airfield just south of Tampa with no way to pursue the killer. The helicopter owner here simply looked at her badge and said stonily, “We’re not endangering any of our pilots for the FBI, not in this foul weather.” The man left her, returning to his office, which was dwarfed here in the massive hangar. She wanted to shove something like a court order down his throat but she had none, and getting one could take more time than she had.
Although only small aircraft flew in and out here, the airfield was large, and there were a number of other companies she could turn to, so she looked out at the blinking lights in the fog that signaled men at work somewhere out there. She looked around for someone to perhaps guide her to another location. The usual heat of a Florida morning had been wiped away by the sodden wet blanket of air hovering over them.
While Jessica worked to get airborne, Eriq Santiva had gone back to the hospital to wait in the hope that Ken Stallings would find a voice in his search for consciousness and reality. Everyone was hoping against hope that he might come around, not only for the man’s sake but because inside his silence lay the key to locating the Night Crawler.
In the meantime, a copy of Patric Allain’s signature on an agreement made between him and a Mr. Scrapheap Jones in Key West, Florida, had come in at Tampa Bay’s main headquarters, Police Precinct One. Eriq was unequivocal when he declared it to be the same handwriting as that on the letters to the press.
To quell the rancor of local politicians and the media, who were doing camera interviews, this new bit of information was carefully spooned out in terms that made it sound as if the Night Crawler might as well already be in custody, since they were now certain that the man named Patric Allain was one and the same as the Night Crawler. The impression Eriq left with the press was that the FBI was closing in on the demon.
Still, local loudmouths claimed that police had failed to protect and serve “even their own” in this instance, and that in fact, authorities had used the Tampa Bay area as a kind of watery “box canyon” into which they flushed the killer-yet had still managed to let him slip free! The implication was that the FBI had completely mishandled the case, as if politicians and reporters could have done law enforcement’s job for them in much better fashion. The Florida press set up a hue and cry like so many armchair detectives.
The other implication was that the FBI had placed all of the Tampa-St. Pete area in danger by chasing this perverted monster into their midst in the first place; why had Miami’s problem become Tampa’s problem? So that now two good, solid citizens, FMP officers, had been brutally assaulted by the man FBI agents couldn’t seem to catch in a months- long, intensive pursuit. Furthermore, the Night Crawler remained in this region, and he might be anywhere, and he might take anyone’s daughter.
Some were demanding that the FBI give a full accounting of its activities in the matter, along with a detailed explanation for what steps it next planned to pursue. Florida politicians around the state were outraged at the duration of this case, as well as what appeared to them to be a lack of efficiency and professionalism.
The word apparently had gone out from the governor’s mansion that it was open season on the FBI in general and on Jessica Coran and Eriq Santiva in particular, the mainstays of the investigation who perhaps ought to be removed and replaced. The groundswell of anger was further fueled by Tammy Sue Sheppard’s family, who were making daily statements to the press, especially the National Enquirer.
The Enquirer did an entire page on how Jessica dressed, how she wore her hair, what kind of lipstick she used and who manufactured her eye shadow, and the kind of extravagance she and Santiva had displayed in staying at the Fon- tainebleau in Miami. Its headline read, Tall amp; Beautiful Scavenger for Scientific Fact Short on Results in Night Crawler Case. The story summarized the case, beginning with facsimiles of the killer’s sweetheart notes to the press. It listed the victims and where each body had been found, giving ample space to the time three bodies washed ashore in one day in Miami. Eddings of the Herald in Miami was quoted throughout the article and claimed to be writing a book on the Night Crawler which would blow the case wide open. The article went on to tell of how painstakingly every port, dock and wharfside restaurant along the Eastern seaboard had been meticulously papered with wanted posters once a witness had come forward with an account and a police sketch artist had created a likeness. The story showed the likeness and a picture of the plaster-cast bust made from the artist’s sketch.
Jessica wondered where they had gotten such details, but it mattered little now. Let the politicians and the press kick all they wanted. She sensed that she was, for the first time, on the trail of the killer, in his direct wake. All they need do now was locate the miserable excuse for a human being out there on the vast ocean, close in on the putrid SOB and finally put an end to the bastard’s killing spree. Men like him and those who’d bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, she mused, must know that there was nowhere for their souls to go, that not even Satan held a place for their kind.
