“Sure, right.”
“Should be forwarded electronically to every law-enforcement agency in the country to alert them to anything smacking of these uniquely gross murders, and anything in the way of peculiar sketches being left at a crime scene.”
Darwin nodded, taking notes. “Yeah, we want to be notified immediately if a similar killing takes place anywhere in the country.”
“Right. We've got to proceed under the assumption of zero help coming out of Minnesota or Oregon, since we've no way of knowing if Richard will be successful or not.” Jessica returned to the mirror, sat and continued brushing out her wet hair as she spoke.
Reynolds watched the shining auburn hair pick up the morning light coming through the balcony windows. “The man who sketched the charcoal drawings did not sign his work, but his signature is all over the drawings.”
“Yeah, if someone pops out of the woodwork and happens to see them, and happens to know the artist, we have it made. But you're right, of course. We need an art expert to tell us what he can about our boy.” “I've already got a guy.”
“An expert who will back our contention that in each case, the artwork is the same hand at work.”
Darwin insisted, “I've got it covered, and I'm satisfied with-”
“Who's your expert?” she challenged.
“My wife's brother.”
She dropped her brush and her chin.
“Now wait a minute! Ronnie's an art major at Columbia. He knows this stuff.”
“No, Darwin, no! We gotta get art professors and dealers plural to cover our asses on this,” she argued. “Multiple opinions, understood? If it's to cut any ice with the governor in Oregon.”
“Yeah… you're right, sure. Important thing is you're with me now, one hundred percent!”
There was no curbing the man's enthusiasm now.
NINE
What a dance I am Leading.
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.