To The Bone

by Neil Mcmahon

  Gwen Bricknell was hurrying up the clinic's steps.

  D'Anton strode to the door and jerked it open, anger overcoming his surprise.

  "What has gotten into you?" he snapped. "First you invite Monks to our house. Then you show up here, in the middle of the night."

  "I'm trying to save you, darling," she said, stalking haughtily past him.

  "Save me? What are you talking about?"

  "From death row," she said kindly.

  'Death row! Gwen, what is this – mad cow disease?" But he felt the unseen blow to his gut, close to where that fear lived.

  "You want to play games, Welles?" she said. "All right. Let me tell you a story."

  She sat on the desk, crosslegged, hands folded in her lap. It was a little girl's pose – but she was at the station where she controlled the clinic. D'Anton stood before her, powerless, like a patient.

  "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful model, who made a plastic surgeon famous," she said. Her tone was childish, too, an eerie high-pitched whisper. "Let's call her Gwen. She spent her career as a living advertisement for him, and then went to work for him. Right here at this desk." She slapped her hand down on it.

  "Then one day she noticed that he was doing thousands of dollars' worth of free surgery on some little slut. Let's call her Eden. It didn't take Gwen long to figure out what was going on. Gwen knew the surgeon had affairs. He'd had one with Gwen, when she was young. She could forgive all that. But this was different. The surgeon was making Eden into his new advertisement. Then he was going to throw Gwen away, like an old rug."

  "Oh, no," D' Anton said softly, enlisting that confident voice that women found hypnotic. "Dear, dear Gwen, you misunderstand completely."

  She ignored him.

  "Gwen started listening to the surgeon when he was on the phone, and one day she heard him tell Eden he'd meet her that night," she said. "But he didn't say where. Gwen drove to all the places she thought they might go, and finally, it must have been one o'clock in the morning by then, she came here.

  "There weren't any cars, but there was a light on inside that shouldn't have been. She thought maybe the surgeon had parked in the loading dock, so no one would know he was here. So she let herself in the back door and looked. Sure enough, the surgeon's car was there, and she could hear somebody, farther in."

  D'Anton stared at her silently, with his dread rising to the point of nausea.

  "Gwen was just about to go in there and let the surgeon and his girlfriend have it," she whispered. "Then she saw that the car's trunk was open, and there was a big plastic garbage bag in it. Now, the surgeon would never have carried something like that in his beautiful car. What in the world was going on?"

  Her eyes were wide, with a child's playacting earnestness. But the fear in them was real.

  "She walked over to the bag and touched it. Something inside was soft and warm. Her hand knew what it was. She took her shoes off and tiptoed out of there as fast as she could, and ran to her car. She never believed she could be so scared."

  D' Anton was stepping back, shaking his head, palms held out in denial.

  "Don't worry," she whispered, leaning forward as if to follow him. "Gwen didn't breathe a word to anybody. It's their secret – hers and the famous surgeon's."

  "No!" D'Anton almost shouted. "It wasn't me "

  Her eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  "You never saw me, did you?" he demanded.

  "I didn't need to," she said, in her normal voice now. "Who else could have been here, driving your car?"

  D'Anton exhaled slowly. "There's only one other person who drives that car."

  "Julia? You can't be serious."

  He turned away, clasping his head as if he was trying to keep it from exploding.

  "You know how vicious she can be," he said. "I suspected it first when that girl, Katie, disappeared. I think there've been others. She's trying to compete with me in some insane way. Taking out her rage. It's been absolute hell to live with, but I didn't know what to do. Just hoped to God I was wrong."

  His body sagged, hands falling to his sides.

  "I think she murdered Eden," he said.

  Abruptly, Gwen laughed, a sound that rang wildly out of place in the stillness.

  "Tell the world that if you want, Welles," she said. "Gwen knows the truth." She slid off the desk and moved toward him, slowly and seductively, all full-grown woman again.

