Read Online Absolute Instinct by Robert W. Walker - Free Book Online Page B

“Can't let out no names or take any pictures till the next of kin's been notified. You know that.”
    Jessica thought again of the worst monster she had ever chased down and killed, Mad Matthew Matisak. No creature of the night she'd ever hunted compared in utter brutality, until now. This ripping out of a woman's spinal cord, this ranked a Tort 10 on the torture scale if the victim were alive when he splayed open her back, and from the coloration around the naked wound, it would surprise Jessica to learn otherwise.
    Matisak's blood-drinking measures had exacted a slow kind of torture, the draining of his victim's very lifeblood, and so it had rated a Tort 9 on the torture scale. The scale of torture represented in the spine-thief case she looked at today did not compare with regard to the time it took to die. The Olsen woman did not suffer long. Still, in Jessica's book, this monster rated a ten for sheer animal brutality, and it made her wonder if it were not some sickening animal need that drove him, some genetically predisposed urge toward gnawing on bone, a throwback to the caveman mind dwelling in us all.
    It felt in her own bones—scuttling like a spider along her own spine—as if the putrid disease of evil carried about by the criminally insane Matisak had unaccountably returned, maybe had never really left. Perhaps in a new guise, a new shape, a new form, but the same evil nonetheless. “Cut of the same satanic cloth, this one,” she muttered to herself.
    “ What's that?” asked Reynolds, his forehead creased in consternation.
    “ Confound bastard is like a fiery coal from hell's own hearth.” She took in another deep breath. “Should've brought some whiskey along.”
    Jessica re entered the death room and stepped to the body again. “This one,” she said to the others in the room, “this one may lead me into early retirement. You say she lived alone, that she hardly socialized or went out?”
    “ That's right, a reclusive type,” replied Agent Reynolds. “Vic's name's Joyce Dixon-Olsen, aged forty-eight, a loner, lived with her dog, Shep. Dog's at his vet's... nice, good-natured as all hell.”
    “ I suppose it'd be asking too much to hope that someone in a forensics capacity got to the dog before he was shampooed?”
    Sands frowned and shook his head. “Gone long before I got here, I'm afraid.”
    “ He was one hell of a mess, a long-haired cocker spaniel,” Reynolds replied apologetically. “First on scene took better care of him than he did securing the body, I'm afraid. Dog lover.”
    Jessica kneeled beside the blood-soaked corpse, and looked into the woman's face, turned as it was sideways against the carpet. Jessica mentally traced the features, thinking she had character written right into them, that she appeared to be someone who had seen and overcome much adversity until now. That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. She might be anyone's mother or aunt. “No family?”
    “ Ex-husband passed away two years ago. Some distant relatives in Nebraska. They've been notified,” said Reynolds in his resonant voice.
    Jessica placed the ruler end of her scalpel against the wound to Olsen's cranium. “Diameter of the wound is less than an inch; the work of a small blunt object, likely a hammer of some sort as Sands said. From the concave appearance an educated guess says the hammer blow came from a ball peen styled one.”
    Darwin Reynolds now knelt alongside the cadaver, too. Reynolds's black skin was as ebony as one of his African ancestors—Nigeria or Ghana, Jessica guessed from his bone structure and height. He had a broad, strong face, and a nose any Roman would kill for, all beneath those black, probing eyes. Every girl's dream, she thought, but not mine. I've got Richard.
    Milwaukee Police Chief Wyatt Abrams, who had remained sullen and silent throughout, a great anger seething below his calm, had also partaken of the balcony air. A big man not to be missed by anyone, his