Darkest Instinct

NINETEEN

Other FMP officers, Coast Guard and county marine cops arrived at the quadrants called in by the 7-11 Team, and they were at first confused by the onslaught of pea soup that they had motored into, a wall of rain and darkness. Somewhere in here their comrades were in trouble, unable to respond to repeated radio calls. Fear for Manley and Stallings ran high. The officers now searching for them were both friends and admirers of the two men.

Patty Lawrence was the first to spot the listless, bobbing little Boston Whaler, all instincts telling her there was something terribly wrong. She had been listening in when Stallings and Manley had made their last radio call to dispatch, advising of their position and intent. She and partner Bill Mullins hadn’t hesitated, but had raced toward the unfolding incident just off Madeira, hoping to be first backup, and then when dispatch lost contact, she’d become terribly worried. It wasn’t like Stallings to leave his radio for so long a time.

She advised Bob Fisher at dispatch to continue hailing the Delta-4, the 7-11 club, as loudly as he could, and that she and her partner would use his hail as a buoy, since a blinding fog had overrun the waters off Madeira.

“ How bad is the fog?” Fisher at dispatch wanted to know.

“ Like a goddamn blanket of misdirection, like a star nebula.”

“ Star what?” asked Fisher from his safe haven ashore. “Like in those Star Trek movies when the ship goes into a cloud of gases created by an ancient exploding star, so you don’t know what’s up, what’s down, what’s right or left.”

Bill Mullins agreed, saying, “You got that right.”

Lights from onshore and from boats all around bounced off the low-lying cloud that’d rolled in. “They’re out there!” She pointed, adding, “I got a glimpse of the boat. Move it, Mullins! Eleven o’clock.”

“ They’re out there and so’s the Crawler,” countered Mullins. “Did Fisher let the rest of the world know what’s going on out here?”

“ Says he reported it to the guard, the mainland police and the sheriff’s office. We’ll have company in a matter of-there it comes.”

They heard sirens blaring as other Marine Patrol boats began to encircle the area.

It was then that Patty caught a second glimpse of the appearing, disappearing, directionless little Boston Whaler. The turbulence was unusual, threatening, so her partner called for a weather report. The boat they searched for was identical to her own, save for the markings. “It’s them! There! See?” She pointed ahead, her partner now putting on some speed. “If you see any sign of a sailing ship moving off in any direction,” Mullins advised all the other patrol boats joining them now, “go at it cautiously, but contain it.”

“ Roger that,” replied another nearby patrol boat.

“ Any sign of your men?” asked a county sheriff’s boat.

“ We have the boat in sight. Going in for a look.” Mullins gave their coordinates so that the others might readily converge on the area.

Patty Lawrence felt the scene as if it were a floating graveyard. She didn’t smell death here on the water with the ocean odors and the light drizzle falling from the cloud they stood in; she didn’t taste death here-all was too sodden for that, the now steady downpour and lapping waves like a warning bell-but she sensed death here nonetheless. It felt like a palpable visitor, a dark figure shrouded and standing on the water between them and Stallings’s boat as they approached. Patty had once enjoyed a wonderful, carefree affair with Ken, long since over, and now all her fears for his safety seemed realized.

Patty and Mullins’s boat had to slice through this Mr. Death, and it did so, dispelling for a moment the Grim Reaper’s hold on her imagination. Only it wasn’t imagination staring back at her as they came alongside the 7-11. The boat fairly cried of crisis. It wasn’t anchored and was without mooring of any kind; it bobbed and waved and threatened to hit them as they approached. There was no one aboard, at least no one who could be seen. The lights reflected crazily around them, hitting and shoving and pushing one another for the right to penetrate the fog, when nothing could penetrate it now. Patty’s own spotlight was more trouble now than it was worth, reflecting back at them like a ghostly mirror. She thought for all the world she saw a kind of airy spirit in the lights and the fog, rising up from the unhappy scene, like the spirit of a departed friend.

Mullins pulled their boat in tight and Patty worked a grappling hook on a ten-foot rod into position over the errant gunwale, snatching the 7-11, the noise creating a din. She tugged and hauled with all her strength, pulling the lonely FMP boat into them.

Patty fairly well jumped onto the 7-11 when the two Whalers bumped, and she quickly tied off the two boats, feeling her way in the darkness but quite aware that what appeared to be two dead men with long spears sticking from their bodies lay at her feet.

“ Christ, Bill, it’s bad… really bad!” she called back to Mullins, who steadied the boat and cast off the anchor line.

Patty felt Manley’s carotid artery for a pulse but found none. His skin felt like wood. His eyes looked up at her like large question marks. She’d always liked Rob Man- ley-his swagger, his humor, his kindness to her over the years-and she gave a thought to Louisa and his four kids, the oldest just finishing high school at George Washington in St. Pete. “Is he… is he dead?” asked Mullins as he leaned in over the death boat.

“ ‘ Fraid so, Bill.”

“ And Stallings?” Fearfully, she looked across Manley’s wide chest, saw the bloody tissue about Ken Stallings’s head and the spear shaft in his leg and shook her head, afraid to touch him, afraid to move, terrified that if she tried, she’d faint at the smell of blood and the sights around her, which threatened to overwhelm her anyway. She’d handled bodies before, but none where the faces were familiar, the ties so strong.

Suddenly breaking the silence, Stallings himself answered Mullins from within the confining darkness of his useless eyes, “Bill? Patty? Is… is zat… you?”

“ Good God, he’s alive!” Patty shouted. “Ken, Ken, it’s us. We’ve got you. Hang in… hang in there.”

“ We’ve got to get him to a hospital, now!” Mullins shouted. “Take the wheel and follow my lights!”

Bill cast off and raised anchor, turning his boat directly for shore. Patty situated herself at the helm of Delta-4 and did precisely as Bill had instructed, following in his wake, her tear-filled eyes ever on his lights rather than on the bodies of her two friends in her peripheral vision, rushing her precious cargo to shore.

Bill radioed dispatch as to what was going on, and Bob Fisher promised that an ambulance would be waiting at Madeira Beach.

