“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.
TWENTY
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
At the apartment rented by Gahran, Jessica took control, her FBI badge extended as she passed local authorities. “Any word on Petersaul or Cates?” she asked Harry Laughlin, the Chicago FBI field office chief.
“Not a word. The car's not been found, either.”
“And no sightings of Gahran?”
“Perhaps in time. We just got the sketch around, and it missed the evening papers. It'll have to wait until tomorrow.”
“What about the apartment? Anything of interest?” asked Sharpe, displaying his badge.
“Nothing of consequence. Lotta charcoal sketches but no blood, no bones, no souvenirs.”
“How soon were your guys on the scene here after your last communication with Petersaul? After she requested the warrant for the place?”
“An hour, maybe an hour-ten.”
“He may've had time to clean out anything incriminating.”
“Found something!” shouted one of the men going through the artists tools, instruments, paint cases and boxes. He held up a box. “Scalpels-thirteen artists quality scalpels.”
“Bag 'em. We'll run tests for blood residue,” Jessica assured everyone in the room.
“Take a look at what's on the guy's bookshelf,” came another tech, holding several old yellowed volumes in his hands, one shiny with beautiful binding, green with foillike green lettering.
Jessica and Richard began to closely examine the reading material of one Giles Gahran. “Gahran's taste in reading,” Richard muttered, noting how dog-eared and marked up and highlighted portions of one volume were.
“A strange collection of bizarre materials. Books I've not come across before.”
Jessica looked over each spine and cover. She and Sharpe passed each to the other as they examined the killer's bedtime reading.
“What the hell is this?” asked Sharpe of her. “The Grand Symbol?”
She took the volume and read the title aloud, “Man As Grand Symbol of the Mysteries by Manly Palmer Hall. Philosophical Research Society, 5th edition, Los Angeles, 1947.” She glanced quickly through it. “A book on the symbolic power of the spinal column.”
“Here's one simply titled The Body,” said Sharpe. “By an Anthony Smith. Oh, a London publisher, Allen and Unwin, 1968-a little more current, but not by much.”
She read a third title. “C.A.S. Williams's Encyclopedia of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs, I960. You got me beat. Oh, look… a chapter in here on the backbone as an artistic construct.”
“Damn, tell me what is a 'luz bone'?” he asked, handing her yet another book to peruse.
“The Bone Called Luz by F.H. Garrison,” she read the spine of the green book. Opening it to the title page, she continued. “New York Medical Journal, 1910. Pages marked here.” She flipped through to the marked pages, muttering, “Ninety-two… and 149 to 152.”
“What're they on?”
“Both sections on the backbone.”
Agent Harry Laughlin greeted someone at the door, a sharply dressed, shapely Asian black-haired officer he introduced as Tanith Chen. She shook hands with Sharpe and Jessica as she held an ornate leather box tied with ribbon into a comical bow. “What's in the box?” asked Jessica.
Chen and Laughlin exchanged a glance. “You want to break the news?” asked Chen.
“She's already had an inkling that this guy thinks he's somehow related to Matisak,” Laughlin explained, bringing Chen up to date. “But I think she needs to know the extent of this guy's psychosis and possible fixation on her.” Laughlin called another agent to get him the duplicate made of the letter now in an FBI lab.
“This overlaid all the clippings and articles in the box,” he told Jessica and Richard who still stood with one of Gahran's books in his hands.
Sharpe lobbed the book onto the small bed and looked at the copy of the document. He read it with a shiver going down his spine. “Jess, I don't think you need see any more of this or the box it came from. Let's get out of here for some air.”
She frowned at him and snatched the letter out of his grasp, quickly reading it, finding it hard to swallow. “This woman… she was likely mad herself… no proof of her being with Matisak. At no time in the course of our investigation or during his trial, or in all those years he spent in prison did she ever surface, and now this? It's got to be bullshit.”
“We'll know if we can find some DNA on the silverware and glasses left in the sink, match it up to what's on file about Matisak,” said Sharpe, taking a deep breath.
“Seems Gahran went up to the top of the Ferris wheel out at Navy Pier,” said Chen. “He'd gone there from the park. I was tailing him in fact, when he disappeared on Michigan Ave.”
“Witnesses say he emptied this box and its contents over the side,” added Laughlin, dropping the box with a heavy thud on a table between them now. “And while he appeared interested in killing himself, our Quasimodo failed to follow the box down.”
“You saying he's a hunchback, too?” asked Jessica.
“Only in spirit, I mean… way his mother meted it out to him,” Laughlin softly replied.
Chen added, “Gahran handed the empty box to a little boy at the amusement ride, and we made the boy cry… confiscated it, along with as much of its contents as we could recover. Some jerk wanted to sell us a fistful of clippings he had confiscated!”
“So the box is stuffed with what Matisak memorabilia?” Jessica asked. “A lot of Goth heads and weirdos buy all kinds of crappy serial killer paraphernalia. They can buy it on fucking eBay.”
“This is no collector at work. This woman got hold of some of the original crime-scene photos-and I don't mean copies downloaded from AutopsiesRus.com or ME.org. These are straight outta the case files, some from the actual Matisak autopsy.”
“The one that cleared me of any wrongdoing in his death, you mean?” she replied.
“How the woman got them I haven't a clue, but you can bet money or goods of some sort passed hands. There's stuff here you'll never see on a website, not even that sick fuck Michael Slade's web page has stuff like this.”
“See for yourself,” added Chen.
Jessica untied the bow and carefully lifted the lid, and she gasped at its contents. She turned and buried her head in Richard's chest, heaving a sigh and quietly sobbing. The picture laying atop the jumbled mess was a coroner's shot of a candy striper hanging from a rafter in an old shack in Wekosha, Wisconsin. Jessica recalled her vividly as the first victim to lead them to Matisak. Jessica turned the photo over as she didn't want to see it anymore only to find scribbled on back the name of the victim and the price Larina Gahran had paid for it from some creep named Scarborough. “Bastard boyfriend of hers pimped her out in life, and sold her in death as well,” she muttered. “Like to know what rung in hell is waiting for him.”
“Him and the guy that sold it to him,” agreed Laughlin.
“I think you're going to want to see this, Dr. Coran.” Chen handed her a shot of an aged woman and man hanging from their heels in a barn by tenterhooks, chains and pulleys, an old horse carriage overhead in the barn with them where they died.
“The Red Birds, a lovely old couple living on an Oklahoma Indian reservation soil who had made the terrible mistake of allowing Matisak to dine with them,” said Jessica as she stared at the picture. “He dined on their blood.”