Darkest Instinct

SEVEN

The Following Morning

Morning came to Miami as if all of nature’s most peaceful and warm and beckoning best had come knocking at the door of mankind’s most striking artifices-the towers of the modern city. A brilliant, blinding Florida sun omni- sciently and without struggle won the battle for hierarchy here, alongside an equally rich and stunning blue sky, a sky which acted the foil for the creamiest, whitest clouds Jessica had ever seen in any place other than Hawaii, all vying for attention amid a lush cityscape of skyscrapers and man- made spirals and pinnacles. For a moment, looking out over the pearl-white sand beaches, she thought that she was back in the paradise which she and Jim Parry had shared; imagined for a moment that he would step out onto the wraparound balcony here with her. A part of her soul went out to him. He had to be feeling her, even from this quantum distance.

But she stood alone on the Fontainebleau balcony overlooking a fresh, new paradise which was compromised once again by the stain of human passions, and unable to answer her own questioning heart, she wondered anew why she had chosen to be so alone. Was there some truth in what C. David Eddings had communicated to her, all that about male/female roles and how you could no more escape the hatred and contempt than you could escape the allure and fascination, unless you were a bona fide third sex maybe? She imagined it might be called a UNIX-a completely combined mix of the female and male sides of the species coming together as in some bizarre and wonderful Clifford Simak science fiction tale.

Perhaps that was what she was-what she’d become over the years, so that she was unfit company for either male or female friends; but if so, why did she still feel so much anger from her encounter with Jim Parry, as if all the misunderstanding was his fault alone?

She nestled into a chair at a small table on the balcony, nursed a cup of coffee and nibbled at a croissant sent up from room service. Miami was a beautiful lady, but she was also an ugly lady, unfeeling with an unadorned growth across her belly. Like all American cities, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, L.A., Honolulu, Miami ate its young.

Jessica stared long and longingly out over the pristine, sun-dappled, sea-splashed, ever-renewing bay, and from this distance it created a magnificent still life; she found the ocean an immense cradle which both supported and destroyed life, its white-tipped waves beckoning and constant, and the horizon above the sea a fresco of thunder- heads poised in a moment of time, painted there by some artist of colossal size, his brush and palette beyond all human proportion. It made her think of what Eddings had said about creation and destruction, giving life and taking life.

“ If the Artist of creation cannot kill,” she prayerfully whispered to the wind as it rushed around her on the balcony, “then God does not kill; so then God is not synonymous with nature or mankind, for both nature and mankind kill indiscriminately. Therefore, God is without guilt.”

Believing the syllogism she had just created might assuage some of the pain she had stored up over the years, since her first encounter with her first serial killer in 1992, she had begun to pursue this notion when her peace was shattered by the telephone.

She reached the phone on the fourth ring, hesitant to answer, wishing for a little more time with the blue, the stark white and the brilliant pinks and yellows of the Miami morning. Still, she acted.

“ Yes. Jessica Coran. Can I help you?”

Detective Quincey’s overwrought voice fired back, “Dr. Coran, you gotta coine right away. I can pick you up in five, maybe ten minutes. There’s been another killing. The body’s washed into Silver Bay, near Virginia Key.”

“ Give me time to dress. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Have you notified Santiva?”

“ I’ll do that now.”

“ Good.” She hung up and dressed quickly, glad that she’d showered the night before. She knew she’d be wading in water, so she pulled on a pair of lightweight jeans and a loose-fitting shiit. She didn’t have time for makeup, but she brushed out her hair, grabbed her bag and was in the lobby before Quincey arrived. Standing on the street corner just outside was Santiva, who had also hastily dressed. But she liked the fedora. He was going native, it seemed.

The standing order to all law enforcement that they be notified immediately of anything smacking of the work of the Night Crawler was obviously being observed. It was 7:03 a.m. when Charles Quincey and his partner, Mark Samernow, pulled up to the hotel lobby.

Santiva had had his car brought around. “You ride with the detectives. Find out whatever you can about the circumstances of discovery and make sure they’re-”

“- following our request that nobody touch the body before I get at it,” Jessica finished for him. “Right, I know. Chief. See you at the scene.”

