Darkest Instinct

NINE

Santiva had somehow come up with a garden salad in a plastic container, a peace offering there in the hallway. “Will you talk to the girl? Judy Templar’s her name. She’s told police everything she remembers twice over, but she’s holding back, says she can’t remember the features of the man whom Tammy Sheppard was last seen with. It’s like she wants to but she’s blocked it out, self-preservation perhaps; I don’t pretend to know. See what you think, and let me know.”

“ Is she deliberately holding back?”

“ I don’t think it’s deliberate so much as it is some sort of psychological safety valve; I think she’s feeling guilty about the death of her friend, and now, learning that her death is a certainty, well… she’s closed some doors.”

“ How long have you had her in interrogation?”

“ Three hours. Had trouble finding her earlier. She was shopping but she didn’t buy anything. No one with her. She’s either a bad liar or very lonely.”

“ She give the composite guys anything?”

“ She’s been so wishy-washy and iffy that the session was a washout.”

Jessica located a small snack room whose tables and hard chairs looked familiar and comforting. She sat down and consumed half her fast-food salad while Eriq paced.

“ All right, I’ll talk to her, but there’s nothing says I’ll get any more from her than you were able to.”

She was up and tossing the remainder of her salad into a trash container, walking out the entry and into the corridor, going for the police precinct upstairs. Santiva hurried alongside her, asking, “Anything new or helpful come of the autopsies?”

“ Just what we suspected. Same MO, same guy.”

“ On all three… astonishing. God, this mother makes me mad.”

“ Maybe that’s his intention-and dive below that a moment, Eriq and ask yourself what that says about us.”

“ Hey, don’t go soft on me now, Jessica. We’re doing our jobs, and that’s all we’re doing. There’s a storm sliding across the sea out there that we didn’t create. We can only monitor it, locate it, warn others of it and somehow work to diffuse it.”

“ Warn others of it? Just how have we warned anyone outside police circles, Eriq? Just when do we get these storm warnings out to the public?”

“ In due time. That’s not your concern.”

“ Not my concern? Hell, Eriq, it should be our number one concern. You saw how young those girls in Coudriet’s Crime Lab were. It’s time we got some information out.”

“ That’s just what he wants us to do, write him up big in all our papers, talk about him on our TV and radio programs. Hell, he probably wants a spot on OprahV’

“ Then give it to the bastard, and give it to the public. It’s past time everyone knew.”

“ You get this kid upstairs to open up about the killer’s identity, and we’ll go public-hell, we’ll go national. Deal?”

She stopped before the elevator as it opened, depositing a handful of medical staff. She then stepped inside and turned to face Eriq, who remained in the corridor. “Deal,” she said as she laid on the close button, the doors responding immediately, closing on Eriq, who shouted, “She’s in interrogation six.”

Jessica saw Mark Samernow at the water cooler and Quincey on the phone at his desk. Samernow gave Jessica a half smile and asked her how she was doing, surprising her.

“ Why can’t anyone get any information from this girl inside interrogation room six?” she asked him.

“ Ask me, I’d say she’s blocked it out. Not a bad kid, really, just scared and feeling badly.”

“ That’s what Santiva tells me.”

“ We could get a shrink in to talk with her, but our guy’s a Freudian and not much with situations like this.”

She nodded. “How’re you doing, Detective?”

“ Me? Hell, I’m fine since the chewing-out I got from Quince and then my captain. He sure put my butt back on track. Tells me I’m being transferred out of Homicide to Vice detail if I don’t clean up my act. Guess I’ll survive one way or another.”

She wondered about the man’s sudden transformation. He seemed to have experienced more than just a dressing- down by the boss. She followed his lead to the door of interrogation six. He was pleasant when he said, “Santiva told us you’d be talking to the girl.”

“ I have carte blanche with this kid?”

“ All right by us.”

“ She’s not being charged for obstruction or anything stupid like that?”

“ Only if you say so, Dr. Coran.”

