Philosophy is written in this grand book-I mean the universe-which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written…
Jessica had sat up with Jay Leno and the rest of the Tonight Show gang via satellite, but she'd lost all but the back-scatter noise of the show in her concentration over the series of files left her by James Parry. Each photo and bio spoke of a young woman with a full life ahead of her, each of the victims coming from a large extended family, a few with children of their own. They weren't the typical big-city prostitutes one might expect. They weren't hardened or beaten or haggard, anorexic or overweight; they didn't have broken noses, scars or pimples, and from their photos most of them looked clean of drugs, their eyes clear and vibrant, speaking of souls filled with life and interests. Several-as Parry had intimated-were part-timers, supplementing their income in order to finish out a term at the university, while still others had no record of prostitution and had last been seen at a regular place of work.
Linda Kahala, also known as Lina, of mixed Portuguese and Hawaiian blood, had been a dark-skinned beauty with radiant round eyes that seemed, from her photo at least, to be filled with an island innocence that likely got her killed.
She wondered if this most recently vanished girl, had actually become the killer's ninth victim by Parry's count, or if she'd turn up at a boyfriend's house or telephoned from the mainland, having run away. Parry had made some big leaps, trying to connect a series of earlier disappearances on the island of Maui, a far less developed and more rural isle, with the disappearances in Honolulu on Oahu.
Jessica wondered if the sweet-faced woman-child in the photograph was as innocent as she appeared; whether she had gotten sucked into the seamier side of Honolulu's cesspool. Every city, no matter its outward beauty and wonder, nourished a seductive, erotically appealing underbelly, all the more alluring to the poor, and it would appear that Linda Kahala might well have been caught in the quagmire, desperately in need of funds to continue at the university… and if her friends could turn tricks for tuition, why not her?
The victims had commonalties among them, each one itemized in Parry's hand. First was appearance and race, then the fact they all worked in service-type jobs catering to tourists, even the ones labeled prostitutes. All of them had at one time lived in or near Kahuiui on Maui or here in Honolulu City, in and around a tightly woven ghetto surrounding Chinatown and an ancient neighborhood of mixed and Hawaiian families, where rows of squat little bungalows hugged the Ala Wai Canal. According to Chief James Parry, thin little Linda Kahala had last been seen on Ala Wai Boulevard the very night that Officers Hilani and Kaniola were murder by gun and machete. Coincidence or connection? If the two incidents were connected, she reasoned now in a half-dazed state, the mangled limb in Lau's freezer could well be Linda Kahala's.
She fell asleep to the sounds of Leno's band as he wrapped for a commercial, her subconscious seemingly grateful for the noise of life. She fought her own mind for control of her dreams, determined that they be pleasant and relaxing, and soon she was back beneath Maui's coastal waters at the incredible underwater
Molokini crater where she'd been diving before she was called to Honolulu. The sights were as breathtaking as when she was actually there, but what was even greater than this was the absolute feeling of freedom in the water; weightlessness brought its own rewards, a sense of absolution. It was the same high she'd heard fliers speak of when they left the ground, the same adrenaline rush that mountain climbers felt and that sky divers loved.
She looked around to find herself completely alone in the water save for its teeming life, reflecting all the colors of the rainbow amid the fanning, waving coral. She saw a school of exquisite silver-blue fish disappear into a cavern below her. Darting after, feeling playful and alive, Jessica swam without hesitation into the black hole of shadow below her, where the beauty of the place took on an entirely new face; still lovely, it was an abiding deep blue turning to midnight in the cave. It was a mysterious and teasing midnight world into which the fish had simply vanished.
She might have slept comfortably with this image, but suddenly the strength of the current which she'd glided on pinned her, forcing her forward into the blackness ahead of her, its strength ten times her own. She could not escape by the route she'd entered, unless the current receded and she caught the force as it returned, but it was growing, and became so turbulent now as to have taken on the character of a killer, capable of smashing her against the jagged rocks she saw silhouetted in the darkness.
