They both saw that Captain Lyle Kaseem had entered and had been listening to their conversation. He smiled his near perfect white teeth at them and said, “A little difference of opinion?”
“ So, what's it with you, Kaseem?” asked Otto, ticked. “Lowenthal's obviously not your man, Rosnich, so you automatically agree with her?” he finished, indicating Jessica.
“ Let's just say, I have my doubts, too.”
“ Why? What possible-”
“ He's an old man.”
“ How old do you have to be to use one of these damned devices?” Otto held up the spigot in a plastic container.
Jessica cut in. “The man would still have to truss them up, Otto, and… and haul them up over his-” She stopped herself, realizing that it was bad form for them to argue with Kaseem staring on.
Kaseem simply said, “I agree with Dr. Coran.”
Otto looked from one to the other of the doctors, not wanting to accept any ripple in what on the surface appeared an open-and-shut case. He was tired of it, fatigued with the pressures that had been coming down on him from above. He wanted it over; and he wanted it bad enough that he was willing to deny Jessica this time.
Joe Brewer came in shouting. “We've got a safe-deposit key for Lincoln National Bank, Otto. Want to be on hand when we open it?”
“ Kaseem?” asked Otto.
Kaseem chewed a bit nervously on the inner wall of his cheek, thinking it over, torn between staying-on the off chance he might learn something from Jessica Coran-and going, on the chance he might learn something from the locked box. He was like the man in the fable who had to choose between three doors to open.
“ Well?” pressed Otto.
“ Yeah, yeah, I'd like to be on hand.”
Otto looked over his shoulder as they were exiting, giving her a wink, telling her he'd done her a favor to get Kaseem out of her way. Down deep, he must believe that if she was on to something, she'd want privacy with the scene and the corpse to determine the full extent of her suspicions.
With the others gone, she drew on some of Brewer's men to assist in the evidence gathering. During her intense investigation, she found that Lowenthal's wrists had been slashed in such a way that it did appear the man had done it to himself. This would have to stand up under more intense scrutiny, measurements and lights, but on the surface, it seemed reasonable to conclude that Lowenthal had indeed cut his own wrists. This did not help her theory.
She next looked closely at Lowenthal's body for any telltale sign of Addison's disease. Cortisone pills had not been found, nor had she seen any apparent indications that Lowenthal had the disease. She looked very closely at the skin in an effort to find symptoms of the vampire disease, porphyria. She found none whatever.
Try as she may, she could not shake the feeling that Lowenthal's death had been somehow “staged” down to the smallest detail. It would take lab time to determine and prove what even Otto was unprepared to accept. But the blood evidence alone indicated to her that there was a second party in the room who had placed the suicide note on the table after the initial blood splatters.
And given the fact the note was signed Teach, it had to be the same man who had written a letter to her in Virginia and had mailed it from Hammond, Indiana, on his way to kill Tommy Fowler in Indianapolis.
She was, by the end of her exhaustive scanning of the body and the physical evidence of the bloody note, convinced that the man calling himself Teach was still very much alive.
Then Boutine and Brewer noisily arrived, proclaiming irrefutable evidence that Lowenthal was Teach.
They had unearthed the most telling, incriminating evidence in the man's private lockbox. He was undeniably Otto's Tort 9 monster. For not only had the man designed the spigot, but here were papers of the design showing that he had recently applied for a patent with the U.S. Government Patent Office in D.C.
“ Imagine that, imagine that,” Brewer was saying, “to be that nuts, that you go out and get a patent on the murder weapon you use. One for the books.”
Kaseem had not returned with them, perhaps accepting this new information as the final word on the Chicago vampire.
“ You can't deny what's before your eyes, Jess,” Otto said to her as she scanned the schematics of the deadly little straw that Lowenthal had created.
No one, not even she, could deny that Maurice Lowenthal was indeed involved with the vampire killings, yet some nagging doubts remained. Was the vampire really dead??
TWENTY-FOUR
There was an almost perceptible, tangible sigh of relief from all of Chicago when the evening news reported an end to the vampire killings. Lowenthal's picture was flashed on every news network, and he was described as the cruel, sadistic killer that had a taste for blood. One enterprising young reporter had even learned that Lowenthal had been sent to various hospitals and places such as Wekosha, Wisconsin, as part of his job. The times of his business visits didn't entirely mesh with the time frame of the killings, but it was felt that he must have gone back to these locations on his own. A spokesperson for Balue-Stork downplayed his connection with the company, saying that he was a low-level employee who had a gift for instrument design, but that he had retired some time ago.
His retirement, Jessica had learned, was the November before the Wekosha killing. She remained skeptical, and when reporters confronted her she kept a chill distance, saying over and over, “No comment, no comment.”
When pushed outside the Chicago Crime Laboratory to disclose her feelings about the case's coming to a close, she said bluntly, “It isn't closed until it's scientifically closed. The FBI does not close a case until it has the stamp of forensic proof required to close it. Is that understood?”
At his home, where he seldom watched TV, Matt Matisak glared now at the replay of events surrounding Lowenthal's death. The chief of police in Chicago had said it was the surest thing he had ever seen; that they had gotten their man. An FBI guy named Brewer said practically the same thing, but here was this bitch holding out as if she knew something no one else knew. She was smug about it, too. So cocksure.
Teach stewed about it. He thought about it all evening long. Suppose she did find something; suppose she did know the truth? Was she that good? She'd been a thorn in his side since Wekosha. She alone seemed to know about him, enough so that he felt a strange bond with her, as if they had an ongoing relationship from the moment he had read about her in the newspapers. It was as if she were reaching out to him, wanting desperately to touch him, to sit down and really communicate with him.
He wondered how he could make her wish come true…
There were ways of finding out where she was staying.
There were ways of attracting her attention, of luring her out.
There were ways… and when she fell into his trap, she'd become his next victim.
But it must be done right.
And he would need an accomplice who was a fool.
He knew the perfect fool.
He knew the perfect place.
He had the perfect plan.
“ Yes, yes… time we met, sweetheart,” Teach said to the film image of Dr. Jessica Coran. “I'll make all the arrangements.”
He then made a phone call, but quickly slammed the phone down. No, he mustn't contact Gamble by phone. Phone company records could give him away.
Gamble was a retarded employee at Balue-Stork's busy, cluttered mailroom. He was easily manipulated. He could be the perfect stand-in for Teach, and so if Lowenthal wasn't enough for the bastards, Lowenthal's associate in crime, Gamble, would be.
“ Of course,” he told himself, “the Chicago vampire is really two people. They'll love it.”
He quickly dressed. His adrenaline was pumping. This might be the best after all, doing Jessica Coran. He'd have to have some of her blood. He knew he'd be unable to walk away from her blood as he had Lowenthal's. She was classy, so sure of herself, and so very intelligent. Her blood was worth something. But he knew he'd have to leave the majority of her blood in jars all about Gamble's place, after he killed both Gamble and Coran.