Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ So, had anyone other than Allain handled the skin?”

“ I had no reason to think so, no.”

“ Show it to me. I want that skin.”

“ It’s in the next room.”

“ Anyone else touch it?” she pressed as she followed Buck.

“ Stu? Anyone in or outta here this morning?”

“ Not a soul.”

“ Did you paw the fella’s prize?”

“ Naw, too busy to take any notice of it,” Stu assured them.

“ There it is, right on the peg where I hung it,” said Buck.

“ I’ll need to have someone come in and take your prints, Mr. Buckner, so we can rule them out. Any others we find, hopefully, will be those of the killer.”

“ You can peel off fingerprints from that?” He pointed to the lifeless scales of the yellowfin with which Patric Allain had allegedly walked through the door.

“ I can with the right tools… We have the technology, but it’ll destroy the skin.”

“ Take the damned thing. It’s old and brittle now any way; said he had it packed in ice the whole time, but obviously that was a lie. Said he caught it in the Cayman Islands, but that was a lie, too.”

“ He said Cayman Islands specifically?”

“ Yeah, I recall he did.”

“ Hmmmm. How could you tell that he was lying about the condition and age of the skin?” Stu jumped in, saying, “Hell, one look at it…” Buck offered, “I don’t figure it’d be in such good shape as it was if he’d hauled it so far as the Caymans. My guess, he snatched it or bought it at some other shop along his way to here from Key West.”

“ Why lie about the Cayman Islands? Why not simply say he caught the fish in the Gulf out there?”

“ I don’t know, pathological? Or maybe he knew the quality was bad, so he made up a cockamamie story.”

The tour had ended with something tangible, a possible clue that could specifically identify the killer. Moyler in England had a print, and if they could match his print with what they found on the fish skin, they could be surer of their prey. She asked Buckner for the use of his phone and contacted Santiva in the nearby van with this news. It took some, although not all, of the sting out of the Crawler’s having not shown up.

“ I’ll pack it and send it off to J.T. at Quantico; see what the lab can find for us in the way of useful prints. J.T.’ll put our best fingerprint tech on the job. It may be the first real gift that Allain has given us. If J.T. finds something, we can put it under an electron microscope and photograph it, maybe match it to what Moyler has in London.”

“ May’s well pack it in,” he suggested. “Not doing any good here.”

“ Let’s give it a little more time,” she suggested. “Maybe he got unavoidably held up.”

“ Yeah, don’t we wish the Coast Guard or the Florida Marine Patrol has picked him up for questioning?”

“ Could we get so lucky?”

“ I’ll get Ford’s best men down here to relieve us, let them watch over this place tonight, and we’ll get some R and R.” said Santiva.

After calling J.T. to tell him what he might expect in the overnight mail, so as to not entirely shock him, Jessica found herself with time on her hands, so she asked Buckner for the phone number of his old partner in Key West, and she then telephoned Scrapheap Jones and plied him full of questions relevant to his encounter with the Night Crawler.

Jones simply refused to believe that the Patric whom he had taught the rudiments of fish-trophy mounting was the Crawler. His mind could not wrap around the concept; he claimed the kid he trained was a wimp, fearful at the sight of blood even in a dead fish. Scrapheap told Jessica that she was on a fool’s chase if she were after that sullen, quiet one-joke boy he had known.

But even as Scrapheap Jones denied her, she read between the lines of what the man said. Allain was sullen, quiet, fearful of the sight of blood and apparently humorless. In point of fact, this profile sounded a great deal more like her prey than Jones realized. “What do you mean by one-joke boy?”

“ He’d say the fishing in the shark aquarium museum here in Key West was the easiest place to fish. Damned fool. Thought it was funny; thought it irritated me when he’d suggest taking a charter to the museum, let ‘em all dip their bait into one of the tanks there. Silly stuff like that, like it was real funny, but it wasn’t. Joke was lame, like the kid.”

“ Did he ever steal from you?”

“ Some… some chemicals, maybe, I ain’t a hunerd percent sure.”

“ Do you have anything in writing about your agreement with him? Did you have him sign a contract or agreement? It’s important.”

“ I did… at the time…”

“ Do you still have it?”

“ It may be in my files.”

“ If you find it, fax it to me at the Naples Police Department.” She gave him the number. “I’ll see what I can do. By the way, is Buck there? Can I speak to him?”

She told him that he could speak with his friend.

“ Oh, just a minute… another thing he always kidded me about…” Scrapheap suddenly said.

“ What’s that, sir?”

“ Ahh, always said he’d like to go somewhere cooler, complained of the Florida heat, so he was always talking about going to the Caymans.”

“ The Caymans?” Jessica wondered at the coincidence.

“ That was the joke, get it?”

She didn’t get it.

“ The Caymans are hotter’n Florida and all hell the time o’ year he was talking.”

“ I see. Had he ever been to the Cayman Islands?”

“ Said he had been there, yes. Not much with trophy mounting, but he sure knew how to sail.”

She told Buck that Jones wanted to speak with him. Relinquishing the phone, she looked up at the clock to see that it was now nearing 3:05 p.m. and still no show.

They waited past three-thirty. Ford and Santiva had by now earnestly discussed pulling up stakes. Jessica could hardly blame them, but she said over the remote that she would give it another hour, till four. Meanwhile Ford arranged for a man in civilian clothes to enter with a fingerprinting kit and both Buck’s and Stu’s fingerprints were taken for the record. What remained of Patric Allain’s trophy fish, the yellowfin he’d walked in off the wharf with, was placed in a large paper sack and carried out for laboratory analysis and fingerprint detection. Jessica would later properly box it in absorbent material and FedEx it off to Quantico, Virginia.

By now Ford had seen enough; he quickly pulled his men-acting as backup-from the area. He and Santiva had gotten into a tiff, and Ford flatly refused to have his men watch over the shop all night. So, for a bit longer, Santiva, Quincey and Samernow remained nearby. Mark and Eriq were in FPL uniforms at the van while Quincey sat at a bus stop now, his makeup-that of a feeble old man down on his luck-beginning to thin.

Four o’clock came around and still no show. Somehow, the killer knew; perhaps he sensed that it was too dangerous to return, especially after having robbed the place of materials the night before. Perhaps he realized that he’d been foolish to use the same alias, even with a man like Buckner, and doubly foolish to have left something of his in the other man’s possession, something with his prints on it. Or perhaps he had simply smelled trouble about the shop, even before coming near it. Like a tiger or a cougar, the Night Crawler obviously had good instincts.

Now he could be anywhere.

Tired and disgruntled and disappointed, the four remaining law enforcement officials found themselves trying to comfort Gordon Buckner, to assure him that he would be safe and to tell him to be in touch the moment he was contacted again by Patric Allain.

“ Then you do think he will contact me again?”