Eriq, ever alert even if he did look like hell, went directly to the new maps, asking, “What’s this all about?”
Jessica brought Anderson over to meet Eriq and introduced them as they shook hands.
The room was alive with buzzing computers, in stark contrast to the silence of the interrogation room. Men and women moved from desk to desk, checking readouts, swapping information and the occasional joke; the place had the feel of an army being mobilized. A large blackboard and podium at one end gave the impression of a classroom, and a huge corkboard at the other end only added to the effect. Ford had somehow gotten photos of all the victims, and they’d been spread across a discovery time line and displayed at eye level.
“Chief, these maps represent Captain Anderson’s depiction of the moving crime scene, the—”
“The Crawler’s boat?” Eriq was instantly curious, studying the maps.
“Against a map of currents and drifts, showing Patric Allain’s possible movements.”
Eriq was both impressed and incredulous. “Why the hell didn’t our experts create something like this for us from the beginning?”
“Maybe it took a seaman’s point of view,” suggested Anderson.
“This is like ... like a damned psychic thing. How did you come up with this?” he asked Anderson.
“Eriq,” began Jessica, “Quincey and I watched Elliot put this together. He did it after we answered his questions, during the boat trip here.”
“My ship is registered out of the Bahamas,” volunteered Anderson, “and she’s called The Misfit.” Anderson again offered his hand and firmly shook Eriq’s.
“Yeah, okay, I see, and you’re telling me you arrived here by... by boat?” Eriq’s expression was pinched, as if he weren’t understanding, as if one of his burners remained unlit.
“Yes, Captain Anderson’s boat.”
Eriq gave her a look of stunned curiosity, but he said nothing more.
Anderson picked up the slack moment, saying, “When the first body drifted away from the killer’s boat, he was south of the discovery site by at least ten and possibly fifty miles, given the northward drift of the current along Florida’s eastern seaboard so far south.”
Eriq looked again at the suntanned, handsome sea captain and said, “Hell, maybe we ought to have you conducting this investigation, Captain... ahh...”
“Anderson,” Elliot repeated, trying on a nervous laugh, but he wasn’t sure if Eriq was kidding or being sarcastic, and neither was Jessica, who now glared at Eriq. She realized that Eriq had been up all night and was fatigued, but he was being rude now to a man who only wanted to help, and she didn’t understand why.
“From the sound of things, I’d say there’re already too many chiefs in your army, Chief Santiva,” continued Anderson, taking a new course and tossing his used cup into a nearby container, “so I’ll not add to your problems. I’m out of here, Dr. Coran. See you back at the boat?”
She nodded, knowing she’d have to return there to retrieve her belongings. “Yeah ... yeah, later.”
She wheeled on Eriq and through grinding teeth asked, “Do you want to explain to me what that was all about?”
“What? What? Did I offend the guy? Well, pardon me.”
“Eriq, you’re beyond fatigue, you’re out of it, and you’re hardly making all the right... connections.”
“I think I know a connection when I see one, and the way that guy was looking at you, well... two nights on a boat with you. I guess that might get to any guy.”
“There’s nothing going on between Elliot and me! Quincey was with us the whole time.”
“Yeah, that’d put a damper on any budding romance.” He tried a laugh, which failed. Then he groggily and foolishly added, “And if Quincey hadn’t been aboard? What then, Jess?” Jessica inwardly admitted a certain attraction for Anderson, who was the quintessential freedom-loving, sun- worshiping sportfisherman. But she hadn’t acted on what little she admired about the man, who in essence remained a stranger to her; nor had she encouraged Anderson to make any moves on her. “This is ridiculous, and worse, what business is it of Eriq Santiva’s in the first bloody place?” He dropped his gaze to the floor and nodded. “Yes, of course, I’m... I’m sorry, Jess. I haven’t the right to... to have... to say...”
“Listen, you’d better get some sleep before two rolls around, if you expect to be in on the net, Eriq. You look awful, you’re dead on your feet and your mind is in the gutter.”
