by Gary Braver
His heart nearly stopped mid-beat. He moved to the body and braced himself, muttering a silent prayer as he gripped the edge of the sheet. Then he pulled it back.
Aaron Monks stared up at him through slitted eyes. A wad of gauze had been taped shut in his mouth and his hands had been tethered to the gurney rails.
He was dead.
Neil tugged at Steve’s arm. He had found something in the corridor. He pointed to a room across the hall—it was the last door on that side. Inside they heard voices and more electronic beeps.
They braced at the door, and when Steve gave the nod they burst in.
“Freeze!”
For a moment Steve’s eyes tried to process what his brain was registering.
In the middle of the room under operating room lights were two gurneys lying side by side with a person on each, draped but for their faces. Standing amidst beeping monitors and hanging IVs and a lot of other medical apparatus were four people in scrubs, masks and hair nets frozen in place. One of them was holding a scalpel wire as an electric cauterizer, the others had suctioning tube for the blood running down Dana’s face.
The heart monitor showed a steady strong beat. And Steve sent up a prayer of thanks.
“Mother of God,” Dacey said.
On the other gurney beside a table piled with bloody sponges and cloths lay a body whose face had been completely removed but for the nose, lips, and patches over the eyes. All that they could make out under the hairline was a glistening mass of red muscle and fat.
“What the fuck..,” Neil said.
Overhead were two large flat screen monitors each with a split-screen image. One had the head of Dana side by side with a three-dimensional contour of her facial muscles and skull bone. Beside it were the same split-screen images of another muscle-bone contoured head and beside it a genderless blank. Overlaid on each were grids that segmented the faces into neat square tiles.
They were in the process of removing Dana’s face to be transplanted onto that of the person on the other gurney.
But Steve could see that the incision on Dana’s face was only partly made, from the forehead down to her right ear.
Steve had his pistol trained on the face of the man with the scalpel and closed in on him. “Drop it and sew her up.”
The man laid down the scalpel and said something in another language to the other man.
The other man looked back at Steve.
“Do it now or I’ll blow your fucking heads off. Do it!”
The scalpel guy nodded then began to blot the blood where the incision had stopped.
Dacey pulled alongside of Steve while Neil moved to the other two surgeons, his gun raised three feet from his head. “Who’s that?” Dacey asked.
Neither of the men responded.
“I said who’s that man?”
Finally in a soft accented voice, one of them said, “Aaron Monks.”
“What? Who the fuck’s out there?” Neil asked, the gun poised in aim at the other surgeon.
“I don’t know his name,” said the taller one. “He was someone Dr. Monks had found.”
“Found for what?” Steve asked.
The man did not answer.
“For what?”
“To be his double.”
“The guy’s dead.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly Steve felt as if the oxygen had been drained from the room. He moved to the gurney where Aaron Monks lay waiting for the face of Dana, his own in bloody scraps in a stainless-steel pan on the side table, some kind of glistening solution over the open tissue like an aspic.
Steve took a deep breath and lifted the bottom of the sheet draped over Monks’s body then raised the bottom of the Johnny he wore.
Aaron Monks was a woman.
96
For days the media fed upon the story like jackals.
And every day was a jubilee for the headline makers, trying to outdo each other with lurid catchiness as details spurted out from the investigation:
NOTED COSMETIC SURGEON TURNED SERIAL KILLER
FAMOUS FACE DOC KILLS TO REMAKE STEPMOM
TRANSSEX FACE—OFF, DOC WANTED TO BE MUM
One tabloid even filled the front page with the King Kong declaration: IT WAS BEAUTY KILLED THE BEAST.
The investigation carried on for weeks during which time Monks’s office, Lexington home, and Vita Nova site had been thoroughly searched. He had been meticulous in not leaving incriminating evidence linking him to the murders of the other women. He either had doctored his records or had arranged for the women to pay by cash so as to eliminate any paper trails.
Likewise, no physical evidence connected him to any of the crime scenes—no black stocking collection, no photographs, no journal, no correspondences. Because he had used freelance surgical teams and conducted all reconstructions at the offsite location, anonymity was maintained.
The only trophy of his crimes would have been Dana’s face.
Following extensive interrogations, the three surgical assistants had confessed to being accomplices to the attempted transplant of Dana, although they pleaded not guilty to murder. Each had been trained in the country of his origin—Korea and Martinique. However, they became associated with Monks when accepted for advanced fellowship training in transplantation under a program allied with the prestigious Institute of Reconstructive Surgery headed up by him. He had taken them under mentorship, and in exchange for the opportunity to work with the renowned leader in facial transplantation—which eventually would help establish them in successful practices back home—they went along with his scheme. Allegedly Dr. Monks had claimed that Dana was suffering from terminal cancer, thus minimizing her sacrifice.
