Robert Walker - Pure Instinct

Not a single word on Matisak since Oklahoma, no leads, not a clue. The few possibilities had turned out to be false. It was as if the lunatic had disappeared off the face of the earth, and thank God if he had gone down in the light plane he had commandeered at a small Oklahoma airport. Neither plane nor pilot had ever been found again, no wreckage reported, nothing. If they'd run out of fuel somewhere in the southwestern desert, it was possible the monster had died a slow and torturous death, the sort he was famous for inflicting on his own victims. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord, and more power to You, she thought now.

She had more than once reveled in the idea of Matisak's dying of slow dehydration, so fitting for a killer that craved the liquid of life, blood. If it had happened, it had not likely occurred before the fiend had fed on the blood of the unfortunate pilot.

She now sat in the darkened projection room, thanks to a busy Paul, who'd come and gone and come back in again. She sat watching the frame-by-frame images of the so-called psychic detective, Dr. “Faith” or Desinor, as she was alternately called by Paul Zanek, whose interest in the woman seemed a bit more than professional. Jessica had pretended she knew nothing of Police Commissioner Stephens of New Orleans, or that he was at Quantico, personally requesting help with the Queen of Hearts killings. She knew now that P.C. Stephens had personally requested her, but that Zanek was doing his level best to sell the man on the psychic detective instead. It was as if Paul had a personal motive in it all, and one that went beyond protecting Jessica from herself.

Paul stopped the camera and in the darkened room, Jessica realized that he'd brought someone else in to view the tape, a tall, older man with piercing green eyes and dyed red hair that she guessed to be Stephens.

Stephens who'd been guided to them by the FBI in Louisiana, was thick-chested, trim at the waist, a man with thinning red hair and a superior attitude that Jessica didn't like in the least on meeting him.

Zanek, a big man, filled the little screening room with his personality and baritone voice. He now said, “We have film on every psychic hit that Dr. Desinor has made since becoming an FBI agent. The woman is nothing short of miraculous. Isn't that right, Dr. Coran?” Paul leaned over and whispered in Jessica's ear, “Back me up on all I say.”

He then turned to Stephens while the still shot of Dr. Desinor, larger than life, stared down on them. “I'm sending Dr. Desinor on an experimental basis, rather than Agent Coran here, Mr. Stephens, for reasons already explained to you. Nothing's changed.”

“ Dr. Desinor,” Jessica said, instantly rebelling, “the psychic we're supposed not to have on our payroll? How're you going to get around that? Come on, Paul. It looks to me like they need scientific help down there in Cajun country, not more voodoo.” Even as she said it, she was sorry. She knew that the psychic arm of the Behavioral Science Unit was from its inception Paul Zanek's innovation, and besides, she had heard only positive, glowing reports on Dr. Desinor.

“ Come off it, Jess,” Paul said. “You'd be waving a bloody flag at yourself down there. The press'd be all over the story when they got wind you were pulling into town. Matisak would be at you like a tiger on a kill.”

“ The last time you used his name, you assured me he was most likely dead! Which is it, Paul?”

“ Damnit, Jess, until we find a body…”

“ And when will that be, Paul? A year, two, three, five? I'm done living this way. I'm through hiding. Do you understand that?”

“ I've got a meeting with Santiva I have to get to. We'll discuss this later today. Say about three?”

“ All right, all right,” she seethed.

Before Zanek retreated, he said, “There's more tapes of Dr. Desinor in action. One in particular you must see, so please, continue without me. Leonard, resume the screening,” he told an assistant, and the film began anew.

Jessica wasn't having any of it.

She caught Paul just outside the door. “So, what do you need me here for?”

“ To help me convince the man. Jess, we've got a chance to show the combined division chiefs, and the head of the FBI, that psychic detection makes sense here, especially on this one.”

“ On psycho weird-out cases, you mean?”

“ It's just bizarre enough, and I don't know, I just feel it. Will it hurt you to watch the film I've pulled for Stephens on Dr. Desinor?”

Jessica had trouble focusing in on the film now, willing to take Paul Zanek's word for Desinor's feats of acumen and talent in the field of psychometric readings of objects found at the scene of a crime.

On screen, Dr. Desinor, a handsome woman with full features, tall with a proud bearing, now held a ransom note in one hand, lightly moving her fingertips over the surface and going into a trance state. A skeptical agent from Georgia named Parlen had his back to the camera now; he'd come seeking her help in a months-old case involving a kidnapped financier. Dr. Desinor's suggestions came as a surprise, even a shock to Agent Parlen, who doubted her credibility. Jessica could read his doubt in his voice. Nonetheless, Parlen promised to look into the possibility of involvement by an illegitimate daughter and perhaps her husband or live-in boyfriend.

Jessica's mind was filled with its own ongoing film, memories of a soul-warming Hawaii, and gentle James Parry and his touch, flooding in, only to be swamped by the ever-present fear she now lived with: that at any moment, any day now, an escaped maniac whom she had once put away would turn up at her doorstep to seek his long-awaited, carefully planned revenge.

“ It's no easy matter living with the knowledge that someone is stalking you.” Dr. Donna Lemonte, her psychiatrist, had tried to be reassuring the last time they'd spoken. “Someone who wants more than just your life. Your life's just a symbol to this guy.”

“ Don't you think I know that? This sonofabitch wants to drain me of my goddamned blood, and drink it before my dangling corpse.”

Mad Matthew Matisak, imprisoned for life for the blood-drinking, torture deaths of countless young women and men, had made a daring and intelligent escape from the maximum security asylum that had only held him for a goddamned total of two and a half years. His escape had left a trail of dead and discarded people, like so many empty containers. And that was exactly how he thought of people-containers, buckets of blood, to leave drained in his gruesome wake. The dead included the head of security and psychiatric treatment at the federal facility in Philadelphia, Dr. Gabriel Arnold, who had never understood Matisak.

Jessica had done countless interviews with Matisak, gaining information about where all the bodies were buried. For the past year, Dr. Arnold, head of forensic psychiatry at the facility, had worked with Matisak, and recently he'd begun to make outlandish and foolish claims about small victories scored against his number-one patient: the zookeeper pleased with his most prized possession. Arnold had claimed that the mass murderer had actually become cooperative during sessions with him, that Matisak had become talkative with him, that he had put away all demands and had finished with his “head games” and was a willing subject of study for the FBI.

She might have guessed on hearing such reports that Matisak was playing yet another game out to its conclusion, but she'd had no idea that this time it would end in death.

Jessica recalled now having warned Arnold of her suspicions, that Matisak was not to be trusted, ever, that the fiend cared not a whit for the suffering of the families of his victims. Arnold had only become defensive and angry, sure that she wanted to “keep Matisak breakthroughs” all to herself. Since Paul Zanek had taken over the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, Dr. Arnold had been feeling more and more put upon and isolated at the facility, which, Jessica had no doubt, had further contributed to his death.