Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  He located a table, a waiter and menus, all in one fell swoop. Seated now, enjoying the lovely music and delight­ful atmosphere, Jessica tried to forget for the moment the reason they were in the tropical city of golden sunsets-— the Gold Coast, it was called, nestled as it was on an enor­mous blindingly white-and-yellow sand bay where cruise ships formed a large part of the skyline.

  “So, how’d it go in your sector today?” Santiva’s ques­tion felt like a tentative probe, and no doubt he both needed and wanted answers; his tone also conveyed the tenor of his day, and it didn’t sound upbeat.

  She shrugged, saying, “Ahh, all right... Got my feet wet with the boys.”

  “Three against one, huh? Some odds. Can’t say that I fared much better.”

  “Well, Coudriet found some excuse to be away for most of the time I was there, but I later found him eavesdropping, if you can believe it. But mostly I just had the two assis­tants, Thorn and Powers, to deal with until the last twenty or thirty minutes. Coudriet’s gotten rather colorful since the last time I saw him speak.”

  “That makes him better or worse?”

  “Different.” She used Coudriet’s word against him.

  “Hmmmmm.” Eriq didn’t know quite what to make of the assessment, so he asked another question altogether.

  “His staying out of your way, how’s that? Good or bad for our case, I mean.”

  “Better would be my guess.” She glanced about the room, allowing the live music to continue its path over her mind, to soothe her frayed nerves. She was still wondering about Coudriet when she asked Eriq, “How about you? You get your feet as wet as your throat?”

  “Drenched, actually. Damned fools. Near as I can tell, they’ve been dragging their asses on this for some time, letting this SOB work freely up and down the coast from here to the Keys without once putting it together.”

  “That’s not atypical of local jurisdictions,” she said while glancing about, people-watching.

  “Too many little jurisdictions all along the seaboard and damned little in the way of cooperation or coordination of effort. You’d think Miami could get it together, but—”

  “But somebody obviously did put it together,” she in­terrupted. “Coudriet, actually, the M.E.”

  “Really?” She was both curious and impressed with Dr. Coudriet all over again.

  “Seems he was on vacation, a fishing trip down in the Keys—Sugarloaf Key, about a hundred twenty miles south of here, when a floater came ashore in the same condition as two others he’d seen earlier. He put two and three to­gether, put out a call to all PDs along the coastal cities, asked for any information on similar cases, placed all the information in his Hewlett-Packard and voila!”

  “The similarities were, as they say, too close for com­fort... too close to ignore.” Her tone made it clear she didn’t question it in the least. “So Andrew Coudriet next contacted all the pathologists and detectives along the wa­terways.”

  “He already tell you all this himself, did he?”

  She shook her head firmly. “No, he didn’t. Quite self- effacing of him. He didn’t tell me any of this. Maybe he’s more modest than I’d given him credit for. I don’t quite know what to make of him.”

  “Did he tell you that there’s an entire highway of wa­ter—the Intracoastal Waterway—which sweeps from Key West north to Jacksonville and beyond?”

  “Which all experienced seamen and weekend warriors use regularly, I’m sure.”

  “You suppose right. Traffic is as heavy here as on the damned Mississippi River, but here most of it’s pleasure craft.”

  They had expensive appetizers and wine before ordering dinner, and Eriq talked about his day with the deputy mayor, the police commissioner and William DeVries, the Miami FBI field chief who’d met with him despite his be­ing in a recuperative condition, something to do with sur­gery to the small intestine, all in the company of Quincey and Mark Samernow, the two chief detectives for Miami. “Good man, Will,” Eriq commented of DeVries. “Been on top of this thing from the moment he learned of it, saw the serial nature of it. Gave me some good insights into what’s been going on down here, politically, that is.... Nobody can say precisely what’s actually going on with the killer.”

