Darkest Instinct

ELEVEN

Somewhere on the Atlantic off the Florida Coast

The Next Morning

Far out to sea, under clouds which painted the sky a cold, gunmetal gray, Warren Tauman thought about his current circumstances. He felt safe, secure in the knowledge that no one knew him or his deeds, and yet he wanted notoriety; he wanted the world to know what he’d done and why, for the why of it was important, and it was for this reason that he kept a diary of his activities and travels. He wrote haltingly, awkwardly and badly, however, never quite able to smooth out the words the way his mind wanted. Maybe he would never be a real writer, as he had always dreamed of becoming. Perhaps he wasn’t good enough, and maybe he wasn’t interesting enough, and maybe what he wrote about no one but the most bookish police science types would find the least bit interesting. Maybe the exact words of the killer would all become as arcane as some lost alchemist’s recipes.

“ Another reason to leave the Miami area,” he spoke aloud to the dead Madeleine. “I was beginning to get bloody morbid and negative there. Not to mention the fact that women were becoming more distrustful, wary and cautious of strangers, and I was, after all, a stranger to everyone there.”

He was already well below Islamorada Key, according to his calculations. He had weathered the storm well. It had turned out to be a simple blow, over quickly and painlessly. He had spent much of his time replacing Mother on the wall, but she had gone stone cold again, not speaking or moving or showing any sign that she remained or planned to reanimate what again seemed a useless corpse.

He had spent the rest of his time at the wheel and writing in his notebook, chronicling the night’s experience, the fact that Mother had finally showed herself, that it wasn’t madness or a fantasy that drove him but a real quest, and a winnable one at that.

He lamented the fact that Mother’s spirit and time here had been so damnably short-lived, that Madeleine’s body was found wanting, for Mother had obviously and completely vacated it. He had come close, but not close enough.

In calm seas, with the ship making a steady clip of eleven knots, he pushed southward. Warren once again placed the sleek schooner-class ship on automatic pilot and began removing Madeleine’s body from the wall of his cabin. This chore accomplished, he carried it, this time more gently, to the waiting sea.

At the stern, he calmly looked down into the dead features, somehow knowing that Mother wanted better, and said, “Good-bye, sweet slut; go now to our lord and master; make Tauto as pleased with you as I once was…”He now watched the corpse as it slid over the side and out to sea. He watched the stiff form bob over the top of the water, caught in the ship’s considerable wake.

The body, so loaded with stiffening agents and preservatives, would float atop the water like a log. “You’ll be discovered shortly and they’ll give chase, Madeleine. Maybe that’s what we need to relieve the boredom, hey. Mother? A good chase? Perhaps that’s what Mother wants… and we always do what Mother wants, don’t we, Warren…”

He grimaced up at the blinding sun.

He knew that leaving the Greater Miami area was the wise thing to do. He had been seen now countless times by women, many of whom were in the company of the women he’d sent to Tauto. He anticipated a police sketch of his likeness would come next, and so he had already begun to grow a beard to add to his repertoire of disguises and makeup. Once again thanks be to Mother, who had taught him the proper use of rouge, lipstick and other assorted feminine items. Mother had used Warren in her act from time to time to play, of all things, a little girl, a daughter or niece. Mother had always wanted a little girl to dress up and play dolly with.

Mother had been wonderful when she was on stage, a force to be reckoned with. Patric Allain was just another of his own stage names, taken from his mother, whose stage name was Patricia Allain. He’d picked up the art of makeup from a life in the theatre, with Mother dragging him about from one engagement to the next, from London to the nether reaches of Scotland and Ireland and beyond, all the while giving him what she called the “best education she knew how.” The knowledge of second rate theatre in Britain, makeup, how to play a part-it was all the best, most practical gift that had been left him, aside from the estate.

Mother had married well near the end of her life; fortunately, too, for she was beginning to lose both her looks and all hope of ever becoming the actress she had set out to become-slowed by a kid, she had so often reminded her bastard son, Warren.

