Skin Deep (41 page)

The next moment Aaron Monks entered the room.

An involuntary cry pressed out of Dana's lungs as she stumbled to look at the man on the gurney and then at the man walking toward her.

I've lost my mind. I've had some kind of brain seizure that's left me delusional. They're one and the same man.

“Wh-wh-who…” was all she could get out.

“He's nobody.”

“Wha-what's happening?” she pleaded.

He walked over to the gurney and pulled the sheet over the man's face and turned toward her. His face looked strangely immobile, eyes dark but blank. Gone was the warm simpatico smile that she had taken comfort in. And in its place something implacable and raw, like a face that had too long been kept under a mold.

“What are you doing?” she begged. She told herself that things would make sense, that someone would tell her what was going on and rid her of the sense of dread that was wracking her bowels.

She tried to ask who that man was and why he looked like Aaron and was he the real Aaron and who are you, but nothing would come. Nothing but fat dumb syllables that didn't connect.

From someplace she heard the sounds of people. The dinner party guests had arrived, she told herself.
Thank God
. Maybe someone would explain things, explain why nothing was making any sense.

My head.

Her brain felt like a lightbulb loose in its socket. “What's going on?” she asked. “Who are you?”

But he didn't answer her. “Get her ready.”

And from behind her Cho and Pierre entered with two other men in green. They took her arms and pulled her out of the room and into the bright lights of the corridor and into another room across it where they lifted her up and laid her on a bed.

Then they began to remove her clothes.

She was too weak to stop them.

The chopper owner was a retired coast guard pilot named Rob Krueger who ran his own flight school out of a small airport in Plymouth. He was a friend of Neil's, who had gone to the police academy with Krueger's brother.

To save time, the pilot picked them up at the medevac heliport on Huntington Avenue in Boston and flew a southerly inland course straight toward Buzzards Bay. Homer's Island lay about ten miles off the Massachusetts shore. The sky was heavily overcast and growing darker by the minute as they approached.

Krueger said he had been over the Elizabeth Islands before and knew the general layout of Homer's. Using a detailed island map that marked the various estates, he found Vita Nova, the name of the estate that Monks's receptionist had given. It was located on a rocky ledge that hung over Buck's Cove.

About fifty minutes from liftoff, they crossed over the southeastern end of the Elizabeth chain and dropped to two hundred feet as they approached Homer's. A sharp turn and the pilot pointed to Buck's Cove, which was outlined by the night lights burning on the row of half a dozen estates.

Vita Nova, which sat at the easterly end of the cove, blazed on the darkling heights. And in the cove below, illuminated by lights burning along a long dock stretching into the water, sat a long white power cruiser.

It was the same boat in the photo in Monks's office. The
Fair Lady.

Above her head hung blinding lights.

She tried to move her arms, but they would not obey the commands of her brain. The same with her feet. Even her middle felt fixed in place. They had strapped her to the table. Then her vision filled with faces.

“What are you doing?” she gasped.

“A little truth, a little beauty. All you need to know on earth. I'm sure Professor Pendergast would have appreciated that. Pity. The wrong man. That makes two of us.”

She didn't understand what he was saying and she was too fuzzy by whatever he had given her.

Pendergast. Pendergast.

Her mind rummaged for a connection. She recognized the name. Something to do with Steve. But it was too much work to recall.

Three other faces closed over hers.

“You remember Cho and Pierre. Actually, Drs. Cho Furlon and Pierre Shan. And this is Dr. Max DuPre, your faithful chauffeur.”

Unlike Monks, who was in white, they were in green scrubs. She could vaguely recognize the faces. They smiled at her then pulled up their masks.

Someone put a needle in her arm, and magically an IV bag appeared above her head. She smelled chemical odors.

Please!
Her mind screamed.
What are you doing? What do you want with me?
But the words got stuck in her brain and would not come.

Then her brain quieted.

And the last thing she saw was the light fixtures beginning to spin.

And the last thing she heard was a soothing voice, “Good night, Beauty Girl.”

The last thing she felt was Aaron Monks marking her face with a felt-tip pen.

