Primal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “Quiet, woman! You don't know Lina is killed!” As he chastised her, he ran to her and put his arms about her. Tears shone in reflected light from the street lamp, now the only thing they could see of the bull-shouldered, short man's features. “You go in; do what you gotta do,” he told Parry and Gagliano.

  Inside the sparse space of the bungalow, Parry jammed a shin against a coffee table before Gagliano found a light to guide them. The light shone on a comfortable, clean house with throw rugs over a parquet floor, countless pillows which soaked up so many cooking odors as to be comfortable with them these days. A large couch, a smaller settee, an easy chair for the old man, along with the TV/VCR/stereo center filled the place—the American Dream.

  Pictures adorned the walls, cabinets, any open space, photos of the family on picnics, outings, at parties with friends, but most of the photos were of Linda, a lovely, smiling creature whose innocent brown eyes were huge, so trusting and curious.

  Satellite rooms went around the living room: kitchen/dining area, a master bedroom and a smaller bedroom. Linda's was easy to find. The light here revealed a teenager's cave, filled with posters of rock stars. Sting, Guns & Roses, Ice-T fought for space with a silly replica of a Hawaiian warrior, the mascot of the University of Hawaii, alongside beautiful seascape posters, Save the Whales posters, pictures of dolphins and the like. A large bookshelf was littered with paperbacks of every stripe, size and shape, as many science fiction titles as romance, and it appeared she loved horror tales as well, her obvious favorites being Dean Koontz, Geoffrey Caine and Stephen Robertson.

  Parry always felt like an intruder at such moments, like some morbid vulture interested in digesting the “remains” of a life. On the girl's nightstand was a book of poetry, a page marked and a few lines of a poem highlighted in red marker, possibly something she was studying at the university. The book was Shakespeare's Sonnets, the lines were from Sonnet 94 and as Parry read them, they spoke deeply to him:

  through the book flipped The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,

  Though to itself it only live and die,

  Lilies But if that flower with base infection meet,

  The basest weed outbraves his dignity;

  For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

  that fester smell far worse than weeds.

  Parry and saw that other lines were marked. “No time for a poetry reading, Chief,” said Gagliano. “These people're going to kick us out on our asses any second now.”

  Parry slipped the book into his pocket and went on with the search of the girl's room. It turned up nothing unusual or telling or helpful. Gagliano was going through the underwear drawer when the father appeared at the door.

  Parry stepped between asking, “Was your girl seeing a boy? Anyone in particular, I mean?”

  “She too serious for most boys; she had mind made up to finish college. No boys, no, 'cept sometimes she went with George, but broke it up.”

  Both FBI men immediately wondered about George, and if this wouldn't simply turn out to be a lovers' spat and Linda would show up on her doorstep tomorrow.

  “George got a last name, sir?” asked Gagliano.

  The father looked perplexed and shouted to his wife for the name.

  “Oniiwah, George Oniiwah,” she moaned through the window from the porch, where she'd remained.

  The father cautioned, “But dey didn't see each other for long time.”

  Parry instantly thought Hawaiian on hearing George's last name, as it was a familiar island name. In fact, many in the Oniiwah family were well-to-do by any standard. “Do you know where this George Oniiwah lives?”

  The father called to his wife, who muttered to him in Portuguese before he came up with a street name and number. It was in a much nicer section of the city. The two of them had met during her freshman year at the university, he said. “But Lina broke it off when he got too serious for her.”

  'Too serious?”

  “You know, get married, have home and children.”

  The mother came in and stood in her missing child's room, her hands filled with papers and a little book, the medical records. Parry accepted them with his heartfelt thanks, and Gagliano took the moment to say they might return again at another time. The father began to protest, but then he let it go. Parry and Gagliano said good night to the distressed parents, whose neighbors were now swarmed about the bungalow and the unmarked FBI cars in a show of support for the bereaved family. Parry wondered where George was, and he asked Linda's father if the boy had gotten in touch since the disappearance. The answer was no.

