Robert Walker - Absolute Instinct

“Hear that, Laughlin? He's possibly still in the area!”

“Unless he grabbed a cab, hopped a bus or the nearby elevated,” replied Laughlin, “but we'll get on it, canvass the neighborhood and paper his face everywhere.”

“Did you see this, Conchita?” Jessica asked, showing her the photo of Gahran as a high-school student on the front page of the Sun-Times. “You had to've seen this. He had to've seen this.”

“He told me you were all trying to frame him for something Keith Orion did, that you released Orion because you didn't have enough to hold him, so now you were making up stuff against Giles.”

“And you believed that?” asked Sharpe, straight-faced.

She glanced up at him but said nothing. Jessica asked, “What was he working on all day? Show me.”

“It's a back room.”

“Is that supposed to be humorous?”

“No, it's just for empty boxes and shit.”

“An ordinary back room.”

“Giles said he made up something special for me in here, but I didn't get no chance to go in there since it got so busy and then you all busted in. So I locked it up, not wanting no one to see it until I did, you know. He said it was special to me.”

“I think we need to see it now, Conchita.”

She led them back past all the sculptures of the three victims when Jessica noticed a fourth rack of backbones free-floating alone, newly draped with black sheets as backdrop canvass for Giles's special brand of black art.

“Lucinda Wellingham,” said Sharpe. “Read the placard.”

On the doorjamb Giles had created a placard naming each of his works. Where the three more elderly women had been depicted, he had simply used November 1, November 2, and November 3. This one read: Essence d'Lucious.

Conchita unlocked a door to the very back storage room in this maze behind her cafe. “All right,” Jessica said, bracing herself. “He could still be in here… in the shadows.”

“Better let us go in first,” suggested Sharpe.

“No way-I won't lose you, Richard, not to this fiend, not as I did Otto.”

Sharpe pushed past her, taking the lead, throwing the door wide on a blackened room, a soft, diffused, muted light striking an object at the center of the room, and the strobe light slowly revolved about the thing at the center.

Jessica and Laughlin followed Sharpe, with Conchita peeking around them, watching as the light source picked up yet another backbone, then another, and finally a third. They hung high in the air here where the ceiling was a good fourteen feet high.

“Three… I count three more spinal columns,” said Richard.

“But whose is the third? We've got one unaccounted for victim,” said Jessica. “Bones will tell us something about him or her.”

Dangling and eerily turning in a draft, the spinal columns looked like flying dragons and the strobe light gave them the illusion of flight. “Flying bones,” Jessica muttered.

Then a second light source on a timer set to go on at intervals came on and raked quickly as a knife stroke across a nude male body, its back splayed open, bloody yet, dripping still from the mangling it'd endured at the hands of Matisak's son. Then the light raced off.

“What in hell was that?” asked Laughlin.

“Is it Gahran?” asked Sharpe. “But how?”

“No,” she countered, “looks like an African male. But who?”

The light source no longer on the body in the dark, no one could say, but Conchita managed words. “It almost looked like Murphy, my husband, but he hasn't much been around. We had a bad… really nasty fight.”

The lights again raked over the set of three flying spinal columns overhead. In a beautiful blue artistic setting, one could construe the bones as birds in formation flight, in perfect sync, and then they realized another light source was directed on yet another scene in the far back of the room. The new light source directed attention to a sculpture of a child holding a small rack of bones-an animal spine-overhead, and from it, flowed a sickly yellowish fluid raining down and dripping over the lips of the boy.

“That's Gahran,” Jessica declared. “As a child.”

“Who's the other guy supposed to be?”

“Where're the lights?” Jessica asked.

Conchita found the switch but Giles had removed the bulb. The alternating light hit the strange unnamed man in the puzzle again, the lifelike nude body posed in the manner of Christ being removed from the cross, the dead body held by unseen moorings, bent in an arch of death throes.

“Oh my God, it is Murphy! Murphy! It's my husband!”

“It might have been you, Conchita,” muttered Laughlin.

“I can't believe this.”

Jessica grabbed her and guided her away from the sight, and back through Giles's colorful show, noting the tincture of blood odor in the air even here and she imagined the bloodred bones in the exhibit had been painted with the blood of Gahran's victims.

“Get a light generator set up in that back room, Richard, and call in the local M.E., Horace Keene, and his team to process all of this. I'm not up to it.”

“He kept saying, 'the lovely bones, the lovely bones… I gotta go see the lovely bones exhibit,' “ Conchita was saying over and over. “When he left here, he said that's where he was going to go… to see the lovely bones.”

“ 'To see the lovely bones'?” Jessica repeated. “What the hell's that?”

Patrons still held at bay by police began to kick this over as if it were a puzzle. “That book… the bestseller… on the New York Times list for a long time a while back… The Lovely Bones by… by…”

Some took stabs at the author's name, but no one could dredge it up.

“There's a bookstore around the corner,” said Laughlin.

“Several,” said another cafe patron. He rattled them off, names and addresses, “Booked Up, In and Out Books and there's Afterword Books.”

“Could mean the elevated,” said another. “Slang for the elevated is the bone rattler. Rattles your bones. You get off and your bones are still moving,” he joked.

“No, man… it's that exhibit,” said a young, shy-eyed Latino girl.

“Exhibit?” asked Jessica at this.

“Downtown at the Field,” she replied.

“Yeah, that's right, dinosaur bones,” added another patron, coffee in hand. “Some famous archeologist named Stroud… dug up some new kinda dinosaur bones. Claims they're like supernatural-at least to the Indians they are.”

“Field Museum,” the shy girl added.

Laughlin had already left, dispatching radio cars throughout the area and to each of the nearest bookstore locations. Richard had gone back to the storage room with a police photographer.

Jessica sat across from a young woman with exotic features who lifted an ad from the newspaper for the Chicago Field Museum. Bold letters overlaying a fade in of Chicago's famous dinosaurs of the Field Museum, a corner shot of scientists working a recent dig, and a third shot of lab-coated men and women with recent bone acquisitions, said: “Come See Our Lovely Bones!”

“He's gone on holiday,” Jessica murmured to herself.

The dark-skinned woman with the ad only smiled and said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

That's where he wants me to meet him, she told herself.

Everyone was busy now. The Chicago M.E.'s people had arrived, and patrons of the cafe were ushered out.

While shaking hands and saying hello to Jessica as an old friend, Horace Keene, Chicago's top M.E. said in his stentorian voice, “Cafe is closed until further notice, people. Everyone out!”

Sharpe guided Keene and the evidence techs back to the body in the dark. With them, they carried all the instruments and light-generating equipment they would need.