Grave Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “It's a fairly educated assumption,” added Santiva, “given his precision with the tools, and it fits with what little we have on the offender.”

  Jessica said, “Unfortunately, there've always been a lot of Jack-the-Rippers among the medical profession. Equally unfortunate, we have only one possible witness, and her testimony is vague at best. A Viki Rollins claims to have seen a man force a woman into a van at gunpoint in Richmond. No crime scenes exist, as we suspect he's using a van. So no clues other than those left on the victim—meaning what he did to her, I'm afraid. There is no fingerprint evidence, no DNA, no complete profile of the lunatic monster, so . . .”

  “We have a psych team on the case as we speak,” Santiva assured his audience.

  Jessica added, “We suspect he's a white male in his mid thirties—and we're pretty much agreed that this doesn't look like the work of an erratic kill-spree murderer, due to his behavior here, just methodical as hell. He will blend in as if invisible, just a normal-looking guy. No maniac eyes or Neanderthal brow. More like the neighbor next door.”

  “Will he be wearing suspenders?” asked Quinton from the floor.

  Everyone laughed at this. “Most assuredly, Quint,” said Santiva.

  J.T. added, “At the moment, profiling of the victims may be our best bet, although we're still compiling more on the young women each day.”

  Jessica agreed with J.T.'s assessment. “Our victim profile that's coming around to you in flyer form has obvious gaps. After reading it, if anyone finds any associations or patterns and similarities between the victims, please let us hear from you. We've pretty much used up all the information forwarded thus far on the young women.”

  Agents seeing the victim profile began to consult one another and a general clamor, fueled by concern, demonstrated their discomfort. The victim profile fit nearly every young adult female in the country, down to their favorite rock groups—Outta Sink, Buglebeee Blow and Rag Bushy. This only punctuated the youth of the victims.

  “Admittedly, it isn't much,” said Santiva, getting the doctors off the hook, “but at the moment, it's all we have. As noted, the killer is mobile—working out of a dark blue or black van, according to information gleaned from a near-abduction case in Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

  “With victim one in Richmond, two in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a possible later attempt in Fayetteville, North Carolina,” said Jessica. “This indicates that he has been roughly on a southerly course down the length of 1-95.”

  “Another 1-95 killer with a new twist?” asked Quinton from the floor.

  “After Fayetteville we can only assume he's on a southerly course—perhaps toward Georgia, possibly Florida,” replied Jessica. “If he stays his course.”

  “The dates of discovery bear this out.” Santiva looked beyond the audience again and called out, “Henrietta, the map.” Lights went out and a map of the southeast states appeared, marked at the two cities where the victims had died. “If not Georgia or Florida, he's likely to show up in Tennessee, going southwest from Winston-Salem instead of straight down 1-95 as predicted.”

  Jessica added, “This . . . this brain-snatching bastard made his first kill within shouting distance of us, gentlemen, ladies, which means one of two things: He is either oblivious to us, or he is spitting in our faces.”

  An undertow of anger erupted from the crowd, a low growl of collective derision.

  “What's this ghoul really doing with their brains?” asked one agent near the front.

  “Who knows, Birch?” replied Santiva. “Maybe he's making love to them, maybe he's freezing them for laboratory study, maybe the creep thinks they make good doorstops the way you use books, Birch. Who knows?”

  This brought on some much-needed laughter.

  “Maybe he's doing like that guy in that old black-and-white sci-fi movie, the one where the doctor puts human brains into animals, chickens and goats and such,” said Agent Quinton.

  More laughter followed.

  “Weren't there some Nazi war crimes involving brain removal and study?” asked a female agent midway back. “I seem to recall reading about it.”

  “Yeah, maybe Hitler's risen from the grave thanks to cloning,” said another agent.

  “Why don't you look into that, Mort?” said another.

