Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

She stepped into the dark interior, steeling herself. She felt her backbone stiffen at the sour odors, now familiar to her. Like the Zion house, there was the distinct odor of mildew, rotten wood and decaying flesh. Walking into a corridor that had become a death trap to the young man they'd called Fowler was like walking into a gallery room created by the Devil, and on this wall hangs the Fowler hody, and beside it in the anteroom, the McDonell body, and in the drawing room, the Trent body followed by the Copeland shell. Lovely only to the killing mind, this satanic gallery of death, filled with its awful sights and sickening odors. For a moment, she felt all alone with the black shape in the dark, silhouetted against the stairwell behind it, where it dangled: Fowler.

She could see the skinny-boy form of the body, hanging from the banister in the hallway that led to the second floor. “We got any lights?” she asked, and they instantly came up to reveal the ugly situation. The men were learning from Joe Brewer exactly who she was, about the fact she had been tracking a vampire killer since the incident in Wekosha, and that they had had another, similar case in Zion, Illinois, only the night before.

“ What's known about this young man?” she asked the crowd of policemen and investigators.

“ Not much,” volunteered one.

“ Dispatcher,” said another, heavier man with a notebook that he flipped pages in, “gay, hung out at a place called Shinnola on Fourteenth and Redding in the heart of-”

“ What kind of dispatcher? Trucks?”

“ Trucks, ambulances-”

“ Ambulances?”

“ Yeah, worked at St. Luke's Hospital. Was a good worker, so everybody there says.”

“ Anyone see him leave the hospital with another man?”

“ Negative.”

She saw the familiar mutilation wounds and the lack of blood on the stairwell, the runner carpet, the wood floor and the walls. She saw the familiar hitching knot, the throat slash. It all looked on the surface like a ghastly replay, a flashback, a macabre d6ja vu.

She called for Brewer who came nearer. “I'll need everything I brought in the helicopter, all the cases, all the equipment.” She had borrowed Chicago's imaging system, but even with the best equipment, the search over the body and premises would take hours. Once again, the killer was far out ahead of them, still free to do this awful thing again.

Again she wondered what had precipitated the killer's sudden spree. Spree killing was not the usual serial killer's way. A spree typified the sudden snap, the leap from rational to irrational, and it typified the disorganized killer, but no amount of labeling or statistics could corner this maniac with a tracheotomy tube and a tourniquet, with his empty Pepsi bottles waiting to be refilled, with his vials of semen that he placed into his victim's orifices by hand.

She wished it were Boutine with her now instead of Brewer. She wondered what had been so important as to keep Otto. She needed his support, his strength, his nagging questions.

The place was like Wekosha in that there were too many cops freely roaming about. She had to ask Brewer to keep control of the place. She thought of what Otto had said about the killer's likely response to reading about the details of the killings in print, that it would excite him to some action which might give them a lead, however small. She silently prayed that the stories in the papers would have this effect, but some nagging doubt clung to the thought like a lamprey, sucking the life from the hope of the psychological profiling team. Whoever this guy was, she guessed that he wasn't going to “respond” as if he were a statistical symbol, that he wouldn't so easily allow them to push his buttons.

Whoever this fucking maniac was, she thought, he wasn't going to be run by any normal rules, even “normal” by deviant behavior “models.”

“ Standards.” Still, he remained a meticulous, careful bastard before, during and after he calmly took the life's blood from his victims. It made her wonder if the capsule found at the Zion murder site hadn't, after all, been planted there by the bastard, just to further confuse and confound them. Anyone who created cosmetic wounds to cover the true cause of death, anyone who intentionally faked both the sexual attack and the mutilation murder in so cool a manner, would find planting a certain drug at the scene child's play.

The Indiana victim was a male, approximate age was placed at nineteen or twenty. Her thoughts were macabre: that the killer must have read somewhere, perhaps in a medical journal, that he could get five to ten more ml./kg. of blood from a man as from a woman.

Around her she heard the investigators and Brewer discussing the matter.

“ One sick puppy, this one.”

“ Damnedest thing I've seen in all my years.”

“ What's he do with the blood?”

“ Could just be a copycat.”

She'd know soon enough if it was a copycat killing. The straw cut to the jugular had not been in any newspaper, so if it was found in Fowler's jugular, as it had been in the Zion woman's, she knew that it was the same killer with his unique killing tool.

The men around her continued to talk and she half listened in order to keep a foot in the world of the sane as she worked in the closest of range about Fowler's throat, taking the necessary section she required for the nearest scanning electron microscope. She learned this was at the university medical complex two hours away.

Brewer was asking questions in rapid fire of the locals. “You check out all the asylums in the area?”

“ Sure, first thing.”

“ Bring in anyone?”

“ Seventeen, so far.”

“ Known what? Child molesters?”

“ Sex offenders, deviants, cross-dressers.” Again, thought Jessica, they're looking for a sex offender. They were looking in the wrong place.

“ I want you to go back to this St. Luke's and canvass the hospital, top to bottom, anyone who knew him, anyone who spoke to him yesterday, anyone who knows anything about him, even if it's just the color of his socks. Our killer picks his victims up at hospitals, we believe,” Brewer told the others.

“ Sure, sure… we'll go back over that trail.”

Brewer had obviously gotten Otto to open up about the case, giving him what he needed to proceed. She went back to her evidence gathering, roping in some of Joe's men to help her set up the imaging equipment. In a matter of ten minutes the place was lit up like a white hospital corridor. The intense light made the corpse look so placidly white that it became unreal if stared at.

The meticulous work now began in earnest.

# # #

She didn't have to go to the SEM microscope to know what her senses told her, that Fowler had died at the hands of the killer they had pursued from Wekosha to here. She wanted instead to go to this hospital where Fowler worked, St. Luke's. She asked for an escort there.

Along the way, she put everything she had learned about the killer into a mental file and she scanned that file now. What kept jumping out at her was the salesman aspect, and the medical supply company possibility. Had the killer come to St. Luke's ostensibly to sell medical wares, he would have come in a van carrying his supplies and samples, possibly a gray van, but the person most likely to tell them about this was Fowler, and he was the victim.

She and Brewer, along with other FBI agents, went over the same ground as the police had earlier, pursuing any small bit of information, annoying the hospital staff, upsetting others and being asked to leave by the administrator of the hospital. The news of Fowler's tragic and horrible fate had unnerved the entire staff, and the FBI's being there only aggravated the situation, according to the officious hospital administrator, who had insisted she and Brewer be seated in his office.