Darkest Instinct

THREE

Pulse less arteries

Are like the fibers of a cloud instinct With light.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“ Just how many more body parts do you have on ice, Dr. Wainwright?” Jessica asked.

“ Quite a stack, actually. A couple of leg fragments, part of another arm, some feet and a cache of bones.”

Jessica turned to Santiva and said, “Tell the helicopter pilot to take off, but to remain on standby for our call. And Eriq-tip him well. And since we’re going to be here for some time, maybe a couple of days, you may want to get a rental car and rooms for us.” She turned to Wainwright and asked where the nearest hotel might be. “Two days, you estimate?” asked Santiva.

“ Hotels, around here? Sorry,” replied Wainwright. “Closest thing I might call a hotel around here is our dormitory, but it’s pretty stark. No room service, but you could dine with us.”

The prospect wasn’t particularly appealing. These people reminded her of the Addams Family for some reason.

“ Do you really figure it’ll take so long, Jess?” Santiva repeated.

“ Long enough so you can get that fishing trip in you’d hoped for, since you are in the Keys, after all. Go for it. But do like Spider said: Get a local guide.”

“ Now that I can help you with,” Wainwright proudly piped up. “Know one, do you?”

“ We know and use several, but Jabez Reiley, he’s the best, though expensive.”

“ Never mind the expense. Where can we get in touch with Mr. Reiley?” Jessica asked.

Eriq put up a cautionary hand to her, taking her aside and whispering, “But Jessica, won’t you need help around here, maybe to keep that dragon lady off your back?”

She returned the whisper. “I can handle the crone, and you’d just be in the way.” She then turned to Dr. Wainwright, telling him, “I want to see every single body part your people have discovered.”

“ No problem.”

“ And I want each one photographed from every conceivable angle; have you a good man for that?”

“ Aron Porter here is an excellent photographer. One of his gifts.”

“ Good… good… Then I’ll want some, if not all, of the body parts collected, boxed and protected with your best absorbent material, okay? I’ll want to take everything back to Miami with us.” Dr. Lois Insley had gone white by this time and had found a stool upon which to perch; she now leaned against one wall, making the noises of one about to hyperventilate. Jessica quickly approached the older woman and offered her a brown paper bag to breathe into, from a supply she kept in her black valise for reasons other than sickness. Brown bags were useful for certain types of evidence gathering, items such as blood spatters on cloth, items you didn’t want to smear or to have drying out in too rapid a fashion.

Dr. Insley graciously accepted the bag, opened it wide and began breathing from it, inhaling deeply, gathering herself up. No one in the place seemed the least concerned or helpful, Jessica thought as she returned to Wainwright and said, “You want to take care of Dr. Insley first?”

“ Sure… sure… although I’d rather get Reiley on the phone for you.” But instead he went over to Dr. Insley, placed a hand on her shoulder and marched her down a corridor, where, presumably, he had her lie down to rest. Jessica hadn’t time to wonder long about their obviously strained relationship. She rocked on the balls of her feet before what remained of Precious, her attention riveted on the torn and ugly limb and the bracelet beside it.

From down the hall, a gentle sobbing welled up from the woman named Insley. Jessica thought the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown; she’d certainly overreacted to their intrusion on her private little world here-or had Precious simply gotten to her?

While Eriq did a cursory stroll about the facility, Jessica continued her examination of the would-be evidence, the two students curiously watching her.

Soon Wainwright appeared and assured Jessica that the other woman was quite all right. “Mood swings, a hormonal thing,” he whispered in Jessica’s ear-the archetypal male response to any female emotional venting too complicated for the male mind, Jessica irritated thought.

She wondered how much plotting and politicking went on in this little research hothouse. With their lives so wrapped up in this place, so focused on their jobs that their identities-who they were-had long since become inextricably mixed up with what they did. It was obvious the work was everything to them, with their whole world and worldview shaped by it. Jessica gave a thought to what Donna LeMonte so often warned her about, that she should not obsessively become Jessica Coran, FBI, ME. She worried momentarily that she might have a lot more in common with Dr. Lois Insley than she cared to admit.