Meanwhile, the other Marine Patrol boats continued a frantic circling about the fog in an ever-widening arc from the original quadrants that’d pinpointed what Ken Stallings had called in as the Tau Cross, the suspect ship. They intended to search all night for it if need be. But somehow, Patty Lawrence feared, the Night Crawler had already escaped the net.

When Jessica and Eriq arrived in Tampa Bay, the TV newscasters and the radios were aflutter with news that two Florida Marine Patrol officers had been struck down by what officials suspected to be the infamous Night Crawler, who had been approached by the FMP officers on a routine check which had turned out to be not so routine when one officer saw the body of a Night Crawler victim. Both men were fired upon, the suspect boat owner using a speargun. One of the officers was dead, shot through the heart, while the other was fighting to regain consciousness from a coma induced by a nasty blow to the head by another spear which, fortunately, had not penetrated his skull.

Both Eriq and Jessica knew how valuable Ken Stallings had suddenly become to their case; what he saw out there on the water was the ship which everyone in America wanted to see hauled ashore with its evil captain in chains. He had information no one else had. They raced to Grant Memorial Presbyterian Hospital in Madeira Beach, where Stallings was hanging on to life. When they arrived, they found an army of family, friends and newshounds, gathered in an enormous vigil which the hospital personnel were perturbed about and trying desperately to force into a small waiting room. A spokesperson, a Dr. Cameron Daniels, told the waiting crowd, “Mr. Stallings appears stable in every respect; we don’t expect to lose him. At this point, we can only give time the opportunity to do its magic and heal this man. We are hopeful, but as yet, he remains in a deep coma.”

“ When do you expect he’ll be out of the coma?” asked one foolish reporter.

“ If I knew that, I could tell you all to come back fifteen minutes before, now couldn’t I? I could also make book on the next Buccaneers game and make some real money. I’m sorry, people, but I can’t make such predictions at this point.”

“ Doctor! Doctor!” the press called out after Daniels, but the spry little man was through a pair of double doors marked Hospital Personnel Only before anyone could cut him off.

“ Let’s get out of here before someone spots us,” Jessica warned Eriq.

“ Right you are.” Outside in a drizzle, they decided to locate Bob Fisher, the dispatcher who had been in contact with Manley and Stallings during the crisis. “I want to hear that tape,” Eriq told Jessica.

“ That makes two of us.”

They made their way back to the rental car and were soon motoring toward the local headquarters of the Florida Marine Patrol. Local FBI field operatives, having expected them, guided them about the unfamiliar territory and informed them of all that had transpired out on the waters fronting Madeira Beach.

Fisher was not hard to find. He was, in fact, still manning the board when Jessica and Eriq were introduced to him. “I’ve got two boats out there still, along with two county patrol boats and a fifth from the sheriff’s office. Coast Guard is out there, too. They’ve searched high and low for that damned bastard you people’ve chased clear up here, but they haven’t so much as a whiff of diesel oil to track him by, and that fog out there’s playing havoc with our guys. We’re ready to call ‘em all in.”

Fisher was a bony, gaunt man with piercing gray-green eyes, a mustache and thinning hair dyed an awful shade of red-brown.

“ That’s your decision, of course,” replied Eriq.

“ You don’t want to risk any more lives, and that’s quite understandable,” agreed Jessica.

“ That’s all well and good, but these men and women out there now, they’re out for revenge. They’re not out there for the FMP or the county or the state; they’re out there for Manley and for Ken Stallings. Ours is a small community. All these watercops know one another. Don’t know if they’d come in off the Gulf if we ordered them, and if we do, and they refuse, then we’ll have sanctions against men who’ve worked all night at risk to life and limb to end this thing. So, I’ve given ‘em rope… let them take the tether for the time being, and I’ve got my boss on the wake-up line. He’s been checking in every few minutes and’s on his way.”

“ We’d like to hear whatever you have of Stallings and Manley on tape,” Jessica told Fisher.

He nodded. “Sure. There’s a soundproof room there,” he said, pointing. “I’ll run it through to you. You just go on in there.” They listened to the moments leading up to death for Manley and coma for Stallings. They listened a second and a third time, and they told Fisher that they’d like a copy of the tape, and that it wasn’t to be given out to the press or TV. He readily agreed and obliged, dubbing them a copy and listening for any new excitement out on the water all at the same time, but he also warned that TV types were going to be offering big sums of money for the tape, and that the FMP was in dire need of funding, and that it wouldn’t be up to him to make the final decision on that one.

“ Certainly sounds like our guy,” Eriq whispered in Jessica’s ear.

“ Ninety-nine percent sure. A body trailing off the back end of the boat, the boat has the words Tau Cross painted at its rear, registration numbers blurred, teakwood all around. Possibly of foreign manufacture.” These were all statements which Stallings had made at one point or another during the course of the night to Fisher’s dispatch office.

Eriq began thinking aloud, saying, “So now that someone’s reached out and touched his boat, he’s got to know we know; he’ll be painting it, changing her look, renaming it. We’ve got to canvass every dry dock along the coast from here to Louisiana and back again to the Keys and the Eastern seaboard to be on the lookout for anyone anxious to maul teakwood with paint and anyone with a boat that bears a name with the word Cross in it. And now this-the Tau Cross. I’d count ourselves lucky: This creep is no longer quite so completely invisible.”

“ The kind of scare those watercops must’ve put in him, I agree. This guy I know. He’s afraid of capture and exposure; he’d probably prefer death. So now he’s running scared.”

“ That’s what I mean,” agreed Santiva. “He’ll run to the nearest boat works, try to sell the boat or overhaul it. If we put out an APB on the boat, he’s dead in the water, so to speak.”

“ He’s scared, but he’s not stupid, Eriq.”

“ What does that mean?”

“ He’s running; he’s going to open that schooner up, take her out of these waters altogether, sail for another location entirely, if he’s as scared as I think he is.”

“ How can you know how frightened he is?”

“ Somebody’s got to think like the bastard.”

“ And you think he’s going to run?”

“ As far and as fast as that schooner and his will will take him, yes.”

“ Back to England?”

“ Maybe.” Fisher ceremoniously handed over the tape to them, adding, “I hope you people catch this bastard, so I can be on hand to watch him fry in the electric chair.”

“ We’re going to do our damnedest,” Eriq assured the man before they left.

