Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Samernow began kidding Quince about how his thick neck looked like ten pounds of sausage in a five-pound bag, and how, when it burst, the buttons were going to go like shotgun pellets. Samernow warned Jessica and Santiva to duck when the thing blew and then laughed at his own joke.

Quince told his partner to shut up.

Now the two detectives warned of the press just ahead, and they weren’t kidding. Along the corridor, there was a retinue of police uniforms and authorities in suits, all waiting along with a small army of newspeople with notepads, recorders and huge microphones extended on lances, their cameras held overhead like loaded cannon flashing the fire of battle. “I guess things are kinda slow in Miami these days,” commented Jessica.

“ Looks like we’re tomorrow’s headline.”

They stopped long enough to assure the reporters and the people of Miami and south Florida that the FBI was making the Night Crawler case a number one priority. Cameras flashed in their faces as they fielded a handful of questions, each one of which required more assurances.

Quince parted the sea before them and led them to a private room in the airport, where Santiva composed himself and Jessica lingered at a window, staring down at a helicopter waiting below to take them to Islamorada Key.

For a time, Jessica wondered if she would ever get Eriq on board the helicopter, telling him at one point that he should stay behind and get familiar with the case from Miami’s point of view, and that she would rejoin him as soon as she could. But he proved too stubborn to leap at the opportunity she extended him, begging another Dramamine patch instead.

And now finally, here they were, at the shark research facility that had tipped them off to what appeared to be quite a cache of body parts, the pathological evidence they had come for. To Jessica, it appeared a kind of dark gold mine.

“ Precious is a nickname given Allison Norris by her father,” said Eriq, just returning from a hurried phone call. “That’s according to Quince in Miami. Quince will call to confirm if Allison wore a bracelet inscribed with the name, but it seems an almost foregone conclusion, given the circumstances.”

Jessica paused in her work over another body part. “Still, a tissue match will be necessary to verify the fact beyond a mirrored shadow… to lay solid foundation against the man who fed Allison to the sharks.”

“ Well, sure…just thought you’d like to know.” She nodded. “Thanks.” Jessica would also have to return with any and all other body parts which Wainwright and company had unearthed here, and tests would have to be run on each, with an eye to matching them to other bodies that had incongruously washed ashore along Florida’s blindingly bright, pastel-colored, idyllic-looking coastal waterways.

Wainwright came to her with yet another bundle of body parts. “There’re a few more small pieces in the freezer, but you’ve got the bulk of it now, at least till we continue our work on the sharks again maybe…”

“ I want to see everything you have, Dr. Wainwright, every specimen, all of it,” she announced. “And I’ll need a larger area in which to work, if you don’t mind.”

“ That’d have to be our main lab, where we do most of the sharks.” You can’t use it,” said Insley suddenly. She’d obviously gotten hold of herself and had returned from her bed. “That would disrupt our entire operation.”

“ I believe, Dr. Insley, that your entire operation here has already been interrupted,” countered Jessica. “I’ll need the space for at least the next twenty-four hours, and if your people discover more human tissue or bones, I’ll want you to turn these over to us as well.”

“ Then I did the right thing, calling you in?” asked Wainwright, solely for Insley’s benefit.

Jessica nodded solemnly. “That you did, Dr. Wainwright… that you did.”

Razzles on the River

South Miami Beach, Florida, 11 P.M.

Once again Kathy Marie Harmon glanced up and into Panic’s alluring, azure eyes… once again. They were the eyes of dreamy miracle within a house of crystal and aqua- blue mirrors-where a girl could get lost and giddy and not care if her head were spinning; they were the eyes of cool, blue ocean swells into which she could so easily splash. He spoke with such assurance and confidence, yet without the arrogance of other men Kathy had met in and around the bar scene in South Miami’s Biscayne Bay area.

Kathy had come to Razzles in the company of two girlfriends, all of them looking for Mr. Right, Mr. Good, Mr. Solid. Usually, they wound up with Mr. Jell-O, a spineless creature with one thing on its mind-satisfying horny urges through unadulterated self-gratification. And most were in fact engaged in some base form of “adulterating” self- gratification, many turning out to be married.

Most of the guys hanging out at bars like this just wanted someone to stick it to, to feel warm flesh against their privates, to “get inside” a woman.

She hadn’t wanted to come out tonight. She was going to sit at home, do her hair, watch an old movie, maybe pop some corn, curl up with a Vincent Courtney or a Geoffrey Caine horror novel and read her brains out, maybe. But the tug and pull of her two girlfriends was too strong. Melissa and Cherylene could not be denied. They, like Kathy herself, believed in rainbows and lotteries and love and romance, all under a full moon, and tonight there hung at least a crescent moon, aglow in the sultry Miami night, rocking like a stellar cradle over the City of Dreams, Oz South.

Perhaps it’d been the moon that had tipped the scales to bring her here tonight. Whatever it was, sitting across from Patrick Allain, she was eternally grateful, while her two best friends had turned a resonant shade of chartreuse that shone through the purple-blue Art Deco lights of the evening world of Key Biscayne.

The live band did their best imitation of Jimmy Buffet, Dylan and Bob Marley tunes all evening long while she and Patrick sipped pina coladas and munched on curly cheese Cajun fries below the moon out on the ocean deck, where beautiful Biscayne Bay met the incoming swells of the Atlantic on picture-postcard Key Biscayne. Over one shoulder blinked the moon, over the other the colored lights of the Sheraton Royal Biscayne. Stretched before them were the milky white sands of Sonista Beach on one side, Harbor Drive and the Harbor Drive Wharf on the other. The night was enchanted lit, the ocean breeze like a lover’s caress, and Kathy’s dreams had all come alive. Patrick had arrived by boat-his boat, an incredible seventy-footer, all wood and sail and lovely, and all his, bought and paid for. He must be rich beyond rich, Kathy surmised. Maybe Patrick was the one. Who knew? Life was a gamble, an exquisite dice game, and love and heartache formed the soft felt playing field of white lines, numbers, colors, rules and order. If you remained on the rail, outside the borders, afraid to toss the dice, nothing happened, all was nil… If she hadn’t shown up here tonight, if Cherylene and Melissa had come here without her, it might have been one of them sitting now across from Patrick instead of her-Melissa most likely, since she was so much prettier than Cherylene-and if so, it’d be Melissa’s eyes all dreamy and swimming with handsome Patrick’s at this moment… But it was as if Patrick had come on the wind of fate for her alone, as if she had heard the enchanted, holy wind call her name so that she might meet the one eternal lover for whom she had longed her entire life.

He sat across from her now.

She didn’t stop to analyze her thoughts or doubts, whether Patrick would simply have found Melissa instead had she come to Razzles without Kathy, nor what this said about him. There was no time for analyzing. There’d be more than enough time for going over the details tomorrow when Cherylene and Melissa came sniffing around to find out what happened.