Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  She opened the phone, careful not to allow the camera to see anything but herself. When she pressed to receive Richard's incoming call, the first noise she heard was the sound of a working backhoe.

  “Richard? Is it you?” She could hardly hear him over the backhoe's grunting and bawling hue. “What the hell's that noise?”

  “Backhoe!” he shouted.

  “Are you in the middle of a construction zone?”

  “Exhumation-in-progress zone!” he shouted back.

  “What're you talking about, Richard? And what time is it? And what kind of a gin mill're you in?”

  “Six-fifty... ahhh... no, seven here now... Minnesota time. What is it there? Same time zone, isn't it? Sorry to wake you, but wanted you to know...” The backhoe won out over several of his words, but she caught the single-most important one: exhumation.

  “How did you get... embroiled... in an exhumation?”

  “Hold on! Hold on!” He stepped away from the rhino-bellowing machine and found a quiet distance beneath a tree. There he informed Jessica of events at the Milwaukee M.E.'s office that led to the exhumation. She took the bad news about the lack of DNA evidence on file with Krueshach's office in relative stride, but Richard could not hold back. He took a moment to get his ire off against Millbrook authorities.

  She shook her head as his camera phone revealed a grimace. “But it sounds—from the backhoe—as though they are fully cooperating with you now?”

  “Well, yes, but only after I threatened them with more FBI descending on them. 'Fraid I woke up Eriq before you. Still, at least the lead investigator—Brannan—is onboard with us, entertaining the thought that Towne could possibly be innocent of the murder in Oregon.”

  “God, an exhumation. Difficult task. How're you holding up, sweetheart?”

  He sighed heavily into the phone. “I'm standing in a drizzle the middle of a rank old cemetery since before 6 A.M. and have been up all night... Now I'm amid people with whom I wouldn't share a pint and don't particularly like, and I am missing hell out of you, but otherwise... You know very well that I am managing.”

  “Like the professional, I know.”

  “Yes, and here digging up the sad remains of one Louisa Childe.”

  “I'm so sorry you're being put through this, Richard, really I am. An exhumation, Richard? I could never have predicted you'd have reason for—”

  Sharpe ordered her to stop. “I'm fine, really. I'm a big boy. I got myself here where I stand all on my own, dear, sad details of law enforcement in Millbrook notwithstanding.” He finished with a good Christian curse against ineptness that ended with “and may your Herefords sire no calves nor give milk nor sustenance to you and yours, Dr. Krueshach!”

  This made her laugh. She asked that he keep her apprised.

  In Millbrook, he replied, “I'm switching off now, and I'll be letting you know what, if anything, comes of this horrible morning's effort by we resurrection men.”

  “Richard, you've gone above and beyond for me again. Thank you, dear, so much.”

  “Not at all. A man's life is at stake. I begin to believe with each moment ticking away that this fellow in Oregon is innocent.”

  “Proving it may be impossible, Richard. I'll tell you what I told Darwin. Don't build your hopes up so high that when they are dashed that you can't ever hope again.”

  “Kind advice... The kind I might expect from an angel.”

  “You're so sweet, Richard. I so miss you.”

  “And I you.” Richard again said good-bye and put away his cell phone.

  Jessica hung up, breathing a sigh of relief that Richard had seen nothing and heard nothing of Agent Reynolds in her room at this hour.

  # # #

  ALTHOUGH Sharpe had presided over a number of exhumations in Great Britain, it was never an easy process nor easy on the nerves. Still, it had been his call, and he felt he had to remain aloof. He tried to show some élan by nonchalantly leaning against a large headstone marked curiously enough with the bold name of Churchill 1893—1933, about the average lifespan of the day, when the headstone moved under his weight. “Shit,” he muttered, quickly readjusting his stance, taking his weight off the stone.

