Darkest Instinct Read online

  “We believe the victim was dead before the shark bites were made.”

  “So, you surmise a lack of blood, and therefore no feed­ing frenzy?” ‘This has appeared evident by the lack of blood around the wounds, along with a lack of any vital—”

  “You needn’t say another word. I understand, but still, sharks feed in groups. If a floating body were attacked by one, it’d be attacked by all; there’d be nothing left to wash ashore.”

  Jessica frowned. “Well, that little mystery will have to await further information, I suppose. But for now, we’re interested in finding out what we can from the pieces... the parts you and Dr. Wainwright have uncovered.”

  “And continue to uncover,” said Wainwright, returning to them now. “There’s one in particular I’d like you to see, Dr. Coran. Come this way.”

  Wainwright led Jessica into a lab, a room filled with many more workstations, microscopes, Bunsen burners and trays filled with test tubes than there were students to work them. Jessica wondered if Insley wanted it that way, or if marine biology had fallen off as a subject of interest for the young, or if so few students were being serviced here due to funding.

  At the center of the room, a crane like device was low­ered, and hanging from it was the opened, gutted carcass of a huge, lackluster white and gray shark.

  “This one came damn near to winning the tournament,” said Joel Wainwright. “It’s a great white. Perfectly beau­tiful creature, older than time itself. You know they date back two hundred million years? To the Triassic period, when all that separated Florida from the coast of Africa was an ocean the size of a wide river. They lived before the dinosaurs appeared, right alongside the crocodiles, and they’re so plentiful now in the seas that we run lotteries to catch them so that we can study them under our scopes.” “He is beautiful... or was,” Jessica commented, her eyes riveted to the once sleek exterior of the gray and white carcass, ignoring for the moment the huge rent to the un­derbelly. Then she saw the sac and fetal tissue that had been carefully placed in a nearby tank.

  “She—-this time of year, we don’t take too many fe­males, as they’re spawning, but Dr. Insley’s work requires a full study of the reproductive system and habits of the females and the males, so—”

  “Oh, do get on with it, Joel,” Dr. Insley insisted.

  “Anyway,” Wainwright continued as Santiva entered the semi darkened room, “she coughed up this.” Wain­wright lifted a small, feminine forearm from a medical cooler, the sort of cooler which kept organ donations fresh. “It was lodged in her small intestine, which makes it fairly fresh.”

  Jessica inched closer to the awful sight. The hand and most of the fingers were still intact, though green now with brown spots, and a golden wristband, embedded in a nasty gash, would have been invisible had it not mirrored the light with its metallic reflection. Wainwright had placed the entire thing under glass.

  For a long moment everyone remained silent, staring, giving hushed homage to what this mangled piece of human flesh mirrored for each of them—their own mortality and connection with the dead.

  “I didn’t want to touch it—scientifically speaking—until you got here, Dr. Coran,” Wainwright explained. “Let’s put this under a bright light,” she calmly replied while her insides readjusted to what lay before her.

  Soon the others were watching Jessica meticulously re­trieve the thin, gold wristband from the gnarled flesh. It had been dented, gnashed and chewed as it was sifted through the shark’s powerful, razor like teeth, before being swal­lowed whole like a chunky cashew.

  Jessica turned the gold beneath the light now and read a single word inscribed there: “Precious.”

  “What?” came a chorus of curious onlookers around Jessica. The two young students who’d been at the truck, having shed their outer protective gear, now joined the oth­ers inside.

  “There’s an inscription here, on the bracelet,” Jessica explained. “An inscription?” asked Aron Porter. “What kind of inscription?” asked Lynette Harris. “What does it say?” asked Insley. “It reads Precious.”

  Santiva’s response was quick. “Who killed Precious?”

  •THREE•

  The human understanding is like a false mirror...

  —Sir Francis Bacon

  Pulse less arteries

  Are like the fibers of a cloud instinct With light.

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley

  “Just how many more body parts do you have on ice, Dr. Wainwright?” Jessica asked.

