The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 7





Making his way back to his workshop off Canal Street, west of Chinatown, Billy Haven was thinking of Lovely Girl again, after the memories of her face, her voice, her touch had arisen so persistently during the modding session with Little Miss Pretentious, Chloe.

He was thinking of the letters he’d done: the second. The borders too.

Yes, a good work.

A Billy Mod.

He’d changed out of his coveralls, which had possibly been contaminated with poison (why take chances?), and had slipped them into a garbage bag. Then into a Dumpster a long way from the boutique. He was wearing street clothes underneath: black jeans, leather gloves, also black. His dark-gray wool coat. It was short – to mid-thigh. Warm enough and not so long that it might interfere if he had to sprint to escape from someone, which as Billy was well aware was a very real possibility at some point over the next few days.


On his head was the ski mask scrunched up as a stocking cap, also wool. He looked like any other young man in Manhattan heading to his apartment through the freezing rain, hunched over, cold.

Lovely Girl …

Billy remembered seeing her for the first time, years ago. It was a photograph, actually, not even the girl herself. But he’d fallen in love – yes, yes, at first sight. Not long after that his aunt had commented, ‘Oh, she’s a lovely girl. You could do much worse than her.’

Billy immediately took that as the pet name for his beloved.

The girl with the beautiful ivory skin.

Squinting against the crappy weather – the wind firing BBs of ice and freezing rain into his face – Billy pulled his coat tighter around him. Concentrated on avoiding icy patches. This was difficult.

It was now some hours after he’d finished with Chloe in the tunnel beneath the boutique. He’d stayed around the area, sticking to the shadows, to see about the police. Somebody had dialed 911 about five minutes after Billy had climbed from the manhole on Elizabeth Street. The cops had arrived en masse and Billy’d checked out their procedures. He’d observed and taken mental notes and would later transcribe his thoughts. The Modification Commandments weren’t phrased like the biblical ones, of course. But if they had been, one would be: Know thy enemy as thyself.

Trudging along, walking carefully. He was young and in good shape, agile, but he could hardly afford a fall. A broken arm would be disastrous.

Billy’s workshop wasn’t far from the site of the attack but he was walking a complicated route back home, making sure no one had seen him near the manhole and followed.

He went around the block once, then twice, just to be safe, and returned to the ugly, squat four-story former warehouse, now a quasi-residential structure. That is, quasi-legal. Or maybe completely illegal. We’re talking New York City real estate, after all. He’d paid cash for the short-term rental, a lot of cash. The agent had taken the money with a smile and made a point of not asking a single question.

Not that it mattered. He’d been prepared to spin a credible tale, forged documents included.

Thou shalt have thy cover story memorized.

Then, confirming that the sidewalk was deserted, Billy walked down a short flight of stairs to his front door. Three clicks of three locks and he was inside, exchanging as a soundtrack the horns of irritated drivers stuck in Chinatown by the bad weather for the rumble and brake squeals of the subway cars running directly beneath his place.

Sounds from underground. Comforting.

Billy pressed a switch and anemic lights filled the twenty-by-twenty-five-foot space – a combination living room/bedroom/kitchen/everything else. The room had a certain dungeon feel to it. One wall was exposed brick, the others halfhearted Sheetrock. He had a second rental, farther north, a safe house, which he’d planned to stay in more frequently than here on his mission for the Modification, but the workshop had turned out to be more comfortable than the safe house, which was smack on a busy street populated with the sort of people he despised.

The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents, some more helpful than others. The Field Guide to Poisonous Plants was sumptuously illustrated but didn’t have quite the same level of useful information as the underground blog called Knock ’Em Off: A Dozen Deadly Recipes for When the Revolution Comes and We Have to Fight Back!!

All arranged neatly on the workspace, just like in his tattoo parlor back home. The far corner of the room was pooled in the cool glow of ultraviolet lights that illuminated eight terrariums. He walked to these now and examined the plants inside. The leaves and flowers comforted him, they were so reminiscent of home. Pinks and whites and purples and greens in a thousand shades. The colors fought against the dull mud tone of the city, whose hateful spirit lapped every minute at Billy Haven’s heart. Suitcases contained changes of clothes and toiletries. A gym bag held several thousand dollars, sorted by denomination but wrinkled and old and very untraceable.

He watered the plants and spent just a few minutes finishing a sketch of one of them, an interesting configuration of leaves and twigs. Even as someone who’d drawn all his life, Billy sometimes wondered where the urge came from. Sometimes he just had to take out a pencil or crayon and transfer something from life, which would fade, into something that would not. That would last forever.

