Robert Walker - Grave Instinct

Phillip sanguinely said, “Little Hildy will soon be having another birthday.”

Grant had always felt estranged from others. His entire life had been spent in a kind of numb dullness that kept him an emotional cripple, and he felt certain that it all had to do with his mother and father, not just the upbringing but something in the poisonous gene pool they had together created. A passing road sign read:

New Orleans-59

Today, he had climbed from bed determined to control Phillip's insatiable appetite for killing and consuming the gray matter of his victims. Now he felt the urge at every turn, as with accepting the stand-in at the bus stop in Mobile. In fact, wherever he looked nowadays, he saw a possible feeding. Phillip wasn't as choosy as he had once been.

Each new encounter now-a maid, a waitress, a clerk- any passing soul, save the decrepit and aged, would do. “What happened to your standards, your list?” he asked Phillip.

“ I sense our time is running out. We've had to lower standards. That ought not to be hard for you, Grant.”

“ Stop calling me that.”

“ Shall I call you by your father's name?”

“ No!”

“ Huh, should I call you 'Phil'?”

“ You sonofabitch,” cursed Grant.

“ Even if I did disguise my voice and tone, boy, you're still somewhere inside this head, boy. You had to know it was me, Corey, son.” “Shut up! Shut up! You damn demented old bastard.” To drown out Phillip, he snatched on the radio and turned it to its highest level, nearly blowing a speaker.

The old couple running the restaurant had looked too much like his parents, and the old woman kept eyeballing him, as if she knew everything about him. The phone on the wall hadn't rung, and growing impatient, he had asked the old woman, “How damn much longer's your husband going to take with my van?”

She'd replied, “Saw the old man finishing up, but he's got no phone in the garage. We can only afford the one line.”

“ I gotta go out there and check on him, you mean?”

She nodded. “Need me a nap,” muttered the old woman, a phrase she had repeated ad nauseam. She then asked him, “Just where you heading, young man?”

He had seen too much interest paid him at Lou and Lew's motel, restaurant and body shop, this mom-and-pop operation in the middle of nowhere. Using a small snub-nosed. 38 Smith amp; Wesson, one he always kept tucked away, he leapt up and terrified the old woman. He led her to the register, opened it and tore out the larger bills.

Her arms flailing like wings, she cried out, begging, “Please, mister, take whatever you want, but please not our lives! Please!”

“ Shut up,” he'd shouted, a fistful of her hair now a tow-line as he forced her out back to visit her husband in the shop. Chickens scrambled to get out of the way, raising noise, so that the old man saw them coming. Obviously, the woman hadn't lied about the phones. He had no way of contacting help, except for his CB radio. With a shotgun in one hand, he tried to hail someone on the CB.

Unable to get anyone on the radio, the old man in overalls and paint bravely came at him with the huge shotgun, but Grant gave him a choice. “She gets a bullet through the head if you don't drop that damned thing.”

“ You give her up to me, then!”

“ Deal.” Grant viciously pushed the old woman into him, and the old man grabbed hold of her as both went down to the earthen floor.

He forced them onto their knees, snatched all the money in a second register here, and said, “Now, you two sweethearts can take a long nap.” He then put a single bullet through each head.

“ It'll look like a robbery murder. Keep the locals busy,” he said to the dead and to Phillip, “if we leave their goddamn brains intact.”

Phillip didn't argue this time. “Old brains carry toe much disease,” he muttered.

Grant took time to open and pour paint all over the garage and the bodies. He emptied some twelve to thirteen gallons of different colors, creating a rainbow of the place. He believed this would confuse anyone wondering about the killer of Lou and Lew's pigsty.

He then climbed into his now dark green rather than blue van and tore from the body shop. A lone red pickup with an old man in it was just pulling into the restaurant's gravel lot.

That had been less than two hours before, and now he saw the steeple-top skyscrapers of New Orleans coming into view on the horizon. He'd be safe here for a while, he told himself, if he could control Phillip.

Quantico, Virginia July 23, 2003

Over the next few days, Jessica, J.T. and their team began taking portions of the tips by state and encrypting them onto the ACC program-the Automated Cross-Check software developed specifically for such a massive search.

They began the painstaking effort of searching for common names on VICAP and other lists of known offenders against the thousands of uninvestigated tips, hoping something would shake out from the mix. Adding to the cauldron what little they knew of the killer's approximate height, weight, race and vehicle, they further reduced the possible suspects.

The process proved tedious and time-consuming, as many of the field agents worked on their own clock; the process was also hardly cost-effective as it took a great deal of time to download all the reports coming in from across the nation. In the meantime, Jessica had grown increasingly impatient for the court order to open Cahil's enormous list of patrons. The delay had everyone on edge.

Amassing the information that Jessica wanted-more than five thousand unanswered tips in the Skull-digger case-proved daunting. They were scattered over hundreds of field offices, some as far away as Oregon. However, the first dividing up was done geographically, whittling the list down from the massive pile sent in from each field operative. Naturally the southeastern states, where the killings had begun, were by far the largest in number of tips.

After working all afternoon, Jessica and J.T. took a moment's break in her office, and she began to talk about her frustrations, all of which he shared. Then the conversation turned to Cahil's patrons.

“ Tell me, J.T., what is it inside people that make them so curious about cannibalism and brain eating, about grave-robbing gray matter from dead children, about a monster like Cahil?”

He sipped at a cup of cold coffee and replied, “What prompts otherwise intelligent people to open that gruesome Web page and spend hours there? Some dark corner of the human psyche, I suppose.”

She raised her own cup, drank from it, and said, “As much as we've seen over the years, I suppose we ought to be used to seeing the worst in people.”

“ We ought to, yes.”

“ But this… this… It makes me think of the scam artists who, days after the World Trade Center attacks, began bottling and boxing up dirt and debris from the rubble of thousands of lives to sell at whatever price they could get.”

“ A slap in the face to all decency and humanity otherwise displayed at Ground Zero.”

They had embarked on a long journey, the first step in reinvigorating the investigation. They were only hours into it, knowing it would take days and a great deal of luck. And while Cahil remained in custody, and would likely stay put for some time, the real murderer remained at large. And since no other victims had been found since Mobile, a low-level buzz among the people working overtime on the case had begun. Everyone wondered if Mobile had not been a copycat killing after all.

Eriq Santiva suddenly entered the room, followed by the head of the FBI, Director Thomas Hinze. Santiva remained silent while Hinze blasted away. “I just got a copy of your DNA analysis on the brain tissue found at Cahil's residence, and it matches the Gleason woman killed in Richmond. Given the date, I'd like to know why it took so long to get to me? That's strong evidence linking Cahil to her murder, wouldn't you say, Dr. Coran?”