Grave Instinct

EIGHTEEN

Jessica and Sorrento had heard the shouting from above, Konrath's voice; the tone meant he was delivering orders or demands. They had seen him at the front door, and they'd seen O'Hurley break in the glass and tear the door open. Something had happened. But by the time Jessica and Sorrento arrived at the front door, Konrath and O'Hurley had vanished. Jessica announced their arrival, calling for Konrath as they bounded up the porch and into the foyer.

They'd been instantly hit with the sight of the dead man lying in the foyer, obviously having fallen from above. Jessica kneeled for a moment, trying to identify him as Swantor or Kenyon. It was neither man. “Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“ Looks like overkill.”

“ Or Kenyon's work.”

“ Konrath!” shouted Sorrento. “O'Hurley!”

They heard a gunshot coming from the rear of the house. This was followed by two additional gunshots originating from upstairs. They heard O'Hurley shout, “I think I got the bastard! LaPlante's down!”

“ The rear!” shouted Jessica, going for the back of the house. Sorrento slipped on the dead man's blood; not slowing, Jessica raced ahead of him, gun pointed.

When Jessica made it to the back door off the kitchen, she saw the two dead men lying out in the rain. She rushed out to where the two men lay in the blood-soaked grass. Jessica saw the youthful face of the man in the Coast Guard uniform, his nametag proclaiming him LaPlante, dead of a clean gunshot wound through the heart. The other man was tall and hefty, and the back of his skull was grinning with a gaping wound like the one they had seen on Sheriff Potter, but this wound to the back of the skull had been washed clean by the rain.

Sorrento was beside her now, doing his own assessment of the situation. With Mike's help, she turned the body and stared into the face of Jervis Swantor. “One down, one to go,” she said through gritted teeth. “It's Swantor.”

Sorrento and Jessica crouched over the bodies in the storm, their weapons pointed, but they had no target, and they were exposed. The two agents scoured the landscape for any sign of Kenyon and Mrs. Swantor. They saw no one.

Konrath came racing from the house, going to his knees over the young guardsman, LaPlante. “Oh, Christ! No, no!”

O'Hurley followed, saying, “He's got the woman! I got two shots off from the upstairs window. I'm sure I hit him.”

Konrath bellowed, “O'Hurley, which way did the bastard go?”

“ They went straight down, just as if they were swallowed up by the earth,” said O'Hurley. “There's got to be a steep drop-off right out there, maybe sixty yards. She's wearing LaPlante's raincoat. The man's wearing dark clothing.”

“ Let's get this bastard before he feeds again,” said Jessica, her teeth set. She grabbed her flashlight and beamed it toward the area O'Hurley's own light sought out. The men followed suit, and they spread out along the drop off, shining their lights at the dark hole into which Kenyon had crawled, taking his prey with him, like some beast out of the scriptures.

They tentatively made their way in the slippery undergrowth for about ten minutes before Jessica's flash picked up a slight movement and the color yellow in the for distance. “There! There she is. Come on!”

They carefully negotiated the incline, when a shot rang out, a bullet whistling past them. This made O'Hurley fall and tumble, sending up a bevy of frightened quail and shattering his ankle on impact against a tree. “Son of a bitch.” He moaned.

First Mate Konrath ordered everyone to discard their slickers, realizing they presented too much of a target. Konrath then tended to O'Hurley while Jessica and Sorrento went toward the yellow marker, where they hoped to find the woman.

They fought tough, jagged underbrush, palmetto bush and gnarled branches that cut their hands and faces just to win a foothold on the riverbank where the yellow coat winked again and again at them like a lure.

Jessica whispered in Sorrento's ear, “Do you see it, the raincoat?”

“ Could be there to decoy us in, a trap,” he replied.

“ What do you suggest?”

“ I walk into the trap… you cover me,” he told her.

“ No, I walk in, you cover me.”

“ Not in this life.”

“ Then we go in together.”

“ We don't have that option,” he insisted.

“ Look, if he hasn't killed her already, this may be our only chance of flushing him out before he does.”

They then heard a flurry of crashing noises in the water, and the yellow raincoat suddenly went in and out of sight. Jessica instinctively rushed toward the sound, ahead of Sorrento.

“ Wait… wait up! We go in together!” he shouted, rushing in behind her.

