temples?” “We suspect a viselike head restraint.”
“ My God.”
“ I'm taking a chopper out immediately. Hold on every-thing.”
“ Might have trouble keeping Bulldog Koening off.”
“ Who would be?”
“ Dr. Ira Koening. Our city M.E. Good, stubborn and tenacious man, but he's been backed up due to health problems. Still, he wanted the case when he heard of its uniqueness.”
“ I've met Ira at a number of conventions. I agree, he's a good man. Tell him I look forward to working with him.”
“ Will do. I told him we intended to get FBI assistance, and that you'd be using lab space at the FDLE.”
“ Florida Department of Law Enforcement has labs in Jacksonville now?”
“ We're progressing.”
“ Tell me what you have so for.”
“ A big nothing. Nothing but questions, I'm afraid. The victim's not giving up any clues. Not yet. But she was wearing an expensive summer dress, appears young-perhaps eighteen, nineteen. Not dressed provocatively, not likely a prostitute, no reason we can see that she should have attracted such violence. Then again, who would?”
“ Was she sexually assaulted?”
“ Hard to tell. She came up out of the water in a fisher-man's net in a dress, but that's as far as we've gotten. Wanted your input before anyone else got to the scene.”
“ I'll be there by daybreak.”
“ Once the press gets this, and they will, there's going to be an outcry here for vigilante justice if we don't find some answers,” Combs told Jessica.
“ Anything else you can tell me relative to the body?”
Combs described the details of the discovery of the body and redundantly spoke about the missing organ. She sounded frazzled. She sounded young for such a position. This was likely the single worst case she had ever caught. She repeated herself on everything, ending with, “Press is going to have a field day with this shit.”
“ Yours is the third such victim that we know of, all young women. And I don't think this creep's going to go away anytime soon.”
“ Is he killing women who look alike? Can we warn women with the same general appearance?”
“ Fact is, there's some superficial likeness between the first two victims, physically, I mean. But as to anything else- likes, dislikes, community involvement, economics-no. But they were both white and young and brunette. One was attending a flight-attendant school, the other was a nursing student. Anna Gleason was twenty-one; Miriam McCloud was twenty-two.”
“ That appears to square with the new victim,” said Combs.
“ Still, they differ in the details enough to make us suspect that they could be randomly selected-chance and opportunity murders-but we're not certain at this point, so we're ruling nothing out.”
“ If they are randomly selected, that will make it all the harder to find this creep.”
Jessica sighed deeply and said, “We've run the details of the other two crimes through the historical files of the VICAP system, to see if anything remotely like this has ever come up before. Cases involving people's brains being smashed in, cut into with knives, pitchforks and axes, but nothing like the kind of thing we're seeing here.”
Jessica recalled the first instance of a body that was missing its brain that VICAP had isolated. It had been in Normal, Illinois, in the 1920s. The body had been dumped in a river there. The killer had been a quiet farmer up until the day he murdered his wife and removed her brain and ate it for supper one night. At his execution, he gave a strange statement: “ 'I done it to please the voice inside my head that pleaded it be done until I could not stand it no more.' “ It had been his ailing wife's voice, he claimed. He died in the electric chair.
Jessica told Combs, “These recent killings are serial in nature; either he feels he must kill the same thing over and over, or he feels he cannot get it right, so he keeps coming back for another try, or he simply likes it so much he can't give it up.”
“ Like an addiction.”
“ Sometimes it's more than that. Sometimes it's the only way they can get their twisted, sexual gratification.”
“ Through such horrid violence to another person?”
“ Yes… afraid so.”
“ This guy kills in Richmond and Winston-Salem, and makes an attempt in Fayetteville, and now here. So, he gets around.”
“ We suspect he may be a working as a deliveryman using a van, dark blue, but then again, anyone having a reason to travel the southeast could be him.”
Jessica said goodbye to Combs and looked up at Santiva.
“ Hey, it's your kind of case, Jess.”
“ Death of a third victim from this brain-hunter,” she muttered, her hands racing to her temples.
“ Jess, I've seen brains caved in, I've seen brain knifings, but I've never seen one stolen. Look, I'll put a helicopter on standby for you. Get out of here and get packed.”
“ The crimes in North Carolina and Virginia began what? A month ago now? I wonder why he slowed down, and what lured him to Jacksonville, Florida.” Anyone's guess at this point. Like I said, a helicopter will be waiting for you. Pack and get out there. I'll say good night, and Jess, be careful. You know firsthand that there're a lot of sharks inhabiting Florida waters.”
FOUR
Adopt the character of the twisting octopus, which takes on the appearance of the rock. Now follow in this direction, now turn a different hue.
Marriott Hotel, Savannah, Georgia Same night
He located the computer terminal in the hotel and went onto the Internet in search of the words that would encourage him to continue on his quest. Like an addict, he quickly found the site he wanted. It read:
While we have separate bodies, we have a singular mind. Every individual shares in this universal mind or soul. The result of even touching slightly on this cosmic mind is an illumination and understanding so profound and mystical, as cited by St. Thomas Aquinas before his death in 1274. Comparing it, he declared all his learning a mere “straw.” Mystic Jacob Boehme wrote: “The gate opened to me… so that I saw and knew more than if I had been many years at a university.”
It is a sharing, my friends, in the inexhaustible spring of eternity He read it, breathed it in, this confirmation that, despite the horror of his actions, he was doing the right thing. This was no simple rationalization. These were facts. Cahil's words were essentially correct, all but his having wrongly fed on the days-old dead in his grave raids rather than the living-and, of course, the foolish notion that a single small island of tissue deep within the medulla oblongata alone held the soul, could also be dismissed as wrongheadedness.
Grant Kenyon and Phillip knew better. The brain to be consumed had to be minutes fresh, not days old. And the entire brain had to be consumed, not a small shred of Cahil's ridiculous gray noodle. Grant had argued this with anyone logging on to Cahil's website who cared to listen.
Cahil had robbed those graves thirteen years ago not for the whole brain but for a two-inch-long finger-sized sliver of it. Such a piece of tissue could not possibly house all of the cosmic mind or soul of an individual, to act as the funnel for the cosmic river to enter the brain. Besides, why take chances? Consume everything, his own mind consistently told him.
Still, it was good to know all of Cahil's thoughts on the subject in order to implicate Cahil as the so-called
