Darkest Instinct jc-4 Read online

  Darkest Instinct

  ( Jessica Coran - 4 )

  Robert W. Walker

  Robert W. Walker

  Darkest Instinct

  PROLOGUE

  She left the web, she left the loom. She made three paces thro’ the room. She saw the water lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She looked down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror cracked from side to side.

  — Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Off Key Biscayne, Florida, in Biscayne Bay April 2, 1996

  The powerful beam from the Cape Florida Lighthouse came some distance over the water, once a beacon of warning to sailors, now just for show. Still, it told Tammy that they had sailed out to the tip end of Biscayne Bay and were fast approaching the open sea. Tammy Sue Sheppard watched the light as she would a star, watched it blink on and off, on and off, on and off again, actually going around in a circular motion, spinning, like her head, racing like her pulse when he took her in his arms.

  Patrick smelled of a tangy, spicy aftershave here in the ocean breeze. He’d been so attentive, and now he was tantalizing her with his gentle caress, the soft touch of his tongue in her ear as they danced again about the deck of the beautiful, large sailboat. It was better than any schoolgirl’s dream.

  He now gently asked her patience as he returned to the controls and paused the ship here at the southern tip of Biscayne Bay, skirting the northern tier of the famous underwater Biscayne National Park, where coral reefs and sunken ships beckoned thousands upon thousands of recreational divers each year. But all that activity, even by night, was far to the south. The area around Cape Florida Lighthouse Point was long since deserted, save for a handful of passing boats, each with its own running lights reflecting off the water ahead of them, each mirroring in Tammy’s mind the image of how she and Patrick’s boat must look from across the bay aboard these other ships.

  One of the other boats was large and not a sailboat, however, storming by at some distance like a rhino rather than a bird like the soft others. The big boat had disturbed the water, sending an enormous wave across to where they had moored, causing the sailboat, as large as it was, to shake and shiver violently from side to side, disturbing their romantic moment, causing Patrick to stare after the cutter for a long time, as if he were fighting the darkness in his effort to read the numbers on the Coast Guard cutter, wishing to report it. Tammy soothingly asked him to come back to the dance. And he did so, turning to her with the widest, welcome- ingest smile she’d ever known. Now, peace restored, Patrick Allain was doing it again. He made her feel so feminine, so alive, so vibrant all over. He began to kiss and caress her, making her quiver in the most pleasant manner she’d ever experienced.

  The promise was as enormous as the sailboat, and at the moment, she didn’t care whether it was a rental or it belonged to him.

  Her best friend, Judy Templar, had whispered a whiskey- laden warning in her ear earlier in the evening, before Tammy had disappeared with Patrick: Don’t believe a word he tells you, girl… and that boat’s likely not his to begin with. In his arms now, feeling overwhelmed with passion, she almost hated Judy for suggesting what she had. Judy and Cyn were both just jealous, because Patrick had picked her out of the trio tonight.

  She wanted to believe Patrick, every word he’d said about himself, his boat, his plans and his feelings. It all seemed so wonderful. In fact, having had a great deal to drink tonight, everything seemed wonderful and anything seemed possible-especially love.

  It seemed that all life lay at Tammy’s beck and call now; it seemed, with such a stunning-looking man actually on his knees to her, now slipping off her shoes, massaging her feet, teasing her toes with his tongue, deliciously tickling her, that anything was possible. It was beautiful out on the large, open bay where the blinking lights of Miami winked at them like some enormous campfire where people huddled, afraid to come into the darkness where they could see the moon glow and the firmament so obliterated by the city lights. Here all of the black void of space was held back while her soul was cuddled and rocked into a safe place by Patrick, who’d created this moment: the rhythmic, friendly sound of water lapping at the boat, gently rocking this big cradle into which she had nestled; the beauty of the restored lighthouse; the warmth of the music, soft and in harmony with the wafting sea breezes; a nurturing ocean, teeming with life. And then there was also Patrick’s gentle, sweet touch, his rich, sonorous voice, filling her with expectations of delight and sensual pangs.

