Absolute Instinct (39 page)

The ribbons lay limp at each side, and Giles had read Mother's parting words at last. She, too, was created by God, and she and his father, were in their way both evil incarnate. While Mother had never killed anyone, she had destroyed a spirit—the spirit Giles might once have had a chance at being or at least at becoming—the shadowy other self who might have eschewed all that his father was, and fought off the ravages of his mother's assaults on that spirit, and overcome the genetic mark left on his soul by a monster seed.

All gone now... any flickering hope of chance for that other self to survive extinguished long ago with his first murder. Too damn much stacked too high against him, borne of man and woman, a creature carrying both the mark of Satan in his very makeup, in the soup of his mother's womb, and the mark created of her doing, of his upbringing and environment. God could not have found a way to save him from Mother when an infant? Why not? Why in God's name not?

Giles stood and looked down from what seemed a faraway place at the damnable, cursed box, realizing that it had been a blight on his soul from the moment Mother had handed it to him from her deathbed. She had had a lawyer bring it to her there in the hospital. It had been sealed for years until she herself broke a thick wax seal she had applied to it when the box had been placed into a bank vault for this day.

“
You have a right to know precisely who and what you are, Giles. That is why I gift this to you. It is the gift of self-awareness and fear... Yes, the gift of fear. You rightly ought to fear the thing you are and until now you have had no idea what you are, not really. You only think you do. Ever wonder where you get the urge to kill a living creature and to feed on its... its spinal fluid and marrow?”

Now Giles knew what she had meant. For the first time everything fit, each puzzle piece in his brain, psyche and in his soul... it all fit. Finally, he understood precisely what Mother had had to live with, why she was so bitter, and why Mother, on bended knee, so often asked God why He had spared her for this—while pointing at Giles. Asking God why she had not been killed by his father.

Giles wanted to run from the box.

All these years since Mother's death, he had fixated on its contents—both fascinated with it and terrified of it at once. Drawn to its contents, closer and closer, until his fingers would inch inside it, fearful of the snakebite of its contents. At once wanting to bathe in it, to luxuriate in the sheer knowledge and power within the box, and to run in terror from it Finally, steeling himself, Giles reached in and snatched out a handful of the news clippings, snatching them from below the dead weight of the strange metal and glass tube device lying atop all. His eyes registered a kind of garden tool device like a hose attachment perhaps. He could not fathom its meaning, but he quaked at touching it. Then he abruptly closed the lid on the thing. Now he began to bravely, courageously read the bizarre stories in the clippings.

Tales of Father...

I could just walk away from it. Leave it right here. Never see it again,” Giles spoke to time, space, the stars and God as he stared down over the box, standing beside the park bench he'd been occupying as he'd read the accounts Mother had gathered over the years for his keepsake.

He took tentative steps away. “When they catch me, they'll think I'm monster enough without knowing who my father was. Least now I know he's long dead. Mother didn't lie about that. They'll think me a common unfeeling sociopath, a psychotic fucking horror to make a blood splatterrama film about, like they did about Father. They'll think me a thing worse than all the other horrors combined, a thing without an ent of humanity—all granite and nerve and unleashed animal instinct like a starved wolf escaped from an ancient cave, as guileless and without pity as Jack the Ripper or Father... dear well-remembered Father. The man everyone on the planet knew about but forgot about with his death, everyone except me. I didn't even have the luxury of forgetting about him, having never known.”

He halted, hearing a rustle behind him. A homeless man with a bundle of StreetWise newspapers to sell under his arm was now admiring the box, poking about its contents, curious as an overgrown cat.

Giles reacted instinctively. “Get away from that, old man! It's mine! I... I just forgot it there.” “I found it! It's mine,” argued the half-demented fellow.

“
Here, here is for your newspapers!” Giles handed him a ten dollar bill.

The shaky hand extended toward Giles to brush his cheek in a moment of need for human touch. Giles felt the scratchy, rough fingers caress his cheek. “You remind me of someone... someone who loved me once,” said the old man in a sandpaper and gravel voice.

Giles pulled away after a moment. “You can keep the papers, re-sell them. Double your profits, old man,” he said as he lifted the ugly gift from Mother, her twisted homage to Father—every detail of his every crime against humanity. According to the news reports, the work of a man who lived a heartless, unfeeling double-life and killed wantonly like an animal by night while selling medical supplies by day. A man who had designed and patented his own medical device for extracting blood from the jugular artery as the hearts of his victims pumped blood to his waiting mason jars, each carefully labeled and packed into a cooler. Mother always said that Giles was neat to a fault, meticulous about his art supplies. Now he knew where he'd gotten the trait.

Father was a blood drinker, a man convinced of his own need for blood, a vampire named Matisak—Mad Matthew Matisak, the newspapers proclaimed him.

In the news stories, Father was characterized again and again as a weak little man suffering a debilitating disease who'd come to think of himself as a parasitic vampire who had to feed on the blood of other human beings to save himself from the disease that threatened to overtake him. One reporter wrote that his mental state had deteriorated far more quickly than had his physical condition, his physical state seemingly taking power from his each kill, and that he could be counted among the truly insane but masterful and ingenious murderers in murderer's row going back through all time. Another reporter claimed that Mad Matthew Matisak had established a strange bond with FBI Agent and Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran.

Giles wondered what this woman could tell him about his father. He wondered how he might best his father's reputation and in doing so possibly meet this Dr. Jessica Coran. Father had wanted her to go into an eternal bliss with him, and he apparently damn near got his way in a warehouse in New Orleans many years ago.

Giles wondered if this FBI doctor were still alive, still working for the FBI, and if so, he wondered if she would feel any kinship—as strange as such a kith and kin might be— to the son of Matthew Matisak. He made his way toward the array of lights and the sounds of gaiety spilling from the ongoing Navy Pier fair. He felt an overwhelming need to be among people even knowing he would never fit in among people.

