“ 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 like splotches and more like exclamation points in a series, as the vein would have spurted. The tracks on the table beneath the note had this significant shape, but the tracks on the face of the paper did not.
It was clear to her that either (1) the dead man had placed the note gently onto the table after he had slashed both his wrists, or (2) someone else was kind enough to do it for him. There was no doubt in her mind that the wounds inflicted were of such a brutal nature that no one could be calm under the circumstances, or clearheaded enough to locate and place that note on the table just before keeling over. She'd had Lowenthal's blood and serums checked for LSD or any other drug that might account for the unusual sequence of events surrounding his death, but the lab had found no trace of drugs, and certainly no cortisone. As for the print left on the cortisone capsule, there was simply not enough to be sure either way. She spent hours over Lowenthal's body, his wrists to be exact, using an exacting method of measurement about the wounds, determining that the left was indeed cut by a right hand, and the right was indeed cut by a left hand. Only the most cunning, methodical of killers would think to change hands with the scalpel as he sliced each wrist, to create the illusion of suicide.
It looked rather hopeless, except for the blood evidence, and all too often, blood evidence was ignored, despite the incredible accuracy of the scientific field. To prove her point, she'd have to get a world-renowned blood specialist. Not even Robertson back at Quantico, with all of his background, would be enough to support what she was saying, and the cost factor, and the logistics of getting a man like T. Herbert Leon, or her old mentor, Holecraft, to fly to Chicago to look over the evidence… Well, it was not likely she'd get the okay from Otto, not in his present mood, and as for getting “permission” from O'Rourke, that'd stick in her craw like a chicken bone.
But maybe she'd have to put her personal feelings aside. She thought of all the professionals who had put in so many grueling hours on the Tort 9 case, from J.T. to Byrnes and Schultz, O'Rourke herself, even Raynack, with their pro bono work going to Kaseem and Forsythe. She wondered momentarily if the man who had staged the “death” of the vampire killer here in Chicago was not the same man who had eluded the military for so many years. Was it possible?
She was tired, exhausted, and while she had the killer's bloody tools to examine against what she knew of the wounds inflicted on the flesh of his victims, tests on the tissue that had come off of these blades had already confirmed a match with Tommy Fowler in Indiana.
How did Lowenthal lure his victims in? An old man who often used a cane. What Scarborough, the only so-called witness had seen was a younger man. They'd found no hairpieces or makeup kit. Yet, his spigot, under magnification, was clearly the nasty weapon used at the jugular on the Cope-land girl and all the others. And if there was another vampire working with Lowenthal, he'd never give up this device.
But suppose, she stopped herself with a thought, suppose there were more than one; suppose Lowenthal had made two or three or more?