Darkest Instinct

SIXTEEN

The stakeout had gone way past two p.m. and no one remotely resembling Patric Allain had shown up, but still Jessica and the others held out a desperate hope, she from inside the trophy shop and the rest from outside. Santiva and Mark held forth in the Florida Power and Light-turned- surveillance van at a remote point across and down from the trophy shop, Quincey from a nearby doorstep, where he played the role of a homeless man.

The trophy shop and its adjacent warehouse, in which fish of every size and shape and color hung in suspended animation from rafters, each in its own crucial stage of preservation, was quite unusual.

Jessica found Buckner’s shop reminiscent of the fictional Little Shop of Horrors. It was a graveyard for fish, large and small, but more than a graveyard, it resembled a cross between a biophysics lab-with its many chemicals and hydroponics agricultural experiment, with fish instead of vegetation hanging from a ceiling-and a dirty, noisy warehouse that might as easily have housed men shearing sheep as men mixing great vats of papier-mache, creating plaster casts and molds and gutting and skinning fish.

The warehouse section was stacked full with supplies in various cortiers and rooms-a labyrinth of rooms, actually-each given over to a certain stage in the reverent process of trophy mounting. The army of workmen committed to the process wore T-shirts, jeans and rubber boots. The shop out front was just that, a front for displays of blue and yellowfin, jack, marlin, grouper, shark and some of Buckner’s monstrosities, coming out of what he called his “pure creative side,” the cross-bred taxidermy of trophy creatures he’d termed Twisted Evolution. He proudly displayed the obnoxious results-a “gator-fish”-under a large sign of the same name: Twisted Evolution. Other items of every conceivable sort necessary to both his main trade and fishing-both big game and small-was sold in his shop, including bait and tackle of every size, shape and suggestion. It was all crowded in with Snickers bars, Lay’s potato chips, and Pepsi-Cola, which lay in the same cooler as the big-game bait.

In his attempt to impress Jessica, Buckner proudly announced that he owned stock in Pepsi-Cola, told her that it had risen recently to forty-six dollars a share and asked if she wouldn’t like a piece of that.

Since Jessica had to be on the inside and pretend familiarity with her “uncle” and her surroundings, she was more than happy to take Buck’s ear-grinning tour of his place which, as he put it, he’d “built up from scratch.”

“ The premises was once a used-boat dealership, long since defunct. Took the place off the Realtor’s hands for a song,” he boasted to Jessica now, as if meaning to propose marriage as soon as he demonstrated how he could get rid of his old lady and keep her. Jessica, in jeans and plaid shirt, her hair pulled back severely, a ponytail bobbing behind her head, was quickly getting a feel for, and a smell for, Buck’s Trophy Shop, as it was called.

Buckner had a number of men working for him, some obviously for day wages, and they had a routine which they never veered from, which Jessica assured them and Buck they should continue to the letter. But Buckner and the others were fascinated with her, acting as if they had never seen a woman in the place before, and perhaps they hadn’t, so she finally gave in, allowing them to show her every detail of the process of mounting the game fish, of which they were solemnly and worshipfully proud. Buck talked the whole time as each of his men in turn demonstrated one or more facets of the process. “You won’t find no damned plastic marlins here, darlin’,” he informed her. “We do it the old-fashioned way, but with state-of-the-art preservation techniques, mind you.”

“ Did a marlin for Paul Newman a ways back,” said Buck’s first assistant. “That was a gas.”

Buck raised his shoulders, “We got some of the world’s most famous big-game anglers coming to us, ‘cause they know we’re the best, and Stu here wants to tell you about Paul Newman! Anyhow, you see, here we do game fish trophies by the hollow-sculpture method.”

“ Meaning?” Jessica stared into one of the papier-mache vats, where an assistant mixed the materials with large wooden ladles, finally plunging his hands and forearms in up to the elbows and mixing the sticky white glue.

“ We use the actual skin of the actual fish. Most places nowadays use fiberglass or Teflon or goddamn graphite! ‘Magine that? Damn thing’s no longer a fish, no more fish than you or me.”

No more a fish than you or /, she thought, wanting to correct his grammar but realizing that to do so would be the grammatical equivalent of spitting into a hurricane wind-useless and messy.

