Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  The officer got him patched through to Santiva. “What’s the word there, Agent Santiva? Does Coran think it’s the work of the Night Crawler?” Coudriet feared the answer.

  “She does indeed. And your location? What’s going on there?”

  “I’d say we’re being courted by this bastard, Santiva. I mean, we’re given three gifts from the bastard, Santiva... three all at once. He’s like a fucking cat now, bringing his dead to us as prizes for show.”

  “Three? And that’s a lock? We’re sure that all three are victims of the same killer?”

  “Think he’s trying to tell us something?”

  News of the triple-sightings of bodies by civilians and the confirmed triple-slaying by the Night Crawler, all along Miami’s seashore resorts, left a burning trail of curiosity- seekers and media sharks from one end of the city to the other, one insensitive radio talk show host likening it to “beached whales—only now we got beached babes!” He didn’t seem to care that the victims’ families might be lis­tening. The Chamber of Commerce, the mayor and his dep­uties were hastily applying Band-Aid measures to shore up the image of their beautiful city, but too late. The damage was done.

  TV and newsprint media saturated viewers and readers with whatever few details had made it past the police PR team assigned to minimize the deaths and maximize the appearance that everything humanly possible was being done to end the nasty little career of the Night Crawler.

  The triple murder was being analyzed by psychiatrists across the city as a throwing down of the gauntlet, as a slap to the collective face of law enforcement and Police Com­missioner Orlando Everette. Jessica and others working the case were hounded and harassed and bombarded with mi­crophones, cameras and inane questions at every turn and down every corridor. “What’re the police doing?”

  “How’re you FBI people helping?”

  “Why isn’t anything being done?”

  “Who’s responsible for this?”

  “Will he strike again, soon?”

  “Where will he strike again?”

  “Is it true that one of the bodies was a copycat killing, maybe two of them?”

  “Is it true that one of the bodies hadn’t been in the water as long as the other two?”

  Jessica and Santiva plowed through with “no com­ments,” geysering forth until they came to a door which was off limits to press, closing it behind them, knowing how foolish they would look on the six and eleven o’clock broadcasts.

  They were led through another door and down a pas­sageway to Dr. Coudriet’s Crime Lab Unit, with its adja­cent morgue. Jessica still had to log in the evidence she was carrying from her seawater crime scene. Here it would be logged by date, tag number and item description and then she would have to sign off on it. This done, she could begin her lab work and analysis of the evidence—such as it was.

  They soon located the evidence lockup and Jessica filled in forms which indicated every piece of evidence she had collected, each item now logged in on a manifest. This took some time, so Eriq located a nearby coffee machine and brought back a Styrofoam cup filled with the black liquid for Jessica. She hadn’t had any breakfast, so the coffee was welcomed.

  “What kind of monster is behind this?” she asked San­tiva as she finished up the necessary paperwork, not ex­pecting an answer. “The damned reporters want to know if and when and where it will continue—stupid questions.”

  “Well, it’s not like we can read minds or look into the future,” he replied, “but on the other hand, we are the experts. Who else’re they going to come to for answers?”

  “Then maybe we’d best work with the press, the Herald at least, as we promised?” She gulped down the remainder of her coffee, which had gone lukewarm.

  “Leave that to me. You concentrate on the lab evi­dence.”

  The uniformed officer at the “cage,” where the evidence was finally and completely logged, now thanked Jessica and told her everything appeared in order. She returned the thanks, tossed away her empty coffee cup and indicated to Santiva to follow her and they’d locate the morgue from here.

  Eriq’s request that she focus on the lab work and leave the press to him sounded like an order, so she said no more on the subject, but it seemed that Santiva felt a need to explain himself further. He looked over at her as they con­tinued down the institutional-gray corridor and said, “Peo­ple are rightfully upset, and I’d be more worried if they weren’t. Hell, it’s a goddamn mystery, and they want some goddamn answers, and we’d better begin to provide some or we’ll be crucified along with Commissioner Everette and his guys.”

