Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

“And what would you do with an open bar this ungodly time of morning?”

“Not the bar, the bartender, dear. You like pilots, I have a weakness for bartenders.”

Jessica laughed. It felt good after the tension of the day before. “Here, have some coffee.” Rolls and coffee lay on the table between them. “Eriq's so thoughtful.”

After they sat down, Jessica watched Kim gulp back stomach bile instead of the rich coffee as the churning blades suddenly roared to life. An attendant young enough to be Jessica's daughter quickly secured the coffeepot and soon they felt themselves slowly rise above the airstrip. With a sudden, violent jerk, the helicopter veered to the left and sped diagonally upward.

“What the hell's that pilot doing?” Kim shouted over the thrum of the MiG.

“His job!” Jessica smirked.

Next the chopper pilot poured on the speed, plastering them to their seats. “Like a carnival ride,” Jessica shouted.

Kim felt every cell in her body tug outward. “I feel like a piece of cargo being tossed around in the hold!” This despite the seat belt she wore. “What did you tell the pilot, Jess? You didn't tell him that you wanted a wild ride, did you? You did, didn't you! Tell me you didn't!”

Jessica's smiled and her eyes lit up. “Doncha love it?”

In a moment the helicopter leveled out. The noise of the rotors took on a new pitch, the sound a whisper by comparison. Next the helicopter took on a new feel-that of a bird in flight, smooth and controlled.

At this point, Jessica unfastened her seat belt and said, “Maybe I'll just have a word with the pilot.”

“It's a little too late to tell him to take it easy on his joystick, wouldn't you say?”

“I won't be but a minute.”

“You're incorrigible, you know that?” Kim protested as Jessica made her way to the nose of the helicopter. “Why don't you tip him?” she shouted, knowing the sound of her racing heart and the rotor blades only drowned her out.

Kim opened a briefcase she'd carried on board and drew out a manila folder. She was opening it just as Jessica returned with the coffeepot. Jessica again saw the three victim photos that Eriq Santiva had shown her earlier, but included in this group were blown-up shots of the backs, the rust-colored, near-red lettering left behind by the killer. “Damn but this looks like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.”

“And the narrator of the tale, this Killer Poet, has to be as mad as one of Poe's narrators,” Kim agreed.

“It's likely a selective madness, one he controls when in the company of others. He's got to be some kind of sadist beneath it all, a true sociopath.”

“Maybe not, Jess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Read the poems. They're hardly sadistic or evil in intent; our boy or girl is-at least inside his or her mind- doing good, perhaps doing God's own work.”

Jessica recognized the one poem as the eulogy that Kim had already read to her over the phone. The other two began with the same three lines about chance meeting innocence.

“Read 'em through,” said Kim. “Familiarize yourself with the style, the voice, whatever you want to call it. After a while the poems get a little scary and… and something else, but I'll let you decide.”

“Scary?”

“I don't know… disturbing, like they have a life of their own. This murdering poet writes some truly engaging stuff; it catches you up so much that you actually forget that it was used as a murder weapon.”

“I'll have another look.” Jessica read the two poems she hadn't yet seen or heard. The first read:

Chance… whose desire is to have a meeting with stunned innocence… is a humming that wells up

In silver moonbeams appearing to the eyes like twin specters softly caressing the drapes, trembling, yet unafraid, languorous and expectant of a touch in return.

Beneath it all: a bed of fibrous dictation.

I am drawn forth, found out brushed with the feather of your glance.

Speaking to a mirror sparkling with never- before phrases, all against the marble life flickering.

Strangely sonorous stuff,” offered Jessica, nodding. “I see how you might get caught up in it, but not enough to allow someone to Etch A Sketch on your back.”

“The poetry is so… melodic and obtuse at once, so that while I'm not always sure what's intended, I don't much care so long as I can hear the music.”

“You mean it's kind of like reading Carl Sagan on the universe?”

“Maybe.” Kim laughed. “I mean that while he's difficult at times to follow… what a way this guy has of lullabying you into thinking sound makes sense, huh? And I'd hardly call it pathological or the words of a lunatic.”

“Maybe it all makes sense to the killer, Kim. How many times have we seen a killer create rationalizations for actions that led to murder? Whether it looks like the ravings of a madman or not, he may well be channeling voices in his head that ultimately tell him to kill.”

Jessica next studied the blown-up shot of the second deadly poem. Again, the torn flesh looked like blood-orange script on a clay tablet, but this was poisoned ink written into human flesh.

She read the second poem:

Chance… whose desire is to have a meeting with stunned innocence… is drawn up and perched to fall into the mirror pool, through meshes of metaphor to disentangle and leave behind unbound fingers of touch.

Sensing sounds in choruses of falling water crashing on nearby rock,

I hear harmony touching my hand where gazes fall into place.

The breath that exhales across the candle fails, and so it remains, flickering.

“And so, and further thoughts?” Kim asked. Jessica breathed in as much air as she could and slowly exhaled. “It's definitely the work of the same person. Along with the one I read before, and the one you read me, it feels almost as if…”

“Yes?”

“As if these weren't three separate poems at all, but-”

“Go on, but what?”

“But one long ongoing…”

“Dirge, yes. I agree.”

“Like a lament.”

“A death march,” agreed Kim.

Nodding, Jessica added, “Over in London they'd refer to it as a threnody.”

“Yes, a hymn, a requiem, all one piece. I just wanted someone else to tell me I wasn't crazy.”

“You think they follow in a sequence?”

“I'm not sure. I mean I've transcribed them and put them in the order of the killings, but there seems to be something… I don't know… missing, as if the killer doesn't know all the pieces yet himself. Or perhaps it wasn't meant to be written in order, because-”

“Because the missing parts haven't as yet been completed.”

“Which likely means more bodies.”

“Exactly.”

The chopper began its descent. Jessica strapped in once again. Kim had never loosened her belt.

Jessica stared out the window. She knew Philadelphia well, having lived there for a time with her military family. She now pointed out the banks of the Delaware and, in the distance, Burlington, New Jersey. Then she pointed to another river. “That's the Schuylkill River.”

“School-kill? Is that anything like road kill? What a strange name for a river, but it seems to fit with the chaos of the modem age,” replied Kim.

“It's pronounced 'school-kill,' but it's an Indian word. Oh, look.” Jessica pointed again. “Scullers on the river.”

Both women watched the machinelike rhythm of flashing oars in the hands of competing crews. The oars looked like blades, and their smooth, deft movement through the water was perfectly synchronized, giving boat and crew an appearance not unlike that of a gliding animal in its natural haunt.

Jessica and Kim made out the roofline of Colonial country houses and villas, and next the looming dome of Memorial Hall, a remnant of the Centennial Exposition. Soon they were over Boathouse Row, the Fairmount Waterworks, and the best view of the skyline of modern Philadelphia and the promenade leading up to the Museum of Art, the stairway made famous by the movie Rocky. The streets here, lined with parkways and universities and museums, reminded Jessica of Washington, D.C.'s Pennsylvania Avenue.