Darkest Instinct jc-4 Read online

  She hadn’t heard from him now in several days. Depressed, she had closed in on herself after that, closed off her feelings, like blinds closed against the light. She had not taken time to mourn the loss of their phantom future life together; instead, she’d thrown herself back into her work, even as Donna argued that this was not the full extent of who she was. Pretending for the time being that nothing mattered but her profession, she had asked for an assignment, any assignment. So now she was on her way to Miami with Chief Eriq Santiva, who had the day before forwarded to her a strange telephone call from a shark research facility in the Florida Keys. She’d spoken to a Dr. Joel Wainwright about some interesting specimens found upon dissection of sharks at his facility-female human body parts. A map of the area showed that, as the shark flies, there was not a lot of distance between Key Largo, where the sharks were caught, and Greater Miami

  Together now, Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva had joined forces on a true fishing expedition, on what seemed a convoluted trail that might lead to a madman who was drowning his defenseless young female victims after sexually molesting them.

  “ You think the water has any significance to the killer?” asked Eriq.

  “ Damned straight it does. Could mean anything from the amniotic fluid in the womb to the salt of the earth to this guy. Look at the letter he wrote to the Miami Herald.”

  He fished among the papers for the handwritten, faxed copy of the purported letter from the Night Crawler, as the press had dubbed the killer.

  Chief Santiva had already scanned the Night Crawler’s scrawl several times. Now his patient eyes played over the loops and swirls of the killer’s feral handwriting once more.

  Santiva, of course, had wanted and had screamed for the original handwritten note attributed to the Night Crawler, but the local police wouldn’t or couldn’t provide the document; something was even said about its having gotten lost in the “cage,” cop talk for the Evidence Lockup Room. Thank God it had been faxed before it was completely lost, if it were indeed from the killer.

  Meanwhile an Interpol communiques, forwarded to the FBI via Scotland Yard by an Inspector Nigel Moyler, had mentioned a similar outbreak of killings occurring along the Thames River in London the previous year, killings which had gone unsolved. He had forwarded a handful of letters written by the Thames River Killer when Santiva had shown an interest. The two cases seemed to have some similarities, and Santiva had seen some immediate similarities in the handwriting, but there were also differences. Many of the most salient differences, according to Eriq, could be attributed to a growing neurosis which was reflected in the letters from overseas.

  Eriq had made no outright promises, but he had mentioned the possibility that since Moyler was pursuing a similar course with a similar monster on the other side of the Atlantic, Eriq or Jessica might go over to see what sort of joint efforts could be made. “In the name of cooperation, should the handwriting of the two killers match up,” Santiva had teased Jessica, believing that she would jump at the chance to visit London and the famous Scotland Yard. Santiva continued to study the faxed document, scanning it for perhaps the twentieth time, reading again the purported lines of the man Jessica had half-jokingly called the Bible Belt Beast. Like Jessica, Santiva had already memorized the dark, sinister little note, a poem actually-the lines spoke of a disturbed individual who held a fathomless hatred for women. Each time he read the lines through, he seemed to get something new from them, gathering in the larger context, the innuendos, the slings and arrows the monster had endured, and the slips, slits and chinks in the madman’s armor.

  The interested stewardess had now disappeared, the jolting of the plane having slackened.

  “ The maniac’s words are almost eloquent in places,” Eriq said.

  Eloquent wasn’t quite the word that had jumped out at her when she’d first read the killer’s remarks. In fact, eloquent was the last word she would have used to describe the bastard. Still, Santiva had a point. Like the missives of Jack the Ripper, the note was brief, concise and eloquently simple. In business parlance, it was to the point. “Well, I give him one thing,” she conceded. He looked askance at her. “What’s that?”

  “ He has a good command of the King’s English, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked.

  Santiva nodded, managing a half grin of thoughtful reflection. “Right, he’s certainly no slacker with regard to grammatical correctness and construction. Bet Mrs. Higgins would give him an A for that alone.”

  “ Mrs. who?”

