Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

Although careful to print, Teach wrote with a flourishing hand where once he had written with a pinched and tiny hand the words he so wanted to convey to Dr. Jessica Coran. She proposed to corner him, to bring him to what they called justice. We will see, he thought as he wrote:

Dear Dr. Coran,

Read Leviticus and you will understand me. I am far from a vampire, and do not consider myself one.

Candy was sweet; that is, her blood was sweet, but I am once more reduced in my supply. As you see from this note, I use blood for every little thing. Perhaps someday I will be fortunate enough to have some of your blood? Please, don't let the newspapers disparage me again. Put your mind at ease. My thirst is, from time to time, quenched. So I will not take any more than my needs dictate. I am fundamentally an environmentally conscious person, and do not squander blood. You know this from your own experience, do you not? So rest assured.

Perhaps someday we can meet, and perhaps you will give me some of your blood? I believe women have much more character than men, don't you? At any rate, you can never hope to catch me before I catch you.

Sincerely,

Teach, the one you seek.

The fools hadn't a single shred of evidence to link him to the deaths. They hadn't even placed Candy Copeland in the hospital where he had first met her in the cafeteria, sipping on a big milkshake. He had seen her in the hospital before on his trips, usually doing the scut work of mopping floors and taking out bedpans, but recently she'd been given more responsibility and she hadn't been able to cope with it. So her days were numbered, and she talked of having to go back on the streets, back to a pimp who kept her. She'd been feeling sorry for herself, and he saw his chance and he took it. He offered her some relief from her sorrows, pointing out some of the types of drugs he peddled for his company. She wanted relief from her life, her pain, and ultimately she felt no pain.

She had liked the candy cane uniform. She had liked being known as a candy striper. She took on the name “Candy” as a result, casting off “Annie.”

Now that he'd finished his letter, Snuffy, who had followed him into the den and had so calmly sat over his feet for the duration of the letter, suddenly snuggled against his leg. The torn then leapt up onto the desktop in a blink and was going for the inkwell and the feather pen and the smell of blood.

He dabbed a bit on his finger and fed it to the cat. “Reach out and touch someone, heh, kitty?” he asked.?

Otto's FBI profiling team had paid microscopic attention to the autopsy reports, to maps and photographs of the various crime scenes. They had paid particular heed to how the victim was treated. A killer who takes the trouble to cover the body afterward speaks one thing, a killer who hides the body is saying something different, and a killer who displays the body like a trophy, quite another.

Byrnes said, “Our guy feels no remorse about his victims.”

“ But he does feel something,” countered O'Rourke. “He sees them as furthering his goal; and in this sense, he cares about them.”

“ But not enough to cut them down, cover them over,” said Schultz.

“ All he's interested in is the blood. The body may's well be an empty can, a receptacle from which he has taken what they willingly gave him.”

“ Whoa,” Jessica stepped in. “They didn't die willingly.”

“ Through no fault of their own, no. But in the killer's mind, they asked for what they got. They wanted to share in his grand design, the design to give him power over them and others.”

“ That's a stretch,” said Byrnes.

“ Well, what we know about victims-victimology-tells us that the victim unwittingly pushes the button. Something about her appearance, either dress or physical,” said Schultz.

“ Any rate, I agree with Teresa, this guy does not feel bad about what he's done, but good, very good. Which means he's likely going to strike again.”

“ I've put out an alert to every law enforcement agency in the nation on this one,” said Otto.

Byrnes had a master's degree in educational psychology from the University of Michigan, but O'Rourke had profiled some 450 murderers, and her degree was in psychology. “If he had moved the body,” she said, “even to a couch, he'd have shown some shred of human emotion. He didn't. Not in any of these instances. Now, Dr. Coran has shown that it is without a doubt the same man, I say we go with profile three.”

Otto told Jessica that the team had created three profiles and that they were in the midst of narrowing it to one. “He didn't give a damn about the victims' bodies being exposed to the elements. He had no idea how soon, if ever, they'd be discovered.”

“ Another personality trait,” said O'Rourke. “He really does not care one way or the other whether the bodies are found or not. He has a lot of rage in him, and a lot of contempt for anyone in authority.”

“ Didn't suckle his mother's breast enough?” asked Byrnes.

“ Something like that,” O'Rourke said, refusing to show any emotional response to Byrnes.

“ So you don't think he stuck around for the funerals?” asked Otto.

“ No way,” said O'Rourke.

Schultz agreed. “He'd only have contempt for such customs.”

“ He'd have no desire to see them decently buried,” said Teresa O'Rourke. “It would be like burying one of the canisters he used to carry off the girl's blood in. She was an object to him, an object to be emptied.”

“ It's the post-offensive behavior of the killer that interests me,” said Schultz, lifting profile number three. “And this fits with profile three. What he did to her after she was dead, and now with this paintbrush business, Christ, it fits. The guy is a stalker.”

“ He brings along his own weapons,” added O'Rourke.

There was no longer any argument about much of this, Jessica thought, because the autopsy information had proven so much.

“ So the guy was organized and cunning,” agreed Otto. “He came from a neighboring town and probably drove a van.”

“ Nothing impulsive or passionate about our vampire,” said Byrnes. “But the facial attack, that usually means the victim knew her killer. The killer, in order to perform his terrible deeds on her, puts out her eyes so that even she can't see what he is doing.”

“ Maybe they had crossed paths before. We need to check on that possibility. Prelims have shown that both Janel McDonell and the Copeland girl worked in hospitals, and the way this thing is shaping up, a hospital seems a likely setting for a first meeting. Say this guy knows a lot about trach tubes and tourniquets,” continued Schultz, whose degree was in sociology, “maybe our guy's a paramedic.”

“ Why stop at paramedic?” asked Byrnes. “Why not a doctor?”

O'Rourke quoted known dogma about murder. “The more brutal the attack-and we are talking Tort 9 here-the closer the relationship between victim and killer.”

“ Maybe she did bring it on herself,” said Byrnes, “in a manner of speaking.”

“ If she did, she had no idea she was doing it,” countered Schultz. “The victim might be guilty and innocent at the same time.”

“ Maybe she teased his sick mind at some point and he never forgot it.”

“ The killer showed mastery of the situation,” said Otto, slowing the back-and-forth intentionally, wishing to get back to profile number three. “He killed slowly and methodically, which means he's a more sadistic personality.”

“ Which places him in the probable range of late twenties or thirties,” said O'Rourke. “And what did he do right after the murder? Did he lounge there? Enjoy himself with the body? Necrophilia? Not so, according to Dr. Coran, who has said that the sperm did not belong to our man but was placed into the orifices-sperm brought with him in a vial. His ritual, the time gone into the act of cutting her tendons, tying her and dangling her and finally draining her… the other, post-offense measures were meant to fool you and me and people like Dr. Zach.”