Grave Instinct

EPILOGUE

Several months later

Daryl Thomas Cahil was being held on charges that his website instigated a murder spree, and he was being held for observation at the same facility where he had spent thirteen years under the care of Dr. Jack Deitze. A case was being put together that Daryl was a danger to himself and others. Still, Jessica felt certain that charges brought against Daryl would never stick unless a direct link could be drawn between his text and graphics and the two killers, Kenyon and Swantor. The freedom of speech issue regarding dangerous and inflammatory materials spread across the Web would protect Cahil and others like him. Still, the legal team set against him asked for and got full cooperation from Jessica, J.T. and the FBI Cyber Squad. They cooperated in showing how the website had influenced first the kill spree and then the madness unique to Swantor. The trial was set for next month in a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia.

In the meantime, Daryl had become despondent since he was denied the fame of the Skull-digger-and access to a computer. Still, Jessica feared, the U.S. vs. Cahil would end with his release, unless federal prosecutors could prove conclusively he had intended to incite behavior such as Kenyon's kill spree and Swantor's act committed against Selese Montoya, James Harris, and his ex wife. They must prove beyond reasonable doubt that Daryl's warped ideas were tantamount to criminal intent, that he meant-like a cyber prophet, a modern-day Charlie Manson-to bring about the death of others. Kenyon's audiotapes represented exhibits one through four; Swantor's computer video of Selese Montoya's death number five. Kenyon had killed Sheriff Danby Potter and Jervis Swantor as well, and presumably Mrs. Swantor, whose body had never surfaced. The prosecutors would back their arguments with Swantor's horrible actions, citing that Daryl's website had had a domino effect.

Daryl might be his own worst enemy at his trial, however, since the stronger the prosecution's case for intent and influence grew, the happier he became with his growing, newfound notoriety. When he heard about Swantor's having filmed Kenyon's last murder, sending it into cyberspace, he became giddy with his power over the two men. Jessica hoped his smugness would hang him in the courtroom.

It had grown late in the day when John Thorpe entered Jessica's office at Quantico carrying a stack of binders. “Here're the autopsy reports from Grand Isle, all six of them.”

She indicated a cleared spot to her left. “Right there.”

He placed the thick bundle of reports in a pile on her desk. “You really need more reading?” he joked.

Jessica had not looked at the death scenes involving so many at the Swantor estate on Grand Isle. She had decided, once she had returned to the comfort and warmth of the Coast Guard cutter that horrible morning, that she didn't want any more to do with the Skull-digger case. She stayed on long enough to monitor the massive manhunt launched from the air, the ground and underwater for Mrs. Lara Swantor. The woman was never found, dead or alive. After that failed attempt, Jessica had chosen to step back, allowing others to clean up the mess left in Kenyon's and Swantor's wake. With so much devastation, so many lives lost in a single night on the island, six autopsies-seven if she were to count the postmortem on the alligator-it had taken all this time to entirely complete the forensic work, so that every murder scene from the yacht to the house, and Ken-yon's end, could be understood down to the smallest detail. Except for the official reports, only the nightmares created by the work of the Skull-digger lingered on.

“ Everything's in order, Jess,” J.T. assured her. “Damned fitting that alligator should chomp down Kenyon's brain, too.”

“ I thought it a fitting justice,” she agreed.

“ No chance for a Jack Deitze to turn him into a pet project. As for the protocols, trust me, Jess… you can rest assured the CSI and M.E. teams sent to Grand Isle did a first-rate analysis of all three crime scenes-the yacht, the house and the backyard-as well as the site where Kenyon was killed.”

“ I'm sure they did a thorough job of it, John. All the same, you know how I operate.”

He frowned and nodded, going for the coffeepot. “I know… I know

… bound to review it.”

“ I'll just give it a quick going over.”

J.T. poured himself the last of the coffee, sat down across from her and watched her go to work on the files, one for each victim and the two perpetrators. “Like I said,” Thorpe spoke between sips of the acrid coffee. “The team New Orleans put together paints a clear picture of how each died, and by whose hand each had met his or her end.” “You know, John, you don't have to go over them again with me.”

J.T. smiled. “I'll just hang for a little while, in case you need me to go over any of the fine points with you.” He finished with a yawn.

She sat back in her chair and drummed a pencil on her desk as she continued to read.

“ You ought to get home to Richard. Leave this for tomorrow, and get that drumming habit fixed.”

“ I'm not planning to review every item and detail to-night. Mostly interested in the Kenyon and Swantor reports, see if there's anything in either or both that might strengthen the case against that other freak, Cahil.”

She wanted to rush home to Richard. They had made plans for the evening. But looking over the protocol made by the attending FBI medical examiner from field to lab at Grand Island and in New Orleans worried her for some reason. All appeared exactly as Jessica recalled it, and the photos brought back graphic memories of the event, but she felt an obligation to at least peruse the final reports.

