Thorn tore off his glasses and wiped his brow with a cloth; Powers, though more stoical, looked perturbed by this news as well. Each of them, Jessica included, tried to picture the type of killing ground-liquid, it appeared- that the killer worked out of. It had to be controlled; it had to be all his for the long hours he needed it.
Still Powers defended his boss, saying, “Dr. Coudriet must’ve wished to spare us the details.”
“ I’m sure,” she replied. “Look, what we’ve got here is a high-level torture victim, gentlemen: a young woman who didn’t go quietly into that gentle night…”
Thorn and Powers looked across at one another, most likely still unconverted by Jessica’s version of the truth, disbelieving that Dr. Coran or anyone else could deduce so much from so little.
She didn’t mind their skepticism, half expected it; furthermore, Jessica Coran didn’t care. What they thought mattered little. She had to tell Santiva what she had, but she wanted time to run some tests, to be certain of her deductions and to have some science to back her up. She wasn’t Kim Desinor, the psychic detective. No one was going to take her “vision/version” of the crime at face value, especially one so horrible as the image that now threatened to make her as ill as Thorn looked to be.
She intended to send some items connected to the various bodies and crime scenes back to headquarters at Quantico for Kim Desinor’s special brand of inspection, but what was there to send? Like Allison Norris’s partially dismembered body, all the others were without clothing, or rings, chains or bracelets. They wouldn’t have had Allison’s bracelet either if a certain shark hadn’t taken a certain tournament fisherman’s hooked bait below a certain boat off Key Largo some forty nautical miles south of Miami during a once-a- year fishing event sponsored by the very people who crusade to save the sharks.
She had reminded Santiva of what she’d said on the plane coming down about murder victims stamping their wills on the evidence, how a body placed in the ocean would find a way to shore, by hook or by crook. Now, with the message stamped clearly in the metal artifact found inside a dissected shark, Santiva had appreciatively agreed with her. What better evidence of this strange phenomenon than the bizarre fate of Allison Norris’s engraved bracelet. Had she, before death, hidden the bracelet away somewhere and somehow on her nude body, say in her mouth, only to later replace it? Or had the killer intended to send another “poetic” message by way of the bracelet, allowing it to remain on Allison’s wrist? Either way, the story of Precious had made a believer out of Eriq Santiva.
It may well have been that the killer was in such a state of excitement that he had somehow overlooked the bracelet. No doubt he had collected many such items of jewelry from his victims, likely used the trinket to fondle and to place around his genitals, to reanimate the lost moments leading up to the victim’s horrid death again and again, or until he struck again, taking another life, adding to his head count and the grisly paraphernalia of his murderer’s museum. “Find that museum,” Jessica had told Santiva on the helicopter ride back to Miami, “and you have his head on a platter.”
But for now, Jessica wondered what she might send back to Quantico for Kim Desinor’s inspection. A goddamn tissue culture, a strip of DNA? A hair sample, what little was left of the arm? Forget about the girl’s nails or fingerprints-there weren’t any, as nothing was left of them, the epidermal layer of skin and nails having long since sloughed off into the ocean along with the lower layers of skin. The body had to have been in the water at least three and a half to four weeks. So where in the ocean had it slumbered in the meantime? she continued to wonder.
She momentarily wondered what Kim, her colleague and friend at the Psychic Detection Unit of the FBI, would think of her forwarding a package of samples and body parts; wondered if Kim wouldn’t be better off with one of the internal organs, or at least a sliver of the heart. Kim had done wonders with the hearts in New Orleans the previous year when they’d tracked down the Queen of Hearts Killer, the maniac who terrorized the French Quarter and ripped the hearts from victims.
Jessica doubted that such forensic matter as organ tissue from the victims of the Night Crawler would be of any use to the psychic in this case. Would it not be better to fly Kim down, to provide her with the means to perform one of her patented psychometric readings over the body itself? Maybe the magician-sorceress-could pull something out of the collective and to-date bare hat.
Jessica made a mental note to discuss the possibilities with Santiva.
