Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  Catherine, Nick, and Langston hurried through. The area was small—possibly converted from a stockroom. There was a chain-and-pulley assembly in the middle of the ceiling. More IV stands in one corner. Dried bloodstains on the concrete floor. They saw their own shocked expressions multiplied by floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls.

  “Doc,” Nick said, “what is this, some kind of torture chamber?”

  Langston had noticed a metal toolbox on a table at one end of the room. He unlatched it, raised the lid, and saw the deep-water fishing hooks in sealed glassine envelopes.

  “He’s into suspension,” he said.

  “What?”

  Langston reached inside for an envelope, opened it, showed her a hook. “He pierces his skin and hangs to achieve a meditative or ecstatic experience. It’s unusual for it to be done without assistance.”

  Catherine gestured around them. “He does a lot that’s unusual, wouldn’t you say?”

  Langston looked at her. “Suspension is an ancient practice. With Hindu sects, Native Americans, other tribal cultures. The endorphin boost from the pain induces altered states, visions…”

  Catherine, struck with a thought, hitched in a breath. She looked at Nick and Langston. “I have to show you two something.”

  They moved past the tacs into the storeroom. Seeing Brass, Catherine gestured for him to join them.

  She stopped at the fifth gallery exhibit. Its sketches showed a lamb with a knife or sword over it, a red-and-white cruciform banner on the blade’s handle. Langston stared at the spray-painted words on the wall above.

  “The Paschal Lamb,” he read aloud.

  “And no photos to go along with the art,” Catherine said.

  Nick was shaking his head. “That crazy son of a bitch is out to add something to his Easter basket.”

  Brass looked at the CSIs, his eyes moving from one to the next before they settled on Nick, a grave scowl weighting his features.

  “You mean someone,” he said.

  11

  EARLY MASS AT Our Lady of Guidance was held at eight o’clock in the morning from Monday through Friday, and Father Molanez, in his gentle implacability, had persuaded the headmaster at the school next door to allow the full choir to join his altar boys for services throughout the forty days of Lent. This had required some assurances to ease the grumblings of certain jittery lay teachers, so to lubricate the wheels of his agreement, the father had agreed that his weekday services would feature a somewhat abbreviated homily and a condensed program of hymns and psalms.

  He would, of course, have to include the reflective Attende Domine and its deeply penitential bookend, the Parce Domine. He had promised himself he would only add the uplifting Jesu Dulcis Memoria if a sizable crowd filled the pews—say, five or more congregants. Now that the Passiontide had come, he’d been tempted to slip in the poetic if somewhat obscure Pange Lingua Gloriosi Proelium of Saint Venantius Fortunatus, but for the time being, he had reserved the Medieval hymn for weekend services.

  And then, of course, there was the essential and much-loved Agnus Dei, into which Jake Clarkson would so earnestly pour his soul to the delight of parishioners.

  Watching Jake dash up the aisle in his cassock now, the priest could not help but smile fondly. True, this morning’s turnout was a tad thin, with just four congregants having shown up for prayer. But he was inwardly resigned to quiet Mondays. It was as if worshippers considered Sunday attendance a heavy dinner that provided two full days of spiritual nourishment, treating the next as optional dessert.

  Still, Father Molanez thought, for those who were present—small handful though they might be—the morning had brightened the instant Jake began his sprint from the sanctuary to the narthex. And for him, the looks on their faces made all of his dickering with the headmaster and his instructors worthwhile.

  Pacing himself to give the boy a chance to reach the choir loft, the father, relishing the show-stopping moment as usual, waited until Jake scooted out the doors before he began to prepare for communion. Only then, as the doors swung shut behind him, did he slowly—slooooowly—turn toward the sacraments.

  * * *

  He had left his car in the church’s parking area at seven-thirty A.M., shortly after watching Jake Clarkson hurry up the lawn from the school bus to the vestry’s outer door. Pulling alongside the church—he’d had almost every space in the lot to choose from—he had popped his trunk, gone around for the heavy moving blanket he’d brought from the warehouse, and lowered the trunk lid without latching it shut.