Something caught her eye, and she leaned forward in her chair, causing it to squeal. This got J.T.'s attention. “What is it now?” he asked.

“ What's this about the bone cutter going missing, J.T.?”

“ It was never recovered, so far as I could tell from my reading of it.”

“ But it was there. I used it on the damned alligator.”

“ I guess someone must've thought it'd make a hell of a souvenir.”

“ That'd figure. Damn, you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.”

“ Ain't it the truth.”

“ I knew I shoulda kept control of the damn scene, John. You know as well as I do that that's no ordinary bone saw. It could speak volumes to a jury.”

“ Kenyon's not on trial, Cahil is. It's unlikely the bone saw would get in, Jess.”

“ We'll never know now, will we?”

“ Jess, they have a strong case against Cahil.”

“ All because I couldn't take any more. Thanks to my turning every goddamn thing over to-”

“ Stop it. Damn it, Jess. We've been over this. You won't be viewed as weak because you stepped away. You chased this guy across what, six, seven states. You'd been through enough hell for three agents down there, and it was time to turn over the reins, that's all.”

“ Who told you that?”

“ Who told me what?”

“ That it was time to turn over the reins, that I was exhausted beyond my limit.”

“ Well… no one put it in those terms.”

“ Who put it in any terms?”

“ Your friend Mike Sorrento for one, that Captain Quarels of the Coast Guard cutter for another.”

“ I see…”

“ Jess, you're only human. You did your job, and you did it well.”

“ Yeah… I did my job. I rushed back here when I should have remained at least as a consult on the postmortems.”

“ You've already had this talk with Eriq. No one's holding it against you.”

The medical team that had taken over consisted of a small army of men and women who had to autopsy six bodies: Selese Montoya, Sheriff Danby Potter, Petty Officer Nicholas LaPlante, Dr. James Harris, Dr. Jervis Swantor and Dr. Grant Kenyon.

“ The team, by all accounts, appears to have done a thorough job,” J.T. added. He got to his feet and bid her good night. “Got a couple of loose ends to tie up in my office before I turn off the light there.”

“ Just want to get away from my bitchin', right?”

“ That too.”

After J.T. had left, people began to disappear from the building, until soon the place appeared deserted, a ghost town eeriness coming over the offices. She brewed a fresh pot of coffee and gave each of the various reports a cursory look, and then she turned over the file relative to Grant Kenyon. Sipping at her coffee and reading, she stumbled onto something that made her sit up a second time tonight. The words lifted off the page and filled her mind with question and worry.

The attending M.E. at the FBI lab in New Orleans had written:

Parts of Kenyon's skullcap and all of his brain matter missing. Presumed ingested in the alligator carcass discarded at the scene.

“ All of it? This doesn't make sense,” she said to the empty room.

Jessica rifled through the accounts, looking for any mention of this by anyone else. There was nothing else mentioned, but she clearly recalled finding nothing of the kind in the alligator she had turned inside out in her search of Mrs. Swantor.

She stared at the words about the missing brain matter. She recalled seeing some of Kenyon's brain oozing out when they had pried him from the alligator's death grip. She distinctly recalled that while his skull was significantly crushed, there was no reason the brain would not be encased in the mangled outer shell. It just seemed so odd, so strange, so like… like the contagion of Cahil's madness, infecting someone new, as it had with Max Strand.

She recalled the moment when she, Konrath and O'Hurley had parted from Sorrento, leaving him alone with the body. To her knowledge, he was the only one left alone with Kenyon's remains and the missing bone saw. In the interim, a part of Kenyon's remains had vanished, and so had the deadly saw.

She could hardly believe her thoughts. Mike Sorrento? Why? She recalled Max Strand's strange end, and how even Dr. Deitze had fallen into a fascination with Cahil, and she thought of the hundreds of thousands who logged on to Cahil's website.

She buzzed J.T., catching him still in his office.

“ Jess're you still here?”

“ That computer list of AOC subscribers to Cahil's online brain show…”

“ Yeah, what about it?”

“ Do you have it nearby?”

“ I've got a copy, yes. Prosecutors have the original.”

“ Log ons before and after Daryl's arrest?”

“ Yes. I have 'em, why?”

“ Pull it for me, will you?”

“ Jess, what's this about?”

“ I'm not sure just yet.”

Thorpe located and pulled the list, laying it pound for pound on his desk. He got back on the line. “What now?”

“ Look down the list to the S's.”

He rifled through to the S's. “You want to revisit Swan-tor?”

“ See if you have the name Sorrento listed.”

“ Sorrento? As in Michael Sorrento?”

“ Just do it, John.” In a moment, a breathless John Thorpe said, “No, Sorrento's not on the list.”

