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.