Absolute Instinct

NINE

The same time

As Giles Gahran worked with hammer and nail, putting his fully packed traveling crates together, he thought of how often he had done just this, picked up his entire circus and left town overnight, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. He looked in over the lip of the collapsible crate he'd finished assembling, readying to hammer the lid shut. Inside lay Luanda's naked body wrapped in absorbent packing materials. From Lucinda's purse he'd gotten Keith Orion's mailing address in Chicago where the other artist hailed from, and he had affixed a label addressed to Orion on the lid. He now placed the lid overtop of Lucinda, gave her one last look and blew her a kiss as he muttered, “Such a waste, so sorry… too bad. We could have made a beautiful partnership, Loose.”

He'd taken her life and one other additional irresistible item-her backbone-and why not? It was there for the taking. Why waste it. Besides, she had so wanted to be a part of his art. Now she would play a major part for all eternity.

A short time after Giles had knocked her into unconsciousness, Lucinda had regained her senses, and she felt a great weight on her back-Giles, squatting gargoyle fashion over her. “I think you're a snake person, Lucy. I'll sculpt snakes all about your feet as if they come to you for advice and succor. You damned witch. You slither in here and get my hopes up and now this. I even trusted you for a brief moment.”

She felt the first incision, and she screamed. The incision ran from the base of the cranium to the tailbone, coursing down and through the center of her back. She screamed murder. Giles stopped cutting long enough to stuff an oily rag in her mouth. Moments later, she felt the artist's scalpel continue on its way. “I'm sure you have a backbone in there somewhere” were his last words to her.

Now she was neatly packed away, as were all his sculptures, including the dogs, horses, birds, figures and all the vertebrae, including Lucinda's own in separate crates.

Giles lifted another pine wood lid top and covered over the crate of carefully packed spinal columns, which he'd thought safest if packed all together, even the one he'd so arduously glued back into one piece with super glue and a bevy of C-clamps. He'd done this work while Lucinda looked on through dead eyes.

It never failed to surprise him how quickly he could, when he put his mind to it, bug out, even though encumbered with artists tools, instruments, the life-size sculptures, all his various colors and elixirs, cleaning fluids, brushes, scrapers, scalpels, oils, easels, papers, pens, clips, clamps, scaffolding, as well as his clothing and personal belongings. As he worked to place everything in boxes, bags, suitcases and crates, he half wanted to forget the box beneath his bed. Part of him said, “Incinerate the damnable thing.” Perhaps if flames consumed it, he might forget it, but he couldn't forget it, now could he? It had been pushed into his hands by his dying mother.

“Go on, take it, you little bastard… spitting image of your father, you are. Sonofabitch that he was. You're just like him… just like him. Long line of sonsofbitches all the way back to the origins. Might as well know all about him now. I spent all these years protecting you from the truth, but it's in you-that same evil fucking seed, his malicious being, his hatred of the world that short-changed him, and his for blood. I've seen you, Giles, out there in the backyard, killing animals. You've got the same disease as your father, exactly. You can only feel when you're inflicting pain. So go on, take the box! Take it and open it after I'm dead, and maybe, just maybe you'll come away with me.”

He now held in his hands the hefty but ornate leather-covered box she had handpicked for him, thinking it a beautiful box, yet fearful of what it contained. “When I'm gone. Not before. I don't want to see the results of it,” she had insisted.

She had taught him to make love to her, had lain with him since infancy till her illness had devoured her, the cancer eating her up from the inside out. She had beaten, raped and tortured him. He had prayed for her death for years, and then finally it came, all in an instant, with him standing before her, the strange box purporting to be his legacy in his hands, searing his hand along with his mind.

He asked the same question today as he had at his mother's deathbed. “What have I inherited? Who is my father? You say he's dead, killed after having gone on some mad murder spree, but you refuse me any details.”

“Details? You want details? Open the box. I've kept it in a vault until now just for you, Giles.”

There was something awkward inside, loose and bounding from side to side. Something heavy like a cast-iron loose cannonball. Giles to this day wondered what the hefty item might be.

Her lawyer had brought the sealed box to her hospital bed.

When Giles had left his dead mother's side, he carried home the box with the noisy bouncing object inside. He shakily took the box to the kitchen table and placed it there, squarely at the center, pushing aside the salt and pepper cellars.

