Killer Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Boutine whispered something in her ear and went by J.T. with a perfunctory hello and got into a second jeep that had come to fetch him.

  The pilot called down to Jessica, asking where she wanted her bags, two forensics valises and an overnight, placed. It was a signal that he didn't do loadings and unloadings.

  “You bring back any of that Wisconsin cheese?” asked J.T. jokingly. “I'll take charge of those!” he shouted up to the pilot. As he bounded up for the bags, Jessica went for the jeep, anxious for home.

  “It went badly, didn't it? Waste of time, wasn't it? I could see it in Boutine's face,” said J.T. when he rejoined her.

  “Since when can you read Boutine's face? It's just a little premature to tell, J.T.; we'll just have to see what the lab results show. Sure, superficially, yes, it looks like it could be the work of the same guy, but that's hardly something we can set in concrete, just yet.” Then her tone changed. “Why didn't you tell me you'd been talking to Boutine about the earlier cases?”

  “I didn't say anything because I didn't know if he'd take any action or not, especially since Raynack was involved, and when Bountine did take action, it was so damned quick, hell... I didn't even know you were gone until I got to the lab this morning. I'm not the principal player here, Jess—you are.”

  “Well, it's... it's been a trip, John, a real trip.”

  “I imagine traveling with Boutine would be. You two get along?”

  “Sure, sure we did.”

  “Look, I can see you're beat. I'll take charge of the goodies you brought back from Wisconsin, with your permission.”

  “Permission granted! I'd just like to fall into a hot tub for now.”

  “I'll see to everything, and you needn't worry.”

  She smiled at him, saying, “I know that I can count on you, J.T.” She climbed into the passenger seat of the jeep as he loaded in the bags and hopped into the rear. The driver took this as his signal and he silently turned and tore away from the airstrip.

  For a moment, Jessica looked for Boutine, but he had disappeared from sight too quickly for even a glance, and it hit her that now that they were back, they'd have to be more formal around each other, that she'd be calling him Chief Boutine again, and that he'd be referring to her as Dr. Coran. It made their sudden parting feel like a severing of ties, and she tried to understand why she felt so cold inside.

  “I left you some instructions on where some of the samples should go for cross-checks,” she told J.T., trying to sound as if her mind were on business. “MacCroone Laboratories in Chicago might tell us something more about the particles and fibers I've labeled for them. Duplicates of these samples, we'll have to share among us, but I want independent verification on everything we do where possible. If we do nail some bastard for these crimes, I don't want to leave a single stone unturned. “Gotcha! And not to worry. I'll overnight 'em. Everything else, we'll divvy up and begin to analyze to the max.”

  She knew he would get the various evidence from Wekosha into the proper and expert hands required.

  “Just hold on using Raynack on any of this, for the time being,” she added.

  He nodded. “Understood.”

  “I'll have to deal with him when and where necessary.”

  “It won't be pretty.”

  “Get the cloth items to—”

  “Boas, I know, and latents'll have to be shared—”

  “Along with the tiles and boards, taken from the scene.”

  “Fluid guys, I know.”

  “You get to keep the nail scrapings, skin, hair.”

  “I'll get Robertson to lend a hand on the blood and serums.”

  “If you can pry him loose.”

  “Don't worry, and as for photos, Hale's our man.”

  “Sounds like you're on top of it, John.”

  “My natural position—on top.”

  He made her laugh and he made her feel secure in the knowledge that he'd protect the sanctity of the evidence as she would herself.

  “Listen, there is one vial I want for us. No one's to know about it but you and I, okay?”

  “You found something! Didn't you? I knew it. I told Boutine you would. What is it?”

  She stared him down a moment. “Take it easy. May be nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  She reached over the seat back and dug into one of the black valises and pointed to the large beaker in which floated a square of flesh the size of a piece of Spam; it resembled Spam, too.

  “From the victim?”

  “Her throat.”

  “What do you hope to find here, Jess? “Won't know until we get it under the electron microscope.”

  “But you have a hunch?”

  “I do.”

  “And I'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out about it?”

  “Give me three hours and I'll see you in the lab. We may have to work all night. Boutine wants a report by sixteen-hundred hours tomorrow.”

  “You're kidding. What the hell can we tell him in twenty-four hours?”

  “He's a man in a rush. We tell him what we can.”

  “He doesn't know about this, does he?” J.T. indicated the throat section.

  “No, just you and me for now.”

  As a matter of protocol, they must first get the materials brought back with her to the lab under the eyes of a witness, in this case the driver of the jeep, who was also a military corporal. Once this was accomplished, the corporal drove her on to her apartment, where she stripped off the day with her clothes, showered and set her alarm for a few hours hence. The peace and solitude of her apartment, the safety she felt here, was like a soothing balm to her mind.

  Four hours later she dragged herself into the Quantico laboratories, where she was head of an investigative forensics team, one of whom was Dr. Zachary Raynack. Many of her team were “on call” from various other divisions, but Raynack, like J.T., was directly answerable to her, which made tensions between the young “upstart” and the old “fart” quite a tussle at times. For the present, she didn't want to have to deal with Raynack, and so she purposely left him out of the Wekosha investigation, certain that at one point she would have to deal with the sometimes intolerable Dr. Raynack.