  “ Oh, just a spicy old English teacher of mine when I was in grade school. She’d bust your chops for confusing the use of the personal pronoun I with me or vice versa, and God forbid you use a possessive pronoun incorrectly. She’d hold you up to public ridicule.” He fell silent a moment longer, his expression telling her that he remembered Mrs. Higgins with more fondness than annoyance. When he spoke again, he said, “You know what we’ve got here, don’t you, Jessica?” He waved the copy of the killer’s note.

  “ Yeah, ‘afraid I do. He’s the most dangerous animal on the planet-an educated lunatic.”

  “ Did you notice the British spellings? On the words caliber and theater?’’

  She admitted that she hadn’t noticed the transverse letters E and R. She’d have to analyze more carefully, she told herself. What would Mrs. Higgins say of her carelessness?

  The turbulence outside the plane settled somewhat, and this settled the unrest inside the plane to some degree, but most people remained cautious, ready to expel yet another gasp if it came to that, and it did. The momentary lull in the turbulence only resulted in a new wave of shocks to the system, the force of the assault seeming to double, sending many people to the altar of the vomit bag. This was all Santiva needed to see and hear. The stewardess who’d sat alongside Eriq was returning to check on him and had to quickly move out of his way as he snapped off his seat belt and raced for the lavatory, too polite a man to vomit in Jessica’s presence. She liked that.

  TWO

  Art is myself; Science is ourselves.

  — Claude Bernard

  Islamorada Key, Florida, April 13, 1996

  The yellow made-over Ryder truck, equipped with an on- again, off-again freezer compartment, wasn’t truly large enough to be called, in trucker lingo, a reefer, but it was fully functional when it worked. It rode low to the ground with the weight of its five thousand pound cargo, and now the frozen cargo was being backed up along a concrete ramp at the University of Florida’s Abbott Marine Research Laboratory on Islamorada Key. At the top of the ramp stood two massive doors and a conveyor belt, beside which waited two strange looking scientists in hip boots and protective gear more suited to the river than the laboratory.

  Lynette Harris and Aron Porter, to whom all the scut work naturally fell, stood poised in bulky clothing and chaps, prepared to enter the truck from the rear, to wade in and slide about in their hip boots, protective clothing, thick rubber gloves and goggles. A pair of student trainees at the high-tech marine research center, each now resignedly climbed aboard, despite Aran’s bitching, to begin the struggle with the dead beasts within: some twenty-five recently deceased sharks of various size and species.

  The protective wear was as much to guard against cuts and bruises as to avoid possible infectious viruses the sharks might easily pass to the humans. Aron marveled at the enormity of the workload that lay ahead of them now that they’d traveled back from Key Largo, and he didn’t appreciate Lynette’s shoving him and nagging, saying, “Let’s have at it. The work won’t get done standing here staring at it. Come on, Aron…”

  Aron was already tired, and he was hungry. He moved slowly, as if his muscles were atrophied.

  Lynette, by comparison, seemed full of energy at all times. She was anxious to have the job behind her. Whenever they might finish downloading their third shipment onto the ramp, there would be upward of ten thousand pounds of shark flesh in the holding tanks, which were filled with a saline solution and kept
at a constant thirty- two degrees Celsius for preservation purposes. The sharks would be processed, not for canning or freezing or selling to the local eating establishments, but for study of the reproductive cycles of the species in order to help determine if the U.S. government-the EPA in particular-really wanted to get involved in controlling fishing rights over sharks in Florida’s coastal waters.

  The trainees knew that their work here was important, that overfishing of sharks, according to Dr. Insley’s projections, would mean a lethal break in the food chain, creating an imbalance that might subject all fish to extinction if the next link in the food chain were to suddenly have a population explosion. But according to Dr. Wainwright, an even more important reason for gathering the shark specimens at Islamorada was so that other research facilities across the nation would have ample biological samples for cancer research, for studies of the immune system with possible application to AIDS research, for cornea implants, and for a supply of skin for burn victims, not to mention for ongoing research into shark repellents.

