Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

“I knew young Gordonn only through a class I taught nearly I a year ago; didn't hear from him or about him again until he began working on his Byron project in the film department, you see. He took my course to leam more about Byron and the Romantics; he loved the notions of romantic love, enduring, undying love, but he remained primarily focused on Lord Byron. I took him under my wing, so to speak, and just recently, he began to brag about how he was party to the killings.”

“That's how he would put it?” asked Jessica.

“Precisely, but I blew it off, as they say. Of course, knowing him, even for a short time, I knew this was all a he, bravado, all that. I never for a moment believed George to be guilty, and so when I learned he was under suspicion, I gave him safe haven until the young man should feel secure enough to leave.”

“That's a felony, Dr. Locke,” said Parry, “one which you could be tried for.”

“I realized that at the time, but I felt an overwhelming need to help George. He had that effect on people; people wanted to 'fix' him.”

“And precisely how did you know he was under suspicion, Dr. Locke?”

“That's right,” added Parry. “It wasn't public knowledge “Information I gleaned from Leare, who had it from her lover, Sturtevante. Seems Sturtevante went to apologize to Donatella about all the misunderstanding, the mishandling of the case, all that, and she let it slip that you were zeroing in on George. Leare knew of George through me, and she had had him as a student once as well. I was trying to help George to stay… stable, you know. I knew what he had gone through. But of late, George had begun to seriously worry me.”

“How's that?”

“Even in the face of being arrested for these crimes he professed to have committed, well… not believing him, I paid little attention until recently. I tell you, he went out last evening and returned to my house with a young woman, although Leare and I had told him specifically that he must remain in hiding.”

“He came back with a woman, a stranger to you?”

“A young woman. She looks to be another coed, I fear, but I didn't know her. I immediately protested when I entered the room I'd turned over to George, only to find him and the girl writing out poetry on each other's nude back.

“I was assured by George that it was a mere dalliance on his part, and his interest in body poetry had nothing whatsoever to do with the murders, and then he confessed to having lied about his involvement in the killings, telling me his shrink had said he had an insatiable need for attention.

“When I first met him, in my class, he told me about his parents, that he was in fact the living proof of the urban legend that had started the back-writing poetry fad, and now, that is a few hours ago, he told me how angry he was at this killer, whoever he was, to have turned his poetic 'invention,' as he called it, into a horror of death.

“He then lamented the deaths of all those young people; he said he felt great guilt since the killer had obviously been inspired by his invention, but again he insisted that he had killed no one, and that his earlier confessions to me were simply to gain attention.”

“And you believed him?” asked Jessica.

“I wasn't hearing his cry. I know, I was a fool, and I could have prevented so much death.”

“What happened next?” Parry asked.

“Something made me look in on him around midnight. I found the girl and George both dead in my home, victims of the poisoned pen that each had used on the other, just as George's parents had done. I was horrified, so I called you.”

“You did the right thing,” Jessica assured him, Parry agreeing.

“Poor lamentable George,” Locke proclaimed. “And this other creature he duped into his final trap.”

“Forensics is going to have a long night of it,” said Jessica. “Let's get a team of evidence techs over here. I'll need all the help I can get with the two corpses.”

Parry got on his cell phone and made the call.

It appeared to all involved to be over. All the evidence pointed to one perpetrator, to George Linden Gordonn. All the information collected at Locke's house and later at Gordonn's also bore this out. Finally, the city of Philadelphia could breathe again and would hear no more from the Lord Poet of Misspent Time, George Gordonn, the Killer Poet who, bizarrely, professed his kinship with Lord Byron.

At Gordonn's home, a stash of poetry in George's hand was taken into custody and remanded to evidence lockup. Jessica heard about the poems, which had been scrawled longhand into a notebook. Along with this, Gordonn had kept a diary in which he fantasized about helping people to commit suicide in order to leave this world of “putrid flesh,” as he called it.

Still, something nagged at Jessica. The number of his victims, including himself, amounted to far fewer than the number nineteen, which Kim had seen again and again. But it was more than this. Something wasn't right about the timing and the circumstances surrounding Gordonn's death in the home of the famous dark poet Lucian Burke Locke, whose wife and children were conveniently away at the time.

After all the protocol work on Gordonn's remains and those of Ariana Dupree, his final victim, Jessica found a moment to confer with Kim Desinor. Kim had taken time to read through Gordonn's diary and poems, and she'd shown copies to Dr. Wahlbore, who fed them into Rocky. Kim's gut reaction to Gordonn's poetry told her the poems didn't match with those of the killer, and Rocky bore her out. Kim had telephoned with this information, saying she was coming right over to discuss what this meant.

Kim showed up at Jessica's office, slipped into a chair, and exasperatedly asked, “How did the quality of Gordonn's poetry go from the junk I found in the notebooks to what he supposedly wrote on the backs of his victims? Did he somehow sprout poetic wings when he had a back to compose on?”

“From what you and Wahlbore say, I would have to assume, as Vladoc suggests, that Gordonn killed under another personality altogether, obviously one who could write a sight better than his regular self.”

“Sounds ludicrous; sounds like Vladoc's interested in covering his ass, Jess. A dual personality explains away how the good doctor could be treating a man and not know a goddamn thing about him.”

“What're you talking about, Kim?”

“I've seen what was collected at the Gordonn home, and I'm telling you, it doesn't cut the mustard. It's not… it didn't come out of the same mind. “I see. Doesn't compare well with the killer's verse. You think Parry and Sturtevante and Roth and the city are going to want to hear that?”

“I'm only telling you what you already know in your heart to be true.”

“That we've tagged the wrong man for the killings?”

“I fear so.”

“But what about all those psychic hits that had to do with his profession?” Jessica countered.

“They may well have been pointing to this, that one day we'd have the wrong man, a technical film specialist, in custody for murder, only he isn't here to tell us so or to refute it.”

“Have you ever known cases of dual personality-both being writers-but who write in totally different ways?”

“I just don't buy it. Vladoc says Gordonn may have been a dual personality, in which case perhaps one of the personalities was a poet, the other not. I just think it's too pat, too easy a way out.” Kim was adamant about this. “His poetry was not up to the standard of the killer's. Was he then inspired when he wrote on the back of his victims but not before?” She repeated her earlier question.