Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Quince answered with his own question. “So, Mark, what gives with Aileen and your kid?’’

“ They’re great, really…”

“ That good, huh?”

Samernow marched on toward the interrogation room, and they trailed after, the corridors here being extremely narrow, all the government outlay of funds having obviously been for exterior show. “Oh, by the way, the re- checks and double checks of the Miami harbors turned up zip on our guy, so we can kiss any leads coming out of that trail good-bye. Got word over the fax this morning from Noonan back at headquarters.”

There was a full-fledged interrogation going on, Captain Ford and Eriq Santiva doing the grilling on the inside while Jessica and Quince were shown to the one-way mirror where they might watch, but it didn’t sound promising. “Who’ve they got in there?”

“ Looking less and less like a suspect,” replied Mark. “Some guy who claims to’ve seen the killer. Claims he knows who the killer is, that he held a conversation with Allain.”

“ What does he have?”

“ The name Patric Allain, which everybody has by now, remember?” He didn’t mean for it to come out an indictment of her having released the information, but it did and it stung.

“ So what makes him special?” asked Quince.

“ Two things. He claims he knew something of Allain earlier, and that Allain showed up a few days ago at his shop.”

“ His shop?” asked Quince. Jessica added, “What kind of shop?”

“ Taxidermy shop.”

Quincey and Jessica momentarily gawked at one another, unable to believe their ears, and then back at the man under interrogation, a man who looked as if he’d fallen off a seventeenth-century ship and washed ashore in rags, a Robinson Crusoe appearance about him, even down to his earrings, shorts and open shirt. He wore a long, scraggly beard that looked both dirty and uncombed. As thin as a dime, he looked like part of the growing homeless population.

“ Rode his bike into headquarters just to tell us his story,” said Mark Samernow with a little shake of his head.

Quince asked, “What’s he ride, a Harley?”

“ Not hardly. Try a Schwinn, a bicycle. Old one at that.”

Jessica frowned and asked, ‘ This guy is a businessman? He owns his own shop but rides a bicycle?”

“ What’s this guy’s name?” asked Quince. “Wouldn’t be Gordon Buckner by any chance, would it?”

Samernow glared at his partner. “What’re you psychic now? Or did you overhear the name while we were approaching?’ ‘

“ Mark,” replied Jessica, “you never mentioned his name, not once. Captain Anderson told us about Buckner before we landed.”

“ Anderson? The guy you came in with?”

“ Buckner’s got some sort of reputation among sportfish- ermen for what he can do with dead fish.”

Samernow looked at the old man with rekindled interest. “So?”

“ He makes trophy fish for walls. If the girl in Matecumbe can be believed, and if the dead body in Key Largo can be believed, it all begins to make warped sense why the Crawler pulled up stakes and chose to come here, in search of the master-Buckner.”

“ Let’s listen up, see what Mr. Buckner has to say,” suggested Quince, finding a hard seat and trying to make himself comfortable.

Jessica remained standing, her arms folded, her eyes studying the man under interrogation, her ears filling with the questions he posed and the answers he provided.

Gordon Luis Buckner was certain of his information. He was approached by a man who wanted to know everything that “Buck” Buckner knew about preserving fish flesh, down to the chemicals he used. However, the man, while a stranger to Buckner and sporting a British accent and a beard, was no novice himself. He had a working knowledge of taxidermy, albeit limited, and claimed to have worked in a place in Key West that specialized in the “art form,” Works of Art Taxidermy, a place Buck himself had started and sold out to a partner when, in his words, “Key West had became too fulla fags and too damned commercialized even for Jimmy Buffet.”

Buckner was a weather-beaten, scrawny and aged man, late sixties, perhaps even early seventies. And he looked like something that had gone out with the tide and the trash through a portal on a sea scow. Unwashed and unkempt, his devilishly sporty gray beard, a multicolored scarf over his nearly bald white head and an earring dangling from both right and left ears marked him as a modern-day Florida pirate-no doubt an image he relished, especially when he grinned to show broken teeth and some gold. The man had pirate written all over him, in every sense of the word. He was a roguish man, and he liked using colorful and off- color words as he spoke. Every one of the cops present wondered if they dared believe half what he was saying.

“ Blasted bastard foreigner, he was…” Buckner was going on at length now, describing his incident. “Spoke just as sweet as Mom’s apple pie, like a lily-livered, be- damned limey if you was to ask me.” He stopped to chuckle through those awful broken teeth. “Claimed he was going to open his own shop, like mine, made a lotta noise about how he admired my work, all that crapola. Said he’d seen my work in Sport Fishing Today-”

Jessica had stepped into the interrogation room moments before, making Buckner perk up and say, “Well, now you boys are talking. This I can deal with.” Captain Ford slapped a magazine into Jessica’s hand, a marker at the pages where Buckner’s creations were given several pages of space in photos depicting what Jessica could term only as hideous monstrosities, mounted fish bodies with the heads of badgers, opossums, alligators as well as whole, intact yellowfin and marlin. The article indicated an international market for what Buckner and a few other Florida trophy taxidermists had discovered in the way of a new “art form.” There was some mention also of litigation as to who owned patent rights on this dubiously creative invention in fish mounting.

“ He had a copy of the article with him,” said Buckner. “Said he’d heard about me all up and down the Eastern seaboard and all the way here.”

“ And it was afterwards, when you saw the wanted sketch on America’s Most Wanted?” asked Eriq, who was leaning against one wall now, showing signs of extreme fatigue.

“ ‘ Zactly. My wife watches the program. I don’t care a whit ‘bout it or anything else on the boob tube.’cept maybe a fishin’ show now and again, but for some reason, she says look at that guy, talking ‘bout how that dirty killer looked so normal and handsome, yet he was wanted for strangling and drowning so many young girls, so I look up and damned if it ain’t the same man who was in my shop just the day before.”

Jessica realized that the episode had obviously aired on a local network as a rerun. She had already heard enough, and was convinced that the old man spoke the truth. She moved in further to tip her badge in Buckner’s direction and introduce herself to him. Then, with Eriq staring a hole through her, she asked, “Did Allain, did he actually use the name Patric Allain, sir?”

“ He did.”

“ You’re sure of that?” she pressed, and Buckner shifted in his seat.

“ Well, either he did or my partner Scrapheap Jones down in Key West did when I telephoned him, you know, to verify this young’un’s story, that he’d worked for a time down there with Scrapheap. But that was ‘fore I realized he was that killer, the Night Crawler, and Scrapheap, he didn’t have no clue about that, no more’n I did, don’t you see?”

Captain Ford nodded as he tried to follow the convoluted trail of information spewing forth from Gordon Buckner, an obviously heavy drinker whose bloodshot eyes and broken teeth only added to his image and the incredulity in which he was being held by the police.