Absolute Instinct jc-11 Page 14

  Suddenly, the massive dark shadow at the table registered in her waking mind.

  My god, it's Darwin. Here all night. He never left. She realized that Reynolds had fallen asleep there, too, sitting upright in a chair, the autopsy report of Louisa Childe lying in disarray on both the table and at his feet. He looked like one of those big Klingons in the Star Trek movies, his eyes closed, head back, slightly snoring.

  Shit, how in the hell did this happen? she asked herself.

  Pulling her robe on and tight around herself, Jessica rolled from bed and grabbed clothing from her unpacked bag. Reynolds blinked and yawned, coming around. “What time is it?” he asked matter-of-factly, as if no time had passed at all.

  Jessica decided she had to cover any sign of embarrassment. “Six-oh-five. We both flaked out. Wake up, will you? Call down to room service for a pot of coffee while I freshen up and dress.”

  She disappeared into the bathroom, and Reynolds staggered to the phone.

  After showering, she rejoined Darwin, and while doing her makeup and hair at the mirror, she summed up what they had discussed the night before, ending with a solemn, “OK, then, I am convinced beyond doubt that the deaths are indeed, in some fashion or other, related.”

  “I knew it! I knew you'd see it my way!”

  “Curb your enthusiasm, Darwin. We've got a long way to go.”

  “But you believe me? You believe me!” He stepped out on the balcony and yelled a hurrah to the sky and the morning traffic.

  Once he had calmed and returned from outside, an enormous smile on his face, Jessica calmly said, “After seeing all this?” She pointed to the circumstantial but compelling evidence he had lain out before her. “Yes, I'm onboard with you, Darwin.”

  Darwin's large black hands exploded, sending a thunderclap bounding off the walls. “Excellent. Think of it. Dr. Jessica Coran's backing. That'll cut the governor's cheese.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but what the governor of Oregon knows about Jessica Coran is not likely to be much.” “Are you kidding? With your rep? With all the FBI cases you've solved? All that behind you?”

  “Damn but you make me feel old, Darwin Reynolds.”

  “I–I-I didn't mean it the way it came out, I swear.”

  “I'll bet you didn't. Look, Darwin, seriously… Trust me, I don't pull a lot of weight.” She said this as she pulled a brush through her long, rich hair.

  “Trust me, you do. You make a big difference.”

  “I think there's another insult in there somewhere.”

  “What?” He looked confused.

  “Con yourself if you like, Darwin, if it helps, but I'm not so sure.” She paced the room, thinking aloud. “Now, as I see it, we need to put out an all-points bulletin on this creep's MO.”

  “Sure, right.”

  “Should be forwarded electronically to every law-enforcement agency in the country to alert them to anything smacking of these uniquely gross murders, and anything in the way of peculiar sketches being left at a crime scene.”

  Darwin nodded, taking notes. “Yeah, we want to be notified immediately if a similar killing takes place anywhere in the country.”

  “Right. We've got to proceed under the assumption of zero help coming out of Minnesota or Oregon, since we've no way of knowing if Richard will be successful or not.” Jessica returned to the mirror, sat and continued brushing out her wet hair as she spoke.

  Reynolds watched the shining auburn hair pick up the morning light coming through the balcony windows. “The man who sketched the charcoal drawings did not sign his work, but his signature is all over the drawings.”

  “Yeah, if someone pops out of the woodwork and happens to see them, and happens to know the artist, we have it made. But you're right, of course. We need an art expert to tell us what he can about our boy.” “I've already got a guy.”

  “An expert who will back our contention that in each case, the artwork is the same hand at work.”

  Darwin insisted, “I've got it covered, and I'm satisfied with-”

  “Who's your expert?” she challenged.

  “My wife's brother.”

  She dropped her brush and her chin.

  “Now wait a minute! Ronnie's an art major at Columbia. He knows this stuff.”

