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  Killer Instinct

  ( Jessica Coran - 1 )

  Robert W. Walker

  Robert W. Walker

  Killer Instinct

  ONE

  Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.

  — BLAISE PASCAL Les Provinciales (1656-57)

  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.”

  A sudden gunshot outside sent Stowell racing for the door, his own gun leaping into his hand, his keen eyes scanning for the danger. All he saw was Junior Lumley standing in the clearing
, his weapon pointed, saying shakily, “Something moved, Sheriff, in the bushes.”

  Stowell marched to where Lumley's bullet had found a stray animal, now whimpering and in much pain. The cry was not that of a dog, the keening taking on a wild, banshee screech suddenly before there was silence again.

  “ Careful, Sheriff… careful,” Lumley cautioned from behind.

  Stowell, flashlight in hand, kicked out at the dead opossum, its razorlike teeth clearly visible where the gums were bared in a grimace of frozen pain. Stowell gnashed his teeth together, trying to control his anger. He turned on Lumley and said firmly, “You holster that damned weapon and keep it there, Junior.”

  “ But Sheriff-”

  “ Just get back to the goddamned squad car so you can direct traffic here.”

  “ You gonna stay with the body?”

  “ Go, Junior, go!”

  “ I'm goin', Calvin, I'm goin'!”

  Stowell called after him as Lumley disappeared down the logging trail. “And when the others get here, you call me Sheriff, Junior! Sheriff!” Sometimes Calvin Stowell wanted to strangle his sister's kid.

  He looked back down at the dead opossum and the pool of blood in the dirt which made a stark contrast to the bloodless floor below the Copeland girl's body. It made him wonder if she had been killed elsewhere and merely brought here later. But then, why hang her by her heels and leave her body in plain view to anyone who might pass? And if she were hatcheted elsewhere, where was that location? No doubt it would be covered in blood. But the FBI bulletins had hinted at a killer who, for whatever screwed up, ritualistic or vampiristic purposes took the blood away with him.

  Several hours later

  The sight of the corpse in its unnatural, upside-down position, dangling at the center of the crime scene, made Jessica Coran shiver uncontrollably. For a moment, as the ice in her veins tried to thaw, she became angry with Otto Boutine. He hadn't told her it would be so chilling. He hadn't prepared her for the ugly extent of the brutality played out on the corpse. But then, it may've been useless to try; perhaps no one could adequately prepare another person to stand here and focus on so diabolical a sight.

  But focus she must. It was her job. It was what she had come halfway across the continent for.

  “ You okay, Jessica?” asked Boutine in her ear.

  Others in the room seemed focused on her, curiously wondering how she was going to react to something they considered unfit for feminine eyes.

  “ I'm… I'm fine, Otto,” she said, consciously working at steeling herself in the face of such horror while secretly a voice was shouting inside her head: Run! Run, girl! Maybe she wasn't ready for such responsibility; maybe she didn't deserve Otto's confidence. But a second voice deep within, sounding very like her deceased father's, said calmly, Stand your ground, Jess.

  She faltered, however, when she looked again at the dismembered arm, lying almost perfectly below the maimed shoulder where it had come from. The sight of the mangled breasts and vagina hit her like a body blow. She went to the wall where thick, solid cedar logs lined the cabin. She tried to take some comfort in the feel of the naked cedar, smooth and hard and clean.

  Otto tentatively placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered, “I think maybe you'd better step out and come back in again, Jess. Come on, I'll do the same.”

  “ Just give me a minute, okay?”

  Otto nodded and brushed back a lock of his long, pepper-and-salt hair. “Sure… sure…”

  She was glad when he looked away, so that he didn't see the next wave of disorientation rush over her, her balance shifting inside her temples like an amusement park ride. Some windows and the doors had been thrown open, but the odor of the relatively fresh corpse in the room clung to the place like a heavy blanket of fog. Decay was easier to take after the first few days of decomposition, but the initial onset, like the carcass of a deer hanging on a tree outside a hunting lodge, filled the brain with primordial stirrings about blood and death. Not even the light from the police generator could dissipate the dark horror of what had occurred here.

  But it was the very freshness of the kill that had caught Otto's attention and had gotten her on a jet for Wekosha, Wisconsin, along with the best psychological profile man in the country. It was the possibility that here they had a crime scene that hadn't been completely destroyed by decay or time or the stupidity of some local authority ill-equipped to deal with sex-mutilation cases of a possible serial nature. This one was fresh enough to give Jessica and Otto hope that they might be able to actually do something about it.

  Otto had some notion that this death in little Wekosha had some similarities to previous cases throughout the Midwest, cases that others had long since filed away, but which continued to disturb Boutine's sleep. All murders for which the FBI had very few clues.

  Her job here was to provide a medico-legal re-creation of the crime, a kind of “negative” of evil that had passed this way. From this a clear print of the killer might or might not be formed.