They also claimed to have known nothing of Monks’s other killings. According to the U.S. Immigration Service, none of them was in the country when the others were committed. On those Monks had apparently acted alone. Subsequent autopsies showed that he had made implants on other women to assimilate the facial structure of Lila Monks, his stepmother, a woman whose beauty had gotten her modeling jobs and a few small parts in movies and television.
It was not clear the exact hold she had had on his psyche, but it was assumed that she had sexualized him as a child to the point that he never developed a normal, healthy relationship with other females. Following her alleged murder of his father, she committed suicide by hanging herself with a black Wolford stocking. According to police records, young Monks had found her and suffered her loss. Nearly inseparable from her, he fell into deep depression, according to sources. Twice during college he attempted suicide. It was hypothesized that Lila Monks’s death had permanently scarred him, possibly rendering him sexually dysfunctional and bitter.
Over the years, his obsession morphed into the quiet hunt for patients whose facial structure resembled that of his stepmother, iconized in the sepia illustration in the negative that hung in his office. With the use of old photographs and MRI software, he had approximated the muscle-skeletal contours of her face to the point of calculating the exact requirements necessary to refashion hers from others.
“One possibility,” Jackie Levini had said, “is that he kept remaking the woman and killing her out of deep rage for abandoning him.”
“You mean,” Steve had replied, “he was killing his wicked stepmother over and over again.”
“Yes. Of course, the other possibility is that he murdered them because they were not Lila Monks. That he was killing his misses—his botched attempts to re-create her.”
“Pygmalion crossed with Ted Bundy.”
“Exactly.”
“Apparently he came to the realization that he’d have to continue killing until he was either stopped or he died.”
“Which was risky and not very fulfilling,” Steve said.
“Yes. And because of his skills, he saw a way to fulfill his profoundest desires while resolving his own sexual conflicts and those with the woman whom he both adored and hated.”
“The sex
change.”
“Yes.”
A few weeks after the story broke, Steve’s office was contacted by a urologist at a clinic in Prague. Six years ago, Monks had apparently convinced the doctors of his gender dysmorphia, and during a leave of absence from his practice—and unbeknownst to any friends or colleagues—he flew to Czechoslovakia, where he underwent a transsexual operation. When he returned to the United States, he continued his practice while he waited for the proper candidate to present herself.
Then Dana walked into his office.
Monks was a clever planner. According to Air France, he immediately purchased tickets to Paris and booked hotels for a medical conference in August. After a five-day stay, he was scheduled to fly to Martinique for another three weeks aboard the Fair Lady, after which he would return to Boston. He had even arranged for the yacht to be leased out to others in the Caribbean the week after he returned and to remain down there for the next seven months, after which he’d fly down to motor it back to Boston next spring.
That was the cover.
The real plan was to have his surgical team replace his own face with Dana’s and to stage a fatal heart attack by leaving behind a dead homeless man, kidnapped months before and whose face Monks and his team had refashioned to a near duplicate of Monks’s own, right down to the mole. For the right occasion, the body had been stored in a refrigeration unit at Vita Nova. Bolstering the visual identity they had even grafted Monks’s own prints onto the dead man’s fingers. Were an autopsy conducted, his death had been affected by curare to assimilate a heart attack. And the obituary would lament the premature death of a world-renowned plastic surgeon. The dead man was never identified.
Meanwhile, completing the diabolical plan, Aaron Monks would be taken on the Fair Lady to Martinique, where in a small villa he owned in backcountry hills he would recover to live out the rest of his life as Lillian Arona. All necessary documents, deeds, and passport had already been fabricated. Containers of red hair dye found aboard the boat revealed his plan to let his hair grow long and to color it.
As a chilling afterword, Steve returned to Aaron Monks’s Web site, where he found a recent article by the doctor that concluded:
Up to this point, the only real technical challenge has been the revitalizing of dead tissue from cadavers. But the future in face transplantation is to lift tissue from living donors, say those with terminal diseases who bequeath their faces. Aside from that, the only other problem is nonsurgical—the secondary effects of anti-rejection drugs.
But great strides are being made in overcoming immunosuppressive problems as shown in clinical trials with humans. Should they prove as effective as we suspect, it will not be long when full-face transplantation for cosmetic reasons will be routine.
In spite of arguments to the contrary, I see no more of an ethical problem than in transplanting a heart or a liver, because the whole purpose is to help the patient in need.
Ironically, because the transplant was interrupted by police, Monks’s own removed skin suffered deterioration, as did the exposed muscles and blood vessels of his face. Because so much time was lost while his colleagues were forced to mend Dana, a last-minute attempt to reattach Monks’s skin failed. For more than a week he was in intensive care at Massachusetts General Hospital, where doctors tried in vain to reverse the infection that had set in.
He died in a state of gross disfigurement, poisoned by his own face.
Because he left no records, the Essex River woman had still not been identified. The case remained open. Of course, there might have been other victims yet undiscovered. More secrets that Aaron Monks took with him to the grave.