  Overhead, flapping in increasing anger or parody, the banner strung across the ancient wrought iron whipped in the breeze, distorting the good name of The Henry Knox Memorial Cemetery. The place looked to be a sad patch of earth far from the center of Millbrook on a winding country road that multiplied the ruralness of this Minnesota haven just west of the Twin Cities tenfold. Brannan had explained that the cemetery had been the old settlers' plot, but when the town was at a loss for things the city council might do with funds found leftover from the various bake sales, the city fathers had ceremoniously renamed the weed patch in honor of President George Washington's Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, commander of the first American Artillery placed in the field against the British. The tale of the Boston Siege of 1775 was postscripted with the heroic story of how Knox made the arduous overland journey that brought the guns of Fort Ticonderoga, New York, to bear on the British at the Siege of Boston in dead of winter. The entire story seemed a reminder to Richard that he was a guest in this Land of Nod, and that his host was an Irishman whose ancestors enjoyed killing British soldiers. No love lost there. The surreal circumstances only enhanced the notion that the differences dividing Americans and the Crown remained intact after nearly 230 years.

  Brannan told the story of Knox with a boastful pride, but Richard knew it was to also cover his nervousness in this place, doing this work, to help pass the time while the backhoe desecrated the ancient earth they stood on so many miles from Boston and Washington, D.C., hallowed as it was by the local citizenry and given sanctity as result.

  “Why was Louisa Childe buried here?” Richard asked. “I mean, rather than in the large cemetery in Millbrook? Was she D-A-R?”

  “D-A-R?” Krueshach then asked.

  “Daughters of the American Revolution, Herman,” explained Brannan.

  “Oh, far from it I'd say,” replied Krueshach, his arms tightly wound about his shoulders. “No ties really to any organization. Rather a recluse, wasn't she, Dan?”

  “Then why the burial in Fort Knox here if you're all so proud of this... ahhh... cemetery?”

  Brannan glared for a moment at the aspersion to the cemetery. Pointing to one side of the field, he said, “This section is the old settlers' graveyard.” Then wheeling, continuing to point to where the deafening backhoe continued its work, he added, “While this other section is a potter's field.”

  “Potter's field, as in a place for John and Jane Does— called A.N. Others in England.”

  “If you mean by that the anonymous John or Jane Doe,

  yes.”

  “But you knew her identity.”

  “Louisa Childe had no burial insurance, nothing other than a health insurance policy, and no one came to claim the body. City couldn't house her indefinitely in Hotel Krueshach's refrigerated suite, so the city paid the freight. She had a great huge turnout at the church service at the Unitarian chapel though, didn't she, Herman?”

  Krueshach nodded successively. “Folks from every county within a fifty mile radius came to show their respects.”

  “I'm sure they did.” Richard wondered how many came out of curiosity to see the woman whose spine had been ripped from her by a brutal monster. He was reminded of stories he'd read of the old American West where outlaws were not only hung, but as in early English history, their bodies put on display. The display tickets paid the local undertaker's wage, and sometimes he sold the display, body and all, to a traveling carnival. Ironically, the criminal made more “honest” money as a dead man than he had earned in a life of crime, but it was his reputation as a criminal that got people to pay. The larger the reputation (often created for the show), the larger the take.

  Knowing human nature and the criminal tendencies of the mind, Sharpe felt instant skepticism as he tried to imagine the moti
ves of the fifty-mile-radius people who'd ostensibly come out of genuine concern or pity. Had that been the case, why had they not raised enough money to give Louisa Childe a decent burial? Still, he knew that in rural areas of England, say Bury St. Edmonds, such a death would be equally poorly handled and made the more curious by the local authorities and press. Little difference at all. Rural was rural and parochial parochial the world over, Richard just hadn't been braced for it in America, not even in Minnesota, not in the year 2004.

  Rather than be contentious and ask more pointed questions surrounding the woman's burial, Richard, turning to his military training, decided to allow Brannan's smalltown-cop illusions about human nature to remain intact, as he saw no tactical advantage to stripping them away.

  Sharpe thought briefly of Jessica, wishing he could be with her now, in her bed, rather than here with the gloom and grim wail of the backhoe. The unnatural noise amid all the surrounding trees and foliage felt so like a desecration. To push off the chill, Sharpe again ruminated about Jessica and the warmth of her body close to his; he recalled how they had first met: how he had approached her for help, hat in hand, and how from the moment he saw her that he'd been struck by the need to have her, and how he tried to resist, and how futile was the attempt.

