Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

At the back of the Medivac van a young couple, each in spandex wear, their English touring bicycles beside them, the woman weeping, held on to one another, speaking to each other in British accents. They looked up at Jessica, wondering about her as she snatched a lab coat from her black valise and kicked off her shoes, placing them in the back of Charles Quincey’s car. She prepared to go barefoot across the sand and to wade out to the body in the surf.

Santiva had pulled in alongside them, and he called out to Jessica that he would speak to the first on-scene cops and anyone who might shed any light on the situation. She went for the sand and the water and the body.

Jessica had done this before, trawling out into water with her black valise on a float-table for a close examination of the body before anyone else got their hands on it; the fear of allowing others to drag the body to shore, tumble it onto sand, lift it into a waiting body bag, then hoist it into an ambulance to be whisked away, was the fear of losing vital information and possible evidence which might not otherwise be had, as floaters were known to drop evidence all along the path of transportation. Waterlogged, the body was literally coming unglued cell by weakening cell.

Jessica was followed out to the body by a handful of curious seagulls and a crotchety old pelican, all wondering what she had in her bag that might be of interest to them. One or two of the seagulls dipped to the body to examine it, but knowing by some instinct that it wasn’t for them, they immediately fled back to the relative safety of buzzing about Jessica’s head as she continued toward the corpse, wading farther out into the hip-deep water, her lab coat floating around her now like a white Christmas tree skirt.

The body had come up against a jetty of jagged stones, where it washed like flotsam in a gentle, rocking tide. The situation was similar to an earlier floater case she’d supervised in D.C., but this time she didn’t need hip boots, a flashlight or a raincoat. This time the sun beat down on the awful waste and the waters surrounding her lapped against her skin with a warm tongue. In the earlier instance, the water had been frigid and black.

She recalled the other floater, a young teenager whose death had at first appeared the result of drugs and a stumbling accident. It was before her FBI days when she was chief of pathology for Washington Memorial, and it certainly hadn’t been her last floater case-as much as she would have liked for it to be. But an M.E. always remembered her first floater…

Jessica had proven the cause of death in fact to be a blow to the back of the head which had sent the teen into the water, causing his death by drowning-he had drowned while unconscious. Armed with this knowledge, the W’PD stepped up their investigation and learned that the boy’s so-called friends had attacked him and left him to drown, all over an argument involving a pair of sneakers- the only article of clothing missing from the body. Life, she mused, was as cheap today on the streets of America as it was in Hitler’s Germany or in the time of the Romans, who fed on the carnage of Christians thrown into the lions’ dens in their sporting arenas. While technology and weaponry had stepped into futuristic vistas, man himself had changed very little since the days of his caveman ancestor, who picked up the first femur to use as a club to strike down his neighbor.

This floater and everything around the victim was different. This floater-basking beneath bright sunlight on the lip of a vast, aquamarine and lush velvet horizon of sky and water-was altogether different from the starfishlike little boy found in that filthy, stagnant stone quarry in Washington, D.C., so many years before. The boy had died in a dark little hole, a watery cemetery; he’d felt no pain after the initial blow to the head which had rendered him unconscious. He hadn’t felt a thing after his school buddies had attacked.

But today’s corpse, this body on this bright Florida morning, lay in stark contrast here to the screaming life all around her, both above and below the water. Both killings were unconscionable; perhaps all killings were unconscionable, she reminded herself now, but in the light of so much life, this one seemed doubly so.

The others onshore stood watching her approach the victim. A second and enormous pelican with more life in its webbed step than the first perched on the jetty rocks, squeaked and walked back and forth in anticipation that she’d feed it. The old pelican seemed resigned simply to stare at Jessica’s advance. She gave neither the men behind her nor the fowl ahead of her any mind, but she could hear the muttering men at her back, and she could sense their absolute discomfort at having to stand idly by while a woman did their work for them.

Reaching the body, she found what appeared to be a pair of black serpents swimming lazily about a bloated, jellyfish version of a large rubber doll, slick and ballooned up. She instantly realized that the black asps coiled near the body were in fact lengths of hefty nylon rope, one coiled tightly about the neck, the other wound about the wrists, which Jessica could only surmise since she could not see the wrists. The corpse floated facedown, on its stomach, the hands somewhere below. She’d either have to fish for them or tug on the detestable rope that had been used to kill the victim.

She instantly saw that the body had been in the water from two to possibly three weeks, and she was grateful both that it hadn’t been there longer and that the corpse lay facedown for now.

There appeared to be no superficial gashes to indicate shark attack. Even as a child, Jessica had been both horrified and shockingly fascinated by the sort of quick death the powerful jaws of a shark might bring, like the mindless devastation of a lightning strike or a blow from a speeding truck. She had always been interested in the myriad shapes and convolutions taken by the Grim Reaper to ply His trade of finality. This eerie predilection had led her to push and push her father for details about his time in the war, what he had seen, experienced and done as a medical officer. For many years, he ignored her requests, denying her any such information, not wanting to relive the horrors of the war, but when he realized that she was serious about going into medicine, about following in his footsteps to become a medical examiner, he began to come around. He began to tell her the truth, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupery, saying, “Horror really can’t be talked about because it’s alive, because it’s mute and goes on growing: Memory-wounding pain drips by day, drips in sleep.” When she continued to prove her genuine interest, he had told her that he had seen every kind of wound imaginable, had seen bodies without limbs or heads; but the bodies which disturbed his sleep the most, he had confessed, were the floaters. He had been in both Korea and Vietnam, where he was part of a M.A.S.H. team, and he’d seen the result of many a battle; he had also seen many a man whose body had gone waiting for attention as the war raged on, many dying in rivers and lagoons deep in the jungle, a world from anywhere.

Here in sun-drenched Miami Beach, there were no long, dark lagoon shadows beneath which to bury the floating corpse, and the water was warm and alive-teeming with life. It saturated Jessica’s jeans and wrapped itself about her, catlike, filling her pores with its touch, this living saline ocean surf which foamed about her waist now where she stood. It wanted to be friends.

It also wanted to revive the dead girl, this life-asserting cradle she was nestled atop in a mockery of the fetal position, this amniotic fluid. That was why it kept lapping at this dead parcel, kept caressing it, licking at it like a favored pet anxious over its master. Yet this seemingly concerned licking was removing small parts of the deceased in infinitesimal increments with each incoming and outgoing tide. Neither time nor the tide was on Jessica’s side.