Grave Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “So the trial transcripts and what Deitze has on him are the only record of his madness?”

  “Until now. He's still thinking the same thoughts only now with live game.”

  “To get at this lump of brain tissue?” J.T. asked, clicking on an icon that opened on a sketch with a caption indicating it was a drawing of the Island of Rheil. “Here it is. Look familiar?” asked J.T.

  It was the first time that J.T. had seen Cahil's drawing to compare it with what they had found inside the victims' skulls. “It does look like the cross,” Jessica muttered into J.T.'s ear, “in a rough kind of way.”

  J.T. shook off a shiver and asked, “How mad can men get, Jess?”

  “It would appear as mad as they wanna be.”

  J.T. clicked on an icon below the article. The computer screen now filled with a scanned photograph of something oddly shaped like a small filleted fish lying beside a six-inch ruler, measuring approximately two inches. It had the gray appearance of real brain tissue, bulbous at one end, cross shaped at the other. Below it read a caption: Human Rheil, sent to me by the Seeker. May 3, 2003-

  “What the hell is that?” asked Owens, pointing to the screen.

  Strand said, “A photograph of this Rheil thing from an actual brain.”

  “From one of the Skull-digger's victims,” suggested J.T.

  Jessica gasped and stared at the small strip of brain tissue. “This alone ought to put the man away for life.”

  Morristown, New Jersey Early morning

  “DARYL'S website is getting hits from all over the U.S. and the planet, Jess,” J.T. told her.

  “Can you trace them?”

  “Which one? They're coming in at warp speed. We need more help and a focused target.”

  A light drizzle had begun around the dark little house vacated by Daryl Thomas Cahil. Jessica had seen that the man's computer was equipped with a digital camera. She asked J.T. to bring up the photographic image of the material Cahil had labeled as a real piece of human brain tissue. “I want another look at it.”

  Now she and Strand stood over J.T.'s shoulder, staring fixedly at the fleshy-looking lump in the digitized computer image. The tissue resembled skin peeled and cut away from a raw chicken leg, except that it was gray, tinged with a blueness, J.T. explained, “The blue color is either from being cold, or it's an enhancement made by Cahil—to dramatize it more.”

  The tissue sample indeed had roughly the same shape as the cross found left inside the victims' skulls, a perpendicular feeder line, a horizontal connecting line and a bulbous top that was roughly circular in shape. More chilling than anything else was that Cahil represented it as the real thing, taken he told his subscribers, from a living human brain.

  “The Internet,” muttered J.T., “you just don't know what kind of crazoid thing is coming outta cyberspace next.”

  “Cut from someone's medulla oblongata.”

  A tired J.T. said, “It's been real, all right. . . .”

  “What're you saying, that we all have this tingler inside us?” asked Owens, who'd hung back, clinging to an ammonia stick.

  “Yes, we do,” replied J.T.

  Jessica closely examined the image. Thinking aloud, she said, “If the sonofabitch photographed it here and put it onto his system, is it possible that it's still around here someplace?”

  “If he hasn't consumed it,” countered Strand.

  “If he left it here, he'd have put it on ice,” suggested Jessica, recalling the hum of the refrigerator.

  “In with the Miller Lite,” joked J.T.

  She rushed for the kitchen area and tore open the refrigerator in search of the small body part depicted in Daryl's photo. Nothing on the shelves other than a few bottles— olives, pickles, pickled beets and rotted vegetables and cheese. No other dairy products or cold drinks or juices, only a jug of water. She snatched open the freezer and began ferreting for something in the many foil-wrapped, un-marked items there.

  “Find anything, Dr. Coran?” asked Agent Owens from behind her.

  “Help me out here. Anything that looks suspiciously like . . . like . . .”

  “Like a brain or a piece of a brain?”

  The freezer compartment was stuffed with small items wrapped in newspaper, and Jessica feared the worse. “Anything that isn't chicken, pork, beef or fish, I'll want to examine, no matter how small, you understand?”

