“ May’s well pack it in,” he suggested. “Not doing any good here.”
“ Let’s give it a little more time,” she suggested. “Maybe he got unavoidably held up.”
“ Yeah, don’t we wish the Coast Guard or the Florida Marine Patrol has picked him up for questioning?”
“ Could we get so lucky?”
“ I’ll get Ford’s best men down here to relieve us, let them watch over this place tonight, and we’ll get some R and R.” said Santiva.
After calling J.T. to tell him what he might expect in the overnight mail, so as to not entirely shock him, Jessica found herself with time on her hands, so she asked Buckner for the phone number of his old partner in Key West, and she then telephoned Scrapheap Jones and plied him full of questions relevant to his encounter with the Night Crawler.
Jones simply refused to believe that the Patric whom he had taught the rudiments of fish-trophy mounting was the Crawler. His mind could not wrap around the concept; he claimed the kid he trained was a wimp, fearful at the sight of blood even in a dead fish. Scrapheap told Jessica that she was on a fool’s chase if she were after that sullen, quiet one-joke boy he had known.
But even as Scrapheap Jones denied her, she read between the lines of what the man said. Allain was sullen, quiet, fearful of the sight of blood and apparently humorless. In point of fact, this profile sounded a great deal more like her prey than Jones realized. “What do you mean by one-joke boy?”
“ He’d say the fishing in the shark aquarium museum here in Key West was the easiest place to fish. Damned fool. Thought it was funny; thought it irritated me when he’d suggest taking a charter to the museum, let ‘em all dip their bait into one of the tanks there. Silly stuff like that, like it was real funny, but it wasn’t. Joke was lame, like the kid.”
“ Did he ever steal from you?”
“ Some… some chemicals, maybe, I ain’t a hunerd percent sure.”
“ Do you have anything in writing about your agreement with him? Did you have him sign a contract or agreement? It’s important.”
“ I did… at the time…”
“ Do you still have it?”
“ It may be in my files.”
“ If you find it, fax it to me at the Naples Police Department.” She gave him the number. “I’ll see what I can do. By the way, is Buck there? Can I speak to him?”
She told him that he could speak with his friend.
“ Oh, just a minute… another thing he always kidded me about…” Scrapheap suddenly said.
“ What’s that, sir?”
“ Ahh, always said he’d like to go somewhere cooler, complained of the Florida heat, so he was always talking about going to the Caymans.”
“ The Caymans?” Jessica wondered at the coincidence.
“ That was the joke, get it?”
She didn’t get it.
“ The Caymans are hotter’n Florida and all hell the time o’ year he was talking.”
“ I see. Had he ever been to the Cayman Islands?”
“ Said he had been there, yes. Not much with trophy mounting, but he sure knew how to sail.”
She told Buck that Jones wanted to speak with him. Relinquishing the phone, she looked up at the clock to see that it was now nearing 3:05 p.m. and still no show.
They waited past three-thirty. Ford and Santiva had by now earnestly discussed pulling up stakes. Jessica could hardly blame them, but she said over the remote that she would give it another hour, till four. Meanwhile Ford arranged for a man in civilian clothes to enter with a fingerprinting kit and both Buck’s and Stu’s fingerprints were taken for the record. What remained of Patric Allain’s trophy fish, the yellowfin he’d walked in off the wharf with, was placed in a large paper sack and carried out for laboratory analysis and fingerprint detection. Jessica would later properly box it in absorbent material and FedEx it off to Quantico, Virginia.
By now Ford had seen enough; he quickly pulled his men-acting as backup-from the area. He and Santiva had gotten into a tiff, and Ford flatly refused to have his men watch over the shop all night. So, for a bit longer, Santiva, Quincey and Samernow remained nearby. Mark and Eriq were in FPL uniforms at the van while Quincey sat at a bus stop now, his makeup-that of a feeble old man down on his luck-beginning to thin.
Four o’clock came around and still no show. Somehow, the killer knew; perhaps he sensed that it was too dangerous to return, especially after having robbed the place of materials the night before. Perhaps he realized that he’d been foolish to use the same alias, even with a man like Buckner, and doubly foolish to have left something of his in the other man’s possession, something with his prints on it. Or perhaps he had simply smelled trouble about the shop, even before coming near it. Like a tiger or a cougar, the Night Crawler obviously had good instincts.
Now he could be anywhere.
Tired and disgruntled and disappointed, the four remaining law enforcement officials found themselves trying to comfort Gordon Buckner, to assure him that he would be safe and to tell him to be in touch the moment he was contacted again by Patric Allain.
“ Then you do think he will contact me again?”
“ No way of knowing, but not likely at this point.” Jessica tried to put the old man’s mind at ease.
“ He could’ve just got the days turned around. If he’s as crazy as they say, why not?”
“ We’ll send some undercover men tomorrow for a possible two p.m. meet. They’ll pretend to work out back for you,” suggested Jessica. “And who knows, maybe I’ll be back with them.”
“ All right, good. Damn this man… damn this whole bloody business,” moaned Buckner, his head in his hands. “I sometimes wonder what God was thinkin’ of when he created the human animal and the perverse human brain. Damn this monster!”
“ Our sentiments exactly, Mr. Buckner.”
They left in the van, which had to be returned to Ford. At the precinct, each promised to meet for drinks and dinner after changing and cleaning up. Jessica, in particular, pleaded that she had to get the fish smell out of her hair and off her body.
When they arrived back at police headquarters, Jessica climbed down from the van and Eriq met her at the rear, helping her out. They stood staring out toward the park, the boat marina, the great Gulf of Mexico beyond and the setting sun. “Where do you think this malfeasant creature is tonight, Jess?” asked Eriq. “What part of the coast is he haunting?” She stared out at the waning sun in the west where it flared bloodred, a giant fire in the sky that spread dark shadows now along the clean, well-kept streets and park of the picturesque city. “I don’t know what shadow he’s hiding in, but I fear the worst, and I think we have to persuade Ford to keep his men on guard at the riverfront bars and restaurants. All we know for sure is that the bastard will strike again. I haven’t had time to do a full autopsy, but I had a look at the body that washed ashore here…”
“ And?”
“ It’s as if he let her go by mistake, as if she were unfinished,” Jessica said. “None of the staging of the others; no quarter-inch nylon rope, no sign of any attempt to preserve or mount this one. You ever catch a fish only to lose it over the side?”
“ Whataya mean?”
“ She got loose from him somehow; he hadn’t tied the knot correctly or quickly enough when a wave took her, probably in the dark. Everything else is to the letter-double, possible triple strangulation, the whole nine yards. But her lungs were not as full of water as the others.”
“ About earlier, Jess… I want to apologize.”
She didn’t want to deal with earlier now. “‘Fraid it’s textbook Night Crawler,” she continued on about the most recent dead girl’s body. “He is definitely in the vicinity, and like Quincey surmised, the bastard may be making his way toward the Tampa Bay-St. Pete area.”