Absolute Instinct

NINETEEN

Surveillance of Giles Gahran's rented apartment in

Chicago continued. Watching for any sign of him, Petersaul and Cates spent the time discussing and arguing their next step.

Petersaul shook her head from behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan. “No way we collar him without a warrant or provocation.”

“We approach him, he runs, you got provocation.”

“Yeah, but suppose he never comes out?”

“We don't know that he's even inside there, Pete. If the local PD has him at Michigan Avenue!”

“Do you really think they actually spotted him, or someone who looks like him? Our collaring this bastard will make up for our screw up with the governor in Oregon, Cates.”

“Wait a minute! We didn't screw up. How'er we to know the governor of Oregon is a prick? When Darwin didn't give us a heads up on the guy, Pete? All we did was report the facts. Hell… people sure can distort the facts.”

“We get a collar that turns out to be this brutal guy who's ripped out the spines now of four women in four separate venues…”

“Three venues. Two were killed on our watch in our town, Olsen and Wellingham, and let's not forget the reward for the arrest and conviction. Honey, with that kind of money I might even begin to look good to you, and we could retire to Acapulco until we got our heads straight and want to surface. I hear the diving there's great. You scuba? Snorkel? Have any desire to see me in a bathing suit?”

She exaggeratedly shook her head and pulled at her ears and hair. “God let me get that image outta my mind.”

They laughed at the good-natured ribbing.

“I'm serious about you getting interested in a nice guy who is unattached, though, Petie girl. I mean-”

“Will you stop mothering… I mean fathering me! You keep it up, I'm going to put in for a new partner.”

He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, God forbid someone tell you what's good for you, and all 'bout the pain of forbidden fruit from one who knows. Experience, baby, nothing like it, along with adversity in human relationships.”

“Adversity? You?”

“Adversity-father of invention I say, and damn sure the invention of the lie, and the biggest of all lies, the one we tell oursel-”

“Shut up! There he is! It's got to be him. He fits Gahran's description and he's carrying an oversized bag.”

“The easel bag. He's got it on his back.”

“You reckon it's chock-full with another spinal rack?”

“That'd give us all the evidence we need,” replied Cates, “unless he's carrying art books.”

“How do you want to approach? You front, me back or vice versa?” “All the evidence we need could be sitting up there in his apartment. Maybe we should let him go in, knock on the door.”

“We need that fucking warrant!”

“A warrant can take hours if we get a liberal judge, and even then it won't give us the latitude we need. Better to get him to invite us in,” advised the senior agent, Cates. “Then anything in plain sight is fair game.”

“But he's not likely to do that.” She whipped out her,9mm automatic and taped it to her leg. “Here's my invitation, and besides, who can resist a long-legged, young, impressionable, shapely art groupie? I'll tell him Lucinda Wellingham sent me. He'll be so freaked by that-”

“-that he'll kill you, Pete!”

“-that he'll invite me in to see his etchings. He makes one wrong move, and that's when I drop his ass, cuff him and call you in to help me search.”

“Sounds fuckin' risk free, sure. No, Pete… can't let you do that. I let you do that, and you get even a scratch on your pretty little derriere, and Darwin'll have my ass.”

“It'll just require a little undercover work. It's legal. It won't come back to haunt us. I follow him to the local bar, get him to pick me up. What could be simpler?”

“All right… if you're sure, but the moment I think you're in danger, I come crashing in with guns blazing, you got that?”

“You're on.”

“Gotta treat this guy like the snake he is,” began Cates. “And dead or alive, I don't care how we do it, Pete, but I do say we nab this guy, take the glory ourselves.”

They sat huddled in the chilly sedan outside the apartment rented to their quarry, a cold wind whipping around the car, fingers of cold drafting up through every vent. “You ready to go knock at the door of the supposed son of Mad Matthew Matisak?” “Yeah, sure… but we call Darwin first. We let him know our every step, just as he ordered.”

“Come on with that shit,” Cates complained, his curmudgeon features pinched in consternation. “He ain't here to blow your nose, Pete.”

Amanda Petersaul frowned, ignored Cates, and dialed Darwin's number as the suspect, one Giles Gahran, went through his front door without noticing them, straight up to his room where a light came on.

The phone rang in Robert Towne's pocket inside the van, inside the hangar as the filming of his brief statement was underway.