  “Mystery meat, I get it.” He went to work with his gloved hands and talked as he did so. “Look, I'm sorry about the false pretenses of my superior, Dr. Coran.”

  “I accept your apology, Owens.” She unwrapped a soup package. He found a bag of peas. They emptied their finds into the crowded sink.

  “I'd just like you to know, I truly am sorry.”

  “Forget about it, Owens, until such a time as I need a favor.” Jessica now unwrapped the intact brain of what appeared a small animal, likely a cat's brain. She placed it gently aside, as Owens gasped on unwrapping a slightly larger brain—most likely that of a dog. “My dear God,” he repeatedly said. “My dear God.”

  “It's not human,” she informed him.

  Strand had entered the kitchen and, seeing this, he said, “I see you've located the neighborhood strays. Do you think they have this island of tissue thing in them, too?”

  “They might, but let's stay focused on anything smacking of human brains.”

  Jessica told Owens, “Look through all these wrapped goodies, and cull any that look or even smell suspicious.” Out of the corner of one eye, Jessica saw Strand going down into the basement. Jessica called out to Strand, “Let me know if there're any freezers down there, Max.”

  “Gotcha,” he called up.

  STRAND'S light shone on an ill-matched washer and dryer set that dominated the small basement—no freezers or locked storage areas, only an array of boxes, garden and house tools, a small workbench, grease-covered tools and parts, and grimy stone walls, but then he saw the stone wheel and small kiln where Daryl fired his clay brains. It was an elaborate set up of raw materials he'd put together, and on shelves behind it, an array of what appeared to be homemade clay pots, each distinct in one way or another, but these were no pots, but his wares. Some were painted bright colors, while some were left gray, to appear natural. Some were large, others small. Some intentionally stylized or misshapen, others realistic. All could be pried open from the top, and a small area inside left room for the pasta.

  Strand moved closer to the finished products for a better look at what appeared a strange hobby even for Cahil. As he neared the clay creations, perhaps fifty in all, he shouted up, “Some hobby Cahil indulged in!”

  He pulled out his camera and began taking photos. “Nobody's ever going to believe this.”

  Just then Strand heard Agent Owens shouting from overhead. He grabbed three of the brains to hand over to Dr. Coran, one painted, the other two neutral gray, and he rushed back up the stairs and into the kitchen area where he placed the clay brains on a countertop. One of the gray ones, having yet to be fired, suddenly crumbled under Strand's fingers. “Shit,” he cursed.

  John Thorpe, having raced from the bedroom, stood alongside Jessica now. The two M.E.'s were busy examining the thing Owens had discovered in the tinfoil that lay thawing out on the counter. “What is it?” Max asked Jessica.

  Owens, who stood aside, shaken by his find, said, “I think it's maybe a child's finger.”

  But Jessica turned and faced Max Strand, her blanched features solemn. “It's that thing he photographed for the Internet. That Island of Rheil tissue.”

  “The Rheil thing from the computer photo?” asked Strand. “You can nail his ass to the wall now for certain.”

  “You mean this little strip of gray matter is all Cahil fed on?” asked Owens.

  “It would appear that he wasn't quite the cannibal everyone painted him,” replied J.T., poking at the frozen finger-sized, fleshy cross of matter with a pen. “He just went in for this little delicacy.”

  “What
aya mean?” asked Strand, his calm broken. “The bastard cut off and discarded whole heads of dead children; fed them to his dogs, and he consumed human flesh—brain tissue.”

  J.T. raised his arms in defeat. “OK . . . OK . . . The man's a cannibal no matter how you slice it,” he tried to joke.

  “So . . . did this tissue come from a child's head or an adult's?” asked Owens.

  “I couldn't hazard a guess except that it corresponds in size to what we read from the book on Rheil. Which means it's probably been taken from an adult brain,” replied Jessica. She turned her eyes back to the counter and stared down at the tissue, icy blue with cold from its sleep inside the freezer and foil cocoon. “It hasn't been in the freezer for too long, probably a month or so.”

