Robert Walker - Pure Instinct

To this day, he couldn't stand water; in fact, he had an unnatural aversion to it. He got the shakes just being in a boat. If he went fishing, it was from a bridge or shore. And to this day, he still had no idea how he had survived the treatment of his cruel captors in Vietnam, except that he'd held onto a shred of hope that one day they'd get careless and he'd crawl up at night and slit their throats while they slept, as he and several other POWs actually did during one of those nights of eternity, he alone finally making his escape stick, finding his way into a neutral country and eventually getting word out of his whereabouts.

His father and the U.S. Marines had long before given him up for dead, and in some ways he was.

Now, here in safe New Orleans he was a prisoner again, having tumbled into the open wound of a murder victim whose heart was replaced by maggots. He'd fallen so deep that his horrid screams couldn't even be heard, and there were no guards to laugh at him and taunt him back to reality. He wasn't so sure he wouldn't trade today's cage for yesterday's, and his screams became one, long, unending shriek.

The howl turned into a shrill ringing noise inside his brain. It would not go away, and he could not climb from out of the living quicksand of the army of maggots that were devouring him alive.

Still, the shrill scream raced through his fevered brain. It would not be silenced so long as he could feel the insect life devouring him along with Surette's corpse.

Then the sound of the telephone beside his bed reached into his vicious nightmare and lifted him from the maggot pool. He found himself shivering in a cold sweat, his hands covering his chest as if to protect his heart, the beads of perspiration running off in snakelike rivulets. Beside his bed was the open copy of Gray's Anatomy that he'd been studying for any useful information concerning the human heart.

He pounced on the phone and just held it tightly in its cradle for some time, feeling the vibration and noise run through him, swallowing in its solid surface, holding on to the reality of it. Relieved to be out of his previous misery, he now drank in the piercing, keening machine sound, thankful that it did not writhe at his touch, that it was genuine and corporeal.

Finally, he lifted the receiver, and out of breath, he spoke weakly and haltingly into it. “Who…who the hell's calling… at this hour?” All the while his mind screamed, Thank God you called!

“ Sincebaugh?”

“ Yeah, this is me!” he barked now, realizing it was Captain Carl Landry on the other end.

Even as he cradled the phone against his ear, leaning back against the headboard, he realized that his nightmare had told him something important about that hot June morning a little over a year before when they'd discovered Victor Surette's body, that his was not only the first of the Hearts murders- despite what Frank Wardlaw and others believed-but that the proof, missing as it was, had been staring them in the face the entire time. Surette's crime scene had been missing a key element: the boy's missing heart had not been replaced by a playing card because the fucking maggots had devoured the lace. And Wardlaw's protocol had proclaimed the heart muscle ripped away by animals.

Landry said, “You and Ben're up to bat.”

“ Another heartless one?” He tried to sound as casual as he could without being vulgar about it.

Landry ignored the pun. “I'll be there to run interference for you guys with the press. It's across U.S. 10 over Big Muddy this time.”

“ Gretna? Why not? He's done everywhere else.”

“ Well, we won't know for sure till you and Ben check it out and Wardlaw agrees, but we got a body washed up near Gretna's Chantilly Pier looks suspiciously like more work by same mother. Leastways, that's the way it came to me.”

Landry sounded tired and depressed.

“ Got you outta bed too, huh, Captain?” Alex was still trying to regain his own composure, and stating the obvious seemed only to help. “God help us, Captain Landry.”

“ I'll light another candle.”

Ever the good and faithful Catholic, Sincebaugh thought, wishing he had half the faith Landry took for granted. “I figured out why Surette didn't get one of those lacy playing cards left inside him, Captain.”

“ Really? And how's that, Alex?”

“ The maggots, sir.”

“ What about the maggots?”

“ Maggots'll feed on just about anything, including cloth. The playing cards're made of flimsy cloth. They ate the queen of hearts before we ever got to the body, so the killer's calling card wasn't present, so we never knew that Surette was victim number one.”

“ Hnmmm, now why didn't anybody else think of that?” Landry's sarcasm was so thick it hardly made it through the cables. “That bit of Sherlockian wisdom, Alex, doesn't ex-plain why the killer took over a year off and started up again. And besides, Doc Wardlaw indicated the heart was eaten away by animals, not maggots, that the missing heart in that case-”

“ That's just it. Wardlaw was too goddamned busy worrying about the missing heart. Remember? Wardlaw had theorized that animals had gotten to the body, rooted around in the open wound, snatched the organ and run. But Wardlaw was going under the assumption the body was found faceup, remember? But Captain, I-”

“ Alex, you've got to get control here.”

Maggots mucking out the empty shell…

“ But I turned the body, Captain. It was facedown and I turned it before Wardlaw ever got there, and I don't know of any raccoon capable of turning a body, and Wardlaw would've known that from lividity alone had he not been stoned that night.”

Landry firmly replied, “Stick to the present, Alex. The past'll take care of itself. Hell, Surette was fifteen months ago, a missing persons call at that.”

“ Who turned into a murder, an unsolved murder.”

“ And you're still obsessing over it? Nobody holds you responsible on either the Surette or the Tommy Harkness cases, Alex, no one. There was insufficient crime-scene evidence in both cases, and you exhausted every lead. Now, you have to put this in proper perspective or you'll wind up in Jyl Muller's whatever-happened-to-so-and-so column or on Dr. Longette's foam-rubber couch. Nobody wants that.”

“ But Captain, if I'm right, then these killings could date back to even before Surette disappeared, and if that's the case-”

“ Hell, Alex…” He sighed heavily into the phone. “There's not one shred of evidence to link Surette's death to the others.”

“ Only because I didn't want to see it; I blocked it out, that whole damned night, but it came back to me, Captain. Came back tonight, clear as-”

“ All right, all right. If you can find any connection with Surette, move on it, but let me know first. And if not, Sincebaugh, I want you to move on!”

“ But it's related. And maybe it wasn't the first, and if Surette was the first, then he should be the one we're concentrating on. I feel it. I know it is.”

“ I know you've got good instincts, Alex, that your intuition is above the norm, but I gotta tell you, Lieutenant, without something more solid soon-very soon-we're looking at a call for help.”

“ F B I? Fine, I welcome the help. They can take over the whole damned case file for all I care. I'll happily go back to domestic violence cases, drug killings and tavern shoot-'em-ups, if that's what you'd like, Captain.”

“ I'd like you to remain on the case, Alex, to show these bastards upstairs what we're made of, but I'm getting more pressure every day on this one from all sides.”

“ I understand, Carl.”

“ The hell you do. You might think you do, but no way. You just get me some kind of a pattern in this friggin' case that has more weight than… than playing cards and hearts. What else is going on here besides fags getting bumped off by some maniac with a hatred for gay guys in a city full of gay guys?”