In the parking lot, the drizzle now a silver-toothed annoyance, Jessica leaned across the hood of the car and called out to Eriq, “What’s our damnedest, Eriq? You mean our best? Well, damned if so far we’ve not done our best; so far, we’ve let this bastard run us around the entire coastline of this state and we’ve been unable to spot him even once.”

She left him standing in the rain, his mouth open, while she climbed into the passenger side of the car.

He climbed in after her. “Just what do you propose we do, Jessica?”

“ I say we get a plane or a helicopter out of here.”

“ What? We just got here.”

“ And we fly it out over the Gulf, and we take it on a course due southeast of here.”

“ Southeast of here? For what destination?”

“ The Cayman Islands, I believe.”

‘ ‘ What? You told me about the Caymans… that he was there, and that possibly he had left a body or two there. But you don’t know that for sure, now do you?”

“ Instinct tells me that he got away with murder in the Caymans, and that he never felt the least threatened there, because no one came close to IDing him there, unlike here. Fact is, they never knew what they had on the islands, and that’s got to sweeten the allure of a return for him. Here, we have an artist sketch, an a.k.a., a possible fix on his real name, and now a good idea of what his boat looks like. He’s got to know those two watercops were on the radio, that they gave a description of the boat-”

“ Precisely why he’ll try to unload it.”

“ Or he’ll take it out of American waters and unload it in a place like the Caymans.”

“ Even if you’re right, and he is running from American waters, why do you suppose he’s returning to the Cayman Islands? Why not Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, any number of places?”

“ He likes the Caymans. He’s familiar with the islands. He’ll go there first.”

“ You’re sure of this?”

“ I am,” she firmly replied, trying to quell all her secret uncertainties.

He thought about her notion a moment. “I may be crazy to go along with this, but okay. We go to the Caymans at first light. No point in going in this darkness with a storm approaching, is there?”

“ We must beat him to the islands, before he has a chance to sell the boat there.”

“ Do you think he’ll sell it or recondition it?”

“ Either way, he can’t get there ahead of us.”

“ So when do you propose leaving?”

“ As soon as possible.”

“ Do you think we can get a flight out on such short notice?”

“ I’m not interested in taking a jetliner, and I don’t want to use a marked police vehicle-I don’t want to spook this SOB into a suicide. I want him captured and brought to justice.”

“ For crimes against Florida, he’ll fry in the chair.” My sentiments are with his victims.”

“ Let’s do it. Set it up.”

“ I want to fly low along the most direct path to the Caymans in search of the boat.”

“ And Captain Anderson can plot the course you are assuming this creep is taking?”

“ Anderson’s still in Naples. We asked him to stay put in case we needed his services again. We can contact him through Ford, and he can send us word if there’s time, but we’ll talk to experts here, too.”

“ All right… do it, but are you really sure about what’s going on in this monster’s mind?”

“ It’s my best guess right now. Do you have any other suggestions?”

Santiva passed a hand along the stubble of a twenty-four- hour growth of beard, and gnashing his teeth, he finally muttered, “Another helicopter ride?”

“ It’s got to be private, or an unmarked police chopper. Either that or a cub plane.”

“ Either way, I’m a sick man.”

“ We’ll get you more Dramamine.”

“ I’ll double the dosage.”

“ And be asleep in my lap?”

He laughed. “I’ve been in much worse spots…”

Patty Lawrence felt she had to do something, and sitting in a hospital waiting room, crowded full with Manley’s people and Ken Stallings’s family and friends, wasn’t good enough. She had yanked her partner from the hospital and they’d agreed to return to the search out there off Madeira Beach for whatever sign they could find of the bastard who’d done this to Ken.

The search front had gone in carefully squared-off areas, the search boats squeezing the playing field, hoping to catch up to a killer who was likely as lost in the fog as they themselves felt. Their instruments, they hoped, were better than his, as they hoped their instincts were.

But several hours of searching had turned up nothing. Perhaps this maniac killer did know what he was doing when it came to maneuvering a sailing vessel.

Bill was now in the flat of the boat, scanning the waters with a pair of night-vision binoculars while Patty inched the Boston Whaler through the soup. A running joke had given their boat its private name. The Pantry-named for all the food Bill brought aboard, from potato chips and cold cuts to Pepsi-Cola and cranberry jam. Bill was a big man, as big as Rob Manley had been, and he had seen all manner of problems on this job. Patty’s Pantry, as some of the guys called their boat, was a misnomer; it ought more rightly to have been Bill’s Pantry. She ate three regulars a day and never strayed from her regimen, never snacking in between, however tempting Bill made it at times, however much he goaded.

They were in near-constant contact with the other search ships. People were getting short with one another; personnel were beginning to feel the emotional and physical strain, the stress growing minute by painful minute as the obvious began to sink in: They’d somehow let the Night Crawler crawl right past them all. The bastard was aptly named.

Tempers flared, ignited by frustration and anger and un resolved feelings. Patty certainly felt her share of the latter. She and Ken Stallings had left so many feelings unresolved. Bill knew about the special bond between them and had always been a gentleman and friend and never once made her feel guilty. But now Bill hadn’t spoken a word in the past fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his mind. Perhaps it was the same simple thought plaguing her: All appeared helpless, useless effort now.

Their radio crackled anew with the voice of a county sheriff’s guy she hardly knew, a man named Trilling, announcing something in the water at their location. He quickly gave the exact coordinates, repeating his message: “Something in the water! Something floating on top of the water! Something out of place…”

Patty had to fight through the radio traffic to ask, “What’ve you got? Describe it.”

Looks… looks like… yeah, Jesus… it’s a body.”

All the search vehicles were close now, so close they could see each other’s searchlights even in the fog. Patty Lawrence silently wondered at the new find. Had the killer left his own brand of calling card?

The find was called in to various dispatches on land, including Bob Fisher, Patty’s own dispatch. The news that they had someone in the water spread like wildfire. Moments later, it was confirmed by Trilling’s partner, and some details filtered over the radio waves: female, five-nine to six foot, thin, well-proportioned, nude and DOA. Apparent late teens, a black nylon rope twisted in a noose around her neck, strangled and drowned.

