Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “No, I just wanted to know the truth. How about you? You interested at all in the truth of your lineage?”

  “Bullshit. You're bullshitting me.”

  “Well, look, if you're not going to get to the point, Giles, and just run up Petersaul's minutes, I'm hanging up.”

  “Agent Petersaul? Amanda need not worry about Cingular now.”

  “You talk like Amanda's dead.”

  “And you want me to believe Amanda's still alive?” He laughed. “Let the games begin.”

  “She is quite alive and recuperating. Took all you could dish out and still survived. Oughta build a new reality TV show around this woman.”

  “Survived?”

  “Yes.”

  “The first ever to survive my interest in a spinal cord.”

  Jessica replied through gritted teeth. “What do you think? That she's going to die just because you want her to?”

  “I think she did die. I had gotten too far on her when I was interrupted by headlights I thought belonged to you.”

  “Petersaul survived. Now, Giles, let's talk about how you want to give yourself up so that no one else gets hurt—including you—since every cop and FBI agent in Chicago is gunning for you.”

  “No, Dr. Coran, let's talk about you coming to my showing.”

  “Really? You want me to come to see your art?”

  “It's good... very good.”

  “I'm sure it is. You forget, I've seen your sketches.”

  “My worst day, my worst piece of art is far better than that prick Orion's junk. My art does not rely on smoke'n mirrors, special effects'n strobe lights'n all that shit. My work has character... backbone, you might say.”

  Jessica immediately realized now what he was doing with the stolen racks of bones. “Your art... is... it is built upon the bones of your victims?”

  “The centerpiece of each sculpture, yes. A must-see.”

  “Then I must see it. When and where?”

  “Not so fast. First off, you come alone.”

  “That flies in the face of all my training and experience, Giles.”

  “You want the son of Matisak, don't you?”

  “There's no scientific proof, Giles, that Matthew Matisak was your father.”

  “What're you saying?” This had not once occurred to him ever. Getting the showing at Cafe Avanti might not seem like much of a showing, not to an Orion perhaps, but it had given him the courage to open and digest all that Mother had left him by way of his father. “Why would Mother lie about... about a thing like that, Dr. Coran. One good reason. Give me one good reason.”

  “Your mother might've had it all wrong, despite what she convinced you and herself of.”

  “That's truly insane, Dr. Coran. Are you simply afraid to face the facts?”

  “Like you?” she softly taunted. “Tell me where to be and when, Giles, and I promise you, I will come alone.”

  “Our little rendezvous... a kind of reunion. Old Dad picked you over Mom, didn't he? Gee-whiz, Pop wanted to go off into eternity with you and leave us to fend for ourselves. I read about his fixation and how he cornered you in New Orleans, how the roof caved in on him, and you got the upper hand, or rather fate in the shape of one big-assed nasty hook took care of Poppa.”

  “That's right, and I watched him squirm on that hook.”

  “Are we on, Doctor?”

  “Will you tell me where you are, Giles?”

  “No... No... I gotta think this thing through.”

  “Your showing, Giles. Where is it happening? I want to see your work and to finally meet you.”

  He hung up.

  She cursed. “Bastard.”

  “Appropriate word in this case,” replied Sharpe, snapping his own phone shut. “But Jess, we've got his signal location via satellite. Hurry!”

  She followed him out to a waiting car. From the car, they radioed Laughlin that they had a fix on Gahran's location.

  Twenty cars silently converged on Cafe Avanti, covering front and back. Men p>oured into the cafe, making it crowded, frightening and disturbing the usual customers and others who'd come to enjoy the evening with laptop computers opened, notepads busy, books propped beside large helpings of exotic coffee drinks and pastries. Other people milled about in the rear, ohs and ahs spilling out as they literally walked through the mind of a killer, examining Giles Gahran's artwork, commenting on the realism of even the blood odor along with the sight of the spines.