The pilot lowered them to the beach, guided by the dock lights. The boat looked empty, although a night-light burned in the pilot compartment.

Dacey, Neil, and Steve got out with their weapons drawn. While Neil covered them from the beach, Steve and Dacey headed for the boat. Nobody was aboard, but a laptop and navigation charts were laid out on a table beside the steering wheel in the fore cabin. One chart showed the entire eastern seaboard, with details of the inland water ways. Others were of the eastern waters of Florida and the West Indies.

At the end of the dock rose a long set of wooden stairs leading up to Vita Nova, which glowed at the cliff top. There was no movement anywhere, no sounds but the waves and the chittering of cicadas. Overhead brooded a thick ceiling of clouds.

The chopper pilot had cut the engines and waited as the others climbed the stairs to the top of the cliff.

Neil and Dacey each carried a shotgun and a Glock in a shoulder holster, while Steve had his service weapon and a belt of stun grenades.

No one was certain what they would find in the mansion, but every fiber of Steve's being told him that Dana was here and in trouble.

At the top, they split but kept in whispered contact by their PDAs. They circled the house to determine any activity inside. Exterior lights burned as did two rooms at the rear, including the kitchen. An upstairs room was also lit. But no sounds came from the house. And no cars in the driveway, although there were two golf carts.

Steve and Dacey reconnoitered at the front while Neil covered the kitchen in the rear.

The front door was locked, but Dacey was prepared. From her pack she removed a handgrip plunger that she fastened to the glass panel near the handle and cut an arc with a glass cutter, then snapped it off, incised the sector, put her hand through the hole, and unlocked the door from the inside.

The interior was dead silent. A light burned in rear rooms, and in the parlor on the right. Steve pointed for Neil and Dacey to check the lit bedroom upstairs while he headed for the kitchen, his weapon gripped in both hands.

There was no sign of life in the kitchen, but there was a single champagne glass and an open bottle of Taittinger.

Neil French and Dacey came down shaking their heads. “Two packed travel bags,” Dacey whispered. “Women's clothes.”

Steve motioned for them to spread throughout the rest of the first floor. As they headed into the other rooms, he stopped in his tracks.

On a stool at a counter in the kitchen he saw Dana's bright green leather handbag. The one she had bought last summer when they were in New York for a long weekend.

When Neil and Dacey looked back, Steve held up the bag and mouthed: “Dana.”

Steve raised his gun and moved down the hall behind Dacey. She took only a few steps when she stopped and cupped her hand to her ear.

A sound. She turned and pointed to a door in a hall just off the kitchen.

Steve moved to it and nodded. A faint beeping. Neil nodded and they readied their weapons at the door. At a nod from Steve, Dacey pulled open the door.

The beeping was louder and more distinct. Like what you heard in hospitals. Heart monitors. Then from someplace below they heard muffled voices.

They were standing at the top of a long wooden staircase leading down to a lit basement. Steve led the way, Dacey behind while Neil waited at the top until they were below.

Steve found himself at the head of a long fluorescent-lit corridor with rooms on either side. The place looked like a replica of Monks's clinic except for a reception desk.

Steve followed the beeping past two rooms, one of which was open and a light inside fell on a hospital gurney. He had been to the Medical Examiner's office more times than he chose, and become all too familiar with the profile of a sheeted body.

His heart nearly stopped mid-beat. He moved to the body and braced himself, muttering a silent prayer as he gripped the edge of the sheet. Then he pulled it back.

Aaron Monks stared up at him through slitted eyes. A wad of gauze had been taped shut in his mouth and his hands had been tethered to the gurney rails.

He was dead.

Neil tugged at Steve's arm. He had found something in the corridor. He pointed to a room across the hall—it was the last door on that side. Inside they heard voices and more electronic beeps.

They braced at the door, and when Steve gave the nod they burst in.

“Freeze!”

For a moment Steve's eyes tried to process what his brain was registering.

In the middle of the room under operating room lights were two gurneys lying side by side with a person on each, draped but for their faces. Standing amidst beeping monitors and hanging IVs and a lot of other medical apparatus were four people in scrubs, masks and hair nets frozen in place. One of them was holding a scalpel wire as an electric cauterizer, the others had suctioning tube for the blood running down Dana's face.