He never knew his father; he rather doubted that his mother knew his father. She wised up later in life, accepting a proposal from a dazzled old country squire, upon whom she worked her considerable feminine wiles. The old man had not for a moment stood a chance, not since the moment he saw her on stage and showed up at her dressing room door, annoyed from the first to discover Warren there in a corner.

The old man. William Anthony Kirlian, had soon turned over everything he owned to the ravishing Patricia Allain, stage star-shortly before his death of “natural causes,” or so the coroner’s inquest had put it. Everyone suspected poisoning at the hand of the new wife, but no one except Mother had suspected suffocation at Warren’s hand.

It was then that she had shipped Warren off to a boarding school, where he did indeed acquire a fine education, but where he also remained lonely, depressed and sullen. When he would visit Mother at her palatial estate outside London, he was made to feel like a guest, an outsider, even an intruder, for Mother always had a man around, and she liked her privacy up until the day she died, in an apparent accidental fall from a cliff near her seaside estate.

He had inherited everything, which after taxes did not amount to near so much as it had appeared it would. The estate had to be sold, and with it went most of the prestige and privilege of class that Warren had for the first time in his life enjoyed, and despite the occasional remorse at having killed his mother, over the years his only constant and tangible remorse had congealed in a desire to have killed her with more aplomb and alacrity, to have drawn out her suffering for long days and nights-and why not? Hadn’t she made his life a living hell? Hadn’t she made him suffer like a pet collie at her hands all his miserable life?

So he had had to sell off the gaudy estate and pocket what he could of the proceeds, and he was left with a sailing ship which he knew not a whit about. The ship, however, became his home and his one true source of pride and excitement. That had been four years ago, and since then he had killed many, many women. He didn’t at first know why he was driven to do so, knowing only that he must, and that he could not control the urge.

When he had killed his mother that day on the precipice, it had come about in a moment of passion born of sheer rage when she told him that he must earn his own way, that she could not in clear conscience provide for his needs a moment longer after having financed his education at Southwark and having learned of the indelicate indiscretion he had committed with another boy there. Southwark wanted no part of Warren, so she had nowhere to send him, and this angered her.

“ After I die, Warren, then all this will be yours, Warren, but until that time, Warren, I would like to see you strike out on your own, Warren, make a go of it, Warren, make Mummy proud, Warren, make as much of yourself as humanly possible, Warren… show me some backbone, Warren… After all, you have an education now, Warren, far more than when I started out in life. Then… well, then… we will see… don’t you see that it’s for your best, Warren?”

They were the last words she ever uttered to him, the last sounds aside from the scream that echoed all the way back up to him.

Since that day, he found himself inextricably drawn to kill others, women in particular. He had killed things before, small birds and animals, and there was the incident at Southwark in which he had tortured the homosexual boy who had made advances. He had lured the boy to a desolate place and kept him trapped there for forty-eight hours before anyone suspected him of having a hand in the disappearance. The nude boy’s body was covered in welts and bite marks. He hadn’t killed the boy, but he might well have, if given more time.

And nowadays he continued to torture and kill, but it all had a purpose, a reason. He targeted only women who reminded him of his mother when she was a young, stupid little tramp. His kill spree had begun with whores and prostitutes along the Thames River in the White Chapel District, women who were closer in age to Mother when she’d died, but he had slowly worked his phantasm of murdering the old sot over and over again so often that he grew tired of the game; he wanted more, especially now. Nowadays, his greatest dream was to kill Mother’s spirit, the soul spirit which visited and tormented his mind whenever he slept, and he had to destroy it before Tauto, in His eyes.

Warren had not known Tauto when he had killed out of rage. Now he wanted to introduce Mother to Tauto, in the only way that such an introduction could occur. He also wanted to destroy her at an early age, before she turned twenty, before she had an opportunity to turn his life into a shambles. He wanted her when she was not much more than a child. He wanted most to kill her at a time in her life before she had given birth to him.