“ No, I don’t think so.”

She opened the door on the interrogation room where Judy Templar had patiently and sadly waited; the place was bare, cold and unfriendly to say the least, and although it had recently been refurbished with new carpeting and furniture, not even the fresh coat of paint could conceal the years-old accumulation of cigar and cigarette smoke. New or old, cigarette butts were cigarette butts, and they lay in cheap Wal-Mart crockery ashtrays instead of cheap tin ashtrays now, and something like battery acid leaked from Sty- rofoam cups, the litter of long nights. Add to this picture one frightened young woman who had come in of her own accord-a second time-to repeat her story, and Jessica knew a change of venue was in order.

She introduced herself to Judy Templar and they shook hands, Jessica immediately aware of the trembling within the other woman. “You’ve been here a long time, I understand. Your parents know you’re here?”

“ Why? They’ve got nothing to do with this.” She looked a bit like the actress Molly Ringwald minus the freckles, Jessica thought, with pretty red tresses for hair; but she’d given no attention to eye shadow or other makeup.

From the young woman’s tone, Jessica guessed aloud, “Your folks

… they tell you to keep your mouth shut, to keep away from the police?”

“ No… not exactly.”

“ They fear your getting involved in any way could make you a target for the killer?”

“ They fear it, I fear it… and why not? You people haven’t been able to stop him, and now they find Tammy and those other two girls, and… and-” Her words were cut short by her inability to breathe, gasp and speak at the same time.

“ You hungry?” Jessica asked Judy.

“ I’m too upset to eat anything.”

“ Have you lost a lot of weight since Tammy was taken?”

“ It’s just fallen off. Can’t eat… can’t sleep.”

Jessica stood, saying, “Whataya say we get the hell out of here. You like cappuccino or Irish coffee or espresso? You know a place where we can get some?”

“ Sure, the Cafe Promenade, just down the street.”

“ Take me, will you?”

“ Just like that, I can leave with you?”

“ No one here’s going to hold you against your will, Judy; no one.”

She seemed suddenly to relax. “Nobody knows how it feels, how I feel, the problem… the sheer size of the problem… of it all.”

“ You want to talk about it?”

“ It’s like a book I read in school once, a book called The Pearl. This man finds a pearl and he thinks it’s going to bring him happiness and riches for his whole family, but all it brings down is misery. I feel kinda like that guy in the book, except I didn’t find any pearl or riches; but I came that close to this bastard who killed Tammy, so close that I sat across from him like I’m sitting across from you, but it’s information-that’s the pearl everybody wants to get from me, but I… I can’t bring it back, and I can’t go back and do things differently…”

“ I understand the feeling, believe me.”

She sniffled and held back a tear. “It’s like my memory on that one point is… well, gone dead. But everybody wants this pearl from me and I don’t have it to give, you know?”

“ Sure… sure… I understand. I shut down on a lot of bad memories myself over the years.” Jessica gave a thought to her psychiatrist, Dr. Donna LeMonte, whose therapy had helped her to deal with her most frightful memories, guilts and ghosts and demons from within and without. She wondered if she might persuade Donna to come to Miami to help Judy Templar and thereby help her and Santiva’s case.

“ Not to worry, Judy. I won’t lie to you. I’m interested in that pearl of information you’re harboring, too, but my first concern is your well-being.”

“ Oh, sure…” This was said in the cynical voice of youth pitted against authority.

“ Judy, you haven’t been able to talk to anyone about this, have you?”

She shook her head to indicate no, her eyes swelling now with tears.

Jessica handed her tissues. “The first time you were asked to come in, you told police you couldn’t remember anything. Was that a lie or were you just as confused as you are now?”

“ I couldn’t bring it back.”

“ You try talking to your family, friends about it?”

“ I tried, but no one wanted to hear it, and I… I was in bad shape, and everybody just wanted to console me, you know, so like Mom says, ‘Put it out of your mind,’ and so I did… I did…”

“ Judy, I’m not here to upset you, but I just spent seven hours with what is left of your friend Tammy.”