The sound of a struggle ahead in the fog-laden bayou beckoned her on. So far, they had been unable to save any of the Skull-digger's victims. Jessica, acutely aware of their utter failure in this regard, meant to change that here and now. Then a deafening silence fell over the place, and Jessica again spotted the yellow cloth. It began to move and thrash about in the black water, and then she heard the sound of the bone cutter's deadly whirr.

“ Jesus, he's killing her right now!” Jessica rushed toward the flagging yellow marker in the dense forest ahead. They had come perhaps a hundred yards from where they'd left Konrath and O'Hurley. Her flashlight shone crazily, hitting the tops of trees now as she brought up her 9-mm semiautomatic to bear on the scene.

As she came into a clearing of caked mud and ooze, she fell and her body was trapped up to her hips in a sucking muck. She'd fallen prey to the swamp. Just ahead of her, from her prone position in the sucking mud, she saw the last of the color yellow go down the gullet of a feeding alligator that was pulling back into the river. Then she realized that Kenyon had leapt onto the monster, that he was actually wrestling with the alligator, using his bone saw now on the creature, cutting wide swaths of tough skin from its head, attempting to kill it. She knew instinctively that this was no act of heroism on Kenyon's part, but rather a rage against the beast and an attempt to regain Mrs. Swantor-or rather her brain-for himself.

Jessica, staring at this sight, froze, curious and amazed.

From behind her, Sorrento shouted as he broke through the brush, almost joining Jessica in the quagmire. Balancing himself, he came to a standstill and stared out at the water where the battle raged. “Shoot… shoot him,” Jessica shouted at Sorrento.

While Mike hesitated, Jessica managed to bring up her gun, readying to fire at Kenyon when she saw that he'd vanished. All had gone silent in the water as if there had never been a disturbance. Nothing left of the battle but ripples on the surface.

Sorrento cursed himself for having hesitated firing. He imagined either the gator had sunk its teeth into Kenyon, or the madman had slipped away. He could be making his way to shore, given that the alligator was busy with Swantor's wife. She pictured Kenyon wading from the water and crawling onto shore somewhere on the island, still holding firm to his bone cutter.

“ Can you get me out of this muck?”

Sorrento worked his way to solid ground as close to her as possible, trying to reach her. He perilously reached a hand out to her, nearly falling in beside her. “Sonofabitch is getting away,” he complained, unable to reach her.

“ No, he slipped off to the left. I saw him,” countered Konrath who'd come up on the clearing from another direction. “He's still out there.”

“ Will you two please get me the hell out of here?” asked Jessica. “We've got to follow the riverbank. Try to keep up with Kenyon.”

Konrath located a strong branch, and with Sorrento's help, they towed Jessica to safety.

“ We have to split up.” Jessica told them. “Kenyon could crawl ashore anywhere on the island, maybe down by the boathouse, make a clean escape. I swear I won't have that, gentlemen.”

Konrath helped her to her feet. “I say we call in for help and wait until daybreak before one of us gets killed.”

“ You do what you think's right, Mr. Konrath,” said Jessica. “I'm going after the bastard.” She stood mud-soaked before them, her eyes determined.

Sorrento suggested, “Why don't you radio for everyone aboard the cutter to form a search party, Mr. Konrath? By time they get here, it will be daybreak.”

“ I'd do that but I lost my radio someplace out here, and the only other one is back with LaPlante's body.”

Sorrento then turned to Jessica, but she was gone, moving swiftly along the bank and out of sight.

“ Damn that impetuous woman,” said Sorrento, before going after her.

Kenyon had felt terror rip through him as the alligator plunged below the surface, turned topsy-turvy, spinning and going for the bottom while holding on to Mrs. Swantor, a little of her coat still extended from its jaws. Kenyon's own ability to hold on became a question of losing either the gun or his bone cutter, something he couldn't allow. So he'd lost the gun in the struggle. In the end, it had been a futile attempt when the alligator dove into the depths, dragging Mrs. Swantor with it.

He imagined her brain deep inside its gullet on its way to the stomach, and awaiting digestion.

He cursed those chasing him; he'd had to give up the fight when they appeared. He had swum away, trying to keep the bone cutter from taking on any more water than it already had.

