Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series) Page 4

  Then again, if leaving the playing card was some sort of plea and not a message, what was the killer pleading for? What did he want Alex—or the NOPD in general—to know? What significance did the queen of hearts hold for the bastard? And just how damned arcane could he remain and for how goddamned long?

  After photoing close ups on the grisly wounds—bodily sites of destruction—and the blood-spattered playing card, both familiar and unusual at once, Sincebaugh carefully lifted the killer's notice—or was it a receipt?—with tweezers. He held the drooping card up to his perplexed eyes for a silent moment, Ben looking on, frowning, no doubt wondering what was going on behind Alex's eyes.

  Alex studied the curled and soiled card front and back without touching it or wiping any of the blood away. “It's the same as the others, unique, as if tailor-made for the victim, like the others before.”

  “Embroidered playing cards. Thought I'd seen it all till now,” Ben replied.

  “Nothing like you're going to find at the corner dime store or cigar stand.”

  It was the fourth queen of hearts found in the open chest of victims in as many months. It clinched the fact that this boy was done by the same sadistic killer.

  “Damned spooky, Alex... damned spooky.”

  “Son of a bitch's got it bad for young gay men, that's for sure.”

  “He's also got four spoilt decks of cards by my calculation,” Ben dryly pointed out. “And hey, what the hell's he doing with the other fifty-one, or the hearts for that matter? That's what I'd like to know, Alex. No evidence the guy hung around long after, so he must be taking the hearts off with him. Why's he taking the hearts, Alex? And why's he cutting out their hearts to begin with? And why's he chopping off their balls and dongs and leaving these damned beer coasters behind? You think he's eatin' the hearts, Alex? You think he's some kinda fuckin' cannibal or something? You think we're going to find a Frigidaire somewhere that's been stocked with human hearts or what, Sincy?”

  “Don't go squirrelly on me, Ben. I think this guy just does queens. He's not buying the cards in decks or in coaster sets. I think he makes 'em.”

  Ben considered this for a moment, each detective aware of what the suggestion meant. The guy selects someone to kill, creates the lacy card and stalks his prey. Ben cleared his throat and said, “Squirrelly, me? What's that s'pose to mean?”

  “Means we don't sweat the whys and wherefores, remember? We go after how. How does he choose his victim? How does the victim fall into his trap? How'd they come together? How'd this kid get here? What was he doing during the last hours of his life to lead him to this dump site? Who was he with and what'd they talk about? Where'd he have his last meal and with whom? And what'd he eat and where'd he eat it?”

  “Sure, sure, I know the routine, Alex, but this... this isn't in any way your routine homicide. These mutilations ... they're... they're...”

  “Hate killings? Lust murders? You going to tell me why before you tell me how, Ben? You're already off track.”

  “But Alex, if we understood why, then maybe it'd be easier to investigate—”

  “And sleep at night?”

  “—and we could come up with a faster solution in these particular cases.”

  “You want to go after it that way? All right, then take a good look at the boy's crotch, Ben. Go ahead, take a closer look.”

  Ben shuddered even as his eyes went a second time to the area where the boy's sexual organs had been cleaved off, the discarded items lying bloody between his legs like the remains of a gutted chicken. Sincebaugh snapped another picture, this time with Ben in the foreground.

  “Something you can show your grandkids, Ben.”

  “You sick son of a bitch, Sincy. You got a real mean streak in you too.”

  “Comes of serving with you.”

  “Let's get outta here.”

  “Can't, not till Wardlaw or one of his stooges arrive.”

  “Where in hell're those guys? We called 'em an hour ago.”

  An ambulance from the NOPD morgue had arrived, but Dr. Franklin T. Wardlaw, M.E. for New Orleans, was nowhere to be seen.

  “Call the bastard again. He probably fell asleep somewhere.”

  Journalists were arriving on the scene now and were being held at bay by the uniformed officers. They wanted all the dirt, and they wanted to know what the NOPD was going to do about the Queen of Hearts killer, and they wanted to know— as always—now. Sincebaugh squarely reckoned that if the killings were ordinary slayings of gay men—without the extraordinary high profile due to the missing hearts—the press would be asleep on the case.