  She nodded in agreement, still in jeans and shirt stained with saltwater, her hair pulled back and in a ponytail. “Peo­ple need to know why this is happening, why here, why now... to them. Only problem is, so far, God alone knows the answer to that one. But you know, Eriq, I’m wondering if anything like this has happened before, if this case can be linked to any earlier bizarre outbreaks elsewhere.”

  “Where multiple victims have been dumped at once?”

  She brightened a bit, hopeful. “Has the computer told you anything along those lines?”

  “Nothing quite like this, no. Like I said, London thinks there could be a connection, but I don’t see it.”

  “What do you think he’s trying to tell us, Eriq, sending us three bodies at once?”

  Eriq shrugged and pushed a door open for her. “Your guess is as good as mine. But I would hazard a guess that he’s not quite as in control of himself as he was earlier.”

  “He’s getting careless; that’s for sure.”

  “Not so much careless as uncaring, perhaps.”

  “Which could be made to work in our favor, if we work swiftly.” She stopped him in his tracks and looked deeply into his eyes, asking, “He’s become bored with the game that he’s played thus far, hasn’t he? That’s what you’re driving at, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s say he’s altering the routine of his fantasy. If it holds true that all three of this morning’s victims were his to give up to us whenever he chose, its clear that he’s be­come more interested in... well, in us...”

  “Good Christ, you don’t suppose he’s stepped up his killing spree as a direct result of reading about our coming in on the case, giving the case a high profile, do you? So he plays to the press even more than ever, which means he steps up his killing agenda?”

  “It is a distinct possibility, Jess.” She dropped her gaze. “God... so, he jazzes it up a bit. To what end?” To make it that much more challenging, exciting, dan­gerous maybe.”

  She nodded, relenting. “Yeah, J can see that.”

  They continued along the corridor, coming to the Miami- Dade Crime Lab, one of the finest in the nation, where Coudriet had already made arrangements for Jessica to view the additional two bodies that’d washed ashore that morn­ing.

  She had instantly wanted to know more about the fresh­est of the three kills as soon as she’d learned of the three- in-one deal allotted them by the murdering Night Crawler. That body had turned out to be the one Coudriet had at­tended to. The most recent kill could quite possibly tell them far more than any other body turned up thus far.

  “I’ve had an opportunity to reexamine my corpse from the Flamingo Hilton Beach Resort,” Dr. Coudriet told them. “She hasn’t been in the water for longer than a week and a half, maybe ten, twelve days at the outside, but she had a condition as a child which medication has over the years stabilized—Addison’s, which bloats the skin. With­out her medication, bloating set in, along with the natural expansion of the tissues by the water. It’s how and why I was able to get fingerprints from her.” He held up a single vial with a tiny lump of flesh in a preservative gel. “It’s one of Tammy Sheppard’s fingertips. It was enough to ID her with a missing persons report. You want a witness list?”

  Thorn hung back, but Powers rushed them with a long- bone X ray, the left femur and knee. “It’s from our victim. She once had a compound fracture.
You can see it here, just below the knee; and just above, here, you also see a simple spiral fracture,” he said, pointing with a ballpoint pen. “It has gone a long way in IDing Jane Doe number three.

  ”Thorn momentarily joined them, piping in with, “As for your victim, Dr. Coran, we found absolutely nothing to distinguish her. Her insides are as clean a slate as her out- sides.”

  “And all three were strangled, repeatedly?” she asked. “The water in the lungs—”

  “Lungs full to bursting, but yes, signs of multiple lac­erations and strangling,” added Thorn.

  “—about the throat and wrists, just like the others, and that information was not released to the press,” added Pow­ers.

  “So, there’s little chance any one of these was a copycat killing,” surmised Santiva.

  “Virtually none...” Coudriet put aside the little vial he’d been tightly holding, a dark shadow coloring his fea­tures.

