“ Hoooo, yes, an evil business that one in Florida I hear of.”
“ That’s my case.”
“ I have word of your string of children, all dead at the hand of this fiend they are calling the Night Crawler, but I didn’t know you were handling the case. If there is anything-anything whatever-I can do, please never hesitate one moment to ask, my dear Doctor.”
She pictured Okinleye’s Sidney Poitier appearance, his wide forehead and piercing, nearly black eyes as she replied, “Ja, have you had any like Missing Persons cases- disappearances-turn into murder victims? These would be young women, American or British, my basic appearance-height, weight, color of hair.”
“ Teens, tourists?”
“ Or early twenties, yes.”
“ In point of fact… yes, but are you suggesting a connection?”
“ I’m not sure…”
“ I will have my best man scour our records for… for how long past?”
“ A year… no, two years ago?”
“ That far back may take some time. I of course recall several instances of bodies washing ashore, all clustering about a year ago, yes.”
“ Were they bound, gagged?”
“ No, nothing like that.”
“ Nude?”
“ Yes.”
“ Cause of death?”
“ First it was suggested as drowning, but one of our men who is academy-trained by your fine FBI realized it was strangulation.”
“ And the killer was never apprehended, I take it.”
“ No, never… to our shame.”
“ We may be trailing the same man here. Can you send all you have on the protocols there?”
“ Absolutely, as soon as it is amassed.”
She gave him the NPD’s address in Naples. “Make sure it’s marked for me personally.”
“ It will be done. I wish you all good luck there, Dr. Coran.”
“ Thank you, Chief Okinleye. It does appear that we’ll need all the luck we can find.”
“ I apologize for my surprise when you first called,” he said.
She unnecessarily shrugged. “What for?”
“ I mean, I thought you were in Hawaii, that you had relocated and had married some fellow there?”
“ Well… not quite…”
“ Not quite? Or not quite yet?”
“ I’m not quite sure yet. Does that answer your question?”
“ I am sorry to pry; your happiness is all that I wish.”
She smiled at this genuine, simple desire, so sincerely stated. “Thank you, Ja, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”
“ When will you come to dive The Wall in Cayman again? When will you come to see us? You will not believe how big my children have become. They were busting the house, so in keeping with my new duties, we have purchased a suitable abode far above the city, overlooking the city and the harbor.”
“ It sounds lovely, and I’ll visit as soon as I can, promise.”
“ Remember to take time to play; that life is not made for work alone, that work alone is not life.”
“ Thank you, Ja. I’ll remember that island wisdom.” Ja hung up and she played over his final words inside her head and heart. She knew he was right, that once again she’d become so entangled in her work that it had become her life. For that kind of advice from her shrink, she paid through the nose; getting it through Ja’s simple wisdom was cheaper, but no less painful.
Quincey and Samernow knew the so-called best barbecue place in Naples, so the foursome wound up at Brace’s for drinks and dinner. They tried to talk about anything and everything besides their great disappointment in not having had the chance to pounce on the Night Crawler this day. They talked of sports and weather and the Eddie Perlman trial, which had started in earnest in Seattle. Perlman was accused of the brutal murder of his six children, his wife and his mother-in-law. The case had been in the headlines for almost a year now as prosecution and defense jockeyed for position. It was a classic example of a defenseless defense resorting to blowing smoke, burning unrelated incense in the courtroom, fanning the flame of confusion and creating doubt where no doubt existed by playing one mirror off another, all in a superfluous effort to deflect and ultimately derail the truth while boring the jury to death.
“ When we do finally catch this bastard Allain, or whoever the hell he is, the damned legal system will drag it out, ass-over-backwards, for ten years,” complained Quincey, “and it’ll take some prison-cell justice to see the SOB gets what he deserves.” Jessica and the others drank to the sad truth.
