The Skin Collector (23 page)

He looked her over carefully. The tattoo was good. The cicatrized border too. He was pleased. When he did a work for clients in his shop back home, Billy never worried about their reaction. He had his own standards. A job they seemed indifferent to might fill him with ecstasy. Or a girl could tearfully look
over her wedding cake tattoo (yes, pretty popular) and cry at how beautiful it was but he’d see one flaw, a tiny stroke out of place, and Billy would be furious with himself for days.

This art was good, though. He was satisfied.

He wondered if they’d catch on to the message now. But, no, not even Lincoln Rhyme was that good.

Thinking about the difficulty he’d had earlier – at the hospital and
the doctors’ office building – he’d decided it was time to start slowing down those pursuing him.

One of the passages in the Commandments, written in Billy’s flowing script, was this: ‘Continually reassess the strengths of the officers investigating you. It may be necessary to throw up roadblocks to their investigation. Aim for the lower-level officers only; too senior, and the authorities will
bring more effort to bear on finding you.’

Or, in Billy’s terms:
Thou shalt smite all those who are trying to mess with the Modification.

His idea for slowing them down was simple. People who’ve never been inked think that machines use a hollow needle. But that’s not the case. Tattoo needles are solid, usually several soldered together, allowing the ink to run down the shaft and into the skin.

But Billy had some hypodermics, to sedate his victims. He now reached into his gear bag and withdrew a plastic medicine bottle with a locking cap. He opened the lid carefully and set the brown cylinder on the ground. He selected a surgeon’s hemostat, long tweezers, from his stash of stolen medical equipment. With this instrument he reached into the plastic bottle and picked up the three-quarter-inch
tip of a thirty-gauge hypodermic – one of the smallest diameters. He’d carefully fatigued this tip off the syringe and packed it with poison.

He now picked up the woman’s purse and worked the dull end of the needle into the leather under the clasp so that when the crime scene cop opened the bag, the business end of the nearly microscopic needle would pierce the glove and the skin. The tip was
so thin, it was unlikely that the person pricked would feel a thing.

Until, of course, about an hour later, when the symptoms hit them like a fireball. And those symptoms were delicious: Strychnine produces some of the most extreme and painful reactions of any toxin. You can count on nausea, convulsion of muscles, hypertension, grotesque flexing of the body, raw sensitivity and finally asphyxiation.

Strychnine, in effect, spasms you to death.

Though in this case, the dosage would, in an adult, lead to severe brain damage rather than death.

Visit pestilence upon your pursuers.

A moan from behind him.

She was swimming to consciousness.

Billy turned toward her, the beam of the halogen whipsawing around the room, fast, leveraged by the motion of his head.

He carefully set the purse on the
ground in a spot that looked as if he’d tossed it aside casually – they’d think it contained all sorts of good trace evidence and fingerprints. He hoped it would be Amelia Sachs who picked it up. He was angry at her for finding him at the hospital, even if Lincoln Rhyme was the one responsible. He’d hoped someday to go back to the specimens room but, thanks to her, he never could.

Of course,
even if she didn’t get jabbed, maybe one of Lincoln Rhyme’s assistants would.

And Rhyme himself? He supposed it was possible; he’d learned that the man had regained some use of his arm and hand. Maybe he’d don a glove and pick up the purse. He
definitely
wouldn’t feel the sting.

‘Oh …’

He turned to look at the art gallery of beautiful skin stretched out before him. Ivory. He taped a flashlight
in place over his canvas, flicked it on. Looked at her eyes, squinting first in confusion, then in pain.

His wristwatch hummed.

Then the other.

And it was time to leave.

Lights flashed off the falling sleet, off the encrusted piles of old snow, off the wet asphalt.

Blue glows, white, red. Pulsing. Urgent.

Amelia Sachs was climbing out of her maroon Torino, parked beside several ambulances, though several ambulances weren’t necessary. None were. The only required medical vehicle was the city morgue van. The first responders to this scene reported that
Samantha Levine, the unsub’s second victim, was deceased, declared dead at the scene.