Each additional bit of information was like another blow to them all. Everyone had heard of the recent disappearance of the young woman from Naples Island, south of Tampa. Everyone wondered if this could be her. There seemed little doubt that whoever she was, she’d been victimized by the Night Crawler, and that he’d brutally used her. The word buzzing over the airways indicated that the girl’s body was as stiff as a long-preserved medical cadaver’s might appear.

Bob Fisher, at the FMP dispatch office in Tampa, promised to get word to the FBI so that they might have someone on hand to examine the body. He started with the local FBI office, telling them what his people and the county had come across off Madeira Beach, adding that it appeared related to the earlier incident involving his people, Officers Manley and Stallings. The FBI was interested, and said they’d locate Chief Santiva and Dr. Jessica Coran to have their best people on the scene when the body came ashore.

An hour later, when the body was brought ashore, a county coroner from Pinellas was the only medical man found readily available to take charge of the body. Jessica Coran could not be located.

Jessica found local aircraft vehicles useless for her needs; neither Tampa nor St. Pete had any to spare, and those that were in repair and might be ready in twenty-four hours were all marked clearly as police vehicles. Officials here in Tampa weren’t in any mood to cooperate in any case; they blamed FBI bungling for the death of the FMP officer named Manley and the maiming of Ken Stallings, a notion fueled by recent newspaper accounts, radio and TV broadcasts and political speeches, some with an extremely irrational, fringe-element twist reminiscent of the kind of talk that had been coming out of militia companies across America since the Waco, Texas, “massacre” and the two- years-in-the-making plot against the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. All Jessica knew for certain was that there had to be one hell of a paranoia at work in the heartland to convince people with brains in their skulls that the U.S. government was interested in creating mass murder of innocent children just to get control of the NRA lobby in Congress.

The killer can’t have gone far, Jessica told herself in keeping with her prediction that he’d gone southeast over the waters, passing back along his track like a cougar, marking his territory well. His going farther westward toward Louisiana and Texas, after a scare like the one the watercops had thrown into him, seemed unlikely. However, to be certain, another search team made up of Samernow and Quincey would go in that direction, hovering over the Gulf waters in a second helicopter. At least, that’d been the plan; but the plan was coming apart at the seams.

First, fellow law enforcement officials were being uncooperative, and now private small-plane and helicopter companies were doing the same. And now Jessica found herself in a lonely, dank helicopter hangar on a fogbound airfield just south of Tampa with no way to pursue the killer. The helicopter owner here simply looked at her badge and said stonily, “We’re not endangering any of our pilots for the FBI, not in this foul weather.” The man left her, returning to his office, which was dwarfed here in the massive hangar. She wanted to shove something like a court order down his throat but she had none, and getting one could take more time than she had.

Although only small aircraft flew in and out here, the airfield was large, and there were a number of other companies she could turn to, so she looked out at the blinking lights in the fog that signaled men at work somewhere out there. She looked around for someone to perhaps guide her to another location. The usual heat of a Florida morning had been wiped away by the sodden wet blanket of air hovering over them.

While Jessica worked to get airborne, Eriq Santiva had gone back to the hospital to wait in the hope that Ken Stallings would find a voice in his search for consciousness and reality. Everyone was hoping against hope that he might come around, not only for the man’s sake but because inside his silence lay the key to locating the Night Crawler.

In the meantime, a copy of Patric Allain’s signature on an agreement made between him and a Mr. Scrapheap Jones in Key West, Florida, had come in at Tampa Bay’s main headquarters, Police Precinct One. Eriq was unequivocal when he declared it to be the same handwriting as that on the letters to the press.

To quell the rancor of local politicians and the media, who were doing camera interviews, this new bit of information was carefully spooned out in terms that made it sound as if the Night Crawler might as well already be in custody, since they were now certain that the man named Patric Allain was one and the same as the Night Crawler. The impression Eriq left with the press was that the FBI was closing in on the demon.

Still, local loudmouths claimed that police had failed to protect and serve “even their own” in this instance, and that in fact, authorities had used the Tampa Bay area as a kind of watery “box canyon” into which they flushed the killer-yet had still managed to let him slip free! The implication was that the FBI had completely mishandled the case, as if politicians and reporters could have done law enforcement’s job for them in much better fashion. The Florida press set up a hue and cry like so many armchair detectives.

The other implication was that the FBI had placed all of the Tampa-St. Pete area in danger by chasing this perverted monster into their midst in the first place; why had Miami’s problem become Tampa’s problem? So that now two good, solid citizens, FMP officers, had been brutally assaulted by the man FBI agents couldn’t seem to catch in a months- long, intensive pursuit. Furthermore, the Night Crawler remained in this region, and he might be anywhere, and he might take anyone’s daughter.

Some were demanding that the FBI give a full accounting of its activities in the matter, along with a detailed explanation for what steps it next planned to pursue. Florida politicians around the state were outraged at the duration of this case, as well as what appeared to them to be a lack of efficiency and professionalism.

The word apparently had gone out from the governor’s mansion that it was open season on the FBI in general and on Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva in particular, the mainstays of the investigation who perhaps ought to be removed and replaced. The groundswell of anger was further fueled by Tammy Sue Sheppard’s family, who were making daily statements to the press, especially the National Enquirer.

The Enquirer did an entire page on how Jessica dressed, how she wore her hair, what kind of lipstick she used and who manufactured her eye shadow, and the kind of extravagance she and Santiva had displayed in staying at the Fon- tainebleau in Miami. Its headline read, Tall amp; Beautiful Scavenger for Scientific Fact Short on Results in Night Crawler Case. The story summarized the case, beginning with facsimiles of the killer’s sweetheart notes to the press. It listed the victims and where each body had been found, giving ample space to the time three bodies washed ashore in one day in Miami. Eddings of the Herald in Miami was quoted throughout the article and claimed to be writing a book on the Night Crawler which would blow the case wide open. The article went on to tell of how painstakingly every port, dock and wharfside restaurant along the Eastern seaboard had been meticulously papered with wanted posters once a witness had come forward with an account and a police sketch artist had created a likeness. The story showed the likeness and a picture of the plaster-cast bust made from the artist’s sketch.