  For now, however, the Fourth Estate had cornered Sincebaugh's captain, Carl Landry, along with Lew Meade, the local FBI chief, who'd been dragged from their beds to come down to have a look. All for the sake of the press. What they could accomplish here was zip, save for public relations, but even saving face and saving grace were unlikely at this point with nothing whatever to go on.

  “Here comes the circus,” said Ben.

  “Where the fuck's that drunken coroner?” asked Sincebaugh.

  4

  A flinty heart within a snowy breast

  Is like base mold lock'd in a golden chest.

  —Francis Beaumont

  Quantico, Virginia

  Dr. Jessica Coran, Medical Examiner for the tactical field unit of the Psychological & Pathological Profiling sector of the Behavioral Sciences Division of the FBI, was on twenty-four-hour call to drop everything and go anywhere Chief Paul Zanek sent her at a moment's notice. For this reason, she had a ready bag packed and waiting in her closet at all times. But for the past six months, she hadn't gone anywhere, and obviously she wasn't going anywhere so long as Paul Zanek was the one making the decision.

  She had awakened after fitful sleep to her own decision, and first thing after showering and dressing in her most businesslike manner, her lab glasses on the end of her nose, she had sought out Eriq Santiva, Zanek's boss.

  She found Santiva surprisingly clear on her point of view, understanding her position, nodding throughout and finally agreeing with her. He still wanted special agents with her— to watch her back, as he said—but she argued passionately that this would only harm any chance at luring Matisak back out into the open.

  Santiva wanted Matisak badly. He'd just come on as new head of the division when Matisak had escaped.

  “Will you clear New Orleans for me?” she asked. “Will you make the whole idea palatable to Paul Zanek? If not, I'm walking out of here, resigning and going back into private practice.”

  Her threat was taken seriously along with her concerns. She liked, admired and trusted Santiva, who had a sparkling record in the Bureau. He was a lean, tall man with striking dark features.

  Santiva shook on it with her. “You'll have New Orleans. Zanek has kept me informed about their wishes, and I think they'll be happy to have you, but you're one hundred percent right about Paul. He'll need to think it's his idea. Keep leaning on him, pressuring him from where you're at, and I'll put it to him from where I sit. Between us, I think we can win Paul over.”

  She thanked Santiva and left with a sense of accomplishment, a sense that she was finally taking a step in the right direction. She followed this up with a visit to Paul Zanek's office, but there she learned that Paul was as adamant as ever about her staying close to home plate, Quantico.

  Zanek, and the others in a position to make choices for her, had stonewalled her since Oklahoma, where the trail for Mad Matthew Matisak had gone cold. Since then, she had been in a kind of “protective custody,” bodyguards surrounding her and friends like Zanek shielding her by keeping her cloaked at Quantico. Meanwhile, her life was no longer her own.

  Not a single word on Matisak since Oklahoma, no leads, not a clue. The few possibilities had turned out to be false. It was as if the lunatic had disappeared off the face of the earth, and thank God if he had gone down in the light plane he had commandeered at a small Oklahoma airport. Neither plane
nor pilot had ever been found again, no wreckage reported, nothing. If they'd run out of fuel somewhere in the southwestern desert, it was possible the monster had died a slow and torturous death, the sort he was famous for inflicting on his own victims. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord, and more power to You, she thought now.

  She had more than once reveled in the idea of Matisak's dying of slow dehydration, so fitting for a killer that craved the liquid of life, blood. If it had happened, it had not likely occurred before the fiend had fed on the blood of the unfortunate pilot.

  She now sat in the darkened projection room, thanks to a busy Paul, who'd come and gone and come back in again. She sat watching the frame-by-frame images of the so-called psychic detective, Dr. “Faith” or Desinor, as she was alternately called by Paul Zanek, whose interest in the woman seemed a bit more than professional. Jessica had pretended she knew nothing of Police Commissioner Stephens of New Orleans, or that he was at Quantico, personally requesting help with the Queen of Hearts killings. She knew now that P.C. Stephens had personally requested her, but that Zanek was doing his level best to sell the man on the psychic detective instead. It was as if Paul had a personal motive in it all, and one that went beyond protecting Jessica from herself.

