Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “Any rate, now the science part is over,” said Stu. “In here it’s time for the art. To restore these babies to their original hues and lifelike appearance, it takes a master like Buck here. It takes talent—”

  “Bullshit, talent,” interrupted the spike-bearded Buck­ner. “Talent’s a dangerous word. More like skill born of experience and know-how. That’s more like it.”

  “Whatever you wanna call it. Buck here’s got more nat­ural talent or skill born of experience and know-how than anybody on the damned planet.”

  Buckner was blushing red below his gray beard, but he pretended nonchalance and went on with his explanation. “First we spray them with a white base coat; then we layer on several color shadings, some done by hand to gain the exact texture required for authenticity.”

  “A decent photo of the catch at the time it’s brought aboard a boat, or at least the moment it’s brought ashore, becomes invaluable here,” interjected Stu.

  “Tropical fish begin to lose their color the moment they’re snagged,” added Buck. “Anyway, a final clear coat is splashed on for protection and the wet look.”

  “How does what you do differ from the work done by other taxidermists?” asked Jessica.

  Buck laughed a horse laugh, slapping Stu on the shoulder before replying, “A guy like me, specializing in marine work, is a whole ‘nuther animal from some bozo who stuffs birds and reptiles and bears and bobcats and squirrels, be­lieve you me. We don’t have hide, fur or feathers to cover our mistakes.”

  “There’s no room here for error,” added Stu. “All we got to work with is a thin layer of skin which stubbornly resists preservatives.” Jessica smiled and replied, “You mean, it’s no job for amateurs?’’

  “That’s why Scrapheap didn’t care for that punk hanging around down in Key West. Said he always wanted to take shortcuts... was careless. Hell, you can see that from the yellowfin he brought in with him.”

  Jessica gave Buckner a stunned look while Stu continued to fill her ear, saying, “Most of our customers are individ­uals, but Buck’s done work for corporations and museums, haven’t you, Buck?”

  Buck nodded with grace, a faint, prideful smile parting his lips. “I’ve done work for Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Charlton Heston... you name it.”

  “King Hussein and former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush.” Stu beamed with pride, too.

  “Pardon me, Buck, but did you say this Patric Allain brought something in with him and left it here?”

  “Yeah, a yellowfin... kinda like a calling card. He’d already skinned it, so he wanted us to do the mounting, but after I looked at it and found a hole large enough to drive a golf ball through, I told him we couldn’t guarantee any­thing approximating perfection.”

  “Did anyone other than you handle the skin? Would you know, if anyone else had done work on it?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “So, had anyone other than Allain handled the skin?”

  “I had no reason to think so, no.”

  “Show it to me. I want that skin.”

  “It’s in the next room.”

  “Anyone else touch it?” she pressed as she followed Buck.

  “Stu? Anyone in or outta here this morning?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Did you paw the fella’s prize?”

  “Naw, too busy to take any notice of it,” Stu assured them.

  “There it is, right on the peg where I hung it,” said Buck.

  “I’ll need to have someone come in and take your prints, Mr. Buckner, so we can rule them out. Any others we find, hopefully, will be those of the killer.”

  “You can peel off fingerprints from that?” He pointed to the lifeless scales of the yellowfin with which Patric Al­lain had allegedly walked through the door.

  “I can with the right tools... We have the technology, but it’ll destroy the skin.”

  “Take the damned thing. It’s old and brittle now any­ way; said he had it packed in ice the whole time, but ob­viously that was a lie. Said he caught it in the Cayman Islands, but that was a lie, too.”

  “He said Cayman Islands specifically?”

  “Yeah, I recall he did.”

  “Hmmmm. How could you tell that he was lying about the condition and age of the skin?” Stu jumped in, saying, “Hell, one look at it...” Buck offered, “I don’t figure it’d be in such good shape as it was if he’d hauled it so far as the Caymans. My guess, he snatched it or bought it at some other shop along his way to here from Key West.”