Jessica wondered where they had gotten such details, but it mattered little now. Let the politicians and the press kick all they wanted. She sensed that she was, for the first time, on the trail of the killer, in his direct wake. All they need do now was locate the miserable excuse for a human being out there on the vast ocean, close in on the putrid SOB and finally put an end to the bastard’s killing spree. Men like him and those who’d bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, she mused, must know that there was nowhere for their souls to go, that not even Satan held a place for their kind.

Due to reasons beyond her control-both the meteorological and the political climate-Jessica found that the local small-aircraft people weren’t cooperating either; no one was willing to take a helicopter up in the soup of this morning’s fog, or brave the winds reportedly coming in behind the dense fog, winds that were howling about the airfield. It was the same damned fog that’d gotten one watercop killed and put another close to death in a coma, the same fog that had masked the killer’s movements. And now this damnable wet haze hung, an enormous blur suspended, rooted, as if controlled by Allain, as if there were some supernatural purpose in fog, so that when old-timers at the airport said, “Never seen a Florida fog stay on so damned long before,” Jessica didn’t take it as idle talk.

“ Damnit, we’ll be heading east, away from the Gulf storm,” she said to one chopper pilot who she thought might break down and say yes. She had always believed helicopter pilots fearless, a bit crazy, willing to do just about anything. That had been her experience with chopper pilots in the past.

“ Sorry… I’ve got too much invested in my bird, and I’m told by air traffic control to keep her on the ground for at least five hours.”

Tropical Storm Karl, as it was now being called, didn’t care about Jessica’s problems. She replied, “To hell with it-I’ll fly myself. Where can I charter a cub plane?” She’d gotten her pilot’s license six months before, soloing with ease after the intensive training she’d received from one of the best pilots she’d ever known, a man who flew jets of all sorts as well as small planes. Kenneth Massey had given her all the confidence she needed to fly through the perimeter of the storm edge. All she needed was a plane, but time and nature appeared to be conspiring against her. She found a mechanic at the airfield who was sitting idle, glancing over a copy of the special-edition Enquirer which Quincey had earlier pointed out to her, and the man easily recognized her from a picture taken when she was walking out to the beach to inspect one of the three bodies washed ashore on that awful day back in Miami, the day Allain threw his power in their faces.

The burly, pigeon-toed mechanic almost dropped his teeth when she spoke to him, looking from her to the newspaper photo and back again. “I need to charter a plane or a helicopter, now. Can you help me?”

“ I, ahhh… I can take you to somebody who maybe can, ma’am.”

“ That would be wonderful, if you don’t mind…”

He didn’t mind in the least taking time away from his duties to drive her across the taxiing strip. “I like driving the golf cart,” he confided as they skirted the runways in search of a plane she might charter. The airfield was so covered in fog that only the lights of the tower were visible, and these were shrouded. They pulled from the darkness to within inches of a white cub plane which had been painted with tiger stripes below a sign that read White Tiger Aviation.

“ It’s a cargo operation with tourist flights as a sideline,” explained the mechanic. She thought it more likely a front for smuggling of some sort. She imagined the little plane going back and forth to Cartagena, Mexico, perhaps even Cuba. And if so, they’d be antsy about knowing that an FBI woman was on the premises.

She tried slipping a twenty to the mechanic, but he flatly refused any payment for his troubles. “You kidding? This was my pleasure, Dr. Coran. Meeting someone like you. Ain’t nobody at the house going to believe it, though. Hey, maybe you could maybe autograph this for me?’’ He lifted out his copy of the Enquirer and turned to the page where a glaring picture of her without makeup and on her way to the scene of a killing stood opposite a shot of her dressed to kill, taken the night she was out with Eriq in Miami’s Little Cuba area. She had not seen any reporters that night, but obviously, someone had seen her, and cameras being everywhere and anywhere these days, now the entire world had.

She scrawled her signature across the article for Lyle, the mechanic, and again thanked him. He replied, “If anybody can get you airborne in this soup, it’ll be Pete Geiger. He flew in Nam, you know.”

“ Thanks… thanks, Lyle.”

“ Didja hear the news ‘bout that girl missing from Naples?”

She hadn’t heard anything recent. “No, no, I haven’t.”

“ Saw it on the tube just an hour ago. She’s been missing a couple of days now. Some say the Crawler got her. Anyways, poor thing… They fished out a body at Madeira Beach where-”

“ Isn’t that where-”

“ Yeah, the two Florida watercops were brought ashore; anyways, some are saying the body’s the Naples girl, that they’re the same.”

“ I pray not.”

“ Sorry about the way the boss treated you, back there at the hangar, I mean. He can be an ass,” Lyle confided as he turned his cart and headed back the way he’d come, disappearing into the shroud and whistling “Misty.”

She’d had extremely bad luck with the helicopter guys across the field. She hadn’t been wrong in feeling some hostility from Lyle’s boss, which even the less than alert mechanic had taken note of. No doubt the guy had eaten heartily of all the negative press about the FBI’s handling of the Night Crawler case. Now, telling the White Tiger guys the truth might easily alienate them, she feared. She needed a plan, one that didn’t include stories in the press and photos in the National Enquirer. She sauntered into White Tiger, knowing she would tell them nothing about her true identity or mission.

Inside she found a man with his feet propped on a desk amid stacks of paper, books and charts, his office a mold and mildew pit below the Quonset hut shell. Dust mites teemed here, it was a place where cheese mold would feel quite at home. A half-eaten sandwich and a Pepsi can indicated a quasi-meal had been only partially consumed some days before.

The moment he saw her come in, he dropped his feet to the floor and began tossing wrappers and empty cans and grossly neglected items such as bread crumbs into a waste- paper basket. He clearly hadn’t expected anyone to step in from the fog outside. All the while, she saw his mind racing with questions: Who is she? How’d she get way out here? Is she alone? Jessica guessed that he also wondered about her marital status, and perhaps how much effort it might take to get her into bed with him. Knowing the male mind as she did, she suspected the truth of it, and it had nothing whatever to do with her opinion of herself. In fact, the weaker her opinions, she knew, the more likely he’d be attracted to her. Perhaps, she told herself, she could use this typical male attitude against the guy to get what she wanted.