“ You all right, Jess?”

“ Yeah, I’m… I’m fine, Chief. Just that sometimes…”

“ Sometimes what, Jess?”

“ You ever feel like a ghoul? What we do, I mean… sit around knowing there’s going to be another victim, knowing and waiting, knowing and being unable to stop it, knowing and being unable to do anything.”

“ Get control, Agent Coran,” he firmly said. “See you at the scene.”

She climbed into the backseat of Quincey’s departmental car, and once again noted how dull and bored the man’s partner was with the whole undertaking. She mentally made note of the fact that Samernow smelled of liquor from the night before and that he looked as if he’d slept in his clothes. Perhaps the case was taking a toll on the younger man.

Quincey seemed to know what she was thinking, having gazed up into the rearview mirror. “Mark’s going through a tough divorce,” Quincey said, covering for his partner. “It’s his first.”

“ Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Detective.”

“ Still, if the captain sees you in this condition, Mark, it’ll be hell to pay.”

Samernow scowled. “Mind your own damned business!” He sat sullen for the duration of the trip to Silver Bay.

“ Anything you can tell me, Detective Quincey, about how the body was discovered that might help me now?”

“ Same as the others, really. Naked, same signs of wear and tear, as if in the water for a long time. It’s bad, from what we’ve been told.”

“ Think I’m going to be sick, Charlie,” announced Samernow in a near whisper. “Pull over.”

“ We can’t pull over, Mark! We’re on our way to a crime scene.”

“ Then let me the hell out!”

“ What?”

“ You heard me, damnit! Either pull over and let me puke or let me outta the damned car.”

Quincey, exasperated, pulled hard into the curb, hitting it and jarring them all. He ordered, “Get out, partner! Go on!”

“ Just hold on a minute,” Samernow replied.

“ Get the fuck outta the car, Mark!” He glanced back at Jessica and added, “Pardon me, Dr. Coran, but lately all Mark responds to is cusswords.”

Samernow slammed the door hard and Quincey burned rubber, leaving his partner to alternately shake a fist at him and double over to vomit in the grass. Again Quincey was apologizing to Dr. Coran and blinking back at her image in the mirror.

“ Sometimes we all make asses of ourselves, Quince,” she assured him. “Not to worry on my behalf, Detective, really… I understand. The job takes a toll.”

“ Between Mark’s divorce and this case, he’s… well, he’s just stretched to the limit is all. I hope it… well, I hope you don’t have to say anything about this to anybody.”

“ You have my word.”

“ Maybe the captain’ll believe one more excuse…”

“ But you doubt it, right?”

“ So, you read minds, too?”

“ Not exactly.”

“ Experience, huh? Some teacher.”

“ The mother of all teachers.”

They passed over a beautiful, spiraling causeway, the water shimmering, even blinding in the morning rays, which danced like splattering nickels and dimes atop the water’s glimmering surface.

“ Here’s our turnoff just ahead. I’ll have you there in a jiffy.”

“ Part of me wishes I’d gotten out of the car with your partner back there, Detective,” she darkly joked.

“ Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“ So, who discovered the body?”

“ Some young couple on bikes, out for a predawn ride. Honeymooners, I hear.”

“ Uhgggg…”

“ Anyway, they rushed to the nearest phone and dialed 911; the paramedics and a couple of cruisers got there about the same time. The paramedics started toward the body, you know, to check it out, but one of the cops, a veteran, saw it for what it was and wouldn’t let them proceed. They got into a shouting match, but we got lucky and the veteran cop stood his ground, a guy named Frank Lombardi who’s seen a lot, used to be a cop in New York City. Anyway, he knew about the FBI request to leave floaters who’ve been in the water for any length of time alone until you guys passed on ‘em. So, here we go.”

He swung the car into an area where a Medivac van and several police cruisers stood silent sentinel over a stretch of palm trees and crescent beach. Already a mob of onlookers was at the scene, and police had snaked a yellow and black banner, flimsy in the wind, between the palm trees, daring anyone to cross the line.