  Dr. Lois Insley’s major concern, however, was to determine if free-for-all fishing of sharks up and down the Keys and Florida would or would not lead to the extinction of certain species.

  Ironically, the institute had for several years now sponsored the Shark Research Fishing Tournament in order to gain enough sharks for research purposes to enable Insley’s extinction theory experiments to continue. This year, they had solicited and obtained dual sponsorship of the popular tournament with SunFin Boats Incorporated, and this made their mother institution, the University of Florida, extremely pleased.

  Now, the third and final day of the tournament had come and gone, Aron and Lynette the night before having weighed and marked each specimen for identification- and, of course, the inevitable photos with the winners in each class having been all taken, before a crowd of curious tourists fascinated by the thirty-odd fishermen, the gathered scientists and the grand prize winner, a 317-pound monster hammerhead which lay now in the back of what passed for a freezer truck at the Islamorada scientific facility.

  The truck, its cargo and the weary lab workers had long since been ready for the tournament’s end, and an end to the grueling effort required to transport the bestial cargo from Key Largo to here.

  This was the final trip this year for the unmarked yellow truck, which had traveled from the southernmost tip of Key Largo; the battered old machine was showing signs of wear and beginning to smell like a slaughterhouse, despite the frigid air compartment. Both Lynette and Aron had come to accept the stench along with their strenuous duty. Later on, they could do what they’d come here for: dissect and study the inner workings of the incredible animals which had netted the contestants in the tournament some fifteen thousand dollars in secondary prize money and an incredible twenty-nine-foot Sun Fin fly bridge boat as grand prize. It was a sleek sport fisherman’s speedboat with choice of gas or diesel power, twin Crusader 350 or 200-hp Volvos- also winner’s choice.

  The folks out of Fort Lauderdale really knew how to spruce up a tournament. Getting Sun Fin Inc. to come on board had been the work of Dr. Joel Wainwright, and it proved an ingenious move.

  As for the institute’s prize, it now had a supply of specimens of various sharks to carry it through another year and a half of research, possibly two, not to mention the profits from selling off the parts to other research labs across the states.

  Inside the mammoth facility, which had been designed to blend in with the surrounding palms and palmetto brush-even the brick was a sand hue to match the white- shell sands of the Keys-research into man’s amazing cousin, the predatory sharks of the Florida coast, was always ongoing. And it was the kind of research that necessitated a great number of shark corpses. Each ponderous shark body was now shoved onto a conveyor belt-each going down into the hold like so much luggage, thought Lynette Harris, except that this luggage had eyes that simultaneously appeared as lifeless as large glass beads and so hypnotic as to appear alive. Life and death mirrored in the milky cornea of a magnificent animal laid waste to. She felt the need for science and the need for life both at once, but as she had many times before, she shoved the thought to the back of her mind in order to carry on with the work at hand. And the work was considerable. They could use both Insley’s and Wainwright’s help, but God forbid the doctors should get their hands dirty at this stage.

  The sharks were incredible, even the smaller species; the average weighed in at or near two hundred fifty pounds. It took some strain and effort to move the lifeless animals from their frigid moorings in the back of the truck to the conveyor belt. The work was cold, hard and thankless.

  “ Grab ‘im by the dorsal and tail fin! Yank and I’ll push,” Aron instructed Lynette from where he stood at the head of a particularly huge monster.

  “ Aren’t you going about this bass-ackwards, Aron? Why not turn ‘im around, then you grab the dorsal and tail? Then you push and I’ll pull ‘im by the jaw with my hook.” Lynette held up a huge meat hook, and given her protective wear, she looked like the creature from the remake of The Thing.

  “ You sure you weren’t a longshoreman in another life?” She stifled a laugh. “Just do it my way, okay? It’ll be less strain on us both.”

  “ Stop squabbling, you two!” came a voice from around the truck. It was Dr. Lois Insley, head of the institute, keeper of the keys and a demanding boss who insisted on blind obedience and deference to her arrogance. She’d even been angry with Wainwright for bringing in the Sun Fin people as sponsors, at least at first. Aron had told Lynette that it was because Lois hadn’t thought of it herself.

