“ I’ve sent word to our field offices there. They’re on the alert. They know the drill.”
They had walked from the van to the park, exercising their legs and lungs while Quince and Samernow saw to the van and the equipment inside. “You look trim and handsome in your FPL uniform, Chief,” she teased.
“ You, you look like the cutest thing in rags I’ve ever seen,” he fired back. “But you’re right about the fish and formaldehyde odor. That’s gotta go.”
From behind them, Jessica heard Quince’s distinct voice carry on the evening trade wind. “Bastard has just raked the whole state from one side to the next…”
“ Promise me one thing,” she asked Eriq.
“ Anything… within reason.”
“ No more quaaludes or uppers or whatever you’ve been on.”
Santiva took in a great breath of air. “I needed it to keep pace. It was just a one-time-only.”
“ Careful, my friend, because one-time-onlies have a way of becoming one-time-eternities.”
“ I appreciate both your concern and your advice, Jess. It means a lot to me, but rest assured, I don’t have a drug problem.”
She looked from the deep wells of his dark, kind eyes back out to sea and the setting sun, a fiery orange orb threatening to engulf the world even as it was being engulfed by the horizon. So much depended on one’s limited perspective, she quietly told herself, wondering anew where the Night Crawler was at this moment.
SEVENTEEN
Through the looking glass and into the abyss angels must spy.
On a hunch, Jessica Coran made a long-distance call to now Chief Constable Ja Okinleye of the Official Police of the Cayman Islands. Ja had become a good friend since the time some years ago when Jessica had assisted him on a murder case on his island of Grand Cayman. At the time he was a lieutenant in the Investigatory Division there. The case had involved a wealthy and highly regarded man who had been involved in the import business and was the owner of the largest clothing and jewelry store on the islands. Ja thought the man had gotten involved with some sort of smuggling operation, a common practice at all levels of society there. The man’s throat had been slashed and there were repeated stab wounds to the body. Ja wondered if it were not the work of an angry co-conspirator in the smuggling operation or the botched work of a burglar, but Jessica merely had to look at the body to tell him otherwise. It was neither business nor mistake that had dispatched the elderly gentleman. She explained that the wound to the throat, while similar to a Colombian necktie-a throat slit from ear to ear-would have been enough to kill the man and that the other repeated stab wounds had been unnecessary save for one need-rage and vengeance of a sort. “So,” she had surmised, “it is the work of some person who knew the deceased well enough to hate him.”
On further investigation at what passed for a crime lab on Grand Cayman, Jessica revealed other, even more startling facts: that the body had been moved from another location and posed; that the stab wounds had come first; that the wound to the throat had been a last-minute addition to the staging of the event; and that in fact the man had died of a broken neck. Someone had simply snapped his neck in a quick, brutal and efficient manner, someone both strong and possibly well-trained in the martial arts.
“ Then, in a fit of rage, he or she did the butchering, quite possibly after spending several hours with the body hatching out what to do with it.”
Ja knew instantly whom he must interrogate further, and it quickly came to light that the man’s nephew was in extreme debt to island loan sharks, that he’d pleaded with his uncle for money and that the old man had stood adamant against lending him another cent. The younger man, it was soon revealed, had lost control and attacked his uncle; in the scuffle, he’d made short work of his uncle’s vertebrae and neck bone. Death had come about as a result of the trauma suffered when the nervous system was severed.
Ja Okinleye had done most of the work that cornered the nephew, but he had been aided immeasurably by Jessica’s display of scientific knowledge, beginning with the fact of lividity, indicating that the man’s body had lain on its side for at least three hours after death before it was lifted up a flight of stairs and thrown across his bed, where the butchering ensued. The body had been left facedown where the throat was cut. The amount of blood soaking into the bedcover, or rather the lack of it, was Jessica’s first indication that things were not as they seemed on the surface; the absence of blood from such an enormous gash had clearly indicated that the old man was dead long before his throat was slashed, another relatively easy surmise.
These facts, thrown in the face of the suspect in Ja’s interrogation room, had brought him to confession and the entire case took a mere three days to solve-all while Jessica was on vacation on the islands. How Ja learned of her and of the fact that she was on his island, she never knew. At any rate, Ja Okinleye estimated Jessica Coran a wizard and a magician and was able to close the baffling case with head-spinning speed. He remained to this day, as he put it, “a great believer and friend.” And if ever she needed a favor…
Ja had since moved up the ranks on Grand Cayman. He had used his new authority to send some of his officers to the United States for training at the FBI Academy, and had been pleased with the results.
Jessica recognized his voice immediately when she was finally put through to Ja.
“ Okinleye here!” Ja was always loud and clear, having had a British education and a military upbringing. He was stiff and formal even at a party, but his formality had become so much a part of his personality, it seemed pleasantly integrated, charming even. “Ja, it’s me, Jessica Coran. I’m calling on a matter of some urgency.”
“ Aha! To congratulate me, no doubt.” She laughed into the phone. “Yes, that of course, but I sent a card when I learned of your promotion. Just the same, congratulations.”
“ And your card and well-wishing is much appreciated. Dr. Coran, it is always a pleasure to hear from you! Where are you calling from? Are you on the island?” He sounded surprised.
“ I’m in Florida-Naples, Florida, to be exact. I’m working a case here; one you may’ve heard about?”
“ Hoooo, yes, an evil business that one in Florida I hear of.”
“ That’s my case.”
“ I have word of your string of children, all dead at the hand of this fiend they are calling the Night Crawler, but I didn’t know you were handling the case. If there is anything-anything whatever-I can do, please never hesitate one moment to ask, my dear Doctor.”
She pictured Okinleye’s Sidney Poitier appearance, his wide forehead and piercing, nearly black eyes as she replied, “Ja, have you had any like Missing Persons cases- disappearances-turn into murder victims? These would be young women, American or British, my basic appearance-height, weight, color of hair.”
“ Teens, tourists?”
“ Or early twenties, yes.”
“ In point of fact… yes, but are you suggesting a connection?”
“ I’m not sure…”
“ I will have my best man scour our records for… for how long past?”
“ A year… no, two years ago?”
“ That far back may take some time. I of course recall several instances of bodies washing ashore, all clustering about a year ago, yes.”
“ Were they bound, gagged?”
“ No, nothing like that.”
“ Nude?”
“ Yes.”
“ Cause of death?”
“ First it was suggested as drowning, but one of our men who is academy-trained by your fine FBI realized it was strangulation.”
“ And the killer was never apprehended, I take it.”
“ No, never… to our shame.”
“ We may be trailing the same man here. Can you send all you have on the protocols there?”