Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ No way of knowing, but not likely at this point.” Jessica tried to put the old man’s mind at ease.

“ He could’ve just got the days turned around. If he’s as crazy as they say, why not?”

“ We’ll send some undercover men tomorrow for a possible two p.m. meet. They’ll pretend to work out back for you,” suggested Jessica. “And who knows, maybe I’ll be back with them.”

“ All right, good. Damn this man… damn this whole bloody business,” moaned Buckner, his head in his hands. “I sometimes wonder what God was thinkin’ of when he created the human animal and the perverse human brain. Damn this monster!”

“ Our sentiments exactly, Mr. Buckner.”

They left in the van, which had to be returned to Ford. At the precinct, each promised to meet for drinks and dinner after changing and cleaning up. Jessica, in particular, pleaded that she had to get the fish smell out of her hair and off her body.

When they arrived back at police headquarters, Jessica climbed down from the van and Eriq met her at the rear, helping her out. They stood staring out toward the park, the boat marina, the great Gulf of Mexico beyond and the setting sun. “Where do you think this malfeasant creature is tonight, Jess?” asked Eriq. “What part of the coast is he haunting?” She stared out at the waning sun in the west where it flared bloodred, a giant fire in the sky that spread dark shadows now along the clean, well-kept streets and park of the picturesque city. “I don’t know what shadow he’s hiding in, but I fear the worst, and I think we have to persuade Ford to keep his men on guard at the riverfront bars and restaurants. All we know for sure is that the bastard will strike again. I haven’t had time to do a full autopsy, but I had a look at the body that washed ashore here…”

“ And?”

“ It’s as if he let her go by mistake, as if she were unfinished,” Jessica said. “None of the staging of the others; no quarter-inch nylon rope, no sign of any attempt to preserve or mount this one. You ever catch a fish only to lose it over the side?”

“ Whataya mean?”

“ She got loose from him somehow; he hadn’t tied the knot correctly or quickly enough when a wave took her, probably in the dark. Everything else is to the letter-double, possible triple strangulation, the whole nine yards. But her lungs were not as full of water as the others.”

“ About earlier, Jess… I want to apologize.”

She didn’t want to deal with earlier now. “‘Fraid it’s textbook Night Crawler,” she continued on about the most recent dead girl’s body. “He is definitely in the vicinity, and like Quincey surmised, the bastard may be making his way toward the Tampa Bay-St. Pete area.”

“ I’ve sent word to our field offices there. They’re on the alert. They know the drill.”

They had walked from the van to the park, exercising their legs and lungs while Quince and Samernow saw to the van and the equipment inside. “You look trim and handsome in your FPL uniform, Chief,” she teased.

“ You, you look like the cutest thing in rags I’ve ever seen,” he fired back. “But you’re right about the fish and formaldehyde odor. That’s gotta go.”

From behind them, Jessica heard Quince’s distinct voice carry on the evening trade wind. “Bastard has just raked the whole state from one side to the next…”

“ Promise me one thing,” she asked Eriq.

“ Anything… within reason.”

“ No more quaaludes or uppers or whatever you’ve been on.”

Santiva took in a great breath of air. “I needed it to keep pace. It was just a one-time-only.”

“ Careful, my friend, because one-time-onlies have a way of becoming one-time-eternities.”

“ I appreciate both your concern and your advice, Jess. It means a lot to me, but rest assured, I don’t have a drug problem.”

She looked from the deep wells of his dark, kind eyes back out to sea and the setting sun, a fiery orange orb threatening to engulf the world even as it was being engulfed by the horizon. So much depended on one’s limited perspective, she quietly told herself, wondering anew where the Night Crawler was at this moment.

On a hunch, Jessica Coran made a long-distance call to now Chief Constable Ja Okinleye of the Official Police of the Cayman Islands. Ja had become a good friend since the time some years ago when Jessica had assisted him on a murder case on his island of Grand Cayman. At the time he was a lieutenant in the Investigatory Division there. The case had involved a wealthy and highly regarded man who had been involved in the import business and was the owner of the largest clothing and jewelry store on the islands. Ja thought the man had gotten involved with some sort of smuggling operation, a common practice at all levels of society there. The man’s throat had been slashed and there were repeated stab wounds to the body. Ja wondered if it were not the work of an angry co-conspirator in the smuggling operation or the botched work of a burglar, but Jessica merely had to look at the body to tell him otherwise. It was neither business nor mistake that had dispatched the elderly gentleman. She explained that the wound to the throat, while similar to a Colombian necktie-a throat slit from ear to ear-would have been enough to kill the man and that the other repeated stab wounds had been unnecessary save for one need-rage and vengeance of a sort. “So,” she had surmised, “it is the work of some person who knew the deceased well enough to hate him.”

On further investigation at what passed for a crime lab on Grand Cayman, Jessica revealed other, even more startling facts: that the body had been moved from another location and posed; that the stab wounds had come first; that the wound to the throat had been a last-minute addition to the staging of the event; and that in fact the man had died of a broken neck. Someone had simply snapped his neck in a quick, brutal and efficient manner, someone both strong and possibly well-trained in the martial arts.

“ Then, in a fit of rage, he or she did the butchering, quite possibly after spending several hours with the body hatching out what to do with it.”

Ja knew instantly whom he must interrogate further, and it quickly came to light that the man’s nephew was in extreme debt to island loan sharks, that he’d pleaded with his uncle for money and that the old man had stood adamant against lending him another cent. The younger man, it was soon revealed, had lost control and attacked his uncle; in the scuffle, he’d made short work of his uncle’s vertebrae and neck bone. Death had come about as a result of the trauma suffered when the nervous system was severed.

Ja Okinleye had done most of the work that cornered the nephew, but he had been aided immeasurably by Jessica’s display of scientific knowledge, beginning with the fact of lividity, indicating that the man’s body had lain on its side for at least three hours after death before it was lifted up a flight of stairs and thrown across his bed, where the butchering ensued. The body had been left facedown where the throat was cut. The amount of blood soaking into the bedcover, or rather the lack of it, was Jessica’s first indication that things were not as they seemed on the surface; the absence of blood from such an enormous gash had clearly indicated that the old man was dead long before his throat was slashed, another relatively easy surmise.

These facts, thrown in the face of the suspect in Ja’s interrogation room, had brought him to confession and the entire case took a mere three days to solve-all while Jessica was on vacation on the islands. How Ja learned of her and of the fact that she was on his island, she never knew. At any rate, Ja Okinleye estimated Jessica Coran a wizard and a magician and was able to close the baffling case with head-spinning speed. He remained to this day, as he put it, “a great believer and friend.” And if ever she needed a favor…