Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

Momentary flashes of Kaniola's father entered into her thoughts as she worked: the man's leathery face, the folds of his skin like aged crinoline, the rugged wrinkles like caulk lines on an ancient vessel. She imagined him in his late fifties. Most likely he'd worked tirelessly his entire life to better the lives of his children, and now one of them had come under her grim care. Despite what Parry said to her or the senior Kaniola, she had the distinct impression she would see the tough newsman again.

She continued to meticulously probe now the two major wounds to Kaniola's body. No longer eyeballing it, but taking precise measurements, keeping log on it for anyone who might follow up or relieve her of this onerous case, she began to wonder how long the assailant stood over the uniformed officer, delighting in his helplessness, before sending the pendulum of death across his throat. She wondered if the killer had taken unusual delight in watching the man then convulse in shock and bleed to death. Or did he only take such pleasure with the women whom Parry suspected of being his victims of choice?

She had yet to do the internal on Kaniola, a big, strapping, proud-looking man, taller than his father. But she first went to his hands, as she had done with Hilani, to explore the possibility of skin fragments or hair below the nails, which would indicate that he had scuffled with his killer, reached up and tore at him. Kaniola's left hand was caked with dark blood, his own, she assumed.

Describing this finding, she spoke aloud for the sensitive microphone overhead as she worked.

“ Left hand is bloodied; blood may be assumed to be that of Officer Kaniola's, as he likely would instinctively reach up to his wounded shoulder.”

As she said these words, she heard her father's voice at the back of her head. “When you assume, you make an ass of u and me.” Her father had been the best medical examiner to ever grace a military uniform, constantly warned her that many an M.E.'s hard-won career had gone the way of the toilet on the basis of a hasty assumption, that assumptions were for the public and floundering gumshoes. Suppose the blood covering Kaniola's left hand was that of Kaniola's killer. Suppose he had also been injured in the gun battle. It was a big leap, but only the microscopes could prove it was Kaniola's blood alone on his palm. So far this killer-if it was Parry's Trade Winds Killer-had left not so much as a molecule of evidence to incriminate himself. She could dazzle Parry instantly if Kaniola had got one hand on the monster who'd murdered him.

Most likely, however, it was the officer's own blood on his hands. Still, Jessica quickly amended her remarks for the record by adding, “By the same token, if the assailant were injured, then the blood on Officer Kaniola's hand could belong to the assailant.”

She took scrapings for the microscope of both the blood and the matter below the nails, hopeful it would not all be for nothing, realizing once more in her state of fatigue that her father would say, “Thoroughness is its own reward.”

She now arched her long legs and back, yawning over the slab, stretching, feeling too tired to go on. Her assistant, a man named Dr. Elwood Warner, was several years her junior, a pathologist with Honolulu General on call for the state; a second pathologist for the county had also turned up somewhat late, and apologized, asking Warner to duplicate any samples he'd be taking for him. This fellow, Dr. Walter Marshal, was also affiliated somehow with the military at Pearl Harbor, the military having taken a decided interest in the case of the two dead Hawaiian cops-”boys” Marshal had called them. He was particularly interested in the blood samples, obviously convinced that the two cops were involved in drugs and anxious to prove it so, thereby extinguishing any future kanaka complaints coming out of the community about Pearl sailor involvement in the deaths.

It was obvious that Marshal and the Pearl brass wanted to tell the community that the two cops had flirted with a cobra and that the cobra had bitten them; no one's fault but their own. It seemed neither the military, the state nor local cops knew as much as Parry, and that perhaps Parry was alone in his suspicion that the dead cops and the missing “prostitutes” as she'd heard them called were connected.

But the big discovery at the Blow Hole had some people hanging closely onto Parry's shirttail now, not to mention hers.

The Honolulu City Medical Examiner, Dr. Harold Shore, had routinely stepped in as M.E. of record for FBI cases when called to do so here on Oahu, and he had a fine reputation; however, he'd recently undergone open-heart surgery and wasn't expected back soon. Jessica, in effect, was standing in for Shore. If he could drag himself from his bed, no doubt, Shore would have been on hand today as well, to represent the city and the HPD. The deaths of the two cops had stirred up a lot of agencies, opened a hornet's nest of festering wounds and reminded people here of hurts both real and imagined. “If you're too tired to go on, Dr. Coran,” said Dr. Marshal, “I should be happy to take over for you.”

Jessica's eyes were instantly boring into Marshal, but below her mask she gave him an easy smile. “I'm fine. Doctor, and I'll finish.”

Two autopsies? In a single day? Seems grueling even by military standards, Doctor. As professionals, I think we can all recognize that?”

She recognized militarese when she heard it. Marshal liked being in command, and he no doubt felt ill at ease playing second fiddle to a female M.E. “Yes, well… just the same, as the representative of the Federal Government here, I think I'd best continue as lead here, if you don't mind.”

“ We both work for the same boss. Doctor,” he replied coolly. “And with Dr. Shore unable to be in attendance, I'm also here on behalf of the Honolulu Police Department.”

Marshal seemed like a man who might have walked out of a thirties film with William Powell and ZaSu Pitts. He never let an expression cross his face, and the military bearing with which he presented himself didn't necessitate a uniform. The military showed right through his white gown.

“ You obviously wear a lot of hats here, Dr. Marshal.”

She continued with the scalpel in her hand.

Warner, the junior here by comparison, seemed a boy, anxious to be done so that he might return to a date on the beach where he'd spiked and left his surfboard; Jessica even pictured him in a bathing suit, stretched out with a buxom friend. A pair of dark glasses dangled around his neck even in here. Moon-doggy, she thought.

It always annoyed her that everyone at an autopsy wanted more than just a “piece” of the corpse, that each man in particular had to jockey for a position of authority over the deceased. She remembered a similar scene two years before in a small Midwestern city where an exhumation had caused every petty official in the state of Iowa to jump. The exhumation had moved her closer to catching a killer who collected human blood the way a vampire bat might, but this killer here in Hawaii was quite a different breed. He didn't collect blood, but rather marveled in spilling it, bathing in it as it cascaded from the bodies of his victims, if Kaniola's corpse was anything to go by. She imagined the so-called Trade Winds Killer using his enormous knife like a deadly phallus against his female victims.

She continued with the autopsy, making the familiar Y-section cut to the chest and abdomen, laying bare the viscera, and with Warner's help they lifted the organ tree whole and intact, leaving the carcass hollow. The eerie silence was quick to fill the void of inner space left by the awful dredging of the body, leaving the room even more deafeningly still than before. Only Jessica's voice seemed strong enough to overcome the silence.