“ Using the actual fish skin means we get the most authentic reproduction of size and shape,” added Stu, a thin, angular man with dark skin and an eagerness to please.

“ It costs more the right way,” explained Buck, “so most times we’re asked to create a reasonable facsimile. Hate to do it, but if you’re gonna use plastic-”

Stu, hearing this so often, finished for Buck, adding, “-at least get a trained skinner who can provide exact specifications!”

“ When we get a fish in, it’s first measured and weighed,” continued Buck. “Then we pose it-you know, in a lifelike position, say leaping or lunging.”

“ Next, plaster of paris is poured over it, to create the spit mold,” contributed Stu. “And after the material sets, it’s removed and the skinning process follows.”

“ We use as delicate surgical instruments as you, Dr. Coran,” Buck assured her. “It has to be done that way, if it’s to be done right.”

“ You use a scalpel, then?”

“ To assure no damage to the specimen, yes.”

“ Were any scalpels stolen from your place along with the chemicals the other night?”

“ Some instruments were taken, yes.”

Stu wanted to get back to the subject at hand, so he deftly stepped between them and continued, saying, “This point’s where I come in.” Stu was obviously proud of his handiwork. “The skin is next given several chemical baths, you know, to remove excess oils, organic matter, microbes.”

“ High-tech insect repellent,” muttered Buck as if to disparage Stu’s expertise.

Stu pretended no offense. “Once cured, the skin is fitted inside the mold, to return it to its original shape, you see.” He demonstrated with a blue marlin.

“ That’s when several layers of paper, glue and papier- mache are applied through an opening. Here. I’ll show you.” Buck lifted one of the molds at this crucial stage to show her the hole on the side that would be against the wall, not showing. “This forms the core, replaces the innards so that there’s no collapse after time. At this stage,” he added, “we say the fish is truly mounted. We don’t use the term stuffed. Stupid to refer to trophy mounting as stuffing, like you’d stuff a bear or a circus animal. As you see, we don’t stuff the damn things.”

“ The mount is then ready for the dehydration process, which can take up to three months, depending on size, of course,” Stu explained. “We’ll pass by the curing and drying room next.”

Jessica saw that the marine taxidermists kept a large inventory of molds on hand to provide a base for, as Buck explained it, “fish received only in the skin. It’s a great deal less expensive to forward a previously gutted fish on ice than one of full dead weight.”

Stu piped in, “But Buck won’t never guarantee perfection unless we can begin with the whole fish when it comes through the door.”

Having been in the business all his life, Buck had amassed so many molds that he could reproduce any fish size or species within a fraction of an inch of its life dimension.

They peeked into what Stu had called the curing and drying room, where bright heat lamps were turned on and focused toward the ceiling. Every available inch of ceiling space was occupied by the enormous trophy fish, many of which were swordfish, their proud swords spiked downward now from their carcasses, lifeless and hard and eyeless, their eyes having been removed at some earlier stage in the process.

The men working in the back of the factory, in white aprons pulled over sleeveless T-shirts and jeans, walked about in rubber boots or sneakers completely covered in globs of papier-mache like so much pizza flour and dough. They worked with great intensity and concentration and smiled at Jessica as she toured the place.

“ We boast a record of forms fitted to within a thirty- second of an inch of the original fish,” said Stu with pride. They moved on to another room. Here Jessica saw the finished work, she thought; but Buck cautioned her otherwise. “This is our primping room. Here’s where I come into play-not doing any of the heavy stuff no more.”

“ They look alive,” she said, staring. Here the fish had remarkably lifelike eyes that stared out at her.

“ I check for any final flaws here. Call it quality control. I correct any skin flaws and reinforce the fins. With the one exception of the glass eyes, everything you see here is from the original fish, ‘cept the mold over which his skin is stretched, of course… but the skin is the animals and basically that’s what we preserve here, the skin.”

“ Except for the billfish,” cautioned Stu.

Frowning, Buck explained, “A bill’s dorsal fin has to be prefabricated. No amount of processing can preserve some of the more delicate membranes.”

“ Any rate, now the science part is over,” said Stu. “In here it’s time for the art. To restore these babies to their original hues and lifelike appearance, it takes a master like Buck here. It takes talent-”

“ Bullshit, talent,” interrupted the spike-bearded Buckner. “Talent’s a dangerous word. More like skill born of experience and know-how. That’s more like it.”

