Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ Whatever is decided and however it goes, Jessica here needs to be off the case,” Parry said to Santiva, their eyes meeting. “What are you talking about, Jim?” she replied. “No, no, Jess, Mr. Parry is absolutely right,” said Chief Santiva.

“ Eriq! This is my case; has been my case from day one. and now that it’s over, that you’d even consider such a… such a… proposal is-”

“ It’s time, Jess, you got a little R and R, and I think Mr. Parry here is just the fellow to see to it you get all the R and R you need.”

“ What about blood splotches, fingerprinting, the evidence search?”

“ I have some authority, Dr. Coran!” Eriq returned. “I’ll have a team sent down from Florida or Quantico if necessary. Meanwhile, you two can enjoy the Caymans. Go do that ‘Wall’ thing you all do here.”

“ Try Rome and Athens,” countered Parry. “I have two tickets, Jess. Will you go with me to Rome and Athens? No work, just play?”

She looked stunned. She looked from Jim to Eriq and back again, finally turning to Eriq and asking, “Are you absolutely sure?”

“ Just do me one favor.”

“ And that is?”

“ Talk to Okinleye. Get us the best deal you can.”

“ That pirate. Sure, I’ll do what I can, of course, and by the way, he likes it if you can pronounce his name correctly.”

“ I thought I had been… Okinlee, right?”

“ No, Okinlee-ye; a bit of emphasis on the ye at the end, please. It might help in all the negotiations when it comes to them…”

“ He knows you best; maybe friendship still counts for something in this world?”

Jessica smiled, Eriq laughed and soon the three of them were nearly hysterical. She hugged Eriq, kissed him on the cheek and hugged him again.

“ I was so worried for you,” she told him. “That was the bravest thing I ever saw anyone do, climbing out on that ladder and jumping onto this deck at the speed this boat was going.”

“ You did it yourself.”

“ No, not at the same speed.”

“ Let’s get turned around for the island. I’m burning up out here and sweating like a pig,” complained Eriq, pretending he was uncomfortable with the flattering compliments. Looking back over his shoulder as he went for the controls, he added, “Hell of a schooner, wouldn’t you say, Parry?”

“ She is beautiful; yes.” Parry again had his arm around Jessica, who had dried in the sun and wind now, her hair hanging in stringy ringlets about her brow. Overhead both helicopters had taken up a hovering position, and now both radioed down that they were running for George Town.

Eriq, using the radio, thanked the two pilots and Okinleye for their excellent assistance in what had turned out to be a treacherous raid on Tauman’s killing ground. He then alerted George Town port authorities that they were coming in with the boat and to be prepared to place the boat under quarantine in order to keep any prying eyes and hands off. No one was to go near it. If there were any incriminating evidence aboard, he certainly didn’t want it to be contaminated any further than it already had been. He then turned back to Jessica and Parry, calling up to them from the well of the cabin, saying, “Listen, you two, while I’m getting us back to shore, I think it safe to begin searching the boat for anything incriminating to help our case once we get back to the U.S. God, I sure hope Tauman didn’t swap boats somewhere between here and the States.”

“ We’ll start a search,” agreed Jessica. “Meantime, everyone is to try as hard as possible to avoid the blood spatters. We’ll take some of Tauman’s blood in evidence, but unless I miss my guess, we’ll find evidence of other blood spatters aboard this death ship. Look there.” She pointed at a section near the starboard side center-rear. “Notice the pinkish hue where blood has soaked into the deck?”

“ That could as well be fish blood,” suggested Parry. “I’ve seen like stains on a thousand boats.”

“ Just the same, our boy didn’t appear to do a great deal of fishing. I want that panel cut and raised for lab inspection, Eriq. It’s a place to start. The material is porous enough that, even after cleaning-and it obviously has been cleaned-trace DNA evidence could quite possibly be lifted for the electron microscope.”

“ Leave a list of instructions. We’ll get a team down here,” Eriq assured her. “We’ll get the best.”

“ That’s impossible, Santiva,” replied Jim, “because the best is leaving with me.”

“ Get J.T., John Thorpe,” she suggested. “He and his team will do an excellent job. And you’re right. I’ll make a list.”

Together, Jessica and Parry began to carefully canvass the boat from the inside out as Eriq brought it in toward Grand Cayman.

Seven Days Later

Athens and Rome were stunning, and it was delightful to get away from the profundity of both her work and the horrors of the Night Crawler case. James had arranged everything down to the last detail, and he had managed to make her forget all about Warren Tauman and the atrocities he had created in his wake. Their vacation was complete, for she cleared her mind of what might or might not be going on back in the Cayman Islands, Miami and Quantico. She hadn’t given a whit’s thought to the collection and delivery of evidentiary materials from Tauman’s boat to the microscopes at Quantico. She felt confident that John Thorpe could do a more than adequate job in her place, and besides, hidden away in a secret compartment was a book, a diary of sorts which Tauman kept. It was mostly a captain’s journal of ports of call, places he and his ship had been, and on the surface of it, there was nothing incriminating there, since he spoke not a word about the killings. He had put all his passion about the killings into his notes to newspapers, apparently. There were, however, names of every port he had visited, along with the dates, and this placed him at every locality where some young woman had disappeared. And there were vague references to his god, his belief system, a belief system that was more than simply scattered and confused and out of focus. There were vague references to his having given “offerings” to his god. But there was nothing whatever that pointed to what exactly he had offered up or how he went about these obscure rituals. However, there was one thing about the journal that was most clear indeed-it was written in the same mad script as the hand of the Night Crawler. Eriq Santiva was satisfied about that the moment his eyes fell upon the script.

This alone was not enough, however, so the book was also dusted for fingerprints, and several of them were lifted from its leather coverlet. Tauman’s prints were also found on the consoles and on the speargun he’d left behind, the weapon believed to have killed Marine Patrol Officer Man- ley back in Tampa. Other evidence would take more time to construct and reconstruct at the microscopic level, and Jessica was banking on the section of stain she’d noticed while aboard the death ship, hoping that it might be matched to Rob Manley’s or Ken Stallings’s blood type and DNA.

It was a foregone conclusion that, in time, they would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it had been Warren Tauman aboard the boat they’d boarded, and that Tauman was Patric Allain, and that both were one and the same as the Night Crawler. Being the Night Crawler was perhaps the only time he felt whole.

So it was with an easy mind that Jessica, after having worked out some preliminary negotiations with Ja Okinleye and several of the highest-ranking officials on the islands, had left Eriq to his own devices in Cayman. That had been a week earlier, and neither she nor James had been bothered by headquarters, newspaper reporters, politicians or ghosts, other than those that roamed the Aegean Sea and the ancient ruins of Greece.