Poison again, of course. That was the preliminary, from the first responders, but there was no doubt this was Unsub 11-5’s work.

When she hadn’t returned to the table of the chic restaurant Provence
²
, her friends had become concerned. A search of the restroom revealed an access door, which was slightly askew.
A waiter had pulled it open, stuck his head in, gasped and vomited.

Sachs stood on the street, looking over the restaurant and the assembling vehicles. Lon Sellitto walked up. ‘Amelia.’

She shook her head. ‘We stopped him at the hospital this morning and he got somebody else. Right away. Telling us basically: “Fuck you.”’

Diners were settling checks and leaving and the staff were looking about
as thrilled as you could imagine, upon learning that a patron had been abducted in the restroom and dragged into a tunnel beneath their establishment and murdered.

It was only a matter of time, Sachs guessed, before Provence
²
would be shuttered. It was as if the restaurant itself were a second victim. She supposed the boutique on Elizabeth Street too would be out of business soon.

‘I’ll start
canvassing,’ the big detective muttered and ambled off, digging a notebook from his pocket.

The crime scene bus arrived and nosed up to the curb. Sachs waved to the CS techs who were climbing out. Jean Eagleston was the lead, the woman who’d worked the Chloe Moore scene in SoHo – only yesterday though it seemed like last month. She had a new partner, a slim Latino who had calm but probing eyes
– hinting that he was perfect for crime scene work. Sachs walked up to them. ‘Same procedure. I’ll go in first, process the body, walk the grid. You can handle the restroom where he snatched her, any exit routes.’

Eagleston said, ‘Will do, Amelia.’ She nodded and Sachs went to the back of the CS vehicle to suit up in the Tyvek, booties, hood and gloves. The N95 respirator too. Remembering that,
whatever happened, she should leave it in place.

Rust …

Goggles this time.

As she was stepping into the legs of the coveralls, she happened to glance up the street. On the corner, the same side of the street as the restaurant, was a man in a dark jacket that was similar to what the unsub had worn at the hospital for the attempted assault on Harriet Stanton – though he was in a baseball cap,
not a stocking. He was on a phone and paying only moderate attention to the scene. Still, there was something artificial about his pose.

Could it be the unsub, back again, as he’d done in SoHo?

She looked away quickly and continued to gown herself, trying to act casual.

It wasn’t common for a perp to return to the scene of the crime – that was a cliché helpful only in bad murder mysteries and
made-for-TV movies – but it did happen sometimes. Particularly perps who weren’t professional criminals but psychopaths, whose motives for murder were rooted in mental or emotional disturbance, which pretty much described Unsub 11-5.

On the pretext of getting a new pair of gloves from the far side of the bus, Sachs eased up to a detective she knew, a sharp, streetwise officer who’d recently been
assigned to Midtown North. Nancy Simpson was handling crowd control detail and directing diners out of the immediate scene as they exited the restaurant.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘Nancy.’

‘This guy again?’ the woman muttered. She was in an NYPD windbreaker, collar pulled high against the weather. Sachs liked the stylish beret, in dark green.

‘Looks like it.’

‘Got people scared all over town,’ Simpson
told her. ‘Reports of intruders in basements’re up a hundred percent. None of ’em pan out, but we send Patrol anyway. Tying up everything.’ She added with a wink. ‘And nobody’s washing their clothes. Afraid of the laundry room.’

‘We may have a situation, Nancy.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Don’t look behind you.’

‘I won’t. Why?’

‘We’ve got a fish I’m interested in. A guy on the corner. This block. He’s
in a jacket, baseball cap. I want you to get close but don’t see him. You know what I mean?’

‘Sure. I saw somebody. Peripheral. Wondered.’

‘Get close. And then stop him. Keep your weapon ready. There’s an off-chance it might be the perp.’

‘Who did
this
?’

‘Who did this. Not likely, I’m saying. But maybe.’

