Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “He’s scared, but he’s not stupid, Eriq.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s running; he’s going to open that schooner up, take her out of these waters altogether, sail for another location entirely, if he’s as scared as I think he is.”

  “How can you know how frightened he is?”

  “Somebody’s got to think like the bastard.”

  “And you think he’s going to run?”

  “As far and as fast as that schooner and his will will take him, yes.”

  “Back to England?”

  “Maybe.” Fisher ceremoniously handed over the tape to them, add­ing, “I hope you people catch this bastard, so I can be on hand to watch him fry in the electric chair.”

  “We’re going to do our damnedest,” Eriq assured the man before they left.

  In the parking lot, the drizzle now a silver-toothed an­noyance, Jessica leaned across the hood of the car and called out to Eriq, “What’s our damnedest, Eriq? You mean our best? Well, damned if so far we’ve not done our best; so far, we’ve let this bastard run us around the entire coastline of this state and we’ve been unable to spot him even once.”

  She left him standing in the rain, his mouth open, while she climbed into the passenger side of the car.

  He climbed in after her. “Just what do you propose we do, Jessica?”

  “I say we get a plane or a helicopter out of here.”

  “What? We just got here.”

  “And we fly it out over the Gulf, and we take it on a course due southeast of here.”

  “Southeast of here? For what destination?”

  “The Cayman Islands, I believe.”

  ‘ ‘What? You told me about the Caymans... that he was there, and that possibly he had left a body or two there. But you don’t know that for sure, now do you?”

  “Instinct tells me that he got away with murder in the Caymans, and that he never felt the least threatened there, because no one came close to IDing him there, unlike here. Fact is, they never knew what they had on the islands, and that’s got to sweeten the allure of a return for him. Here, we have an artist sketch, an a.k.a., a possible fix on his real name, and now a good idea of what his boat looks like. He’s got to know those two watercops were on the radio, that they gave a description of the boat—”

  “Precisely why he’ll try to unload it.”

  “Or he’ll take it out of American waters and unload it in a place like the Caymans.”

  “Even if you’re right, and he is running from American waters, why do you suppose he’s returning to the Cayman Islands? Why not Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, any number of places?”

  “He likes the Caymans. He’s familiar with the islands. He’ll go there first.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “I am,” she firmly replied, trying to quell all her secret uncertainties.

  He thought about her notion a moment. “I may be crazy to go along with this, but okay. We go to the Caymans at first light. No point in going in this darkness with a storm approaching, is there?”

  “We must beat him to the islands, before he has a chance to sell the boat there.”

  “Do you think he’ll sell it or recondition it?”

  “Either way, he can’t get there ahead of us.”

  “So when do you propose leaving?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Do you think we can get a flight out on such short notice?”

  “I’m not interested in taking a jetliner, and I don’t want to use a marked police vehicle—I don’t want to spook this SOB into a suicide. I want him captured and brought to justice.”

  “For crimes against Florida, he’ll fry in the chair.” My sentiments are with his victims.”

  “Let’s do it. Set it up.”

  “I want to fly low along the most direct path to the Caymans in search of the boat.”

  “And Captain Anderson can plot the course you are as­suming this creep is taking?”

  “Anderson’s still in Naples. We asked him to stay put in case we needed his services again. We can contact him through Ford, and he can send us word if there’s time, but we’ll talk to experts here, too.”

  “All right... do it, but are you really sure about what’s going on in this monster’s mind?”

  “It’s my best guess right now. Do you have any other suggestions?”

  Santiva passed a hand along the stubble of a twenty-four- hour growth of beard, and gnashing his teeth, he finally muttered, “Another helicopter ride?”

  “It’s got to be private, or an unmarked police chopper. Either that or a cub plane.”

  “Either way, I’m a sick man.”

  “We’ll get you more Dramamine.”

  “I’ll double the dosage.”

  “And be asleep in my lap?”

  He laughed. “I’ve been in much worse spots...”

  Patty Lawrence felt she had to do something, and sitting in a hospital waiting room, crowded full with Manley’s people and Ken Stallings’s family and friends, wasn’t good enough. She had yanked her partner from the hospital and they’d agreed to return to the search out there off Madeira Beach for whatever sign they could find of the bastard who’d done this to Ken.

  The search front had gone in carefully squared-off areas, the search boats squeezing the playing field, hoping to catch up to a killer who was likely as lost in the fog as they themselves felt. Their instruments, they hoped, were better than his, as they hoped their instincts were.

  But several hours of searching had turned up nothing. Perhaps this maniac killer did know what he was doing when it came to maneuvering a sailing vessel.

  Bill was now in the flat of the boat, scanning the waters with a pair of night-vision binoculars while Patty inched the Boston Whaler through the soup. A running joke had given their boat its private name. The Pantry—named for all the food Bill brought aboard, from potato chips and cold cuts to Pepsi-Cola and cranberry jam. Bill was a big man, as big as Rob Manley had been, and he had seen all manner of problems on this job. Patty’s Pantry, as some of the guys called their boat, was a misnomer; it ought more rightly to have been Bill’s Pantry. She ate three regulars a day and never strayed from her regimen, never snacking in between, however tempting Bill made it at times, however much he goaded.