  Jessica had heard DeVries’s name in connection with the case before. It was Will DeVries who’d first alerted Santiva to the situation brewing in Florida, and when Jessica had gone to Eriq to give him the particulars of the strange phone call she’d taken from Islamorada, Santiva had surprised her with his instantaneous response—a single curse word sug­gesting both exasperation and procreation. His next re­sponse had been a question: “How soon can you be packed to leave for Florida?”

  “We haven’t left yet?” she’d countered that day in his office at Quantico. Later, on the plane, he’d confessed to having put the call from Islamorada through to her. Her involvement in the case had been carefully orchestrated. Now, here in Miami, she wanted to know, “Why didn’t DeVries’s men meet us at the airport when we first arrived? Why MPD detectives?”

  “Every agency in the entire state is antsy and sensitive at the same time over this one. There isn’t a jurisdiction along the entire Eastern seaboard of the state that isn’t miss­ing some little girl. And as you know, the latest victim, the Norris girl, was highly connected, so it’s become a real bone of contention as to who exactly is in charge, and Will’s become disenchanted with the local authorities.”

  “Pissed off, you mean? So everybody’s scrambling and watching his own ass?”

  “Something like that.”

  She bit her lower lip and added, “Meanwhile it’s all to the killer’s advantage that law enforcement can’t get its collective act together.”

  “Enjoy your appetizer,” he told her, his tone still that of the boss and dictator. It was his show now, no mistaking that. “Will didn’t want any sort of scene between the MPD and his guys out at the airport, not with so many cameras around.”

  “What’s the connection with London?” she asked.

  “DeVries has a friend at Scotland Yard. I mentioned him to you earlier, Nigel Moyler? Anyhow, they’ve worked a few international cases together. I’ve got a few contacts in the mother country myself, but these two guys realized that what happened a year ago in London was being duplicated here—or so it seemed to Moyler. But I believe he’s not quite seeing this with twenty-twenty vision.”

  “Something’s cast doubt on the connection?”

  “Not something—me. I pointed out some glaring dif­ferences in the two cases, and the single fingerprint they have is a partial and is practically useless, and the notes they were supposed to’ve forwarded haven’t arrived yet, so who knows.”

  “Glaring differences? Like what?” she asked while en­joying the fried zucchini appetizer.

  “Well, I can sympathize with Moyler. The London mur­ders were never solved, but the victims there were all of a type wholly different from our own.”

  “Wholly different? Were they men?”

  “No, no... they were all women,” he conceded.

  “Were they all strangled?”

  He nodded. “All strangled and—”

  “—their bodies all thrown into the water?” she finished for him.

  “They were all determined by authorities there to’ve been drowned after repeated strangulation, yes.”

  “Really?” She kept her counsel.

  “But there are more dissimilarities than similarities, I’m afraid.”

  “For instance?” she asked between bites and sips of wine. “No poems to the authorities, for one.” She nodded. “Go on.”

  Santiva’s eyes were busy. They followed people about the room. “Our victims are young women, hardly out of their teens. So far as I can tell, the English victims were all a good deal older, all with similar facial characteristics and body builds. Ours are younger, sweeter, more naive, thinner and a great deal more upscale.”

  “Well, you may well be right, Eriq, about
there being no British tie-in here.” She watched his eyebrows take an inquisitive leap.

  “What’re you saying?”

  “Hold on to your modus operandi theories, Eriq, because Allison Norris was definitely choked, but not to death; she drowned after having been repeatedly choked by hand and by rope. But she was alive when she hit the water. Does that sound like our British killer, Eriq?”

  “They’ve listed them all as having drowned after re­peated strangulation, yes, but I thought Coudriet’s report said she’d been strangled and the body discarded in the ocean,” replied Eriq.

  “Actually, if you read Coudriet’s report carefully, you’ll note he fudged on whether she was dead or alive when she hit the water. I think since then he has amended his reports to certify that she was alive when she inhaled all that water. At least that’s what I got from the team tonight. The report sent to us was a rushed job, corrected later. She was alive in the water, her lungs filled to bursting with microscopic sea life and saline. There’s also evidence pointing to the killer’s having dragged her bodily through the water.” Jes­sica finished her drink and sucked on an ice cube.

