We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air.
The flight to Miami from Quantico, Virginia, played unrelenting hell with Chief Eriq Santiva and the tourists, but it delighted the innocent children and Jessica Coran, since she and they reveled in a ride through rough waters-in this case air pockets, shifting thermals that rocked the air- boat like crashing waves from every direction while it cruised at 30,000 feet. The pilot, either by design or inability, seemed unable to get above or below the disturbance. But it made Jessica feel something, and that was the rush, because for some time now she had been without feelings or emotions. The flight provided an adrenaline rush she hadn’t felt for a long time, proving-at least in her case-that fear was sometimes better than no emotion whatsoever. Some people, even those she counted as friends-without voicing it, unable to put it into words- worried nowadays that she was perhaps beyond what others might consider the everyday, normal, rational fears and anxieties, and maybe she was. Maybe it was the legacy left her by Mad Matthew Matisak and other such monsters she’d hunted down and destroyed.
True or not, she considered going down with the plane in a storm a small fear. After all, she’d faced down New Orleans’s Queen of Hearts serial killer the year before, and compared with dying as one of that monster’s victims, a plane crash seemed an almost pleasurable end.
Below their airplane, the entire Eastern seaboard remained blanketed in an ocean-thick, roiling, bubbling, gargantuan glacier of gray-white cloud, and below this the continent was under attack by an arsenal of thunder, lightning, sleet, snow and hail, the world pounded by an unfeeling, killer storm. But unfeeling was hardly the right word. What natural phenomenon of raw power had feelings? Jessica thought it foolish of newscasters to call a storm cruel or heartless or evil, or to give it any human characteristic whatsoever or bestow the feminine personal pronoun she on it, since it had not a whit of human emotion about it. Like a so- ciopathic criminal on the loose, a storm destroyed life and limb without any more emotion than was felt by the sea or the void of outer space. None of these acts of nature or acts of God or abominations experienced any feelings one way or another toward human suffering. Yet some lamebrain news- people insisted on calling this the cruelest storm in recent history, perhaps the meanest in a decade, and on reporting that she meant to torture the mid-Atlantic and Eastern states for days, playing out her unkind work until she might finally exhaust her evil self over the very land she ravished. And it further infuriated Jessica that storms were always characterized as female fury, unleashed feminine emotion. May as well read a Harlequin romance novel as listen to the weather report these days, she thought.
Jessica had seen on the Channel 2 TV newscast how the computer rendition of the storm appeared, and how on the forecaster’s maps and screens, it was given an unreal, cartoonlike quality, making it look like a swirling mass of harmless, honeycombed whip cream, friendly in every aspect. A cotton candy apparition hunkered over thousands of miles of territory.
In reality this blanket of deadly white had killed over a hundred people along its zigzag path across the U.S., its subzero and snow-related deaths racking up sizable numbers from Wichita, Kansas, to Pittsburgh. The unkind storm had crept across from northern Canada, through the Great Plains, up again toward the Midwest, scourging Chicago and Buffalo, causing catastrophic problems for some, death for others, across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and now working on a downward spiral in its mad rush toward the Atlantic. The ride over this storm front was indeed calamitous, riotous and heart-pumping.
Still, it was good to feel that long-silent heart in her chest pounding again; Jessica was only sorry that it was at the expense of so many other passengers. She’d gone numb on December 2, 1995, the day she had left James Parry and Hawaii for a second time. They had made such a perfect pair, and his showing her the return of the glorious, spawning humpback whales in Maui’s steamy, warm-water bays was an unforgettable experience which she would cherish forever, just as she cherished her moments alone with Jim. But they had both felt the rest of the world crushing in by November’s end; they were both committed to their work, their careers once more conspiring against all happiness.
Still, on returning to the mainland, she’d put in for a transfer to the islands, telling headquarters that she wanted to make the move a permanent one. But D.C. wasn’t in any mood to play Cupid for Jim and her, and there had appeared no real solution to the dilemma. Then things had changed quickly and drastically.
Jessica found herself in that daydreaming-again-about- Jim territory of her mind here now on American flight 312 when she was shaken from her reverie by the first of Eriq Santiva’s deafening groans. She stared at him on her left, watching him turn to Jell-O with sound effects. His reeling head and dizziness, along with his stomach pains, were as real as his fear of flying, and those double-decker flapjacks he’d had just before takeoff had come to life, jumping up and over again.
Eriq Santiva wanted her here, on this special case which didn’t involve Hawaii. In fact, it appeared it might lead in an entirely different direction, that of London, by way of Miami, and the Keys, perhaps.
