Robert Walker - Absolute Instinct

Poor stupid self-deluded reclusive Louisa Childe. Her last thoughts were likely of her birds and Archer.

Giles went back to the door he would exit from, and there he removed what might be taken as a big blue easel bag, struggling to bring it from deep within his backpack. Successful, he dug from the bag a large towel. Using the towel, he lifted the woman's spine from where he had left it on her buttocks, wrapping the serpentine rack of bones in the towel and carefully working it, section by section, into the oblong bag without its coming apart.

The vertebral column filled the blue bag, creating a somewhat irregular line, but Giles had read somewhere that the eye saw only what the eye wanted to see. He worried little that anyone would stop him to ask what might be inside the bag. After all, it wasn't as if he were transporting a body. It would appear to anyone he might pass that he carried an easel inside. Nothing sinister about an easel.

He then located his change of clothes. He quickly pulled on a set of clean underclothes, pants and a pullover sweatshirt to accompany his hat and gloves. Finally, he replaced his shoes and socks with what he'd brought. He then threw on his coat, filled his hands with bags, and with a final look around, surveying the charcoal drawings on the wall, and the one clutched in Louisa's hand, he bid adieu to the place and the woman who had supplied him with what he needed. He inched out the door, careful to make no noise.

As he walked down the hallway, the bagged spine over his shoulder, he located the incinerator shaft and dropped the trash bag with glass, leftover sandwich, fingertips with his DNA embedded (all save the one the cat had squirreled away), and the bloody clothing he'd been wearing. It would all burn with the Tuesday morning trash as it did every Tuesday morning on the corner of Cologen and Geldman streets, a crossroads intersection with a stern green light in the middle of icy Millbrook, Minnesota.

The cold air fired brisk chilling needles into the pours of his face.

“Thank you, Miss Childe for a lovely evening and a fine trade,” he said to himself as he stepped out onto the street. Surprised, he found that the plumber's van had remained parked out front of the building the entire night. “Looks like someone else got lucky at Number Forty-eight Geldman,” he muttered, hefting the bone sack and sauntering casually toward the bus stop.

Giles loved riding buses. Loved people watching.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin November 12, 2004

“Mothers… you gotta back pain in dem joints? Den back outta dem joints.”

“I'd say the cure was worse than the patient.”

“Yeah, surefire way to get rid of that pesky ol' sciatica…” muttered Special Agent in Charge, Xavier Darwin Reynolds to the others from the crime-scene unit, who were gathered about the victim, each in turn taking a verbal joust at the impossibly insane crime scene.

Not only had the victim's back been splayed wide open by an as-yet-undetermined blade, but her insides looked out at the detectives-shyly hiding, peeking out through a bloody rectangle in her back the size of a French-louvered window.

All surrounding tissue and remaining bones had collapsed inward on organs untouched by the killer and the bone cutter used to extract the spinal column from its calcified moorings. And so the back window stood open like some bizarre pirate's chest, literally plundered as if an archeological dig, and the plunderer had made off with a strange treasure indeed, leaving all the rest. He had not cored out her eyes. Had not taken any teeth. Had taken nothing of her features, asked nothing of her breasts, nothing of her genitalia. Only the serpent of bone.

An enormously disturbing sight for which the only defense seemed stark, grim humor which now, thanks to the lead investigator's having joined in, opened the floodgate wide.

“Least she had-with an emphasis on had-backbone.”

“Somebody really had a boner on for her.”

“Gonna need one helluva big pot to flavor the ol' bisque with that ham-bone!”

“Ham-bone, ham-bone!” sang a tall female agent.

“Gone are the days of spine and roses,” said a photographer.

“Gives new meaning to the old spinal tap, don't it?” came another.

“Render unto us a few bars, Jerry, 'Take me BAAAAACK to ol' Virginy

“Guy needs serious back up.”

“All right, enough with the vertebral backgammon,” said FBI Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran, who stood staring from the small foyer leading into the apartment. Jessica had just arrived from the airfield, her auburn hair burnished and gleaming in the light filtering through the apartment windows. Jessica's keen eye immediately crossed swords with the awful wound done the victim, when a large policewoman stepped between her and the body-cutting off her line of vision. Jessica silently thanked the woman, wondering if it were intentional or otherwise.

The small army of men and women of the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, FBI field office crime-scene unit fell silent. The others watched this guru of forensics who'd flown in from Quantico, copiloting the FBI Lear Jet from Virginia to oversee their case.

Jessica quickly donned a hair net over her ample hair, which had been pulled tight in a ponytail for the work. She slipped a pair of gloves over her smooth, suntanned fingers and worked them over each hand. She wondered if any of the others could read what was going on behind her shining eyes. Eyes now sending messages to a brain that truly didn't want to cooperate with the image she'd seen only photos of until now. She stalled for time, swallowing back the bile that threatened to erupt on her first sight of the god-awful hacking the victim had taken.

“Ever see anything like this in the D.C. area?” asked one of the field ops, a strikingly large young woman with a blue jacket over her vomit-stained business suit. It appeared from her nonchalance that she'd been in and out of the crime-scene area, and that she'd popped something akin to Prozac. Her dangling name tag read Amanda Petersaul.

She extended a gloved hand and Jessica pumped it. “I'm Agent Petersaul. Everyone just calls me Pete.”

“You mean the boy's've decided you're OK, so they graced you with a nickname.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you make of it so far?” Jessica indicated the deceased.

“You can't be in this crime scene without steppin' in it, so you'd best-”

“Put on the booties, I can see that,” replied Jessica. A curving river of blood painted the carpet all round them there in the foyer. They stood on the dried stuff and it felt crunchy beneath Jessica's shoes. She placed on the booties and tied them about her ankles.

Jessica looked toward the body a second time. Agent Pete's considerable size continued to act as a kind of blind from which Jessica could safely view it without anyone seeing her pained wince. She'd been trained not to show emotion under any circumstance at a crime scene. Her number of years and experience had taught her the only way to gain the trust and authority required to take control in mutilation murder cases was via an aloofness and professional acumen that could not be questioned.

“This is like looking at a war wound,” commented Agent Petersaul.

“You come to us through the military?” asked Jessica.

“How'd you guess?”

“Psychic powers and that pendant around your neck, GI issue.”

“Had it made at great expense.” She fingered the golden numbers: 101st Airborne. “First in, last out.”

“You see duty in Iraq?”

“Pakistan and Iraq. Fucked up place in a fucked up world, yeah.”