The heart monitor showed a steady strong beat. And Steve sent up a prayer of thanks.

“Mother of God,” Dacey said.

On the other gurney beside a table piled with bloody sponges and cloths lay a body whose face had been completely removed but for the nose, lips, and patches over the eyes. All that they could make out under the hairline was a glistening mass of red muscle and fat.

“What the fuck..,” Neil said.

Overhead were two large flat screen monitors each with a split-screen image. One had the head of Dana side by side with a three-dimensional contour of her facial muscles and skull bone. Beside it were the same split-screen images of another muscle-bone contoured head and beside it a genderless blank. Overlaid on each were grids that segmented the faces into neat square tiles.

They were in the process of removing Dana's face to be transplanted onto that of the person on the other gurney.

But Steve could see that the incision on Dana's face was only partly made, from the forehead down to her right ear.

Steve had his pistol trained on the face of the man with the scalpel and closed in on him. “Drop it and sew her up.”

The man laid down the scalpel and said something in another language to the other man.

The other man looked back at Steve.

“Do it now or I'll blow your fucking heads off. Do it!”

The scalpel guy nodded then began to blot the blood where the incision had stopped.

Dacey pulled alongside of Steve while Neil moved to the other two surgeons, his gun raised three feet from his head. “Who's that?” Dacey asked.

Neither of the men responded.

“I said who's that man?”

Finally in a soft accented voice, one of them said, “Aaron Monks.”

“What? Who the fuck's out there?” Neil asked, the gun poised in aim at the other surgeon.

“I don't know his name,” said the taller one. “He was someone Dr. Monks had found.”

“Found for what?” Steve asked.

The man did not answer.

“For what?”

“To be his double.”

“The guy's dead.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly Steve felt as if the oxygen had been drained from the room. He moved to the gurney where Aaron Monks lay waiting for the face of Dana, his own in bloody scraps in a stainless-steel pan on the side table, some kind of glistening solution over the open tissue like an aspic.

Steve took a deep breath and lifted the bottom of the sheet draped over Monks's body then raised the bottom of the Johnny he wore.

Aaron Monks was a woman.

For days the media fed upon the story like jackals.

And every day was a jubilee for the headline makers, trying to outdo each other with lurid catchiness as details spurted out from the investigation:

 

NOTED COSMETIC SURGEON TURNED SERIAL KILLER

FAMOUS FACE DOC KILLS TO REMAKE STEPMOM

TRANSSEX FACE—OFF, DOC WANTED TO BE MUM

 

One tabloid even filled the front page with the
King Kong
declaration:
IT WAS BEAUTY KILLED THE BEAST
.

The investigation carried on for weeks during which time Monks's office, Lexington home, and Vita Nova site had been thoroughly searched. He had been meticulous in not leaving incriminating evidence linking him to the murders of the other women. He either had doctored his records or had arranged for the women to pay by cash so as to eliminate any paper trails.

Likewise, no physical evidence connected him to any of the crime scenes—no black stocking collection, no photographs, no journal, no correspondences. Because he had used freelance surgical teams and conducted all reconstructions at the offsite location, anonymity was maintained.

The only trophy of his crimes would have been Dana's face.

Following extensive interrogations, the three surgical assistants had confessed to being accomplices to the attempted transplant of Dana, although they pleaded not guilty to murder. Each had been trained in the country of his origin—Korea and Martinique. However, they became associated with Monks when accepted for advanced fellowship training in transplantation under a program allied with the prestigious Institute of Reconstructive Surgery headed up by him. He had taken them under mentorship, and in exchange for the opportunity to work with the renowned leader in facial transplantation—which eventually would help establish them in successful practices back home—they went along with his scheme. Allegedly Dr. Monks had claimed that Dana was suffering from terminal cancer, thus minimizing her sacrifice.

They also claimed to have known nothing of Monks's other killings. According to the U.S. Immigration Service, none of them was in the country when the others were committed. On those Monks had apparently acted alone. Subsequent autopsies showed that he had made implants on other women to assimilate the facial structure of Lila Monks, his stepmother, a woman whose beauty had gotten her modeling jobs and a few small parts in movies and television.

