she wanted to do was drift off with the soft slumber reaching out for her, the car gently rocking now over the dirt road.

  “Good,” she managed.

  “But I promised something in return.”

  She blinked, her expression turning to curiosity, before she said, “He'll get a full report, soon as we have—”

  “He wants to know if she was or was not sexually
molested before the mutilation.”

  Stowell spoke for himself. “Candy wasn't a bad person. She didn't deserve dying like this.”

  “You knew her?”

  “She had an arrest record.”

  “Prostitution?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that how you knew her?”

  “I spent some off-duty time with her; got her a job; got her to clean up her life. Now this...”

  Stowell filled her in on the details concerning Annie “Candy” Copeland's life. At the age of eighteen and three-quarters, she'd been a waitress for all of two months at a diner in Wekosha. Before that she had been working the streets and living with her pimp. Before this, as an idealist still in high school, she had been a volunteer at the local hospital, a candy striper, from which she had derived the nickname, Candy.

  “What about her family life?” asked Jessica.

  Stowell's voice had the grit of a man who had seen a great deal of sorrow in his professional life. “She was what you'd call a throwaway kid. Stepfather abused her, mother looked the other way, and when she tried to fight back... came to me... they booted her onto the streets. System didn't begin to work for this kid, so I did what 1 could, which wasn't much.”

  “Stowell and I'll be talking with the pimp soon,” Boutine said.

  “And the stepfather.”

  “Co-workers at the diner, all that,” Otto added.

  She knew the routine. First check with those who knew her, those who came into routine contact with her; who had last seen her alive, when and where, and with whom? Suspect the relatives, the friends, the co-workers, and work from there. Question each and from each gain a new insight and a possible new lead or clue to her demise.

  “So, tonight, you want me to tell you if she was sexually molested?”

  “Best guesstimate, Dr. Coran,” said Otto.

  “My best estimate should await lab analysis, Otto, and you of all people should know that.”