  “No, Darwin, no! We gotta get art professors and dealers plural to cover our asses on this,” she argued. “Multiple opinions, understood? If it's to cut any ice with the governor in Oregon.”

  “Yeah… you're right, sure. Important thing is you're with me now, one hundred percent!”

  There was no curbing the man's enthusiasm now.

  NINE

  What a dance I am Leading.

  — From a poem by Jack the Ripper

  The same time

  As Giles Gahran worked with hammer and nail, putting his fully packed traveling crates together, he thought of how often he had done just this, picked up his entire circus and left town overnight, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. He looked in over the lip of the collapsible crate he'd finished assembling, readying to hammer the lid shut. Inside lay Luanda's naked body wrapped in absorbent packing materials. From Lucinda's purse he'd gotten Keith Orion's mailing address in Chicago where the other artist hailed from, and he had affixed a label addressed to Orion on the lid. He now placed the lid overtop of Lucinda, gave her one last look and blew her a kiss as he muttered, “Such a waste, so sorry… too bad. We could have made a beautiful partnership, Loose.”

  He'd taken her life and one other additional irresistible item-her backbone-and why not? It was there for the taking. Why waste it. Besides, she had so wanted to be a part of his art. Now she would play a major part for all eternity.

  A short time after Giles had knocked her into unconsciousness, Lucinda had regained her senses, and she felt a great weight on her back-Giles, squatting gargoyle fashion over her. “I think you're a snake person, Lucy. I'll sculpt snakes all about your feet as if they come to you for advice and succor. You damned witch. You slither in here and get my hopes up and now this. I even trusted you for a brief moment.”

  She felt the first incision, and she screamed. The incision ran from the base of the cranium to the tailbone, coursing down and through the center of her back. She screamed murder. Giles stopped cutting long enough to stuff an oily rag in her mouth. Moments later, she felt the artist's scalpel continue on its way. “I'm sure you have a backbone in there somewhere” were his last words to her.

  Now she was neatly packed away, as were all his sculptures, including the dogs, horses, birds, figures and all the vertebrae, including Lucinda's own in separate crates.

  Giles lifted another pine wood lid top and covered over the crate of carefully packed spinal columns, which he'd thought safest if packed all together, even the one he'd so arduously glued back into one piece with super glue and a bevy of C-clamps. He'd done this work while Lucinda looked on through dead eyes.

  It never failed to surprise him how quickly he could, when he put his mind to it, bug out, even though encumbered with artists tools, instruments, the life-size sculptures, all his various colors and elixirs, cleaning fluids, brushes, scrapers, scalpels, oils, easels, papers, pens, clips, clamps, scaffolding, as well as his clothing and personal belongings. As he worked to place everything in boxes, bags, suitcases and crates, he half wanted to forget the box beneath his bed. Part of him said, “Incinerate the damnable thing.” Perhaps if flames consumed it, he might forget it, but he couldn't forget it, now could he? It had been pushed into his hands by his dying mother.

  “Go on, take it, you little bastard… spitting image of your father, you are. Sonofabitch that he was. You're just like him… just like him. Long line of sonsofbitches all the way back to the origins. Might as well know all about him now. I spent all these years protecting you from the truth, but it's in you-that same evil fucking seed, his malicious being, his hatred of the world that short-changed him, and his for blood. I've seen you, Giles, out there in the backyard, killing a
nimals. You've got the same disease as your father, exactly. You can only feel when you're inflicting pain. So go on, take the box! Take it and open it after I'm dead, and maybe, just maybe you'll come away with me.”

  He now held in his hands the hefty but ornate leather-covered box she had handpicked for him, thinking it a beautiful box, yet fearful of what it contained. “When I'm gone. Not before. I don't want to see the results of it,” she had insisted.

  She had taught him to make love to her, had lain with him since infancy till her illness had devoured her, the cancer eating her up from the inside out. She had beaten, raped and tortured him. He had prayed for her death for years, and then finally it came, all in an instant, with him standing before her, the strange box purporting to be his legacy in his hands, searing his hand along with his mind.