  “All kidding aside, Agent Sydney, since you brought it up, find out what you can about Nazi evisceration experiments, will you. Who knows, maybe our killer is a neo-Nazi with a plan to indoctrinate us all by stealing our minds.” More discussion followed and questions were hurled at Santiva now, and Jessica thought of her lifelong career as a man hunter. During her decade-long career as a medical examiner for the FBI, Dr. Jessica Coran had encountered the strange, the bizarre, the heart-wrenching and the gruesome. The monsters had come in all sizes and myriad forms, but now her sleep was disturbed by a killer who wanted something so out of the ordinary that it surprised even her. He killed to possess that single prize. The idea alone unnerved Jessica. Everyone held some object or place or attribute near and dear, but how many felt their very organ of will and mind and soul was up for grabs by some maniacal beast anxious to rip it from them? Carried within and protected by the skull lay this three-pound gift of God and nature, and now it was threatened by a monster who wanted to take it.

  Precisely why he wanted it remained a mystery, but want it he did, and now two young victims had fallen into his hands.

  Why did he want it? Was it a mad craving or a twisted fantasy that had revealed some magical potent power or elixir made from grinding the brain and beating it in a mixer to be consumed? Or did he like it solid and raw? All speculation. No one knew. No evidence collected thus far had pointed to what motivated him to kill others for the only sentient organ in the body.

  Jessica had, in the course of doing autopsies since her first medical training in forensics, removed a lot of gray matter in her searches for cause of death. She had seen the brain destroyed by all manner of disease, toxins and slow poisons like alcohol. She had seen the results of massive trauma to the brain from highway accidents to dining-room murders. The dead brain itself always felt the same to her—inert matter with no life force left—a three-pound misshapen dodo bird shot down, lying wingless, earthbound, not so much as a feathery flutter of a nerve.

  The fully developed brain always looked and weighed the same—three pounds, give or take. But looks deceive. Jessica knew from her readings and experience that no two brains were exactly the same, no more so than human fingerprints. In some distant future, she imagined a time when a John or Jane Doe might be “recognized” and given an identity through a brain-print or brain map. The brain in its infinite folds and fissures has a unique pattern all its own, not unlike any two mountain ranges or glaciers, no matter the outward appearance. Still, some brains were put to better or weightier use than others, so if not in scale, in power the brains differed. Was there something in this fact of individuality that had prompted him to murder?

  She and J.T., along with her significant other, Richard Sharpe, had discussed these very issues the night before. But they had come to no meaningful conclusions. In fact, they had come away as confused as before.

  . “If this brain chef is killing in order to feed on brain food,” said Richard, “if you will, then why cannibalize young teens who have amassed little or no knowledge of the world beyond rap music? If, of course, you are doing this deed for the reason put forth by aboriginal tribes and primitive peoples the world over. That is, to take on the qualities and intellect of the man or woman's brain you consume,” Richard said as he packed for a diplomatic mission to China to shore up the extradition proceedings to bring a suspected terrorist prisoner back to the States.

  “Good question,” replied J.T., sipping at his wine.

  “Suppose he's not doing it for reasons put forth by primitives,” said Jessica. “Suppose he's answering to a different, perhaps more personal calling.” “You mean perhaps his dead mother is telling him to do it?”
Richard stared at her for a response.

  “Something like that, yes.”

  J.T. nervously laughed. Richard continued to pack. His plane would soon be leaving from the Quantico airstrip. The evening quickly ground to a halt, and she shooed J.T. out and then drove Richard to the airstrip where they had only a short time to embrace and say goodbye.

  “I may not be here when you call. I may be in the field,” she'd told him. “If you can't reach me here, use the cell number.”

  “Jess, why must Santiva always send you out on the worst, most awful crimes the FBI has to offer?”

  “You mean like the time he sent me to London? Where I met you? Habit, I'd say.”

  “Yes, London, but also where you damned near got killed. Just be careful while I'm gone.” He kissed her and again they embraced. She had remained there, waving until the six-passenger jet transport took off.

