Absolute Instinct (2 page)

She thought of the years yet ahead of her with him as her child. She wondered what might become of Giles, wondered again if he would ever contemplate robbing her of life for her spinal column the way he had Squeakums's.

In the will, she would insist on him never being left alone with her body. She would insist on immediate cremation.

She got a mental image of him feeding on her bone marrow, his lips and tongue slick with her spinal fluid.

He had enjoyed it too much with the cat.

ONE

One of the many appeals of Minnesota—aside from the lakes—is that if the world ended, you wouldn't hear about it until the next day.

—
LT. DKT. DANIEL BRANNAN, MILLBROOK PD

Millbrook, Minnesota November 14, 2002

LOUISA Anne Childe closed a dying fist around the blood-soaked charcoal drawing she'd so loved—the impeccable image of her sitting in the park across the street, doing what she loved, feeding the late winter birds. With a trapped breath in her throat, believing it her last, she knew— feared—gasped. Her only hold left on this life—her sketch. Perhaps in the next life, things would be as peaceful as in the black-and-white drawing. Still, birdlike breaths of air fluttered, perched, and then struggled past her lips and into her lungs; and when she felt the dagger rip into her spine, she wished desperately that it had been her last breath.

Cheated, she felt a wave of anger against God for allowing this murder—her murder. She'd always imagined herself dying peacefully in her sleep. Instead, she would die a fool, a victim of murder, by a cunning killer who had led her down a grim-rose lane with a mere bit of artistry, the sleight of hand of flattery playing no small part. He had been so good for her ego... until now. What would Papa say... ? He'd say she was a fool woman, that's what, and that she'd be left with the now-worthless sketch and her own disgrace.

Disgrace at being found dead at the hand of a man she had invited past her threshold. How stupid was that? How disgraceful her body would present itself. She feared her spirit would hover, witness to the disgrace. .The thought of it, the horror of a scene involving paramedics, policemen and women, detectives, coroners... it was simply horrid. She feared being manhandled by those strangers, certain none would look like Basil Rathbone, Clark Gable or George Clooney. She feared strangers seeing her nude form, her clothes ripped from her, her naked body bloated and ugly with the passage of time, as she had no one.

No one would come looking until the rent was long overdue. Even more painful, the truth: She had literally put herself into an early grave by a murdering con artist. Louisa felt this humiliation above all, even above the pain of the cold giant chasm now being opened down the length of her spine.

The last earthly words she heard, he whispered in her ear, “You will still sit for me, won't you, Louisa.” It wasn't a question, more a statement. Little wonder he had failed to sign her charcoal drawing.

Louisa Anne Childe had endured the flesh-separating blade, feeling it course from the nape of her neck and race to the bottom of her spine. When the second cut snaked from the bottom up and up, and finally returned to the nape, Louisa still clutched the drawing. Her killer had seduced her with the enticement of charcoal drawings of her in the park, sitting, feeding birds.

She now fell into unconsciousness, her fist frozen about her favorite of four sketches.

By the time the rectangle of flesh was removed from her back, Louisa had died from hemorrhagic shock. She didn't feel a thing when her murderer's gloved hands latched on to her spine with one hand and worked a rib cutter with the other. He cut the twelve thoracic vertebra of the rib cage from their hold on the spinal cord. This finished, twisted wirelike nerves snapped as he tugged and ripped the backbone, but it jammed and held.

“
Godfuckingsonofamotherfuckingbitching bastard!” he erupted and immediately covered his mouth with his gloved hand to silence himself. “Like fighting with a metal snake,” he added as he continued to tug. Finally, the spinal octopus let go and came free, almost sending Giles tumbling over.

The sketch-artist killer liked the heft and weight and feel of the bone snake in his hands, freed of all its moorings.

Strangely supple and beautiful in its shape, the human spine had always fascinated Giles, even as a child. And now he had one in his possession, to have as his own, to do with as he wished, and he had a plan. In the waiting room of a chiropractor's office, in a collection of newspaper clippings favoring the laying-on-of-hands science over pills and surgeries, he had read that every person on the planet had slight individual differences in their spinal development— some quite subtle, others as remarkable and as lurid as those of the Elephant Man. Certainly no two racks were ever exactly alike. So he now held a unique backbone in his hands, Louisa's, dripping with bodily fluids and blood.