Despite all of her patently biased thoughts, all the man said was a polite, “May I help you, ma’am?”

He was a tall, gaunt young man with rugged Clint Eastwood features. In fact, the fellow most certainly didn’t look old enough to have been in the Vietnam War; neither did he look as if he’d be comfortable in the cockpit of a small plane, given the length of his legs. Still, his flak jacket hung on a coat rack behind him, and pictures of him and other men standing around Air Force fighter jets signaled that he was a wartime flier at one time, perhaps during Desert Storm.

“ I need a plane out of here, Mr., ahhh…”

“ Lansing, ma’am. Don Lansing.”

“ I thought your name was Pete Geiger.”

“ I’m Pete’s, ahhh… partner. We’ve been told to stand down till this weather’s over, though, ma’am, so I’m-”

“ Don’t say it! I’ve heard ‘sorry’ up and down this damned airport. You’ve flown in worse, I’m told.”

His smile was wide, charmed and charming. “I have, but going against the tower, ma’am, miss… well… it rubs those boys the wrong way, and I’ve got to live with them after…”

She read into his words that he’d also have to answer to Pete.

“ I’ll make it worth your while.”

He was instantly interested. “How much?” She drew on her best Lauren Bacall voice now. “Double your usual rate.” She saw his eyebrows twitch.

“ Phewww… wish I could. I hate turning down green, and being grounded all in the same day. now that’s a bitch. Pardon, ma’am.”

“ Then let me take it up; I’ll fly it out, return it in a few days.”

His hands shot up in a defensive gesture as if she’d pulled a gun on him. “Whoa… you’re going to take it up in this fog?”

“ I’ve flown in fog before,” she lied. “Besides, once I’m above the soup, there should be no trouble.”

“ ‘ Cept from Pete or Harvey up there in the tower. You hear those winds revving up to eighty, ninety miles an hour? You know what that does to a little bird like that modified Sandpiper out there?”

“ I’m heading due east,” she lied again.

“ Straight for where?”

“ The other coast.”

“ Must be awful important, Miss, ahhh…”

“ Little, Pamela Little, and yes, it is important, extremely.”

“ What’s your exact destination?”

“ The… the Cayman Islands.”

“ Really? That’s not exactly due east. Damn, you’d be lost in a blink up there alone. Love the Caymans myself. Haven’t been there in some time.”

“ Maybe now’s a good time? We go sharp east first, avoid the storm, get south of it and continue in southeast over Cuba.” She purposefully, rapidly blinked her lashes at him as she spoke. “That ought to get us to the Caymans sometime late today.”

Jessica could tell that he was giving it serious thought as his eyes played over her; he imagined she was propositioning him. She really wants a pilot, badly… maybe some sort of pilot groupie, he no doubt was thinking. She really didn’t have any notion whatsoever of flying out of here for the Caymans on her own.

“ Whataya say?” she prodded. She really didn’t want to have to fly out of here herself, especially not with Santiva screaming in her ear that she was a madwoman to attempt it. “Twice my usual rate?” asked Lansing, biting his inner right cheek.

“ That’s what I said.”

“ You must be in an awful hurry. You runnin’ from the law or something?”

“ Will you do it?” Let his imagination fill in the blanks, she told herself. He looked out at the fogged-in airfield. “Well, I can’t let you do it.”

“ All right, then you take me out of here.”

“ No, I can’t do it neither, much as I’d like, Miss… Little, did you say? I could lose my license; I could lose my business.”

“ Triple your usual rate.”

“ Damn…” He started to pick up the phone. Then he thought better of it, replacing it in its cradle. “How soon can you be ready?”

“ I have to make a call; you’ll have two passengers.”

“ Two?”

“ Is that a problem?”

“ Well, it means more drag… the weight, you know.”

“ Is it a problem?” she repeated. “No… no… guess not. How soon do you want to depart?” he asked again.

“ As soon as my… my friend can get here.”

Jessica, already armed with the water route that Anderson had outlined for her, thanks to Quincey’s being in contact with him, needed now only to get Eriq out here to the airfield. She telephoned the hospital, waited on hold, finally reached him and asked in a conspiratorial voice for Mr. Santivas, intentionally adding a final letter for Don Lansing’s benefit. Santivas sounded even more exotic and intriguing than Santiva.

Lansing, while remaining the other side of the desk, cocked an ear in her direction as she spoke to Eriq, hearing only Jessica’s voice. “Has the situation there changed?” she breathily questioned Eriq.

“ Yes, it has,” he surprised her. “What’s happened?”

“ Stallings is out of critical danger, and he’s fully conscious; it appears he’s going to make it, and with some rehab, he’ll be fine. They’re not so sure his eyesight will ever return, however.”

“ That’s good news; has he been able to tell you anything, anything at all? About the boat, perhaps?”

“ He’s still weak, and his eyesight is zero like I said, and his emotional state isn’t so good; he’s blaming himself for Manley’s death.”

“ So he’s not talking?”

‘ ‘ Well, I managed to make him see the light, so to speak. He gave me enough to recognize the schooner when I see it.”

“ Schooner?”

“ World class. He said it had three masts and state-of- the-art equipment, that it was fully automated so that one knowledgeable seaman alone could sail her. That even the sails could be brought down and put up by a single man. Said it was of British manufacture, made for racing, had excellent teakwood moldings all around, and that while the name and call numbers were obscured, it appeared to be the Tau Cross.’’

“ Excellent. Then we’re on our way to the Caymans.”

“ Not so fast. Something else has surfaced.”

“ I heard something about a body in Madeira Bay?” Jessica was acutely aware that her words were causing quite a stir in Don Lansing; she was either going to frighten him away or excite him into following through on the flight out of here. It all depended on what kind of man he was. “Well, it’s not a bay, actually.” Eriq was giving her a geography lesson. “It’s oceanfront, and yes, a body has been left in the bastard’s wake, a kind of present for us. She’s already been IDed as a Naples Missing Persons case.”

Jessica audibly groaned. “We’ve got to end this freak show, Eriq.”

“ You’ve got to get back here, locate the Pinellas County Coroner’s Office and do your thing. See if the body can tell you-”

“ Tell me what. Eriq? Tell me what I already know? No, I’m not coming back there. I’m flying to the Caymans within the hour.”