He’d sketched Lovely Girl a thousand times.

The pencil now drooped in his hand and he left a sketch of a branch half-finished, tossing the pad aside.

Lovely Girl …

He couldn’t think of her without hearing his uncle’s somber voice, the deep baritone: ‘Billy. There’s something I have to tell you.’ His uncle had gripped him by the shoulders and looked down into his eyes. ‘Something’s happened.’

And, with those simple, horrific words, he’d learned she was gone.

Billy’s parents too were gone – though their deaths had been years ago and he’d come to some terms with the loss.

Lovely Girl’s? No, never.

She was going to be his companion forever. She was going to be his wife, the mother of his children. She was going to be the one to save him from the past, from all the bad, from the Oleander Room.

Gone, just like that.

But today he wasn’t thinking so much of the terrible news, wasn’t thinking of the unfairness of what had happened, though what had happened was unfair.

And he wasn’t thinking of the cruelty, though what had happened was cruel.

No, at the moment, having just finished inking Chloe, Billy was thinking that he was on the road to the end of pain.

The Modification was under way.

Billy sat at the rickety table in the kitchen area of the basement apartment and removed from his shirt pocket the pages of the book he’d found that morning.

He’d found out about the volume weeks ago and knew he needed a copy to complete his planning for the Modification. It was out of print, though he’d found a few copies he could buy online through secondhand-book sellers. But he couldn’t very well order one with a credit card and have it shipped to his home. So Billy had been searching through used-book shops and libraries. There were two copies in the New York Public Library but they weren’t where they should have been in the stacks, in either the Mid-Manhattan branch or a satellite branch in Queens.

But he’d tried once more, earlier today, returning on a whim to the library on Fifth Avenue.

And there it was, reshelved and Dewey Decimaled into place. He’d pulled the book down from the shelf and stood in the shadows, skimming.

Badly written, he’d noted from his brief read in the stacks. An absurdly sensational cover in black, white, red. Both the style and the graphics helped explain the out-of-print status. But what the book contained? Just what he needed, filling in portions of the plan the way flats or round shader needles filled in the space between the outlines of a tattoo.

Billy had worried about getting the book out of the library – he couldn’t check it out, of course. And there’d been security cameras near the photocopiers. In the end he’d decided to slice out the chapter he wanted with a razor blade. He’d cut deep and carefully before hiding the book away so no one else could find it. He knew that the book itself probably contained a chip in the spine that would have set off the alarm at the front doors if he’d tried to walk out with the entire thing. Still, he’d flipped through all the pages he’d stolen, one by one, to search for a second chip. There’d been none and he’d walked out of the library without a blare of alarms.


Now he was eager to study the pages in depth, to help with the rest of the plans for the Modification. But as he spread them out before him, he frowned. What was this? The first page was damaged, the corner torn off. But he was sure that he’d extracted all of them intact from the spine without any tearing. Then he glanced at his shirt breast pocket and noted it too was torn. He remembered that Chloe’d ripped his coveralls when she’d fought back. That’s what had happened. She’d torn both the clothing and the page.

But the damage wasn’t too bad though and only a small portion was missing. He now read carefully. Once, twice. The third time he took notes and tucked them into the Commandments.

Helpful. Good. Real helpful.

Setting the pages aside, he answered some texts, received some. Staying in touch with the outside world.

Now it was cleaning time.

No one appreciates germs, bacteria and viruses more than a skin artist. Billy wasn’t the least concerned about infecting his victims – that was, really, the whole point of the Modification – but he was very concerned about infecting himself, with whatever tainted the blood of his clients and, in particular, with the wonderful substances he was using in place of ink.

He walked to the sink and unzipped his backpack. Pulling on thick gloves, he took the American Eagle tattoo machine to the sink and dismantled it. He drained the tubes of liquid and washed them in two separate gallon buckets of water, rinsing them several times and drying them with a Conair. The water he poured into a hole he’d cut in the floor, letting it soak into the earth beneath the building. He didn’t want to flush or pour the water down the drain. That little matter of evidence, once again.

This bath was just the start, however. He cleaned each piece of the machine with alcohol (which sanitizes only; it doesn’t sterilize). He placed the parts in an ultrasonic bath of disinfectants. After that he sealed them in bags and popped them into the autoclave – a sterilization oven. Normally needles are disposed of but these were very special ones and hard to come by. He autoclaved these too.

Of course, only part of this was sanitizing to protect himself from poisons and infection. There was a second reason as well: What better way to sever any link between you and your victims than to burn it away at 130 degrees Celsius?

Might even make hash of your ‘dust’ theory, don’t you think, Monsieur Locard?