Absolute Instinct (24 page)

She shook her head and then stared into his eyes again. “Reynolds, Detective Reynolds, our relationship has to remain on a—”

“—
a professional level, I know that, but like I said, we've got two hours to kill. Trust me, Jessica, while I do find you attractive and intelligent, I have an Italian wife and three little girls.”

“
Really? Photographs, let's see em.”

He pulled forth charming pictures of three girls ranging in age from four to seven. “Keep me hopping.”

“
I'll bet.” She noticed he showed no photo of the wife.

“
Children will keep you running on the one hand, grounded on the other, and all four of my girlfriends would bust my balls if I so much as looked at another woman.”

This made her laugh, and he joined in. “Sounds like you've got your hands full.”

“
Oh, I do, I do!” H/s infectious smile is the irresistible part of him, that and his eyes, she thought, but she said, “What would she do to you if she knew you slept in my room the other night?” asked Jessica. “This Italian woman of yours?”

“
Let's just say she wouldn't be as understanding as your friend Richard. Now that that's out of the way, how about we go see the Orion exhibit?”

“
As soon as you finish your sandwich and coffee. I'll just go freshen up, Darwin. I like your name, Darwin.”

“
Given to me by my adoptive parents,” he replied. “My adoptive parents were great people who happened to be black like me. I had a good childhood once I got hooked up with them. Prior to that... not so good.”

She dared not ask about the not so good, at least not here and now.

“
So you like 'Darwin?” he asked.

“
Yeah, interesting choice your parents made.”

“
You mean it beats 'Thomas,' ” he joked. “I'll put a stop to the proposed name change proceedings.” Something jammed with sadness flitted across his eyes. The big black man sitting before her dropped his gaze. She thought she might see a tear fall into his coffee if she watched long enough.

She changed the subject. “I think an art museum opening would be just the thing to feed my child. It's a ritual I must go through so I have something positive to report to my therapist.”

“
I hear you.”

“
I suppose we both could use a break from this case.”

He nodded, looking up again at her, having regained himself, in control. “I'm with you.”

“
But nature calls first. Be right back.”

He waved her off, dabbing at his eye with a napkin.

Inside the restroom, she stared at herself in the mirror for the second time today and said, “You damn sure still know how to make a fucking fool of yourself, Doctor Jessica 'Sensitive' Coran.”

But for the life of her, she could not decipher what had made Reynolds tear up.

ELEVEN

The body snatchers they have come

And made a snatch at me... Don't go to weep upon my grave.

And think that there I be; They haven't left an atom there Of my anatomy!

—
THOMAS HOOD

ON the train to Chicago, Giles slept sitting up. He hadn't had much sleep since killing Lucinda, and fatigue now washed over him in waves. Drowsy, his eyes glazed over and his mind went numb with the steady sound and vibration underfoot of the train as it wended its way along the tracks toward downtown Chicago. As the train picked up speed and stormed toward the Windy City, he replayed the way things had unfolded, how he had killed Lucinda, his own benefactress.

He had thought her knocked unconscious with the hammer blow, but when he'd relaxed his vigilance, believing her completely subdued, she'd pulled free and rushed to his workbench, frantically searching for a weapon among his tools, knocking over an array of knives and sculpting tools. She screamed amid the panting, but she couldn't get enough breath to do a good scream justice. In fact, it sounded like the scream of a woman in the throes of love. Maybe she did love him. She swiped at him, grimacing, hissing catlike, an animal ferocity that screamed her desire to live in her eyes.

He backed momentarily away, studying her contorted features. They were like those of a young nurse he'd seen once in a photograph hidden away among his foster mother's things, a photo of Mother at about Lucinda's current age. “You're not doing yourself any good this way, Loose. Only prolonging the inevitable.”

As he backed off, she came at him, the raised sharp end of the triangled spade coming at his eyes. A dodge and a grab, and he had her arm in a viselike grip, all the while she screamed, “I'm not going to die like this! Like some victim in a goddamn horror movie! Damn you, Giles, may God damn you!”