The young woman grimaced and looked away.

Jessica cautiously continued, “My concerns are your concerns now; we’re in this together. I’m not a cop, I’m-”

“ You’re FBI, I know.”

“ I’m an M.E. first, and I’m a woman before that, Judy. I have also been the target of stalkers, of madmen, and I have felt fear like a cold rod of steel in my bone marrow, so I think I do have some empathy with you, dear.”

Tearfully, expectantly, her eyes wide, Judy asked Jessica, “Can you… do you think you can help me? I think I’m going crazy.”

Jessica stood, came around the interrogation table and reached out for Judy Templar, who got to her feet and accepted Jessica’s warm embrace. Jessica felt like a mother as she took the younger woman in her arms and hugged her firmly. The human contact felt good and right for herself too, Jessica instantly realized.

Judy’s immediate family had somehow hindered her, encouraged her to hide away from the reality of what had happened, and whatever part she had played in it had been unsuccessfully buried. Jessica felt the eyes of the others on them, penetrating through the mirrored wall at her back. Behind the one-way mirror, the MPD detectives and Eriq Santiva no doubt watched and monitored the words coming out of interrogation six.

“ Come on, let’s get out of here. Get that cup of cappuccino. Whataya say, Judy?”

The young woman passively agreed to leave with Jessica. They gathered up Judy’s things and stepped from the cold room that had made her feel only more guilty than she already did, and together they marched past Santiva and the detectives for the door.

Eriq Santiva called out, “We’re not done with Ms. Templar just yet, Dr. Coran.” He then took Jessica aside, leaving Judy looking alone and vulnerable again, and whispered, “Just where do you think you are going?”

The hard edge Eriq was showing had a dramatic flair that instantly told Jessica he was playing bad cop to her good cop to reinforce her bond with Judy Templar. Good move, she silently thought as she snubbed her nose at Santiva and replied, “None of your goddamned business, Agent Santiva! You’ve bullied this poor girl enough for one day!”

And with that she whisked Judy out the front door as Judy thanked her for being so kind and so brave.

“ I never liked that guy,” she conspiratorially confessed to Judy. “Thinks he’s Einstein and Mel Gibson rolled into one.”

Judy managed a laugh at this, a good sign in the sparkling Florida evening, where the shadows heralded the last rays of the sun in the west. But they were staring due east, toward Washington Avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets, just down from Espafiola Way and two blocks from Ocean Avenue and the white-sand beaches of Miami.

“ Which way to this Promenade place?” Jessica asked, feeling the light touch of the warm evening breeze kiss her cheek.

Judy Templar filled her lungs with the salt air, and Jessica did the same as if on impulse; but it was conscious mimicry. Judy said of the cafe, “It looks out over the promenade walkway and the ocean, just a block or so east. I’ll show you.”

They started down the alabaster stone steps of the old City Hall-now the Miami Beach Police and Courthouse Building. It was a beautiful old white structure, the courthouse, done in Spanish hacienda style with red-brick-tiled roofs all around. A newer complex and parking garage had been attached, the add-on forming the new Crime Lab. The entire municipal complex took up a good city block. The walk to the cafe was pleasant and passed in silence between them for most of the way. “It’s okay to talk about Tammy, about how you felt about her, about the last night you saw her, Judy.”

“ I’ve tried… but it’s locked away.”

“ If you can give us any information whatsoever, it may save another girl’s life.”

“ I know all that… I know…”They reached the cafe, a delightful place with outdoor tables and chairs where the waiters outnumbered the patrons for a change, two to a table, each taking turns at improving the comfort of their customers. The view of the sea, with a waning sun reflecting off thunderheads just offshore, was spectacular, and along the walkway between them and the ocean, passersby kept the view from ever becoming static.

They each ordered cappuccino, and after a moment Jessica asked, “Would you see a friend of mine who might help you to remember that night?”