  “Right around the time the Digger killings began,” commented J.T. “We need the lab at Quantico, John,” she replied. “We need to match the DNA from this to the victims. We need the brain-imaging program to take a look at this thing in a normal adult brain to make any determinations about its origin. Frankly, until this case, I'd never heard of this brain piece.”

  “Neither had I,” replied J.T.

  “What does it—what's its function? Why is it inside of us?” asked Owens.

  “First one I've actually seen,” said Strand. “I always took it for a hoax Cahil pulled on the court, the doctors and his legion of Web visitors. I never took it for a real item out of here.” He pointed to his own skull. Then he parroted Owens's concern. “What is it inside our heads for?”

  Jessica sensed the uneasiness both men felt on learning that something strange and remarkable had been inside their brains all their lives and they had not known it. She didn't know how to answer their questions.

  J.T. broke the silence. “No one—and I mean no one— knows what it's in there for, kind of like the appendix in the body ... a leftover from previous eons, likely quite as dormant as the appendix.”

  “The appendix,” said Owens, nodding.

  Strand said, “You mean it has no use anymore? That whatever it once functioned as has just sort of atrophied?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “That's good enough for me,” said Owens.

  Strand bit his lower lip, gave it another thought and added, “Makes sense.”

  Jessica was glad for J.T.'s comparison as well. She could also now draw a bead on it and put the thing in proportion, she hoped. It was a theory at the opposite pole from that put forth by Daryl Cahil and Dr. Rheil himself. For them, the small organic cross of tissue was hardly dormant; for them, this thing comprised a palace for the soul. Jessica momentarily wondered at the depth to which Jack Deitze could have fallen under the spell of such a theory.

  “Have we got enough now to get out of this goddamn hole?” asked Owens, anxious to get out of Cahil's world.

  “I'm taking possession of this thing,” said Jessica, preparing a formaldyhyde-filled vial and dropping the brain tissue into the vial. “But the man's computer's not going to fit in here,” she indicated her valise. “We'll want any disks, any and all books with titles on the brain, especially any with markers in them. They'll be boxed and sent to Quantico. Can you—”

  “I'll get some help down here,” said Owens, anxious to make amends.

  “If it's no bother. We could use some agents handy with lightbulbs.”

  Owens frowned at this. “I'll arrange for help.”

  “Strand,” she said to Max, “you may want to canvass the backyard for any recently turned earth. We may still have a missing woman on our hands, and if this Rheil item doesn't match one of the victims we have, it could belong to Cahil's girlfriend. I noticed women's clothing in one of the closets.”

  “At his trial, I tell you, he spoke in a personality that was a woman. He's quite convincing because he's that rare case—a real schizophrenic. All the same, I'll take charge of a search out back. I need some air anyway.”

  Jessica, too, was ready to vacate the morbid sea of squalor and misdirected thought. But first she asked Strand, “Are these clay brains all you found in the basement?” She pointed to the three models of the brain, one cracked and broken, shards of it everywhere, the other two intact, one natural gray, the other painted half chartreuse, half psychedelic orange. Strand demonstrated how the two parts of the brain were detached to reveal the pocket of space inside for the cache of noodles. “There's maybe forty-five or fifty of these things downstairs, with boxes, labels and packing material, but no freezers and nothing smacking of a new false wall or new concrete floor. I got no odor of decay or death, but we might want to get some dogs down there.”

  “Some hobby to pass the time with, huh?” said J.T., examining the wildly painted brain.

  “More like a fixation,” said Max.

  “Yes, a fixation,” Jessica agreed.

  “One of the shrinks at Cahil's trial said he had never seen such an advanced case of hyper . . . hypro ...”

  “ 'Hyperprosexia,' I think they call it,” Jessica suggested.

  Max nodded. “That's it.” He went carefully toward the exit in search of air. Jessica followed in his wake. Just outside, Max lit up a cigarette and added, “Said even if Cahil could not be proved insane by reason of multiple-personality disorder, that he could easily be proved to have this hyperprosexia thing.”