His weakened arm could not hold her as she pulled free and brought the glinting spade down at his chest, but he grabbed her arm and locked it, wresting the weapon from her grasp and tossing it aside. She found the air and screamed at the top of her lungs for help.

She felt the stun to her temples as he brought a fist to her head. Lucinda Wellingham fell to the floor a second time amid the rubble of art supplies and tools there. It had all happened so fast, Giles could hardly recall the exact linear thread of events, but he recalled how she fought for her life. Desperate, dazed, she again managed to wrap a hand around the pointed spade, the one he used for special line effects— perfectly aged skin, like parchment, on the late-forties figures of the women depicted in his sculptures, likenesses of Louisa Childe, Sarah Towne and Joyce Olsen in his final plastering on of the last layer of “skin”—the epidermal layer. They all looked, after a fashion, like Mother, even Lucinda's general features matched Nurse Gahran from the photos of Mother when she was Lucinda's age. Mother and Loose... Mother was loose, Loose was a mother.

Yes, Lucinda had fallen beside the spade and grabbed it up again, jabbing at him with it.

Giles tried to wrench the spade from her a second time, Lucinda now on her back, pointing it menacingly up at him. He stood over her with a hammer in his hand, and then he kneeled down to administer the blow.

She stabbed out at him in an attempt to put the spade into his heart. He somehow grabbed her wrist as the shining spade came barreling forward, and she screamed at the pain he caused her wrist, twisting it until the stubborn fingers popped free of the handle, and it fell away with a clanging complaint.

Giles instantly choked off her screams with one hand over her mouth, and he fought for control of her struggling body by strangling her. Blood—his blood—dripped down over her from a flesh wound she'd inflicted in her repeated jabs at him. His arm had been seriously cut. In the excitement of the moment, he hadn't felt a thing, but Lucinda had nicked him badly. The bleeding bothered him. He didn't do well seeing his own blood spilled. It made him feel heady, giddy, filled him with nausea and threatened to send him into a shiver leading to a possible blackout. He fought this. Fought it hard as he held her down, kicking and attempting to scream, his hands cutting off her air supply at two points.

He finally squeezed off her air supply altogether, so tightly that her eyes rolled back in her head, her tongue lolled out. She had passed out.

It gave Giles some respite. He rushed to the bathroom and cleaned off the stinging, bleeding wound to his forearm. This left Lucinda's unconscious form lying nude amid the debris field and ruin of his tools. He glanced over at her and in that moment of seeing her nude, silent, looking dead amid the scattered bones against the now slick, wet wooden floor like a crocodile out of its element, he thought how beautiful the sight, that it would be in this fashion he would pose her sculpted form alongside her backbone as if it had leapt from her evil body to disown her. It was then that he noticed water leaking through the floorboards, seeping through grooves and cracks. He rushed to throw towels over the epicenter of the spill, attempting to dry up the damnable swimming pool she'd made of his living room. He feared it might seep through to the apartment below, and lead to bad consequences involving others below. He didn't want unwelcome visitors anytime.

His arm continued bleeding into the one towel he'd wrapped about himself. He returned to the bathroom and turned on the shower to run cold water over his arm. The blood and water meshed in a swirl of ribbons, intermingling and washing down the drain, the blood of his mother and father and himself, but only God alone knew what Father was, Father all wrapped up in that box below his bed, tied tightly and held at bay, yet always asking to be introduced to his son. Family ties... blood ties... everybody has 'em. The blood of the fathers shall be upon the sons, he thought, watching it flow from him.

Dropping the bloodied towel into the bathtub, Giles had grabbed a fresh one, dabbing as the blood flow lessened. He found a first-aid kit he kept for whenever he nicked himself while working, and he plastered the wound with salve and covered it with gauze and bandage.