Towne raised his hands in a gesture of confusion as the phone continued to ring.

“Shit! Cut! Cut!” shouted the serious young man directing the tape who had played one of the power and light decoys at the prison. “Can't work like this, people,” he kiddingly said.

“Answer the call,” Jessica said. “It could be Petersaul in Chicago with good news.”

“Maybe you should answer it,” countered Towne. “She's not going to recognize my voice.”

“Are you kidding? You sound just like Darwin.” Still, Jessica took the ringing phone he extended. She announced herself to the caller, adding, “What can I do for you?”

“This is Petersaul. Where's Darwin? I've an update for him. It's urg-”

“He's somewhat indisposed at the moment.”

“Indisposed? How so?”

Petersaul's tone gave her away in the slight twinge of building anger. “This is urgent,” she repeated. “Put him on, Dr. Coran.”

“I'd have to smuggle the phone into the Oregon state pen to do that.”“

What? What are you talking about?”

“He's exchanged places with his look-a-like brother, Robert-”

“-Towne, I know… I know they are brothers. Now please explain to me whose brilliant idea it was to put Darwin on death row! Are you people all as crazy as… as…”

“As Darwin? It was my idea, but Darwin is loving it, and we have everything under control. He's not going to be executed, and neither is his brother.”

“So you're all now fugitives?”

“One way to look at it. So, what have you got for us, and how soon can we take this guy Gahran into custody and start sweating out a confession?”

“We're sitting outside his apartment.”

“Really! Excellent! How did you locate him?”

“Followed the trail of a train ticket to a taxicab that brought him here. It helped that we had the composite drawing got up from the fire marshal and the landlady in Milwaukee.”

“Do you have a warrant for search and seizure?”

“Not yet, but we've been here less than an hour, trying to determine if he's in or out. Now we know he's in. Meanwhile, the field office is working on a search warrant, yes.”

“Don't move on him without the warrant and backup. We don't want this creep slipping through any legal loopholes later, and you certainly don't want him giving you the slip.”

“Don't worry. Like I said we're all over this guy and he doesn't even know we're parked on his-”

Two gunshots rang out along with the sound of shattered glass and a scream-Petersaul's scream, then silence.

Jessica shouted into the phone, calling Petersaul repeatedly but to no avail, when suddenly a male voice with a slightly familiar, irritating motorboat-like gravelly sound behind it said, “Is it you, my might've-been Mother? Dr. Jessica Coran?”

“Gahran?”

“The one who killed my father?”

“Listen to me, Giles.”

“Giles is it? Do you have any idea how much I hate you? Be wise. Don't come looking for me, or you will lose a major portion of your skeletal makeup like these two when I'm finished with them.”

“Giles, you need help.”

“Help? I've done quite well without anyone's help. Or do you mean to say that you wish to help me debone these two?”

“Giles, I know why you hurt, how deeply you hurt. I know how awful your mother-”

“Do you now understand me-you-Father's obsession?”

“I do, more than anyone on the planet, I do.”

She struggled to keep him engaged, her mind doing cartwheels. She wrote out a note telling Richard to call Chicago PD to get a car immediately to the address where Petersaul and Cates had staked out the apartment. Richard was immediately on it.

Giles said over the phone, “Have I become your obsession, Jessica? You keep coming at me like it's so, like you're looking for Father in me. If so, there's no stopping the inevitable, is there, and you become my obsession, and together, we are both mad.”

“Giles, there's a name for what you have, a mental disorder, and there are drugs and therapies, and we will get you the best doctors in the-”

“Only doctor I want is you, Jessica. You'd make a wonderful gift for dear old Dad.”

“It does not have to come to that, life or death for either of us.”

“They say history repeats itself. It happens all over again like New Orleans in that Mardi Gras graveyard where you almost died. We'll just have to find the proper time and place, you and me. But I won't take just your blood like Father.”

“You don't have to be like him, Giles!”

“But I am… just like Father. And I will take all of you. I'm going to cut out”-she heard him rummaging through Petersaul's wallet-”to cut out Agent Petersaul's spine like the others, you can be sure, along with this fat man, Cates.”

