Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “If you really want to help me, you'll sit for me,” he said. “But please, I won't take your money.”

  “I can do that, sit. In fact, it's one of the best things I do, indeed.” Lightly laughing at her own little joke, Louisa again lifted the sketches, studying them. Then she said, “Giles, you didn't sign the sketches.”

  “Forget about the sketches for the moment and concentrate on me,” he said, staring into her eyes. She saw something she could not read flash across those cobalt-blue eyes. He still hadn't taken off his gloves or his hat, only the overcoat.

  “Giles, why don't you take off your hat and those gloves?”

  “I'm still cold,” he repeated.

  “Jack Daniel's'll help with that.” She poured him a second tumbler full and went to the fridge for the water.

  “I want you to sit for me now, Louisa,” he told her as she placed the glass in his hands.

  “Why didn't you sign the sketches, Giles? They're beautiful. You must see that. You, young man, are an artist of extraordinary talent.”

  “Careful of that word. Talent usually means the end result of years of preparation.” He put aside his barely tasted sandwich. “In the living room, on the floor, Louisa. I want to sketch you lying on the floor.”

  “Lying on the floor? Really? Now?”

  “In the supine position.”

  “You mean lounging on pillows?”

  “Yes, with your clothes off.”

  “Nude! I hardly know you, Giles.”

  “I only want to draw you, Louisa. I have no intention of taking advantage of you or to lose the mutual respect and admiration we have. Besides, our age difference alone is... is...“Is what?” she sounded scolding.

  “Ahhh... incompatible.”

  She shook her head, almost laughed but frowned instead. “Incompatible, indeed.”

  “I mean it could only lead to no good, and I wouldn't dare jeopardize our newfound friendship.”

  In the back of his head, a voice told him to get on with it, to drop all pretense and take what he wanted and swiftly.

  She smiled. “You're right, of course, but you have a lot to learn about how to flatter a girl... ahhh... woman.” She blushed at the underlying suggestiveness, and that they were dancing around such a subject at all. “I suggest you read Men Are from—”

  “Mars... Women... from Venus. I have, but it hasn't helped.” He laughed on cue.

  Having made him laugh struck her as amazing, and he saw that, for a millisecond, she appeared to fight back a heart-wrenching tear. A quiet coyness filtered into her voice. “I'm not sure if I should be pleased about this age difference thing, or if I should take offense.”

  “Calmly now, Louisa, go into the other room, get comfortable with the idea and the pillows and the floor and the nudity. You will be beautiful when I am done with you, I promise. I promise.”

  Louisa only stared in response. “I-I-I couldn't... not without weeks of workouts... you know, the cellulite, flab!”

  “What?”

  “I just couldn't... really, Giles. Not in a million years.” She shivered from within. “We hardly... I hardly know you. It's out of the question, and I think...”

  “How much more do we need to know about one another? This is just false modesty, Louisa.”

  “No... no... nothing false about it. I have plenty to be modest about.”

  “But you're beautiful.”

  She dropped her gaze and shook her head. “I know better. All life has taught me different.”

  “Just do it... like the ads say, just do it, Louisa.” His impatience filtered through.

  “I really can't see myself doing that, Giles.”

  “But that's precisely how you do it. You psych up for it, mentally, picturing yourself there”—he pointed to her living room floor—”lying nude there for me to paint. Look, I've gone to the trouble to bring all my tools and supplies for the job. You really must, and I insist.”

  “With a lady, you don't insist on anything, not in my house, Giles, and if I'm uncomfortable with the idea, why then—”

  “What's a little moment's awkwardness and discomfort if it serves a larger purpose and—”

  “I-I-I would like you to leave now, Giles.”

  He didn't move. “Leave?”

  “Now. Now, Giles. I want you to leave, yes... please.”

  Still he did not budge.

  A slow quaking fear slithered along her spine like a warning, an instinctual bell tolling inside her frame. “Out! Out this minute, Giles. I want you out!” She went to the table and lifted the charcoal drawings and said, “Our arrangement is over! You can have these back!”