  For the present, however, her full concentration was on J.T.'s work at the electron miscroscope. He was an artist with this marvel bit of hardware. The photographs created by the electron miscroscope meant that the photos themselves became the evidence, as the electron bombardment of the human tissue destroyed the evidence as the photos were being shot. J.T. made shots from every angle as the material disintegrated under his gaze. His eyes on the tissue layer that'd been peeled away from the larger sample, he said, “There is a strange configuration developing here.”

  “I thought there could be.”

  J.T. gulped, his Adam's apple bobbing just below the double eyepiece of the massive microscope that hummed with life. “I think you've really hit on something here, Jess.”

  “If what I think went on at the crime scene did go on, we've got one cold bastard on our hands, J.T., and he's likely to strike again. Most likely sometime around the beginning of next month.”

  His eyes went from the sample to her, staring.

  “Don't look at me! Get those shots in sequence.”

  Each layer of the throat had been put in culture and prepared for the microscope, placed atop one another and slipped below the eyepiece in rapid succession, making a kind of movie of the photo process. This would then be fed to the computer for enhancement and contour.

  Death investigation required large sums of money for personnel and for extremely expensive equipment, like the scanning electron microscope. The SEM detected the minutest of changes in the surfaces of tissue, telltale evidence left by, for example, a bullet, a knife or a blunt object. With a record of patterns and through experience, Thorpe could detect, for instance, if the section of skin he was looking at was punctured by a screwdriver or an ice pick. This instrument had a magnificatio
n of up to 50,000 times the size of the specimen, and this was projected onto the accompanying television screen in a three-dimensional image. It could detect the difference between a burn from a cigarette, a fire or torture; it could detect microscopic metallic elements down to rust from an unclean knife. It helped determine whether a knife wound was from a finely honed knife or a dull one, a scalpel or a serrated blade. It could even tell whether a cancer was caused by asbestos, and of the four kinds of asbestos, the SEM could tell which was present.

  The SEM accomplished these feats because it did not work on the principle of light passing through the specimen, but bombarded the specimen instead with electrons, creating an incredibly precise image through the electromagnetic lens. Still photos could be taken as the image was sent back. These could be blown up for the nonscientist to see more clearly.

  The much more portable TEM, transmission electron microscope, was an electronic version of the tried-and-true microscope. Both instruments were so sensitive to vibration that they were intentionally located in a subbasement, surrounded by solid concrete; the place sometimes made people claustrophobic, but not the scientists, whose minds were so directed on what was beneath the electron spray of the scope that hours might pass by without their realizing it.

  An array of other computerized instruments that measured, sifted and otherwise separated the minutiae of a crime—the puzzle pieces—such as the gas chromatograph, or GC, machine, filled the rooms of Section IV of the Quantico labs.

  Jessica was in love with the place. So, too, was J.T.

  John Thorpe was a tall man, large with hands like a pair of flatirons, and yet his touch over the instruments was sensitive and light. He was aware of what she'd found now, a telltale straw hole that had punctured the dead girl's jugular but had been masked by the larger butcher's cut that had torn half her throat away, the cosmetic wound which they were supposed to have taken as the killing wound, one Raynack had possibly allowed himself to be fooled by in earlier cases.

  “So tell me what you see, John.”

  He ran his hand through his hair. “It's peculiar, a circular cut definitely present, like... like a tracheotomy scar, isn't it? A catheter or tube of some sort with a beveled, sharp end, the kind used to free a blocked artery, make a circumvention in the blood or windpipe.”

  “I'll check with the family physician, see if there's any record of a tracheotomy ever having been performed on the Copeland girl.”

  She glanced into the microscope now that it was on its last frame, the tissue all but gone. “Certainly a precision cut; sure knew what he was doing. Didn't sever the back side of the vein; knew just how deep to penetrate to the millimeter, like he'd had some practice.”

  J.T. took a deep breath and let it out with his words. “Just lodged this thing into her jugular to... to...”

  “To open a vein,” she finished for him, then saw that he had gone a bit white. “You okay? Want to get some breakfast before taking these to the computer?”

  They both knew the process of computer enhancement would take some time and that at this point a slight error could cause irreparable damage.

  “You need everything you can get by sixteen-hundred hours. But this... this'll blow their socks off. Just how the hell did you see it at the scene?”

  “Didn't. I missed the severed tendons, too. Picked up on both at autopsy yesterday.”

  “Still, even at autopsy? How'd you ever know to look below the larger gash for this?” He indicated the microscope.

  “Stumbled on it when I was taking measurements of the throat gash. I took two measurements, and they didn't add up. The creep dug deep on both sides of the jugular, but he left the center almost intact. Either careless error or he's taunting us, playing games, hiding his little secret almost too well. I just got lucky.”

  He lightly laughed at this. “Nahhh, nobody just lucks onto something like this. You're a wizard, lady.”

  “No, no, I'm just careful, like yourself,” she replied before her tone again became serious. “You do realize what this means, J.T.? That we're going to have to take another and a closer look at the earlier victims.”

