He had laughed lightly, taking her again in his arms and kissing her in response. Then he’d said, “I’ve loved every moment of our time together, Jess.”
Looking around at the empty little room she now stood in, Jessica wondered if she’d been wrong to stay away from Jim’s recently arranged and fully bogus funeral, the one the gossipmongers had created for the gullible likes of Santiva. Perhaps she ought to’ve hopped a jet for Hawaii, shown up unexpectedly with a wreath and a bottle of cognac so they could toast his demise. With Jim ostensibly dead, their lovers’ quarrel might have evaporated.
She laughed at the idea. Then she stepped into the shower and felt the warm spray drain the excesses of the day from her bones.
No doubt there was talk about what kind of woman she was to’ve not attended James Parry’s funeral. She wondered if he’d been cremated, his ashes dropped over Mount Haleakala on Maui from a police helicopter, or if his body had simply been laid out in the bottom of an outrigger canoe and cast off into the cradling arms of the forever sea. Either way, she had missed the romantic ceremony and was, no doubt, being crucified for her stony heart.
She wondered if Jim knew he was dead; wondered if he’d seen or heard his obituary reported, and if so if he would immediately call her to allay any concerns she might have? Most likely he’d get a good howling laugh out of the entire matter, she told herself as she lathered her hair and body with soap. Perhaps he could no more deal with the greatly exaggerated reports of his death than she. On the other hand, it gave him a damned good excuse to contact her, so why hadn’t he?
Perhaps there was a guiding hand in all the world’s frenetic activity and business-maybe. A hand reaching down into the lives of individuals like herself, a hand that kept turning her in this single-minded direction; a hand directing her, telling her that she was meant for this one path, this single road, and that she must travel it alone. That there was no room for Jim; no room for her personal happiness and peace of mind.
Perhaps her star, the one she was bom under, made of her some sort of crusader of right and justice, perhaps even divine vengeance, or at least intervention. But maybe that was sheer and absolute nonsense, like all else; certainly it was stretching a point to call it divine, but there did seem to be a hand that sometimes not so gently forced her back to her never-ending toil as an FBI medical examiner, forced her onto the trail of the most brutal monsters roaming the darkest corners of the planet.
So here she was again… showering, toweling off, readying for bed at the moment, yet readying also for an arduous search for a sadistic, unfeeling sociopath with a fixation on young women and his own brutal, ritualistic game of destruction; a psycho who believed in his heart and brain that he was placed on this earth for the sole purpose of meting out a brand of justice all of his own creation, an evil passed on to him by some demonic force that controlled his intentions, his actions and his perverted pleasure- seeking. He, like her, was on a mission; he created her mission as he wreaked death on others.
Allison Norris had not stood a chance against such a foul creature as stalked her, at least not while she was alive; but maybe, ironically, she stood a chance against the monster now that she was dead. Allison had come to them-to Jessica in particular-washing up on South Beach that bleached-white morning here in Miami, followed by her missing part, deposited before Dr. Wainwright’s astonished gaze from the gut of a shark some forty miles south of the city.
Allison had somehow demanded to be seen, to be ignored no longer. She demanded it here and in Islamorada. She demanded justice, and in her death, she held up a dirtied, bloodied and opaque-looking glass through which Jessica must now step.
But for now, weary and needful of sleep, it took all Jessica could do to step from the shower, towel off and find her bed. She stretched out, her body pleading for REM sleep. However, Jessica’s mind, helplessly driven, played over the events of the day. and Allison in particular.
Allison’s body-such as it remained-on ice at the MPD morgue, had spoken its death song to Jessica Coran. Why else was Jessica here, why else than to take up this young woman’s haunting cause? Allison Norris deserved to rest in peace. She didn’t deserve to waft about in some ethereal purgatory, to remain so much flotsam to haunt those left in the wake of her sadistic murder. But the sheer duration and intensity of Allison’s suffering wouldn’t allow anything but a purgatory at this point, and nothing would change that- not until her killer was brought down. Only in some measure of justice might Allison and her family find peace, along with other victims who’d suffered at the hands of the Night Crawler, or Tidewater Killer as the phantom trawler of souls was also being called-not to mention future and potential victims of this fiend: young women who might otherwise live long, fruitful lives if this monster were caught, put away or put out of his primeval misery.
It was up to Jessica Coran to put an end to this monster’s patterned, ritualistic assassinations.
And on this troubled thought, her eyelids firmly but independently closed, her brain seeking out and finding slumber, her soul patiently waiting like a Nostradamus come to dream visions from the fabric of moonlight, mist, smoke and mirrors.
SIX
Here are a few of the unpleasant’st words That ever blotted paper.
The Following Day
C. David Eddings looked once again over the obituary news of the day, the page for which he was responsible. All looked well except for the column on George T. Flagler, a descendent of the great Flagler who had brought the railroad to Florida when Miami was just a trading post on the great waterway, a speck on the map. It was hardly enough space for a relative of this great man who had opened up a wilderness to the outside world, the wilderness which was Florida in the late 1800s. True, from what he read of the reporter’s notes, the third- generation Flagler had done little to distinguish himself in his own lifetime, living off the fortunes won by his forebears. All the same, some show of respect was required and the young reporter, Dabney, hadn’t understood the importance of the history behind the man’s name, that this man’s ancestor had brought the first tentative signs of civilization to Ormond Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and even Key West with his railroad. For his part, Junior had sold shares in a fledgling and faltering land development company, so maybe placing the man’s obit at the top, first column on the page, smacked a bit of the “old boy” syndrome the South was already so well- known for. But Eddings didn’t think so.
“ Be damned if C. David Eddings’ll ever add to that total fabrication by bowing to it! I’m not in the business of fostering misconceptions or carrying on stereotypes, no,” he mumbled to himself, as was his habit while he worked.
The habit was so well-worn now that only the greenest of office workers and reporters might stare; everyone else took it in stride, along with the noise of several hundred computer monitors, all humming their chorus of meaningless gibberish.
C. David Eddings was the obit page editor and the last man to be called into an editorial board meeting, but today he looked up to see that Merrick, the editor in chief of the Miami Herald, was gesturing him to follow the pack into the boardroom.
“ Wonder what’s up,” he said to himself, checking the wall clock and seeing that it’d just turned 8:06 a.m.
“ We got another sweetheart letter from this freak who’s killing girls up and down the goddamn coast,” said Bill Lawrence as he whizzed by. “Come on, Eddings, you don’t wanna miss this.”
There was something ugly and unsettling, yet terribly exciting about what was going on with this serial killer everyone was calling the Night Crawler. Unsettling was the best word for it, like someone had taken a cold, coarse, rusty pair of pliers and reached into Eddings’s stomach and torn at the core of him, at the soul of his being, rocking his world on its axis-mainly because he found that he enjoyed the excitement of it; something like a strange, prurient interest had hold of him, and since the paper had begun reporting the disappearances and the subsequent