  Gagliano's glint met Parry's knowing look. “We'll have to pull Georgie boy in for questioning.”

  'Tomorrow, Tony,” Jim Parry replied, weary-eyed and searching the dial on his watch, trying to focus, only to find it was already one in the morning. It had been a full day. He patted the book of poems in his pocket and said, “I'm going home, catch up on some reading and some sleep. See you tomorrow.”

  Suddenly one of the concerned neighbors, a large, healthy Hawaiian woman who came at Parry like arhino, said in a voice that shook even Gagliano, “You bastards bettah fine-dat little honey Lina, sin her home to her momma, you got-dat, Mr. United States FBI Mans? If you don't, there goin' to be big trouble in Oahu for you.”

  “You threatening Chief Parry, lady?” Gagliano began. But Parry held up a restraining hand and shouted to the crowd, “We're going to do everything within our power to locate the girl, but we're not superhuman. We can't work miracles.”

  He'd as much as told them the girl was dead. Parry and Gagliano got into their separate cars and wasted little time in moving off, but they did so at a snail's pace, all but daring the crowd to throw a rock or fire a shot. Both men were glad when nothing further developed. Parry looked back via his rearview mirror the whole way down the block, feeling frustrated, angry, and weary all in equal measure.

  6

  Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written....

  Galileo

  Jessica had sat up with Jay Leno and the rest of the Tonight Show gang via satellite, but she'd lost all but the back-scatter noise of the show in her concentration over the series of files left her by James Parry. Each photo and bio spoke of a young woman with a full life ahead of her, each of the victims coming from a large extended family, a few with children of their own. They weren't the typical big-city prostitutes one might expect. They weren't hardened or beaten or haggard, anorexic or overweight; they didn't have broken noses, scars or pimples, and from their photos most of them looked clean of drugs, their eyes clear and vibrant, speaking of souls filled with life and interests. Several—as Parry had intimated—were part-timers, supplementing their income in order to finish out a term at the university, while still others had no record of prostitution and had last been seen at a regular place of work.

  Linda Kahala, also known as Lina, of mixed Portuguese and Hawaiian blood, had been a dark-skinned beauty with radiant round eyes that seemed, from her photo at least, to be filled with an island innocence that likely got her killed.

  She wondered if this most recently vanished girl, had actually become the killer's ninth victim by Parry's count, or if she'd turn up at a boyfriend's house or telephoned from the mainland, having run away. Parry had made some big leaps, trying to connect a series of earlier disappearances on the island of Maui, a far less developed and more rural isle, with the disappearances in Honolulu on Oahu.

  Jessica wondered if the sweet-faced woman-child in the photograph was as innocent as she appeared; whether she had gotten sucked into the seamier side of Honolulu's cesspool. Every city, no matter its outward beauty and wonder, nourished a seductive, erotically appealing underbelly, all the more alluring to the poor, and it would appear that Linda Kahala might well have been caught in the quagmire, d
esperately in need of funds to continue at the university... and if her friends could turn tricks for tuition, why not her?

  The victims had commonalties among them, each one itemized in Parry's hand. First was appearance and race, then the fact they all worked in service-type jobs catering to tourists, even the ones labeled prostitutes. All of them had at one time lived in or near Kahuiui on Maui or here in Honolulu City, in and around a tightly woven ghetto surrounding Chinatown and an ancient neighborhood of mixed and Hawaiian families, where rows of squat little bungalows hugged the Ala Wai Canal. According to Chief James Parry, thin little Linda Kahala had last been seen on Ala Wai Boulevard the very night that Officers Hilani and Kaniola were murder by gun and machete. Coincidence or connection? If the two incidents were connected, she reasoned now in a half-dazed state, the mangled limb in Lau's freezer could well be Linda Kahala's.

