Killer Instinct Read online

  “We've alerted every law enforcement agency in the country to be on the lookout for anything smacking of a Tort “You seem to have gotten off the mark on this rather slowly. Otto,” said Leamy. “Why?”

  “My people have been on it from the beginning, but we've been looking in the wrong place, in the wrong way. Now, with Dr. Coran—”

  “How so, the wrong way?”

  Otto sighed deeply. “The killings had all the earmarks of satanic ritual, and what with all that's been going on in the papers and the news lately... well, like Jess says, this guy is shrewd. So—”

  “So he has the FBI, with all its manpower and equipment and communications network, wasting valuable time and personnel on running down leads to every local satanic cult in the midsection of the country. I get the picture.”

  “Until now, we haven't had any information pointing to one perpetrator. We knew they were taking the blood, but we had made up our collective minds that it was the work of a pack of satan worshippers. One reason is the fact we already knew that one man could not drink the blood of a full-grown person at one sitting, and these were strike-and-run slayings.”

  “And you're convinced now that Dr. Coran is on the right track?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And you. Dr. Coran... you wish to dig up some mottled old corpses from grave sites here, and here, and here,” he said, pointing consecutively at Missouri, Illinois and Iowa.”

  “That is correct, sir, and it would help greatly if you could get the court orders on each.”

  “Now you want me to do your paperwork for you?”

  “You have great influence, sir,” she replied. He frowned. “I'll see what I can do. Have the details to me before five.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you for coming, Chief,” said Otto as Leamy rushed away.

  When the door closed on them, she hugged Otto and shouted, “We did it. We've got him on our side. Isn't that why you asked him to the meeting, really?”

  He held onto her, enjoying the touch of the woman, savoring the moment. “You know, you're too smart for your own good. I ought to have the right to some secrets.”

  Her laughter filled the room and amid it both of them heard J.T.'s intentional noise with the projector. He was still puttering about with the slides. He had been in the projection room the entire time.

  Otto instantly let her go, and she lightly blushed and quickly asked J.T. to get the details of time and place on the earlier deaths to Leamy's office.

  J.T. said, “Sure, soon as I put these irreplaceable slides into the safe. See you both later. Chief Boutine, Dr. Coran.”

  There was an awkward moment between them now. Otto reached out a hesitant finger toward her cheek and said, “I'm sorry if I embarrassed you with J.T. It was—”

  “No, no need to apologize... really.”

  “I'm sure he got the wrong idea.”

  “He has... well, an active imagination. It's what makes him a good lab man.”

  “Maybe it's more than imagination,” said Otto, staring deeply into her eyes.

  “Yes, perhaps...”

  She thought he was going to take her in his arms and kiss her, but instead, he reached past her for the door, snatched it open and turned out the lights, rushing out ahead of her as if he were suddenly afraid of her. She stood in the hallway a moment wondering about her success with the P.P. team, and wondering if she had not inadvertently upset Otto, and wondering about the sudden emotions that they had shared like juggling burning knives, too hot and sharp to handle. She wondered how much J.T. had heard and seen; she wondered if J.T. had felt anything in the room. She certainly had.

  Otto was vulnerable; his wife an invalid, in a coma at Bethesda. Jessica had no right to him, she told herself, and he truly had no interest in her in that direction. It was just the elation of the moment, the hours upon hours of working together. That was all, and that was all that J.T. needed to know.

  NINE

  When alone, he went by the name he called himself when he took their blood: Teach. He often thought of himself as a teacher. Certainly, every day he taught. It was part of the job he held, to instruct. And when he killed, he taught unforgettable lessons, after all. Teach... he liked that. When he bathed, sometimes Teach used blood instead of water.

  He was well read, and he had taught himself all there was to know about blood, and not just what modern medicine had to say about the substance, but what the ancients used it for, how they used it and why.

  He'd read widely about the curative powers of blood, how it was a skin softener, how it restored hair. So, he lay back now in his blood-filled tub, heated by the tap water that helped to fill it. He had used up almost all of his supply, but the idea of the bath was too exciting to pass up. And it didn't fail him. He lay back, imagining the power it sent through his pores, imagining that he was inside his victim in a sense, here lying amid her, and she going through his pores, that she was her blood and her blood was her, and that it all belonged to him and him alone. Remarkable feelings rummaged about his being and his psyche, feelings of warmth and a heady feeling of belonging. He had never truly belonged anywhere... but here, with himself and his victim, like a circle without beginning, without end...

  Thought was suspended, his mind arrested by the feel of her blood, the smell of it, the taste of it, for he had kept some pure, and it filled a Pepsi bottle at his side. Languid in the liquid.

  He had read of great rulers like Vlad the Impaler and Genghis Khan who bathed in the blood of the people they enslaved. He supposed that he was as close to such greatness as he would ever get. The emotional impact was enough to bring a tear to his eye. He wanted no ordinary bath, and no ordinary life.

  Virgin blood was hard to come by, but according to the books, it had the most curative powers. It was used as a healing agent in the diseases like leprosy and syphilis. The afflicted parts and organs had to be washed in it, and this application of blood to the skin caused it to glow with supernatural beauty. He had read of how the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory in the early 1600s had murdered over six hundred girls to have them drained of their blood so that she might bathe nightly in blood and thereby remain forever beautiful and healthy. She, too, preferred virgins.