  Sharpe glanced now from Dan Brannan's red-splotched drinker's face to the sullen Dr. Herman Krueshach's raw-boned German features. Both Millbrook men had agreed that the matter should stay in their jurisdiction after all. Still, a nervous agitation wound around the predawn light as thick as the cemetery fog.

  Sharpe hated the damp earthy smell of cemeteries. He tried to focus on the work of the backhoe as it systematically uncovered Louisa Childe's crypt. The workmen then got atop it and removed the concrete lid with pulleys. Then they climbed atop the coffin, working like hunched-over gargoyles to inchworm thick old world hemp ropes beneath it. Then the coffin was lifted and gently placed on level ground.

  The workmen pried open the lid, and inside they found the skull's empty eye sockets staring back. The corpse still had swaths of skin here and there, and some strands of wispy hair went fluttering as the wind dove into the coffin and sifted through it. Sharpe felt a pang of sympathy for the woman, and he was suddenly struck with why Krueshach wanted the fingertips returned to her—after all, she'd gone to eternity without her vertebrae. The least Krueshach could do to restore some dignity to the corpse was to return her fingertips—all but one that was never recovered.

  Now they had dishonored her grave. Violated its below-ground sanctity. No one was happy about this, least of all Richard Sharpe.

  Sharpe now watched Krueshach lift the bony hand and pry it open, first from the sketch that Lieutenant Dan Brannan had returned to her, and then from its three-year position of a hard fist. Sharpe lifted the bloodstained sketch of the woman in her lifelike pose feeding the birds. Strangely, save for some splotches of now-brown blood and insect activity about the edges, the charcoal drawing appeared as fresh as the day it had been rendered. Sharpe thought it the most peaceful scene he'd ever laid eyes on, not unlike a Hogarth portrait.

  Her right-hand nails remained barely intact, coming away with Dr. Krueshach's tweezers. The sun had come up while the backhoe had completed its work, and the light— made to dance through the flurry of leaves—caused each fingernail to wink like mother-of-pearl. Krueshach bottled each nail separately, and for good measure, he took scrapings of the area below each nail, all bone now, and each of these scrapings he bottled, labeled, and capped. Sharpe, no longer able to stare at the corpse, saw the sad, small evidence bag filled with fingertips that had been placed alongside the body. Krueshach offered up a silent prayer, his lips barely moving. When he was finished and back on his feet, the little M.E. in wire rims shouted, “Place Miss Childe back into her earthly chamber!”

  Before the workmen could do so, a small swarm of chirping meadowlarks appeared, flew about the scene in a circle and as quickly disappeared, all but one. The straggler landed on a low-hanging tree limb overlooking the coffin, silently staring down at Louisa Childe, as curious as a Minnesota farmer, rubber-necking, tweeting as if a lone voice in the desert, wailing a cosmic complaint that Richard Sharpe himself felt like making.

  TEN

  Just a line to let you know I love my work.

  —JACK THE RIPPER

  Apartment of Giles Gabran, Milwaukee

  THE apartment smelled so strongly now of bleach and ammonia and muriatic acid that it'd gotten into the air ducts and visited apartments throughout the building. People began pouring past Giles Gahran s door, exiting the building, fearful some sort of terrorist attack had been accomplished, fearful their lungs were already in advance stages of collapse and decay. Even Mrs. Parsons was ambling past his door, and seeing him peeking out, shouted, “Giles! Get out of the building! It's awful. Some sort of airborne poison has been let loose in the building. Get out! Get out now!”

  More people filed past as firefighters in protective gear rushed in, searching for the source of the disturbance. Giles slammed his door, gritting his teeth. He cursed himself for having overdone it with the cleaning fluids.

  “Fuck me! Damn! All right... just have to remain calm. Guy's got a right to clean his place, even if he is moving out. Just tell 'em it's a compulsion, one of those anxiety things, a phobia of germs, microbes, dust mites. A personal war. They'll buy it. Hell, it's partially true. Hell, it's entirely true.”

