wrong assumption about her. Just because O'Rourke was sleeping with Leamy…
He was interrupted by a waiter with a telephone, saying, “You are Inspector Boutine?”
“ Yes.”
“ Telephone, sir.”
The waiter hooked up the phone at the table and after a series of clicks, Joe Brewer came on. “Otto, you may want to cancel your flight back.”
“ What's that?” Something's come up. May be nothing, but who can tell? I'd like to hit you with it, see what you think.”
“ This to do with Lowenthal?”
“ Yeah.”
“ You saying that maybe Jess is right about him?”
“ Could be. Any rate, he may just be half of a duo.”
“ A team? He had help?”
“ Maybe, Otto-it's a strict maybe.”
“ Comes from where?”
“ Something in the apartment. Some things said by co-workers.”
“ At Balue-Stork?”
“ Right.”
“ Anything concrete, or is this just backscatter?”
“ He used a typewriter most of the time, but the few scraps we've found in his hand don't match the handwriting at all.”
“ It was printed, remember?”
“ He didn't habitually print, but when he did, it was not the same.”
“ Anything else?”
“ Some co-workers claimed he said he would one day stick it to Balue-Stork; that he was going into business with a partner to patent a new product. Sound familiar?”
“ So he was talking about himself, a second personality. The guy was a split-brain! You've seen the type- signing with his other self, this Teach character.”
“ But he went so far as to talk to a lawyer about drawing up papers between himself and his partner, to keep his partner from exploding, he told the lawyer.”
“ You got the lawyer with you?”
“ Can you come over?”
“ Will do.”
For the first time. Otto considered the fact that perhaps the wizardry of Dr. Jessica Coran had once again been right-or at least half right.
# # #
Boutine canceled his flight from Brewer's office. The jagged pieces of the puzzle had been forced to make a fit, and he had been happy with the notion that his last case would be closed with his boxing up his personal items back at Quantico, and he could leave with his head up. But the truth was, they'd dropped some of the puzzle pieces, allowing them to hide about their feet.
Everyone, that was, except Jess.
And she had touched off something in Brewer, sending him off on his own to scrounge up new, additional information, such as the fact Lowenthal's lawyer had gotten a sudden phone call only hours before his death, asking if he could arrange for papers to be drawn up between himself and a partner he had which declared them equal partners in a venture that involved some sort of medical invention that he was having patented.
“ The idea,” explained Jeff Eastfal, Lowenthal's lawyer, “belonged, Maurice said, to this second party; the other individual had come to Maurice with the idea. Maurice, while still under Balue-Stork's roof, began toying with the idea at night in his home lab, he said, evenings, weekends, refining it.”
“ Did he tell you the name of this partner?” asked Boutine.
“ No.”
“ Did he say anything to you to indicate who this man was?”
“ Nothing.”
Boutine bellowed, “Christ.”
“ Except that they had once worked together.”
“ Worked together? At Balue-Stork?”
“ He didn't say.”
“ What did he say?”
Eastfal put up a hand, gesturing for the FBI man to calm down, refusing to go on if he did not. Brewer muttered a few whispered words into Boutine's ear. Boutine settled into a chair.
Eastfal continued at Brewer's nod. “I got the general impression it was Balue-Stork, but honestly, he did not say. And while we're on the subject of honesty, Maurice was, so far as I knew him, an honest man, and I can't believe for a moment that he had anything whatever to do with-with murdering for blood.”
“ He designed the bloody murder weapon!” shouted Boutine.
“ I am aware of that, but it's my considered opinion, sir, that he did not know to what uses his-his so-called partner was putting it.”
Outside the lawyer's prestigious downtown offices where the halls were marbled wall and floor, with mahogany finishings and stairwells, the two FBI men stood wondering what Eastfal's story meant.
“ We've got to go back to Balue-Stork, Otto,” Brewer told him. “Look at this.”
Brewer showed him a letter addressed to Eastfal from Maurice Lowenthal. Otto had to agree, the handwriting was light-years away from the blood letters that'd been written by Teach.
“ Still, if Teach was a second personality-”
“ I know, I know… wouldn't the handwriting reflect that?”
“ And isn't it feasible-just feasible-that Maurice's so-called partner was his other self, this Teach? And maybe this would explain why he was afraid to give his lawyer a name.”
“ This case could drive me wacko,” admitted Brewer. “Look, we go to Balue-Stork. Do a little snooping, say in personnel, records-”
“ Sales. We hit sales records,” said Boutine. “See if they've got anyone who regularly visits hospitals in Wekosha; Iowa City; Paris, Illinois; Indianapolis-”And Zion.”
The two men stared into each other's eyes. “If there is another killer out there taking blood-'' began Brewer.
“ It could be Kaseem's vampire.”
“ It could also be the one who likes to write to Dr. Coran, too.”
At that moment, Otto knew he would not be leaving Chicago without Jessica beside him. “Let's get over to this medical supply. You know the quickest route?”
“ It's damned far from here; located in the suburbs. We'll have to use the siren, make it down the Eisenhower. Come on.”
It was nearing 5 P.M., which was just as well. They'd go in after most of the employees were off the premises, and they'd dig all night if it was necessary.?
TWENTY-FIVE
Jessica Coran set up a number of tests which would separate the blood splotches on the letter both on the front and the back to determine the exact amount of time they had been on the paper. If there was a significant lag time, it would be logical to assume that the blood on top of the suicide note was different in some regard from that found below. At the crime scene she had drawn extensive diagrams for the trajectory of the blood from Lowenthal's wounds. If the suicide note had been lying on the coffee table before he cut his wrists, the splatters would be less
