Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

Samernow didn’t miss a beat this round. “You try it sometime. Hardest collar I ever got. Bitchin’ paperwork, and when we tried to stand him before the judge, well, all hell broke loose,” recounted Samernow, in rare form. See­ing his daughter had obviously helped his disposition.

  “Yeah,” Jessica teased Mark now, her smile growing. “Heard you brought in an Austrian?”

  “Cops here are gung-ho to bring in the Crawler. Can you blame them? They’ve never had a chance to make Top Cops or Unsolved, so they’re working overtime at it. Can’t say that’s the worst attitude they might’ve taken. So, how’d you guys do down south? How’d it go in Key Largo and Matecumbe, and why’d it take so damned long to get here?”

  Quince answered with his own question. “So, Mark, what gives with Aileen and your kid?’’

  “They’re great, really...”

  “That good, huh?”

  Samernow marched on toward the interrogation room, and they trailed after, the corridors here being extremely narrow, all the government outlay of funds having obvi­ously been for exterior show. “Oh, by the way, the re- checks and double checks of the Miami harbors turned up zip on our guy, so we can kiss any leads coming out of that trail good-bye. Got word over the fax this morning from Noonan back at headquarters.”

  There was a full-fledged interrogation going on, Captain Ford and Eriq Santiva doing the grilling on the inside while Jessica and Quince were shown to the one-way mirror where they might watch, but it didn’t sound promising. “Who’ve they got in there?”

  “Looking less and less like a suspect,” replied Mark. “Some guy who claims to’ve seen the killer. Claims he knows who the killer is, that he held a conversation with Allain.”

  “What does he have?”

  “The name Patric Allain, which everybody has by now, remember?” He didn’t mean for it to come out an indict­ment of her having released the information, but it did and it stung.

  “So what makes him special?” asked Quince.

  “Two things. He claims he knew something of Allain earlier, and that Allain showed up a few days ago at his shop.”

  “His shop?” asked Quince. Jessica added, “What kind of shop?”

  “Taxidermy shop.”

  Quincey and Jessica momentarily gawked at one another, unable to believe their ears, and then back at the man under interrogation, a man who looked as if he’d fallen off a seventeenth-century ship and washed ashore in rags, a Rob­inson Crusoe appearance about him, even down to his earrings, shorts and open shirt. He wore a long, scraggly beard that looked both dirty and uncombed. As thin as a dime, he looked like part of the growing homeless popu­lation.

  “Rode his bike into headquarters just to tell us his story,” said Mark Samernow with a little shake of his head.

  Quince asked, “What’s he ride, a Harley?”

  “Not hardly. Try a Schwinn, a bicycle. Old one at that.”

  Jessica frowned and asked, ‘ This guy is a businessman? He owns his own shop but rides a bicycle?”

  “What’s this guy’s name?” asked Quince. “Wouldn’t be Gordon Buckner by any chance, would it?”

  Samernow glared at his partner. “What’re you psychic now? Or did you overhear the name while we were ap­proaching?’ ‘

  “Mark,” replied Jessica, “you never mentioned his name, not once. Captain Anderson told us about Buckner before we landed.”

  “Anderson? The guy you came in with?”

  “Buckner’s got some sort of reputation among sportfish- ermen for what he can do with dead fish.”

  Samernow looked at the old man with rekindled interest. “So?”

  “He makes trophy fish for walls. If the girl in Mate­cumbe can be believed, and if the dead body in Key Largo can be believed, it all begins to make warped sense why the Crawler pulled up stakes and chose to come here, in search of the master—Buckner.”

  “Let’s listen up, see what Mr. Buckner has to say,” sug­gested Quince, finding a hard seat and trying to make him­self comfortable.

  Jessica remained standing, her arms folded, her eyes studying the man under interrogation, her ears filling with the questions he posed and the answers he provided.

