Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

Hardy fumed. “I'll just see what Chief Leamy has to say about all this.”

“ Good idea,” she responded coolly, “do that.” She then ushered him to and through the door, but no sooner was he gone than in stepped Dr. Zachary Raynack, an M.E. with more years on the force than anyone, and a man who had been passed over when she was given direction of the forensics division. Raynack held deep-seated animosities toward her for this reason, and it hadn't been lost on her that the McDonell girl in Iowa and the Trent girl in Illinois had been his cases, and that he had done various tests on the tissues and samples forwarded to the FBI from these remote places. There had never been an opportunity for him to see the entire truth of these deaths, not long-distance.

He slammed her lab door behind him.

Raynack had dark features giving way to a gray, peppery look about both the bushy eyebrows and the head. Still, at almost fifty, he had a full head of hair. He wore thin wire-rim glasses over a wide face that was pockmarked from some childhood affliction, it seemed. He was known as one of the sharpest minds in criminal investigation. The reputation was well deserved, but in the past several years his health and his professionalism had fallen off, or so it seemed to Jessica. Zachary had always had a low tolerance for what he considered his “ignorant” colleagues, and this “professional intolerance” hadn't slacked off in the slightest, but had rather grown to cancerous proportions. And it had been for this reason that few people could work with Dr. Zach, as he was known about the building, and it was for this reason that his work had been curtailed. He had not been given anything to do with the Wekosha killing. The McDonell and Trent cases had come in as separate cases without any relation to each other; it had been Otto, tipped by J.T., who had made the connection. Meanwhile, Raynack, studying the minutiae of each case under his scope, had seen no similarities.

She had long known that even though she was his superior now, Raynack considered her one of his more ignorant colleagues, and she suspected that it didn't help her case to be female.

Raynack was a small man in stature, but his years with the department and his uncanny record of convictions gave him more clout than he may have had a right to. He was a close personal friend of Leamy's; they had been through much together over the years. While Boutine was her superior, Raynack was her elder and Leamy her commander, and it could all get very tacky and sticky quickly if Dr. Zach wished to make life hard for her. At the moment, from the look in his eye, he wanted her to shrivel up before him and die.

“ You, Doctor,” he said haltingly, as if he might choke before he got it out. “You go to dig up my mistakes, I hear.”

There were no secrets in the department. ' 'Not a mistake, sir,” she began, but was cut off.

“ No? Are you saying you don't think it a bit extreme? Exhuming not one, but two of my postmortems?”

“ If you will let me explain.”

“ No, no. Doctor, you needn't explain. I understand Boutine is behind this. That is explanation enough. You've been charmed by Otto, quite understandable. So what do you do? Otto suggests that you awaken an old case-”

“ Those two deaths are connected to a murder in Wisconsin that occurred four days ago, Dr. Raynack, and Boutine may charm you, sir, but he does not charm me\”

“ Everyone knows he is using you to claw together more power. The man is an egomaniac.”

“ Doctor, I think your judgment is clouded by personality issues-”

“ Personality issues is what the FBI is about, young woman, and if you are smart, you will learn this, and if not, you will be sucking up scum for the rest of your life.”

“ Do you have any interest in why I went to Iowa, Dr. Raynack? Or are you here just to lobby for your own personality? Christ,” she finished with a mutter.

“ I know what you went to Iowa for. To embarrass me, to send a signal to chief of operations that Boutine is right and that I should go.”

“ Christ, is everyone paranoid?” she asked, standing now and pacing her office. “This divisive attitude toward one another, Doctor, must go. We can't divvy up the damned department. It's all or nothing. We're all working for truth, or we're all working on building lies. What's it to be?”

“ Under your direction the divvying has already started, Dr. Coran,” he countered. “Forensics teams should be divvied up and placed under various other departments? As a scientist, my dear, you of all people should know what that might result in! Biased, coerced information supplied by our scientific divisions in order to fit cases they make! Pure science cannot work that way.”

“ I think you're wrong about Otto's motives and plans,” she said succinctly. “And frankly, I don't agree with you. We can't isolate ourselves with a microscope and ignore the facts-”

“ Facts! Boutine doesn't give a damn about facts.”

“- the facts of a case, locked away in here!” She indicated the labs with a flourish of her hands. “Never smelling the blood.”

“ Ahhh, yes, the blood… Like this vampire killer that you two have cooked up for the publicity?”

“ We didn't create the psycho. Doctor!”

“ But you and the press will embellish him to grand, superhuman characteristics, so that when Boutine locates this pathetic sonofabitch in some hole out there he will be the hero, and you will have placed the pedestal under his feet.”

“ Are you at all interested in the evidence in this case?” she shouted.

Politics and personalities, she thought with a rumbling fear welling up inside. Damn them all. Boutine included. Boutine had been smart enough and careful enough to have called it a confession when he told her to her face that he indeed was using her.

Now Raynack, a man who could have her job if he played his cards carefully, was making sounds like there had been some improprieties taken by Boutine where Dr. Coran was concerned. It smacked of Bledsoe's thoughtless remarks on the shooting range, but Zach was no harmless Bledsoe. Raynack could make things uncomfortable.

She tried to calm him down and she tried lies. “Dr. Raynack, it was your reports on the McDonell and Trent cases that initially stirred us up when we saw what had happened in Wekosha. You did fine work-”

“ Then why're you digging up the bodies to have another go at them?”

“ Something new surfaced. It had to be checked on the other two women, and there was only one way to do that.”

He seemed somewhat mollified, falling into a chair, taking a deep breath. “Then Boutine recognizes my contribution to the case?”

“ Absolutely.”

He thought about this for a moment. And for that moment she felt as if she were teetering on a tightrope between Boutine and Dr. Zach. Part of Raynack's concern was keeping the forensics arm of the FBI intact, and to keep it “pure,” apart from the political wrangling, to keep it as an “untouchable” and unapproachable temple, forbidden to the likes of the nonscientists and the novice. He had many times said there was no place in the “service” for the armchair forensics dick; that it was the equivalent of giving a loaded. 45 to a three-year-old. He considered Boutine, despite his years of training and experience in the field, just such a novice in the exacting science that went on in the crime labs.

Boutine, on the other hand, wanted the crime lab people more involved in what went on in the field and behind the closed doors of the brainstorming sessions held by the PPT.

It seemed that Raynack was the more unreasonable and unbending of the two men; Raynack with his desire to keep some kind of monastic mystery around the day-to-day of the labs. They had all played that game for a long time, and even she was guilty of it, she knew. But as policy? The days of cloaking such devices as the gas chromatograph in mystery were long gone.