Grave Instinct

ELEVEN

Hardscrabble, Mississippi July 21, 2003

Grant Kenyon lingered over breakfast, finding it not half bad with the hot coffee. He again thought of his last contact made with Cahil's website. He'd gotten through to the website, but something was up. Cahil was backed up, not answering. Perhaps Phillip's plan, as the Seeker, to implicate Cahil was actually unfolding. Maybe Daryl and his website had been busted, and he was in custody for the murders Phillip had committed with Grant's assistance. It was for this reason that Grant had argued with Phillip to stop killing, so that Cahil would be brought to trial for the deaths, and then Grant could go back to his old life in New Jersey.

However, Phillip wasn't accepting any of it, and so Grant could not help himself, or rather, he could not stop himself, or rather, he could not stop Phillip. And so, Phillip had again killed for the brain matter he craved, this time a young woman named Sharon. This time, he decided to throw authorities off, not marking the victim with the Rheil symbol as he had before, wanting to confuse them into thinking it a new killer, a copycat.

After the kill in Mobile, Alabama, Grant knew that Phillip had lessened his chances of ever returning to a normal life. The authorities were probably closing in, as indicated by Cahil's absence. While he'd seen nothing about an arrest, he knew Cahil never left his computer for long, and it had been a week without an update from him.

Before the killing in Mobile, Grant had tried desperately to explain to Phillip that they should not strike again until they had gone as far west as they could go, across the continent to California. But no, Phillip couldn't wait that long. They'd driven from Valdosta, Georgia, but had only gotten as far west as Mobile, Alabama, off I-10 when Phillip had demanded to be fed again.

From there they'd made their way to a Biloxi, Mississippi, area hotel in a crossroads patch of buildings in a place called Hardscrabble. While there, Grant arranged to have the van painted green, as he tried to plan for a future that didn't include getting caught or killed. As Grant worked out a plan-since Grant could not prevent Phillip from killing-Phillip slept.

From California, he planned to go north after perhaps three or four feedings. As he moved north, Phillip could continue feeding. Once he got to Washington, he'd turn east and go back across the continent on a northerly track, again taking some time off from feeding to throw authorities off. He would continue to move and Phillip could feed as they went.

Still sitting at the table in the restaurant, his brains and eggs long finished, he opened a single sheet of paper with the names and addresses of people who had confided in him their real-time addresses, people he had chatted with on Cahil's website. Four of the names had been marked off, and now he marked off a fifth. He had rendezvoused with only two of them, three others had refused to meet, but he had learned of their addresses because they trusted him. He told them he would help them get a fresh start. Each one was in a troubled relationship or was having difficulties at home with parents. He sent them bus tickets and timetables where to meet him. He told them his name was Phillip. There was always the chance that one of them would use the tickets he'd forwarded. He'd also struck up an online friendship with males, and one lived just north of New Orleans. Grant had chatted online with this fellow for more than a year, knowing him only as Mr. SquealsLoud on the computer, but he had given Grant his real name and address. Now Grant and Phillip knew him as Dr. Jervis Swantor and they knew he lived at a marina outside New Orleans. Swantor had said he'd be in Florida sometime this month as well, but Grant and Phillip had found themselves too busy and they'd missed the agreed upon date, and when Grant had checked at the marina in Jacksonville, it had been crawling with cops.

As Grant continued to kill time in Hardscrabble, Mississippi, waiting for the paint to dry next door, he gave thought to Swantor.

Dr. Swantor had claimed to be in complete agreement with Grant against Cahil's notions on how to properly go about finding the cosmic eternal mind. After a while, Grant felt comfortable with Swantor, that they were of a like-mindedness he felt with no one else. Missing him in Florida had been disappointing, but Swantor had also said he'd be returning to New Orleans immediately after. Perhaps Grant and Phillip should look the man up.

Still, Grant wasn't certain he could trust Swantor or anyone else, for that matter, with the dark secrets he and Phillip shared. Grant put Swantor out of his mind for now. He instead focused on the garage owner. He had promised to pay the elderly man twice what the man asked for in an effort to keep him quiet about the van and Grant ever having been there.

He next returned to thoughts about his plans for California. It was a grand scheme his mind had devised and fixed upon, but already it was undermined by Phillip. Still, there was no dissuading Phillip, not anymore, not once he set his mind-their mind-to feeding.

