Fatal Instinct

Twenty-Nine

The bullet entered here.” The doctor pointed to the occipital lobe of the brain represented by the plaster-cast model he was using. “It completely fractured the occipital bone, here; and this in turn destroyed much of the occipital artery, which is why the man is on a heart-lung, because that artery supplies the head and scalp with blood from the carotid.”

“ Is he in any pain?” Jessica wanted to know.

“ When he's conscious, which isn't often, yes, considerable pain.”

She nodded. It was all she wanted to know. But the doctor continued with his explanation just the same.

“ We've done successive brain scans to determine the sites of blood clotting and the extent of damage. Radioisotopes indicate far more damage than can be repaired in any one operation, and in his condition any single operation could kill him.”

Alan Rychman pointed to a computer chart beside the brain model. “What's this, Doctor?”

“ Oh, the BEAM.”

“ Beam?”

“ Brain map, brain electric activity map,” he replied, lifting the chart and pointing out the evidence of brain activity going on inside the head of the dying man not fifteen feet from them. “The computer map of the brain responds to the brain's electrical signals, monitoring them and creating a map for us every hour. Abnormal patterns, blocked and distorted signals, like those you see here and here indicate extensive damage. Of course, you realize the violent jarring of a bullet into the brain is, well, tantamount to a Hiroshima bomb exploded in that contained miniature world. Little wonder his body reaction is one of paralysis and long periods of unconsciousness. I'm surprised the man has not lapsed into irreversible coma and brain death.”

“ But he will, eventually, won't he?” asked Jessica.

“ it's very difficult to say.”

She took the BEAM chart from him, staring at it and asking aloud, “What do you suppose he's thinking in there? What kind of thoughts are going through his mind?”

“ Mostly just pain and suffering, I should think.”

“ Who deserves it more?”

There was 3 silence among them which was only accentuated by the blips and electronic hum of the life-support system that Simon Archer was attached to.

“ As I said, there is extensive damage throughout the brain. Even if he should, by some strange force, manage to live, he would be a simpering idiot.”

“ A jury would be hard-pressed to give a simpering idiot the death penalty,” she said coldly. “Despite the fact he engineered the deaths of so many others.”

“ It's out of our hands, Jess,” said Alan, trying to lead her away.

She pulled from Alan's hold and went to the glass partition that separated her from Simon Archer's helpless form, wishing only a few minutes alone with him. As she stared at the evil encased in the glass room, his orifices jammed with tubes, his head covered in a turban of white linen, she wondered if the evil within him would not somehow beat death, would not somehow transcend it. She thought of Gerald Ray Sims' insistence that his deadly other self, Stainlype, would infect someone else upon his death. He had warned her that it could be her, and at this moment, standing over another human being, wishing it only suffering, pain and death, she began to think that maybe Gerald Ray Sims, Matthew Matisak and Simon Archer had, after all, infected her with their madness and rage.

She could almost see the floating parasite rising above Archer, the evil of his Casadessus, lying in wait for a host to come near enough and stay long enough to be infected and corrupted by it. And perhaps the process had already occurred.

Dr. Phillip C. Graf, chief of brain surgery and neurological disorders at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., exchanged a long glance with Alan Rychman. Taking him aside, he said, “You may want to get your friend a little psychiatric assistance on this. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a depart-ment to run.”

Graf was gone, and now Alan took her in his arms and held her. Her holding onto him was like grabbing onto the side of a boat in the midst of drowning. She said in his ear, “Thanks for staying on, Alan.”

Over his shoulder she stared at the pathetic form of the man she had so maimed.

That was the last she had seen of Simon Archer, and now she was in the Cayman Islands, some 150 feet below the surface, as far from the horrors of her profession as she could bodily get. Alongside her, in the vivid blue-white of the deep, outlined against the stark beauty of the coral reef, was Alan Rychman. They had together run away, and being here, in the ocean, there was no chance either one would be disturbed for some time.

Alan held her each night on the boat as it cradled her to sleep in the soft foam. They made love beneath the brilliant sun on deck, not a soul within sight, and they dove together, marveling at the beauty that life could, in its proper course, create.

But she was not blind to the predatory nature of the creatures that sometimes surrounded the area, sharks of every size and stripe, mean-looking barracudas and other aggressives, given to taking what they required of life, feeding on life as Simon Archer had, as Matisak had, as other killers in her future would.

Alan signaled that his air tank was low, and when she checked her watch and the gauge that dangled from her octopus, she realized that down here where the human spirit soared, time was different, that it went by in a flash. In the deep her soul was unfettered, without constraints, that it en-joyed a kind of flying.

Kelp and minute creatures were carried by her mask in the current that swirled in eddies, dovetailed and returned, fanning the coral in its wake. She reluctantly followed Alan to the surface, perhaps for the last time, as they were down to a single tank of air, and zero days.

Their time here had been beautiful and she didn't want it to end. In the water she needed no cane, and she felt whole and complete again. In the water even her memories were washed away, but on the surface the memories came creeping into the back of her mind, even as she lay in Alan's arms.

She'd think about how her own dark side had been appeased by just seeing Simon Archer's struggling body, suffering in his coma. It filled her with a sense of retribution she could never feel when looking through the bars at Matisak's smug countenance.