Jessica had seen a look of animal fear in Dr. Insley’s eyes when they’d arrived. She had also seen the sudden loss of color in the woman’s face, replaced by a doughy pallor which reminded Jessica of how Santiva’s naturally dark, Cuban skin had gone two shades lighter by the time he’d returned to his plane seat over North Carolina on the long journey coming down. And now, as Wainwright began bringing out the accumulated body parts, each tagged and dated, and as Jessica rolled up her sleeves to go to work over each errant body part collected by Wainwright, she thought back to the plane trip down. With her hands, eyes and mind busy at her current task, she considered just how her relationship with Santiva was shaping up, even as her mind wandered back to what they knew of the killer they’d come in pursuit of.

She recalled now the killer’s taunting note to the authorities and what Eriq had revealed to her about it through the handwriting analysis-a kind of magic-he performed.

The note was written out in lean but large and hard strokes, the aggressive longhand having a character of its own, and it read:

When Jessica had looked up from the note, Santiva began working with her, explaining, spending great effort in carefully filling her in on what hidden and subconscious messages the killer had given them. “Notice he signs in the name of his god, not unlike the Zodiac Killers we’ve seen over the years.”

She nodded. “Yeah, he’s from a long line of upstanding killers. Hell, it’s easy to kill if you can pass the buck along to some demonic force within you which you conveniently have no control over. Lets you and your murderous hands off the hook, so to speak. Gives you reason and motive, and removes all personal guilt. That’s my personal favorite. What a bastard.”

“ The big excuse,” Santiva agreed, the plane having finally leveled out above the storm. “Takes away your inhibitions. Greatest excuse in the world.”

“ Ranks right up there with ‘a woman made me do it,’ ‘the Devil made me do it* and ‘God talks to me.’ Son of a — bitch.”

“ You see these little clubs at the end of each long letter, the L here, and F here and here?’’ Santiva pointed to each letter he mentioned. Jessica quick-studied them, knowing he had come up through the ranks as a documents and handwriting analysis expert. “Yeah, I see them.” “See the thin tight lines? A lot of letters you and I would loop, he makes straight up and down. See here, the G? And notice the force with which he crosses his Ts? The long extension across the page?”

“ Yeah, I see.” The lines were overlong, overdone, overwhelming, thrusting forward like lances.

Eriq continued, “The drive behind any line going forward can show excitement, energy or a lack of energy. In our man’s case, we see energy in the extreme-not a positive sign of energy, but rather in this case aggressive and unrestrained energy, sexually motivated, potent energy, even hostility, rage.”

Jessica immediately felt the truth of what Santiva was saying and sensed that Eriq was indeed a gifted handwriting analyst and interpreter, although she didn’t have much firsthand evidence to base this conclusion on. Still, she was hoping to learn more about this interesting “science” that had years ago been adopted by military authorities, police agencies and the FBI. She believed that Eriq could teach her a great deal about what he called “graphology” as they worked this case together.

“ It is a rare murderer who writes notes, letters or poetry to the press, although a surprising number do write to authorities: the Zodiac Killers, both the New York and the California one; the Son of Sam; and Jack the Ripper, to name a few,” Eriq continued. “They do so for a simple reason: they must convey their feelings about their kills- conquests-to someone. Is it safer to vent such feelings in a bar with buddies or to write authorities and taunt police? Either way, the phenomenon reveals the killer’s need to tell the world what he has done, to validate it, because he craves validation, and in this perverse validation there comes a twisted absolution. It underscores the killer’s original need to first control and then destroy other living beings, in order to convince himself and the world that he is better than the role life has meted out for him, that he isn’t a hapless nobody, that he is in fact somebody, somebody with an identity. The killing becomes a vicious circle so as to cyclically codify and warrant his own bloody identity: / kill… therefore I am. I kill therefore I am a killer… therefore I kill… thus, I become a more efficient killer… therefore I kill again… and again kill…

“ Law enforcement authorities count on this need for self-actualization, which causes men locked in cells to spill their guts to strangers in lockup with them. Writing letters that claim responsibility for brutal murders is another cry, not so much for help in most cases as a cry for recognition, a cry that shouts, ‘Look at me! I did it, and I’m somebody important for having done it.’