At the back of the Medivac van a young couple, each in spandex wear, their English touring bicycles beside them, the woman weeping, held on to one another, speaking to each other in British accents. They looked up at Jessica, wondering about her as she snatched a lab coat from her black valise and kicked off her shoes, placing them in the back of Charles Quincey’s car. She prepared to go barefoot across the sand and to wade out to the body in the surf.

Santiva had pulled in alongside them, and he called out to Jessica that he would speak to the first on-scene cops and anyone who might shed any light on the situation. She went for the sand and the water and the body.

Jessica had done this before, trawling out into water with her black valise on a float-table for a close examination of the body before anyone else got their hands on it; the fear of allowing others to drag the body to shore, tumble it onto sand, lift it into a waiting body bag, then hoist it into an ambulance to be whisked away, was the fear of losing vital information and possible evidence which might not otherwise be had, as floaters were known to drop evidence all along the path of transportation. Waterlogged, the body was literally coming unglued cell by weakening cell.

Jessica was followed out to the body by a handful of curious seagulls and a crotchety old pelican, all wondering what she had in her bag that might be of interest to them. One or two of the seagulls dipped to the body to examine it, but knowing by some instinct that it wasn’t for them, they immediately fled back to the relative safety of buzzing about Jessica’s head as she continued toward the corpse, wading farther out into the hip-deep water, her lab coat floating around her now like a white Christmas tree skirt.

The body had come up against a jetty of jagged stones, where it washed like flotsam in a gentle, rocking tide. The situation was similar to an earlier floater case she’d supervised in D.C., but this time she didn’t need hip boots, a flashlight or a raincoat. This time the sun beat down on the awful waste and the waters surrounding her lapped against her skin with a warm tongue. In the earlier instance, the water had been frigid and black.

She recalled the other floater, a young teenager whose death had at first appeared the result of drugs and a stumbling accident. It was before her FBI days when she was chief of pathology for Washington Memorial, and it certainly hadn’t been her last floater case-as much as she would have liked for it to be. But an M.E. always remembered her first floater…

Jessica had proven the cause of death in fact to be a blow to the back of the head which had sent the teen into the water, causing his death by drowning-he had drowned while unconscious. Armed with this knowledge, the W’PD stepped up their investigation and learned that the boy’s so-called friends had attacked him and left him to drown, all over an argument involving a pair of sneakers- the only article of clothing missing from the body. Life, she mused, was as cheap today on the streets of America as it was in Hitler’s Germany or in the time of the Romans, who fed on the carnage of Christians thrown into the lions’ dens in their sporting arenas. While technology and weaponry had stepped into futuristic vistas, man himself had changed very little since the days of his caveman ancestor, who picked up the first femur to use as a club to strike down his neighbor.

This floater and everything around the victim was different. This floater-basking beneath bright sunlight on the lip of a vast, aquamarine and lush velvet horizon of sky and water-was altogether different from the starfishlike little boy found in that filthy, stagnant stone quarry in Washington, D.C., so many years before. The boy had died in a dark little hole, a watery cemetery; he’d felt no pain after the initial blow to the head which had rendered him unconscious. He hadn’t felt a thing after his school buddies had attacked.

But today’s corpse, this body on this bright Florida morning, lay in stark contrast here to the screaming life all around her, both above and below the water. Both killings were unconscionable; perhaps all killings were unconscionable, she reminded herself now, but in the light of so much life, this one seemed doubly so.

The others onshore stood watching her approach the victim. A second and enormous pelican with more life in its webbed step than the first perched on the jetty rocks, squeaked and walked back and forth in anticipation that she’d feed it. The old pelican seemed resigned simply to stare at Jessica’s advance. She gave neither the men behind her nor the fowl ahead of her any mind, but she could hear the muttering men at her back, and she could sense their absolute discomfort at having to stand idly by while a woman did their work for them.

Reaching the body, she found what appeared to be a pair of black serpents swimming lazily about a bloated, jellyfish version of a large rubber doll, slick and ballooned up. She instantly realized that the black asps coiled near the body were in fact lengths of hefty nylon rope, one coiled tightly about the neck, the other wound about the wrists, which Jessica could only surmise since she could not see the wrists. The corpse floated facedown, on its stomach, the hands somewhere below. She’d either have to fish for them or tug on the detestable rope that had been used to kill the victim.

