Jessica stared long and longingly out over the pristine, sun-dappled, sea-splashed, ever-renewing bay, and from this distance it created a magnificent still life; she found the ocean an immense cradle which both supported and destroyed life, its white-tipped waves beckoning and constant, and the horizon above the sea a fresco of thunder- heads poised in a moment of time, painted there by some artist of colossal size, his brush and palette beyond all human proportion. It made her think of what Eddings had said about creation and destruction, giving life and taking life.
“ If the Artist of creation cannot kill,” she prayerfully whispered to the wind as it rushed around her on the balcony, “then God does not kill; so then God is not synonymous with nature or mankind, for both nature and mankind kill indiscriminately. Therefore, God is without guilt.”
Believing the syllogism she had just created might assuage some of the pain she had stored up over the years, since her first encounter with her first serial killer in 1992, she had begun to pursue this notion when her peace was shattered by the telephone.
She reached the phone on the fourth ring, hesitant to answer, wishing for a little more time with the blue, the stark white and the brilliant pinks and yellows of the Miami morning. Still, she acted.
“ Yes. Jessica Coran. Can I help you?”
Detective Quincey’s overwrought voice fired back, “Dr. Coran, you gotta coine right away. I can pick you up in five, maybe ten minutes. There’s been another killing. The body’s washed into Silver Bay, near Virginia Key.”
“ Give me time to dress. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Have you notified Santiva?”
“ I’ll do that now.”
“ Good.” She hung up and dressed quickly, glad that she’d showered the night before. She knew she’d be wading in water, so she pulled on a pair of lightweight jeans and a loose-fitting shiit. She didn’t have time for makeup, but she brushed out her hair, grabbed her bag and was in the lobby before Quincey arrived. Standing on the street corner just outside was Santiva, who had also hastily dressed. But she liked the fedora. He was going native, it seemed.
The standing order to all law enforcement that they be notified immediately of anything smacking of the work of the Night Crawler was obviously being observed. It was 7:03 a.m. when Charles Quincey and his partner, Mark Samernow, pulled up to the hotel lobby.
Santiva had had his car brought around. “You ride with the detectives. Find out whatever you can about the circumstances of discovery and make sure they’re-”
“- following our request that nobody touch the body before I get at it,” Jessica finished for him. “Right, I know. Chief. See you at the scene.”
“ You all right, Jess?”
“ Yeah, I’m… I’m fine, Chief. Just that sometimes…”
“ Sometimes what, Jess?”
“ You ever feel like a ghoul? What we do, I mean… sit around knowing there’s going to be another victim, knowing and waiting, knowing and being unable to stop it, knowing and being unable to do anything.”
“ Get control, Agent Coran,” he firmly said. “See you at the scene.”
She climbed into the backseat of Quincey’s departmental car, and once again noted how dull and bored the man’s partner was with the whole undertaking. She mentally made note of the fact that Samernow smelled of liquor from the night before and that he looked as if he’d slept in his clothes. Perhaps the case was taking a toll on the younger man.
Quincey seemed to know what she was thinking, having gazed up into the rearview mirror. “Mark’s going through a tough divorce,” Quincey said, covering for his partner. “It’s his first.”
“ Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Detective.”
“ Still, if the captain sees you in this condition, Mark, it’ll be hell to pay.”
Samernow scowled. “Mind your own damned business!” He sat sullen for the duration of the trip to Silver Bay.
“ Anything you can tell me, Detective Quincey, about how the body was discovered that might help me now?”
“ Same as the others, really. Naked, same signs of wear and tear, as if in the water for a long time. It’s bad, from what we’ve been told.”
“ Think I’m going to be sick, Charlie,” announced Samernow in a near whisper. “Pull over.”
“ We can’t pull over, Mark! We’re on our way to a crime scene.”
“ Then let me the hell out!”
“ What?”
“ You heard me, damnit! Either pull over and let me puke or let me outta the damned car.”
