The Skin Collector (17 page)

  
Trace evidence

• Nitric oxide, ozone, iron manganese, nickel, silver beryllium, chlorinated hydrocarbon, acetylene
  

  –
  Possibly oxy-fuel welding supplies
  

• Tetrodotoxin
  

  –
  Fugu fish poison
  

  –
  Zombie
  drug
  

  –
  Minute amounts
  

  –
  Not used on victim here
  

• Stercobilin, urea 9.3 g/L, chloride 1.87 g/L, sodium 1.17 g/L, potassium 0.750 g/L, creatinine 0.670 g/L
  

  –
  fecal material
  

  –
  Possibly suggesting interest/obsession in underground
  

  –
  From future kill sites underground?
  

• Benzalkonium chloride
  

  –
  Quaternary ammonium (quat), institutional sanitizer
  

• Adhesive latex
  

  –
  Used in bandages and construction,
  other uses too.
  

• Inwood marble
  

  –
  Dust and fine grains
  

• Tovex explosive
  

  –
  Probably from blast site
  

Rhyme turned from the chart to Amelia Sachs, whom he caught staring out the window into the sleety morning. She was still obviously troubled by the news she’d received yesterday – that Pam was going on a ’round-the-world tour with her boyfriend, then moving in with him when they returned.

Seth was a nice young man, she’d explained as they’d lain in his sumptuous bed last night, lights out, the wind battering the windows. ‘To date. Not hole up in a hostel in Morocco or Goa. Maybe he’s Mr Perfect, maybe he’s not. Who can tell?’

‘Think it’ll blow over?’

‘No. She’s determined.’

‘Like you. Remember your mother didn’t like you going out with a gimp in a wheelchair?’

‘You could’ve
been a marathon runner and she wouldn’t’ve liked you. Nobody could meet my mother’s standards. She likes you now, though.’

‘My point exactly.’

‘I like Seth. I’ll like him better in a year.’

Rhyme had smiled.

She had asked, ‘Any thoughts?’

‘Afraid not.’ Rhyme had been married for a few years. He’d gotten divorced not long after his accident (his call; not his wife’s), but the marriage had
been doomed for some time. He was sure he’d been in love at some point but the relationship had soured for reasons he could never isolate, quantify and analyze. As for what he had with Sachs? It worked because it worked. That was the best he could say. Lincoln Rhyme was admittedly in no position to offer romantic advice.

But then who, ultimately, was? Love is an occurrence for which there are
no expert witnesses.

Sachs had added, ‘And I didn’t handle it well. I got protective. Too motherly. It turned ugly. I should’ve been objective, rational. But, no, I let things get out of control.’

Now, this morning, Rhyme could see that Sachs was still deeply troubled. He was thinking he should say something reassuring, when, to his relief, the professional deflected the personal.

‘Have something
here,’ Pulaski called from across the lab, where he’d been staring at a monitor. ‘I think …’ He fell silent, glowering. ‘Damn Internet. Just when I had some hits.’

Rhyme could see that his screen was frozen.

‘Okay, okay, up again.’

He was tapping more keys. Maps and schematics and what appeared to be lists of compounds and elemental materials popped up on the big screen.

‘You’re getting to
be quite the scientist, rookie,’ Rhyme said, regarding the notes.

‘What do you have, Ron?’ Mel Cooper asked.

‘Some good news for a change. Maybe.’

Harriet Stanton’s family trip to New York, which she’d been looking forward to for years, had not turned out as planned.

It had been derailed by a chance incident that could have changed her life forever.

Harriet now stood before the mirror of the hotel suite she’d spent a restless night in and looked over her suit. Dark. Not black but navy blue.

How close she’d come to selecting
the former color. Bad luck, making that choice.

She plucked a few pieces of random lint off the wool, brushed at some dust – the hotel was not as nice as advertised online (but it was affordable and frugality was important in the Stanton family, which hailed from a town where accommodation standards were set by a Holiday Inn).

