He’d tried the mortician’s way, to no avail; it was good for only so long. He had then tried the taxidermist’s method, plying the body with the chemicals of the fish trophy people. He had apprenticed with them, had learned all their secrets—so why wasn’t it working now? Because humans aren’t fish, common sense told him. Each organ decayed at its own pace and in its own time. Maybe it would be necessary to gut the body—but then it wouldn’t be ready for Mother to inhabit and reanimate when she finally arrived. It would be a mere shell. Could all his work, all his earlier attempts, all his experimenting truly have come to this dead end?
He had done all that his god had asked of him; he had caught his mother’s spirit again and again, had made her suffer in ways even he had not dreamed possible. He had made her beg and plead for her life countless times; he had repeatedly and pleasingly humiliated her. He had raped her again and again, and still she resisted coming to him and remaining as his permanent trophy. As he struggled to get the body above deck, he cursed, “If you had any character, any character at all, you’d have come to me long ago to end the suffering I must continue to bring down upon the innocent. Mother, you putrid bitch!” He had released the three bodies at once, sacrifices to his demon god, so he had truly expected better; he’d expected Her to come to him. But this was only followed by another day and night of being unable to fill the need that drove him. And now another day had passed in which he’d had no opportunity to kill, not anyone. His god counseled patience, that the right time and opportunity would present itself, and soon, but the frustration of doing nothing—of accomplishing nothing—was overwhelming, boxing him up, making him feel small and useless and helpless and irritable and memory-ridden, so much so that he’d begun to wonder if he had been foolish to cut loose three of the dead at once—one of which he hadn’t had the use of for very long at all. A deepening depression continued to enshroud Warren.
Still, there was meaning and reason to his rash act, since he was assured by the voice of the deity driving him—a twofold purpose, in fact. He would taunt authorities for proof of the sheer fact that he could, yes, but in addition, by releasing the rotting corpses of those he’d kept in limbo, he’d be forced to go after more, to harvest others, replace those lost... to seek a higher plane, a better union with the one power capable of returning Mother to him so that he might hurt Her for all eternity.
Substitutes were no longer enough.
It hadn’t been a completely conscious path he had followed to come to this plateau of understanding, no more so than had been the decision to release three victims of his insatiable need at once. In fact, he hardly recalled cutting the ropes, and he certainly didn’t recall deciding to leave the ropes dangling from the bodies, although he did recall leaving the rope attached to their hands and throats. Was it purposeful? Was it to give authorities a taste of the fox, so to speak? He knew the authorities wanted him so badly that they might do anything to stop him, but he did not believe them capable of learning about him, locating him or stopping him. In fact, releasing three bodies at once was a slap in their collective faces, the bloody bastards. Give them not one body to ponder but three at once. It was a stroke of irrepressible genius, if he could take credit for it; but no doubt the idea had been deposited by Tauto.
Now that the collective they had the FBI working the case, Warren—or some part of him, perhaps his Tauto, his god—had decided to be more playful, to exact a higher price from those who virtually allowed his ravagings to go on, to give them more to chew on and nightmare over. Three killings were better than one. The newspapers couldn’t ignore it. The TV cameras couldn’t ignore it. The world couldn’t ignore it.
But it seemed they had pretty much ignored it. They gave it a minute and twenty-nine seconds of airtime on Channel 3; the Herald positioned it on page two while turning page one over to the President’s arms embargo of a third-world country, a big trade agreement with Japan and the death of a local politician by suicide.
“Well, screw the whole lot of them,” he told the empty expanse of ocean where he stood, Madeleine’s body fighting him, the gravity pull on it so powerful it felt like lead. For a moment, he wondered if the pull wasn’t from the hand of Mother, ever-teasing bitch that she was. He looked out over the side, saw the rushing wake and realized his ship was moving at quite a clip and that he must return his attention to the helm. Earlier he had set sail for the south to see where the winds of fortune and fate might take him. And now what had begun as a mild tropical wind had become a strong southeast tack that had tagged his T-cross, filling out her sails, the breath of his god speaking to him, telling him it was time to return to more southerly regions, cast his fate in another direction, see what might come of it. He was, after all, a free soul now.