“ Jessica, nodding the whole time, agreed. “The thinking isn’t far removed from that of an assassin who kills merely for the purpose of seeing a picture of himself in the newspapers, or to be able to say that he’s become one with his god as a result of fulfilling his god’s wish.” Because of Jessica’s keen understanding of this and the killing mind, she squarely sided with the prosecution whenever the blood and DNA evidence was overwhelming. Given the Night Crawler’s liking for the pen, and Eriq Santiva’s genius, Jessica looked forward to a case which might prove extremely interesting while also proving or disproving some of Santiva’s theories regarding “hand- reading,” as he liked to call it.

Santiva reached from his seat to take her hand in his, guiding her fingers to one of the letters on the killer’s words. “Touch it. Feel it. See it?”

“ See what, exactly?”

‘ The small clubs at the ends of many of the letters. See here and here, at the bottoms and tops of the long letters.”

“ What exactly do you mean, clubs?”

“ The little caveman clubs.”

“ Oh, you mean how the author has allowed the ink to swell into a bulb at each end?”

“ Yes, precisely what I’m driving at-like the bulb at the root of a hair follicle. You see, this man… this supposed killer didn’t passively allow the ink to run there. It wasn’t passive. His hand pressed hard as hell at those points. This indicates great aggression, pent-up anger, rage released through the ink and pen. See here and here, and over here?”

Suddenly she saw little clubs all over the page where before she hadn’t noticed. He continued, guiding her forefinger like a marker on a Ouija board. ‘ ‘Take a close look at his lowercase Ds.”

Together they located a number of lowercase Ds. “What’s so remarkable about his Ds?” she wondered aloud.

“ Well, you do see the pattern, the similarity between every lowercase D, don’t you?”

“ Yeah, they all slant drastically far to the right. But what’s the significance?”

“ It’s what we call the ‘maniac D.’ See how violently slanted they are, leaning at an acute right angle toward the next word? See how far to the right it goes from the center line of the words on the sentence plane?”

He had told her about center, top and lower lines, saying each was a plane. Everyone’s handwriting followed a center line; some people dipped below their personal center diagonal excessively, and those with wild, swooping lower- plane letters, while not necessarily sexual deviants, were highly charged sexual beings. Those who spent most of their writing energy in upper regions, above the center line, were more interested in mental games, money, domination and winning. Aberrant behavior was shown in shaky, enigmatic loops and swirls on letters at either upper or lower regions. Those who maintained an even keel, staying close to the center diagonal at all times, were both better at control and more even-tempered and rule-conscious, and perhaps less sexually inclined. A shaky hand which had no control or patterns whatsoever might be that of a madman or a seriously ill person, or a person suffering from cerebral palsy or some other nervous disorder. He demonstrated via a quick forgery of Richard Nixon’s handwriting when he was at the pinnacle of his career how “in charge” and brash the man was; showed her a forgery of his name during his near impeachment that demonstrated how incredibly deteriorated the handwriting had become; and ended with a reconstructed, steadier Nixon signature upon his becoming an unofficial delegate to China. The emotional differences were startling and revealing.

It appeared the Night Crawler was all over the scale, swooping high, showing intelligence and creativity, and then dipping low below the center line, showing deviances of all sorts, his hand sometimes erratic, sometimes calm and controlled but always aggressive, harsh, brutal.

“ Whoa, you’re losing me a bit here,” she complained now and again as Eriq painted a picture of both the value of the analysis and the character of the killer as seen through his writing, saying that handwriting clearly mirrored the condition of the mind, that it was as good as or better than having a look into a man’s soul through the eyes.

Jessica began to see the pattern Eriq called the maniac D. “Oh, yeah… I see what you mean by the Ds now. Each D leans or points directly across at the word following?”

