Absolute Instinct Read Online Free PDF

her. “You have some final words?” he asked.
    She whispered so low that he could not hear. When he came within reach, she tore at his face with her nails, shouting, “Bastard!”
    Her fighting back had surprised Giles; he wondered why she wanted to live. To hang pictures of birds on her walls? To feed her cat? To clean her sink of dishes? Some other mundane chore in her dull existence?
    She'd passed out, and needing to get at her entire backside, he ripped her clothes from her. The entry through the back must be completely unfettered. He next located the sketches and began to stuff them into the bag. But he was stopped when he saw the blood stained sketch she clung to. He decided to place the last three he'd done on the walls as she had planned. He hunted down her tape-and-scissors drawer and got it done.
    Backing up, studying and admiring his hung Collection of Birds in the Park, he imagined what she had had in mind. With the right frames and in this context, it might have been lovely. Too bad he could not take credit, a bow for the work. It was good.
    He next returned to his tools and pulled out his scalpel and rib cutter.
    The actual killing had taken less than a minute; the working up to it all these months, was a different story altogether.
    Still, getting in and out of Louisa's apartment had taken far too much time. Giles now felt an urgency to vacate without being seen. He lifted the hand she had scratched his face with; she had left him with a scar from chin to Adam's apple. Using the rib cutter, he snapped off each fingertip at the joint, dropping each into the trash bag alongside the broken glass and his partial sandwich. One of the round-nailed fin-gertips missed the bag, seemingly leaping to freedom, rolling away toward the sofa chair, when in the same instant Archer the cat darted and snatched it up and was gone again.
    “ Damn you, cat!” he bellowed. He coaxed but failed to lure the cat from its hiding place; kneeling low, looking up under the sofa chair, he learned the damn thing had simply vanished, along with Louisa's fingertip. “Fucking cat!”
    Giving up on the cat, Giles turned back to Louisa's body and stopped momentarily to stare at how beautiful the geometry of her form lay there, splayed open, limbs forming a kind of human swastika, each aligned in a spontaneous akimbo, but what struck him most remained that damnable charcoal drawing clutched in her dying hand. The sight caused him to give up cutting off any more fingertips. He reasoned it out: She had to've torn at him with her only free hand, and since he resided somewhere under the police radar here in Millbrook, Minnesota, he had acted accordingly to remain that way, removing any possible DNA he may've left in the apartment or on the body—all save the DNA the cat would hopefully consume.
    “ Isn't likely they'll cut open a cat for evidence they don't know is there,” he muttered to the empty room and corpse.
    For some minutes, he stood clear of the blood while regarding her in death, moving round the body with care in his bare feet, considering every angle. He made mental notes for later. He'd want to depict her exactly as she lay here, only in the abstract—caught like a butterfly on a pin within the context of his art.
    No, he needn't bother with her right hand. She'd only scratched him with her left, and only the once before falling back.
    “ Got to get out of here,” he told Archer from whom he caught snatches of contented birdlike murmurs coming from the gut and throat, somewhere below the sofa, happy with his prize. Out Louisa's window, he saw a man walking a poodle past a service truck of some sort. He ruminated how people foolishly attributed warm, cozy feelings to their animals so as to feel better about themselves, as if they had some kind of reciprocal even symbiotic relationship with their pets, as if the pet cared. And people did this so routinely and without the slightest sense or dared thought. The same people who made