  "You don't have to hide anything from her anymore," she said softly. "She knows you're the master sculptor. You're driven to push beyond the limits. To see how far you can take the living flesh, toward perfection."

  "I'm not hiding anything. Haven't you heard what I've said?"

  "But you have to remember, you owe everything to Gwen," she said. "It was her face, her body, that the world saw, with your name hooked to them. And you are going to keep her the way she was. She's done aging."

  D'Anton's forehead furrowed in bewilderment. "What are you talking about? No one stops-"

  She slapped his face, a hard stinging blow.

  "She's going to make the Monks problem go away," she said. "And then, things are going to be like they used to be. You're going to make her perfect again, an inch at a time. From now on, she is what you do"

  D'Anton looked into her impassioned eyes, his skin prickling with the realization that he might have thought the wrong woman was insane.

  He said, with a quaver in his voice, "Was it you who killed Eden?"

  "Eden's gone. Now there's just Gwen." She leaned close, all softness again, breasts against him, lips at his ear. "She'll take care of you, much better than Eden ever would have. And she'll keep faith, to the death."

  D'Anton was starting to understand that the beauty he had created was making him a prisoner.

  Then he thought he heard a stealthy sound coming from the hallway that led to the procedure rooms.

  Chapter 30

  Outside the windows of Larrabee's office, the sky was starting to lighten into dawn. Guido Franchi, Larrabee's detective friend from the SFPD, was sitting at the kitchen table across from Monks. Franchi was a big black-haired man with a drooping mustache, a heavily lined face, and skeptical eyes that were bleary from his being called out at five o'clock on a Saturday morning. They watched Monks steadily.

  "So, let me make sure I got this right," Franchi said. "You left there naked, after having sex with this lady? Your clothes are still there?"

  Monks had his hands pressed against his face, forefingers massaging his temples.

  "I know how it sounds," he said.

  "You admit you could have imagined the part about her trying to drown you? What with the drug, and all?"

  "I don't think so. But it's possible."

  Franchi leaned back in his chair, turning his mug of coffee in both hands, as if trying to warm it through friction.

  'That doesn't give me much to work with," he said. "Right off, there's a jurisdiction problem. If she's still up in Marin, it's their case. If she came back to the city, I could pick her up for attempted murder. But how the fuck am I supposed to do that, when my only witness admits he was stoned out of his skull?"

  Monks was still shaky, and he felt like there was grit floating around in his brain, but the drug seemed to be gone from his system now.

  "I don't have any measure of how far gone I was," he said. "Either of you ever tried it? Ecstasy?"

  Franchi shook his head. "Too New Age for me."

  "Iris brought some home a couple times," Larrabee said. "It's great for in the sack, but it does twist your head around. What I'm wondering about, Carroll, how could she have known about the scarf? Or Martine?"

  Monks had been wondering that, too. More and more, he was fearing that he had hallucinated the whole thing.

  "Sorry," he said. "I feel like an asshole, believe me."

  "I'm not worried about you feeling like an asshole," Franchi said. "I'm worried about me fucking around with a guy like D' Anton, and coming up empty." He stood and
poured more coffee. "You got anything to eat?" he asked Larrabee. "Sweet roll, something like that?"

  "Bagels."

  "Terrific. My stomach starts acting up if I don't get something in it. Any advice, Doc?"

  "Go easy on the coffee. Try Tagamet."

  "Yeah, that's pretty much what my doctor said. But I keep forgetting." Franchi stepped to a window and stared out, scowling.

  "If it's true, that Katie Bensen was killed, and Roberta Massey almost was," Franchi said, "was Ms. Bricknell the one who did that, too?"

  Monks shook his head. "I can believe she slipped something in my drink," he said. "Tried to drown me. Maybe even poisoned Eden. But not that she cut the skin off a woman's face."

  But he knew he could be wrong.

  "What about that nurse she pointed out? Who's so jealous of D'Anton?" Larrabee asked.

  "She'd have the skills," Monks said. "So would D'Anton, or other clinic people."