  “Damn, that puts a different color on things. Dragged her through the water? That means he used a boat of some sort, and that’s how he moves in and out so quickly and easily. Think of it—a floating lair, a floating kill scene. Little wonder we have so damned few clues to go on.”

  She dropped her gaze. “It’s made him brash, cocksure. He travels with his incriminating evidence, keeps it close to him. It makes him feel safe to know where it all is, so safe he sends us word to tell us so...”

  Eriq seemed caught up in an image building in his mind. “Imagine this bastard hauling them through the water like so much garbage.”

  “What did you mean that the London victims were up­scale?” she asked.

  “No, I said that our victims were upscale compared with those found in England.”

  “Ahh... meaning?” Jessica asked, her eyes fixed on him, alert and waiting for his answer.

  He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, finding some mod­icum of repose. “So far our victims haven’t been prosti­tutes.”

  “I see.”

  “Most of the London victims were rough street girls, women actually... like I said, average age thirty thirty- five. Our girls here are ten, twelve years younger on av­erage with no history of prostitution, no more promiscuous than most. There was one arrest of a prostitute who claimed to’ve been a near victim of the Night Crawler early on in the case, but she was kicked loose for want of verifiable evidence.”

  “Averages can be misleading, Eriq. Suppose the killer’s taste in victims has changed over time.

  “An evolving fantasy’.’“ asked Santiva. “I guess we might consider it, but the British connection seems tenuous at best even so, and it could lead to a dead end and a great waste of time and effort.”

  “So. your mentioning a possible British connection ear­lier was just to get me interested?”

  He shook his head. “Not entirely, no...” She let it drop. “So. tell me more about your day,” she suggested, a waiter now clearing away their dishware and providing more wine. Eriq told her how he’d spent much of the day walking through police reports with various homicide detectives working the cases, explained that Samernow and Quincey were but two of some thirty detectives from fifteen different municipalities dotting the coast who were all interested in the case, all with their own separate lists of missing per­sons, and he further informed her that they had all come to the city to see what the FBI could do for them.

  “So what have we done for them lately, Chief?”

  Santiva exaggeratedly scratched behind his ear and said, “Duuuh... well... ahh... hmmmm.”

  “I hope you didn’t use that line with them!” She was now laughing. He shook his head, smiling, playing with the lit candle in the bottle that was their centerpiece. “No, that’s what I told the press.”

  They laughed together now.

  “You can bet I talked you up, Jess. They were cheered to have our forensics capabilities, and I promised that our Behavioral Science Division profile of both killer and vic­tim type would be circulated among them all. I strongly urged, called for, pleaded for a central clearinghouse and a task force to be put together in which FBI, state and local officials would cooperate, sharing and pooling informa­tion.”

  “And how’d that go over?”

  “The PR cop liked the idea “

  She laughed and knowingly nodded.

  “Said it was something they could feed the press, show the outside that the MPD was doing something construc­tive. Said the Herald’s been raking their rocks... raking them over the coals.”

  They ordered and ate a wonderful meal, Jessica enjoying the native grouper, sautfed in garlic and butter. Santiva, the philistine, had filet mignon, despite her protest that he could get steak in D.C.

  “I can get fish in D.C., too.”

  “Not fish native to these waters,” she countered. “Don’t tell me how to eat, okay?” His Latin blood had been fired up by the idea that some woman was telling him what to order.

  After dinner, Santiva, who was part Cuban and who knew Miami well, showed her some of the nightlife, taking her to South Beach Street, Cocowalk in Coconut Grove, showing off the Art Deco regions and Little Havana. In Little Havana, she learned why Miami was called the Cap­ital of Latin America. It was wild, raw and romantic all at once, their trip punctuated by perpetual stops all along the way for small cups of cafe Cubano. They visited Ayestaran, El Meson Catellano, Malaga and Casa Juancho, all in that order, and she had to keep up with Eriq. Some of the fur­nishing and the Art Deco seemed out of time, as if 1950 still held sway here.