  They were in near-constant contact with the other search ships. People were getting short with one another; person­nel were beginning to feel the emotional and physical strain, the stress growing minute by painful minute as the obvious began to sink in: They’d somehow let the Night Crawler crawl right past them all. The bastard was aptly named.

  Tempers flared, ignited by frustration and anger and un resolved feelings. Patty certainly felt her share of the latter. She and Ken Stallings had left so many feelings unresolved. Bill knew about the special bond between them and had always been a gentleman and friend and never once made her feel guilty. But now Bill hadn’t spoken a word in the past fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his mind. Perhaps it was the same sim­ple thought plaguing her: All appeared helpless, useless ef­fort now.

  Their radio crackled anew with the voice of a county sheriff’s guy she hardly knew, a man named Trilling, an­nouncing something in the water at their location. He quickly gave the exact coordinates, repeating his message: “Something in the water! Something floating on top of the water! Something out of place...”

  Patty had to fight through the radio traffic to ask, “What’ve you got? Describe it.”

  Looks... looks like... yeah, Jesus... it’s a body.”

  All the search vehicles were close now, so close they could see each other’s searchlights even in the fog. Patty Lawrence silently wondered at the new find. Had the killer left his own brand of calling card?

  The find was called in to various dispatches on land, including Bob Fisher, Patty’s own dispatch. The news that they had someone in the water spread like wildfire. Mo­ments late
r, it was confirmed by Trilling’s partner, and some details filtered over the radio waves: female, five-nine to six foot, thin, well-proportioned, nude and DOA. Appar­ent late teens, a black nylon rope twisted in a noose around her neck, strangled and drowned.

  Each additional bit of information was like another blow to them all. Everyone had heard of the recent disappearance of the young woman from Naples Island, south of Tampa. Everyone wondered if this could be her. There seemed little doubt that whoever she was, she’d been victimized by the Night Crawler, and that he’d brutally used her. The word buzzing over the airways indicated that the girl’s body was as stiff as a long-preserved medical cadaver’s might appear.

  Bob Fisher, at the FMP dispatch office in Tampa, prom­ised to get word to the FBI so that they might have someone on hand to examine the body. He started with the local FBI office, telling them what his people and the county had come across off Madeira Beach, adding that it appeared related to the earlier incident involving his people, Officers Manley and Stallings. The FBI was interested, and said they’d locate Chief San­tiva and Dr. Jessica Coran to have their best people on the scene when the body came ashore.

  An hour later, when the body was brought ashore, a county coroner from Pinellas was the only medical man found readily available to take charge of the body. Jessica Coran could not be located.

  Jessica found local aircraft vehicles useless for her needs; neither Tampa nor St. Pete had any to spare, and those that were in repair and might be ready in twenty-four hours were all marked clearly as police vehicles. Officials here in Tampa weren’t in any mood to cooperate in any case; they blamed FBI bungling for the death of the FMP officer named Manley and the maiming of Ken Stallings, a notion fueled by recent newspaper accounts, radio and TV broad­casts and political speeches, some with an extremely irra­tional, fringe-element twist reminiscent of the kind of talk that had been coming out of militia companies across America since the Waco, Texas, “massacre” and the two- years-in-the-making plot against the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. All Jessica knew for certain was that there had to be one hell of a paranoia at work in the heartland to convince people with brains in their skulls that the U.S. government was interested in creating mass murder of innocent children just to get control of the NRA lobby in Congress.

  The killer can’t have gone far, Jessica told herself in keeping with her prediction that he’d gone southeast over the waters, passing back along his track like a cougar, marking his territory well. His going farther westward to­ward Louisiana and Texas, after a scare like the one the watercops had thrown into him, seemed unlikely. However, to be certain, another search team made up of Samernow and Quincey would go in that direction, hovering over the Gulf waters in a second helicopter. At least, that’d been the plan; but the plan was coming apart at the seams.

  First, fellow law enforcement officials were being un­cooperative, and now private small-plane and helicopter companies were doing the same. And now Jessica found herself in a lonely, dank helicopter hangar on a fogbound airfield just south of Tampa with no way to pursue the killer. The helicopter owner here simply looked at her badge and said stonily, “We’re not endangering any of our pilots for the FBI, not in this foul weather.” The man left her, returning to his office, which was dwarfed here in the massive hangar. She wanted to shove something like a court order down his throat but she had none, and getting one could take more time than she had.

  Although only small aircraft flew in and out here, the airfield was large, and there were a number of other com­panies she could turn to, so she looked out at the blinking lights in the fog that signaled men at work somewhere out there. She looked around for someone to perhaps guide her to another location. The usual heat of a Florida morning had been wiped away by the sodden wet blanket of air hovering over them.

  While Jessica worked to get airborne, Eriq Santiva had gone back to the hospital to wait in the hope that Ken Stallings would find a voice in his search for consciousness and reality. Everyone was hoping against hope that he might come around, not only for the man’s sake but be­cause inside his silence lay the key to locating the Night Crawler.