She instantly saw that the body had been in the water from two to possibly three weeks, and she was grateful both that it hadn’t been there longer and that the corpse lay facedown for now.

There appeared to be no superficial gashes to indicate shark attack. Even as a child, Jessica had been both horrified and shockingly fascinated by the sort of quick death the powerful jaws of a shark might bring, like the mindless devastation of a lightning strike or a blow from a speeding truck. She had always been interested in the myriad shapes and convolutions taken by the Grim Reaper to ply His trade of finality. This eerie predilection had led her to push and push her father for details about his time in the war, what he had seen, experienced and done as a medical officer. For many years, he ignored her requests, denying her any such information, not wanting to relive the horrors of the war, but when he realized that she was serious about going into medicine, about following in his footsteps to become a medical examiner, he began to come around. He began to tell her the truth, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupery, saying, “Horror really can’t be talked about because it’s alive, because it’s mute and goes on growing: Memory-wounding pain drips by day, drips in sleep.” When she continued to prove her genuine interest, he had told her that he had seen every kind of wound imaginable, had seen bodies without limbs or heads; but the bodies which disturbed his sleep the most, he had confessed, were the floaters. He had been in both Korea and Vietnam, where he was part of a M.A.S.H. team, and he’d seen the result of many a battle; he had also seen many a man whose body had gone waiting for attention as the war raged on, many dying in rivers and lagoons deep in the jungle, a world from anywhere.

Here in sun-drenched Miami Beach, there were no long, dark lagoon shadows beneath which to bury the floating corpse, and the water was warm and alive-teeming with life. It saturated Jessica’s jeans and wrapped itself about her, catlike, filling her pores with its touch, this living saline ocean surf which foamed about her waist now where she stood. It wanted to be friends.

It also wanted to revive the dead girl, this life-asserting cradle she was nestled atop in a mockery of the fetal position, this amniotic fluid. That was why it kept lapping at this dead parcel, kept caressing it, licking at it like a favored pet anxious over its master. Yet this seemingly concerned licking was removing small parts of the deceased in infinitesimal increments with each incoming and outgoing tide. Neither time nor the tide was on Jessica’s side.

Jessica stared down at the body again, leaned in over it and tried to work, steeling herself against the awful appearance death had sculpted here. The saltwater had preserved the body to some degree, and this did cut down on the stench, which would otherwise have been overwhelming. Small favor, she mused as she set to work, first studying the hands, which she’d had to tug free from below. There had been a strange reluctance, as if something was weighing the hands down and didn’t want them revealed, but this inertia was followed by the equally unnerving ease with which, once freed, the hands began to float in her direction. She saw them as huge, white blowfish coming at her now.

Settling her nerves, Jessica saw that only two nails remained on the right hand, one on the left. All the other nails had popped from the combined pressure of expanding flesh and moving water. Even the few nails remaining, however, had been washed entirely clean by the ocean, and were rather useless as a result. Even if Jane Doe had fought her attacker and taken scrapings from his face or arms, the skin tissue and hair was long ago lost. But she did note that both remaining nails were jagged, torn and split, as if the victim had attempted to bare-handedly rip her way free from a stone hole, or quite possibly to pull her way up alongside the hull of a boat, obviously without success.

“ Poor young devil,” Jessica lamented, giving thought to who she was, what her dreams and aspirations might have been, who loved her and why.

Jessica took the two remaining nails from the right hand, and as she did so, one was caught by the tide pool and whisked into invisibility. “Damnit, God… give me something to work with here,” she mournfully cursed.

With the extreme care that comes only of long experience, she carefully, gently twirled the body so that it floated closer to her and away from the jagged rocks abutting the victim’s left side. She now examined more closely the left hand nail. There was only the one remaining, the sea having peeled away the others. This one, like the other two on the right hand, was broken and jagged. She carefully grabbed hold with her tweezers and with a quick pull, the sun-and-water-bleached nail silently, easily came away from the rippled skin at the fingertip. This time, Jessica lifted it out of reach of the nipping surf.

Each of the victim’s fingers now resembled a bloated snake, the fat thumbs like turtles. Little wonder a shark, even a small one, might find such parts of the floater an appealing strike. The hands were like pillow-sized jellyfish, squishy to the touch.

