Twenty cars silently converged on Cafe Avanti, covering front and back. Men p›oured into the cafe, making it crowded, frightening and disturbing the usual customers and others who'd come to enjoy the evening with laptop computers opened, notepads busy, books propped beside large helpings of exotic coffee drinks and pastries. Other people milled about in the rear, ohs and ahs spilling out as they literally walked through the mind of a killer, examining Giles Gahran's artwork, commenting on the realism of even the blood odor along with the sight of the spines.
Police and FBI agents secured every exit. The owner rushed at them, calling them pigs and demanding to know the meaning of this outrage, saying, “You think this is Guatemala or something you can just bust into my place like fucking Nazi storm troopers? You got a warrant?”
Laughlin dealt with her as other agents swarmed upstairs and cleared each room one by one. Jessica, with Richard at her side, took the gruesome tour through Giles Gahran's mind, going from a dark little room down even darker little corridors to another adjacent room and another larger one partitioned off. She recognized the featureless, eyeless creations as those of each victim. The park bench and birds in one, the playful dog in another, the extremely cramped horse with Sarah Towne's form, and dangling above all as if lifting out of the backs of women flew the backbones-so lifelike and amazingly startling and eerie in their levitation above the human forms frozen in time. Because, as Jess determined now by touch, they were real. Made even the more eerie as Jessica confirmed her worst fear, that the sculpted bones were sculpted not by Giles but by God.
Onlookers were being ushered out of the gallery created here to display Giles's twisted idea of art. Laughlin joined them, the owner still on him, bitching at him, when he announced there was no sign of Gahran. “We've hit every nook and cranny from basement to third floor and the roof. He's not here, and the owner isn't cooperating.”
“This is a crime scene now. We don't need her cooperation to process this place,” Jessica replied. Jessica stepped up to Conchita Raold and glared at her with such intensity that Raold averted her eyes.
“Ms. Raold. You could be prosecuted for harboring a murderer, and we could tie you up so many ways legally and illegally that you will lose this cafe and everything else you hold dear. You will cooperate with us. Where is he?”
“I don't know. He came down here during the day and began working in the very back room, and I tried to bring him something to eat and drink, but he wouldn't let me go in there. Then he came out all exhausted. He never got no sleep the whole time we were… I tried to get him to sleep, you know. He'd been up all night. But he came with more bones I… I thought he made them outta his own head, you know. I… I can't believe what they are telling me.”
Jessica took her aside and sat her down. Calmly, Jessica asked, “He worked all day and then what?”
“He wasn't too clearheaded. I tried to get him to go back up to bed, you know. He looked mad when he got off the phone, just five minutes before you all come bustin' into my place. I thought Chicago was part of America, but I guess not.”
“Hear that, Laughlin? He's possibly still in the area!”
“Unless he grabbed a cab, hopped a bus or the nearby elevated,” replied Laughlin, “but we'll get on it, canvass the neighborhood and paper his face everywhere.”
“Did you see this, Conchita?” Jessica asked, showing her the photo of Gahran as a high-school student on the front page of the Sun-Times. “You had to've seen this. He had to've seen this.”
“He told me you were all trying to frame him for something Keith Orion did, that you released Orion because you didn't have enough to hold him, so now you were making up stuff against Giles.”
“And you believed that?” asked Sharpe, straight-faced.
She glanced up at him but said nothing. Jessica asked, “What was he working on all day? Show me.”
“It's a back room.”
“Is that supposed to be humorous?”
“No, it's just for empty boxes and shit.”
“An ordinary back room.”
“Giles said he made up something special for me in here, but I didn't get no chance to go in there since it got so busy and then you all busted in. So I locked it up, not wanting no one to see it until I did, you know. He said it was special to me.”
“I think we need to see it now, Conchita.”
She led them back past all the sculptures of the three victims when Jessica noticed a fourth rack of backbones free-floating alone, newly draped with black sheets as backdrop canvass for Giles's special brand of black art.
“Lucinda Wellingham,” said Sharpe. “Read the placard.”
On the doorjamb Giles had created a placard naming each of his works. Where the three more elderly women had been depicted, he had simply used November 1, November 2, and November 3. This one read: Essence d'Lucious.
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.