  He asked the same question today as he had at his mother's deathbed. “What have I inherited? Who is my father? You say he's dead, killed after having gone on some mad murder spree, but you refuse me any details.”

  “Details? You want details? Open the box. I've kept it in a vault until now just for you, Giles.”

  There was something awkward inside, loose and bounding from side to side. Something heavy like a cast-iron loose cannonball. Giles to this day wondered what the hefty item might be.

  Her lawyer had brought the sealed box to her hospital bed.

  When Giles had left his dead mother's side, he carried home the box with the noisy bouncing object inside. He shakily took the box to the kitchen table and placed it there, squarely at the center, pushing aside the salt and pepper cellars.

  Fourteen years old at the time, Giles had sat before the box, alone in the world, staring at that cursed box for fifteen minutes, his hands going to it, tentatively touching it, pulling away as if snakebitten by the lifeless thing, knowing that an evil beyond anything he had ever felt or experienced lived a kind of palpable life within this dust-laden old box of crap his mother had collected. All of it kept just to one day prove to him that she was right about him. To show that her summary of his character, his core traits, those at rock-bottom, unchangeable, indelible were gathered together inside this hideously fascinating box that, if opened, would speak volumes, would open his soul to the truth about himself, would define him, be him, reflect him, and cut through to his most secret self, the self that knew what was in the box, and feared it all the more for this knowledge.

  His curious but shaking boy's fingers had reached out and toyed with the leather ribbons and ties, and in a moment they'd come undone, as if of their own accord. / hardly touched 'em, he had thought at the time.

  He gritted his teeth and took hold of the oxblood colored lid and slowly inched it open. Microscopic dust bunnies filled the air as the lid was disturbed, making the boy's nose itch and his eyes water. An odor of mildew rose along with the dust. Still, he had to go on. His dead mother's shrill words cheered him on, filling his ears. Higher, higher, closer he came to unleashing what was inside. He caught a glint of glassine tubing and steel bands, as on a coffeepot with a snaked tube end, and a strange flick switch along its center, all wrapped half-assed in a yellowed sheath of newspaper. Another piece of newspaper clung to the roof of the lid until it came away and slithered into his peripheral vision. Giles made out only half of the words in the bold headline: Torture Level… Blood Addict. Then he slammed the lid shut, tied it tight and rushed from it, leaving it on the table. It had traveled with him to his foster home in Millbrook, Minnesota, and later it had traveled with him to Portland, Oregon, and later it had come back across the country when he moved from Portland to Milwaukee after he'd taken Sarah Towne's spine. Since he had been in Milwaukee, almost a year now, the box had resided beneath his bed. Giles had at times forgotten of its existence, and now here it was, again begging him, pulling him toward it, pleading to be opened, to be completely explored and fully digested.

  On hands and knees now, staring below the bed at the dirty old brown box left him by his birthmother, Giles again felt like the child in the kitchen, afraid to touch the damn thing, for as evil as he felt, something far more sinister than Giles Gahran resided inside the box gifted over to him by his mother.

  Open the damn box! he heard his mother's dead wail reverberate though the coils of his inner ear, bouncing off the walls of his brain, echoing down the corridors of his cerebellum. You cheated me long enough! Open the damned box! It was always strongest-this insistence-after he had claimed someone's spine.

  A part of him wanted to tear it open, spill out all of its contents, spend hours pouring over all that she had planned to rub in his face-all that she had horded all those years for his eyes only. But another part of Giles screamed to burn the damnable parcel from hell.

  He reached beneath the bed and pulled the box toward his eyes. Dust flew. He held his breath, felt it catching as if he might be somehow cutting off his own air supply. “Fuck this. It's just a box of crap, old papers, shit, nonsense. I'm a man now. I don't need this shit.” Even as he said it, he felt the beads of perspiration that'd formed on his forehead and hands, and he felt his stomach churning and lurching as if some phantom bitch was rhythmically suctioning his insides like butter in a bucket.