“ Like a spear, an attack, isn’t it?”

“ ‘ Maniac D.’ Just how scientific is that term, Chief?”

“ Jack the Ripper, in his notes to the White Chapel Vigilante Committee and authorities in 1888, used clubs and the maniac D. That’s how scientific it is. And we see it time and again with violent offenders behind bars.”

She looked again at the clubbed ends and the strange, violent Ds. “I take your point. What else does his handwriting tell you, Eriq?”

“ Tells me he’s a jumble, a complex SOB. Creative, ingenious perhaps, certainly an above-average IQ, which-”

“ Suggests a Ted Bundy type? Suave, smooth, lures his victim in and snares her in that instant when her guard is completely down?”

“ Could well be, but if so, it’s an act; likely a well- rehearsed and polished act, but an act all the same. This guy’s full of phobias and problems. Likely the product of a broken home; likely a failure at most everything he’s touched; likely working at some menial job somewhere which he regards as far below his natural talents.”

“ You can tell all that from his handwriting?” She could not completely keep the skepticism from filtering into her voice.

“ Well, I combine the handwriting analysis with what we also know of profiling, of course. It’s in the combination that I sometimes get startlingly lucky results.”

“ Sometimes?” she replied sarcastically. Much of Santiva’s work was chronicled, much of it now standard reading for FBI Academy personnel. His work in both document investigation and handwriting analysis had caused his star to rise meteorically, due to his extraordinary success rate at pinpointing killers through trace evidence and profiling techniques which were applied to victim and killer alike to create a matrix for murder.

Santiva coined an interesting line to explain what it was that his profiling team did, telling the press once, “We create a vector of character, personality, physical traits, even habits of both the victim and the killer.”

By studying the victim or victims, as well as by studying the killer, Santiva and the profiling team to which Jessica now belonged could put together a total picture of what occurred, and sometimes from that why it occurred. Before getting on the plane, they had already put together a complex picture of the man the press had dubbed the Night Crawler, but Jessica had not been in on sessions directly related to the handwritten document the killer had felt compelled to forward to authorities.

There at thirty thousand feet, Jessica had next concentrated on the ME’s report on Allison Norris. A capable man, this Miami M.E. named Coudriet demonstrated his own smaller, neater, nearly pinched handwriting, which Eriq called controlled, conservative, careful. “He’s likely to hold his cards extremely close to his chest,” Eriq said, sizing the man up in much the same terms as Jessica had. Even the corrections he’d made on the page told her that he was a guarded man. There was that element of purposeful equivocation in his language. He’d likely been prodded and rushed to turn over a report which he was not entirely happy with; he likely had wanted much more time to find the truth than people and agencies around him wanted him to take, from insurance companies to the Miami Police Department to the FBI. In Dr. Coudriet’s couched tones, bruises about the wrists might indicate handcuffs or possibly tightly tied ropes. Strangulation about the neck perhaps might indicate use of rope or cord, and/or likelihood of the killer’s hands. Strangulation death may have occurred before seawater entered the lungs, and this may indicate death before drowning. The man’s tentativeness was a sure sign the autopsy was a slapdash job, that he was attempting to cover his ass in the event questions arose later, at which time he could simply say, “I never said that…”

“ What do you know about Dr. Andrew Coudriet?” Santiva had suddenly asked, as if reading her mind.

“ Not much, save by reputation.”

“ Good, bad. indifferent?”

“ Highly regarded, well respected. He’s always on someone’s dais.”

“ Someone’s what?”

“ You know, giving speeches on the latest technologies used in crime detection. Speaks anywhere and everywhere they’ll pay his fee.”

“ Which is?”

“ Astronomically high-five, six figures, I’d assume.”

“ Sounds lucrative. Why aren’t you on the talk circuit?”

“ Doing’s better’n telling? I haven’t given it much thought. Not that I haven’t had offers, but who has the time?”

