Killer Instinct Page 15

  He turned up the volume as loud as it would go and returned to his red bath. Nude, he slid into the reheated blood bath. He had had to use more jars. His supply was getting dangerously low, and he believed in the domestic truth: one off the shelf, replace it yourself

  In the warm crimson bath now, he resumed where he left off before they'd called him into the office that morning. He'd have to be on the road the following day early, but tonight, he had all evening to enjoy himself with Renee.

  Listening to classical music and reading his favorite passage from the Bible, he heard his cat mew. The cat, a big, black torn, was left often to fend for itself, put on the street whenever he was gone. But Snuffy—so named for a chronic congestive disorder—always returned. He liked the smell of blood, too, and whenever he could get it, he'd lap it up.

  “The vital essence of a living thing... the life of the flesh is in the blood,” he read aloud to Snuffy. The cat came near enough for his extended hand to pet. But it wasn't interested in a caress, turning back on his hand and licking frantically at the bloody moisture there.

  The cat knew. It somehow knew what he knew and what the Bible said was true, that the way to health, to a cure, to longer life—quality time—was through the intake of blood, orally, through the pores, any way you could get it. He rubbed the blood into the animal's thick, black coat violently and it came back for more. This made him laugh and say, “You like it, don't you... don't you, boy?”

  After an hour's languishing in the heated bath, he pulled the plug, rinsed off under the shower head, toweled himself down and went into the next room, and down the corridor of the old house he had inherited from his father when his mother died. For sixteen years he had seen to the needs of his ailing parents, and he had watched them both wither and die, and it had both sickened and terrified him. At the end of the corridor, he went into what was once his grandfather's study, which was now his study. The old man had been a general practitioner in the days when doctors worked out of their homes, and beside his den there was a small examining room. He had wanted him to be a doctor as well, and he tried to be what he wanted to be, but it just was not to be. There were too many people in the world set against him: his teachers for one, his superiors, the doctors who made the decisions in medical school, the ones who created hurdles for him to jump over, and then there were his parents. Their illnesses had come on like a fire but then lingered for years, sapping the family of finances just as it sapped him of any compassion he might have otherwise felt for his essentially weak father and dominating mother.

  So he had turned to teaching, because those who can, do; and those who can't, teach. But he learned quickly that teaching itself was yet another science—an art really—like being an actor, and only the best actors with great inward confidence and the best scripts survived teaching. His too soft approach, his too gentle demeanor and his essentially introverted nature and lack of confidence, along with the fact he had never acted, never scripted anything in his life, had failed him in this as it had failed him in medicine.

  Finally, three years ago, he had turned to the want ads in the Chicago Tribune and in the Sun Times, and he searched for any jobs having to do with medicine that he might qualify for. He went through a series of such jobs before becoming a salesman for a Chicago firm specializing in medical supplies, from new pills to new forceps. The only sort of supplies they didn't supply was linens.

  Into the den he carried with him his large Bible, but he now placed it aside, and below the student lamp on the oak desk, he picked up the Old World pen from the inkwell before him and now he dabbed off the feather quill in the inkwell and watched the blood drip from its end.

  He had a letter to write, a response to the misrepresentations of the news coming out of Wekosha, Wisconsin, that he was some sort of vampire. He was far more than any fictional nightmare. He was quite real, and his purpose should not be confused with cinematic nonsense or lurid novels.

  Using the blood of Candy, mixed with an anticoagulating agent in the inkwell, he wrote out his first line which he intended to send to a woman named Coran at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. He had already used an ordinary red Bic pen for the envelope, finding the address easily enough in the Registry of Law Enforcement Agencies at the library. He had read the feeble accounts of the so-called slash-and-drink vampire killer of Wekosha, now making the rounds of the various papers from USA Today to the Enquirer. None of them had the story right. He felt relatively secure about keeping his identity and his home safe from all the people who would enjoy getting at his throat with a scalpel.