  You don't have to open it, Son, came a voice, a male voice, one he had no recollection of save as the one he'd made up as a child-the voice of his loving father, the one his mother had lied about all those years. The box is just a pack of lies, Son. Burn the fucking thing, Son. Burn it all. She's with Lucifer now and can't ever hurt you again. Send the box back to hell, back to that cunt who dared call herself a mother!

  He sat Indian fashion just staring at the box between his legs for a long time. Minutes passed. The trash chute out in the hallway was mere feet from his door, a straight shot to the incinerator. Why not burn the fucking box and send it back to Hades? asked his loving father. Why not get shed of it forever. Why not take some action, my helpless Hamlet? came the soothing father's voice.

  He grabbed hold with both hands and rushed to the door, tore it open. Eyes wide, he rushed toward the trash chute, but Mrs. Parsons, the eighty-year-old hag from down the hall was standing there with three trash bags, working each in one at a time.

  “Hello, Giles!” she called out.

  “Mrs. Parsons.”

  “Nice weather we're enjoying.”

  “Yes ma'am indeed.”

  “Whatcha-got-there-inyer-hand?”

  “Ahhh… this? This old box? Nothing… nothing, really.”

  “Interesting box. Can't get boxes like that anymore. Find it in an antique shop? Seen some file boxes with ties wrapped round them, but they were just cardboard. That's a fine box.”

  “Hell of a box.”

  “Wanna part with it? My granddaughter would love it. How much would you want for a thing like that?”

  “I'm… ahhh… afraid… you see, if it wasn't a gift maybe…”

  “Oh, really? An heirloom! How enchanting.”

  “Ahhh… you could say so. It was gifted to me by… by Mother… upon her death.”

  The landlady's hands shot instantly up in a mock gesture of surrender. “Oh, dear, I'm so sorry for your loss. You can't possibly part with a thing like that, and I certainly understand.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just that last time I saw one like that, it was in a library, housing important papers.”

  “Yes… I keep all my important papers close,” he lied. “I've got to finish packing now, Mrs. Parsons. I gotta go.” He began disappearing from the hallway as he spoke, inching spiderlike back into his apartment.

  “You sure created a ruckus in there last night!” she called after him. “Making that art of yours. My, but it must take a lot of perspiration indeed, all that banging! Makes a body go loco to hear all that incessant hammering.”

  But Giles had safely returned to his apartment and closed the door on the woman's ranting. He dropped the box into one of the crates. He'd move it again, put it away at the new place, and perhaps one day he'd h
ave the guts to open it and look on every word, every item collected by his mother.

  He stared around at his studio and slid down the side of the crate, exhausted. He pulled the phone to him and called UPS to come get the boxes and crates he'd be shipping.

  “Chicago, City of Blues and Dirty Politics, here comes Giles Gahran, and as for professor of art, Keith Orion, get ready Dr. 0, for a visit from an old flame.”

  He looked across the wood floor of his studio apartment and saw a fleck of blood he'd missed with his cleaning fluids, and while on the phone with UPS, ordering them to pick up his crates as soon as possible, he saw a trail of other specks he'd overlooked, mocking him. Lucinda's blood. He lifted a jar filled with red fluid, already labeled LW. He remained on the line, on hold, listening to “Sweet Lorraine” in its original Nat King Cole version. Annoyed by the culmination of these circumstances, he located his concoction of ammonia, bleach, Mr. Clean, and that muriatic acid the Ace hardware man had assured him could clean a gravestone of a hundred years of accumulated mold, and he sprayed the powerful, nose-pinching, eye-gouging concoction over the last remnants of Lucinda's blood.

  When Jessica lifted her ringing cell phone from where she had left it beside the bed, she stood shower refreshed and staring out at the terrace where Darwin Reynolds had wandered to stretch and to lift his face into the early morning rain.

  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.