It was not clear the exact hold she had had on his psyche, but it was assumed that she had sexualized him as a child to the point that he never developed a normal, healthy relationship with other females. Following her alleged murder of his father, she committed suicide by hanging herself with a black Wolford stocking. According to police records, young Monks had found her and suffered her loss. Nearly inseparable from her, he fell into deep depression, according to sources. Twice during college he attempted suicide. It was hypothesized that Lila Monks's death had permanently scarred him, possibly rendering him sexually dysfunctional and bitter.

Over the years, his obsession morphed into the quiet hunt for patients whose facial structure resembled that of his stepmother, iconized in the sepia illustration in the negative that hung in his office. With the use of old photographs and MRI software, he had approximated the muscle-skeletal contours of her face to the point of calculating the exact requirements necessary to refashion hers from others.

“One possibility,” Jackie Levini had said, “is that he kept remaking the woman and killing her out of deep rage for abandoning him.”

“You mean,” Steve had replied, “he was killing his wicked stepmother over and over again.”

“Yes. Of course, the other possibility is that he murdered them because they were
not
Lila Monks. That he was killing his misses—his botched attempts to re-create her.”

“Pygmalion crossed with Ted Bundy.”

“Exactly.”

“Apparently he came to the realization that he'd have to continue killing until he was either stopped or he died.”

“Which was risky and not very fulfilling,” Steve said.

“Yes. And because of his skills, he saw a way to fulfill his profoundest desires while resolving his own sexual conflicts and those with the woman whom he both adored and hated.”

“The sex change.”

“Yes.”

A few weeks after the story broke, Steve's office was contacted by a urologist at a clinic in Prague. Six years ago, Monks had apparently convinced the doctors of his gender dysmorphia, and during a leave of absence from his practice—and unbeknownst to any friends or colleagues—he flew to Czechoslovakia, where he underwent a transsexual operation. When he returned to the United States, he continued his practice while he waited for the proper candidate to present herself.

Then Dana walked into his office.

Monks was a clever planner. According to Air France, he immediately purchased tickets to Paris and booked hotels for a medical conference in August. After a five-day stay, he was scheduled to fly to Martinique for another three weeks aboard the
Fair Lady,
after which he would return to Boston. He had even arranged for the yacht to be leased out to others in the Caribbean the week after he returned and to remain down there for the next seven months, after which he'd fly down to motor it back to Boston next spring.

That was the cover.

The real plan was to have his surgical team replace his own face with Dana's and to stage a fatal heart attack by leaving behind a dead homeless man, kidnapped months before and whose face Monks and his team had refashioned to a near duplicate of Monks's own, right down to the mole. For the right occasion, the body had been stored in a refrigeration unit at Vita Nova. Bolstering the visual identity they had even grafted Monks's own prints onto the dead man's fingers. Were an autopsy conducted, his death had been affected by curare to assimilate a heart attack. And the obituary would lament the premature death of a world-renowned plastic surgeon. The dead man was never identified.

Meanwhile, completing the diabolical plan, Aaron Monks would be taken on the
Fair Lady
to Martinique, where in a small villa he owned in backcountry hills he would recover to live out the rest of his life as Lillian Arona. All necessary documents, deeds, and passport had already been fabricated. Containers of red hair dye found aboard the boat revealed his plan to let his hair grow long and to color it.

As a chilling afterword, Steve returned to Aaron Monks's Web site, where he found a recent article by the doctor that concluded:

Ironically, because the transplant was interrupted by police, Monks's own removed skin suffered deterioration, as did the exposed muscles and blood vessels of his face. Because so much time was lost while his colleagues were forced to mend Dana, a last-minute attempt to reattach Monks's skin failed. For more than a week he was in intensive care at Massachusetts General Hospital, where doctors tried in vain to reverse the infection that had set in.

He died in a state of gross disfigurement, poisoned by his own face.

Because he left no records, the Essex River woman had still not been identified. The case remained open. Of course, there might have been other victims yet undiscovered. More secrets that Aaron Monks took with him to the grave.