  She fell asleep to the sounds of Leno's band as he wrapped for a commercial, her subconscious seemingly grateful for the noise of life. She fought her own mind for control of her dreams, determined that they be pleasant and relaxing, and soon she was back beneath Maui's coastal waters at the incredible underwater

  Molokini crater where she'd been diving before she was called to Honolulu. The sights were as breathtaking as when she was actually there, but what was even greater than this was the absolute feeling of freedom in the water; weightlessness brought its own rewards, a sense of absolution. It was the same high she'd heard fliers speak of when they left the ground, the same adrenaline rush that mountain climbers felt and that sky divers loved.

  She looked around to find herself completely alone in the water save for its teeming life, reflecting all the colors of the rainbow amid the fanning, waving coral. She saw a school of exquisite silver-blue fish disappear into a cavern below her. Darting after, feeling playful and alive, Jessica swam without hesitation into the black hole of shadow below her, where the beauty of the place took on an entirely new face; still lovely, it was an abiding deep blue turning to midnight in the cave. It was a mysterious and teasing midnight world into which the fish had simply vanished.

  She might have slept comfortably with this image, but suddenly the strength of the current which she'd glided on pinned her, forcing her forward into the blackness ahead of her, its strength ten times her own. She could not escape by the route she'd entered, unless the current receded and she caught the force as it returned, but it was growing, and became so turbulent now as to have taken on the character of a killer, capable of smashing her against the jagged rocks she saw silhouetted in the darkness.

  She felt a cold chill break out beneath her diving suit; felt gooseflesh slither along her body; heard the symbiotic human and mechanical sound of her own labored breathing through her regulator growing in intensity, now dangerously erratic as she sucked frantically on what little oxygen was left her. She felt dizzy, disoriented, confused as the water tumbled her about in the now-blue-black cavern, trapping her here, a powerless paper doll. The cutting, jagged edges of rock tore into her, ripping her suit and flesh, rending her life support from her mouth, crushing her tanks. Her body was held against the rock surface above her and she could feel both her blood and her breath slowly taken from her.

  Floating past her were bones and fleshy body parts, the long-haired, severed heads of dark-featured women, and one of them came to rest before her, pinned with her against the volcanic cave wall here below the Blow Hole, and this one's eyes were those of Linda Kahala. The girl's wide eyes filled both the cavern and Jessica's mind.

  She sat bolt upright, desperately fighting for breath in the phantom cave below the sea, fending off the dead girl who had come into her bed. “Christ!” she shouted at the room and at herself, angry for allowing herself even a subconscious moment of fear. She had fought long and hard to overcome the scars left upon her by the madman named Matisak, now safely locked away in a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane, but she knew that she'd never again be the same Jessica Coran she'd been before he had maimed her, that weakness and doubt shadowed her every step. It was the kind of frailty she did not want Parry, or anyone else for that matter, to ever see in her.

  A bittersweet taste of perspiration found her lips as beads cascaded tearlike from her forehead and down her cheek. She gave another moment's thought to Matisak, who even from behind bars had managed to get word to the press that he, from the confines of his cell, had meticulously led Jessica ever closer to the identity of the cannibalistic Claw in New York the year before. The story, finding print in the worst rags, claimed that she had used “Professor” Matisak's considerable powers of deduction in her remarkable manhunt to locate and destroy the Claw. Matisak, who was once a teacher, known also as 'Teach,” had a well-fed ego thanks to the incompetence of her superiors and the tabloid press. Two years of incarceration had only inflated his self-image and his lunacy.

  She wanted nothing more to do with the maniac who had killed Otto Boutine, and she'd made this clear to her superiors at the close of the Claw case when that bastard saw real justice done him: a paralyzing bullet she had sent through his skull, allowing him plenty of time for the kind of suffering and pain he'd inflicted on others before he went completely catatonic and died.

  Now, with a new section head, the overtures on the part of the new chief to keep gleaning information from Matisak left her cold. She'd told Zanek never again.