  Although careful to print, Teach wrote with a flourishing hand where once he had written with a pinched and tiny hand the words he so wanted to convey to Dr. Jessica Coran. She proposed to corner him, to bring him to what they called justice. We will see, he thought as he wrote:

  Dear Dr. Coran,

  Read Leviticus and you will understand me. I am far from a vampire, and do not consider myself one.

  Candy was sweet; that is, her blood was sweet, but I am once more reduced in my supply. As you see from this note, I use blood for every little thing. Perhaps someday I will be fortunate enough to have some of your blood? Please, don't let the newspapers disparage me again. Put your mind at ease. My thirst is, from time to time, quenched. So I will not take any more than my needs dictate. I am fundamentally an environmentally conscious person, and do not squander blood. You know this from your own experience, do you not? So rest assured.

  Perhaps someday we can meet, and perhaps you will give me some of your blood? I believe women have much more character than men, don't you? At any rate, you can never hope to catch me before I catch you.

  Sincerely,

  Teach, the one you seek.

  The fools hadn't a single shred of evidence to link him to the deaths. They hadn't even placed Candy Copeland in the hospital where he had first met her in the cafeteria, sipping on a big milkshake. He had seen her in the hospital before on his trips, usually doing the scut work of mopping floors and taking out bedpans, but recently she'd been given more responsibility and she hadn't been able to cope with it. So her days were numbered, and she talked of having to go back on the streets, back to a pimp who kept her. She'd been feeling sorry for herself, and he saw his chance and he took it. He offered her some relief from her sorrows, pointing out some of the types of drugs he peddled for his company. She wanted relief from her life, her pain, and ultimately she felt no pain.

  She had liked the candy cane uniform. She had liked being known as a candy striper. She took on the name “Candy” as a result, casting off “Annie.”

  Now that he'd finished his letter, Snuffy, who had followed him into the den and had so calmly sat over his feet for the duration of the letter, suddenly snuggled against his leg. The torn then leapt up onto the desktop in a blink and was going for the inkwell and the feather pen and the smell of blood.

  He dabbed a bit on his finger and fed it to the cat. “Reach out and touch someone, heh, kitty?” he asked.

  FIFTEEN

  Otto's FBI profiling team had paid microscopic attention to the autopsy reports, to maps and photographs of the various crime scenes. They had paid particular heed to how the victim was treated. A killer who takes the trouble to cover the body afterward speaks one thing, a killer who hides the body is saying something different, and a killer who displays the body like a trophy, quite another.

  Byrnes said, “Our guy feels no remorse about his victims.”

  “But he does feel something,” countered O'Rourke. “He sees them as furthering his goal; and in this sense, he cares about them.”

  “But not enough to cut them down, cover them over,” said Schultz.

  “All he's interested in is the blood. The body may's well be an empty can, a receptacle from which he has taken what they willingly gave him.”

  “Whoa,” Jessica stepped in. “They didn't die willingly.”

  “Through no fault of their own, no. But in the killer's mind,
they asked for what they got. They wanted to share in his grand design, the design to give him power over them and others.”

  “That's a stretch,” said Byrnes.

  “Well, what we know about victims—victimology—tells us that the victim unwittingly pushes the button. Something about her appearance, either dress or physical,” said Schultz.

  “Any rate, I agree with Teresa, this guy does not feel bad about what he's done, but good, very good. Which means he's likely going to strike again.”

  “I've put out an alert to every law enforcement agency in the nation on this one,” said Otto.

  Byrnes had a master's degree in educational psychology from the University of Michigan, but O'Rourke had profiled some 450 murderers, and her degree was in psychology. “If he had moved the body,” she said, “even to a couch, he'd have shown some shred of human emotion. He didn't. Not in any of these instances. Now, Dr. Coran has shown that it is without a doubt the same man, I say we go with profile three.”

