she didn’t know quite what to think of him. He was intelligent, quick, keen, hardworking and driven to do his very best, and far more interested in results than in lip service or politicking, so far as she’d judged. All qualities she had in common, all qualities she liked in a man. He was quite the opposite of Paul Zanek, the consummate diplomat and politician who seldom, if ever, left the side of his phone.
Santiva began to get his mind off the turbulence by looking over the file Jessica handed him. It was the Norris girl’s file, faxes mostly, sent up from Miami-Dade PD. He lifted the file and began scanning it, even as it bobbed along with his knees on the roiling plane.
“ Peculiar how long the body was in the water, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Coran?”
“ Please, call me Jessica. It’s going to be a long trip if you continue to call me Doctor the entire way.”
“ Eriq then,” he immediately countered.
“ That medicinal patch I gave you? Did you put it behind your ear like I told you, or did you eat it?”
“ Yes, no… I did like the doctor told me.”
“ Is it helping any?”
“ Some… and thanks for the concern.”
Even as she spoke of different things, Jessica gave thought to what he’d asked, about the peculiarity of Allison Norris’s body being in the water so long.
She said, “Strange thing about a body, any body, Chief… Eriq “Oh, what’s that?”
Jessica didn’t readily answer, noticing that the flight attendant beside Eriq had leaned in to listen in on their talk. The pilot, crew and flight attendants on the plane had earlier been privately instructed that they were FBI so that there would be no undue concern over their weapons. Jessica took this as her cue to gross the nosy woman out by flashing one of the crime scene photos and adding, “A body… well, it wants out. It wants to be seen, wants help, wants to give up its identity. Sometimes it screams.”
“ Screams?” asked the stewardess, whose name tag read Tawny. Santiva frowned. “Wants out… wants to be seen? Screams?”
“ For instance, how often do you hear of a body at a huge city dump, say in New York City, being discovered?”
“ All the time, unfortunately.”
“ That’s what I mean. The bad guys bury the bodies in places you’d think no one could possibly sniff them out, right?”
“ Right with you, so far.”
“ Given the stench of the place on any given day, who’d ever find the body in a New York City dump?”
Eric held back his breakfast, flashing on a mental picture of a bloated body at a dump site.
Jessica continued. “And it’s not just confined to dump sites, this phenomenon.” Jessica was warming to her audience, having them on. “Oh, really?”
“ Killers are notoriously resourceful. Killers place bodies in cement lockers and bury them below the earth, but still the body leaks information. The Jimmy Hoffa scenario is actually quite rare.”
“ Leaks information, huh? Stinks up the place, you mean?”
“ By hook or by crook, the body screams, ‘I want outta here!’ Put it in a trunk and throw the trunk into the ocean, you think you’ve got it made, but the body works its way out like Houdini, or the trunk floats not out to sea but onto shore, and no one can stroll by such a ‘treasure’ without opening it up.”
Santiva laughed now, and it did him good. His mind was taken off the flight, if only momentarily. “You really think the body’s got some kinda power to, you know, influence the ocean swells? I mean the Norris body in Florida?”
She smiled a faint and mysterious smile, shook her head and laughed lightly, thinking about what she’d just said, realizing she meant every word, before replying. “All I know is that even if the body’s been put in acid, its skeleton finds a way out.”
He nervously laughed again, and Tawny nervously joined him while Jessica kept talking. “Put your dirty dead deed in the ocean, and it wants above the waves. If you bury it below ground, it wants above ground. If you cut it up into fifty little pieces, all the pieces want to find one another. If you stuff all the pieces into a drainage pipe, they all come out at or near the same location. If you burn the body, it will sit up and grin and wave, because in its mouth it holds firm to its identity, and its identity will hang you. If you drink the blood of the corpse, you’ll spill enough to mark a trail to you. If you chop it into pieces and feed it to the sharks, some guy in a research facility hundreds of miles away will discover it in his laboratory when he goes to dissect a shark for its secrets. In other words, dead men have a way of plotting their revenge and pointing accusing fingers at their killers.”