“ Jess, it’s not good protocol to just let the body-”

“ It’s exactly what he wants, Eriq. Don’t you see that? The body was left for us to find in order to slow us down.”

Santiva was silent for a moment at the other end. She jumped on his silence, adding, “He’s yanking our chain. That dead body is his way of trying to control our movements and to cut down on his own damned drag!” Jessica realized only now that Lansing, on hearing additional snippets of her conversation, had carefully armed himself, placing a gun in his belt. She feared that perhaps she’d gone too far with her masquerade and that Lansing had only heard the most provocative words, most out of context.

“ You’ve secured transportation?” asked Eriq.

“ I have, and I want you here ASAP. Otherwise, I do this alone.”

“ No… no. you don’t. Give me your location.”

She gave him directions and the name of the place from which they were booking the flight. “You’re in a hospital. Pick up what you need in the way of Dramamine there, and then get right over here, Eriq.” Jess, this latest victim deserves our best, as much as any of the others.”

“ Then send our best field M.E. or pathologist over there. Tampa’s got to have someone who can take over.”

“ This young woman, Jess, lived her entire life in Naples and was some sort of a queen at her high school there; she wasn’t a tourist but a resident, a towny. She loved Naples and they loved her.”

“ Eriq, trust me. If I don’t see you here in forty minutes, I’m gone, so like I said, get right over here.”

“ And you’d do it, too, wouldn’t you?” he said, but she’d already hung up, wondering if the killer had any other bodies aboard the ship which Stallings had called the Tau Cross; did the bastard plan to drag the body of yet another victim the entire distance to the Cayman Islands with him? Now Jessica stood looking across the room at Lansing, who was nervously pacing, wishing he hadn’t said yes, anxious to find out more about her-or just anxious to get out of the deal? He kept looking across at her, sizing her up, curious about her and her story-and her friend on the other end of the line. The situation seemed more shady with each passing moment. The questions were pinging about his brain like a pinball, so palpable she could almost hear them ringing, and she realized she had him exactly where she needed him to be.

“ How long’ll it take for your friend to get here?” he asked now.

“ An hour, maybe.”

“ Maybe by then some of this stuff’ll blow over. Maybe… if things don’t take a turn for the worse…”

He tuned in the weather report, but the news only made both of them more nervous and fidgety, filled as it was with the latest happenings and the strange disappearance and possible literal “surfacing” of the girl from Naples, followed with reports that her body may have “washed ashore in a state of preservation, as if lost by a mortuary,” in the reporter’s words.

“ Damn, Madeira Beach’s not too far from here,” mused Lansing. Jessica tried to recall if she’d said anything about Madeira Beach which Don Lansing might’ve taken the wrong way. At the same time, a picture flashed on the TV for a few moments, a photo of the dead girl in happier times, telling Jessica that the victim had the same general appearance as all the others before her. Finally, Lansing clicked the TV off.

“ I just brewed some coffee. Would you like some?” he asked her.

“ Sure… that’d be great… might warm my insides a bit.” She was very aware of the small-caliber but quite deadly. 22 he’d holstered in his belt.

There was no clean place in the hut to sit. She remained standing, pacing, looking from time to time out the window as if any moment the strobe lights of a police car might be out there, giving chase to the fleeing suspect in Don Lansing’s florid mystery as it played out in his brain.

When he came to stand beside her at the window, the coffee extended, he, too, peeked out at the fog as if expecting someone.

“ Triple my usual’s going to come to a hell of a lot of money, lady. You do understand that?” He jotted down a figure on a pad and handed it to her. His twenty-four-hour day rate was $575 plus fuel, so the mysterious “Maltese Falcon” lady who’d just stepped into Don’s life was looking at over $1,700 just for starters. That’d buy him and Pete some time on those bloodsucking creditors; Pete would thank him for this later, Don assured himself, tell him that if he hadn’t taken this job, Pete would’ve killed him, and if Pete were here, he’d do exactly what Don was doing right this moment, up the ante.

He went to the phone, asked if it was all right if he called his partner, to let Pete know what was going on and where they’d be taking Pete’s plane.

“ Pete owns the plane?”

“ Yeah, it’s Pete’s plane…”

“ Sure, do what you have to do.” Lansing got only an answering machine, into which he spoke a cryptic message for his partner. “You’re doing the right thing,” she assured him. A long look into her eyes confirmed this for Don, she was sure. The clock on the wall seemed frozen in time at 5:09 a.m. She wished Eriq would get here before Don changed his mind and backed out.

“ Triple my usual,” repeated Lansing, “almost enough to go to hell for.”

She looked up at him. “Paradise, remember,” she replied.

He moved in a little too closely, and she stepped away. She wondered how far the Night Crawler might’ve gotten in the six hours that had elapsed since he’d eluded Stallings and Manley. She wondered how long it might take to catch the killer’s ship, imagining that moment when it would come into view; she imagined going on to Grand Cayman Island and simply waiting for Patric Allain to ease into port there and how simple it would be to apprehend the bastard beast when he stepped off the boat. They could then secure the boat as a crime scene, and she’d nail him six ways to Sunday and beyond for multiple murder. Next stop the Florida electric chair, the same as toasted the likes of Ted Bundy; see how Patric liked sailing that mother.

She imagined that Okinleye would want to hold Allain for questioning in the murders that had occurred in his jurisdiction, but knowing Ja and the problems of the islands, she also believed that the Cayman government would not stand in the way of an expedient order, so that Allain would stand trial in Florida, where he’d face the death penalty. She was only sorry that he could not be electrocuted separately for each victim he’d so tortured.

Eriq finally arrived in an unmarked police car, in the company of Samernow and Quincey, the small crowd making Don Lansing even more nervous about his decision than before, Jessica realizing how like Mafia types the two burly Miami cops and the tall, stolid Santiva appeared. Jessica caught the others outside, out of Don’s earshot, explaining that the only way she could get a flight out was to con this guy into thinking they were running from the law, so she told Quincey and Samernow to get a chopper from the police hangars as soon as the fog lifted and the storm had passed and to take it on a course west along the coast as insurance. She asked Eriq to go along with her, follow her lead, and to pretend that he was a Cuban nationalist trying desperately to get out of the country.