  “Of course, there were a lot more of them in those days,” he said, chuckling and splashing.

  Blood was, after all, the source of life, he reasoned. His medical knowledge told him it was the source of two life-sustaining liquids: milk, which was blood filtered through the breasts; and semen, blood filtered through the testes.

  Blood had great magnetic power, and it fascinated him. Gods and demons alike were attracted to the smell of it, just as Teach was attracted by it, especially shed blood... the blood of those violently slain. It was not killing and murder itself that attracted him, but the shedding of blood. The ancients who sacrificed blood to the gods were foolishly wasteful. He was not.

  He had scoured occult literature for every word written on blood, and he had found that some occultists believed as he did, that the vital essence of life was actually an invisible and intangible vapor, and the medium for that vapor was blood. As far as he was concerned, modern medicine was full of shit. It was not the heart that caused the blood to flow, but the spirit within the blood. It connected the material and the spiritual spheres like a cosmic, astral tissue. The Bible said it best, Teach thought: The life of the flesh is in the blood.

  “Leviticus 17:11,” he said with a sigh as he dipped into the blood with his cupped hands and poured it over his head, laughing.

  The phone rang. He cursed it, let it ring. No doubt the office. Bastards. Hardly back from being on the road for them, and they can't give him a few hours peace and solitude.

  “I am the blood and the life,” he said.

  The answering machine clicked on and he lay back to the sound of his own voice. Then came his boss's grating voice like a serrated knife over his brain.

  “We've got orders to fill down here!”
shouted his boss. “Where the hell've you been? Time is money, mister! Want to see your ass at HQ by three!”

  Christ, he thought, if he had to go in in the middle of the day, he'd have to cover up, wear the wide-brimmed hat, the dark glasses. Light hurt him. Light hurt him like it hurt a fucking vampire. It all had to do with his disorder, a disorder he had kept hidden from everyone. But should he get too much sun...

  He prayed for a cloud cover, prayed for rain. He had used up every excuse. He'd have to turn on the shower and rinse down and get out of the tub. He hated wasting the blood, so he decided to keep the plug in and reheat it when he returned, after seeing Mr. Sarafian about the goddamned orders.

  # # #

  “Why can't we get the body shipped here? If we could do the work here—”

  “The best we can do, Jess! Truth is we were lucky to get this much.”

  She stood in the middle of Boutine's office, pacing. “Weren't there others you were suspicious of?”

  “One we can't even locate. Nobody seems to know where she was buried.”

  “And the other?”

  “They won't let the body out of town, much less the state. Families can be very—”

  “Stupid—”

  “No, Jess, not stupid.” His voice slurred. “Thing is, I understand exactly why they feel the way they do.”

  She realized he was referring to his wife. She sat down across from him and said, “I'm sorry... just so frustrating. If we can do some good here, stop this maniac... Whatever it takes, we have to do it. You know what kind of conditions we're likely to find in these rural places. It'll be like Wekosha all over again.”

  “You found the evidence of the tube in Wekosha, Jess. You can do it again.”

  “With a decomposed body? In an unsafe and poorly arranged lab?”

  “You can do it.”

  She thought of the waste of room C upstairs. “All right, what about the second one? Which one do I go see first?”

  “Afraid there's another problem there.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “The order is for the same time period. Someone else'11 have to go to the second location.”

  She dropped her tired head forward, her long hair burying her face, all in a gesture of desperation. He came around to her and sat on the edge of his desk, as if simply wishing to get closer. “I figure J.T. is the best choice for the Illinois site. What do you think?”

  “We're running multiple tests on the Copeland samples, the semen, the DNA.”

  “You've got capable lab people for that.”

  “All right, all right.” She looked into his eyes, saw a glimmer of the earlier, dagger like stare before he broke away for the window to glance over the field outside. She got up and went to him “Otto. “Yes?”

  “Something... I think we ought to talk about what happened earlier today.”

  “Nothing to talk about. I'll see you when you get back; army transport's the best I can do for you this time, Jess.”

  “That'll be fine.”

  “Leaves in two hours. I'll call Iowa City, have the papers waiting for you. Return trip'll have to be Greyhound if you can't work something out with the guys at the military base.”

  “I'll get home, don't worry. You'll do the same for J.T. so he can get to Illinois?”

  “Consider it done. You really came through for me, Jess. So now you get yourself packed.”

  “I've felt on standby since Wekosha, expecting a call at any time, so I am pretty well packed already.”

  “Good.”

  “I'll just see that my people in the lab know what to do, and I thought I'd get some range time in before I left.”

  He nodded. “Behind on mine, too.”

  “Join me there?”

  “I'd like to but...” He lifted a stack of files and papers and let them plop on the desk before him.

  She wondered if his reasons were more complicated than the work load, but she said nothing, nodding. “I'll see you then when I get back.”

  “Sorry that I won't be able to see you off.”

  “Well, that can't be helped, I'm sure, and I am a big girl.”

