Absolute Instinct Read online

  “It would figure that this young man must be related by blood to the most notorious serial killer of our time,” she said. “Why the fuck didn't I see it? It was staring me in the face the whole time.”

  “He has an entirely idiosyncratic MO, nothing like Matisak's. Matisak was a blood drinker. We don't know what Gahran does with the bones, what kind of rituals he might have come up with in all these books, but it bears no resemblance to that bloodsucker's goal... unless...”

  “Unless he's feeding on the bone marrow deep within the spine.”

  “And to get at it, he's got to empty the spinal fluid.”

  “Maybe the books can tell us more. If he's drinking the spinal fluid and consuming the bone marrow... maybe it's because he believes in some of the esoteric rituals found in these books about ancient cultures and bone use.”

  “Meanwhile, where are Petersaul and Cates?”

  “And are their spines intact?”

  “Right now only God and Giles Gahran know.”

  “There's one other horror we think you should see, Dr. Coran,” said Laughlin, his eyes apologetic. He gave a nod to Chen.

  Chen lifted a large, sealed Tupperware dish from Giles box. Through the plastic, at eye level, Jessica saw Matisak's awful blood tap, the Spigot, or one of several that had, long years before, been confiscated on his capture. “It was also in the box,” said Chen.

  “Part of Mother's gift,” finished Laughlin.

  Jessica held it up, staring at it, the light filtering through, touching it. “Voodoo bitch. Truly evil...”

  “Indelible evil,” agreed Richard. “Insidious evil, that woman.”

  “And so is her offspring with Matisak.”

  Rosehill Cemetery November 13, 2004

  Milos Drivdnios, the morning caretaker at Rosehill Cemetery, felt a slight discomfort of acid reflex well up, and so he again popped two anti-acid pills prescribed by his doctor, and earlier he had taken a coated aspirin. He had a heart condition. Carrying too much weight at 226 pounds, standing only at 5'6”, he had difficulty just climbing from bed in the morning to spell Liam Rielsen from the nightshift at Rosehill. Climbing into and out of his car, going up a flight of steps, any exertion, even as simple as raking leaves put a great strain on his body and heart. As for shoveling snow, he had strict orders to never pick up a shovel, but Enid, his wife, believed it all nonsense, that Milos needed more exertion, more exercise, not less. He'd had to make Dr. Stephanik write it on his letterhead for Enid to see, and even then she thought it a bought-and-paid-for agreement between men. That's when Milos told her that Dr. Stephanik was a woman, and Enid went crazy on learning this, that some other woman was seeing him half naked, her hands on Milos, checking him out.

  “What happened to Dr. Weagley?” she'd shouted. “You were supposed to see Dr. Weagley!”

  “He died two weeks ago. Lung cancer I'm told. I told him that Greek cigarettes would kill him, and they did.”

  Milos played over the scene in his mind as he drove to work in the dark twilight of predawn. He asked the empty cab of the car, “What does the woman want? Does she want me dead? Weagley, the man was in worst health than me. Ha!”

  Milos arrived at the outer facade of Rosehill, the building created by the same architect who had created the famous Chicago Water Tower. As with each morning, Milos superstitiously rolled down his window and reached out and rubbed the brass placard on the cornerstone here. It read Est. 1859. History. The place exuded it. The old things. The old days. That was what Milos liked about Chicago, her history.

  “At least with the young lady doctor the medical facility assigned me,” he continued to muse aloud, enjoying the sound of his own rich voice that helped to keep his eyes open, “at least she is fucking easy to look at. What harm... what harm in a look? You tell me that, Enid. May God strike me down if I have had any evil thought about Dr. Stephanik. Although in that lab coat... with those legs... that wavy red hair and—”

  He saw something like a shadow squeeze through the brick wall at gate's end, a flaw in the design of the enclosure, one routinely taken advantage of by neighborhood brats and hoodlums who, for some sick reason felt an attraction for graveyards after hours, and to do harm to headstones. It was a maddening routine, especially before, during and after Halloween, but now it was November. Such should not be the case.

  Milos realized the moment he drove into the inner courtyard where he routinely parked in one corner, that something awful had happened here. A strange car squatting there at the gate, and three odd shapes scattered about it. Lumps of debris of some sort also scattered about.

