Killer Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Still, he must face the fact that he was at a crucial point in his life. He had read a lot about patterns and phases of growth, stages that a man went through. This was one of them, contracting the fat tummy and the fat jowls. He vowed not to let it get the best of him, and so, as tired as he was, he did his push-ups and sit-ups before showering and lying back on the bed. In the shower, his mind had wandered back to the scene of the murder. The hot shower water was like her blood in its warmth.

  In bed, his mind wandered back again to the details of the killing. He returned to survey the crumbling, filthy, odor-ridden old place in the woods miles from the main roads. He then methodically found the precise instruments that he required in the briefcase he had on hand, in order to open a vein and drain Candy of what he wanted from her. He dwelled on this, allowing the moment to cradle him to sleep. His rest was deep and peaceful, stirred only by the unpleasant flashes regarding the need for the imprecise, heavy-duty equipment he'd used on Candy.

  He had had to return to the van, placing the murder weapons in a secret compartment, putting the camera filled with the negatives of the killing on the seat. From the rear now he pulled forth his battery-operated hacksaw, a nice toy. He then returned to stand before the body, deciding what touches would be best.

  The hum of the hacksaw was welcome in the deafening silence of the place; he carefully sliced away the breasts before mutilating the vagina. There was next to no wasted blood. He counted on the horror of the mutilation to confound local police, send them scouring the countryside for a lunatic escaped from an asylum perhaps, or the town weirdo, or a recluse of the woods. Certainly, no one would be looking for a man like him.

  When he'd done with his final cuts, he stepped back to look at the result, casting a roving, critical eye over the corpse. He started away, but at the door he stopped and returned.

  “What the hell,” he said aloud, touching the hacksaw almost gently to where her shoulder and arm met, severing the ligaments on all sides. With a gentle tug of his gloved hand, the bone separated neatly from its socket, and with a final flourish, he threw the arm across the room.

  He was about to leave when he remembered one of his scalpels in the kitchen. He had left it in the basin. As he passed the corpse again, he also recalled the hospital tourniquet tied tightly about her neck, and the pink ribbon in her hair which he had placed there. He snatched this away, too. He didn't want to leave any clues save those that would befuddle and misguide the authorities, like her severed arm and the mutilated genitals.

  Earlier, he had fished out the vial of semen from the cooler in his van. The semen belonged to another man, someone he didn't even know. He had warmed it to room temperature, then poured some into the dead woman's vagina and the remainder in her mouth. He was then careful to put the vial and its top back into the cooler to be taken away with him.

  He'd sent the authorities on the trail of a sex pervert. They'd find just what he wanted them to and nothing more, like the little surprise in her mouth and vagina.

  Satisfied, the killer left. Home was far away and waiting, and yet he was home and in bed, his needs fulfilled, dreaming that he was coming and becoming... Could life be any richer? He rather doubted it.

  And his dreams proved him right now... as before... and always.

  He kneels on all fours like a panting animal, below her neck where she is dangling. In a frenzied, altered state of consciousness and being, he doesn't remember tying her long, loose hair back in order to have a clear path to the spigot of her throat from which her blood is about to flow, now that he has tapped into it. He has everything in place. He loosens the tourniquet with his hand held over her eyes. The blood is coming through to him in a controlled, measured flow, just as he had imagined it a thousand times. His inventiveness and imagination have not failed him.

  He is in orgy at this point, and while not a religious man by anyone's standard, he knows now what fervent emotions strike like paralyzing electricity through the brain and heart of a zealot. Down on all fours, he catches the blood of her life in his mouth, swallows it warm and experiences the ethereal soul of her pass into his bowels, relinquishing to him her complete essence. Blood sacrifices... as old as time and man.

  She does not bleed profusely or carelessly. He has taken careful steps not to squander the precious red fluid. He has covered the wound he has inflicted on her white throat with the spigot and surgical tape, turning the tourniquet, applying just enough pressure to slow the bleeding so as to catch it calmly in the mason jars he has brought with him. As each is filled, he sets it aside on the table, working by the light of an old oil lamp and a lantern flashlight he has set up on end. He doesn't want the light to draw any attention, although it is miles to the main road.

  He knows his lust is insatiable and that the supply he's taken from Candy will not long last him. He knows even before he arrives home this night that he will crave the drink he craves for the rest of his life, not only because he likes the taste of blood—has liked it from childhood—but also because he likes the good feeling of the slaughter itself. He finds comfort in it; he finds reason and balance and beauty in his relationship with the body he feeds on, the woman that feeds him.

  He is, after all, a vampire.

  He has tried to tell people of his affliction, to get help, but that has gotten him nowhere. Most refuse to hear his cry. They don't believe that daylight hurts him, or that he sleeps by day, prowls at night, and feeds on the blood of others. He has no one. No one cares. No one but Candy, who dangles before him as his sustenance and his warm friend, forever in his mind, fulfilling him.

  He thinks momentarily of home, and of taking a bath in Candy's blood. He thinks it an exciting idea and it grows. He is much closer to Candy than to Melanie or the others. Maybe a bathtub filled with her isn't such a crazy notion.