  She held out the drawings, and he reluctantly took them. His eyes downcast, he looked like a petulant boy.

  But instead of leaving, he laid aside three of the sketches and held one out to her. “You must keep this one, Louisa.”

  She had instinctively clutched on to the broom to use as a weapon, should she need it.

  “Take the sketch and don't be foolish. I'm leaving, Louisa, and I'm so sorry. The last thing I wanted was that you should feel a moment's distress around me, really,” Giles assured her. Indicating the broom, he added, “You can put that down. It's totally unnecessary, Louisa. We don't need shit like this between us. We're still friends, right?”

  She eased her grip on the broom but stood her ground. She stared at the single drawing, her favorite of the four, extended to her.

  “Of course, you're right.”

  “I mean, who couldn't use another friend. No such thing as too many friends, right?”

  She nodded, saying nothing, as if embarrassed, and she further loosed her grip on the broom. The moment she took hold of the charcoal drawing of herself surrounded by birds, Giles grabbed for the broom, frightening her. With the sketch clutched against the handle, she brought the broom up and knocked the glass from his hand. It rained across the floor in miniature thunder. The broken pieces winked up at the odd pair—recluse and would-be killer.

  “Please, Louisa, you're beautiful... a beautiful person resides deep within you. In your soul, and I want to get at it. That's all, that's all.”

  She softened in both body language and tone. “That's all?”

  “Yes, that's all I want is to sketch you. After that, I want to do you in oils, that is to paint you. You see, I sketch first, paint last.”

  She hesitated. She tightened her grip on the sketch in her hands.

  Giles quietly said, “All I really want for Christmas is your spine, Louisa. You can keep the rest.”

  “What?” she said, confused. “What did you say?”

  But even as she asked this, he pulled a small, hefty hammer from the loose overalls he wore, and the ugly tool came crashing down, bloodying her scalp. She stumbled to the floor and crawled into the living room, dazed, disorientated, still clutching the sketch, wondering where she was and what had happened to her. Even dazed, she felt him standing over her. Something instinctive told her to face him, but she could not stand. Doing the next best thing, she turned onto her back to face up. “Come close, closer...” she croaked out a whisper.

  He leaned in over her. “You have some final words?” he asked.

  She whispered so low that he could not hear. When he came within reach, she tore at his face with her nails, shouting, “Bastard!”

  Her fighting back had surprised Giles; he wondered why she wanted to live. To hang pictures of birds on her walls? To feed her cat? To clean her sink of dishes? Some other mundane chore in her dull existence?

  She'd passed out, and needing to get at her entire backside, he ripped her clothes from her. The entry through the back must be completely unfettered. He next located the sketches and began to stuff them into the bag. But he was stopped when he saw the blood stained sketch she clung to. He decided to place the last three he'd done on the walls as she had planned. He hunted down her tape-and-scissors drawer and got it done.

  Backing up, studying and admiring his hung Collec
tion of Birds in the Park, he imagined what she had had in mind. With the right frames and in this context, it might have been lovely. Too bad he could not take credit, a bow for the work. It was good.

  He next returned to his tools and pulled out his scalpel and rib cutter.

  The actual killing had taken less than a minute; the working up to it all these months, was a different story altogether.

  Still, getting in and out of Louisa's apartment had taken far too much time. Giles now felt an urgency to vacate without being seen. He lifted the hand she had scratched his face with; she had left him with a scar from chin to Adam's apple. Using the rib cutter, he snapped off each fingertip at the joint, dropping each into the trash bag alongside the broken glass and his partial sandwich. One of the round-nailed fin-gertips missed the bag, seemingly leaping to freedom, rolling away toward the sofa chair, when in the same instant Archer the cat darted and snatched it up and was gone again.

  “Damn you, cat!” he bellowed. He coaxed but failed to lure the cat from its hiding place; kneeling low, looking up under the sofa chair, he learned the damn thing had simply vanished, along with Louisa's fingertip. “Fucking cat!”