  Paul stopped the camera and in the darkened room, Jessica realized that he'd brought someone else in to view the tape, a tall, older man with piercing green eyes and dyed red hair that she guessed to be Stephens.

  Stephens who'd been guided to them by the FBI in Louisiana, was thick-chested, trim at the waist, a man with thinning red hair and a superior attitude that Jessica didn't like in the least on meeting him.

  Zanek, a big man, filled the little screening room with his personality and baritone voice. He now said, “We have film on every psychic hit that Dr. Desinor has made since becoming an FBI agent. The woman is nothing short of miraculous. Isn't that right, Dr. Coran?” Paul leaned over and whispered in Jessica's ear, “Back me up on all I say.”

  He then turned to Stephens while the still shot of Dr. Desinor, larger than life, stared down on them. “I'm sending Dr. Desinor on an experimental basis, rather than Agent Coran here, Mr. Stephens, for reasons already explained to you. Nothing's changed.”

  “Dr. Desinor,” Jessica said, instantly rebelling, “the psychic we're supposed not to have on our payroll? How're you going to get around that? Come on, Paul. It looks to me like they need scientific help down there in Cajun country, not more voodoo.” Even as she said it, she was sorry. She knew that the psychic arm of the Behavioral Science Unit was from its inception Paul Zanek's innovation, and besides, she had heard only positive, glowing reports on Dr. Desinor.

  “Come off it, Jess,” Paul said. “You'd be waving a bloody flag at yourself down there. The press'd be all over the story when they got wind you were pulling into town. Matisak would be at you like a tiger on a kill.”

  “The last time you used his name, you assured me he was most likely dead! Which is it, Paul?”

  “Damnit, Jess, until we find a body...”

  “And when will that be, Paul? A year, two, three, five? I'm done living this way. I'm through hiding. Do you understand that?”

  “I've got a meeting with Santiva I have to get to. We'll discuss this later today. Say about three?”

  “All right, all right,” she seethed.

  Before Zanek retreated, he said, “There's more tapes of Dr. Desinor in action. One in particular you must see, so please, continue without me. Leonard, resume the screening,” he told an assistant, and the film began anew.

  Jessica wasn't having any of it.

  She caught Paul just outside the door. “So, what do you need me here for?”

  “To help me convince the man. Jess, we've got a chance to show the combined division chiefs, and the head of the FBI, that psychic detection makes sense here, especially on this one.”

  “On psycho weird-out cases, you mean?”

  “It's just bizarre enough, and I don't know, I just feel it. Will it hurt you to watch the film I've pulled for Stephens on Dr. Desinor?”

  Jessica had trouble focusing in on the film now, willing to take Paul Zanek's word for Desinor's feats of acumen and talent in the field of psychometric readings of objects found at the scene of a crime.

  On screen, Dr. Desinor, a handsome woman with full features, tall with a proud bearing, now held a ransom note in one hand, lightly moving her fingertips over the surface and going into a trance state. A skeptical agent from Georgia named Parlen had his back to the camera now; he'd come seeking her help in a months-old case involving a kidnapped financier. Dr. Desinor's suggestions came as a surprise, even a shock to Agent Parlen, who doubted her credibility. Jessica could read his doubt in his voice. Nonetheless, Parlen promised to look into the possibility of involvement by an illegitimate daughter and perhaps her husband or live-in boyfriend.

  Jessica's mind was filled with its own ongoing film, memories of a soul-warming Hawaii, and gentle James Parry and his touch, flooding in, only to be swamped by the ever-present fear she now lived with: that at any moment, any day now, an escaped maniac whom she had once put away would turn up at her doorstep to seek his long-awaited, carefully planned revenge.