  “Quite a stack, actually. A couple of leg fragments, part of another arm, some feet and a cache of bones.”

  Jessica turned to Santiva and said, “Tell the helicopter pilot to take off, but to remain on standby for our call. And Eriq—tip him well. And since we’re going to be here for some time, maybe a couple of days, you may want to get a rental car and rooms for us.” She turned to Wainwright and asked where the nearest hotel might be. “Two days, you estimate?” asked Santiva.

  “Hotels, around here? Sorry,” replied Wainwright. “Closest thing I might call a hotel around here is our dor­mitory, but it’s pretty stark. No room service, but you could dine with us.”

  The prospect wasn’t particularly appealing. These people reminded her of the Addams Family for some reason.

  “Do you really figure it’ll take so long, Jess?” Santiva repeated.

  “Long enough so you can get that fishing trip in you’d hoped for, since you are in the Keys, after all. Go for it. But do like Spider said: Get a local guide.”

  “Now that I can help you with,” Wainwright proudly piped up. “Know one, do you?”

  “We know and use several, but Jabez Reiley, he’s the best, though expensive.”

  “Never mind the expense. Where can we get in touch with Mr. Reiley?” Jessica asked.

  Eriq put up a cautionary hand to her, taking her aside and whispering, “But Jessica, won’t you need help around here, maybe to keep that dragon lady off your back?”

  She returned the whisper. “I can handle the crone, and you’d just be in the way.” She then turned to Dr. Wain­wright, telling him, “I want to see every single body part your people have discovered.”

  “No problem.”

  “And I want each one photographed from every con­ceivable angle; have you a good man for that?”

  “Aron Porter here is an excellent photographer. One of his gifts.”

  “Good... good... Then I’ll want some, if not all, of the body parts collected, boxed and protected with your best absorbent material, okay? I’ll want to take everything back to Miami with us.” Dr. Lois Insley had gone white by this time and had found a stool upon which to perch; she now leaned against one wall, making the noises of one about to hyperventilate. Jes­sica quickly approached the older woman and offered her a brown paper bag to breathe into, from a supply she kept in her black valise for reasons other than sickness. Brown bags were useful for certain types of evidence gathering, items such as blood spatters on cloth, items you didn’t want to smear or to have drying out in too rapid a fashion.

  Dr. Insley graciously accepted the bag, opened it wide and began breathing from it, inhaling deeply, gathering her­self up. No one in the place seemed the least concerned or helpful, Jessica thought as she returned to Wainwright and said, “You want to take care of Dr. Insley first?”

  “Sure... sure... although I’d rather get Reiley on the phone for you.” But instead he went over to Dr. Insley, placed a hand on her shoulder and marched her down a corridor, where, presumably, he had her lie down to rest. Jessica hadn’t time to wonder long about their obviously strained relationship. She rocked on the balls of her feet before what remained of Precious, her attention riveted on the torn and ugly limb and the bracelet beside it.

  From down the hall, a gentle sobbing welled up from the woman named Insley. Jessica thought the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown; she’d certainly overreacted to their intrusion on her private little world here—or had Precious simp
ly gotten to her?

  While Eriq did a cursory stroll about the facility, Jessica continued her examination of the would-be evidence, the two students curiously watching her.

  Soon Wainwright appeared and assured Jessica that the other woman was quite all right. “Mood swings, a hor­monal thing,” he whispered in Jessica’s ear—the arche­typal male response to any female emotional venting too complicated for the male mind, Jessica irritated thought.

  She wondered how much plotting and politicking went on in this little research hothouse. With their lives so wrapped up in this place, so focused on their jobs that their identi­ties—who they were—had long since become inextricably mixed up with what they did. It was obvious the work was everything to them, with their whole world and worldview shaped by it. Jessica gave a thought to what Donna Le­Monte so often warned her about, that she should not ob­sessively become Jessica Coran, FBI, ME. She worried momentarily that she might have a lot more in common with Dr. Lois Insley than she cared to admit.

