Primal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

“He ensnares, perhaps with words at first.” Parry thought of the Shakespearean sonnets he'd picked up from Linda's room, taken home and glanced over.

  “Then he renders his victim helpless,” she went on, “as when a snake sends venom into a mouse, immobilizing it. We found traces of a drug called curare, not present in the usual street drugs.”

  “I see...”

  “He next assaults, kills and disposes of his victims.”

  “And he hunts nightly during the trades, looking for his victim of opportunity.”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “And when he fails to find her, he goes home and opens his box of precious collectibles—a collection of keys, hairpins, lipstick vials, underwear, earrings, necklaces and body parts.”

  “HPD has a lot of red-eyed detectives back out on the streets, particularly along Ala Moana, Kalakaua, Kuhio and the Ala Wai, interviewing pimps, johns, taxi drivers, employees in stores and restaurants in the vicinity, you name it. My own people have already logged three hundred man hours out there and zip. It's like this guy's a magician; makes 'em disappear before everyone's eyes.”

  “Yeah, I saw how crowded the streets were the other night when we were strolling. He meets her at a bus stop or a supermarket, convinces her that he has something she needs, that they have to go to his place to get it.”

  Parry grimly replied, “He has that lethal combination of desire, passion, lust and an inability to satisfy that need through any normal means.”

  “Impotence,” she agrees. “Dysfunctional, and squeamish over the thought of pain and suffering—his own, that is—and the sight of blood—his own, that is. But at the first sight of blood from his first slash when he lost control with his first victim, he learned that the feel of anguish and torture, and the sight of blood streaming down the body of a helpless victim, creates in him an epiphany of pure pleasure, an orgasm like nothing he has ever experienced before, that for the first time in his miserable life he is sexually fulfilled.”

  “Yeah, understood... not only does overpowering a helpless woman give him an erection, it makes him ejaculate.”

  “Blood and pain... that's what he's into, and whoever this guy is, he's slowly come around to the conclusion that murder's not only easy, it's sexually gratifying,” she continued. “The sight of blood, the struggle against him, the ultimate empowerment he feels, his goddamned erection, it all combines when he cuts into his victim and dangles her life over the edge.”

  “Her life or death in his hands alone. Makes him feel like God, I'm sure.”

  “For once in his life he's in control. That's what matters to him.”

  Parry swallowed hard, thinking of young Linda Kahala, of her father and mother, of how he was going to break the news to them that their daughter was now, for a certainty, the first positively identified young woman of the many missing who were all assuredly dead. It followed that since the last of the missing was murdered, the others were more than likely just as dead. There was no telling how many bodies this madman had accumulated below the waters of the Blow Hole.”Not so sure I can eat lunch now,” admitted Jessica.

  “How about a stiff island drink?” he suggested.

  “That I can't refuse.”

  “Maybe after a drink, you'll feel like something to eat, maybe a sandwich. I know a place close by.”

  She got up, grabbed her cane and came around to where he'd remained standing. “You're certainly taking good care of me.”

  “Zanek's orders,” he said casually.

  “Is that it? And what did Paul tell you about me?”

  “Only that you're the best, and now I understand why he says so.”

  She stripped away her lab coat, put her jacket over her shoulders, and tapped with her cane ahead of him, privately pleased at his attentions. In D.C. she had a reputation as something of a cold “cutter,” a typical M.E. rubric. Some there still called her the Scavenger—always on the hunt for clues. People, and men in particular, were usually standoffish, unsure around her, often threatened by her. The irony of it was that, despite her education, her medical training and her time at the FBI academy, and despite the fact she was an excellent markswoman, she thought herself the least intimidating person she knew. At least, she didn't intentionally intimidate men; still, like an aura one is bom with, she was seldom viewed as anything other than Dr. Jessica Coran, M.E., FBI. There had only been a handful of men in her life who had gotten beyond their initial hangups about her qualifications and degrees, and even this usually required close working conditions and long hours to reach what ought to be an easily accessible plateau.

  Interestingly, this hadn't been the case with Inspector James Parry. Here, with him, she'd been treated like a lady from the moment they'd met.

  “You seem to do pretty well without the cane,” he commented when they'd gotten into the elevator. “I looked in on you earlier. You were busy in the lab, so...”

  “Sometimes I need it more... depends on how long I've been on my feet,” she managed.

  It was a lovely, silver-handled thing, given her as a coming- home present from J.T. and others at her Quantico labs when she had “come home” after her long ordeal with rehab. The trial that had placed a maniac into a psycho ward in a federal pen for the criminally insane had also been a treacherous ordeal. To this day, Mad Matthew Matisak held sway over certain of her emotions. As Donna, her well-paid psychologist whom she knew on a first- name basis now, had told her, “When you stare into the abyss, it sometimes stares back.”

  The healing process, for the brand of distress which Matisak had put her through, had taken years, and even now she was far from any cure or freedom from the scars, particularly the invisible ones. Matisak had cut into her for reasons not unlike those of the Trade Winds Killer, and here she was, staring again into the pit, looking for answers to questions most people pretended never to hear... searching through the rubble of the ugliest side of the human condition which netted rape, bloodletting, torture, mutilation and lust murder.

