Absolute Instinct Read online

  The watchman at first ambled over, yelling as if he'd discovered some pesky repeat offenders, teens out to test their metal against the neighborhood superstitions. “Get yourselves and that car outta here! This time o'night! Go home!”

  Gaining no response, he found his cell phone and made a call. “Something strange out here, Milos. Think maybe I ought to call the cops again? OK... You're on your way. I'll wait till you get here.”

  The watchman put down his phone, stuffing it into his overalls, the nametag sewn into them reading Liam. Raising his light overhead, he cautiously approached the two bodies lying alongside the deserted car. “Fun's over, you two! Time to get home to your—”

  The watchman stopped as if hit by a wall of horror, the light from his Bic Torchlight wavering and wildly illuminating the tops of nearby trees. Visibly shaken, he again grabbed for his phone, this time dialing 911. The watchman looked energized somehow, animated, his mannerisms and moves exaggerated. Turning wildly leaflike in the blustering Chicago wind. Finally, the man found his legs and ran to put distance between himself and the awful mutilations not twenty yards from him.

  Giles fired a single bullet and it sank a tiny hole through the back of the man's spine, making him fall, twitching on the way down, and crying out, sniveling, he continued in fits like a wind-up toy lying on its side.

  He wasn't dead when Giles turned his face away, and facedown, began tearing away his clothes with the titanium scalpel he used. Once the twitching man's back was exposed, he dug into him with the scalpel and carved out the now familiar long coffin-shaped box of flesh from his back as the screaming subsided and finally died with his victim going into blood-loss trauma.

  Holding a spinal column in each hand, Giles felt an overwhelming sense of power course through his veins. He turned his eyes back on the woman, Agent Petersaul. “Not to be greedy, but I want yours, too,” he said to the dead woman. “This will make Chicago headlines and serial killer history. Three spines in one night. Maybe I'll get my own bubble-gum card, like Dad.”

  Giles went to the female whose back he had earlier bared. Stuffing each of the already stolen treasures into his easel bag, and setting this aside, its Wirtz Art Supplies logo shiny in the half light of sodium vapor lamps peeking over the castle walls, Giles made a move toward Petersaul. She had a lovely, long back, graceful, gazellelike. It must contain a beautiful spine, he thought. Brushing off the leaves and debris that had fallen on her, Giles felt her still-warm body, when suddenly beneath his hand, she moved.

  Independent of his touch, she had moved.

  She was alive.

  She moaned in utter distress, the sound of a keening animal in pain.

  “Helllllllllpa-pa-meee!” she cried, unable to be loud about it.

  Giles leaned back on his haunches and watched her and listened to her pain like a perched gargoyle or gremlin, fascinated by the hand of death as it pressed in upon this stranger who did not resemble Mother in the least, but whose spine more readily would.

  The lights of a cruising police car alerted Giles. The Chicago city cruiser's side panel spotlight scanned on-off as its beam cleared the castle entrance, but it didn't quite make the distance from street to the furthermost inner courtyard where Petersaul's car stood and her body lay alongside the other two. The police squad car moved slowly by and continued like a grazing animal.

  # # #

  “EITHER way, Hughes can forget about reelection,” Sharpe said as they watched the young production team polish the final take, finish the final splice, and add audio onto the computer feed beamed to satellites spread across the cosmos.

  Everyone on the plane held a collective breath as the feed was beamed to the world. Richard grasped Jessica's hands and clasped them in both his. “Whatever happens, we have the knowledge of having done the right thing. Perhaps not the wise thing, perhaps not the prudent thing and perhaps not the legal thing, but the morally correct thing.”

  “Rare nowadays,” muttered Robert Towne. “Rare to see justice and good old-fashioned revenge prevail, too. Hughes's political future is in the shitlands now.”

  They all laughed at this.

  “All the same, I think I'd better call Warden Gwingault,” suggested Jessica.

  Robert asked, “Just to be on the safe side?”

  “Make sure he's looking at the late-night news.”