  “It's no easy matter living with the knowledge that someone is stalking you.” Dr. Donna Lemonte, her psychiatrist, had tried to be reassuring the last time they'd spoken. “Someone who wants more than just your life. Your life's just a symbol to this guy.”

  “Don't you think I know that? This sonofabitch wants to drain me of my goddamned blood, and drink it before my dangling corpse.”

  Mad Matthew Matisak, imprisoned for life for the blood-drinking, torture deaths of countless young women and men, had made a daring and intelligent escape from the maximum security asylum that had only held him for a goddamned total of two and a half years. His escape had left a trail of dead and discarded people, like so many empty containers. And that was exactly how he thought of people—containers, buckets of blood, to leave drained in his gruesome wake. The dead included the head of security and psychiatric treatment at the federal facility in Philadelphia, Dr. Gabriel Arnold, who had never understood Matisak.

  Jessica had done countless interviews with Matisak, gaining information about where all the bodies were buried. For the past year, Dr. Arnold, head of forensic psychiatry at the facility, had worked with Matisak, and recently he'd begun to make outlandish and foolish claims about small victories scored against his number-one patient: the zookeeper pleased with his most prized possession. Arnold had claimed that the mass murderer had actually become cooperative during sessions with him, that Matisak had become talkative with him, that he had put away all demands and had finished with his “head games” and was a willing subject of study for the FBI.

  She might have guessed on hearing such reports that Matisak was playing yet another game out to its conclusion, but she'd had no idea that this time it would end in death.

  Jessica recalled now having warned Arnold of her suspicions, that Matisak was not to be trusted, ever, that the fiend cared not a whit for the suffering of the families of his victims. Arnold had only become defensive and angry, sure that she wanted to “keep Matisak breakthroughs” all to herself. Since Paul Zanek had taken over the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, Dr. Arnold had been feeling more and more put upon and isolated at the facility, which, Jessica had no doubt, had further contributed to his death.

  Now her predictions had come true tenfold, with the madman's having so completely checkmated Dr. Arnold, making mincemeat of his remains after divesting him of every ounce of blood via a dialysis machine. The madman had made a fool of Arnold, whose so-called “cumulative progress” had amounted to psycho-nonsense.

  Cunning and satanically wise, Matisak had not tried to fake an illness, but rather had induced an attack from one or several of the afflictions which wracked his body. He'd done so by not taking his medications, which he'd undoubtably been hiding either in his laundry or on his food tray, if not feeding the
stuff to the occasional mouse visiting him in the night. These were medications Matisak had been on for the past two and a half years, medications—supplied via federal funds—which not only controlled his mood swings but his physical abnormalities as well. He had a potpourri of illnesses to choose from. Faking any one of them would have ended in disaster from the start, and knowing this, he'd instead invited a true attack. A calculated risk of his own life. It had all been carefully planned and thought out. Matisak had lingered in the sick ward for almost a week, biding his time, regaining strength as his weakened condition faded. Security there was tight, but he was out of his cage, and only a short walk down the corridor freedom stood waiting. At precisely the right time of day, using an orderly's robe and badge, the so-called madman—incapable of knowing right from wrong according to some human rights activists who'd fought to keep him from the death penalty—would make the easy walk to deliverance, unafraid of his captors.

  So he had waited, and each day had brought a visit from the now-trusting Dr. Arnold, and after the physical therapy sessions, Dr. Arnold would try his uniquely asinine brand of psychotherapy on the killer.

  Matisak had cunningly chosen the precise moment of opportunity, when Arnold had filled a syringe and pumped the serum that Matisak needed into his arm. Matisak had grabbed the empty syringe and plunged it deep into Arnold's throat. This had sent the doctor staggering back as Matisak grabbed a scalpel from Arnold's lapel pocket. After a moment's macabre dance with Whalen, the security guard, Matisak had turned the scalpel on Whalen, sluicing through his thick neck in one instantaneous movement.

  After wrestling the dying security guard to the floor, Mad Matthew Matisak had easily overpowered an orderly who was new to asylum work and who, frozen in place, had waited for death to easily come.