  “Why lie about the Cayman Islands? Why not simply say he caught the fish in the Gulf out there?”

  “I don’t know, pathological? Or maybe he knew the quality was bad, so he made up a cockamamie story.”

  The tour had ended with something tangible, a possible clue that could specifically identify the killer. Moyler in England had a print, and if they could match his print with what they found on the fish skin, they could be surer of their prey. She asked Buckner for the use of his phone and contacted Santiva in the nearby van with this news. It took some, although not all, of the sting out of the Crawler’s having not shown up.

  “I’ll pack it and send it off to J.T. at Quantico; see what the lab can find for us in the way of useful prints. J.T.’ll put our best fingerprint tech on the job. It may be the first real gift that Allain has given us. If J.T. finds something, we can put it under an electron microscope and photograph it, maybe match it to what Moyler has in London.”

  “May’s well pack it in,” he suggested. “Not doing any good here.”

  “Let’s give it a little more time,” she suggested. “Maybe he got unavoidably held up.”

  “Yeah, don’t we wish the Coast Guard or the Florida Marine Patrol has picked him up for questioning?”

  “Could we get so lucky?”

  “I’ll get Ford’s best men down here to relieve us, let them watch over this place tonight, and we’ll get some R and R.” said Santiva.

  After calling J.T. to tell him what he might expect in the overnight mail, so as to not entirely shock him, Jessica found herself with time on her hands, so she asked Buckner for the phone number of his old partner in Key West, and she then telephoned Scrapheap Jones and plied him full of questions relevant to his encounter with the Night Crawler.

  Jones simply refused to believe that the Patric whom he had taught the rudiments of fish-trophy mounting was the Crawler. His mind could not wrap around the concept; he claimed the kid he trained was a wimp, fearful at the sight of blood even in a dead fish. Scrapheap told Jessica that she was on a fool’s chase if she were after that sullen, quiet one-joke boy he had known.

  But even as Scrapheap Jones denied her, she read be­tween the lines of what the man said. Allain was sullen, quiet, fearful of the sight of blood and apparently humor­less. In point of fact, this profile sounded a great deal more like her prey than Jones realized. “What do you mean by one-joke boy?”

  “He’d say the fishing in the shark aquarium museum here in Key West was the easiest place to fish. Damned fool. Thought it was funny; thought it irritated me when he’d suggest taking a charter to the museum, let ‘em all dip their bait into one of the tanks there. Silly stuff like that, like it was real funny, but it wasn’t. Joke was lame, like the kid.”

  “Did he ever steal from you?”

  “Some... some chemicals, maybe, I ain’t a hunerd per­cent sure.”

  “Do you have anything in writing about your agreement with him? Did you have him sign a contract or agreement? It’s important.”

  “I did... at the time...”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “It may be in my files.”

  “If you find it, fax it to me at the Naples Police De­partment.” She gave him the number. “I’ll see what I can do. By the way, is Buck there? Can I speak to him?”

  She told him that he could speak with his friend.

  “Oh, just a minute... another thing he always kidded me about
...” Scrapheap suddenly said.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Ahh, always said he’d like to go somewhere cooler, complained of the Florida heat, so he was always talking about going to the Caymans.”

  “The Caymans?” Jessica wondered at the coincidence.

  “That was the joke, get it?”

  She didn’t get it.

  “The Caymans are hotter’n Florida and all hell the time o’ year he was talking.”

  “I see. Had he ever been to the Cayman Islands?”

  “Said he had been there, yes. Not much with trophy mounting, but he sure knew how to sail.”

  She told Buck that Jones wanted to speak with him. Re­linquishing the phone, she looked up at the clock to see that it was now nearing 3:05 p.m. and still no show.

  They waited past three-thirty. Ford and Santiva had by now earnestly discussed pulling up stakes. Jessica could hardly blame them, but she said over the remote that she would give it another hour, till four. Meanwhile Ford ar­ranged for a man in civilian clothes to enter with a finger­printing kit and both Buck’s and Stu’s fingerprints were taken for the record. What remained of Patric Allain’s tro­phy fish, the yellowfin he’d walked in off the wharf with, was placed in a large paper sack and carried out for labo­ratory analysis and fingerprint detection. Jessica would later properly box it in absorbent material and FedEx it off to Quantico, Virginia.