Jessica mentally placed the time in the water at between twenty and twenty-five days, something shorter than that of earlier victims, and she wondered about the difference, whether it was significant or simply a fluke. Jessica stowed away the second of the two nails she’d recovered into a vial which contained a pink gel fixative. She placed this deep into her valise and felt the pontoon platform bang against her ribs, as if the sea were upset with her for taking that which belonged to it.

She considered the stroke of luck she’d had when the right cop had come along and kept the gung-ho Rescue 911 paramedics from wading out here and dragging the unfortunate victim to shore. All her nails would’ve been gone had that taken place, not to mention another layer of skin. She alone would give the body the care and attention required, like a marine archeologist with an ancient artifact.

Jessica heard someone shouting from behind onshore, and this noise made her look over her shoulder. She saw Santiva arguing with one of the medics, on the verge of a fistfight, it appeared, when suddenly the medic’s partner intervened and pulled his coworker away, the two of them backing off like a giant crab, kicking up sugar-white sand as they danced together until the first man finally threw up his hands in what Jessica understood to be part of that male sign language that meant control had been regained.

No doubt Eriq was protecting her honor, she thought; no doubt the medic had called Jessica a witchy ghoul woman, but in far more unappealing language. No doubt she presented a strange picture to the people ashore, to curious onlookers from hotel windows and joggers who’d stopped to stare, what with her out here performing some sort of weird travesty of a baptism to send the deceased over to the other side.

But baptisms were celebrations of life, not death. Here the recipient of the baptism was the color and texture of Styrofoam, bloodless in appearance. At the slightest touch pieces of it-pieces of her-sloughed off, floated away, marrying with the sea, dissolving, and with it precious evidence was lost. But evidence of what? she wondered while staring into the intricate pattern created against the water by the woman’s floating strands of hair.

Still, Jessica’s medical examination, this antibaptismal ritual, was absolutely necessary. Even so, few could realize or understand that such an indignant Eucharist might be needed. Something in people wanted to protect the body from the foul elements-including foul people-to snatch it from the water’s grasp, shade it from the sun’s glare, cover it with a blanket to give the corpse some semblance of modesty and dignity and consecration. She understood the impulse, but she also knew that in a capital case such as this, with a repeat offender on the loose, people like herself were rare and must be allowed to do their jobs.

She turned her entire attention back to the body. The corpse was like a plank gone pulpy with water, like plasterboard after flood damage. However, Jessica had come to the body prepared, her vials, fixatives, tweezers, bags, pliers, scalpel and more at her disposal on the floating mini- barge attached to her arm. It was a contraption she had developed with her mentor, Dr. Asa Holecraft, many years before for just such occasions as this. Beneath the still platform upon which her valise rested was a swivel that took the brunt of the mild surf here in the protected bay, and beneath the entire structure, which measured sixteen by sixteen inches, were two small pontoons.

Knowing that the victim had been in the water for as long as she had told Jessica that not one moment’s delay could be tolerated for certain tests. She drew a sample of the victim’s blood here and now. She took a splotch of skin, a swatch of hair. DNA testing could begin immediately on these samples alone, along with tests for blood alcohol level at the time of death and for whether or not certain poisons could be ruled out. Any delay now could mean that Jessica might not be able to exact from the body who she was, precisely how old she was, and if she had been drugged or abused either physically or sexually or both before her death.

“ How old is the kid?” someone from shore called. It was one of the cops, and from the size of his gut and the mileage on his weary and worn face, she guessed him to be the man who had preserved her evidence, such as it was.

When she didn’t readily answer, he said, “We got a missing persons report on a thirteen-year-old runaway. Any chance it’s her?”

“ Rest easy, officer,” Jessica replied. “This one’s in her late teens, maybe early twenties. More suitable to our profile than yours.”

He waved a thanks and returned to the ranks of others waiting for Jessica to finish so that they could do their jobs. She saw that Santiva had stripped off his shoes and had rolled up his pants and was preparing to join her. The jetty had seen some erosion and a large barricade had been erected where it met land, so no one could safely come out along the rocks.