The corpse he’d just thrown overboard was now out of sight, flushed from the wake of his ship like so much refuse. He wondered what authorities would make of this last one, all those chemicals pumped into her… the hook in her back…

It would be such a deviation from the others. He had experimented on some of the others’ limbs, a hand here, a leg there, but this was the first time he had left one whole, preserved body. It would serve only to confuse and anger the faceless people who pursued him. The recent papers carried a photograph of a pair of FBI investigators, one a man, the other a woman, who were in dogged pursuit of clues leading to his whereabouts, or so the reporter said. A total exaggeration, so far as Warren could make out. Still, he knew that when his skin told him to get, he should get, and so he had instinctively decided to flee.

He returned now to the wheel and steered his ship, the ocean pleased with his work, in harmony with him. He was one of two beings in the universe which the ocean smiled upon. The other was his god.

He returned in his mind to those first killings in London. He had enjoyed each better than the one before, his ritual of humiliating and creating suffering in his victims becoming more and more elaborate as he went, more exciting and satisfying as he continued building onto the ritual labyrinth of inducing pain and horror in his prey. They were all so easy to kill; but it took some imagination to torture them, and so his imagination grew.

After his thirteenth victim, he began to keep a record of his activities-”perversions,” the press called them. His diary chronicled his methods of torture, but also his work in attempting to perfectly preserve one of his victims-a thing which if accomplished, he could stop killing, he was sure. If he could find a way to capture Mother’s soul and keep it captive inside a perfectly preserved double of her, then he wouldn’t have to go on killing; there would be no point, and he would be at peace with Tauto.

When he’d first started killing, most of the women, at first, little resembled his mother except in age and habit- they were all whores. The London Times and other newspapers in England had called him a modern-day Jack the Ripper because he worked the infamous White Chapel District where the Ripper had done his work. But he was no ripper. He took no delight in mutilating the beautiful female form, and he detested the odor and the sight of blood. He didn’t cut the bodies open. In fact, other than suffocating and drowning them, he barely touched his victims during his first forays into murder. At first, he was rather shy about it, actually, rushing it and running quickly from the deed.

The elaborate scheme to somehow fetch his mother from the nether regions into which he himself had sent her, to return her to himself so that he might inflict eternal suffering on her, only evolved over long time and experience with murder.

Those first fledgling attempts at feeling something, of making contact with his own soul, with which he had become unfamiliar, were important bridges. They were bridges leading to the soul of his dead mother as well, although he had been awkward, crude and blind in his murdering meanderings. Only when he found the teachings of Tauto and read them, understanding that all things in life carried a spiritual double, did he realize that it might be possible to recapture the moment of murdering his mother through the soul of a stand-in. Rudimentary as they were, those first killings became the cornerstone upon which he had built a relationship with his god and his deceased mother.

Tauto, in his great wisdom, told Warren to leave London and to seek his mother’s image in younger women, women who in every way mirrored her as she was the year of Warren’s birth. He calculated that she was between sixteen and eighteen when she gave birth to him, so he had sailed from England to America in search of a fresh start and a fresh approach to his problem. Now, in the land of milk and honey, along the sun-drenched coasts of Florida, he had found what he had come in search of many times over…

Still, he remained unfulfilled, his need insatiable, so long as Mother remained aloof and out of reach, capable of tormenting him at will.

He brought his pleasure craft into the wind and looked forward to his return trip to the Keys and beyond, perhaps a little trip to the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of Florida. He’d heard that Tampa Bay and the Naples area were both beautiful this time of year…

Jessica yawned even as she worked over her microscope at the crime lab this morning. She hadn’t gotten much in the way of sleep the night before, tossing and turning due to her earlier argument with Eriq and a late-night phone call from Dr. Kim Desinor which only solidified the fact that their killer was a sailor, and an elusive one at that. The psychic’s take on the killer told Jessica she was looking for a man with a frightful multiple personality disorder, possibly schizophrenic, with a brain full of voices, certainly delusional and possibly hallucinating. “This man convinces people to go off with him, Kim,” she’d challenged Desinor. “How can he be hallucinating and in control at the same time?” “I get the picture of a complex personality-complex.”