All night long, Grant had lain in a state of dormancy, like a moth, sleeping as if cocooned up. Still, while his body had shut down, his mind raced headlong, planning his next move, wondering if Biloxi had a Greyhound station or a train station, certain it must have one or the other or both most likely with all its gambling casinos, advertised on every other billboard sign along I-10 in this and adjoining states.

Grant had found Sharon, Phillip's latest victim, at a bus station. Runaways. They made easy targets, but the kills would have been impossible without his van. If he hadn't had his van in Mobile, he wondered how he could possibly have handled the girl. He had expected everything to go smoothly, since he had assurances from a Bolinda that she was on her way. She lived close to Mobile, only a short bus ride away, she had confided. They had first met in Cahil's chat room and subsequently she had given up her E-mail address to him. She had been intrigued by him, she'd said on more than one occasion.

It turned into a long wait.

She wasn't on the bus she'd said she would be on. He waited for the next one. He had spent a suspicious hour in and around the Greyhound station, when finally a young woman got off a bus coming in from Nashville.

No one at the station hailed her or went near her, as others found their loved ones. This one stood apart, alone and vulnerable, like the last gazelle at a watering hole.

She looked the pan he had planned for her: young, naive, frightened and hungry. No one paid any heed when he went up to her and said, “Bolinda? Is that you?”

The young woman glared at him, not surprisingly. “No, my name's not Bolinda. You're looking for someone else.”

“ It's me, Seeker.” He didn't flinch. Instead, he offered her a meal and a place to stay for the night, along with any drugs she might like.

She stared back at him, her eyes wide. “I'm not Bolinda, and no, I don't think so.”

“ Well, whoever you are, you can't stay on the streets. A pretty girl like you? You'd be dead by morning.”

“ Get away from me, you creep,” she said, the words echoing about the room.

He looked up and raised his shoulders to anyone who might be staring, mimicking a lover's quarrel.

“ I only want to help you.”

“ What're you? The local pimp?”

Grant thought of how he pimped for Phillip. “I'd only do that for you if you chose to, if you wanted to make money. I wouldn't force you into it.”

“ You've got some nerve. You've got to be kidding,” she replied.

“ Just stay the night. There's other girls you can get to know. They'll tell you I never hurt so much as a fly, and that I only want what's best for them.”

“ I'm sure you have them all well trained.”

“ Well fed and well trained, and they get whatever they want.”

She stared at him, studying his features. “Just stay the one night, and by morning, you can make your decision.”

“ You say you've got some drugs?”

“ I do.”

“ What kind?”

“ Any kind, anything you want, sweetheart, for the taking… for now. Here, let me carry your bag. I'm parked just around the corner outside.”

She sheepishly followed. He confidently walked ahead of her, taking charge, asking, “If you're not Bolinda, what is your name, sweetheart?”

“ Sharon.”

“ Nice name. Nice.”

“ Who's Bolinda?”

“ Someone who stood me up.”

In a moment, they stood at the rear of his van, and he placed her bag on the curb. He opened the rear door on the black interior while she stood beside him, gauging the wisdom of her decision. He could feel her thinking, it was like a pulsing beam coming off her cranium. She was young and filled with a powerful energy, he decided. It was an energy Phillip craved.

As he opened the door with one hand, he grabbed and shoved her head into the metal with the other, knocking her into submission and jamming the needle into her arm. She slumped into his arms.

“ Everything OK here?” asked a Latino street beggar with his hand out.

Grant hefted the girl inside, lifted her bag and told the street man that he could have it and its contents. This gesture both stunned and pleased the beggar, who marched off quickly with the girl's things.

Grant then secured Sharon's extremities and head. He wisely locked the rear doors and climbed into the driver's seat, going for the secluded place beneath the bridge that he had earlier scouted for the work. Phillip later told Grant that he believed Sharon was sent to them, and that she had more soul in her head than Bolinda would ever achieve.

Reliving it here over coffee and the remnants of his late breakfast, Grant tried to recall the moment of touching that cosmic universal soul that Phillip had so guaranteed him. Phillip described it in beatific terms and was filled with excruciating happiness over it, but Grant had to be told about it, as by then he was no longer in the van. The operation was Dr. Grant Kenyon's doing, but the feeding and subsequent feelings of power and ecstasy belonged to Phillip.

