altogether.
“ His staying out of your way, how’s that? Good or bad for our case, I mean.”
“ Better would be my guess.” She glanced about the room, allowing the live music to continue its path over her mind, to soothe her frayed nerves. She was still wondering about Coudriet when she asked Eriq, “How about you? You get your feet as wet as your throat?”
“ Drenched, actually. Damned fools. Near as I can tell, they’ve been dragging their asses on this for some time, letting this SOB work freely up and down the coast from here to the Keys without once putting it together.”
“ That’s not atypical of local jurisdictions,” she said while glancing about, people-watching.
“ Too many little jurisdictions all along the seaboard and damned little in the way of cooperation or coordination of effort. You’d think Miami could get it together, but-”
“ But somebody obviously did put it together,” she interrupted. “Coudriet, actually, the M.E.”
“ Really?” She was both curious and impressed with Dr. Coudriet all over again.
“ Seems he was on vacation, a fishing trip down in the Keys-Sugarloaf Key, about a hundred twenty miles south of here, when a floater came ashore in the same condition as two others he’d seen earlier. He put two and three together, put out a call to all PDs along the coastal cities, asked for any information on similar cases, placed all the information in his Hewlett-Packard and voila!”
“ The similarities were, as they say, too close for comfort… too close to ignore.” Her tone made it clear she didn’t question it in the least. “So Andrew Coudriet next contacted all the pathologists and detectives along the waterways.”
“ He already tell you all this himself, did he?”
She shook her head firmly. “No, he didn’t. Quite self- effacing of him. He didn’t tell me any of this. Maybe he’s more modest than I’d given him credit for. I don’t quite know what to make of him.”
“ Did he tell you that there’s an entire highway of water-the Intracoastal Waterway-which sweeps from Key West north to Jacksonville and beyond?”
“ Which all experienced seamen and weekend warriors use regularly, I’m sure.”
“ You suppose right. Traffic is as heavy here as on the damned Mississippi River, but here most of it’s pleasure craft.”
They had expensive appetizers and wine before ordering dinner, and Eriq talked about his day with the deputy mayor, the police commissioner and William DeVries, the Miami FBI field chief who’d met with him despite his being in a recuperative condition, something to do with surgery to the small intestine, all in the company of Quincey and Mark Samernow, the two chief detectives for Miami. “Good man, Will,” Eriq commented of DeVries. “Been on top of this thing from the moment he learned of it, saw the serial nature of it. Gave me some good insights into what’s been going on down here, politically, that is… Nobody can say precisely what’s actually going on with the killer.”
Jessica had heard DeVries’s name in connection with the case before. It was Will DeVries who’d first alerted Santiva to the situation brewing in Florida, and when Jessica had gone to Eriq to give him the particulars of the strange phone call she’d taken from Islamorada, Santiva had surprised her with his instantaneous response-a single curse word suggesting both exasperation and procreation. His next response had been a question: “How soon can you be packed to leave for Florida?”
“ We haven’t left yet?” she’d countered that day in his office at Quantico. Later, on the plane, he’d confessed to having put the call from Islamorada through to her. Her involvement in the case had been carefully orchestrated. Now, here in Miami, she wanted to know, “Why didn’t DeVries’s men meet us at the airport when we first arrived? Why MPD detectives?”
“ Every agency in the entire state is antsy and sensitive at the same time over this one. There isn’t a jurisdiction along the entire Eastern seaboard of the state that isn’t missing some little girl. And as you know, the latest victim, the Norris girl, was highly connected, so it’s become a real bone of contention as to who exactly is in charge, and Will’s become disenchanted with the local authorities.”
“ Pissed off, you mean? So everybody’s scrambling and watching his own ass?”
“ Something like that.”
She bit her lower lip and added, “Meanwhile it’s all to the killer’s advantage that law enforcement can’t get its collective act together.”
“ Enjoy your appetizer,” he told her, his tone still that of the boss and dictator. It was his show now, no mistaking that. “Will didn’t want any sort of scene between the MPD and his guys out at the airport, not with so many cameras around.”
“ What’s the connection with London?” she asked.
“ DeVries has a friend at Scotland Yard. I mentioned him to you earlier, Nigel Moyler? Anyhow, they’ve worked a few international cases together. I’ve got a few contacts in the mother country myself, but these two guys realized that what happened a year ago in London was being duplicated here-or so it seemed to Moyler. But I believe he’s not quite seeing this with twenty-twenty vision.”
“ Something’s cast doubt on the connection?”
“ Not something-me. I pointed out some glaring differences in the two cases, and the single fingerprint they have is a partial and is practically useless, and the notes they were supposed to’ve forwarded haven’t arrived yet, so who knows.”
“ Glaring differences? Like what?” she asked while enjoying the fried zucchini appetizer.
“ Well, I can sympathize with Moyler. The London murders were never solved, but the victims there were all of a type wholly different from our own.”
“ Wholly different? Were they men?”
“ No, no… they were all women,” he conceded.
“ Were they all strangled?”
He nodded. “All strangled and-”
“- their bodies all thrown into the water?” she finished for him.
“ They were all determined by authorities there to’ve been drowned after repeated strangulation, yes.”
“ Really?” She kept her counsel.
“ But there are more dissimilarities than similarities, I’m afraid.”
“ For instance?” she asked between bites and sips of wine. “No poems to the authorities, for one.” She nodded. “Go on.”
Santiva’s eyes were busy. They followed people about the room. “Our victims are young women, hardly out of their teens. So far as I can tell, the English victims were all a good deal older, all with similar facial characteristics and body builds. Ours are younger, sweeter, more naive, thinner and a great deal more upscale.”
“ Well, you may well be right, Eriq, about there being no British tie-in here.” She watched his eyebrows take an inquisitive leap.
“ What’re you saying?”
“ Hold on to your modus operandi theories, Eriq, because Allison Norris was definitely choked, but not to death; she drowned after having been repeatedly choked by hand and by rope. But she was alive when she hit the water. Does that sound like our British killer, Eriq?”
“ They’ve listed them all as having drowned after repeated strangulation, yes, but I thought Coudriet’s report said she’d been strangled and the body discarded in the ocean,” replied Eriq.
“ Actually, if you read Coudriet’s report carefully, you’ll note he fudged on whether she was dead or alive when she hit the water. I think since then he has amended his reports to certify that she was alive when she inhaled all that water. At least that’s what I got from the team tonight. The report sent to us was a rushed job, corrected later. She was alive in the water, her lungs filled to bursting with microscopic sea life and saline. There’s also evidence pointing to the killer’s having dragged her bodily through the water.” Jessica finished her drink and sucked on an ice cube.
“ Damn, that puts a different color on things. Dragged her through the water? That means he used a boat of some sort, and that’s how he moves in and out so quickly and easily. Think of it-a floating lair, a floating kill scene. Little wonder we have so damned few clues to go on.”
She dropped her gaze. “It’s made him brash, cocksure. He travels with his incriminating evidence, keeps it close to him. It makes him feel safe to know where it all is, so safe he sends us word to tell us so…”
