Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

He leaves the building, unseen save for a homeless man who pays him little mind. He steps out onto the wet shimmering bricks of a newly gentrified neighborhood, where cheap pavement meets expensive stone, the renovated warehouse courtyard silent and slick with a summer shower that futilely attempts to wash this world clean.

A mewing cat from the alleyway abandons her search of a garbage heap to follow the Lord Poet of Misspent Time, whose left hand carries a valise, the tools of his trade. It's as if the cat wishes to be his next protegee, begging him to skin her and scrawl a poem across her back and send her over to… to some cat heaven. He ignores the animal. Still, the poet's soft-soled steps from this place are like a cat's, like the fog of Carl Sandburg's poem that “comes on little cat feet,” and he thinks of J. Alfred Prufrock, the eponymous hero of poet T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and he wonders who knew first, the poet or the creation. And which of the two was more real, Prufrock or Eliot, the poet. Which of the two saw the world for what it is, and which of the two did something about it. As I have done this night, he thinks.

Twilight had painted the common grounds about the

FBI buildings at Quantico in lavender and purple shadow beneath the lamps lining the walkways. The springtime hills around the Virginia compound appeared cluttered. Blooming dogwood splashed color up and down the forests. From a distance, it looked like swaths of lingering snow, the flowers snuggling and wiggling and boring in-alive amid greening blades of wild grass, all at odds with the carefully kept, manicured lawns of Quantico. The training grounds were empty, classrooms locked up for the night, most lights turned off, most buildings vacated or nearly so, but the bright fluorescent lights of the forensics lab glared out at the night like so many defiant eyes.

Using two pairs of surgical tweezers, FBI medical examiner Dr. Jessica Coran lifted the mask of skin over the chin with a surgical dexterity that Dr. John Thorpe had learned to expect. Jessica's long auburn hair had been wrapped in a bun, held tightly by a single hairpin, the way her mother wore her hair in treasured family photos. Jessica hadn't known her mother for very long before she had passed away, but from the warm feelings that welled up inside whenever her father had talked about her, she knew she had been a loving and gentle person. Jessica resembled her in many respects, the high cheekbones, the classic upturned nose, the deep emerald eyes, but her height Jessica inherited from her father, who had also been a medical examiner. When she had graduated from medical school and still had four grueling years ahead in order to specialize, her father had beamed with pride both at her accomplishment and at her decision to continue in forensic medicine. She knew what he would think today, if he were alive, to see her a full-blown FBI agent as well as a medical examiner. With his military background and the years he spent as a medical examiner in the U.S. Army, she knew he'd be proud beyond anything she could imagine.

Dr. John Thorpe, known to his closest friends simply as JT, now watched as Jessica gently tugged the freed mask of the face up, over, and past the protruding nasal cartilage. She next inched it ever so carefully about the eyes, revealing the red mass of flesh and crisscrossed arteries below the forehead's outer husk, to at last find the victim's cranial bone. JT had seen this operation go horribly wrong before, and had even bungled it himself. Tearing the outer flesh of the victim left unmistakable signs of botched work, causing lacerations no one wanted to see at an open-coffin funeral.

Jessica Coran accepted the rotary diamond-stylus deluxe Windsor bone saw that Thorpe reluctantly extended to her. JT held on to it long enough to plead, “Let me do this part, Jess.”

She glanced at her lab partner, released a pent-up breath, nodded, and relinquished the saw. “She's all yours, JT.”

Jessica watched JT, his potbelly at odds with his otherwise slim frame. She knew he was closing in on yet another middle-age crisis, but since he had divorced his wife, Rhoda, he had no one to share his crises with. Also since his divorce, the man lived on McDonald's burgers, fries, and fish fillets, when he wasn't defrosting the ultimate in junk cuisine-the oxymoronic gourmet dinner. The curl of his lips gave JT a perpetual half grin, and his dusky brown eyes shone like those of a schoolboy whenever he became excited over a case. Jessica trusted him as a forensic expert, trusted his skills and knowledge, but even more important, she genuinely liked him as a person. He made her laugh, a thing few other men were capable of doing, and their friendship had weathered many storms. 'Tell me again, Jess, why're we exposing the brain?”

“Only way to be certain what caused the woman's coma-the drugs or the beating she took.”

“Yes, of course, but-”

“If there're signs of significant-”

“Swelling, I know. But coma is coma, and dead is dead. What difference will it make to her or her family to know if the coma were drug-induced or caused by trauma?”

“You need a vacation, JT.”

“What kind of crack is that?” She had stepped away from the corpse, away from the wet steel slab, where a constant flow of water kept debris moving for the drain in the center of the blindingly white tiled floor. The drain gurgled and burped like an impatient animal awaiting its evening feeding. Overhead, an equally constant jet of air protected her and JT from contamination, a constant fear.

Jessica took a step toward JT, where he stood holding on to the saw. “You know very well what difference it makes.”

“All right… all right… I do, yes.”

“Then repeat after me,” she shouted over the scream of the saw against bone as JT proceeded. “The truth is in there.” She ended by pointing at the brain, then snatching her finger out of harm's way just as the cranial cap gave way and into JT's outstretched left hand. He fumbled like a water boy on a football field startled to find himself in possession of the football, but when he dropped it, it fell into the wide mouthed basket beneath the head, placed there to prevent anything from making contact with the ceramic tiles at their feet.

Jessica wondered at the magnitude of the horror that had been inflicted on the victim, a young black woman named Adinatella LaMartine, hardly in her twenties. The young woman had been a stellar student at Washington's Howard University, where she had aced all her political science classes. On seeing their daughter's body at the morgue, her parents spoke of her having been chosen as a White House intern for the fall, and now this: abducted from a parking lot during or just after a frat party, raped, savagely beaten, and overdosed on what was looking more and more like some deadly concoction of arborescens: azaleas and/or rhododendrons ground up in some sort of honey cake, a poor man's Spanish fly. They had the same poisonous effect as mountain laurel. Toxicity level proved high at six, and in too great a quantity, the drug became as poisonous as arsenic. A fast-acting narcotic, it initially caused drooling, vomiting, and increased tear formation, followed by paralysis, a slowed pulse rate, and lowered blood pressure, leading to coma, depending on the dose. Still, it remained a remote possibility that the beating she had taken had sent her spiraling into a coma long before the drug took effect. Which came first in this case meant a great deal in prosecuting a suspect. If the defendant had taken a comatose young woman into the nearest hospital, he might be spared some jail time, having shown some mercy and some sense. However, if he beat to death a comatose victim, that would add jail time, showing depraved indifference for life. If he beat to death a dead body, that would be regrettable but it would not be murder. In all scenarios, Jessica felt the young man had shown depravity, but only proof of the exact sequence of events would put the killer behind bars. The “Twinkie defense” and the “Oops! defense” were created for such cases as this.