Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

They all looked at her.

  “I have a hunch,” she said. “We walk out this door, go twenty miles, and we can stop.”

  “Okay, we’re set for takeoff,” said the Bureau of Land Management ranger from behind the controls of the Bell 206. A whipcord-thin guy named Ken Granderson, he glanced over at Catherine in the cockpit beside him, shifted halfway around toward his other passengers. “You two strapped in back there?”

  Nick and Sara nodded from the rear, hearing his voice in their headsets over the whine of the chopper’s engine. It was now a little past three o’clock in the afternoon, twenty minutes after he’d met the CSIs outside the visitor center at the east end of the Red Rock Canyon conservation area. From there, he’d driven them out to the helipad in a spot he’d called Calico Hill that was maybe a mile away.

  “I’m gonna guess your man would need six hours minimum to get here from Miriam,” he said. “That’s assuming he did a good seventy-five, eighty out in those open stretches of the interstate.”

  “So if he’s here, he hasn’t been for long,” Catherine said.

  Granderson nodded. “My guess is he’d take Charleston into the valley—it’s the easiest way from the north. Problem is that once he’s in, he’s in. Could be anywhere.”

  “And we don’t know what sort of car we’re looking for. Or if it’s even a car or some other sort of vehicle.”

  Granderson considered that, his hands on the sticks. “Couple of things we do know,” he said. “It’s early in the year for tourists, so there won’t be a lot of them.”

  “And?”

  “We won’t find him by staying here,” he said, and brought the bird up.

  “We ought to have the mayor stick his schnoz into every case,” Greg said, glancing over at Langston from the Mustang’s passenger seat. “It’s like he’s got judges all around town waiting on standby to authorize warrants.”

  Ray grinned as they left the gate behind and made the turn curving toward the lakeside estate of Pierre Chenard. They went up between rows of towering palms and swung past ornamental gardens into a circular drive. A silver Bentley was parked outside, a black Mercedes SUV behind it.

  “And here we felt lucky getting the Mustang out of req,” Langston said, pulling in.

  They exited the car, strode along the tiled front walk to the door, and rang the bell. A servant in a blue blazer, red necktie, and tan trousers promptly appeared, and they showed him their identification.

  “Mr. Chenard is expecting you,” he said. “Please come with me.”

  He led them through expansive rooms filled with antique furniture and crystal vases to a warm, sun-washed atrium facing the man-made lake out back. As they approached, the man they assumed was Chenard rose off a high-backed cane chair to meet them. Short and corpulent, he had on a Panama hat, an eggshell suit over a light blue shirt, and brown crepe-soled loafers.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, motioning them toward chairs. “Please make yourselves comfortable. Daniel here can bring us some refreshments.”

  The CSIs remained standing. “No, thank you,” Langston said.

  “Are you certain? We have coffee or tea prepared—”

  “Mr. Chenard, I assume you know we’ve come with a warrant to search your premises,” Langston said, getting it out of his jacket pocket. “You may want to look over the papers.”

  He shook his head slightly, keeping his hands at his sides. “My attorney is on his way to take care of that. I contacted him on short notice, so he’ll be arriving in a bit. Which is why I thought we could wait arriving in the meantime. Perhaps discuss the reason for your visit.”

  “Do you have your cell phone handy?” Greg said.

  Chenard shot him a look. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because we need you to turn it over to us, sir.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “This is a search-and-seizure warrant,” Langston said. “That’s why I urged you to read it. We don’t have to wait for your attorney. We have a half-dozen patrol cars outside the gate and can have officers turning this place inside out before he’s decided which pair of shoes to wear for his visit. But we thought you might prefer that we handle this discreetly.”

  Chenard’s upper lip twitched a little. “Handle what? I have nothing to hide.”

  “Then you should have no problem with the cell phone,” Langston said. “We’ll also want to take a look around the house.”

  “I still don’t know what all this is about.”