Fourteen years old at the time, Giles had sat before the box, alone in the world, staring at that cursed box for fifteen minutes, his hands going to it, tentatively touching it, pulling away as if snakebitten by the lifeless thing, knowing that an evil beyond anything he had ever felt or experienced lived a kind of palpable life within this dust-laden old box of crap his mother had collected. All of it kept just to one day prove to him that she was right about him. To show that her summary of his character, his core traits, those at rock-bottom, unchangeable, indelible were gathered together inside this hideously fascinating box that, if opened, would speak volumes, would open his soul to the truth about himself, would define him, be him, reflect him, and cut through to his most secret self, the self that knew what was in the box, and feared it all the more for this knowledge.

His curious but shaking boy's fingers had reached out and toyed with the leather ribbons and ties, and in a moment they'd come undone, as if of their own accord. / hardly touched 'em, he had thought at the time.

He gritted his teeth and took hold of the oxblood colored lid and slowly inched it open. Microscopic dust bunnies filled the air as the lid was disturbed, making the boy's nose itch and his eyes water. An odor of mildew rose along with the dust. Still, he had to go on. His dead mother's shrill words cheered him on, filling his ears. Higher, higher, closer he came to unleashing what was inside. He caught a glint of glassine tubing and steel bands, as on a coffeepot with a snaked tube end, and a strange flick switch along its center, all wrapped half-assed in a yellowed sheath of newspaper. Another piece of newspaper clung to the roof of the lid until it came away and slithered into his peripheral vision. Giles made out only half of the words in the bold headline: Torture Level… Blood Addict. Then he slammed the lid shut, tied it tight and rushed from it, leaving it on the table. It had traveled with him to his foster home in Millbrook, Minnesota, and later it had traveled with him to Portland, Oregon, and later it had come back across the country when he moved from Portland to Milwaukee after he'd taken Sarah Towne's spine. Since he had been in Milwaukee, almost a year now, the box had resided beneath his bed. Giles had at times forgotten of its existence, and now here it was, again begging him, pulling him toward it, pleading to be opened, to be completely explored and fully digested.

On hands and knees now, staring below the bed at the dirty old brown box left him by his birthmother, Giles again felt like the child in the kitchen, afraid to touch the damn thing, for as evil as he felt, something far more sinister than Giles Gahran resided inside the box gifted over to him by his mother.

Open the damn box! he heard his mother's dead wail reverberate though the coils of his inner ear, bouncing off the walls of his brain, echoing down the corridors of his cerebellum. You cheated me long enough! Open the damned box! It was always strongest-this insistence-after he had claimed someone's spine.

A part of him wanted to tear it open, spill out all of its contents, spend hours pouring over all that she had planned to rub in his face-all that she had horded all those years for his eyes only. But another part of Giles screamed to burn the damnable parcel from hell.

He reached beneath the bed and pulled the box toward his eyes. Dust flew. He held his breath, felt it catching as if he might be somehow cutting off his own air supply. “Fuck this. It's just a box of crap, old papers, shit, nonsense. I'm a man now. I don't need this shit.” Even as he said it, he felt the beads of perspiration that'd formed on his forehead and hands, and he felt his stomach churning and lurching as if some phantom bitch was rhythmically suctioning his insides like butter in a bucket.

You don't have to open it, Son, came a voice, a male voice, one he had no recollection of save as the one he'd made up as a child-the voice of his loving father, the one his mother had lied about all those years. The box is just a pack of lies, Son. Burn the fucking thing, Son. Burn it all. She's with Lucifer now and can't ever hurt you again. Send the box back to hell, back to that cunt who dared call herself a mother!

He sat Indian fashion just staring at the box between his legs for a long time. Minutes passed. The trash chute out in the hallway was mere feet from his door, a straight shot to the incinerator. Why not burn the fucking box and send it back to Hades? asked his loving father. Why not get shed of it forever. Why not take some action, my helpless Hamlet? came the soothing father's voice.

He grabbed hold with both hands and rushed to the door, tore it open. Eyes wide, he rushed toward the trash chute, but Mrs. Parsons, the eighty-year-old hag from down the hall was standing there with three trash bags, working each in one at a time.

“Hello, Giles!” she called out.

“Mrs. Parsons.”

“Nice weather we're enjoying.”

“Yes ma'am indeed.”

“Whatcha-got-there-inyer-hand?”

“Ahhh… this? This old box? Nothing… nothing, really.”

“Interesting box. Can't get boxes like that anymore. Find it in an antique shop? Seen some file boxes with ties wrapped round them, but they were just cardboard. That's a fine box.”

“Hell of a box.”

