Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

She imagined Jim Parry, a hemisphere away, and she longed to be with him. “J.T., don’t go playing Cupid now. The role doesn’t suit you.” He laughed lightly and said good-bye and they hung up, Jessica left with this extraordinary new twist in the case, wondering if she should rush to share it with Eriq Santiva or hold the information in abeyance, at least until after the episode of America’s Most Wanted was aired, so that they might keep it under wraps for future use against the Night Crawler.

She could go to him, argue the point. And if she didn’t share with Eriq, her chief? She could get into a hell of a lot of trouble with him over failing to bring the news to his attention through the lie of omission. He’d be wanting soon to know also if she’d had contact with Kim Desinor.

Jessica rubbed her tired eyes, lifted her head and leaned back on the stool. She stared out through the glass partitions all around her. The partitions ran the length of the lab offices like a house of mirrors, each reflecting light from the other to create an illusion of endless corridors within corridors, an ev- erlastingness reflecting science-man’s need to know the truth at all costs. The Miami-Dade authorities certainly had spared no cost in building the new facility here.

Now, through the various partitions, Jessica saw Dr. Andrew Coudriet approaching. He seemed to be looking for her, so she waved. He came now directly to her and in a near whisper, he said, “I heard about your blowout with your partner.”

She frowned up at him. “The walls hear everything?”

“ Is there more? I heard you disagreed over whether to release the artist sketch and description.”

Jessica’s hands seemed to work independently of her at the lab table. She’d been made aware that all of Allison Norris’s parts were to be interred today, per order of the family despite what Coudriet or anyone in the FBI had to say about it, and personally, she didn’t have the strength or desire to fight the politically powerful family-not at this late point in time.

Finally, she looked into Coudriet’s eyes and replied, “It’s a sad day when the M.E.’s office can’t control the evidence it oversees.”

“ If you mean the Norris body, well… that’s out of our hands. If you FBI people wanted to contest it, then you have my blessings, but it sounds as if Santiva has already caved, as they say.” She shook her head. “There really isn’t much more that Allison can tell us now, is there?” He nodded. “Pretty sure she’s given up her last secret.” Jessica withheld even from her colleague the fact that the girl’s hand had actually been severed before she died and used in an unholy fashion, in the killer’s attempt to permanently preserve it. Little wonder that body and body part had become so separated in their quest for final burial. The killer had held on to the hand for a long time, along with the bracelet, before he gave up on it, tossing it overboard as shark fodder. And Jessica had no doubt that the killer had given up this trophy with the name bracelet intact- superglued, in fact, to the wrist-with thoughtful intent, for his own reasons; most likely, he wanted to tell Jessica-or someone like her-the truth. The monster wanted a voice, wanted to speak, wanted to communicate its plans.

The terrible truth told at the molecular level was that the hand had been severed while the girl remained alive and that very soon after the severed hand had been injected with embalming fluids.

“ So what are the juicy details surrounding this big problem that has arisen between you and your chief?” Coudriet asked.

Pretending busyness, Jessica returned to the microscope.

“ Don’t pretend you don’t hear me, Doctor, or that you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Coudriet said, placing a meaty hand over her microscope lens.

“ Precisely how did you hear about our disagreement?” She had told no one of her and Eriq’s argument.

“ As you said, walls in a police precinct have ears.” He noticed only now, by their labels, that the series of slides she was working on had come from the severed hand of Allison Norris. The attention she showed the slides created in him even more interest in what she was about. “What more do you hope to accomplish with that material?”

Jessica needed an ally, needed someone she could talk the scientific facts out with. Andrew Coudriet would have to be it; he would soon have access to the information anyway. “I’m not sure, but I noticed some odd anomalies with respect to the chemical makeup.”

“ Really? Now you’re a forensic chemist as well?”

“ I had our chemists at Quantico check it out.”

“ I see.”

“ Something didn’t quite jive, but now I’m sure.”

“ Sure of what?”

“ I noticed an odor when I first had this specimen in Islamorada, but I chalked it up to the embalming fluids used on the shark carcasses there. Early on, I sent tissue samples up to Quantico, to chemists there. Quantico confirmed a hunch I had, so now that I’ve got corroboration, I thought you might care to have a look.” She got up from her stool to allow him access to the microscope. “Go ahead. Tell me what you see.”

He looked from her to the scope and back again before settling his eyes over the dual eyepiece. “What am I looking for?”

“ Just keep looking.”

Coudriet settled in, removed his glasses and stared hard down into the microscope. After a moment, he thoughtfully said, “This came from the severed hand?”

“ Yes.”

“ What is it, precisely?”

“ I just got off the phone with an expert chemist with my outfit in D.C. He FedExed these slides overnight.”

Coudriet’s eyes squinted, the red brows looking like bird feathers. “And… and?”

“ And from the chemicals they were able to isolate, J.T. says it’s clearly a preservative or fixative of some sort… not unlike the kind we use to keep our own specimens in limbo.” Jessica rubbed the sleepiness from her eyes.

“ Good God, are you saying this madman is or was a… a medical man?”

“ Not necessarily. The chemicals could be had at most any drugstore. He might also have a link with a mortician’s office, or for that matter any number of places in the business of preserving flesh,” Jessica speculated.

“ From Jell-O to WonderPIus Glow 19? But why is he using preservatives on the hand alone? We saw nothing of the kind in the autopsy, and a thing like that, you don’t miss.”

“ No, there was no evidence of it in the body proper, no.”

“ Islamorada then. They somehow stuck the hand full of it. It’s the only logical explanation,” Coudriet said.

“ Yeah, maybe… I thought the same.”

“ Thought? As in the past tense?”

“ Well, Doctor, one of my jobs is to think the unthinkable.”

“ And precisely what unthinkable are you thinking?”

She considered her answer carefully. She knew she ought actually to be talking to Eriq about this, and she planned to, but he had so infuriated her the night before that she meant to steer clear of him today. “If I were relentlessly killing people, Dr. Coudriet, in cold and brutal fashion, I’d need some sort of construct or scaffolding built around me, as a safety measure for my own sanity. You follow me so far?”

“ I… I think I do.”

“ So, I kill and kill and kill again, enjoying the delight I take in robbing others of the most potent and powerful force on the planet-life itself. I feed myself on that loss of life and suffering others must pay me. However, I need a reason, a rationalization for my cruelty and perversion which will in effect wash my hands of guilt.”

“ What has this to do with preserving the girl’s hand?”

“ As a trophy, as a prize, to keep forever or to give in offering to my master and god.”