It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
Razzles on the River
South Miami Beach, Florida, 11 P.M.
Once again Kathy Marie Harmon glanced up and into Panic’s alluring, azure eyes… once again. They were the eyes of dreamy miracle within a house of crystal and aqua- blue mirrors-where a girl could get lost and giddy and not care if her head were spinning; they were the eyes of cool, blue ocean swells into which she could so easily splash. He spoke with such assurance and confidence, yet without the arrogance of other men Kathy had met in and around the bar scene in South Miami’s Biscayne Bay area.
Kathy had come to Razzles in the company of two girlfriends, all of them looking for Mr. Right, Mr. Good, Mr. Solid. Usually, they wound up with Mr. Jell-O, a spineless creature with one thing on its mind-satisfying horny urges through unadulterated self-gratification. And most were in fact engaged in some base form of “adulterating” self- gratification, many turning out to be married.
Most of the guys hanging out at bars like this just wanted someone to stick it to, to feel warm flesh against their privates, to “get inside” a woman.
She hadn’t wanted to come out tonight. She was going to sit at home, do her hair, watch an old movie, maybe pop some corn, curl up with a Vincent Courtney or a Geoffrey Caine horror novel and read her brains out, maybe. But the tug and pull of her two girlfriends was too strong. Melissa and Cherylene could not be denied. They, like Kathy herself, believed in rainbows and lotteries and love and romance, all under a full moon, and tonight there hung at least a crescent moon, aglow in the sultry Miami night, rocking like a stellar cradle over the City of Dreams, Oz South.
Perhaps it’d been the moon that had tipped the scales to bring her here tonight. Whatever it was, sitting across from Patrick Allain, she was eternally grateful, while her two best friends had turned a resonant shade of chartreuse that shone through the purple-blue Art Deco lights of the evening world of Key Biscayne.
The live band did their best imitation of Jimmy Buffet, Dylan and Bob Marley tunes all evening long while she and Patrick sipped pina coladas and munched on curly cheese Cajun fries below the moon out on the ocean deck, where beautiful Biscayne Bay met the incoming swells of the Atlantic on picture-postcard Key Biscayne. Over one shoulder blinked the moon, over the other the colored lights of the Sheraton Royal Biscayne. Stretched before them were the milky white sands of Sonista Beach on one side, Harbor Drive and the Harbor Drive Wharf on the other. The night was enchanted lit, the ocean breeze like a lover’s caress, and Kathy’s dreams had all come alive. Patrick had arrived by boat-his boat, an incredible seventy-footer, all wood and sail and lovely, and all his, bought and paid for. He must be rich beyond rich, Kathy surmised. Maybe Patrick was the one. Who knew? Life was a gamble, an exquisite dice game, and love and heartache formed the soft felt playing field of white lines, numbers, colors, rules and order. If you remained on the rail, outside the borders, afraid to toss the dice, nothing happened, all was nil… If she hadn’t shown up here tonight, if Cherylene and Melissa had come here without her, it might have been one of them sitting now across from Patrick instead of her-Melissa most likely, since she was so much prettier than Cherylene-and if so, it’d be Melissa’s eyes all dreamy and swimming with handsome Patrick’s at this moment… But it was as if Patrick had come on the wind of fate for her alone, as if she had heard the enchanted, holy wind call her name so that she might meet the one eternal lover for whom she had longed her entire life.
He sat across from her now.
She didn’t stop to analyze her thoughts or doubts, whether Patrick would simply have found Melissa instead had she come to Razzles without Kathy, nor what this said about him. There was no time for analyzing. There’d be more than enough time for going over the details tomorrow when Cherylene and Melissa came sniffing around to find out what happened.
So, thanks to lovely, intricate destiny, chance, fortune, circumstance, karma, kismet-all stepping in at once to play Cupids-this time it was Kathy Harmon’s turn to shine instead of Melissa’s or Cherylene’s. Yes, this time it was her time, her fortune, and Patric was the treasure of a lifetime, meant only for her, fated. And what a treasure, looking as if he’d stepped off the cover of a romance novel or magazine cover. And the way he’d picked her out from among her friends, just as if he’d come directly here from some exotic port of call for her and her alone; just as if he had sailed across the Atlantic to find her, and with that dreamy accent-British maybe, or perhaps Australian- maybe she wasn’t far wrong. He obviously had money, and didn’t mind spending it, either. And he hadn’t gotten the least annoyed when she’d been unable to finish her veal parmigiana dinner across the street at the Sheraton, where he had insisted on taking her.
“ We’ve wasted so much time, Kathleen,” he suddenly said. No one ever called her Kathleen. “I have been to many places, I have done many things and I have loved many women, but tonight, it is as if my life has been one long search.”
“ Search?” she squeaked.
“ A search for you, of course… and it has taken so awfully long.”
Sure it sounded like a line, but by now she didn’t care. “A search for me?”
“ I’ve dreamed dreams about you.”
“ That’s just ridiculous. How could you? You don’t- didn’t even know me until tonight.”
“ No, it is true. Dreams are like mirrors held up to the soul, and you are the one in my dreams, and I want now to show you my virtual soul, my other love which allows me the freedom of the seaman’s life.”
“ Virtual reality I’ve heard of, but virtual soul?” she asked, looking out beyond the riggings of the many boats and ships in harbor. “Is that like some new rock band?”