  Otto told Jessica that the team had created three profiles and that they were in the midst of narrowing it to one. “He didn't give a damn about the victims' bodies being exposed to the elements. He had no idea how soon, if ever, they'd be discovered.”

  “Another personality trait,” said O'Rourke. “He really does not care one way or the other whether the bodies are found or not. He has a lot of rage in him, and a lot of contempt for anyone in authority.”

  “Didn't suckle his mother's breast enough?” asked Byrnes.

  “Something like that,” O'Rourke said, refusing to show any emotional response to Byrnes.

  “So you don't think he stuck around for the funerals?” asked Otto.

  “No way,” said O'Rourke.

  Schultz agreed. “He'd only have contempt for such customs.”

  “He'd have no desire to see them decently buried,” said Teresa O'Rourke. “It would be like burying one of the canisters he used to carry off the girl's blood in. She was an object to him, an object to be emptied.”

  “It's the post-offensive behavior of the killer that interests me,” said Schultz, lifting profile number three. “And this fits with profile three. What he did to her after she was dead, and now with this paintbrush business, Christ, it fits. The guy is a stalker.”

  “He brings along his own weapons,” added O'Rourke.

  There was no longer any argument about much of this, Jessica thought, because the autopsy information had proven so much.

  “So the guy was organized and cunning,” agreed Otto. “He came from a neighboring town and probably drove a van.”

  “Nothing impulsive or passionate about our vampire,” said Byrnes. “But the facial attack, that usually means the victim knew her killer. The killer, in order to perform his terrible deeds on her, puts out her eyes so that even she can't see what he is doing.”

  “Maybe they had crossed paths before. We need to check on that possibility. Prelims have shown that both Janel McDonell and the Copeland girl worked in hospitals, and the way this thing is shaping up, a hospital seems a likely setting for a first meeting. Say this guy knows a lot about trach tubes and tourniquets,” continued Schultz, whose degree was in sociology, “maybe our guy's a paramedic.”

  “Why stop at paramedic?” asked Byrnes. “Why not a doctor?”

  O'Rourke quoted known dogma about murder. “The more brutal the attack—and we are talking Tort 9 here—the closer the relationship between victim and killer.”

  “Maybe she did bring it on herself,” said Byrnes, “in a manner of speaking.”

  “If she did, she had no idea she was doing it,” countered Schultz. “The victim might be guilty and innocent at the same time.”

  “Maybe she teased his sick mind at some point and he never forgot it.”

  “The killer showed mastery of the situation,” said Otto, slowing the back-and-forth intentionally, wishing to get back to profile number three. “He killed slowly and methodically, which means he's a more sadistic personality.”

  “Which places him in the probable range of late twenties or thirties,” said O'Rourke. “And what did he do right after the murder? Did he lounge there? Enjoy himself with the body? Necrophilia? Not so, according to Dr. Coran, who has said that the sperm did not belong to our man but was placed into the orifices—sperm brought with him in a vial. His ritual, the time gone into the act of cutting her tendons, tying her and dangling her and finally draining her... the other, post-offense measures were meant to fool you and me and people like Dr. Zach.”

  There was some muffled laughter at this.

  Schultz picked up the thread from here, clearing his throat first, his hand going habitually to his throat, as if protecting his own jugular as he spoke. “Many killers take something of the victim's away with them—a bracelet, a ring, a watch, a mirror or compact—as a kind of artifact of the crime; to use later to excite themselves, to relive the experience, recreate the memory. This guy took blood!”

  O'Rourke added to this. “Certain kinds of killers also keep diaries, scrapbooks, other memorabilia of their deeds. With this guy, it's likely to be a freezer filled with blood in tidy packs or jars.”

  “Tidy,” said Jessica.

  “What?” asked Otto.

  “Oh, nothing... just that I had gotten the exact same impression of the killer when we were there, in Wekosha, that he was a fastidious man. You people are remarkable,” she said to them.