“There’re a hundred things to orchestrate.”
“I’m a fine maestro; let me orchestrate. Go find your bed and set your alarm.”
Eriq ambled away—like a dejected puppy, Jessica thought, feeling somewhat sympathetic about his condition, and still a bit stunned by what he had said. Where the hell was his mind? Quincey and Samernow joined her now, along with Captain Ford, interrupting her musings.
“Let’s see what the Naples PD has in the way of undercover wear, people,” suggested Ford.
“And just how would the granddaughter of the famous and infamous Gordon Buckner dress?” asked Jessica with a rakish smile.
“I think she’s definitely a jeans and plaid shirt girl, so you’re halfway there,” Quincey replied with a chuckle. “Ragged cuticles and open-toed shoes,” added Samernow.
Eriq was suddenly back, and he pulled her to the side and walked her into an empty stairwell, wanting a private word with her. “Whatever happens out there today, Jess, you don’t take any chances.”
“Not a chance...”
“I mean it—no stunts or foolish hotdogging. Got it?”
She looked again into Eriq’s handsome face and penetrating eyes, which were glazed over at the moment like those of a druggie. Probing, wondering what he’d been on all night, she asked, “Where’s this coming from, Chief? Eriq?”
“Just be careful. No one wants you hurt.”
“Someone been telling you stories out of school about me? Or have you been reading my jacket again? I’m not a risk, not for myself and not for others, and certainly not for you.”
“Not a risk, huh?”
“No.” Then she saw it in his eyes: a glimmer of lust, a flourish of desire, a bird spreading wings to take flight in that moment that his eyes lingered over hers, and she realized for the first time since seeing him that between Naples and Miami he had somehow concocted some sort of love interest in her. “No, no ... this isn’t going to happen, Eriq, not between us. It would just get in the way and serve no purpose because—”
“I can’t help the way I feel, Jess.” He reached out, took her shoulders in his hands and was about to pull her to him when she pulled away.
“No, Eriq... I’m sorry, but this... it’s just not what I want or need at the moment. It’s nothing against you, nothing like that at all. It’s just that—”
“It’s Anderson, isn’t it?”
“Damnit, Eriq! Blink once for hello, Eriq, and twice for no, I’m no longer on this planet There is nothing going on between Anderson and me. Got it?”
“Then it’s Parry, isn’t it?”
He knew she found him attractive, so she needed a good excuse to stiff-arm Eriq with, and Jim Parry certainly presented a larger-than-life explanation which Eriq could both grasp and find solace for his male ego.
“Yeah, yeah... that’s it. I’m still very much in love with Jim.”
He nodded appreciatively. “I’ve been there. I just want you to know that if you ever need someone, Jess... if you ever need anything from me, day or night... well, I’m not just your superior, I’m your friend.”
It was a genuine remark, despite the “superior” crap. She smiled, nodded and thanked him.
“I mean that one hundred percent, Jess. You okay with that?”
She nodded. “Now, you go get that rest, and for God’s sake, Eriq, don’t ever change.”
“And what’re you going to do in the meantime?”
“Meantime, we’re going to see what
Ford has for us in the way of a van and some decoy clothes. What size shoe do you wear?” He couldn’t recall. “Shirt size?” He couldn’t recall. She escorted him back to the others and called Ford over to ask him to have Eriq escorted to a place where he could lie down and sleep, all to a chorus of Eriq’s protests. But finally he was persuaded to locate some rest in a room upstairs where there was a couch.
“What’s up with him?” asked Quincey.
“Too many pills and too little sleep,” suggested Samernow.
Jessica gave assurances. “He’s okay... He’ll be okay by two.”
•SIXTEEN •
Disappear like a tale that is told.
—Simeon Ford
The stakeout had gone way past two p.m. and no one remotely resembling Patric Allain had shown up, but still Jessica and the others held out a desperate hope, she from inside the trophy shop and the rest from outside. Santiva and Mark held forth in the Florida Power and Light-turned- surveillance van at a remote point across and down from the trophy shop, Quincey from a nearby doorstep, where he played the role of a homeless man.