Quincey, exasperated, pulled hard into the curb, hitting it and jarring them all. He ordered, “Get out, partner! Go on!”
“ Just hold on a minute,” Samernow replied.
“ Get the fuck outta the car, Mark!” He glanced back at Jessica and added, “Pardon me, Dr. Coran, but lately all Mark responds to is cusswords.”
Samernow slammed the door hard and Quincey burned rubber, leaving his partner to alternately shake a fist at him and double over to vomit in the grass. Again Quincey was apologizing to Dr. Coran and blinking back at her image in the mirror.
“ Sometimes we all make asses of ourselves, Quince,” she assured him. “Not to worry on my behalf, Detective, really… I understand. The job takes a toll.”
“ Between Mark’s divorce and this case, he’s… well, he’s just stretched to the limit is all. I hope it… well, I hope you don’t have to say anything about this to anybody.”
“ You have my word.”
“ Maybe the captain’ll believe one more excuse…”
“ But you doubt it, right?”
“ So, you read minds, too?”
“ Not exactly.”
“ Experience, huh? Some teacher.”
“ The mother of all teachers.”
They passed over a beautiful, spiraling causeway, the water shimmering, even blinding in the morning rays, which danced like splattering nickels and dimes atop the water’s glimmering surface.
“ Here’s our turnoff just ahead. I’ll have you there in a jiffy.”
“ Part of me wishes I’d gotten out of the car with your partner back there, Detective,” she darkly joked.
“ Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“ So, who discovered the body?”
“ Some young couple on bikes, out for a predawn ride. Honeymooners, I hear.”
“ Uhgggg…”
“ Anyway, they rushed to the nearest phone and dialed 911; the paramedics and a couple of cruisers got there about the same time. The paramedics started toward the body, you know, to check it out, but one of the cops, a veteran, saw it for what it was and wouldn’t let them proceed. They got into a shouting match, but we got lucky and the veteran cop stood his ground, a guy named Frank Lombardi who’s seen a lot, used to be a cop in New York City. Anyway, he knew about the FBI request to leave floaters who’ve been in the water for any length of time alone until you guys passed on ‘em. So, here we go.”
He swung the car into an area where a Medivac van and several police cruisers stood silent sentinel over a stretch of palm trees and crescent beach. Already a mob of onlookers was at the scene, and police had snaked a yellow and black banner, flimsy in the wind, between the palm trees, daring anyone to cross the line.
At the back of the Medivac van a young couple, each in spandex wear, their English touring bicycles beside them, the woman weeping, held on to one another, speaking to each other in British accents. They looked up at Jessica, wondering about her as she snatched a lab coat from her black valise and kicked off her shoes, placing them in the back of Charles Quincey’s car. She prepared to go barefoot across the sand and to wade out to the body in the surf.
Santiva had pulled in alongside them, and he called out to Jessica that he would speak to the first on-scene cops and anyone who might shed any light on the situation. She went for the sand and the water and the body.
Jessica had done this before, trawling out into water with her black valise on a float-table for a close exam
ination of the body before anyone else got their hands on it; the fear of allowing others to drag the body to shore, tumble it onto sand, lift it into a waiting body bag, then hoist it into an ambulance to be whisked away, was the fear of losing vital information and possible evidence which might not otherwise be had, as floaters were known to drop evidence all along the path of transportation. Waterlogged, the body was literally coming unglued cell by weakening cell.
Jessica was followed out to the body by a handful of curious seagulls and a crotchety old pelican, all wondering what she had in her bag that might be of interest to them. One or two of the seagulls dipped to the body to examine it, but knowing by some instinct that it wasn’t for them, they immediately fled back to the relative safety of buzzing about Jessica’s head as she continued toward the corpse, wading farther out into the hip-deep water, her lab coat floating around her now like a white Christmas tree skirt.
