“ It’s got to be private, or an unmarked police chopper. Either that or a cub plane.”
“ Either way, I’m a sick man.”
“ We’ll get you more Dramamine.”
“ I’ll double the dosage.”
“ And be asleep in my lap?”
He laughed. “I’ve been in much worse spots…”
Patty Lawrence felt she had to do something, and sitting in a hospital waiting room, crowded full with Manley’s people and Ken Stallings’s family and friends, wasn’t good enough. She had yanked her partner from the hospital and they’d agreed to return to the search out there off Madeira Beach for whatever sign they could find of the bastard who’d done this to Ken.
The search front had gone in carefully squared-off areas, the search boats squeezing the playing field, hoping to catch up to a killer who was likely as lost in the fog as they themselves felt. Their instruments, they hoped, were better than his, as they hoped their instincts were.
But several hours of searching had turned up nothing. Perhaps this maniac killer did know what he was doing when it came to maneuvering a sailing vessel.
Bill was now in the flat of the boat, scanning the waters with a pair of night-vision binoculars while Patty inched the Boston Whaler through the soup. A running joke had given their boat its private name. The Pantry-named for all the food Bill brought aboard, from potato chips and cold cuts to Pepsi-Cola and cranberry jam. Bill was a big man, as big as Rob Manley had been, and he had seen all manner of problems on this job. Patty’s Pantry, as some of the guys called their boat, was a misnomer; it ought more rightly to have been Bill’s Pantry. She ate three regulars a day and never strayed from her regimen, never snacking in between, however tempting Bill made it at times, however much he goaded.
They were in near-constant contact with the other search ships. People were getting short with one another; personnel were beginning to feel the emotional and physical strain, the stress growing minute by painful minute as the obvious began to sink in: They’d somehow let the Night Crawler crawl right past them all. The bastard was aptly named.
Tempers flared, ignited by frustration and anger and un resolved feelings. Patty certainly felt her share of the latter. She and Ken Stallings had left so many feelings unresolved. Bill knew about the special bond between them and had always been a gentleman and friend and never once made her feel guilty. But now Bill hadn’t spoken a word in the past fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his mind. Perhaps it was the same simple thought plaguing her: All appeared helpless, useless effort now.
Their radio crackled anew with the voice of a county sheriff’s guy she hardly knew, a man named Trilling, announcing something in the water at their location. He quickly gave the exact coordinates, repeating his message: “Something in the water! Something floating on top of the water! Something out of place…”
Patty had to fight through the radio traffic to ask, “What’ve you got? Describe it.”
Looks… looks like… yeah, Jesus… it’s a body.”
All the search vehicles were close now, so close they could see each other’s searchlights even in the fog. Patty Lawrence silently wondered at the new find. Had the killer left his own brand of calling card?
The find was called in to various dispatches on land, including Bob Fisher, Patty’s own dispatch. The news that they had someone in the water spread like wildfire. Moments later, it was confirmed by Trilling’s partner, and some details filtered over the radio waves: female, five-nine to six foot, thin, well-proportioned, nude and DOA. Apparent late teens, a black nylon rope twisted in a noose around her neck, strangled and drowned.
Each additional bit of information was like another blow to them all. Everyone had heard of the recent disappearance of the young woman from Naples Island, south of Tampa. Everyone wondered if this could be her. There seemed little doubt that whoever she was, she’d been victimized by the Night Crawler, and that he’d brutally used her. The word buzzing over the airways indicated that the girl’s body was as stiff as a long-preserved medical cadaver’s might appear.
Bob Fisher, at the FMP dispatch office in Tampa, promised to get word to the FBI so that they might have someone on hand to examine the body. He started with the local FBI office, telling them what his people and the county had come across off Madeira Beach, adding that it appeared related to the earlier incident involving his people, Officers Manley and Stallings. The FBI was interested, and said they’d locate Chief Santiva and Dr. Jessica Coran to have their best people on the scene when the body came ashore.
An hour later, when the body was brought ashore, a county coroner from Pinellas was the only medical man found readily available to take charge of the body. Jessica Coran could not be located.
Jessica found local aircraft vehicles useless for her needs; neither Tampa nor St. Pete had any to spare, and those that were in repair and might be ready in twenty-four hours were all marked clearly as police vehicles. Officials here in Tampa weren’t in any mood to cooperate in any case; they blamed FBI bungling for the death of the FMP officer named Manley and the maiming of Ken Stallings, a notion fueled by recent newspaper accounts, radio and TV broadcasts and political speeches, some with an extremely irrational, fringe-element twist reminiscent of the kind of talk that had been coming out of militia companies across America since the Waco, Texas, “massacre” and the two- years-in-the-making plot against the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. All Jessica knew for certain was that there had to be one hell of a paranoia at work in the heartland to convince people with brains in their skulls that the U.S. government was interested in creating mass murder of innocent children just to get control of the NRA lobby in Congress.
The killer can’t have gone far, Jessica told herself in keeping with her prediction that he’d gone southeast over the waters, passing back along his track like a cougar, marking his territory well. His going farther westward toward Louisiana and Texas, after a scare like the one the watercops had thrown into him, seemed unlikely. However, to be certain, another search team made up of Samernow and Quincey would go in that direction, hovering over the Gulf waters in a second helicopter. At least, that’d been the plan; but the plan was coming apart at the seams.
First, fellow law enforcement officials were being uncooperative, and now private small-plane and helicopter companies were doing the same. And now Jessica found herself in a lonely, dank helicopter hangar on a fogbound airfield just south of Tampa with no way to pursue the killer. The helicopter owner here simply looked at her badge and said stonily, “We’re not endangering any of our pilots for the FBI, not in this foul weather.” The man left her, returning to his office, which was dwarfed here in the massive hangar. She wanted to shove something like a court order down his throat but she had none, and getting one could take more time than she had.
Although only small aircraft flew in and out here, the airfield was large, and there were a number of other companies she could turn to, so she looked out at the blinking lights in the fog that signaled men at work somewhere out there. She looked around for someone to perhaps guide her to another location. The usual heat of a Florida morning had been wiped away by the sodden wet blanket of air hovering over them.
While Jessica worked to get airborne, Eriq Santiva had gone back to the hospital to wait in the hope that Ken Stallings would find a voice in his search for consciousness and reality. Everyone was hoping against hope that he might come around, not only for the man’s sake but because inside his silence lay the key to locating the Night Crawler.
In the meantime, a copy of Patric Allain’s signature on an agreement made between him and a Mr. Scrapheap Jones in Key West, Florida, had come in at Tampa Bay’s main headquarters, Police Precinct One. Eriq was unequivocal when he declared it to be the same handwriting as that on the letters to the press.