Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “That's a comfort. Now where're we going?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Chicago?”

  “Everything is pointing to Chicago, yes. We have agents on the trail of a man believed to have killed a woman in Milwaukee and—”“But the cops in Chicago released the guy!” protested Towne. “Said he had proof he didn't kill that girl.”

  “Darwin had a long talk with Agents Petersaul and Cates just before we came to see you, Rob,” countered Jessica.

  “Petersaul and her partner are closing in on another suspect,” added Richard.

  Towne looked hopefully into her eyes. “Who is this guy?”

  “A kind of shadowy second to Orion with whom Lucinda Wellingham had spent a little time close to the end of her life. Likely grooming him for his own showing.”

  “Another artist... fits in with the sketches. I tried to tell these fools here I haven't a lick of artistic talent but—”

  Bouncing through a bit of turbulent roadwork, Jessica added, “We suspect this guy reacts badly to major events happening in his life.”

  Richard told him, “We suspect that his mother's death rather unleashed him on the world. His chance at a showing in Milwaukee, perhaps out of some sudden incident that set him on a rage, perhaps fear of success—who knows—precipitated his killing of his benefactress. Perhaps your wife and Louisa Childe in Millbrook were in a sense benefactors.”

  “We've uncovered an unsolved case connected to him as well, years ago in Millbrook, the disappearance of an art dealer-agent type who had some dealings with Gahran. Male this one.”

  “Most of his victims,” added Richard, “we again suspect were fill-ins... ahhh... stand-ins for Mommy Dearest, Nurse Ratched, the Evil Queen or whoever he hates most in this life.”

  “And a study of the victims not only shows how close in age they were but in matronly appearance, all save Lucinda Wellingham, and this other art dealer, of course, but these two also represented power, authority figures who held his future in their hands, like his mother, we surmise.”

  “Big events set him off?”

  “One reason he takes months, sometimes years to strike again,” she said. “He lives a quiet, patient, long-suffering lifestyle between in which he buries his urges in his artistic endeavors—puts them in his work, so to speak.”

  Clearing his throat, Richard smirked. “He literally puts the 'objects' of his rage into his work.”

  “Sounds better and better for this, doesn't he?” asked Towne, a half-satisfied smile creasing his stern features. “How... what else you got on him?” pressed Towne.

  “Not to get your hopes up too high,” Jessica said, sipping hot coffee from a Thermos, “but this guy was born in 1980 to a single mother, Larina Gahran. Ring any bells?”

  “Gahran... Larina... son named Giles? No, none.”

  “Didn't mean a thing to us, either. You see, he's remained under the radar. Never been arrested, so he shows up on no one's screen. Certainly not the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—VICAP.”

  Outside the tinted car windows the black landscape of Oregon turned to lighted strip malls, gas stations, fast-food restaurants and the debris of urban sprawl as they neared the airport.

  In the darkness of the cab, Richard again broke the stillness. “Guy's mother is said to have berated him all his life, or so school records show a distinct psychosis involving his relationship with her—was a disability check recipient, former nurse, in of all places, Millbrook, Minnesota.”

  “How do you know all this now and not before?” asked a frustrated Towne, accepting a cup of the hot coffee from Jessica.

  “Once Petersaul and Cates got on his trail, it led back to Millbrook,” began Richard, “so I called my contact there, Brannan, and he dug up all he could find on Giles Gahran and faxed it to Petersaul, who in turn, contacted Jessica on her cell just before we arrived at your address, Mr. Towne.”

  “Then it's all good, solid information, right? All to the good, right?”

  “You tell me. Born and raised in Millbrook with a history of medical problems, yes.” Richard held a smug look of assurance. “Everything points to Giles Gahran.”

  “That's his name, Giles Gahran,” repeated Towne.

  “Now Darwin's got to play out his hand first, and as soon as possible, we will bring him home, too,” Jessica assured him.

  Sharpe continued with, “Records show that Gahran attended Millbrook schools, and Brannan's got hold of a yearbook photo he's forwarded to Chicago PD and FBI.”