“ Say that again.”

“ I mean, he plots out his actions against his victims, Jess, but he’s also quite mad, not unlike your old friend Matisak.”

“ I get the picture.”

“ And he’s a man of many disguises who has seawater for blood.”

Jessica pictured the pretty psychic at the other end of the line. She was sharp and intelligent and quick, and most of the time, in one fashion or another, she was right, her instincts dead-on. However, Jessica had learned to take what Kim said with caution. She saw signposts and symbols as often as she saw actualities, so every word had to be weighed in the context of its possibly being a reflection of some other meaning.

“ Your killer has many ties, but he has no ties.” Enough with the riddles, Jessica thought, but kept silent.

“ He is tied to his past. He is filled with venomous anger, a fiery rage, and he is on some sort of bizarre quest to locate something he lost as a child-some great object he must regain.”

“ He’s murdering young women to regain something he’s lost. Now that’s a bulletin, Kim,” Jessica replied, unable to hold back on her sarcasm any longer. “That hardly narrows my search.”

“ There is one other thing.”

It sounded as if Kim was about to give out with the good stuff. “Go on.”

“ The letter T which he signs with…”

“ Yes, well, we’ve come to expect tea with this crumpet.”

Kim paused before saying, “Cute, Jess. I read about the accent, and that maybe the guy is British. You’re thinking there may be some validity to it, but be cautious. He’s a player, a thespian if you get my drift, so the accent could well be part of his act.”

“ Are you saying he’s a pro?”

“ If not, very close to it, yes. Now, back to the cross-T signature.”

“ What can you tell me about it?”

“ It’s actually the sign of the Tau Cross; a cross in the shape of a T. I had a friend in the department, Peter Ames, an expert on ancient markings, look it over.”

“ And?”

“ He says it has an ancient and rather mysterious history. It has a history as a Christian marking, but there’s also an offshoot religion called the Tau which keeps coming up in the literature.”

“ And? What about it?”

“ Well, very little is known about it, but he says one thing is sure.”

“ What’s that, Kim?”

“ Human sacrifice was part of the deal.”

“ Why am I not surprised?”

“ One other thing, Jess.”

“ Yes?”

“ He’s like a confused or wounded animal-he’s extremely dangerous.”

“ We know that much.”

“ He makes love to the dead; he’s a necrophile.”

“ There’s no way to know that scientifically since all evidence of such… such perversion was washed away by the sea. We know the women were raped, but how can you be sure he… he does their bodies?”

“ I saw it.”

Over the course of the rest of that night, any pleasant dream Jessica conjured churned itself into, a convoluted nightmare, her rest shattered by the screams of modern human sacrifices.

Now bleary-eyed, Jessica sat in the lab, contemplating microscopic trace evidence taken from the victims and at the same time recalling Dr. Kim Desinor’s psychic and psychological profile of the killer. They seemed no closer to catching this cretin than the day they’d arrived in Florida, and this frustrated her to no end.

A lab technician called to Jessica, bringing her out of the scope and her reverie. “There’s a phone call for you. Press three,” said the Oriental technician, a small woman with a sweet smile and smiling eyes.

She lifted the phone beside her to hear the warm hello of Dr. John T. Thorpe. J.T., her lab director and friend back at Quantico, had been put onto something which he had kept secret from Jessica up till now.

“ Your timing is impeccable, J.T.”

“ As always,” he joked.

“ I’m right this moment staring into my microscope, looking at the slide which you FedExed me yesterday.” With the phone in one hand, her microscope at the other, she and J.T. talked about the strange new findings in the Night Crawler case.