“Wanna part with it? My granddaughter would love it. How much would you want for a thing like that?”

“I'm… ahhh… afraid… you see, if it wasn't a gift maybe…”

“Oh, really? An heirloom! How enchanting.”

“Ahhh… you could say so. It was gifted to me by… by Mother… upon her death.”

The landlady's hands shot instantly up in a mock gesture of surrender. “Oh, dear, I'm so sorry for your loss. You can't possibly part with a thing like that, and I certainly understand.”

“Thank you.”

“Just that last time I saw one like that, it was in a library, housing important papers.”

“Yes… I keep all my important papers close,” he lied. “I've got to finish packing now, Mrs. Parsons. I gotta go.” He began disappearing from the hallway as he spoke, inching spiderlike back into his apartment.

“You sure created a ruckus in there last night!” she called after him. “Making that art of yours. My, but it must take a lot of perspiration indeed, all that banging! Makes a body go loco to hear all that incessant hammering.”

But Giles had safely returned to his apartment and closed the door on the woman's ranting. He dropped the box into one of the crates. He'd move it again, put it away at the new place, and perhaps one day he'd have the guts to open it and look on every word, every item collected by his mother.

He stared around at his studio and slid down the side of the crate, exhausted. He pulled the phone to him and called UPS to come get the boxes and crates he'd be shipping.

“Chicago, City of Blues and Dirty Politics, here comes Giles Gahran, and as for professor of art, Keith Orion, get ready Dr. 0, for a visit from an old flame.”

He looked across the wood floor of his studio apartment and saw a fleck of blood he'd missed with his cleaning fluids, and while on the phone with UPS, ordering them to pick up his crates as soon as possible, he saw a trail of other specks he'd overlooked, mocking him. Lucinda's blood. He lifted a jar filled with red fluid, already labeled LW. He remained on the line, on hold, listening to “Sweet Lorraine” in its original Nat King Cole version. Annoyed by the culmination of these circumstances, he located his concoction of ammonia, bleach, Mr. Clean, and that muriatic acid the Ace hardware man had assured him could clean a gravestone of a hundred years of accumulated mold, and he sprayed the powerful, nose-pinching, eye-gouging concoction over the last remnants of Lucinda's blood.

When Jessica lifted her ringing cell phone from where she had left it beside the bed, she stood shower refreshed and staring out at the terrace where Darwin Reynolds had wandered to stretch and to lift his face into the early morning rain.

She opened the phone, careful not to allow the camera to see anything but herself. When she pressed to receive Richard's incoming call, the first noise she heard was the sound of a working backhoe.

“Richard? Is it you?” She could hardly hear him over the backhoe's grunting and bawling hue. “What the hell's that noise?”

“Backhoe!” he shouted.

“Are you in the middle of a construction zone?”

“Exhumation-in-progress zone!” he shouted back.

“What're you talking about, Richard? And what time is it? And what kind of a gin mill're you in?”

“Six-fifty… ahhh… no, seven here now… Minnesota time. What is it there? Same time zone, isn't it? Sorry to wake you, but wanted you to know…” The backhoe won out over several of his words, but she caught the single-most important one: exhumation.

“How did you get… embroiled… in an exhumation?”

“Hold on! Hold on!” He stepped away from the rhino-bellowing machine and found a quiet distance beneath a tree. There he informed Jessica of events at the Milwaukee M.E.'s office that led to the exhumation. She took the bad news about the lack of DNA evidence on file with Krueshach's office in relative stride, but Richard could not hold back. He took a moment to get his ire off against Millbrook authorities.

She shook her head as his camera phone revealed a grimace. “But it sounds-from the backhoe-as though they are fully cooperating with you now?”

“Well, yes, but only after I threatened them with more FBI descending on them. 'Fraid I woke up Eriq before you. Still, at least the lead investigator-Brannan-is onboard with us, entertaining the thought that Towne could possibly be innocent of the murder in Oregon.”

“God, an exhumation. Difficult task. How're you holding up, sweetheart?”

He sighed heavily into the phone. “I'm standing in a drizzle the middle of a rank old cemetery since before 6 A.M. and have been up all night… Now I'm amid people with whom I wouldn't share a pint and don't particularly like, and I am missing hell out of you, but otherwise… You know very well that I am managing.”

“Like the professional, I know.”

“Yes, and here digging up the sad remains of one Louisa Childe.”