She felt a cold chill break out beneath her diving suit; felt gooseflesh slither along her body; heard the symbiotic human and mechanical sound of her own labored breathing through her regulator growing in intensity, now dangerously erratic as she sucked frantically on what little oxygen was left her. She felt dizzy, disoriented, confused as the water tumbled her about in the now-blue-black cavern, trapping her here, a powerless paper doll. The cutting, jagged edges of rock tore into her, ripping her suit and flesh, rending her life support from her mouth, crushing her tanks. Her body was held against the rock surface above her and she could feel both her blood and her breath slowly taken from her.
Floating past her were bones and fleshy body parts, the long-haired, severed heads of dark-featured women, and one of them came to rest before her, pinned with her against the volcanic cave wall here below the Blow Hole, and this one's eyes were those of Linda Kahala. The girl's wide eyes filled both the cavern and Jessica's mind.
She sat bolt upright, desperately fighting for breath in the phantom cave below the sea, fending off the dead girl who had come into her bed. “Christ!” she shouted at the room and at herself, angry for allowing herself even a subconscious moment of fear. She had fought long and hard to overcome the scars left upon her by the madman named Matisak, now safely locked away in a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane, but she knew that she'd never again be the same Jessica Coran she'd been before he had maimed her, that weakness and doubt shadowed her every step. It was the kind of frailty she did not want Parry, or anyone else for that matter, to ever see in her.
A bittersweet taste of perspiration found her lips as beads cascaded tearlike from her forehead and down her cheek. She gave another moment's thought to Matisak, who even from behind bars had managed to get word to the press that he, from the confines of his cell, had meticulously led Jessica ever closer to the identity of the cannibalistic Claw in New York the year before. The story, finding print in the worst rags, claimed that she had used “Professor” Matisak's considerable powers of deduction in her remarkable manhunt to locate and destroy the Claw. Matisak, who was once a teacher, known also as 'Teach,” had a well-fed ego thanks to the incompetence of her superiors and the tabloid press. Two years of incarceration had only inflated his self-image and his lunacy.
She wanted nothing more to do with the maniac who had killed Otto Boutine, and she'd made this clear to her superiors at the close of the Claw case when that bastard saw real justice done him: a paralyzing bullet she had sent through his skull, allowing him plenty of time for the kind of suffering and pain he'd inflicted on others before he went completely catatonic and died.
Now, with a new section head, the overtures on the part of the new chief to keep gleaning information from Matisak left her cold. She'd told Zanek never again.
Still, while she knew that rationally Matisak was thousands upon thousands of miles away and imprisoned, he was somehow here with her, his chilling astral spirit bringing down the temperature in the hotel room. He was with her now… along with Linda Kahala… tonight in Honolulu.
Several days later, July 15, 1995
After several nights of fitful dreams and nightmare visitations by Matisak, the Claw and their phantom evil here in Honolulu, the Trade Winds Killer, the toll was beginning to show on Jessica. Between 3 A.M. nightmares and all-day stints at the lab with Lau, she was exhausted. Still, she pushed herself harder than anyone on the team, anxious to fill in as many gaps as possible for Parry and his people, expecting any day now to get an evac order from Paul Zanek. She was just beginning to make progress, finalizing tests which Lau's people had prepared the way for, and the results were remarkable. From this fact she drew strength and pride.
It was determined early on that Officer Kaniola's gunshot wound had not been fatal, and that he was alive and possibly conscious when the killer, using great force, sent what amounted to a machete or cane cutter into his throat, nearly severing the head. Tests proved this assumption valid. More importantly, perhaps, she'd discovered that blood found covering Alan Kaniola's left palm was determined to belong to someone else. While another medical examiner might simply have assumed it was Kaniola's own blood, instinct told her that Kaniola, in his death throes, might possibly have gouged his killer, possibly with the man's own knife. She was elated to gain this small prize of information. At least it gave her some degree of hope, for now the killer's blood could be tested, and they'd be that much closer to their prey, for no one knew the outcome of a blood test. Anything might be forthcoming about their killer: blood type, race, age, sex.
But now, closer examination of the blood proved confusing. It was the blood of a young woman, possibly Linda Kahala's, and if so, it meant that somehow Officer Kaniola came into contact with either the body or a blood spatter somewhere up there on Koko Head. Seeing this turn of events beneath her microscope lens, Jessica set her teeth and clenched her fists. This information changes things, she thought, wondering at the possibilities.
