“ We’ve wasted so much time, Kathleen,” he suddenly said. No one ever called her Kathleen. “I have been to many places, I have done many things and I have loved many women, but tonight, it is as if my life has been one long search.”
“ Search?” she squeaked.
“ A search for you, of course… and it has taken so awfully long.”
Sure it sounded like a line, but by now she didn’t care. “A search for me?”
“ I’ve dreamed dreams about you.”
“ That’s just ridiculous. How could you? You don’t- didn’t even know me until tonight.”
“ No, it is true. Dreams are like mirrors held up to the soul, and you are the one in my dreams, and I want now to show you my virtual soul, my other love which allows me the freedom of the seaman’s life.”
“ Virtual reality I’ve heard of, but virtual soul?” she asked, looking out beyond the riggings of the many boats and ships in harbor. “Is that like some new rock band?”
He pointed toward his sailing vessel. “It is where my other self resides, where I am free, unencumbered…”
“ Oh, I’ll bet.” She tried to laugh, but something in his eyes told her not to. “I mean, I bet you can do just about anything you want with that kind of a… a ship. So what kind of weed or pill is this virtual soul? Or are we talking PCPs? I don’t do needles.”
“ No, you misunderstand. It is not a drug. It is my life.”
“ Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound gross or anything.”
“ It is where my Tauto lives.”
“ Your tattoo? Lives?”
“ No, not tattoo, dear. Certainly you’ve heard of the Tau cross?”
“ Tau cross? That sounds like a good name for a boat, but what’s a Tau cross?”
“ The T-cross. It is an essential element of nature. Where two lives cross, such as our lives are crossing tonight, now… below this moon.”
“ Is that like what you mean by virtual soul? Or is that just what you call your boat?”
“ Never mind,” he replied, pointing toward his boat, which was lost amid the forest of others. “Isn’t she beautiful? All I need now is someone like you to share her with.”
“ How did you get… I mean, how can you afford such a boat?”
“ It was an inheritance. One of many.”
She could hardly believe her luck. “What do you do, besides sail, I mean?”
“ I write.”
“ Really? What kind of writing?”
“ You will laugh.”
“ No, no I won’t. I think it’s romantic, that you write.”
“ I write stories, mysteries, romances. I earn some from that, and as I said, I have an inheritance.”
“ You’re independently wealthy?”
“ Well-off, let’s say. Now, will you come aboard? We can take her out, and you can enjoy the river from a whole new and exciting perspective.”
“ Sure… sure, why not? Let me just say good-bye to my friends. You’ll drive me home after we dock?”
“ Oh, of course, absolutely.” There again was that divine English accent. Dreamy, she thought. “Be right back, then.”
“ Meet me at the boat.” It took all of ten seconds to tell her friends not to bother waiting for her, that she had scored big time. They were full of questions, which tumbled forth with their giggling; they were anxious to know more about the handsome, sun- painted god that Kathy had cornered.
“ All I know is he’s European or something with a nice accent, and his name is Patric without a K. Talks with an English accent, I think, like Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, and he’s loaded as well as handsome. So, girls, have a nice night. Ciao…”
It was the last image-her friends smiling and waving- which Kathy Marie Harmon recalled when once again the brutal, sadistic bastard brought her around to consciousness. He wouldn’t let her die so easily, wouldn’t let her find the peace she had moments ago accepted. She was too weak to fight him any longer, and he placed her, naked, into the water alongside the other dead girls. That’s exactly what she was now: a dead girl..
She felt the stranglehold of the noose about her neck and the tearing ropes at her wrists; she heard the powerful jets of the motor as he revved it up, and in a moment her glazed eyes made out the back of the boat, the big letters spelling out the T-cross; then the stalwart, potent rush of the sea- water slammed into her and her entire body was dragged paper-doll fashion, a puppet on a string to bring him perverted-beyond-satanic kicks.
She herself was beyond tears, beyond pain actually. She felt a languishing, uncaring feeling wash over her on the wave created when he powered up the boat for faster speed, dragging her form through the now ugly, dark sea that had until so recently been a beautiful, romantic setting for her and the man she thought he was.
She’d been so wrong.
His every word to her had been a lie.
He had orchestrated a trap.
She had stepped willingly, blindly into his trap, into the trap of the Night Crawler’s tangled and perverted net. Then the boat slowed and the monster who called himself Patric brought it to a stuttering halt, her cold body slamming hard into the bow, pressed in by the other dead girls dangling there with her, and he returned to the bow to look out over the side to taunt her, saying, “Life is death, death is life, and now you go to a greater glory… the glory of Tauto, the god of all things which are indivisible. Now you travel to the virtual soul…”
Seeing that she remained yet alive, he returned to the controls and dragged her farther out to sea.
Two Days Later, Miami-Dade Police Department Crime Lab and Morgue, Evening
Jessica was relieved to learn that Dr. Andrew Coudriet was involved all day in courtroom testimony, giving evidence on a Mafia-linked killing, and had become too fatigued to meet with her until the following day. Meanwhile, he’d left word that his offices were at her disposal, and that she had carte blanche with respect to the physical evidence already logged and remaining. This meant she had full access to the most recent victim’s body as well. She and Santiva had flown back to Miami earlier in the day, having finally finished up in the Keys.