  He had then walked around to the front of the church, climbed the steps, entered the narthex, and stolen a quick glance around. With no one in sight, he had pushed open the polished oak door to the choir loft and slipped through.

  Behind it was a wooden landing from which a creaky staircase rose along a brick structural support wall to the loft. Running down from where he stood, another flight of stairs bent around to the church’s basement. Leaning over the rail, he’d seen a space where a corner of the support wall created a blind spot for anyone coming in from the narthex. He had stepped down off the landing and flattened himself into that convenient niche, the folded moving quilt tucked under his arm.

  Afterward, he had waited in silence, standing there for perhaps fifteen minutes, hearing the footsteps and noisy laughter of the choirboys as they made their way up to the balcony.

  When the service began, he had listened carefully to the priest and the beautiful Lenten hymns of the mass, able to hear it all clearly as he prepared to act. The Agnus Dei would be sung once the congregation, such as it was today, began sharing in the Eucharist. His plan was to return to the landing shortly before the sermon concluded. And wait.

  A pause now in the priest’s delivery and the vocals above him. He flexed the stiffness from his arms, reached into his pocket for his auto injector, and removed its cap.

  Another minute or so went by before he heard the boy push past the double doors between the church and the nave. He wetted his lips, ready to launch back onto the stairs from his hiding place

  Then the door swung in. He waited for the boy to appear on the landing, sprang from around the corner of the support wall, and came up quickly behind him, clapping a hand over his mouth while pulling him close to his body. The boy somehow managed to twist his head halfway around, his pink-cheeked face briefly turning just enough to allow him a glimpse of the man who’d surprised him from the murky dimness below the stairs. Having been filled with excitement as he’d raced to join the choir group, his eyes suddenly turned fearful, giving his attacker a split second’s pause, almost making him lament what had to be done, before he jabbed the spring-loaded auto injector against the boy’s neck, waiting ten seconds for its dose of pentobarbital to be fired through the soft, thin flesh.

  He did not strike the boy to ensure that he was fully out. He could not have brought himself to do it. At any rate, the tranq was powerful enough to make him droop instantly, his mouth lolling open.

  Holding the small body against him with one arm, keeping it erect, he shook open the moving blanket, draped it loosely over the unconscious boy, and slung him over his shoulder.

  A second later, he pushed out into the narthex, left the church through its arched entryway, and hurried down and around to his car, depositing the boy’s limp, covered body in the trunk before slamming it shut.

  He drove slowly along until he turned from the church grounds onto the road and only then accelerated a bit. As he did, it occurred to him that if the boy’s father had done the same when he’d abducted Kyle all those long years ago, his flight might well have gone unnoticed, resulting in his identity forever remaining a mystery. But instead, he had sped from the scene and attracted attention… leaving all those who had seen and done nothing to suffer the necessary punishments for having let him go free.

  His hand clenched around the telephone receiver, Father Molanez waited as the operator for the Douglas County sheriff’s office transferred him to a deputy. Th
e silence in his earpiece was maddening, although only three or four seconds had passed since he’d been put on hold.

  Jake Clarkson had vanished. Impossibly vanished. One moment, the priest had been standing at the altar, looking toward the back of the church, expecting Jake’s face to join those of the other choirboys. The next, he’d wondered what was taking him so long to reach them. And then the restless, puzzled stirring had begun in the pews and up in the loft.

  Vanished, Father Molanez told himself again. From the church. From under his supposedly attentive care. It was almost too much for him to comprehend.

  His first confused thought when the boy didn’t appear in the balcony was that he’d bumped into an acquaintance in the narthex. Perhaps a late arrival to services. It hadn’t been very sensible, of course. The boy had a keen sense of responsibility and would not delay the communion.

  The explanation that followed in Molanez’s mind seemed more plausible. Jake’s father had showed up. He’d forgotten to pack Jake’s lunch or noticed his homework on the table—something of that nature—and then had hurried over with it on his way to work.