  They weren't homeless. They had a car. Some sort of drug for money exchange gone bad? They looked dead. But one was moving, the tall womanly form, nude from the waist up.

  Milos rushed from his car to the woman, seeing that she had suffered a terrible knifing to the back, a huge scar in the shape of a rectangle running the length of her back. The two male forms, also stripped to buttocks had not been so lucky. In each case, the bastards who did this awful thing had removed whole chunks of rectangular flesh from the men, the flesh boats cut from them dirty and lying on the cement and field stone block floor of the courtyard.

  Milos averted his eyes, but not before they registered the fact that one of the men lying dead was his friend, watchman Liam Rielsen. Milos moaned his name and crossed himself and looked over his shoulder in fear all in one fluid motion.

  “Gotta get help... nine-one-one... hold on, lady... hold on!”

  Milos rushed back to his car and grabbed his cellular phone and with his large fingers desperately punched the tiny numbers on the keypad, cursing the small pads as never before.

  Finally someone came on and breathless, Milos shouted for help.

  “Slow down, sir. Can you give me your location, your name, the nature of your emergency.”

  “Nature of emergency! It's an emergency! Need an ambulance here for the live one, the woman. Need authorities.”

  “Your name, sir.”

  “Milos.”

  “OK, Milos... is that your last name?”

  “My God, woman! I am... my name... Milos Drivdnios. I am caretaker at Rosehill Cemetery.”

  “The address, Milos?”

  “ Every damnbody knows where Rosehill is! Ahhh Ravenswood... ahhh... fifty-eight-hundred block Ravenswood. Hurry!”

  “Nature of the emergency, sir?”

  “Murder! Two people murdered, a third badly hurt!”

  “Please stay at this location and on the line, Milos.”

  “At the gates of Rosehill... need ambulance. Help.”

  “Help is on the way. Police assistance in three minutes dispatched to your location, Milos. Milos, take a deep breath. Help is on its way.”

  “An ambulance for the girl.”

  “On its way, I assure you.”

  “Thank you, thank you.” Milos held tight to the phone as if it were a lifeline, his knuckles white. His lovely Rosehill, always a haven away from the world, from his problems, from Enid, from the traffic and the horrors of the street, even ironically a haven from the fear of a heart attack, as everything in the cemetery conspired to make you relax and feel the breeze and listen to the birds and see the life amid all the gravestones insisting on continuing no matter. Now his safe little haven had suddenly and violently again asserted itself as a place of death, and Milos felt the violation, and that deep within he no longer felt at ease here in his Rosehill. It had become a place of disquiet, not out at the graves but here, in his chest, inside him. His Rosehill that he had cared for for so long now, thirty-three years of his life, now harbored something evil that had come this way out of the world beyond the gates, and still it lurked in every shadow and in Milos's fear.

  He must assume that the monster capable of ripping out backbones did not climb from the cemetery earth as some subterranean monster, but had driven that car in here, had the hands and legs and torso and brain of a man. A worst-case scenario indeed.

  Another par
t of his mind disagreed. The thing that could do this was still nearby, staring from the darkness just out of his sight, its hunger for blood burning within it as strong as ever. Even though his mind admonished him that whoever did this thing used a precision cutting instrument or one hell of a sharp butcher's knife, and so must be human, still a part of his old-world genes believed it must be a wild animal somehow loose in the city, a wolf or tiger or lion escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo, however improbable that sounded, due to the precision carving this monster managed. Milos came around, his ears filling with an angry honking horn and a screech of tires. Morning traffic passed within twenty yards of the castle facade, and now the rush-hour traffic had picked up, workers at nearby factories along Ravenswood or the enormous neighborhood employer Miseriacordia—the Catholic charitable organization and school for the handicapped where the mercy and goodness of mankind evidenced itself every day.

  Evil and goodness side by side, Milos thought.

  Then his chest pains began.

  But he couldn't think of his heart now. He must do what he could for the woman in so much pain. He rushed back to her as the 911 operator introduced herself as Gina.

  “Gina, I may need help too before this is over. I got a bad heart, and this... this ain't doing me no good, neither.”

  “I understand, Milos. Try to remain as calm as possible. I will alert the medic team about your condition. They'll know what to do.”