Earlier she had seen Agent Tony Gagliano, who'd come by to drop off all the medical documents he'd been able to lay hands on; wonderfully enough, he'd located useful medical information on Linda Kahala, an entire medical history from birth. Jessica began a routine blood-matching scan between what was found on Kaniola's palm and what was known about Linda Kahala's blood, which was considerable since she had a rare blood disorder and several easily identifiable characteristics. The testing took most of the morning, but the difficult part was extracting blood from the shoulder and forearm removed from the freezer. Meanwhile, the arm itself was undergoing a battery of tests, and so far the results all pointed to its belonging to a young woman between the ages of fifteen and twenty, as close as Jessica could tell, the age when the bone marrow was fully extended, at its peak in growth and maturity. The size of the bone also matched that of a girl Linda's age. With the help of a forensics anthropologist on loan from the University of Hawaii, a Dr. Katherine Smits, it became increasingly clear that this was the limb of a young woman in her late teens whose ancestry was Hawaiian, at least in part. Had there been an X-ray of Linda's arm in her history or any DNA samples to match against, Jessica was certain they could undoubtedly match the body fragment to Linda Kahala. As things stood, a blood match had to suffice.
She returned to the blood matching, and by mid-afternoon she was completely convinced that not only was the limb's owner Linda Kahala, but that the blood on Officer Kaniola's palm had also been Linda's.
The now-sure revelation made her sit down and lean back into the folds of the easy chair in the office that had been turned over to her. Lau alone, among all the assistants, seemed to suspect or know. He had helped her do the blood matching. He came in, and saw her confusion over their findings.
“ Odd, no?” he offered. “I mean about the arm and Kaniola's palm?”
“ Don't go jumping to any crazy conclusions, Mr. Lau,” she admonished. “This is just the kind of information that, in the wrong hands, could cause no end of confusion, embarrassment to your lab and our combined reputations, not to mention what I've been told is a volatile situation here in your city. We don't want the wrong people to know about this, understood?”
He looked stricken. “You do not trust me as a professional to keep silent about what is inside our house? I have been here long time before you come, Doctor, and I have to be here long time after you gone. No, you don't worry 'bout me telling people outside house what kine work we are here doing… no.”
She was immediately apologetic. “I only meant to say that the press can be awfully good at skinning people like me as well as you, Mr. Lau, so it was a cautionary remark, that's all. Chief Parry's going to want it hush-hush, top secret, I'm sure. At least for now.”
“ I understand. Haole press headline read: 'Kanaka Cop Is Trade Winds Kill'a, He Kill All Hawaiian Girls.' A Hawaiian man do this. I see it now, and then what happens?”
“ Exactly,” she agreed. Although she hadn't seen it happening in the same way, she knew as he spoke it that he was absolutely right. The whites, especially those in power, would assuredly like nothing better than to pin the killings of the Hawaiian women on a Hawaiian national, thus ending any suspicion that the monster was a white man-as Jim Parry believed. She'd read his profile of the likeliest age, sex, race and lifestyle of the phantom. And it made complete sense, based as it was on statistical averages. Still, statistics didn't always pan out; that was why they were called averages.
“ Not to worry one bit,” Lau assured her. “So what is next step?”
“ Late lunch,” she monotoned, dropping her head in her hands, fatigue now a constant companion.
She stood, stretched and stared out the huge windows for some time without saying a word, Lau becoming fidgety behind her. She stared fixedly at the western rim of Oahu, the gorgeous flood of green foothills spilling from out of the volcanic rim of the vast Waianae Range. If she could not look out the windows and see this sight, she might imagine herself back at her Quantico lab which overlooked the academy and training grounds. She'd learned that the greenness of Hawaii was actually man-made, created by the many canals built into the mountains to bring water down from the uppermost heights in order to irrigate an otherwise barren landscape that, if not so nurtured, would be the color of teakwood. She now wished that no one had told her, that the illusion was intact and whole.
“ Lunch a good idea,” said Lau, breaking the silence. “You work too hard, Dr. Coran. Not good for nobody.”
