Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “Most tall people are. What does the name of the night­club mean? Havana Tocador?” she repeated.

  The car shot to a halt in front of them, and Eriq opened her door for her, tipped the valet and off they drove. “To­cador. It means one of two things.”

  “Yes?”

  “Boudoir, but it has also a sexual connotation as dessert.”

  She looked askance at him, her eyes asking before her mouth, “No lie?”

  “Yeah,” he confessed, “I’m just teasing. Hey, before going back to our separate, lonely hotel cells, how about maybe—”

  “Cells? You call those rooms cells?”

  “—how about a walk on beautiful Miami Beach?”

  “Eriq, Eriq... don’t you ever run out of steam? Wha- taya got, a sleep disorder or something? Insomnia or something?”

  “Something,” he muttered in return.

  “‘Cause that I can understand, but Eriq, it’s past two a.m., and I have to be in early tomorrow if I’m going to be in any kind of shape to duke it out again with the big guys, to stay ahead of Coudriet and company.”

  “All right, then... I will escort you back to your hotel and say good night like a decent fellow.”

  His slight tone of irritation sounded both sweet and sophomoric at once, she thought, wondering just what was on his mind. He certainly had had enough to drink. “I did have a... an interesting time, Eriq, and I do appreciate your having shown me a side of the city I would not have seen otherwise.”

  “Don’t mention it. I had a good time, too.”

  “Frankly, in this town, I’m lost.”

  “So are several million others.”

  A light sprinkle began, like the spray from a partially opened nozzle, and suddenly the streets were slick with water, reflecting car, billboard and neon lights, painting Mi­ami in the fluid rainbow hues of quicksilver and mercury. Headlights flashed by them like speeding ghosts, and the dark interior of the car grew smaller, denser—an enclave against the artificial light of this place.

  Eriq turned on both the radio and the defrost, clearing the fogged-up windows to the beat of a mellow Johnny Mathis song, a welcome respite after the noisy restaurant music.

  Jessica laid her head back, trying to empty it of all thought, all pain, when out of nowhere Santiva said, “Look, I don’t think I’ve expressed my deep regret about your recent loss, Jessica, and I want to now.” He had had too much to drink. He was getting schmaltzy, his voice slurred, and she hadn’t any idea in the world what the hell he was talking about. “I’m extremely very sorry that Parry took that bullet.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Eriq?”

  “I was told that this guy you were seeing, that you were going to chuck everything for, was shot in the line of duty, killed.”

  “When? When did you hear this?”

  “Two weeks ago. It was going around Quantico.”

  “That’s the craziest piece of bullshit I’ve heard in a year.”

  “Then it didn’t happen? But I was under the impression you were... that you two were... and then suddenly you’re back as if nothing had happened, so I asked around and somebody said—”

  “Somebody’s full of shit, Eriq.” She gulped back the rest of her reply, not knowing what it ought to be, and she fought back hot tears. “It’s rather old news now, Eriq, but we simply broke up. Nobody... no one was shot. At least no one that I love... not this year...” She imagined that someone had somehow scrambled the story of Otto Bou- tine’s death with the story of her recent breakup with James Parry, and that somehow Parry’s obituary had been written. As Mark Twain would’ve said, the reports of Parry’s death were greatly exaggerated. “Can we now get back to the hotel, please?” she asked.

  He drove on, saying something inane about having to use a rental, that the dummies in the bureau hadn’t been organized enough to get him a radio car, “but that’s going to change tomorrow!”

  After this, the silence between them was like lead inside glass. When they got back to the beautifully lit palace of the Fontainebleau, he parked the car and grabbed her hand. ‘ ‘In the interest of doing a good job down here, I’m going to support you in every way possible, Jess.”

  “Thanks, Eriq. You’re doing fine.” She wondered what he meant by in every way possible.

  “Jess, I’m faxing all we have first thing tomorrow. Any­thing else I can use in the report back to Quantico?”

  “I can’t be certain, Eriq but...” She hesitated.

  “Go on, what?”

