do. By the way, is Buck there? Can I speak to him?”
She told him that he could speak with his friend.
“ Oh, just a minute… another thing he always kidded me about…” Scrapheap suddenly said.
“ What’s that, sir?”
“ Ahh, always said he’d like to go somewhere cooler, complained of the Florida heat, so he was always talking about going to the Caymans.”
“ The Caymans?” Jessica wondered at the coincidence.
“ That was the joke, get it?”
She didn’t get it.
“ The Caymans are hotter’n Florida and all hell the time o’ year he was talking.”
“ I see. Had he ever been to the Cayman Islands?”
“ Said he had been there, yes. Not much with trophy mounting, but he sure knew how to sail.”
She told Buck that Jones wanted to speak with him. Relinquishing the phone, she looked up at the clock to see that it was now nearing 3:05 p.m. and still no show.
They waited past three-thirty. Ford and Santiva had by now earnestly discussed pulling up stakes. Jessica could hardly blame them, but she said over the remote that she would give it another hour, till four. Meanwhile Ford arranged for a man in civilian clothes to enter with a fingerprinting kit and both Buck’s and Stu’s fingerprints were taken for the record. What remained of Patric Allain’s trophy fish, the yellowfin he’d walked in off the wharf with, was placed in a large paper sack and carried out for laboratory analysis and fingerprint detection. Jessica would later properly box it in absorbent material and FedEx it off to Quantico, Virginia.
By now Ford had seen enough; he quickly pulled his men-acting as backup-from the area. He and Santiva had gotten into a tiff, and Ford flatly refused to have his men watch over the shop all night. So, for a bit longer, Santiva, Quincey and Samernow remained nearby. Mark and Eriq were in FPL uniforms at the van while Quincey sat at a bus stop now, his makeup-that of a feeble old man down on his luck-beginning to thin.
Four o’clock came around and still no show. Somehow, the killer knew; perhaps he sensed that it was too dangerous to return, especially after having robbed the place of materials the night before. Perhaps he realized that he’d been foolish to use the same alias, even with a man like Buckner, and doubly foolish to have left something of his in the other man’s possession, something with his prints on it. Or perhaps he had simply smelled trouble about the shop, even before coming near it. Like a tiger or a cougar, the Night Crawler obviously had good instincts.
Now he could be anywhere.
Tired and disgruntled and disappointed, the four remaining law enforcement officials found themselves trying to comfort Gordon Buckner, to assure him that he would be safe and to tell him to be in touch the moment he was contacted again by Patric Allain.
“ Then you do think he will contact me again?”
“ No way of knowing, but not likely at this point.” Jessica tried to put the old man’s mind at ease.
“ He could’ve just got the days turned around. If he’s as crazy as they say, why not?”
“ We’ll send some undercover men tomorrow for a possible two p.m. meet. They’ll pretend to work out back for you,” suggested Jessica. “And who knows, maybe I’ll be back with them.”
“ All right, good. Damn this man… damn this whole bloody business,” moaned Buckner, his head in his hands. “I sometimes wonder what God was thinkin’ of when he created the human animal and the perverse human brain. Damn this monster!”
“ Our sentiments exactly, Mr. Buckner.”
They left in the van, which had to be returned to Ford. At the precinct, each promised to meet for drinks and dinner after changing and cleaning up. Jessica, in particular, pleaded that she had to get the fish smell out of her hair and off her body.
When they arrived back at police headquarters, Jessica climbed down from the van and Eriq met her at the rear, helping her out. They stood staring out toward the park, the boat marina, the great Gulf of Mexico beyond and the setting sun. “Where do you think this malfeasant creature is tonight, Jess?” asked Eriq. “What part of the coast is he haunting?” She stared out at the waning sun in the west where it flared bloodred, a giant fire in the sky that spread dark shadows now along the clean, well-kept streets and park of the picturesque city. “I don’t know what shadow he’s hiding in, but I fear the worst, and I think we have to persuade Ford to keep his men on guard at the riverfront bars and restaurants. All we know for sure is that the bastard will strike again. I haven’t had time to do a full autopsy, but I had a look at the body that washed ashore here…”
“ And?”
“ It’s as if he let her go by mistake, as if she were unfinished,” Jessica said. “None of the staging of the others; no quarter-inch nylon rope, no sign of any attempt to preserve or mount this one. You ever catch a fish only to lose it over the side?”
“ Whataya mean?”
“ She got loose from him somehow; he hadn’t tied the knot correctly or quickly enough when a wave took her, probably in the dark. Everything else is to the letter-double, possible triple strangulation, the whole nine yards. But her lungs were not as full of water as the others.”
“ About earlier, Jess… I want to apologize.”
She didn’t want to deal with earlier now. “‘Fraid it’s textbook Night Crawler,” she continued on about the most recent dead girl’s body. “He is definitely in the vicinity, and like Quincey surmised, the bastard may be making his way toward the Tampa Bay-St. Pete area.”
“ I’ve sent word to our field offices there. They’re on the alert. They know the drill.”
They had walked from the van to the park, exercising their legs and lungs while Quince and Samernow saw to the van and the equipment inside. “You look trim and handsome in your FPL uniform, Chief,” she teased.
“ You, you look like the cutest thing in rags I’ve ever seen,” he fired back. “But you’re right about the fish and formaldehyde odor. That’s gotta go.”
From behind them, Jessica heard Quince’s distinct voice carry on the evening trade wind. “Bastard has just raked the whole state from one side to the next…”
“ Promise me one thing,” she asked Eriq.
“ Anything… within reason.”
“ No more quaaludes or uppers or whatever you’ve been on.”
Santiva took in a great breath of air. “I needed it to keep pace. It was just a one-time-only.”
“ Careful, my friend, because one-time-onlies have a way of becoming one-time-eternities.”
“ I appreciate both your concern and your advice, Jess. It means a lot to me, but rest assured, I don’t have a drug problem.”
She looked from the deep wells of his dark, kind eyes back out to sea and the setting sun, a fiery orange orb threatening to engulf the world even as it was being engulfed by the horizon. So much depended on one’s limited perspective, she quietly told herself, wondering anew where the Night Crawler was at this moment.
SEVENTEEN
Through the looking glass and into the abyss angels must spy.
On a hunch, Jessica Coran made a long-distance call to now Chief Constable Ja Okinleye of the Official Police of the Cayman Islands. Ja had become a good friend since the time some years ago when Jessica had assisted him on a murder case on his island of Grand Cayman. At the time he was a lieutenant in the Investigatory Division there. The case had involved a wealthy and highly regarded man who had been involved in the import business and was the owner of the largest clothing and jewelry store on the islands. Ja thought the man had gotten involved with some sort of smuggling operation, a common practice at all levels of society there. The man’s throat had been slashed and there were repeated stab wounds to the body. Ja wondered if it were not the work of an angry co-
