Robert Walker - Pure Instinct

Both men were feeling the tension on the streets in Slidell, where race relations hadn't been so grand lately, and where they felt ill at ease anyway because it was so far from their home jurisdiction and base of operations in New Orleans.

There'd been a riot of a different color than race “o'er t' Biloxi, Mississippi,” as Ben had put it in his best Cajun tongue. “At one-a-dem grand 'Sippi casinos der on't da river.”

It was a floating palace the size of four football fields, called the Royal Flush. TTie ballroom/concert hall had gotten in the Granite Psycho rock band to add a little allure to the gambling tables, as if there were a need, and things had gotten out of control. Since the gambling casino boat was moored between Biloxi and New Orleans, and the Mississippi legislature had allowed a two-day blue-flu walkout when negotiations failed there, New Orleans police were prevailed upon to respond. So while almost every cop within a six-county radius of Biloxi, including two precincts from New Orleans, had turned out in full riot gear there, Alex and Ben had agreeably driven out to Slidell to follow a lead on Kenny Alvarez and Terrell Foreman, the pushers, only to get the coincidence call of the century, should this work out to be Victor Surette's body, since they'd been doing the M.P. work on him up till now. Ben called it “i-ron-knee.”

Dispatch had spoken of a badly decomposed body found at a dump site on a lonely stretch of sand disguising itself as a path. The weeds here were as large as cattails. It was a place that even Alex was unfamiliar with. Alex and Ben had immediately decided as they pulled into the thicket that whoever killed the victim knew the region intimately.

The man reporting the carnage had driven in here to dump a mattress, had spotted something odd among the brush and debris and decided to investigate until he realized that his find was human. After getting the man's statement, Ben had threatened to levy a fine on the fool if he didn't take his damned mattress to a dump, threatening to impound his Nissan pickup as further inducement.

Little good Ben's efforts would do here. The clutter of humanity's leavings hereabouts served to remind Sincebaugh of his father's near-constant drone on how things used to be along the backwaters, amid the swamps and lakes of the region. His father said their great loss was due to shoddy city planning, overwhelming urban sprawl, greedy developers and boating communities now hugging the shores, as well as a general lack of concern for wildlife areas. His father constantly harped on the death of the Old Louisiana, an Emerald City he'd returned to in 1945 after a four-year tour of duty in Eu-rope during World War II. The developers had swallowed up everything his father had remembered in a mad effort to satisfy the rising appetite of the ugly creature called New Orleans. His father called it a travesty of justice whenever he'd had a few too many.

Today, the cityscape was an alien world to the old man. But not to Alex. Alex knew the terrain and felt a certain sense of safety even in its worst neighborhoods.

Still, there was common ground here for father and son to agree on, that pollution in all its ugly guises flourished here, that the gulf waters were losing the battle against industrial waste, that the growing scarcity of game animals in the region was alarming. Now the alarming cavity flapping open when Alex turned the body over startled him. Even with the surgical gloves on, Alex snatched his hands away from the body; repulsed by a spreading, moving, living creature that undulated inside the enormous, gaping chest wound, which showed clearly how the killer had taken great glee in spreading wide the flesh, the knifing giving the appearance of a lust killing, one in which rage had created an uncontrollable urge to mutilate the boy's corpse. The entire episode, from the moment Alex had touched the corpse and turned it, played over and over in his head at a snail's pace, making him physically ill.

He'd slowly turned the corpse, but it had begun to take on its own momentum, its soupy weight and bones like rolling potatoes in a burlap bag, bursting at the seams. A moment of remorse had flashed through

Sincebaugh's mind. He knew that something had ruptured. He'd even heard a faint twig like snap. Most likely the bone at the base of the neck had just popped, causing what the M.E. would term an undertaker's fracture. Careless handling of a corpse caused breaks, rents and tears. He'd forgotten to cushion the head as one might a newborn's.

Not that he wanted forgiveness, but it was his first mutilation-style murder investigation, and his stomach was doing far more thinking at the moment than his head. Yet his concern for the neck fracture was instantly forgotten now that his penetrating, icy green eyes found the victim's chest splayed open by some awful instrument of destruction, a pool of writhing maggots where the guy's heart ought to have been at peaceful rest.

The fist-sized red organ that once pumped the fluid of life through Victor Surette was missing, only a gaping cavity and the maggots left behind.

“ Son of a mother fuck in bitch in heat, Sincy!” lamented deYampert in that curiously poetic tempo that swearing in his melodic tongue took on. Ben's olive and bronze complexion blanched by rapid degrees, his natty but thick hair seeming to stand on end. “Christ on a stick! Geezus, turn 'im back over. Leave 'im for Wardlaw.”

“ Can't… can't do that…” Alex heard himself saying as if for the hundredth time, as if from far away.

“ Hell you can't,” cried Big Ben.

“ He's my responsibility, Ben. I'm in charge here, not the M.E., not you, nobody but me, you got that?” This meant it was Sincebaugh's call, Slidell or no Slidell. It was his bloody ugly case, because he was first detective on call, and it was his rotation, and he hadn't bargained it away with Ben or anyone, and therefore it was his call all the way. Any glory to be had out of the case was his, and by the same token, any disgrace would stick to him far longer. Ben knew this as well as Alex.

“ Be damned if I'm going to turn the body over before I investigate the scene thoroughly,” Alex now muttered.

Ben knew that he was still smarting from a previous investigation into the death of a little boy not yet seven years old who'd been abducted, sodomized and strangled and finally dumped at a site not unlike this lonely place. That case had gone unsolved now for eight months, and Sincebaugh still blamed himself, believing that he'd not been thorough enough that first night at the scene, that he had somehow missed some vital clue. He more than made up for it these days, Ben thought, exasperated with his partner at times.

“ I'll let you know when,” Sincebaugh muttered now, but even as he said it, he involuntarily turned his eyes away from the gruel in which the maggot life swam within the chest cavity. Doing so, he realized for the first time that the genital area was caked in coagulated blood, and that the genitals had been removed via the same butchery carried out over the chest.

“ Wardlaw'll be pleased,” he heard Ben saying.

Christ, what a thing to say, he thought.

“ Wardlaw loves maggots. Says they speak volumes about time of death.”

The insects, still in their larval state, would tell Wardlaw the approximate time of death. “Too bad Wardlaw can't be as timely about getting here as the fucking maggots,” Sincebaugh said, struggling to keep his composure.

When he turned to look again on the awful hole in the dead kid, Alex suddenly tumbled into it, somehow losing his footing over Victor Surette's form, and losing his grip on reality. Sincebaugh's entire body had somehow plunged into the pool of mindless, writhing insect life, and he found himself swarmed over by the decay-eaters, found him self being eaten by them as well. He tried to pull himself back, tried desperately to find Big, to scream and throw his hand back up for Big to grab onto and haul him from the cesspool into which he'd descended. It was a cesspool worse than the bamboo cell in the water in Nam in which he had endured life for two grueling months, when he had seen the epidermal layer of his skin begin to slough off in cascading ringlets.