  By now Ford had seen enough; he quickly pulled his men—acting as backup—from the area. He and Santiva had gotten into a tiff, and Ford flatly refused to have his men watch over the shop all night. So, for a bit longer, Santiva, Quincey and Samernow remained nearby. Mark and Eriq were in FPL uniforms at the van while Quincey sat at a bus stop now, his makeup—that of a feeble old man down on his luck—beginning to thin.

  Four o’clock came around and still no show. Somehow, the killer knew; perhaps he sensed that it was too dangerous to return, especially after having robbed the place of ma­terials the night before. Perhaps he realized that he’d been foolish to use the same alias, even with a man like Buckner, and doubly foolish to have left something of his in the other man’s possession, something with his prints on it. Or per­haps he had simply smelled trouble about the shop, even before coming near it. Like a tiger or a cougar, the Night Crawler obviously had good instincts.

  Now he could be anywhere.

  Tired and disgruntled and disappointed, the four remain­ing law enforcement officials found themselves trying to comfort Gordon Buckner, to assure him that he would be safe and to tell him to be in touch the moment he was contacted again by Patric Allain.

  “Then you do think he will contact me again?”

  “No way of knowing, but not likely at this point.” Jes­sica tried to put the old man’s mind at ease.

  “He could’ve just got the days turned around. If he’s as crazy as they say, why not?”

  “We’ll send some undercover men tomorrow for a pos­sible two p.m. meet. They’ll pretend to work out back for you,” suggested Jessica. “And who knows, maybe I’ll be back with them.”

  “All right, good. Damn this man... damn this whole bloody business,” moaned Buckner, his head in his hands. “I sometimes wonder what God was thinkin’ of when he created the human animal and the perverse human brain. Damn this monster!”

  “Our sentiments exactly, Mr. Buckner.”

  They left in the van, which had to be returned to Ford. At the precinct, each promised to meet for drinks and din­ner after changing and cleaning up. Jessica, in particular, pleaded that she had to get the fish smell out of her hair and off her body.

  When they arrived back at police headquarters, Jessica climbed down from the van and Eriq met her at the rear, helping her out. They stood staring out toward the park, the boat marina, the great Gulf of Mexico beyond and the setting sun. “Where do you think this malfeasant creature is tonight, Jess?” asked Eriq. “What part of the coast is he haunting?” She stared out at the waning sun in the west where it flared bloodred, a giant fire in the sky that spread dark shadows now along the clean, well-kept streets and park of the picturesque city. “I don’t know what shadow he’s hid­ing in, but I fear the worst, and I think we have to persuade Ford to keep his men on guard at the riverfront bars and restaurants. All we know for sure is that the bastard will strike again. I haven’t had time to do a full autopsy, but I had a look at the body that washed ashore here...”

  “And?”

  “It’s as if he let her go by mistake, as if she were un­finished,” Jessica said. “None of the staging of the others; no quarter-inch nylon rope, no sign of any attempt to preserve or mount this one. You ever catch a fish only to lose it over the side?”

  “Whataya mean?”

  “She got loose from him somehow; he hadn’t tied the knot correctly or quickly enough when a wave took her, probably in the dark. Everything else is to the letter—dou­ble, possible triple strangulation, the whole nine yards. But her lungs were not as full of water as the others.”

  “About earlier, Jess... I want to apologize.”

  She didn’t want to deal with earlier now. “‘Fraid it’s textbook Night Crawler,” she continued on about the most recent dead girl’s body. “He is definitely in the vicinity, and like Quincey surmised, the bastard may be making his way toward the Tampa Bay-St. Pete area.”

  “I’ve sent word to our field offices there. They’re on the alert. They know the drill.”