“ Lunch! My thoughts exactly,” said James Parry, who'd appeared at the door so stealthily that even Lau was shaken.
“ You're some G-man, Chief Parry… sneak up on a person like that,” said Lau.
“ Sorry, didn't mean to get on your nerves, Mr. Lau.”
“ No bother,” Lau lied, and started to leave, saying, “I think you guys have much to talk about.”
“ Our Mr. Lau reads minds,” said Parry as he made himself comfortable across from her, sitting in an office chair.
“ Whatya mean, reads minds?”
Failing to answer her, he said, “There's something we've got to talk about.”
“ Oh, something come up I should know about?”
“ I took the whole thing, what we know, what we suspect-all of it-to Dave Scanlon, the Commissioner of Police, Honolulu. Now he's sweatin' it.”
“ Sweating what? Why?”
“ Let's just say the commissioner's a good politico, and he simply wants to cover all his asses. Any rate, all the different districts of the HPD are pouring over their missing-persons case files for the past several years. No telling how long this thing may've been going on, you see?”
“ You think the disappearances could've gone undetected for much longer than we already suspect?”
“ No one's sure at this point.”
“ But you dug up some old cases that're suspiciously similar in addition to last year's here and two years ago on Maui?”
He nodded. “Guilty as charged.”
She realized that Parry was of a breed of men who looked differently at whatever fell under his purview, that while countless other cops on the island had seen the same information, it was Parry who'd put it all together. All of the material had been studied by others, but Parry and his team had looked at it in a fresh if twisted light, in the dark light cast by a stone-cold killer. Parry was what the FBI was all about. To him a crime scene wasn't simply a place where the evidence might be collected, bagged, collated and tagged, but a blight of the darkness within a killer's mind. Why had the killer chosen this place, this time, this person? It was the kind of approach pioneered by the late Otto Boutine, whom she had both admired and loved very much, a man who had died to save her from a terrible death at the hands of the infamous vampire killer, Matt Matisak.
Parry didn't work a crime scene backwards in an effort to reconstruct the crime, as the typical street-level detective might, formulating a mock-up of what might've occurred and then launching a neat and tidy investigation along a line of presumptions. Parry, like Jessica, knew that there are some clues left at a crime scene, which by their very nature do not lend themselves to a sane orbit. Parry obviously would be interested in items of tangible evidence left by the killer if there were any, but even if there were, he'd be even more interested in the implied clues lingering at the crime scene, each a passport to the mind of the killer. In the case of the Trade Winds Killer, or what the lab people had begun to think of as the Cane Cutter, there'd been no tangible clues-not a scrap-until Linda Kahala's misshapen arm had appeared; furthermore, there still was no crime scene as such, only a dumping ground, and even that was no ordinary dumping site, for it remained
Inaccessible. Now James Parry wanted to know for certain, “Is there any sign so far's you can tell of ritualistic, sadistic, pseudo-sexual acts performed on the victim?”
“ What in God's name do you think I am, Parry? A magician? No way I can tell all that with what little I have to work with. Get me more of Linda Kahala's body and maybe… just maybe…”
Still, she understood his burning need to know the answers to all the questions: Did the murderer take his time, or was he hurried? What insight into the mind of the maniac haunted the killing ground? What was he thinking before, during, after?
As her father had once put it, “To understand the 'artist,' you must first truly look at his “work.'“ Otto Boutine's profiling team had taught her that the killer must be defined as either an “organized” or a “disorganized” murderer, and that these traits were “symptoms” of orderly or disorderly behavior at the scene of his crimes, further defining the fiend far more than the type of weapon he used or the caliber of the bullet he preferred. Cane cutters on these islands were a dime a dozen.
“ What I can tell you now for certain is that given the severity of the mutilation to the arm alone, the ritual nature of the slashes, the blade marks against the bone itself, he definitely cut into her while she remained alive; we are also confident that such brutalization means that he's certain to continue. He enjoys it.”
“ So that's the reason for the consistent victim profile. He seeks women who have that certain look.” Parry stated it as a verification of what he'd already come to believe.
“ When killing involves such butchery, it is either a crime of passion or psycho-sexual passion.”