Jessica reminded them how, after capture, Mad Matthew Matisak had been placed in a federal prison for the criminally insane, and how he had played the system for years, and how the moment his doctor’s defenses went down, he’d struck like a waiting cobra. He’d escaped, wreaked havoc and murder from Philadelphia to Louisiana, where he began stalking her, until finally she had cornered and killed him in a New Orleans warehouse. Final justice three long years after he was found guilty of the slow-torture deaths of the countless victims he had drained blood from to feed an insatiable appetite for the red fluid.
And so the conversation worked its way back around to what was eating away at them all tonight, the whereabouts of the Night Crawler.
“ Where the hell can he be?”
“ He’s like a damned crayfish, hiding in the mud out there-invisible but there.”
“ How’d he know we’d staked out Buck’s Trophy Shop?”
“ Was he maybe using Buck to decoy us away?”
“ What do you mean?”
“ Keep us here, while he goes north to Tampa?”
“ Is he just playing more cat-and-mouse games with us?”
The questions spiraled and threaded through their conversation, and Jessica sadly and resignedly began to believe that they were no closer to apprehending the monster than when they’d begun their effort so long ago in Islamorada Key. She voiced this feeling and the others stopped their drinking and eating to stare.
“ How can you say that, Jess?” asked Eriq. “We know a lot more about this creep now than when we began.”
“ But that’s not enough. Knowing about him hasn’t stopped him.”
“ Fact is, he gets off on letting us know bits and pieces, seems to me,” said Quincey. “Isn’t that why he cut loose three bodies in one day and left the nylon rope behind?”
Samernow agreed. “Isn’t that why he keeps writing the damned papers with his damnable poetry?”
“ Yeah, he feeds us… we feed him,” grumbled Santiva, who’d had more to drink than the others and was now completely despondent.
“ Anybody here by the name of Coran or Santiva?” shouted the bartender, waving a phone in one hand, hefting a stein of beer in the other.
“ Yeah, over here,” replied Jessica, going for the phone.
Quincey asked, “Who knows we’re here?”
“ Ford,” explained Santiva. “Told him to keep us informed of anything from his side.”
Jessica held firmly to the phone, as if its hard density might keep her from reeling; she felt a little light-headed, and too much beer, not enough pretzels and the news she was receiving wasn’t helping any. She gritted her teeth and stared back at the men she’d just left at the table. She met Santiva’s eyes, and he proved sober enough to read her body language. He could tell the call was serious, so he got up and joined her, asking, “What is it?”
“ Tampa Tribune got a love note from the Crawler. Looks like he’s in the Bay Area all right. Postmark is St. Petersburg.”
“ Damn, the bastard’s got us hopping to his tune.”
“ All part of his game. Only good news is that there haven’t been any other bodies to wash ashore from the Gulf.”
“ As yet, you mean
“ Let’s get up the coast. Think you can get us a helicopter?”
“ We’ll get some local help on that score. Be ready to leave”-he looked at his watch-”at midnight. W
hat about a facsimile of the letter? Has Ford received one?”
“ He has.”Tell him to send a copy to my hotel room, and tell him we’re on our way to Tampa-St. Pete.”
Jessica did as instructed, thanking Ford for his cooperation and the help of his men, asking him to be on the lookout for a package arriving there for her postmarked the Cayman Islands and instructing him to forward it to FBI Headquarters in Tampa. She again thanked Ford before hanging up, then rushed out of the restaurant with Eriq, who’d left instructions with Samernow and Quincey. The two detectives would follow them by way of car or boat- depending on Anderson’s mood-the following day.
“ Tampa, Jess,” Eriq said to her in firm conviction.
“ What about Tampa?”
“ That’s where we’re going to corner this bastard.”
“ Yeah, well, for a time we thought the same of Naples, but it didn’t happen.”
“ The noose is tightening. We just have to pull on the rope.”
She realized he was just doing a bit of cheerleading, attempting to bolster her sagging spirits. It was Eriq’s way of trying to comfort her and bring her along emotionally.
“ I hope you’re right, Eriq,” she relented somewhat as they got into the car that would take them to the airport, where a chopper was holding for them.
“ I am right. I have to be right,” he assured her.
“ He’s led us on one hell of a chase.”
