Primal Instinct Page 8

  He looked stricken. “You do not trust me as a professional to keep silent about what is inside our house? I have been here long time before you come, Doctor, and I have to be here long time after you gone. No, you don't worry 'bout me telling people outside house what kine work we are here doing... no.”

  She was immediately apologetic. “I only meant to say that the press can be awfully good at skinning people like me as well as you, Mr. Lau, so it was a cautionary remark, that's all. Chief Parry's going to want it hush-hush, top secret, I'm sure. At least for now.”

  “I understand. Haole press headline read: 'Kanaka Cop Is Trade Winds Kill'a, He Kill All Hawaiian Girls.' A Hawaiian man do this. I see it now, and then what happens?”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. Although she hadn't seen it happening in the same way, she knew as he spoke it that he was absolutely right. The whites, especially those in power, would assuredly like nothing better than to pin the killings of the Hawaiian women on a Hawaiian national, thus ending any suspicion that the monster was a white man—as Jim Parry believed. She'd read his profile of the likeliest age, sex, race and lifestyle of the phantom. And it made complete sense, based as it was on statistical averages. Still, statistics didn't always pan out; that was why they were called averages.

  “Not to worry one bit,” Lau assured her. “So what is next step?”

  “Late lunch,” she monotoned, dropping her head in her hands, fatigue now a constant companion.

  She stood, stretched and stared out the huge windows for some time without saying a word, Lau becoming fidgety behind her. She stared fixedly at the western rim of Oahu, the gorgeous flood of green foothills spilling from out of the volcanic rim of the vast Waianae Range. If she could not look out the windows and see this sight, she might imagine herself back at her Quantico lab which overlooked the academy and training grounds. She'd learned that the greenness of Hawaii was actually man-made, created by the many canals built into the mountains to bring water down from the uppermost heights in order to irrigate an otherwise barren landscape that, if not so nurtured, would be the color of teakwood. She now wished that no one had told her, that the illusion was intact and whole.

  “Lunch a good idea,” said Lau, breaking the silence. “You work too hard, Dr. Coran. Not good for nobody.”

  “Lunch! My thoughts exactly,” said James Parry, who'd appeared at the door so stealthily that even Lau was shaken.

  “You're some G-man, Chief Parry... sneak up on a person like that,” said Lau.

  “Sorry, didn't mean to get on your nerves, Mr. Lau.”

  “No bother,” Lau lied, and started to leave, saying, “I think you guys have much to talk about.”

  “Our Mr. Lau reads minds,” said Parry as he made himself comfortable across from her, sitting in an office chair.

  “Whatya mean, reads minds?”

  Failing to answer her, he said, “There's something we've got to talk about.”

  “Oh, something come up I should know about?”

  “I took the whole thing, what we know, what we suspect—all of it—to Dave Scanlon, the Commissioner of Police, Honolulu. Now he's sweatin' it.”

  “Sweating what? Why?”

  “Let's just say the commissioner's a good politico, and he simply wants to cover all his asses. Any rate, all the different districts of the HPD are pouring over their missing-persons case files for the past several years. No telling how long this thing may've been going on, you see?”

  “You think the disappearances could've gone undetected for much longer than we already suspect?”

  “No one's sure at this point.”

  “But you dug up some old cases that're suspiciously similar in addition to last year's here and two years ago on Maui?”

  He nodded. “Guilty as charged.”

  She realized that Parry was of a breed of men who looked differently at whatever fell under his purview, that while countless other cops on the island had seen the same information, it was Parry who'd put it all together. All of the material had been studied by others, but Parry and his team had looked at it in a fresh if twisted light, in the dark light cast by a stone-cold killer. Parry was what the FBI was all about. To him a crime scene wasn't simply a place where the evidence might be collected, bagged, collated and tagged, but a blight of the darkness within a killer's mind. Why had the killer chosen this place, this time, this person? It was the kind of approach pioneered by the late Otto Boutine, whom she had both admired and loved very much, a man who had died to save her from a terrible death at the hands of the infamous vampire killer, Matt Matisak.

