“Then it's all good, solid information, right? All to the good, right?”
“You tell me. Born and raised in Millbrook with a history of medical problems, yes.” Richard held a smug look of assurance. “Everything points to Giles Gahran.”
“That's his name, Giles Gahran,” repeated Towne.
“Now Darwin's got to play out his hand first, and as soon as possible, we will bring him home, too,” Jessica assured him.
Sharpe continued with, “Records show that Gahran attended Millbrook schools, and Brannan's got hold of a yearbook photo he's forwarded to Chicago PD and FBI.”
“Our first victim, Louisa Childe was killed only blocks from where this kid went to high school. He has no college record other than a Portland arts school-”
“Wait… whoa up there. You have him in Portland? at the time of Sarah's murder?” asked Towne.
“We do,” replied Sharpe.
“And this only after his mother died and Childe was killed,” added Jessica. “His tuition in Portland was seeded by money coming out of her estate, the house sale.”
“Sold out and moved to Portland soon after the Childe killing,” Richard said, his hands like fluttering birds, insistent of the truth. “Only weeks after Giles Gahran's mother dies, two years ago, Louisa Childe's mutilated body is discovered in late November, determined to have been killed in mid-November.”
“Your wife was murdered in mid-November too,” added Jessica. “Joyce Olsen murdered in Milwaukee in the same manner in mid-November.”
“Records also show his having attended Portland's prestigious Kanar Institute of the Arts. While in attendance there, your wife is killed.”
“Damn… Sarah was taking classes there…”
“Gahran next shows up in Milwaukee, having not quite completed his studies in Portland, and now we have not one but two killings using the same MO in Milwaukee.”
“Sounds like you're all over this guy now like he fell outta the sky. Where they hell was all this when I was locked up all this time?”
“He's disappeared into oblivion each time,” Jessica's tone turned from excited to apologetic, “and he allowed so much time between his killings.”
Sharpe said, “Now he's become part of the Chicago cityscape. Still very much at large, but he will surface.”
“It's only a matter of time and credit-card use,” Jessica assured Towne, “a registration record, signing a lease, a lot of interviewing and footwork in the arts community on our part.”
“Besides, Chicago's as good a place to stash you as any,” added Sharpe.
“When do we make the tape?” he asked.
“At the airport, back of the van. It's all set up. Plan is to keep you mobile.”
“You musta paid those boys good.”
“Yeah, we did pay them well,” replied Jessica, “using my FBI MasterCard, but they are also anti-death penalty advocates.”
They pulled into a Flying Tigers airport hangar, the van following. The hangar door came down on cue, just as Richard had promised it would. “That credit card's going to be maxed out anytime now.”
EIGHTEEN
Evil is easy and has infinite forms.
With the exhibit up and already looking like a hit among cafe patrons at Avanti, Giles wandered outside to gaze at the cityscape and found himself and his box parked on a bench at the terminus of Oak Street overlooking the lake again. He kept staring up at the enormous, lovely, revolving, lit-by-a-million bulbs Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. The lights and sounds wafting across the lake from the joyous time people-normal people-were having there seemed so close, so within his touch. And yet so far from it.
A well of sadness balled up inside Giles for all the harm he had done in this world, in this life given him by some deity somewhere who must have known… had to have known what he would do with it, how he would ruin it, given all that he was even before exiting his mother's womb, and all that she molded him into; after all, such a deity did play with people's lives. He put Louisa Childe in harm's way, in Giles's path. He put Sarah Towne at that right juncture along that riding path in the park in Portland within miles of the Kanar Institute. He had placed Joyce Olsen at that park just as Giles had passed by, and he had molded the faces and bodies of these women to look and move just like Mother. After all was said and done, God had placed all the others within Giles's reach as well, Lucinda and that fool in Millbrook, the one who would never be found. His spine, along with all else, had been dug up by roaming animals, quarry dogs most likely, and dragged, he supposed into some deep cave or burrow to rot there-a waste of a good spinal column, but at least no one had ever discovered Cameron Lincoln's body. Not even Giles. By the time he'd gotten nerve enough to go back to where he'd hurriedly buried the art exhibitor, below a scattering of twigs and leaves, the dead man had disappeared into the deep Minnesota woods.
Giles stared up into the heavens at the night stars, the constellations winking in a clear, bright sky. “You planned all this right, God? You got those mysterious ways for us not to question, so whatever else, You-you're at back of all of it, invisible strings attached to our spines, manipulating all of it. Used to think it was Satan pulling my chain.”
He stood and lifted the opened box, the one with all the news clippings and the letter Mother had carefully typed out and lain across the pile of horror stories that explained who his father was. The one with the heavy metal and glass object lumbering about inside it.
The ribbons lay limp at each side, and Giles had read Mother's parting words at last. She, too, was created by God, and she and his father, were in their way both evil incarnate. While Mother had never killed anyone, she had destroyed a spirit-the spirit Giles might once have had a chance at being or at least at becoming-the shadowy other self who might have eschewed all that his father was, and fought off the ravages of his mother's assaults on that spirit, and overcome the genetic mark left on his soul by a monster seed.
All gone now… any flickering hope of chance for that other self to survive extinguished long ago with his first murder. Too damn much stacked too high against him, borne of man and woman, a creature carrying both the mark of Satan in his very makeup, in the soup of his mother's womb, and the mark created of her doing, of his upbringing and environment. God could not have found a way to save him from Mother when an infant? Why not? Why in God's name not?
Giles stood and looked down from what seemed a faraway place at the damnable, cursed box, realizing that it had been a blight on his soul from the moment Mother had handed it to him from her deathbed. She had had a lawyer bring it to her there in the hospital. It had been sealed for years until she herself broke a thick wax seal she had applied to it when the box had been placed into a bank vault for this day.
“You have a right to know precisely who and what you are, Giles. That is why I gift this to you. It is the gift of self-awareness and fear… Yes, the gift of fear. You rightly ought to fear the thing you are and until now you have had no idea what you are, not really. You only think you do. Ever wonder where you get the urge to kill a living creature and to feed on its… its spinal fluid and marrow?”
Now Giles knew what she had meant. For the first time everything fit, each puzzle piece in his brain, psyche and in his soul… it all fit. Finally, he understood precisely what Mother had had to live with, why she was so bitter, and why Mother, on bended knee, so often asked God why He had spared her for this-while pointing at Giles. Asking God why she had not been killed by his father.
Giles wanted to run from the box.
All these years since Mother's death, he had fixated on its contents-both fascinated with it and terrified of it at once. Drawn to its contents, closer and closer, until his fingers would inch inside it, fearful of the snakebite of its
