The Skin Collector Read online

  Tat up. Get over it.

  But then his instructor had Billy sit beside him while he inked a client. A little work: Ozzy Osbourne's face. For some reason.

  Man, the blood and fluid that spattered! The face guard was as flecked as a pickup's windshield in August.

  'Be smart, Billy. Remember.'

  'Sure.'

  Ever since, he'd assumed that each customer was ripe with hep C and B and HIV and whatever other sexual diseases were popular.

  And for the mods he'd be inking over the next few days, of course, he couldn't afford any blowback.

  So, protection.

  And he'd worn the latex mask and hood, too, to make sure he didn't shed any of his abundant hair or slough off epidermal cells. To distort his features as well. There was the remote chance that, despite his careful selection of the secluded kill zones, he'd get spotted.

  Billy Haven now examined his victim again.

  Chloe.

  He'd noted the name on the tag on her chest and the pretentious Je m'appelle preceding it. Whatever that meant. Maybe Hello. Maybe Good morning. French. He lowered his gloved hand - double-gloved - and stroked her skin, pinching, stretching, noting the elasticity, the texture, the fine resilience.

  Billy noted too the faint rise between her legs, beneath the forest-green skirt. The lower line of the bra. But there was no question of misbehaving. He never touched a client anywhere he shouldn't touch.

  That was flesh. This was skin. Two different things entirely, and it was skin that Billy Haven loved.

  He wiped more sweat with a new tissue, carefully tucked it away again. He was hot, his own skin prickling. Though the month was November the tunnel was stifling. Long - about a hundred yards - yet sealed at both ends, which meant no ventilation. It was like many of the passages here in SoHo, south of Greenwich Village. Built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these tunnels honeycombed the neighborhood and had been used for transporting goods underground to and from factories and warehouses and transfer stations.

  Abandoned now, they were perfect for Billy's purposes.

  The watch on his right wrist hummed again. A similar sound from a backup watch in his pocket came a few seconds later. Reminding him of the time; Billy often got lost in his work.

  Just let me get God's knuckle perfect, just a minute more ...

  A clattering came from a bud microphone in his left ear. He listened for a moment then ignored the noise and took up the American Eagle machine once more. It was an old-style model, with a rotary head, which moved the needle like a sewing machine's, rather than modern devices that used a vibrating coil.

  He clicked it on.

  Bzzzz ...

  Face shield down.

  A millimeter at a time, he inked with a lining needle, following the bloodline he'd done quickly. Billy was a natural-born artist, brilliant at pencil and ink drawing, brilliant at pastels. Brilliant at needles. He drew freehand on paper, he drew freehand on skin. Most mod artists, however talented, used stencils, prepared ahead of time or - for the untalented - purchased and then placed on the skin for the inker to trace. Billy rarely did this. He didn't need to. From God's mind to your hand, his uncle had said.

  Now time to fill. He swapped needles. Very, very carefully.

  For Chloe's tat, Billy was using the famous Blackletter font, known more commonly as Gothic or Old English. It was characterized by very thick and very thin strokes. The particular family he used was Fraktur. He'd selected this font because it was the typeface of the Gutenberg Bible - and because it was challenging. He was an artist and what artist didn't like to show off his skills?

  Ten minutes later he was nearly done.

  And how was his client doing? He scanned her body then lifted her lids. Eyes still unfocused. Her face gave a few twitches, though. The propofol wouldn't last much longer. But of course by now one drug was replacing the other.

  Suddenly pain coursed through his chest. This alarmed him. He was young and in very good shape; he dismissed the thought of a heart attack. But the big question remained: Had he inhaled something he shouldn't have?

  That was a very real, and lethal, possibility.

  Then he probed his own body and realized the pain was on the surface. And he understood. When he'd first grabbed her, Chloe had fought back. He'd been so charged he hadn't noticed how hard she'd struck him. But now the adrenaline had worn off and the pain was throbbing. He looked down. Hadn't caused any serious damage, except for tearing his shirt and the coveralls.

  He ignored the ache and kept going.