“ What does this mean, J.T.?” she asked even though she knew.

“ You tell me,” he replied. “I’m really in no position to say, Jess.”

“ Well, is it a case of accidental contamination somewhere along the journey of the evidence chain? Did the botching come as a result of those people in Islamorada Key, maybe?”

“ Well, they’re researchers; what do they know about handling forensic evidence?”

“ We’ve got to know if this was intentional-committed by the killer-or accidental, committed by Wainwright or someone in Coudriet’s lab, here in Miami.” J.T.’s voice was suddenly thick with disbelief. “Jess, if it’s intentional, then the chemical agents were introduced by the monster behind the killings…”

“ And what does that tell you?”

“ He’s into some sort of preserve-the-flesh fetish?”

“ On top of everything else. We have reason to suspect he’s a necrophile, and if so, attempting to preserve the body for as long as he can fits.”

“ So an icebox isn’t good enough for this guy.”

“ Cold bruises the skin tone, discolors the product.” She continued to stare through the dual ocular eyepiece of the electron comparison microscope, to assure herself that what she was looking at made sense in light of the information J.T. had found back at Quantico, where he’d put their best chemists to work on tissue samples she’d taken from some of the body parts found that day in Islamorada. There had been something peculiar about the isolated chemicals; they didn’t belong.

Now she had confirmation; the bizarre turn of events unearthed at the microchemical level brought about a shower of new and disturbing images of the killer. This new information showed trace amounts of chemicals routinely used in the mortician’s trade. Perhaps their killer had worked for a time in a mortuary. Such a fact would tie in with a fetish for preserving the tissue. “Listen, J.T., this is to be kept between us, understand?”

“ No problem whatsoever, Jess.”

“ We’ve got precious little to convict on if we ever do connect anyone with these killings. If a true confession is ever taken, and the killer opens up about this aspect of his fantasy, then we’ll know we’ve got the right man. At the moment, we have thirty-four confessed Night Crawlers undergoing various stages of arrest, booking, psychiatric testing, scrutiny and release.”

“ Damn, that’s amazing.”

“ What’s amazing?” she asked.

“ That anyone would confess to such heinous crimes.”

“ Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe the real Night Crawler will crawl up the MPD stairs and turn himself in today or tomorrow. But I rather doubt it.”

“ Yeah, don’t hold your breath.”

She involuntarily nodded. “He’s having too much fun to stop.”

“ But what about the letters? Isn’t that a subconscious cry for someone to stop him, a sign that he wants to confess?”

“ Like you said, J.T., don’t hold your breath. No, this guy’s letters are strictly to please himself, to taunt us and to vent more of his venom.”

“ Talk about confessions… Had a call the other day from a guy in Hawaii,” J.T. abruptly changed the direction of the subject. Jessica felt her heart skip a beat. “What? Really?” She wondered if she’d successfully kept her excitement out of her voice.

“ He was looking to talk to you, Jess. Maybe you should give him a call. Sounds like he really misses you.”

“ Good… he should.”

“ Hope you don’t mind, but I told him where you were staying. So be warned: He may call.”

She imagined Jim Parry, a hemisphere away, and she longed to be with him. “J.T., don’t go playing Cupid now. The role doesn’t suit you.” He laughed lightly and said good-bye and they hung up, Jessica left with this extraordinary new twist in the case, wondering if she should rush to share it with Eriq Santiva or hold the information in abeyance, at least until after the episode of America’s Most Wanted was aired, so that they might keep it under wraps for future use against the Night Crawler.

She could go to him, argue the point. And if she didn’t share with Eriq, her chief? She could get into a hell of a lot of trouble with him over failing to bring the news to his attention through the lie of omission. He’d be wanting soon to know also if she’d had contact with Kim Desinor.