  His hands moved along the contours of her body now as he regained his feet; towering over her now, he took her in his arms now, his tongue finding and jousting with her own now, his body heat flowing into hers now. All now; everything, all life focused on the now. Certainly every fiber of her being was focused on the now.

  His passionate tongue next found her ear, his sensual overtures continuing to happily chill her.

  Doesn’t he know he has turned me to putty? She wondered.

  Then his hands turned from gentle to rough, all in a careless instant, and she looked up into his eyes, only to find the eyes of another person-wide, crazed, lascivious, indigo eyes that spoke of evil and bestiality.

  He tore at her clothing, ripping her blouse as she tried to pull away. He slammed her to the deck, and the soothing sounds of the bay were drowned by the terror raging now in her ears as he rammed her forehead into the deck several times, knocking her into submission and oblivion. When she awoke-she thought it moments later-it was to her own coughing and retching and gasping for air, her windpipe in pain. He had long since torn away her remaining clothing. She lay naked and raped there on the deck, seemingly alone. She could not make him out in the darkness. An eerie fog had enveloped the boat; there was no lighthouse anymore, no sign of shore, and it didn’t feel as if the boat were moored any longer either. In fact, they seemed far, far from shore, and now she was shivering from pain and nudity, shame and the awful taste and smell of her own blood where he had slammed and bruised her, cutting her lip as well as her forehead. There was considerable pain the entire length of her throat, and she continued to gasp for air. Aside from the water hitting the side of the boat, her gasps were the only sounds to be heard.

  Tammy Sue, get a hold of yourself, figure a way out of this, she silently berated herself. She tried to assess the damage, finding most of the pain lodging in and about her throat and her private parts. She had no doubt that he’d strangled her near to death-and enjoyed his sex rough, no doubt-and she was as yet dazed and confused by the encounter. Apparently, he could only enjoy sex by taking it- and the rougher the better-while she had nothing but pain from the encounter.

  “ Son of a bitch bastard,” she moaned aloud. From some where behind the fog. like a man behind a mirror, just out of her vision, came his voice, but it, too, had changed. “Pirates never were the romantic figures Hollywood made them into, my dear little mother.” His accent now sounded ugly to her ears-and why was he calling her a mother?

  She began to weep and think. She thought of her own mother, her little sister, her father, home. She wished with all her heart to be home again-not her lonely little apartment, but her childhood home. She wondered if she would ever see home again. She wondered if Patrick meant to kill her.

  She reached up to touch the bruised, painful area about her Adam’s apple. It was so tender, she could hardly touch it. He truly had choked her so roughly that she’d been near dead.

  “ Be of good cheer, child,” he said cruelly, still standing back of the mist, where she could hardly make out his form.

  “ For while you once were a nobody, I am going to make you a somebody, someone important.”

  She begged, “No, no… please, Patrick. I just want to go home… I j
ust want to go home. Please?”

  He mimicked her words, and followed with a taunting laugh. He stepped into her line of vision, looking like some sort of monster, huge and hulking. “Your friends there”- he pointed as if he were on a stage, reading lines from a script he’d memorized-”what were their names? Julie and Cynthia? They will read about you in the papers, Tammy. Isn’t that nice? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “ Don’t… hurt me, please… Please, if you’ll just let me go, I won’t tell anyone, not a thing. I… I promise… I swear. I know I led you on. It wasn’t your fault, Patrick. Please, please, just let me go.” Her words trailed off in a keening, animal whine which further excited him, bringing him to his knees over her, bringing him to begin to trace his finger along her naked thigh, sending dread throughout her body.

  “ I’ll let you go… when I’m finished with you.” Where was this maniac coming from? What did he want of her? Why had he done this to her? The Patric she’d wanted to love was here but not here, a phantom somewhere in the air around her while this evil twin kept them both in its awful clutches. “Patrick!” she screamed.