The trophy shop and its adjacent warehouse, in which fish of every size and shape and color hung in suspended animation from rafters, each in its own crucial stage of preservation, was quite unusual.
Jessica found Buckner’s shop reminiscent of the fictional Little Shop of Horrors. It was a graveyard for fish, large and small, but more than a graveyard, it resembled a cross between a biophysics lab—with its many chemicals and hydroponics agricultural experiment, with fish instead of vegetation hanging from a ceiling—and a dirty, noisy warehouse that might as easily have housed men shearing sheep as men mixing great vats of papier-mache, creating plaster casts and molds and gutting and skinning fish.
The warehouse section was stacked full with supplies in various cortiers and rooms--a labyrinth of rooms, actually—each given over to a certain stage in the reverent process of trophy mounting. The army of workmen committed to the process wore T-shirts, jeans and rubber boots. The shop out front was just that, a front for displays of blue and yellowfin, jack, marlin, grouper, shark and some of Buckner’s monstrosities, coming out of what he called his “pure creative side,” the cross-bred taxidermy of trophy creatures he’d termed Twisted Evolution. He proudly displayed the obnoxious results—a “gator-fish”—under a large sign of the same name: Twisted Evolution. Other items of every conceivable sort necessary to both his main trade and fishing—both big game and small—was sold in his shop, including bait and tackle of every size, shape and suggestion. It was all crowded in with Snickers bars, Lay’s potato chips, and Pepsi-Cola, which lay in the same cooler as the big-game bait.
In his attempt to impress Jessica, Buckner proudly announced that he owned stock in Pepsi-Cola, told her that it had risen recently to forty-six dollars a share and asked if she wouldn’t like a piece of that.
Since Jessica had to be on the inside and pretend familiarity with her “uncle” and her surroundings, she was more than happy to take Buck’s ear-grinning tour of his place which, as he put it, he’d “built up from scratch.”
“The premises was once a used-boat dealership, long since defunct. Took the place off the Realtor’s hands for a song,” he boasted to Jessica now, as if meaning to propose marriage as soon as he demonstrated how he could get rid of his old lady and keep her. Jessica, in jeans and plaid shirt, her hair pulled back severely, a ponytail bobbing behind her head, was quickly getting a feel for, and a smell for, Buck’s Trophy Shop, as it was called.
Buckner had a number of men working for him, some obviously for day wages, and they had a routine which they never veered from, which Jessica assured them and Buck they should continue to the letter. But Buckner and the others were fascinated with her, acting as if they had never seen a woman in the place before, and perhaps they hadn’t, so she finally gave in, allowing them to show her every detail of the process of mounting the game fish, of which they were solemnly and worshipfully proud. Buck talked the whole time as each of his men in turn demonstrated one or more facets of the process. “You won’t find no damned plastic marlins here, darlin’,” he informed her. “We do it the old-fashioned way, but with state-of-the-art preservation techniques, mind you.”
“Did a marlin for Paul Newman a ways back,” said Buck’s first assistant. “That was a gas.”
Buck raised his shoulders, “We got some of the world’s most famous big-game anglers coming to us, ‘cause they know we’re the best, and Stu here wants to tell you about Paul Newman! Anyhow, you see, here we do game fish trophies by the hollow-sculpture method.”
“Meaning?” Jessica stared into one of the papier-mache vats, where an assistant mixed the materials with large wooden ladles, finally plunging his hands and forearms in up to the elbows and mixing the sticky white glue.
“We use the actual skin of the actual fish. Most places nowadays use fiberglass or Teflon or goddamn graphite! ‘Magine that? Damn thing’s no longer a fish, no more fish than you or me.”
No more a fish than you or /, she thought, wanting to correct his grammar but realizing that to do so would be the grammatical equivalent of spitting into a hurricane wind—useless and messy.