  Gordon Luis Buckner was certain of his information. He was approached by a man who wanted to know everything that “Buck” Buckner knew about preserving fish flesh, down to the chemicals he used. However, the man, while a stranger to Buckner and sporting a British accent and a beard, was no novice himself. He had a working knowledge of taxidermy, albeit limited, and claimed to have worked in a place in Key West that specialized in the “art form,” Works of Art Taxidermy, a place Buck himself had started and sold out to a partner when, in his words, “Key West had became too fulla fags and too damned commercialized even for Jimmy Buffet.”

  Buckner was a weather-beaten, scrawny and aged man, late sixties, perhaps even early seventies. And he looked like something that had gone out with the tide and the trash through a portal on a sea scow. Unwashed and unkempt, his devilishly sporty gray beard, a multicolored scarf over his nearly bald white head and an earring dangling from both right and left ears marked him as a modern-day Florida pirate—no doubt an image he relished, especially when he grinned to show broken teeth and some gold. The man had pirate written all over him, in every sense of the word. He was a roguish man, and he liked using colorful and off- color words as he spoke. Every one of the cops present wondered if they dared believe half what he was saying.

  “Blasted bastard foreigner, he was...” Buckner was going on at length now, describing his incident. “Spoke just as sweet as Mom’s apple pie, like a lily-livered, be- damned limey if you was to ask me.” He stopped to chuckle through those awful broken teeth. “Claimed he was going to open his own shop, like mine, made a lotta noise about how he admired my work, all that crapola. Said he’d seen my work in Sport Fishing Today—”

  Jessica had stepped into the interrogation room moments before, making Buckner perk up and say, “Well, now you boys are talking. This I can deal with.” Captain Ford slapped a magazine into Jessica’s hand, a marker at the pages where Buckner’s creations were given several pages of space in photos depicting what Jessica could term only as hideous monstrosities, mounted fish bodies with the heads of badgers, opossums, alligators as well as whole, intact yellowfin and marlin. The article in­dicated an international market for what Buckner and a few other Florida trophy taxidermists had discovered in the way of a new “art form.” There was some mention also of litigation as to who owned patent rights on this dubiously creative invention in fish mounting.

  “He had a copy of the article with him,” said Buckner. “Said he’d heard about me all up and down the Eastern seaboard and all the way here.”

  “And it was afterwards, when you saw the wanted sketch on America’s Most Wanted?” asked Eriq, who was leaning against one wall now, showing signs of extreme fatigue.

  “ ‘Zactly. My wife watches the program. I don’t care a whit ‘bout it or anything else on the boob tube.’cept maybe a fishin’ show now and again, but for some reason, she says look at that guy, talking ‘bout how that dirty killer looked so normal and handsome, yet he was wanted for strangling and drowning so many young girls, so I look up and damned if it ain’t the same man who was in my shop just the day before.”

  Jessica realized that the episode had obviously aired on a local network as a rerun. She had already heard enough, and was convinced that the old man spoke the truth. She moved in further to tip her badge in Buckner’s direction and introduce herself to him. Then, with Eriq staring a hole through her, she asked, “Did Allain, did he actually use the name Patric Allain, sir?”

  “He did.”

  “You’re sure of that?” she pressed, and Buckner shifted in his seat.

  “Well, either he did or my partner Scrapheap Jones down in Key West did when I telephoned him, you know, to verify this young’un’s story, that he’d worked for a time down there with Scrapheap. But that was ‘fore I realized he was that
killer, the Night Crawler, and Scrapheap, he didn’t have no clue about that, no more’n I did, don’t you

  see?”

  Captain Ford nodded as he tried to follow the convoluted trail of information spewing forth from Gordon Buckner, an obviously heavy drinker whose bloodshot eyes and bro­ken teeth only added to his image and the incredulity in which he was being held by the police.

  “Did he say anything about returning to your shop?” pressed Santiva.

  “Sure, sure he did, or I did rather.”

  “Well, which is it, man?” Eriq was being extremely short now.

  Captain Ford asked more calmly, “When, Gordon? When’ll he be returning?”

  “He’s ‘sposed to be back today, to start in on his train­ing.”

  Eriq breathed a deep sigh, and Jessica on the other side of the table followed suit as the two of them exchanged eye contact. It seemed hardly likely that the killer meant to spend any time in such a port as this, certainly not long enough to train at anything. Jessica also saw that Eriq was dead on his feet, and she felt a little guilty. She had slept like a baby on board Anderson’s charter boat. The Misfit.