Jessica rubbed her tired eyes, lifted her head and leaned back on the stool. She stared out through the glass partitions all around her. The partitions ran the length of the lab offices like a house of mirrors, each reflecting light from the other to create an illusion of endless corridors within corridors, an ev- erlastingness reflecting science-man’s need to know the truth at all costs. The Miami-Dade authorities certainly had spared no cost in building the new facility here.

Now, through the various partitions, Jessica saw Dr. Andrew Coudriet approaching. He seemed to be looking for her, so she waved. He came now directly to her and in a near whisper, he said, “I heard about your blowout with your partner.”

She frowned up at him. “The walls hear everything?”

“ Is there more? I heard you disagreed over whether to release the artist sketch and description.”

Jessica’s hands seemed to work independently of her at the lab table. She’d been made aware that all of Allison Norris’s parts were to be interred today, per order of the family despite what Coudriet or anyone in the FBI had to say about it, and personally, she didn’t have the strength or desire to fight the politically powerful family-not at this late point in time.

Finally, she looked into Coudriet’s eyes and replied, “It’s a sad day when the M.E.’s office can’t control the evidence it oversees.”

“ If you mean the Norris body, well… that’s out of our hands. If you FBI people wanted to contest it, then you have my blessings, but it sounds as if Santiva has already caved, as they say.” She shook her head. “There really isn’t much more that Allison can tell us now, is there?” He nodded. “Pretty sure she’s given up her last secret.” Jessica withheld even from her colleague the fact that the girl’s hand had actually been severed before she died and used in an unholy fashion, in the killer’s attempt to permanently preserve it. Little wonder that body and body part had become so separated in their quest for final burial. The killer had held on to the hand for a long time, along with the bracelet, before he gave up on it, tossing it overboard as shark fodder. And Jessica had no doubt that the killer had given up this trophy with the name bracelet intact- superglued, in fact, to the wrist-with thoughtful intent, for his own reasons; most likely, he wanted to tell Jessica-or someone like her-the truth. The monster wanted a voice, wanted to speak, wanted to communicate its plans.

The terrible truth told at the molecular level was that the hand had been severed while the girl remained alive and that very soon after the severed hand had been injected with embalming fluids.

“ So what are the juicy details surrounding this big problem that has arisen between you and your chief?” Coudriet asked.

Pretending busyness, Jessica returned to the microscope.

“ Don’t pretend you don’t hear me, Doctor, or that you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Coudriet said, placing a meaty hand over her microscope lens.

“ Precisely how did you hear about our disagreement?” She had told no one of her and Eriq’s argument.

“ As you said, walls in a police precinct have ears.” He noticed only now, by their labels, that the series of slides she was working on had come from the severed hand of Allison Norris. The attention she showed the slides created in him even more interest in what she was about. “What more do you hope to accomplish with that material?”

Jessica needed an ally, needed someone she could talk the scientific facts out with. Andrew Coudriet would have to be it; he would soon have access to the information anyway. “I’m not sure, but I noticed some odd anomalies with respect to the chemical makeup.”

“ Really? Now you’re a forensic chemist as well?”

“ I had our chemists at Quantico check it out.”

“ I see.”

“ Something didn’t quite jive, but now I’m sure.”

“ Sure of what?”

“ I noticed an odor when I first had this specimen in Islamorada, but I chalked it up to the embalming fluids used on the shark carcasses there. Early on, I sent tissue samples up to Quantico, to chemists there. Quantico confirmed a hunch I had, so now that I’ve got corroboration, I thought you might care to have a look.” She got up from her stool to allow him access to the microscope. “Go ahead. Tell me what you see.”

He looked from her to the scope and back again before settling his eyes over the dual eyepiece. “What am I looking for?”

“ Just keep looking.”

Coudriet settled in, removed his glasses and stared hard down into the microscope. After a moment, he thoughtfully said, “This came from the severed hand?”

“ Yes.”

“ What is it, precisely?”

“ I just got off the phone with an expert chemist with my outfit in D.C. He FedExed these slides overnight.”

