Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

The master bedroom was empty, so they made their way down the hall toward the children's rooms. Passing a large guest room, again they saw nothing. The first child's room was empty of all but stuffed animals. In the second child's room, they located the children, huddled together, their backs covered with the words of the Poet Killer.

Apparently, after both children died, killed by the powerful poison selenium, their mother had somehow found the strength to get downstairs. The impression on the bed where she had been lying clearly indicated this to be the case.

But where was Papa Locke? The mastermind of this mayhem?

As if in answer to their thoughts, a creaking, groaning sound, followed by a thwacking sound rose up from downstairs. Jessica and Kim rushed out of the chamber of death that the children's room had become, hearing police sirens and the squeal of tires outside. They moved toward the apparent source of the strange noises that welled up from somewhere in the bowels of the large house.

The sound of spurting, gurgling water led them to the kitchen. There they located a door that led to the basement, and the moment they opened this door, they knew they'd found the source of the gurgling. It was a busted pipe Going cautiously down the steps, their guns extended along with the flashlight, they were stopped when the light hit the prone figure of a man with a noose around his neck. It was Locke, small and misshapen, lying below the busted pipe, which spewed water over him. His pitiful suicide attempt had apparendy failed not once but twice. His back was etched with a poem, and his throat was raw and swollen from his attempted hanging, but he was still alive. Somehow the selenium had not killed him and the pipe he hanged himself from had torn loose, sending him falling to the concrete floor and saving his miserable life.

“Kill me… kill me,” he pleaded, lying over a gutter and holding his hands over his eyes.

“We'll let the state decide whether or not you live, Locke. Not our job,” replied Jessica.

“Put me out of my misery. Send me over.”

Sturtevante and Parry rushed into the now cramped basement, bringing with them a floodlight. The light made the little man on the floor look all the more disgusting and ugly and pitiable.

“The children?” asked Parry.

“Dead, along with their mother.”

“Angels one and all,” muttered Locke.

At that moment. Parry lost control, kicking out at the lump of tortured flesh on the cold floor, sending him reeling over. “You lousy sonovabitchingmotherfucking child killer!” Again Parry kicked him, this time in the teeth. Jessica and Sturtevante pulled and shoved Parry into a corner, shouting for him to cool down, when suddenly an explosion filled the small room, and they all saw Kim Desinor standing over Lucian Locke, a bullet hole through his head and a shocked look in his eyes. “He… he grabbed out at my gun!” Kim shouted. “He took hold of the barrel. I didn't mean for it to go off, but it did. It all happened in the blink of an eye. It was an accident.”

“Good riddance,” Parry said in a raspy whisper, patting Kim on the back, as if to congratulate her. “Imagine what the literati of this country would turn him into if he lived to a ripe old age in prison, writing poems from his cell, given his own Web site like Charlie Manson. He'd probably become the most celebrated poet of his generation.” Parry then turned and rushed up the noisy, wooden stairwell to the kitchen, where backup cops had turned on lights.

Kim kept repeating, “It was an accident. The gun went off when he grabbed the barrel. He yanked at it with my linger on the trigger. I was distracted by you guys and Parry, all the fighting, and then the explosion.”

“We believe you,” said Sturtevante. “No one will dispute your need to kill that piece of shit.”

Jessica put her arm around Kim, telling her that it would be all right. “It will be investigated and there will be no charges of wrongful death. You did what you had to do.”

“It wasn't like that, Jess. Truly, he grabbed the gun and pulled it straight at himself, but I had a strong grip on it, and it went off, all quite unintentionally.”

“Perhaps not on your part, but what about his? He asked us to put him down, and when we didn't respond in the manner he wanted, he created the circumstance in which you had to end his life. Simple as that.”

“It's such a horror for me, taking a life. I feel less of a human being for it.”

“He left you with no choice; he wanted you to act instinctively, intuitively, and you did. You did for him what the rope over the pipe couldn't do… and I'm getting wetter'n than the proverbial drenched rat in here, so let's vacate this place for now. Come on upstairs with me into the light-

Kim nodded weakly and allowed Jessica to lead her away from the body and this place. “And for the sake of protocol,” Jessica added as they turned to go, “since I was on hand when the perpetrator of this bloodless slaughter was shot to death, I'd best call Shockley and his ETs in to collect evidence and to deal with the bodies.” Jessica led her friend and colleague out of the death grid, neatly defined here in the basement to await Shockley. “It's always difficult to take a life, but if he'd gotten firm hold on that gun and turned it on all of us, well… suffice to say, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”

“He didn't want to fire the gun on any of us; he wanted it for himself, and he managed to use me to that end, didn't he? Clever SOB, I'd say, very clever indeed.”

The core task-force team felt a great weight lifted off their collective shoulders, knowing now for certain that the serial killer called the Poet had finally been identified and his career ended.

Jessica remained close to Kim while both the PPD's Internal Affairs cops and the FBI's own Internal Affairs people asked questions about the death of the suspect, Lucian Locke.

Everyone found the scene gruesome, and emotionally painful to process, especially the room where the two children lay in bed, faces down, their backs revealing the final verses of the poem Locke had written. By now all the verses had come together to make a whole.

Jessica felt little pleasure in having been proven right, that each of the poems was a section of one large, ambitious work. She supported Kim's version of the shooting one hundred percent, telling the IAD guys that she had seen the shooting go down exactly as Dt. Desinor described it.

Meanwhile, Sturtevante and Parry, their services no longer being required, had gotten a federal warrant for search and seizure at Dr. Lucian Locke's office, club locker, Second Street apartment, and home. Parry meant to go by the book, to create an airtight, hermetically sealed case against the now dead poet.

The news of the Lockes' deaths following so quickly on the heels of Leare's, and the even more lurid news that Locke had murdered Leare-everyone agreed that such news was tailor-made to increase dramatically the appeal of their poetry to young people fascinated with death and the trappings of death.

Parry, Sturtevante, and a small army of white-gloved detectives combed the house for incriminating evidence that might explain Locke's behavior, explain why he had killed his wife and children, and the series of people who had come before them. Nothing came of the search, not a shred of useful information, not even from his locked desk drawer in the spacious den.

A team of evidence techs were sent to his university office, and they, too, came up empty. But a third team, sent to his Second Street apartment, hit the mother lode. Pinned on the walls were the photos Jessica had been looking for, shots of each of the victims who had preceded his final rampage. These, combined with the photographic record of the poems etched in poisoned ink, proved irrefutable.