  He clamped both hands over her throat, drowning out her cry. Subdued, certain now he meant to kill her, she again fell silent, wide-eyed and fearful. More than anything, she feared fainting. She feared that if she lost consciousness again, she would not awake a second time. He suddenly released his stranglehold on her and cruelly latched on to her hair, then dragged her to the back of the boat, kicking and screaming. It had become obvious that they were far out in the middle of the ocean. No one could hear her screams.

  “ I want to show you something, sweetheart.” He pushed her aside and began tugging on a thick, black nylon rope which hung taut over the stern. He pulled at what was a great weight at the other end. For a time, she thought he’d be unable to lift whatever was on the other end, but soon the rope and its hoard were hoisted up.

  She expected to see a large fish perhaps, but instead she found herself staring into the dead eyes of a completely waterlogged dead girl near her own age and similar in general appearance, her hair like seaweed, her skin drained of color, only the shell of life remaining. Tammy screamed, causing Patrick to laugh delightedly and push her head into the dead girl’s now mushy countenance, some of the skin peeling off and adhering to Tammy’s forehead and cheek.

  “ Like looking into the future, into a mirror that reflects back your own future, Tammy, don’t you see? I didn’t want to lie to you another second.”

  He pushed her down, where she feebly grabbed on to his legs, pleading.

  “ Now that you know, it’s… well, out of the way. It’s good now that you know exactly what’s going to happen here.

  ” While Tammy began to whimper and blubber, he stared fixedly into the eyes of the dead girl he’d placed at the end of the nylon rope. “Her name was Allison. She’s been in the water for a long time. See?

  ” He snatched up the dead girl’s right arm to reveal that it had been severed at the forearm. “Sometimes I feed the sharks, you know, bits and pieces…”

  Tammy’s scream wafted across the great expanse of the Atlantic. He dropped Allison’s body back into the depths and yanked in succession at two other ropes that hung over the stern. “Mary Ellen and Carrie Beth,” he named each rope. Then he tugged at a fourth rope that gave easily, looping about his hands. “This one’s for Tammy.”

  “ Ahhhhh! Oh, no, no, please!”

  “ Shut up!” He slapped her hard across the face and she fell to the deck. “Why? Why?” she pleaded. “What did I ever do to you?”

  “ Nothing and everything. You were born to be mine.

  You’re a perfect victim.” He dug his thumbs into her throat again, registering the life’s blood of her pulsating heart there. He easily, helplessly choked and choked her, enjoying the pleasure of it all, feeding himself on the life as it was given up from her a second time.

  She fell again, eyes bulging wide, into unconsciousness. As he continued to squeeze, he felt the life draining from her, rising into his fingertips, into his hands, along his forearms and toward his heart and head. It was a feeling that gave him a sense of incredible power, a sense of identity and purpose and freedom from the mundane world.

  “ Thanks to you, Tammy, I’m no longer bored,” he told the unconscious woman.

  While she was out, he tied the thick nylon rope in a sailor’s knot about her throat and bound her hands with a leather thong.

  “ When she returns to consciousness, Tauto,” he spoke to himself and the cosmos, “we’ll put her in the water and she’ll be all yours to enjoy, hey?”

  Then he set about fulfilling his perverted sexual needs on the near-dead victim for a second time this night, baying at the moon as he did so.

  ONE

  We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air.

  — Charlotte Bronte

  The flight to Miami from Quantico, Virginia, played unrelenting hell with Chief Eriq Santiva and the tourists, but it delighted the innocent children and Jessica Coran, since she and they reveled in a ride through rough waters-in this case air pockets, shifting thermals that rocked the air- boat like crashing waves from every direction while it cruised at 30,000 feet. The pilot, either by design or inability, seemed unable to get above or below the disturbance. But it made Jessica feel something, and that was the rush, because for some time now she had been without feelings or emotions. The flight provided an adrenaline rush she hadn’t felt for a long time, proving-at least in her case-that fear was sometimes better than no emotion whatsoever. Some people, even those she counted as friends-without voicing it, unable to put it into words- worried nowadays that she was perhaps beyond what others might consider the everyday, normal, rational fears and anxieties, and maybe she was. Maybe it was the legacy left her by Mad Matthew Matisak and other such monsters she’d hunted down and destroyed.