She felt a wave of relief wash over her. “Good… that's good.”

“ Of course, he could be using another subscriber other than AOC.”

“ Of course…”

“ Actually, all our field offices use PQ Uninet. If he were say investigating the case, researching, he might log in via Uninet.”

“ Who's got Cahil's computer now, our Cyber Squad?”

“ Watching it like hawks, yeah.”

“ OK, I'll talk to Dana in the morning about this.”

“ About what?”

“ Ahhh, it may be nothing… and unless I have more to go on, I think I'll keep it to myself, John.”

“ More than one agent in a field office logged on while we were monitoring, Jess, out of curiosity, you know. You know how the FBI grapevine works. We also had a few field agents warning us about this dangerous website from tips they'd received. Mike Sorrento may've been among them.”

“ Forget about it tonight, John, and thanks.”

The following day, Jessica pursued it with Dana Morill, and the computer expert left a written message in an envelope by the end of business day. It read:

Yes, Agent M. Sorrento, New Orleans Field Office, logged on August 12, seeking information. Was he researching the case? His inquiries look like a fishing expedition. They date back to just before we confiscated the computer. He never logged on again.

Perhaps he had been fascinated with the case and was researching it against the day that he could contribute to it, but it seemed odd that he had said nothing to her about logging on to the weird website.

When she again looked at the crime-scene files, she looked closely at the photos of Kenyon's body, and the close-ups of his cranial wounds inflicted by the gator. She called J.T. into her office and pushed one of the photos at him. “What do you see?”

He stared for a moment. “A dead man I recognize as Grant Kenyon with his head crushed.”

“ Look closely at the negative space, all darkness inside, like Kenyon's victims. There's no brain inside that head.”

“ As I recall, they said the gator got his brains.”

“ And what, sucked them out through the cracks?”

“ What're you suggesting, Jess?”

“ When I left Kenyon's body, all of it was intact. Some-one at that scene… before this picture was taken, before Dr. Alan Mays, M.E. for New Orleans, made his initial report… someone stole and possibly consumed the brain of the Skull-digger.”

“ This is a hell of an accusation, Jess. This have to do with your questions about Sorrento the other night?”

“ Maybe.”

“ But you can't prove it.”

She bit her lower lip. “I guess I can't. No one can verify it, other than the man who did it.”

“ Suppose Mrs. Swantor somehow got at the body.”

“ Sorrento said he'd guard against any animals getting at it. He volunteered.”

“ You know I trust your instincts, Jess, but this… It's pretty wild.”

“ I'll have to write up my suspicions. Someone's got to keep an eye on Agent Sorrento. And meantime… hope we don't hear of any more brain-snatching murders erupting someplace.” “As in New Orleans?”

Jessica sighed heavily, and in a moment the silence was shattered by the phone. “Yeah, this is Jessica Coran,” she said.

“ Dr. Coran, it's me, Mike Sorrento.”

“ Sorrento… how… how are you?”

“ You're not going to believe this.”

“ I don't know. Try me.”

“ We got something weird going down in my city.”

She took a deep breath. “Go on.”

“ Looks like some bastard's taking up where Kenyon left off. Victim was left without a brain.”

“ Dear God no.”

“ Thought you might like to join us down here on the manhunt. We certainly could use your brain power.”

“ My God… I–I thought we'd seen the last of such horror.”

“ Wish it were so.”

“ When did it occur?”

“ Last night, a college kid named Samantha Poole from Tulane. Head cut is different, but same kind of tool used, a bone cutter-”

The one never found-Kenyon's cutter, she guessed but did not say.

He continued, adding, “This guy just cuts around the entire head, back to front, Dr. Mays tells me. Lifts off the skullcap entirely and appears to eat out of the bowl of the head. Like I said, different but alike. Guess it shouldn't come as such a surprise, not to us, huh?”

She was stunned to hear him say this. He was either guileless or he had taken on Kenyon's sense of arrogant power. “Guess we shouldn't be surprised? What do you mean?” He repeated it. “We shouldn't be surprised, knowing that damned cyber video of Swantor's was beamed across the whole damn planet.”

“ Yeah, agreed… see what you mean now.”

“ Will you come and help us out on this one?”

“ Absolutely,” she said, thinking: Along with an arrest warrant for you! She needed to get her facts together, organize her thinking on this. She needed to inform Eriq of her suspicions, have a discreet background check done on Sorrento, and talk directly to Dr. Brunner and Dr. Mays. She'd get a blowup done of the photos, contact O'Hurley and Joe Konrath for their testimony, and she'd pull the record of Sorrento's visit to Cahil's site. It wasn't conclusive evidence, but when she went to New Orleans, it would be in the company of two U.S. marshals to calmly, quietly arrest the new Skull-digger.?