He nodded appreciatively. “You ought to know, Doc- Jessica.”
“ I’m telling you only what every decent M.E. in the country knows, that the most immovable, inanimate and inert object on God’s green earth-a body-will find a way out. It will simply find a way out, a way to move or a way to point a finger, either literally or in blood and body fluids, hair samples or fibers. It might take the help of a sensitive nose, a hunter’s dog who likes to dig away at the grossest odors, a fisherman’s hook, a dogged medical examiner or obsessed detective, but like life itself, always finding a way to evolve and grow, death remains intractable in its desire to evolve and, if not grow, mutate, and it is in that mutation that the body sends out signals, tugs at its moorings or surroundings, bloats and floats and finally pulls away in search of us, Eriq.”
“ You think that Allison Norris was looking for us?”
“ I have to.”
Santiva and the stewardess exchanged a glance, the woman lowering her eyes to her lap, a bit embarrassed at having listened in, or simply wishing she hadn’t. Santiva returned to Allison Norris’s file, likely sizing it up in relation to what Jessica had said, trying to determine if there were indeed a fatalism at work here, perhaps one that began when victim and killer spoke their first words to one another.
Jessica’s own thoughts again turned to James in Hawaii. They’d made superficial, perhaps frivolous preparations to have Jessica return to Hawaii a third time; to shed everything she owned, all that she was, give it all up to be with him in Hawaii even if the FBI could not see its way clear to a transfer, since he simply could not leave Hawaii. Even if the FBI did see its way clear, she’d have to take a lesser position, become a field operative at the state level. She’d still be working cases, but her work would be confined to the Hawaiian island state. “Not exactly the worst wall to have your back against,” Jim had kept reminding her of her choices.
It was a major life and career change, and she and Jim had a great deal of thinking to do before lunging ahead. Still, she recalled those precious days on Maui where she had spent the most wonderful moments of her adult life. Jim had been so vibrant, so loving and good for her. James and Hawaii had rejuvenated her, had conspired to make her whole again, and in Hawaii you could almost believe that evil no longer had a depressingly powerful foothold in the world.
Finally, at one point she’d sworn to Jim, and any of her friends kind enough to listen, that she’d return to D.C. only once more, to make all necessary arrangements to return to Paradise for good and all. Jim and she had talked of taking their romance to the next stage. And she’d made up her mind that either the FBI would grant her a full- time arrangement on the islands, so that she and Jim could be together, or she would seek a civilian job outside the agency, go back into pathology work with one of the hospitals in Oahu… maybe.
Jim and she were talking marriage, a home together, stability and someday-some days for an array of milestones awaiting them, among them someday children. Her closest and dearest friends-Donna LeMonte, Kim Desinor, J. T„even Paul Zanek-were happy for her, and her life’s work quickly became how best to get the hell out of the D.C. area and back to Jim. She began by divesting herself of the many worldly possessions she would have had absolutely no need of in Hawaii, from heavy winter coats, hats and gloves to woolen blankets and rain slickers and boots. In Hawaii people went barefoot in the rain.
She had also begun to rid herself of binding arrangements here, from her job to her apartment and money matters, looking into electronically moving her money into a bank in Oahu, and she was discreetly saying her good- byes when she got the wake-up call that, while she was gutting her own world, James Parry was actually unwilling to give up anything for the relationship. She was uprooting and changing everything so that her life might fit into his life, while James had forfeited nothing. She had leapt into love’s crevasse, while he stood yet at the cliff, looking on. All these impossibly huge life changes she’d made without the slightest guarantee, and it suddenly dawned bright that it wasn’t fair. Then her friend, psychiatrist Donna LeMonte, had kindly and cleanly cut her up into little pieces with the truth, that this perceived lack of sacrifice on Jim’s part was all the excuse and rationale she’d secretly, subconsciously been waiting for, so she might escape the terrifying stress and equally terrifying idea of commitment