A string of brutal murders along the Intracoastal Waterway between Key West and Miami had left local authorities guessing and ghost-chasing. The phantom killer seemed to come and go on the tropical wind, seemed capable of complete deception and near invisibility. And he had quite a knack for making his victims vanish as well. It was as if these young women were abducted by some sort of spectral visitor from another planet who floated in, dazzled them with pixie dust and then poof! — all gone but the remains, which washed ashore out of an uncaring ocean some twenty to thirty days later.
What the killer did with the bodies in the interim was anyone’s guess, and at the moment, Jessica wasn’t sure she wanted to look under that rock. That kind of peek into the pit would come soon enough, she knew.
The killer left no trail, no clues, no sign of himself, no killing ground, and his victims averaged one a month-a far greater number than those of the heart-taking killer of New Orleans-all eventually washing up on lonely, deserted Florida beaches, and on occasion, at one of the classier private beaches of a prestigious hotel, where guests would wade in the water with the floater until someone recognized it for what it was, usually by the gruesome gashes taken out of the body by passing sharks.
One victim had washed up outside a plate-glass window at a seaside restaurant where patrons were dining on native grouper and other delicacies of the sea. The most recent floater washed up just behind a house in South Miami Beach. The outline of the story read like a dark, perverse, reverse fairy tale without a happy ending: That bright morning the wife drew the curtains and stared out on her stretch of beach to see a glorious sunrise and what she believed to be the remains of the largest jellyfish she’d ever seen. It proved to be the fish-eaten, flesh-gone-slick torso of a missing seventeen-year-old named Allison Norris…
Forensics estimated her time in the water at about the same number of days as she’d gone missing, which was just over a month. What remained was hardly human, save the superstructure of bone below the clinging gelatin.
No one in the medical or police profession knew how a floater-a body in the water-could take thirty days to wash ashore. The body had to have been anchored in some manner below the water, since it was determined by the local M.E. to have expired between twenty-five and thirty days before-a difficult call with any floater. So the thinking was that the body had been moored somehow below the surface, but had somehow worked loose. Yet there were no chains or ropes attached, although there was evidence to indicate that the girl’s wrists had been burned and bruised by ropes or handcuffs or a combination thereof. Her throat also showed severe signs of rope burn, as well as manual strangulation, as if she’d been hung by her neck, or so said the M.E.’s protocol.
Cause of death was listed as strangulation-drowning, as if the two had curiously occurred simultaneously.
Eriq Santiva, sitting the entire flight in the aisle seat beside Jessica, was still struggling with his half-digested breakfast. Beside Eric in the aisle, and on the floor on her rump, sat a tall, leggy stewardess who’d been flirting with the dark-eyed Eriq, whose natural good looks made him a kind of Latin George Clooney.
The stewardess had simply plopped, unable to in any way gracefully return to her seat to buckle in, when turbulence had struck a third time, this time with a vengeance, and as if on cue with Jessica’s rising dislike of the other woman. The stewardesses had only just finished serving what American Airlines referred to as a “Continental Breakfast” and was about to clean away trays and cups when the seat belt light dinged on for the third time, at which time the curvaceous woman had simply given up trying to maneuver on the wild ride.
“ You okay, Chief?” Jessica felt compelled by common courtesy to ask after her boss’s discomfort.
Santiva swiped at his face again with the damp towel he’d specifically asked the stewardess for. She had obliged and had been cooing over the “poor man” ever since. At least he had been wise enough to decline any coffee or Danish, and for good reason. He’d had enough trouble just watching Jessica scarfs down her own.
Breathing heavily, he said, “Never was a comfortable flyer, but I’ve never gotten into anything quite like this before.”
She patted his hand and with a smile said, “No need to apologize, Chief.”
“ This goddamn seat feels like it’s on a gyrating compass.”
“ Who knows,” she replied, fighting back a gasp with the updrafts. “Might make you”-she grasped hard onto the sides of her seat when the plane was yanked to one side by unseen but powerful forces outside the aircraft-”a more comfortable… flyer in the end.”
“ Just wish the turbulence would end.”
“ Ultimately, it will.”
“ That doesn’t sound exactly reassuring. Dr. Coran.”
“ Perhaps if we went over some of the particulars of the case, it might take your mind off of it?”
Santiva was a bronze-skinned man with dark, piercing eyes and a rakish grin when he wasn’t reeling from nausea. He’d made a number of changes back at Quantico, one being to replace Paul Zanek with his own, more trusted man, and he made it clear that on the more important cases where profiling techniques and handwriting analysis were being used, he might well be along for the ride. He had built a reputation on solving cases through the use of handwriting analysis.