He thought he heard Lucinda moan, and he heard her scratching along the floor in an attempt to move once more toward freedom and life. He returned to stand over her, watching her crawl. It brought to mind an old fantasy of his: seeing Mother in the same position, crawling, mewing, begging his forgiveness, pleading for her life.

Giles then lifted a handheld mirror up to his features.

Dark circles blotted his eyes. That old pallor, white and pasty, had crept back into his epidermis. What the hell was that all about? He felt lethargic. More and more, the sunlight of day became intolerable.

“
Maybe I should just sculpt my own backbone. Put an end to this aberrant behavior. I could do it if I put my mind to it. It's not like I need to do this to feed myself. But then again... perhaps it does feed me... in ways I don't even understand.”

Then he saw his form in the mirror retreat backward until it was sitting in the lotus position, bent over the broken vertebral rack that once belonged to Joyce Olsen, struggling to get the glue down in the joints, struggling to get the C-clamps on just right, when an army of Milwaukee firemen stormed in and attacked him with untold fire axes, screaming obscenities at him as they hacked him to pieces, shouting, “Die monster, die!”

He came awake with a start, finding himself on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, the train having slowed, the rhythm of its bounce along the rails having dramatically changed. In the near distance, he saw the mammoth John Hancock Center, and beyond this the even taller Sears Tower. “A new home,” he muttered.

“
Say what, son?” asked a passing conductor.

“
Chicago, sir,. ., my new home.”

“
Well, welcome home, son. City of Big Shoulders and Wide Arms, I always say. Greatest city on the planet. You'll love it here.”

“
I'm sure I will get acclimated.”

“
Well, son,... I don't know nothing 'bout where you'd begin to find anything like that!” the conductor joked. “Who is this ac-climb-ated, huh?” The conductor moved on, laughing at his own lame joke, a man singularly in love with his work, and shouting now, “Chicago downtown! Union Station! All Out!”

# # #

THE monotonous thrum of the public-trust FBI jet, a state-of-the-art Beechcraft had put Jessica at such ease that she began to doze as they sped toward Portland, Oregon, at sixty thousand feet. The much-deeded nap had crept over her without warning. Leaving Milwaukee for their scheduled meeting with Governor James Jason “J.J.” Hughes in Portland had been difficult after what she and Darwin had found in the darkened corridors of the Orion showing at the Fine Arts Center. She had had to convince Darwin to take no immediate action against Keith Orion. Darwin, bent on arresting him on obscenity laws dating back to the 1800s was too willing to tip their hand. They compromised, and so Darwin instead set in motion a surveillance of Orion and a full background check in an effort to gain enough information to warrant going to a federal judge for a search-and-seizure order.

Meantime, she got him on the plane for Portland as planned. Slumbering now, Jessica revisited Keith Orion's showing, her mind playing over the dark and sinister images created by the artist, some of which had startled them both into suspecting Orion of being the Spine Thief.

Orion's work was created for one purpose only, to shock and chase people from the gallery, his underlying theme the humiliation of women. His work depicted women in all manner of degradation, all poses of disgust. So ugly and distasteful was the work that Jessica had to force herself through the motions alongside Darwin.

Orion's palate ran to stark blood-orange, an array of red, deep ochre, shades of black and gloomy grays. Special-effects lighting, lasers and strobes shattered the otherwise utter blackness of the cave created for the showing. Blaring heavy metal music further attacked the senses.

Darwin, too, had felt uneasy. “You want to skip this?” he'd asked early on, seeing that the exhibit was not much different than viewing an array of crime-scene photos.

“
I can see this on the job,” she had replied. “Let's give it a little more time. Maybe there's something redeeming just down from the next painting or sculpture.”

But soon they had agreed that there simply was nothing redeeming in Orion's work, and they were on their way out when she was stunned by a small painting that'd been left un-illuminated, alone in a corner. What had caught her eye had also immediately caught Darwin's as well. The painting depicted a woman lying facedown, a huge black abyss of a gash, bloody along the edges, taken out of her back from shoulders to backside.