Coudriet’s eyes squinted, the red brows looking like bird feathers. “And… and?”

“ And from the chemicals they were able to isolate, J.T. says it’s clearly a preservative or fixative of some sort… not unlike the kind we use to keep our own specimens in limbo.” Jessica rubbed the sleepiness from her eyes.

“ Good God, are you saying this madman is or was a… a medical man?”

“ Not necessarily. The chemicals could be had at most any drugstore. He might also have a link with a mortician’s office, or for that matter any number of places in the business of preserving flesh,” Jessica speculated.

“ From Jell-O to WonderPIus Glow 19? But why is he using preservatives on the hand alone? We saw nothing of the kind in the autopsy, and a thing like that, you don’t miss.”

“ No, there was no evidence of it in the body proper, no.”

“ Islamorada then. They somehow stuck the hand full of it. It’s the only logical explanation,” Coudriet said.

“ Yeah, maybe… I thought the same.”

“ Thought? As in the past tense?”

“ Well, Doctor, one of my jobs is to think the unthinkable.”

“ And precisely what unthinkable are you thinking?”

She considered her answer carefully. She knew she ought actually to be talking to Eriq about this, and she planned to, but he had so infuriated her the night before that she meant to steer clear of him today. “If I were relentlessly killing people, Dr. Coudriet, in cold and brutal fashion, I’d need some sort of construct or scaffolding built around me, as a safety measure for my own sanity. You follow me so far?”

“ I… I think I do.”

“ So, I kill and kill and kill again, enjoying the delight I take in robbing others of the most potent and powerful force on the planet-life itself. I feed myself on that loss of life and suffering others must pay me. However, I need a reason, a rationalization for my cruelty and perversion which will in effect wash my hands of guilt.”

“ What has this to do with preserving the girl’s hand?”

“ As a trophy, as a prize, to keep forever or to give in offering to my master and god.”

“ To God?”

“ Not just any god, but the god who talks to me, the god I’ve created who buttresses and shores up the scaffold of my perverse rationale. It becomes an offering, the hand, but it must be as perfect as I can make it.”

“ But it’s perishable, impossible to preserve.”

“ Up to a point, yes… So over the side it goes. It was not released at the same time as the body.”

“ So the shark that swallowed it-”

“ Did not attack Allison’s body to come away with it. It had already been severed.”

“ But the bracelet? He would have removed it, wouldn’t he?”

“ He’s playing at god himself; he’s neither sane nor afraid of us, Doctor. There’s resin-epoxy-residue from Super Glue where he attached the bracelet.”

“ Heartless sonofabitch… But the arm was hacked off by what appeared to be a shark’s bite; you said so yourself.”

“ I wanted to believe the parts matched, and they did. Self-fulfilling prophecy. We go back for another look, a more critical look, we’ll find differently. We do it all the time in our business. Doctor.”

Coudriet remained recalcitrant, unconvinced, shaking his head. “We can’t possibly hold the body any longer. They want the body released yesterday…”

Jessica said nothing.

“ But why? Why would this madman sever the hand and embalm it? What possible purpose could it serve?”

“ We’ve got to stop looking for purpose; this bastard’s purpose is totally a construct of his own making, having no validity outside his brain.”

“ No validity save that which his fevered mind has concocted…”

“ Precisely, no reason in our world, only his; but if you want my opinion, the hand is just the beginning of an escalation.”

“ An escalation of what?”

“ His attempt to preserve flesh, to preserve a victim whole… It’s in keeping with how long he has held them in the water.”

Coudreit didn’t want to believe it, but it shook him nonetheless. “Such madness allowed to move about freely out there.”

“ We’re going to catch this monster.”

“ Sometimes… sometimes it makes me wonder where God is in all this. And what about this madness in here, too… The way this investigation is being run, it’s all insane.”

