Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ All of the above. Somewhere along the line, this bastard’s going to slip up, and when he does, we’ll be there, Jess,” he assured her.

“ You’d better extend your net to every conceivable slip, including boat repair shops, dry docks, and maybe any shops where they preserve fish as trophies.”

“ How’s that?”

“ A strange new development. Let me tell you about it.”

Eriq felt his flesh crawl. “All right, fill me in.”

In the midst of making Eriq’s stomach turn, Jessica was told she had a long-distance call. She grabbed the nearest phone and identified herself and was suddenly surprised and elated to hear James Parry’s voice on the other end, asking, “Are you taking care of the woman I love?”

“ Oh, James… Where-where are you?” She pictured James Parry at the other end of the line, pleased beyond comprehension that he’d located her. “I’m calling from the islands, which have lost a great deal of their luster since you left. I’ve dearly missed you, darling.”

“ God, I’ve missed you.” Out of the side of her eye, she noticed Eriq impatiently waiting. She turned her back on him and continued her conversation.

They had a long talk in which they exchanged vows of love. It was enough to send Santiva from the room. She asked Jim to call her later before bedtime, to tuck her in. He promised that he would. She was happy for the first time since arriving in Miami. What was that all about?” asked Eriq when he returned to finish with her.

“ Personal.”

“ Oh, I see…”

“ Let’s get back to work.”

“ Long distance?” Santiva was smiling for her. “Hawaii maybe?”

“ Maybe…”

Ten Days Later

When America’s Most Wanted did its segment on the killings in Florida, it appeared the trail of the killer had gone stone cold. No more notes coming in from the killer and, thankfully, no more bodies either. It was as if the creature had simply vanished while camera crews had replaced police and medics, film barricades had replaced police tape and Jessica had been replaced by an actor, Santiva by a director.

The images on the TV screen of women floating in the sea, although simulations, were emotionally stirring-but not when Jessica considered the fact that those young women would, off camera, lift their heads from the surf, stand, wade back to shore and go home to dinner. And as for truly simulating a bloated drowning victim, prime-time TV simply wasn’t ready.

There was both relief and anger in the Miami area when, a week and a half after the discovery of three victims of the Night Crawler in the space of hours, there were no further developments and no new leads in the case, so far as the public knew. Meanwhile, the national attention given the case, the TV exposure and the fact that it remained open had helped persuade the government steering committee on payroll centers to steer elsewhere.

Theories regarding the whereabouts of the killer abounded: He’d killed himself; he had been arrested on some other charge, been convicted and put away, and from behind bars he could only contemplate murder at some future date. Others theorized that he had left the country for more fertile ground-virgin turf, as it were. Missing Persons departments all over the state continued as always to file reports on young women disappearing or running away from their homes, but not all of these fit the victim profile. There was a growing, sinking feeling among law enforcement officials that the Night Crawler had simply been frightened off by the news accounts and the police sketch, which had gone out across the state and the nation, and that despite his flirtation with the news media, he had turned out to be extremely camera-shy after all.

Jessica had begun to believe she’d blundered badly, that Eriq and his superiors had been right in wanting to withhold information on the killer until some future date. But upon her voicing this concern to Eriq, he shook his head and told her that what had upset local politicos most was that they had made certain promises to America’s Most Wanted: that the poster would be shown there first and that other vital clues in the case would be revealed only on the show. He ended with an apology that he hadn’t confided all this nonsense to her earlier, but said that he’d been unable to.

Still, Jessica wondered if Patric Allain had not fled as a direct result of her actions. She believed now that Allain, or whoever he was, had simply decided to vanish, and that to do so he had been forced to control his killing urge. To control such primitive, overwhelming compulsions, she felt, he had to demonstrate a willpower few men, good or bad, possessed, and she wasn’t buying it; and neither would the monster for long, she figured. She recalled with chilling detail the case of the Claw in New York, who could not control his need to cannibalize. It was a need which had compelled the monster to follow her for several hundred miles in an attempt to make a meal of her.

Knowing what she did of the criminal mind, including its need for a familiar landscape upon which to operate, Jessica had contacted Moyler in England to warn him that the killer could be returning there. On the other hand, she noted this particular killer seemed at home on the oceans and seas of the world. He might be anywhere on the globe.

In the meantime, Moyler had found additional information on the female named Madeleine Tauman whose alias had been Patricia Allain. She had grown up amidst what Moyler termed “difficult situations in a difficult area of London,” and she’d become a prostitute at a young age. Soon she had gone from prostitution to the small-time stage, using the same alias, Allain, as her stage name. Late in life, she had married a well-to-do landowner named William Anthony Kirlian who owned an estate in Grimsby on what the ancients called the Nordsee-the North Sea-far to the north of London. Not surprisingly, the old baron died a year after the marriage, but a coroner’s inquest turned up nothing beyond a massive heart attack. The kicker came when Lady Kirlian, the former Patricia Allain, herself died soon after in what was ruled a fatal accident involving a cliff near the estate. Lady Kirlian’s tumble from a precipice near the estate, Moyler told Jessica, was witnessed only by her devoted son, Warren Tauman.

Moyler had located some people who had worked for Kirlian and Lady Kirlian before their deaths, and as to the young man, Warren, they had little to say except that he was sullen, brooding and always staring out over the horizon to the North Sea, commiserating with nature on the very precipice where his mother had slipped and fallen to her death on the jagged rocks below.

Moyler now believed that Patric Allain might possibly be an alias for Warren Tauman, who’d disappeared after dissolving the estate and keeping what monies he could, along with a sailboat valued in the hundreds of thousands, which he diligently learned to work.

It seemed that while the trail in England had finally heated up, the trail in America had dried up, and when another week slipped by and still nothing remarkable occurred, FBI operations in Florida seemed at an end.

Santiva was talking about packing up and returning to Quantico, where more pressing matters awaited. In the meantime, Jessica had kept in touch with Judy Templar, whose therapy had done wonders for her, according to Donna LeMonte.

Meanwhile, Quincey and Samernow had finally persuaded Monroe and Lovette family members to give up the location of the other supposed eyewitness by making certain they saw the America’s Most Wanted segment which requested information on Aeriel Marilee Lovette Monroe, who was wanted for questioning in relation to the killings. Something in the notoriety of being mentioned on national TV, or of being close to someone named on national TV, got a lot of people to talk to authorities.