He tried to catch his breath as he swam, hearing the authorities in the distance. He quietly made for the bank, disorientated and wondering where he was in relation to the house and the boat dock.

Then he saw the gator coming for him, weakened but coming on, its eyes filled with an eternity, its mouth still filled with small parts of Mrs. Swantor's raincoat.

Horrified now, Kenyon hurled the bone cutter ahead of him, hoping it would make shore, and then he swam faster and noisier in the same direction. The creature was right on his heels, snapping and trying to grab hold of Kenyon.

Kenyon had weakened it considerably with the damage he'd done the monster's head, yet it came on like a demonic force. Kenyon now pulled himself to land, and tugging at the exposed roots of trees, he threw himself onshore, tearing at the earth and pulling himself as far from the bank as he could. When he looked back, he saw the thing had somehow climbed ashore as well.

“ Fuck, the damn thing's fixated on you, Phillip,” Grant reasoned. “Something in it has to have Phillip-to feed on Phillip's cosmic mind.”

But Grant didn't want to die, not like this. He clawed his way farther along, mustered his strength and got to his feet. He ran.

Having heard Kenyon's struggle from the water and the thrashing alligator, Jessica positioned herself as close to the battle as possible. She had grabbed a vine in the underbrush where she saw Kenyon attempting to escape the alligator, and she pulled the sturdy vine taut just as Kenyon raced toward her, unaware of her presence. Jessica had waited for the exact moment to rip at the hanging vine that cut across Kenyon's path. The vine stiffened at an angle, cutting him viciously across the face.

This sent him down on his back, a bruise across his forehead like one of the lines he'd so often drawn on his prey.

Seeing Kenyon immobilized, the alligator now took one last, powerful leap, and with its front feet firmly set, its bottom jaw scooped beneath Kenyon's skull and the massive upper jaw awaited its lower counterpart. The consequent crack, snap and pop through bone sounded like small gunfire at a distance, muffled as it was by the monster's closed jaws. The massive teeth met directly at Kenyon's forehead. Again the monster chomped, and Jessica heard the subsequent sound of crackling bone until she imagined the man's brain was spiked. She wondered if he were yet alive in this position.

Grant Kenyon, the man she had chased halfway across the continent now, writhed, his body stiffening and his every fiber feeling the pain, not unlike the pain that he had inflicted on his victims. He was still very much alive. As the gator thrashed, so did Kenyon's body.

Finally, Jessica listened to the horrible sound of bubbles and air escaping Kenyon in a long, painful agony of last rites.

She held out her firearm, preparing to put an end to it, but she questioned such an action. Kenyon had shown not the slightest mercy to his many victims, victims he presumed to rob of their souls while they suffered a live torment.

Her gun pointed at Kenyon, she saw that his body was still now, dead at last.

“ Now, you son of a bitch, you've got a taste of nature's bone cutter,” Jessica shouted, her eyes firmly held by the sight, when a final spasm of the man's body made the alligator chomp-swallow on him once again.

The beast then tried to pull Kenyon's dead weight back toward the water, tugging at its prey, and shaking its tail to move in reverse.

“ Jessica! We can't let that gator get away!” shouted Mike Sorrento from behind her. “We've got to recover both bodies, Kenyon's and Mrs. Swantor if we can.”

Jessica fully agreed. She both wanted to recover Mrs. Swantor's body from the bowels of the beast, and to hold on to Kenyon's body, so that no one could ever question whether the Skull-digger was killed this day or not. She wanted no ambiguity remaining.

Since she didn't want to lose the alligator a second time, Jessica aimed and fired into its brain. A second shot from Sorrento rang out, hitting the beast as well. Right as it made the riverbank, the creature expired like a balloon losing air, dead of wounds earlier inflicted by Kenyon and now their combined gunfire.

She turned to Sorrento, his gun smoking. How long had he been there? How much of her behavior he had witnessed, she did not know.

The rains had softened and the sky along with it, a hint of daybreak showing through in the east.

Mike Sorrento stepped before her, and he stared at the scene: All but Kenyon's head extended from the alligator's mouth, his brain crushed inside the monstrous jaws. “Makes for a fitting metaphor for the man's life.”

“ Going to make one hell of a forensic photo, too,” she replied, standing over the scene.