  The cabin walls, the floor, the ceiling, the objects in the room, were in silent collaboration, holding secrets which she alone might translate to the world. She must pry the unseen, microscopic evidence from the larger shocking picture before them.

  It was by no means the first tortured body she had ever witnessed, but somehow here, in the field, it was different. The corpse didn't arrive in a brightly lit forensics laboratory, in a neatly zipped plastic bag, and there were no water hoses or stainless-steel surgical slabs. Instead, there was a mangled body dangling from a rope by its heels, its clothing ripped and strewn about, its hair gnarled macrame, its bloodless limbs mannequinlike.

  It's different when you know you're dying… when you die badly… when your suffering is prolonged…

  She finally brought her eyes up from where they had been hiding, to look again at the body. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to be strong. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew that the victim had died slowly, fully aware of her hideous fate.

  Just knowing your own death is at hand…

  Cramped quarters. No other women in the room other than she and the corpse, lightly swaying because someone had touched or bumped it.

  Whispers, garbled talk, ancient odors, dark cave… an awful way to die.

  Amid the noise and movement of local and state lawmen, here in Wekosha, Wisconsin, Dr. Jessica Coran, medical examiner, fresh from the Quantico, Virginia, FBI laboratories, wanted to shout the dramatic order for everyone to clear the room, to take charge of the investigation, like in the movies. However, she knew this would serve little effect beyond alienating the locals, and since now that the crime scene had already been compromised, she swallowed hard and simply said, “I'll need everyone's cooperation here. Can I count on it, Otto?”

  “ You've got it, Dr. Coran,” Boutine said with more than enough flare for the both of them. His booming voice made the others start. Chief of Division IV, Psychological Profiling of Mutilation Murderers, FBI, Otto Boutine was a hefty man with a deceptive and perpetual cat's grin. He possessed the most penetrating gray eyes that fired like steel at the heart whenever he commanded others. He poked at the door with a shiny Cross pen that he'd been nervously twirling since their arrival here. “Everyone please clear the area so Dr. Coran can work. If and when she needs assistance, she will ask.”

  The others began to file out with a few grunts, some of which were an octave higher than necessary. As they drifted out onto the rickety front porch, she said to Otto, “Just don't leave me completely alone, okay?”

  He realized from the plea in her eyes that her request was more than a concern for procedure, that a witness be at her side at all times; the request was also quite personal.

  “ So what's your initial impression?”'he asked awkwardly.

  “ Too soon to tell much beyond the fact the local medicine man is pissed.”

  “ Yeah, I got that impression, too. Wants first call, I suppose.”

  “ Anyone can
declare her dead. No, he just wants to dress the body for burial, spare the relatives any further grief. Least, that's what he said outside.”

  “ So where do we begin, now that it's ours?”

  “ The light in here stinks,” she said.

  “ Got that right, but it's the best we can do with field generators.”

  “ Have those guys bring up their squad cars, come through the windows and the door with their headlights. Dammit, where're those guys from Milwaukee with what we need?”

  “ On their way, or they better be.”

  She went to her black valise and began laying out the tools of her trade: slides, capsule bottles, plastic bags, labels, forceps, specialty scalpels and syringes. She took off her long beige overcoat and donned her apron, gloves and mask. From the inside pocket of the overcoat she pulled forth a scalpel in a case that she flipped open. Otto stared, wondering about the scalpel. She saw the curiosity in his eyes.

  “ It was my father's. I guess it's kinda superstitious, but it helps me get through times like this.”

  “ Sure, sure,” he said.

  They approached the body once again and Otto asked,' it is definite, from what I see.”

  “ What's definite?”

  “ We got ourselves a torture victim at the ninth level.”

  “ A Tort 9,” she said shakily.

  “ Next to no blood evidence, other than around the wounds.”

  “ You've seen a few of these. I haven't. Give me time to work, okay?”

  “ But Jess, it's obvious, isn't it?”

  “ Nothing's ever obvious to me. I didn't build a reputation on reporting on the obvious. Now, let me work. It will take some time.”

  It had been her considerable reputation upon which Boutine had counted on. He had climbed out on a shaky limb here, a limb which could send them both tumbling should it snap. Both their careers could go down with it. But it was Boutine's bid, and so she hadn't questioned it when he had come into her lab several weeks before asking her a hundred and one questions that had begun with how many pints of blood were there in the human body and ending with how would those pints be most efficiently emptied. Meanwhile, Jessica had heard rumblings about disagreeable scenes between Boutine and his boss, Chief William Leamy, something to do with manpower, monies and time. So he had “recruited” her in an effort to enlarge his investigative powers at headquarters and to build onto his team, adding a forensics expert to his psychological profiling team. It was a maneuver, and not quite yet a fait accompli. She had chosen to leave such jockeying for position and strength to Otto, and to concentrate on her own chess game, which was with the killer. This game began here and now.