Jessica heard the sound of the car's ignition, and then Giles Gahran came back on. “I know you've been chasing me just as you chased my father before me, as you've chased all the truly brilliant and ingenious monsters, all the heirs to Jack the Ripper, all of us. But if you come after me, I will debone you, do you understand? Debone you.” His laughter was the last thing she heard before the phone went dead.

“Christ! I don't even know the address.” Jessica was rattled, but she knew she had to remain calm.

“Chicago field office agents are racing to the scene now,” Richard told her. “They're on it, Jess. Nothing we can do but pray they cut off his escape and that our agents are not dead.”

“Not sure I want to wish them alive in his hands,” she replied.

Robert Towne listened closely to the terrible turn of events.

“We've got to get to Chicago without any further delay!” she announced once off the line with Chicago FBI, who were on the lookout now for the car, the apartment at 3010 North Sheffield, the Hermitage Apartments, in the Wrigley Field ballpark area known locally as Wrigleyville.

“They're going to treat the apartment as a crime scene. We'll see it as is, untouched. They hope to have word on the missing field vehicle, Agents Petersaul and Cates, and the suspect by time we get there.”

“What're we waiting for?” asked Sharpe. “The jet is juiced up.”

“What about our video?” asked the young director. “This is going to go to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all of 'em. It's going to put Scorp-Ion Productions on the fucking map, man.”

“Perhaps more than you know. How dramatic will it be to do a live feed from a jet plane to the networks? And can you do it? Do you have the equipment for it?”

“Are you kidding? We've got state-of-the-art, same as reporters had during the Iraqi war. Sure…”

“Terrific, but there's to be no information going out about our destination.”

The young man, Darren Callahan, turned to his technicians and fellow actors. “So, who's up for a trip to Chicago?”

“Cool!”

“Way cool!”

“I'm in, man.”

“Hey, bud, this is going to rock!”

The others looked at Jessica with large, expectant eyes. She replied, “Why the hell not? My expense account is blown anyway.”

“Before we send this out to every major network in America-”

“This is going worldwide, Dr. Coran,” Callahan corrected. “The final take, after we're OK with the last edit and audio, is going to hit a number of satellites at once, and it's going via laser-beam feed to the world.”

“All the better. But we give Governor Hughes one last chance to call the warden for a stay.”

“Damn, can't we just run it?” asked Callahan. “It's great stuff.”

Sharpe replied, “The kid's right. Hughes had his chance. Fuck him.”

“No, Richard. We lay it all out for Hughes. Give him fair warning.”

“He's not going to believe you, Jess. It's just a waste of time.”

“All the same, we warn him.” “Prick doesn't deserve any warning,” said Towne, “but go ahead, Dr. Coran.”

Jess contacted Hughes's office, getting Mrs. Dornan, who began making excuses for her boss, saying he couldn't be disturbed.

“You mean he's sleeping through the execution?”

“Not at all. He's simply washed his hands of your… you crusaders.”

“Mrs. Dornan, I called to give him fair warning. The man sitting in the cell on your death row is not Robert Towne but his brother, Darwin Reynolds.”

“What? I've never heard of such… such a bold ploy in all my life. The very idea.”

“We have a tape of the exchange between the brothers, and a blood test performed by Dr. Waters only an hour ago will prove you have Agent Darwin Reynolds on death row and not Towne. Towne is here with me, on a jet plane, thirty thousand feet over D.C.,” she lied. “Now, would you care to wake the governor or not? Your call, dearie. Oh, and by the way, within fifteen minutes, the story is going to break on every network in the U.S. and abroad.”

“I–I-I will get the governor on the line. Hold on. Hold on.”

It took several minutes but finally Hughes, his voice thick with sleep, came on, asking, “What is this nonsense, Dr. Coran? Do you know how upset you have made Mrs. Dornan, my personal-”

“You don't have Towne on death row.”

“What're you saying?”

“The FBI has Towne. / have Towne. You have Reynolds. Take a lot closer look at the man you intend on executing while you sleep.”

“This is preposterous, a lie.”

“Ask Warden Gwingault why Dr. Waters gave your phony Towne a last-minute blood test tonight, and it will prove what I say. Or call Dr. Waters directly and put it to him. He is expecting your call, and he expects to lose his contract with the state over this.” She gave him Waters's phone number. “He is waiting for your call.”

“You're bluffing, and if you aren't… if there is anything to this… if you have broken a man out of a maximum-security prison, you will pay, all of you to the fullest extent of Oregon law, you will-”

“Five minutes!” Jessica hung up on him.