  Police and FBI agents secured every exit. The owner rushed at them, calling them pigs and demanding to know the meaning of this outrage, saying, “You think this is Guatemala or something you can just bust into my place like fucking Nazi storm troopers? You got a warrant?”

  Laughlin dealt with her as other agents swarmed upstairs and cleared each room one by one. Jessica, with Richard at her side, took the gruesome tour through Giles Gahran's mind, going from a dark little room down even darker little corridors to another adjacent room and another larger one partitioned off. She recognized the featureless, eyeless creations as those of each victim. The park bench and birds in one, the playful dog in another, the extremely cramped horse with Sarah Towne's form, and dangling above all as if lifting out of the backs of women flew the backbones—so lifelike and amazingly startling and eerie in their levitation above the human forms frozen in time. Because, as Jess determined now by touch, they were real. Made even the more eerie as Jessica confirmed her worst fear, that the sculpted bones were sculpted not by Giles but by God.

  Onlookers were being ushered out of the gallery created here to display Giles's twisted idea of art. Laughlin joined them, the owner still on him, bitching at him, when he announced there was no sign of Gahran. “We've hit every nook and cranny from basement to third floor and the roof. He's not here, and the owner isn't cooperating.”

  “This is a crime scene now. We don't need her cooperation to process this place,” Jessica replied. Jessica stepped up to Conchita Raold and glared at her with such intensity that Raold averted her eyes.

  “Ms. Raold. You could be prosecuted for harboring a murderer, and we could tie you up so many ways legally and illegally that you will lose this cafe and everything else you hold dear. You will cooperate with us. Where is he?”

  “I don't know. He came down here during the day and began working in the very back room, and I tried to bring him something to eat and drink, but he wouldn't let me go in there. Then he came out all exhausted. He never got no sleep the whole time we were... I tried to get him to sleep, you know. He'd been up all night. But he came with more bones I... I thought he made them outta his own head, you know. I... I can't believe what they are telling me.”

  Jessica took her aside and sat her down. Calmly, Jessica asked, “He worked all day and then what?”

  “He wasn't too clearheaded. I tried to get him to go back up to bed, you know. He looked mad when he got off the phone, just five minutes before you all come bustin' into my place. I thought Chicago was part of America, but I guess not.”

  “Hear that, Laughlin? He's possibly still in the area!”

  “Unless he grabbed a cab, hopped a bus or the nearby elevated,” replied Laughlin, “but we'll get on it, canvass the neighborhood and paper his face everywhere.”

  “Did you see this, Conchita?” Jessica asked, showing her the photo of Gahran as a high-school student on the front page of the Sun-Times. “You had to've seen this. He had to've seen this.”

  “He told me you were all trying to frame him for something Keith Orion did, that you released Orion because you didn't have enough to hold him, so now you were making up stuff against Giles.”

  “And you believed that?” asked Sharpe, straight-faced.

  She glanced up at him but said nothing. Jessica asked, “What was he working on all day? Show me.”

  “It's a back room.”

  “Is that supposed to be humorous?”

  “No, it's just for empty boxes and shit.”

  “An ordinary back roo
m.”

  “Giles said he made up something special for me in here, but I didn't get no chance to go in there since it got so busy and then you all busted in. So I locked it up, not wanting no one to see it until I did, you know. He said it was special to me.”

  “I think we need to see it now, Conchita.”

  She led them back past all the sculptures of the three victims when Jessica noticed a fourth rack of backbones free-floating alone, newly draped with black sheets as backdrop canvass for Giles's special brand of black art.

  “Lucinda Wellingham,” said Sharpe. “Read the placard.”

  On the doorjamb Giles had created a placard naming each of his works. Where the three more elderly women had been depicted, he had simply used November 1, November 2, and November 3. This one read: Essence d'Lucious.

  Conchita unlocked a door to the very back storage room in this maze behind her cafe. “All right,” Jessica said, bracing herself. “He could still be in here... in the shadows.”

  “Better let us go in first,” suggested Sharpe.

  “No way—I won't lose you, Richard, not to this fiend, not as I did Otto.”