Santiva had also instated the use of psychic detection within the Behavioral Science Division, wisely giving full credit for its introduction into formal FBI channels to the departing Paul Zanek, who had been made bureau chief in Puerto Rico, having finally gotten that island paradise job he’d always fantasized about. This innovation had not come without controversy, and at great personal and professional costs to Santiva’s own safety and well-being, primarily in the loss of points with the big guys overhead, who were all extremely conservative and old-fashioned-the Hooverites, they were called in the ranks. But no one could argue with the results in New Orleans the year before, when Dr. Kim Faith Desinor proved the extreme value of psychic detection in a major-profile case, the baffling, bizarre instance of the infamous Queen of Hearts Killer, a dreaded monster who literally preyed on the still-beating hearts of young transvestites in the French Quarter district of New Orleans. But Dr. Desinor had a history with Miami-Dade which was not conducive to good relations, so she was not to be directly involved in this case, although she might be contacted at any time with material evidence and asked to run her sensitive hands over it to see what might surface.
Kim Desinor had remained in touch with Alex Since- baugh of the NOPD, and Jessica cheered them on in their ongoing love affair. Sincebaugh had left New Orleans and had found a detective’s job in Baltimore to be closer to Kim. Jessica silently cursed Jim Parry for not having made such a move; if he had, everything would have been different. But he hadn’t, and now she often felt completely alone in this world.
Chief Santiva interrupted her thoughts of Jim a second time, this time with a Cuban curse, something about his ill luck at having failed to get one of the FBI’s Lear jets, or at least one of the military transports out of the Marine base at Quantico. But she informed him again that no aircraft would be comfortable in this storm. She’d continued her own flying lessons whenever she could find a moment, and she knew that none but the craziest, most thrill-seeking pilot cared to fly in such weather.
Lightning flashed outside the windows, and she thoughtfully closed the shield so that Eriq didn’t have to look any longer. Santiva was slightly taller than Jessica, and he sported a roguish Venetian-styled beard, something that called to mind the players in a Shakespearean play set in Italy. And the man was so polite and well-mannered that she didn’t know quite what to think of him. He was intelligent, quick, keen, hardworking and driven to do his very best, and far more interested in results than in lip service or politicking, so far as she’d judged. All qualities she had in common, all qualities she liked in a man. He was quite the opposite of Paul Zanek, the consummate diplomat and politician who seldom, if ever, left the side of his phone.
Santiva began to get his mind off the turbulence by looking over the file Jessica handed him. It was the Norris girl’s file, faxes mostly, sent up from Miami-Dade PD. He lifted the file and began scanning it, even as it bobbed along with his knees on the roiling plane.
“ Peculiar how long the body was in the water, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Coran?”
“ Please, call me Jessica. It’s going to be a long trip if you continue to call me Doctor the entire way.”
“ Eriq then,” he immediately countered.
“ That medicinal patch I gave you? Did you put it behind your ear like I told you, or did you eat it?”
“ Yes, no… I did like the doctor told me.”
“ Is it helping any?”
“ Some… and thanks for the concern.”
Even as she spoke of different things, Jessica gave thought to what he’d asked, about the peculiarity of Allison Norris’s body being in the water so long.
She said, “Strange thing about a body, any body, Chief… Eriq “Oh, what’s that?”
Jessica didn’t readily answer, noticing that the flight attendant beside Eriq had leaned in to listen in on their talk. The pilot, crew and flight attendants on the plane had earlier been privately instructed that they were FBI so that there would be no undue concern over their weapons. Jessica took this as her cue to gross the nosy woman out by flashing one of the crime scene photos and adding, “A body… well, it wants out. It wants to be seen, wants help, wants to give up its identity. Sometimes it screams.”
“ Screams?” asked the stewardess, whose name tag read Tawny. Santiva frowned. “Wants out… wants to be seen? Screams?”
“ For instance, how often do you hear of a body at a huge city dump, say in New York City, being discovered?”
“ All the time, unfortunately.”
“ That’s what I mean. The bad guys bury the bodies in places you’d think no one could possibly sniff them out, right?”
“ Right with you, so far.”
“ Given the stench of the place on any given day, who’d ever find the body in a New York City dump?”
Eric held back his breakfast, flashing on a mental picture of a bloated body at a dump site.
Jessica continued. “And it’s not just confined to dump sites, this phenomenon.” Jessica was warming to her audience, having them on. “Oh, really?”
“ Killers are notoriously resourceful. Killers place bodies in cement lockers and bury them below the earth, but still the body leaks information. The Jimmy Hoffa scenario is actually quite rare.”
“ Leaks information, huh? Stinks up the place, you mean?”
“ By hook or by crook, the body screams, ‘I want outta here!’ Put it in a trunk and throw the trunk into the ocean, you think you’ve got it made, but the body works its way out like Houdini, or the trunk floats not out to sea but onto shore, and no one can stroll by such a ‘treasure’ without opening it up.”
Santiva laughed now, and it did him good. His mind was taken off the flight, if only momentarily. “You really think the body’s got some kinda power to, you know, influence the ocean swells? I mean the Norris body in Florida?”