  “Raynack's mistakes.”

  “Now, come on, no one made any mistakes,” she corrected him. “Like I told you, if you weren't looking, or if you weren't lucky enough to stumble on it, this wound to the jugular would never surface. It just so happened that I looked for strangulation signs in the larynx and—”

  “I rest my case. You thought to look more closely at the throat, ignoring the gross wounds. Raynack—”

  “J.T., no more about Raynack's oversights. Regardless, we're going to have to do some exhuming.”

  She saw by his facial expression that his enthusiasm had taken a nosedive. No one cared to exhume a body, not even a forensics specialist. ' 'Sure, makes sense... check each victim for the straw-hole mark, right?”

  “It could tell us the whole story, or it could be for nothing. I'm going to put in the order, and we'll see what comes of it.”

  “Better not let Raynack get wind of this.”

  “He won't... not from me. So I'd appreciate complete discretion, okay?”

  “You Jcnow you can trust me.”

  “And as for the enlargements on the electron photos, and the computer-enhanced—”

  “Count on it.”

  “By sixteen hundred?”

  “Sure... don't worry about the pictures. They'll be in your hands by three.”

  “Two-thirty.”

  “Don't push it.”

  “And J.T.?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “I'd like you to be in the meeting with—”

  “Aw, come on, I hate those things.”

  “We've got to convince them of what we've got here, and I may not be able to do that without you standing there corroborating everything I say.”

  He shook his head over this. “Come on, you're department head here, Jess; time to throw off that mortal coil and those chains of womanhood that—”

  “No, it's no time for any bullshit, or for me to stand on principle, however good! Dammit, J.T., trust me. There can't be a man in that room that leaves with even a shadow of doubt about what kind of fiend we're dealing with.” At the back of her mind, also, she wanted no one leaving the meeting thinking that Chief Boutine had blundered in sending her to Wisconsin. “Please, J.T.”

  “It's your show. Boutine wants you to handle it, not me.”

  “I need your backing, that's all.”

  “All right... if it means that much to you.”

  “I'd kiss you if you weren't married.”

  “Go ahead anyway.”

  She did so on the cheek and hurried out, saying, “Don't be late, room 222.”

  “Gotcha!”

  # # #

  On the floor above there were six autopsy rooms, and within room A, the main autopsy room with overhead viewing seats, there were no fewer than six stainless-steel tables. A number of universities and medical centers in the area used the facilities when they were not otherwise engaged. Each autopsy room came with the appurtenances of the profession: hanging scales, sinks with running water, drains on the floor, hoses, freezing compartments, microphones and huge magnifying glasses on birdlike swivel arms. The lighting was painfully harsh. The tables were deliberately placed close together so that medical examiners could easily confer when necessary, and because of the inevitable and necessary noise of electric saws and other equipment, a soundproof booth stood in the comer for the M.E. to dictate her notes, if necessary.

  Jessica wandered past room A for room C, where she stood examining the schedule, determining when she might have C, should she be able to gain access to a body in the ground since winter. Exhumation was always a big hurdle, and transportation of the body to Quantico another. She'd like to get at least one of the former victims on a table in room C under her scrutiny—preferably before the killer struck again. If her suspicions were correct, he would strike again; he must to feed his insatiable blood
lust.

  C had only one autopsy table in it, next to a full array of X-ray equipment. The more meticulous and sometimes the more contagious cases, and cases of special medical difficulty, like exhumations, wound up in room C. A large room, it had specially designed features built into the air-conditioning system, making it airtight and as safe as possible. The A.C. sucked infectious gases from the body and transferred these to an incinerator on the roof, where they were destroyed. It was perfect in cases of advanced decomposition.

  She knew she was getting ahead of herself, that she'd have to get a court order, not to mention the paperwork necessary from her own sector chief, Leamy. Still, she filled in the request for the room, taking her best guess at when she'd need it and for how long. Currently, it was in use, and it'd see use off and on through the week.

  She went from here to the investigation division on the same floor. Here men and women worked on color-photo processing, photo files, and in the rear were additional X-ray rooms, the offices of the dental forensics center and the neuropathology laboratory. She needed items from just about every section. She needed the photos of the scene, dental verification that the decedent was indeed Copeland, the X-rays and photos hopefully blown up by now.

  She needed med reports corroborating her initial findings at the scene and during the autopsy, reports on the array of slivers she had carved from various organs from the Copeland body, from the brain to the spleen. Jessica had learned from Dr. Holecraft that there could never be enough corroborating evidence.

  Jessica knew which people under her she could call and which she needed to confront in order to get what she needed for the meeting, now only an hour away. She had taken the few hours left her to conduct a few tests on her own, skipping lunch, too nervous to eat anyway. Word'd gotten round that the chief of the entire sector, William Leamy, would be at the psychological profiling session over which she and Boutine would preside. Leamy wished to see firsthand the results from Wekosha. An interest in a case from so high up could mean one of two things—promotions or firings. She thought of the small confidences that Otto had shared with her, slivers of information, innuendos. Something was in the air.