The Skin Collector

by Jeffery Deaver

  'Serenity?'

  'The name of the room across the hall. This room is Peace, Mr Ardell's service.'

  Goddamn. Pulaski thought back. The fellow at the front door had told him to turn right. He'd turned left.

  Shit, shit, shit. Fucking head injury. If this'd been a drug set, he might be dead now.

  Think smarter.

  But act the part. 'One of your people, I don't remember who, sent me to that room.'

  'I'm so sorry. Please accept our apologies. Our fault entirely.'

  'And names? I've never heard of naming rooms in a funeral parlor. You ought to have numbers.'

  'Yessir, it's a little unusual. I'm sorry. I do apologize.'

  'Oh, all right.' Pulaski grimaced. He nodded back. Then paused, recalling the curious expression on the faces of the mourners when he'd mentioned working with the deceased.

  'One question. You said I didn't seem like the sort who worked with this Ardell. What'd he do for a living?'

  'He was an adult film star in the seventies,' Berkowitz whispered. 'Gay. The family doesn't like to talk about it.'

  'I'd guess not.'

  'That's the room with Mr Logan's remains.' He pointed to a small doorway.

  Serenity ...

  Pulaski stepped through it and into a small room, twenty by twenty. There were a few chairs, a coffee table, innocuous landscapes covering the walls. Also a bouquet of subdued white flowers. And on a velvet-draped table, similar to the one holding the urn of late porn star, sat a brown cardboard box. This would, Pulaski knew, be the Watchmaker's remains. Beside it stood a round, balding man in a dark business suit. He was making a mobile phone call. He looked at Pulaski briefly, with curiosity, and turned away. He seemed to speak more softly. Finally he disconnected.

  Inhaling a steadying breath, Pulaski walked up to him. He nodded.

  The man said nothing.

  Pulaski looked him up and down - keep it blunt, keep it tough. 'You were a friend of Richard's?'

  'And you are--?' the man asked in a soft baritone, with the hint of a Southern accent.

  'Stan Walesa,' Pulaski said. The name almost seemed natural at this point. 'I was asking, you're a friend of Richard's?'

  'I don't know who you are and I don't know why you're asking.'

  'Okay, I worked with Richard. Off and on. I heard he was being cremated this morning and I assumed there'd be a service.'

  'Worked with Richard,' the man repeated, looking the officer up and down. 'Well, there is no service. I've been retained to bring his remains back home.'

  Pulaski frowned. 'A lawyer.'

  'That's right. Dave Weller.' No hands were proffered.

  Pulaski kept up the offensive. 'I don't remember you from the trial.'

  'Mr Logan was not my client. I've never met him.'

  'Just taking the ashes back home?'

  'Like I said.'

  'That's California, right?'

  The only response was: 'What are you doing here, Mr Walesa?'

  'Paying respects.' He stepped closer to the box. 'No urn?'

  'Not much point,' Weller said. 'Richard wanted his ashes scattered.'

  'Where?'

  'Did you send those?'

  Pulaski looked at the bouquet, which Weller was nodding at. The officer tried to looks somewhat, but not overly, confused. 'No.' He stepped to the vase and read at the card. He gave a bitter laugh.

  Inscrutable.

  He said, 'That's pretty low.'

  Weller asked, 'How do you mean?'

  'You know who that is, who sent them?'

  'I read the card when I got here. But I don't know the name. Lincoln Rhyme?'

  'You don't know Rhyme?' Lowering his voice: 'He's the son of a bitch who put my friend in prison.'

  Weller asked, 'Police?'

  'Works with the police.'

  'Why would he send flowers?'

  'I think he's gloating.'

  'Well, that was a waste of money. Richard's hardly going to be offended now, is he?' A glance at the box of ashes.

  Silence.

  How to behave now? Man, this acting stuff was exhausting. He decided to shake his head at the unfairness of the world. He looked down. 'Such a shame, really. When I talked to him last, he was fine. Or at least he didn't mention anything, like chest pains.'

  Weller now focused. 'Talked to him?'

  'Right.'

  'This was recently?'

  'Yeah. In prison.'

  'You're here alone?' Weller asked.

  A nod. Pulaski asked the same question.

  'That's right.'

  'So there's no funeral?'

  'The family hasn't decided.' Weller looked Pulaski up and down carefully.

  Okay, time to go with the less ...

  'Well, so long, Mr Weller. Tell his family, or whoever your clients are, I'm sorry for their loss. I'll miss him too. He was an ... interesting man.'

  'Like I said, I never met him.'

  Pulaski pulled on dark cotton gloves. 'So long.'

  Weller nodded.

  Pulaski was at the door when the lawyer said, 'Why did you really come here, Mr Walesa?'

  The young officer stopped. He turned back. '"Reall"Y? What's that supposed to mean?'

  De Niro tough. Tony Soprano tough.

  'There was never going to be a memorial service. If you'd called to see when I was picking up the remains - which you did, since here you are - you would have learned there was no service. So. What do I make of that?'