They’d returned with what she trusted was enough evidence to bury the Night Crawler several times over when and if they ever caught the bastard.
She’d learned that there was a positive ID on the bracelet, and although continuing to match the tissue and blood seemed a footnote to the truth, she ordered the tests just the same. She had also put a team of experts to work on the photos from the crime scenes and the photos of missing parts found inside the sharks that had been caught off the coast of Key Largo. They had to work from photos because, save for Allison Norris, all the victims had by now been either buried or cremated, and any exhumations appeared at this point out of the question for several reasons, not the least being the costs, in both financial and emotional terms.
The photo expert teams must attempt to match up, as if they were placing jigsaw pieces into a puzzle, the various parts with the parts missing from victims who’d come before Allison Norris. If they had any additional matches, this could speak volumes about the killer. From there, further study would go forward and decisions regarding exhumations made. They hoped such measures could be avoided.
After suiting up, Jessica had gone straight for the freezer cabinet housing what remained of Allison Norris, and now the body, such as it was, lay before her. Two assisting physicians, internists who’d aided Dr. Coudriet in the initial autopsy, were at Jessica’s disposal. The two men stood nearby, ready to assist in any way possible, or so she’d been told.
What she hoped to gain by a second examination, she didn’t herself know, so explaining it to the two internists wasn’t particularly successful. She merely stated-in an effort to cool the two anxious interns and their inquiring minds-”I see no reason for a second full-fledged autopsy.”
“ Good,” one responded in knee-jerk fashion.
“ We’ll call my examination merely a rout
ine check, for the record and my FBI protocol.” She said this for the microphone as well as for the worried pair, who had donned surgical masks and garb, as had Jessica.
One of the men seemed to buy it. She was as cursory as possible, sensing that both Drs. Thorn and Powers were anxious and appeared to have been coached into a reticent silence.
Coudriet’s two men, Theodore Thorn and Owen Powers, both capable young interns, explained that they had felt duty-bound to be on hand. Still, she had little doubt that duty-bound, properly translated, meant that Coudriet had ordered them to be there.
All was routine until Jessica questioned the findings on the throat and the single wrist of the girl. She saw the ligature marks just as Coudriet and his associates had before her-ugly discoloration scars about the neck, indicating that the girl was strangled. Of this, there was no doubt. But the ligature marks were soft compared with the thumb tracks embedded in the tissue at the larynx. Some things even the ocean couldn’t completely wipe away, such as a broken hyoid bone.
Jessica reached up and turned off the camera that was taping the secondary autopsy; she did so lavishly enough to tell the two men that what she was about to say was off the record. “This monster so thrusted his thumbs into the girl’s throat that it scarred and dented tissue far below the surface, so far below that it’s clear even after several layers of skin have sloughed away and nearly a week has gone by since discovery of the body; and it’s estimated that the body’s time in the water was an astounding three and a half to four weeks. Doesn’t that strike anyone as odd, that it took so long for the body to surface?”
Coudriet’s men remained silent, one of them nodding.
Seeing they had no comment, she switched the TV camera back on in just as ceremonious a fashion as before, a bit angry at the two crows who stood across from her. Now on the record, she continued, “The killer rammed his large thumbs deep into her throat. A closer look tells me that the girl’s entire pharynx was bruised and swollen before death.”
The pharynx is the tubelike structure that acts as both the digestive tract and the breathing hose. It also works in speech, changing shape to allow a person to form vowel sounds. Jessica momentarily wondered what kind of sounds Allison might have emitted under such brute force applied to the muscle and cartilage and membrane. The entire structure divides into three distinct regions, the second being the oropharynx, which extends from the soft palate to the level of the hyoid bone just below the lower jaw.
It was this area that Jessica took great time and care in examining, causing Thorn and Powers to stare and sweat beneath their surgical gowns. She asked for one of them to grab the Polaroid nearby and snap close-ups of the area she had opened with her scalpel. After Powers snapped three shots, Jessica asked Thorn to hold up a sterile tray to receive the small samplings she now sliced from the larynx tissue.
“ I thought this was going to be a cursory exam,” said Powers.
Jessica shot back, “It is.” Thorn abruptly said, “Dr. Coudriet was aware of the condition of the throat.”
“ But he chose to examine it only externally?”
“ He examined it by hand, coming up from the breastplate after the Y-cut was made below. He knew she’d been choked to death before she drowned, if that’s what you’re… wondering. And besides, there was pressure on to do as little as possible and still call it an autopsy. Allison Norris’s father’s a very influential man.”
“ Yes, well, if that’s the case, why wasn’t it reported as a strangulation death?”
“ It was, eventually.” She bit her lip and nodded. “I see.” Coudriet was no doubt under some pressure at the time and saw little difference in whether the dead girl was strangled by rope or by hand or drowned, since all had the same result. This explained his qualifying language in the report.