“ Whataya mean, a shrink?”

“ A dear, trusted friend and my own psychiatrist, who can regress you back to-”

“ I’m not sure I can go back to that night.”

“ If you don’t go back now, you will be going back forever,” Jessica told the younger woman. “I know… I’ve been where you are now, and believe me, Judy-”

“ You’re sure it’s for the best?”

“ I am.”

“ It’ll be going against my parents…”

“ How old are you, Judy?”

“ But who’s going to pay for a shrink? I don’t have the-”

“ The FBI’ll pay for it; all you have to do is want help.”

“ Sign off on some sorta waiver, you mean?” Judy asked. “So there’s no lawsuits later, right?”

Two steaming-hot cups of dark liquid were set before them, the waiter asking if he might get them anything else. “Anything at all,” he said with a hint of flirtation in his voice that Judy was in no condition to receive.

After Jessica had assured the waiter he could help them no more, noticing how his eyes roved over Judy and then her, and the man had retreated, she spoke again to Judy. “Let me tell you about Dr. Donna LeMonte.

Onshore, the Miami lights were just blinking on, and in the western skies, the heavens lived up to the word firmament. In blood-orange hues that radiated from the horizon, the sun had painted the whole area an extraordinary red- orange, save for the soft, reflected underbelly of scudding clouds which melted into muted lavenders and purples. From his sailboat, a powerful schooner-class vessel capable of great speed and endurance, Warren Tauman skillfully raised his sails to catch the new wind. The evening before, he had plotted a course that would take him in a south-by-southeasterly direction toward the Keys, and to make time, he’d gone out beyond sight of land, to catch the strongest ocean currents.

A balmy wind had come up, and forecasters had predicted that it would grow in intensity. It was a sign: It was time for him to move on. Besides, moving over the ocean at a fast clip helped reduce his anxiety and depression.

He had a great deal to be depressed about. His plans had gone well only up to a point. His ability to ensnare his victims as Patric Allain had gone wonderfully well, but what of his master plan? The one which would please him to no end, and please his faithful god, Tauto? This plan had not materialized; in fact, there had been another major setback.

Now, even as he worked hemp into tightly twisted knots and brought the ship about to take full advantage of the tropical winds, his mind went over and over his failure, which was down below in the cabin, pinned to a wall there with judicious care so as to have no pierced parts showing, so as to have her appear as lifelike as possible: a Madonna-Mother in her prime…

He now set the wheel, turning the ship for sea and watching Miami slowly, imperceptibly disappear behind his tack.

He screamed at the wind that blasted his face and body. “To hell with the games here! To hell with the FBI and the MPD and all the fools who thought they could catch me or ever understand me.”

They hadn’t come close; they had disappointed him as well. Now, they didn’t deserve his time or energy. Perhaps, elsewhere, he’d be given more attention by the press, be given the respect and awe rightly owed him. He was, after all, death incarnate.

The ship was well away now, the wind doing its work. It was a beautiful clear night in the Devil’s Triangle, where he felt at home. He set the wheel and went below to stare at his last victim once more.

She hung from the wall where the hook he’d placed through her backbone held her in place. From the frontal view, she was perfect in every way, but there was the stench he could not get rid of, and there was the seeping from every orifice, despite the huge amount of absorbent packing material he’d used in the mouth, ears and other openings. He’d discovered only too late that there was seepage out the back, where he’d so meticulously placed the hook and packed the preservative material and plaster of paris about the wound. True, this had been his first attempt at whole-body preservation. But like all the others, this one was hell-bent to refuse preservation. She’d have to be chucked overboard like those before her. “You disappoint me, Madeleine.” He spoke to her, holding up a photo of a young beauty in a wide-brimmed, theatrical hat who looked like the young woman hanging before him. “And you look so much the part… more like Mother than any of the others ever had; in fact, the resemblance to the pictures of young Mother are uncanny. But something in the mixture, perhaps the measurements, perhaps the pervasive moisture, continues to frustrate my every attempt.”