  “Our first victim, Louisa Childe was killed only blocks from where this kid went to high school. He has no college record other than a Portland arts school—”

  “Wait... whoa up there. You have him in Portland? at the time of Sarah's murder?” asked Towne.

  “We do,” replied Sharpe.

  “And this only after his mother died and Childe was killed,” added Jessica. “His tuition in Portland was seeded by money coming out of her estate, the house sale.”

  “Sold out and moved to Portland soon after the Childe killing,” Richard said, his hands like fluttering birds, insistent of the truth. “Only weeks after Giles Gahran's mother dies, two years ago, Louisa Childe's mutilated body is discovered in late November, determined to have been killed in mid-November.”

  “Your wife was murdered in mid-November too,” added Jessica. “Joyce Olsen murdered in Milwaukee in the same manner in mid-November.”

  “Records also show his having attended Portland's prestigious Kanar Institute of the Arts. While in attendance there, your wife is killed.”

  “Damn... Sarah was taking classes there...”

  “Gahran next shows up in Milwaukee, having not quite completed his studies in Portland, and now we have not one but two killings using the same MO in Milwaukee.”

  “Sounds like you're all over this guy now like he fell outta the sky. Where they hell was all this when I was locked up all this time?”

  “He's disappeared into oblivion each time,” Jessica's tone turned from excited to apologetic, “and he allowed so much time between his killings.”

  Sharpe said, “Now he's become part of the Chicago cityscape. Still very much at large, but he will surface.”

  “It's only a matter of time and credit-card use,” Jessica assured Towne, “a registration record, signing a lease, a lot of interviewing and footwork in the arts community on our part.”

  “Besides, Chicago's as good a place to stash you as any,” added Sharpe.

  “When do we make the tape?” he asked.

  “At the airport, back of the van. It's all set up. Plan is to keep you mobile.”

  “You musta paid those boys good.”

  “Yeah, we did pay them well,” replied Jessica, “using my FBI MasterCard, but they are also anti-death penalty advocates.”

  They pulled into a Flying Tigers airport hangar, the van following. The hangar door came down on cue, just as Richard had promised it would. “That credit card's going to be maxed out anytime now.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Evil is easy and has infinite forms.

  — BLAISE PASCAL

  WITH the exhibit up and already looking like a hit among cafe patrons at Avanti, Giles wandered outside to gaze at the cityscape and found himself and his box parked on a bench at the terminus of Oak Street overlooking the lake again. He kept staring up at the enormous, lovely, revolving, lit-by-a-million bulbs Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. The lights and sounds wafting across the lake from the joyous time people—normal people—were having there seemed so close, so within his touch. And yet so far from it.

  A well of sadness balled up inside Giles for all the harm he had done in this world, in this life given him by some deity somewhere who must have known... had to have known what he would do with it, how he would ruin it, given all that he was even before exiting his mother's womb, and all that she molded him into; after all, such a deity did play with people's lives. He put Louisa Childe in harm's way, in Giles's path. He put Sara
h Towne at that right juncture along that riding path in the park in Portland within miles of the Kanar Institute. He had placed Joyce Olsen at that park just as Giles had passed by, and he had molded the faces and bodies of these women to look and move just like Mother. After all was said and done, God had placed all the others within Giles's reach as well, Lucinda and that fool in Millbrook, the one who would never be found. His spine, along with all else, had been dug up by roaming animals, quarry dogs most likely, and dragged, he supposed into some deep cave or burrow to rot there—a waste of a good spinal column, but at least no one had ever discovered Cameron Lincoln's body. Not even Giles. By the time he'd gotten nerve enough to go back to where he'd hurriedly buried the art exhibitor, below a scattering of twigs and leaves, the dead man had disappeared into the deep Minnesota woods.

  Giles stared up into the heavens at the night stars, the constellations winking in a clear, bright sky. “You planned all this right, God? You got those mysterious ways for us not to question, so whatever else, You—you're at back of all of it, invisible strings attached to our spines, manipulating all of it. Used to think it was Satan pulling my chain.”

