Absolute Instinct by Robert W. Walker Page A

was Richard Sharpe, calling from their Virginia home. He had called to tell her how much he missed her.
    Jessica smiled at the sound of Richard's baritone voice. He sounded like the actor Richard Burton.
    She immediately went to her suit jacket and pulled out the PCS Vision phone with built in camera that Richard had purchased for her—or them rather. It'd been a special gift, a way to see one another despite the miles between them. This particular model had a feature that allowed real-time panning of a room or vista.
    Using the gift, she now called her live-in lover and best friend. She had first gotten to know him as Inspector Sharp of the New Scotland Yard, London, England. They had met when Richard had come calling at Quantico in search of help, and she had gone back to London to work with him on a curious case there involving millennium-phobic cultists and crucifixion murders. Richard, nowadays a working consultant and liaison between the FBI and the State Department, had only recently returned from an overseas assignment, and now she had to leave him at their home in Quantico, Virginia. Richard kept up a half-kidding needling of her to marry him, but she had remained reluctant, fearful of such a heady commitment.
    He came on, standing in the yard at a white fence, horses playing over his shoulder as he smiled at her. His first words on hearing her voice were direct, as always. “When are we going to tie the knot, as you Yanks say? I'm feeding apples to Ben and Porsche. Bet you wish—”
    “ I was there, yes! As to getting hitched, things between us are too good to sacrifice to a marriage license,” she firmly replied, waving into the camera for him to see.
    “ That room behind you could be our wedding suite,” he persisted.
    “ Are you kidding, Richard? I'm going to want Maui or Tahiti, maybe New Zealand, but certainly not Milwaukee for our... But why am I even talking about this?”
    “ Because, you secretly want it as much as I?”
    She quickly changed the subject. “I've gotten myself involved in quite a strange case here, Richard.” He became instantly curious on hearing the details of the bizarre Milwaukee case and Agent Reynolds's theory that it could be connected to two other murders years apart from one another.
    “ Does his theory have any credence?” Richard jokingly asked Ben, one of the horses nuzzling, when a second horse shoved him completely off camera. Jessica heard Richard shout, “Porsche! That's not very ladylike at all!”
    More apple slices calmed both horses.
    “ As a matter of fact, Darwin's theory has a great deal of credence, just not enough hard evidence to get a man off death row. We have no DNA, no fingerprints to match, not even the killer's blood to make any comparisons with. And Towne's defense went from pleading insanity to denying this, and then he apparently stopped any move toward an appeal made on his behalf.”
    “ Sounds like a confused man this Towne. Still, young Reynolds may have a case, but how can you be sure? About the first crime scene. Just how bungled was it?”
    “ Hard to tell from here. But like I said, the kid's made some compelling arguments.”
    “ Fill me in.”
    She rattled off the similarities in the three cases and added, “The only thing that distinguishes them as not being the work of the same killer is—”
    “— the disparity of time between each.”
    “ Exactly, yes.” She nodded, her image reaching him but breaking up. “From all we know of serial killers, they strike within days, weeks, months at best, not years apart.”
    The horse tugged off Richard's hat in a bid for attention. Richard laughed his full rich laugh. “And given our predilection for accurate bureau statistics, such an aberration frightens the hell out of us, doesn't it?”
    “ You're going to make those horses sick if you feed them any more apples. Put an end to it, for goodness' sake,” she suggested.
    After a moment's thought, Richard said, “Speaks highly of