  “Then let me make it clear. You are under suspicion for the murders of Laurel Whitsen, Daichi Sato, and Lynda Griffith. We’ve come to collect potential evidence. And it’s in your best interest to cooperate.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Chenard’s features had blanched. “I would never harm, let alone kill, anyone. Moreover, I don’t know those people.”

  “Then you must have an awfully bad memory,” Greg said.

  Chenard looked at him. “Again, I’m bewildered. And frankly haven’t any notion where you’re going with these accusations.”

  “Flash Ink,” Greg said, and saw the remaining color leach from Chenard’s cheeks. “For openers, anyway.”

  “You see the depression down there to the left?” Granderson asked, pointing out the chopper’s windscreen.

  Catherine nodded, saw the thick carpet of sagebrush along its sides and bottom. “Is that where the Dumas boy was found?”

  “You’ve got it,” he said. “I wasn’t here back then, but I checked out that newspaper photo you e-mailed, then did some reading up. On average throughout the state, all those plants reach full flower in the summer. But the canyon as a whole’s unusual as far as temperature and sun, and it’s especially true of this area. Another week or two, and they’ll be blooming like in the picture.”

  She narrowed her gaze, the image of the man with the boy in his arms superimposing itself over the empty gully below. After a moment, she looked over her shoulder at Sara. It was her hunch that had brought them to the canyon, and Catherine was going to ride it.

  “You suppose that’s where Dumas would bring Jake Clarkson?”

  Sara sat very still. Although her eyes were on Catherine, they seemed to be looking inward. “No,” she said after a long moment. “It’s loaded with negative vibes.”

  “He kidnapped the boy,” Catherine said. “He doesn’t have anything good planned.”

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t think he’d see it that way,” she said. “Whatever he’s done or intends to do… I think he believes it’s right.”

  Catherine silently absorbed that, trying to follow her thought process. “If there’s anything here with a positive significance for Dumas, what would it be?”

  “Affirmative would be a better word,” Sara said. “I’m not playing semantics. But it’s something that gives him a reason to go on.”

  “His art,” Nick said. “I mean, something that’s associated with it.”

  “The minerals,” Sara said. “The ones he uses for his pigments. They’d make Dumas feel in touch with his dead son. Closer to him.”

  Nick and Catherine looked at her as understanding dawned on their faces.

  An instant later, she leaned slightly forward, tilting her head toward Granderson. “Is there someplace where the hematite and Caetano tuff are mixed in heavy concentration?”

  The ranger nodded. “Keystone Thrust,” he said. “Slopes aren’t too awful and…” His sentence faded as he worked the cyclic and collective and the chopper banked sharply north.

  “What is it?” Catherine said.

  “There’s an overlook,” he said. “One where you can park a car and then climb down pretty easy.”

  “What’s on the other side here?” Brass asked Chenard. Bookended by a pair of LVPD unis, he was standing in front of a heavy paneled oak door in Chenard’s basement, or underground art gallery, whichever term one chose to describe the climate-controlled space with its rows of framed paintings.

  “A private study,” Chenard said.
He was sweating heavily despite the low temperature. “It contains items of personal sentiment.”

  Brass tried the handle. “It’s locked,” he said. “Open it.”

  “I do feel compelled to wait for my attorney,” Chenard said. “In spite of having a difficult time with this situation, I’ve gone out of my way to be helpful.”

  “I’m glad you’re coping,” Brass said. “But now you’ll either have to open the door or get out of our way so we can break it down.”

  Chenard flinched as he turned toward Langston. “You told me this would be handled with discretion. That the police would wait outside the gate.”

  Langston was thinking he hadn’t said precisely as much but was not about to enter into a dispute. “And you told me you had nothing to hide,” he replied instead. “I suggest you listen to the detective.”

  Chenard produced a handkerchief from his lapel pocket, unfolded it, and dabbed a glistening spot of perspiration off his brow. Then he gave a resigned shake of his head, reached into the jacket for a fob with a single key attached to it, and slid it into the lock.

  He stepped back as Brass, the two cops, and the CSIs moved past him into the room.