  He stood and lifted the opened box, the one with all the news clippings and the letter Mother had carefully typed out and lain across the pile of horror stories that explained who his father was. The one with the heavy metal and glass object lumbering about inside it.

  The ribbons lay limp at each side, and Giles had read Mother's parting words at last. She, too, was created by God, and she and his father, were in their way both evil incarnate. While Mother had never killed anyone, she had destroyed a spirit—the spirit Giles might once have had a chance at being or at least at becoming—the shadowy other self who might have eschewed all that his father was, and fought off the ravages of his mother's assaults on that spirit, and overcome the genetic mark left on his soul by a monster seed.

  All gone now... any flickering hope of chance for that other self to survive extinguished long ago with his first murder. Too damn much stacked too high against him, borne of man and woman, a creature carrying both the mark of Satan in his very makeup, in the soup of his mother's womb, and the mark created of her doing, of his upbringing and environment. God could not have found a way to save him from Mother when an infant? Why not? Why in God's name not?

  Giles stood and looked down from what seemed a faraway place at the damnable, cursed box, realizing that it had been a blight on his soul from the moment Mother had handed it to him from her deathbed. She had had a lawyer bring it to her there in the hospital. It had been sealed for years until she herself broke a thick wax seal she had applied to it when the box had been placed into a bank vault for this day.

  “You have a right to know precisely who and what you are, Giles. That is why I gift this to you. It is the gift of self-awareness and fear... Yes, the gift of fear. You rightly ought to fear the thing you are and until now you have had no idea what you are, not really. You only think you do. Ever wonder where you get the urge to kill a living creature and to feed on its... its spinal fluid and marrow?”

  Now Giles knew what she had meant. For the first time everything fit, each puzzle piece in his brain, psyche and in his soul... it all fit. Finally, he understood precisely what Mother had had to live with, why she was so bitter, and why Mother, on bended knee, so often asked God why He had spared her for this—while pointing at Giles. Asking God why she had not been killed by his father.

  Giles wanted to run from the box.

  All these years since Mother's death, he had fixated on its contents—both fascinated with it and terrified of it at once. Drawn to its contents, closer and closer, until his fingers would inch inside it, fearful of the snakebite of its contents. At once wanting to bathe in it, to luxuriate in the sheer knowledge and power within the box, and to run in terror from it Finally, steeling himself, Giles reached in and snatched out a handful of the news clippings, snatching them from below the dead weight of the strange metal and glass tube device lying atop all. His eyes registered a kind of garden tool device like a hose attachment perhaps. He could not fathom its meaning, but he quaked at touching it. Then he abruptly closed the lid on the thing. Now he began to bravely, courageously read the bizarre stories in the clippings.

  Tales of Father...

  I could just walk away from it. Leave it right here. Never see it again,” Giles spoke to time, space, the stars and God as he stared down over the box, standing beside the park bench he'd been occupying as he'd read the accounts Mother had gathered over the years for his keepsake.

  He took tentative steps away. “When they catch me, they'll think I'm monster enough without knowing who my father was. Least now I know he's long dead. Mother didn't lie about that. They'll think me a common unfeeling sociopath, a psychotic fucking horror to make a blood splatterrama film about, like they did about Father. They'll think me a thing worse than all the other horrors combined, a thing without an ent of humanity—all granite and nerve and unleashed animal instinct like a starved wolf escaped from an ancient cave, as guileless and without pity as Jack the Ripper or Father... dear well-remembered Father. The man everyone on the planet knew about but forgot about with his death, everyone except me. I didn't even have the luxury of forgetting about him, having never known.”

  He halted, hearing a rustle behind him. A homeless man with a bundle of StreetWise newspapers to sell under his arm was now admiring the box, poking about its contents, curious as an overgrown cat.

  Giles reacted instinctively. “Get away from that, old man! It's mine! I... I just forgot it there.” “I found it! It's mine,” argued the half-demented fellow.

  “Here, here is for your newspapers!” Giles handed him a ten dollar bill.