“ Yeah… yeah, one hell of a shot. Good of you to put Kenyon out of his misery.”

“ I shot the gator, not Kenyon.”

“ No, I shot the gator,” he disagreed.

“ Then we both shot the thing.”

“ How long did Kenyon suffer?”

“ All of his life, I'd say.”

They stared for a moment at one another, each keeping silent. Jessica again wondered how much Mike Sorrento had seen, and how much his remarks were meant to elicit from her. In the distance, they heard Konrath calling out, trying to locate their position. I don't want anyone thinking we just sat here and let the alligator do our job for us,” she said.

“ I can't imagine anyone thinking that, Dr. Coran.”

“ I stopped him with a vine strung across his path. The moment he fell, the gator grabbed him. There was no pulling him to safety.”

“ I know… and you didn't have time to react. I saw the whole thing,” he concurred. “And if it becomes necessary, Jessica, I'll back you up.”

It wasn't lost on her that this was the first time he'd called her Jessica. Now that they shared a secret, he presumed them closer, she imagined.

Konrath came through the underbrush and stared at the scene. “Jesus,” he said. “Terrible way to go.”

“ No more so than his victims,” Sorrento replied.

Jessica knew that even dead, the gator's digestive juices would only continue to eat away at Lara Swantor's flesh. “Look around for that brain saw. It's got to be around here someplace.”

The two men did so, and Sorrento complained, “It's likely in the water, six feet under.”

“ No, here it is!” shouted Konrath holding it up.

“ Let me have it.” Jessica examined the machine and expertly started it. “Good, it's still functioning.”

“ What're you going to do?” asked Sorrento.

“ I'm getting what's left of that woman out of that beast, OK? Now, first thing we need to do is pry open the gator's mouth and get Kenyon's weight off. Then I want you two to help me roll that damned beast on its back. I'm going to cut it open.”

“ Don't you want to wait? Get a CSI team in here, photos, the whole nine yards?” asked Sorrento. “Cover our asses, so to speak?” “Some things can't wait. We couldn't save this woman in life, least we can do is help her in death.”

“ How much of the woman do you hope to recover?” asked Konrath.

“ Gators swallow whole chunks, like sharks. Most of her will be intact.”

O'Hurley came through the brush on a makeshift splint. He gaped at the scene, and Konrath brought him up to date. Together, the three men pried Kenyon from the monster's jaws. Jessica and the others grimaced at the sight of the crushed skull and oozing gray matter. They then rolled the gator onto its back. In a moment, the alligator's bulk quit shimmying under the blue light of dawn, and it lay now on its back, its green-to-white stomach shimmering like glowing mildew.

Jessica revved up the bone cutter again and began the incision, unconcerned about precision as the cutter sailed through the tough underbelly of the twelve-foot-long monster.

Sorrento in a failed attempt to ease the tension said, “Some cesarean section you've got going here, Doc.”

After the difficult work of the center cut, a visible, odious gas flume expelled from the stomach, sending Jessica back-peddling, the odor too much to bear. When it was safe to return, she cut two flap wings at top and bottom of the original cut.

With no other instruments to work with, she worked in butcher fashion to open the stomach lining. More gas fumes erupted, and Jessica said, “Think there's something here.” She grabbed hold of a gooey yellow swath of clothing and pulled at it. A large portion of the raincoat. She was finding nothing in the way of flesh and bone.

Working on, without gloves, she used her blood-smeared hands to pull back the tough, unyielding skin once more. Sorrento lent a hand, holding back one of the massive flaps, the odor of the insides threatening to make him ill when Jessica declared, “There's no Mrs. Swantor here. She's got to be out there somewhere.”

“ In the woods?”

“ In the river?”

“ Someplace other than the gator.”

“ She may've drowned.”

“ Maybe the gator has a hole someplace below the water where he stashes food.”

“ She could be in shock, wandering about in a daze.”

The theories came fast and furious.

They began calling her name, their voices wafting through the thickets and out over the river. No answer.

“ We'll get some help from the cutter, do a thorough search of the entire area,” suggested Konrath.

Jessica searched for her cellular phone but realized it must be in the Mississippi muck that Konrath and Sorrento had pulled her from. “All right,” she said, relenting. Looking down at herself, she saw that she was covered in animal blood and tissue, caked in with mud. Ignoring this, she began to spout orders. “Yeah, we need reinforcements. You're right.”