“I'm so sorry you're being put through this, Richard, really I am. An exhumation, Richard? I could never have predicted you'd have reason for-”

Sharpe ordered her to stop. “I'm fine, really. I'm a big boy. I got myself here where I stand all on my own, dear, sad details of law enforcement in Millbrook notwithstanding.” He finished with a good Christian curse against ineptness that ended with “and may your Herefords sire no calves nor give milk nor sustenance to you and yours, Dr. Krueshach!”

This made her laugh. She asked that he keep her apprised.

In Millbrook, he replied, “I'm switching off now, and I'll be letting you know what, if anything, comes of this horrible morning's effort by we resurrection men.”

“Richard, you've gone above and beyond for me again. Thank you, dear, so much.”

“Not at all. A man's life is at stake. I begin to believe with each moment ticking away that this fellow in Oregon is innocent.”

“Proving it may be impossible, Richard. I'll tell you what I told Darwin. Don't build your hopes up so high that when they are dashed that you can't ever hope again.”

“Kind advice… The kind I might expect from an angel.”

“You're so sweet, Richard. I so miss you.”

“And I you.” Richard again said good-bye and put away his cell phone.

Jessica hung up, breathing a sigh of relief that Richard had seen nothing and heard nothing of Agent Reynolds in her room at this hour.

Although Sharpe had presided over a number of exhumations in Great Britain, it was never an easy process nor easy on the nerves. Still, it had been his call, and he felt he had to remain aloof. He tried to show some elan by nonchalantly leaning against a large headstone marked curiously enough with the bold name of Churchill 1893–1933, about the average lifespan of the day, when the headstone moved under his weight. “Shit,” he muttered, quickly readjusting his stance, taking his weight off the stone.

Overhead, flapping in increasing anger or parody, the banner strung across the ancient wrought iron whipped in the breeze, distorting the good name of The Henry Knox Memorial Cemetery. The place looked to be a sad patch of earth far from the center of Millbrook on a winding country road that multiplied the ruralness of this Minnesota haven just west of the Twin Cities tenfold. Brannan had explained that the cemetery had been the old settlers' plot, but when the town was at a loss for things the city council might do with funds found leftover from the various bake sales, the city fathers had ceremoniously renamed the weed patch in honor of President George Washington's Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, commander of the first American Artillery placed in the field against the British. The tale of the Boston Siege of 1775 was postscripted with the heroic story of how Knox made the arduous overland journey that brought the guns of Fort Ticonderoga, New York, to bear on the British at the Siege of Boston in dead of winter. The entire story seemed a reminder to Richard that he was a guest in this Land of Nod, and that his host was an Irishman whose ancestors enjoyed killing British soldiers. No love lost there. The surreal circumstances only enhanced the notion that the differences dividing Americans and the Crown remained intact after nearly 230 years.

Brannan told the story of Knox with a boastful pride, but Richard knew it was to also cover his nervousness in this place, doing this work, to help pass the time while the backhoe desecrated the ancient earth they stood on so many miles from Boston and Washington, D.C., hallowed as it was by the local citizenry and given sanctity as result.

“Why was Louisa Childe buried here?” Richard asked. “I mean, rather than in the large cemetery in Millbrook? Was she D-A-R?”

“D-A-R?” Krueshach then asked.

“Daughters of the American Revolution, Herman,” explained Brannan.

“Oh, far from it I'd say,” replied Krueshach, his arms tightly wound about his shoulders. “No ties really to any organization. Rather a recluse, wasn't she, Dan?”

“Then why the burial in Fort Knox here if you're all so proud of this… ahhh… cemetery?”

Brannan glared for a moment at the aspersion to the cemetery. Pointing to one side of the field, he said, “This section is the old settlers' graveyard.” Then wheeling, continuing to point to where the deafening backhoe continued its work, he added, “While this other section is a potter's field.”

“Potter's field, as in a place for John and Jane Does- called A.N. Others in England.”

“If you mean by that the anonymous John or Jane Doe,

yes.”

“But you knew her identity.”

“Louisa Childe had no burial insurance, nothing other than a health insurance policy, and no one came to claim the body. City couldn't house her indefinitely in Hotel Krueshach's refrigerated suite, so the city paid the freight. She had a great huge turnout at the church service at the Unitarian chapel though, didn't she, Herman?”

Krueshach nodded successively. “Folks from every county within a fifty mile radius came to show their respects.”