  The shaky hand extended toward Giles to brush his cheek in a moment of need for human touch. Giles felt the scratchy, rough fingers caress his cheek. “You remind me of someone... someone who loved me once,” said the old man in a sandpaper and gravel voice.

  Giles pulled away after a moment. “You can keep the papers, re-sell them. Double your profits, old man,” he said as he lifted the ugly gift from Mother, her twisted homage to Father—every detail of his every crime against humanity. According to the news reports, the work of a man who lived a heartless, unfeeling double-life and killed wantonly like an animal by night while selling medical supplies by day. A man who had designed and patented his own medical device for extracting blood from the jugular artery as the hearts of his victims pumped blood to his waiting mason jars, each carefully labeled and packed into a cooler. Mother always said that Giles was neat to a fault, meticulous about his art supplies. Now he knew where he'd gotten the trait.

  Father was a blood drinker, a man convinced of his own need for blood, a vampire named Matisak—Mad Matthew Matisak, the newspapers proclaimed him.

  In the news stories, Father was characterized again and again as a weak little man suffering a debilitating disease who'd come to think of himself as a parasitic vampire who had to feed on the blood of other human beings to save himself from the disease that threatened to overtake him. One reporter wrote that his mental state had deteriorated far more quickly than had his physical condition, his physical state seemingly taking power from his each kill, and that he could be counted among the truly insane but masterful and ingenious murderers in murderer's row going back through all time. Another reporter claimed that Mad Matthew Matisak had established a strange bond with FBI Agent and Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran.

  Giles wondered what this woman could tell him about his father. He wondered how he might best his father's reputation and in doing so possibly meet this Dr. Jessica Coran. Father had wanted her to go into an eternal bliss with him, and he apparently damn near got his way in a warehouse in New Orleans many years ago.

  Giles wondered if this FBI doctor were still alive, still working for the FBI, and if so, he wondered if she would feel any kinship—as strange as such a kith and kin might be— to the son of Matthew Matisak. He made hi
s way toward the array of lights and the sounds of gaiety spilling from the ongoing Navy Pier fair. He felt an overwhelming need to be among people even knowing he would never fit in among people.

  Unsure why the lights of the Ferris wheel pulled him, Giles began a brisk walk for the pier.

  The homeless man looked after him until certain the young man had no intention of returning. He then unfolded the white sheath of paper with the sketch of the suspect in the Lucinda Wellingham—UPS murder case, with a strong possible connection to the Spine Thief mutilation murders.

  The cop's excited hands revealed shaking manicured, painted nails below the gloves as the detective tore them away, finally able to open the tightly folded paper on the likeness. There seemed a definite rough similarity between the man with the box and the man in the sketch. But undercover police detective Tanith Chen, peeling away a layer of her stifling makeup that created the rough texture and manly appearance she was known for, as it was the opposite of her feminine beauty, remained unsure. This kid parked so long on a park bench and talking to himself was new to the area, else he'd have known about her and her nightly collars of degenerates and drug dealers using her territory for all manner of perversions in the park, perversions now on the decline thanks to her collaring so many who dared “do their thing” on her watch. She'd kept one eye on the suspect in the distance now, his back to her. She began to slowly, cautiously follow the stranger, curious as to what he'd been up to. She'd watched earlier from a safe distance, watched him intentionally leave the package like it was some ransom demand or something. Certainly, her blue sense told her not everything in this picture was kosher.

  She found a park lamppost, one of those almost useless ones put up for decoration in the park by the pork-barrel politicians and Daley. Make Chicago beautiful... keep Chicago beautiful... the park is for the people... all a lot of crap, a moneymaking boondoggle the whole thing, as dripping of political favoritism and corruption as the deal with the tow-truck companies in this town. She laughed lightly to herself, recalling what her partner, Gene Kelley said just the night before at the Red Lion Inn where they mingled with other cops and writers and cops who wanted to be writers and writers who wanted to be cops. In a Faux baritone voice, he declared, “If Christ came to Chicago, his fucking donkey would be ticketed at the curb and more'n likely towed to boot by the Lincoln Park pirates. And where in the love of God is Christ going to come up with that kind of cash?”