Robert Walker - Bitter Instinct

Vladoc showed up at the scene of the crime now, and as he walked among the living scurrying about doing their work, he looked like a dead man. “Poor Evey, and those children, I loved them as if they were my own,” he repeatedly told anyone who would listen, as if saying the words over and over would make them sound more true. How could Vladoc not have known that his brother was so deeply disturbed?

“I had no idea, I swear to you all,” he finally said. “I was as much in the dark as you. He… Lucian always appeared happy, pleased with his life. He only spoke on occasion of minor problems in his marriage, his desire to be free of all the responsibilities of work and fatherhood and being a husband, but nothing serious, you see. He always worked things out in his head, I was certain. Obviously, I never heard his cry. He never allowed me to.”

“He may well have thought you blind to the reality he lived,” Jessica suggested in an attempt to ease Vladoc's obvious pain.

“Such a waste of human life and potential…” Vladoc, unable to stand another moment in the house, tearfully made his way out into the night. Jessica feared he would blame himself for the rest of his life, not only for what had happened here, but for all the victims of his brother's quiet madness.

Jessica had to fight off the recurring image of the children upstairs. Locke's two children, aged six and seven, along with his beautiful wife, had returned early from a trip to the Florida Keys, all suntanned and healthy-looking, but now all were quite dead, each with a poem scrawled across his or her back.

From the basement, Shockley shouted for Dr. Coran to come downstairs. She reluctantly complied, taking the steps down to the blinding field of lights that had been set up in the basement. Water sloshed around her ankles as the drains fought a losing battle with the leaking pipes. “We were in the process of moving the body out of this damned deluge when this floated by.” He extended a handwritten note.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Read it. It's his last remarks. Quite incriminating.” Jessica read the note scrawled in the killer's shaky hand.

I loved them all. Even poor George. I loved each and every one of them. They were all broken-winged fairy angels, not of this world, certainly not needing to endure life on this plane a moment longer. I love all of those whom I have sent over. There was no other choice.

The note ended with Lucian Locke's familiar signature. Jessica looked up to see Kim and a retinue of uniformed police standing nearby, everyone watching as Locke's body was hoisted onto a stretcher. Only now did she see the words written in blood orange along his arms and chest.

“He tried to write himself to death,” Shockley lamely joked. “Get it? But he appears to have run out of ink. Used it all up on everyone else.”

“We found leather straps around the wife's legs and wrists,” commented one of the evidence techs who'd taken charge of the scene in the room where Evey Locke had been found. Apparendy she had not willingly complied with her husband's plan to send her to a better world. According to the ETs who worked the upstairs room, the children had been drugged into a stupor before the quill pen dug into their flesh.

“In the end, he pulled out all the stops,” said Jessica. “He didn't have time for the niceties, like convincing his victims that to have a Lucian Locke poem emblazoned on their backs was their ticket to paradise.”

Locke, his body misshapen and his hair matted and disheveled, was carried up the stairs and to one of the two waiting emergency vans, their strobe lights having wakened the entire neighborhood. As one of the ETs plunked out a rendition of “Chopsticks” on the piano next to Evey Locke, the old ME, Shockley, made his way upstairs to the children. “I want a firsthand look at the boy and girl,” he said sadly.

“Angels he had called them.” Jessica shook her head. “I'll go with you.”

“Thanks. I'll need your help.”

“We know now how he kept abreast of the investigation.”

“Yes, I heard. Through his brother, Vladoc. Don't you find it strange, though, that Vladoc didn't recognize his own brother's handwriting and poetry? After all, he was studying it, he made pronouncements on it, told us all about that Enochian thing, and yet he had no idea his brother was so deeply into this warped philosophy?”

“I've wondered the same, yes,” said Kim, who had come into the room and overheard them. “But while subconsciously he may have known, consciously I'm not so sure. I just spent time with him outside, and he's a broken man. He could not have taken part in his brother's actions. His brother's DNA will tell the story, and I don't believe he was involved from afar, like some master puppeteer.”

“Locke was the only puppeteer here,” Jessica returned. “Still, now that he's dead, we should confiscate all of Vladoc's records on his patient.”

“Just to be sure,” Shockley agreed.

“He could not have accepted such a truth; only now has he been able to, now that the evidence is irrefutable,” Kim assured them. “I held his hand, and I tell you he is horrified at what has happened to the only family he has.”

With the final evidence gathered and the last photograph of the death scenes at the Locke house taken, Jessica rushed outside to the predawn air, breathing it in deeply several times, attempting to clear her head. Nothing so affected the death investigator as the unnecessary death of a child, and here were two innocents taken. Leanne Sturtevante and James Parry had returned to the scene, and Parry asked her how she was holding up.

“I've been better. It's horrible what's happened here.”

Parry and Sturtevante confessed to having had the same discussion as the others regarding Vladoc. They all agreed that his brother had used him, duped him.

Sturtevante remained with Jessica while Parry stepped back inside for a final look around the murder/suicide house. Locke's death had been ruled as suicide in that he had caused it knowingly and willingly, when he realized the poison he'd used on himself had not been a toxic enough dosage and his attempt to hang himself also failed. Jessica now learned from Sturtevante how she had discovered Marc Tamburino in the final throes of death.

“Before he died he told me it was Locke. It was the only word he managed to speak before he choked and expired. From the mouth of a dying man. I knew it couldn't be ignored. Tamburino's back had been turned into a grid of death by Locke's letters.”

“What's amazing to me,” Jessica said, “is that he would go off like this after so carefully constructing a scapegoat in the person of George Gordonn. I suppose we can only infer that after he manipulated things so that no suspicion could fall on him, the irrational powers and forces driving Locke proved stronger than his logical mind.”

“Marc Tamburino didn't know Locke was the killer until it was too late. He figured it out as he lay dying, about the time I found him in his apartment this evening. Locke rushed out before I got there, leaving Marc still alive. I must have frightened Locke as I approached.”

Kim, who had been standing nearby listening to Sturtevante describe the path that had led her to Locke, offered her thoughts. 'Tamburino no doubt thought it a great honor to be wearing an original Lucian Locke poem emblazoned across his body to the clubs last night, I suppose.”

“Who wouldn't?” Sturtevante said. “Even Donatella thought it'd be cool to display an original Locke on her back. It's what's gotten all of them killed.”

Jessica asked for more of the details surrounding Tamburino's death.

“I carried him down to my car rather than wait for any ambulance, and I rushed him to Cellmark, the closest hospital with a poison center, but we were simply too late. An attempt to save him from the selenium, even though I could identify the poison coursing through his body, fell short. Time was not on Marc's side.”