Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

She wondered if there wasn't something else he was holding back; she believed for a moment there was and that he was going to continue to confess, to say something about how he felt about Jessica Coran and not about Dr. Coran. But he lapsed into silent stoicism, staring out into the blankness of the cloud cover above Quantico.

Up front, the garbled voice of the pilot talking to the tower was the only thing that broke the silence of the cab. The revelations from Boutine, such as they were, only served to confuse her. She knew he was having difficulties with his wife's condition, that any man must, but she had not known that he was becoming paranoid, that he felt threatened here at Quantico by Leamy, Raynack and mysterious others. It must be the booze talking.

The plane touched down, the urrrk-urrrk-urrrrrrk of the burning tires kissing the tarmac below a sullen, rain-soaked, dreary sky here on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. She was relieved to be returning to the Virginia facilities and to home.?

John Thorpe met them at the airstrip the moment they touched down, wheeling out in a jeep, waving his arms, as full of enthusiasm as ever. He leaped from the backseat, rushed toward the plane and plied them with questions before they got their feet on the ground, anxious to know if the trip had panned out, or if it should have been panned.

Boutine whispered something in her ear and went by J.T. with a perfunctory hello and got into a second jeep that had come to fetch him.

The pilot called down to Jessica, asking where she wanted her bags, two forensics valises and an overnight, placed. It was a signal that he didn't do loadings and unloadings.

“ You bring back any of that Wisconsin cheese?” asked J.T. jokingly. “I'll take charge of those!” he shouted up to the pilot. As he bounded up for the bags, Jessica went for the jeep, anxious for home.

“ It went badly, didn't it? Waste of time, wasn't it? I could see it in Boutine's face,” said J.T. when he rejoined her.

“ Since when can you read Boutine's face? It's just a little premature to tell, J.T.; we'll just have to see what the lab results show. Sure, superficially, yes, it looks like it could be the work of the same guy, but that's hardly something we can set in concrete, just yet.” Then her tone changed. “Why didn't you tell me you'd been talking to Boutine about the earlier cases?”

“ I didn't say anything because I didn't know if he'd take any action or not, especially since Raynack was involved, and when Bountine did take action, it was so damned quick, hell… I didn't even know you were gone until I got to the lab this morning. I'm not the principal player here, Jess-you are.”

“ Well, it's… it's been a trip, John, a real trip.”

“ I imagine traveling with Boutine would be. You two get along?”

“ Sure, sure we did.”

“ Look, I can see you're beat. I'll take charge of the goodies you brought back from Wisconsin, with your permission.”

“ Permission granted! I'd just like to fall into a hot tub for now.”

“ I'll see to everything, and you needn't worry.”

She smiled at him, saying, “I know that I can count on you, J.T.” She climbed into the passenger seat of the jeep as he loaded in the bags and hopped into the rear. The driver took this as his signal and he silently turned and tore away from the airstrip.

For a moment, Jessica looked for Boutine, but he had disappeared from sight too quickly for even a glance, and it hit her that now that they were back, they'd have to be more formal around each other, that she'd be calling him Chief Boutine again, and that he'd be referring to her as Dr. Coran. It made their sudden parting feel like a severing of ties, and she tried to understand why she felt so cold inside.

“ I left you some instructions on where some of the samples should go for cross-checks,” she told J.T., trying to sound as if her mind were on business. “MacCroone Laboratories in Chicago might tell us something more about the particles and fibers I've labeled for them. Duplicates of these samples, we'll have to share among us, but I want independent verification on everything we do where possible. If we do nail some bastard for these crimes, I don't want to leave a single stone unturned. “Gotcha! And not to worry. I'll overnight 'em. Everything else, we'll divvy up and begin to analyze to the max.”

She knew he would get the various evidence from Wekosha into the proper and expert hands required.

“ Just hold on using Raynack on any of this, for the time being,” she added.

He nodded. “Understood.”

“ I'll have to deal with him when and where necessary.”

“ It won't be pretty.”

“ Get the cloth items to-”

“ Boas, I know, and latents'll have to be shared-”

“ Along with the tiles and boards, taken from the scene.”

“ Fluid guys, I know.”

“ You get to keep the nail scrapings, skin, hair.”

“ I'll get Robertson to lend a hand on the blood and serums.”

“ If you can pry him loose.”

“ Don't worry, and as for photos, Hale's our man.”

“ Sounds like you're on top of it, John.”

“ My natural position-on top.”

He made her laugh and he made her feel secure in the knowledge that he'd protect the sanctity of the evidence as she would herself.

“ Listen, there is one vial I want for us. No one's to know about it but you and I, okay?”

“ You found something! Didn't you? I knew it. I told Boutine you would. What is it?”

She stared him down a moment. “Take it easy. May be nothing.”

“ What is it?”

She reached over the seat back and dug into one of the black valises and pointed to the large beaker in which floated a square of flesh the size of a piece of Spam; it resembled Spam, too.

“ From the victim?”

“ Her throat.”

“ What do you hope to find here, Jess? “Won't know until we get it under the electron microscope.”

“ But you have a hunch?”

“ I do.”

“ And I'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out about it?”

“ Give me three hours and I'll see you in the lab. We may have to work all night. Boutine wants a report by sixteen-hundred hours tomorrow.”

“ You're kidding. What the hell can we tell him in twenty-four hours?”

“ He's a man in a rush. We tell him what we can.”

“ He doesn't know about this, does he?” J.T. indicated the throat section.

“ No, just you and me for now.”

As a matter of protocol, they must first get the materials brought back with her to the lab under the eyes of a witness, in this case the driver of the jeep, who was also a military corporal. Once this was accomplished, the corporal drove her on to her apartment, where she stripped off the day with her clothes, showered and set her alarm for a few hours hence. The peace and solitude of her apartment, the safety she felt here, was like a soothing balm to her mind.

Four hours later she dragged herself into the Quantico laboratories, where she was head of an investigative forensics team, one of whom was Dr. Zachary Raynack. Many of her team were “on call” from various other divisions, but Raynack, like J.T., was directly answerable to her, which made tensions between the young “upstart” and the old “fart” quite a tussle at times. For the present, she didn't want to have to deal with Raynack, and so she purposely left him out of the Wekosha investigation, certain that at one point she would have to deal with the sometimes intolerable Dr. Raynack.

For the present, however, her full concentration was on J.T.'s work at the electron miscroscope. He was an artist with this marvel bit of hardware. The photographs created by the electron miscroscope meant that the photos themselves became the evidence, as the electron bombardment of the human tissue destroyed the evidence as the photos were being shot. J.T. made shots from every angle as the material disintegrated under his gaze. His eyes on the tissue layer that'd been peeled away from the larger sample, he said, “There is a strange configuration developing here.”