  Parry didn't work a crime scene backwards in an effort to reconstruct the crime, as the typical street-level detective might, formulating a mock-up of what might've occurred and then launching a neat and tidy investigation along a line of presumptions. Parry, like Jessica, knew that there are some clues left at a crime scene, which by their very nature do not lend themselves to a sane orbit. Parry obviously would be interested in items of tangible evidence left by the killer if there were any, but even if there were, he'd be even more interested in the implied clues lingering at the crime scene, each a passport to the mind of the killer. In the case of the Trade Winds Killer, or what the lab people had begun to think of as the Cane Cutter, there'd been no tangible clues—not a scrap—until Linda Kahala's misshapen arm had appeared; furthermore, there still was no crime scene as such, only a dumping ground, and even that was no ordinary dumping site, for it remained

  Inaccessible. Now James Parry wanted to know for certain, “Is there any sign so far's you can tell of ritualistic, sadistic, pseudo-sexual acts performed on the victim?”

  “What in God's name do you think I am, Parry? A magician? No way I can tell all that with what little I have to work with. Get me more of Linda Kahala's body and maybe... just maybe...”

  Still, she understood his burning need to know the answers to all the questions: Did the murderer take his time, or was he hurried? What insight into the mind of the maniac haunted the killing ground? What was he thinking before, during, after?

  As her father had once put it, “To understand the 'artist,' you must first truly look at his “work.'“ Otto Boutine's profiling team had taught her that the killer must be defined as either an “organized” or a “disorganized” murderer, and that these traits were “symptoms” of orderly or disorderly behavior at the scene of his crimes, further defining the fiend far more than the type of weapon he used or the caliber of the bullet he preferred. Cane cutters on these islands were a dime a dozen.

  “What I can tell you now for certain is that given the severity of the mutilation to the arm alone, the ritual nature of the slashes, the blade marks against the bone itself, he definitely cut into her while she remained alive; we are also confident that such brutalization means that he's certain to continue. He enjoys it.”

  “So that's the reason for the consistent victim profile. He seeks women who have that certain look.” Parry stated it as a verification of what he'd already come to believe.

  “When killing involves such butchery, it is either a crime of passion or psycho-sexual passion.”

  “Psycho-sexual passion?”

  “A term we've just coined recently at the bureau for all the sociopaths who destroy people based upon some predisposition to an ideal or fantasy that is all mixed up with their emotional crisis.”

  “Passion seems a dirty word to use with this bastard.”

  'Two sides to every passion, Inspector.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “We've got to locate his lair, find his killing ground, where he plays out his fantasy,” she said, her right hand running the length of a stiff neck.

  “Don't get your hopes up on that score.”

  She looked at him with a wondering gaze.

  “You know as well as I that chances favor our serial killer going the way of most, meaning he'll never be caught,” said Parry. “More likely than an arrest, he'll reach a state of complete mental brea
kdown.”

  “And quiet, private institutionalization,” she softly agreed.

  “It's what most believe happened to Jack the Ripper, who was also 'down on whores.' “

  She bit her lip thoughtfully, placed her head in her hands and asked, “Do you think they were all prostitutes? Including Linda Kahala?”

  “If not, she was mistaken for one. Hard to tell if she was into that scene just yet.”

  She showed him proof positive that the errant limb had once belonged to Linda, and then she told him about Kahala's blood on Kaniola's palm. This information shocked him into uncharacteristic silence.

  'Then old Joe Kaniola was right about his son's having been the only man to ever see this bastard up close. If it's her arm, the killer must've been at work getting rid of the body when Kaniola and Hilani surprised him.”

  “It appears so.”

  Parry continued to ruminate. “But how'd the Kaniola boy get her blood on his palm?”

  “That boy was thirty-four, Jim,” she corrected him.