“Free of the past?” he asked himself as he struggled with the body, working it up and over the lip of the ship’s starboard side. “Not hardly... not until Mother comes for Hers,” he reminded himself, talking to the stiff body he continued to struggle to bring to the rail.
He’d readied to send the body over when it spoke to him. “You’ll never be free of me, Warren dear...” The weight and gravity pulled the body from his grasp, but Warren held on to it by a thread, by the single hook in its back. It dangled over the side precariously, trying to pull him into the depths with it.
“Mother, you dirty, filthy, whoring bitch!” he shouted at the corpse, feeling the sting of a psychological imprisonment he’d endured all his life.
She just purred up at him from the well of the dead carcass, speaking in her cockney English brogue, “Not bloody likely you’ll ever be free of me, dearie... not yet, anyway...” The dead lips mouthed the words as Warren blinked back saltwater spray and tears and the ship bounced wildly against the increasing waves.
Perhaps, he thought, / won 7 ever be free... can 7 be free...
“Not until you’re dead, dear,” the corpse said in his head.
“Mother, it isssss you! It is you! Finally come...” He held insanely to the body with all his strength as it fought to find the water. He struggled as the ship lurched now against the sea, threatening to claim his mother, his hard- won prize. He held on to the corpse, cursing it. “Damn you, I’ve finally got you, and I’m holding on!”
He almost fell into the ocean with the corpse, but suddenly the hook around the spinal column held, despite the yielding, no-longer-devoted flesh, and Warren Tauman and Madeleine careened against the deck, flailing like two fish there beneath the rain that had begun to fall.
He screamed up at the heavens, cursing Mother over and over again, saying, “Ugly hag bitch! I’ve got you now! I’ve finally got you now!”
He lay on the deck, his forehead split open from the impact of the hard shell that had crashed into him. When he realized that he had won the battle, he began an uncontrollable laughing. The sea had turned against him, churning the ship now like a corkscrew in a whirlwind. He’d entered a storm, and rain continued to pelt him where he lay on the deck with Mother.
He went instantly to the controls below and corrected his course, set the ship on auto again and returned to the corpse on deck, where it was washing from side to side. He had to secure Mother. “You won’t get away from me so easily this time, Mother,” he told the body. He then lifted it and carried it back down into the cabin.
•TEN •
Thou has betrayed thy secret as a bird betrays her nest, by striving to conceal it.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Clever of you to get Dr. LeMonte here in so timely a fashion, Jess,” said Santiva. “How’d you manage it?”
Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva sat opposite one another in a small and unhealthy little room which the MPD called their task force ready room. Surrounding Jessica, on every wall, were blowup photos of the Night Crawler’s victims and a gallery of other, up till now, only missing young women. Some, Jessica had mentally ruled out as simply missing persons, since they were obviously not of the type th
at he preferred. Blondes, raven-haired women and ordinary brunettes were not targeted, and this was likely why Judy Templar—more brunette than auburn or redheaded—was spared while her more auburn- haired friend Tammy was taken. In fact, the young victims seemed to bear a haunting similarity to Jessica as a younger woman; it was a disturbing similarity, one she’d kept to herself, one which no one else, apparently, had noticed.
“I had to bribe Dr. LeMonte to get her here,” she told Eriq.
“Bribe? How?”
“The FBI’s picking up her tab.”
He cleared his throat. “A considerable one, I’m sure.”
“You can bank on it.”
“What else did you promise her?”
“A week in Miami.”
“Jesus, at our expense?”
Jessica nodded.
“I thought you and Dr. LeMonte were friends.” Between them a VCR remote lay waiting for Quincey and Samernow to arrive for a viewing of the taped session between Dr. LeMonte and Judy Templar.