  She made the call to alert Warden Donald Gwingault, telling him to turn on the news.

  “What channel?”

  “Any channel.”

  In a moment, she heard the warden gasp and say, “Oh, my God.”

  “Have you heard from the governor yet to put an end to this?”

  “No, not a word. Does Hughes know about this?”

  “He does by now.”

  “I hardly believe my eyes. How did you manage to make a switch like that with my guards on hand, and with cameras running, and damn it, how'd you get that tape out of our library and past our checkpoints?”

  “Will you call me, Mr. Gwingault, at my cell phone number the moment you hear from Hughes?”

  “I don't have to hear from Hughes if this is true. If this is true, we have an innocent man on our Green Mile who's had his shoes replaced by booties, his head shaven, his spiritual needs met and his last supper.”

  “Mr. Gwingault, you always did have an innocent man on your row.”

  “I'm putting an end to this right now.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And just where is Towne now?”

  “Catch us if you can, Warden.” She hung up, knowing that any forward movement toward an execution in Oregon was at an end. She informed the others of Warden Gwingault's action.

  Cheers filled the airplane.

  “Darwin's under arrest now,” said Towne sadly once the euphoria had died away. “Gone from an FBI field chief to a common criminal in lockup.”

  “Darwin knew that going in,” Richard assured him.

  The pilot announced that they were on descent for the runway at O'Hare, and he asked everyone to buckle in.

  The news of what they had done spread wildfire fashion, and FBI headquarters was abuzz with the story.

  One of the young techs on board the plane had a handheld Sony television and he silenced everyone as an excited Wolf Blitzer shared the story with his viewers. “News networks across America are now carrying this incredible breaking story. A party of anti-capital punishment conspirators, including a number of FBI personnel, have successfully helped convicted killer Robert W. Towne in a secretive escape from death row in Portland, Oregon, and the man now sitting on death row in his stead is his brother, FBI Agent Xavier Darwin Reynolds.”

  The news would be all over Chicago even before they landed. Towne, still worried, erupted with, “What if Hughes convinces Gwingault and the rest that it's all a hoax, what we say we did? What if he goes through with the goddamn execution?”

  “It won't happen. Gwingault won't let it happen,” she assured Towne.

  Richard came to her support. “It can't happen now with so many eyes trained on him.”

  “And J. J.'s precious state,” Jessica assured Towne as she buckled into her seat for landing, the last to do so.

  “Not till we get that call from Darwin am I going to be satisfied,” Towne replied.

  TWENTY

  In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

  —THEODORE ROETHKE

  AT the apartment rented by Gahran, Jessica took control, her FBI badge extended as she passed local authorities. “Any word on Petersaul or Cates?” she asked Harry Laughlin, the Chicago FBI field office chief.

  “Not a word. The car's not been found, either.”

  “And no sightings of Gahran?”

  “Perhaps in time. We just got the sketch around, and it missed the evening papers. It'll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “What about the apartment? Anything of interest?” asked Sharpe, displaying his badge.

  “Nothing of consequence. Lotta charcoal sketches but no blood
, no bones, no souvenirs.”

  “How soon were your guys on the scene here after your last communication with Petersaul? After she requested the warrant for the place?”

  “An hour, maybe an hour-ten.”

  “He may've had time to clean out anything incriminating.”

  “Found something!” shouted one of the men going through the artists tools, instruments, paint cases and boxes. He held up a box. “Scalpels—thirteen artists quality scalpels.”

  “Bag 'em. We'll run tests for blood residue,” Jessica assured everyone in the room.

  “Take a look at what's on the guy's bookshelf,” came another tech, holding several old yellowed volumes in his hands, one shiny with beautiful binding, green with foillike green lettering.

  Jessica and Richard began to closely examine the reading material of one Giles Gahran. “Gahran's taste in reading,” Richard muttered, noting how dog-eared and marked up and highlighted portions of one volume were.

  “A strange collection of bizarre materials. Books I've not come across before.”

  Jessica looked over each spine and cover. She and Sharpe passed each to the other as they examined the killer's bedtime reading.

