Free The Architect by Keith Ablow Page A

the bedspread out from under her, leaving her naked on a plastic sheet he had placed there before she arrived. He unfolded the sides of the sheet so that it covered the entire bed and several feet of the carpet on either side of it.
    He rolled his vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunk to the bedside, pulled open one of its drawers, revealing a scalpel, surgical saw, retractors, and surgical clamps.
    From another drawer he took a perfectly pressed white linen tunic and pulled it on. He knelt beside the bed, closed his eyes, and prayed:
    Lord God, King of the Universe
    May you steady my mind and heart and hand .
    Your resolve is mine ,
    As I liberate this family from evil .
    I once was lost, but now am found .
    Was blind, but now, I see .
    He stood up. He watched and listened to make absolutely certain Chase was not breathing. He checked her wrist to make sure she had no pulse. He did notwant to cause suffering in the world. He wanted to end suffering.
    She was gone.
    All that remained for him was to leave a symbol of his love of beauty and truth. He knew it would be one of his last chances to do so.
    He pushed Chase’s legs together, spread her arms out to the sides, replicating Leonardo da Vinci’s famous illustration of the divine proportions of the human body.
    He turned up the volume on the stereo, allowed the grace of The Messiah to fill him.
    He picked up the scalpel.
    Behind the eyelids, deep to the bony orbits and orbital septum, lay a world of perfect structure and function. Bands of rectus, levator, and oblique muscles, enervated by three separate cranial nerves, embraced the eyeball, allowing the brain miraculous control over eye movement. The ophthalmic artery branched a dozen times, a tree of life feeding not only the eye muscles, but retina, lacrimal gland, iris, and cornea.
    Crosse’s first incision bisected Chase’s right upper lid. He took two handmade sterling silver nails out of the steamer trunk and pinned back each flap, revealing the delicate axons of the supraorbital nerve. Waves of excitement began to course through him. He thought to himself how little other people were willing to see, how terrified they were to look toward the light, to imagine where freedom might take them and then summon the courage and faith to get there.
    He worked more than three hours, placing his last sterling silver nail through Chase’s right optic nerve at 3:05 A.M.
    He stood back in awe, not of the work he had done, but the perfection he had exposed. In this, as in everything, he was no more than God’s messenger.
    He made deep, curved incisions under Chase’s hips, slicing into the muscles and fascia connecting her legs and pelvis. He wrapped the plastic sheet around her, emptied the steamer trunk of its drawers, and placed her inside, with her knees tucked tight against her chin.
    He called the parking attendant and told him to have his black Range Rover waiting, cargo door open. He took the elevator down to the lobby, calmly checked out of the hotel, and then strolled toward the front doors, pulling the steamer trunk behind him. As he walked, he reveled in the travertine marble walls, the rare Irish wool carpeting under his feet. But he was moved especially, as he always was, by the Rigal mural overhead, composed of twenty-one individual paintings, each a tribute to Greek mythology. He felt completely at peace, reassured that great art endures and that his greatest work was almost at hand.

EIGHTEEN
    AUGUST 13, 2OO5, 11:50 A.M., CENTRAL TIME
    Clevenger had gotten a call from Whitney McCormick just before 7:00 A.M. and had managed to grab an 8:35 A.M. flight from Boston to Chicago.
    He stood with her in front of Chase Van Myer’s naked body, sitting upright, wrists bound to the armrests of the center seat in the front row of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a billowing, stainless steel band shell designed by Frank Gehry, the centerpiece of Chicago’s $475 million Millennium Park. Her eye sockets had been meticulously