Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

She was holding back tonight, allowing Boutine to be the man in charge, and yet everyone in the place knew that she was in charge, that something had happened when she went to work. Charisma, the X-factor, whatever it was that made others respond to her, she had it. Otto knew that all he had was the ability to intimidate and frighten.

He had met her once, when she was sixteen or seventeen, at the ceremony held when her father had been made chief of forensics at Bethesda. She had come a long way.

Suddenly she stood, stretching out the cramps in her legs from the crouching she had been doing. She turned and found him staring, and almost politely asked, “Daydreaming, Otto? At a time like this?”

Not giving away anything, he fired back at her. “Defense mechanism.” He wondered if she had any idea that she was the subject of his thoughts.

“ Give me a hand,” she said. “I need a pair of tweezers I left over by the valise, and another vial, please.”

He pocketed his unlit pipe, nodding, saying, “Sure, sure… Anything else?”

Otto felt the eyes of the other men on them, perhaps envious of him. Envious not because of his many years of service with the Bureau, nor his long record of accomplishments, but envious that he knew her personally and professionally.

“ Family's got a right to put this thing to rest,” said Dr. Samuel Stadtler in her ear. The gray-haired, pinch-faced local pathologist had been shuffling the periphery of the crime scene for hours muttering disturbing words to the sheriff and the others because he had not been asked by Jessica to assist in any way.

“ It may be a while before I can release the body to you. Dr. Stadtler,” she told him. “I'll want to be involved in the autopsy, you understand?”

“ I understand more than you know,” he said cryptically. “For instance, I know that murder isn't normally the concern of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I know that Stowell called you people in, and I know how you people operate, without the slightest concern for the family.”

Otto stepped in, hearing this, and seeing that all the other lawmen were anxious to see the showdown between the old country doctor and the young lady doctor. Otto said, “This is a federal affair now, Dr. Stadtler-”

But he was cut off by Jessica, who stepped into Dr. Stadtler's face. “And you can either cooperate or be removed from the case altogether. Either way, it's up to you.”

“ I have jurisdiction here, Doctor,” snapped Stadtler.

“ No, no, you don't. Not unless and until we are asked by the authorities who requested us in to leave,” she countered. “Now, I suggest, sir, that if you're so concerned about the family, then you go and sit with them and counsel them, sir.”

Stadtler's face was flushed and he could not find words to express his anger. Looking around for support but finding none, he marched out. They heard his car ignition and the bump and grind of the vehicle on the weedy dirt road.

Otto turned to her and said, “You're going to find that a lot of locals are threatened by us when we come in.”

“ God, I hope I didn't make things worse.”

“ No, no, you handled him by the book.”

She smiled for the first time tonight. Otto's forehead was one of his most intriguing features, being so dominant and wide at the top. His cranial size gave way to a smooth tapering jaw and firm chin, which made for a long face with a variety of expressions, all hard to read at times. He was tall, regal even; his straight-backed posture and take-charge manner never failed to impress. And now Otto's steel and ice eyes penetrated the fog of her fatigue, and for a moment she saw the pain behind those eyes, the ghost of a demon, perhaps two or three, demons that creased his face with concerns he could not voice.

“ Better get done here,” he said, drawing away from her stare as if to hide his eyes from further investigation.

“ Yeah, right.”

Boutine returned to the tight leash he'd held the other men on, ordering them back to work, telling them precisely what Dr. Coran wanted and needed, managing to irk them all in turn until silence blanketed the crowded little death hole. When this happened, Otto stepped outside for some air.

Everyone here had been touched by this victim; touched in a place no one wished to ever be touched. She realized only now just how badly Otto had been affected.

The idea that there was in this world someone who wanted to rob her of her blood, to drink it down and piss it away, the thought alone made the FBI woman shudder in that secret part of her soul reserved for fears she had thought long banished from her psyche.

But the psyche never did play fair, not even with itself.

Otto Boutine had seen mutilation murder in its every guise throughout his long career in the FBI Psychological Profiling Division and as an advisor before such a division existed; in fact, most of the cases he had handled dealt with some form of body mutilation. He had become the resident dean of mutilation murders, the expert, the Ben “obi-wan” Kenobi of mutilation. It sometimes concerned him that this was how he had spent his life; that he had spent more waking hours-and sometimes the hours in deep sleep-inside the minds of the most brutal killers ever brought to justice, than he had with his wife who was now slipping helplessly away from him. But from the moment he had gone into collaboration with the Bureau, he had learned how to think like a man capable of the most atrocious acts imaginable, but this, the result of the ninth level of torture, was not easily fathomed.

Intellectually, he could accept the fact there were between three and four hundred so-called real vampires roaming the country, and that while all of them had an unholy need for the taste of blood, few of them actually became serial killers, opting for other and safer means of satisfying their needs; however, emotionally, Otto had great trouble imagining the mind-set of a man capable of actually draining another human being of blood. The slow death process was so torturous, so heinous that it topped the FBI list of worst crimes of torture.

It was difficult to think like a murderer, much less a sadistic, perverted killer; now to think like a man who believed that he was a child of Satan, a descendent of zombies! That, in order to insure his survival, he must not only feed on human blood, but the rich, warm, heady mixture of a fresh kill? It was difficult even for a man of Boutine's expertise, and yet he had thrown himself into the investigation like a man bent on going over Niagara Falls in a canoe, flying in the face of Raynack, disregarding Leamy's warnings. Did it have something to do with Marilyn? Had Leamy somehow sensed his desperation for work that would take him out of Washington, away from the pale shadow of the woman who lingered on in coma, the one he could not bear to watch any longer? Or was it simply that this tort nine was what his entire career had been about? To stop a cruel and human phantom he alone believed in: a twisted creature of the dark that ingested fresh blood from another in order to accumulate-at least psychologically- supernormal power over life and death. Was it just possible that the satanic bastard believed in his own bloody immortality? The vampire complex: the fixation that gave rise to men like the Marquis de Sade, and women who believed they could stay their beauty by bathing in the blood of virgins. Human lampreys, lusting for the blood of others.

But this was the first time he'd ever seen the results of such an insane fantasy.

He stared again at the drained body hanging upside down from the rafters of the ancient log house in Wekosha, Wisconsin. The local authorities had called them in the moment they realized what they had, a bloodless mutilation scene, just as his fax had described.