“ Whatever you wanna call it. Buck here’s got more natural talent or skill born of experience and know-how than anybody on the damned planet.”

Buckner was blushing red below his gray beard, but he pretended nonchalance and went on with his explanation. “First we spray them with a white base coat; then we layer on several color shadings, some done by hand to gain the exact texture required for authenticity.”

“ A decent photo of the catch at the time it’s brought aboard a boat, or at least the moment it’s brought ashore, becomes invaluable here,” interjected Stu.

“ Tropical fish begin to lose their color the moment they’re snagged,” added Buck. “Anyway, a final clear coat is splashed on for protection and the wet look.”

“ How does what you do differ from the work done by other taxidermists?” asked Jessica.

Buck laughed a horse laugh, slapping Stu on the shoulder before replying, “A guy like me, specializing in marine work, is a whole ‘nuther animal from some bozo who stuffs birds and reptiles and bears and bobcats and squirrels, believe you me. We don’t have hide, fur or feathers to cover our mistakes.”

“ There’s no room here for error,” added Stu. “All we got to work with is a thin layer of skin which stubbornly resists preservatives.” Jessica smiled and replied, “You mean, it’s no job for amateurs?’’

“ That’s why Scrapheap didn’t care for that punk hanging around down in Key West. Said he always wanted to take shortcuts… was careless. Hell, you can see that from the yellowfin he brought in with him.”

Jessica gave Buckner a stunned look while Stu continued to fill her ear, saying, “Most of our customers are individuals, but Buck’s done work for corporations and museums, haven’t you, Buck?”

Buck nodded with grace, a faint, prideful smile parting his lips. “I’ve done work for Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Charlton Heston… you name it.”

“ King Hussein and former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush.” Stu beamed with pride, too.

“ Pardon me, Buck, but did you say this Patric Allain brought something in with him and left it here?”

“ Yeah, a yellowfin… kinda like a calling card. He’d already skinned it, so he wanted us to do the mounting, but after I looked at it and found a hole large enough to drive a golf ball through, I told him we couldn’t guarantee anything approximating perfection.”

“ Did anyone other than you handle the skin? Would you know, if anyone else had done work on it?” she asked.

“ Oh, sure.”

“ So, had anyone other than Allain handled the skin?”

“ I had no reason to think so, no.”

“ Show it to me. I want that skin.”

“ It’s in the next room.”

“ Anyone else touch it?” she pressed as she followed Buck.

“ Stu? Anyone in or outta here this morning?”

“ Not a soul.”

“ Did you paw the fella’s prize?”

“ Naw, too busy to take any notice of it,” Stu assured them.

“ There it is, right on the peg where I hung it,” said Buck.

“ I’ll need to have someone come in and take your prints, Mr. Buckner, so we can rule them out. Any others we find, hopefully, will be those of the killer.”

“ You can peel off fingerprints from that?” He pointed to the lifeless scales of the yellowfin with which Patric Allain had allegedly walked through the door.

“ I can with the right tools… We have the technology, but it’ll destroy the skin.”

“ Take the damned thing. It’s old and brittle now any way; said he had it packed in ice the whole time, but obviously that was a lie. Said he caught it in the Cayman Islands, but that was a lie, too.”

“ He said Cayman Islands specifically?”

“ Yeah, I recall he did.”

“ Hmmmm. How could you tell that he was lying about the condition and age of the skin?” Stu jumped in, saying, “Hell, one look at it…” Buck offered, “I don’t figure it’d be in such good shape as it was if he’d hauled it so far as the Caymans. My guess, he snatched it or bought it at some other shop along his way to here from Key West.”

“ Why lie about the Cayman Islands? Why not simply say he caught the fish in the Gulf out there?”

“ I don’t know, pathological? Or maybe he knew the quality was bad, so he made up a cockamamie story.”

The tour had ended with something tangible, a possible clue that could specifically identify the killer. Moyler in England had a print, and if they could match his print with what they found on the fish skin, they could be surer of their prey. She asked Buckner for the use of his phone and contacted Santiva in the nearby van with this news. It took some, although not all, of the sting out of the Crawler’s having not shown up.