  He frowned, realizing he'd been caught in a verbal slip that could have cost him had he been on camera. “Of course,” he quietly agreed. “So how did he get her blood on his hands?”

  “You figure it out. He was following a suspicious-looking vehicle, right?”

  Parry thought back over the radio signal tapes he'd listened to countless times now of Hilani and Kaniola sparring with one another, their friendly banter culminating in their last words on earth. “Yeah, the car they followed.”

  “The car, the dead girl's clothes, the dead girl's body— anything's possible,” she suggested.

  “So Kaniola reaches into the car, touches the dead girl or her clothes, sure... sure.”

  “Your guesswork is quite probable.” There was a little girl's glint in her eye and a lilt to her voice.

  “You've found something else, haven't you?”

  “There were some cloth fibers found on his uniform and adhering to his left palm, in the coagulated blood. All the fibers match. Now all we've got to do is find Linda Kahala's clothes, have the relatives I.D. them and we cross-match.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Get Scanlon's people to comb the countryside up there around Koko Head, see if something gets shaken loose.”

  “Why wouldn't he have simply tossed the clothes into the Blow Hole with the body parts?”

  'Too much chance of their going awry, lifted by the wind, missing the hole; besides, if he's a purist, I think he'd send his victims over nude.”

  “Purist? Purist what?”

  “This guy's into some kind of la-la fantasy world I don't pretend to understand, but suffice it to say that sacrifices appear to be his thing. Usually sacrifices are sent from this world in the manner in which they came into it, nude.”

  “Is that how you see it?”

  “Kaniola comes along, finds the clothing in the car and while he and Hilani are examining it, realizing too late what they have in their possession, he surprises them. That's the way I see it.”

  “Pretty shrewd,” he replied, a hand going to his chin.

  “Damn sure the first giveaway clue from this guy in all this time, and completely unintentional. He's cool and calculated, quite organized in the way he eliminated your two HPD cops, and in not drawing attention to himself over the years. He obviously is quite intelligent.”

  “That'd figure.” Parry paced the office, his mind racing now that he had the first forensic truth to back his up-till-now-flimsy net of assumptions.

  Because the killer was in the organized category, they could predict with some confidence that, once caught, he would match the profile, at least in part. Unlike psychics, they weren't professing to “see” into the heart and mind of a killer, but utilizing known facts and information gleamed from serial killers in captivity, such as John Wayne Gacey, Jeffrey Dahmer, Gerald Ray Sims before he'd killed himself while in captivity, the executed Ted Bundy— all serial killers who'd been far more forthcoming and cooperative than Mad Matt Matisak cared to be. Although for her money, Jessica believed Ted Bundy had merely filled in blanks to presupposed questions placed before him by the State Attorney's office in Florida, providing little more than what they wanted to hear.

  The Trade Winds Killer would come from a dysfunctional family. His father's work would be stable, but parental discipline would have been inconsistent at best. Child molestation in one of its myriad forms was likely a staple of family life. He would have an average or better-than-average I.Q., but was likely working at a menial job which he felt was far below his designated rank or calling or talented abilities; his work history would be sporadic, even chaotic.

  “He could be a student at the University of Hawaii, most likely with an uneven average,” she suggested.

  “Perhaps, but then again not.”

  “Several of the girls were attending the university,” she reminded him.

  “One of the few connections we've made among some of the victims,” he agreed. He briefly told her about George Oniiwah, Linda's boyfriend, who happened to be a student at the Monoa campus at U.H.

  “It would seem likely that the killer may have some connection with the university, given what little we know, that is.” Jessica lifted a warm can of Coca-Cola off her desktop and poured what remained of its contents down a drain in the lab, rinsed the can and tossed it into a recycling bin below a table. Lau watched her movements from a room three doors away through a series of glass partitions separating the portions of the lab and offices. She was a little unnerved by Lau's interest in her and Parry, and she couldn't help wonder what was cooking behind his black eyes. Is good gossip in the lab hard to come by? she wondered.