  “They were strangled, that’s certain, but I have a sixth sense about this guy.”

  “Whataya mean?”

  “I have to run some tests on the Norris body first, but I’ve got a sensation that this guy is very controlled, and that he wouldn’t be satisfied to just kill his victim by stran­gulation or drowning. Not this guy.”

  “What’re you getting at?”

  “I think—and it’s just conjecture until I can run some tissue samples, check out the lungs, that sort of thing—but it’s just possible that he watches his victims drown, to get a full charge; you know, watching their struggles in the water.”

  “Can you prove that? Damn, if you could prove that, once we get this sicko-scumbag-bastard into custody, it’d go a long way toward the death penalty with a Florida jury.”

  “I think I can prove it, yes.”

  They walked from the lot to the hotel foyer, where Jes­sica said good night.

  Eriq again apologized. “I’m sorry about my blunder ear­lier, for my error regarding Jim Parry.”

  “Forget it, Eriq, and get some rest. You’re going to need all the rest you can get for this case.” She started straight for the elevator and her room.

  Once alone, Jessica kicked off her shoes and tore away her clothes, anxious for a shower and rest. She walked to the bath, where she and ran the hot water, catching a glimpse of her slim body in the quickly fogging mirror. She watched the smooth film of condensation create a mo­saic of the mirror—lines, veins, arteries of condensation forming nectarlike before her body, erasing her, making a ghost of her before her own eyes. She gave a thought to Allison Norris’s last involuntary pose before the camera; somewhere in the thick protocol and information on the victim, Jessica had read that she was a part-time model, so she had worked as daddy’s little girl in the boat sales show­room, just waiting to be discovered by Hollywood East— Orlando. Sadly, her final photographs taken on this earth found her the victim of a cruel death which robbed her of beauty and dignity, her backdrop the Miami city morgue.

  Now all that Jessica could see in the fog-laden mirror were her hands reflecting back at her where she reached out to touch the intangible image of her self lost inside that mirror. She wondered how lost Allison Norris must have felt the night she died.

  Jessica tore herself from the mirror and stepped toward the shower. She tried to shake off the dark, dreary images by recalling to mind her lover, Jim Parry. She gave Jim a long and thoughtful moment, recalling the warmth, the gen­tleness they had shared, the explosive sex that was beyond any lovemaking she had ever known. She arched her body toward his memory, the memory of his touch. In her wak­ing dream, she pressed her lips to his and all of an instant, she was making passionate love to him again. It was a deep, abiding love which rivaled the Hawaiian trade winds in sheer intensity and duration.

  She recalled how deliciously their lovemaking had pro­gressed, gaining momentum, getting better, better, better each time she found herself in his naked embrace. The lov­ing went in measured point-counterpoint fashion, an un­folding melodic composition, a choir of rising and falling crescendo with the ebb and flow of the midnight-blue wa­ters on the black-sand beaches of Maui. For a brief moment, she recalled how she and Jim had become one out there on the beach, not only with one another but with their primeval setting, and how they had flown together, having become the very air they breathed in and out of one another.

  That morning on the beach, she’d awakened
and begun to tease, saying, “Now that’s the way to welcome a girl to paradise, James Parry.”

  He had laughed lightly, taking her again in his arms and kissing her in response. Then he’d said, “I’ve loved every moment of our time together, Jess.”

  Looking around at the empty little room she now stood in, Jessica wondered if she’d been wrong to stay away from Jim’s recently arranged and fully bogus funeral, the one the gossipmongers had created for the gullible likes of Santiva. Perhaps she ought to’ve hopped a jet for Hawaii, shown up unexpectedly with a wreath and a bottle of cognac so they could toast his demise. With Jim ostensibly dead, their lov­ers’ quarrel might have evaporated.

  She laughed at the idea. Then she stepped into the shower and felt the warm spray drain the excesses of the day from her bones.

