Robert Walker - Grave Instinct

“ You don't have to keep me chained up,” Kenyon pleaded. “We ought to be able to trust one another.”

“ You'd kill me at the first opportunity. I have no illusions about that, Grant.”

“ But I wouldn't.”

“ Shut up and do as I say!” Swantor indicated the gun in his hand. “You must be starved. Aren't you hungry?”

“ I am… that I am.”

“ Go then, feed.”

Swantor locked Kenyon and Selese Montoya in the cabin together. As he made his way toward the living area, Swantor heard the woman's uncontrolled screams. Selese continued to scream hysterically as Swantor watched the viewing screen and set up the computer to send to Cahil's website. A part of him grew fascinated, and he slowed to watch it all unfold as he filmed it. He keyed in the necessary strokes and beamed it directly to the world. He added a special message to the screen for the FBI woman who had contacted him:

You and the rest of the world are going to enjoy this.

He imagined all the people who would see the film, duplicate it and forward it on to others. It represented a kind of immortality for Swantor.

Swantor had given Kenyon no Demoral to work with, but Phillip didn't care. In order to make her hold still, he knocked her unconscious. Then the Digger had gone immediately to work, shaving the woman's head, marking her fore scalp with bold red lines and lifting his scalpel over her closed eyes. With his left hand, Kenyon worked deftly, cutting down to bone. With the first bloody incision, Selese awoke and immediately screamed, and realized what Kenyon was telling her: “I only want your brain.” Knowing now what he was doing to her, she pleaded for help from anyone on the other side of the camera lens.

From his seat at the controls, watching, Swantor smiled and said, “I beseech thee! I beseech thee!”

He then watched Selese swoon before fainting altogether from blood loss.

Swantor could not have been happier with the results. His camera had caught every blood spatter, every deft movement of the doctor's hands. And Swantor, now the Webmaster, zoomed in to display a close-up of the disfigured forehead. Now the camera recorded as Kenyon's bone saw came to life. Its mechanical whirr created a terrifying sound in this context, and an even more horrifying noise as it made its screaming, grinding path through the skull-shattered shards of glass ground in a mixer.

“ I give you the Skull-digger,” said Swantor, recording his master of ceremonies voice. “Finally, the star of his own show…”

“ I hope you're enjoying this, Swantor!” Kenyon shouted as he placed the bone cutter to Selese's forehead again, making the final, methodical cut in his medically delicate manner. The computer had been told to blip any mention of Jervis's name. His own fifteen minutes of fame would come at his own choosing, in time.

The computer camera next captured Kenyon plucking the cut window of flesh and bone from the forehead and discarding it. The camera then showed him lifting his surgical tongs, opening them, plunging them into the window he'd created, and plucking forth the brain. He held it up to the camera eye. Like sweetmeats prised from a crustacean.

“ Is this what you want, you bastard? Is it?” He bit into the brain matter, tearing away a portion, devouring it half chewed. He repeated this again and again, his hands slick with blood and brain fluid.

Swantor reveled in what he filmed, clicking off the audio and saying through the intercom, “Perfect… perfectly executed, Dr. Kenyon. This will make us both great men!”

Kenyon as Phillip devoured the last of Selese's brain. As he did so, Swantor said over the intercom, “I'll have another for you soon.”

The camera left the bloody mouth of the killer and focused on the body of Selese Montoya, slowly making its way from her toes, along her legs, to torso, neck, lower face and then to the black rectangle created in the empty skull.

“ This is going out live, Kenyon, to the world. Take a bow.”

Grant cried out, his mouth still bloody, raging at the camera. “Let me out of here now, Swantor! Let me out!”

“ Audio's off, Dr. Kenyon. No one can hear you.”

The captain of the cutter, on which Jessica and Sorrento traveled, stood looking out over the broad expanse of the river. A cruise ship made up to look like an old-time paddle-wheeling riverboat passed them by, tourists waving from every deck and chair, a gleaming diamond-colored chandelier winking at them from the windowed restaurant aboard. The gaiety of the riverboat stood in stark contrast to the work at hand aboard the Coast Guard cutter. “Imagine the guy's insurance premium if that damn floating restaurant should go down out here in this fog,” he said to Joseph Konrath, his first mate.

Jessica and Sorrento returned to the bridge, and the captain greeted them and then said, “I've checked in again and again with boats downriver and no one's seen him. But I have an idea.”

“ What's that, Captain?” asked Sorrento.

“ Reports from here to Pilottown-end of the river-say that no one has spotted this yacht. That's just too unbelievable, unless he's taken another tack.”

“ What tack? North, you mean?” asked Jessica.

“ Well, he may have used one of the old canals to cut from the river to a bay area.”

“ The canals? What canals?” asked Jessica.

Quarels took them to a nautical map on the wall. “We are about here, the canal I have in mind is right here,” he said, pointing just ahead. “Leads west into the bay and some swamplands.”

“ Isn't that the fastest way to get to the Grand Isle area?” asked Sorrento. This guy has some real estate there and most animals do run back to their lairs when chased.”

“ Show me where Grand Isle is, Captain,” asked Jessica.

Quarels pointed it out, a small dot on the map to the southwest of their position. “It's just a hunch, but when Sorrento asked about Grand Isle before, I recalled the canal up ahead. Just a hunch, but I think it may be the reason why no one's seen our man.”

Jessica turned to Sorrento and said, “Grand Isle, of course. He's got to be heading there, Mike.” She then said to Quarels, “We had a local lawman check there yesterday, and he found no sign of Swantor in the area, but all that's changed now.”

“ Follow the course of the canal, Captain,” said Sorrento.

“ All right. We'll do just that, but the storm's going to pound us in there, and we have a skeleton crew.”

“ Back in Florida, Swantor made some passing remark that his wife got the house, and he got the boat. Perhaps the house in question is on this Grand Isle,” said Jessica.

“ Mansions, high living,” said the captain. “That's Grand Isle.”

“ Combs's background check on Swantor had the house in contention.”

Sorrento rubbed his chin. “Swantor's ex-wife, maybe she still resides there on the island.”

“ His ex.” They all fell silent.

“ You thinking what I'm thinking?” Sorrento asked.

“ That he intends on feeding his ex to Kenyon?”

“ If so, what's he need Selese for?”

“ I don't know, maybe to… to keep Kenyon in line?”

“ My God.”

Jessica wondered at the curious irony, if her long, circuitous chase after the Skull-digger should end on an island.

“ Under normal circumstances, I'd radio for assistance, bring up another cutter to go around the boot at Pilot town, surround the island,” suggested Captain Quarels. “But reports are bad all along the coast at the Gulf, and I can't get any help, not at the moment.”

“ We'll keep trying,” said Konrath. “But reports of flooding problems south of us are keeping all crews busy.”

“ Rains preceding Hurricane Alice,” said Quarels.