  “ Have either of you seen Dr. Wainwright about?” Dr. Insley asked, her nervous eye twitch back like a bad rash. “Think he’s in his lab, Doctor,” replied Lynette, her gloves already slick with the juices exuded by dead fish, her toes and fingers freezing.

  “ I’m so furious with that man,” announced Dr. Insley. “But why?” asked Aron. “Hell, this-sis-been one hell of a tournament, thanks to Dr. Wainwright.

  ” Lynette immediately agreed, smiling behind her protective wear. “We’ve got all the specimens we need, and it didn’t cost the institute or the university a dime. I think Dr. W. is a… well, a genius.” Lynette knew Aron and Dr. Insley must know how she felt about Dr. Wainwright, that she had an uncontrollable crush on the older man. “Getting Sun Fin to put up the prize was certainly a stroke of marketing genius,” Aron quickly added, knowing it needled the frumpy Dr. Insley to tell her that anyone but Her Majesty had any genius. He hoped that the use of the word marketing to qualify Dr. W.’s genius would keep Insley on an even keel. “The damned fool has called in outsiders about… about what we’ve been seeing in the lab.”

  “ The human body parts, you mean?” Lynette unnecessarily asked, recalling vividly how several days before, with the first onrush of new specimens, Dr. Wainwright, with her and Dr. Insley beside him, had uncovered yet another stash of undigested human body parts and bones amid the usual stomach contents. There were some gruesome intact parts, from toes and fingers to whole hands and feet. And while this wasn’t totally unusual, the sheer amount, from the very first specimens opened up, gave everyone in the lab a chilled pause.

  “ Keep unloading and don’t stop till you’ve emptied the truck. We’re paying that driver for his time as well, you know. I want him back on the road for the final cache and back here by tomorrow this time. So, move!”

  “ But, Dr. Insley, this is the third and last load,” Aron corrected as gently as he could. Dr. Insley, however, had angrily waddled away, in search of Dr. Wainwright.

  Lynette and Aron exchanged a long look from behind their goggles, Aron finally shrugging and Lynette saying, “She may know how to work with data and statistics and her computer program, but she hasn’t got a clue about the real world, does she?”

  “ Know what gets me?”

  “ What’s that, Aron?” Lynette worked as she talked, but Aron took a break with each word.

&nbs
p; “ How she ever got in charge of this place in the first place.”

  “ Wrote a grant, and grant money speaks volumes in ac- ademia. Anyhow, all you’ve got to know is that she is in charge.”

  “ She’s in charge… but she’s not in control…

  ” Lynette watched the older woman, with her no-nonsense step and severely arranged hair, storm into the building, wondering what Lois ever did for fun, for frolic… for sex.

  Inside the spacious facility of the laboratories. Dr. Insley found Wainwright studying the latest human body part to fall from the gut of a great white.

  “ How dare you disobey me, Doctor?” she stormed at him. “To go over my head to the board members, and to call in the FBI after I assured you that there was no necessity here to do so, that these human body fragments are par for the course in our research and that-”

  “ I tried reasoning with you, Dr. Insley,” Wainwright calmly replied, his body language rigid, unable to completely ignore his so-called superior. Still, he kept his eyes glued to the human bone and tissue specimen he was studying through the wide lens of the powerful magnifying glass, which he now swung away from himself, the glass careening away on its swivel arm, trying its best to strike Dr. Insley.

  Finally, he could no longer ignore the woman, who stood like a pillar of salt before him in her white lab coat. Meeting her eyes, he said, ‘ These parts are extremely fresh, and the sheer number indicates an anomaly at best. You have to concede that much. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “ What papers?”

  “ The newspapers.”

  “ I have enough to readjust keeping up with the literature in the field.”

  “ The Miami Herald and even the Keys papers have been filled with missing persons cases lately, and some freak has been claiming responsibility, writing letters to the authorities about how he hates women, and all these parts appear to be petite… female parts? Get it. Doctor? I mean you have to concede that-”