Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Thorn, even while shaking his head and pushing aside Powers’s restraining hand, asked, “What’re you saying. Dr. Coran?’’

“ I’m saying this murdering… fiend first incapacitates his victim with repeated strangulations and then drowns them, that this evil being, whoever or whatever he is, has turned back down the evolutionary trail, allowing his most base, animal desires to overtake him.”

“ But why repeatedly kill someone?”

“ He obviously gains great pleasure at watching an Allison Norris struggle and suffer, and he too much enjoys watching his victim languish and agonize to allow her a quick death. He wants long hours to pass before he allows her to go.”

“ But why?”

“ He wants to control the clock, hold back time and death itself, to send her soul across a high wire of tension, with himself at the controls; he wants to control death itself.”

If memory served Jessica, Dr. Andrew Coudriet had not questioned the method in which the throat had been brutalized and the bone splintered, as opposed to crushed or mangled. He had taken it at face value that the strangulation was the result of a tightly wound rope about the neck; he’d described it as a hangman’s noose, due to the angle of the ligature marks. And he was definitely correct in that assumption. A hangman’s noose burned the back of the neck at the base of the brain far more than it did across the Adam’s apple and throat. She had noted this in her report.

Yes, Coudriet was right about the rope burns, but before the rope burns, the girl had been strangled by hand, and strangled badly, repeatedly. The question remained, was she choked to death so far as the killer knew-an important distinction in determining the level and duration of torture heaped upon the victim-before or after she was lynched? Also, was she dead before he threw her into the water, or had she been choked repeatedly first and then, while still alive, thrown into the water, where exhaustion and blackout would do the rest? Jessica asked the questions aloud after formulating them. Articulating the horrid questions proved too much for Powers, who suddenly reached up and shut off the camera and audio. He stood staring across at Jessica now, the body lying between them. “Dr. Coudriet’s report had the lungs full with water, so the woman was alive when she swallowed the ocean.”

“ That may well be,” Jessica agreed, knowing that as far as many forensics experts were concerned that was the only way for the lungs to be filled with water. But Jessica wasn’t so sure. Water was a force that could find its way into the lungs of even a dead person, particularly if that force were guided. It didn’t have to be inhaled in to find its way into the lungs.

“ All right, let’s speculate on why the bodies are always found so far from the victim’s last known sighting. Hundreds of miles, in some cases.”

Thorn said, “We found her lungs bursting with water, so we know she was alive at the time of drowning.”

“ You ever hear of a pump?” she replied more sarcastically than she’d meant to. Still, she wondered at his use of the term bursting. It sounded like an exaggeration.

“ What?” Thorn replied.

“ The kind of monster we’re after, gentlemen, would be capable of killing her with his bare hands and then, using a mechanical device, pump her lungs full of water just to throw us off.”

Powers’s eyebrows rose appreciably as he asked, “Really?”

“ I know-I’ve hunted this type before.”

“ Do you really think-” began Thorn, but Powers put a hand against his chest, reminding him to keep his mouth shut.

Powers then sarcastically added, “If Dr. Coudriet says she was drowned, then she was drowned. He’s only handled ninety-two drownings this year. Do you really want to call his judgment into question?”

“ Killers sometimes mask their moves. You… we… can’t be too careful.”

“ The autopsy report faxed to you at Quantico was premature, but that wasn’t our fault; there wasn’t time,” explained Powers, his hands in the air.

“ Your superiors were on our necks,” added Thorn.

“ So it was a hurried report?”

“ Well, yes. It was hurried, I’m afraid. At the request of your FBI field office chief here-DeVries?”

DeVries was the first man to alert Eriq Santiva to the trouble brewing in Florida. Plagued by health problems, he’d since taken an extended leave. “Dr. Coudriet had wanted more time with the victim, but this one’s red hot, politically speaking.”

“ Understood-a senator’s girl.” And she did understand. She’d been in the same predicament on several occasions.

She stared closely again at the force-injury at the throat. She brought a more powerful magnifying glass on a swivel arm to bear on the wound, and found only collaboration for what she had originally theorized. “She was repeatedly strangled, gentlemen.”

“ Repeatedly?” asked Thorn, his eyeglasses bobbing.

“ Whoever did this took his own sweet time with her. Brought her to near death with his hands more than once before he threw her into the water. My guess? The rope burns came afterwards, and it’s also my guess that she was in the water when the rope burns did their work on her neck. She drowned from exhaustion in the water, possibly from blacking out and going under repeatedly-after considerable strangulation by hand.”

Thorn tore off his glasses and wiped his brow with a cloth; Powers, though more stoical, looked perturbed by this news as well. Each of them, Jessica included, tried to picture the type of killing ground-liquid, it appeared- that the killer worked out of. It had to be controlled; it had to be all his for the long hours he needed it.

Still Powers defended his boss, saying, “Dr. Coudriet must’ve wished to spare us the details.”

“ I’m sure,” she replied. “Look, what we’ve got here is a high-level torture victim, gentlemen: a young woman who didn’t go quietly into that gentle night…”

Thorn and Powers looked across at one another, most likely still unconverted by Jessica’s version of the truth, disbelieving that Dr. Coran or anyone else could deduce so much from so little.

She didn’t mind their skepticism, half expected it; furthermore, Jessica Coran didn’t care. What they thought mattered little. She had to tell Santiva what she had, but she wanted time to run some tests, to be certain of her deductions and to have some science to back her up. She wasn’t Kim Desinor, the psychic detective. No one was going to take her “vision/version” of the crime at face value, especially one so horrible as the image that now threatened to make her as ill as Thorn looked to be.

She intended to send some items connected to the various bodies and crime scenes back to headquarters at Quantico for Kim Desinor’s special brand of inspection, but what was there to send? Like Allison Norris’s partially dismembered body, all the others were without clothing, or rings, chains or bracelets. They wouldn’t have had Allison’s bracelet either if a certain shark hadn’t taken a certain tournament fisherman’s hooked bait below a certain boat off Key Largo some forty nautical miles south of Miami during a once-a- year fishing event sponsored by the very people who crusade to save the sharks.

She had reminded Santiva of what she’d said on the plane coming down about murder victims stamping their wills on the evidence, how a body placed in the ocean would find a way to shore, by hook or by crook. Now, with the message stamped clearly in the metal artifact found inside a dissected shark, Santiva had appreciatively agreed with her. What better evidence of this strange phenomenon than the bizarre fate of Allison Norris’s engraved bracelet. Had she, before death, hidden the bracelet away somewhere and somehow on her nude body, say in her mouth, only to later replace it? Or had the killer intended to send another “poetic” message by way of the bracelet, allowing it to remain on Allison’s wrist? Either way, the story of Precious had made a believer out of Eriq Santiva.