Stadtler-”
But he was cut off by Jessica, who stepped into Dr. Stadtler's face. “And you can either cooperate or be removed from the case altogether. Either way, it's up to you.”
“ I have jurisdiction here, Doctor,” snapped Stadtler.
“ No, no, you don't. Not unless and until we are asked by the authorities who requested us in to leave,” she countered. “Now, I suggest, sir, that if you're so concerned about the family, then you go and sit with them and counsel them, sir.”
Stadtler's face was flushed and he could not find words to express his anger. Looking around for support but finding none, he marched out. They heard his car ignition and the bump and grind of the vehicle on the weedy dirt road.
Otto turned to her and said, “You're going to find that a lot of locals are threatened by us when we come in.”
“ God, I hope I didn't make things worse.”
“ No, no, you handled him by the book.”
She smiled for the first time tonight. Otto's forehead was one of his most intriguing features, being so dominant and wide at the top. His cranial size gave way to a smooth tapering jaw and firm chin, which made for a long face with a variety of expressions, all hard to read at times. He was tall, regal even; his straight-backed posture and take-charge manner never failed to impress. And now Otto's steel and ice eyes penetrated the fog of her fatigue, and for a moment she saw the pain behind those eyes, the ghost of a demon, perhaps two or three, demons that creased his face with concerns he could not voice.
“ Better get done here,” he said, drawing away from her stare as if to hide his eyes from further investigation.
“ Yeah, right.”
Boutine returned to the tight leash he'd held the other men on, ordering them back to work, telling them precisely what Dr. Coran wanted and needed, managing to irk them all in turn until silence blanketed the crowded little death hole. When this happened, Otto stepped outside for some air.
Everyone here had been touched by this victim; touched in a place no one wished to ever be touched. She realized only now just how badly Otto had been affected.
The idea that there was in this world someone who wanted to rob her of her blood, to drink it down and piss it away, the thought alone made the FBI woman shudder in that secret part of her soul reserved for fears she had thought long banished from her psyche.
But the psyche never did play fair, not even with itself.
Otto Boutine had seen mutilation murder in its every guise throughout his long career in the FBI Psychological Profiling Division and as an advisor before such a division existed; in fact, most of the cases he had handled dealt with some form of body mutilation. He had become the resident dean of mutilation murders, the expert, the Ben “obi-wan” Kenobi of mutilation. It sometimes concerned him that this was how he had spent his life; that he had spent more waking hours-and sometimes the hours in deep sleep-inside the minds of the most brutal killers ever brought to justice, than he had with his wife who was now slipping helplessly away from him. But from the moment he had gone into collaboration with the Bureau, he had learned how to think like a man capable of the most atrocious acts imaginable, but this, the result of the ninth level of torture, was not easily fathomed.
Intellectually, he could accept the fact there were between three and four hundred so-called real vampires roaming the country, and that while all of them had an unholy need for the taste of blood, few of them actually became serial killers, opting for other and safer means of satisfying their needs; however, emotionally, Otto had great trouble imagining the mind-set of a man capable of actually draining another human being of blood. The slow death process was so torturous, so heinous that it topped the FBI list of worst crimes of torture.
It was difficult to think like a murderer, much less a sadistic, perverted killer; now to think like a man who believed that he was a child of Satan, a descendent of zombies! That, in order to insure his survival, he must not only feed on human blood, but the rich, warm, heady mixture of a fresh kill? It was difficult even for a man of Boutine's expertise, and yet he had thrown himself into the investigation like a man bent on going over Niagara Falls in a canoe, flying in the face of Raynack, disregarding Leamy's warnings. Did it have something to do with Marilyn? Had Leamy somehow sensed his desperation for work that would take him out of Washington, away from the pale shadow of the woman who lingered on in coma, the one he could not bear to watch any longer? Or was it simply that this tort nine was what his entire career had been about? To stop a cruel and human phantom he alone believed in: a twisted creature of the dark that ingested fresh blood from another in order to accumulate-at least psychologically- supernormal power over life and death. Was it just possible that the satanic bastard believed in his own bloody immortality? The vampire complex: the fixation that gave rise to men like the Marquis de Sade, and women who believed they could stay their beauty by bathing in the blood of virgins. Human lampreys, lusting for the blood of others.
But this was the first time he'd ever seen the results of such an insane fantasy.
He stared again at the drained body hanging upside down from the rafters of the ancient log house in Wekosha, Wisconsin. The local authorities had called them in the moment they realized what they had, a bloodless mutilation scene, just as his fax had described.
Jessica Coran had been like a rock in the face of the horror. Amazing lady, terrific medical mind, incredible skill and control. He knew that he'd have to control the superlatives concerning her field performance in the report he intended to write, that he mustn't make her sound like Joan of Arc or Sister Theresa, but he was impressed, and the report would reflect a commendable job. He went to her, gripped her arm, asking, “How's it going?” She'd been at it full tilt for hours and dawn was approaching.
“ Coming to an end.” Her slurred voice said it all.
“ You're going to need some sleep before doing the autopsy, and it's nearing light out now.”
An autopsy could take hours, and a complicated one- and this was sure to be complicated-could take eight hours.
“ Don't let them do it without me, Chief.”
He nodded and changed the subject. “Been some time since I've seen one quite this bad, I admit.” She thought she detected a slight shudder in Boutine's voice. For a moment their eyes met, his shimmering gray darts plunging uninhibitedly into her deep blue-green pools to mesh in a silent bond of understanding. She realized for the First time that he was as profoundly wounded by the outrage committed here as she; at the same time she wondered how it could be otherwise, and how she could have thought it otherwise. Yet, Otto was Otto, so stiff, so muscular, so strongly wired together, and earlier he had seemed so above it all, so much in control-all useful mannerisms she had this night emulated so tenaciously, feeling like a cat with her teeth sunk deep, afraid to let go even in the least, for fear she'd lose the battle with herself.
But there it was, the hurt in his eyes.
It was just a flicker, and she was beyond fatigue, yet the flaring ember of a moment's weakness had been there. The gruesome nature of the case had struck him in his soul, just as it had hers. He tried instantly to put it out, and as must usually be the case, it was quickly extinguished, replaced with the steel again, and she half heard his directives to her.
“ Time we get it wrapped up here, so you can get a few hours' sleep.”
She nodded, saying nothing. But somehow, she knew that they would always hold on to a bond created here amid the carnage.
But he was suddenly all business again, throwing the mantle of chief across his brow once again, as if not interested in sharing such emotions with her. She was reminded without so much as a word of his invalid wife, who had remained now for a month in a coma at Bethesda Naval Hospital, a victim of an aneurysm. She remembered that no one got too close to Boutine, that Otto shared only the rudiments of his life and nothing of the core of his being with anyone, least of all a junior officer in the department.
The only reason he was here was to oversee her performance in fieldwork for the Bureau. He was working on a major overhaul of his profiling team, and she was central to that restructuring effort. He had held nothing back in this regard, telling her precisely what his plans for her were, and nothing about those plans said anything of sharing an emotion, even if it was spontaneous and unintentional.
Up until this morning. Dr. Jessica Coran had worked assembly-line fashion within the relatively friendly, clean
