“Excellent.”
“And just where is Towne now?”
“Catch us if you can, Warden.” She hung up, knowing that any forward movement toward an execution in Oregon was at an end. She informed the others of Warden Gwingault's action.
Cheers filled the airplane.
“Darwin's under arrest now,” said Towne sadly once the euphoria had died away. “Gone from an FBI field chief to a common criminal in lockup.”
“Darwin knew that going in,” Richard assured him.
The pilot announced that they were on descent for the runway at O'Hare, and he asked everyone to buckle in.
The news of what they had done spread wildfire fashion, and FBI headquarters was abuzz with the story.
One of the young techs on board the plane had a handheld Sony television and he silenced everyone as an excited Wolf Blitzer shared the story with his viewers. “News networks across America are now carrying this incredible breaking story. A party of anti-capital punishment conspirators, including a number of FBI personnel, have successfully helped convicted killer Robert W. Towne in a secretive escape from death row in Portland, Oregon, and the man now sitting on death row in his stead is his brother, FBI Agent Xavier Darwin Reynolds.”
The news would be all over Chicago even before they landed. Towne, still worried, erupted with, “What if Hughes convinces Gwingault and the rest that it's all a hoax, what we say we did? What if he goes through with the goddamn execution?”
“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