“ How can you be certain she was strangled more than once?” asked an interested Thorn, breaking into her thoughts, his beaked nose twitching. She frowned at first, then clicked the recording camera and audio back on before she began to explain. “Look closely here at the center of the wound. The way he did her, well, it’s certain that it was done with a direct, blunt force, and not as the result of a cord or rope about the neck. But there are two distinct circular marks as well, so he used a favored cord or rope during part of his party time-before he got to the larger, thicker rope that was the last to be tied about her neck. The wider strip, if you look closely, is actually newer, fresher than the smaller choking device used. In fact, the wider strip is the freshest mark on the entire body except for those cuts and slashes which were determined to be from the coral reef as her body drifted toward shore.”
“ We looked at those cuts carefully, yes,” agreed Powers, “and they didn’t fit the contours of any knife blade. They were all the doing of Mother Nature.”
“ I guess if there’s anything to be grateful for-and believe me, there’s not much here-it’s that this creep doesn’t get off on blood. Frankly, gentlemen, I’m sick to death of butchers who have some craving for mutilating dead bodies into unrecognizable cuts of meat.”
“ What’re you thinking?” asked Thorn. “You think this guy is some sort of gentleman killer who doesn’t want to destroy the beauty of the bodily form? If so, think again. He just lets the sea do his dirty work for him.”
Owen Powers snapped off his gloves and, nodding his agreement, added, “I think this bastard’s a momma’s boy, afraid of the sight of blood, afraid to get his hands really dirty. He probably vomits at the sight of blood. So he chokes and drowns them instead.”
“ You may be right, but I’m not so sure he doesn’t just prefer that their deaths be more lingering and painful. A single knife wound can send a victim into paralysis and shock and the fun’s over. I think this guy just likes to have long-lasting fun.” Jessica stared across at Thorn, who looked the picture of Buddy Holly minus the guitar, his studious air and overbite marking him as having been a sure whipping boy for bullies during his childhood. Powers, by comparison, was muscular and handsome, sporting a full beard and deep-set, penetrating eyes. He hadn’t totally ignored Jessica’s conjecture, although he pretended otherwise.
“ So, whoever this guy is, he likes to use his hands,” Powers now said.
“ Rather than a meat cleaver,” agreed Thorn, pushing his glasses back up on his nose with his rubbered fingers and looking away from the body, regaining his composure again.
Jessica pushed the swivel-arm magniscope out of her way and replied, “The bastard also likes rope, and plenty of it. He enjoys trussing up his victims. He likes to touch his victims, a hands-on kind of guy. And while he’s not particularly fond of blood, it’s only because it doesn’t excite his libido.”
A booming voice through a magnified electronic filter made them all jump. “Are you saying he gets off on this, sexually?” asked Dr. Andrew Coudriet from over her shoulder and above, looking down on the scene from a viewing tower where students usually gathered to watch an autopsy. He spoke through an intercom, and Jessica wondered just how eccentric the red-haired M.E. had become over the ensuing years since she’d last seen him lecturing on a stage at George Washington State University.
One thing was obvious-the world hadn’t been particularly kind to Coudriet. Besides the white-gray pallor of his skin and the thinned-out patch of red hair dusting his cranium, there was a decided limp and arthritic gait as he found the stairs and came toward her. She decided to answer the man. “What excites this bastard is the draining, the feel of death as it moves through his fingertips, as death washes over his chosen victim. In fact, he likes it so damned much that once is not enough for this SOB. He wants to feel her life drain from her once, twice, three times, maybe four before the night and the fun comes to an end. And I’ll tell you something else, Dr. Coudriet… gentlemen… this body’s been stashed in the water somehow for just about as long as this young woman has gone missing.”
“ So I gathered,” Coudriet replied, his amplified voice like that of God, his eyes daring her. “Makes you wonder where the cadaver has been all this time; you suppose our killer maintains a Davy Jones locker somewhere out there at sea?”
She’d wondered the same thing-how was this creep keeping the bodies from surfacing sooner?
Thorn muttered across at his male colleague, “I tried to tell you that, Owen.”
Powers bridled at this, as if the other man had slapped him with a pair of wet, heavy gloves, showing him up