The blood splatters, pools and puddles amounting to a great deal of red, reflected in Giles's delighted eyes as he turned the spinal column in his hands, closely examining it. “A true work of art,” he muttered. “But I can't ever do this again... never.”

He saw the woman's cat, “Archer” she'd called the little creature. Archer stood on his paws as if they'd turned to arrowheads, prepared to dart or pounce or race off, but his marble-green eyes froze wide at the fear he swallowed in a growl. Staring from behind a doily-covered sofa, Archer's nose went busily atwitter with the odor of blood and what wafts up from an opened body.

Giles reached a tentative hand out, calling, “Here, kitty, here kitty-kitty!”

But when he tried to pet Archer, the cat slipped below the sofa and disappeared in one fluid motion. “Don't want nothing to do with me. Smart animal,” Giles muttered. Then he near shouted, “I've yanked out a few cat spines in my day!”

Giles then turned his attention to the human spine in his left hand, Louisa's gruel-dripping backbone. He laid the spinal column across the dead woman's buttocks. As he busily collected her blood in small, empty honey jars he'd cleaned and brought with him—sample-size jars he'd pocketed from the hotel where he'd been staying the entire time he had staked out Louisa's place, having stalked her from her beloved park bench to her most private corner of the planet. He briefly flashed on Grendel, which he'd read as a child, and how touched he had been by the monster's cave. How cold and unhappy a place it was, and the creature's absolute aloneness—an Adam without an Eve. And so poorly misunderstood, the sad oversized hairy beast, and how very pathetic it all became, his story. How he had no choice but to attack and destroy those men who sat about the warm hearths chomping on their muttonchops and raising their ale glasses and whoring with their women. How he'd see the lights of men in the company of men, and how he must absolutely hate them for their happiness.

Giles shook off the remembrance with a strange psychic shiver he little understood. Time to finish up with the blood collection and pack up the spine for transport, but then his stomach churned with a clawing hunger, a reminder of the deserted corned beef on rye that Louisa had made for him, left unattended in the kitchenette.

From a kneeling position over the body, Giles pushed off the bloody carpet to stand over Louisa's remains. Her spine was as beautiful and intricate as he'd imagined all those days and weeks of stalking her. It reflected her beautiful soul, Giles thought before stepping over the mutilated body, going for the sandwich. Once in the kitchen area, he stood contemplating whether or not he had left behind any trace of himself when he saw the red footprints on the Italian marble tiles he'd just walked across.

A small oval mirror—a homey Midwestern message stamped onto the glass—stared across at him where he leaned against the counter, chomping down large bites of the corned beef. He thought it odd how his reflected eyes formed little blue bull's-eyes in the final two O's in the of and of in the familiar, apropos message: Today Is The Last Day Of The Rest Of Your Life.

Giles hadn't removed his hat or his tight-fitting gloves on entering her place, even when she offered to turn on the gas-driven fireplace. He'd argued it was unnecessary and that he'd only be a few minutes. So he had kept hat and gloves on, as they were now in the mirror. But he had also admitted that his fingers and toes remained numb from being outside, and that's when the mother in Louisa leapt out. She insisted he stay for a sandwich and a tumbler of whiskey “to warm his giblets,” as she'd put it.

With the gloves on, he needn't worry about fingerprint evidence. The hairnet he wore below his winter knit cap would keep hairs from falling, but there was always fiber evidence, and now his footprints in blood. He had to consider everything. As he did so, his cobalt-blue eyes surveyed the kitchenette, which in its heyday surely must have been top of the line, fabulous even. As he looked about the small space, he heard the crunch of glass.