Before leaving Mobile, Jessica had been assured by Agent Douglas that an alert on their killer there would go out. Unfortunately, the description of the van he used was a match for millions like it. Still, Douglas assured her that he would ask cities and towns dotting the map along I-10 west of Mobile, Alabama, to be on heightened alert for anything looking suspicious.

She and J.T. had talked about their next strategy during the plane trip back to Quantico.

“ Listen, J.T., before Daryl Thomas Cahil was labeled the Skull-digger, the FBI had amassed 6,511 tips from the public as to the identity and whereabouts of the Skull-digger.” Jessica spoke over the hum of the plane.

J.T. nodded. “Several of those tips pointed to Daryl. We had an army of agents across the nation looking into each tip, but since word Cahil got out… sorry, but all such tips were put in a holding pattern.”

“ According to Jere Anderson we now have a positive DNA match between Daryl's delicacy found in Morristown and Anna Gleanson from Richmond.” Jessica had checked in with the Quantico lab just before boarding.

“ Which implicates Daryl even more than ever. This fact alone will be enough to cement the case against Cahil in most minds.”

“ Most minds haven't seen what we've seen in Mobile, Alabama. We never had the Skull-digger in custody, John. He's still at large, a lunatic who likely took cues from Cahil.”

“ So what's next?”

“ We concentrate on the civilian tips,” she told J. T.

“ That's a lot of tips,” replied J. T. “We'll need a miracle to jump-start this case.”

Every instinct and desire was to close a case, and once closed, minds shut down as well. No one back at Quantico would welcome the news that the FBI still had no clue as to the identity of the Digger.

“ I think Cahil's records-his database-are still very use-fill. We have to proceed under the assumption that whoever sent him that small portion of Anna Gleason is our killer. Daryl believes it to be the man who logs on as Seeker.”

“ I ran it through VICAP as a possible alias, Jess. Got nowhere.”

“ Then we run all the code names we've culled as possible leads through VICAP. See if it spits any back at us.”

“ We can do that, sure… good idea.”

“ I was thinking that we can do the same against all the crime tips that have gone uninvestigated because the FBI grapevine had the case, quote: 'winding to a close.' “

“ Great idea… we'll run cross-checks on both lists.”

In fact, the tips that still remained in an uninvestigated status numbered well over five thousand, with more coming in every day. Most of these unchecked tips would prove a waste of time, but somewhere in the slush pile of tips, someone somewhere may have information vital to locating the real Skull-digger.

“ Earlier we asked VICAP for similar crimes. This time we go back to the unsolicited tips, pursuing each only in the event of matching key words and phrases that we'll program the computer to locate, such as 'doctor,' 'brain removal,' 'cannibalism' and 'Rheil.' “

Jessica telephoned Eriq and, after greetings, she said, “We need to divert all the tips on the Digger case from every field office electronically to our Quantico computer.”

“ To consolidate them all in one place. Should've been done a long time ago, I agree.”

Jessica suggested to Eriq, “We can then cross-reference them with other lists, like VICAP.”

“ It will take you months to run down every one of them,” he countered.

“ I have an idea that might save us months.”

“ Really?”

“ Once we finally get AOC to release information on the users on Cahil's website, we cross-reference them with names provided by VICAP and the tipsters.”

“ That's not bad… not bad at all, if we can get the AOC to release the goddamn subscriber names, make a three-way match, the list can't be so long.”

Jessica was speaking over him. “Then we look very closely at any three-way matchups, and-”

“ We take only those crisscrossing people, and we investigate each thoroughly.” Eriq had a knack for making any good idea sound like his own. “Set it up. Let's do it.”

Now the jet carrying them back to Quantico was circling for a landing, and Jessica could see the airport tower and the buildings of Quantico in the near distance. She saw the pleasant small town of Quantico, the comings and goings of cars in and out of store lots, people busy with their lives, the marching training cadets in the FBI compound, the place looking like a cross between a military barracks and a college campus.

The sight always reminded her of the first time she'd come to Quantico as a cadet, recruited from her medical examiner job in Washington, D.C.

The little stopover at the Mississippi grill had reminded Grant Kenyon of his childhood, devoid of color or charm, when his name had been Corey Lyttle. He had legally changed his name when he'd gone off to college, never seeing or speaking to his parents again. Growing up as the son of a farmer in rural upstate New York, his life had been filled with the raising and slaughtering of animals-chickens, sheep, goats, hogs and cattle, and the seasonal deer kill. The slaughters were always detailed and time-consuming, involving getting at the intestines and organs-the vitals and vittles as his father had called them. The process involved salvaging every item of the carcass, from hoof to head, including the brain.