Santiva waded toward her, his pants and pockets and shirt filling with water, the weave of the fabric drinking it in. When Eriq got to her, he looked over the body and watched Jessica’s hands at work, curiously silent for the moment.

Jessica could not help but have the impression he was sent out by the others to report on what she was doing. Either that or he couldn’t stand being with the others another second and actually preferred the company of the body and the M.E. to those ashore. He finally asked, “How’s it coming, Jess?”

“ The natives getting restless?” I think Quincey’s going to chew his fingers off. His captain’s chewed his head off already over his partner’s being a no-show and-”

“ Yeah, well… some things can’t be helped. But where the hell’s Coudriet and his boys?”

“ What exactly happened with Samernow?” he stubbornly pressed. “I saw Quincey pull over and put him out. Started to pick him up myself, but decided I’d best steer clear of that one.”

“ I’d say the case is… has gotten to him…”

“ Quincey or Samernow? Or both?”

“ Samernow for certain.”

“ Doesn’t surprise me.”

“ A case like this, Eriq… it’s enough to get to anybody, so go easy on him.”

“ None of my concern until it gets in the way.”

“ Far more important, where in hell’s Coudriet’s brigade? I’d expected him to come sloshing out to me a good twenty or thirty minutes ago.”

“ There was another call, Jess.”

“ Another call. Well, that figures, a city the size of Miami…” She continued to work over the body, snipping at loose tissue and filling vials.

Santiva was having a hard time of it now, looking at the body, turning a shade of green to rival the waters.

“ I mean another call’s come in on another floater…”

“ Another floater?”

“ Yeah, what are the odds, huh?”

Jessica continued to work. “Well, this is water country…”

“ It was in another section of beach south of here. In fact, there’ve been two additional bodies located, three in all this morning.”

She looked up at him from her work and found Eriq’s eyes now pinned on the open sea and horizon, his mouth mumbling something about how each of the bodies must have come in from a northwesterly direction, this one having gotten caught up on the jetty, the other two released elsewhere, but all within close proximity and along a straight line with the coast. As he mumbled, she kept repeating the single-word question: “Three? Three?”

“‘ Fraid so.”

“ Are you telling me-”

“ All quite possibly related, yes.”

“ Three… He gives us three in one bloody day?”

“ Coudriet is overseeing one of the others and his two assistants are taking care of number three. It would appear that our man has stepped up his timetable considerably.”

She nodded her dismayed agreement, cursing the monster under her breath. Eriq turned, stared into her eyes and then at the corpse over Jessica’s shoulder and said, “He’s decided to really rub our faces in it, hasn’t he?”

“ You sure you want to be this close to the corpse, Eriq?” she asked. “I’m going to need help any minute now to roll the body. You want to get those medics out here?”

Santiva shook his head and donned a smug look that told her he was macho enough to take whatever she could. He looked down once more at the blowfish corpse and suddenly Eriq’s large chest heaved like a machine, pulsating in staccato rhythm to the pump that was now in control of his stomach and spewing forth bile into his throat. He lurched away and vomited into the ocean.

“ Aww, damnit, Eriq, can’t I take you anywhere?” she asked, half smiling. “Maybe you had better wait onshore with the others. I’m near about done here, anyway. You can tell the others to come ahead with their ropes and nets.”

“ I’m all right, damnit. Whatever assistance you need…”

“ Eriq, you ever roll a floater before?”

“ One or two…”

“ This long in the water?”

“ No, but it’s time I got my hands wet, so to speak. Let’s get on with it, Doctor.”

“ Got a bit more here to finish up on first, so hold on, Eriq.”

“ Do you know any more than when you began?” he wondered aloud. “Will I ever know all the answers you seek, Eriq?” She bagged and labeled a strand of soggy hair. “Yes, I’d say so.”

“ How much longer, Jess? Out here like this, I mean?” She breathed in the sea air. “I want enough for my collection, Eriq.”

“ Cute…”

“ I’ll be done in five, maybe ten minutes. Takes time collecting fibers, skin, embedded minerals, chemicals, trace elements, all that good stuff.”

Eriq guffawed, repeating her words. “Good stuff…”

“ I don’t exactly have time to train you in the ways of forensic medicine here and now, Chief.”