  True or not, she considered going down with the plane in a storm a small fear. After all, she’d faced down New Orleans’s Queen of Hearts serial killer the year before, and compared with dying as one of that monster’s victims, a plane crash seemed an almost pleasurable end.

  Below their airplane, the entire Eastern seaboard remained blanketed in an ocean-thick, roiling, bubbling, gargantuan glacier of gray-white cloud, and below this the continent was under attack by an arsenal of thunder, lightning, sleet, snow and hail, the world pounded by an unfeeling, killer storm. But unfeeling was hardly the right word. What natural phenomenon of raw power had feelings? Jessica thought it foolish of newscasters to call a storm cruel or heartless or evil, or to give it any human characteristic whatsoever or bestow the feminine personal pronoun she on it, since it had not a whit of human emotion about it. Like a so- ciopathic criminal on the loose, a storm destroyed life and limb without any more emotion than was felt by the sea or the void of outer space. None of these acts of nature or acts of God or abominations experienced any feelings one way or another toward human suffering. Yet some lamebrain news- people insisted on calling this the cruelest storm in recent history, perhaps the meanest in a decade, and on reporting that she meant to torture the mid-Atlantic and Eastern states for days, playing out her unkind work until she might finally exhaust her evil self over the very land she ravished. And it further infuriated Jessica that storms were always characterized as female fury, unleashed feminine emotion. May as well read a Harlequin romance novel as listen to the weather report these days, she thought.

  Jessica had seen on the Channel 2 TV newscast how the computer rendition of the storm appeared, and how on the forecaster’s maps and screens, it was given an unreal, cartoonlike quality, making it look like a swirling mass of harmless, honeycombed whip cream, friendly in every aspect. A cotton candy apparition hunkered over thousands of miles of territory.

  In reality this blanket of deadly white had killed over a hundred people along its zigzag path across the U.S., its subzero and snow-related deaths racking up sizable numbers from Wichita, Kansas, to Pittsbu
rgh. The unkind storm had crept across from northern Canada, through the Great Plains, up again toward the Midwest, scourging Chicago and Buffalo, causing catastrophic problems for some, death for others, across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and now working on a downward spiral in its mad rush toward the Atlantic. The ride over this storm front was indeed calamitous, riotous and heart-pumping.

  Still, it was good to feel that long-silent heart in her chest pounding again; Jessica was only sorry that it was at the expense of so many other passengers. She’d gone numb on December 2, 1995, the day she had left James Parry and Hawaii for a second time. They had made such a perfect pair, and his showing her the return of the glorious, spawning humpback whales in Maui’s steamy, warm-water bays was an unforgettable experience which she would cherish forever, just as she cherished her moments alone with Jim. But they had both felt the rest of the world crushing in by November’s end; they were both committed to their work, their careers once more conspiring against all happiness.

  Still, on returning to the mainland, she’d put in for a transfer to the islands, telling headquarters that she wanted to make the move a permanent one. But D.C. wasn’t in any mood to play Cupid for Jim and her, and there had appeared no real solution to the dilemma. Then things had changed quickly and drastically.

  Jessica found herself in that daydreaming-again-about- Jim territory of her mind here now on American flight 312 when she was shaken from her reverie by the first of Eriq Santiva’s deafening groans. She stared at him on her left, watching him turn to Jell-O with sound effects. His reeling head and dizziness, along with his stomach pains, were as real as his fear of flying, and those double-decker flapjacks he’d had just before takeoff had come to life, jumping up and over again.