Fifty-three years old, with slim shoulders and a pear-shaped build
(but a slim pear), Harriet had a staunch face that was ruddy and weathered – from gardening, from marshaling children after class in the backyard, from picnics and barbecues. Yet she was the least vain woman on earth, and the only creases that troubled her were not in her face but in the skirt of the suit – one set of wrinkles that she could control.

Given her destination, a grim place, she might
easily have ignored the imperfection. But that wasn’t Harriet’s way. There was a right approach and a wrong, a lazy, a misguided approach. She unzipped and sloughed off the skirt, which slid easily over the beige slip.

She deftly ratcheted open the cheap ironing board with one hand (oh, Harriet knew her laundry implements) and plugged in the inadequate iron, which was secured to the board with
a wire; were handheld appliance thefts such a terrible problem in New York? And didn’t the hotel have the guests’ credit cards anyway?

Oh, well. It was a different world here, so different from home.

As she waited for the heat to gather she kept replaying her husband’s words from yesterday as they’d walked through the chill streets of New York.

‘Hey, Harriet, hey.’ He’d stopped on the street,
halfway between FAO Schwarz and Madison Avenue, hand on a lamppost.

‘Honey?’ she’d asked, circling.

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ The man, ten years older than his wife, had seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m not feeling so good. Something.’ He’d touched his chest. ‘Something here, you know.’

Cab or call? she’d wondered, debating furiously.

Nine one one, of course. Don’t fool around.

In twenty minutes they were
at a nearby hospital emergency room.

And the diagnosis: a mild myocardial infarction.

‘A what?’ she’d asked.

Oh, it seemed: heart attack.

This was curious. Outfitted with low cholesterol, the man had never smoked cigarettes in his life, only occasional cigars, and his six-foot-two frame was as narrow and strong as the pole he’d gripped to steady himself when the heart attack had struck. He
trekked through the woods after deer and boar every weekend during hunting season when he could find the time. He helped friends frame rec rooms and garages. Every weekend he muscled onto his shoulder forty-pounders of mulch and potting soil and carried them from pickup truck to shed.

‘Unfair,’ Matthew had muttered, upon hearing the diagnosis. ‘Our dream trip to the city, and look what happens.
Damn unfair.’

As a precaution, the doctors had transferred him to a hospital about a half hour north of their hotel, which was apparently the best cardiac facility in the city. His prognosis was excellent and he’d be released tomorrow. No surgery was called for. There would be some medication to lower his blood pressure and he’d carry around nitroglycerine tablets. And he should take an aspirin
a day. But the doctors seemed to treat the attack as minor.

To test the iron she flicked a dot of spit onto the Teflon plate. It sizzled and leapt off. She spritzed a bit of water onto the skirt from the Dannon bottle and ironed the wrinkles into oblivion.

Slipping the skirt back on, she reexamined herself in the mirror. Good. But she decided she needed some color and tied a red-and-white silk
scarf around her neck. Perfect. Bright but not flamboyant. She collected her handbag and left the room, descending to the lobby in an elevator car outside which a chain jangled at every passing floor.

Once outside, Harriet oriented herself and flagged down a cab. She told the driver the name of the hospital and climbed into the back seat. The air inside was funky and she believed the driver,
some foreigner, hadn’t bathed recently. A cliché but true.

Despite the sleet, she rolled down the window, prepared to argue if he objected. But he didn’t. He seemed oblivious to her – well, to everything. He punched the button on the meter and sped off.

As they clattered north in the old taxi, Harriet was thinking about the facilities at the hospital. The staff seemed nice and the doctors professional,
even if their English was awkward. The one thing she didn’t like, though, was that Matthew’s room in Upper Manhattan Medical Center was in the basement at the end of a long, dim corridor.

Shabby and creepy. And when she’d visited last night it had been deserted.

Looking at the elegant town houses to the left and Central Park to the right, Harriet tried to cast off any concerns about visiting
the unpleasant place. She was thinking that maybe the bad luck of the heart attack was an omen, hinting at worse to come.

But then she put those feelings down to superstition, pulled out her phone and sent a cheerful text that she was on her way.

With his backpack over his shoulder – the pack containing the American Eagle machine and some particularly virulent poison – Billy Haven turned down a side street, past a large construction area, avoiding pedestrians.

