The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 50





Leaving the poisoned whisky for Rhyme had been as exhilarating as Billy Haven had expected. More, actually.

Part of this was the need to derail the criminalist’s investigation. But part too was the thrill of the game. Sneaking inside, right under the man’s nose, while he and his associates were in the front hall, watching the excitement in the park.

Dark-skinned male …

Making his way through the East Village, Billy was reflecting that the Commandments took into account nearly everything about the Modification. But some contingencies it didn’t cover. Like poisoning the forensic expert who anticipated everything.

He was now on a similar mission.

Thou shalt be prepared to improvise.

The residents in this part of the city seemed frazzled, unclean, distracted, tense. After the abortive trip to the hospital in Marble Hill, escaping, he’d felt a certain contempt for those on the streets of the Bronx, but at least he’d observed plenty of families, shopping together, going into diners together, heading to or from school events. Here, everyone seemed on their own. People in their twenties mostly, wearing threadbare winter coats and ugly boots, protecting them from the gray-yellow slush. A few couples but even they seemed drawn together by either rootless infatuation or desperation. No one appeared really in love.

He pitied them but he felt contempt for these people too.

Billy thought, naturally, of Lovely Girl. But now he wasn’t sad. Everything was going to be all right. He was confident. All would be made right. Full circle.

The Rule of Skin …

He walked a few blocks farther until he came to the storefront. The sign on the door reported Open but there was no one inside, not in the shop itself, though in the back he could see a shadow of movement. He looked over the art and posters and photos in the windows. Superheroes, animals, flags, monsters. Slogans. Rock groups.

A thousand examples of tattoos.

Mostly silly and commercial and pointless. Like TV shows and Madison Avenue advertising. He mentally sneered at the tackiness on display.

How skin art had changed over time, Billy reflected. Inking was, in ancient days, a serious affair. For the first thousand or more years of its existence, tattooing was not primarily about decoration. Until the 1800s body art was ritualistic and bound up with religion and societal structure. Primitive people tattooed themselves for a number of practical reasons: defining class or tribe, for instance, or sucking up to this god or that. The art served another reason too, vital: identification of your soul for entry into the underworld; if you were unmarked in life, you’d be rejected by the gatekeeper and wander the earth after death, weeping for eternity. Inking acted too as a barrier to keep your soul from migrating out of the body (the origin of the chain and barbed-wire body art so common nowadays on biceps and necks). And high on the list of reasons people inked themselves was to open a portal so evil spirits would flee the body, like wasps out an open car window – spirits that would, say, prod them to do something they didn’t want to do.

Taking pleasure from blood, for instance.

The Oleander Room …

His reflections faded as Billy pulled on his jaundiced latex gloves and opened the door, which set off a buzzer.

‘Out in a minute,’ the voice from the back called.

‘No worries.’ Billy looked around the tiny shop. The chairs, the massage-style tables for tramp stamps and shoulders, the machines and tubes and needles. Good stuff. He looked at the pictures of satisfied customers and concluded that, even if most of the works the shop produced were crap, TT Gordon was a talented artist.

Extracting the hypodermic needle filled with propofol from his backpack, Billy flipped the hanging sign on the door to Closed and locked the latch. He made his way toward the shimmery curtain of beads separating the front room from the back.