  Greg’s eyes widened in horror and revulsion the instant he followed Langston through from the outer gallery. “Oh,” he said, a hand going up to his temple. “Oh, man.”

  There were more than a half-dozen acrylic frames on the walls containing tattooed human skins. A large pinkish heart with a radiant blue-and-yellow eye in the middle. A feathered serpent coiling through gemstone-colored constellations of stars. A concupiscent male face composed of countless tiny flowers, with shriveled brown protuberances discernible as human nipples on the skin itself…

  Greg looked around the room, his expression of sick disgust mirrored on the face of everyone who’d come into it with him. And then his eyes abruptly froze on one in particular.

  Below the framed tattoo of a nude woman with graceful angelic wings, a brass wall plaque read, “KZ Buchenwald, Block Two, Germany, ap-1943.”

  Greg snapped his head around toward Chenard, who had remained outside the entrance. “How?” he said. “How could you…”

  “I’m only a connoisseur, a buyer,” Chenard said, the handkerchief in his hand again. “But I can give you the one who sold them to me.”

  Its rotors whopping, the chopper reached the heaving bluff Granderson had called Keystone Thrust, then climbed almost vertically alongside its rock face to fly over its flattened summit.

  Catherine looked down at an unattended Honda sedan parked on the overlook and motioned out her window.

  “Only car in sight,” she said. “How do we find out if it’s our man?”

  “I’ll widen my circle,” Granderson said. He nodded toward a small compartment beneath the instrument panel. “The binoculars are in there.”

  She reached inside as he glided out over the edge of the rocky platform, then brought the lenses up to her eyes.

  As he made his second looping run around the cliffs, breath hissed through her front teeth. “I see him!” She gesticulated to her right and passed the binocs back to Nick and Sara. “He’s got the boy.”

  Catherine stared out the windscreen, following his progress with her unaided eyes. He was down at the bottom of the gully, struggling across a wash to the opposite slope, Jake Clarkson’s limp form over his shoulder. The boy was gagged and trussed like an animal, his arms and legs bound with cord. As the Bell chopper flew above him, the fleeing man craned his head back long enough to get a look at it, then continued stumbling on foot toward the far side of the wash.

  “If we go back to the overlook, try to climb down from there, there’s no chance we can catch up to him,” Nick said.

  Granderson filled his chest with air. “You want to hang on to your seats, I can try bringing her down here in the arroyo,” he said. “It ought to be level enough in the wash for me to get my skids…”

  “Do it,” Catherine said.

  And then she felt her stomach lurch as Granderson made a sheer, rapid descent, the bird shuddering as it dove in low over the ground, shedding a hundred fifty feet of altitude in what felt like a heartbeat.

  Catherine looked out the windscreen. The fleeing man was still well ahead of them, rushing toward a cut in the gully’s wall that hadn’t been visible from above. But she thought they at least had a chance to catch up. If—

  “You’ve gotta land this thing now!” she exclaimed

  Granderson grunted. “All right, this is where it gets bumpy.”

  He gripped the sticks hard. A moment later, the bird made a touchdown that jarred Catherine’s spine, the backwash of its blades kicking up a cloud of sand and gravel.

  She sucked in a breath and unclipped her safety harness. In the rear of the aircraft, Nick and Sara were doing the same.

  “Just wait a few seconds so the blades can slow,” Granderson said. “Keep your heads tucked.”

  Catherine gave it exactly one second and jumped out her door, crouched beneath the flapping rotors, Nick and Sara close on her heels. Ahead of them, their quarry had almost reached the notch in the slope.

  “Frank Dumas!” Nick shouted, jogging behind at a fast clip. “Las Vegas police! Stop where you are!”

  The man barely held up. But Catherine had seen the slightest hitch in his step as she kept running, running, running, arms pumping at her sides.

  He continued on, stumbling a little under the awkward burden of the boy’s weight. And then he plunged into the notch.

  Nick had drawn his duty weapon, an H&K .45-caliber pistol, and he put on the speed now, moving alongside Catherine and then slightly in front. She and Sara had pulled their own pistols but let him take the lead. Texas boy, best shot, legs all hard muscle, he had a better chance of eating up the ground that separated them from their man before it was too late. Assuming, God help all of them, that already wasn’t the case.