  But even that idea only half made sense. Ronald Clarkson would have had no reason to interrupt services to drop off whatever he might have found. Even if he’d arrived just as his son was dashing upstairs, he would have taken communion and quietly given it to him afterward. Either that, or, if he was in a hurry, left it in the narthex or in a rear pew. Or with Jake’s homeroom teacher at school.

  No, it wasn’t that Jake had met his father or anyone else. Heaven forbid, then, might he have slipped on the stairs and gotten hurt? Surely, the boys up in the loft would have heard that. But what else could have happened? There was a rest-room in the vestry—Jake might have had some sort of emergency, perhaps been taken ill, and rushed out to the side door rather than embarrass himself by doubling back through the church.

  That, at least, seemed a rational possibility.

  All of this had passed through Father Molanez’s mind in a matter of seconds before he begged patience of his little group of congregants, hurried down the hall to the vestry, and knocked on the restroom door, lightly, then with greater urgency, calling Jake’s name when there was no response.

  When he returned to the nave, the congregation had instantly read the alarm on his face. It had not taken long for them to start looking everywhere for the boy, even as Molanez called the school to ascertain that none of Jake’s teachers or classmates had seen him there.

  They had not.

  And now he was on the phone with the sheriff’s office. Being transferred. Waiting through the unbearable, seemingly interminable silence for someone to—

  “Hello, this is Deputy Vasquez,” a voice said. “Do I understand correctly that there’s a missing child?”

  Father Molanez’s throat almost clamped shut around his monosyllabic answer. “Yes,” he said.

  “Okay, I want to see exactly where we stand,” Catherine said, thinking with dour amusement that it almost seemed a loaded statement, given that everyone at the conference table looked utterly discombobulated, their weariness evident from their raccoon-ringed eyes, scrambled and beaten hair, and wrinkled clothes. Catherine herself was willing to bet her own body chemistry now consisted of ninety percent coffee, and judging from everyone’s breath—not to put too fine a point on things—she wasn’t alone.

  “Nick?” she said. “How about you start off with Frank Dumas?”

  Nick nodded. “I think your using his name tells us a lot,” he said, running a hand over his stubbled cheek. “Everything we know points to him being Tattoo Man. We’ve got various lines of evidence that tie the victims to the murder of his son. In his eyes, every one of them would have had a role in Ronald Clarkson’s exoneration.”

  “And you’re positive there was never another suspect.”

  “Never,” Nick said. “It’s a cold case.”

  Catherine thought for a moment. “Kyle Dumas’s body is found ditched in Red Rock Canyon. The epithelials from Dorset and Noble tell us Tattoo Man uses homemade pigments made from minerals in Red Rock Canyon…”

  “And then Cody Vaega confirms someone he knows as the Master does, too, and that producing it is no easy skill,” Langston said. “Next, we raid the Master’s warehouse and find photos of all of Tattoo Man’s victims.”

  “Plus one,” Sara said.

  Catherine considered that and frowned. “It’s one thing connecting Tattoo Man, or the Master, or whatever name you want to give him, to the murder of Kyle Dumas. But how do we know he’s the boy’s father and not someone else with an attachment to the case?”

  “We don’t conclusively,” Nick said. “But there’s plenty to suggest that he’s our guy. Frank’s a top graphic designer, moonlights as a fine artist. He sells his home and drops out of sight right around the time somebody buys the warehouse in Poppy Lane. Also, we need to go back to Mitchell Noble. He wasn’t one of the perceived erroneous or nonwitnesses. His only sin, if we want to think like the Tattoo Man, was that he took a photo of Frank Dumas holding his boy’s corpse.”

  “A photo that Clarkson’s defense attorney argued tainted virtually all of the trace evidence against him,” Catherine said.

  “Right.”