  She wondered if Jim Parry's solicitousness was due to his measured concern for what had happened to her in the past, due to what he knew of her encounter with “Teach” Matisak. He knew that she had looked even deeper into the abyss than he, and that for her it was Matisak's insane eyes that stared back. Parry was intelligent and keen and sensitive. Was he interested in her, she wondered, or what she knew firsthand about serial killers?

  Like all of the FBI family, Jim had to be well informed about her ordeal, aware of her near-death experience at Matisak's hand. How she'd lost Otto to Matisak...

  At his car, he took her cane and offered a hand as she eased into the seat, and for a moment he lingered over the beauty of the cane itself, commenting on the ornamental craftsmanship. It wasn't a Rolex, but it had to have cost some bucks... and he must have known that it was the same cane which had thwarted the demonic efforts of Simon Archer, a.k.a. the Claw. She could read it in his lingering gaze.”You want to know about Simon Archer and about Matthew Matisak, don't you?” she asked.

  “No, no,” he said.

  She didn't believe him. By the same token, she knew that Parry thrived on knowing facts, and that feeding on case-file information was not enough for a thorough investigator such as he. This was his strength and what made him appealing, and she also knew that he was dying to know all the inside dirt.

  “If it'll endear me to you,” she said with a crooked smile, “I suppose I can tell you about Matisak and Archer.” It might even be theraputic, she heard Donna Lemonte say.

  He came around to the driver's side, the cane still in his hand. Placing the cane onto the rear seat and sliding in, he said, “Jessica, you don't have to talk about it.”

  His sincerity was tinged with a healthy dose of cop curiosity which she both understood and respected. “No, no,” she began, “it's pretty obvious what's on your mind.”

  “Really,” he insisted, “we can talk about other things.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she replied, “after this is out of t
he way.”

  “Jess!” he said, feigning annoyance.

  She launched into the subject of Mad Matisak by way of an autopsy and a double exhumation which led her along a twisted trail to Matisak's lair.

  7

  We heed no instincts but our own.

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Jessica's whiskey sour with a twist of lime had arrived alongside Parry's gin and tonic, and she was taking in the incredible expanse of the turquoise Pacific, about to taste her drink there in the lounge atop the Aloha Tower, when Jim Parry lifted his glass in a salute, pointed to Diamond Head in the distance and said, “Okole maluna.”

  She accepted the toast, touching her glass to his, asking, “And what does that mean?”

  “Bottoms up, in this instance.”

  “What do you mean in this instance? It has a double meaning?”

  “A vulgar one.”

  She was intrigued. “Really? I love vulgar—what?”

  “I'd just as soon—”

  “No, please, what else does it mean?”

  “Well, the literal translation means 'stick your bottom up toward the moon,' kind of moon the moon, a practice which most Honolulu cops let pass unless the drunk gets completely out of hand.”

  She shook her head and frowned, “Luna, like the Italian moon.”

  “Suck 'em up.” He made it sound like sock 'urn op, as he downed the rest of his drink. “That's another island expression, generally to do with alcoholic beverages, but this could also be taken as a cry of need, an invitation... depends upon the speaker and... circumstances.”

  “As circumstances warrant? It sounds as if the Hawaiian people are a flexible lot, if you go by their language.” She felt a bit uneasy with the innuendo, looked around and asked aloud about the time.

  He laughed lightly and said, “It's Hawaiian Time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A bit late. Anywhere from several hours to several days late, that is.”

  She smiled again, relaxing. “You know the island people well, don't you?”

  “No haole ever completely knows them, and when you speak of the island people, well, that includes a lot of varied nationalities. What with all the imported labor for the sugarcane and pineapple fields over the years—Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese. Did you know there were one hundred sixty thousand Japanese on the islands at the time Pearl Harbor was attacked?”

  She realized of course that he was right; she'd heard nine languages being spoken in the space of time it took for her to gather her bags at the airport in Maui and get to her hotel— Chinese, English, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Samoan, and a smattering of Spanish.

  “The diversity,” she told him, “simply adds to the romance of the islands.”

  “For the visitor, sure. For the working law-enforcement official, it can cause a lot of problems. For instance, the big Samoans, many of them huge monsters, keep an annual holiday which when translated is 'Kill a Haole Day.'“

  “Kill a White Day,” she repeated. “I see.”

  “Still, English has been the spoken language of Hawaii since the 1850s and it's taught in all island schools.”

  “I've heard a pidgin English among the bellhops, cabbies and others.”

  “Mo betta leave da kine talk 'lone.”

  She laughed at his charming accent.

  “Hawaiians liberally lace their language with pidgin; kind of a tapestry of Hawaiian words, English words and something in between. Tony, me, others working the law here have had to learn it as a matter of survival.”

  She knew that the Hawaiian alphabet was the shortest in the world, using five vowels—a, e, i, o, u—and only seven consonants—h, k, 1, m, n, p and w. All vowels were pronounced and there was a vowel at the end of each syllable, and a vowel always between consonants. An eighth consonant was a glottal stop, pronounced the way the breathy pause in “oh-oh” was created. The w after an i or e made the sound of a v as in Ewa.