  “What the hell is this?” asked Sharpe of her. “The Grand Symbol?”

  She took the volume and read the title aloud, “Man As Grand Symbol of the Mysteries by Manly Palmer Hall. Philosophical Research Society, 5th edition, Los Angeles, 1947.” She glanced quickly through it. “A book on the symbolic power of the spinal column.”

  “Here's one simply titled The Body,” said Sharpe. “By an Anthony Smith. Oh, a London publisher, Allen and Unwin, 1968—a little more current, but not by much.”

  She read a third title. “C.A.S. Williams's Encyclopedia of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs, I960. You got me beat. Oh, look... a chapter in here on the backbone as an artistic construct.”

  “Damn, tell me what is a 'luz bone'?” he asked, handing her yet another book to peruse.

  “The Bone Called Luz by F.H. Garrison,” she read the spine of the green book. Opening it to the title page, she continued. “New York Medical Journal, 1910. Pages marked here.” She flipped through to the marked pages, muttering, “Ninety-two... and 149 to 152.”

  “What're they on?”

  “Both sections on the backbone.”

  Agent Harry Laughlin greeted someone at the door, a sharply dressed, shapely Asian black-haired officer he introduced as Tanith Chen. She shook hands with Sharpe and Jessica as she held an ornate leather box tied with ribbon into a comical bow. “What's in the box?” asked Jessica.

  Chen and Laughlin exchanged a glance. “You want to break the news?” asked Chen.

  “She's already had an inkling that this guy thinks he's somehow related to Matisak,” Laughlin explained, bringing Chen up to date. “But I think she needs to know the extent of this guy's psychosis and possible fixation on her.” Laughlin called another agent to get him the duplicate made of the letter now in an FBI lab.

  “This overlaid all the clippings and articles in the box,” he told Jessica and Richard who still stood with one of Gahran's books in his hands.

  Sharpe lobbed the book onto the small bed and looked at the copy of the document. He read it with a shiver going down his spine. “Jess, I don't think you need see any more of this or the box it came from. Let's get out of here for some air.”

  She frowned at him and snatched the letter out of his grasp, quickly reading it, finding it hard to swallow. “This woman... she was likely mad herself... no proof of her being with Matisak. At no time in the course of our investigation or during his trial, or in all those years he spent in prison did she ever surface, and now this? It's got to be bullshit.”

  “We'll know if we can find some DNA on the silverware and glasses left in the sink, match it up to what's on file about Matisak,” said Sharpe, taking a deep breath.

  “Seems Gahran went up to the top of the Ferris wheel out at Navy Pier,” said Chen. “He'd gone there from the park. I was tailing him in fact, when he disappeared on Michigan Ave.”

  “Witnesses say he emptied this box and its contents over the side,” added Laughlin, dropping the box with a heavy thud on a table between them now. “And while he appeared interested in killing himself, our Quasimodo failed to follow the box down.”

  “You saying he's a hunchback, too?” asked Jessica.

  “Only in spirit, I mean... way his mother meted it out to him,” Laughlin softly replied.

  Chen added, “Gahran handed the empty box to a little boy at the amusement ride, and we made the boy cry... confiscated it, along with as much of its contents as we could recover. Some jerk wanted to sell us a fistful of clippings he had confiscated!”

  “So the box is stuffed with what Matisak memorabilia?” Jessica asked. “A lot of Goth heads and weirdos buy all kinds of crappy serial killer paraphernalia. They can buy it on fucking eBay.”

  “This is no collector at work. This woman got hold of some of the original crime-scene photos—and I don't mean copies downloaded from AutopsiesRus.com or ME.org. These are straight outta the case files, some from the actual Matisak autopsy.”

  “The one that cleared me of any wrongdoing in his death, you mean?” she replied.

  “How the woman got them I haven't a clue, but you can bet money or goods of some sort passed hands. There's stuff here you'll never see on a website, not even that sick fuck Michael Slade's web page has stuff like this.”

  “See for yourself,” added Chen.