  Miami was every bit the wild, raucous city that it was purported to be—a multifaceted city, a place of dizzying, dancing lights, too many signs, too many twisting, confus­ing streets and other more sinister mysteries. It was an in­ternational city, filled as it was with the fashions, foods and faces of many nationalities, but the Cuban influence—at least in the circles Santiva took her—was most strongly evident at every turn.

  One place where they had drinks appeared to be full of Mafia types who suspiciously eyed them the whole time. Santiva left her alone for a moment and bullied right up to the head man of this “tribe,” flashing his badge, talking loudly and holding back nothing, explaining why he was in the city. Soon he and the others were talking like old friends, with Eriq repeatedly pointing at Jessica as if she were some prize he’d won in a raffle.

  He’s just playing his part, getting on their good side, she kept telling herself, but she didn’t care for being made to feel like a piece of merchandise. She had read a line once from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Buchanan of the Miami Herald that called Miami home to big-league football, basketball, baseball and motorists who’d kill for a parking space or simply to prove quien es mas macho. She wondered if that wasn’t exactly what Santiva was trying to prove here tonight, just what a tough guy he was, or if there wasn’t some other hidden agenda. The strangers wanted to know where Eriq and his family had originated, what part of Cuba. Eriq didn’t tell them that he was born in Sioux City, Iowa, but rather bullshitted his way through, having learned Cuban geography long ago.

  By the time Eriq returned to Jessica, where she sat all alone at her table, Jessica had had enough of bar-hopping and dancing, but he insisted they have one last dance.

  “For mis amigos,” he said, pointing. He then turned back and said conspiratorially, “Make me look good in their eyes. It’s importante.”

  She shook her head, sighed heavily and stood, replying, “This better produce something, Eriq. I’ve been on my feet all day.”

  He swept her up in his arms and moved her about the dance floor with a grace and panache she didn’t know he possessed. The Latin in him had surfaced fully, and she found herself twirling and dancing to a fast-paced mamba that steadily increased in tempo as the music from a live band thre
atened to blow out the walls. When the music finally came to an abrupt halt, Jessica felt as if she ought to have a rose between her teeth, but the “hombres” didn’t seem to mind the omission as they roared their approval, some high-fiving others.

  Eriq waved to them as he and Jessica made for the door.

  “What was that all about?”

  ‘ ‘They know every fishing fleet, cutter and pleasure craft that comes and goes from the ports here, and how a man­ifest is doctored and who gets paid off and—”

  “I thought we had the Port Authority Police for that.”

  “-—and if we can get them on our side... well, let me put it this way: They have more eyes than do the police.”

  Both Eriq and Jessica knew that the majority of victims had last been seen at one of the countless oyster bars and pier restaurants around the state, and that the killer might well be coming and going via the waterways. “Well, the more the merrier,” Jessica finally conceded.

  “If this guy is using a boat as his killing ground, maybe someone in the Cuban community has seen something odd somewhere along the line.”

  “I get the picture, but Eriq, I’m beat and I have to get an early start tomorrow with the MPD guys and the M.E. so—”

  “Coudriet, yes. Don’t be intimidated by him.” Eriq handed the valet his car tag and the young man in white jacket and tie rushed off for their car, leaving them standing before the Havana Tocador nightclub.

  “Me, intimidated by the M.E.?” A light sea breeze lifted Jessica’s now damp hair from her brow. The night air felt deliciously cool.

  “Yes, well, I understand he’s something of a giant, phys­ically.”

  “He’s no taller than you, Eriq, and he vaguely resembles Andy Griffith when he was sheriff of Mayberry, and he’s about as folksy, and he has freckles.”

  “All that and red hair. I can picture it, but what I meant was his professional stature. Don’t let his professional stat­ure—”

  “Influence me? Not to worry, Eriq.” She then asked, “What does it mean, Tocador?”

  “Good move regarding Coudriet, but he’s very good at what he does. He’s your senior by fifteen years, and he is used to being looked up to, or so I’m told.”