He lifted a mirror from the opposite cabin wall and placed it before the dead girl, whose form was given a lifelike pose by her outstretched and rigid arms, her feet helping to support her via the steel rods he’d fixed from the deck to the soles of her feet. He’d seen it done with the weight of tigers, so why not with her small frame?

Her body was nude. “Look at yourself; you are beautiful, Mother dear, so why do you not come to me now? Do you fear me so much?”

Warren, alias Patric Allain, looked away from the dead girl once known as Madeleine and into the mirror. In the mirror, he saw her eyes blink open and quickly close, teasing him; her fingers twitched, struggling toward life, but again only in the mirror.

Mother wanted so much to come back to him. She was trying, desperately, but now in the mirror, all was still life again, all was solidly, stolidly dead.

“ Damn you!” He slammed the mirror down onto a countertop, and although it cracked, it did not break. “Damn you for taunting me and playing these bloody games, Mother!” His anger rose, a torrential sea swell, and caught up in it, he grabbed hold of the dead girl and ripped her from her hook and the super-strength glue that held her shoulders and backside to the wall. He dragged the stiff body up the stairs to the staccato beat of its stiff limbs against the ladder.

“ It isn’t as if I were asking for the moon; it seems a bloody simple enough desire, a plain enough wish to preserve a human body without completely gutting it!”

He’d tried the mortician’s way, to no avail; it was good for only so long. He had then tried the taxidermist’s method, plying the body with the chemicals of the fish trophy people. He had apprenticed with them, had learned all their secrets-so why wasn’t it working now? Because humans aren’t fish, common sense told him. Each organ decayed at its own pace and in its own time. Maybe it would be necessary to gut the body-but then it wouldn’t be ready for Mother to inhabit and reanimate when she finally arrived. It would be a mere shell. Could all his work, all his earlier attempts, all his experimenting truly have come to this dead end?

He had done all that his god had asked of him; he had caught his mother’s spirit again and again, had made her suffer in ways even he had not dreamed possible. He had made her beg and plead for her life countless times; he had repeatedly and pleasingly humiliated her. He had raped her again and again, and still she resisted coming to him and remaining as his permanent trophy. As he struggled to get the body above deck, he cursed, “If you had any character, any character at all, you’d have come to me long ago to end the suffering I must continue to bring down upon the innocent. Mother, you putrid bitch!” He had released the three bodies at once, sacrifices to his demon god, so he had truly expected better; he’d expected Her to come to him. But this was only followed by another day and night of being unable to fill the need that drove him. And now another day had passed in which he’d had no opportunity to kill, not anyone. His god counseled patience, that the right time and opportunity would present itself, and soon, but the frustration of doing nothing-of accomplishing nothing-was overwhelming, boxing him up, making him feel small and useless and helpless and irritable and memory-ridden, so much so that he’d begun to wonder if he had been foolish to cut loose three of the dead at once-one of which he hadn’t had the use of for very long at all. A deepening depression continued to enshroud Warren.

Still, there was meaning and reason to his rash act, since he was assured by the voice of the deity driving him-a twofold purpose, in fact. He would taunt authorities for proof of the sheer fact that he could, yes, but in addition, by releasing the rotting corpses of those he’d kept in limbo, he’d be forced to go after more, to harvest others, replace those lost… to seek a higher plane, a better union with the one power capable of returning Mother to him so that he might hurt Her for all eternity.

Substitutes were no longer enough.

It hadn’t been a completely conscious path he had followed to come to this plateau of understanding, no more so than had been the decision to release three victims of his insatiable need at once. In fact, he hardly recalled cutting the ropes, and he certainly didn’t recall deciding to leave the ropes dangling from the bodies, although he did recall leaving the rope attached to their hands and throats. Was it purposeful? Was it to give authorities a taste of the fox, so to speak? He knew the authorities wanted him so badly that they might do anything to stop him, but he did not believe them capable of learning about him, locating him or stopping him. In fact, releasing three bodies at once was a slap in their collective faces, the bloody bastards. Give them not one body to ponder but three at once. It was a stroke of irrepressible genius, if he could take credit for it; but no doubt the idea had been deposited by Tauto.