  Jessica had seen a look of animal fear in Dr. Insley’s eyes when they’d arrived. She had also seen the sudden loss of color in the woman’s face, replaced by a doughy pallor which reminded Jessica of how Santiva’s naturally dark, Cuban skin had gone two shades lighter by the time he’d returned to his plane seat over North Carolina on the long journey coming down. And now, as Wainwright began bringing out the accu­mulated body parts, each tagged and dated, and as Jessica rolled up her sleeves to go to work over each errant body part collected by Wainwright, she thought back to the plane trip down. With her hands, eyes and mind busy at her cur­rent task, she considered just how her relationship with San­tiva was shaping up, even as her mind wandered back to what they knew of the killer they’d come in pursuit of.

  She recalled now the killer’s taunting note to the au­thorities and what Eriq had revealed to her about it through the handwriting analysis—a kind of magic—he performed.

  The note was written out in lean but large and hard strokes, the aggressive longhand having a character of its own, and it read:

  When Jessica had looked up from the note, Santiva be­gan working with her, explaining, spending great effort in carefully filling her in on what hidden and subconscious messages the killer had given them. “Notice he signs in the name of his god, not unlike the Zodiac Killers we’ve seen over the years.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, he’s from a long line of upstanding killers. Hell, it’s easy to kill if you can pass the buck along to some demonic force within you which you conveniently have no control over. Lets you and your murderous hands off the hook, so to speak. Gives you reason and motive, and removes all personal guilt. That’s my personal favorite. What a bastard.”

  “The big excuse,” Santiva agreed, the plane having fi­nally leveled out above the storm. “Takes away your in­hibitions. Greatest excuse in the world.”

  “Ranks right up there with ‘a woman made me do it,’ ‘the Devil made me do it* and ‘God talks to me.’ Son of a - bitch.”

  “You see these little clubs at the end of each long letter, the L here, and F here and here?’’ Santiva pointed to each letter he mentioned. Jessica quick-studied them, knowing he had come up through the ranks as a documents and handwriting analysis expert. “Yeah, I see them.” “See the thin tight lines? A lot of letters you and I would loop, he makes straight up and down. See here, the G? And notice the force with which he crosses his Ts? The long extension across the page?”

  “Yeah, I see.” The lines were overlong, overdone, over­whelming, thrusting forward like lances.

  Eriq continued, “The drive behind any line going for­ward can show excitement, energy or a lack of energy. In our man’s case, we see energy in the extreme—not a pos­itive sign of energy, but rather in this case aggressive and unrestrained energy, sexually motivated, potent energy, even hostility, rage.”

  Jessica immediately felt the truth of what Santiva was saying and sensed that Eriq was indeed a gifted handwriting analyst and interpreter, although she didn’t have much first­hand evidence to base this conclusion on. Still, she was hoping to learn more about this interesting “science” that had years ago been adopted by military authorities, police agencies and the FBI. She believed that Eriq could teach her a great deal about what he called “graphology” as they worked this case together.

  “It is a rare murderer who writes notes, letters or poetry to the press, although a surprising number do write to au­thorities: the Zodiac Killers, both the New York and the California one; the Son of Sam; and Jack the Ripper, to name a few,” Eriq continued. “They do so for a simple reason: they must convey their feelings about their kills— conquests—to someone. Is it safer to vent such feelings in a bar with buddies or to write authorities and taunt police? Either way, the phenomenon reveals the killer’s need to tell the world what he has done, to validate it, because he craves validation, and in this perverse validation there comes a twisted absolution. It underscores the killer’s orig­inal need to first control and then destroy other living be­ings, in order to convince himself and the world that he is better than the role life has meted out for him, that he isn’t a hapless nobody, that he is in fact somebody, somebody with an identity. The killing becomes a vicious circle so as to cyclically codify and warrant his own bloody identity: / kill... therefore I am. I kill therefore I am a killer... therefore I kill... thus, I become a more efficient killer... therefore I kill again... and again kill...

