From his seat at the controls, watching, Swantor smiled and said, “I beseech thee! I beseech thee!”
He then watched Selese swoon before fainting altogether from blood loss.
Swantor could not have been happier with the results. His camera had caught every blood spatter, every deft movement of the doctor's hands. And Swantor, now the Webmaster, zoomed in to display a close-up of the disfigured forehead. Now the camera recorded as Kenyon's bone saw came to life. Its mechanical whirr created a terrifying sound in this context, and an even more horrifying noise as it made its screaming, grinding path through the skull-shattered shards of glass ground in a mixer.
“ I give you the Skull-digger,” said Swantor, recording his master of ceremonies voice. “Finally, the star of his own show…”
“ I hope you're enjoying this, Swantor!” Kenyon shouted as he placed the bone cutter to Selese's forehead again, making the final, methodical cut in his medically delicate manner. The computer had been told to blip any mention of Jervis's name. His own fifteen minutes of fame would come at his own choosing, in time.
The computer camera next captured Kenyon plucking the cut window of flesh and bone from the forehead and discarding it. The camera then showed him lifting his surgical tongs, opening them, plunging them into the window he'd created, and plucking forth the brain. He held it up to the camera eye. Like sweetmeats prised from a crustacean.
“ Is this what you want, you bastard? Is it?” He bit into the brain matter, tearing away a portion, devouring it half chewed. He repeated this again and again, his hands slick with blood and brain fluid.
Swantor reveled in what he filmed, clicking off the audio and saying through the intercom, “Perfect… perfectly executed, Dr. Kenyon. This will make us both great men!”
Kenyon as Phillip devoured the last of Selese's brain. As he did so, Swantor said over the intercom, “I'll have another for you soon.”
The camera left the bloody mouth of the killer and focused on the body of Selese Montoya, slowly making its way from her toes, along her legs, to torso, neck, lower face and then to the black rectangle created in the empty skull.
“ This is going out live, Kenyon, to the world. Take a bow.”
Grant cried out, his mouth still bloody, raging at the camera. “Let me out of here now, Swantor! Let me out!”
“ Audio's off, Dr. Kenyon. No one can hear you.”
The captain of the cutter, on which Jessica and Sorrento traveled, stood looking out over the broad expanse of the river. A cruise ship made up to look like an old-time paddle-wheeling riverboat passed them by, tourists waving from every deck and chair, a gleaming diamond-colored chandelier winking at them from the windowed restaurant aboard. The gaiety of the riverboat stood in stark contrast to the work at hand aboard the Coast Guard cutter. “Imagine the guy's insurance premium if that damn floating restaurant should go down out here in this fog,” he said to Joseph Konrath, his first mate.
Jessica and Sorrento returned to the bridge, and the captain greeted them and then said, “I've checked in again and again with boats downriver and no one's seen him. But I have an idea.”
“ What's that, Captain?” asked Sorrento.
“ Reports from here to Pilottown-end of the river-say that no one has spotted this yacht. That's just too unbelievable, unless he's taken another tack.”
“ What tack? North, you mean?” asked Jessica.
“ Well, he may have used one of the old canals to cut from the river to a bay area.”
“ The canals? What canals?” asked Jessica.
Quarels took them to a nautical map on the wall. “We are about here, the canal I have in mind is right here,” he said, pointing just ahead. “Leads west into the bay and some swamplands.”
“ Isn't that the fastest way to get to the Grand Isle area?” asked Sorrento. This guy has some real estate there and most animals do run back to their lairs when chased.”
“ Show me where Grand Isle is, Captain,” asked Jessica.
Quarels pointed it out, a small dot on the map to the southwest of their position. “It's just a hunch, but when Sorrento asked about Grand Isle before, I recalled the canal up ahead. Just a hunch, but I think it may be the reason why no one's seen our man.”
Jessica turned to Sorrento and said, “Grand Isle, of course. He's got to be heading there, Mike.” She then said to Quarels, “We had a local lawman check there yesterday, and he found no sign of Swantor in the area, but all that's changed now.”
“ Follow the course of the canal, Captain,” said Sorrento.
“ All right. We'll do just that, but the storm's going to pound us in there, and we have a skeleton crew.”
“ Back in Florida, Swantor made some passing remark that his wife got the house, and he got the boat. Perhaps the house in question is on this Grand Isle,” said Jessica.
“ Mansions, high living,” said the captain. “That's Grand Isle.”
“ Combs's background check on Swantor had the house in contention.”
Sorrento rubbed his chin. “Swantor's ex-wife, maybe she still resides there on the island.”
“ His ex.” They all fell silent.
“ You thinking what I'm thinking?” Sorrento asked.
“ That he intends on feeding his ex to Kenyon?”
“ If so, what's he need Selese for?”
“ I don't know, maybe to… to keep Kenyon in line?”
“ My God.”
Jessica wondered at the curious irony, if her long, circuitous chase after the Skull-digger should end on an island.
“ Under normal circumstances, I'd radio for assistance, bring up another cutter to go around the boot at Pilot town, surround the island,” suggested Captain Quarels. “But reports are bad all along the coast at the Gulf, and I can't get any help, not at the moment.”
“ We'll keep trying,” said Konrath. “But reports of flooding problems south of us are keeping all crews busy.”
“ Rains preceding Hurricane Alice,” said Quarels.
“ What about helicopters?” asked Jessica.
“ Sorry, they tell me that all our helicopters in this sector've been diverted to the coast until they know what's going to happen there. It's a category four, with several waterspouts. Already had a ship in the Gulf swamped by this thing, so they're expecting additional rescue efforts will be necessary.” It was getting stormy here, as well. When Jessica and Sorrento had made their way back up to the pilothouse, the wind had whistled down the length of the boat, swirling and eddying about them, threatening to send them overboard. The western horizon had been ablaze with beautiful colors at dusk, but now it'd become late, and darkness had suddenly come on with the storm front, clouds blotting out moon and stars.
Jessica drew an imaginary line on Quarels's Mississippi River map with her index finger the distance to Grand Isle. “How many hours?” she asked Quarels.
“ Three perhaps in good weather. Can't say in this.” He nodded to the black windows ahead of them.
They drank coffee under the light of the pilothouse and watched as a deluge of rain began pouring over them. The powerful winds made the ship shiver.
Jessica said, “He's facing worse weather if he is south of us. We have to make better time, and hope he's had to slow down.”
“ When we get into the center of the canal, we'll open her up,” Quarels promised. Then he invited them to look on at the sonar and radar screens. According to the equipment aboard, the cutter began a wide turn into a sharply cut canal, its banks like walls sketched in thin green lines. Jessica tried to imagine them by day.
Now they headed into deep backwater swamp. “I wonder how much your fugitive is relying on the weather,” Quarels said to them. “Normally, in a dry season, some of these canals might not be deep enough in sections. Lot of boaters get hung up on sandbars in them. But if he's been monitoring the weather… well, he's planned this thing out, that's certain.”
The canal took them west first through a back bay area that Captain Quarels had pinpointed on the map. He showed them how it would sharply turn again south. Jessica and Sorrento were studying the nautical map of the area when Jessica's phone rang.