  "All right, we'll run NCIC checks on all those employees," Franchi said, turning back to the room. "Eden's boyfriend, too. Somebody might have a sheet. Let's locate D'Anton, and let's pick up Gwen. You said she's got an apartment here?"

  "That's what she told me," Monks said. "I don't know the address. She might have stayed in Marin, too."

  "You call her there," Franchi said. "Don't say the cops are in this yet; that might spook her. If she's gone, try and find out where she is. If she's there, play it like she was right, you lost your head, you want to come talk to her, some bullshit like that."

  "Tell her you want your clothes back," Larrabee said. Both detectives looked amused. Monks was not.

  The directions Gwen had given him to the party, with the house's phone number, were still in the Bronco. He went down to get them, hobbling on his scratched and bruised feet.

  When he came back, Larrabee had popped bagels out of a toaster oven and put them on a plate.

  "There's cream cheese," he said. "Sorry, no lox."

  "I'll make the call first," Monks said.

  Larrabee turned the telephone's speaker on. The two detectives stood listening, chewing quietly, while Monks punched the number.

  It rang several times before a woman's voice answered. She was very irritable, and she was not Gwen.

  "Do you have any idea what time it is?" she snapped. "Who is this?"

  "It's Dr. Monks. Mrs. D'Anton? Julia?"

  "Yes?" Her tone made it clear that identifying himself had not gained him any points.

  Franchi made a cutting motion across his throat with his forefinger. They did not want Julia D' Anton to know that she was on the suspect list, too.

  Monks nodded. "I need to find Gwen," he said.

  'Then I suggest you call someplace she is, instead of someplace she's not."

  "Where's that?" Monks said quickly, worried that she would hang up.

  "How should I know? You were her date."

  "Her apartment in San Francisco?"

  "I'd say that's likely," Julia said. "Although maybe with somebody else. Did you disappoint her?"

  "How about your husband? Do you know where he is?"

  "Probably in the city, too, at our house there. That's where he stays most of the time."

  "I need both those addresses and phones. Cells, too."

  "Dr. Monks, what exactly is your interest in us?" Julia said scathingly. "First, Gwen tells me you suspect that Eden was murdered. Next thing I know, you're socializing at our house, staggering around like a drunk teenager. Now you're tracking us. Are we under suspicion? Or are you just trying to screw my cousin?"

  Monks looked for help to Franchi, and got none. The cop's big, weary face stayed impassive.

  "I wasn't drunk, Julia," Monks said. "Somebody drugged me. This has taken a very serious turn."

  Long seconds of silence passed. Monks felt himself being weighed. When she spoke again, her tone was still haughty, but a note of uncertainty had crept in.

  "I'll have to get my address book. I don't remember the cell numbers."

  She returned to the phone a few moments later. Monks wrote down the information and gave her Larrabee's office number.

  "If anybody comes back there, don't say anything about this," he said. "Get someplace private and call me."

  He clicked the phone off and looked at his judges, wondering if he had given too much away. But Franchi did not seem displeased.

  "Okay," Franchi said. "Let's get after it."

  Monks picked at a bagel and listened while Franchi dispatched unmarked cars to Gwen Bricknell's apartment building, a Nob Hill high-rise, and to D'Anton's Pacific Heights home. While they waited, Franchi called downtown to start National Crime Information Center checks on the suspects.

  It only took a few minutes to find out that nobody answered the phones, or the doors, at either Gwen's apartment or D'Anton's house. Both their vehicles were gone.

  "You could try the clinic," Monks said. "Sometimes she goes there on weekends to catch up on work."

  'The morning after she tried to off you?" Franchi said sourly.

  Monks winced.

  "Well, what the hell," Franchi said. "Can't hurt to look."

  He called the cars in the field again. The three men waited.

  This time, when Franchi's phone rang back, he started to look animated.

