Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Santiva blinked and nodded. “That’s exactly right.”

“ Did Coudriet say anything about ropes on his victim of this morning?”

“ No, no… but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any. I’ll check when we get back ashore.”

Jessica loosened the rope about the neck with some care, looking to find the bruises she had come to expect about the Adam’s apple, the thumb impressions of the murderer. They were clearly present, and so she mystified Santiva once again by saying, “This is no copycat killing, Eriq.

This is the real thing; all the marks of our boy.”

“ You’re sure of that?”

“ I am.”

“ Then why the ropes left on the neck and why’d he leave the hands tied? You think he did on the others, too, maybe, but then the rope came loose and was claimed by the sea?”

Her most doubtful glance told him she didn’t believe that theory for a moment.

Santiva tried to salvage the question. “Or do you think the bastard is taunting us with the rope?”

“ Probably… yes, I’d guess he intentionally left the rope for us to find.”

“ Then he damned sure is starting to play games with us. Three bodies in one day, intentional clues left behind. He’s grown bored with the game as it was being played and has changed the rules, hasn’t he?”

She quietly said, “I put my fingers in her mouth.”

“ What?”

“ You asked me how I can be sure of her age.”

“ You can tell by putting your fingers in her mouth?”

“ Earlier, I placed my fingers into what’s left of her mouth; actually, it’s easier to do with her face down if you want the top molars. I felt out the dental work.”

“ And?”

“ She’s got a full set of wisdom teeth, very few caps and fewer spaces. She’s a young woman, in her late teens or early twenties.”

“ Wisdom teeth, huh?”

“ They usually emerge between sixteen and seventeen years of age. It follows that since hers are fully formed that-”

“ All right…. I get it…”

“ I can also tell by the skeletal size and makeup, but this is all guesswork, as you know. It’ll take a complete autopsy to be certain of anything. ”She looks much older… so damned large.”

“ How many floaters have you seen, Eriq?” she asked again. “I confess… not many who’ve been in the water this long, obviously “

“ The tissues expand far beyond normal.”

The skin tone was bleached, stark, bloodless, albino in nature. Santiva couldn’t rise above the awful hue, the bloating, the sloughing away of skin, as if the sea owned her now and was not willing to allow her to be taken, at least not wholly.

Jessica began helping Eriq understand what was going through his mind. “It’s the glue… the bond between the outermost layer of flesh and the corium below. It has weakened so much that the blood has seeped out through the corium, escaping a trace bit at a time.”

Eriq shivered in the blistering sun and the warm water. “You mean like osmosis?”

She nodded. “Precisely, osmosis and diffusion… just like in a high school chemistry class experiment, except this one’s due to murder.”

“ You just enjoy grossing me out, don’t you, Jess?” She managed a wane smile. “Let’s say you make it too easy for me. Eriq.”

“ I need a drink.”

“ You’d only spew it up, Eriq.”

“ I hope you’re not forgetting that I am your superior, Agent Coran. Talk like that could get you into trouble. No Cuban can be told he can’t hold his liquor.”

“ A thousand pardons. Chief.”

“ How much longer?” he asked again.

“ Okay… Okay, you win. Let’s get her bagged, but please, please see to it that those clowns on shore don’t drag her out using the damned ropes or her hair, so her hands or her head doesn’t pop off.”

“ They’ll take every precaution. I’ll see to that.”

“ I mean it. The ropes have cut and burned their way near through the wrists and neck, and there’s really not much holding them on.”

“ I’ll make them apprised of it.”

She stopped him with a hand on his forearm. “Eriq, this bastard takes delight in dragging his victims’ bodies through the water at high speeds.”

Eriq gulped at the image this notion once again caused inside his head. “I recall you saying as much the other night over dinner.”

“ It’s pure conjecture, but I think one, maybe two of the victims weren’t so much victims of shark attack as victims of the ropes, which cut off their heads and hands, allowing them to pull free of their moorings unbeknownst even to the killer. I think that’s why some have come undone, as it were.”

“ But these ropes didn’t come loose from anywhere?” She held up the end of the rope that trailed from the dead girl’s throat. “No, no… This was cut with a knife.”

“ Don’t worry, I’ll make sure the medics know the score.”

“ Without giving too much away?”

“ Right. Of course.” They both knew they had to keep some information about the killer and his private moments with his victims a complete secret from the press and public. How else to know him when they were standing across from him in an interrogation room?

“ And make sure they take her to the right morgue, Eriq, and-”

“ All right, I get it.” Eriq didn’t need a second telling. He was now quickly wading toward shore, solid ground and the other men. He looked back only once, when he heard Jessica saying a prayer over the dead.

Jessica felt his eyes on her as she finished what few words she could muster for the deceased young woman, for now Jane Doe. The brilliant sun reflecting off the water was blinding, burning, hateful to the eyes, which she had kept protected with her sunglasses all the while she worked. The polarized lenses didn’t distort colors like other glasses, so they had served her well here while she’d labored over the body, the lenses also cutting down on the awful glare, so much so that she could see the trail of lively, excitable minnows nipping at her feet below the surface. The miniature fish also tried to nip at the rest of the corpse, wanting it in death to give over to them continued life.

Rainbow Heaven Beach Resort

Dr. Andrew Coudriet, like Jessica Coran before him, stood now in an alcove of the cathedral of the saltwater Atlantic, up to his calves after having removed shoes and socks and rolled up his pants. His own near-alabaster skin was not so far removed from that of the corpse, and the sight before him was beginning to be too damned common, angering as well as disgusting him. Neither statistical data on suicides nor accidental drownings could account for the sheer number of bodies washing up on Florida shores this season.

And all this bleached-white death was so damnably stark by contrast to this brilliant, lovely morning with its heady sea breeze that whispered tales of immortality in the air. The ocean swells were mere curious creatures this morning, rising only a soft few inches in this estuary where the land developers had placed their pinnacle of a resort, which shone in the sun like something out of Oz, but the swells, like persistent, hungry dogs, kept up a constant begging at his calves, soaking the fabric of his pants in ever-higher increments, even as the water cradled the body in a rocking, back-and-forth fashion.

“ To and fro, lullaby and good night,” he murmured to the dead as the next swell hit and then moved away from him, trying to take the too-heavy body back with it.

He had taken most of what he wanted from the dead girl as other officials waited to do their jobs, each looking on from afar. One of the hotel guests, looking down from his window, had that morning stepped from his shower to a balcony and spotted the corpse as it washed ashore here. He’d immediately dialed 911 and everyone was put on alert. Coudriet was on his way to another crime scene when he was diverted here by the call.