Absolute Instinct (43 page)

“
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 public 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.

“
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.