His arm continued bleeding into the one towel he'd wrapped about himself. He returned to the bathroom and turned on the shower to run cold water over his arm. The blood and water meshed in a swirl of ribbons, intermingling and washing down the drain, the blood of his mother and father and himself, but only God alone knew what Father was, Father all wrapped up in that box below his bed, tied tightly and held at bay, yet always asking to be introduced to his son. Family ties… blood ties… everybody has 'em. The blood of the fathers shall be upon the sons, he thought, watching it flow from him.
Dropping the bloodied towel into the bathtub, Giles had grabbed a fresh one, dabbing as the blood flow lessened. He found a first-aid kit he kept for whenever he nicked himself while working, and he plastered the wound with salve and covered it with gauze and bandage.
He thought he heard Lucinda moan, and he heard her scratching along the floor in an attempt to move once more toward freedom and life. He returned to stand over her, watching her crawl. It brought to mind an old fantasy of his: seeing Mother in the same position, crawling, mewing, begging his forgiveness, pleading for her life.
Giles then lifted a handheld mirror up to his features.
Dark circles blotted his eyes. That old pallor, white and pasty, had crept back into his epidermis. What the hell was that all about? He felt lethargic. More and more, the sunlight of day became intolerable.
“Maybe I should just sculpt my own backbone. Put an end to this aberrant behavior. I could do it if I put my mind to it. It's not like I need to do this to feed myself. But then again… perhaps it does feed me… in ways I don't even understand.”
Then he saw his form in the mirror retreat backward until it was sitting in the lotus position, bent over the broken vertebral rack that once belonged to Joyce Olsen, struggling to get the glue down in the joints, struggling to get the C-clamps on just right, when an army of Milwaukee firemen stormed in and attacked him with untold fire axes, screaming obscenities at him as they hacked him to pieces, shouting, “Die monster, die!”
He came awake with a start, finding himself on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, the train having slowed, the rhythm of its bounce along the rails having dramatically changed. In the near distance, he saw the mammoth John Hancock Center, and beyond this the even taller Sears Tower. “A new home,” he muttered.
“Say what, son?” asked a passing conductor.
“Chicago, sir,, my new home.”
“Well, welcome home, son. City of Big Shoulders and Wide Arms, I always say. Greatest city on the planet. You'll love it here.”
“I'm sure I will get acclimated.”
“Well, son,… I don't know nothing 'bout where you'd begin to find anything like that!” the conductor joked. “Who is this ac-climb-ated, huh?” The conductor moved on, laughing at his own lame joke, a man singularly in love with his work, and shouting now, “Chicago downtown! Union Station! All Out!”
The monotonous thrum of the public-trust FBI jet, a state-of-the-art Beechcraft had put Jessica at such ease that she began to doze as they sped toward Portland, Oregon, at sixty thousand feet. The much-deeded nap had crept over her without warning. Leaving Milwaukee for their scheduled meeting with Governor James Jason “J.J.” Hughes in Portland had been difficult after what she and Darwin had found in the darkened corridors of the Orion showing at the Fine Arts Center. She had had to convince Darwin to take no immediate action against Keith Orion. Darwin, bent on arresting him on obscenity laws dating back to the 1800s was too willing to tip their hand. They compromised, and so Darwin instead set in motion a surveillance of Orion and a full background check in an effort to gain enough information to warrant going to a federal judge for a search-and-seizure order.
Meantime, she got him on the plane for Portland as planned. Slumbering now, Jessica revisited Keith Orion's showing, her mind playing over the dark and sinister images created by the artist, some of which had startled them both into suspecting Orion of being the Spine Thief.
Orion's work was created for one purpose only, to shock and chase people from the gallery, his underlying theme the humiliation of women. His work depicted women in all manner of degradation, all poses of disgust. So ugly and distasteful was the work that Jessica had to force herself through the motions alongside Darwin.
Orion's palate ran to stark blood-orange, an array of red, deep ochre, shades of black and gloomy grays. Special-effects lighting, lasers and strobes shattered the otherwise utter blackness of the cave created for the showing. Blaring heavy metal music further attacked the senses.
Darwin, too, had felt uneasy. “You want to skip this?” he'd asked early on, seeing that the exhibit was not much different than viewing an array of crime-scene photos.
“I can see this on the job,” she had replied. “Let's give it a little more time. Maybe there's something redeeming just down from the next painting or sculpture.”
But soon they had agreed that there simply was nothing redeeming in Orion's work, and they were on their way out when she was stunned by a small painting that'd been left un-illuminated, alone in a corner. What had caught her eye had also immediately caught Darwin's as well. The painting depicted a woman lying facedown, a huge black abyss of a gash, bloody along the edges, taken out of her back from shoulders to backside.
They continued to stare, examining the strange oil on dry wallboard. It was dated 2001, the same year Louisa Childe had been murdered.
“My old grandfather would call this coincidence paaaar-tic-cularly peculiar,” Darwin said as they stood before the painting.
“Certainly bears looking into. Can it be this serendipitous? We come in to see an art exhibit and we discover our murderer is this close, this public?”
“Nobody's that lucky. Still… damned eerie isn't it?”
Jessica cautioned, “Could be a thousand explanations. Could just be representational, symbolic to Orion alone and meaningless to anyone else, and so it's a very personal expression that has nothing whatever to do with our case, Darwin.”
“Sure… of course…” But Darwin was ready to put the cuffs on Orion.
Jessica had simply continued to stare long at the strange painting, seeing a child in the gloomy darkness of the backdrop at what appeared at once the distance and up close in a kind of optical illusion. The child stood as a ghostly shadow over the body of the woman with the huge gaping blackness running up and down her spine. “You see the kid standing in the gloom? Staring down the length of the dead woman?”
Darwin squinted. “Now that you point it out, yeah. I could've easily missed it.”
“Self-portrait you think?”
“You think?”
“Could be… could also be homage to Dali.”
“Dolly? You talking about the cloned sheep?”
“No, the artist, Salvador Dali. He put himself into each of his paintings as an observant child.”
“I see.”
“I think we need to learn a great deal more about this so-called artist, Orion.”
“Sounds like a stage name, Orion.”
“We'll find out.”
“Agreed.”
She checked her watch. “Getting close to takeoff time. We've got to grab a cab, but before we do, let's talk to the museum people, find out what we might about this character. On our way to the airport, I'll make a call, order an FBI background check.”
“To hell with that. I can put a surveillance team on his ass.”
“Sure, okay, but Darwin, we don't want to tip our hand to him. We want to-”
“See what kind of snakes come crawling out from under this rock. Like I said, I'll put my people on a twenty-four-hour surveillance of Mr. Orion.”