“ Psycho-sexual passion?”
“ A term we've just coined recently at the bureau for all the sociopaths who destroy people based upon some predisposition to an ideal or fantasy that is all mixed up with their emotional crisis.”
“ Passion seems a dirty word to use with this bastard.”
'Two sides to every passion, Inspector.”
“ Yeah, I suppose so.”
“ We've got to locate his lair, find his killing ground, where he plays out his fantasy,” she said, her right hand running the length of a stiff neck.
“ Don't get your hopes up on that score.”
She looked at him with a wondering gaze.
“ You know as well as I that chances favor our serial killer going the way of most, meaning he'll never be caught,” said Parry. “More likely than an arrest, he'll reach a state of complete mental breakdown.”
“ And quiet, private institutionalization,” she softly agreed.
“ It's what most believe happened to Jack the Ripper, who was also 'down on whores.' “
She bit her lip thoughtfully, placed her head in her hands and asked, “Do you think they were all prostitutes? Including Linda Kahala?”
“ If not, she was mistaken for one. Hard to tell if she was into that scene just yet.”
She showed him proof positive that the errant limb had once belonged to Linda, and then she told him about Kahala's blood on Kaniola's palm. This information shocked him into uncharacteristic silence.
'Then old Joe Kaniola was right about his son's having been the only man to ever see this bastard up close. If it's her arm, the killer must've been at work getting rid of the body when Kaniola and Hilani surprised him.”
“ It appears so.”
Parry continued to ruminate. “But how'd the Kaniola boy get her blood on his palm?”
“ That boy was thirty-four, Jim,” she corrected him.
He frowned, realizing he'd been caught in a verbal slip that could have cost him had he been on camera. “Of course,” he quietly agreed. “So how did he get her blood on his hands?”
“ You figure it out. He was following a suspicious-looking vehicle, right?”
Parry thought back over the radio signal tapes he'd listened to countless times now of Hilani and Kaniola sparring with one another, their friendly banter culminating in their last words on earth. “Yeah, the car they followed.”
“ The car, the dead girl's clothes, the dead girl's body- anything's possible,” she suggested.
“ So Kaniola reaches into the car, touches the dead girl or her clothes, sure… sure.”
“ Your guesswork is quite probable.” There was a little girl's glint in her eye and a lilt to her voice.
“ You've found something else, haven't you?”
“ There were some cloth fibers found on his uniform and adhering to his left palm, in the coagulated blood. All the fibers match. Now all we've got to do is find Linda Kahala's clothes, have the relatives I.D. them and we cross-match.”
“ Is that all?”
“ Get Scanlon's people to comb the countryside up there around Koko Head, see if something gets shaken loose.”
“ Why wouldn't he have simply tossed the clothes into the Blow Hole with the body parts?”
'Too much chance of their going awry, lifted by the wind, missing the hole; besides, if he's a purist, I think he'd send his victims over nude.”
“ Purist? Purist what?”
“ This guy's into some kind of la-la fantasy world I don't pretend to understand, but suffice it to say that sacrifices appear to be his thing. Usually sacrifices are sent from this world in the manner in which they came into it, nude.”
“ Is that how you see it?”
“ Kaniola comes along, finds the clothing in the car and while he and Hilani are examining it, realizing too late what they have in their possession, he surprises them. That's the way I see it.”
“ Pretty shrewd,” he replied, a hand going to his chin.
“ Damn sure the first giveaway clue from this guy in all this time, and completely unintentional. He's cool and calculated, quite organized in the way he eliminated your two HPD cops, and in not drawing attention to himself over the years. He obviously is quite intelligent.”
“ That'd figure.” Parry paced the office, his mind racing now that he had the first forensic truth to back his up-till-now-flimsy net of assumptions.
Because the killer was in the organized category, they could predict with some confidence that, once caught, he would match the profile, at least in part. Unlike psychics, they weren't professing to “see” into the heart and mind of a killer, but utilizing known facts and information gleamed from serial killers in captivity, such as John Wayne Gacey, Jeffrey Dahmer, Gerald Ray Sims before he'd killed himself while in captivity, the executed Ted Bundy- all serial killers who'd been far more forthcoming and cooperative than Mad Matt Matisak cared to be. Although for her money, Jessica believed Ted Bundy had merely filled in blanks to presupposed questions placed before him by the State Attorney's office in Florida, providing little more than what they wanted to hear.