“We are friends,” she told Eriq.
He laughed heartily at this.
“After all, she had to put all her regular patients on hold to fly down to meet with Judy Templar.”
Quincey burst through the door with his usual aplomb and sat heavily in one of the chairs, which hadn’t given an inch for anyone else but made an exception in Quincey’s case. Samernow slowly followed, eyes averted, head bowed, again looking despondent. Jessica wondered at his mood swings.
She got right to business, telling the others why she had called them all in to view the tape. “I think Judy Templar saw the Night Crawler and that inside her head, she has a physical description. Dr. LeMonte and a police sketch artist are working on that as we speak. For now, I would just like you to listen and learn what you can about Patric—”
“Patric?” asked Quincey, his brows arching.
“It’s what he calls himself; at least, it’s what Judy Templar knows him as.”
“No last name?” asked Samernow, alert now.
“ ‘Fraid not.”
“Didn’t we have another so-called witness to ID some guy named Patric, Mark?” Quincey asked, searching his memory and his partner’s bloodshot eyes.
“I don’t know ... maybe... Yeah, one of our hundreds of so-called eyewitnesses,” he sarcastically replied.
“I’m talking about the one you’ve expended so much energy in trying to locate again, Mark.”
Samernow glowered at his partner, then slowly began to talk about the circumstances. “Said she’d been abducted by this beautiful man, taken to a boat and tied up for several days while he repeatedly raped, sodomized and choked her. Said she survived only by faking unconsciousness and escaping and swimming a hundred yards to shore.”
“When did this happen? Why haven’t you told us about this witness?”
“She disappeared on us. Left the state, but we have notes.”
“Get them—after you listen to this.” Jessica clicked on the VCR and TV screen. On the screen were the distressed teen and the exquisitely dressed, very chic psychiatrist, Donna’s hair still with its salon patina and curl.
Jessica then got up and left the men to view the tape alone. She had already been through it three times. She went for a cup of coffee, running the entire scene described by Judy Templar in her mind’s eye. Hearing Judy Templar’s hypnotized drawl in her ear.
Donna had drawn on Judy’s considerable memory of that evening when her best friend. Tammy Sue Sheppard, disappeared down a wharf and to her death.
Judy’s hypnotic trance had her speaking in the third person, a technique Donna LeMonte had used on Jessica on frequent occasions, as it supposedly helped patients separate themselves from the moment.
Coffee in hand, fatigue setting in already at 3 p.m., Jessica was listening to the taped session unfold for the fourth time, without benefit of high technology, merely by using her own internal Internet:
They were all at the Magic Wand, a bar and grill built out over the river where it met the ocean at the tip of the South Miami Beach strip.
Judy frowned in a pretense of anger, repeating the name Patric, mocking Tammy in a half-kidding, half-angry manner, “Patric without the K, Patric without the K,” until it became a boozy chant. Cynthia dug back into her chair and consoled herself with her third Bloody Mary, looking and feeling grumpy. Judy remained standing for a time to watch her exuberant friend Tammy rush after her pickup, literally skipping out to the harbor boats along the planked dock, where she disappeared among the enormous floating city, her form lost to the angles and edges, the rigging and white sails and tall masts which comfortably bobbed in a lullaby of noise created by ocean breeze and swells, turning the poles and ropes into giant chimes there where the Intracoastal Waterway met the incoming ocean tide.
Judy then breathed a great sigh of resignation, turned to Cynthia and asked, “What’s the name of the boat?”
“What boat?”
“Cynthia! The one Tammy’s going on. What did she say the name of the boat was?”
“Oh, I dunno ... and I don’t care,” Cynthia said, lounging unladylike in her deck chair.
Judy suddenly called out after Tammy, both curious and a little unsure of her friend’s wisdom at going off with the stranger this second time, however handsome, virile or loaded he might be. Earlier, he had taken Tammy Sue to a nearby restaurant, plying her with wine and shellfish.