  Sharpe pushed past her, taking the lead, throwing the door wide on a blackened room, a soft, diffused, muted light striking an object at the center of the room, and the strobe light slowly revolved about the thing at the center.

  Jessica and Laughlin followed Sharpe, with Conchita peeking around them, watching as the light source picked up yet another backbone, then another, and finally a third. They hung high in the air here where the ceiling was a good fourteen feet high.

  “Three... I count three more spinal columns,” said Richard.

  “But whose is the third? We've got one unaccounted for victim,” said Jessica. “Bones will tell us something about him or her.”

  Dangling and eerily turning in a draft, the spinal columns looked like flying dragons and the strobe light gave them the illusion of flight. “Flying bones,” Jessica muttered.

  Then a second light source on a timer set to go on at intervals came on and raked quickly as a knife stroke across a nude male body, its back splayed open, bloody yet, dripping still from the mangling it'd endured at the hands of Matisak's son. Then the light raced off.

  “What in hell was that?” asked Laughlin.

  “Is it Gahran?” asked Sharpe. “But how?”

  “No,” she countered, “looks like an African male. But who?”

  The light source no longer on the body in the dark, no one could say, but Conchita managed words. “It almost looked like Murphy, my husband, but he hasn't much been around. We had a bad... really nasty fight.”

  The lights again raked over the set of three flying spinal columns overhead. In a beautiful blue artistic setting, one could construe the bones as birds in formation flight, in perfect sync, and then they realized another light source was directed on yet another scene in the far back of the room. The new light source directed attention to a sculpture of a child holding a small rack of bones—an animal spine—overhead, and from it, flowed a sickly yellowish fluid raining down and dripping over the lips of the boy.

  “That's Gahran,” Jessica declared. “As a child.”

  “Who's the other guy supposed to be?”

  “Where're the lights?” Jessica asked.

  Conchita found the switch but Giles had removed the bulb. The alternating light hit the strange unnamed man in the puzzle again, the lifelike nude body posed in the manner of Christ being removed from the cross, the dead body held by unseen moorings, bent in an arch of death throes.

  “Oh my God, it is Murphy! Murphy! It's my husband!”

  “It might have been you, Conchita,” muttered Laughlin.

  “I can't believe this.”

  Jessica grabbed her and guided her away from the sight, and back through Giles's colorful show, noting the tincture of blood odor in the air even here and she imagined the bloodred bones in the exhibit had been painted with the blood of Gahran's victims.

  “Get a light generator set up in that back room, Richard, and call in the local M.E., Horace Keene, and his team to process all of this. I'm not up to it.”

  “He kept saying, 'the lovely bones, the lovely bones... I gotta go see the lovely bones exhibit,' “ Conchita was saying over and over. “When he left here, he said that's where he was going to go... to see the lovely bones.”

  “ 'To see the lovely bones'?” Jessica repeated. “What the hell's that?”

  Patrons still held at bay by police began to kick this over as if it were a puzzle. “That book... the bestseller... on the New York Times list for a long time a while back... The Lovely Bones by... by...”

  Some took stabs at the author's name, but no one could dredge it up.

  “There's a bookstore around the corner,” said Laughlin.

  “Several,” said another cafe patron. He rattled them off, names and addresses, “Booked Up, In and Out Books and there's Afterword Books.”

  “Could mean the elevated,” said another. “Slang for the elevated is the bone rattler. Rattles your bones. You get off and your bones are still moving,” he joked.

  “No, man... it's that exhibit,” said a young, shy-eyed Latino girl.

  “Exhibit?” asked Jessica at this.

  “Downtown at the Field,” she replied.

  “Yeah, that's right, dinosaur bones,” added another patron, coffee in hand. “Some famous archeologist named Stroud... dug up some new kinda dinosaur bones. Claims they're like supernatural—at least to the Indians they are.”

  “Field Museum,” the shy girl added.

