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.”
“Is that it with the coroner's photos? Are there any more like this?” asked Sharpe, a tincture of concern in his voice. Jessica knew the concern was for her.
“Ahhh, no, just newspaper photos but nothing like this except…” Chen hesitated.
“There's one picture we thought it best to remove,” added Laughlin.
“What picture is that?”
“Otto Boutine.”
“Otto?” Boutine had died trying to save Jessica from Matisak.
“His autopsy photos, several of them. That autopsy was done right here in Chicago, we are investigating how those photos got into Larina Gahran's possession.”
Sharpe and Jessica turned their attention on the box. “Thanks for your… your sensitivity, Chen, Laughlin,” she said, showing her old steel. “What else have we got here?”
“It's not going to help your disposition or help you sleep at night, Dr. Coran, but it may help lead us to this guy and to understand him a little better.”
Larina Gahran had squirreled away in this box every word ever written on Matisak, including a paperback version of Jessica's own book about murderer's row that included a chapter on him, and including copies of her FBI research findings on Matisak, all the years of studying him-all material any of the FBI public relations people or her publisher in New York might have. All of it entombed in this ornate Devil's box with its own diablo spinata- devil's spine that read Mementoes of Father.
The box had the obvious feel of a one of a kind, as if created specifically for her purpose, and Jessica began to imagine the depth of evil that Larina had perpetrated on her son. While he might have Matisak's DNA, while he might even have a real inclination toward violence, a predisposition to cut open living things to find out what was inside, still if he had had any chance whatsoever at a normal life, his mother had absolutely destroyed any chance of that happening.
No one needed say it. The silence as Jessica rummaged through the remaining heap said it all.
“The woman bequeathed the box to her son,” said Sharpe, trying to wrap his mind around the idea.
“Cruel bitch,” Jessica muttered. “She's managed to create another Matisak, rather than protect him from this terrible knowledge. It's how he knew about me. He read the stories… read all about his mad, blood-drinking father.”
“The son of Matisak,” muttered Sharpe, who had heard so much about the infamous madman that he had finally gone back into the records and read all of the material on Matisak. How Jessica had been maimed by him in his Chicago lair; how he had killed Jessica's first love, behavioral science pioneer Otto Boutine of the FBI, the man who had recruited Jessica from a D.C. coroner's position after observing her coolheaded professionalism at a horrendous plane crash site. He'd heard all about how Matisak was put into a federal facility for the criminally insane in Pennsylvania, and his subsequent bloody as hell escape, followed by a new wave of terror across the nation, as he fed on others in his maniacal urge to stalk and corner Jessica a second time in a Mardi Gras warehouse. That time with a plan to bleed both her and himself to death by use of a dialysis machine working to empty each of them of blood, their blood and spirits to commingle there in New Orleans and in the netherworld of eternity.
“It would figure that this young man must be related by blood to the most notorious serial killer of our time,” she said. “Why the fuck didn't I see it? It was staring me in the face the whole time.”
“He has an entirely idiosyncratic MO, nothing like Matisak's. Matisak was a blood drinker. We don't know what Gahran does with the bones, what kind of rituals he might have come up with in all these books, but it bears no resemblance to that bloodsucker's goal… unless…”
“Unless he's feeding on the bone marrow deep within the spine.”
“And to get at it, he's got to empty the spinal fluid.”
“Maybe the books can tell us more. If he's drinking the spinal fluid and consuming the bone marrow… maybe it's because he believes in some of the esoteric rituals found in these books about ancient cultures and bone use.”
“Meanwhile, where are Petersaul and Cates?”
“And are their spines intact?”
“Right now only God and Giles Gahran know.”
“There's one other horror we think you should see, Dr. Coran,” said Laughlin, his eyes apologetic. He gave a nod to Chen.
Chen lifted a large, sealed Tupperware dish from Giles box. Through the plastic, at eye level, Jessica saw Matisak's awful blood tap, the Spigot, or one of several that had, long years before, been confiscated on his capture. “It was also in the box,” said Chen.
“Part of Mother's gift,” finished Laughlin.
Jessica held it up, staring at it, the light filtering through, touching it. “Voodoo bitch. Truly evil…”
“Indelible evil,” agreed Richard. “Insidious evil, that woman.”
“And so is her offspring with Matisak.”
Rosehill Cemetery November 13, 2004
Milos Drivdnios, the morning caretaker at Rosehill Cemetery, felt a slight discomfort of acid reflex well up, and so he again popped two anti-acid pills prescribed by his doctor, and earlier he had taken a coated aspirin. He had a heart condition. Carrying too much weight at 226 pounds, standing only at 5'6”, he had difficulty just climbing from bed in the morning to spell Liam Rielsen from the nightshift at Rosehill. Climbing into and out of his car, going up a flight of steps, any exertion, even as simple as raking leaves put a great strain on his body and heart. As for shoveling snow, he had strict orders to never pick up a shovel, but Enid, his wife, believed it all nonsense, that Milos needed more exertion, more exercise, not less. He'd had to make Dr. Stephanik write it on his letterhead for Enid to see, and even then she thought it a bought-and-paid-for agreement between men. That's when Milos told her that Dr. Stephanik was a woman, and Enid went crazy on learning this, that some other woman was seeing him half naked, her hands on Milos, checking him out.
“What happened to Dr. Weagley?” she'd shouted. “You were supposed to see Dr. Weagley!”
“He died two weeks ago. Lung cancer I'm told. I told him that Greek cigarettes would kill him, and they did.”