“Using the actual fish skin means we get the most authentic reproduction of size and shape,” added Stu, a thin, angular man with dark skin and an eagerness to please.
“It costs more the right way,” explained Buck, “so most times we’re asked to create a reasonable facsimile. Hate to do it, but if you’re gonna use plastic—”
Stu, hearing this so often, finished for Buck, adding, “—at least get a trained skinner who can provide exact specifications!”
“When we get a fish in, it’s first measured and weighed,” continued Buck. “Then we pose it—you know, in a lifelike position, say leaping or lunging.”
“Next, plaster of paris is poured over it, to create the spit mold,” contributed Stu. “And after the material sets, it’s removed and the skinning process follows.”
“We use as delicate surgical instruments as you, Dr. Coran,” Buck assured her. “It has to be done that way, if it’s to be done right.”
“You use a scalpel, then?”
“To assure no damage to the specimen, yes.”
“Were any scalpels stolen from your place along with the chemicals the other night?”
“Some instruments were taken, yes.”
Stu wanted to get back to the subject at hand, so he deftly stepped between them and continued, saying, “This point’s where I come in.” Stu was obviously proud of his handiwork. “The skin is next given several chemical baths, you know, to remove excess oils, organic matter, microbes.”
“High-tech insect repellent,” muttered Buck as if to disparage Stu’s expertise.
Stu pretended no offense. “Once cured, the skin is fitted inside the mold, to return it to its original shape, you see.” He demonstrated with a blue marlin.
“That’s when several layers of paper, glue and papier- mache are applied through an opening. Here. I’ll show you.” Buck lifted one of the molds at this crucial stage to show her the hole on the side that would be against the wall, not showing. “This forms the core, replaces the innards so that there’s no collapse after time. At this stage,” he added, “we say the fish is truly mounted. We don’t use the term stuffed. Stupid to refer to trophy mounting as stuffing, like you’d stuff a bear or a circus animal. As you see, we don’t stuff the damn things.”
“The mount is then ready for the dehydration process, which can take up to three months, depending on size, of course,” Stu explained. “We’ll pass by the curing and drying room next.”
Jessica saw that the marine taxidermists kept a large inventory of molds on hand to provide a base for, as Buck explained it, “fish received only in the skin. It’s a great deal less expensive to forward a previously gutted fish on ice than one of full dead weight.”
Stu piped in, “But Buck won’t never gu
arantee perfection unless we can begin with the whole fish when it comes through the door.”
Having been in the business all his life, Buck had amassed so many molds that he could reproduce any fish size or species within a fraction of an inch of its life dimension.
They peeked into what Stu had called the curing and drying room, where bright heat lamps were turned on and focused toward the ceiling. Every available inch of ceiling space was occupied by the enormous trophy fish, many of which were swordfish, their proud swords spiked downward now from their carcasses, lifeless and hard and eyeless, their eyes having been removed at some earlier stage in the process.
The men working in the back of the factory, in white aprons pulled over sleeveless T-shirts and jeans, walked about in rubber boots or sneakers completely covered in globs of papier-mache like so much pizza flour and dough. They worked with great intensity and concentration and smiled at Jessica as she toured the place.
“We boast a record of forms fitted to within a thirty- second of an inch of the original fish,” said Stu with pride. They moved on to another room. Here Jessica saw the finished work, she thought; but Buck cautioned her otherwise. “This is our primping room. Here’s where I come into play—not doing any of the heavy stuff no more.”
“They look alive,” she said, staring. Here the fish had remarkably lifelike eyes that stared out at her.
“I check for any final flaws here. Call it quality control. I correct any skin flaws and reinforce the fins. With the one exception of the glass eyes, everything you see here is from the original fish, ‘cept the mold over which his skin is stretched, of course... but the skin is the animals and basically that’s what we preserve here, the skin.”
“Except for the billfish,” cautioned Stu.
Frowning, Buck explained, “A bill’s dorsal fin has to be prefabricated. No amount of processing can preserve some of the more delicate membranes.”
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