  Pulaski debated - and made a show of debating. He dug into his pocket and produced a business card. Offered it to the man with a gloved hand. He said, 'Give that to your clients.'

  'Why?'

  'Just give it to them. Or throw it out.' A shrug. 'Up to you.'

  The lawyer looked at him coolly, then took the card. It had only the fake name and the prepaid mobile number on it.

  'What exactly do you do, Mr Walesa?'

  Pulaski's gaze began at the lawyer's bald head and ended at his shoes, which were nearly as shiny. 'Have a good day, Mr Weller.'

  And, with an oblique glance at the box containing the Watchmaker's ashes, Pulaski headed for the door.

  Pulaski, thinking: Yes, nailed it!

  CHAPTER 49

  The unsub, however, had not left as much evidence in the town house as Rhyme had hoped.

  And there were no other solid leads.The phone call about the intruder had come from an anonymous source. A canvass of the area, to find witnesses who'd seen the intruder, had yielded nothing. Security video cameras in two nearby stores had recorded a thin man in dark coveralls, walking with his head down and carrying a briefcase. He'd diverted suddenly into the cul-de-sac. No image of his face, of course.

  Mel Cooper had run an analysis on the bottle and found, naturally, only Rhyme's and Thom's fingerprints, not even those of a liquor store stocker or a Scottish distiller.

  No other trace was on the bottle.

  Sachs was now telling him, 'Nothing significant, Rhyme. Except he's an ace lock picker. No tool marks. Used a pick gun, I'm sure.'

  Cooper was checking the contents of the evidence collection bags. 'Not much, not much.' A moment later, though, he did make a discovery. 'Hair.'

  'Excellent,' Rhyme said. 'Where?'

  Cooper examined Sachs's notes. 'It was by the shelf where he spiked the whisky.'

  'And very good whisky it used to be,' Rhyme muttered. 'But a hair. Good. Only: Is it his, yours, mine, Thom's, a deliveryman's?'

  'Let's take a look.' The tech lifted the hair from the tape roller and prepared a slide for visual observation in the optical microscope.

  'There a bulb?' Rhyme asked.

  Hair can yield DNA but generally only if the bulb is attached.

  But this sample, no.

  Still, hair can reveal other facts about the perp. Tox and drug profiles, for instance (hair retains drug-use info for months). And true hair color, of course.

  Cooper focused the microscope and hit the button that put the imag
e on the high-def monitor nearby. The fiber was short, just a bit of stubble.

  'Hell,' Rhyme said.

  'What?' Sachs asked.

  'Look familiar, anyone?'

  Cooper shook his head. But Sachs gave a soft laugh. 'Last week.'

  'Exactly.'

  The hair hadn't come from the unsub but from the City Hall murder case of the week before, the worker killed fighting with the mugger. The beard stubble. The victim had shaved just before he'd left the office.

  This happened sometimes. However careful you were with evidence, tiny samples escaped. Oh, well.

  The mass spectrum computer screen came alive. Cooper focused and said, 'Got the toxin profile: tremetol. A form of alcohol. Comes from snakeroot. There wasn't enough to kill you, unless you drank the whole bottle at once.'

  'Don't tempt me,' Rhyme said.

  'But it would have made you very, very sick. Severe dementia. Possibly permanent.'

  'Maybe he didn't have time to inject the whole dosage into the bottle. You know, it's the dosage that's deadly, not the substance itself. We all ingest antimony and mercury and arsenic every day. But not in quantities that do us any harm. Hell, water can kill you. Drink enough too quickly and the sodium imbalance can stop your heart.'

  That was it, Sachs reported. No fingerprints, no footprints, no other trace.

  Nor had any leads been discovered at or near the Belvedere apartment building. No one had seen a man impersonating a fireman, handing out poisoned coffee. A team sent to check the trash cans in the area had found no other containers of tainted beverage. Security videos were not helpful.

  Lon Sellitto was still in critical condition and unconscious - and therefore unable to give them any more information about the unsub, though Rhyme doubted that he'd have been so careless as to reveal anything about himself, as he'd handed out the tainted coffee.

  Mel Cooper checked with the research team that Lon Sellitto had put together and learned they had not been able to find anything having to do with the numeric message. They did receive something, though. A memorandum had come in from other Major Cases officers Sellitto had 'tasked', his verb, with researching the centipede tattoo.

  From: Unsub 11-5 Task Force

  To: Det. Lon Sellitto, Capt. Lincoln Rhyme

  Re: Centipede

  We have not had much luck in finding connections between specific perpetrators in the past and the unsub in this case, regarding centipede tattoos. We have learned this: Centipedes are arthropods in the class Chilopoda of the subphylum Myriapoda. They have one pair of legs per body segment but don't necessarily have one hundred legs. They can have as few as two dozen, as many as three hundred. The largest are about a foot long.

  Only centipedes have 'forcipules,' which are modified front legs, just behind the head. These legs grab prey and through needle-like openings deliver venom that paralyzes or kills. They have venom glands on the first pair of legs, forming a pincer-like appendage always found just behind the head. Forcipules are not true mouthparts, although they are used in the capture of prey items, injecting venom and holding on to captured prey. Venom glands run through a tube almost to the tip of each forcipule.