The Trade Winds Killer would come from a dysfunctional family. His father's work would be stable, but parental discipline would have been inconsistent at best. Child molestation in one of its myriad forms was likely a staple of family life. He would have an average or better-than-average I.Q., but was likely working at a menial job which he felt was far below his designated rank or calling or talented abilities; his work history would be sporadic, even chaotic.
“ He could be a student at the University of Hawaii, most likely with an uneven average,” she suggested.
“ Perhaps, but then again not.”
“ Several of the girls were attending the university,” she reminded him.
“ One of the few connections we've made among some of the victims,” he agreed. He briefly told her about George Oniiwah, Linda's boyfriend, who happened to be a student at the Monoa campus at U.H.
“ It would seem likely that the killer may have some connection with the university, given what little we know, that is.” Jessica lifted a warm can of Coca-Cola off her desktop and poured what remained of its contents down a drain in the lab, rinsed the can and tossed it into a recycling bin below a table. Lau watched her movements from a room three doors away through a series of glass partitions separating the portions of the lab and offices. She was a little unnerved by Lau's interest in her and Parry, and she couldn't help wonder what was cooking behind his black eyes. Is good gossip in the lab hard to come by? she wondered.
“ Yeah, and that means forty-six percent of the student population,” Jim Parry was saying as he followed her about.”Come again?”
“ The precise number of male students at the Manoa campus hovers around five thousand nine hundred eighty.”
“ Concentrate on part-timers first,” she suggested.
That'd be something like two thousand two hundred fifty.”
“ No,” she corrected him. “Less the females, say forty percent, one thousand two hundred fifty to thirteen hundred.”
“ Hey, not bad. Now there's a figure we can work with,” he said with a little salute of sarcasm. “I'll set Tony to work on it.”
“ Just remember, our guy-if he is a student and not a bottle-washer out there-he may've dropped out or flunked out before now. You may want to get backlist enrollments as well as current ones.”
He nodded, telling her she was right, and then he quietly added to her repertoire of knowledge about the killer, saying, “This creep probably lives, or has lived most of his life, with a partner or spouse.”
“ Or parents,” she replied.
“ Maybe one parent.”
“ Stress would factor into his violence.”
“ Stress is brought on by the trade winds, maybe?”
She quickly agreed. “Something symbolic in the wind, perhaps? Maybe our guy got left out in a nasty storm as a child, who the hell knows.”
“ Probably hears voices in the damned wind.”
She nodded admiringly, continuing the game of automatic thought. “Violence could also be triggered with a sudden problem- finances, job, marriage, or a romantic relationship.”
“ Alcohol and/or drugs are apt to figure in,” Parry added, casually rising to the challenge. “A person who's usually no threat, nothing to take a second look at, socially capable, visibly acceptable, but he doesn't stand out.”
“ Approaches his victim in an open area, uses a non-threatening manner in a friendly, even familiar place.”
“ Picks 'em up at malls, in shops, at the bus station.”
“ Prefers verbal manipulation to physical force as he hunts for his prey. From the police reports, sounds like Linda may have known him from an earlier time, didn't want to go with him, and so he had to resort to physical force to get her off the street and into the car.”
“ Exactly… she knew him, and perhaps some of the others also knew him.”
“ Control over his victim is a vital part of what he does, and fantasy-”
“ Ritual dominates his actions; the murder itself an acting out of a long-held fantasy, I know.”
“ He brutalized Linda. It was no pure accident the geyser sent her arm up from the spray.”
Parry looked quizzical. “Whataya mean?”
“ Close examination of the tear shows that it was sliced off at the shoulder, not torn off by natural forces.
There're striated marks at the bone.”
“ Bastard…” he said.
“ He transports the bodies in a vehicle,” she said, continuing the unofficial killer profile they'd begun together.