“ I’ll pack it and send it off to J.T. at Quantico; see what the lab can find for us in the way of useful prints. J.T.’ll put our best fingerprint tech on the job. It may be the first real gift that Allain has given us. If J.T. finds something, we can put it under an electron microscope and photograph it, maybe match it to what Moyler has in London.”

“ May’s well pack it in,” he suggested. “Not doing any good here.”

“ Let’s give it a little more time,” she suggested. “Maybe he got unavoidably held up.”

“ Yeah, don’t we wish the Coast Guard or the Florida Marine Patrol has picked him up for questioning?”

“ Could we get so lucky?”

“ I’ll get Ford’s best men down here to relieve us, let them watch over this place tonight, and we’ll get some R and R.” said Santiva.

After calling J.T. to tell him what he might expect in the overnight mail, so as to not entirely shock him, Jessica found herself with time on her hands, so she asked Buckner for the phone number of his old partner in Key West, and she then telephoned Scrapheap Jones and plied him full of questions relevant to his encounter with the Night Crawler.

Jones simply refused to believe that the Patric whom he had taught the rudiments of fish-trophy mounting was the Crawler. His mind could not wrap around the concept; he claimed the kid he trained was a wimp, fearful at the sight of blood even in a dead fish. Scrapheap told Jessica that she was on a fool’s chase if she were after that sullen, quiet one-joke boy he had known.

But even as Scrapheap Jones denied her, she read between the lines of what the man said. Allain was sullen, quiet, fearful of the sight of blood and apparently humorless. In point of fact, this profile sounded a great deal more like her prey than Jones realized. “What do you mean by one-joke boy?”

“ He’d say the fishing in the shark aquarium museum here in Key West was the easiest place to fish. Damned fool. Thought it was funny; thought it irritated me when he’d suggest taking a charter to the museum, let ‘em all dip their bait into one of the tanks there. Silly stuff like that, like it was real funny, but it wasn’t. Joke was lame, like the kid.”

“ Did he ever steal from you?”

“ Some… some chemicals, maybe, I ain’t a hunerd percent sure.”

“ Do you have anything in writing about your agreement with him? Did you have him sign a contract or agreement? It’s important.”

“ I did… at the time…”

“ Do you still have it?”

“ It may be in my files.”

“ If you find it, fax it to me at the Naples Police Department.” She gave him the number. “I’ll see what I can do. By the way, is Buck there? Can I speak to him?”

She told him that he could speak with his friend.

“ Oh, just a minute… another thing he always kidded me about…” Scrapheap suddenly said.

“ What’s that, sir?”

“ Ahh, always said he’d like to go somewhere cooler, complained of the Florida heat, so he was always talking about going to the Caymans.”

“ The Caymans?” Jessica wondered at the coincidence.

“ That was the joke, get it?”

She didn’t get it.

“ The Caymans are hotter’n Florida and all hell the time o’ year he was talking.”

“ I see. Had he ever been to the Cayman Islands?”

“ Said he had been there, yes. Not much with trophy mounting, but he sure knew how to sail.”

She told Buck that Jones wanted to speak with him. Relinquishing the phone, she looked up at the clock to see that it was now nearing 3:05 p.m. and still no show.

They waited past three-thirty. Ford and Santiva had by now earnestly discussed pulling up stakes. Jessica could hardly blame them, but she said over the remote that she would give it another hour, till four. Meanwhile Ford arranged for a man in civilian clothes to enter with a fingerprinting kit and both Buck’s and Stu’s fingerprints were taken for the record. What remained of Patric Allain’s trophy fish, the yellowfin he’d walked in off the wharf with, was placed in a large paper sack and carried out for laboratory analysis and fingerprint detection. Jessica would later properly box it in absorbent material and FedEx it off to Quantico, Virginia.

By now Ford had seen enough; he quickly pulled his men-acting as backup-from the area. He and Santiva had gotten into a tiff, and Ford flatly refused to have his men watch over the shop all night. So, for a bit longer, Santiva, Quincey and Samernow remained nearby. Mark and Eriq were in FPL uniforms at the van while Quincey sat at a bus stop now, his makeup-that of a feeble old man down on his luck-beginning to thin.