  “Yeah, and that means forty-six percent of the student population,” Jim Parry was saying as he followed her about.”Come again?”

  “The precise number of male students at the Manoa campus hovers around five thousand nine hundred eighty.”

  “Concentrate on part-timers first,” she suggested.

  That'd be something like two thousand two hundred fifty.”

  “No,” she corrected him. “Less the females, say forty percent, one thousand two hundred fifty to thirteen hundred.”

  “Hey, not bad. Now there's a figure we can work with,” he said with a little salute of sarcasm. “I'll set Tony to work on it.”

  “Just remember, our guy—if he is a student and not a bottle-washer out there—he may've dropped out or flunked out before now. You may want to get backlist enrollments as well as current ones.”

  He nodded, telling her she was right, and then he quietly added to her repertoire of knowledge about the killer, saying, “This creep probably lives, or has lived most of his life, with a partner or spouse.”

  “Or parents,” she replied.

  “Maybe one parent.”

  “Stress would factor into his violence.”

  “Stress is brought on by the trade winds, maybe?”

  She quickly agreed. “Something symbolic in the wind, perhaps? Maybe our guy got left out in a nasty storm as a child, who the hell knows.”

  “Probably hears voices in the damned wind.”

  She nodded admiringly, continuing the game of automatic thought. “Violence could also be triggered with a sudden problem— finances, job, marriage, or a romantic relationship.”

  “Alcohol and/or drugs are apt to figure in,” Parry added, casually rising to the challenge. “A person who's usually no threat, nothing to take a second look at, socially capable, visibly acceptable, but he doesn't stand out.”

  “Approaches his victim in an open area, uses a non-threatening manner in a friendly, even familiar place.”

  “Picks 'em up at malls, in shops, at the bus station.”

  “Prefers verbal manipulation to physical force as he hunts for his prey. From the police reports, sounds like Linda may have known him from an earlier time, didn't want to go with him, and so he had to resort to physical force to get her off the street and into the car.”<
br />
  “Exactly... she knew him, and perhaps some of the others also knew him.”

  “Control over his victim is a vital part of what he does, and fantasy—”

  “Ritual dominates his actions; the murder itself an acting out of a long-held fantasy, I know.”

  “He brutalized Linda. It was no pure accident the geyser sent her arm up from the spray.”

  Parry looked quizzical. “Whataya mean?”

  “Close examination of the tear shows that it was sliced off at the shoulder, not torn off by natural forces.

  There're striated marks at the bone.”

  “Bastard...” he said.

  “He transports the bodies in a vehicle,” she said, continuing the unofficial killer profile they'd begun together.

  Parry, pacing now, nodded and said, “Yeah, and his car's in fairly good condition. He won't risk being pulled over or caught with a dead engine, especially after Koko Head.”

  “Still, something about his car that night attracted the HPD cops.”

  “Kaniola.”

  “What?”

  “Alan Kaniola first noticed the car... called it 'suspicious- looking.' I've only listened to the dispatch tape a thousand times.” Parry's obvious anguish over the case showed through. “There's nothing there. They never called in a plate; never had the chance.”

  “Look, I think the killer takes souvenirs from each victim, squirrels them away, possibly clothing and jewelry, but most assuredly the hands.”

  “Cut at the wrist?” he asked.

  She nodded, her eyes boring into him. “He... he takes his trophies out later... re-counts them, relives the fantasy over and over, until he does it again. And one more thing. He likely enjoys reading about the accounts of the missing girls and any news coverage devoted to their disappearances.”

  Parry nodded. “He's always out there looking for prey, the girl who looks like Linda Kahala.”

  “He knows what he likes... what he wants, and he feels comfortable doing it here. He's on his own turf. He knows the terrain well.”

  Parry agreed. “And when he sees that look-alike victim, he strikes.”