Parry, pacing now, nodded and said, “Yeah, and his car's in fairly good condition. He won't risk being pulled over or caught with a dead engine, especially after Koko Head.”
“ Still, something about his car that night attracted the HPD cops.”
“ Kaniola.”
“ What?”
“ Alan Kaniola first noticed the car… called it 'suspicious- looking.' I've only listened to the dispatch tape a thousand times.” Parry's obvious anguish over the case showed through. “There's nothing there. They never called in a plate; never had the chance.”
“ Look, I think the killer takes souvenirs from each victim, squirrels them away, possibly clothing and jewelry, but most assuredly the hands.”
“ Cut at the wrist?” he asked.
She nodded, her eyes boring into him. “He… he takes his trophies out later… re-counts them, relives the fantasy over and over, until he does it again. And one more thing. He likely enjoys reading about the accounts of the missing girls and any news coverage devoted to their disappearances.”
Parry nodded. “He's always out there looking for prey, the girl who looks like Linda Kahala.”
“ He knows what he likes… what he wants, and he feels comfortable doing it here. He's on his own turf. He knows the terrain well.”
Parry agreed. “And when he sees that look-alike victim, he strikes.”
“ He ensnares, perhaps with words at first.” Parry thought of the Shakespearean sonnets he'd picked up from Linda's room, taken home and glanced over.
“ Then he renders his victim helpless,” she went on, “as when a snake sends venom into a mouse, immobilizing it. We found traces of a drug called curare, not present in the usual street drugs.”
“ I see…”
“ He next assaults, kills and disposes of his victims.”
“ And he hunts nightly during the trades, looking for his victim of opportunity.”
“ Exactly,” she agreed. “And when he fails to find her, he goes home and opens his box of precious collectibles-a collection of keys, hairpins, lipstick vials, underwear, earrings, necklaces and body parts.”
“ HPD has a lot of red-eyed detectives back out on the streets, particularly along Ala Moana, Kalakaua, Kuhio and the Ala Wai, interviewing pimps, johns, taxi drivers, employees in stores and restaurants in the vicinity, you name it. My own people have already logged three hundred man hours out there and zip. It's like this guy's a magician; makes 'em disappear before everyone's eyes.”
“ Yeah, I saw how crowded the streets were the other night when we were strolling. He meets her at a bus stop or a supermarket, convinces her that he has something she needs, that they have to go to his place to get it.”
Parry grimly replied, “He has that lethal combination of desire, passion, lust and an inability to satisfy that need through any normal means.”
“ Impotence,” she agrees. “Dysfunctional, and squeamish over the thought of pain and suffering-his own, that is-and the sight of blood-his own, that is. But at the first sight of blood from his first slash when he lost control with his first victim, he learned that the feel of anguish and torture, and the sight of blood streaming down the body of a helpless victim, creates in him an epiphany of pure pleasure, an orgasm like nothing he has ever experienced before, that for the first time in his miserable life he is sexually fulfilled.”
“ Yeah, understood… not only does overpowering a helpless woman give him an erection, it makes him ejaculate.”
“ Blood and pain… that's what he's into, and whoever this guy is, he's slowly come around to the conclusion that murder's not only easy, it's sexually gratifying,” she continued. “The sight of blood, the struggle against him, the ultimate empowerment he feels, his goddamned erection, it all combines when he cuts into his victim and dangles her life over the edge.”
“ Her life or death in his hands alone. Makes him feel like God, I'm sure.”
“ For once in his life he's in control. That's what matters to him.”
Parry swallowed hard, thinking of young Linda Kahala, of her father and mother, of how he was going to break the news to them that their daughter was now, for a certainty, the first positively identified young woman of the many missing who were all assuredly dead. It followed that since the last of the missing was murdered, the others were more than likely just as dead. There was no telling how many bodies this madman had accumulated below the waters of the Blow Hole.”Not so sure I can eat lunch now,” admitted Jessica.
“ How about a stiff island drink?” he suggested.
“ That I can't refuse.”
“ Maybe after a drink, you'll feel like something to eat, maybe a sandwich. I know a place close by.”
She got up, grabbed her cane and came around to where he'd remained standing. “You're certainly taking good care of me.”
“ Zanek's orders,” he said casually.
