Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

Jessica Coran had been like a rock in the face of the horror. Amazing lady, terrific medical mind, incredible skill and control. He knew that he'd have to control the superlatives concerning her field performance in the report he intended to write, that he mustn't make her sound like Joan of Arc or Sister Theresa, but he was impressed, and the report would reflect a commendable job. He went to her, gripped her arm, asking, “How's it going?” She'd been at it full tilt for hours and dawn was approaching.

“ Coming to an end.” Her slurred voice said it all.

“ You're going to need some sleep before doing the autopsy, and it's nearing light out now.”

An autopsy could take hours, and a complicated one- and this was sure to be complicated-could take eight hours.

“ Don't let them do it without me, Chief.”

He nodded and changed the subject. “Been some time since I've seen one quite this bad, I admit.” She thought she detected a slight shudder in Boutine's voice. For a moment their eyes met, his shimmering gray darts plunging uninhibitedly into her deep blue-green pools to mesh in a silent bond of understanding. She realized for the First time that he was as profoundly wounded by the outrage committed here as she; at the same time she wondered how it could be otherwise, and how she could have thought it otherwise. Yet, Otto was Otto, so stiff, so muscular, so strongly wired together, and earlier he had seemed so above it all, so much in control-all useful mannerisms she had this night emulated so tenaciously, feeling like a cat with her teeth sunk deep, afraid to let go even in the least, for fear she'd lose the battle with herself.

But there it was, the hurt in his eyes.

It was just a flicker, and she was beyond fatigue, yet the flaring ember of a moment's weakness had been there. The gruesome nature of the case had struck him in his soul, just as it had hers. He tried instantly to put it out, and as must usually be the case, it was quickly extinguished, replaced with the steel again, and she half heard his directives to her.

“ Time we get it wrapped up here, so you can get a few hours' sleep.”

She nodded, saying nothing. But somehow, she knew that they would always hold on to a bond created here amid the carnage.

But he was suddenly all business again, throwing the mantle of chief across his brow once again, as if not interested in sharing such emotions with her. She was reminded without so much as a word of his invalid wife, who had remained now for a month in a coma at Bethesda Naval Hospital, a victim of an aneurysm. She remembered that no one got too close to Boutine, that Otto shared only the rudiments of his life and nothing of the core of his being with anyone, least of all a junior officer in the department.

The only reason he was here was to oversee her performance in fieldwork for the Bureau. He was working on a major overhaul of his profiling team, and she was central to that restructuring effort. He had held nothing back in this regard, telling her precisely what his plans for her were, and nothing about those plans said anything of sharing an emotion, even if it was spontaneous and unintentional.

Up until this morning. Dr. Jessica Coran had worked assembly-line fashion within the relatively friendly, clean and safe confines of the “store.” But now she was to head up her own assembly line for the follow-through on this case. This time, she was to see the whole picture. And she did; she got it right in her face.?

Jessica had given up on getting the sophisticated fingerprint equipment promised them by the Milwaukee field office. She might have had results with an ultraviolet imaging system that intensified light 700,000 times at a crime scene. But she must make do with what she had, a field generator and headlights flooding through the windows and doors. She tried to take it in stride; besides, the chances of actually capturing a print from the killer in the terribly disturbed crime scene was scarce at best. She had noticed that someone had actually picked up one of the dead girl's parts and returned it to her, laying it below the body like an offering, and it wasn't very likely that it had been the killer's doing, but someone who had been moved by the awful scene.

Still, she had gone through the motions, using the best technology available to her, the MAGNA brush. It was an ingenious device, small enough to carry in her breast pocket. The MAGNA made it possible to develop fingerprints on all kinds of materials, even those that once resisted processing. The locals were making their own prints with conventional tools and seemed to her in the stone age.

Everything would have to await her return to Quantico, where fluids and stains found at the scene, along with fibers, could be identified, and where DNA results might show them something. But such tests took time.

The local law guys were getting antsy now, wanting very much to cut the corpse down, close down the death house. She couldn't blame them. It was one of those universal instincts, an urge to tidy up the helpless victim, to right the wrong so far as it could be righted, to at least put the helpless form of the victim in a more natural pose; they wanted someone to clean her wounds, not to measure and poke and take slivers of tissue from her. They wanted to put the ugliness from view.

Along with the urge to clean and tidy up came the accompanying illusion that doing so was not only helpful but the morally right thing to do.

Her father had told her about such things as this; he had been witness to it countless times, and so had she now. But he also taught her that such urges were both natural and good, despite the harm they often did in destroying evidence and the desired sanctity of a crime scene. Such human urges certainly served the living; they certainly served to “soften” the scene, but thankfully, and somehow, Otto's long-distance proviso that the corpse not be touched by anyone had prevailed, amazing as it seemed. Once again, she guessed it was the sheriffs doing, a man named Stowell. She knew that to these men she appeared hard, perhaps even perverted, to have kept them so long from releasing the body from its silent torment, its bonds and its unholy position. The kind of well-intentioned mentality that caused no end of problems at crash sites where victims of burning Boeing 707s were too soon lifted off and placed all in neat little rows, creating a nightmare of identification problems for the medical examiner.

She had been called in on such a case with the terrible fate of Pan Am flight 929. It had been her first mass-death site and it would prove a massive undertaking in more ways than one. Identifying mangled and charred bodies, fitting limbs torn and hurtled about a debris field of some hundred and fifty yards, was enough of a challenge for any forensics specialist. She had been an assistant M.E. on call at Washington Memorial when the news of the crash came over. Such an announcement is like an invitation to a frat party, and so within the hour all roads leading to the crash site were congested with off-duty cops, reporters, camera crews, voyeurs of every stripe. Anyone with the remotest excuse to be on hand converged on the site, including politicians prepared to be interviewed.

Fire engines lined the way along with ambulances, along with more cops than necessary. The terrible secret amid the mayhem and confusion was the looting which was typically blamed on the local population. At a busy airport like Dulles International the first on scene were those whose job it was to rescue the living and protect the bodies of those who'd died. At the Pan Am crash the first to arrive were the Port Authority police, followed by the WPD, the firemen and the emergency medical supply teams, nurses, doctors, morticians and then nearby residents. The amount of looting was unforgivable.