  Catherine lifted her coffee cup, saw it was drained, and frowned. “Okay, let’s premise that Frank Dumas is acting out of payback, warped justice, again, pick your own term. That image of the lamb… what did you call it, Ray?”

  “The Paschal Lamb,” he said from across the table. “Literally, the sacrificial lamb at ancient Passover celebrations. It holds great symbolism for Jews and Christians.”

  “We have to believe it does for Dumas, too,” Catherine said. “And that it’ll have a meaning we don’t want to contemplate for his next victim.”

  “Unless we find Dumas first,” Sara said.

  Everyone at the table thought in silence for a while.

  “While we’re grasping here, do we know Ronald Clarkson’s current whereabouts?” Catherine asked.

  “A little town called Miriam way out near the California border,” Nick said. “I checked it out this morning. His number’s unlisted, so I had to go through procedural hoops to get hold of it.”

  “You phone him yet?”

  Nick nodded. “Got his machine, left a message to please return my call. This time of day, people are at work. Or on the way. I hope to hear back from him soon.”

  “We should quietly notify the local police out there. Just so they keep an eye on him,” Catherine said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Catherine sighed and turned to Greg. “Okay, let’s move on. How’d you do poking around in the Flash Ink member logs?”

  “I did more than poke,” Greg said. He glanced about the table. “I think I came up with somebody we’d better talk to.”

  She looked at him sharply. “What’s his name?”

  “Pierre Chenard,” Greg said. “Lives right nearby in one of those posh Summerlin villages.”

  Catherine didn’t know why she felt disappointed. Not Bockem? Follow the evidence, though. It had been Grissom’s mantra. “Tell us what you know, Greg.”

  “Since the murders—Laurel Whitsen and the couple in the park yesterday—there’s been a huge uptick in traffic on the site. The victims’ photo galleries in particular.”

  “Internet lookeeloos.”

  “Right,” Greg said. “That’s predictable. But the IP addresses I zoned in on were ones that frequented the galleries before and after the killings. I included the Canadian murders, too.”

  Langston was nodding. “Serial killers will often trawl for their catches and then admire them.”

  “Like trophy hunters,” Catherine said.

  Greg nodded some more, looking contemplative. “This wasn’t about fancy evolution equations for me. My computational method wasn’t too different from what market researchers use to find a celeb’s likability index. Or what any website would use to monitor its success rate pulling in ta
rgeted visitors. I narrowed down the number of unique and repeat IPs that hit the galleries, then factored in chronological proximity to the murders. And then sat back while the software went through successive iterations.”

  “And this Chenard…”

  “Is way over the top, visiting the victims’ galleries over and over again,” Greg said. “I’m talking compulsive. Besides that, he repeatedly hit them before the stories hit the news, and I got him on there in real time for maybe two hours last night.”

  “How’d you match the IP address to his name?”

  Greg grinned. “The clown logs on with his smart phone, uses Wi-Fi on open networks,” he said. “I just traced the IP back to his mobile account. And I’ll be able to pull even more on him from the cellular provider and Flash Ink’s user database once we get a warrant.”

  “Flash Ink wouldn’t give you voluntary access to his personal info?”

  “Not without a warrant,” Greg said. “Can’t blame them, either. They have privacy guarantees for membership and need to protect themselves against lawsuits.”

  “Then let’s request those warrants and see if we can get a search-and-seizure for his home while we’re at it,” Catherine said. “With Stancroft laying on the pressure, I think we can probably get instant approval—”

  Her cell phone beeped. She held up a hand, pulled it out, and listened without saying a word. And then listened some more, deep lines materializing around her mouth like parentheses. Finally, she put down the phone and looked at the waiting faces around the table.

  “There’s an AMBER Alert out,” she said. “Issued in Douglas County. A boy named Jake Clarkson disappeared from a church in Miriam.”

  Four pairs of eyes widened into stares.

  “I think at least one of us needs to head out there,” Nick said after a pause. “Damn, it must be three, four hundred miles away—”

  “Red Rock Canyon isn’t,” Sara said.