  A thundering pounding against the door through which Lucinda had attempted escape the night before now filled the room along with the pungent odors of the cleaning fluids and rags he'd used. Giles lifted the cleaning rags and the mop to the door and cracked it open. He stared out through the crevice at a huge, imposing fireman whose flat, black visor looked like the face of death, like Giles's dead, faceless father come to visit. Amadeus in a Milwaukee firefighter's biohazard suit.

  Through a mechanical speaker below the visor, the man inside the suit, sounding like Darth Vader said, “Sir, we've traced an odor emanating from this unit that has disturbed all the inhabitants, most of them aged and now on the street awaiting our clearance. Can you give an explanation of what that odor is, sir?”

  Giles smiled and chuckled.

  “Something funny about all this, son?”

  “No, no, of course not... Sorry, it's just that some old fool in the building called you guys out on a wild goose chase, I'm afraid, and it's... well... it's silly.”

  “The odometers are registering high, son. So no one's thinking this silly, least of all the Milwaukee Fire Department.”

  “But it's just my fucking cleaning fluids is all.” He pulled the door wider, showing off the mop, a bucket of water at the center of the room near all the crates, boxes, bags and luggage. Giles held out a handful of dirty rags toward the black-visored, tall man, now being joined by his fellow firefighters, curious and staring past the door and into the apartment.

  Inwardly, Giles quaked. They stood only feet from Luanda's body, all his collection of spines and jars of blood-paint, all his sculptures. In a matter of minutes, if they chose to barge in and do a thorough inspection, Giles could be found out, more authorities called in, his crates ordered opened by a search warrant. In his mind's eye, Giles saw it all happening, a complete, total end to his quest to one day display all of his work in a glorious opening of his own choosing, his own time and place.

  The big man with the dark visor finally removed his protective helmet, his ruddy good looks rivaling anything Giles had ever seen in the way of a magazine model. “We're just going to take these soaked rags with us, if you don't mind, Mr... ahhh?”

  “Gahran... Giles Gahran.”

  “Yes, Mr. Gahran, and if you don't mind, would you remove the mop head, and we'll remove that as well. It'll speed up the process of the odors dissipating in the building.”

  “Oh, sure... absolutely... and I'm so sorry about all this. Really had no idea—”

  A second, older fireman with gray-black hair pushed past the young
er man, taking everything in, his uncovered nose sniffing. “You using some form of marine pool deck cleaner in here, young man?”

  “Ahhh... yes, sir. Muriatic acid. Guy at the hardware said it'd get off any mildew on the planet and the moon. That's the way he put it. Said it'd clean a gravestone with a century's worth of mildew on it. So I got it.”

  “Smell bleach, too,” replied the man.

  “Yes, sir. I... I didn't entirely trust the hardware guy and the acid, so...”

  “Son of a bitch... you mixed muriatic acid and bleach? What the fuck else did you throw into this cocktail? No wonder the odor don't bother you, boy. You've burned out your olfactory instruments, scudded out the lining of your nose, blown it out your ass. Fucking fool. Getting us all out here with all this gear and equipment, sending everybody in the fucking building into a panic. Christ, don't you watch the news, kid?”

  “I don't, sir. No TV. Come in and have a look!” Giles stepped aside, inviting the man into the apartment, pointing to the interior. “A war could be going on and I wouldn't know. It's all negative vibes I just don't allow into my life.

  “There is a goddamn war going on! We're sitting on a terror alert stage orange, fella! Get this out to the media, Tom,” said the older firefighter to the younger fireman, “and round up everybody.”

  “Code thirteen, sir?”

  “What the fuck else? We're done here! Christ, this is going to bite the budget.”

  “Yes, sir, Chief. Right away, Chief.” The younger firefighter rushed off with the rags in hand. Giles heard him on the landing, shouting to other firefighters up and down the stairwell, “All's clear! That's a Code thirteen. We're outta here!”

  The older man did a quick walk through of Giles's apartment, cursorily looking here and there. He noticed the ornate box on the kitchen table, commented on what a nice-looking box it was, and continued on. Giles popped open one of his crates and told him to have a look at one of his sculptures. The big fireman leaned in over the crate almost as tall as he, and stared down at the statue of a woman. “Looks inter-estin',” was his comment.