  “Trust me,” said O'Rourke, “we rely a great deal more on statistical probability than on our deep psychological insights.”

  “Ah-ahhh, Teresa,” said Byrnes with a shake of his index finger, “we're not to give away trade secrets.”

  “Plain common sense; experience gained from sweating out hundreds of cases,” said Schultz. “With the Copeland case, for instance, since the victim was white, it's a good, educated guess that her killer, too, is white. But then you connected Janel McDonell to the killer, and she was black. Most black women are killed by blacks, and whites by whites,” said Byrnes.

  “This is especially true in the vast majority of mutilation murders,” said Otto.

  “We settled on white, because Trent was white. Two out of three,” said Schultz.

  “And the age?” Jessica asked.

  O'Rourke replied. “The kind of methodical, organized killer he is points to someone who's been around a while. He's probably fantasized about these crimes for twenty years, since puberty.”

  “The killer's conduct with regard to the victim both before and after death,” added Bymes a bit smugly, “was quite measured, quite controlled, and this would be highly unusual in an impulsive teenager or someone in his early twenties.”

  “He lives alone, or if with someone else it will be an elderly parent who is dependent upon him.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” asked Jessica, who had remained silent, completely fascinated by the work of the profiling team.

  O'Rourke half turned in her chair and crossed her shapely legs before saying, “It's virtually certain he can't carry on a lasting relationship with a woman, and if he has sustained one, it will be to a wife who is totally dominated by him, a virtual house slave. But more likely, he's a momma's boy, and is either taking care of his mother or living in her house left him when she died. This is, of course, in all probabil-ity.”

  ' 'The guy did know a lot about Wekosha. He has spent a lot of time there,” said Schultz.

  “And Iowa City, and Paris, Illinois,” added Bymes.

  “Because he knew where to take his victims. He knew how much time he had with each. “He had to be fairly familiar with his surroundings to chance this kind of killing. He's no fool, no impulsive kid on a rampage.”

  “So he lives near the crime scene for a while?” asked Jessica. “People in the area had to have had dealings with him, then.”

  “All that's certain is that he knew the area well enough that he felt he could do whatever he wanted to do without disturbance,” finished Otto. “But the distances
between these cases suggests a moving killer, someone who may be familiar to people in Wekosha, but someone who does not stay very long, a kind of recurring, cyclical person.”

  “Like a deliveryman?”

  “A trucker? Maybe a long-haul man?”

  “Or a salesman,” suggested O'Rourke.

  “Hospitals on the one hand, salesmen on the other.”

  “Salespeople frequent hospitals every day,” said Jessica.

  “By the hundreds of thousands,” said J.T.

  Otto paced. Everyone watched him. He had an uncanny ability to come up with detailed descriptions of unknown assailants on the scantiest of information. His mind seemed to be boiling over with these new suggestions. Everyone remained silent, watching him.

  Boutine began his profiling career in 1979, and at the time he taught a course in applied criminology at the FBI Academy, where students who came from all over the country brought him their cases. One story had it that when one of his former students telephoned from Oregon with a baffling case, Otto, with a handful of details about the stabbing death of a young woman, told his student he should be looking for a teenager who lived near the victim. Otto said he would be a skinny, pimply boy who spent more time with computers than people, a socially isolated individual. He said it was an impulsive act and the kid was suffering from great fear, grief and remorse, and that his guilt would give him away. “If you walk the neighborhood, knock on doors, you'll probably run into him, and when you identify yourself, just stare straight into his eyes and say, 'You know why I'm here.'“ The next day the Oregon officer called back to thank Otto and to say that he had apprehended the killer, a teenager with acne whose best friend was his Tandy 2000.

  Otto had made it clear that he wasn't interested in psychology for psychology's sake, that a treatise on mental disorders was of no use to the FBI, that his interest was not in why a killer did what he did, but how he did it, and how knowing that leads to his capture.