Unsure why the lights of the Ferris wheel pulled him, Giles began a brisk walk for the pier.

The homeless man looked after him until certain the young man had no intention of returning. He then unfolded the white sheath of paper with the sketch of the suspect in the Lucinda Wellingham—UPS murder case, with a strong possible connection to the Spine Thief mutilation murders.

The cop's excited hands revealed shaking manicured, painted nails below the gloves as the detective tore them away, finally able to open the tightly folded paper on the likeness. There seemed a definite rough similarity between the man with the box and the man in the sketch. But undercover police detective Tanith Chen, peeling away a layer of her stifling makeup that created the rough texture and manly appearance she was known for, as it was the opposite of her feminine beauty, remained unsure. This kid parked so long on a park bench and talking to himself was new to the area, else he'd have known about her and her nightly collars of degenerates and drug dealers using her territory for all manner of perversions in the park, perversions now on the decline thanks to her collaring so many who dared “do their thing” on her watch. She'd kept one eye on the suspect in the distance now, his back to her. She began to slowly, cautiously follow the stranger, curious as to what he'd been up to. She'd watched earlier from a safe distance, watched him intentionally leave the package like it was some ransom demand or something. Certainly, her blue sense told her not everything in this picture was kosher.

She found a park lamppost, one of those almost useless ones put up for decoration in the park by the pork-barrel politicians and Daley. Make Chicago beautiful... keep Chicago beautiful... the park is for the people... all a lot of crap, a moneymaking boondoggle the whole thing, as dripping of political favoritism and corruption as the deal with the tow-truck companies in this town. She laughed lightly to herself, recalling what her partner, Gene Kelley said just the night before at the Red Lion Inn where they mingled with other cops and writers and cops who wanted to be writers and writers who wanted to be cops. In a Faux baritone voice, he declared, “If Christ came to Chicago, his fucking donkey would be ticketed at the curb and more'n likely towed to boot by the Lincoln Park pirates. And where in the love of God is Christ going to come up with that kind of cash?”

Under the weak glow of the old-world styled lamppost, Detective Chen pulled forth the stolen note she'd palmed from the box, a cryptic note from mother to son as it turned out, but an eerie, even chilling note at the same time. As Chen read it, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She felt her skin crawl as if a sudden cold rash of creeping satanic fingertips scraped over her soul. She gasped, glanced all around, over her shoulder, half certain that the son of the infamous Matthew Matisak must have the eyes and instincts of a tiger, that he could not only pierce the night with his vision but her very mind, to know what she held in her hand, and to kill her for it.

“
My God... it's him... gotta be the one the APB's out on, the creep that rips people's backs open for their spines, and he and I are the only two people on the planet who know who... who he is.”

Tanith Chen had never felt so vulnerable or so absolutely alone in her territory before. She feared, even as good as she was, she'd be no match for this cunning madman.

Still he'd kept going, moving north toward the lights of Michigan Avenue, Saks, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, Water Tower Place. He'd be swallowed up in the crowds. She had to follow, to again catch sight of him, and she had to get backup. She folded and put away the note and the police sketch, noticing that her hands shook. Her fingers struggled with the keypad on her cell phone. As she called for help, she began tearing away her baggy, oversized clothing, dropping it as she went to rid herself of the disguise he would spot. At the same time, her feet moved her fluidly toward Michigan Avenue in the direction the son of Matisak had taken. She'd lost sight of him, and having to pass by hedges, she feared he knew what she was thinking and who she was, and that he might, at any moment, dart out at her. Fleeting thoughts of how great it would be to have the Spine Thief collared by an Asian Chicago policewoman flitted through her mind as well.

And the note she had plucked from the box and folded away. What about that? This was hardcore evidence. It must not be lost or damaged or ruined by her fingerprints or perspiration any further. It needed to be under glass and studied by the experts chasing this guy. It needed FBI attention. This whole damn night needed FBI attention.

Her call to her partner for help went through. Looking now like a jogger, all her makeup peeled away, wearing only sweatpants and T-shirt—a bit chilled by the mix of cool air and stumbling onto the biggest case of her career, Tanith Chen tried consciously to slow both her mind and her breathing. It didn't work. She breathlessly told her partner what she had, standing now at the perimeter of the park in the shadow of the Drake Hotel, traffic noise causing her to shout into the mouthpiece.

“
Where is he now?” asked her partner, Gene Kelley.

She looked all round her. He was nowhere in sight. She had to admit this to Gene. As she did so, she wondered if the killer had somehow doubled-back and faded into the green blackness of the park foliage. Or had he stepped up his pace, going north on the Magnificent Mile?

Gene promised a shitload of backup, so they could cordon off the entire area for six blocks. But Tanith cautioned any sirens, and any big show of force. “You'd just alert him to the fact we're on to him.”

“
How can you be on to him if you don't know where the fuck he is?” countered Kelley.

“
Given the nature of the beast, innocent lives could be put at risk if you come rushing in like the cavalry, Gene. Look, I think he went south on Michigan. I'm going to do what I can to get and keep a visual on him. But no helicopters or guys rappelling down on the avenue unless they can stay out of his sight.”

“
You go cautiously, Slick.”

“
I talked to him, Gene. He's a cool customer. Didn't spook, but then he was convinced I was Barney the Street-Wise salesman. He had no idea who I was.”

“
We've all got his likeness now. You were out when it was disseminated. We all know what the guy looks like.”

“
So do I... now.” She spotted him in the crowd ahead. She'd jogged, stopping only to talk to Gene. “My God, I got a visual on him!”

“
Where's he headed?”

“
I dunno. The Tribune tower maybe?”

“
What, to give himself up?”“Could be.”