  No doubt there was talk about what kind of woman she was to’ve not attended James Parry’s funeral. She won­dered if he’d been cremated, his ashes dropped over Mount Haleakala on Maui from a police helicopter, or if his body had simply been laid out in the bottom of an outrigger canoe and cast off into the cradling arms of the forever sea. Either way, she had missed the romantic ceremony and was, no doubt, being crucified for her stony heart.

  She wondered if Jim knew he was dead; wondered if he’d seen or heard his obituary reported, and if so if he would immediately call her to allay any concerns she might have? Most likely he’d get a good howling laugh out of the entire matter, she told herself as she lathered her hair and body with soap. Perhaps he could no more deal with the greatly exaggerated reports of his death than she. On the other hand, it gave him a damned good excuse to con­tact her, so why hadn’t he?

  Perhaps there was a guiding hand in all the world’s fre­netic activity and business—maybe. A hand reaching down into the lives of individuals like herself, a hand that kept turning her in this single-minded direction; a hand directing her, telling her that she was meant for this one path, this single road, and that she must travel it alone. That there was no room for Jim; no room for her personal happiness and peace of mind.

  Perhaps her star, the one she was bom under, made of her some sort of crusader of right and justice, perhaps even divine vengeance, or at least intervention. But maybe that was sheer and absolute nonsense, like all else; certainly it was stretching a point to call it divine, but there did seem to be a hand that sometimes not so gently forced her back to her never-ending toil as an FBI medical examiner, forced her onto the trail of the most brutal monsters roaming the darkest corners of the planet.

  So here she was again... showering, toweling off, readying for bed at the moment, yet readying also for an arduous search for a sadistic, unfeeling sociopath with a fixation on young women and his own brutal, ritualistic game of destruction; a psycho who believed in his heart and brain that he was placed on this earth for the sole pur­pose of meting out a brand of justice all of his own creation, an evil passed on to him by some demonic force that con­trolled his intentions, his actions and his perverted pleasure- seeking. He, like her, was on a mission; he created her mission as he wreaked death on others.

  Allison Norris had not stood a chance against such a foul creature as stalked her, at least not while she was alive; but maybe, ironically, she stood a chance against the monster now that she was dead. Allison had come to them—to Jes­sica in particular—washing up on South Beach that bleached-white morning here in Miami, followed by her missing part, deposited before Dr. Wainwright’s astonished gaze from the gut of a shark some forty miles south of the city.

  Allison had somehow demanded to be seen, to be ig­nored no longer. She demanded it here and in Islamorada. She demanded justice, and in her death, she held up a dirt­ied, bloodied and opaque-looking glass through which Jes­sica must now step.

  But for now, weary and needful of sleep, it took all Jes­sica could do to step from the shower, towel off and find her bed. She stretched out, her body pleading for REM sleep. However, Jessica’s mind, helplessly driven, played over the events of the day. and Allison in particular.

  Allison’s body—such as it remained—on ice at the MPD morgue, had spoken its death song to Jessica Coran. Why else was Jessica here, why else than to take up this young woman’s haunting cause? Allison Norris deserved to rest in peace. She didn’t deserve to waft about in some ethereal purgatory, to remain so much flotsam to haunt those left in the wake of her sadistic murder. But the sheer duration and intensity of Allison’s suffering wouldn’t allow anything but a purgatory at this point, and nothing would change that— not until her killer was brought down. Only in some mea­sure of justice might Allison and her family find peace, along with other victims who’d suffered at the hands of the Night Crawler, or Tidewater Killer as the phantom trawler of souls was also being called—not to mention future and potential victims of this fiend: young women who might otherwise live long, fruitful lives if this monster were caught, put away or put out of his primeval misery.

  It was up to Jessica Coran to put an end to this monster’s patterned, ritualistic assassinations.

  And on this troubled thought, her eyelids firmly but in­dependently closed, her brain seeking out and finding slum­ber, her soul patiently waiting like a Nostradamus come to dream visions from the fabric of moonlight, mist, smoke and mirrors.

  •SIX-

  Here are a few of the unpleasant’st words That ever blotted paper.