The pilot informed them that he would start his descent for Chicago in ten minutes. “We gave the governor five minutes to call off the execution. If we don't hear back, then it's a go.”

The film production company hoped for a go. She could see it in their anxious eyes. Richard's eyes told her he held out no hope for the governor's coming around, and Towne voiced what was on everyone's mind. “Even if he does call the warden now, you people ought to air that tape.”

Giles had driven the two dead cops, whom he had since discovered to be Milwaukee-based FBI, to the castlelike Gothic-gated Rosehill Cemetery at 5800 North Ravenswood where he drove the car into the enclosed courtyard just beyond the open mouth of the castle. Ever interested in the “permanent” residents of a city, ever the cemetery buff and headstone reader, Giles had gotten a book called The Graveyards of Chicago. He'd earlier visited Rosehill with his box, thinking he might buy a plot and have the damn thing buried alongside some of Chicago's most famous scoundrels and get-rich quick artists, schemers, dreamers and real-estate investors whose final investment had been plots here at Rosehill.

He pulled the car to a stop and one by one, he groped and tugged and dropped the dead weight onto the paved courtyard, an enormous foyer leading up to the final gate, locked against him at this hour.

When he had slipped through the apartment building after seeing the two cops, and had sneaked around the back of their vehicle where they seemed in argument over their next step, he had brought his bag with him, filled with his tools, and the gun he had purchased as a precaution walking Chicago city streets. But now the hefty little.22-caliber proved extremely fortuitous.

He had fired a single shot into each of their craniums. The male never knew what hit him, but glass and his brain matter had embedded in the woman's cheek, sending up a shriek of shock and pain, and then he put one in her head. She didn't suffer long.

He now cut away the clothing from each body and began cutting away at each back from top to bottom, determined to take their spinal cords off with him. He had just finished work over the man, lifting out his cord when he heard a noise, someone with a huge flashlight, the beam raking over them where they were, Giles and his two new friends.

He knew the car could not be missed, that the watchman would come to investigate, even if he didn't know what he was looking at. Giles slipped just the other side of the car, realizing only now that he'd left his bone saw and bag out in plain view with the two mutilated bodies. Cates's spine, too, lay alongside him.

The watchman at first ambled over, yelling as if he'd discovered some pesky repeat offenders, teens out to test their metal against the neighborhood superstitions. “Get yourselves and that car outta here! This time o'night! Go home!”

Gaining no response, he found his cell phone and made a call. “Something strange out here, Milos. Think maybe I ought to call the cops again? OK… You're on your way. I'll wait till you get here.”

The watchman put down his phone, stuffing it into his overalls, the nametag sewn into them reading Liam. Raising his light overhead, he cautiously approached the two bodies lying alongside the deserted car. “Fun's over, you two! Time to get home to your-”

The watchman stopped as if hit by a wall of horror, the light from his Bic Torchlight wavering and wildly illuminating the tops of nearby trees. Visibly shaken, he again grabbed for his phone, this time dialing 911. The watchman looked energized somehow, animated, his mannerisms and moves exaggerated. Turning wildly leaflike in the blustering Chicago wind. Finally, the man found his legs and ran to put distance between himself and the awful mutilations not twenty yards from him.

Giles fired a single bullet and it sank a tiny hole through the back of the man's spine, making him fall, twitching on the way down, and crying out, sniveling, he continued in fits like a wind-up toy lying on its side.

He wasn't dead when Giles turned his face away, and facedown, began tearing away his clothes with the titanium scalpel he used. Once the twitching man's back was exposed, he dug into him with the scalpel and carved out the now familiar long coffin-shaped box of flesh from his back as the screaming subsided and finally died with his victim going into blood-loss trauma.

Holding a spinal column in each hand, Giles felt an overwhelming sense of power course through his veins. He turned his eyes back on the woman, Agent Petersaul. “Not to be greedy, but I want yours, too,” he said to the dead woman. “This will make Chicago headlines and serial killer history. Three spines in one night. Maybe I'll get my own bubble-gum card, like Dad.”