  Culturally, centipedes are depicted for two purposes: One, to intimidate enemies. The image of a walking snake, armed with venom-delivering fangs, taps into root fears of humans. We came across this quotation from a Tibetan Buddhist: 'If you enjoy frightening others, you will be reincarnated as a centipede.'

  Two, centipedes represent invasion of apparently safe places. Centipedes will make their homes in shoes, beds, couches, cradles, dresser drawers. The theory is that the insect represents the idea that what we think is safe really isn't.

  Note that some people have tattoos based on The Human Centipede, a particularly bad gross-out film in which three people are sewn together to form what the title suggests. These tattoos have nothing to do with the centipede insect.

  'Reads like a bad term paper,' Rhyme muttered. 'Mumbo-jumbo but print it out, tape it up.'

  The door buzzer sounded and he was amused to notice everyone else in the room start. Cooper and Sachs dropped their hands near their weapons - the aftershock of the attempted attack earlier today. Though he doubted their unsub would return, much less announce his arrival with the bell.

  Thom checked the door and let Ron Pulaski into the town house.

  He walked in, noticed everyone's troubled faces and asked, 'What's up?'

  He was told about the attempted attack.

  'Poison you, Lincoln? Oh, man.'

  'It's okay, rookie. Still here to torment you. How did the undercover job go?'

  'I think I did okay.'

  'Tell us.'

  He explained how the trip to the funeral home had gone, meeting the lawyer, the man's reluctance to say much or reveal his clients.

  A lawyer. Interesting.

  Pulaski continued, 'I think I won him over. I called you a son of a bitch, Lincoln.'

  'That work for you?'

  'Yeah, felt good.'

  Rhyme barked a laugh.

  'Then I did what you told me. I suggested - didn't say anything exactly - but I suggested that I'd worked with Logan. And that I'd been in touch recently.'

  'Did you get a card?'

  'No. And Weller didn't offer. He was keeping his cards close to his chest.'

  'And you didn't want to overplay your hand.'

  Pulaski said, 'I like that, what you just said. You slapped down my cliche with one of your own.'

  The kid was really coming into his own. 'Anything you could deduce?'

  'I tried to see if he was from California but he wouldn't say. But he was tanned. Looked healthy, balding, stocky. Southern accent. Name was Dave Weller. I'll check him out.'

  'Well, good. We'll see if he makes a move. If not, I'll talk to Nance Laurel in the DA's Office about getting a subpoena to scoop up the funeral home records. But that's a last resort; I want to keep you in play for as long as we can. Okay. Not a bad job, rookie. We wait. Now: to the task at hand. Unsub 11-5. He's still got his message to complete. "the second". "forty". "seventeenth". He's not through yet. I want to know where he's going to hit next. We have to move on it.'

  He wheeled closer to the chart. The answers are there someplace, he thought. Answers to where he would strike next, who he was, what his purpose in orchestrating these terrible attacks might be.

  But those were answers as shadowed as the sleet-laden skies of New York.

  * * *

  582 E. 52nd Street (Belvedere Parking Garage)

  Victim: Braden Alexander - Not killed

  Unsub 11-5 - See details from prior scenes

  - Six feet

  - Yellow latex mask

  - Yellow gloves

  - Possibly man in Identi-Kit image - Possibly coveralls

  - Probably from Midwest, West Virginia, mountains - other rural setting - Had scalpel

  Sedated with propofol - How obtained? Access to medical supplies? (No local thefts)

  Potential Kill Zone - Underneath garage

  - Similar infrastructure to other scenes IFON

  ConEd Metro-North rail Emergency Communication Link

  Handcuffs - Generic, cannot be sourced

  Tattoo - Implants

  - '17th'

  - Loaded with concentrated nicotine Nightshade family Too many locations to source

  Trace from plastic bag - Human albumin and sodium chloride (plastic surgery in his plans?) - 'No. 3' written on bag in red water-soluble ink generally used for water treatment but not in prior locations or here, so could be a poison for future attack (however too many sources to find)

  Sidney Place, Brooklyn Heights (Pam Willoughby's apartment)

  Victim: Seth McGuinn - Not killed, minor injuries

  Unsub - Red centipede tattoo

  - Confirmed had American Eagle tattoo machine - Fit general description from earlier attacks - Coveralls

  Sedated with propofol - How obtained? Access to medical supplies? (No local t
hefts)

  American Medical 31-gauge single-use hypodermic syringe. - Used primarily for plastic surgery

  Toxic extract from white baneberry plant (doll's eyes) - Cardiogenic

  No friction ridges

  No footprints (wore booties)

  Handcuffs - Generic, cannot be sourced

  Trace: - Fibers from blueprint/engineering diagram - Cicutoxin trace, probably from earlier scene

  Rhyme Townhouse

  Unsub - No friction ridges

  - No footprints (booties) - Talented lock picker (used pick gun?)

  Hair - Beard stubble, but probably from prior scene

  Toxin - Tremetol from snakeroot

  * * *

  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.