  Jessica untied the bow and carefully lifted the lid, and she gasped at its contents. She turned and buried her head in Richard's chest, heaving a sigh and quietly sobbing. The picture laying atop the jumbled mess was a coroner's shot of a candy striper hanging from a rafter in an old shack in Wekosha, Wisconsin. Jessica recalled her vividly as the first victim to lead them to Matisak. Jessica turned the photo over as she didn't want to see it anymore only to find scribbled on back the name of the victim and the price Larina Gahran had paid for it from some creep named Scarborough. “Bastard boyfriend of hers pimped her out in life, and sold her in death as well,” she muttered. “Like to know what rung in hell is waiting for him.”

  “Him and the guy that sold it to him,” agreed Laughlin.

  “I think you're going to want to see this, Dr. Coran.” Chen handed her a shot of an aged woman and man hanging from their heels in a barn by tenterhooks, chains and pulleys, an old horse carriage overhead in the barn with them where they died.

  “The Red Birds, a lovely old couple living on an Oklahoma Indian reservation soil who had made the terrible mistake of allowing Matisak to dine with them,” said Jessica as she stared at the picture. “He dined on their blood.”

  “Is that it with the coroner's photos? Are there any more like this?” asked Sharpe, a tincture of concern in his voice. Jessica knew the concern was for her.

  “Ahhh, no, just newspaper photos but nothing like this except...” Chen hesitated.

  “There's one picture we thought it best to remove,” added Laughlin.

  “What picture is that?”

  “Otto Boutine.”

  “Otto?” Boutine had died trying to save Jessica from Matisak.

  “His autopsy photos, several of them. That autopsy was done right here in Chicago, we are investigating how those photos got into Larina Gahran's possession.”

  Sharpe and Jessica turned their attention on the box. “Thanks for your... your sensitivity, Chen, Laughlin,” she said, showing her old steel. “What else have we got here?”

  “It's not going to help your disposition or help you sleep at night, Dr. Coran, but it may help lead us to this guy and to understand him a little better.”

  Larina Gahran had squirreled away in this box every word ever written on Matisak, including a paperback version of Jessica's own book about murderer's row that included a chapter on him, and including copies of her FBI research findings on Matisak, all the years of studying him—all material any of the FBI pub
lic relations people or her publisher in New York might have. All of it entombed in this ornate Devil's box with its own diablo spinata— devil's spine that read Mementoes of Father.

  The box had the obvious feel of a one of a kind, as if created specifically for her purpose, and Jessica began to imagine the depth of evil that Larina had perpetrated on her son. While he might have Matisak's DNA, while he might even have a real inclination toward violence, a predisposition to cut open living things to find out what was inside, still if he had had any chance whatsoever at a normal life, his mother had absolutely destroyed any chance of that happening.

  No one needed say it. The silence as Jessica rummaged through the remaining heap said it all.

  “The woman bequeathed the box to her son,” said Sharpe, trying to wrap his mind around the idea.

  “Cruel bitch,” Jessica muttered. “She's managed to create another Matisak, rather than protect him from this terrible knowledge. It's how he knew about me. He read the stories... read all about his mad, blood-drinking father.”

  “The son of Matisak,” muttered Sharpe, who had heard so much about the infamous madman that he had finally gone back into the records and read all of the material on Matisak. How Jessica had been maimed by him in his Chicago lair; how he had killed Jessica's first love, behavioral science pioneer Otto Boutine of the FBI, the man who had recruited Jessica from a D.C. coroner's position after observing her coolheaded professionalism at a horrendous plane crash site. He'd heard all about how Matisak was put into a federal facility for the criminally insane in Pennsylvania, and his subsequent bloody as hell escape, followed by a new wave of terror across the nation, as he fed on others in his maniacal urge to stalk and corner Jessica a second time in a Mardi Gras warehouse. That time with a plan to bleed both her and himself to death by use of a dialysis machine working to empty each of them of blood, their blood and spirits to commingle there in New Orleans and in the netherworld of eternity.