Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

“I just want to find out if it is him, if we're really onto the right man here,” she confessed, now telling him what he already knew. She continued to thumb through Gordonn's photos and books, private papers and file boxes in an attempt to at last discover the truth.

Then Jessica came across a photo of Gordonn as a child with his mother and father. She noticed that his father was separated from his wife and son, who huddled together as if in a shared cocoon, as if they were protecting each other. Perhaps for good reason? she silently asked, her eyes searching every detail, every nuance of the snapshot.

In another photo, mother and child were captured in the nude, and their obvious delight at playing whatever game they were playing again suggested how terribly close they were, maybe a bit too close, Jessica caught herself thinking.

Jessica wondered who had taken the photo-Gordonn's father, perhaps? Flipping to yet another photo, she gasped. “My God, Jim, he's got to be the Poet Killer. Look at this photo.”

Parry came to her side and looked at the strange photograph. What he saw caused him to gasp as well. The words Happy 6* Birthday in an angry, burnt-orange color seemed to scream at him from little George's back, where they had apparently been scrawled. Evidence or sheer coincidence? the detectives wondered, their eyes meeting.

“God bless me,” said Parry, swallowing his own words. The message written across the child's back looked like a banner; these words were followed by the lines of a poem: Spirit child of my spirit/Soar to the estate/Of star and moon/To return to us soon… On his sixth birthday, either Gordonn's mother, Lydia Byron Gordonn, or his father had written lines of poetry on the child's back, as if to carve them into his flesh.

This single photo spoke volumes in and of itself, Jessica believed, but photos of Gordonn's victims would prove absolutely damning. It all gave her pause, and her thoughts fluttered like so many nervous pigeons now as she considered the mother's maiden name of Byron and her married name, Gordonn. It was yet another damning apparent coincidence, for the Romantic Poet Lord Byron, Jessica knew, had been bom George Gordon, the same name minus an n.

She wondered if the mother had perhaps been a failed poet, and a failed person as well, and if she meant more by these words on her son's back than anyone knew, if she had been the one who penned them. She wondered about the relationship between mother and son, and between father, Harold Gordonn, and son. She wondered just how balled up and twisted up with Byron's dark and somber personality the relationship between father and mother had become. Myths and legends had grown up around Lord Byron, both during his scandalous lifetime and after; Jessica even remembered hearing it said that he had become a vampire, or simply a person who lived the life of a vampire in some ways. Yet his poetry was as beautiful as it was disturbing. Some considered him a fallen angel, and there was evidence in his reported conversations and poetry to suggest that he himself had started this particular bit of folklore.

Parry cursed first under his breath, and then aloud. “Fucking A-these shots of little George ought to come in handy at trial, once we can get our hands on them again, but for now, darlin', they have to stay put. Place them back exactly as you found them. We don't want Gordonn to have the slightest inkling we've been here or that we're onto him.”

“I need to search for photos of his victims. These won't convince a jury that he's guilty of murder. It's far too circumstantial and could be presented as mere coincidence, chance, by a good defense lawyer.” She began a frantic search through the remaining albums on the shelf but stopped when several clippings from the Philadelphia Inquirer fell onto the dirty carpet.

Jessica now knelt, dirtying her skirt and knees, to reclaim the clippings, ecstatic, certain they had located more incriminating evidence. But her bubble burst when her eyes lit on the date of the clippings: May 4, 5, 6, and 10, 1969. Another clipping was dated a year later, 1970. The clippings dealt with the suicide pact of Gordonn's mother and father, and with the surviving child, who had been turned over to Child Protective Services, a child with a strange poem emblazoned on his back. Jessica only had time to scan the clippings when Parry shouted, “We've got to get out of here-now!”

“Just a minute.”

“We're out of time. Leanne's calling 'rampage.' “ Jessica could hear the word like a mantra over the police band. “Get moving, Jess. It's the warning we agreed upon earlier. Gordonn's returning home.”

“Then we take these with us,” she said, pointing to the photos and clippings.

“No, we can't take a thing; we've already disturbed too much here. If he knows we've been inside, he'll know the place is bugged, and all our efforts will have been for nothing. No, you can't leave the premises with a thing. As for the clippings, they're public record. We can duplicate them at the Inquirer's microfiche library.”

“But, Jim, the photos, these could disappear; he could bum them at any time.”

“He hasn't burned them in all these years. Why would he do it now?”

“If he feels threatened, he might.”

“We'll just have to take that chance.”

“And I still want to locate victim photos.”

“You don't even know if they exist. It's just something Kim Desinor thinks she knows, another trance image.”

Jessica and Parry were still arguing when Sturtevante pushed through the door and shouted, “He's only a block away. Get out of here-now!”

“Put everything back the way you found it, Agent Coran. That's an order!” shouted Parry.

“Going to pull rank on me now, Jim?” Jessica bit her lip but did as he ordered, tucking the loose photos back into the album from which they had spilled, her hands steady but her nerves pulled taut.

Parry said, “Sorry, Jess, but we haven't enough evidence on the guy to get a warrant, obviously, so how're we going to justify taking stuff out of his home?”

Jessica replaced the albums on the shelf where they had sat gathering dust, dust that she had disturbed. She had wanted to find a stash of victim shots, a diary perhaps, a running tally of his victims, maybe some newspaper clippings that referred to the ongoing investigation, but none of these had surfaced, only the telltale shots of the child with the writing on his back.

Parry continued his tirade. “And to prematurely abscond with anything from the house will open up a legal hole in a later trial that any defense lawyer could run a tractor trailer through.”

“Allow the creep time to incriminate himself fully,” Sturtevante said, putting her hand on Jessica's shoulder to emphasize her words. “It's time you took your own advice, Jessica. I wish I had heeded it earlier.”

Parry tugged at her now, losing patience. “We've already broken the law by being here and bugging his place. Let's not compound that. This gets out and my next assignment will be in Podunk.”

“It's the first break we've had, and you're asking me to just walk away from it?” Jessica demanded. “Suppose he bums all the stuff tonight?”

“We all want to nail this bastard, Jessica,” soothed Sturtevante, “but we need to do it by the book to make it stick. Desinor has the warrant in hand, but she isn't here, and it isn't kosher until she gets here with it. Besides, we've bugged the place. Jim's right. Let's do the rest of this by the book.”

Jessica knew they were right, yet she found it difficult to let go of the only incriminating evidence in the case anyone had seen. On their way out of Gordonn's bungalow residence, she told Sturtevante, who hadn't taken the time to look, what she had shown to Parry.