“ Obviously Coudriet does,” he replied, but beneath his words, he was running a thought-trying to figure out just how to take her last remark about having had offers, she guessed. She tilted the photo of Allison Norris’s body in his direction, a mushroomed body that had exploded with gases after having been picked over by sea life. In the photo, sand crabs were still making a meal of the dead girl, who was missing a chunk of flesh from her upper left thigh, a right femur and a right arm up to the elbow, where, obviously, sharks had taken more than a passing nibble.

“ Whoever did this to Allison Norris wants for power. craves control of the ultimate-life itself. He kills to show that he has the power in his hands to do so,” Jessica said.

“ He takes their manna, their being,” Santiva agreed. “At least, he thinks he does, and so long as he believes he does, he’ll continue to kill.”

“ He takes their power away from them, takes power from another living creature and claims all that power for himself. I’ve seen it before.”

“ I know you have. That’s why you’re here on the case with me. Now, if you don’t mind…” He indicated the picture, his queasiness threatening a return.

She closed the file jacket, leaned back in her cushioned chair and rode out the remainder of the storm.

Forty-nine minutes later, below a silver spray of rain shimmering in bright sunlight, they landed on a newly blackened, rain-slicked, glassy runway at Miami International. A smoother landing Jessica had never experienced, and when the captain came on the intercom to give himself a cheer, saying that after twenty-seven years of flying he’d finally made the perfect landing, everyone offered a spirited hand-clapping and hooting reply-at least those who were able to.

After this and the taxiing to the airline terminal, the usual deplaning chaos ensued. Everyone wanted off as quickly as possible, wanted to feel their feet on the solid construction of the airport walkways. But one man was forcing his way onto the plane, holding up a gold shield and shouting Santiva’s name.

Santiva waved the heavyset, middle-aged man with the balding head and Gene Hack man features forward. As the passengers thinned out, the Miami-Dade homicide detective managed to shuffle down the aisle and come alongside the patient FBI team he’d come to welcome to Miami.

“ You’re Eriq Santiva,” he said, smiling, extending his hand, the gregarious grin remaining on his face even as he vigorously shook Santiva’s hand and then exchanged it for Jessica’s. “And you must be Dr. Coran. What a pleasure, an honor, really, to meet you both. I’m Detective Charles Quincey, MPD. Just call me Quince. Everybody does. I was sent ahead with Mark, my partner”-he indicated a man in a gray suit who’d held back at the exit-”you know, to kinda escort you out of here and onto the waiting helicopter for Islamorada, or if you prefer to take a little time, freshen up; we can arrange that as well.”

Santiva turned to Jessica and muttered, “Helicopter… isn’t there any other way to this Isma-whatever-Key?” She stifled an urge to smile. “Not if we’re going to make time, no.”

Eric’s frown brought the enthused MPD detective down. “Escort away,” Eriq told him, “and as for taking a little time, yes, by all means, and thank you, Detective.” Jessica grabbed her carry-on and the round Detective Quincey made a grab for it.

“ No thanks, Detective. This one stays with me.” He realized that it was her professional black bag. “Ahh, yes, Dr. Coran, and may I say on behalf of the MPD, we’re extremely glad to have you on the case.”

“ That would be a refreshing attitude,” she replied.

“ It’s true, Doctor. We’re at wit’s end and we know it. This makes the ninth victim in the state to wash ashore in as many months. I mean this bastard’s doing ‘em on average of one a month, maybe more. We’ve had a lotta strange disappearances.”

“ The disappearances outnumber the bodies, I understand,” she replied.

“ ‘ Fraid so, yes ma’am… er, Doctor.”

Outside the plane but inside the exit ramp, which was like a sauna in Miami in the springtime, they met Charles Quincey’s partner, a well-proportioned, tanned and tall man with piercing blue eyes and the rugged good looks of an outdoorsman, perhaps a fisherman or maybe just someone who spent a lot of hours playing volleyball at South Miami Beach. The younger man’s level of enthusiasm was nil, contrasting sharply with Quincey’s attitude. Obviously, Quincey’s partner did not share his appreciation for having the Feds come in on the case, for this detective offered no handshakes, nor could he be bothered to open his mouth, more or less groaning his name, Detective Mark Samernow.

