Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

“All right,” she said, relenting, “but I still wonder if we won't both regret the decisions we made back there at his place.”

“Are you referring to Sturtevante? Has she a hidden agenda?” Something like that. She's kinda closed off, or hadn't you noticed?”

“Holds her cards close to her chest, yeah,” he agreed.

“Do you trust her, Jim?”

“I do, and you can as well.”

“Fine… good to hear it.”

“Does that mean you trust me, too?”

“I trust that you're at my back.”

“Yeah… you can bank on that, Jess.”

“I haven't forgotten how you saved my life in the Cayman Islands,” she told him.

He stabbed at his fettuccini. “We'd best get out of here and to that meeting with Vladoc and Desinor. See if they've come up with anything useful on Gordonn.”

Sturtevante was late for the meeting. “Gordonn is on the prowl, heading down Second Street as we speak,” she told them as she entered the meeting room. “Surveillance is on him, but I think we ought to get out in the field.”

“I want to know what Dr. Vladoc and Dr. Desinor have to say first,” Parry told her.

Jessica remained silent. Vladoc, who had been speaking when Leanne arrived, picked up where he had left off.

“Further investigation into Gordonn's past and parents reveals much to us,” he declared, twirling his glasses as he spoke. “Dr. Desinor has unearthed all the local newspaper articles from the various papers, including those she found at the Philadelphia Inquirer's, microfiche library.”

“There's sufficient detail in the stories,” said Kim, “to link what happened to Gordonn as a child with what is going on today.”

Jessica stared at the array of articles Kim had collected, squinting in order to follow the fuzzy microfiche copies. In the days before computers, microfiche had seemed a miracle of an invention, but today it seemed about as advanced as chiseling on stone tablets. The images and words on the poor-quality copy she held in her hand were hard to see, but the headline was easy enough to read: family suicide pact ends life of poet lydia byron and artist husband harold gordonn-child survives.

The story summarized the macabre little family suicide pact that became as powerful an urban legend as any in Philadelphia artistic circles, in addition to being the great motivating force of George Gordonn's life, the origin of the living-poem fad and the reason he was on the prowl that very night.

The phone rang, breaking everyone's intense concentration. Jessica picked it up and heard Marc Tamburino's voice, sounding loud and shaken. “Dr. Coran, I have some information you might like to know about.”

“Pay for, you mean? You're suddenly getting very good at digging up stuff, Marc. I think we've discovered a hidden talent in-”

“I located information about how the Philadelphia fad of writing poetry into the skin began.”

“Is that right? Go ahead,” she told him, curious now.

“There've been several explanations over the years that have attached themselves to the fad, but one in particular I found in my research… well, it's weird enough for The X-Files, and I wanted to share it with you.”

She took share to mean sell.

“Does it have anything to do with a bizarre suicide pact in George Gordonn's past?”

Tamburino's silence clearly meant yes.

“Do you know this guy Gordonn?” she asked.

“Are you kidding? He's the leader of the Locke and Leare groupies. He never misses a signing, and he's taken a lot of pictures at them. Hey, just remember, without me, you'd be nowhere on this case. ”So why wasn't he on the list of names you gave me earlier.”

“It never occurred to me to list him. I thought you wanted pros! He's an amateur, a goofball, a weirdo, but not the kind you'd notice particularly, and certainly not the kind who you imagine could kill somebody.”

“Your information is a little late, Marc and frankly it sucks. No deals this time. In other words, thanks but no thanks.” She hung up on his protests. While plainly useless at this point, Tamburino's phone call at least added to their conviction that they were on the right path.

“We're wasting time here,” said Sturtevante.

“I want to see if Gordonn shows up on anyone else's class list, say like Garrison Burrwith's, Leare's, or Locke's,” Jessica protested. “It won't take long.”

“Grab the lists; bring them along,” Parry suggested.

“They're in lockup,” Jessica told him, “along with all the other evidence we have. It'll take a while to get my hands on them. Go ahead. I'll catch up.”

“Let's hit the streets, people,” said Parry. “Get on the track of this creep. Tonight I feel lucky.”

With that, everyone but Vladoc and Jessica hurried out of the office. When they were gone, Vladoc muttered, as if to himself, “I still can't believe it of George. He's so mild-mannered and pleasant.”

“So was Ted Bundy, Doctor.”

Jessica left the police psychiatrist and went to the evidence room, where she signed out the class lists they'd acquired from the university and quickly scanned for George Gordonn's name. It appeared three times. He'd taken poetry classes with Locke, Leare, and Burrwith.

She ran into Kim on her way toward a waiting car. “Thought I'd ride with you,” said her psychic friend. “What did the class lists reveal about George's career as a student?” He took classes with the whole triumvirate-Locke, Leare, and Burrwith.”

“Why didn't we see this before?”

“It's not unusual for the same students to be showing up in a series of lit courses, especially when one is a prerequisite for the other. A lot of the names on the lists were repeated.”

“Including those of the victims. George Gordonn knew the victims.”

“He took Burrwith first, a year ago, followed by Locke last summer, and then Leare most recently, fall term. After that he signed up for Goldfarb's film class. He's been busy.”

“It would seem so… researching the life of Byron perhaps?”

“It would seem so…”

As the car pulled out of the underground lot, Jessica at the wheel, Kim said what both of them were thinking. “It would appear that we are finally on the trail of the Poet Killer, Jess.”

George Linden Gordonn, it seemed, having somehow learned of the police's interest in him, most likely from noticing that he was being followed and watched, had fled. At first, this presented no problem to the surveillance team, as they had him in their sights, driving his sedan. It was only when he slipped out of sight, veering into an underground lot and speeding out at an exit around the block, that it became a problem. But when they went to round him up-they figured he'd shot himself in the head or something-they found an empty car.

“How the hell did he just vanish?” the police chief, Roth, asked, having joined them at the car with a warrant in hand to search the vehicle, “and exactly how did Gordonn know that we were onto him?” He'd been kept apprised of events by Sturtevante. Angry, he shouted, “The surveillance team was never compromised, and yet he knew he was being watched. How?”

“Perhaps he simply felt the police presence everywhere, picked it up in, I don't know, some supersensory way,” Jessica wondered aloud. “Perhaps that's how he's stayed a step ahead of us.”

“You saying he's psychic?” asked Kim.

“That or very 'blue-sensed.' “

Roth and the others knew she was referring to police jargon for a cop's instincts. Sturtevante offered another possibility. “Maybe someone's keeping him informed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe someone close to the case is in some way close to him. I'd thought that was the case when… when I suspected Leare, that she was getting the information from me.