  “Easy to say,” the man muttered in return, looking again on the nasty wound to the woman's back. Realizing now what the wound actually represented. “The shadow I saw... must've been him.”

  “What is that, Milos?” asked Gina over the line.

  “He was here, hunched over her when he saw my headlights. He panicked and ran off. I saw him the way you see a deer dash from sight, only a shadow. He was doing to her what he did to poor Liam and the other man when I frightened him off. Her wound is bad... but it could've been worse.”

  “Thank God you arrived when you did, Milos. You're a hero.”

  “I don't feel like no hero. I feel sick and... and helpless. How do you help someone you can't touch for fear of causing her pain?”

  Finally, the sound of a siren, and in a moment, Milos saw the squad car pulling in beside his own. The spotlight was welcomed but the guns pointed at him were not.

  “Hands up!” shouted one of the cops.

  Milos also heard the metallic voice of a female dispatcher over the radio car's airwaves saying, “See the man, Milos... See the man, Milos, at the scene.”

  “You fools! I am Milos!” he shouted back. “Do you wish me to have a heart attack now?”

  The sound of an ambulance siren came thundering toward Rosehill. Milos handed the first cop his phone. “Nine-one-one—I call nine-one-one for you guys. I am caretaker here!”

  The cops holstered their weapons, one of them joking, “Damn Dean-o-boy, 'nough lights and sirens to wake the dead.”

  Laughing, the second cop replied, “You the man, Stan. I think you oughta seriously consider doing that stand-up comedy club open-mic night deal.”

  “Who the hell's got rehearsal time?”

  “Hell with that! You think Andy Kaufman rehearsed? Jim Carrey?”

  “Look! Here... come with me! Look!” Milos, holding his hands crossed in a supplicating gesture against the chest wall, a kind of unconscious prayer to reduce the pain now shooting through his chest and shoulder and down his left arm. He guided them to the bodies and the woman in pain.

  “Holy Mother of God,” said the one called Stan, crossing himself.

  “Jesus, Stan,” said Dean, “we've lucked out here, buddy. You know what we've got here? Those two missing feds! Victims now of that crazy son of a bitch the feds chased here from Milwaukee.”

  “Geez, you think, Dean?”

  “Their fucking backs are cut open like deer kill, Stan. Yeah, now this is stand-up comedy material for sure, Stan.”

  “Shut up, Dean.”

  “Catching this case... This could mean a rank up, pal. Luck of the draw.”

  “Will you fucking shut up, Dean?”

  “I tell you it's that Spine Thief killer, the one all over the tube, the one in the composite we got today that—”

  “The bastard's cut out their spines, and he was working on the woman but didn't finish.”

  “I think... I interrupt... him,” said Milos. “She needs hospital... doctors.”

  “You don't look so good yourself, Mister.”

  “Milos... know other man... caretaker.”

  “Grab him, Stan!”

  Milos went over in a dead faint.

  “Christ but we got our hands full here, Dean,” said Stan, his arms full with the big Greek. “You think we ought to administer mouth to mouth?”

  “I’ll see to the woman.” Dean left Milos in Stan's care, going for the woman. He bent over the helpless form, afraid to touch her, unsure if he should not wait for the experts. “We're here now, Agent... ahhh... Agent Petersaul? Are you Petersaul?”

  “Cates? Is he... is he dead?”

  “I-I think he may just make it, Agent,” Dean lied to keep her spirits up as much as possible. “Ambulance is on its way.”

  The ambulance pulled in alongside them as he said this, the lumbering thing like a panting pachyderm where it sat idling and bouncing at once.

  “Take care of Cates first. I-I got him into this,” Petersaul said before passing out again.

  The paramedics pushed in, taking over, shouting for Dean to get out of the way. Another team worked on Milos with a defibrillator and a hypodermic filled with something they called “eppie” and then the man closely examining Petersaul's back said to Dean Rodriquez, “Man, thank God you didn't move this one. Had you rolled her over, this entire block of her flesh would've fallen away.”

  Dean breathed deeply, fighting back an unfamiliar feeling of nausea. He hadn't wanted to throw up on the job in years.

  “Tom, we've got a real problem here,” shouted the paramedic to his partner. “She needs massive injections of antibiotics. This wound's gotta already be infected.”