“ Is that it? And what did Paul tell you about me?”
“ Only that you're the best, and now I understand why he says so.”
She stripped away her lab coat, put her jacket over her shoulders, and tapped with her cane ahead of him, privately pleased at his attentions. In D.C. she had a reputation as something of a cold “cutter,” a typical M.E. rubric. Some there still called her the Scavenger-always on the hunt for clues. People, and men in particular, were usually standoffish, unsure around her, often threatened by her. The irony of it was that, despite her education, her medical training and her time at the FBI academy, and despite the fact she was an excellent markswoman, she thought herself the least intimidating person she knew. At least, she didn't intentionally intimidate men; still, like an aura one is bom with, she was seldom viewed as anything other than Dr. Jessica Coran, M.E., FBI. There had only been a handful of men in her life who had gotten beyond their initial hangups about her qualifications and degrees, and even this usually required close working conditions and long hours to reach what ought to be an easily accessible plateau.
Interestingly, this hadn't been the case with Inspector James Parry. Here, with him, she'd been treated like a lady from the moment they'd met.
“ You seem to do pretty well without the cane,” he commented when they'd gotten into the elevator. “I looked in on you earlier. You were busy in the lab, so…”
“ Sometimes I need it more… depends on how long I've been on my feet,” she managed.
It was a lovely, silver-handled thing, given her as a coming- home present from J.T. and others at her Quantico labs when she had “come home” after her long ordeal with rehab. The trial that had placed a maniac into a psycho ward in a federal pen for the criminally insane had also been a treacherous ordeal. To this day, Mad Matthew Matisak held sway over certain of her emotions. As Donna, her well-paid psychologist whom she knew on a first- name basis now, had told her, “When you stare into the abyss, it sometimes stares back.”
The healing process, for the brand of distress which Matisak had put her through, had taken years, and even now she was far from any cure or freedom from the scars, particularly the invisible ones. Matisak had cut into her for reasons not unlike those of the Trade Winds Killer, and here she was, staring again into the pit, looking for answers to questions most people pretended never to hear… searching through the rubble of the ugliest side of the human condition which netted rape, bloodletting, torture, mutilation and lust murder.
She wondered if Jim Parry's solicitousness was due to his measured concern for what had happened to her in the past, due to what he knew of her encounter with “Teach” Matisak. He knew that she had looked even deeper into the abyss than he, and that for her it was Matisak's insane eyes that stared back. Parry was intelligent and keen and sensitive. Was he interested in her, she wondered, or what she knew firsthand about serial killers?
Like all of the FBI family, Jim had to be well informed about her ordeal, aware of her near-death experience at Matisak's hand. How she'd lost Otto to Matisak…
At his car, he took her cane and offered a hand as she eased into the seat, and for a moment he lingered over the beauty of the cane itself, commenting on the ornamental craftsmanship. It wasn't a Rolex, but it had to have cost some bucks… and he must have known that it was the same cane which had thwarted the demonic efforts of Simon Archer, a.k.a. the Claw. She could read it in his lingering gaze.”You want to know about Simon Archer and about Matthew Matisak, don't you?” she asked.
“ No, no,” he said.
She didn't believe him. By the same token, she knew that Parry thrived on knowing facts, and that feeding on case-file information was not enough for a thorough investigator such as he. This was his strength and what made him appealing, and she also knew that he was dying to know all the inside dirt.
“ If it'll endear me to you,” she said with a crooked smile, “I suppose I can tell you about Matisak and Archer.” It might even be theraputic, she heard Donna Lemonte say.
He came around to the driver's side, the cane still in his hand. Placing the cane onto the rear seat and sliding in, he said, “Jessica, you don't have to talk about it.”
His sincerity was tinged with a healthy dose of cop curiosity which she both understood and respected. “No, no,” she began, “it's pretty obvious what's on your mind.”
“ Really,” he insisted, “we can talk about other things.”
“ Yeah, maybe,” she replied, “after this is out of the way.”
“ Jess!” he said, feigning annoyance.
She launched into the subject of Mad Matisak by way of an autopsy and a double exhumation which led her along a twisted trail to Matisak's lair.