  Still, while she knew that rationally Matisak was thousands upon thousands of miles away and imprisoned, he was somehow here with her, his chilling astral spirit bringing down the temperature in the hotel room. He was with her now... along with Linda Kahala... tonight in Honolulu.

  Several days later, July 15, 1995

  After several nights of fitful dreams and nightmare visitations by Matisak, the Claw and their phantom evil here in Honolulu, the Trade Winds Killer, the toll was beginning to show on Jessica. Between 3 A.M. nightmares and all-day stints at the lab with Lau, she was exhausted. Still, she pushed herself harder than anyone on the team, anxious to fill in as many gaps as possible for Parry and his people, expecting any day now to get an evac order from Paul Zanek. She was just beginning to make progress, finalizing tests which Lau's people had prepared the way for, and the results were remarkable. From this fact she drew strength and pride.

  It was determined early on that Officer Kaniola's gunshot wound had not been fatal, and that he was alive and possibly conscious when the killer, using great force, sent what amounted to a machete or cane cutter into his throat, nearly severing the head. Tests proved this assumption valid. More importantly, perhaps, she'd discovered that blood found covering Alan Kaniola's left palm was determined to belong to someone else. While another medical examiner might simply have assumed it was Kaniola's own blood, instinct told her that Kaniola, in his death throes, might possibly have gouged his killer, possibly with the man's own knife. She was elated to gain this small prize of information. At least it gave her some degree of hope, for now the killer's blood could be tested, and they'd be that much closer to their prey, for no one knew the outcome of a blood test. Anything might be forthcoming about their killer: blood type, race, age, sex.

  But now, closer examination of the blood proved confusing. It was the blood of a young woman, possibly Linda Kahala's, and if so, it meant that somehow Officer Kaniola came into contact with either the body or a blood spatter somewhere up there on Koko Head. Seeing this turn of events beneath her microscope lens, Jessica set her teeth and clenched her fists. This information changes things, she thought, wondering at the possibilities.

  Earlier she had seen Agent Tony Gagliano, who'd come by to drop off all the medical documents he'd been able to lay hands on; wonderfully enough, he'd located useful medical information on Linda Kahala, an entire medical history from birth. Jessica began a routine blood-matching scan between what was found on Kaniola's palm and what was known about Linda Kahala's blood, which was considerable since she had a rare blood disorder and several easily identifiable characteri
stics. The testing took most of the morning, but the difficult part was extracting blood from the shoulder and forearm removed from the freezer. Meanwhile, the arm itself was undergoing a battery of tests, and so far the results all pointed to its belonging to a young woman between the ages of fifteen and twenty, as close as Jessica could tell, the age when the bone marrow was fully extended, at its peak in growth and maturity. The size of the bone also matched that of a girl Linda's age. With the help of a forensics anthropologist on loan from the University of Hawaii, a Dr. Katherine Smits, it became increasingly clear that this was the limb of a young woman in her late teens whose ancestry was Hawaiian, at least in part. Had there been an X-ray of Linda's arm in her history or any DNA samples to match against, Jessica was certain they could undoubtedly match the body fragment to Linda Kahala. As things stood, a blood match had to suffice.

  She returned to the blood matching, and by mid-afternoon she was completely convinced that not only was the limb's owner Linda Kahala, but that the blood on Officer Kaniola's palm had also been Linda's.

  The now-sure revelation made her sit down and lean back into the folds of the easy chair in the office that had been turned over to her. Lau alone, among all the assistants, seemed to suspect or know. He had helped her do the blood matching. He came in, and saw her confusion over their findings.

  “Odd, no?” he offered. “I mean about the arm and Kaniola's palm?”

  “Don't go jumping to any crazy conclusions, Mr. Lau,” she admonished. “This is just the kind of information that, in the wrong hands, could cause no end of confusion, embarrassment to your lab and our combined reputations, not to mention what I've been told is a volatile situation here in your city. We don't want the wrong people to know about this, understood?”