He had grown up watching and learning and taking part in those slaughters, so as to become a man, as his father had put it. He recalled his callous and heavy-handed father's wielding of an ax to open the skulls of slaughtered cows, and his equally callous words: “Waste nothing, from an animal, boy.”

His father had had no finesse when it came to going into the cranium for the brains of the animals. He simply shoved his gloveless hands inside the cavity created by two strokes of the ax, and then he wrenched the brain free. Inside the old house, his mother chopped the animal brains into mincemeat to be used like hamburger.

When they slaughtered an animal for their own use, they fed on its every pan, including the brains. His mother had recipes for cornbread and brains, brain potatoes, brain soup, brains and eggs, brain brownies even. It had started young Corey Lyttle on a lifelong taste for brains. How many times did his father repeat the words, “Listen close, boy. Them animal brains'll make you smart, and we both know you need all the smarts you can rustle up. Besides, they fill you up when nothing else will.”

Now Grant had gotten back on the road, heading west, going toward New Orleans on 1-10. He recalled how, as a child, he had become sick to death of brains, and once he left home he had vowed to never touch them again. He held on to that promise for many years, until he learned of the crimes committed by Daryl Thomas Cahil, and his motive for committing those grave robbings. That was the first time he'd ever heard of a physical connection between brain and soul, and it brought about the growth, development and metamorphosis of Phillip the Seeker.

He'd left home with two overwhelming urges: to become his father's opposite, and to feed his thirst for knowledge, which would keep him from ever having to return to Stark, New York. He finished high school at the top of his class and earned a scholarship to college at NYU in New York City. Far from endearing himself to his mother and father, his education only worked to further their estrangement.

Traffic now buzzed by and around Grant, while the sameness of the divided highway all around him induced boredom. A look into the rearview mirror reminded him how similar in features he was, at middle age, to his father. The same large brow, the same wrinkles in exactly the same places, along his jaw, about the neck, the same ears, eyes, nose even. It felt like staring at a ghost.

“ Some things you can't escape from, Corey,” said Phillip, the voice in his head.

“ What the hell do you want?” he replied.

“ What do I always want?”

He drove on.

He next thought of his wife and child, left in New Jersey to fend for themselves. Their family had been doing well up to a point, while Grant had kept his demons at bay. He'd purchased a nice house in Holyoke, a subdivision just outside Newark, and he and Emily were happy for a time, and when Hildy was born, it appeared all would be heaven and peace. He hadn't practiced any sort of brain-feeding for several years, keeping that powerful, gnawing craving at bay. On learning of Cahil in the papers, he began to follow the case, and he fulfilled his cravings vicariously for a long time by going online with Cahil's website, a secret fascination. He had even, for a time, practiced Cahil's prescription for his so-called legal brain-feeding. But ultimately, his urges took over, and he began to practice Cahil's first notion of eating the brains of dead people, in ready supply at the hospital morgue where he worked.

Phillip had slowly emerged and had pushed Grant to sample and feed on the bodies he would autopsy at the morgue. So he had, on occasion, sampled human brain tissue. Then he slipped up badly during the Allandale autopsy the night his problems began with Erdman and the hospital.

That night he had devoured the brain in his office, washing it down with wine.

“ No doubt, Emily's put out a missing-person's report on you by now,” suggested Phillip, causing Grant to jump in his seat and swerve. I should've faced Emmie; should've told her I needed some time alone.”

Phillip sanguinely said, “Little Hildy will soon be having another birthday.”

Grant had always felt estranged from others. His entire life had been spent in a kind of numb dullness that kept him an emotional cripple, and he felt certain that it all had to do with his mother and father, not just the upbringing but something in the poisonous gene pool they had together created. A passing road sign read:

New Orleans-59

Today, he had climbed from bed determined to control Phillip's insatiable appetite for killing and consuming the gray matter of his victims. Now he felt the urge at every turn, as with accepting the stand-in at the bus stop in Mobile. In fact, wherever he looked nowadays, he saw a possible feeding. Phillip wasn't as choosy as he had once been.

Each new encounter now-a maid, a waitress, a clerk- any passing soul, save the decrepit and aged, would do. “What happened to your standards, your list?” he asked Phillip.

