so cool a manner, would find planting a certain drug at the scene child's play.
The Indiana victim was a male, approximate age was placed at nineteen or twenty. Her thoughts were macabre: that the killer must have read somewhere, perhaps in a medical journal, that he could get five to ten more ml./kg. of blood from a man as from a woman.
Around her she heard the investigators and Brewer discussing the matter.
“ One sick puppy, this one.”
“ Damnedest thing I've seen in all my years.”
“ What's he do with the blood?”
“ Could just be a copycat.”
She'd know soon enough if it was a copycat killing. The straw cut to the jugular had not been in any newspaper, so if it was found in Fowler's jugular, as it had been in the Zion woman's, she knew that it was the same killer with his unique killing tool.
The men around her continued to talk and she half listened in order to keep a foot in the world of the sane as she worked in the closest of range about Fowler's throat, taking the necessary section she required for the nearest scanning electron microscope. She learned this was at the university medical complex two hours away.
Brewer was asking questions in rapid fire of the locals. “You check out all the asylums in the area?”
“ Sure, first thing.”
“ Bring in anyone?”
“ Seventeen, so far.”
“ Known what? Child molesters?”
“ Sex offenders, deviants, cross-dressers.” Again, thought Jessica, they're looking for a sex offender. They were looking in the wrong place.
“ I want you to go back to this St. Luke's and canvass the hospital, top to bottom, anyone who knew him, anyone who spoke to him yesterday, anyone who knows anything about him, even if it's just the color of his socks. Our killer picks his victims up at hospitals, we believe,” Brewer told the others.
“ Sure, sure… we'll go back over that trail.”
Brewer had obviously gotten Otto to open up about the case, giving him what he needed to proceed. She went back to her evidence gathering, roping in some of Joe's men to help her set up the imaging equipment. In a matter of ten minutes the place was lit up like a white hospital corridor. The intense light made the corpse look so placidly white that it became unreal if stared at.
The meticulous work now began in earnest.
# # #
She didn't have to go to the SEM microscope to know what her senses told her, that Fowler had died at the hands of the killer they had pursued from Wekosha to here. She wanted instead to go to this hospital where Fowler worked, St. Luke's. She asked for an escort there.
Along the way, she put everything she had learned about the killer into a mental file and she scanned that file now. What kept jumping out at her was the salesman aspect, and the medical supply company possibility. Had the killer come to St. Luke's ostensibly to sell medical wares, he would have come in a van carrying his supplies and samples, possibly a gray van, but the person most likely to tell them about this was Fowler, and he was the victim.
She and Brewer, along with other FBI agents, went over the same ground as the police had earlier, pursuing any small bit of information, annoying the hospital staff, upsetting others and being asked to leave by the administrator of the hospital. The news of Fowler's tragic and horrible fate had unnerved the entire staff, and the FBI's being there only aggravated the situation, according to the officious hospital administrator, who had insisted she and Brewer be seated in his office.
“ We want your records on suppliers coming into the hospital yesterday,” said Brewer, not allowing the man another word.
“ That would be impossible. Have you any idea how many vendors come through our doors in a given day?”
“ I don't give a damn how many.”
She jumped in. “You can narrow it to Chicago medical supply companies.”
“ That does little to help, as most of our suppliers, even those based in Indianapolis, have corporate offices in Chicago, Dr. Coran.”
“ Then give us a complete list.”
“ I don't believe there is one.”
Brewer was fuming by now. “Then give us what you goddamned have!”
“ Stamping about like a bull isn't going to get you anywhere with me, Inspector,” said the man. “We are a hospital, and we have hospital business to conduct, and such a request-”
“ Hospital business, huh? Tell me, Dr. Marchand, is it? Tell me this: Could your hospital stand an IRS audit? Could it stand an audit of credited accounts, and what about your medicine chest? Tell me, any cortisone capsules missing? Any morphine, LSD, cocaine, heroin or-”
“ All right, all right,” he replied shakily. “It may take some time, but I'll put my assistant to work on it immediately.”
Within an hour they had a computer list that was plopped on the desk before them, as thick as a telephone book.
“ You asked for them all.”?
NINETEEN
He was home safe now, his freezer restocked, his mind at ease, and his physical needs sated. He felt replenished by the swift taking of the boy's blood, but in those most private of private moments, in his killing mind and soul, he knew that it was not just the blood he needed, but the ritual itself, that it somehow linked him with a heritage he knew only in the innermost, deepest avenues of his psyche, a kind of traveling vampiric genetic predisposition to blood-thirst in its most primal form, and also a predisposition to administer suffering and torturous pain to his victims.
He had unloaded the van, moving from garage to house, placing all his instruments of death into the garage sink, where he routinely cleansed them of any bloody or clinging tissue. The least microscopic tissue match or blood match that might connect him with the victims could be his undoing. He knew this full well. He started the business of cleaning up, his least favorite part of the hunt for fresh prey, when fatigue overcame him.
For the first time in his killing career, he let the cleaning up go for the morning.
The office would be expecting him early tomorrow. Indiana had been trying and he had spent some desperate hours there. When the distraught young thing at the hospital did not come out of the emergency room alone, but in the company of a pair of cops who escorted her from the parking lot with flashing lights, he knew enough to not only slump down in his seat there in the van where he watched them, but not to follow. He knew a curse when he saw one, and his plans for this girl had been cursed from the start.
He drove around the hospital after the police lights disappeared over a mound lined with trees. He cruised about the hospital Jot like a shark surveying its waters until he saw the thin silhouette of a person draped over the front end of an I-Roc with racing stripes, the hood pointing heavenward.
His prayer was answered.
He drove up so that his window was closest to the bony, angular form in the dark, the form that held what he wanted.
“ Car trouble this time of night can be a bitch,” he said casually when he rolled down his window. When the young man stepped into the spray of the sodium-vapor light of the parking lot, he was instantly recognized, and so was the killer.
“ Mr. Matisak? Is that you, sir?”
“ Your lucky night,” he said. “What do you need? A ride?”
“ That's not necessary. I'll just go back inside and phone.”