He pointed toward his sailing vessel. “It is where my other self resides, where I am free, unencumbered…”
“ Oh, I’ll bet.” She tried to laugh, but something in his eyes told her not to. “I mean, I bet you can do just about anything you want with that kind of a… a ship. So what kind of weed or pill is this virtual soul? Or are we talking PCPs? I don’t do needles.”
“ No, you misunderstand. It is not a drug. It is my life.”
“ Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound gross or anything.”
“ It is where my Tauto lives.”
“ Your tattoo? Lives?”
“ No, not tattoo, dear. Certainly you’ve heard of the Tau cross?”
“ Tau cross? That sounds like a good name for a boat, but what’s a Tau cross?”
“ The T-cross. It is an essential element of nature. Where two lives cross, such as our lives are crossing tonight, now… below this moon.”
“ Is that like what you mean by virtual soul? Or is that just what you call your boat?”
“ Never mind,” he replied, pointing toward his boat, which was lost amid the forest of others. “Isn’t she beautiful? All I need now is someone like you to share her with.”
“ How did you get… I mean, how can you afford such a boat?”
“ It was an inheritance. One of many.”
She could hardly believe her luck. “What do you do, besides sail, I mean?”
“ I write.”
“ Really? What kind of writing?”
“ You will laugh.”
“ No, no I won’t. I think it’s romantic, that you write.”
“ I write stories, mysteries, romances. I earn some from that, and as I said, I have an inheritance.”
“ You’re independently wealthy?”
“ Well-off, let’s say. Now, will you come aboard? We can take her out, and you can enjoy the river from a whole new and exciting perspective.”
“ Sure… sure, why not? Let me just say good-bye to my friends. You’ll drive me home after we dock?”
“ Oh, of course, absolutely.” There again was that divine English accent. Dreamy, she thought. “Be right back, then.”
“ Meet me at the boat.” It took all of ten seconds to tell her friends not to bother waiting for her, that she had scored big time. They were full of questions, which tumbled forth with their giggling; they were anxious to know more about the handsome, sun- painted god that Kathy had cornered.
“ All I know is he’s European or something with a nice accent, and his name is Patric without a K. Talks with an English accent, I think, like Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, and he’s loaded as well as handsome. So, girls, have a nice night. Ciao…”
It was the last image-her friends smiling and waving- which Kathy Marie Harmon recalled when once again the brutal, sadistic bastard brought her around to consciousness. He wouldn’t let her die so easily, wouldn’t let her find the peace she had moments ago accepted. She was too weak to fight him any longer, and he placed her, naked, into the water alongside the other dead girls. That’s exactly what she was now: a dead girl..
She felt the stranglehold of the noose about her neck and the tearing ropes at her wrists; she heard the powerful jets of the motor as he revved it up, and in a moment her glazed eyes made out the back of the boat, the big letters spelling out the T-cross; then the stalwart, potent rush of the sea- water slammed into her and her entire body was dragged paper-doll fashion, a puppet on a string to bring him perverted-beyond-satanic kicks.
She herself was beyond tears, beyond pain actually. She felt a languishing, uncaring feeling wash over her on the wave created when he powered up the boat for faster speed, dragging her form through the now ugly, dark sea that had until so recently been a beautiful, romantic setting for her and the man she thought he was.
She’d been so wrong.
His every word to her had been a lie.
He had orchestrated a trap.
She had stepped willingly, blindly into his trap, into the trap of the Night Crawler’s tangled and perverted net. Then the boat slowed and the monster who called himself Patric brought it to a stuttering halt, her cold body slamming hard into the bow, pressed in by the other dead girls dangling there with her, and he returned to the bow to look out over the side to taunt her, saying, “Life is death, death is life, and now you go to a greater glory… the glory of Tauto, the god of all things which are indivisible. Now you travel to the virtual soul…”
Seeing that she remained yet alive, he returned to the controls and dragged her farther out to sea.
Two Days Later, Miami-Dade Police Department Crime Lab and Morgue, Evening
Jessica was relieved to learn that Dr. Andrew Coudriet was involved all day in courtroom testimony, giving evidence on a Mafia-linked killing, and had become too fatigued to meet with her until the following day. Meanwhile, he’d left word that his offices were at her disposal, and that she had carte blanche with respect to the physical evidence already logged and remaining. This meant she had full access to the most recent victim’s body as well. She and Santiva had flown back to Miami earlier in the day, having finally finished up in the Keys.
They’d returned with what she trusted was enough evidence to bury the Night Crawler several times over when and if they ever caught the bastard.
She’d learned that there was a positive ID on the bracelet, and although continuing to match the tissue and blood seemed a footnote to the truth, she ordered the tests just the same. She had also put a team of experts to work on the photos from the crime scenes and the photos of missing parts found inside the sharks that had been caught off the coast of Key Largo. They had to work from photos because, save for Allison Norris, all the victims had by now been either buried or cremated, and any exhumations appeared at this point out of the question for several reasons, not the least being the costs, in both financial and emotional terms.
The photo expert teams must attempt to match up, as if they were placing jigsaw pieces into a puzzle, the various parts with the parts missing from victims who’d come before Allison Norris. If they had any additional matches, this could speak volumes about the killer. From there, further study would go forward and decisions regarding exhumations made. They hoped such measures could be avoided.
After suiting up, Jessica had gone straight for the freezer cabinet housing what remained of Allison Norris, and now the body, such as it was, lay before her. Two assisting physicians, internists who’d aided Dr. Coudriet in the initial autopsy, were at Jessica’s disposal. The two men stood nearby, ready to assist in any way possible, or so she’d been told.