  Then Billy noted Chloe's breathing becoming deeper. The anesthetic would soon wear off. He touched her chest - Lovely Girl wouldn't have minded - and beneath his hand he could feel her heartbeat thudding more insistently.

  It was then that a thought occurred to him: What would it be like to tattoo a living, beating heart? Could it be done? Billy had broken into a medical supply company a month ago in anticipation of his plans here in New York. He'd made off with thousands of dollars in equipment, drugs, chemicals and other materials. He wondered if he could learn enough to put someone under, crack open the chest, ink a design or words onto the heart itself and sew the victim back up. Living out his or her life with the altered organ.

  What would the work be?

  A cross.

  The words: The Rule of Skin

  Maybe:

  Billy + Lovely Girl 4 Ever

  Interesting idea. But thinking about Lovely Girl made him sad and he returned to Chloe, finishing the last of the letters.

  Good.

  A Billy Mod.

  But not quite finished yet. He extracted a scalpel from a dark-green toothbrush container and reached forward, stretching out the marvelous skin once more.

  CHAPTER 3

  One can view death in two ways.

  In the discipline of forensic science an investigator looks at death abstractly, considers it to be merely an event that gives rise to a series of tasks. Good forensic cops view that event as if through the lens of history; the best see death as fiction, and the victim as someone who never existed at all.

  Detachment is a necessary tool for crime scene work, just like latex gloves and alternative light sources.

  As he sat in the red-and-gray Merits wheelchair in front of the window of his Central Park West town house, Lincoln Rhyme happened to be thinking of a recent death in just this way. Last week a man had been murdered downtown, a mugging gone wrong. Just after leaving his office in the city's Department of Environmental Protection, mid-evening, he'd been pulled into a deserted construction site across the street. Rather than give up his wallet, he'd chosen to fight and, no match for the perp, he'd been stabbed to death.

  The case, whose file sat in front of him now, was mundane, and the sparse evidence typical of such a murder: a cheap weapon, a serrated-edge kitchen knife, dotted with fingerprints not on file at IAFIS or anywhere else, indistinct footprints in the slush that had coated the ground that night, and no trace or trash or cigarette butts that weren't day-or week-old trace or trash or cigarette butts. And therefore useless. To all appearances it was a random crime; there were no springboards to likely perps. The officers had interviewed the victim's fellow employees in the public works department and talked to friends and family. There'd been no drug connections, no dicey business deals, no jealous lovers, no jealous spouses of lovers.

  Given the paltry evidence, the case, Rhyme knew, would be solved only one way: Someone would carelessly boast about scoring a wallet near City Hall. And the boastee, collared for drugs or domestic abuse or petty larce, would cut a deal by giving up the boaster.

  This crime, a mugging gone wrong, was death observed from a distance, to Lincoln Rhyme. Historical. Fictional.

  View number one.

  The second way to regard death is from the heart: when a human being with whom you have a true connection is no longer of this earth. And the other death on Rhyme's mind on this blustery, grim day was affecting him as deeply as th
e mugging victim's killing was not.

  Rhyme wasn't close to many people. This was not a function of his physical condition - he was a quadriplegic, largely paralyzed from the neck down. No, he'd never been a people person. He was a science person. A mind person.

  Oh, there'd been a few friends he'd been close to, some relatives, lovers. His wife, now ex.

  Thom, his aide.

  Amelia Sachs, of course.

  But the second man who'd died several days ago had, in one sense, been closer than all of the others, and for this reason: He'd challenged Rhyme like no one else, forced him to think beyond the expansive boundaries where his own mind roamed, forced him to anticipate and strategize and question. Forced him to fight for his life too; the man had come very close to killing him.

  The Watchmaker was the most intriguing criminal Rhyme had ever encountered. A man of shifting identities, Richard Logan was primarily a professional killer, though he'd orchestrated an alpha-omega of crimes, from terrorist attacks to robbery. He would work for whoever paid his hefty fee - provided the job was, yes, challenging enough. Which was the same criterion Rhyme used when deciding to take on a case as a consulting forensic scientist.