  “He told you he was coming back?” Jessica was both astounded and pleased to hear this. “That’s what I told your friends here, but they haven’t the sense to believe me.”

  “Coming back for... for more lessons in taxidermy?”

  “Mostly understands the process. He wanted to know about my most potent chemicals. Wanted to know if I gut a gator before I preserve it, and if there was a way to do it and leave the internal organs intact.” He looked up at them, around the room. “By God, it’s what he said. I told him it’d be foolish to leave the innards; they’d spoil, and the stench would be overwhelming after a time.”

  “What did he say to that?” she asked.

  “I offered to do him some lessons in trophy setting, since he was being so generous with his money.”

  “To show him how to do what he wanted?”

  “He said he’d pay double my usual salary for the job. Couldn’t turn it down, but now... hell, I don’t never want to be alone with that motherfucker ever again, ever. That’s why I come to you boys; figure you can do one of them whataya-callits?”

  “A stakeout,” supplied Chief Ford. “You bet we will.”

  “What else do you know about this Patric Allain?” asked Jessica of Gordon Buckner as she began to pace the room, taking Eriq’s eyes with her. Was he upset that she’d stepped into his interrogation? Perhaps, but she had ques­tions for Buckner that couldn’t wait. “Had you ever seen him before?”

  “No, never. Friends of mine in Key West told him about me, or so he said. Showed me a note scrawled in Scrap- heap’s handwriting.”

  “A note?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “Naw, pitched it back at the shop. Prob’ly out at the dump by now. Why? Is that important?”

  Santiva shook his head. “Could be... might’ve been. If he wrote anything on it, anything at all, we could match it to handwriting samples we already have on this guy.”

  “Matching his handwriting ain’t gonna fetch him, though, is it?”

  “It could help convict him, should he fail to confess, Mr. Buckner,” Jessica explained. “It would also tie him to the crimes if we can place him in shops like yours. You see, he’s been using chemicals such as those you use for preserving for... in an attempt to preserve human flesh.”

  Buckner cringed. “He musta been the one who broke into my shop last night, made off with some chemical com­pounds... Disgusting, despicable SOB.”

  “Did the note he carried have a date affixed to it, sir?” she asked.

  “Yeah, he’d just come from Key West. It had a date on it for Saturday last.”

  “Thank you, that’s very important, Mr. Buckner.”

  “Buck, honey ... you can call me Buck.”

  Buck continued where he’d left off before Jessica had interrupted him. “I did some calling, checked up right after this fella left, and sure ‘nough he was down Key West way, making a nuisance of himself just ‘bout ever’day, according to my former partner at Works of Art. So, they put him on for a time. That’d been last fall, almost a year now.”

  “They hired him on?”

  “Right, ‘cept it was more like they apprenticed him.”

  “In other words, he paid your friend?”

  “They don’t have many jobs to come open, so he worked for nothing. Said he wanted to learn the business, so—” Bruckner gasped to a stop, looked around to Eriq and asked, “You Feds aren’t going to get after ol’ Scrap- heap Jones in Key West, now are you?”

  Jessica assured him they weren’t IRS agents.

  “What time did you tell Allain to return to your shop?”

  “Two this afternoon.”

  Jessica and Eriq exchanged a look of satisfaction. Fi­nally, they knew they were on the right track, although each wondered if putting the arrest moves on the Night Crawler could be this simple. After all, if there had been a break- in and the killer was behind it, he might well not return. It would take some arrogance to do so. Then again, they knew this character had plenty of that commodity to spare.

  “Can you get us a surveillance van, something with a logo on it, something inconspicuous?” asked Eriq of Ford.

  “We can get an FPL van from Florida Power and Light.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Let’s move on it,” agreed Jessica. “Mr. Buckner... Buck, I’m your granddaughter for the time being. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “You a gotxl shot?”

  “She’s the best,” assured Santiva.

