Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Eriq had made no outright promises, but he had mentioned the possibility that since Moyler was pursuing a similar course with a similar monster on the other side of the Atlantic, Eriq or Jessica might go over to see what sort of joint efforts could be made. “In the name of cooperation, should the handwriting of the two killers match up,” Santiva had teased Jessica, believing that she would jump at the chance to visit London and the famous Scotland Yard. Santiva continued to study the faxed document, scanning it for perhaps the twentieth time, reading again the purported lines of the man Jessica had half-jokingly called the Bible Belt Beast. Like Jessica, Santiva had already memorized the dark, sinister little note, a poem actually-the lines spoke of a disturbed individual who held a fathomless hatred for women. Each time he read the lines through, he seemed to get something new from them, gathering in the larger context, the innuendos, the slings and arrows the monster had endured, and the slips, slits and chinks in the madman’s armor.

The interested stewardess had now disappeared, the jolting of the plane having slackened.

“ The maniac’s words are almost eloquent in places,” Eriq said.

Eloquent wasn’t quite the word that had jumped out at her when she’d first read the killer’s remarks. In fact, eloquent was the last word she would have used to describe the bastard. Still, Santiva had a point. Like the missives of Jack the Ripper, the note was brief, concise and eloquently simple. In business parlance, it was to the point. “Well, I give him one thing,” she conceded. He looked askance at her. “What’s that?”

“ He has a good command of the King’s English, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked.

Santiva nodded, managing a half grin of thoughtful reflection. “Right, he’s certainly no slacker with regard to grammatical correctness and construction. Bet Mrs. Higgins would give him an A for that alone.”

“ Mrs. who?”

“ Oh, just a spicy old English teacher of mine when I was in grade school. She’d bust your chops for confusing the use of the personal pronoun I with me or vice versa, and God forbid you use a possessive pronoun incorrectly. She’d hold you up to public ridicule.” He fell silent a moment longer, his expression telling her that he remembered Mrs. Higgins with more fondness than annoyance. When he spoke again, he said, “You know what we’ve got here, don’t you, Jessica?” He waved the copy of the killer’s note.

“ Yeah, ‘afraid I do. He’s the most dangerous animal on the planet-an educated lunatic.”

“ Did you notice the British spellings? On the words caliber and theater?’’

She admitted that she hadn’t noticed the transverse letters E and R. She’d have to analyze more carefully, she told herself. What would Mrs. Higgins say of her carelessness?

The turbulence outside the plane settled somewhat, and this settled the unrest inside the plane to some degree, but most people remained cautious, ready to expel yet another gasp if it came to that, and it did. The momentary lull in the turbulence only resulted in a new wave of shocks to the system, the force of the assault seeming to double, sending many people to the altar of the vomit bag. This was all Santiva needed to see and hear. The stewardess who’d sat alongside Eriq was returning to check on him and had to quickly move out of his way as he snapped off his seat belt and raced for the lavatory, too polite a man to vomit in Jessica’s presence. She liked that.

Islamorada Key, Florida, April 13, 1996

The yellow made-over Ryder truck, equipped with an on- again, off-again freezer compartment, wasn’t truly large enough to be called, in trucker lingo, a reefer, but it was fully functional when it worked. It rode low to the ground with the weight of its five thousand pound cargo, and now the frozen cargo was being backed up along a concrete ramp at the University of Florida’s Abbott Marine Research Laboratory on Islamorada Key. At the top of the ramp stood two massive doors and a conveyor belt, beside which waited two strange looking scientists in hip boots and protective gear more suited to the river than the laboratory.

Lynette Harris and Aron Porter, to whom all the scut work naturally fell, stood poised in bulky clothing and chaps, prepared to enter the truck from the rear, to wade in and slide about in their hip boots, protective clothing, thick rubber gloves and goggles. A pair of student trainees at the high-tech marine research center, each now resignedly climbed aboard, despite Aran’s bitching, to begin the struggle with the dead beasts within: some twenty-five recently deceased sharks of various size and species.

The protective wear was as much to guard against cuts and bruises as to avoid possible infectious viruses the sharks might easily pass to the humans. Aron marveled at the enormity of the workload that lay ahead of them now that they’d traveled back from Key Largo, and he didn’t appreciate Lynette’s shoving him and nagging, saying, “Let’s have at it. The work won’t get done standing here staring at it. Come on, Aron…”

Aron was already tired, and he was hungry. He moved slowly, as if his muscles were atrophied.

Lynette, by comparison, seemed full of energy at all times. She was anxious to have the job behind her. Whenever they might finish downloading their third shipment onto the ramp, there would be upward of ten thousand pounds of shark flesh in the holding tanks, which were filled with a saline solution and kept at a constant thirty- two degrees Celsius for preservation purposes. The sharks would be processed, not for canning or freezing or selling to the local eating establishments, but for study of the reproductive cycles of the species in order to help determine if the U.S. government-the EPA in particular-really wanted to get involved in controlling fishing rights over sharks in Florida’s coastal waters.

The trainees knew that their work here was important, that overfishing of sharks, according to Dr. Insley’s projections, would mean a lethal break in the food chain, creating an imbalance that might subject all fish to extinction if the next link in the food chain were to suddenly have a population explosion. But according to Dr. Wainwright, an even more important reason for gathering the shark specimens at Islamorada was so that other research facilities across the nation would have ample biological samples for cancer research, for studies of the immune system with possible application to AIDS research, for cornea implants, and for a supply of skin for burn victims, not to mention for ongoing research into shark repellents.

Dr. Lois Insley’s major concern, however, was to determine if free-for-all fishing of sharks up and down the Keys and Florida would or would not lead to the extinction of certain species.

Ironically, the institute had for several years now sponsored the Shark Research Fishing Tournament in order to gain enough sharks for research purposes to enable Insley’s extinction theory experiments to continue. This year, they had solicited and obtained dual sponsorship of the popular tournament with SunFin Boats Incorporated, and this made their mother institution, the University of Florida, extremely pleased.

Now, the third and final day of the tournament had come and gone, Aron and Lynette the night before having weighed and marked each specimen for identification- and, of course, the inevitable photos with the winners in each class having been all taken, before a crowd of curious tourists fascinated by the thirty-odd fishermen, the gathered scientists and the grand prize winner, a 317-pound monster hammerhead which lay now in the back of what passed for a freezer truck at the Islamorada scientific facility.