and devotion, for which she would have to relinquish so much of herself, her hard-won identity.
Donna had reminded Jessica that there were never any assurances in the best of relationships. But Jim had made no assurances whatsoever, and for Jessica, the signals she was basing her new life on suddenly crumbled like stale cookies, forcefully alerting her to the kind of fool she’d become. And next she began to question her and Jim’s motives. Was Jim worth turning her entire life inside out for? Maybe yes, but he might’ve at least shown some of the class Alex Sincebaugh had in giving up his beloved New Orleans for the woman he loved. Whether right or wrong, Jessica decided at the thirteenth hour that neither Jim nor Hawaii was going to back her into any corners.
She had desperately tried to explain her newfound well of concerns to Jim, but his typical male response had infuriated her. He’d complicated the issue with his ego; had dared complain that he had already placed his house up for sale and had been searching for a beach house, a place for the two of them. He had finished with a lame joke, some nonsense about how much Jessica was going to be underfoot. She heard it as how she had “put him out.” “Wrong answer,” she had told him, hanging up on him.
She hadn’t heard from him now in several days. Depressed, she had closed in on herself after that, closed off her feelings, like blinds closed against the light. She had not taken time to mourn the loss of their phantom future life together; instead, she’d thrown herself back into her work, even as Donna argued that this was not the full extent of who she was. Pretending for the time being that nothing mattered but her profession, she had asked for an assignment, any assignment. So now she was on her way to Miami with Chief Eriq Santiva, who had the day before forwarded to her a strange telephone call from a shark research facility in the Florida Keys. She’d spoken to a Dr. Joel Wainwright about some interesting specimens found upon dissection of sharks at his facility-female human body parts. A map of the area showed that, as the shark flies, there was not a lot of distance between Key Largo, where the sharks were caught, and Greater Miami
Together now, Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva had joined forces on a true fishing expedition, on what seemed a convoluted trail that might lead to a madman who was drowning his defenseless young female victims after sexually molesting them.
“ You think the water has any significance to the killer?” asked Eriq.
“ Damned straight it does. Could mean anything from the amniotic fluid in the womb to the salt of the earth to this guy. Look at the letter he wrote to the Miami Herald.”
He fished among the papers for the handwritten, faxed copy of the purported letter from the Night Crawler, as the press had dubbed the killer.
Chief Santiva had already scanned the Night Crawler’s scrawl several times. Now his patient eyes played over the loops and swirls of the killer’s feral handwriting once more.
Santiva, of course, had wanted and had screamed for the original handwritten note attributed to the Night Crawler, but the local police wouldn’t or couldn’t provide the document; something was even said about its having gotten lost in the “cage,” cop talk for the Evidence Lockup Room. Thank God it had been faxed before it was completely lost, if it were indeed from the killer.
Meanwhile an Interpol communiques, forwarded to the FBI via Scotland Yard by an Inspector Nigel Moyler, had mentioned a similar outbreak of killings occurring along the Thames River in London the previous year, killings which had gone unsolved. He had forwarded a handful of letters written by the Thames River Killer when Santiva had shown an interest. The two cases seemed to have some similarities, and Santiva had seen some immediate similarities in the handwriting, but there were also differences. Many of the most salient differences, according to Eriq, could be attributed to a growing neurosis which was reflected in the letters from overseas.
Eriq had made no outright promises, but he had mentioned the possibility that since Moyler was pursuing a similar course with a similar monster on the other side of the Atlantic, Eriq or Jessica might go over to see what sort of joint efforts could be made. “In the name of cooperation, should the handwriting of the two killers match up,” Santiva had teased Jessica, believing that she would jump at the chance to visit London and the famous Scotland Yard. Santiva continued to study the faxed document, scanning it for perhaps the twentieth time, reading again the purported lines of the man Jessica had half-jokingly called the Bible Belt Beast. Like Jessica, Santiva had already memorized the dark, sinister little note, a poem actually-the lines spoke of a disturbed individual who held a fathomless hatred for women. Each time he read the lines through, he seemed to get something new from them, gathering in the larger context, the innuendos, the slings and arrows the monster had endured, and the slips, slits and chinks in the madman’s armor.
The interested stewardess had now disappeared, the jolting of the plane having slackened.
“ The maniac’s words are almost eloquent in places,” Eriq said.
Eloquent wasn’t quite the word that had jumped out at her when she’d first read the killer’s remarks. In fact, eloquent was the last word she would have used to describe the bastard. Still, Santiva had a point. Like the missives of Jack the Ripper, the note was brief, concise and eloquently simple. In business parlance, it was to the point. “Well, I give him one thing,” she conceded. He looked askance at her. “What’s that?”
“ He has a good command of the King’s English, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked.
Santiva nodded, managing a half grin of thoughtful reflection. “Right, he’s certainly no slacker with regard to grammatical correctness and construction. Bet Mrs. Higgins would give him an A for that alone.”
“ Mrs. who?”
“ Oh, just a spicy old English teacher of mine when I was in grade school. She’d bust your chops for confusing the use of the personal pronoun I with me or vice versa, and God forbid you use a possessive pronoun incorrectly. She’d hold you up to public ridicule.” He fell silent a moment longer, his expression telling her that he remembered Mrs. Higgins with more fondness than annoyance. When he spoke again, he said, “You know what we’ve got here, don’t you, Jessica?” He waved the copy of the killer’s note.
“ Yeah, ‘afraid I do. He’s the most dangerous animal on the planet-an educated lunatic.”
“ Did you notice the British spellings? On the words caliber and theater?’’
She admitted that she hadn’t noticed the transverse letters E and R. She’d have to analyze more carefully, she told herself. What would Mrs. Higgins say of her carelessness?
The turbulence outside the plane settled somewhat, and this settled the unrest inside the plane to some degree, but most people remained cautious, ready to expel yet another gasp if it came to that, and it did. The momentary lull in the turbulence only resulted in a new wave of shocks to the system, the force of the assault seeming to double, sending many people to the altar of the vomit bag. This was all Santiva needed to see and hear. The stewardess who’d sat alongside Eriq was returning to check on him and had to quickly move out of his way as he snapped off his seat belt and raced for the lavatory, too polite a man to vomit in Jessica’s presence. She liked that.
TWO
Art is myself; Science is ourselves.
Islamorada Key, Florida, April 13, 1996
The yellow made-over Ryder truck, equipped with an on- again, off-again freezer compartment, wasn’t truly large enough to be called, in trucker lingo, a reefer, but it was fully functional when it worked. It rode low to the ground with the weight of its five thousand pound cargo, and now the frozen cargo was being backed up along a concrete ramp at the University of Florida’s Abbott Marine Research Laboratory on Islamorada Key. At the top of the ramp stood two massive doors and a conveyor belt, beside which waited two strange looking scientists in hip boots and protective gear more suited to the river than the laboratory.
Lynette Harris and Aron Porter, to whom all the scut work naturally fell, stood poised in bulky clothing and chaps, prepared to enter the truck from the rear, to wade in and slide about in their hip boots, protective clothing, thick rubber gloves and goggles. A pair of student trainees at the high-tech marine research center, each now resignedly climbed aboard, despite Aran’s bitching, to begin the struggle with the dead beasts within: some
