Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

A sudden gunshot outside sent Stowell racing for the door, his own gun leaping into his hand, his keen eyes scanning for the danger. All he saw was Junior Lumley standing in the clearing, his weapon pointed, saying shakily, “Something moved, Sheriff, in the bushes.”

Stowell marched to where Lumley's bullet had found a stray animal, now whimpering and in much pain. The cry was not that of a dog, the keening taking on a wild, banshee screech suddenly before there was silence again.

“ Careful, Sheriff… careful,” Lumley cautioned from behind.

Stowell, flashlight in hand, kicked out at the dead opossum, its razorlike teeth clearly visible where the gums were bared in a grimace of frozen pain. Stowell gnashed his teeth together, trying to control his anger. He turned on Lumley and said firmly, “You holster that damned weapon and keep it there, Junior.”

“ But Sheriff-”

“ Just get back to the goddamned squad car so you can direct traffic here.”

“ You gonna stay with the body?”

“ Go, Junior, go!”

“ I'm goin', Calvin, I'm goin'!”

Stowell called after him as Lumley disappeared down the logging trail. “And when the others get here, you call me Sheriff, Junior! Sheriff!” Sometimes Calvin Stowell wanted to strangle his sister's kid.

He looked back down at the dead opossum and the pool of blood in the dirt which made a stark contrast to the bloodless floor below the Copeland girl's body. It made him wonder if she had been killed elsewhere and merely brought here later. But then, why hang her by her heels and leave her body in plain view to anyone who might pass? And if she were hatcheted elsewhere, where was that location? No doubt it would be covered in blood. But the FBI bulletins had hinted at a killer who, for whatever screwed up, ritualistic or vampiristic purposes took the blood away with him.

Several hours later

The sight of the corpse in its unnatural, upside-down position, dangling at the center of the crime scene, made Jessica Coran shiver uncontrollably. For a moment, as the ice in her veins tried to thaw, she became angry with Otto Boutine. He hadn't told her it would be so chilling. He hadn't prepared her for the ugly extent of the brutality played out on the corpse. But then, it may've been useless to try; perhaps no one could adequately prepare another person to stand here and focus on so diabolical a sight.

But focus she must. It was her job. It was what she had come halfway across the continent for.

“ You okay, Jessica?” asked Boutine in her ear.

Others in the room seemed focused on her, curiously wondering how she was going to react to something they considered unfit for feminine eyes.

“ I'm… I'm fine, Otto,” she said, consciously working at steeling herself in the face of such horror while secretly a voice was shouting inside her head: Run! Run, girl! Maybe she wasn't ready for such responsibility; maybe she didn't deserve Otto's confidence. But a second voice deep within, sounding very like her deceased father's, said calmly, Stand your ground, Jess.

She faltered, however, when she looked again at the dismembered arm, lying almost perfectly below the maimed shoulder where it had come from. The sight of the mangled breasts and vagina hit her like a body blow. She went to the wall where thick, solid cedar logs lined the cabin. She tried to take some comfort in the feel of the naked cedar, smooth and hard and clean.

Otto tentatively placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered, “I think maybe you'd better step out and come back in again, Jess. Come on, I'll do the same.”

“ Just give me a minute, okay?”

Otto nodded and brushed back a lock of his long, pepper-and-salt hair. “Sure… sure…”

She was glad when he looked away, so that he didn't see the next wave of disorientation rush over her, her balance shifting inside her temples like an amusement park ride. Some windows and the doors had been thrown open, but the odor of the relatively fresh corpse in the room clung to the place like a heavy blanket of fog. Decay was easier to take after the first few days of decomposition, but the initial onset, like the carcass of a deer hanging on a tree outside a hunting lodge, filled the brain with primordial stirrings about blood and death. Not even the light from the police generator could dissipate the dark horror of what had occurred here.

But it was the very freshness of the kill that had caught Otto's attention and had gotten her on a jet for Wekosha, Wisconsin, along with the best psychological profile man in the country. It was the possibility that here they had a crime scene that hadn't been completely destroyed by decay or time or the stupidity of some local authority ill-equipped to deal with sex-mutilation cases of a possible serial nature. This one was fresh enough to give Jessica and Otto hope that they might be able to actually do something about it.

Otto had some notion that this death in little Wekosha had some similarities to previous cases throughout the Midwest, cases that others had long since filed away, but which continued to disturb Boutine's sleep. All murders for which the FBI had very few clues.

Her job here was to provide a medico-legal re-creation of the crime, a kind of “negative” of evil that had passed this way. From this a clear print of the killer might or might not be formed.

The cabin walls, the floor, the ceiling, the objects in the room, were in silent collaboration, holding secrets which she alone might translate to the world. She must pry the unseen, microscopic evidence from the larger shocking picture before them.

It was by no means the first tortured body she had ever witnessed, but somehow here, in the field, it was different. The corpse didn't arrive in a brightly lit forensics laboratory, in a neatly zipped plastic bag, and there were no water hoses or stainless-steel surgical slabs. Instead, there was a mangled body dangling from a rope by its heels, its clothing ripped and strewn about, its hair gnarled macrame, its bloodless limbs mannequinlike.

It's different when you know you're dying… when you die badly… when your suffering is prolonged…

She finally brought her eyes up from where they had been hiding, to look again at the body. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to be strong. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew that the victim had died slowly, fully aware of her hideous fate.

Just knowing your own death is at hand…

Cramped quarters. No other women in the room other than she and the corpse, lightly swaying because someone had touched or bumped it.

Whispers, garbled talk, ancient odors, dark cave… an awful way to die.

Amid the noise and movement of local and state lawmen, here in Wekosha, Wisconsin, Dr. Jessica Coran, medical examiner, fresh from the Quantico, Virginia, FBI laboratories, wanted to shout the dramatic order for everyone to clear the room, to take charge of the investigation, like in the movies. However, she knew this would serve little effect beyond alienating the locals, and since now that the crime scene had already been compromised, she swallowed hard and simply said, “I'll need everyone's cooperation here. Can I count on it, Otto?”

“ You've got it, Dr. Coran,” Boutine said with more than enough flare for the both of them. His booming voice made the others start. Chief of Division IV, Psychological Profiling of Mutilation Murderers, FBI, Otto Boutine was a hefty man with a deceptive and perpetual cat's grin. He possessed the most penetrating gray eyes that fired like steel at the heart whenever he commanded others. He poked at the door with a shiny Cross pen that he'd been nervously twirling since their arrival here. “Everyone please clear the area so Dr. Coran can work. If and when she needs assistance, she will ask.”