Now that the collective they had the FBI working the case, Warren-or some part of him, perhaps his Tauto, his god-had decided to be more playful, to exact a higher price from those who virtually allowed his ravagings to go on, to give them more to chew on and nightmare over. Three killings were better than one. The newspapers couldn’t ignore it. The TV cameras couldn’t ignore it. The world couldn’t ignore it.

But it seemed they had pretty much ignored it. They gave it a minute and twenty-nine seconds of airtime on Channel 3; the Herald positioned it on page two while turning page one over to the President’s arms embargo of a third-world country, a big trade agreement with Japan and the death of a local politician by suicide.

“ Well, screw the whole lot of them,” he told the empty expanse of ocean where he stood, Madeleine’s body fighting him, the gravity pull on it so powerful it felt like lead. For a moment, he wondered if the pull wasn’t from the hand of Mother, ever-teasing bitch that she was. He looked out over the side, saw the rushing wake and realized his ship was moving at quite a clip and that he must return his attention to the helm. Earlier he had set sail for the south to see where the winds of fortune and fate might take him. And now what had begun as a mild tropical wind had become a strong southeast tack that had tagged his T-cross, filling out her sails, the breath of his god speaking to him, telling him it was time to return to more southerly regions, cast his fate in another direction, see what might come of it. He was, after all, a free soul now.

“ Free of the past?” he asked himself as he struggled with the body, working it up and over the lip of the ship’s starboard side. “Not hardly… not until Mother comes for Hers,” he reminded himself, talking to the stiff body he continued to struggle to bring to the rail.

He’d readied to send the body over when it spoke to him. “You’ll never be free of me, Warren dear…” The weight and gravity pulled the body from his grasp, but Warren held on to it by a thread, by the single hook in its back. It dangled over the side precariously, trying to pull him into the depths with it.

“ Mother, you dirty, filthy, whoring bitch!” he shouted at the corpse, feeling the sting of a psychological imprisonment he’d endured all his life.

She just purred up at him from the well of the dead carcass, speaking in her cockney English brogue, “Not bloody likely you’ll ever be free of me, dearie… not yet, anyway…” The dead lips mouthed the words as Warren blinked back saltwater spray and tears and the ship bounced wildly against the increasing waves.

Perhaps, he thought, / won 7 ever be free… can 7 be free…

“ Not until you’re dead, dear,” the corpse said in his head.

“ Mother, it isssss you! It is you! Finally come…” He held insanely to the body with all his strength as it fought to find the water. He struggled as the ship lurched now against the sea, threatening to claim his mother, his hard- won prize. He held on to the corpse, cursing it. “Damn you, I’ve finally got you, and I’m holding on!”

He almost fell into the ocean with the corpse, but suddenly the hook around the spinal column held, despite the yielding, no-longer-devoted flesh, and Warren Tauman and Madeleine careened against the deck, flailing like two fish there beneath the rain that had begun to fall.

He screamed up at the heavens, cursing Mother over and over again, saying, “Ugly hag bitch! I’ve got you now! I’ve finally got you now!”

He lay on the deck, his forehead split open from the impact of the hard shell that had crashed into him. When he realized that he had won the battle, he began an uncontrollable laughing. The sea had turned against him, churning the ship now like a corkscrew in a whirlwind. He’d entered a storm, and rain continued to pelt him where he lay on the deck with Mother.

He went instantly to the controls below and corrected his course, set the ship on auto again and returned to the corpse on deck, where it was washing from side to side. He had to secure Mother. “You won’t get away from me so easily this time, Mother,” he told the body. He then lifted it and carried it back down into the cabin.