  —William Shakespeare

  The Following Day

  C. David Eddings looked once again over the obituary news of the day, the page for which he was responsible. All looked well except for the column on George T. Flagler, a descendent of the great Flagler who had brought the rail­road to Florida when Miami was just a trading post on the great waterway, a speck on the map. It was hardly enough space for a relative of this great man who had opened up a wilderness to the outside world, the wilderness which was Florida in the late 1800s. True, from what he read of the reporter’s notes, the third-generation Flagler had done little to distinguish himself in his own lifetime, living off the fortunes won by his forebears. All the same, some show of respect was required and the young reporter, Dabney, hadn’t understood the importance of the history behind the man’s name, that this man’s ancestor had brought the first tentative signs of civilization to Ormond Beach, Fort Lau­derdale, Miami and even Key West with his railroad. For his part, Junior had sold shares in a fledgling and faltering land development company, so maybe placing the man’s obit at the top, first column on the page, smacked a bit of the “old boy” syndrome the South was already so well- known for. But Eddings didn’t think so.

  “Be damned if C. David Eddings’ll ever add to that total fabrication by bowing to it! I’m not in the business of fos­tering misconceptions or carrying on stereotypes, no,” he mumbled to himself, as was his habit while he worked.

  The habit was so well-worn now that only the greenest of office workers and reporters might stare; everyone else took it in stride, along with the noise of several hundred computer monitors, all humming their chorus of meaning­less gibberish.

  C. David Eddings was the obit page editor and the last man to be called into an editorial board meeting, but today he looked up to see that Merrick, the editor in chief of the Miami Herald, was gesturing him to follow the pack into the boardroom.

  “Wonder what’s up,” he said to himself, checking the wall clock and seeing that it’d just turned 8:06 a.m.

  “We got another sweetheart letter from this freak who’s killing girls up and down the goddamn coast,” said Bill Lawrence as he whizzed by. “Come on, Eddings, you don’t wanna miss this.”

  There was something ugly and unsettling, yet terribly exciting about what was going on with this serial killer everyone was calling the Night Crawler. Unsettling was the best word for it, like someone had taken a cold, coarse, rusty pair of pliers and reached into Eddings’s stomach and torn at the core of him, at the soul of his being, rocking his world on its axis—mainly because he found that he enjoyed the e
xcitement of it; something like a strange, pru­rient interest had hold of him, and since the paper had be­gun reporting the disappearances and the subsequent discoveries of the bodies, he found himself unable really to get enough. This fact and his reflection over it disturbed him greatly. It was a side of himself he had not known existed. He found himself sitting up nights, wondering what the killer was like, who he was, where he was at that mo­ment, why he was doing it, how he did it—curious about each gory detail. He dared not share his newfound fasci­nation with anyone, but keeping it bottled within had be­come more and more difficult.

  He saw death every day in his obits, dealt with it as a sausage grinder might sausage, but there was something sotitillating, so invitingly dirty about this whole Night Crawler affair that it must be like what was at the heart of most illicit love affairs, he guessed. Yet this was far dif­ferent, at the other end of the spectrum of emotions, he reasoned, and it had continued to confuse and agitate him, this dangerous, pseudonymous side of himself that he’d dis­covered, this sick interest he had taken both in the case of the Night Crawler and in the monster himself, as well as in what he did to the women. What kind of man was he? Was he of the same species as Eddings? The same race? How could he do such terrible and vicious things to lovely young women? What did it do for him? Did it make him forget who he was? Did it make him feel taller, larger, stronger, immortal—what? And why was he sending newsy little tidbits about himself to the Heraldl

  The short, stubby obit page editor snatched at the loops on his suspenders and straightened his pants, hitching them up before he threw on his coat and stepped toward the big boardroom. He was conscious of the stares and the chat­tering going on all around the bull pen. Word had leaked, as it always does across a newsroom floor, and everyone knew what the emergency meeting was all about. Eddings felt like a snoop, a prurient meddler, his guilt rising as he moved from his desk to the juicy information which awaited him inside the newspaper boardroom.