  The Watchmaker was one of the few criminals able to outthink him. Although Rhyme had eventually set the trap that landed Logan in prison he still stung from his failure to stop several plots that were successful. And even when he failed, the Watchmaker sometimes managed to wreak havoc. In a case in which Rhyme had derailed the attempted killing of a Mexican officer investigating drug cartels, Logan had still provoked an international incident (it was finally agreed to seal the records and pretend the attempted hit had never happened).

  But now the Watchmaker was gone.

  The man had died in prison - not murdered by a fellow inmate or a suicide, which Rhyme had first suspected upon hearing the news. No, the COD was pedestrian - cardiac arrest, though massive. The doctor, whom Rhyme had spoken to yesterday, reported that even if they'd been able to bring Logan around he would have had permanent and severe brain damage. Though medicos did not use phrases like 'his death was a blessing,' that was the impression Rhyme took from the doctor's tone.

  A blast of temperamental November wind shook the windows of Rhyme's town house. He was in the building's front parlor - the place in which he felt more comfortable than anywhere else in the world. Created as a Victorian sitting room, it was now a fully decked-out forensic lab, with spotless tables for examining evidence, computers and high-def monitors, racks of instruments, sophisticated equipment like fume and particulate control hoods, latent fingerprint imaging chambers, microscopes - optical and scanning electron - and the centerpiece: a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, the workhorse of forensic labs.

  Any small-or even medium-sized police department in the country might envy the setup, which had cost millions. All paid for by Rhyme himself. The settlement after the accident on a crime scene rendering him a quad had been quite substantial; so were the fees that he charged the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies that hired him. (There were occasional offers from other sources that might produce revenue, such as Hollywood's proposals for TV shows based on the cases he'd worked. The Man in the Chair was one suggested title. Rhyme and Reason another. Thom had translated his boss's response to these overtures - 'Are they out of their fucking minds?' - as, 'Mr Rhyme has asked me to convey his appreciation for your interest. But he's afraid he has too many commitments at this point for a project like that.')

  Rhyme now turned his chair around and stared at a delicate and beautiful pocket watch sitting in a holder on the mantelpiece. A Breguet. It happened to be a present from the Watchmaker himself.

  His mourning was complex and reflected the dual views of death he'd been thinking of. Certainly there were analytical - forensic - reasons to be troubled by the loss. He'd now never be able to probe the man's mind to his satisfaction. As the nickname suggested, Logan was obsessed with time and timepieces - he actually made watches and clocks - and that was how he plotted out his crimes, with painstaking precision. Ever since their paths first crossed, Rhyme had marveled at how Logan's thought processes worked. He even hoped that the man would allow him a prison visit so that they could talk about the chess-match-like crimes he'd planned out.

  Logan's death also left some other, practical concerns. The prosecutor had offered Logan a plea bargain, a reduced sentence in exchange for giving up the names of some of the people who'd hired him and whom he'd worked with; the man clearly had an extensive network of criminal colleagues whose identities the police would like to learn. There were rumors too of plots Logan had put together before he'd gone to prison.

  But Logan hadn't bought the DA's deal. And, more irritating, he'd pleaded guilty, denying Rhyme another chance to learn more about who he was and to identify his family members and associates. Rhyme had even planned to use facial recognition technology and undercover agents to identify those attending the man's trial.

  Ultimately, though, Rhyme understood he was taking the man's demise hard because of the second view of death: that connection between them. We're defined and enlivened by what opposes us. And when the Watchmaker died, Lincoln Rhyme died a bit too.

  He looked at the other two people in the room. One was the youngster on Rhyme's team, NYPD patrol officer Ron Pulaski, who was packing up the evidence in the City Hall mugging/homicide case.

  The other was Rhyme's caregiver, Thom Reston, a handsome, slim man, dressed as immaculately as always. Today: dark-brown slacks with an enviable knife-blade crease, a pale-yellow shirt and a zoological tie in greens and browns; the cloth seemed to sport a simian face or two. Hard to tell. Rhyme himself paid little attention to clothing. His black sweats and green long-sleeved sweater were functional and good insulators. That was all he cared about.