  Giving up on the cat, Giles turned back to Louisa's body and stopped momentarily to stare at how beautiful the geometry of her form lay there, splayed open, limbs forming a kind of human swastika, each aligned in a spontaneous akimbo, but what struck him most remained that damnable charcoal drawing clutched in her dying hand. The sight caused him to give up cutting off any more fingertips. He reasoned it out: She had to've torn at him with her only free hand, and since he resided somewhere under the police radar here in Millbrook, Minnesota, he had acted accordingly to remain that way, removing any possible DNA he may've left in the apartment or on the body—all save the DNA the cat would hopefully consume.

  “Isn't likely they'll cut open a cat for evidence they don't know is there,” he muttered to the empty room and corpse.

  For some minutes, he stood clear of the blood while regarding her in death, moving round the body with care in his bare feet, considering every angle. He made mental notes for later. He'd want to depict her exactly as she lay here, only in the abstract—caught like a butterfly on a pin within the context of his art.

  No, he needn't bother with her right hand. She'd only scratched him with her left, and only the once before falling back.

  “Got to get out of here,” he told Archer from whom he caught snatches of contented birdlike murmurs coming from the gut and throat, somewhere below the sofa, happy with his prize. Out Louisa's window, he saw a man walking a poodle past a service truck of some sort. He ruminated how people foolishly attributed warm, cozy feelings to their animals so as to feel better about themselves, as if they had some kind of reciprocal even symbiotic relationship with their pets, as if the pet cared. And people did this so routinely and without the slightest sense or dared thought. The same people who made light of a man like John Edwards, the TV psychic, attributed an entire array of emotions and feelings of love that their cat or dog provided them, when in fact the animal liked your smell, and why'd it like your odor? Because when your smell was nearby, they knew they'd be fed. And this Childe woman with her birds and this crazy belief system she had built up around them, as if they spent time thinking about her, placing her in their little animal dreams and thoughts, as if they gave a shit about her when all they really cared about came out of a bag of feed in her hand. The woman had come to think of herself as a kind of Uncle Remus—like in a Disney film—birds flitting about her cheek, stealing kisses, or a St. Francis of Assisi in a skirt, animals whispering in her ear the secrets of the universe and peace on fucking Earth. And all that crap about the complexity of the bird's brain written by that so-called naturalist who bought his degree was exactly that— crap. “Birds're as smart as my left nipple,” Giles allowed. “Bird Man of Alcatraz only proved one thing—birds contract as many diseases as we do, but it took the brain of a man to combat those diseases.”

  Poor stupid self-deluded reclusive Louisa Childe. Her last thoughts were likely of her birds and Archer.

  Giles went back to the door he would exit from, and there he removed what might be taken as a big blue easel bag, struggling to bring it from deep within his backpack. Successful, he dug from the bag a large towel. Using the towel, he lifted the woman's spine from where he had left it on her buttocks, wrapping the serpentine rack of bones in the towel and carefully working it, section by section, into the oblong bag without its coming apart.

  The vertebral column filled the blue bag, creating a somewhat irregular line, but Giles had read somewhere that the eye saw only what the eye wanted to see. He worried little that anyone would stop him to ask what might be inside the bag. After all, it wasn't as if he were transporting a body. It would appear to anyone he might pass that he carried an easel inside. Nothing sinister about an easel.

  He then located his change of clothes. He quickly pulled on a set of clean underclothes, pants and a pullover sweatshirt to accompany his hat and gloves. Finally, he replaced his shoes and socks with what he'd brought. He then threw on his coat, filled his hands with bags, and with a final look around, surveying the charcoal drawings on the wall, and the one clutched in Louisa's hand, he bid adieu to the place and the woman who had supplied him with what he needed. He inched out the door, careful to make no noise.