Giles went to the female whose back he had earlier bared. Stuffing each of the already stolen treasures into his easel bag, and setting this aside, its Wirtz Art Supplies logo shiny in the half light of sodium vapor lamps peeking over the castle walls, Giles made a move toward Petersaul. She had a lovely, long back, graceful, gazellelike. It must contain a beautiful spine, he thought. Brushing off the leaves and debris that had fallen on her, Giles felt her still-warm body, when suddenly beneath his hand, she moved.

Independent of his touch, she had moved.

She was alive.

She moaned in utter distress, the sound of a keening animal in pain.

“Helllllllllpa-pa-meee!” she cried, unable to be loud about it.

Giles leaned back on his haunches and watched her and listened to her pain like a perched gargoyle or gremlin, fascinated by the hand of death as it pressed in upon this stranger who did not resemble Mother in the least, but whose spine more readily would.

The lights of a cruising police car alerted Giles. The Chicago city cruiser's side panel spotlight scanned on-off as its beam cleared the castle entrance, but it didn't quite make the distance from street to the furthermost inner courtyard where Petersaul's car stood and her body lay alongside the other two. The police squad car moved slowly by and continued like a grazing animal.

“Either way, Hughes can forget about reelection,” Sharpe said as they watched the young production team polish the final take, finish the final splice, and add audio onto the computer feed beamed to satellites spread across the cosmos.

Everyone on the plane held a collective breath as the feed was beamed to the world. Richard grasped Jessica's hands and clasped them in both his. “Whatever happens, we have the knowledge of having done the right thing. Perhaps not the wise thing, perhaps not the prudent thing and perhaps not the legal thing, but the morally correct thing.”

“Rare nowadays,” muttered Robert Towne. “Rare to see justice and good old-fashioned revenge prevail, too. Hughes's political future is in the shitlands now.”

They all laughed at this.

“All the same, I think I'd better call Warden Gwingault,” suggested Jessica.

Robert asked, “Just to be on the safe side?”

“Make sure he's looking at the late-night news.”

She made the call to alert Warden Donald Gwingault, telling him to turn on the news.

“What channel?”

“Any channel.”

In a moment, she heard the warden gasp and say, “Oh, my God.”

“Have you heard from the governor yet to put an end to this?”

“No, not a word. Does Hughes know about this?”

“He does by now.”

“I hardly believe my eyes. How did you manage to make a switch like that with my guards on hand, and with cameras running, and damn it, how'd you get that tape out of our library and past our checkpoints?”

“Will you call me, Mr. Gwingault, at my cell phone number the moment you hear from Hughes?”

“I don't have to hear from Hughes if this is true. If this is true, we have an innocent man on our Green Mile who's had his shoes replaced by booties, his head shaven, his spiritual needs met and his last supper.”

“Mr. Gwingault, you always did have an innocent man on your row.”

“I'm putting an end to this right now.”

“Excellent.”

“And just where is Towne now?”

“Catch us if you can, Warden.” She hung up, knowing that any forward movement toward an execution in Oregon was at an end. She informed the others of Warden Gwingault's action.

Cheers filled the airplane.

“Darwin's under arrest now,” said Towne sadly once the euphoria had died away. “Gone from an FBI field chief to a common criminal in lockup.”

“Darwin knew that going in,” Richard assured him.

The pilot announced that they were on descent for the runway at O'Hare, and he asked everyone to buckle in.

The news of what they had done spread wildfire fashion, and FBI headquarters was abuzz with the story.

One of the young techs on board the plane had a handheld Sony television and he silenced everyone as an excited Wolf Blitzer shared the story with his viewers. “News networks across America are now carrying this incredible breaking story. A party of anti-capital punishment conspirators, including a number of FBI personnel, have successfully helped convicted killer Robert W. Towne in a secretive escape from death row in Portland, Oregon, and the man now sitting on death row in his stead is his brother, FBI Agent Xavier Darwin Reynolds.”

The news would be all over Chicago even before they landed. Towne, still worried, erupted with, “What if Hughes convinces Gwingault and the rest that it's all a hoax, what we say we did? What if he goes through with the goddamn execution?”

“It won't happen. Gwingault won't let it happen,” she assured Towne.

Richard came to her support. “It can't happen now with so many eyes trained on him.”

“And J. J.'s precious state,” Jessica assured Towne as she buckled into her seat for landing, the last to do so.

“Not till we get that call from Darwin am I going to be satisfied,” Towne replied.