  They had walked from the van to the park, exercising their legs and lungs while Quince and Samernow saw to the van and the equipment inside. “You look trim and handsome in your FPL uniform, Chief,” she teased.

  “You, you look like the cutest thing in rags I’ve ever seen,” he fired back. “But you’re right about the fish and formaldehyde odor. That’s gotta go.”

  From behind them, Jessica heard Quince’s distinct voice carry on the evening trade wind. “Bastard has just raked the whole state from one side to the next...”

  “Promise me one thing,” she asked Eriq.

  “Anything... within reason.”

  “No more quaaludes or uppers or whatever you’ve been on.”

  Santiva took in a great breath of air. “I needed it to keep pace. It was just a one-time-only.”

  “Careful, my friend, because one-time-onlies have a way of becoming one-time-eternities.”

  “I appreciate both your concern and your advice, Jess. It means a lot to me, but rest assured, I don’t have a drug problem.”

  She looked from the deep wells of his dark, kind eyes back out to sea and the setting sun, a fiery orange orb threatening to engulf the world even as it was being en­gulfed by the horizon. So much depended on one’s limited perspective, she quietly told herself, wondering anew where the Night Crawler was at this moment.

  •SEVENTEEN •

  Through the looking glass and into the abyss angels must spy.

  —from the notebooks of Jessica Coran

  On a hunch, Jessica Coran made a long-distance call to now Chief Constable Ja Okinleye of the Official Police of the Cayman Islands. Ja had become a good friend since the time some years ago when Jessica had assisted him on a murder case on his island of Grand Cayman. At the time he was a lieutenant in the Investigatory Division there. The case had involved a wealthy and highly regarded man who had been involved in the import business and was the owner of the largest clothing and jewelry store on the is­lands. Ja thought the man had gotten involved with some sort of smuggling operation, a common practice at all levels of society there. The man’s throat had been slashed and there were repeated stab wounds to the body. Ja wondered if it were not the work of an angry co-conspirator in the smuggling operation or the botched work of a burglar, but Jessica merely had to look at the body to tell him otherwise. It was neither business nor mistake that had dispatched the elderly gentleman. She explained that the wound to the throat, while similar to a Colombian necktie—a throat slit from ear to ear—would have been enough to kill the man and tha
t the other repeated stab wounds had been unnec­essary save for one need—rage and vengeance of a sort. “So,” she had surmised, “it is the work of some person who knew the deceased well enough to hate him.”

  On further investigation at what passed for a crime lab on Grand Cayman, Jessica revealed other, even more star­tling facts: that the body had been moved from another location and posed; that the stab wounds had come first; that the wound to the throat had been a last-minute addition to the staging of the event; and that in fact the man had died of a broken neck. Someone had simply snapped his neck in a quick, brutal and efficient manner, someone both strong and possibly well-trained in the martial arts.

  “Then, in a fit of rage, he or she did the butchering, quite possibly after spending several hours with the body hatching out what to do with it.”

  Ja knew instantly whom he must interrogate further, and it quickly came to light that the man’s nephew was in ex­treme debt to island loan sharks, that he’d pleaded with his uncle for money and that the old man had stood adamant against lending him another cent. The younger man, it was soon revealed, had lost control and attacked his uncle; in the scuffle, he’d made short work of his uncle’s vertebrae and neck bone. Death had come about as a result of the trauma suffered when the nervous system was severed.

  Ja Okinleye had done most of the work that cornered the nephew, but he had been aided immeasurably by Jessica’s display of scientific knowledge, beginning with the fact of lividity, indicating that the man’s body had lain on its side for at least three hours after death before it was lifted up a flight of stairs and thrown across his bed, where the butch­ering ensued. The body had been left facedown where the throat was cut. The amount of blood soaking into the bed­cover, or rather the lack of it, was Jessica’s first indication that things were not as they seemed on the surface; the absence of blood from such an enormous gash had clearly indicated that the old man was dead long before his throat was slashed, another relatively easy surmise.