Matisak had sent a letter to her while she had still been in Virginia, immediately after Simon Archer had been apprehended. He had said that they had made a good team. He reminded her that when no one else had accepted her theory of the crime, he had remained the only faithful voice among a pack of jackals that wanted to see her proven wrong. His final words had made her physically ill at the time she had read them: “You and I are more alike than we are different, Dr. Coran. And now you see it, don't you? I preyed on my victims, and you prey on yours. If you were not on the side of righteousness, if your dark side gripped you as mine does me, then perhaps you, too, would be locked away. Congratu-lations…”

She had felt in the grip of her darkest self, that black shadow self that Donna Lemonte had told her she must give vent to at times, when she had shot Simon Archer. She had been elated that she had had the strength and the ability to make that final shot, but she was also displeased at having been under the control of the dark, evil instinct that welled up from within, even for that moment-to end Archer's life. Still, she had mastered the evil, had countered the rumbling beast within. Unlike Matisak and men of his ilk, she had not been overtaken by her sinister self; she instead had forced that part of her to give her the strength and determination to allow Jessica Coran to act as she must.

She would be stronger still in the future, a thing that O'Rourke had taken note of on their last encounter, a fact that J.T. applauded and a fact that Alan Rychman perhaps feared as he might an approaching storm. They both knew that their relationship faced many obstacles, that once they returned to the real world, she would continue at her FBI laboratory, and he as C.P. of New York.

Aboard ship, Alan said to her, “We'd better get in.” He pointed to a dark patch of sky moving toward them in the distance.

She nodded and went about the business of dressing down, helping him get his tanks off, he reciprocating. They'd have to hurry if they wished to stay out of rough waters. Below, both had noticed the marked change in the underwater currents, like a harbinger of what awaited them above. Lightning strikes streaked the sky in the distance where darkness seemed to be reaching toward them, eclipsing the horizon.

Soon Alan had the sailboat moving toward the islands. Thunder rolled across the distances of the sea like the angry spirits of men. Alan gave her the tiller as the motor pushed them shoreward. She watched Alan tie off lines and secure others. All the sails were bound by thick ropes, like the ropes that held her in check, she thought, like the ropes that held all men and women in check, until one snapped.

The little ship was streamlined and the motor was powerful. They skittered across the top of green waters toward the white sand, the darkness at their backs, the wind and waves lifting, sending them rolling from side to side.

The peace of the ocean floor had, she realized, been a fa?ade, as false as the peace of civilization. The calm of the ocean, too, had been false, lulling them into a sense of its having a warm and caring identity when in reality it was an unforgiving, often cruel god, this ocean that had the night before cradled them like children. Now it wanted to kill them.

As soon as they got to the hotel, messages were pushed at them by hotel people who had been saving them up for days. Rychman had more than she, but both of them were being pressed hard to return to their duties. They looked into one another's eyes. Rychman just threw his arm over her shoul-der, saying, “The New York natives're getting restless again.”

“ Pressing problems, I know,” she said, her cane tapping across the floor where their wet bodies left a trail of water that seeped from beneath the wraps they wore over their suits. Outside, the gale was beating ferociously at the building's windows. It was the only ill weather they'd seen since arriving several weeks before.

Her cane's rap, tap, tap came to an abrupt end when she stopped, frozen in place. It was a cryptic message from J.T. that read: “Archer finally dead.” It was dated two days before.

Alan, holding onto her, asking after her, took the note from her clenched fingers. He read the note, saying, “Amen.”

“ Yes, amen,” she agreed.

“ Guess we'll never know what drove him to it.”

“ Demons,” she said. “That much we know.”

“ Get changed. We'll have dinner and then…”

He let his words hang in the air, teasing. “And then we'll book a flight back?” she asked.

“ Yeah, that… but we'll also make love.”

She kissed him. “I do love you, Alan.”

He was taken aback. “That's… that's news to me.”

“ Me, too.”

“ What're we going to do about it?”

“ Do we have to do anything about it?”

He breathed deeply. “I want to be with you as many hours in the day as possible,” he confessed. He sounded like a schoolboy, she thought, and she loved him for his enthusiasm.

“ If it's really love, Alan, it can survive time and distance. Weil find a way.”

“ Chief coroner spot's still open in New York. You could-”

“ No, no sudden changes. Not right now. I've got to have time and it's got to be right.” He nodded. “Sure, sure… I understand.”

Someone called her name, a man coming toward them through the spacious lobby of the hotel, a black man in an island police uniform. “You are Dr. Coran? Captain Rychman?”

“ NYPD,” said Rychman.

“ Yes, I am Dr. Coran.”

“ FBI?” he asked.

“ Apparently, you know more about me than I know about you, Officer ahhh-”

“ Okinleye, Ja Okinleye, Lieutenant Investigatory, Cayman. There's… there's been a murder. Someone knew of your being here. Could you look at the body, Dr. Coran? We hear of your work in the United States. The deceased is… was an important man in the islands, a grower and an owner in this hotel you are staying in.”

“ You have no coroner?”

“ He comes from Martinique, but it will be a day, maybe two.”

“ Give me time to change,” she said.

Alan stopped her. “You sure you want to get involved in this?”

“ Got to get my feet wet again sometime. May as well take the leap.”

“ Wait up. I'll go with you.”

“ You'd best answer your calls and book our flight.”

“ Yeah, maybe you're right.”

Lieutenant Investigator Okinleye could not help but see that the two Americans were very much in love. He said abruptly, “Of course, I hate to intrude on your holiday, and I would not have, except that… well, this is the third such murder on the island, and the man died in so… such… an unusual manner.”

“ Really?” she asked. “Tell me about it.”