  Santiva's meeting now at a close, people filed out. Jessica lagged behind. She picked up all her notes and thought about how helpless they were in the face of the random violence brought about by spree and serial killers. When and where the Brain Thief might strike again must wait until it happened. Unless they could find a miracle in all the thousands upon thousands of tips already flooding in on who the Brain Thief was. “He's everyone's neighbor or lover,” as J.T. had put it.

  In the now empty room, Jessica looked up at the wall where the slides had been. The blankness felt like a challenge they would not soon or easily overcome. It made up a clear metaphor for the case—not so much as a clue on the smooth surface of the manila wall.

  “Would you like to see the slides again?” asked a female voice from the back of the room.

  “Oh, Henrietta, it's you. I thought I was alone,” she replied. Henrietta was Eriq's technical assistant. “No, thanks to seeing the slides again. Maybe another time.”

  “Just putting all of this stuff in a safe place,” said the technician. “You people, you've got to catch this SOB fast, Dr. Coran, before he butchers someone else's little girl. That's what he is, a butcher, not a doctor, not like you. He kills people; you save people.”

  Jessica thanked Henrietta for the vote of confidence and quickly left. And though part of her did want to see the slides again, another part did not.

  STILL hiding in his Jacksonville, Florida, motel room, Grant Kenyon assessed his situation: thirty-nine years of age, facing forty, and somehow his life had been turned over to this insidious other self that he found his body, mind and soul contracted to—his damnable brain. A thinking organism living within him and fighting him for dominance; a thing telling him even as a child to consume brain matter. He had fed on small animals in this way as a child, working his way up to larger animals, and he had fed on the brains of medical cadavers when in medical school. No one had ever discovered that he'd had anything to do with the two missing brains there. Another kid, accused of pulling off a fraternity stunt, was expelled but no one had pointed a finger at Kenyon. In later years, he had fed on several fresher dead brains in the hospital morgue where he worked after earning his degree. None of it involved murder, no more so than the Jersey Ghoul, Daryl Thomas Cahil, had murdered his victims in '89 and '90. Now all that had changed—gone was any semblance of concern for where he got the brains. His mind now insisted he take them while they were still warm. Now he committed murder in the name of this craving, and for such a leap, his brain had had to concoct a perfect rationalization about glimpsing into the cosmic mind, one he'd first learned of from Daryl Thomas Cahil. Kenyon had followed the man's case from his first grave snatching to his apprehension, incarceration and release from prison. Using a fail-safe system with a firewall, he had remained in touch with Cahil from the moment he discovered the man had a website called Isle of Brain, which Cahil had begun in prison. The website had toned down over the years, preaching the use of symbolic tools such as animal brains instead of human brains to reach the cosmic over mind, but anyone reading between the lines knew that this was Cahil's only way to remain free to communicate. Even so, he had animal-rights activists working diligently to shut him down.

  Cahil had abdicated the thrown of the brain-master, and Grant Kenyon's other brain had latched on to it, promising itself that it would surpass anything Cahil had ever attempted.

  Still, a relatively new development had come—an aberration as if out of nowhere. His other mind/brain wanted to bond with him over this obsessive craving for the living, warm brain. He had already killed and consumed such. At least his altered self had, but to do so, it had had to collaborate with the part of his mind that premeditated selecting and attacking a victim. The uncontrollable urge belonged to the other within, while organization and carrying out of the specifics belonged to him. Highly unlikely that anyone but himself would or could see the distinction, save perhaps a competent shrink like those who had found some redeeming quality in Daryl Thomas Cahil. Grant didn't know where the original obsession plaguing him had come from, what its roots might be—whether genetically based or something that had occurred at an extremely early moment in his life. Perhaps it'd begun in the womb inside his forming brain, perhaps just after. He didn't know how deeply the fixation extended, or how long it would go on; nor did he begin to understand the need to consume human brain matter. Yet the necessity—according to the one within, calling himself by Grant's father's name as some kind of cruel joke—grew more powerful and insis-tent with each feeding. And as the need grew, he felt more and more of his own identity waning, flickering like the last moments of a candle until soon it would be extinguished, consumed by Phillip altogether.