“ We have some black-water divers aboard the cutter. We'll get them out here, too. We'll find Mrs. Swantor,” Konrath assured her.

Jessica breathed deeply and rubbed the back of her aching neck. “We've got to grid the house, the backyard and the yacht as well as three additional crime scenes. There's a total of six bodies, seven if Mrs. Swantor is found dead. And we need to confiscate the tapes that Swantor made aboard his-”

“ Jess, I think you need some rest and-” began Sorrento.

“ Rest?”

“- to step back. Let others handle things from here on,” he suggested.

“ You're cold and shivering, Dr. Coran,” added Konrath. “We could all use some hot food, nourishment, coffee. It's been a rough night.”

Sorrento took her by the shoulders and firmly said, “I'll stay behind, keep any animals from getting at the bodies until you send in a team, Doctor.”

“ Good news is we've put an end to the Skull-digger. I'll let them know back at headquarters, get the word out.”

“ Come on, O'Hurley,” said Konrath. “You need that ankle taken care of.”

Jessica again thanked Sorrento for all he'd done, and then she thanked the Coast Guard men. Looking up at the top of the rise, she saw sunlight up there above this backwater hole.

“ Yeah, you're right, Mike. I'll be able to coordinate everything from the ship a lot more efficiently than from here.”

“ Exactly.”

Along with Konrath and O'Hurley, Jessica made her way up the incline, climbing for the light.

SORRENTO watched all the others leave. When he felt certain he was alone, he stepped around to Grant Kenyon's shattered head. He easily plucked away large pieces of shattered bone from the skullcap created by the powerful jaws of the dead gator lying nearby. He squatted over the man's exposed gray matter, removing more and more of the fractured pieces from around it. He then, curious, proceeded to dig with his hands, and he liked the texture and feel of the cortical matter on his fingertips. Finally, Sorrento dared taste Kenyon's smashed brain.

The head was fractured wide, part of the skull easily picked apart like an eggshell. He found pieces, shards, whole chunks easy to prize out, just like feeding on a large walnut. Other parts had to be ripped with some difficulty from the crushed skull. Sorrento was convinced that this man's brain held power after he had cannibalized so many, and that if he now consumed Kenyon's brain, he might quite possibly have a glimpse at this “cosmic mind” he had read so much about on his computer since he had first logged on to the website run by Cahil, after a high-school kid up in Chimera, Louisiana, had first contacted him about it. Something about Cahil's suggestions were hypnotic, as radical as they sounded. But he had never entertained the idea that Cahil was the real Skull-digger. But rather that Cahil had influenced the Skull-digger.

Peering in through the cracks of Kenyon's demolished skull, he saw there was more inside he could not get at because his hand was too large to reach inside. He saw the bone saw lying where Jessica had left it, but dared not use it. That would tip his hand. Instead, he grabbed up a rock and smashed it against the cranium, opening the already existing fissures wider still. Using his Swiss Army knife, he managed to dig out more of the brain. He fed on it, not caring for the taste, but devouring it nonetheless for its magical power.

The situation, the location, it was all so perfect for his needs. No one need ever know. Everyone would simply believe the alligator got at Kenyon's brain before it died. Jessica had been too busy worrying over the woman's remains to pay close attention to the condition of Kenyon's brain.

No one would be the wiser… no one but Michael Sorrento.

Just then he heard a twig snap, and turning, the raw gray matter of what was left of Kenyon's brain in his hand, he saw a naked, shivering woman staring at him, but her eyes didn't register a thing. It was Mrs. Swantor, and she was in complete shock.

He stood and smiled, stepped toward her and said, “Mrs. Swantor.. I'm FBI Agent Mike Sorrento. I've been looking for you everywhere.”

She could not speak-showing only fear and looking like a deer caught in headlights. Frozen. Still, she might bolt. She stared past him at the bodies of the gator and Kenyon. Sorrento wondered how long she'd been standing here, staring; how much she had seen.

A Coast Guard helicopter began whirring overhead, a deafening sound. Sorrento guided the woman beneath a thicket of trees. “Stay right here, Mrs. Swantor, until I come back.” He went for the bone cutter. The sound it would make was no longer a concern.