Due to reasons beyond her control-both the meteorological and the political climate-Jessica found that the local small-aircraft people weren’t cooperating either; no one was willing to take a helicopter up in the soup of this morning’s fog, or brave the winds reportedly coming in behind the dense fog, winds that were howling about the airfield. It was the same damned fog that’d gotten one watercop killed and put another close to death in a coma, the same fog that had masked the killer’s movements. And now this damnable wet haze hung, an enormous blur suspended, rooted, as if controlled by Allain, as if there were some supernatural purpose in fog, so that when old- timers at the airport said, “Never seen a Florida fog stay on so damned long before,” Jessica didn’t take it as idle talk.
“ Damnit, we’ll be heading east, away from the Gulf storm,” she said to one chopper pilot who she thought might break down and say yes. She had always believed helicopter pilots fearless, a bit crazy, willing to do just about anything. That had been her experience with chopper pilots in the past.
“ Sorry… I’ve got too much invested in my bird, and I’m told by air traffic control to keep her on the ground for at least five hours.”
Tropical Storm Karl, as it was now being called, didn’t care about Jessica’s problems. She replied, “To hell with it-I’ll fly myself. Where can I charter a cub plane?” She’d gotten her pilot’s license six months before, soloing with ease after the intensive training she’d received from one of the best pilots she’d ever known, a man who flew jets of all sorts as well as small planes. Kenneth Massey had given her all the confidence she needed to fly through the perimeter of the storm edge. All she needed was a plane, but time and nature appeared to be conspiring against her. She found a mechanic at the airfield who was sitting idle, glancing over a copy of the special-edition Enquirer which Quincey had earlier pointed out to her, and the man easily recognized her from a picture taken when she was walking out to the beach to inspect one of the three bodies washed ashore on that awful day back in Miami, the day Allain threw his power in their faces.
The burly, pigeon-toed mechanic almost dropped his teeth when she spoke to him, looking from her to the newspaper photo and back again. “I need to charter a plane or a helicopter, now. Can you help me?”
“ I, ahhh… I can take you to somebody who maybe can, ma’am.”
“ That would be wonderful, if you don’t mind…”
He didn’t mind in the least taking time away from his duties to drive her across the taxiing strip. “I like driving the golf cart,” he confided as they skirted the runways in search of a plane she might charter. The airfield was so covered in fog that only the lights of the tower were visible, and these were shrouded. They pulled from the darkness to within inches of a white cub plane which had been painted with tiger stripes below a sign that read White Tiger Aviation.
“ It’s a cargo operation with tourist flights as a sideline,” explained the mechanic. She thought it more likely a front for smuggling of some sort. She imagined the little plane going back and forth to Cartagena, Mexico, perhaps even Cuba. And if so, they’d be antsy about knowing that an FBI woman was on the premises.
She tried slipping a twenty to the mechanic, but he flatly refused any payment for his troubles. “You kidding? This was my pleasure, Dr. Coran. Meeting someone like you. Ain’t nobody at the house going to believe it, though. Hey, maybe you could maybe autograph this for me?’’ He lifted out his copy of the Enquirer and turned to the page where a glaring picture of her without makeup and on her way to the scene of a killing stood opposite a shot of her dressed to kill, taken the night she was out with Eriq in Miami’s Little Cuba area. She had not seen any reporters that night, but obviously, someone had seen her, and cameras being everywhere and anywhere these days, now the entire world had.
She scrawled her signature across the article for Lyle, the mechanic, and again thanked him. He replied, “If anybody can get you airborne in this soup, it’ll be Pete Geiger. He flew in Nam, you know.”
“ Thanks… thanks, Lyle.”
“ Didja hear the news ‘bout that girl missing from Naples?”
She hadn’t heard anything recent. “No, no, I haven’t.”
“ Saw it on the tube just an hour ago. She’s been missing a couple of days now. Some say the Crawler got
