Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

July 16. 9 A.M., FBI Headquarters. Honolulu

“ Joe Kaniola's put your shit, my shit, everybody's shit on the street, in print, front page of his rag!” shouted Scanlon at the top of his lungs. “Only good news is nobody reads it and it's in Hawaiian. Course, it's going to be picked up and translated by every paper in the islands and on the fuckin' radio and TV and the mainland anyway, a story like this… Christ, Parry!”

Scanlon was a bear of a man, broad-shouldered and barrel- chested, whose once-hard, chiseled face had collapsed in and was now jowly and square, a near-hidden cleft chin below the folds, and a surprisingly thin nose no longer at ease with a pair of near-closed, squinting colorless eyes. There was a history between Parry and Scanlon, Jim Parry's office having embarrassed the HPD in the past on more than one occasion, but particularly on the Daiporice murders when Parry had, after extensive examination of the facts, quickly linked several island scams which had led to a brutal professional killing. It turned out the hit man was contracted for by a high-ranking city official who was dirtier than most Mafia types Parry had known.

Meanwhile, the HPD blithely followed a path that netted several suspects, all of whom had nothing whatever to do with the crime. The HPD districts weren't communicating well on the case, and each area had arrested separate individuals for the scam and the killing, maintaining the two incidents were unrelated, filing separate reports bearing no relation to each other.

Another body surfaced and this time the FBI, acting on a missing-persons report, got involved. As bureau chief of the FBI, Parry didn't need a formal invite from Scanlon or any of his captains to come in on a missing-persons report, especially if it involved a minor, and Daiporice's own son, aged seventeen, had somehow gotten in the way and been eliminated. The loss of his son brought Ted Daiporice to his knees.

Parry's take-charge style had been viewed as abrasive by some HPD personnel before Daiporice, and it was likely for this reason he'd been “unaccountably” left out of the loop on the seventeen- year-old's disappearance. Parry charged in and crashed HPD's party anyway, when they couldn't find a trace of the missing young man anywhere.

Then came the Wilson Lewis case. Parry studied forensic reports and police reports on the case, along with the so-called confessions of those men being held in connection with a string of brutal slice-and-dice mutilations. Those arrested were mental defectives, down-and-outs and PSOs-previous sex offenders. When Parry came in on the case, he immediately saw the links between the victims; wounds to the eyes in particular showed such force as to indicate uncontrollable rage and hatred. Even the bones around the eyes had been damaged by the hilt of a knife; sexual organs too were gutted and turned out, as if the killer had to look and touch inside them, not unlike the Trade Winds Killer in this regard.

To be fair to Scanlon and his detectives, the bodies were always found weeks later in deserted areas of the forests, far off the main roads, and in the summer heat, that year reaching into the nineties, a cadaver was stripped to skeletal remains within ten days. So Scanlon's people didn't have much in the way of evidence either to identify the victims or to reconstruct the crimes. Like the Trade Winds Killer, Wilson Solomon Lewis, an otherwise mild-mannered insurance salesman by day, didn't leave his victims where he had killed them, so there was no crime scene to analyze per se; all they had to go on was where the bodies were dumped-a stone whodunit, in police parlance, the hardest kind of case to resolve.

Parry went to work, orchestrating a surveillance, his people watching every drop point for a full month, while he and Tony, spelled by others, watched what ought to be the killer's next and last drop point, according to the computer program tracking the bastard. They got lucky one night when a large vehicle consistent with the tire marks found at the other locations drove calmly off U.S. 61 passing the darkened surveillance vehicle on the far side of the road, placed at some distance away. Parry and Gagliano called for backup and drove into the woods, following at a safe stretch until their headlights hit on Lewis, his arms filled with overstuffed garbage bags, the trunk of his car popped, the light from the trunk setting off his features into a mosaic of contortion.

For a moment he looked relieved, waving to them as if he'd expected them long before. Still, he stuffed what he'd lifted from the trunk back into the vehicle and slammed home the lid.

Gagliano turned the spotlight on the man, who was wearing a pullover sweater and jeans, his hands smeared with a red substance that was unmistakable. A body was indeed inside the spacious trunk of his roomy Lincoln Town Car, the one he did regular business in. Wilson Lewis put up no resistance, standing aside like a child staring down at the valuable vase he'd broken, the damage irreparable.

“ Whhhhhh-y'd it take youuuuuu so… so… so long to… to st-st-stop me?” He stuttered.

“ Read him his fucking rights, Tony,” Parry had said, his eyes riveted to the horror encased in the man's trunk, his mind going over the question put to him by the insane.

Why had it taken them so long to stop him? he wondered. How could they've been so blind?

All of Lewis's victims had been prospective clients, many taken right from their homes at midday, all of them single and living alone. Records indicated that Lewis had no previous police record, but a careful scrutiny of his life later unearthed the troublesome nature of this man whom no one liked, not his neighbors, not his relatives, not his former bosses, of whom there were many. He had a long list of jobs from which he'd been fired, often for “odd, lewd or strange” behavior in one form or another. He had all his life been building toward vengeance against women, for women were, in his estimation, the cause of all sin on earth, the mothers of ruination, since his own mother and the mother of his children were satanic.

Parry's handling of the case effectively threw out several HPD “convictions” and so-called confessions, which both the press and the public had been screaming for. A police detective in any state in the land lived or died by the number of cases he closed, so Parry's victory was not as welcomed as it might otherwise have been by detectives who had followed the other, now patently useless leads. Not only were the detectives below Scanlon embarrassed, but so too were the ranking officers, Scanlon included, who had okayed the arrest, confession and indictment of a partially retarded itinerant pineapple farmer.

Since then Parry had begun a secretive crusade of sorts, aimed at indolence and incompetence within the HPD. He began with unsolved missing-persons reports, carefully reviewing the case of Sinitia “Cynthia” Toma the year before, which led to Kololia “Gloria” Poni. The trail led to a list of seven missing within a span of a few months. He'd heard of a similar situation on Maui the year before this. In Maui he learned the girls' names: Ela, Wana'ao, Kini, Merelina, Kimi, Lala, and Iolana. Of course, there were other missing persons, even during the period of these vanishings; however, all of these young women were not only natives, but they shared a common appearance, down to the long-trailing black hair and light-filled wide eyes, as well as size, general age and weight. Parry had made it a pet project, reviewing all information authorities had on the cases, searching for any pattern, any link between them. The first obvious such link was that the victims in Honolulu vanished along a trajectory that was bounded by the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific known as the Punchbowl, the University of Hawaii and the Waikiki Beach resort area. Searches among the foothills, along deserted mile markers off the Pali Highway and elsewhere, turned up no clues at the time. The proximity to the air force and naval bases continued to lead Parry to suspect someone in uniform. Whoever he was, this guy left no trace either of himself or his victims. Yet the geography was always the same, that rectangular wedge of island centering on busy Waikiki. The killer must spend a lot of time there, possibly working in the area, living on its perimeter.