The body had come up against a jetty of jagged stones, where it washed like flotsam in a gentle, rocking tide. The situation was similar to an earlier floater case she’d supervised in D.C., but this time she didn’t need hip boots, a flashlight or a raincoat. This time the sun beat down on the awful waste and the waters surrounding her lapped against her skin with a warm tongue. In the earlier instance, the water had been frigid and black.
She recalled the other floater, a young teenager whose death had at first appeared the result of drugs and a stumbling accident. It was before her FBI days when she was chief of pathology for Washington Memorial, and it certainly hadn’t been her last floater case-as much as she would have liked for it to be. But an M.E. always remembered her first floater…
Jessica had proven the cause of death in fact to be a blow to the back of the head which had sent the teen into the water, causing his death by drowning-he had drowned while unconscious. Armed with this knowledge, the W’PD stepped up their investigation and learned that the boy’s so-called friends had attacked him and left him to drown, all over an argument involving a pair of sneakers- the only article of clothing missing from the body. Life, she mused, was as cheap today on the streets of America as it was in Hitler’s Germany or in the time of the Romans, who fed on the carnage of Christians thrown into the lions’ dens in their sporting arenas. While technology and weaponry had stepped into futuristic vistas, man himself had changed very little since the days of his caveman ancestor, who picked up the first femur to use as a club to strike down his neighbor.
This floater and everything around the victim was different. This floater-basking beneath bright sunlight on the lip of a vast, aquamarine and lush velvet horizon of sky and water-was altogether different from the starfishlike little boy found in that filthy, stagnant stone quarry in Washington, D.C., so many years before. The boy had died in a dark little hole, a watery cemetery; he’d felt no pain after the initial blow to the head which had rendered him unconscious. He hadn’t felt a thing after his school buddies had attacked.
But today’s corpse, this body on this bright Florida morning, lay in stark contrast here to the screaming life all around her, both above and below the water. Both killings were unconscionable; perhaps all killings were unconscionable, she reminded herself now, but in the light of so much life, this one seemed doubly so.
The others onshore stood watching her approach the victim. A second and enormous pelican with more life in its webbed step than the first perched on the jetty rocks, squeaked and walked back and forth in anticipation that she’d feed it. The old pelican seemed resigned simply to stare at Jessica’s advance. She gave neither the men behind her nor the fowl ahead of her any mind, but she could hear the muttering men at her back, and she could sense their absolute discomfort at having to stand idly by while a woman did their work for them.
Reaching the body, she found what appeared to be a pair of black serpents swimming lazily about a bloated, jellyfish version of a large rubber doll, slick and ballooned up. She instantly realized that the black asps coiled near the body were in fact lengths of hefty nylon rope, one coiled tightly about the neck, the other wound about the wrists, which Jessica could only surmise since she could not see the wrists. The corpse floated facedown, on its stomach, the hands somewhere below. She’d either have to fish for them or tug on the detestable rope that had been used to kill the victim.
She instantly saw that the body had been in the water from two to possibly three weeks, and she was grateful both that it hadn’t been there longer and that the corpse lay facedown for now.
There appeared to be no superficial gashes to indicate shark attack. Even as a child, Jessica had been both horrified and shockingly fascinated by the sort of quick death the powerful jaws of a shark might bring, like the mindless devastation of a lightning strike or a blow from a speeding truck. She had always been interested in the myriad shapes and convolutions taken by the Grim Reaper to ply His trade of finality. This eerie predilection had led her to push and push her father for details about his time in the war, what he had seen, experienced and done as a medical officer. For many years, he ignored her requests, denying her any such information, not wanting to relive the horrors of the war, but when he realized that she was serious about going into medicine, about following in his footsteps to become a medical examiner, he began to come around. He began to tell her the truth, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupery, saying, “Horror really can’t be talked about because it’s alive, because it’s mute and goes on growing: Memory-wounding pain drips by day, drips in sleep.” When she continued to prove her genuine interest, he had told her that he had seen every kind of wound imaginable, had seen bodies without limbs or heads; but the bodies which disturbed his sleep the most, he had confessed, were the floaters. He had been in both Korea and Vietnam, where he was part of a M.A.S.H. team, and he’d seen the result of many a battle; he had also seen many a man whose body had gone waiting for attention as the war raged on, many dying in rivers and lagoons deep in the jungle, a world from anywhere.