“
Damn me!” he cursed, lifting his shoe off the glass tumbler she'd earlier knocked from his hand in her panic at realizing that Giles had come for far more than money for the charcoal drawings he'd done of Louisa in the park. The broken glass underfoot lay shattered in countless pieces now, whereas it had been neatly shorn into three large, easy-to-dispose parts before he had clumsily stomped on it. Earlier her cheap whiskey had gone flying when she lashed out at him with a broomstick. Any minute amount of saliva on the shards of the glass would carry his DNA. He scooped all the larger pieces into his gloved hands and tossed them into the trash container. He then located broom and dustpan and swept up the residue of granular-sized glass, the sandy stuff mixing with hair, fiber, dust, all discarded into the plastic container lining the trash can.

He next stared at the counter, littered with the paraphernalia of apartment living: obligatory spice rack, bottles, jars, can opener, skillets, dirty dishes—she'd not been expecting him so soon—nickel-plated silverware, used-up E. coli-infested sponges and dish towels. Amid this, he had located his half-bitten corned beef on rye piled high with tomato, lettuce, mayo and mustard that Louisa had lovingly prepared for him, remarking on how cooking for a man was tantamount to a gesture of true love, blushing as she said it, the old dear.

A gnat-sized banana fly flit into and out of his peripheral vision as if lift off had come from the center of his sandwich. Louisa's lithe little soul in the guise of an insect—a black Tinkerbell perhaps? Highly doubtful, but the possibility the thing had been crawling on his sandwich the entire time he'd been taking bites from it disturbed him enough to make him toss it into the trash bin with the broken glass.

Giles left the bag open to receive his bloody clothing and shoes. Naked now, he next lifted the broom from the floor. Firmly holding on to the broom, Giles painted his bloody shoe prints into swirls and eddies created by the nylon bristles. He stood back and studied the beauty of patterns he found unexpected. The patterns made the red circles look like giant fingerprints, but they'd be useless to authorities, these giant, mocking prints. The thought of it created a strange but welcome shiver along the length of his epidermis from scalp to toe.

This finished, he stepped back into the cramped living area. He stepped over Louisa's body and placed the bag alongside his other two bags near the door, readying to leave once dressed. But first, seeing additional red shoe marks stamped and drying against the carpet, he quickly swiped at these with the broom. His finished product here created a river-stream effect of red against the thick pile to blot out his footprints as he worked his way backward toward the door and the bags he'd placed there.

He looked down at his victim, the woman he thought an absolutely useless human being. Mousy brown hair just turning to gray, the first signs of old age beginning to crease her face, a woman tired of life, Giles imagined. Had never been with a man, he further imagined, never dared anything, never lived. The dash between the dates on her tombstone will stand for nothing, he told himself. Still, she had been sweet to him, kindly, motherly even. He hadn't expected the depth of her concern, and he'd felt ill at ease with it, though certainly he'd cultivated her trust. A double-edged sword; part of the game. While Louisa had, in effect, made things far easier for him as a result of her trusting kindness toward him, the end result was accompanied by a strange feeling in Giles, a twinge of remorse. Such regret surprised him.

In a way, Louisa had shared with Giles a handful of similar, if not identical, characteristics, just as he shared with the monster Grendel. She was trusting, wanting to believe the best in human nature, even good-hearted. In another time, another place, another upbringing, with other parentage, Giles believed he'd have been as kindly, as good of heart as Louisa any day of the week. His mind tumbled over the notion that it could not wrap around, trying to form thoughts, the thoughts trying to form words, to get a fix, a hold on the facts and keep them in order. She got what was coming to her in the long run, her damnable, milksop, cookie-baking, Millbrook kindness notwithstanding, something he'd encouraged sure, but he'd wanted it to be false, not true, a kind of Midwestern traditional mask, all bullshit, her mewing at him like a kindly mother, her treating him as she did her precious damned Archer as if she meant it, as if it meant anything, when all it managed to do was cloud his determination, blur his purpose, and make things more difficult. The bitch'd made things easy only up to a point; even after death, she somehow managed to make things hard. Certainly harder than doing dogs and cats. In fact, thanks to her damnable sandwich and whiskey and doting, she'd made it the hardest thing Giles had ever had to do. Still, he congratulated himself on having stood his ground and having done the deed.