The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 19





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.

And the others, repulsive to some, but not to Billy: the aromas of skin in decay, skin melting under infection and bacteria, skin burning to ash … perhaps from lasers in operating rooms.

Or maybe hospital workers were disposing of discarded tissue and organs in an oven somewhere. He couldn’t think of this without recalling the Nazis, who had used the skin of Holocaust victims for practical purposes, like lamp shades and books. And who had devised a system of tattooing that was the simplest – and most significant – in history.

The Rule of Skin …

Billy inhaled deeply.

He sensed some other aroma: extremely offensive. What, what?

Oh, he understood. With so many foreign workers in the medical fields, the foods the hospital prepared included those aromatic with curry and garlic.

Disgusting.

Billy finally entered the heart of the hospital, the third sub-basement. It was completely deserted here. A perfect place to bring a victim for some deadly modding, he reflected.

The elevator would have surveillance cameras so he found the stairwell, entered it and started to climb. At the next sub-basement, number two, he paused and peeked out. It was the morgue, presently unstaffed. Apparently the medicos had not managed to kill anyone yet today.

Up another flight to the basement level, a floor with patient rooms. Peering out through the fire door’s greasy glass, crosshatched with fine metal mesh, he could see a flash of color, then motion: a woman walking down the corridor, her back to him.

Ah, he thought, noting that while her skirt and jacket were navy blue, the scarf around her neck was red-and-white shimmery silk. It stood out like a flag in the drab setting. She was alone. He eased through the door and followed. He noted her muscular legs – revealed clearly by the knee-length skirt – noted the slim waist, noted the hips. The hair, in a tight bun, was brown with a bit of gray. Although the sheer pantyhose revealed a few purplish veins near the ankle, her skin was superb for an older woman’s.

Billy found himself aroused, heart pounding, the blood throbbing in his temples. And elsewhere.

Blood. The Oleander Room … blood on the carpet, blood on the floor.


She whispered harshly, ‘Come here! Get under cover. We’ve got a perp somewhere.’

He joined her and they both pressed against the wall.

‘Amelia.’

‘I’m Leron.’ The man had quick eyes and he took in the hallway. ‘I heard a ten-thirteen.’

‘Heard?’

‘Gotta scanner.’

‘Backup’s on their way?’

‘Right.’

She noted he had a Beretta Nano on his hip, a small gun, 9mm, and accurate enough under good conditions if you mastered the long trigger pull. Unusual for a hospital guard to be armed. She noted that he hadn’t drawn it. No need, no target. This explained him.

‘You were in?’ she asked.

‘Nineteenth.’

One of the Upper East Side precincts.

‘Patrol. Retired, medical. Diabetes. That sucks. Keep your weight down.’ He was breathing hard. ‘Not that you—’

‘You came from the doctors’ office building?’

‘Yep. Drew that detail today. Security in the hospital called me.’ He looked behind her and snickered. ‘None of the brothers I work with decided to come take a look-see. Ha.’

‘So he couldn’t’ve gotten out that way.’

‘Nope. Not past me.’ Leron scanned again, behind them, to the left, then to the right.

So 11-5 was here somewhere near, then. But there weren’t many places to hide. There were only a few doors and most of them, storage or electrical and infrastructure, were padlocked.

Leron whispered, ‘Backpack.’

‘Right.’

‘Bomb?’

‘Not his MO. Serial doer, we’re thinking.’

‘Weapon?’

‘Said so but I didn’t see it.’

‘If they say and don’t show they usually don’t have.’

This was true.

‘But, Leron, time for you to get upstairs.’ Nodding toward the stairwell. ‘I’ll take over.’ She was supposed to keep civilians – which Leron was, even in his storm trooper uniform and with an American-made Italian gun – out of tactical situations.

‘Sorry, Detective,’ the man said firmly. ‘The hospital, ’s my ’hood here. Nobody f*cks with it. You tell me to stay put, I’ll follow you anyway. An’ I don’t suppose you want to hear footsteps behind you in a spooky place like this.’

Backup, she guessed, was still ten, fifteen minutes away.

She debated. But not very long. ‘Deal. Just don’t fire that sissy gun of yours unless the perp’s about to park one in me. Or you. And you get yourself shot, I’ll be writing up reports till kingdom come. That’ll piss me off.’

‘Got it.’

‘We’ll go together, Leron. Now let’s move.’