Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

“ I'd need some lab work to prove either way.”

“ Your best guess?”

“ If I were guessing… before. All part of the intimidation and interrogation. Strip him and threaten and cut him.” Parry stalked off, unable to stare down at what remained of George Oniiwah a moment longer. She shouted to the waiting ambulance attendants, “Bag the hands-for all the good it'll do-and finish up here. See the body gets to the FBI morgue in Honolulu.”

She caught up to Parry, who was leaning over the hood of his car. “You can't blame yourself for this, Jim.”

“ Damnit, I should've known better. I should've seen it fucking coming.”

“ Christ, an act of depravity like this? How do you see that coming, Jim? What? You're supposed to be psychic or something? Give it a rest, and give yourself a break, Jim… Jim!”

He pulled away, not listening, climbing into the car. She gave him some space, going to the passenger side and sliding in beside him.

He wheeled on her and pointed his finger in her face. “We're all walking on a tinderbox here. Of all people, Jess, I shoulda known. I shoulda foreseen this. I shoulda been more careful. Tony tried to tell me; hell, the population over in the canal district tried to tell me when they dusted my car, but I'm thick! I'm goddamned thick and stupid. I keep thinking the best of people; keep thinking people've got to see right from wrong, but that's crazy… It gets people killed.”

“ Damnit, Jim, we've got no time for this… this self-pity crap! If what you say is true about the Trade Winds Killer, he's still searching for another victim, and the sun'll be down in a few hours.”

His jaw firmly set, he said, “So what the hell do you suggest. Dr. Coran?”

“ I suggest to you that Ewelo be held as long as possible on as many violations as you can get him on, and in the meantime, we do a blood typing on Oniiwah's body, and maybe we'll have a match that will put Ewelo at the scene of the boy's death. But that won't be enough. You've got to have a finger pointed in the right direction. I suggest that finger be the roommate. Lean on him.”

“ Way ahead of you on that score. Tony's working on him as we speak.”

“ And in the meantime, run a check on any possible connections Ewelo may've had with any of the victims. If you find there are any threads there, that he knew Kahala and perhaps Kia, if they frequented his place, and if he put them on the street, that gives him a ticket to the show.”

He considered this in quiet reflection until the ambulance sirened for clearance and sped out of the sand. A cascade of pebbles responded as the ambulance careened onto the tarmac, taking Oniiwah's body off with little fanfare.

“ Better keep the ambulance in view,” she suggested. “No telling how long Ewelo's reach is.”

“ This Paniolo guy disgusts me, but I don't think he's the Trade Winds Killer,” he flatly observed.

“ Aren't you being a bit premature?”

“ He doesn't fit the profile.”

“ Sometimes the profile doesn't fit, so? You can't be a slave to it. Let your instincts guide you. Besides, the color of his skin certainly fits.” She hesitated, doing battle with her seat belt. “Serial killers tend to kill within their own race. At least you've got probable cause which, even if it doesn't stick, may get Ewelo on Oniiwah's murder, not to mention the fact it'll give you some breathing room.”

“ Ever the opportunist, aren't you?”

“ Drive,” she replied.

He tore out and flipped the switch to his strobe light, in hot pursuit of the ambulance. Bodies had been known to get lost before, and if Ewelo did have friends in high places…

Jessica, still with her lab coat over her shoulders, and tearing away the surgical gloves she'd used in examining the body, now said, “Ewelo's mean enough and ugly enough to please Pearl, the city, county, state and the boys back home in D.C. Hell, his eyes alone'll convict him. Just see to it the newsies get his photo-graph-preferably a mug shot.”

“ I like the way your mind works, Jess.”

“ And Jim?”

“ What?”

“ It's time to warn the women of this island in complete detail just what turns the Trade Winds Killer on, just in case Ewelo's not the real thing, which given our doubts…”

Jim, thinking aloud, said, “You think Ewelo used a cane cutter on George Oniiwah?”

“ Possibly, but whatever he used, if the evidence supports it, you'll have him on the boy's murder.”

“ But you agree with me; you don't think he's the Trade Winds Killer, do you?”

“ My luck doesn't usually run that well. How 'bout yours?”

“ I've seen overly helpful men volunteer, join in search parties, work day and night on a case-”

“ Sure, and shout the loudest for police to do their job,” she added.

“ And go ballistic and self-righteous and do the vigilante thing as a cover.”

She considered this a moment as the lush island landscape flew past. “It'd make for a hell of a cover. Yeah,” she conceded, “I've been involved in cases where the killer revisited the crime scene, relived the events over again, fantasized about his emotional release at the point of killing, all without the least worry of being caught by a stakeout, because he's part of the damned stakeout.”

Parry, nodding, added, “Not to mention the fact he becomes privy to the investigation.”

“ Sure, Ewelo could be our guy, but we won't know that unless we can make the connections. One is his proximity to the university where the women were going to school; a second is the fact he may've feared what Oniiwah knew, and in a show of civic duty, he offs Oniiwah, as a lesson to those who dared to harm Hawaiian women. A third connection, Oniiwah's blood, will give us an opportunity to revisit Paniolo's, his den, not to mention his home. Hopefully locate other blood samples. We need to know everything there is to know about this man: who his friends are, who does business with him, where he's worked before on the island, and if he likes to cruise the strip where the women disappeared.”

Parry liked what he heard, and he gunned the Stealth until they were a hundred yards behind the ambulance, which was now cutting off 72 for 63 and the Pali Tunnel. Once they were back in Waikiki they'd tighten up to be sure the driver knew he was being watched. Never again would Parry assume anything when it came to the mind of a Hawaiian national. He gave a thought to the political power of the PKO, the Preserve Kahoolawe Ohana, which had come into greater prominence in the nineties.

Parry radioed ahead that they were coming in with George Oniiwah's body, and said that information should be conveyed to Claxton for his own safety and that Claxton was to be picked up.

“ On what charges, sir?” asked Dispatch. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“ Roger that. Number 1. We have your orders.” Even Dispatch liked the sound of it.

“ You think you can make it stick?”

“ Maybe not, but when we wheel Oniiwah's body past him, maybe he'll change his mind about protective custody and a change of scenery.”

“ What about Claxton as a possible suspect in the Trade Winds killings?”

“ No, won't wash.”

“ Why not?”

“ He's a lover; likes pretty young women, can't keep his hands off them, but he doesn't get his jollies by beating or humiliating them, no… and he's not into carving them up for sexual arousal as obviously our boy is.”

“ So, what're the Cowboy's sexual proclivities?”

“ Closer to our killer's, I'm told.”

Jessica could never quite fathom the sadistic sexual urge that led to a primitive need to destroy a sexual partner completely in order to ejaculate and thereby conquer wholly the being of another. Murder and sex, an ancient story. The Cane Cutter didn't murder to cover a rape, however; in fact, what he did was not classified at all as a rape by FBI standards, but rather he raped in the ultimate sense by raping life from his victim in order to fulfill his peculiar, deviant sexual urges. The Trade Winds Killer punished his victims because they had something he did not: a normal sex drive; he tortured them and cut into them to prove himself a man, to prove that he could overcome his own impotence, showering them no doubt with his sperm when it finally came forth, ending the ritual of foreplay and ejaculation only to open the door to the final ritual of death, the last act played out between victim and killer.