  'I want to send flowers,' Rhyme now announced.

  'Flowers?' Thom asked.

  'Yes. Flowers. Send them. People still do that, I assume. Wreaths saying RIP, Rest in Peace, though what's the point of that? What else're the dead going to be doing? It's a better message than Good Luck, don't you think?'

  'Send flowers to ... Wait. Are you talking about Richard Logan?'

  'Of course. Who else has died lately who's flower-worthy?'

  Pulaski said, 'Hm, Lincoln. "Flower-worthy." That is not an expression I would ever imagine you saying.'

  'Flowers,' Rhyme repeated petulantly. 'Why is this not registering?'

  'And why're you in a bad mood?' Thom asked.

  'Old married couple' was a phrase that could be used to describe caregiver and charge.

  'I'm hardly in a bad mood. I simply want to send flowers to a funeral home. But nobody's doing it. We can get the name from the hospital that did the autopsy. They'll have to send the corpse to a funeral home. Hospitals don't embalm or cremate.'

  Pulaski said, 'You know, Lincoln. One way to think about it is: There's some justice. You could say the Watchmaker got the death penalty, after all.'

  Blond and determined and eager, Pulaski had the makings of a fine crime scene officer and Rhyme had taken on the job of mentor. Which included not only instruction in forensic science but also getting the kid to use his mind. This he didn't seem to be doing presently. 'And just how does a random arterial occlusion, rookie, equal justice? If the prosecutor in New York State chose not to seek the death penalty, then you might say that a premature death undermines justice. Not furthers it.'

  'I--' the young man stammered, blushing Valentine red.

  'Now, rookie, let's move on from spurious observations. Flowers. Find out when the body's being released from Westchester Memorial and where it's going. I want the flowers there ASAP, whether there's a service or not. With a card from me.'

  'Saying what?'

  'Nothing other than my name.'

  'Flowers?' Amelia Sachs's voice echoed from the hallway leading to the kitchen and the back door of the town house. She walked into the parlor, nodding greetings.

  'Lincoln's going
to send flowers to the funeral home. For Richard Logan. I mean, I am.'

  She hung her dark jacket on a hook in the hall. She was in close-fitting black jeans, a yellow sweater and a black wool sport coat. The only indication of her rank as a police detective was a Glock riding high on her hip, though the leap from weapon to law enforcer was a tentative deduction at best. To look at the tall, slim redhead - with abundant straight hair - you might guess she was a fashion model. Which she had been, before joining the NYPD.

  Sachs walked closer and kissed Rhyme on the lips. She tasted of lipstick and smelled of gunshot residue; she'd been to the range that morning.

  Thinking of cosmetics, Rhyme recalled that the victim of the City Hall mugging/murder had shaved just before leaving the office; nearly invisible bits of shave cream and tiny rods of beard had been found adhering to his neck and cheek. He'd also recently sprayed or rubbed on aftershave. In their analysis, while Rhyme had been noting those facts, potentially helpful for the investigation, Sachs had grown still. She'd said, 'So he was going out that night, a date probably - you wouldn't shave for guy friends. You know, Rhyme, if he hadn't spent that last five minutes in the restroom, the timing would've changed. And everything would've turned out different. He'd've survived the night. And maybe gone on to live a long, full life.'

  Or he might've gotten into his car drunk and rammed a bus filled with schoolchildren.

  Waste of time, playing the fate game.

  View of Death Number One, View of Death Number Two.

  'You know the funeral home?' Sachs asked.

  'Not yet.'

  Not knowing he was about to be arrested, and believing he was minutes away from murdering Rhyme, Logan had made a promise that he would spare Sachs's life. Perhaps this clemency was another of the reasons for Rhyme's mourning the man's death.

  Thom nodded to Sachs. 'Coffee? Anything else?'

  'Just coffee, thanks.'

  'Lincoln?'

  The criminalist shook his head.