Jessica next repeated her procedure for the laryngophar- ynx, which extends from the base of the hyoid bone to the esophagus. The entire region, up and down, was badly bruised, not simply from the ugly blemish caused by the attempt to mask rope burns, but from powerful hands, the hands of a sociopath who had killed many times before until the routine and habit of his killing had begun to actually bore him. so that now he slowly and lastingly strangled his victims, no doubt in a controlled fashion, in controlled time and in a controlled space-his space- where he felt most comfortable and had a great deal of time to carry out a lingering murder. He then obviously dumped the body into the ocean-but where, to keep it from surfacing for so long?
Thorn and Powers exhibited signs of boredom themselves now. They’d been up and down this territory before, no doubt wondering what volumes of information she hoped to locate in the larynx, or voice box.
“ The hyoid bone,” she said, as if to allay any doubts, “while fractured, remains very much intact, indicating some sort of controlled strangulation, in which the killer took his evil time with the strangulation process. Patient, composed, self-possessed strangulation. The killer shows all the characteristics of an organized murderer who had likely fantasized killing for years before he ever attempted it, and who, once he did attempt the thing, began to meticulously work out the particulars in cool and cunning detail.”
“ You got all that from looking at the throat?” asked a befuddled-looking Thorn, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his nose.
She ignored his question and continued, “Now that he has any number of killings behind him, it has become a ritualized killing sport, each step as important as the next, and nothing left to chance or forgetfulness.”
She explored the wounds further, no simple task given the bloated condition of the skin; but the freezer had at least held the decay in check. She used a stainless-steel probe and handheld magnifying glass. “He’s devised the perfect murders, so far as he is concerned. And in conceiving such murders and carrying them out, he’s given over his soul to whatever demons drive him.” Yes, the hyoid bone was fractured-as was reported in the original autopsy-indicative of strangulation, but she’d seen many a crushed hyoid bone, and this one was far from crushed. In fact, it was near intact. She so noted this fact for the record, which disquieted Thorn and Powers a bit. Jessica was used to posing questions and scenarios as she worked; it had become part of her modus operandi.
She didn’t bother now with asking Thorn or Powers anything further, but she did ask the microphone and camera, ‘ ‘Could the victim have been alive yet after the fracture of the hyoid? It was quite certain that she was, since the lungs, too, were full of water when the body was discovered, although in and of itself this fact does not prove death by drowning. Clearly, more tests need to be run, but my most educated guess is running along the lines of a torture murder of the sort the FBI rates on a scale of one to ten, Mad Matthew Matisak having been a Tort. 9. This fiend, if he is slowly strangling the life from his victims, only to allow them to resurface from death as it were, only to put them through the torment again, and repeatedly, ranks right up there with the blood-drinking vampire killer. While he does not appear to have cannibalized or drunk his victim’s blood, he obviously breathes in their suffering to empower himself.”
Thorn, even while shaking his head and pushing aside Powers’s restraining hand, asked, “What’re you saying. Dr. Coran?’’
“ I’m saying this murdering… fiend first incapacitates his victim with repeated strangulations and then drowns them, that this evil being, whoever or whatever he is, has turned back down the evolutionary trail, allowing his most base, animal desires to overtake him.”
“ But why repeatedly kill someone?”
“ He obviously gains great pleasure at watching an Allison Norris struggle and suffer, and he too much enjoys watching his victim languish and agonize to allow her a quick death. He wants long hours to pass before he allows her to go.”
“ But why?”
“ He wants to control the clock, hold back time and death itself, to send her soul across a high wire of tension, with himself at the controls; he wants to control death itself.”
If memory served Jessica, Dr. Andrew Coudriet had not questioned the method in which the throat had been brutalized and the bone splintered, as opposed to crushed or mangled. He had taken it at face value that the strangulation was the result of a tightly wound rope about the neck; he’d described it as a hangman’s noose, due to the angle of the ligature marks. And he was definitely correct in that assumption. A hangman’s noose burned the back of the neck at the base of the brain far more than it did across the Adam’s apple and throat. She had noted this in her report.
Yes, Coudriet was right about the rope burns, but before the rope burns, the girl had been strangled by hand, and strangled badly, repeatedly. The question remained, was she choked to death so far as the killer knew-an important distinction in determining the level and duration of torture heaped upon the victim-before or after she was lynched? Also, was she dead before he threw her into the water, or had she been choked repeatedly first and then, while still alive, thrown into the water, where exhaustion and blackout would do the rest? Jessica asked the questions aloud after formulating them. Articulating the horrid questions proved too much for Powers, who suddenly reached up and shut off the camera and audio. He stood staring across at Jessica now, the body lying between them. “Dr. Coudriet’s report had the lungs full with water, so the woman was alive when she swallowed the ocean.”
“ That may well be,” Jessica agreed, knowing that as far as many forensics experts were concerned that was the only way for the lungs to be filled with water. But Jessica wasn’t so sure. Water was a force that could find its way into the lungs of even a dead person, particularly if that force were guided. It didn’t have to be inhaled in to find its way into the lungs.
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