What she hoped to gain by a second examination, she didn’t herself know, so explaining it to the two internists wasn’t particularly successful. She merely stated-in an effort to cool the two anxious interns and their inquiring minds-”I see no reason for a second full-fledged autopsy.”
“ Good,” one responded in knee-jerk fashion.
“ We’ll call my examination merely a routine check, for the record and my FBI protocol.” She said this for the microphone as well as for the worried pair, who had donned surgical masks and garb, as had Jessica.
One of the men seemed to buy it. She was as cursory as possible, sensing that both Drs. Thorn and Powers were anxious and appeared to have been coached into a reticent silence.
Coudriet’s two men, Theodore Thorn and Owen Powers, both capable young interns, explained that they had felt duty-bound to be on hand. Still, she had little doubt that duty-bound, properly translated, meant that Coudriet had ordered them to be there.
All was routine until Jessica questioned the findings on the throat and the single wrist of the girl. She saw the ligature marks just as Coudriet and his associates had before her-ugly discoloration scars about the neck, indicating that the girl was strangled. Of this, there was no doubt. But the ligature marks were soft compared with the thumb tracks embedded in the tissue at the larynx. Some things even the ocean couldn’t completely wipe away, such as a broken hyoid bone.
Jessica reached up and turned off the camera that was taping the secondary autopsy; she did so lavishly enough to tell the two men that what she was about to say was off the record. “This monster so thrusted his thumbs into the girl’s throat that it scarred and dented tissue far below the surface, so far below that it’s clear even after several layers of skin have sloughed away and nearly a week has gone by since discovery of the body; and it’s estimated that the body’s time in the water was an astounding three and a half to four weeks. Doesn’t that strike anyone as odd, that it took so long for the body to surface?”
Coudriet’s men remained silent, one of them nodding.
Seeing they had no comment, she switched the TV camera back on in just as ceremonious a fashion as before, a bit angry at the two crows who stood across from her. Now on the record, she continued, “The killer rammed his large thumbs deep into her throat. A closer look tells me that the girl’s entire pharynx was bruised and swollen before death.”
The pharynx is the tubelike structure that acts as both the digestive tract and the breathing hose. It also works in speech, changing shape to allow a person to form vowel sounds. Jessica momentarily wondered what kind of sounds Allison might have emitted under such brute force applied to the muscle and cartilage and membrane. The entire structure divides into three distinct regions, the second being the oropharynx, which extends from the soft palate to the level of the hyoid bone just below the lower jaw.
It was this area that Jessica took great time and care in examining, causing Thorn and Powers to stare and sweat beneath their surgical gowns. She asked for one of them to grab the Polaroid nearby and snap close-ups of the area she had opened with her scalpel. After Powers snapped three shots, Jessica asked Thorn to hold up a sterile tray to receive the small samplings she now sliced from the larynx tissue.
“ I thought this was going to be a cursory exam,” said Powers.
Jessica shot back, “It is.” Thorn abruptly said, “Dr. Coudriet was aware of the condition of the throat.”
“ But he chose to examine it only externally?”
“ He examined it by hand, coming up from the breastplate after the Y-cut was made below. He knew she’d been choked to death before she drowned, if that’s what you’re… wondering. And besides, there was pressure on to do as little as possible and still call it an autopsy. Allison Norris’s father’s a very influential man.”
“ Yes, well, if that’s the case, why wasn’t it reported as a strangulation death?”
“ It was, eventually.” She bit her lip and nodded. “I see.” Coudriet was no doubt under some pressure at the time and saw little difference in whether the dead girl was strangled by rope or by hand or drowned, since all had the same result. This explained his qualifying language in the report.
Jessica next repeated her procedure for the laryngophar- ynx, which extends from the base of the hyoid bone to the esophagus. The entire region, up and down, was badly bruised, not simply from the ugly blemish caused by the attempt to mask rope burns, but from powerful hands, the hands of a sociopath who had killed many times before until the routine and habit of his killing had begun to actually bore him. so that now he slowly and lastingly strangled his victims, no doubt in a controlled fashion, in controlled time and in a controlled space-his space- where he felt most comfortable and had a great deal of time to carry out a lingering murder. He then obviously dumped the body into the ocean-but where, to keep it from surfacing for so long?
Thorn and Powers exhibited signs of boredom themselves now. They’d been up and down this territory before, no doubt wondering what volumes of information she hoped to locate in the larynx, or voice box.
“ The hyoid bone,” she said, as if to allay any doubts, “while fractured, remains very much intact, indicating some sort of controlled strangulation, in which the killer took his evil time with the strangulation process. Patient, composed, self-possessed strangulation. The killer shows all the characteristics of an organized murderer who had likely fantasized killing for years before he ever attempted it, and who, once he did attempt the thing, began to meticulously work out the particulars in cool and cunning detail.”
“ You got all that from looking at the throat?” asked a befuddled-looking Thorn, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his nose.
She ignored his question and continued, “Now that he has any number of killings behind him, it has become a ritualized killing sport, each step as important as the next, and nothing left to chance or forgetfulness.”
She explored the wounds further, no simple task given the bloated condition of the skin; but the freezer had at least held the decay in check. She used a stainless-steel probe and handheld magnifying glass. “He’s devised the perfect murders, so far as he is concerned. And in conceiving such murders and carrying them out, he’s given over his soul to whatever demons drive him.” Yes, the hyoid bone was fractured-as was reported in the original autopsy-indicative of strangulation, but she’d seen many a crushed hyoid bone, and this one was far from crushed. In fact, it was near intact. She so noted this fact for the record, which disquieted Thorn and Powers a bit. Jessica was used to posing questions and scenarios as she worked; it had become part of her modus operandi.