  FIVE

  The wake-up call from Otto Boutine blared in her ears, but for a moment Jessica could not recall where she was; she certainly didn't recall any sleep. It seemed that only minutes had elapsed. She woke in her clothes, sprawled on the bed. With the phone on its third, perhaps fourth ring, she made a mad dive for the thing, knocking it to the floor and catching the receiver before it dropped. Good reflexes were a blessing, something she had always possessed.

  “Jess, it's me, Otto.”

  “What time is”—she yawned—”it?”

  “Getting on toward ten, and you said you'd like to see the body in the morgue before we head back to Virginia.”

  “So I did.”

  “Stadtler isn't exactly waiting for you with bated breath.”

  “Fish-baited breath, maybe.”

  “That's why I like you so, Jess, but let's not piss anyone else off at us before we leave, okay?”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Consider it cheap advice. You comin'?”

  “Give me ten—no—twenty minutes, Chief. I've got to shower and dress.”

  “Meet you in the lobby.”

  “Grand.”

  She quickly grabbed something to wear, realizing that she'd have to let her hair dry along the way, and that lately she hadn't given a thought to her appearance. She rushed from bed to bath, and later when she slipped from the shower, she heard a knock at the door.

  “Boutine, dammit, I'm not ready.”

  The knock persisted and someone was saying something on the other side, but she couldn't make it out. She threw on a robe and opened the door. A waiter stood outside holding a breakfast tray.

  “Room service, compliments of 605.”

  Boutine could be thoughtful, she said to herself. “Oh, please, on the table.” She rushed ahead of him to clear away the things she'd tossed over the table. Then she fumbled for a gratuity, but the waiter told her it was taken care of, and he promptly left.

  She rushed down the toast and coffee and scrambled eggs as she continued to dress. She was a half hour getting to the lobby, where she found Boutine engrossed in the Milwaukee Journal.

  “Anything abou
t the case?”

  “Too damned much. I swear I don't understand reporters. You politely ask 'em for cooperation and they nod and say yes, sir, anything you want, sir, and then they weasel information outta some schlock deputy P.R. officer, tack on a few innuendos, and they're practically blowing whatever careful case you might make against a suspect before you've even got the bastard in custody.”

  “They got the vampire angle?” She was upset now.

  “No, not yet.”

  She sighed, pursed her lips and nodded. ' 'Thank God for that much.”

  “Faxed a copy of the one good print you found to Quantico.”

  “And I take it, it's not on file, right?”

  “Right, Sherlock.”

  “Stands to reason.”

  His quizzical stare lingered over her. “I didn't have much hope that it would check out either, but what made you think so?” 'Nature of the crime places this guy as one of the general population. Likely to be white, middle to upper class, blends in like a sci-fi horror alien who's taken over a human body. Possible dual, if not quadruple, personality, leads stellar life by day, model neighbor, belongs to the Rotary, relatives and friends think of him as just a regular guy who stays pretty much to himself. Lives with his mother or alone, and if he is married, he's a mouse, completely dominated by her. Away from home a lot; goes hunting for human blood by night. But we'll be lucky to find a parking ticket with his name on it, much less a record.”

  “Maybe you ought to be in psychological profiling, Doctor.”

  “Maybe. Any event, this case may be unsolvable.”

  “No one said it was going to be easy.”

  “Thanks for breakfast,” she said. “Nice gesture.”

  He shrugged. “We're on expense account.”

  “Just the same—”

  “Glad you enjoyed it.”

  As they went for the door, she told him, “We've got to come up with a few more details that'll stay in-house.”

  “That's one reason we insisted on the autopsy.”

  “Poor woman's suffered some very unkind cuts, and now we're going to literally open her up to more. I can see why the locals hate us.”

  “Something else you ought to know,” he said, placing a gentle hand on her arm as he led her to the waiting car. “Having to do with her severed arm? At the crime scene?”

  “I know about that.”

  “What do you know about it?” He half smiled, incredulous, certain that he knew something she did not. The smile softened his granite features and she saw the boy who enjoyed puzzles and games surface in him. Word at Quantico had it that he was into sophisticated computer war games and simulations for relaxation, and that he was currently helping in the design of a software package that would simplify the work of police psychological profiling, and that this system might one day be textbook material in every criminalistics course in the country and quite possibly every police precinct in the land.

  She said to his smile, “One of the cops picked up the arm from somewhere else in the room and laid it to rest beside the body.”

  “How the hell did you know that? This guy comes to me early this morning, says he can't sleep, saying he's scared shitless you'll find his prints on her somewhere, and that he was one of the first on scene, and that he had—”

  “Picked up the arm and placed it with the body without thinking.”

  “And told no one, no one. So how could you know?”

  “Human nature and human folly,” she said, climbing into the car, leaving him to wonder and frown.

  Inside, Boutine gave the driver directions, and then he turned to her. “Out with it.”

