Robert Walker - Grave Instinct

“ Fact is, anyone can project a charismatic image over the Net. Still, it's unlikely he'd leave word in his correspondence with a victim's actual name for us to find. And like I said, he'd have to convince them to give him personal information, address, meeting place. We'll do best to get our cyber experts to help out here, Jess.”

“ And as for this Seeker guy?”

“ Well, code names can only be traced with help from the server, unless our experts can find a way to hack into the guy's computer.”

“ How likely is that?”

“ Fifty-fifty, depending on what kind of firewalls he's put up.”

“ Give it a try.”

“ Could be this Seeker is just another of Cahil's other selves, you know. If he's as multiple as Eriq says he is, he likely has more than one computer persona as well.”

“ You have been talking to Eriq.”

“ Yeah, I have.”

“ All right, get the computer search underway. Let me know where it leads,” she said.

“ Like Max Strand said, there'll be roadblocks.”

“ Who knows, maybe the server will be cooperative.”

“ Like they were after Nine-Eleven?” J.T. facetiously asked.

“ Maybe they've learned something since then.”

“ I won't hold my breath, Jess. This company in particular guards its subscriber list with a vengeance.”

They said their goodbyes and Jessica sat upright in bed and ate. While using the remote, flipping through TV land, she picked at her meal. She then took a shower to the sound of argument and laughter on the late-night TV talk show Real Time with Bill Maker. The soothing hot shower eased the tense muscles in her neck and shoulders, and she trusted this would help her to sleep soundly.

Donning a terry-cloth robe, she returned to the bed, where a second plate, filled with vegetables and fruits, awaited her. Suddenly the TV chatter turned to the Digger. Bill Maher made a grim joke about the Digger, asking why the Skull-digger hadn't gone after the Dolphins in Discovery Cove if he wanted brains. “What's so brainy about the average American woman?” he asked the audience, garnering a wave of groans instead of laughs. Everyone on the show was critical of how the police was handling the case. The public had learned many of the shocking details, except those withheld by authorities. Everyone feared it was the beginning of a long nightmare. “News of FBI involvement,” according to Maher, “has not calmed anyone's brain.”

Jessica lay her head down and in a moment the TV talk show was replaced by the interrogation room, but it had clouds all around its periphery. She was again grilling Daryl, who wore a Cheshire cat's grin during the entire interview.

“ What's this we found in your house in Newark, Daryl?” she demanded, holding out a small bag filled with seeds.

“ Birdseed,” Cahil announced. “I feed the birds out back of the house.”

“ Other than the house in Morristown, Daryl, is there someplace else you spend time?” asked Jessica.

“ One place else, yes.”

“ And where is it located?”

Cahil pointed to his head.

Jessica gritted her teeth, feeling horribly uncomfortable in such proximity to the man. She felt his horrible hot breath on her.

“ Any other physical place outside your head, that we might search?” she pressed.

He looked absolutely befuddled by this, losing the grin, concentrating on her words to the point she thought his head would explode.

“ Do you reside anywhere else, say in a van, for instance?” asked Jessica.

“ Nah, no other space or place. This is it…”

Jessica studied the man's off-center features and his black-bean pupils to determine if he were lying or not. But there was no life in his eyes, so no reading them. She watched his hands for signs of clenching or cutting himself with his nails. She watched his breathing and his movements for any sign of telltale lying. But there was nothing to read in this man, nothing in his body language, eyes, tone or stance. The system had taught him well. He was as zombielike in this dream as he had been in the actual interrogation.

“ I was very popular when I was in prison,” Daryl said. “Three women wanted to marry me.”

“ Really?”

“ Started out as pen pals. They all proposed marriage. They wanted me to impregnate them, to have my child.”

I can see why, Jessica thought. “Daryl, have you been in contact with any of these women since leaving prison?”

“ Of course, the ones who're alive.” His grin proved satanically grim.

“ One of them died in Richmond, one in Winston-Salem, the third in Jacksonville, Florida.”

Jessica started in her sleep, her body involuntarily tensing and releasing, waking her in the process. She knew on awakening that her every instinct insisted that Cahil's confessions-both in real time and in dream time-were lies. Cahil was indeed not the Skull-digger. Some part of him wanted to be the Skull-digger, but that hardly qualified him as the killer.

That left one of his Web-page visitors, one who had forwarded the brain piece to Daryl. His contributors literally numbered in the hundreds of thousands over a decade. It would be a grueling and time-consuming search, necessitating cooperation among hundreds of agents and from Cahil's Internet server.

If Combs could find a link between the Manning girl from her computer in Florida to Cahil's website, Jessica felt hopeful that they could get a court order to open up the Internet server's records. Short of that, as J.T. said, they'd have to rely on the hacking skills of their Cyber Squad. She tried to fall back asleep on that hopeful thought, but a phone call awakened her.

“ Dr. Coran… Agent Owens in Morristown.”

“ Agent, what is it?” She glanced at the clock which read 11:43 P.M.

“ Thought you'd like to hear it from us first.”

“ Don't tell me. They found a woman's body at Cahil's place?”

“ No… sorry… bad news about Max Strand.”

“ What? What's that?”

“ Max was… he was killed sometime yesterday in a park a few blocks from Cahil's house. He… he was bludgeoned to death by a pair of homeless guys in the park. They're in custody, ratting each other out.”

“ Oh, my God.”

“ But Max did something strange just before he died. Thought you ought to know about it.”

“ What's that?”

“ He made off with one of the cat brains from Cahil's freezer.” “Made off with it? What the hell do you mean? Made off with it?”

“ Took it with him… to the park. He cut it open there and kinda

… kinda, I don't know, threw it around. All of the brain pieces were scattered, as if…”

Jessica tried to picture it. “As if he were searching for something?”

“ Yeah… yeah, that's what it looked like. Strange as hell.”

Searching for something like the Island of Rheil in humans? she wondered.

Jessica further wondered what this might mean. How many people are to be infected in one manner or another with Cahil's dangerous notions? She thanked Owens and said good night, and somehow the aloneness and the night became larger tenfold.

John Thorpe had tried to relax on his flight back to Quantico, Virginia. He had made mental notes on what he'd found on Cahil's website. He thought that many of the E-mail visitors to the Cahil Web page sounded like teens and preteens at play, getting a kick out of the zaniness of it all. But then many others sounded truly psychotic. Teeny-bopper or psychotic-a hard distinction to make in real life much less in cyberspace. He chuckled.

J.T. knew Jessica would want him to create a watch list from the countless numbers on the page's history, but that could take a month or more of full-time work to compile, and even when finished, it would only be a list of coded names. He wondered how they could get at the truly disturbed among all the hits. He had no way of telling from this end if any of the Digger's actual victims had logged on; nor had he any way of learning who the Seeker was without help from the online server, a difficult thing to get.