Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

Everyone was in on the kill. And everyone who wasn't wanted to be. Terri Reno and her burly partner Kalvin Haley were on hand, along with Tony Gagliano, Jim Parry and Jessica and everyone in the Hawaii FBI who had worked the case, plus a couple of HPD squad cars, one carrying Police Commissioner Dave Scanlon. They had all collected out front of the remote little bungalow on this bright Hawaiian day, the sun blinding in its intensity, the heat sending up a searing mix of gasoline and blood that mingled in the few feet between home and auto. Something about the house and the loud music coming from inside the crumbling little structure, its deserted location on a dead-end street, the terminus a crevasse looking two miles back down toward the city, and even something about the dark maroon car spoke clearly to Jessica that this was it.

At the door, there was no answer to Tony Gagliano's insistent pounding. Tony called out, “FBI, open up!”

The waiting seemed a lifetime before Parry abruptly shouted to Gagliano, “Kick the sonofabitch in.”

“ You got it, Boss,” said Gagliano, relishing the moment. “It'll make me feel useful.”

Everyone had a gun drawn. With all his might, Tony made a clean strike at the lock, sending the door in on its hinges, wood splintering going up against the door frame creating spiked lances. From within, the blare of a Hawaiian radio station hammered out an old favorite, Jim Croce's “Leroy Brown.” Swelling up also from within the dark little interior was an odor like nothing Jessica had ever encountered, not even in an exhumation. The odor wafted past the door, which, swinging on its destroyed hinges, made an eerie irk-irk-irking sound.

“ Smells bad,” complained Gagliano, whipping out a large red bandanna to cover his nostrils and mouth before stepping through.

“ Don't touch anything,” Jessica warned from behind Parry, who quickly followed Gagliano inside, using a flashlight to illuminate the place. The incredible sunlit brightness of the Hawaiian street outside was at such great odds with the bleak hole of the doorway, so that every shadow inside was plunged that much further into darkness. Jessica's skin crawled as she stepped past the dangling door, her nostrils now flaring at the thick, pungent odor of death emanating from inside as if the odor were a living creature that had taken up residence permanently and was about to pounce shadowlike from a comer. Her eyes battled to adjust to the lack of light. When her eyes won, she found Gagliano and Parry staring back in her direction, Gagliano playing the flashlight over the wall behind Jessica's head and to her immediate left.

The place was a pigsty, she was thinking when she heard Jim's warning: “Don't turn around, Jess.”

She did exactly as instructed not to do, turned and gasped at the mutilated woman dangling there, her features torn from her, making it impossible to readily identify her as the young store clerk listed as missing. Jessica's immediate reaction was one of horror and fright, but at the same time she saw the telltale signature wounds she'd come to expect from the Trade Winds Killer, each slash a meaningful symbol to the insane man. These body art marks created by Lopaka had until now been mere speculation, since all previous victims had been swallowed up by the sea.

She shuddered at the enormity of the suffering that was apparent. Parry grabbed onto her shoulders and tried to usher her out.

“ No, no, Jim,” she said, pulling free of him. “Have to protect the… integrity of the crime scene… learn everything we can about this sadistic monster.”

“ Just step out and get your bearings, Jess.”

“ Going out at this point'II just make it doubly hard to step back in, and it'll just make breathing tenfold harder. No.” She remained adamant. “Just get me some decent illumination in here and the best equipment you've got.” She was panting, trying to gain control of her autonomous reflexes. “And… and for God's sake, Jim, don't let anybody walk through here until I'm finished.”

He looked deeply into her eyes, biting his lip and biting back his own sense of horror and insult, and recalling for a moment her tenderness of the night before, tried to reconcile that with the woman he stood before now.

“ Do it, damnit. Get me some field lights in here and one of those newly developed ultraviolet reflective imaging systems if you've got one. We'll intensify the light in here seventy thousand times and maybe, just maybe we can find some usable prints in this pigsty, but whatever we do, we're going to find enough evidence to bury this bastard. The death penalty in effect in Hawaii? God, I hope so.”

“ Sorry, no can do… not even the chamber,” replied Tony, shaking his head. “And if we ever needed it…”

“ Too good for this guy,” countered Jim Parry.

On the wall, on an elaborately constructed bamboo and wood “meat” rack, hanging by her wrists, her legs dangling free, Hiilani's corpse was like an agonizing, deafening scream that drowned out anything Jessica or anyone else had to say. The body, somehow like a stone object with soft, human eyes, might be made of papier-mache and paint, ketchup and fake blood, except that the caked-on stuff was real and the flesh was responsive to the touch, the vitality of the cells having returned after rigor had come and gone, releasing the corpse from its stiffness, allowing a kind of supple “life” to return at the cellular level. Naturally, all of the lividity was in the lower extremities, all the blood having rushed there. She might appear mannequin-like, but she wouldn't feel that way, not when Jessica had to touch and prod the corpse for wound measurements, specimens and samples and slides and swabs.

She thought of the stark bone-fragment evidence brought in by the Navy guys, and now this. “You wanted evidence,” she muttered to no one in particular, staring at the leis made of teeth and native hair, predicted by the old man.

“ Not like this,” replied Parry.”Careful for what you wish…”Gagliano had staggered about the small enclosure trying to train his eye on something-anything but the mutilated China doll on the wall. In doing so, like Jessica, he began to go to work, scanning for anything that might be useful. He immediately zeroed in on a rack of swords and knives on a wall the other side of the room. “Jesus, look at these,” he said, pointing, about to reach out and touch one of the blades before catching himself.

“ Check the refrigerator,” Jessica told them.

“ What?” asked Gagliano.

“ Mutilation murderers… lust killers, they often keep 'trophies' on ice. Like the ropes he used on her.”

“ What about the ropes?” asked Jim, coming closer and shouting at Terri Reno, Haley and the others at the doorway to stay out, that it was already too damned crowded inside. Reno shouted back, “Do we have the son of a bitch or not?”

“ We know where he kills,” Parry replied tersely before turning his attention back to Jessica, who, using a scalpel pulled from her jacket pocket, sliced one of the restraints holding the victim. This brought both victim and rack further from the wall, but everything held.

She held out the twisted rope. “It's human hair, most likely from his earlier victims.”

“ Jesus… and teeth, human teeth.”

Gagliano moved to the icebox and snatched the door open to find it relatively empty, the little light coming from it reflecting off the dead girl on the wall, making her look like an odd specimen in a house of horrors display. The fridge compartment revealed a man who didn't live on food.

“ Check the freezer compartment,” said Jim, holding onto the black-hair rope which might well have been Lina Kahala's hair.

Gagliano swallowed hard before snatching open the freezer door. He did so a little too abruptly, and out flowed a stack of frozen female hands complete with rings and painted nails. Tony hopped back, gasping and swearing when the solid, iced hands hit the floor like so many T-bone steaks.