Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Jessica stared down at the body again, leaned in over it and tried to work, steeling herself against the awful appearance death had sculpted here. The saltwater had preserved the body to some degree, and this did cut down on the stench, which would otherwise have been overwhelming. Small favor, she mused as she set to work, first studying the hands, which she’d had to tug free from below. There had been a strange reluctance, as if something was weighing the hands down and didn’t want them revealed, but this inertia was followed by the equally unnerving ease with which, once freed, the hands began to float in her direction. She saw them as huge, white blowfish coming at her now.

Settling her nerves, Jessica saw that only two nails remained on the right hand, one on the left. All the other nails had popped from the combined pressure of expanding flesh and moving water. Even the few nails remaining, however, had been washed entirely clean by the ocean, and were rather useless as a result. Even if Jane Doe had fought her attacker and taken scrapings from his face or arms, the skin tissue and hair was long ago lost. But she did note that both remaining nails were jagged, torn and split, as if the victim had attempted to bare-handedly rip her way free from a stone hole, or quite possibly to pull her way up alongside the hull of a boat, obviously without success.

“ Poor young devil,” Jessica lamented, giving thought to who she was, what her dreams and aspirations might have been, who loved her and why.

Jessica took the two remaining nails from the right hand, and as she did so, one was caught by the tide pool and whisked into invisibility. “Damnit, God… give me something to work with here,” she mournfully cursed.

With the extreme care that comes only of long experience, she carefully, gently twirled the body so that it floated closer to her and away from the jagged rocks abutting the victim’s left side. She now examined more closely the left hand nail. There was only the one remaining, the sea having peeled away the others. This one, like the other two on the right hand, was broken and jagged. She carefully grabbed hold with her tweezers and with a quick pull, the sun-and-water-bleached nail silently, easily came away from the rippled skin at the fingertip. This time, Jessica lifted it out of reach of the nipping surf.

Each of the victim’s fingers now resembled a bloated snake, the fat thumbs like turtles. Little wonder a shark, even a small one, might find such parts of the floater an appealing strike. The hands were like pillow-sized jellyfish, squishy to the touch.

Jessica mentally placed the time in the water at between twenty and twenty-five days, something shorter than that of earlier victims, and she wondered about the difference, whether it was significant or simply a fluke. Jessica stowed away the second of the two nails she’d recovered into a vial which contained a pink gel fixative. She placed this deep into her valise and felt the pontoon platform bang against her ribs, as if the sea were upset with her for taking that which belonged to it.

She considered the stroke of luck she’d had when the right cop had come along and kept the gung-ho Rescue 911 paramedics from wading out here and dragging the unfortunate victim to shore. All her nails would’ve been gone had that taken place, not to mention another layer of skin. She alone would give the body the care and attention required, like a marine archeologist with an ancient artifact.

Jessica heard someone shouting from behind onshore, and this noise made her look over her shoulder. She saw Santiva arguing with one of the medics, on the verge of a fistfight, it appeared, when suddenly the medic’s partner intervened and pulled his coworker away, the two of them backing off like a giant crab, kicking up sugar-white sand as they danced together until the first man finally threw up his hands in what Jessica understood to be part of that male sign language that meant control had been regained.

No doubt Eriq was protecting her honor, she thought; no doubt the medic had called Jessica a witchy ghoul woman, but in far more unappealing language. No doubt she presented a strange picture to the people ashore, to curious onlookers from hotel windows and joggers who’d stopped to stare, what with her out here performing some sort of weird travesty of a baptism to send the deceased over to the other side.

But baptisms were celebrations of life, not death. Here the recipient of the baptism was the color and texture of Styrofoam, bloodless in appearance. At the slightest touch pieces of it-pieces of her-sloughed off, floated away, marrying with the sea, dissolving, and with it precious evidence was lost. But evidence of what? she wondered while staring into the intricate pattern created against the water by the woman’s floating strands of hair.

Still, Jessica’s medical examination, this antibaptismal ritual, was absolutely necessary. Even so, few could realize or understand that such an indignant Eucharist might be needed. Something in people wanted to protect the body from the foul elements-including foul people-to snatch it from the water’s grasp, shade it from the sun’s glare, cover it with a blanket to give the corpse some semblance of modesty and dignity and consecration. She understood the impulse, but she also knew that in a capital case such as this, with a repeat offender on the loose, people like herself were rare and must be allowed to do their jobs.

She turned her entire attention back to the body. The corpse was like a plank gone pulpy with water, like plasterboard after flood damage. However, Jessica had come to the body prepared, her vials, fixatives, tweezers, bags, pliers, scalpel and more at her disposal on the floating mini- barge attached to her arm. It was a contraption she had developed with her mentor, Dr. Asa Holecraft, many years before for just such occasions as this. Beneath the still platform upon which her valise rested was a swivel that took the brunt of the mild surf here in the protected bay, and beneath the entire structure, which measured sixteen by sixteen inches, were two small pontoons.

Knowing that the victim had been in the water for as long as she had told Jessica that not one moment’s delay could be tolerated for certain tests. She drew a sample of the victim’s blood here and now. She took a splotch of skin, a swatch of hair. DNA testing could begin immediately on these samples alone, along with tests for blood alcohol level at the time of death and for whether or not certain poisons could be ruled out. Any delay now could mean that Jessica might not be able to exact from the body who she was, precisely how old she was, and if she had been drugged or abused either physically or sexually or both before her death.

“ How old is the kid?” someone from shore called. It was one of the cops, and from the size of his gut and the mileage on his weary and worn face, she guessed him to be the man who had preserved her evidence, such as it was.

When she didn’t readily answer, he said, “We got a missing persons report on a thirteen-year-old runaway. Any chance it’s her?”

“ Rest easy, officer,” Jessica replied. “This one’s in her late teens, maybe early twenties. More suitable to our profile than yours.”

He waved a thanks and returned to the ranks of others waiting for Jessica to finish so that they could do their jobs. She saw that Santiva had stripped off his shoes and had rolled up his pants and was preparing to join her. The jetty had seen some erosion and a large barricade had been erected where it met land, so no one could safely come out along the rocks.

Santiva waded toward her, his pants and pockets and shirt filling with water, the weave of the fabric drinking it in. When Eriq got to her, he looked over the body and watched Jessica’s hands at work, curiously silent for the moment.