That is, avoiding witnesses.

He stepped into the doctors’ office building annex, next to the Upper Manhattan Medical Center complex. In the lobby he kept his head down
and walked purposefully toward a stairwell. He’d scoped the place out and knew exactly where he was going and how to get there invisibly.

No one paid any attention to the slim young man, like so many slim young men in New York, an artist, a musician, a wishful actor.

Just like them.

Though their backpacks didn’t contain what his did.

Billy pushed through the fire door and started down the
stairs. He descended to the basement level and followed the signs to the hospital proper, through a long, dim corridor. It was deserted, as if not many workers knew about it. More likely, they were aware of the dingy route but preferred to walk from office building to hospital on the surface, where you could not only find a Starbucks or buy a slice of Ray’s original pizza but not get dragged into
a closet and raped.

The tunnel leading to the hospital was long – several hundred feet – and painted a gray that you associated with warships. Pipes ran overhead. It was dark because the hospital, perhaps in a move to save money, had placed a bulb in every third socket. There were no security cameras.

Billy knew time was critical but he, of course, had to make one stop. He’d noted the detour
yesterday, when he’d checked to see if this would be a suitably private route into the hospital.

The sign on the door had intrigued him.

He’d simply
had
to go inside.

And he did so now, aware of the time pressure. But feeling like a kid playing hooky to hang out in a toy store.

The large room, labeled by the sign
Specimens
, was dim but lit well enough by the emergency exit lights, which cast
an eerie rosy glow on the contents: a thousand jars filled with body parts floating in a jaundiced liquid, presumably formaldehyde.

Eyes, hands, livers, hearts, lungs, sexual organs, breasts, feet. Whole fetuses too. Billy noted that most of the samples dated to the early twentieth century. Maybe back then medical students used the real thing to learn anatomy, while today’s generation went for
high def computer images.

Against the wall were shelves of bones, hundreds of them. He thought back to the infamous case Lincoln Rhyme had worked years ago, the Bone Collector crimes. Yet bones held little interest for Billy Haven.

The Rule of Bone?

No, didn’t resonate like the Rule of Skin. No comparison.

He now walked up and down the aisles, examining the jars, which ranged from a few inches
to three feet in height. He paused and stared, eye-to-eye with a severed head. The features seemed of South Pacific heritage to Billy, or so he wanted to believe – because, to his delight, the head sported a tattoo: a cross just below where the hairline would have been.

Billy took this as a good sign. The word ‘tattoo’ comes from the Polynesian or Samoan
tatau
, the process of inking the lower
male torso with an elaborate geometric design, called a
pe’a
(and a woman’s with a similar inking, called a
malu
). The process takes weeks and is extremely painful. Those who finish the inking get a special title and are respected for their courage. Those who don’t even try are called ‘naked’ in Samoan and marginalized. The worst stigma, though, was awarded to the men and women who started the
procedure but didn’t finish it because they couldn’t stand the pain. The shame remained with them forever.

Billy liked the fact that they defined themselves according to their relationship to inking.

He decided to believe that the man he was staring at had endured getting his
pe’a
and had gone on to be a force in his tribe. Heathen though he might have been, he was brave, a good warrior (even
if not clever enough to avoid having his head end up on a steel shelf in the New World).

Billy held the jar in one hand and leaned forward until he was only a few inches from the severed head, separated by thick glass and thin liquid.

He thought about one of his favorite books.
The Island of Doctor Moreau
. The H. G. Wells novel was about an Englishman shipwrecked on an island, on which the doctor
of the title surgically combined humans and animals. Hyena-men, Leopard-men … Billy had read and reread the book the way other kids would read
Harry Potter
or
Twilight
.

Vivisection and recombination were the ultimate modding, of course.
And Doctor Moreau
was the
perfect
example of the application of the Rule of Skin.

All right. Time to get back to reality, he chided himself.

Billy now stepped
to the door and looked up and down the corridor. Still deserted. He continued his way to the hospital and knew when he’d crossed into the building. The neutral scent of cleanser and mold from the office building was overrun by a mélange of smells. Sweet disinfectants, alcohol, Lysol, Betadine.