  “Parents of the IDed Jane are on their way.” Jessica only half heard Powers’s last remark as she stepped into the autopsy rooms, where all three victims lay beneath sheets, well within view of one another, separated only by glass partitions. The three bodies looked like an endless trail of reflected images here, as if a mirror were being held up at each end.

  Three in one, one after the other; the bastard had cut them loose close enough to shore to insure that they would float straight into the hands of authorities. Had the SOB learned via TV or newsprint of her and Santiva’s arrival and the organization of a task force? Was that the cause of his sudden rage? Either way, all three victims had been long dead before their arrival. It was like stepping into a dark theater in the midst of a play about insanely vented evil. She stood silent vigil over the bodies for a moment, looking into each room from where she stood, realizing anew the enormity of the moment. In each death room lay a separate victim of the Night Crawler, three young women who had most likely not one thing in common before now, and who now had everything in common.

  “If they could only talk,” whispered Coudriet in her ear.

  Peeling back the sheet in the first room, Jessica recog­nized the remains of the young woman she had earlier ex­amined in the field. She went next to the second room and looked into the bloated face of another victim, this one with features still adhering. This one was Coudriet’s subject, the young woman he was calling Tammy Sue Sheppard. Jessica lingered, looking over the remains and instantly agreeing that this woman’s body was in far better shape than the one she had examined. Thorn and Powers, like children anxious to show off a favorite pet or toy, led her to the third body, the one they had taken charge of in the field. “Want to show you this,” announced Powers, his glasses bobbing as he tore away the sheet covering the swollen, draining body. There was a ter­rible gash in this one’s left side, just below the rib cage.

  “Looks like another shark bite,” said Thorn.

  “Measures up rather shallow for a large shark, but a small one might’ve done the damage,” Powers instantly added.

  Jessica’s mind worked over the possibilities: auto crash wounds sometimes looked bad, but seldom was so large a section of flesh missing from the torso; she’d seen hatchet- type weapons such as meat cleavers do as much, but the cut would be clean—cleaved in two. “It’s more than a simple fall or collision,” she agreed. “And the edges of the wound are really quite jagged.”

  “In keeping with a shark bite, I’d say,” Thorn quickly defended, as if his reputation were on the line.

  “Try an outboard motor,” said Dr. Coudriet. “I’ve seen outboard motor cuts a lot down here; somebody, or something like a manatee, gets tangled in one of those things, it can take out a hell of a chunk of flesh.”

  “Along with the sailor’s rope and knot, it all points back to a boat being the killing ground,” suggested Santiva.

  “The bodies may’ve traveled a good distance across the channel, too, in which case a speeding boat may’ve hit her,” cautioned Coudriet.

  Jessica agreed but did not say so. “We have lots of work to do here, Eriq. I’ll see what I can learn from the Sheppard body in particular.”

  Eriq nodded as he said, “Word’s come down that her parents are on their way to ID the body, so I wouldn’t do any carving until—”

  “A little late for that,” said Coudriet, recalling his bag of fingertips, “but not to worry. We’ll have her presentable at the window.”

  “I’ll go talk to the parents,” Eriq said, “and I understand there were a couple of young ladies with her the night of her disappearance. I’m seeing them today; see what they can give us. Touch base with you later.”

  “Right, and good luck.” Eriq nodded and disappeared through a corridor, led by Powers to where civilians, and parents in particular, awaited officialdom. “No doubt having the FBI on the case will do wonders putting the concerns of the victims’s relatives on hold,” Coudriet mocked.

  “We have released enough information that we can hope for some help in learning the identities of the other two girls,” Jessica told Coudriet. “It may take some time, but we have television and the news media on our side for the time being—”

  “Don’t count on that lasting very long.”

  “All three of them died in the exact same manner as Allison Norris, and I suspect there will be more.”

  “Shall we go to work, Doctor?”

  She nodded, then went for a surgical gown and gloves. She superstitiously located her own scalpel from her bag as well, the scalpel her father had given her so many years before, the scalpel she’d used to foil Matthew Matisak’s ugly plans in Chicago. She knew she’d need all the luck and skill she could muster to end the career of the heartless Night Crawler.