  Laughlin had already left, dispatching radio cars throughout the area and to each of the nearest bookstore locations. Richard had gone back to the storage room with a police photographer.

  Jessica sat across from a young woman with exotic features who lifted an ad from the newspaper for the Chicago Field Museum. Bold letters overlaying a fade in of Chicago's famous dinosaurs of the Field Museum, a corner shot of scientists working a recent dig, and a third shot of lab-coated men and women with recent bone acquisitions, said: “Come See Our Lovely Bones!”

  “He's gone on holiday,” Jessica murmured to herself.

  The dark-skinned woman with the ad only smiled and said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  That's where he wants me to meet him, she told herself.

  Everyone was busy now. The Chicago M.E.'s people had arrived, and patrons of the cafe were ushered out.

  While shaking hands and saying hello to Jessica as an old friend, Horace Keene, Chicago's top M.E. said in his stentorian voice, “Cafe is closed until further notice, people. Everyone out!”

  Sharpe guided Keene and the evidence techs back to the body in the dark. With them, they carried all the instruments and light-generating equipment they would need.

  Jessica quietly slipped out, located the car she had come in, found the keys dangling in the ignition, got in and drove for Chicago's Lake Shore Drive and the Museum Campus.

  Along the way her phone rang. She looked at the signal to determine if it were Richard. He'd be angry and fuming by now if he had discovered her gone. But she recognized the signal as coming from Amanda Petersaul's phone. It was Giles calling.

  “It's a special night,” he said. “By now, you've seen my work. What do you think, Dr. Coran?”

  “It's... It was unique... Yes, very different from anything I have ever seen before, I must say.”

  “And coming from you, that's saying a hell of a lot.” “An amazing display of bravado on your pan. Are you wanting to be put down like a dog, Giles?”

  “I think I've surpassed the master! Dear old Dad?”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking, absolutely.”

  “In a manner of speaking?” he said, clearly annoyed that she hadn't agreed wholeheartedly.

  “In some ways, yes.”

  “In all ways.”

  “If you say so, Giles.”

  “No, bullshit. If you say so, Dr. Coran, and I know
you feel it, too. Wish we had time to delve into this more, time to just sit over coffee there at the Avanti and just talk about it.”

  “We do, Giles. We have the rest of your life.”

  He exploded with laughter at this, and then he hesitated. “You mean, Dr. Coran, you'd come to see me? Visit at the asylum? Have tea with the freak, the criminally insane, Satan's son, heir to Jack the Ripper? Did you know that Jack, too, was an artist?”

  “I believe any tea we might have, Giles, would be shared on death row, in the shadow of the execution chamber.”

  “Society's monster killer. You know very well I'd get the asylum, like Father. Come now! My crimes are too insane to not offer up an insanity defense.”

  Silence followed as her car sped along the faerie tale lit outer drive past the gaiety of Navy Pier with its array of colors and giant, lit-up Ferris wheel, a beacon in the night. She wondered why he had not leapt off the wheel after overturning the box of clippings on his father. She now asked him point-blank.

  He replied, “You think you know me, don't you, Jessica? But if you really knew me, you'd never ask such a question.”

  Something chilling in his remark told her that he meant to do as his father had attempted, to take Jessica with him into eternity, be it heaven or hell.

  Given the full-page ad for the Field Museum's night opening of the bone show, Jessica assumed the place would be overrun by people. Capturing or killing Giles Gahran, or dying in the process herself as Otto before her, one way or another, this life and death struggle between them was going to happen here and now. It would end at the Field Museum, his chosen venue.

  She felt the bulge of her holster and gun below her armpit as she drove. She felt the heft of her second weapon on her ankle. If Matisak was indeed his father, she'd need both weapons.

  “Well, Doctor? Which is it to be? Execution tonight or the asylum? You think there's an asylum that can hold a Matisak?”

  “No... on that we agree.”

  “How lovely a spine you must possess, Jessica. Come alone.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The blood of the moon steeps through me. but you cannot find me. as I have disappeared into your darkness.