Here in sun-drenched Miami Beach, there were no long, dark lagoon shadows beneath which to bury the floating corpse, and the water was warm and alive-teeming with life. It saturated Jessica’s jeans and wrapped itself about her, catlike, filling her pores with its touch, this living saline ocean surf which foamed about her waist now where she stood. It wanted to be friends.
It also wanted to revive the dead girl, this life-asserting cradle she was nestled atop in a mockery of the fetal position, this amniotic fluid. That was why it kept lapping at this dead parcel, kept caressing it, licking at it like a favored pet anxious over its master. Yet this seemingly concerned licking was removing small parts of the deceased in infinitesimal increments with each incoming and outgoing tide. Neither time nor the tide was on Jessica’s side.
Jessica stared down at the body again, leaned in over it and tried to work, steeling herself against the awful appearance death had sculpted here. The saltwater had preserved the body to some degree, and this did cut down on the stench, which would otherwise have been overwhelming. Small favor, she mused as she set to work, first studying the hands, which she’d had to tug free from below. There had been a strange reluctance, as if something was weighing the hands down and didn’t want them revealed, but this inertia was followed by the equally unnerving ease with which, once freed, the hands began to float in her direction. She saw them as huge, white blowfish coming at her now.
Settling her nerves, Jessica saw that only two nails remained on the right hand, one on the left. All the other nails had popped from the combined pressure of expanding flesh and moving water. Even the few nails remaining, however, had been washed entirely clean by the ocean, and were rather useless as a result. Even if Jane Doe had fought her attacker and taken scrapings from his face or arms, the skin tissue and hair was long ago lost. But she did note that both remaining nails were jagged, torn and split, as if the victim had attempted to bare-handedly rip her way free from a stone hole, or quite possibly to pull her way up alongside the hull of a boat, obviously without suc
cess.
“ Poor young devil,” Jessica lamented, giving thought to who she was, what her dreams and aspirations might have been, who loved her and why.
Jessica took the two remaining nails from the right hand, and as she did so, one was caught by the tide pool and whisked into invisibility. “Damnit, God… give me something to work with here,” she mournfully cursed.
With the extreme care that comes only of long experience, she carefully, gently twirled the body so that it floated closer to her and away from the jagged rocks abutting the victim’s left side. She now examined more closely the left hand nail. There was only the one remaining, the sea having peeled away the others. This one, like the other two on the right hand, was broken and jagged. She carefully grabbed hold with her tweezers and with a quick pull, the sun-and-water-bleached nail silently, easily came away from the rippled skin at the fingertip. This time, Jessica lifted it out of reach of the nipping surf.
Each of the victim’s fingers now resembled a bloated snake, the fat thumbs like turtles. Little wonder a shark, even a small one, might find such parts of the floater an appealing strike. The hands were like pillow-sized jellyfish, squishy to the touch.
Jessica mentally placed the time in the water at between twenty and twenty-five days, something shorter than that of earlier victims, and she wondered about the difference, whether it was significant or simply a fluke. Jessica stowed away the second of the two nails she’d recovered into a vial which contained a pink gel fixative. She placed this deep into her valise and felt the pontoon platform bang against her ribs, as if the sea were upset with her for taking that which belonged to it.
She considered the stroke of luck she’d had when the right cop had come along and kept the gung-ho Rescue 911 paramedics from wading out here and dragging the unfortunate victim to shore. All her nails would’ve been gone had that taken place, not to mention another layer of skin. She alone would give the body the care and attention required, like a marine archeologist with an ancient artifact.
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