Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

Something akin to a fetid spirit moved past the sheriff and his deputy when the warped cabin door creaked open, revealing a black crypt. But it was just the stale, pent up air, the closeness. Still there was the odor, heavy and solid, like a presence. The flashlight beam sluiced about the empty dark without reporting anything back.

Was the place filled with dead vermin? Had a raccoon crawled in through some hole, given birth to a litter only to die here, her starving young going unattended? Sheriff Calvin Stowell had opted to follow the lonely course of an old logging road, the terminus revealing the old Risley place. It had remained uninhabited for the last several years, the old man having died, his family scattered. Only the land held any value-the trees a mix of the finest hardwoods- but even the land seemed abandoned.

“ Somepin' sure stinks, Calvin,” said Lumley in the sheriffs ear.

The Wekosha Police had covered the territory around Baker's Road west to Three Forks, meeting up with the State Patrol moving eastward from the lake. This after repeated efforts along Old Market Road and Boyd's fishing camp and Killough Cove where the missing woman's family currently resided, all to no avail. Stowell, on a hunch, recalling the ancient, forgotten Risley place, quietly took his own direction now, and as if preordained, the weak and fading flashlight beam picked up a large shadow against one wall. All evening long Stowell's men had fanned out along Hawk's Ridge, a massive swell of connected mounds pushing up along with the boulders here in the shape of a crescent, a giant, sleeping Gulliver in fetal position. The men had wrestled with twisted briar bush, thickets of white and jack pine, coming on ramshackle homes hidden deep in the wood, startling people in the process.

The search had begun the night before, so Stowell and the others were reluctant tonight to give up. Working far into the dark Wisconsin interior, they'd flashed pictures of the Copeland girl up and down the dismal Chippewa Creek, occasionally catching glimpses of something floating in the water that, from a distance, was easily mistaken for a swatch of clothing, or a body. All the false alarms had just added to frayed nerves and a collective frustration that threatened to explode. As frustration rose, hope waned.

Townspeople from all walks of life had joined in the search this night. The gesture had knitted them all together- Common cloth of concern, Stowell thought now-however, the additional manpower had netted them little else. Meanwhile time ticked on mercilessly for Annie Copeland. The cops in particular could not help but fear the worst, that “Candy,” as she was known to friends and relatives, was no longer breathing, that her body was in some shallow grave in a field where she might one day, months from now, be discovered by some hunter's hound stopping to sniff at the carcass.

It had happened so often before, and Stowell had seen it firsthand in Fremont. There in the northern tier of the state, where Stowell had been a county deputy, several young women had been kidnapped, raped and mutilated by a pair of madmen who had kept their decapitated heads jammed into paint cans, using the dead orifices for sex acts too unspeakable to think of even now.

This old cabin had the same nasty feel to it, Stowell thought. He braced himself for what the odor and the shadow meant. Lumley had instinctively drawn his weapon, the long barrel of the. 45 Remington almost jabbing into Stowell who was first through the threshold. Stowell felt as if he'd been hit by a powerful force when it came clear that the shadow against the wall was cast by a strangely peaceful, dangling body-hair, head and torso turned upside down, at the center of this small place. His throat went dry as his eyes registered bits and pieces of this collage of terror; so many fragmented parts: an arm lying on the floor directly below, one breast cut away and missing, either hidden in a dark corner or taken off by the madman.

It was unbearable, far too much for the eyes to accept or the mind to register all at once. Stowell's insides heaved and his head reeled, a fluttering, birdlike dizziness threatening to overtake him. Both he and Lumley had fully seen and had fully inhaled the death-filled room, swallowing it whole.

The disfigured face was still Candy Copeland's. There were terrible gashes to the limbs and sex organs. Dismemberment.

Stowell rushed out past a frozen Lumley who was stupidly pointing his big gun at the body. Outside, Stowell fought to keep down the bile and Red Devil tobacco he'd chewed on all evening long. Lumley ran out after him like a kid left in a haunted house, now taking great gasps of air as if to purge his lungs of the odor lingering inside him.

A few minutes later, Stowell returned to stand before the body, his flashlight playing over the awful slash that had nearly severed the head. There was a lot of blood caked around this wound, but strangely, there was no blood on the floor. At first, Stowell thought it was the darkness concealing the purple blood that had soaked into the ancient boards. But when he got down on his knees and examined it closely with the light, he saw that the only thing disturbed about the floor boards was the layer of dirt which the killer, Lumley and he had tracked over. He cursed the fact that they had already compromised the crime scene, but it was the incredible lack of blood around the body that struck him as extremely important and startling. It reminded him of something he had read several weeks before, something in his True Crime magazine, the Police Gazette, or was it one of those FBI bulletins he had been rummaging through? It had been an alert put out by some guy with the FBI, a big shot with one of their psychological profiling teams, a guy named Button or Buntline or Boutine. Yeah, that was it-Boutine.

The FBI had been interested in hearing from any sector in the country, but particularly the midwest, about any mutilation murder that, oddly enough, left very little in the way of blood evidence. That's what the floor beneath the dangling body made Sheriff Stowell think about now, and he was almost grateful, as it gave him something to focus on other than the horrid wounds, the decay and the waste before him.

Lumley remained at the door, only his right foot sticking through. “Want I should radio the others now, Calvin? Let 'em know?”

Lumley's voice was hollow, but Calvin Stowell was glad to hear the words just the same. “Yeah, tell 'em we've found her… search is over.”

Lumley had holstered his gun and was now snatching at the barking police radio dangling from his belt. It had been the only sound disturbing the absolute quiet here.

“ Tell Melvin to get Chief Wright out here. It's his case.”

“ But we're pretty far out from Wekosha, Sheriff, and it's still in our jurisdiction, and-”

“ Just get him here!” Stowell flashed his light at the other man as he shouted, creating a black silhouette of his big deputy there in the doorway.

“ If you say so, sir.”

“ And get a message patched through to Marge to alert the FBI.”

“ FBI?”

“ You got plugs in your ears, son?”

“ No, sir, but FBI? We can nail this creep! You know it's got to be her pimp boyfriend, Scarborough.”

“ We don't know a fucking thing, Lumley. Now, do as I asked.”

Lumley frowned, stepped out of the doorway and sauntered into the scrub out front from where he made the calls. Stowell turned his big, sad eyes once again to the dark form hanging beside him and said in a tender voice, “Nobody can ever hurt you again, Candy. And we found you… we found you.”