  They looked to the sky for signs of stars, the moon, anything for some respite from this place. “As I remember it from the trial,” Strand continued, “it had something to do with the sheer depth of his obsession with the brain. Course, at the time, I thought it all hogwash. But now . . . seeing that piece of brain tissue in there . . . this Rheil thing . . .”

  “Hyperprosexia is a term for rigid, undeviating attention of a pathological intensity. It's considered a psychotic condition in which the mind takes hold of an idea with unshakable fixity. It certainly fits the Skull-digger's profile.”

  J.T. had followed them out, listening to their conversation. He added, “In layman's terms, it's a morbidly adhered to fixation, like monomania—idk fixe the French call it.”

  “Like I told them in '90,” said Strand, inhaling deeply from his cigarette. “If they ever let this guy out again, he'll go right back to what he did before. Looks like he's cooked it a little differently, but he's still after the same thing. He's only recently displayed the picture of it, I can tell you, or I'd have been on his ass in a flash.”

  “Which of his recent victims—murdered this time around—do you suppose this brain item came from?” asked J.T. “The girl in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia or Florida?”

  “Hopefully it's his last,” said Jessica falling silent, thinking about the second near-abduction incident in New Bern, North Carolina, and trying to square it with the newly discovered evidence against Daryl Cahil. She thought of the female voice on the phone the night she had first heard of Cahil, the voice that had so pleaded for Jessica to take an interest in Daryl as the Digger. Had the first call actually been from Cahil himself while under the control of another personality? Could he be working with an accomplice? Or were both of the failed abductions the work of another man who had no bearing on their case?

  Owens had gone out to his car to call for a team of evidence techs to get to the address. He returned now to the rear stairs where the others stood talking.

  Jessica told Owens, “Dr. Thorpe will have the honor of overseeing the evidence collection from here on. Right, John?”

  J.T. nodded his assent. “I know you need to get to Quan-tico, and picking through this mess . . . well, it'll take some time. I'll see to it that Cahil's computer will follow you. We're going to need some real experts to delve into the man's website, to determine just how nuts he and his cyberspace connections are. We'll bring in someone from the Cyber Squad and get a fix on anyone out there who has taken Cahil too seriously.” “What for?” asked Strand. “You can't charge them with anything. Hell, he's selling those brains through eBay and Amazon, along with his damned Rheil noodles.”

  “Agreed, bu
t we may just want to put any of his more serious followers on a watch list,” replied J.T.

  “And remember, no one has yet proven that this creep Cahil is in fact the Digger,” added Jessica. “If we learn there's still a killer at large, even though Cahil is in custody, then we may have someplace to start over. That's supposing Cahil has become master to some disciple out there.”

  J.T. contemplated the complexities of getting at Cahil's Web list. “We've got a lot of decisions to make. Do we go back six months, a year, two, three? It's all for nothing if we can't force the Internet server to give up the profiles of the people who've logged on. And we're bucking the ACLU here, known for fighting any infringement on Internet users, Jess.”

  “I thought servers didn't want profane garbage on the Net,” said Owens, “that they monitored everything.”

  “Not Cahil's server. They've built a reputation as the bad boys of the Net. Anything goes. That way, they get subscribers,” replied J.T.

  “We'll need a fire-and-brimstone federal judge to get a warrant to open the thing up then,” said Jessica. “I'm sure it won't be a problem for the FBI.”

  “The creep has been influencing a potential audience of billions,” said J.T. “That's got to stop.”

  “Still, good luck getting the Net server to release the information. It won't be easy. I've tried it myself,” said Strand. “It'll take an act of God, Dr. Coran, not the FBI.”

  “Maybe if we can narrow it to people who keep coming back to the well, not to mention we'd like to know if any of the Digger's victims are among the subscribers to Cahil's site, then—” “It's a catch-22, I tell you. Without that list, no court will give you a warrant, but you can't get that list without a damned warrant,” Strand assured her. “Trust me. I've worn myself out pleading for it.”

  “You're dealing with local judges. We'll get our top echelon at Quantico on it,” J.T. assured Strand.