‘How should I get close?’

‘You’re checking traffic, you’re on your phone, pretending
you’re on your phone, I mean.’

‘Arrest?’

‘Just ID at this point. I’ll come up behind. I’ll have my weapon drawn.’

‘Fish. I’m bait.’

Sachs glanced to the side. ‘Oh, hell. He’s gone.’

The unsub, or whoever he was, had disappeared around the corner of a glass-and-chrome building, about ten stories high, next to the restaurant where Samantha Levine had been dining – before the fateful trip to
the restroom.

‘I’m on it,’ Simpson said. She sprinted in the direction the man had gone.

Sachs ran to the command post and told Bo Haumann there was a possible suspect. Instantly he marshaled a half-dozen ESU and other officers. She glanced toward Simpson. From the way she paused and looked around, Sachs deduced the suspect had vanished.

The detective turned and trotted back to Sachs and Haumann.

‘Sorry, Amelia. He’s gone. Maybe ducked into that building – the fancy one on the corner – or took off in a car.’

Haumann said, ‘We’ll follow up. We have a picture of your unsub from the homicide yesterday, the Identi-Kit image.’

She pictured the surly, Slavic-looking face, the weirdly light eyes.

The ESU leader said to the men he’d called around him, ‘Deploy. Go find him. And somebody call
it in to Midtown South. I want a team moving west down Fifty-two Street. We’ll hem him in, if we can.’

‘Yessir.’

They trotted off.

As much as she wanted to go with them – she considered handing off the crime scene – Sachs finished dressing for the grid.

When she was gowned, bootied and hooded, she grabbed the collection kit and, with a glance back at the street down which the fish had swum
away, Sachs started for the door of the restaurant.

Sachs was grateful that, as at the previous scene, she didn’t have to lug the heavy halogen spots down to the murder site; they were already set up and burning brightly.

Thank you, first responders.

She glanced at the diagram from Rhyme’s database of underground New York to orient herself.

There were some similarities to the prior scene: the waterpipe, the utility conduits, the yellow boxes marked
IFON
. But there was a major difference too. This space was much bigger. And she could climb directly into it through the access doorway in the bathroom. No circular coffin breadbaskets.

Thank you …

From the ancient wooden pens surrounding the dirt floor, she deduced that it had been
part of a passageway to move animals to and from one of the stockyards that used to operate near here, in Hell’s Kitchen. She remembered that the perp seemed to be influenced by the Bone Collector; that killer too had used a former slaughterhouse as a place to stash one of his victims – and staked her down, bloody, so she would be devoured alive by rats.

Unsub 11-5 certainly had learned at the
feet of a master.

The access door in the restroom opened into a large octagon, from which three tunnels disappeared into the darkness.

Sachs clicked on the video and audio feed. ‘Rhyme? You there?’

‘Ah, Sachs. I was wondering.’

‘He might’ve come back again. Like on Elizabeth Street.’

‘Returned to the scene?’

‘Or never left. I saw someone on the street, matching. Bo Haumann’s got officers
checking it out.’

‘Anything?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why’s he coming back?’ Rhyme mused. Not expecting an answer.

The camera was pointed in the direction she was looking – toward the dimness of a tunnel’s end. Before turning to the body, though, she slipped rubber bands over her booties and tracked along the unsub’s footprints, also muted by protective plastic, which led down one of the tunnels.

‘That’s
how he got in? I can’t see clearly.’

‘Looks that way, Rhyme. I see some lights up ahead.’

The perp hadn’t used a manhole to gain access. This tunnel, one of three, opened onto a train track – the line running north from Penn Station. The opening was largely obscured by a pile of debris but there was plenty of room for a person to climb over it. The unsub had simply walked up or down the tracks,
from a spot near the West Side Highway, and then scaled the rubble and made his way to the octagon-shaped space where Samantha had died. She radioed Jean Eagleston and told her about the secondary crime scene – the entrance/exit route.