  "Get some backup, make sure nobody gets out of there," he said into the phone. "Then see if she'll come to the door. If she does, hold her till I get there. Again, that name's Gwen Bricknell. Very good-looking babe, dark hair, about forty." He glanced at Monks, eyebrows raised, for corroboration. Monks nodded.

  "And keep this off the radio," Franchi ordered. "I don't want every fucking unit in the Taraval coming in spikes high."

  "Her car's there," he told Monks and Larrabee. "Let's hope she lets them in. We can't just go kicking the door down."

  More minutes passed, with Franchi talking tersely to the officers on the scene. Monks could not understand all of the clipped, coded copspeak, but it did not sound promising.

  Finally, Franchi confirmed that. "Nobody answers the phone inside. They've banged on the doors and windows. Nothing. I'll have to go downtown, try to get a warrant to break in. This is really hanging my ass out." He was looking bleary again, but now pissed off, too. Monks was aware that police tended not to like it when technicalities got in the way, especially in the way of taking down someone genuinely dangerous.

  "You want to ride along?" Franchi asked Larrabee. "Catch up on what you've been missing all these years?" Larrabee nodded. To Monks, Franchi said, "I think you ought to stay here, Doctor. If she is in there, it might not be a good idea for her to see you. You could probably use some sleep. Just keep that phone close by, in case the doctor's wife calls."

  Monks was a little hurt, like a child who had been ditched by older boys going off on an adventure too rough for him.

  He finished the bagel he had been working on, then went into Larrabee's living room and stretched out on the couch. Sleep was out of the question. But it started to come home to him that he was in a warm, safe place.

  That was something he had not appreciated nearly enough in his life.

  Chapter 31

  It was just after seven a.m. when Larrabee and Franchi arrived at D'Anton's clinic, carrying a warrant empowering the police to enter it, by force if necessary. An unmarked car with two plainclothes detectives was waiting in front, and two black-and-white squad cars were parked to triangulate the building, watching the other exits. They had tried repeatedly to rouse anyone who might be inside, but there had been no response.

  The break-in was not going to require finesse. Ordinary locks could be picked or opened with a lock gun, but the clinic was protected by high-security deadbolts. All narcotics were locked in a safe, but any place that kept them was still a prime target for burglary. The simplest way in, and easiest to repair, was to break a window. That would set off a silent alarm system connected to the Taraval District police station, but they had been alerted and would not respond.


  One of the detectives was in his thirties, comparatively young and agile. At Franchi's okay, wearing gloves and goggles, he smashed a ground-floor window with a gorilla bar. They waited, listening. It was just possible that someone was inside, armed, and that the intrusion would make him – or her – desperate.

  The detective cleared the shards of glass from the frame, then went in, boosted by the others, pistol in hand. A minute later, he opened the rear door. Franchi, Larrabee, and the second detective went in next, leaving the uniformed cops outside to guard.

  They stepped into a utility area, with stainless-steel counters, sinks, and refrigerators. Larrabee was immediately aware of the crisp smell he associated with medical facilities. It was silent except for the faint humming of physical plant machinery.

  Franchi led, his pistol also drawn. He opened a door into a hallway, with four more opposing doors opening off of it. All but one were open. They were procedure rooms, fitted with operating tables and equipment, empty of people.

  Franchi stepped quietly past the closed door and pressed himself against the wall. The young detective threw the door open, jumping back and leveling his gun.

  Nothing moved inside the room, but there was something on the table.

  Larrabee's gut understood before his mind did that it was not just something, but someone.

  Franchi turned his head and yelled back down the hallway to the cops waiting outside, "One dead!"

  The body was female, with coppery skin and long, jet black hair spilling from her head off the table's end. Her face had been largely peeled away, leaving rough, dark red crusted patches of raw tissue. The table and the floor underneath were slick with blood. There was a thick smell, not decay yet, but its precursor.

  Franchi crossed himself, muttering in Italian. The young detective let his gun hand fall, his other forearm rising to cover his mouth. Larrabee had to fight the urge to hyperventilate. He had seen his share of bodies, but never one like this.