  The autopsies on the two as-yet-unidentified young women only corroborated what they already knew, that each had died in the same manner, at the hands of the same killer. Tammy Sue Sheppard died in identical fashion, the fantasy-murder ritual precisely the same.

  But it took seven hours of intensive lab work to prove it beyond any doubt, so Jessica was seven hours on her feet as they performed three autopsies simultaneously, each M.E. in communication with the other. By the time it was over, all the doctors were exhausted.

  It was after six p.m. when suddenly Santiva showed up and said, “I’ve got something for you to see, and there’s someone I want you to meet right away.”

  “Eriq, I’m beat. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?” Jessica pleaded.

  “There’s been another letter from the killer.”

  She was tearing away the rubber gloves she’d used dur­ing the autopsy, tossing them into a trash bin, thinking how stupid it was to expect anyone to replace rubber gloves at every single step of an autopsy or evidence-gathering. “As we expected there would be,” she said far more calmly than her heart was beating.

  “Here’s a copy. Read it, then meet me in the corridor. The eyewitness hasn’t been exactly forthcoming with us. I thought perhaps if she talked to you, another woman, it might be productive of something.”

  She waved her hands in the air. “Jesus, Eriq, at least let me change and scrub and throw some water in my face, and while I’m doing that, do you think you could find me a nice garden salad?”

  “Jess, this is important.”

  She took in a deep breath as she tore away her surgical garb and deposited it in a gurney. She then took the copy of the killer’s note in hand and walked into a nearby locker room where female internists and lab technicians changed. Coudriet and the other doctors had disappeared after the triple-autopsy like scattering rats, leaving the technicians to find freezer space for the bodies.

  Santiva stormed into the women’s locker room behind her, saying, “I know you’ve been on your feet and you’re stretched to the max, Jess, but I think you’ll want to talk to Tammy Sue Sheppard’s girlfriend. The girl remembers something of the man Tammy Sue disappeared with the night she didn’t come home.”

  A female lab assistant stepped in from the shower, plac­i
ng a towel about herself as she did so. Seeing Santiva, she gasped and shouted for him to get out. Jessica joined in the chorus of expletives, driving Eriq from the room.

  “Pervert! Get outta here!” Jessica ordered, feeling good about doing so. She then sat down and stared at the strange note from the killer. Just as Eddings had pre­dicted, the sequel verse in the e. j. hellering poem was continued. It read:

  • NINE •

  Has anyone ever seen a stranger moral fervor?

  You who dirty the mirror

  cry that it isn 7 clean.

  —JUANA iNfiS DE LA CRU7.

  Santiva had somehow come up with a garden salad in a plastic container, a peace offering there in the hallway. “Will you talk to the girl? Judy Templar’s her name. She’s told police everything she remembers twice over, but she’s holding back, says she can’t remember the features of the man whom Tammy Sheppard was last seen with. It’s like she wants to but she’s blocked it out, self-preservation per­haps; I don’t pretend to know. See what you think, and let me know.”

  “Is she deliberately holding back?”

  “I don’t think it’s deliberate so much as it is some sort of psychological safety valve; I think she’s feeling guilty about the death of her friend, and now, learning that her death is a certainty, well... she’s closed some doors.”

  “How long have you had her in interrogation?”

  “Three hours. Had trouble finding her earlier. She was shopping but she didn’t buy anything. No one with her. She’s either a bad liar or very lonely.”

  “She give the composite guys anything?”

  “She’s been so wishy-washy and iffy that the session was a washout.”

  Jessica located a small snack room whose tables and hard chairs looked familiar and comforting. She sat down and consumed half her fast-food salad while Eriq paced.

  “All right, I’ll talk to her, but there’s nothing says I’ll get any more from her than you were able to.”

  She was up and tossing the remainder of her salad into a trash container, walking out the entry and into the corri­dor, going for the police precinct upstairs. Santiva hurried alongside her, asking, “Anything new or helpful come of the autopsies?”