  “And I should warn you about asking a Hawaiian about directions,” he added.

  “Oh, and why's that?”

  “You've got two main directions here: mauka—towards the mountains—and makai—towards the sea. Even on their maps you'll be hard pressed to know north from south, east from west. A kamaaina refers to landmarks rather than to points on a compass.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “All right, to reach Iolani Palace from here, 'da kine trip, you go mauka four blocks, then waikiki three blocks, li' dat. Now geev um, brah—go for it, friend!”

  Jessica's full, warm laughter filled the cocktail lounge. She stared out at the unending sea and back to Diamond Head. Parry watched her gleaming eyes.

  He said almost in whisper, “Leahi.”

  Her eyes returned to him, her lips parting, asking him to explain himself with a mere look, almost certain he was paying her some sort of Hawaiian compliment.

  “Wreath of Fire.”

  “What?”

  “Leahi—that's what the Hawaiians called it—Diamond Head. They called it Wreath of Fire because long ago signal beacons were lit up there, or possibly because in Hawaiian mythology, Hi'iaka, Pele's little sister, compared the crater's shape to the brow—lae—of an 'ahi fish, the yellowfin tuna.”

  “Then how'd it become Diamond Head?”

  “It was first called Diamond Head by British seamen who mistook the calcite crystals they found there for diamonds. At night sometimes, when the light is right, the calcite crystals resemble—at least for the Hawaiian romantics—the tears of Pele, goddess of the crater. Her tears were formed into diamonds, so to speak, by the force of the lava. Anyway, makes for great copy for the island promos.”

  “It is beautiful,” she said, “and so are the legends, wherever they come from.”

  “Sometimes hard to distinguish fact from fiction here,” he replied, lifting his empty glass at the waitress. “People think that grass skirts and ukuleles were invented here, but not so.”

  “It still sounds to me as though you love the islands, Jim.”

  He smiled at the use of his name. “I do. It's become home for me now. I've gotten accustomed to their ways.”

  “Guess I feel the same about my place in Quantico. We certainly grow attached to our surroundings—people in general, I mean.”

  “People in our line of work in particular,” he added. “You try to build a safe wall of protection, a place to finally get away from what your normal day—if you can call it that—brings you. I don't have to tell you.”

  She shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder why I stay in the FBI.”

  “So do I, but then I get up in the morning and go straight back in. Some of the cases I've worked have been so brutalizing, dehumanizing, awful—for me, I mean. Guess... guess from what you've said, you're not wanting in that department.”

  She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, thinking of the nearly nine months of intensive psychological trashing she had taken at the hands of her therapist. “Guess it's in my blood,” she replied, telling him about her father instead, a man who had been an M.E. for the Navy for most of his life. She didn't want to admit to any failures or scars, either physical or psychological. She didn't want Parry to think her less than perfect, for despite the cane, he seemed, at the moment, to think highly of her.

  Parry now ordered an island daiquiri, explaining that the locals made the drink two and three times as potent as normal. “I earned it,” he proclaimed. “I'll need it for the trip back to the Kahalas'. Time to inform the parents...”

  “I'll go with you,” she offered, extending her hand, her jaw set firmly, eyes fixed onto him. “I've dealt with grieving parents before.”

  “I'm sure you have.”

  “Having a female along might help.”

  “It might at that, but you've had enough for one day.”

  “Worried about my stamina or Paul Zanek?” Instead of answering her, he pulled out a small, tattered-looking book of poems which might have come from an ancient pawn
shop. “Found this in Linda Kahala's room several days ago.” He handed it over.

  The title read Shakespeare's Sonnets. He-indicated the highlighted lines, flipping through to Sonnet 73, where Jessica scanned the morbid lines underlined in red, made more curious by the circumstances of Linda's death:

  In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

  As after sunset fadeth in the west;

  Which by and by black night doth take away,

  Death's second self that seals up all the rest.

  In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

  That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

  As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

  Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

  “I've checked with the university and she was involved in a Shakespeare class,” said Parry. “Most of her grades were pretty mediocre, except for the English, with the exception again of the Shakespeare course. So thought I'd take a pass at her instructor. See what shakes out there.”

  “Not a bad idea. She certainly seemed melancholy, but that's true of most teens. It's the age when they groove on Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Love craft, too, so maybe you ought not to take these red marks too seriously.”

  “Just a hunch, a feeling.”

  “I still think you ought to get some divers as close to that Blow Hole as possible; see what may have flushed out from the bottom,” she suggested.

  “Didn't suppose you'd let that go. But it'll be dangerous, even for the most experienced men. Still, I guess we'll have to go hunting down there now for sure.”

  “I'm not interested in a media show, just forensic evidence. If this bastard's ever caught, we're going to need all we can get on him.”

  “Whether you like media circuses or not, we've got one on our hands. No way to duck it, and maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we ought to use the media to our advantage.”

  “That kind of thing can be risky. People can get hurt.”

  “I'm aware of that, Jessica. I wanted you here for good reason. You've used the press to advantage in the past.”