  “Gotcha, yeah.” The paramedic named Tom kneeled beside Petersaul. “Jesusgodalmighty, Bill, what the fuck did this?”

  “All I knows we can't put her on her back, but we have to keep her flat and still.”

  “She's in need of major, major help at the ER.”

  “Let's get her evac'ed then as soon as possible.”

  “But she'll die at Hope General. We need to airlift her to Northwestern. She won't make it anywhere else. Trust me.”

  “All right, Bill. You know best. I'll call for the chopper.”

  “And you, Officer!” he shouted to Dean. “Clear this whole courtyard of cars to make plenty of room for the chopper.”

  “All right but we can't move the suspect vehicle. It's a crime scene within a crime scene for now.”

  “Understood.”

  “And as for the two dead, they gotta stay put, too. They're also the crime scene.”

  “Do you mind our taking this one to the ER, or is she part of your fucking crime scene, too?” Bill Waldron shot back, not expecting an answer.

  “I'll just clear the way for the MedEvac chopper.”

  Just then another car tore into the courtyard. The police ban airwaves were abuzz with the discovery. Emerging from this unmarked car, stepped Jessica Coran, Richard Sharpe and Chief Laughlin.

  Jessica rushed in to see about Petersaul, and to determine the extent of her wounds. The bloody matted hair spoke of a gunshot wound to the head, but when Jessica probed with

  her gloved fingers, she announced, “The wound to the head is superficial. No penetration.”

  She next examined the wound to the back, withholding a sense of rage and tears and stomach wrenching sickness. She wondered if Gahran had done these killings just to seed her interest in putting an end to him, just to taunt her and as a warning. If so, his mother had been right about one thing— it'd be his father's way. Ju
st like Matisak.

  Paramedic Bill Waldron brought her up to date as he and his partner placed Petersaul on a stretcher. As they did so, Jessica watched the boat of cutaway flesh down her back shake like Jell-O.

  “She's in good hands, Jess,” said Sharpe, placing his strong arm around her as the helicopter descended.

  Dean and Stan had by now gotten all the various vehicles out of the chopper's way.

  “Caretaker's had a heart attack. The second guy cut open was a pal of his, I gather,” said Dean to the feds. “We've already thrown up a perimeter search, a ten-block grid. The old man”—he indicated Milos, where he was being placed in an ambulance—”says he thinks he saw someone slinking off as he drove up. Says maybe some guy squeezed through the gate end where a thin man or boy could fit.”

  “How's the old-timer doing?” asked Sharpe.

  “He's regained consciousness. That shot to the heart hit him good.”

  “Epinephrine,” Jessica said. “Did he say it was Gahran when you showed him the composite?”

  “Said he was just a shadow. Said he wasn't even sure at first he'd really seen anything, just a trick of light, until he saw the bodies. Nice old guy. Only wants to know if the girl will live. No thought to himself except to call the wife.”

  “I want this cemetery combed, men and dogs, the works,” said Jessica. “He's at home in such places, just like his father.”

  She recalled the games Mad Matthew Matisak had played in New Orleans, how he had had her canvassing a Metairie Cemetery at midnight on the promise he would be there for her, a ruse as it turned out, another dead end. This could also end in a dead end in a cemetery, or another death if not the arrest of Mad Matisak's crazed kid.

  “Sun'll be up soon,” said Stan, the uniformed cop. “If he's within these walls, or tries to climb over them, we'll get him.”

  Dean added, “We've got squad cars encircling the place from here to Petersen and Western. Got the North Side wall covered, too.”

  She stared in through the bars where the sonofabitch of all sonsofbitches had possibly escaped. Already they had given him too much time. She disbelieved he'd be foolish enough to still be in the area. However, he'd obviously lost the usual disciplinary controls he had maintained over himself all the years since Millbrook. His newfound madness, likely a response to his having learned who his father was, may have triggered the belief that he was invincible. If Gahran thought for a moment of coming back to finish his carving and raising of Petersaul's spine—the thing he apparently, madly and wantonly had to have in numbers now—-the flood of need beyond any control he had once exercised—he might have hesitated long enough to find himself surrounded by the quick response of the Chicago Police Department.