She didn’t bother now with asking Thorn or Powers anything further, but she did ask the microphone and camera, ‘ ‘Could the victim have been alive yet after the fracture of the hyoid? It was quite certain that she was, since the lungs, too, were full of water when the body was discovered, although in and of itself this fact does not prove death by drowning. Clearly, more tests need to be run, but my most educated guess is running along the lines of a torture murder of the sort the FBI rates on a scale of one to ten, Mad Matthew Matisak having been a Tort. 9. This fiend, if he is slowly strangling the life from his victims, only to allow them to resurface from death as it were, only to put them through the torment again, and repeatedly, ranks right up there with the blood-drinking vampire killer. While he does not appear to have cannibalized or drunk his victim’s blood, he obviously breathes in their suffering to empower himself.”
Thorn, even while shaking his head and pushing aside Powers’s restraining hand, asked, “What’re you saying. Dr. Coran?’’
“ I’m saying this murdering… fiend first incapacitates his victim with repeated strangulations and then drowns them, that this evil being, whoever or whatever he is, has turned back down the evolutionary trail, allowing his most base, animal desires to overtake him.”
“ But why repeatedly kill someone?”
“ He obviously gains great pleasure at watching an Allison Norris struggle and suffer, and he too much enjoys watching his victim languish and agonize to allow her a quick death. He wants long hours to pass before he allows her to go.”
“ But why?”
“ He wants to control the clock, hold back time and death itself, to send her soul across a high wire of tension, with himself at the controls; he wants to control death itself.”
If memory served Jessica, Dr. Andrew Coudriet had not questioned the method in which the throat had been brutalized and the bone splintered, as opposed to crushed or mangled. He had taken it at face value that the strangulation was the result of a tightly wound rope about the neck; he’d described it as a hangman’s noose, due to the angle of the ligature marks. And he was definitely correct in that assumption. A hangman’s noose burned the back of the neck at the base of the brain far more than it did across the Adam’s apple and throat. She had noted this in her report.
Yes, Coudriet was right about the rope burns, but before the rope burns, the girl had been strangled by hand, and strangled badly, repeatedly. The question remained, was she choked to death so far as the killer knew-an important distinction in determining the level and duration of torture heaped upon the victim-before or after she was lynched? Also, was she dead before he threw her into the water, or had she been choked repeatedly first and then, while still alive, thrown into the water, where exhaustion and blackout would do the rest? Jessica asked the questions aloud after formulating them. Articulating the horrid questions proved too much for Powers, who suddenly reached up and shut off the camera and audio. He stood staring across at Jessica now, the body lying between them. “Dr. Coudriet’s report had the lungs full with water, so the woman was alive when she swallowed the ocean.”
“ That may well be,” Jessica agreed, knowing that as far as many forensics experts were concerned that was the only way for the lungs to be filled with water. But Jessica wasn’t so sure. Water was a force that could find its way into the lungs of even a dead person, particularly if that force were guided. It didn’t have to be inhaled in to find its way into the lungs.
“ All right, let’s speculate on why the bodies are always found so far from the victim’s last known sighting. Hundreds of miles, in some cases.”
Thorn said, “We found her lungs bursting with water, so we know she was alive at the time of drowning.”
“ You ever hear of a pump?” she replied more sarcastically than she’d meant to. Still, she wondered at his use of the term bursting. It sounded like an exaggeration.
“ What?” Thorn replied.
“ The kind of monster we’re after, gentlemen, would be capable of killing her with his bare hands and then, using a mechanical device, pump her lungs full of water just to throw us off.”
Powers’s eyebrows rose appreciably as he asked, “Really?”
“ I know-I’ve hunted this type before.”
“ Do you really think-” began Thorn, but Powers put a hand against his chest, reminding him to keep his mouth shut.
Powers then sarcastically added, “If Dr. Coudriet says she was drowned, then she was drowned. He’s only handled ninety-two drownings this year. Do you really want to call his judgment into question?”
“ Killers sometimes mask their moves. You… we… can’t be too careful.”
“ The autopsy report faxed to you at Quantico was premature, but that wasn’t our fault; there wasn’t time,” explained Powers, his hands in the air.
“ Your superiors were on our necks,” added Thorn.
“ So it was a hurried report?”
“ Well, yes. It was hurried, I’m afraid. At the request of your FBI field office chief here-DeVries?”
DeVries was the first man to alert Eriq Santiva to the trouble brewing in Florida. Plagued by health problems, he’d since taken an extended leave. “Dr. Coudriet had wanted more time with the victim, but this one’s red hot, politically speaking.”
“ Understood-a senator’s girl.” And she did understand. She’d been in the same predicament on several occasions.
She stared closely again at the force-injury at the throat. She brought a more powerful magnifying glass on a swivel arm to bear on the wound, and found only collaboration for what she had originally theorized. “She was repeatedly strangled, gentlemen.”
“ Repeatedly?” asked Thorn, his eyeglasses bobbing.
“ Whoever did this took his own sweet time with her. Brought her to near death with his hands more than once before he threw her into the water. My guess? The rope burns came afterwards, and it’s also my guess that she was in the water when the rope burns did their work on her neck. She drowned from exhaustion in the water, possibly from blacking out and going under repeatedly-after considerable strangulation by hand.”