  She thought of the need of rescuers at crash sites and other scenes of horror and mutilation, how often they wanted to put the pieces back together, line the bodies up in neat rows. But she said, “Well, the arm was severed by some kind of cutting tool, big tool by the look of things, but in any event, it would not have fallen into place as it was, at an exact angle from where it'd come off. Whoever placed it there did so with some attention to anatomy, fitting it as closely to the socket as possible, pointing straight away. At first, I thought maybe the killer had placed it there, reset it, so to speak. But I ruled that out quickly for two reasons.”

  “What reasons?” He was clearly fascinated.

  “First, the other missing piece, the breast, was halfway across the room, the other one dangling by a thread of skin. If the killer was obsessively interested in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, he would have been motivated to do so for all the pieces, not just the arm.”

  “Good point.” He understood obsessive behavior.

  “As for the second reason, I saw the displaced dust where the arm had been originally thrown. It hit one of the walls. left a faint sign of fluids and left a mark at the foot of this mark on the floor. I assumed then that it had been moved.”

  From the inn it took them twenty minutes to get to the hospital. It was attached to a university teaching complex. Once inside, they were led down a long corridor and a flight of steps to the morgue belowground. It looked like a hundred thousand such places tucked away in hospitals across the country, a kind of earthly perdition for the remains, until which time as cause of death could be determined, a death certificate signed and the body turned over to the family.

  Boutine stopped short of the morgue door, and his booming voice seemed out of place in the silence. “Make it quick. We have to be back in Virginia at sixteen hundred hours.”

  “Understood, but I thought you were joining us.”

  “No, thought I'd talk to some of the relatives, see what I might gather about the girl.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Same to you.” He took her hand to shake, but he held it a bit longer, saying, “You did excellent work last night, but you know that, don't you?”

  “Doesn't hurt to hear it from you. But it's a little premature. So far we don't have a thing.”

  She pushed through the door where the local coroner and an assistant stood over the body; they'd begun to run some tests already.

  “Ahhhh, Dr. Coran... nice of you to join us,” said Dr. Stadtler, whose forehead was discolored by age spots, as were the backs of his hands.

  She replied coolly, “I was up pretty late last night.” Stadtler's having left the scene hours before her still rankled them both.

  He pursed his lips below his mask and nodded, his eyes studying her closely. “I do not know perhaps as much as the FBI, my dear Dr. Coran”—it grated her nerves to have someone refer to her as my dear doctor—”but I do know that under poor lighting conditions, we doctors miss a lot.”

  He had obviously been relishing this moment, she thought. “And what did you find, Dr. Stadtler, that I overlooked? Or, rather, that you assume I overlooked.”

  It was a bloodless autopsy, the first such that she had ever witnessed. She came closer to the corpse, its slashed eyes now familiar to her.

  Stadtler continued in a voice that overflowed with smugness, a ribbon of contempt snaking through. “The girl's feet, below the ropes...” His pause was calculated. “Slashed.”

  Despite the fact she was angry with herself for the oversight, she said, “Achilles tendons, I know.” The lie caught Stadtler and his assistant off guard. “But that's what autopsies are for, to be sure.” She'd paid absolutely no attention to the feet other than to note that they had been bound.

  “Yes, well,” Stadtler muttered like a chess player whose king has been cornered, “both tendons were severed.”

  “Making it impossible for her to stand, let alone run from her assailant.” She located a frock, a cap and a mask in a nearby supply cabinet. In an autopsy room only the minimal rules of sanitation applied. It was highly unlikely that the “patient,” as dead as she was, was contagious. As Jessica readied herself, she thought anew of the girl's ordeal. Even if she had had a chance of escape, with her heel tendons severed, she'd have had to drag herself away, pulling herself along like a two-armed lizard.
She wondered if the killer had watched her drag herself about before he hauled her up to the rafters by the rope. Doubtful. There'd been no blood trail to substantiate this. Why then cut the tendons? Another precaution against the police, to confound the issue?

  There was a policeman from Wekosha in the autopsy room who hadn't said a word. She recognized him from the murder scene the day before and she guessed it was he who had replaced the arm. She gave him a cursory smile before hiding behind her mask. He volunteered something. “Dr. Coran, I'm Captain Vaughn. Wekosha and the county sheriffs office are combining on this killing.”

  “Good idea.” She went first to the tendons to examine the scars there. Working from the feet up on an autopsy was how she had learned her craft at Bethesda from perhaps the best man in the business, Dr. Aaron Holecraft. Holecraft was semiretired now, but he wasn't above talking to a former student about a puzzling case. She knew she'd have to see him when she got back to Quantico about the Wekosha vampire case. She knew that Holecraft had seen some Tort 9s in his day.

  The wounds had been cleaned thoroughly by Stadtler's assistant. “Did you get any pictures of the tendons before you cleaned them?” she asked the assistant.

  Stadtler spoke up instead. “Why? Didn't you, my dear doctor?”

  “I'm not sure if the photographer last night got them, no.”

  “In any case, we'll be happy to provide them,” said Stadtler as if he had won a small victory.

  The dull-faced, heavy-set Vaughn piped in. “We're checking every MDSO file we have.”

  She rattled off the letters in her head as she worked and asked, “Mentally disturbed sex offenders?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Waste of time, Captain.”