Conchita unlocked a door to the very back storage room in this maze behind her cafe. “All right,” Jessica said, bracing herself. “He could still be in here… in the shadows.”
“Better let us go in first,” suggested Sharpe.
“No way-I won't lose you, Richard, not to this fiend, not as I did Otto.”
Sharpe pushed past her, taking the lead, throwing the door wide on a blackened room, a soft, diffused, muted light striking an object at the center of the room, and the strobe light slowly revolved about the thing at the center.
Jessica and Laughlin followed Sharpe, with Conchita peeking around them, watching as the light source picked up yet another backbone, then another, and finally a third. They hung high in the air here where the ceiling was a good fourteen feet high.
“Three… I count three more spinal columns,” said Richard.
“But whose is the third? We've got one unaccounted for victim,” said Jessica. “Bones will tell us something about him or her.”
Dangling and eerily turning in a draft, the spinal columns looked like flying dragons and the strobe light gave them the illusion of flight. “Flying bones,” Jessica muttered.
Then a second light source on a timer set to go on at intervals came on and raked quickly as a knife stroke across a nude male body, its back splayed open, bloody yet, dripping still from the mangling it'd endured at the hands of Matisak's son. Then the light raced off.
“What in hell was that?” asked Laughlin.
“Is it Gahran?” asked Sharpe. “But how?”
“No,” she countered, “looks like an African male. But who?”
The light source no longer on the body in the dark, no one could say, but Conchita managed words. “It almost looked like Murphy, my husband, but he hasn't much been around. We had a bad… really nasty fight.”
The lights again raked over the set of three flying spinal columns overhead. In a beautiful blue artistic setting, one could construe the bones as birds in formation flight, in perfect sync, and then they realized another light source was directed on yet another scene in the far back of the room. The new light source directed attention to a sculpture of a child holding a small rack of bones-an animal spine-overhead, and from it, flowed a sickly yellowish fluid raining down and dripping over the lips of the boy.
“That's Gahran,” Jessica declared. “As a child.”
“Who's the other guy supposed to be?”
“Where're the lights?” Jessica asked.
Conchita found the switch but Giles had removed the bulb. The alternating light hit the strange unnamed man in the puzzle again, the lifelike nude body posed in the manner of Christ being removed from the cross, the dead body held by unseen moorings, bent in an arch of death throes.
“Oh my God, it is Murphy! Murphy! It's my husband!”
“It might have been you, Conchita,” muttered Laughlin.
“I can't believe this.”
Jessica grabbed her and guided her away from the sight, and back through Giles's colorful show, noting the tincture of blood odor in the air even here and she imagined the bloodred bones in the exhibit had been painted with the blood of Gahran's victims.
“Get a light generator set up in that back room, Richard, and call in the local M.E., Horace Keene, and his team to process all of this. I'm not up to it.”
“He kept saying, 'the lovely bones, the lovely bones… I gotta go see the lovely bones exhibit,' “ Conchita was saying over and over. “When he left here, he said that's where he was going to go… to see the lovely bones.”
“ 'To see the lovely bones'?” Jessica repeated. “What the hell's that?”
Patrons still held at bay by police began to kick this over as if it were a puzzle. “That book… the bestseller… on the New York Times list for a long time a while back… The Lovely Bones by… by…”
Some took stabs at the author's name, but no one could dredge it up.
“There's a bookstore around the corner,” said Laughlin.
“Several,” said another cafe patron. He rattled them off, names and addresses, “Booked Up, In and Out Books and there's Afterword Books.”
“Could mean the elevated,” said another. “Slang for the elevated is the bone rattler. Rattles your bones. You get off and your bones are still moving,” he joked.
“No, man… it's that exhibit,” said a young, shy-eyed Latino girl.
“Exhibit?” asked Jessica at this.
“Downtown at the Field,” she replied.
“Yeah, that's right, dinosaur bones,” added another patron, coffee in hand. “Some famous archeologist named Stroud… dug up some new kinda dinosaur bones. Claims they're like supernatural-at least to the Indians they are.”
“Field Museum,” the shy girl added.
Laughlin had already left, dispatching radio cars throughout the area and to each of the nearest bookstore locations. Richard had gone back to the storage room with a police photographer.
Jessica sat across from a young woman with exotic features who lifted an ad from the newspaper for the Chicago Field Museum. Bold letters overlaying a fade in of Chicago's famous dinosaurs of the Field Museum, a corner shot of scientists working a recent dig, and a third shot of lab-coated men and women with recent bone acquisitions, said: “Come See Our Lovely Bones!”
“He's gone on holiday,” Jessica murmured to herself.
The dark-skinned woman with the ad only smiled and said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
That's where he wants me to meet him, she told herself.
Everyone was busy now. The Chicago M.E.'s people had arrived, and patrons of the cafe were ushered out.
While shaking hands and saying hello to Jessica as an old friend, Horace Keene, Chicago's top M.E. said in his stentorian voice, “Cafe is closed until further notice, people. Everyone out!”
Sharpe guided Keene and the evidence techs back to the body in the dark. With them, they carried all the instruments and light-generating equipment they would need.
Jessica quietly slipped out, located the car she had come in, found the keys dangling in the ignition, got in and drove for Chicago's Lake Shore Drive and the Museum Campus.
Along the way her phone rang. She looked at the signal to determine if it were Richard. He'd be angry and fuming by now if he had discovered her gone. But she recognized the signal as coming from Amanda Petersaul's phone. It was Giles calling.
“It's a special night,” he said. “By now, you've seen my work. What do you think, Dr. Coran?”
“It's… It was unique… Yes, very different from anything I have ever seen before, I must say.”
“And coming from you, that's saying a hell of a lot.” “An amazing display of bravado on your pan. Are you wanting to be put down like a dog, Giles?”
“I think I've surpassed the master! Dear old Dad?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking, absolutely.”
“In a manner of speaking?” he said, clearly annoyed that she hadn't agreed wholeheartedly.
“In some ways, yes.”
“In all ways.”
“If you say so, Giles.”
“No, bullshit. If you say so, Dr. Coran, and I know you feel it, too. Wish we had time to delve into this more, time to just sit over coffee there at the Avanti and just talk about it.”
“We do, Giles. We have the rest of your life.”
He exploded with laughter at this, and then he hesitated. “You mean, Dr. Coran, you'd come to see me? Visit at the asylum? Have tea with the freak, the criminally insane, Satan's son, heir to Jack the Ripper? Did you know that Jack, too, was an artist?”
“I believe any tea we might have, Giles, would be shared on death row, in the shadow of the execution chamber.”
“Society's monster killer. You know very well I'd get the asylum, like Father. Come now! My crimes are too insane to not offer up an insanity defense.”
Silence followed as her car sped along the faerie tale lit outer drive past the gaiety of Navy Pier with its array of colors and giant, lit-up Ferris wheel, a beacon in the night. She wondered why he had not leapt off the wheel after overturning the box of clippings on his father. She now asked him point-blank.