“Forget it,” said Cynthia. “She’s long gone. I thought when he came back here, that he was going to ... that he might... that maybe they were ... you know...”
“No, I don’t know,” Judy replied, staling across at her boozed-up friend. “Know what?”
“Ask us to join ‘em.”
“Join ‘em for what?”
“Judy, you’re so mired in your middle-class mind.”
“God, no... not even drunk, Cyn—”
“He’s such a hunk, though...”
“You’re serious. You were going to suggest that we all three do him, weren’t you?”
“No! Yes! No, maybe... I didn’t suggest it. His eyes suggested it. Did you see the way he was undressing me and you while he had Tammy on his arm?”
“God, you, Cyn... You would do it, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I didn’t say I would, no.”
“A three-way! God, Cyn, you’re awful.”
Cynthia flailed her drunken hands in the air. “I just thought that maybe Tammy’d have the decency to invite us to join them, so we could get to, you know, know him, too.”
“Hell, I’ve taught Tammy better’n that, Cyn.”
Cynthia only frowned and waved her now-empty glass.
Judy suggested, “Let’s go have a look at the boat while they’re pulling away. Get the call numbers, you know, just in case.”
“Call numbers? Planes have call numbers, not boats.”
“Boats have identifying numbers, too. It’s the law.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you grew up in Indiana. I wouldn’t expect you to know.”
“But we can’t go traipsing after them.”
“Just out to the end of the dock is all. Tammy told me the guy wants to take her to the Caribbean.”
“Tonight?”
“Well, no... I don’t think tonight, but sometime.”
“Damn, he gets better and better all the time. Where in the Caribbean?”
“I think she said the Caribbean... isn’t the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean Sea?”
“Geography’s not my best subject; never was,” replied Cynthia.
“So suppose she says yes and they just, you know, disappear for two weeks on that gorgeous sailing ship? What’re we going to tell Tammy’s parents when they call?”
“God, they’d flip, wouldn’t they? I’d pay to see that.”
“So, come on. Let’s at least go see the boat off.”
“But it won’t look right. She’ll think we’re jealo
us.”
“Goddamnit, Cynthia, we are jealous.”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t have to know it.”
“Cynthia, Cynthia... she already knows that much.”
“But to give her the satisfaction? No way!”
“Well, I’m going to watch them shove off.”
“Not before you dig deep into your pockets.”
“What?”
“This’s your round of drinks, remember?” Cynthia waved the empty again, this time like a flag.
“Oh, yeah... sure...”
Judy Templar located the necessary cash and tip, dropped it on the table and started away. She returned, however, for one last-ditch effort to get Cynthia to tag along. “You coming?”
“Naw... Think I’ll just sit here.”
“Come on, Cyn... We’ll just pretend to be looking at the boats. She won’t know any different. She’s too preoccupied with Paaaaatric-without-the-K anyway. Come on, Cyn... Cyn...”
“Oh, all right, all right. Stop your whining. God...” They’d gotten up to go toward the dock when two young men not quite their ages intercepted them, asking if they’d care to dance. Judy whispered a bit of feminine philosophy in Cyn’s ear, saying, “What is it about a place like this? It never fails that in a place like this, the losers always find us. Are we wearing signs on our backs or what?”
One of the band members hit a bad note and it brought Judy’s attention full circle to the musicians and the fact that some people were dancing.
Cynthia wondered what her friend had just said even as she whispered back, “What is it about places like this that attract boys too young to drink and too cash-poor to buy me a drink?”
Both of them giggled, trying to mask their amusement with their hands and failing miserably to do so. Then they each grew more serious and stared at the other for the right answer to their would-be suitors.
Finally, Judy Templar said, “I’m sorry. I’m just going for a walk.”
Cynthia said, “I’ll dance.”
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