“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.
He replied, “You think you know me, don't you, Jessica? But if you really knew me, you'd never ask such a question.”
Something chilling in his remark told her that he meant to do as his father had attempted, to take Jessica with him into eternity, be it heaven or hell.
Given the full-page ad for the Field Museum's night opening of the bone show, Jessica assumed the place would be overrun by people. Capturing or killing Giles Gahran, or dying in the process herself as Otto before her, one way or another, this life and death struggle between them was going to happen here and now. It would end at the Field Museum, his chosen venue.
She felt the bulge of her holster and gun below her armpit as she drove. She felt the heft of her second weapon on her ankle. If Matisak was indeed his father, she'd need both weapons.
“Well, Doctor? Which is it to be? Execution tonight or the asylum? You think there's an asylum that can hold a Matisak?”
“No… on that we agree.”
“How lovely a spine you must possess, Jessica. Come alone.”
TWENTY-THREE
The blood of the moon steeps through me. but you cannot find me. as I have disappeared into your darkness.
The Chicago Field Museum had a long and distinguished history as one of the original buildings of the famous White City of 1893, created for the Chicago World's Fair Columbian Exposition of that year. It had stood sentinel at 1400 S. Lake Shore ever since, and millions annually flocked to its doors to see the wonders of the natural world.
Ironic, Jessica thought, that her chasing down Giles Gahran, the son of her worst nightmare, should end here in this palace devoted to all things natural-its other name being the Museum of Natural History. But then there actually was something natural about the development of the criminally insane, too… How natural it all was, despite what people wanted to believe to the contrary. The criminal mind was as old as man himself, and like an ancient, persistent, resistant virus, it resided-sometimes dormant, sometimes active, but always present-within every developing human brain, the paterfamilias of evil. Like a new layer or patina over an old deck, the rotted original boards remained.
