Robert Walker - Grave Instinct

The tissue sample indeed had roughly the same shape as the cross found left inside the victims' skulls, a perpendicular feeder line, a horizontal connecting line and a bulbous top that was roughly circular in shape. More chilling than anything else was that Cahil represented it as the real thing, taken he told his subscribers, from a living human brain.

“ The Internet,” muttered J.T., “you just don't know what kind of crazoid thing is coming outta cyberspace next.”

“ Cut from someone's medulla oblongata.”

A tired J.T. said, “It's been real, all right…”

“ What're you saying, that we all have this tingler inside us?” asked Owens, who'd hung back, clinging to an ammonia stick.

“ Yes, we do,” replied J.T.

Jessica closely examined the image. Thinking aloud, she said, “If the sonofabitch photographed it here and put it onto his system, is it possible that it's still around here someplace?”

“ If he hasn't consumed it,” countered Strand.

“ If he left it here, he'd have put it on ice,” suggested Jessica, recalling the hum of the refrigerator.

“ In with the Miller Lite,” joked J.T.

She rushed for the kitchen area and tore open the refrigerator in search of the small body part depicted in Daryl's photo. Nothing on the shelves other than a few bottles- olives, pickles, pickled beets and rotted vegetables and cheese. No other dairy products or cold drinks or juices, only a jug of water. She snatched open the freezer and began ferreting for something in the many foil-wrapped, un-marked items there.

“ Find anything, Dr. Coran?” asked Agent Owens from behind her.

“ Help me out here. Anything that looks suspiciously like… like…”

“ Like a brain or a piece of a brain?”

The freezer compartment was stuffed with small items wrapped in newspaper, and Jessica feared the worse. “Anything that isn't chicken, pork, beef or fish, I'll want to examine, no matter how small, you understand?”

“ Mystery meat, I get it.” He went to work with his gloved hands and talked as he did so. “Look, I'm sorry about the false pretenses of my superior, Dr. Coran.”

“ I accept your apology, Owens.” She unwrapped a soup package. He found a bag of peas. They emptied their finds into the crowded sink.

“ I'd just like you to know, I truly am sorry.”

“ Forget about it, Owens, until such a time as I need a favor.” Jessica now unwrapped the intact brain of what appeared a small animal, likely a cat's brain. She placed it gently aside, as Owens gasped on unwrapping a slightly larger brain-most likely that of a dog. “My dear God,” he repeatedly said. “My dear God.”

“ It's not human,” she informed him.

Strand had entered the kitchen and, seeing this, he said, “I see you've located the neighborhood strays. Do you think they have this island of tissue thing in them, too?”

“ They might, but let's stay focused on anything smacking of human brains.”

Jessica told Owens, “Look through all these wrapped goodies, and cull any that look or even smell suspicious.” Out of the corner of one eye, Jessica saw Strand going down into the basement. Jessica called out to Strand, “Let me know if there're any freezers down there, Max.”

“ Gotcha,” he called up.

Strand's light shone on an ill-matched washer and dryer set that dominated the small basement-no freezers or locked storage areas, only an array of boxes, garden and house tools, a small workbench, grease-covered tools and parts, and grimy stone walls, but then he saw the stone wheel and small kiln where Daryl fired his clay brains. It was an elaborate set up of raw materials he'd put together, and on shelves behind it, an array of what appeared to be homemade clay pots, each distinct in one way or another, but these were no pots, but his wares. Some were painted bright colors, while some were left gray, to appear natural. Some were large, others small. Some intentionally stylized or misshapen, others realistic. All could be pried open from the top, and a small area inside left room for the pasta.

Strand moved closer to the finished products for a better look at what appeared a strange hobby even for Cahil. As he neared the clay creations, perhaps fifty in all, he shouted up, “Some hobby Cahil indulged in!”

He pulled out his camera and began taking photos. “Nobody's ever going to believe this.”

Just then Strand heard Agent Owens shouting from overhead. He grabbed three of the brains to hand over to Dr. Coran, one painted, the other two neutral gray, and he rushed back up the stairs and into the kitchen area where he placed the clay brains on a countertop. One of the gray ones, having yet to be fired, suddenly crumbled under Strand's fingers. “Shit,” he cursed.

John Thorpe, having raced from the bedroom, stood alongside Jessica now. The two M.E.'s were busy examining the thing Owens had discovered in the tinfoil that lay thawing out on the counter. “What is it?” Max asked Jessica.

Owens, who stood aside, shaken by his find, said, “I think it's maybe a child's finger.”

But Jessica turned and faced Max Strand, her blanched features solemn. “It's that thing he photographed for the Internet. That Island of Rheil tissue.”

“ The Rheil thing from the computer photo?” asked Strand. “You can nail his ass to the wall now for certain.”

“ You mean this little strip of gray matter is all Cahil fed on?” asked Owens.

“ It would appear that he wasn't quite the cannibal everyone painted him,” replied J.T., poking at the frozen finger-sized, fleshy cross of matter with a pen. “He just went in for this little delicacy.”

“ Whataya mean?” asked Strand, his calm broken. “The bastard cut off and discarded whole heads of dead children; fed them to his dogs, and he consumed human flesh-brain tissue.”

J.T. raised his arms in defeat. “OK… OK… The man's a cannibal no matter how you slice it,” he tried to joke.

“ So… did this tissue come from a child's head or an adult's?” asked Owens.

“ I couldn't hazard a guess except that it corresponds in size to what we read from the book on Rheil. Which means it's probably been taken from an adult brain,” replied Jessica. She turned her eyes back to the counter and stared down at the tissue, icy blue with cold from its sleep inside the freezer and foil cocoon. “It hasn't been in the freezer for too long, probably a month or so.”

“ Right around the time the Digger killings began,” commented J.T. “We need the lab at Quantico, John,” she replied. “We need to match the DNA from this to the victims. We need the brain-imaging program to take a look at this thing in a normal adult brain to make any determinations about its origin. Frankly, until this case, I'd never heard of this brain piece.”

“ Neither had I,” replied J.T.

“ What does it-what's its function? Why is it inside of us?” asked Owens.

“ First one I've actually seen,” said Strand. “I always took it for a hoax Cahil pulled on the court, the doctors and his legion of Web visitors. I never took it for a real item out of here.” He pointed to his own skull. Then he parroted Owens's concern. “What is it inside our heads for?”

Jessica sensed the uneasiness both men felt on learning that something strange and remarkable had been inside their brains all their lives and they had not known it. She didn't know how to answer their questions.

J.T. broke the silence. “No one-and I mean no one- knows what it's in there for, kind of like the appendix in the body… a leftover from previous eons, likely quite as dormant as the appendix.”

“ The appendix,” said Owens, nodding.

Strand said, “You mean it has no use anymore? That whatever it once functioned as has just sort of atrophied?”