Philosophy is written in this grand book-I mean the universe-which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written…
Jessica had sat up with Jay Leno and the rest of the Tonight Show gang via satellite, but she'd lost all but the back-scatter noise of the show in her concentration over the series of files left her by James Parry. Each photo and bio spoke of a young woman with a full life ahead of her, each of the victims coming from a large extended family, a few with children of their own. They weren't the typical big-city prostitutes one might expect. They weren't hardened or beaten or haggard, anorexic or overweight; they didn't have broken noses, scars or pimples, and from their photos most of them looked clean of drugs, their eyes clear and vibrant, speaking of souls filled with life and interests. Several-as Parry had intimated-were part-timers, supplementing their income in order to finish out a term at the university, while still others had no record of prostitution and had last been seen at a regular place of work.
Linda Kahala, also known as Lina, of mixed Portuguese and Hawaiian blood, had been a dark-skinned beauty with radiant round eyes that seemed, from her photo at least, to be filled with an island innocence that likely got her killed.
She wondered if this most recently vanished girl, had actually become the killer's ninth victim by Parry's count, or if she'd turn up at a boyfriend's house or telephoned from the mainland, having run away. Parry had made some big leaps, trying to connect a series of earlier disappearances on the island of Maui, a far less developed and more rural isle, with the disappearances in Honolulu on Oahu.
Jessica wondered if the sweet-faced woman-child in the photograph was as innocent as she appeared; whether she had gotten sucked into the seamier side of Honolulu's cesspool. Every city, no matter its outward beauty and wonder, nourished a seductive, erotically appealing underbelly, all the more alluring to the poor, and it would appear that Linda Kahala might well have been caught in the quagmire, desperately in need of funds to continue at the university… and if her friends could turn tricks for tuition, why not her?
The victims had commonalties among them, each one itemized in Parry's hand. First was appearance and race, then the fact they all worked in service-type jobs catering to tourists, even the ones labeled prostitutes. All of them had at one time lived in or near Kahuiui on Maui or here in Honolulu City, in and around a tightly woven ghetto surrounding Chinatown and an ancient neighborhood of mixed and Hawaiian families, where rows of squat little bungalows hugged the Ala Wai Canal. According to Chief James Parry, thin little Linda Kahala had last been seen on Ala Wai Boulevard the very night that Officers Hilani and Kaniola were murder by gun and machete. Coincidence or connection? If the two incidents were connected, she reasoned now in a half-dazed state, the mangled limb in Lau's freezer could well be Linda Kahala's.
She fell asleep to the sounds of Leno's band as he wrapped for a commercial, her subconscious seemingly grateful for the noise of life. She fought her own mind for control of her dreams, determined that they be pleasant and relaxing, and soon she was back beneath Maui's coastal waters at the incredible underwater
Molokini crater where she'd been diving before she was called to Honolulu. The sights were as breathtaking as when she was actually there, but what was even greater than this was the absolute feeling of freedom in the water; weightlessness brought its own rewards, a sense of absolution. It was the same high she'd heard fliers speak of when they left the ground, the same adrenaline rush that mountain climbers felt and that sky divers loved.
She looked around to find herself completely alone in the water save for its teeming life, reflecting all the colors of the rainbow amid the fanning, waving coral. She saw a school of exquisite silver-blue fish disappear into a cavern below her. Darting after, feeling playful and alive, Jessica swam without hesitation into the black hole of shadow below her, where the beauty of the place took on an entirely new face; still lovely, it was an abiding deep blue turning to midnight in the cave. It was a mysterious and teasing midnight world into which the fish had simply vanished.
She might have slept comfortably with this image, but suddenly the strength of the current which she'd glided on pinned her, forcing her forward into the blackness ahead of her, its strength ten times her own. She could not escape by the route she'd entered, unless the current receded and she caught the force as it returned, but it was growing, and became so turbulent now as to have taken on the character of a killer, capable of smashing her against the jagged rocks she saw silhouetted in the darkness.
She felt a cold chill break out beneath her diving suit; felt gooseflesh slither along her body; heard the symbiotic human and mechanical sound of her own labored breathing through her regulator growing in intensity, now dangerously erratic as she sucked frantically on what little oxygen was left her. She felt dizzy, disoriented, confused as the water tumbled her about in the now-blue-black cavern, trapping her here, a powerless paper doll. The cutting, jagged edges of rock tore into her, ripping her suit and flesh, rending her life support from her mouth, crushing her tanks. Her body was held against the rock surface above her and she could feel both her blood and her breath slowly taken from her.
Floating past her were bones and fleshy body parts, the long-haired, severed heads of dark-featured women, and one of them came to rest before her, pinned with her against the volcanic cave wall here below the Blow Hole, and this one's eyes were those of Linda Kahala. The girl's wide eyes filled both the cavern and Jessica's mind.
She sat bolt upright, desperately fighting for breath in the phantom cave below the sea, fending off the dead girl who had come into her bed. “Christ!” she shouted at the room and at herself, angry for allowing herself even a subconscious moment of fear. She had fought long and hard to overcome the scars left upon her by the madman named Matisak, now safely locked away in a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane, but she knew that she'd never again be the same Jessica Coran she'd been before he had maimed her, that weakness and doubt shadowed her every step. It was the kind of frailty she did not want Parry, or anyone else for that matter, to ever see in her.
A bittersweet taste of perspiration found her lips as beads cascaded tearlike from her forehead and down her cheek. She gave another moment's thought to Matisak, who even from behind bars had managed to get word to the press that he, from the confines of his cell, had meticulously led Jessica ever closer to the identity of the cannibalistic Claw in New York the year before. The story, finding print in the worst rags, claimed that she had used “Professor” Matisak's considerable powers of deduction in her remarkable manhunt to locate and destroy the Claw. Matisak, who was once a teacher, known also as 'Teach,” had a well-fed ego thanks to the incompetence of her superiors and the tabloid press. Two years of incarceration had only inflated his self-image and his lunacy.
She wanted nothing more to do with the maniac who had killed Otto Boutine, and she'd made this clear to her superiors at the close of the Claw case when that bastard saw real justice done him: a paralyzing bullet she had sent through his skull, allowing him plenty of time for the kind of suffering and pain he'd inflicted on others before he went completely catatonic and died.
Now, with a new section head, the overtures on the part of the new chief to keep gleaning information from Matisak left her cold. She'd told Zanek never again.
Still, while she knew that rationally Matisak was thousands upon thousands of miles away and imprisoned, he was somehow here with her, his chilling astral spirit bringing down the temperature in the hotel room. He was with her now… along with Linda Kahala… tonight in Honolulu.
Several days later, July 15, 1995
After several nights of fitful dreams and nightmare visitations by Matisak, the Claw and their phantom evil here in Honolulu, the Trade Winds Killer, the toll was beginning to show on Jessica. Between 3 A.M. nightmares and all-day stints at the lab with Lau, she was exhausted. Still, she pushed herself harder than anyone on the team, anxious to fill in as many gaps as possible for Parry and his people, expecting any day now to get an evac order from Paul Zanek. She was just beginning to make progress, finalizing tests which Lau's people had prepared the way for, and the results were remarkable. From this fact she drew strength and pride.
It was determined early on that Officer Kaniola's gunshot wound had not been fatal, and that he was alive and possibly conscious when the killer, using great force, sent what amounted to a machete or cane cutter into his