  “Law enforcement authorities count on this need for self-actualization, which causes men locked in cells to spill their guts to strangers in lockup with them. Writing letters that claim responsibility for brutal murders is another cry, not so much for help in most cases as a cry for recognition, a cry that shouts, ‘Look at me! I did it, and I’m somebody important for having done it.’

  “ Jessica, nodding the whole time, agreed. “The thinking isn’t far removed from that of an assassin who kills merely for the purpose of seeing a picture of himself in the news­papers, or to be able to say that he’s become one with his god as a result of fulfilling his god’s wish.” Because of Jessica’s keen understanding of this and the killing mind, she squarely sided with the prosecution whenever the blood and DNA evidence was overwhelming. Given the Night Crawler’s liking for the pen, and Eriq Santiva’s genius, Jessica looked forward to a case which might prove extremely interesting while also proving or disproving some of Santiva’s theories regarding “hand- reading,” as he liked to call it.

  Santiva reached from his seat to take her hand in his, guiding her fingers to one of the letters on the killer’s words. “Touch it. Feel it. See it?”

  “See what, exactly?”

  ‘The small clubs at the ends of many of the letters. See here and here, at the bottoms and tops of the long letters.”

  “What exactly do you mean, clubs?”

  “The little caveman clubs.”

  “Oh, you mean how the author has allowed the ink to swell into a bulb at each end?”

  “Yes, precisely what I’m driving at—like the bulb at the root of a hair follicle. You see, this man... this supposed killer didn’t passively allow the ink to run there. It wasn’t passive. His hand pressed hard as hell at those points. This indicates great aggression, pent-up anger, rage released through the ink and pen. See here and here, and over here?”

  Suddenly she saw little clubs all over the page where before she hadn’t noticed. He continued, guiding her fore­finger like a marker on a Ouija board. ‘ ‘Take a close look at his lowercase Ds.”

  Together they located a number of lowercase Ds. “What’s so remarkable about his Ds?” she wondered aloud.

  “Well, you do see the pattern, the similarity between every lowercase D, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, they all slant drastically far to the right. But what’s the significance?”

  “It’s what we call the ‘maniac D.’ See how violently slanted they are, leaning at an acute right angle toward the next word? See how far to the rig
ht it goes from the center line of the words on the sentence plane?”

  He had told her about center, top and lower lines, saying each was a plane. Everyone’s handwriting followed a center line; some people dipped below their personal center di­agonal excessively, and those with wild, swooping lower- plane letters, while not necessarily sexual deviants, were highly charged sexual beings. Those who spent most of their writing energy in upper regions, above the center line, were more interested in mental games, money, domination and winning. Aberrant behavior was shown in shaky, en­igmatic loops and swirls on letters at either upper or lower regions. Those who maintained an even keel, staying close to the center diagonal at all times, were both better at con­trol and more even-tempered and rule-conscious, and per­haps less sexually inclined. A shaky hand which had no control or patterns whatsoever might be that of a madman or a seriously ill person, or a person suffering from cerebral palsy or some other nervous disorder. He demonstrated via a quick forgery of Richard Nixon’s handwriting when he was at the pinnacle of his career how “in charge” and brash the man was; showed her a forgery of his name dur­ing his near impeachment that demonstrated how incredibly deteriorated the handwriting had become; and ended with a reconstructed, steadier Nixon signature upon his becom­ing an unofficial delegate to China. The emotional differ­ences were startling and revealing.

  It appeared the Night Crawler was all over the scale, swooping high, showing intelligence and creativity, and then dipping low below the center line, showing deviances of all sorts, his hand sometimes erratic, sometimes calm and controlled but always aggressive, harsh, brutal.

  “Whoa, you’re losing me a bit here,” she complained now and again as Eriq painted a picture of both the value of the analysis and the character of the killer as seen through his writing, saying that handwriting clearly mir­rored the condition of the mind, that it was as good as or better than having a look into a man’s soul through the eyes.