  “Welcome to the family.” Buckner’s face broke into a wide grin and his leathery hand took hers and held it until the sweat made her uncomfortable.

  “You go back to your shop for now, Gordon,” Chief Ford told the man. “Try to carry on as if it were a normal day.”

  Eriq interjected, saying, “And don’t let on that you sus­pect this guy in the least. If he comes in, treat him cour­teously, like you would any customer.”

  “The hell I will—”

  “Mr. Buckner!” shouted Ford. “I have to yell and shout at the bastard if he’s to be treated like any of the fools I’ve taught my trade to over the years. ‘Sides, if I don’t treat ‘im just as goddamned rude as I done before, then he will suspect something’s up.”

  Jessica joined Ford when he broke into a smile and laughed. “That’s just fine,” agreed Ford. “You do that. That’ll be just the way to play it then, old-timer.”

  “ ‘Old-timer,’ is it?”

  They wrangled with one another through the doorway and down the corridor. Alone with Eriq now, Jessica turned to him. “He’s here—the Night Crawler’s here—and we’re going to snare him this time.”

  Eriq had found one of the chairs and collapsed into it. “Careful, our batting average in Naples—hell, in the whole state—hasn’t exactly been sterling. For all we know this old coot could’ve entertained a perfectly harmless guy who wants to take up a weird hobby and doesn’t in the least resemble our killer.”

  “But the British accent, and the fact that he wants to know more about trophy setting, preservatives... Eriq, it’s got to be Allain. The old man said he used the name Patric Allain.”

  “So did America’s Most Wanted. Do you think the killer would continue to use the name, knowing we’re hot on it?”

  She frowned and tried to look everywhere but into Eriq’s eyes. He seemed intense, almost distraught, “I know you’re still upset with me about releasing as much as I did on the Night Crawler, and you have every right to be, Eriq, but—’’

  He shot to his feet, waved her down with his hands and, hissing, said, “That’s water under the bridge. We’re part­ners here, and we’re going to end this thing together.”

  “Today, today at two p.m.,” she insisted, wanting very much to believe it possible.

  “So, yeah... let�
�s keep that happy positive thought lodged firmly in our minds, okay? You’re probably right. Ol’ Buck seems to be very knowledgeable about our man, and he’s most likely telling the truth.”

  “So far as he knows it, you mean? You sound skeptical, Eriq.”

  “So far as he knows it... so, right... right... and I’m pretty sure... there’s one thing seems certain enough.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This creep wants to take the next highest step in his evolving fantasy, like you said, Jess. His is not a fixed fantasy like most killers, but one that is growing larger and more deadly each day.”

  Jessica hesitated a moment before answering, choosing her words with great care. ‘ The Night Crawler most likely had to have used his Patric Allain alias with Buckner, don’t you see? It would’ve been on the recommendation from Buckner’s partner in Key West. His partner may well have Allain’s handwriting on some agreement they made. I’ll contact him, see if anything shakes loose there.”

  “If it’s as Buckner remembers, yes... But he’s a bit strange,” Eriq again cautioned, “and so he may have just picked up the name from another source, like his TV set. He may be a Most Wanted junkie who’s decided to seize upon an opportunity to get his face on the boob tube.”

  Again the Most Wanted episode, with details about Al­lain, had come back to haunt them; and yet without it, Buckner might not have come forward.

  “So, how did everything go in Key Largo and Mate­cumbe? Gain any new insights? Any new evidence?” he wanted to know as he worked up a smile for her. She read into his unspoken words: Was the trip worth the taxpayers’ money?

  “You prepared to be astonished?” she replied.

  “I would love to be astonished.”

  “Then come with me.” She led him from the cold, institutional interrogation room and down the corridor.

  “Where we going?”

  God, he sounds weary, she thought before replying, “The ready room. Someone there I want you to meet.” Along the way, Jessica explained what they’d found in the Keys, what vital new information they had learned about their prey, and why they had come to Naples by boat. She finished up as they relocated the task force room where Captain Anderson’s maps had been pinned to a wall. She found Anderson pacing with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand, a packet of photos of the victims in the other. He flipped through the photos with growing anger.