“ It comes to an end in Tampa.”
“ Promise?”
“ Promise.”
EIGHTEEN
I advance to attack; I climb to assault.
Like a choir of young worms at a corpse in a vault.
— Charles Baudelaire
Tampa Bay, Florida
Another jet bringing more tourists and money into the Tampa-St. Pete area careened overhead, perfectly aligned with the lights at Tampa International. Being on the bay, out on the water like this, watching the planes come and go, was akin to watching a fireworks and laser display, thought Florida Marine Patrol Officer Ken Stallings. When he mentioned it to his partner, big Rob Manley, the other man grunted in his usual fashion and said, “Give me a boat any day.”
Viewed from the water, Tampa Bay on a Saturday night was surreal, the canals and waterways like a broad boulevard where riverfront restaurants and harbor lamps reflected multicolored lights off the inky surface of the bay. The waterways were lined with mega-yachts, utterly fantastic in size and scale in relation to the little Boston Whaler police boat patrolling here.
On the FMP boat, Officer Stallings shouted from behind the wheel down to his partner in the flatbed, “Problem with these yuk-yuk yacht guys… the bigger the damned boat, the longer they think their dicks extend, so the worse the attitude they give you.”
Rob Manley raised his black hand and waved knowingly, agreeing. “Big pricks and bad-ass attitudes is right; that’s what this place is full of, bad attitude.”
“ Can’t totally fault ‘em, though.”
“ The boaters? The weekend water warriors? The yachtsmen? And just why not?”
“ We board their boats out here, they see it as home invasion, which-”
“ You talkin’ invasion of privacy?”
“- which it is, kind of.”
“ That’s crap, Ken, and you know it,” Manley shot back. ‘ ‘They give up any right to privacy when they put another person’s life in jeopardy or run the lanes at full speed. They get boarded when they break the law; if they want to keep their boats sacro… sacro-”
“ Sacrosanct?”
“ Yeah, that. If they want to keep that, then they should observe the law. Simple as that. You do the crime, you pay the fine or the time as the case may be, and you lose that saccharine thing.”
Stallings laughed in response. “That’s why I like having you around, Rob. You intimidate these suckers out here, and you understand them at the same time.”
“ Don’t take much to understand stupidity and arrogance. Had a lifetime of that with my drunk-ass daddy.”
Manley had been on the job for seven years against Stal- lings’s eleven. They joked about that, calling themselves the 7-11 Team-unbeatable and unstoppable. Manley had once been a bouncer, and he still looked the part; Stallings had once been a prizefighter, lightweight division, and he still worked out and entered amateur contests. Each man was in top physical condition. They had to be for this job.
They waved as the blue strobes of another police boat passed by in the lane. There was a lot of police traffic here tonight, maybe too much. Every available officer was on alert that the creep they called the Night Crawler was possibly visiting all the way from Miami. Everyone had heard how this mooncalf demon freak who’d done all those girls could now be in the Tampa Bay area. Everybody was looking to score big.
Stallings and Manley were no exception.
They held the record for most stops on a normal night, and they could rack up more OUIs and registration violations than any of their counterparts out here, but Stallings and Manley had made a pact earlier: They were going hunting for larger fish tonight, and no OUIs or regs. violations were going to stand in the way of that covenant. Any other midnight Manley was flashing his light at every damned boat that dared go by, pulling them over for safety inspections-life jackets, flotation devices, dinghies intact; liquor cans at a minimum-all in Man- ley’s constant crusade to “make a damned strong impression: Wherever there’s water, there’s muthafuckiri water- cops!”
Tonight, however, Manley was flashing registration numbers using his power light, and Ken was checking every single one against the FMP computer net for previous violations. “July-Oscar-Niner-Six-Delta,” Stallings called off another “suspect” registration number. They were hoping to win the lottery, the prize being the Night Crawler. They were hoping to be like the now-famous cop who’d stopped Timothy McVeigh for a traffic violation after the bombing in Oklahoma City.
