Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

As usual her friend made sense. Still Jessica said nothing, thinking of the dream she'd been yanked from.

“Go with me to Philadelphia, Jess. I'll help you any way I can.”

Jessica knew Kim meant that she would help her with any personal turmoil involving Parry as well as the case. “Thanks,” she muttered.

“Meantime, we have a unique case in Quaker City.”

Jessica felt a bit foolish. She hadn't given the case half the thought she'd given to James Parry. No doubt psychiatrist Donna Lemonte would have made great gobs of critical gravy over her failure to scrutinize the case with her usual fervor, all due to James Parry. Jessica hadn't been seeing Donna professionally for years. Although she was now more of a friend than a doctor, perhaps a talk with Donna was in order.

Kim asked, “Do you know that the killer in Philadelphia is leaving poems at each crime scene? Etched into the victims' backs?”

“I know. Do you recall the Night Crawler in Miami?”

“Sure… who forgets the creepiest of the creeps?”

“He did the same-left poetic lines like crumbs wherever he went. His poems were filled with venomous hatred toward women. It's not unusual. We learned a great deal about the bastard from his handwriting.”

“Miami was a bitch. Sure, I saw the clues left by the killer there. He used lines from that poet who never capitalized, the British counterpart of e.e. cummings.”

“Yeah, e.j. hellering's poems. Killer used them to get his point across, but hellering's stuff wasn't what I'd call memorable by any stretch.”

“This guy's poetry is not maniacal, and it's not filled with anger or hatred, Jess. The crime scenes are bloodless, pristine in fact, and it's all in terrible contradiction to the idea of a rampage, yet the word keeps insinuating itself on me. Strange. As to the poetry I've seen thus far, it's… it is rather mesmerizing, haunting on some strange level I can't quite comprehend.”

“Really? It's that good?”

'To my mind it recalls some of the English-lit classes I endured in college, but the subject matter is modem.”

“Coleridge, Keats, Wadsworth?”

“Don't you mean Wordsworth, dear?”

“English literature was never my best subject,” Jessica replied, “and I found a lot of the old poetry to be a wad of it, so I'll stick with Wfofsworth.” Kim laughed.

Jessica now asked, “So if not Wordsworth, then who? Shelley, Keats?”

'Try Gerard Manley Hopkins, or better yet Lord Byron. Again not in style or even form, but something melancholy and haunting about the quality of the mind behind it. Brooding… like Byron.”

Jessica paused before saying, “Really? Byron. Haven't thought of Byron since I was in college.”

“I don't mean to say that the poetry is equal to Byron's, or even that it's similar. And as I said, it's certainly not written in the same style. But something about it reminds me of Byron.”

“Such as?”

“The Byronic hero-man against the herd, man against establishment-but in this case life itself, being born into this existence is the fiend, the reviled establishment, if you will. And I think, or rather feel, that the Poet Killer is himself or herself a flawed character in the scene the killer is creating, perhaps wantonly so.”

“Somewhat melodramatic, isn't it?”

“Scatch the surface of Byron and what're you left with but melodrama? I'm telling you this poisoner thinks of himself as the lone man standing against the machine of society, the establishment, the human condition, you name it.”

“That is remarkable. You've gotten all that from the victim photos?”

“Copies actually, but yes. Eriq faxed 'em to me. But I really need to see the originals, lay my hands on the real deal. Parry's told me that can be arranged.”

Over the phone line, Jessica heard Kim's hands thumbing through papers. “Let me read you what we have so far from the killer. It's known that this fellow left behind flowers and wine along with the poems. Some task-force members think these may be offerings, keepsakes for the deceased to take to the other side with them.”

Jessica took a moment to listen intently to the poetic lines, nodding as she did so. When Kim had finished, she said, “You may be onto something here, Kim.”

“Aside from the classic feel of the poems, the killer's… I don't know… writing to the gods, the fates, the angels, as well as to the victims he dispatches, but he's not directing a word to anyone in authority, anyone, say, like you or me…

Jessica asked, “What're you saying?”

“He's not at all interested in us. His poems are an homage to the victims, what you'd call…”

“Eulogies?”

“Exactly.”

“That is a new wrinkle. A guy kills you and then writes your eulogy.”

“Loves to write your epitaph on your corpus delecti,” Kim quipped. “Really would like to get my hands on the originals.”

Jessica knew what she meant. Kim was a psychometrist: she “read” information from the objects a victim or a killer handled. She had received vivid images both in the New Orleans case and in the Houston case merely by handling objects belonging to the victims.

“Want to feel the originals, don't you? But that means laying your hands on the bodies in Philadelphia.”

“Hands-on, right. One reason I need to go there. I want you to hear another of the poems. Listen to this one, Jess.”

Kim read the lines the killer had penned, the lines that had killed one of his victims:

Chance… whose desire is to have a meeting with stunned innocence.. and to tell it again; luminescent green is the color of the script, and ice-blue hues embrace the images.

They make skin crawl with miniature electric devotions, huddled and yearning, hushed whispers waiting on the shadow of a flickering light.

“Whew… pretty heavy shit,” Jessica remarked, unsure what to say. “The Philly detectives think the killer is working out of some sense of pity for his victims. Maybe he sees his murders as an act of mercy.”

“Yeah, I got that much from Eriq. But this sounds like a type of mercy killer we haven't seen before.”

“Mercy killer, maybe… that is, we only know that Philly PD has characterized him as such. Seems the fellow kills his victims after sharing wine, cheese, and a laying-on of a deadly pen.”

“Wine and cheese I get, but what kind of pen is he using?”

“Something around the turn of the century or a couple, few years before. Definitely dips the thing, as he's left drops of poisonous ink stains on bedclothes and floor. From the depth of the cuts, it's been surmised that the delivery system is sharp.”

“ 'Cutting edge' long before high tech adopted the word?” suggested Jessica, wincing. “Sounds painful.”

“Not if you're knocked out on booze. Bread and wine. wine and cheese, sometimes pizza; point is, they spend a long and pleasant evening together, killer and victim, ending with a bit of poison-a poison, by the way, that continues to defy analysis. No one seems to be able to agree on its properties or give it a name. And as a final touch, his victims appear to sit for the poetic writing, er… killing, willingly.”

“Persuasive guy, this Shakespeare. What kind of profile do they have on him?”

“Mixed bag. Not even sure he's a he; could just as well be a female killer, given the choice of weapons. As to the victims, two women, one man, all young, all into New Age thinking and beliefs, all living in an area that's gone ape-shit for this new craze of 'living poetry,' and curiously enough no other tattoos or nose rings or tongue piercings found on the vies.”

“Conservative about how they used their bodies, but all talked into doing the body-writing thing,” Jessica mused.