Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ It goes a little higher than that, Jess. There are several former presidents and White House execs and senators who live in this state, and-”

“ Christ, I don’t want to hear it, Eriq.”

“ And there’s something in the wind about a spot on America’s Most Wanted if we can fit into their programming schedule, which-”

“ Are you nuts, Eriq, or just ambitious? I know you think you’re Errol Flynn but-”

“ Goddamnit, Jess, you haven’t got a clue. This isn’t about me or you or Tammy Sue Sheppard. This is about Allison Norris, the senator’s daughter, and by God, we’ve got-I’ve got-orders, Jessica… orders I can’t just disobey. Paul Zanek is no longer in Washington because he ignored orders once too often. You know where he is now?’’

A part of her was curious about Zanek; obviously Paul was not in cushy Puerto Rico after all. She exploded, “Donna was right: Policy stinks, Eriq.” She marched from the room.

Somewhere on the Atlantic off the Florida Coast

The Next Morning

Far out to sea, under clouds which painted the sky a cold, gunmetal gray, Warren Tauman thought about his current circumstances. He felt safe, secure in the knowledge that no one knew him or his deeds, and yet he wanted notoriety; he wanted the world to know what he’d done and why, for the why of it was important, and it was for this reason that he kept a diary of his activities and travels. He wrote haltingly, awkwardly and badly, however, never quite able to smooth out the words the way his mind wanted. Maybe he would never be a real writer, as he had always dreamed of becoming. Perhaps he wasn’t good enough, and maybe he wasn’t interesting enough, and maybe what he wrote about no one but the most bookish police science types would find the least bit interesting. Maybe the exact words of the killer would all become as arcane as some lost alchemist’s recipes.

“ Another reason to leave the Miami area,” he spoke aloud to the dead Madeleine. “I was beginning to get bloody morbid and negative there. Not to mention the fact that women were becoming more distrustful, wary and cautious of strangers, and I was, after all, a stranger to everyone there.”

He was already well below Islamorada Key, according to his calculations. He had weathered the storm well. It had turned out to be a simple blow, over quickly and painlessly. He had spent much of his time replacing Mother on the wall, but she had gone stone cold again, not speaking or moving or showing any sign that she remained or planned to reanimate what again seemed a useless corpse.

He had spent the rest of his time at the wheel and writing in his notebook, chronicling the night’s experience, the fact that Mother had finally showed herself, that it wasn’t madness or a fantasy that drove him but a real quest, and a winnable one at that.

He lamented the fact that Mother’s spirit and time here had been so damnably short-lived, that Madeleine’s body was found wanting, for Mother had obviously and completely vacated it. He had come close, but not close enough.

In calm seas, with the ship making a steady clip of eleven knots, he pushed southward. Warren once again placed the sleek schooner-class ship on automatic pilot and began removing Madeleine’s body from the wall of his cabin. This chore accomplished, he carried it, this time more gently, to the waiting sea.

At the stern, he calmly looked down into the dead features, somehow knowing that Mother wanted better, and said, “Good-bye, sweet slut; go now to our lord and master; make Tauto as pleased with you as I once was…”He now watched the corpse as it slid over the side and out to sea. He watched the stiff form bob over the top of the water, caught in the ship’s considerable wake.

The body, so loaded with stiffening agents and preservatives, would float atop the water like a log. “You’ll be discovered shortly and they’ll give chase, Madeleine. Maybe that’s what we need to relieve the boredom, hey. Mother? A good chase? Perhaps that’s what Mother wants… and we always do what Mother wants, don’t we, Warren…”

He grimaced up at the blinding sun.

He knew that leaving the Greater Miami area was the wise thing to do. He had been seen now countless times by women, many of whom were in the company of the women he’d sent to Tauto. He anticipated a police sketch of his likeness would come next, and so he had already begun to grow a beard to add to his repertoire of disguises and makeup. Once again thanks be to Mother, who had taught him the proper use of rouge, lipstick and other assorted feminine items. Mother had used Warren in her act from time to time to play, of all things, a little girl, a daughter or niece. Mother had always wanted a little girl to dress up and play dolly with.

Mother had been wonderful when she was on stage, a force to be reckoned with. Patric Allain was just another of his own stage names, taken from his mother, whose stage name was Patricia Allain. He’d picked up the art of makeup from a life in the theatre, with Mother dragging him about from one engagement to the next, from London to the nether reaches of Scotland and Ireland and beyond, all the while giving him what she called the “best education she knew how.” The knowledge of second rate theatre in Britain, makeup, how to play a part-it was all the best, most practical gift that had been left him, aside from the estate.

Mother had married well near the end of her life; fortunately, too, for she was beginning to lose both her looks and all hope of ever becoming the actress she had set out to become-slowed by a kid, she had so often reminded her bastard son, Warren.

He never knew his father; he rather doubted that his mother knew his father. She wised up later in life, accepting a proposal from a dazzled old country squire, upon whom she worked her considerable feminine wiles. The old man had not for a moment stood a chance, not since the moment he saw her on stage and showed up at her dressing room door, annoyed from the first to discover Warren there in a corner.

The old man. William Anthony Kirlian, had soon turned over everything he owned to the ravishing Patricia Allain, stage star-shortly before his death of “natural causes,” or so the coroner’s inquest had put it. Everyone suspected poisoning at the hand of the new wife, but no one except Mother had suspected suffocation at Warren’s hand.

It was then that she had shipped Warren off to a boarding school, where he did indeed acquire a fine education, but where he also remained lonely, depressed and sullen. When he would visit Mother at her palatial estate outside London, he was made to feel like a guest, an outsider, even an intruder, for Mother always had a man around, and she liked her privacy up until the day she died, in an apparent accidental fall from a cliff near her seaside estate.

He had inherited everything, which after taxes did not amount to near so much as it had appeared it would. The estate had to be sold, and with it went most of the prestige and privilege of class that Warren had for the first time in his life enjoyed, and despite the occasional remorse at having killed his mother, over the years his only constant and tangible remorse had congealed in a desire to have killed her with more aplomb and alacrity, to have drawn out her suffering for long days and nights-and why not? Hadn’t she made his life a living hell? Hadn’t she made him suffer like a pet collie at her hands all his miserable life?

So he had had to sell off the gaudy estate and pocket what he could of the proceeds, and he was left with a sailing ship which he knew not a whit about. The ship, however, became his home and his one true source of pride and excitement. That had been four years ago, and since then he had killed many, many women. He didn’t at first know why he was driven to do so, knowing only that he must, and that he could not control the urge.