“ I sense our time is running out. We've had to lower standards. That ought not to be hard for you, Grant.”

“ Stop calling me that.”

“ Shall I call you by your father's name?”

“ No!”

“ Huh, should I call you 'Phil'?”

“ You sonofabitch,” cursed Grant.

“ Even if I did disguise my voice and tone, boy, you're still somewhere inside this head, boy. You had to know it was me, Corey, son.” “Shut up! Shut up! You damn demented old bastard.” To drown out Phillip, he snatched on the radio and turned it to its highest level, nearly blowing a speaker.

The old couple running the restaurant had looked too much like his parents, and the old woman kept eyeballing him, as if she knew everything about him. The phone on the wall hadn't rung, and growing impatient, he had asked the old woman, “How damn much longer's your husband going to take with my van?”

She'd replied, “Saw the old man finishing up, but he's got no phone in the garage. We can only afford the one line.”

“ I gotta go out there and check on him, you mean?”

She nodded. “Need me a nap,” muttered the old woman, a phrase she had repeated ad nauseam. She then asked him, “Just where you heading, young man?”

He had seen too much interest paid him at Lou and Lew's motel, restaurant and body shop, this mom-and-pop operation in the middle of nowhere. Using a small snub-nosed. 38 Smith amp; Wesson, one he always kept tucked away, he leapt up and terrified the old woman. He led her to the register, opened it and tore out the larger bills.

Her arms flailing like wings, she cried out, begging, “Please, mister, take whatever you want, but please not our lives! Please!”

“ Shut up,” he'd shouted, a fistful of her hair now a tow-line as he forced her out back to visit her husband in the shop. Chickens scrambled to get out of the way, raising noise, so that the old man saw them coming. Obviously, the woman hadn't lied about the phones. He had no way of contacting help, except for his CB radio. With a shotgun in one hand, he tried to hail someone on the CB.

Unable to get anyone on the radio, the old man in overalls and paint bravely came at him with the huge shotgun, but Grant gave him a choice. “She gets a bullet through the head if you don't drop that damned thing.”

“ You give her up to me, then!”

“ Deal.” Grant viciously pushed the old woman into him, and the old man grabbed hold of her as both went down to the earthen floor.

He forced them onto their knees, snatched all the money in a second register here, and said, “Now, you two sweethearts can take a long nap.” He then put a single bullet through each head.

“ It'll look like a robbery murder. Keep the locals busy,” he said to the dead and to Phillip, “if we leave their goddamn brains intact.”

Phillip didn't argue this time. “Old brains carry toe much disease,” he muttered.

Grant took time to open and pour paint all over the garage and the bodies. He emptied some twelve to thirteen gallons of different colors, creating a rainbow of the place. He believed this would confuse anyone wondering about the killer of Lou and Lew's pigsty.

He then climbed into his now dark green rather than blue van and tore from the body shop. A lone red pickup with an old man in it was just pulling into the restaurant's gravel lot.

That had been less than two hours before, and now he saw the steeple-top skyscrapers of New Orleans coming into view on the horizon. He'd be safe here for a while, he told himself, if he could control Phillip.

Quantico, Virginia July 23, 2003

Over the next few days, Jessica, J.T. and their team began taking portions of the tips by state and encrypting them onto the ACC program-the Automated Cross-Check software developed specifically for such a massive search.

They began the painstaking effort of searching for common names on VICAP and other lists of known offenders against the thousands of uninvestigated tips, hoping something would shake out from the mix. Adding to the cauldron what little they knew of the killer's approximate height, weight, race and vehicle, they further reduced the possible suspects.

The process proved tedious and time-consuming, as many of the field agents worked on their own clock; the process was also hardly cost-effective as it took a great deal of time to download all the reports coming in from across the nation. In the meantime, Jessica had grown increasingly impatient for the court order to open Cahil's enormous list of patrons. The delay had everyone on edge.

Amassing the information that Jessica wanted-more than five thousand unanswered tips in the Skull-digger case-proved daunting. They were scattered over hundreds of field offices, some as far away as Oregon. However, the first dividing up was done geographically, whittling the list down from the massive pile sent in from each field operative. Naturally the southeastern states, where the killings had begun, were by far the largest in number of tips.

After working all afternoon, Jessica and J.T. took a moment's break in her office, and she began to talk about her frustrations, all of which he shared. Then the conversation turned to Cahil's patrons.