Thorn tore off his glasses and wiped his brow with a cloth; Powers, though more stoical, looked perturbed by this news as well. Each of them, Jessica included, tried to picture the type of killing ground-liquid, it appeared- that the killer worked out of. It had to be controlled; it had to be all his for the long hours he needed it.
Still Powers defended his boss, saying, “Dr. Coudriet must’ve wished to spare us the details.”
“ I’m sure,” she replied. “Look, what we’ve got here is a high-level torture victim, gentlemen: a young woman who didn’t go quietly into that gentle night…”
Thorn and Powers looked across at one another, most likely still unconverted by Jessica’s version of the truth, disbelieving that Dr. Coran or anyone else could deduce so much from so little.
She didn’t mind their skepticism, half expected it; furthermore, Jessica Coran didn’t care. What they thought mattered little. She had to tell Santiva what she had, but she wanted time to run some tests, to be certain of her deductions and to have some science to back her up. She wasn’t Kim Desinor, the psychic detective. No one was going to take her “vision/version” of the crime at face value, especially one so horrible as the image that now threatened to make her as ill as Thorn looked to be.
She intended to send some items connected to the various bodies and crime scenes back to headquarters at Quantico for Kim Desinor’s special brand of inspection, but what was there to send? Like Allison Norris’s partially dismembered body, all the others were without clothing, or rings, chains or bracelets. They wouldn’t have had Allison’s bracelet either if a certain shark hadn’t taken a certain tournament fisherman’s hooked bait below a certain boat off Key Largo some forty nautical miles south of Miami during a once-a- year fishing event sponsored by the very people who crusade to save the sharks.
She had reminded Santiva of what she’d said on the plane coming down about murder victims stamping their wills on the evidence, how a body placed in the ocean would find a way to shore, by hook or by crook. Now, with the message stamped clearly in the metal artifact found inside a dissected shark, Santiva had appreciatively agreed with her. What better evidence of this strange phenomenon than the bizarre fate of Allison Norris’s engraved bracelet. Had she, before death, hidden the bracelet away somewhere and somehow on her nude body, say in her mouth, only to later replace it? Or had the killer intended to send another “poetic” message by way of the bracelet, allowing it to remain on Allison’s wrist? Either way, the story of Precious had made a believer out of Eriq Santiva.
It may well have been that the killer was in such a state of excitement that he had somehow overlooked the bracelet. No doubt he had collected many such items of jewelry from his victims, likely used the trinket to fondle and to place around his genitals, to reanimate the lost moments leading up to the victim’s horrid death again and again, or until he struck again, taking another life, adding to his head count and the grisly paraphernalia of his murderer’s museum. “Find that museum,” Jessica had told Santiva on the helicopter ride back to Miami, “and you have his head on a platter.”
But for now, Jessica wondered what she might send back to Quantico for Kim Desinor’s inspection. A goddamn tissue culture, a strip of DNA? A hair sample, what little was left of the arm? Forget about the girl’s nails or fingerprints-there weren’t any, as nothing was left of them, the epidermal layer of skin and nails having long since sloughed off into the ocean along with the lower layers of skin. The body had to have been in the water at least three and a half to four weeks. So where in the ocean had it slumbered in the meantime? she continued to wonder.
She momentarily wondered what Kim, her colleague and friend at the Psychic Detection Unit of the FBI, would think of her forwarding a package of samples and body parts; wondered if Kim wouldn’t be better off with one of the internal organs, or at least a sliver of the heart. Kim had done wonders with the hearts in New Orleans the previous year when they’d tracked down the Queen of Hearts Killer, the maniac who terrorized the French Quarter and ripped the hearts from victims.
Jessica doubted that such forensic matter as organ tissue from the victims of the Night Crawler would be of any use to the psychic in this case. Would it not be better to fly Kim down, to provide her with the means to perform one of her patented psychometric readings over the body itself? Maybe the magician-sorceress-could pull something out of the collective and to-date bare hat.
Jessica made a mental note to discuss the possibilities with Santiva.
“ How can you be certain she was strangled more than once?” asked an interested Thorn, breaking into her thoughts, his beaked nose twitching. She frowned at first, then clicked the recording camera and audio back on before she began to explain. “Look closely here at the center of the wound. The way he did her, well, it’s certain that it was done with a direct, blunt force, and not as the result of a cord or rope about the neck. But there are two distinct circular marks as well, so he used a favored cord or rope during part of his party time-before he got to the larger, thicker rope that was the last to be tied about her neck. The wider strip, if you look closely, is actually newer, fresher than the smaller choking device used. In fact, the wider strip is the freshest mark on the entire body except for those cuts and slashes which were determined to be from the coral reef as her body drifted toward shore.”
“ We looked at those cuts carefully, yes,” agreed Powers, “and they didn’t fit the contours of any knife blade. They were all the doing of Mother Nature.”
“ I guess if there’s anything to be grateful for-and believe me, there’s not much here-it’s that this creep doesn’t get off on blood. Frankly, gentlemen, I’m sick to death of butchers who have some craving for mutilating dead bodies into unrecognizable cuts of meat.”
“ What’re you thinking?” asked Thorn. “You think this guy is some sort of gentleman killer who doesn’t want to destroy the beauty of the bodily form? If so, think again. He just lets the sea do his dirty work for him.”
Owen Powers snapped off his gloves and, nodding his agreement, added, “I think this bastard’s a momma’s boy, afraid of the sight of blood, afraid to get his hands really dirty. He probably vomits at the sight of blood. So he chokes and drowns them instead.”