Eriq pointed to the body and said, “Look at this… It’s like a parade balloon. How can you tell the age from this?”

“ I’d like to get a look at her throat and face now, Eriq, if that’s possible. Will you gently help me to turn her in the water onto her back? ”His mortified expression said, Jesus, Jess… I didn ‘t come out here for this, but if it’ll help speed up matters, while his voice said, “That’s what I’m here for…”

“ Good, it’ll speed up matters.”

He extended his hands in a gesture to indicate they were there for her bidding. “Just tell me what to do.”

“ Just follow my lead; grab on to her right forearm, not the wrist, and her right ankle. With her hands still tied, that’s going to help turn her. I’ll keep her steady.”

He tentatively touched the spongy flesh until it was no longer quite so disturbing to him, but this took some time.

“ Got hold?” she asked.

“ Some date,” he muttered.

“ Now begin to turn her with the tide on my count. One, two… three and go.”

Each layer of skin was like a soggy pastry crust, more water than flesh. Tissue came off the bloated corpse like cream at the top of curdled milk as the dead girl was twirled in the water, and now the FBI agents looked into a pair of empty eye sockets, like mirrors removed from frames, the soft tissue of the eyes having been first to disintegrate or become a meal for feeding microbes, fish, crabs and the like. Nose, chin, cheeks, ears and forehead had all congealed into one puffy, featureless putty mask. No one could safely or routinely identify what the sea had sculpted from flesh. Santiva looked as if he were ready again to lose it, but he obviously had nothing left to chuck.

“ The body has had long exposure to the air as well as the water,” she informed him. “If it’d remained underwater, at some depth, the decay would have been forestalled to a greater degree than we see here, pressure at greater depths being equal on all sides. The flesh would’ve remained firmer, more intact. As it is, with the slightest touch, the skin sloughs off.”

Santiva watched as a piece of the dead girl curled away with the outgoing tide, like oil spilling into the water. “What does that say

… ahh, tell you about the body, about how it came to be here like this?”

It was a good question. “Come back at me with that one when I know more, will you, Eriq?” she asked.

“ Can’t get over what water does to flesh,” he said, even his words creep-crawling as he spoke.

“ Kinda like centuries-old books,” Jessica replied. “You know, how they crumble at the slightest touch, even at the threat of a touch,” she added, both fascinated and pitying at once.

“ How can you be so damned clinical?” he said, and immediately regretted it, apologized and fell silent again.

She shrugged both the remark and the apology off, searching the bloated rolls of skin about the throat and trying a peek below the rope for what she might find there. Santiva, perhaps in an attempt to further mask his earlier remark, now asked, “How can you be so sure of the age, or even the sex for that matter?” The woman’s torso, stomach to sternum, was one large blimp, swallowing the breasts in bloated mimicry of the female form. The crotch area, too, was inflated beyond recognition. What they had was hardly human. Jessica dared not, at this time and place, attempt to remove the tightly twisted rope from the bloated neck to reveal what awful bruises lived beneath. “The other bodies before Jane Doe here were discovered without rope around their necks.”

Santiva blinked and nodded. “That’s exactly right.”

“ Did Coudriet say anything about ropes on his victim of this morning?”

“ No, no… but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any. I’ll check when we get back ashore.”

Jessica loosened the rope about the neck with some care, looking to find the bruises she had come to expect about the Adam’s apple, the thumb impressions of the murderer. They were clearly present, and so she mystified Santiva once again by saying, “This is no copycat killing, Eriq.

This is the real thing; all the marks of our boy.”

“ You’re sure of that?”

“ I am.”

“ Then why the ropes left on the neck and why’d he leave the hands tied? You think he did on the others, too, maybe, but then the rope came loose and was claimed by the sea?”

Her most doubtful glance told him she didn’t believe that theory for a moment.

Santiva tried to salvage the question. “Or do you think the bastard is taunting us with the rope?”

“ Probably… yes, I’d guess he intentionally left the rope for us to find.”

“ Then he damned sure is starting to play games with us. Three bodies in one day, intentional clues left behind. He’s grown bored with the game as it was being played and has changed the rules, hasn’t he?”