Four o’clock came around and still no show. Somehow, the killer knew; perhaps he sensed that it was too dangerous to return, especially after having robbed the place of materials the night before. Perhaps he realized that he’d been foolish to use the same alias, even with a man like Buckner, and doubly foolish to have left something of his in the other man’s possession, something with his prints on it. Or perhaps he had simply smelled trouble about the shop, even before coming near it. Like a tiger or a cougar, the Night Crawler obviously had good instincts.

Now he could be anywhere.

Tired and disgruntled and disappointed, the four remaining law enforcement officials found themselves trying to comfort Gordon Buckner, to assure him that he would be safe and to tell him to be in touch the moment he was contacted again by Patric Allain.

“ Then you do think he will contact me again?”

“ No way of knowing, but not likely at this point.” Jessica tried to put the old man’s mind at ease.

“ He could’ve just got the days turned around. If he’s as crazy as they say, why not?”

“ We’ll send some undercover men tomorrow for a possible two p.m. meet. They’ll pretend to work out back for you,” suggested Jessica. “And who knows, maybe I’ll be back with them.”

“ All right, good. Damn this man… damn this whole bloody business,” moaned Buckner, his head in his hands. “I sometimes wonder what God was thinkin’ of when he created the human animal and the perverse human brain. Damn this monster!”

“ Our sentiments exactly, Mr. Buckner.”

They left in the van, which had to be returned to Ford. At the precinct, each promised to meet for drinks and dinner after changing and cleaning up. Jessica, in particular, pleaded that she had to get the fish smell out of her hair and off her body.

When they arrived back at police headquarters, Jessica climbed down from the van and Eriq met her at the rear, helping her out. They stood staring out toward the park, the boat marina, the great Gulf of Mexico beyond and the setting sun. “Where do you think this malfeasant creature is tonight, Jess?” asked Eriq. “What part of the coast is he haunting?” She stared out at the waning sun in the west where it flared bloodred, a giant fire in the sky that spread dark shadows now along the clean, well-kept streets and park of the picturesque city. “I don’t know what shadow he’s hiding in, but I fear the worst, and I think we have to persuade Ford to keep his men on guard at the riverfront bars and restaurants. All we know for sure is that the bastard will strike again. I haven’t had time to do a full autopsy, but I had a look at the body that washed ashore here…”

“ And?”

“ It’s as if he let her go by mistake, as if she were unfinished,” Jessica said. “None of the staging of the others; no quarter-inch nylon rope, no sign of any attempt to preserve or mount this one. You ever catch a fish only to lose it over the side?”

“ Whataya mean?”

“ She got loose from him somehow; he hadn’t tied the knot correctly or quickly enough when a wave took her, probably in the dark. Everything else is to the letter-double, possible triple strangulation, the whole nine yards. But her lungs were not as full of water as the others.”

“ About earlier, Jess… I want to apologize.”

She didn’t want to deal with earlier now. “‘Fraid it’s textbook Night Crawler,” she continued on about the most recent dead girl’s body. “He is definitely in the vicinity, and like Quincey surmised, the bastard may be making his way toward the Tampa Bay-St. Pete area.”

“ I’ve sent word to our field offices there. They’re on the alert. They know the drill.”

They had walked from the van to the park, exercising their legs and lungs while Quince and Samernow saw to the van and the equipment inside. “You look trim and handsome in your FPL uniform, Chief,” she teased.

“ You, you look like the cutest thing in rags I’ve ever seen,” he fired back. “But you’re right about the fish and formaldehyde odor. That’s gotta go.”

From behind them, Jessica heard Quince’s distinct voice carry on the evening trade wind. “Bastard has just raked the whole state from one side to the next…”

“ Promise me one thing,” she asked Eriq.

“ Anything… within reason.”

“ No more quaaludes or uppers or whatever you’ve been on.”

Santiva took in a great breath of air. “I needed it to keep pace. It was just a one-time-only.”

“ Careful, my friend, because one-time-onlies have a way of becoming one-time-eternities.”

“ I appreciate both your concern and your advice, Jess. It means a lot to me, but rest assured, I don’t have a drug problem.”

She looked from the deep wells of his dark, kind eyes back out to sea and the setting sun, a fiery orange orb threatening to engulf the world even as it was being engulfed by the horizon. So much depended on one’s limited perspective, she quietly told herself, wondering anew where the Night Crawler was at this moment.