  A blurry yard, then another few feet, and the CSIs were inside the cut.

  They drew to a halt. The boy was on a flat red stone the shape of a large anvil. Semiconscious—they could see him moving his head groggily from side to side. Standing over him, his abductor was gripping a Bowie knife in both hands, holding it over the boy’s throat.

  “Mr. Dumas,” Nick said. Twenty, thirty feet away from him. Decent range. His firearm held out. “You don’t want to hurt the boy.”

  The man turned his head in Nick’s direction. The knife was poised over the boy’s jugular.

  “God demands balance,” he said. “A pure sacrifice.”

  “No,” Sara said, stepping up from behind Nick. “No, listen to me. God didn’t want your son to die. He doesn’t want another man’s son—”

  “This boy’s spirit will be given unto him,” Dumas said. “Be cleansed and sanctified at this altar. And Kyle’s soul will be reborn in the flesh. Returned to us. Balance…”

  Sara was shaking her head. “Kyle’s at rest,” she said slowly. “He’s someplace better than here. You can’t bring him back, nobody can, so why don’t you put down the knife?”

  He looked at her. Their eyes locked.

  “Please, Mr. Dumas,” she said. “Drop the knife. We understand your loss and don’t want to hurt you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have long to live,” he said. “It’s lung cancer.”

  “Then we can get you medical care.”

  “You don’t understand,” Dumas said. “The cancer is God’s message to me. A gift of Awakening. So that I would know it was time to act. And what had to be done.”

  “No,” Sara said. “I’m telling you, Mr. Dumas. You are making a terrible mistake.”

  He started to say something, appeared to reconsider, and instead shut his mouth. Looked from the boy to Sara, then back down at the boy. Finally, he shook his head and lowered the Bowie knife to the boy’s throat.

  Nick pulled the trigger of his gun once, knowing that was all it would take. Dumas staggered backward, blood splashing from his chest, hit
ting the ground with the knife still in his slackening grip.

  His weapon against his thigh now, Nick ran over to him, knelt to check his pulse, turning toward Catherine and Sara as they untied the boy, carefully lifted him from the stone, and set him on the ground.

  He shook his head, holstered the pistol. “Gone,” he said.

  Sara looked over at him and met his gaze, the cords she’d helped remove from Jake Clarkson’s wrists dangling from her hand.

  “If there really is a better place than this… I’d like to think he’s with his son,” she said. “But heaven help us, I’m not even sure he deserves it.”

  12

  “I WANT TO MAKE sure we’re all clear about this,” Brass said. Along with CSI Willows, he was in Interrogation Room B at headquarters, addressing Pierre Chenard’s defense lawyer, a middle-aged guy named David Billson who was decked out in maybe two thousand dollars’ worth of tailored Armani fabric. “Your client here is insisting he is not the person who’s been murdering contestants—and would-be contestants—who appeared on the Flash Ink television show but a collector of unusual tattoos.”

  “A connoisseur of exceptional body art and human skin rarities,” Chenard broke in from where he sat beside Billson. “However repetitious that might sound, I prefer not to be mischaracterized. Also, as my attorney has indicated, you may address me directly, Captain.”

  Brass stared across the table at him. “I appreciate that,” he said. “As I understand it, Mr. Chenard, you claim that you weren’t trawling the Flash Ink website for potential victims but were checking out merchandise—”

  “Browsing for modern masterpieces,” Chenard said. “A bit compulsively at times, I admit. But I dive into my passions with abandon.”

  “Which you say explains the frequency of your visits to the galleries.”

  “Correct.”

  “And so—again, I want to make sure there’s no mistake—you are asserting that you were a buyer and not the seller.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you belong to some sort of secret auction group that bids on these human skins online.”

  “A very select group of body-art connoisseurs with members around the world,” Chenard said. “Although I don’t know the identities of the other bidders.”