“ What do you suggest we do about it?” She was touched by his sudden show of concern, the depth of his feeling. “Look, I have a fax machine in my office and direct E-mail on my computer, should you care to avail yourself.” He dropped a stark photocopy likeness of the killer onto the lab table beside her. “But of course if policy prevents you, I’ll understand.”

“ You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“ The hell I don’t. Frankly speaking, Dr. Coran, I never much cared for the politicizing of this office or any murder investigation, and I’m sure, if you are your father’s daughter, you don’t either.” It was a challenge to her, the gauntlet thrown at her feet. She looked from the eyes of the killer in the artist’s composite to the soft, even and determined eyes of Dr. Coudriet. There seemed to be a fresh, new glow about the man today, and he smelled different, like a man who’d discovered some new delight in life. “What do you know of my father?” she asked.

‘ ‘ Are you serious? I learned a great deal from him; read every word he ever wrote on forensic medicine, twice over. I once heard him speak-brilliant man-and once I met him at a gathering in Oregon.”

‘ ‘ We… the family was stationed there for some time in the late fifties,” Jessica offered. She noticed that Coudriet smelled of musk oil. Or was it a natural musk odor? That was it. The good M.E. had just come from having had sex with someone. He was aglow in the wash of it, and could no better hide it than he might his red hair.

“ Tell me how you learned about the disagreement between Eriq and me.”

“ News travels fast around here,” he commented, stepping a little away. “When people learn that this fiend is embalming his victims atop everything else…”

“ That news stays within these walls, between you and me, Doctor.”

With a solemn bow of the head, he nodded his agreement. “Will you then at least do the right thing, Jessica Coran?”

Damn, she thought, he sounds like my father. “And exactly what is that?”

“ I’m in utter and complete agreement with you, Dr. Coran. What little information we have on the killer’s identity and the threat he poses to certain victim types, that all this information be released to our still largely unsuspecting public, many of whom-many of whom-could fall victim to the killer before daybreak tomorrow. My God, he released three bodies to us yesterday. That clearly tells us that he means to replenish his supply.”

Coudriet was right; the killer meant to start over, she thought but did not say. “I’m not in a position to authorize-”

“ Damnit, Jessica, someone’s got to authorize it; we can’t wait for the governor or the mayor or the fucking Boy Scouts!”

“ That’s enough!” Jessica weighed the decision for a long moment. She lifted the computer-enhanced image of the killer before her eyes and stared at the dreaded and hated creature, the Night Crawler, known now also as Patric Allain. He was, as Judy Templar had attested, a handsome and alluring creature of dark, mysterious features. The shock of boyish hair over the forehead, the telltale birthmark peeking from beneath, the thin jaw and even teeth, the somewhat weak upper lip and sensual lower lip. But it was in the eyes that she saw the allure. These eyes of a madman, filled with mystery. “You have E-mail,” she stated. “I do.”

“ I’d like to get in touch with Scotland Yard, an Inspector Moyler there, about the case. Tell him our man speaks with a British accent and uses the name Patric Allain. See if it turns up anything there.”

“ And what about here, closer to home?”

She breathed in a long breath of air, weighing her friendship with Eriq and her loyalty to him as a superior. The whole thing felt like a cracked mirror, a wingless bird, a blind owl, a dolphin without sonar. If she pushed Eriq far enough, he might send her packing; she’d be off the case, possibly up on disciplinary charges. But then, maybe that would give her reason to walk away from Quantico altogether, to rejoin Jim Parry in Hawaii…

“ You get me through to this fellow in London, and I’ll release the damned police sketch. But it goes first to the Herald.”

“ Other law enforcement agencies throughout the state, up and down the coast, first,” he countered.

“ That’s been done already.”

“ No… no, it hasn’t, I’m afraid.”

“ What? Damn…” Jessica now saw with certainty that Eriq Santiva would continue in his conservative approach to catching the killer. “The Herald first.” She stood firm.

Coudriet read her face. He realized that she was stepping out onto a shaky limb. “All right; done.”

“ Let’s get to work then.”