“ Tell me, J.T., what is it inside people that make them so curious about cannibalism and brain eating, about grave-robbing gray matter from dead children, about a monster like Cahil?”

He sipped at a cup of cold coffee and replied, “What prompts otherwise intelligent people to open that gruesome Web page and spend hours there? Some dark corner of the human psyche, I suppose.”

She raised her own cup, drank from it, and said, “As much as we've seen over the years, I suppose we ought to be used to seeing the worst in people.”

“ We ought to, yes.”

“ But this… this… It makes me think of the scam artists who, days after the World Trade Center attacks, began bottling and boxing up dirt and debris from the rubble of thousands of lives to sell at whatever price they could get.”

“ A slap in the face to all decency and humanity otherwise displayed at Ground Zero.”

They had embarked on a long journey, the first step in reinvigorating the investigation. They were only hours into it, knowing it would take days and a great deal of luck. And while Cahil remained in custody, and would likely stay put for some time, the real murderer remained at large. And since no other victims had been found since Mobile, a low-level buzz among the people working overtime on the case had begun. Everyone wondered if Mobile had not been a copycat killing after all.

Eriq Santiva suddenly entered the room, followed by the head of the FBI, Director Thomas Hinze. Santiva remained silent while Hinze blasted away. “I just got a copy of your DNA analysis on the brain tissue found at Cahil's residence, and it matches the Gleason woman killed in Richmond. Given the date, I'd like to know why it took so long to get to me? That's strong evidence linking Cahil to her murder, wouldn't you say, Dr. Coran?”

“ Yes, it is but-”

“ And I have a copy of your protocol sent to Santiva here on the last victim located in Mobile, Alabama. She didn't have the mark of this Island of Rheil thing on the backside of her skull or anywhere else. Chief Santiva here tells me that you had informed him that the killing in Alabama was the exact same MO-identical. Says he has only now learned it wasn't. What kind of games are you two playing, Dr. Coran, Dr. Thorpe?”

“ Director… Chief, it's my report, not J.T.'s,” she said, standing now to keep from cowering beneath them.

“ Aren't we all on the same team here, people?” asked Hinze.

J.T. said, “I'm as much to blame as Jessica, sir. I kept silent about it, too.”

“ Only at my request,” she countered J.T. and turned to Eriq. “Look, I know in my gut that one of Cahil's Web buddies set him up.” Her tone matched her look of defiance. “You know my instincts about this kind of thing are good. That I'm good at what I do. Just let me do my job.”

Santiva said, “Jess, I think you two made a grave error in Mobile.”

“ How so?”

With an upraised hand, Hinze stopped Santiva from answering. “This just isn't panning out, Dr. Coran. Thorpe here has monitored the Web page to no avail. We've got hundreds of agents working overtime on a hunch. We need to cut our losses, indict this Cahil person, and get on.”

“ We're in too deep for that,” she countered.

“ We've wasted too much time on this case, and I think it's time you came to the same conclusion, Dr. Coran.”

“ We're not halfway through the tips yet, Director.”

“ If the Skull-digger were still out there, he'd have struck again. We'd know about it conclusively. This murder in Mobile was a copycat.”

“ I don't think so. Our profile all along said that the Digger could not control his urge after a few days, remember?” “Unless he's become more disciplined,” suggested Hinze. “And incarceration has that effect!”

Jessica added, “What if the latest body just hasn't surfaced yet?”

“ Do you two have any idea how much hot air's breathing down my neck right now?” asked Hinze. “Besides, suppose for a moment you're wrong, Dr. Coran, and you and I know you've been wrong before-”

She thought of mistakes made in Chicago that had gotten her friend and mentor, Otto Boutine, killed. She thought of mistakes she'd made in tracking Mad Matthew Matisak, and the trail of bodies he had left in his wake, and how she had almost gotten herself killed on more than one occasion.

Hinze, a tall, imposing figure, continued talking over her thoughts. “Suppose the woman in Mobile… that her killer goes free, this Citizen X-because we decide it's the work of the Skull-digger. And instead, it's just some guy using the same MO to cover his tracks!”

It had been known to happen more often than officials cared to inform the public. How many murders were tacked on to a serial killer list might even surprise a criminal judge.

“ We're set on this course, Director. We are investigating another theory, that the Digger is one of Cahil's website junkies. We know his online name-the Seeker.”