Jessica thought that Samernow looked as if he’d slept in his clothes; perhaps he’d pulled an all-night stakeout, or simply an all-nighter.

Samernow was disheveled, whereas Quincey had obviously put some hair gel and some thought into their meeting. Quince was together, perhaps for the first time in his career as a detective, his hair slicked down, his tie in a knot around a neck that didn’t easily take to it, reddening and swelling and about to burst; even cuff links showed at his wrists. Samernow, by comparison, had a wild shock of dark hair lying over his forehead and one eye, his tie snatched viciously away from his neck, a short-sleeved white shirt with a jacket carelessly tossed over his shoulder, making Jessica wonder where his gun was.

Samernow began kidding Quince about how his thick neck looked like ten pounds of sausage in a five-pound bag, and how, when it burst, the buttons were going to go like shotgun pellets. Samernow warned Jessica and Santiva to duck when the thing blew and then laughed at his own joke.

Quince told his partner to shut up.

Now the two detectives warned of the press just ahead, and they weren’t kidding. Along the corridor, there was a retinue of police uniforms and authorities in suits, all waiting along with a small army of newspeople with notepads, recorders and huge microphones extended on lances, their cameras held overhead like loaded cannon flashing the fire of battle. “I guess things are kinda slow in Miami these days,” commented Jessica.

“ Looks like we’re tomorrow’s headline.”

They stopped long enough to assure the reporters and the people of Miami and south Florida that the FBI was making the Night Crawler case a number one priority. Cameras flashed in their faces as they fielded a handful of questions, each one of which required more assurances.

Quince parted the sea before them and led them to a private room in the airport, where Santiva composed himself and Jessica lingered at a window, staring down at a helicopter waiting below to take them to Islamorada Key.

For a time, Jessica wondered if she would ever get Eriq on board the helicopter, telling him at one point that he should stay behind and get familiar with the case from Miami’s point of view, and that she would rejoin him as soon as she could. But he proved too stubborn to leap at the opportunity she extended him, begging another Dramamine patch instead.

And now finally, here they were, at the shark research facility that had tipped them off to what appeared to be quite a cache of body parts, the pathological evidence they had come for. To Jessica, it appeared a kind of dark gold mine.

“ Precious is a nickname given Allison Norris by her father,” said Eriq, just returning from a hurried phone call. “That’s according to Quince in Miami. Quince will call to confirm if Allison wore a bracelet inscribed with the name, but it seems an almost foregone conclusion, given the circumstances.”

Jessica paused in her work over another body part. “Still, a tissue match will be necessary to verify the fact beyond a mirrored shadow… to lay solid foundation against the man who fed Allison to the sharks.”

“ Well, sure…just thought you’d like to know.” She nodded. “Thanks.” Jessica would also have to return with any and all other body parts which Wainwright and company had unearthed here, and tests would have to be run on each, with an eye to matching them to other bodies that had incongruously washed ashore along Florida’s blindingly bright, pastel-colored, idyllic-looking coastal waterways.

Wainwright came to her with yet another bundle of body parts. “There’re a few more small pieces in the freezer, but you’ve got the bulk of it now, at least till we continue our work on the sharks again maybe…”

“ I want to see everything you have, Dr. Wainwright, every specimen, all of it,” she announced. “And I’ll need a larger area in which to work, if you don’t mind.”

“ That’d have to be our main lab, where we do most of the sharks.” You can’t use it,” said Insley suddenly. She’d obviously gotten hold of herself and had returned from her bed. “That would disrupt our entire operation.”

“ I believe, Dr. Insley, that your entire operation here has already been interrupted,” countered Jessica. “I’ll need the space for at least the next twenty-four hours, and if your people discover more human tissue or bones, I’ll want you to turn these over to us as well.”

“ Then I did the right thing, calling you in?” asked Wainwright, solely for Insley’s benefit.

Jessica nodded solemnly. “That you did, Dr. Wainwright… that you did.”