“ You may be right, but I’m not so sure he doesn’t just prefer that their deaths be more lingering and painful. A single knife wound can send a victim into paralysis and shock and the fun’s over. I think this guy just likes to have long-lasting fun.” Jessica stared across at Thorn, who looked the picture of Buddy Holly minus the guitar, his studious air and overbite marking him as having been a sure whipping boy for bullies during his childhood. Powers, by comparison, was muscular and handsome, sporting a full beard and deep-set, penetrating eyes. He hadn’t totally ignored Jessica’s conjecture, although he pretended otherwise.
“ So, whoever this guy is, he likes to use his hands,” Powers now said.
“ Rather than a meat cleaver,” agreed Thorn, pushing his glasses back up on his nose with his rubbered fingers and looking away from the body, regaining his composure again.
Jessica pushed the swivel-arm magniscope out of her way and replied, “The bastard also likes rope, and plenty of it. He enjoys trussing up his victims. He likes to touch his victims, a hands-on kind of guy. And while he’s not particularly fond of blood, it’s only because it doesn’t excite his libido.”
A booming voice through a magnified electronic filter made them all jump. “Are you saying he gets off on this, sexually?” asked Dr. Andrew Coudriet from over her shoulder and above, looking down on the scene from a viewing tower where students usually gathered to watch an autopsy. He spoke through an intercom, and Jessica wondered just how eccentric the red-haired M.E. had become over the ensuing years since she’d last seen him lecturing on a stage at George Washington State University.
One thing was obvious-the world hadn’t been particularly kind to Coudriet. Besides the white-gray pallor of his skin and the thinned-out patch of red hair dusting his cranium, there was a decided limp and arthritic gait as he found the stairs and came toward her. She decided to answer the man. “What excites this bastard is the draining, the feel of death as it moves through his fingertips, as death washes over his chosen victim. In fact, he likes it so damned much that once is not enough for this SOB. He wants to feel her life drain from her once, twice, three times, maybe four before the night and the fun comes to an end. And I’ll tell you something else, Dr. Coudriet… gentlemen… this body’s been stashed in the water somehow for just about as long as this young woman has gone missing.”
“ So I gathered,” Coudriet replied, his amplified voice like that of God, his eyes daring her. “Makes you wonder where the cadaver has been all this time; you suppose our killer maintains a Davy Jones locker somewhere out there at sea?”
She’d wondered the same thing-how was this creep keeping the bodies from surfacing sooner?
Thorn muttered across at his male colleague, “I tried to tell you that, Owen.”
Powers bridled at this, as if the other man had slapped him with a pair of wet, heavy gloves, showing him up in front of a woman. “I’ve never worked with floaters before, Ted. So what do I know.”
“ There are ligature marks on each ankle where I surmise ankle weights were used, the marks having been caused by metal as you might see with handcuffs, but no such weights came in with the body-or any of the earlier bodies either, Dr. Coran,” the Miami M.E. stated.
“ And as for the ligature marks about the wrists?”
“ Well, I’m inclined to believe they’re due to rope and not metal as in cuffs.”
She hadn’t yet gotten to the marks on the ankles, but she took a cursory look and replied, “I must agree, Dr. Coudriet.”
“ Bravo!” pealed the booming voice of Dr. Coudriet. “But, still, the cuts from both the weights and the ropes are so deep, like knife wounds.” Coudriet pushed through the door now and entered the autopsy room, with Jessica wondering just how long he’d been standing overhead. The older man, sporting an Armani suit, continued speaking. “It’s as if the rope grew tighter and tighter around the skin over a period of days, weeks even. How do you account for that?”
“ Leather thongs,” she suggested. “Possibly…”
“ But you don’t think so?”
“ No more than you.” Coudriet moved closer, extending his hand to her, and they shook, with smiles all around. “Lotta pressure on those wrists and the neck, and a great deal of moisture buildup in those wounds, too. The single intact wrist was near severed as a result.”
“ Not unlike the neck,” concurred Jessica.
“ Well, it does sound as if we’re pretty much in agreement as to how this unfortunate young woman came to be in this state.”
“ We are,” she replied, liking Coudriet instantly.
“ So do you wish me to tell you, or will you tell me what we have here?”
“ I would like very much for you to tell me whatever suspicions you harbor about our killer, Dr. Coudriet. I think you’ve already heard my own theories.”Coudriet looked at each of his assistants in turn, took a deep breath and paced before her, saying, “They were all dragged.”
“ Dragged?” asked Powers.
“ Maliciously, through the water, at relatively high speeds,” Coudriet continued.
Jessica nodded her agreement, saying, “Frankly, Doctor, I was beginning to suspect as much.”
“ Wanted verification, did you? That’s quite understandable,” he said, nodding. “Intelligent, I daresay. It’s what I want, too.”
“ Thank you, Doctor.” She said it both for the compliment and for the implication that he wanted full cooperation and give-and-take to reign here. She just wasn’t certain she could trust him to actually carry through on such promises.
“ You realize that we’ve all heard about your exploits, Dr. Coran, especially with respect to one Mad Matthew Matisak, and your daring on Hawaii with the Kowona case, not to mention the heart-taker-in New Orleans, was it?” Now Coudriet went to the monitor and shut down the camera and audio.
“ Yes, well, thank you. I do my best, and I’m sure we can work together, Doctor. I have the utmost respect for your work. I’ve read every paper you’ve ever presented at the Forensics Institute for Medical Advancement and in the Medical Examiner’s Eye.”