Their blue lights bounced around each marina, reflected off decks and shoreline establishments as they passed, a menacing warning to heavy drinkers and an annoyance to diners and dancers. The air here in the boat lane was crackling with electricity. The squeal of the Mako radio, emitting a nonstop barrage of police calls, mingled with the palpable rancor of boaters who just wanted all signs of law and order gone, out of their liquor-hairy faces.
Stallings and Manley were used to angry customers thinking FMP vehicles an interference in their holiday cruising. People on boats didn’t want to observe any rule that applied to land; they seemed to feel that open water meant open-ended morality, that familiar Mardi Gras attitude that said, “Anything goes.” Boaters didn’t want signs to mark their way, to tell them about slow wakes or manatee crossings or fish hatcheries. And they generally regarded watercops as arrogant, reckless nuisances with 225-hp motors, badges and guns. Still, whatever the public thought, the FMP units were equipped to outmaneuver and outrun the public at every turn.
“ Maybe we shouldn’t stray too far,” Stallings suggested to Manley, “seeing that we’ve got plenty o’ trouble brewing right here in the lanes.”
“ Hell, any overflow problems, the other guys can just send ‘em to the county sheriff’s patrol boat at the city marina. They can just line up there and wait their turn,” Man- ley replied, anxious to follow through with their earlier plans.
A huge yacht with horsepower to spare opened up in the slow wake area, whose limits were posted in plain view. “We gotta take that one,” Ken told Rob.
“ Damn fool bastard,” replied Manley, exasperated at the obvious speed violation. Stallings revved up their speedboat and hailed the yacht with siren blaring and lights flashing, followed by the bullhorn.
Cursing the yacht pilot under his breath the whole time, Manley targeted the bridge with his light, and lifting his bullhorn he ordered the yacht, a boat with the dubious name of Hellfire, to dock for a safety inspection now.
Once the yacht was secured to a nearby wharf, the inspection went in routine
fashion, by the book, no problems on board except for the single lush sitting in a deck chair who kept saying, “You can’t be serious.”
“ Yes, sir… we’re quite serious,” Manley repeated each time the little guy opened his mouth. Stallings stifled a laugh.
“ You weren’t OUI here, were you, sir?” Manley finally asked the small man in the chair.
“ No, no, no! You saw me operating the boat, officer,” bellowed the pilot.
“ OUI?” asked the drunk. “Don’t you mean IOU?”
“ Operating under the influence, Tom,” explained the pilot, “and no, no no,” he pleadingly added for Manley’s sake, “no one here’s operating while intoxicated.”
Ken suggested into Rob Manley’s ear, “Send ‘em on their way.”
“ Watch your speeds through here, sir.” Manley tutored as he and Stallings returned to their patrol boat.
“ Damn nigger watercop…” muttered someone from behind them as they shoved off.
“ Any other night, I’d’ve found sixteen violations for those turkeys,” Manley assured his partner.
“ But this ain’t just any night,” Stallings agreed. “There’ll be eight, nine, maybe ten other units on the water tonight-our guys, the Coast Guard, Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Pinellas and Manatee County Sheriff’s Offices, and the Tampa Police-they all wanna see action. Let them keep an eye on ol’ Hellfire.”
Tampa Bay, with adjoining Hillsborough Bay and the wide channel, skirted three counties, their boundaries clear only on the maps, smack in the water. There were also islands to the south and the Gulf side of St. Petersburg to consider, where the “Pete” Police would have a couple of units in the water. If what the FBI was saying had any validity to it at all, the damned ugly Crawler would be a fool to come into these waters. And from what Stallings had gathered, this creep would be most attracted by the St. Petersburg strip along Reddington Beach. So he now quietly suggested they cruise out into the Gulf and northward to have a look.
The watercops of the well-trained Florida Marine Patrol had been efficiently scouring Florida’s coasts from Jacksonville on the Eastern seaboard to Tampa Bay and Pen- sacola on the Gulf, checking every boat that resembled anything like that belonging to the alleged killer-but then, given the general nature of the description of the boat, they knew it might match literally thousands in these waters.
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