Epilogue
NINE MONTHS LATER
They were sitting at a window seat at Flora Restaurant on Mass. Ave. just outside Arlington center. Steve had ordered pan-seared sea scallops and Dana, the sea bass. At the moment they were sharing an appetizer special, rolled grape leaves.
“Yours are better,” she said in a low voice so the waiter wouldn’t hear. “Doesn’t have the same exotic spiciness.”
Steve leaned forward. “Because they rolled them with their hands.”
Dana laughed, her eyes glittered, and music filled the air. If he hadn’t already done so years ago, he would have fallen in love with her at that moment.
Dana sipped her sparkling water and glanced over Steve’s shoulder, watching the street out the window. It was a warm May night and strollers were about in numbers.
Her hair was back to its original sandy blond, and she wore it longer but without the feathery bangs. Because of the cosmetic procedures, she still looked thirty and probably would for a few more years. Though he had never perceived them as problematic, her smile lines had returned and the forehead crease was again visible. But she would happily live with those and other inevitabilities.
The hairline scar from her forehead down the side of her face had faded away. Yet there were times when Steve would glance at her and in a shuddering moment see flash-card images of Monks’s scalpel-handed assistants in the process of removing her face.
With luck, those too would fade.
Luckily, Dana remembered nothing of that night since along with the sedative, Monks had given her ketamine, an anesthetic whose side effect is amnesia. Her only memory was arriving on the island and walking around the first floor of Vita Nova, wondering where all the dinner party guests were. After that, she was blank until she woke up in the hospital the next day. The only reason they had not given her an injection to stop her heart was that they needed the constant supply of blood to her facial tissue during the operation. After that, their plan was to kill her and dispose of her body at sea.
From the island, she was flown to Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was held for two days for observation. Over the next two weeks, Steve slept at the house because she was not comfortable being alone at night. He stayed on after that because she wanted him back. Officially, it was the thirty-fourth-week anniversary of his moving back and their second round of marriage.
And it was working.
And tonight they were celebrating that and a lot else. Ten months had passed since his last alcoholic drink. Nearly so long since his nightmares had stopped. Six months since his last Ativan tab.
And two months since they became pregnant.
When the waiter returned, Steve ordered a second bottle of Pellegrino. He took a sip. “It might be my well-corrupted palate, but do you detect any difference between this and your basic Stop and Shop seltzer?”
“About five dollars.”
“Tasting better already.”
Dana was back at school, but following the fall term, she would take a year’s leave of absence to have the baby. After that, she would make a decision about resignation. At the moment, it was motherhood that filled their horizon. As for the pharmaceutical sales job, those interests faded also.
“I got a postcard from Neil,” Steve said.
“Where from?”
“He brought Lily and her girlfriend to Yellowstone National Park for her birthday. They’re out there hiking.”
“Yellowstone? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Yeah, I know, must be five hundred miles from the nearest mall. But he says they’re having a good time tracking the buffalo.”
“That’s great. How’s she doing otherwise?”
“Still seeing her therapist, but I think things are better. She’s going to her classes and actually doing well. Neil said she made the honor roll and that she’s even applying to colleges.”
“Good for her. How’s he doing?”
“Better. I think he’s dating again.” Steve removed a wedge of lemon from the grape leaves dish and squeezed it into his sparkling water. He sniffed it then took a swallow. “Ah. Bold citrusy nose, delicate balance of acidity and alkalinity, nice clean bite. Yowza.”
Dana laughed. “Yeah, but I’m proud of you because,” she whispered, “I know you’d rather be doing what that guy at the bar is doing.”<
br />
The guy she indicated with her eyes was on his second Chivas Regal. “Kind of wish you hadn’t mentioned him because now I want a drink.”
“Well, you’re better off where you are. We both are, and I’m proud of you for that, too—for not letting go of us.”
“Me, too,” Steve said.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She was quiet for a moment. “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be here.”
“That makes three of us.”
“Which reminds me. What do you think of Jason?”
“Who’s Jason?”
“Possibly the name of your son.”
“Oh. Yeah, I like Jason,” Steve said. “He stole the golden fleece and got the girl.”
“Yeah, but the girl was Medea.”
“Let’s hope he has better luck.”
“And if it’s a girl?” Dana said.
“I still like Andrea. What do you think?”
“It’s a very pretty name. Does she have a myth?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But she may have the nose.”
“So might Jason,” Steve said. “But that’s their problem. Our job is to give them a lot of love and a happy home.”
Dana smiled. “I think we can do that.”
He raised his glass of sparkling water to meet hers. “You bet we can.”
Other Novels by Gary Braver
Flashback
Gray Matter
Elixir
Writing as Gary Goshgarian
The Stone Circle
Rough Beast
Atlantis Fire
Acknowledgments
Several people have helped me with technical matters in the writing of this book and I would like to thank them for their generous time and expertise.