The director paced the room. “All right. Chief Santiva tells me you have a thing for this guy that Cahil pointed out early on. But he also tells me Cahil's page has not heard anything from the Seeker. Isn't that right? And there's a theory that the Seeker and Cahil may be one and the same. Santiva is beginning to think so, aren't you, Eriq? Tell her.”

Eriq cleared his throat and replied, “That thought has been discussed, yes, but I have to stand with Dr. Coran's assessment. We need to keep the investigation open until we can follow the leads we've uncovered to a conclusion we can all live with, sir.”

“ We're still hopeful that we'll hear from this Seeker character when he checks in again with Cahil's page,” added J.T.

“ The guy who calls himself the Seeker argues that Cahil has no special knowledge of where the soul resides in the brain, argues against the Island of Rheil being of any consequence. And Cahil claims this person sent the brain tissue from Anna Gleason to him.”

“ Through field ops, we raided a Richmond PO box this Seeker guy used for surface correspondence, but the guy used phony identification.”

J.T. then hefted a computer printout in his hands. “I did locate an interesting old letter from the Seeker to Cahil. It's about the Seeker's childhood, all about slaughtering animals on a farm, but it includes slaughtering them for their brains. He doesn't give any details as to time or place or his identity except for a first name-”

“ Which is?”

“ Corey,” J.T. replied. “You might find it interesting if gruesome reading.”

Jessica added, “I think maybe we ought to go after a discovery warrant on this guy alone, take our chances with the roll of the dice.”

“ Too late for that,” said Santiva. “I wrote the order for full disclosure of every user.” Eriq and the director now stood over Jessica's shoulder and scanned the data J.T. had handed her.

“ Still we can put him at the top of the list.” Jessica pushed back in her chair and tried to calm her nerves. It had appeared for so long now that no one stood with her save J.T., but she realized now that Eriq firmly backed her as well, despite his earlier doubts.

Eric and the director left, and J.T. soon followed their lead. Left alone, Jessica stared down at the collected E-mail letters from the Seeker. She had mumbled a goodbye to J.T. but her eyes and mind were focused on the letter describing the Seeker's upbringing. “I know you're out there, whatever you care to call yourself-Seeker, Corey, Satan.”

Jessica Coran stood over a team of men and women sifting through the computers in the computer analysis section of the FBI at Quantico. She nervously paced, holding on to reams of information coming out of their new investigation. She remained anxious to get word from a judge that AOC had been made to comply with the FBI request to open up the subscriber lists visiting Cahil's website. But so far, nothing forthcoming. Everyone on the team felt stymied.

Daryl Cahil's name had come up so far as the only three-way match among the civilian tips, the VICAP program and, of course, on his own website. He remained the only known user still, and would so long as AOC continued its fight with the FBI. The court battle had brought out curious reporters, and AOC, happy with the publicity it was now garnering, wanted nothing more than to fight for the rights of their customers-to drag the publicity out. This also dragged into the light the whole story of Cahil's arrest, his website and the AOC controversy and what it had to do with the Skull-digger case. This only caused a flood of hits on Cahil's website, causing more problems for the team's monitoring efforts-adding to the nightmare.

Meanwhile, all the other users logging on remained unknowns. Cross-referencing with Cahil's website log-on code names proved useless. But they had learned that the Seeker and a handful of others had faithfully logged on for years, and that in fact, the Seeker was among the first to contact Cahil while he remained in jail. Santiva relentlessly pursued the federal court judge to get AOC to open its files on the E-mail addressees. The result had been a long, anxiety-ridden delay. In its arguments, AOC cited that many of the logons came from hotels and libraries, as well as private homes, and that what the FBI wanted was tantamount to invasion of privacy and against the public's right to assume they had privacy as upheld by the AOC's contract with the public.

The bad news from AOC was called in from a female representative of the company, a spokesperson. Jessica had immediately asked the AOC representative if she would at least pinpoint which users had logged on from libraries and hotels in Richmond, Winston-Salem, Jacksonville, Savannah and Mobile on specific days and nights. The representative stood firm, spouting policy, adding, “Only in the event of a terrorist attack can we lay aside the principle of privacy to our customers.”

“ There is a serial killer on the loose, looking for his sixth victim!”

The phone clicked dead.