  As he walked down the hallway, the bagged spine over his shoulder, he located the incinerator shaft and dropped the trash bag with glass, leftover sandwich, fingertips with his DNA embedded (all save the one the cat had squirreled away), and the bloody clothing he'd been wearing. It would all burn with the Tuesday morning trash as it did every Tuesday morning on the corner of Cologen and Geldman streets, a crossroads intersection with a stern green light in the middle of icy Millbrook, Minnesota.

  The cold air fired brisk chilling needles into the pours of his face.

  “Thank you, Miss Childe for a lovely evening and a fine trade,” he said to himself as he stepped out onto the street. Surprised, he found that the plumber's van had remained parked out front of the building the entire night. “Looks like someone else got lucky at Number Forty-eight Geldman,” he muttered, hefting the bone sack and sauntering casually toward the bus stop.

  Giles loved riding buses. Loved people watching.

  TWO

  My days are in the yellow leaf, The flowers and fruits of life are gone, The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone.

  — LORD BYRON

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin November 12, 2004

  “MOTHERS... you gotta back pain in dem joints? Den back outta dem joints.”

  “I'd say the cure was worse than the patient.”

  “Yeah, surefire way to get rid of that pesky ol' sciatica...” muttered Special Agent in Charge, Xavier Darwin Reynolds to the others from the crime-scene unit, who were gathered about the victim, each in turn taking a verbal joust at the impossibly insane crime scene.

  Not only had the victim's back been splayed wide open by an as-yet-undetermined blade, but her insides looked out at the detectives—shyly hiding, peeking out through a bloody rectangle in her back the size of a French-louvered window.

  All surrounding tissue and remaining bones had collapsed inward on organs untouched by the killer and the bone cutter used to extract the spinal column from its calcified moorings. And so the back window stood open like some bizarre pirate's chest, literally plundered as if an archeological dig, and the plunderer had made off with a strange treasure indeed, leaving all the rest. He had not cored out her eyes. Had not taken any teeth. Had taken nothing of her features, asked nothing of her breasts, nothing of her genitalia. Only the serpent of bone.

  An enormously disturbing sight for which the only defense seemed stark, grim humor which now, thanks to the lead investigator's having joined in, opened the floodgate wide.

  “Least she had—with an emphasis on had—backbone.”

  “Somebody really had a boner on for her.”

/>   “Gonna need one helluva big pot to flavor the ol' bisque with that ham-bone!”

  “Ham-bone, ham-bone!” sang a tall female agent.

  “Gone are the days of spine and roses,” said a photographer.

  “Gives new meaning to the old spinal tap, don't it?” came another.

  “Render unto us a few bars, Jerry, 'Take me BAAAAACK to ol' Virginy

  “Guy needs serious back up.”

  “All right, enough with the vertebral backgammon,” said FBI Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran, who stood staring from the small foyer leading into the apartment. Jessica had just arrived from the airfield, her auburn hair burnished and gleaming in the light filtering through the apartment windows. Jessica's keen eye immediately crossed swords with the awful wound done the victim, when a large policewoman stepped between her and the body—cutting off her line of vision. Jessica silently thanked the woman, wondering if it were intentional or otherwise.

  The small army of men and women of the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, FBI field office crime-scene unit fell silent. The others watched this guru of forensics who'd flown in from Quantico, copiloting the FBI Lear Jet from Virginia to oversee their case.

  Jessica quickly donned a hair net over her ample hair, which had been pulled tight in a ponytail for the work. She slipped a pair of gloves over her smooth, suntanned fingers and worked them over each hand. She wondered if any of the others could read what was going on behind her shining eyes. Eyes now sending messages to a brain that truly didn't want to cooperate with the image she'd seen only photos of until now. She stalled for time, swallowing back the bile that threatened to erupt on her first sight of the god-awful hacking the victim had taken.

  “Ever see anything like this in the D.C. area?” asked one of the field ops, a strikingly large young woman with a blue jacket over her vomit-stained business suit. It appeared from her nonchalance that she'd been in and out of the crime-scene area, and that she'd popped something akin to Prozac. Her dangling name tag read Amanda Petersaul.