  The words of an old professor somehow filtered through to Grant Kenyon. “Our present understanding of the brain leaves us in the dark, and we may as well say the encephalon is filled with cotton wadding as anything else.”

  Since then, as a medical man, Dr. Grant Kenyon had learned that the brain had no parallel, and that it was a supernatural organ that bridged the gap between physical and psychical realms. “Look at what it's done to me,” he said to the empty room, his now-distant reflection winking at him in the dark created by the closed drapes. “The bastard thing's got me on a scavenger hunt for immortality.”

  “I've told you, Grant. I'm not seeking immortality for you or for me,” Phillip replied.

  “What then? What do you want?”

  The man in the mirror across the room shook his head as if disappointed in Grant. “The cortex is equipotential. ...” he said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Grant.

  “Capable of learning and operating under unique and unforeseen—often unimaginable—circumstances doubling and quadrupling its capacity for memory and storage. Don't you see? Anything can happen.”

  “It—you learn exponentially?”

  “Every new generation is evidence of this. There is no end to the wisdom to be gained when we finally locate the perimeters of—”

  “Stop it! Stop it! Enough! Goddamn you.”

  “—perimeters of the mind in this inner solar system.”

  At what price? Dr. Grant Kenyon asked himself, silence filling him. But his brain had to have the last word. “At any price, Doctor... at any price.”

  Kenyon knew only that there was one merciful element to his bloodletting and cannibalizing of brains. He had no conscious memory of it, only what the other within him wished to tell him; he had to be informed of it after the fact, like an amnesia patient after a train wreck. He was aware of planning it, even executing the initial phases of abduction, but the actual murder? The taking of the victim's brain? No, he had no conscious memory of killing young women for what Phillip prized. Perhaps, he reasoned, this partition his mind had created between his victim and himself was the only way he could accomplish the task. Still, Phillip made sure that Grant always heard about it. His brain told him about it afterward like a story read to him from a book.

  Grant knew he had killed three times now; Phillip had relayed the details in unfailing and excruciating minutia— every detail. But
his mind did not replay these details in the ordinary sense of memories. He got no visual images other than what he imagined after hearing it rendered in words. Only then could he feel, hear, smell, taste and see the “pictured” killings and feedings.

  At first he could not be made to believe the images real; not part of his memory. Yet, it was real—the simultaneous attack on all his senses proved it so. It had in fact happened; he had to believe his brain was telling the truth. After all, his brain must know, and it was the only explanation for the dried gray crumbs of brain matter he had found in his van alongside the bloodied tools he remembered gathering up for Phillip. At times he would stop long enough to clean his tools and the rear of his van. He'd left nothing behind at his home in Holyoke, New Jersey, nothing but Emily and the baby, Hildy. Once Phillip had killed their first victim in Richmond, Grant had not dared go back home. Instead, he'd gone to a gun show and he'd purchased a shotgun and a .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson.

  The first killing in Richmond signaled the end of one life, and the beginning of his new existence. He had taken that first life, had taken the prize and run away. Knowing that Phillip would never be satisfied with only one such meal, he knew he had to at least protect his family by putting distance between Phillip and them.

  Wishing to rest his mind, he clicked on the television and Oprah gave way to the local Jacksonville station, an advertisement for a local watering hole called The Stacked Deck where the young could find gaiety in the pounding music overlooking the ocean. Phillip insisted that Grant write the name of the place and the address down. They'd go hunting tonight. Last night, before settling in, they had scoured the area for a safe dumping ground for Phillip's third victim. After locating an abandoned place along the St. John's River, they had scoured the bus station for a victim without result. Prior to that, they had scouted out the local library where Phillip insisted on checking Cahil's website to see if he'd received the strip of brain matter Phillip'd sent to his mentor—to prove there was nothing like the real thing and to implicate Cahil should a time come when he needed a scapegoat “Time we roll, boy.” Phillip's order spiraled through his brain. “Enough wasted time.”