She quietly said, “I put my fingers in her mouth.”

“ What?”

“ You asked me how I can be sure of her age.”

“ You can tell by putting your fingers in her mouth?”

“ Earlier, I placed my fingers into what’s left of her mouth; actually, it’s easier to do with her face down if you want the top molars. I felt out the dental work.”

“ And?”

“ She’s got a full set of wisdom teeth, very few caps and fewer spaces. She’s a young woman, in her late teens or early twenties.”

“ Wisdom teeth, huh?”

“ They usually emerge between sixteen and seventeen years of age. It follows that since hers are fully formed that-”

“ All right…. I get it…”

“ I can also tell by the skeletal size and makeup, but this is all guesswork, as you know. It’ll take a complete autopsy to be certain of anything. ”She looks much older… so damned large.”

“ How many floaters have you seen, Eriq?” she asked again. “I confess… not many who’ve been in the water this long, obviously “

“ The tissues expand far beyond normal.”

The skin tone was bleached, stark, bloodless, albino in nature. Santiva couldn’t rise above the awful hue, the bloating, the sloughing away of skin, as if the sea owned her now and was not willing to allow her to be taken, at least not wholly.

Jessica began helping Eriq understand what was going through his mind. “It’s the glue… the bond between the outermost layer of flesh and the corium below. It has weakened so much that the blood has seeped out through the corium, escaping a trace bit at a time.”

Eriq shivered in the blistering sun and the warm water. “You mean like osmosis?”

She nodded. “Precisely, osmosis and diffusion… just like in a high school chemistry class experiment, except this one’s due to murder.”

“ You just enjoy grossing me out, don’t you, Jess?” She managed a wane smile. “Let’s say you make it too easy for me. Eriq.”

“ I need a drink.”

“ You’d only spew it up, Eriq.”

“ I hope you’re not forgetting that I am your superior, Agent Coran. Talk like that could get you into trouble. No Cuban can be told he can’t hold his liquor.”

“ A thousand pardons. Chief.”

“ How much longer?” he asked again.

“ Okay… Okay, you win. Let’s get her bagged, but please, please see to it that those clowns on shore don’t drag her out using the damned ropes or her hair, so her hands or her head doesn’t pop off.”

“ They’ll take every precaution. I’ll see to that.”

“ I mean it. The ropes have cut and burned their way near through the wrists and neck, and there’s really not much holding them on.”

“ I’ll make them apprised of it.”

She stopped him with a hand on his forearm. “Eriq, this bastard takes delight in dragging his victims’ bodies through the water at high speeds.”

Eriq gulped at the image this notion once again caused inside his head. “I recall you saying as much the other night over dinner.”

“ It’s pure conjecture, but I think one, maybe two of the victims weren’t so much victims of shark attack as victims of the ropes, which cut off their heads and hands, allowing them to pull free of their moorings unbeknownst even to the killer. I think that’s why some have come undone, as it were.”

“ But these ropes didn’t come loose from anywhere?” She held up the end of the rope that trailed from the dead girl’s throat. “No, no… This was cut with a knife.”

“ Don’t worry, I’ll make sure the medics know the score.”

“ Without giving too much away?”

“ Right. Of course.” They both knew they had to keep some information about the killer and his private moments with his victims a complete secret from the press and public. How else to know him when they were standing across from him in an interrogation room?

“ And make sure they take her to the right morgue, Eriq, and-”

“ All right, I get it.” Eriq didn’t need a second telling. He was now quickly wading toward shore, solid ground and the other men. He looked back only once, when he heard Jessica saying a prayer over the dead.

Jessica felt his eyes on her as she finished what few words she could muster for the deceased young woman, for now Jane Doe. The brilliant sun reflecting off the water was blinding, burning, hateful to the eyes, which she had kept protected with her sunglasses all the while she worked. The polarized lenses didn’t distort colors like other glasses, so they had served her well here while she’d labored over the body, the lenses also cutting down on the awful glare, so much so that she could see the trail of lively, excitable minnows nipping at her feet below the surface. The miniature fish also tried to nip at the rest of the corpse, wanting it in death to give over to them continued life.