Jessica had even contacted Dr. Jack Deitze, Cahil's keeper while imprisoned, and pleaded for information on anyone contacting Cahil via U.S. mail or phone before he began his website. Neither Dr. Deitze nor anyone else at the facility could help her, as records kept on U.S. mail addresses coming into the prison were not kept beyond ten years. They'd been destroyed two years before. Phone logs likewise.

FBI code-breakers continued to work on Cahil's hard drive. Meanwhile, several hundred other names had also made a two-way match-up between VICAP and civilian tips, and this formed the long list Jessica now held in her hands. She pulled a chair alongside Dana Morrill, a bright young computer aide, and she said, “Using these two-way matches as your starting point, cross the list with the words 'island,' 'isle,' 'soul,' 'brain,' 'mind,' 'doctor' and R-h-e-i-1,' “ she said, spelling out the last word. As an after-thought, she added the word “butcher.” She recalled that in Cahil's pitiful little biography he had once been a butcher.

J.T. had been on a well-earned break, but now he reentered the unit and saw that Jessica appeared as much in hot pursuit of the leads as before. He came near and whispered, “Jess, we just got a report out of a place called Hardscrabble, Mississippi, of an elderly couple murdered at a body shop- a freshly painted van was involved. You said we should be on the lookout for an escalation in violent and erratic behavior.”

“ Where's this place located?”

“ Some seventy or so miles from New Orleans. A crossroads between Biloxi and New Orleans, right off 1-10. Police are suspicious it could be our guy, since there's evidence of a freshly redone van. Like I said, it occurred at a shop run by this elderly couple-both shot to death. A dark green van was seen leaving the place.”

Jessica studied the report J.T. held out. “Location is right. Could be him driving a freshly painted van since this involves a body shop. Do we have anyone to ID the killer?”

“ Negative. Witness only saw the van peeling off, headed toward New Orleans. Word is, the guy just executed these two-bullet to the back of each head.”

“ May be our guy, maybe not. He's got to be feeling us on his heels. Look at this.” She extended the computer's hits from the keywords she'd asked for earlier. “Sixty matches.”

“ Wow, that many doctors on a violent-crime list and on civilian tips at the same time? That's kind of scary.”

“ Wonder how many visited Cahil's chat room? Damned AOC gets their way, we may never know.”

“ Eriq's back at the courthouse now, trying to get us what we want,” J.T. assured her. Jessica turned to the computer aide. “Bring up any photos we have of our gallery of rogue doctors and butchers- see if we find any Sweeny Todds. I want to see if any of them vaguely resemble the work of the two sketch artists in Fayetteville and Mobile.”

“ All sixty of them?” Dana Morrill looked at her watch. It read 5:47 P.M.

They worked throughout the evening hours on Jessica's notion, but in every case the level of violence was ruled as entirely out of keeping with the violence done victims of the Skull-digger. Still, since there were two-way match-ups between “doctors” and “butchers,” each conceivably possessing the tools and skills to remove a human brain, Jessica dispatched the information to respective field offices to investigate these doctors.

One agent complained, “We're already canvassing a list you gave us that's three times as long.”

“ Drop the long list. Use the short list for now. They've been identified as doctors and butchers taken from the long list. One of them might be the Skull-digger.” One of them might be the Seeker, she thought.

“ So, the man being detained is not the Digger?” asked an agent in New Orleans.

“ Jesus. That's for the press. Official thinking, right now, is what you're pursuing, Agent.”

“ Damn, and we thought it was over,” replied the field agent. “You know, a little more cooperation and information sharing, and a little please and thank-you, Dr. Coran, might help.”

“ Yeah, please and thanks.” Jessica's level of frustration felt at an all-time high. She feared that anytime now the Digger would strike again, and still no one knew his identity or whereabouts.

She called Eriq on his cell phone. No answer. She tried again. When he finally came on, he said he'd had to leave the courtroom to take the call.

“ How's it going with FBI vs. AOC?” she asked.

“ We're going to win this thing, but they're putting up a stubborn fight.”

“ We suspect the real Digger is in and around New Or-leans with a newly painted van. Dark green in color. I believe we should put New Orleans on a heightened-alert status.”

“ How sure are you, Jess?”

“ Fairly sure.”

“ Then consider it done.”

“ And how soon are we going to win the order against AOC?”

“ Like I said, still in the pipeline, but I think it's finally going our way.”

She replied, “Something has to.”