The mention of the newsletter for the Medical Examiner’s International Association brought a smile to Andrew Coudriet’s broad, passionate lips, and well it should have. Only the top men in the field were published in the prestigious and eclectic newsletter. But the old M.E.’s smile was quickly extinguished and replaced with a grim frown when Jessica turned to Owen Powers and asked, “Dr. Powers, can you get a close-up shot of the wrist? Follow that up with a close-up of the severed wrist. I know we have some, but the lighting here is far superior to what we had in Islamorada.”
Powers momentarily looked to Dr. Coudriet as if for permission, then snapped to it. “Ahh… yes, certainly, Dr. Coran.”
“ These close-ups of the wrists and throat will be helpful. I want to compare them to what we found in Islamorada.”
“ But Powers has already done a full set of photos,” protested Ted Thorn. “They’re in Dr. Coudriet’s portfolio on the corpse.”
“ I’m starting my own FBI collection, for the record.” She looked over to Dr. Coudriet now and added, “I believe we’re done here, Doctor.”
“ Good, and thank you…” he impishly replied.
“ For what?”
“ Showing my boys here a good time, and teaching them something in the bargain, Doctor.”
“ Well… thank you,” she replied, surprised at his courteous remark, and knowing also that her having further disfigured the body by opening up the throat took him off the hook with the senator from Florida, Allison’s bereaved father. She sensed that the elder M.E. would have no difficulty in passing information along to the senator. No wonder he’d worked it so that he would not even be in the room when she took to the body.
Coudriet walked her toward the changing room. “You’ll have to pardon my young assistants. We’re all on edge for many reasons, not the least being that we’ve had to stare into the bowels of a demon the likes of which no one truly wants to deal with, yet we are in no position to walk away, either.”
“ I can appreciate that.” She started to push through the door, but he quickly grabbed it and held it open for her.
“ I have since heard about what was found at the shark research center in the Keys. You will share what you have found there with us?”
“ Absolutely, and not to worry about Thorn and Powers. Floaters are the worst kinds of corpses to work on, even worse than burn victims. I understand their reluctance to work on the same floater twice,” Jessica tried to assure him. “Kinda like double jeopardy in the emotions department.”
“ And dealing with this floater on this table was particularly difficult work, because the Norris girl is… was, rather, the granddaughter of Congressman Bill Norris, and the niece of a former governor of the state as well as… well, you already know all that, now don’t you.”
Actually, she had not known the girl was quite so well- connected; still, beyond this indisputably political fact, the corpse was so damnably mannequinlike in appearance that it no longer resembled anything human, but rather a gelatin mold in places, a slick of albino tar in others. Strong political ties could no longer help her.
Coudriet laughed mildly at some deep inner thought. “You wish to share something funny, Doctor? I could use a laugh,” she said, unable to fathom what could possibly be funny in this affair.
“ No, not at all. It’s just that this is more than just a case of a simple floating victim perturbing my boys.
The two of them see this as an opportunity to advance their careers, if they can impress the former governor and Congressman Norris, or the senator, you see. “But you don’t?” He laughed further, more uproariously now. “Me? What can a congressman or a senator do for this old shell? No, my dear, I believe you could do more for me and my libido than all of the congressmen in all the states combined, thank you.” He laughed more-an infectious laugh-and this time Jessica joined him. Maybe she was wrong about him, she thought now.
Still, she thought the use of the term boys for Thorn and Powers spoke volumes, and she wondered if the doctors were some sort of threesome outside the office, say golfing buddies. But she rather doubted that. Coudriet likely simply thought of them as his underling children. “In a way, I’d rather work on a faceless, featureless corpse than the other extreme,” he said, confiding what she thought to be an odd statement, even for a medical examiner.
“ Really?” she replied, pulling wide another door and stepping into the closet where she could strip away her surgical garb and dump it into a basket.
He’d followed her in after taking a long, lingering look at her backside. “A floater like this isn’t near so bad as a victim with identifiable features,” he continued, trying to convince her of his sincerity but unable to fully do so. He was mostly talking to hear himself, she gathered. “Especially when the corpse has a familiar face, say that of an acquaintance. Ever happen to you, Coran?”
“ Once or twice, yes.”
“ Then you know what I mean. Good. Experience shows in you. Now, with this Norris girl’s cadaver here, unless you saw the pictures in the papers of this young woman before this happened to her, you could just treat her like a mannequin, like one of those corpses we had in medical school, right, Doctor?” He looked to Jessica for affirmation, but Jessica didn’t give him the satisfaction. He took another long, lingering look to admire her form as she removed the green gown, displaying her crisp, white blouse and beige slacks beneath. In the other room, she could hear the click-click-click of Powers’s Polaroid at work.
“ But if they’ve got looks, these sweet features,” continued Coudriet, coming around to face her, “well, it’s just harder for me, personally. I’m a grandfather now, three times over, and I look into those innocent eyes and faces, and I think if God ever put one of those innocent little sweethearts of mine on my slab, I’d run out of here screaming. Be right off to the loony farm. Felt the same way when I saw those little baby children blown to bloody shards in Oklahoma City. What’s so frightening about it all is that in today’s world, I have a one-in-five chance of seeing one of my grandchildren violently killed before I die.”
