Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

Bob Fisher, at the FMP dispatch office in Tampa, promised to get word to the FBI so that they might have someone on hand to examine the body. He started with the local FBI office, telling them what his people and the county had come across off Madeira Beach, adding that it appeared related to the earlier incident involving his people, Officers Manley and Stallings. The FBI was interested, and said they’d locate Chief Santiva and Dr. Jessica Coran to have their best people on the scene when the body came ashore.

An hour later, when the body was brought ashore, a county coroner from Pinellas was the only medical man found readily available to take charge of the body. Jessica Coran could not be located.

Jessica found local aircraft vehicles useless for her needs; neither Tampa nor St. Pete had any to spare, and those that were in repair and might be ready in twenty-four hours were all marked clearly as police vehicles. Officials here in Tampa weren’t in any mood to cooperate in any case; they blamed FBI bungling for the death of the FMP officer named Manley and the maiming of Ken Stallings, a notion fueled by recent newspaper accounts, radio and TV broadcasts and political speeches, some with an extremely irrational, fringe-element twist reminiscent of the kind of talk that had been coming out of militia companies across America since the Waco, Texas, “massacre” and the two- years-in-the-making plot against the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. All Jessica knew for certain was that there had to be one hell of a paranoia at work in the heartland to convince people with brains in their skulls that the U.S. government was interested in creating mass murder of innocent children just to get control of the NRA lobby in Congress.

The killer can’t have gone far, Jessica told herself in keeping with her prediction that he’d gone southeast over the waters, passing back along his track like a cougar, marking his territory well. His going farther westward toward Louisiana and Texas, after a scare like the one the watercops had thrown into him, seemed unlikely. However, to be certain, another search team made up of Samernow and Quincey would go in that direction, hovering over the Gulf waters in a second helicopter. At least, that’d been the plan; but the plan was coming apart at the seams.

First, fellow law enforcement officials were being uncooperative, and now private small-plane and helicopter companies were doing the same. And now Jessica found herself in a lonely, dank helicopter hangar on a fogbound airfield just south of Tampa with no way to pursue the killer. The helicopter owner here simply looked at her badge and said stonily, “We’re not endangering any of our pilots for the FBI, not in this foul weather.” The man left her, returning to his office, which was dwarfed here in the massive hangar. She wanted to shove something like a court order down his throat but she had none, and getting one could take more time than she had.

Although only small aircraft flew in and out here, the airfield was large, and there were a number of other companies she could turn to, so she looked out at the blinking lights in the fog that signaled men at work somewhere out there. She looked around for someone to perhaps guide her to another location. The usual heat of a Florida morning had been wiped away by the sodden wet blanket of air hovering over them.

While Jessica worked to get airborne, Eriq Santiva had gone back to the hospital to wait in the hope that Ken Stallings would find a voice in his search for consciousness and reality. Everyone was hoping against hope that he might come around, not only for the man’s sake but because inside his silence lay the key to locating the Night Crawler.

In the meantime, a copy of Patric Allain’s signature on an agreement made between him and a Mr. Scrapheap Jones in Key West, Florida, had come in at Tampa Bay’s main headquarters, Police Precinct One. Eriq was unequivocal when he declared it to be the same handwriting as that on the letters to the press.

To quell the rancor of local politicians and the media, who were doing camera interviews, this new bit of information was carefully spooned out in terms that made it sound as if the Night Crawler might as well already be in custody, since they were now certain that the man named Patric Allain was one and the same as the Night Crawler. The impression Eriq left with the press was that the FBI was closing in on the demon.

Still, local loudmouths claimed that police had failed to protect and serve “even their own” in this instance, and that in fact, authorities had used the Tampa Bay area as a kind of watery “box canyon” into which they flushed the killer-yet had still managed to let him slip free! The implication was that the FBI had completely mishandled the case, as if politicians and reporters could have done law enforcement’s job for them in much better fashion. The Florida press set up a hue and cry like so many armchair detectives.

The other implication was that the FBI had placed all of the Tampa-St. Pete area in danger by chasing this perverted monster into their midst in the first place; why had Miami’s problem become Tampa’s problem? So that now two good, solid citizens, FMP officers, had been brutally assaulted by the man FBI agents couldn’t seem to catch in a months- long, intensive pursuit. Furthermore, the Night Crawler remained in this region, and he might be anywhere, and he might take anyone’s daughter.

Some were demanding that the FBI give a full accounting of its activities in the matter, along with a detailed explanation for what steps it next planned to pursue. Florida politicians around the state were outraged at the duration of this case, as well as what appeared to them to be a lack of efficiency and professionalism.

The word apparently had gone out from the governor’s mansion that it was open season on the FBI in general and on Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva in particular, the mainstays of the investigation who perhaps ought to be removed and replaced. The groundswell of anger was further fueled by Tammy Sue Sheppard’s family, who were making daily statements to the press, especially the National Enquirer.

The Enquirer did an entire page on how Jessica dressed, how she wore her hair, what kind of lipstick she used and who manufactured her eye shadow, and the kind of extravagance she and Santiva had displayed in staying at the Fon- tainebleau in Miami. Its headline read, Tall amp; Beautiful Scavenger for Scientific Fact Short on Results in Night Crawler Case. The story summarized the case, beginning with facsimiles of the killer’s sweetheart notes to the press. It listed the victims and where each body had been found, giving ample space to the time three bodies washed ashore in one day in Miami. Eddings of the Herald in Miami was quoted throughout the article and claimed to be writing a book on the Night Crawler which would blow the case wide open. The article went on to tell of how painstakingly every port, dock and wharfside restaurant along the Eastern seaboard had been meticulously papered with wanted posters once a witness had come forward with an account and a police sketch artist had created a likeness. The story showed the likeness and a picture of the plaster-cast bust made from the artist’s sketch.

Jessica wondered where they had gotten such details, but it mattered little now. Let the politicians and the press kick all they wanted. She sensed that she was, for the first time, on the trail of the killer, in his direct wake. All they need do now was locate the miserable excuse for a human being out there on the vast ocean, close in on the putrid SOB and finally put an end to the bastard’s killing spree. Men like him and those who’d bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, she mused, must know that there was nowhere for their souls to go, that not even Satan held a place for their kind.