She smiled a faint and mysterious smile, shook her head and laughed lightly, thinking about what she’d just said, realizing she meant every word, before replying. “All I know is that even if the body’s been put in acid, its skeleton finds a way out.”
He nervously laughed again, and Tawny nervously joined him while Jessica kept talking. “Put your dirty dead deed in the ocean, and it wants above the waves. If you bury it below ground, it wants above ground. If you cut it up into fifty little pieces, all the pieces want to find one another. If you stuff all the pieces into a drainage pipe, they all come out at or near the same location. If you burn the body, it will sit up and grin and wave, because in its mouth it holds firm to its identity, and its identity will hang you. If you drink the blood of the corpse, you’ll spill enough to mark a trail to you. If you chop it into pieces and feed it to the sharks, some guy in a research facility hundreds of miles away will discover it in his laboratory when he goes to dissect a shark for its secrets. In other words, dead men have a way of plotting their revenge and pointing accusing fingers at their killers.”
He nodded appreciatively. “You ought to know, Doc- Jessica.”
“ I’m telling you only what every decent M.E. in the country knows, that the most immovable, inanimate and inert object on God’s green earth-a body-will find a way out. It will simply find a way out, a way to move or a way to point a finger, either literally or in blood and body fluids, hair samples or fibers. It might take the help of a sensitive nose, a hunter’s dog who likes to dig away at the grossest odors, a fisherman’s hook, a dogged medical examiner or obsessed detective, but like life itself, always finding a way to evolve and grow, death remains intractable in its desire to evolve and, if not grow, mutate, and it is in that mutation that the body sends out signals, tugs at its moorings or surroundings, bloats and floats and finally pulls away in search of us, Eriq.”
“ You think that Allison Norris was looking for us?”
“ I have to.”
Santiva and the stewardess exchanged a glance, the woman lowering her eyes to her lap, a bit embarrassed at having listened in, or simply wishing she hadn’t. Santiva returned to Allison Norris’s file, likely sizing it up in relation to what Jessica had said, trying to determine if there were indeed a fatalism at work here, perhaps one that began when victim and killer spoke their first words to one another.
Jessica’s own thoughts again turned to James in Hawaii. They’d made superficial, perhaps frivolous preparations to have Jessica return to Hawaii a third time; to shed everything she owned, all that she was, give it all up to be with him in Hawaii even if the FBI could not see its way clear to a transfer, since he simply could not leave Hawaii. Even if the FBI did see its way clear, she’d have to take a lesser position, become a field operative at the state level. She’d still be working cases, but her work would be confined to the Hawaiian island state. “Not exactly the worst wall to have your back against,” Jim had kept reminding her of her choices.
It was a major life and career change, and she and Jim had a great deal of thinking to do before lunging ahead. Still, she recalled those precious days on Maui where she had spent the most wonderful moments of her adult life. Jim had been so vibrant, so loving and good for her. James and Hawaii had rejuvenated her, had conspired to make her whole again, and in Hawaii you could almost believe that evil no longer had a depressingly powerful foothold in the world.
Finally, at one point she’d sworn to Jim, and any of her friends kind enough to listen, that she’d return to D.C. only once more, to make all necessary arrangements to return to Paradise for good and all. Jim and she had talked of taking their romance to the next stage. And she’d made up her mind that either the FBI would grant her a full-time arrangement on the islands, so that she and Jim could be together, or she would seek a civilian job outside the agency, go back into pathology work with one of the hospitals in Oahu… maybe.
Jim and she were talking marriage, a home together, stability and someday-some days for an array of milestones awaiting them, among them someday children. Her closest and dearest friends-Donna LeMonte, Kim Desinor, J. T„even Paul Zanek-were happy for her, and her life’s work quickly became how best to get the hell out of the D.C. area and back to Jim. She began by divesting herself of the many worldly possessions she would have had absolutely no need of in Hawaii, from heavy winter coats, hats and gloves to woolen blankets and rain slickers and boots. In Hawaii people went barefoot in the rain.
She had also begun to rid herself of binding arrangements here, from her job to her apartment and money matters, looking into electronically moving her money into a bank in Oahu, and she was discreetly saying her good-byes when she got the wake-up call that, while she was gutting her own world, James Parry was actually unwilling to give up anything for the relationship. She was uprooting and changing everything so that her life might fit into his life, while James had forfeited nothing. She had leapt into love’s crevasse, while he stood yet at the cliff, looking on. All these impossibly huge life changes she’d made without the slightest guarantee, and it suddenly dawned bright that it wasn’t fair. Then her friend, psychiatrist Donna LeMonte, had kindly and cleanly cut her up into little pieces with the truth, that this perceived lack of sacrifice on Jim’s part was all the excuse and rationale she’d secretly, subconsciously been waiting for, so she might escape the terrifying stress and equally terrifying idea of commitment 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.