Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Santiva had also instated the use of psychic detection within the Behavioral Science Division, wisely giving full credit for its introduction into formal FBI channels to the departing Paul Zanek, who had been made bureau chief in Puerto Rico, having finally gotten that island paradise job he’d always fantasized about. This innovation had not come without controversy, and at great personal and professional costs to Santiva’s own safety and well-being, primarily in the loss of points with the big guys overhead, who were all extremely conservative and old-fashioned-the Hooverites, they were called in the ranks. But no one could argue with the results in New Orleans the year before, when Dr. Kim Faith Desinor proved the extreme value of psychic detection in a major-profile case, the baffling, bizarre instance of the infamous Queen of Hearts Killer, a dreaded monster who literally preyed on the still-beating hearts of young transvestites in the French Quarter district of New Orleans. But Dr. Desinor had a history with Miami-Dade which was not conducive to good relations, so she was not to be directly involved in this case, although she might be contacted at any time with material evidence and asked to run her sensitive hands over it to see what might surface.

Kim Desinor had remained in touch with Alex Since- baugh of the NOPD, and Jessica cheered them on in their ongoing love affair. Sincebaugh had left New Orleans and had found a detective’s job in Baltimore to be closer to Kim. Jessica silently cursed Jim Parry for not having made such a move; if he had, everything would have been different. But he hadn’t, and now she often felt completely alone in this world.

Chief Santiva interrupted her thoughts of Jim a second time, this time with a Cuban curse, something about his ill luck at having failed to get one of the FBI’s Lear jets, or at least one of the military transports out of the Marine base at Quantico. But she informed him again that no aircraft would be comfortable in this storm. She’d continued her own flying lessons whenever she could find a moment, and she knew that none but the craziest, most thrill-seeking pilot cared to fly in such weather.

Lightning flashed outside the windows, and she thoughtfully closed the shield so that Eriq didn’t have to look any longer. Santiva was slightly taller than Jessica, and he sported a roguish Venetian-styled beard, something that called to mind the players in a Shakespearean play set in Italy. And the man was so polite and well-mannered that she didn’t know quite what to think of him. He was intelligent, quick, keen, hardworking and driven to do his very best, and far more interested in results than in lip service or politicking, so far as she’d judged. All qualities she had in common, all qualities she liked in a man. He was quite the opposite of Paul Zanek, the consummate diplomat and politician who seldom, if ever, left the side of his phone.

Santiva began to get his mind off the turbulence by looking over the file Jessica handed him. It was the Norris girl’s file, faxes mostly, sent up from Miami-Dade PD. He lifted the file and began scanning it, even as it bobbed along with his knees on the roiling plane.

“ Peculiar how long the body was in the water, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Coran?”

“ Please, call me Jessica. It’s going to be a long trip if you continue to call me Doctor the entire way.”

“ Eriq then,” he immediately countered.

“ That medicinal patch I gave you? Did you put it behind your ear like I told you, or did you eat it?”

“ Yes, no… I did like the doctor told me.”

“ Is it helping any?”

“ Some… and thanks for the concern.”

Even as she spoke of different things, Jessica gave thought to what he’d asked, about the peculiarity of Allison Norris’s body being in the water so long.

She said, “Strange thing about a body, any body, Chief… Eriq “Oh, what’s that?”

Jessica didn’t readily answer, noticing that the flight attendant beside Eriq had leaned in to listen in on their talk. The pilot, crew and flight attendants on the plane had earlier been privately instructed that they were FBI so that there would be no undue concern over their weapons. Jessica took this as her cue to gross the nosy woman out by flashing one of the crime scene photos and adding, “A body… well, it wants out. It wants to be seen, wants help, wants to give up its identity. Sometimes it screams.”

“ Screams?” asked the stewardess, whose name tag read Tawny. Santiva frowned. “Wants out… wants to be seen? Screams?”

“ For instance, how often do you hear of a body at a huge city dump, say in New York City, being discovered?”

“ All the time, unfortunately.”

“ That’s what I mean. The bad guys bury the bodies in places you’d think no one could possibly sniff them out, right?”

“ Right with you, so far.”

“ Given the stench of the place on any given day, who’d ever find the body in a New York City dump?”

Eric held back his breakfast, flashing on a mental picture of a bloated body at a dump site.

Jessica continued. “And it’s not just confined to dump sites, this phenomenon.” Jessica was warming to her audience, having them on. “Oh, really?”

“ Killers are notoriously resourceful. Killers place bodies in cement lockers and bury them below the earth, but still the body leaks information. The Jimmy Hoffa scenario is actually quite rare.”

“ Leaks information, huh? Stinks up the place, you mean?”

“ By hook or by crook, the body screams, ‘I want outta here!’ Put it in a trunk and throw the trunk into the ocean, you think you’ve got it made, but the body works its way out like Houdini, or the trunk floats not out to sea but onto shore, and no one can stroll by such a ‘treasure’ without opening it up.”

Santiva laughed now, and it did him good. His mind was taken off the flight, if only momentarily. “You really think the body’s got some kinda power to, you know, influence the ocean swells? I mean the Norris body in Florida?”

She smiled a faint and mysterious smile, shook her head and laughed lightly, thinking about what she’d just said, realizing she meant every word, before replying. “All I know is that even if the body’s been put in acid, its skeleton finds a way out.”

He nervously laughed again, and Tawny nervously joined him while Jessica kept talking. “Put your dirty dead deed in the ocean, and it wants above the waves. If you bury it below ground, it wants above ground. If you cut it up into fifty little pieces, all the pieces want to find one another. If you stuff all the pieces into a drainage pipe, they all come out at or near the same location. If you burn the body, it will sit up and grin and wave, because in its mouth it holds firm to its identity, and its identity will hang you. If you drink the blood of the corpse, you’ll spill enough to mark a trail to you. If you chop it into pieces and feed it to the sharks, some guy in a research facility hundreds of miles away will discover it in his laboratory when he goes to dissect a shark for its secrets. In other words, dead men have a way of plotting their revenge and pointing accusing fingers at their killers.”

He nodded appreciatively. “You ought to know, Doc- Jessica.”

“ I’m telling you only what every decent M.E. in the country knows, that the most immovable, inanimate and inert object on God’s green earth-a body-will find a way out. It will simply find a way out, a way to move or a way to point a finger, either literally or in blood and body fluids, hair samples or fibers. It might take the help of a sensitive nose, a hunter’s dog who likes to dig away at the grossest odors, a fisherman’s hook, a dogged medical examiner or obsessed detective, but like life itself, always finding a way to evolve and grow, death remains intractable in its desire to evolve and, if not grow, mutate, and it is in that mutation that the body sends out signals, tugs at its moorings or surroundings, bloats and floats and finally pulls away in search of us, Eriq.”