“ You play Bogey?” she asked, the wind now whipping her jacket about her.

His tie flagged across his forehead and eyes. “I’ll do my best, shh-weet-heart.”

“ Do you have Captain Anderson’s notes and map?”

“ I do, but I don’t know how helpful it’s going to be.”

She took hold of the route the killer might take if he were to leave Tampa straight for the Caymans. “Okay, let’s get airborne.”

Lansing was already on the radio to the tower, explaining that there was an emergency need to take off. They weren’t buying it, from the sound of things. Jessica laid Captain Anderson’s projected route before Lansing. Lansing told the tower he’d be back in touch with them, then stared at the proposed flight plan.

“ You said you wanted to go due east. This is south.”

“ Southeast,” she split hairs.

“ That’s a lot of miles in storm conditions.”

“ Don, it’s important we follow this path as closely as possible.”

“ No way we’re going through the Straits of Mexico, not in the given weather pattern. It’d be safer and simpler to go direct for the east coast and south from there, and maybe even a layover in Miami to refuel…”

Lansing desperately attempted to ignore Eriq Santiva, and he did well, save for the out-the-corner-of-his-eye suspicious looks. Jessica took Don aside to reason with him while Eriq continued the silent, stony role he’d fallen into, his inscrutable Cuban features befitting the situation.

“ It’s important we get out over international waters as soon as possible,” she told Don.

He nodded as if he actually understood. “All right… all right. Get your friend out to the airplane, and we’ll be on our way.”

She went to Eriq and when she turned around, Don was already out the door and on the airfield. When they stepped out, they saw that Don was doing a preflight check of the plane, and he shouted over the wind for them to get aboard. Obviously, Don had made up his mind.

The wind pummeled the airfield and the people on it. Eriq was pushed into the plane. Jessica’s coat did a wild flap dance about her body as the wind lashed out at her and the small plane, creating a shiver in the aircraft. The skies were just lightening up but remained a gunmetal gray all the same, painted and smeared with the ominous hues of storm clouds preparing to burst. But at the moment there seemed a fortuitous lull in the precipitation. Looking out over the grass, the taxi strip and the small runway now, Jessica saw how slick everything was. But she was determined to go ahead with her plans, climbing into the cockpit after Eriq, who’d opted for the backseat.

Once inside the plane, Don asked, “What am I going to tell the tower? I take off without talking to them, my butt’s in a sling when I get back here.”

“ But you did talk to them, inside, earlier…” shouted Jessica over the wind. “And they didn’t like it; told us to stay put,” he countered. “Radio them it’s a police emergency,” Jessica countered his counter.

“ They’re going to want to know more than that.”

“ Tell ‘em it’s got to do wid dat, ahh, ahh, whataya-callit case. Dat, uhhhh…” began Eriq, in rare form.

“ The Night Crawler thing?”

“ Right… dat’s it, kid. Tell ‘em dat.”

“ Suppose they want to talk to one of the policemen?”

“ Tell them we’re FBI,” said Jessica. “And if they want to talk to me, tell them I’m Agent Coran and this is Agent John Thorpe…”

“ Thorpe; FBI?” He looked Eriq over as if he hadn’t seen him before. “You think they’re going to believe that?”

“ We’ll give them badge numbers if they ask,” she replied. “Let’s get out of here, now.”

“ Roger that…”

Don had gone sullen on her, and his new somberness had begun the moment Santiva had entered the picture, Jessica believed. He no doubt had originally accepted her offer in the comfortable male fantasy that a woman alone, a woman like her-vulnerable and in need-could prove to be fun and “rewarding” in every sense of the word to take on as his lone passenger to a Caribbean paradise; that they’d fly off and into a romantic adventure together, a la Romancing the Stone or some such thing.

The tower, on hearing their FBI numbers read, had no trouble allowing Lansing to take off, but the dispatcher did so with caution heaped upon caution. And the takeoff itself proved to be like rushing into a blinding wall. Unable to see ahead of them, Lansing did a marvelous job of getting airborne in the dense fog.

Jessica, in the copilot’s position gasped when the plane smashed against the mountain of cloud they were under. With Jessica clutching at her copilot seat and Eriq tucked into the rear, the little plane was buffeted about like a toy in a wind tunnel once lift was reached. With the rush of noise and the engine so near, Jessica saw-rather than heard-Don muttering to himself, likely kicking himself for taking on this job. Only when she placed on the headphone set could she hear him cursing himself.

The sky was lighter now, but this was of little comfort. They were still flying blind into an unpredictable wind shear. Still, they rose higher, trying to escape the thermals and the fog, the bumps, grinds and whips, when suddenly they were above the enormous pillow of clouds-popping free like a bird escaping a cage, flying directly into the brilliant sun, a welcome sign even if it, too, was blinding.

Lansing leveled the plane out, its roar like a cat’s purr in the infinity of sky, and in a moment the compass indicated their heading as due south. They would follow along the western coast of the Sunshine State; only today, there was neither sunshine nor view below them, only above.

Jessica wondered at the killer’s luck. With this kind of cloud cover, how were they going to go in low over suspicious boats? How could they possibly ID the suspect sailing ship even now, armed with Ken Stallings’s description? Furthermore, the winds would have given the sailing vessel full power to skim over the water. And Allain had six hours on them.

Eriq seemed settled for the moment in the rear seat, having steadied his nerves after the bumpy takeoff. He appeared beat, so dead tired in fact that when Jessica glanced again at him, his eyes were closed. She prayed he hadn’t overdosed on Dramamine. With Lansing beside her, they filled the little cockpit from top to bottom. He seemed a capable pilot. She had given little thought to his skills or possible lack thereof before now, but he’d handled the thermals and the wind well, appearing a capable master of the air. She felt somewhat guilty at having duped the young man. Now that they were airborne, she wondered how much of the lies had been absolutely necessary to get them here. It now seemed foolish to have run such a charade on Lansing to get what she wanted, but telling him the truth now could mean a 180-degree turnaround and a return to the ground-and to hell with that, Jessica quietly told herself, keeping silent counsel as the plane soared southward toward the emerald Caribbean Sea.