She mentally questioned his statistics but had to agree that he wasn’t far off. He was a half inch or so taller than she, his eyes a burnt umber, the brown orbs shining orange under the dim light of the dressing area. The little orange flecks glowing in his eyes matched his limitless freckles and augmented what was left of his red hair. In his time he’d been a powerfully built, handsome man, and he still managed to bring together enough stage presence to make others curiously jealous of him. His eyebrows were bushy across a thick ridge of forehead. He was a genius and he knew it, and he wasn’t certain he wanted Jessica’s competition on the case. His little display of first trying to make her feel uncomfortable and threatened, then the mild form of sexual innuendo, followed by ruminations about his grandchildren and their vulnerability, meant that he felt vulnerable. The Night Crawler cases had so escalated as to eclipse any and all others his department was working on- or had ever worked on during his twenty-nine-year reign as chief medical examiner for the city of Miami.
She guessed that he might’ve retired with an outstanding record, but then this had come up, and he felt duty-bound to see it through, like the president of a failing business trying desperately to see black again before retirement. She both respected and disliked his stubborn Irish. And she realized that he was understandably feeling like a man under a microscope, the intense heat of which could burn away a lifetime career.
She did her best to allow for this. “I guess I know what you mean,” she said, humoring him regarding his preference for a corpse without a face to one that possessed fine, comparatively healthy features.
He suddenly took her by the arm and escorted her back into the autopsy room, where he stood and pointed at the bloated, fishy creation of the sea that lay across the slab. Powers was just finishing his snapshots.
The senior medical man began a new diatribe. “She has no hue in her bloated eyelids, no eyebrows, lashes or color; this girl has neither a pointed nor a flat nose, no ears jutting out or lying back in feline majesty; no moles, fissures, pockmarks, overbites, underbites; the lips are neither dark nor light, thick nor thin, nor meaningful, since you can’t say where they begin or end; and as for the eyes… God, were they ever so deep-set in life as now when they are missing altogether, pecked out by crabs and microscopic sea life?”
“ Dr. Coudriet,” said Powers, taking hold of his boss’s arm. But Coudriet shook off the other man’s touch, continuing, “Is that her brow or that of a Cyclops? If she had eyes, brows, a large or small forehead, at least she’d be somebody, even in death.”
“ I think I’ve seen enough for one night,” Jessica firmly told Coudriet, anxious now to step away from Allison Nor ris’s remains for the last time, angry with Coudriet’s having put her so near the girl and so far from her main objective.
But he continued on, waving his hands as he spoke, a professor repeating a favored lecture to a student. “With this kind of bloated corpse, every minuscule pore and cell is saline-swelled, burying the facial characteristics in pulpy flesh, so there is no recognizing Allison for Allison.”
Now Dr. Thorn tried to intervene, using a kind word. “Doctor Coudriet, it’s late, and you must be exhausted…”
Still he continued on as if he were alone with the corpse. “With Allison Norris, even the distinguishing birthmark on her hip-used along with dental and medical records to ID her-was so ballooned up as to be three times its normal size. She-it-had no identity left, not to speak of, no fingernails or prints, eyebrows or lashes…”
Jessica easily and quickly acknowledged all this as true enough. The sea had been merciless, unaffected actually, uncaring and unforgiving-like a storm-leaving Allison’s body a blank, a mold upon which nothing had been stamped. All color was bleached white to an albino finish, a waxy white lather painted on with a huge brush to create the patina of death. Her auburn hair, once quite close to Jessica’s own in appearance, was bleached from the intense Florida sun. And even this hinted at a horrid truth, Jessica realized. The body had floated atop the water for at least two and perhaps three weeks before discovery. But where and how could it have without being seen by someone somewhere? And if dragged through the water, wouldn’t it have had to be by boat? And if by boat, could not the killing ground have been the sea, the entirety of the ocean itself? If so, this explained a great deal.
Coudriet, like some bad actor now, was still working on his monologue. “Without the birthmark and the dental records, Allison’s body could never have been identified. The quivering mass ot” flesh remaining was like an empty slate, and decay had even blemished this when the abdomen, due to a buildup of noxious gases, had erupted and ruptured. A hell of a lot of lish had dined on her after that.”
As if on cue, a globule of flesh, now at room temperature, first separated itself from the body like a piece of living clay and then spattered onto the white-tiled morgue floor, where it promptly seeped like thick syrup through a grate over a drain below the slab, following the water seeping from a hose that ran continuously to keep the area clean. Pieces of Allison were disappearing before Jessica’s eyes, Jessica thought just as Coudriet. being careless, still wearing his “civvy” shoes, slipped on a second globule off the dripping dead woman, going to one knee. Powers quickly helped the older man back up. Coudriet’s face was flushed red now, and Jessica realized for the first time that he’d been drinking.
There wasn’t much hope of learning anything further from Allison tonight, but at this rate, Jessica wondered how much more Allison’s corpse could tell anyone, including Jessica Coran or even the impatient and obsessed Dr. Coudriet.
Jessica made a few additional quick assumptions about the killer and his modus operandi, but she wisely kept these to herself for the time being. It was late, and Coudriet was being a tad more than strange and eccentric now. When he signaled with a slight nod that he was finished, Ted Thorn took charge to remove the body.
Jessica thanked Coudriet for his opinion and his time, adding that she was tired and thought she’d go back to the hotel to get some rest, in order to return refreshed in the morning.
“ Yes, of course,” Coudriet agreed as if coming out of a trance. She wondered if, besides the booze she now smelled on his breath, he were on something-perhaps medication for an ailment.“Well, good night to you all. I’ll likely see you tomorrow.”
She quickly exited, noticing the embarrassment on the faces of the two junior men in the room. Perhaps their mentor was slipping in more ways than one.