  In the meantime, a copy of Patric Allain’s signature on an agreement made between him and a Mr. Scrapheap Jones in Key West, Florida, had come in at Tampa Bay’s main headquarters, Police Precinct One. Eriq was unequiv­ocal when he declared it to be the same handwriting as that on the letters to the press.

  To quell the rancor of local politicians and the media, who were doing camera interviews, this new bit of infor­mation was carefully spooned out in terms that made it sound as if the Night Crawler might as well already be in custody, since they were now certain that the man named Patric Allain was one and the same as the Night Crawler. The impression Eriq left with the press was that the FBI was closing in on the demon.

  Still, local loudmouths claimed that police had failed to protect and serve “even their own” in this instance, and that in fact, authorities had used the Tampa Bay area as a kind of watery “box canyon” into which they flushed the killer—yet had still managed to let him slip free! The im­plication was that the FBI had completely mishandled the case, as if politicians and reporters could have done law enforcement’s job for them in much better fashion. The Florida press set up a hue and cry like so many armchair detectives.

  The other implication was that the FBI had placed all of the Tampa-St. Pete area in danger by chasing this perverted monster into their midst in the first place; why had Miami’s problem become Tampa’s problem? So that now two good, solid citizens, FMP officers, had been brutally assaulted by the man FBI agents couldn’t seem to catch in a months- long, intensive pursuit. Furthermore, the Night Crawler re­mained in this region, and he might be anywhere, and he might take anyone’s daughter.

  Some were demanding that the FBI give a full account­ing of its activities in the matter, along with a detailed ex­planation for what steps it next planned to pursue. Florida politicians around the state were outraged at the duration of this case, as well as what appeared to them to be a lack of efficiency and professionalism.

  The word apparently had gone out from the governor’s mansion that it was open season on the FBI in general and on Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva in particular, the main­stays of the investigation who perhaps ought to be removed and replaced. The groundswell of anger was further fueled by Tammy Sue Sheppard’s family, who were making daily statements to the press, especially the National Enquirer.

  The Enquirer did an entire page on how Jessica dressed, how she wore her hair, what kind of lipstick she used and who manufactured her eye shadow, and the kind of extrav­agance she and Santiva had displayed in staying at the Fon- tainebleau in Miami. Its headline read, Tall & Beautiful Scavenger for Scientific Fact Short on Results in Night Crawler Case. The story summarized the case, beginning with facsimiles of the killer’s sweetheart notes to the press. It listed the victims and where each body had been found, giving ample space to the time three bodies washed ashore in one day in Miami. Eddings of the Herald in Miami was quoted throughout the article and claimed to be writing a book on the Night Crawler which would blow the case wide open. The article went on to tell of how painstakingly every port, dock and wharfside restaurant along the Eastern sea­board had been meticulously papered with wanted posters once a witness had come forward with an account and a police sketch artist had created a likeness. The story showed the likeness and a picture of the plaster-cast bust made from the artist’s sketch.

  Jessica wondered where they had gotten such details, but it mattered little now. Let the politicians and the press kick all they wanted. She sensed that she was, for the first time, on the trail of the killer, in his direct wake. All they need do now was locate the miserable excuse for a human being out there on the vast ocean, close in on the putrid SOB and finally put an end to the bastard’s killing spree. Men like him and those who’d bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, she mused, must know that there was no�
�where for their souls to go, that not even Satan held a place for their kind.

  Due to reasons beyond her control—both the meteoro­logical and the political climate—Jessica found that the lo­cal small-aircraft people weren’t cooperating either; no one was willing to take a helicopter up in the soup of this morn­ing’s fog, or brave the winds reportedly coming in behind the dense fog, winds that were howling about the airfield. It was the same damned fog that’d gotten one watercop killed and put another close to death in a coma, the same fog that had masked the killer’s movements. And now this damnable wet haze hung, an enormous blur suspended, rooted, as if controlled by Allain, as if there were some supernatural purpose in fog, so that when old-timers at the airport said, “Never seen a Florida fog stay on so damned long before,” Jessica didn’t take it as idle talk.

  “Damnit, we’ll be heading east, away from the Gulf storm,” she said to one chopper pilot who she thought might break down and say yes. She had always believed helicopter pilots fearless, a bit crazy, willing to do just about anything. That had been her experience with chopper pilots in the past.

  “Sorry... I’ve got too much invested in my bird, and I’m told by air traffic control to keep her on the ground for at least five hours.”

  Tropical Storm Karl, as it was now being called, didn’t care about Jessica’s problems. She replied, “To hell with it—I’ll fly myself. Where can I charter a cub plane?” She’d gotten her pilot’s license six months before, soloing with ease after the intensive training she’d received from one of the best pilots she’d ever known, a man who flew jets of all sorts as well as small planes. Kenneth Massey had given her all the confidence she needed to fly through the perimeter of the storm edge. All she needed was a plane, but time and nature appeared to be conspiring against her. She found a mechanic at the airfield who was sitting idle, glancing over a copy of the special-edition Enquirer which Quincey had earlier pointed out to her, and the man easily recognized her from a picture taken when she was walking out to the beach to inspect one of the three bodies washed ashore on that awful day back in Miami, the day Allain threw his power in their faces.