“I'm sure they did.” Richard wondered how many came out of curiosity to see the woman whose spine had been ripped from her by a brutal monster. He was reminded of stories he'd read of the old American West where outlaws were not only hung, but as in early English history, their bodies put on display. The display tickets paid the local undertaker's wage, and sometimes he sold the display, body and all, to a traveling carnival. Ironically, the criminal made more “honest” money as a dead man than he had earned in a life of crime, but it was his reputation as a criminal that got people to pay. The larger the reputation (often created for the show), the larger the take.

Knowing human nature and the criminal tendencies of the mind, Sharpe felt instant skepticism as he tried to imagine the motives of the fifty-mile-radius people who'd ostensibly come out of genuine concern or pity. Had that been the case, why had they not raised enough money to give Louisa Childe a decent burial? Still, he knew that in rural areas of England, say Bury St. Edmonds, such a death would be equally poorly handled and made the more curious by the local authorities and press. Little difference at all. Rural was rural and parochial parochial the world over, Richard just hadn't been braced for it in America, not even in Minnesota, not in the year 2004.

Rather than be contentious and ask more pointed questions surrounding the woman's burial, Richard, turning to his military training, decided to allow Brannan's smalltown-cop illusions about human nature to remain intact, as he saw no tactical advantage to stripping them away.

Sharpe thought briefly of Jessica, wishing he could be with her now, in her bed, rather than here with the gloom and grim wail of the backhoe. The unnatural noise amid all the surrounding trees and foliage felt so like a desecration. To push off the chill, Sharpe again ruminated about Jessica and the warmth of her body close to his; he recalled how they had first met: how he had approached her for help, hat in hand, and how from the moment he saw her that he'd been struck by the need to have her, and how he tried to resist, and how futile was the attempt.

Sharpe glanced now from Dan Brannan's red-splotched drinker's face to the sullen Dr. Herman Krueshach's raw-boned German features. Both Millbrook men had agreed that the matter should stay in their jurisdiction after all. Still, a nervous agitation wound around the predawn light as thick as the cemetery fog.

Sharpe hated the damp earthy smell of cemeteries. He tried to focus on the work of the backhoe as it systematically uncovered Louisa Childe's crypt. The workmen then got atop it and removed the concrete lid with pulleys. Then they climbed atop the coffin, working like hunched-over gargoyles to inchworm thick old world hemp ropes beneath it. Then the coffin was lifted and gently placed on level ground.

The workmen pried open the lid, and inside they found the skull's empty eye sockets staring back. The corpse still had swaths of skin here and there, and some strands of wispy hair went fluttering as the wind dove into the coffin and sifted through it. Sharpe felt a pang of sympathy for the woman, and he was suddenly struck with why Krueshach wanted the fingertips returned to her-after all, she'd gone to eternity without her vertebrae. The least Krueshach could do to restore some dignity to the corpse was to return her fingertips-all but one that was never recovered.

Now they had dishonored her grave. Violated its below-ground sanctity. No one was happy about this, least of all Richard Sharpe.

Sharpe now watched Krueshach lift the bony hand and pry it open, first from the sketch that Lieutenant Dan Brannan had returned to her, and then from its three-year position of a hard fist. Sharpe lifted the bloodstained sketch of the woman in her lifelike pose feeding the birds. Strangely, save for some splotches of now-brown blood and insect activity about the edges, the charcoal drawing appeared as fresh as the day it had been rendered. Sharpe thought it the most peaceful scene he'd ever laid eyes on, not unlike a Hogarth portrait.

Her right-hand nails remained barely intact, coming away with Dr. Krueshach's tweezers. The sun had come up while the backhoe had completed its work, and the light- made to dance through the flurry of leaves-caused each fingernail to wink like mother-of-pearl. Krueshach bottled each nail separately, and for good measure, he took scrapings of the area below each nail, all bone now, and each of these scrapings he bottled, labeled, and capped. Sharpe, no longer able to stare at the corpse, saw the sad, small evidence bag filled with fingertips that had been placed alongside the body. Krueshach offered up a silent prayer, his lips barely moving. When he was finished and back on his feet, the little M.E. in wire rims shouted, “Place Miss Childe back into her earthly chamber!”

Before the workmen could do so, a small swarm of chirping meadowlarks appeared, flew about the scene in a circle and as quickly disappeared, all but one. The straggler landed on a low-hanging tree limb overlooking the coffin, silently staring down at Louisa Childe, as curious as a Minnesota farmer, rubber-necking, tweeting as if a lone voice in the desert, wailing a cosmic complaint that Richard Sharpe himself felt like making.