Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

“ Good idea. Send them over first, and I'll try to narrow the field from the books.”

“ Consider it done.”

She hung up, taking a deep breath, realizing the day had disappeared and her neck was getting as stiff as a board. She'd not been contacted by Boutine or anyone else since her return, and once when she called Boutine, she was told curtly that he was out and would not be returning all day. She left a message with the secretary for him to get in touch with her as soon as possible. She then called his home number. He'd told her to call there whenever necessary. Again, she got the answering machine and her frustration with him was rising.

She had heard from J.T. at noon, grousing long distance about how he planned on never going back to Paris again. He found her now in the lab, coming as he did straight from the airstrip with the specimen from the Trent girl in a cooler. It was 8:30 P.M. by the wall clock.

“ Devil of a time, Jess,” he said.

“ Welcome home.” She went to him, taking his coat. “You look like hell.”

“ Murphy's law in triplicate.” He told her of the frightful night he'd spent, finishing with, “And it's only through my Job-like patience that I didn't murder someone-Forsythe for one.”

“ Pain in the ass. So was Kaseem, but the man did lend an air of respectability and military bearing to the proceedings without even trying.”

“ I don't think we've seen the last of those two, Jess, really. Something fishy-smelling about the whole setup, like big brother is watching.”

“ Maybe… maybe not.”

“ What else could it be?”

“ AFIP has been wanting to get better training in this area. Our guys stationed all over the world have a guy like Forsythe or Kaseem doing autopsies in places like Manila, Germany, Guam… Well, maybe anything they can learn from us-”

“ Nahh, that's too simple. Besides, what can they learn on an exhumation?”

“ More than you might think. Are you sure we're not just being paranoid a bit here?”

“ Paranoia is a healthy emotion, despite the bad rap it gets.”

She thought again of Boutine, wondering if he had known about the AFIP's involvement, wondering again where he was.

“ Look,” she told J.T., spreading out the new images on the McDonell SEM photos, laying them alongside the Copeland shots. “Can hardly tell them apart. You couldn't if you didn't know one of them was buried for six months. Look at the configuration, here, about the center. Big as a bull's eye. She got the killer's ugly spigot jammed into her jugular, too.”

“ It'd take a guy who really knew what he was doing to hit the mark twice,” he replied. “Now, what about thrice?” His eyes lit up with the cooler he held to her eyes. “My damnable vacation into prairie hell best not have been for nothing.”

“ You've got to be bushed, John. Hell, it's almost nine and you've gone through an exhumation, an autopsy and what must've been the longest flight in history from Illinois to here-”

“ Three stopovers, and when the military says stopover, you get a real stopover! But I won't rest until I know. You go on. I'll just see what this tells us.”

“ You sure?”

“ Determined is the operative word.”

She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Makes it all worthwhile, and my life complete,” he said.

This made her laugh. “Good night, and keep all this under lock and key.”

“ Now who's paranoid?”

“ Better safe than sorry's all.” She left for her office, leaving J.T. to finish up. One match was nice, but the findings could be refuted if interpreted wrongly by others, a thing that happened more often than not in forensic science. But two, if J.T. could pull it off, would be unassailable. They could then begin to search for the kind of awful weapon that the killer had used. The investigators could then see the hacksaw for what it was.

In her office she hung up her lab coat, looked about her desk, wondering if there were any reports she needed to take home with her. She lifted a couple of files she'd been meaning to rummage through, some early work on the Tort 9 killer type. She wanted to see what research had been done. It was indeed scant from the size of the files.

Suddenly, there was someone at her door. She saw the shadow cross her desk, and she was startled when she looked up to find Boutine leaning against the dooijamb, looking shaken, his clothes looking as if slept in, his hair wild, the normally focused eyes unable to look at her.

“ Otto? Are you all right? I've been trying to reach you and-”

“ It's Marilyn… my wife…”

She came to him, her breath coming in short gasps. “She… she's gone, isn't she?”

“ Odd how it happened,” he croaked. “She… she came out of her coma, just briefly… asking for me. When they got hold of me, I raced to Bethesda. Got there and she was gone back into coma. I stayed and stayed, trying to bring her back around, and for a brief moment, I felt her hand squeezing mine. Doctors said it was just a convulsion, a spasm, but I knew it was… was more than that… and then she just… just left… went… flatline.”

She took him into her arms, holding him. Over her shoulder, he said, “Hospital staff was busy, and for a time no one noticed the flatline, no one but me, of course. I… I sensed she wanted to go… had to go. I didn't call for anyone. I just let her go.”

His frame rumbled with pent-up tears. She held onto him. After a while, she suggested, “You shouldn't be alone tonight, Otto. Why don't you come home with me?”

He pulled away from her. He never looked confused or out of control. It was difficult for her to believe this was the same man, and yet the depth of his feeling for his wife touched her. “Come on… to hell with appearances,” she ordered him.

“ I don't want to impose on you any longer.”

“ Then why'd you come to me?”

He could say nothing.

“ Impose. That's what friends are for, especially at times like this.”

He allowed her to lead him away.

# # #

Otto was weak with exhaustion and grief. She led him through doors, into the elevator and into her place as if guiding the blind. It wasn't the Otto Boutine she had always known. Once at her place, after he went through a halfhearted walk-through of the apartment, commenting on how it was both warm and bright all at once, he quickly found the sofa, and for the rest of the evening would remain there.

Jessica broke out a bottle of wine and they drank it and nibbled at cheese and crackers until the wine was gone and he asked if she hadn't something stronger. She returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Scotch, to which he approved, asking for it on ice, neat.

“ What about something to eat?” she asked.

“ The Scotch'11 do.”

“ I'm going to fix myself something. Are you sure-”

“ No, nothing… I couldn't eat.”

So she settled down with him there, not eating either. He began to talk about Marilyn, about her enthusiasm for her work. She had been a civil case trial lawyer. They had met when he was on a case that took him to California. Her family was in San Diego, some of them flying to Virginia now for the wake and the funeral. As for him, it was true what she had heard-that he was without family. He'd been orphaned at the age of eighteen. Afterward he'd done a stint in the army, where he'd learned self-discipline. He had finally chosen police work at a very early age. He had come up through the system and had made of his life what it was now.

“ Took me away from Marilyn a lot,” he said flatly. “We'd be at a wedding, a party, some other thing-once our own anniversary-and I'd be called away. She was hurt. As understanding as she was, she was hurt.”

“ Otto, people like us, we're on call twenty-four hours a day. That's just the way it is. Don't beat up on yourself.”