  He laughed lightly at this. “You've certainly impressed my team and Leamy, Jess. We've made some great strides in reinstating the importance of physical evidence in psychological profiling techniques. Thanks mainly to you.”

  She bit her lower lip, forming a pout. “I understand why you can't see me off, Otto.”

  He stopped the shuffling of papers and looked deeply into her eyes. “I'm very glad that you do understand.” She closed the door to his office, understanding completely. He was feeling guilty, and he was worried about what J.T. had seen, or thought he had seen. He was worried about keeping up appearances, she decided.

  As she stood there, hesitating, she realized that Otto's secretary was staring at her.

  # # #

  Every FBI person working as a field agent was required to log in a minimum of three hours a week at the shooting range. Unlike most people in the labs, Jessica Coran liked the firing range and enjoyed the feel of a gun in her hand, and the power it unleashed and the frustrations it exploded. For her, the shooting range was a place of catharsis, clearing her head, relaxing in its simplicity, representing as it did the ultimate solution to a problem. Even if the solution was symbolic instead of real—the target paper instead of the Wekosha fiend who had tortured Annie “Candy” Copeland—the act of imagining it so, helped her soul in the way a hot shower or a walk in the park might for someone else.

  For the period of time that she concentrated on the target, putting .38 shots into the head of the black silhouette of the monster that had killed the Copeland girl, and possibly Melanie Trent in Illinois and Janel McDonell in Iowa, she felt the same kind of rush she got when closing a case. That feeling of putting an end to it was only temporary here on the firing range, but it was better than the scattered pieces that, so far, represented such a maze that no end seemed in sight.

  She emptied her gun in rapid-fire succession, and after the deafening echo died down, she heard Jim Bledsoe's voice coming through her protective earphones. “Hey, hey, Dr. Coran! You're about the best shooter we got going through here these days. You going to make the contest on Saturday?”

  Bledsoe was speaking from his soundproof office, a small cubicle some thirty yards away. She pressed a call button on the wall and replied, “Doubt I can make it, Jim. Things have gotten pretty heavy for me, just lately.”

  “Yeah, so I've heard.”

  She was an excellent shot, with the accompanying confidence that assured her of placing every bullet where she wanted it. She had learned to shoot as a child from her father, who had also taught her everything he knew about firearms. When she banged the switch that sent her target flying toward her, she saw that every shot had gone into the head of the silhouette, but that not all her shots could be accounted for, because several had passed through the same hole. Bledsoe's binoculars told him the same story, and his close inspection of the target would confirm this.

  Her watch told her she hadn't any more time if she planned to shower and catch that transport. She had told J.T. to report to the airstrip also, that he was going to southern Illinois after the throat of Melanie Trent. She had given detailed instructions to her staff regarding the remaining Copeland evidence and the tests to run. She had expressly asked Dr. Stephen Robertson, a specialist in blood and semen analysis, to determine if the specimens displayed any disorders.

  She holstered her weapon, ripped down her final target and grabbed her lab duster off the hook and made her way to the range master's office, where she turned in her target. Jim Bledsoe knew her well, and he both admired and liked her.

  “Another perfect shoot, Dr. Coran. You're wasted in a laboratory. Chicago or New York could use you.” He laughed lightly. “I'd like to get back into the field myself, but my leg... what happened in Akron...”

  She'd heard the story many times before from Jim and did not have time to listen to it ag
ain. He had been wounded during a manhunt. Bledsoe was a big man, and even wounded, he had brought down his man, and for this act of bravery he was decorated. Now Big Jim Bledsoe logged time and targets for younger men and women on a shooting range.

  He was an athletic-looking forty-six with the features of a golf pro. He kept himself in excellent health and shape, waiting for the day he would get a reassignment.

  “Jim, you're just a big flatterer.”

  “I hear you're doing fieldwork these days, though! What gives? How'd you swing it, the Wekosha gig? Heard it was a bloody mess.”

  Far from bloody, she thought. “It was pretty awful, Jim.”

  “Heard you went as Boutine's protégé?”

  She now blushed and felt the redness in her face, realizing the implication in Bledsoe's words, that she had gotten the fieldwork by sleeping with Boutine. “I earned it, Bledsoe, pure and simple.”

  “Hell, I know that. Dr. Coran. I didn't mean anything by... by...”

  She said, “Log my time and targets, will you, Jim? And just so the rumor mill has something to grind, I've gotten another field assignment in Iowa. Going tonight—solo!”

  “That's great. Dr. Coran. I always said you were wasted, like me, here, doing this!” He gestured to the small wooden office where he worked, overseeing the range.

  “I know you mean that, Jim.” She calmed. “Thanks.”

  “I do... I always say you're wasted in the lab.”

  She imagined what Jim meant to say, a pretty woman like her was wasted locked away in a lab.

  “Thanks, Jim. And you might tell anyone who's even remotely interested that—”she paused—”that I'll be traveling alone.”

  “None of my business, Dr. Coran.”

  “Just... just log these in.” She pushed the targets at him once more. As she walked off, she wondered if maybe Otto was right. Maybe Iowa City was the best place for her to be for now. Maybe there was more talk going about than she had realized.