The Skin Collector

  Fifty-three years old, with slim shoulders and a pear-shaped build (but a slim pear), Harriet had a staunch face that was ruddy and weathered - from gardening, from marshaling children after class in the backyard, from picnics and barbecues. Yet she was the least vain woman on earth, and the only creases that troubled her were not in her face but in the skirt of the suit - one set of wrinkles that she could control.

  Given her destination, a grim place, she might easily have ignored the imperfection. But that wasn't Harriet's way. There was a right approach and a wrong, a lazy, a misguided approach. She unzipped and sloughed off the skirt, which slid easily over the beige slip.

  She deftly ratcheted open the cheap ironing board with one hand (oh, Harriet knew her laundry implements) and plugged in the inadequate iron, which was secured to the board with a wire; were handheld appliance thefts such a terrible problem in New York? And didn't the hotel have the guests' credit cards anyway?

  Oh, well. It was a different world here, so different from home.

  As she waited for the heat to gather she kept replaying her husband's words from yesterday as they'd walked through the chill streets of New York.

  'Hey, Harriet, hey.' He'd stopped on the street, halfway between FAO Schwarz and Madison Avenue, hand on a lamppost.

  'Honey?' she'd asked, circling.

  'Sorry. I'm sorry.' The man, ten years older than his wife, had seemed embarrassed. 'I'm not feeling so good. Something.' He'd touched his chest. 'Something here, you know.'

  Cab or call? she'd wondered, debating furiously.

  Nine one one, of course. Don't fool around.

  In twenty minutes they were at a nearby hospital emergency room.

  And the diagnosis: a mild myocardial infarction.

  'A what?' she'd asked.

  Oh, it seemed: heart attack.

  This was curious. Outfitted with low cholesterol, the man had never smoked cigarettes in his life, only occasional cigars, and his six-foot-two frame was as narrow and strong as the pole he'd gripped to steady himself when the heart attack had struck. He trekked through the woods after deer and boar every weekend during hunting season when he could find the time. He helped friends frame rec rooms and garages. Every weekend he muscled onto his shoulder forty-pounders of mulch and potting soil and carried them from pickup truck to shed.

  'Unfair,' Matthew had muttered, upon hearing the diagnosis. 'Our dream trip to the city, and look what happens. Damn unfair.'

  As a precaution, the doctors had transferred him to a hospital about a half hour north of their hotel, which was apparently the best cardiac facility in the city. His prognosis was excellent and he'd be released tomorrow. No surgery was called for. There would be some medication to lower his blood pressure and he'd carry around nitroglycerine tablets. And he should take an aspirin a day. But the doctors seemed to treat the attack as minor.

  To test the iron she flicked a dot of spit onto the Teflon plate. It sizzled and leapt off. She spritzed a bit of water onto the skirt from the Dannon bottle and ironed the wrinkles into oblivion.

  Slipping the skirt back on, she reexamined herself in the mirror. Good. But she decided she needed some color and tied a red-and-white silk scarf around her neck. Perfect. Bright but not flamboyant. She collected her handbag and left the room, descending to the lobby in an elevator car outside which a chain jangled at every passing floor.

  Once outside, Harriet oriented herself and flagged down a cab. She told the driver the name of the hospital and climbed into the back seat. The air inside was funky and she believed the driver, some foreigner, hadn't bathed recently. A cliche but true.

  Despite the sleet, she rolled down the window, prepared to argue if he objected. But he didn't. He seemed oblivious to her - well, to everything. He punched the button on the meter and sped off.

  As they clattered north in the old taxi, Harriet was thinking about the facilities at the hospital. The staff seemed nice and the doctors professional, even if their English was awkward. The one thing she didn't like, though, was that Matthew's room in Upper Manhattan Medical Center was in the basement at the end of a long, dim corridor.

  Shabby and creepy. And when she'd visited last night it had been deserted.

  Looking at the elegant town houses to the left and Central Park to the right, Harriet tried to cast off any concerns about visiting the unpleasant place. She was thinking that maybe the bad luck of the heart attack was an omen, hinting at worse to come.

  But then she put those feelings down to superstition, pulled out her phone and sent a cheerful text that she was on her way.

  CHAPTER 19

  With his backpack over his shoulder - the pack containing the American Eagle machine and some particularly virulent poison - Billy Haven turned down a side street, past a large construction area, avoiding pedestrians.

  That is, avoiding witnesses.

  He stepped into the doctors' office building annex, next to the Upper Manhattan Medical Center complex. In the lobby he kept his head down and walked purposefully toward a stairwell. He'd scoped the place out and knew exactly where he was going and how to get there invisibly.

  No one paid any attention to the slim young man, like so many slim young men in New York, an artist, a musician, a wishful actor.

  Just like them.

  Though their backpacks didn't contain what his did.

  Billy pushed through the fire door and started down the stairs. He descended to the basement level and followed the signs to the hospital proper, through a long, dim corridor. It was deserted, as if not many workers knew about it. More likely, they were aware of the dingy route but preferred to walk from office building to hospital on the surface, where you could not only find a Starbucks or buy a slice of Ray's original pizza but not get dragged into a closet and raped.

  The tunnel leading to the hospital was long - several hundred feet - and painted a gray that you associated with warships. Pipes ran overhead. It was dark because the hospital, perhaps in a move to save money, had placed a bulb in every third socket. There were no security cameras.

  Billy knew time was critical but he, of course, had to make one stop. He'd noted the detour yesterday, when he'd checked to see if this would be a suitably private route into the hospital.

  The sign on the door had intrigued him.

  He'd simply had to go inside.

  And he did so now, aware of the time pressure. But feeling like a kid playing hooky to hang out in a toy store.

  The large room, labeled by the sign Specimens, was dim but lit well enough by the emergency exit lights, which cast an eerie rosy glow on the contents: a thousand jars filled with body parts floating in a jaundiced liquid, presumably formaldehyde.

  Eyes, hands, livers, hearts, lungs, sexual organs, breasts, feet. Whole fetuses too. Billy noted that most of the samples dated to the early twentieth century. Maybe back then medical students used the real thing to learn anatomy, while today's generation went for high def computer images.

  Against the wall were shelves of bones, hundreds of them. He thought back to the infamous case Lincoln Rhyme had worked years ago, the Bone Collector crimes. Yet bones held little interest for Billy Haven.

  The Rule of Bone?

  No, didn't resonate like the Rule of Skin. No comparison.

  He now walked up and down the aisles, examining the jars, which ranged from a few inches to three feet in height. He paused and stared, eye-to-eye with a severed head. The features seemed of South Pacific heritage to Billy, or so he wanted to believe - because, to his delight, the head sported a tattoo: a cross just below where the hairline would have been.

  Billy took this as a good sign. The word 'tattoo' comes from the Polynesian or Samoan tatau, the process of inking the lower male torso with an elaborate geometric design, called a pe'a (and a woman's with a similar inking, called a malu). The process takes weeks and is extremely painful. Those who finish the inking get a special title and are respected for their courage. Those who don't even try are called 'nake
d' in Samoan and marginalized. The worst stigma, though, was awarded to the men and women who started the procedure but didn't finish it because they couldn't stand the pain. The shame remained with them forever.

  Billy liked the fact that they defined themselves according to their relationship to inking.

  He decided to believe that the man he was staring at had endured getting his pe'a and had gone on to be a force in his tribe. Heathen though he might have been, he was brave, a good warrior (even if not clever enough to avoid having his head end up on a steel shelf in the New World).

  Billy held the jar in one hand and leaned forward until he was only a few inches from the severed head, separated by thick glass and thin liquid.

  He thought about one of his favorite books. The Island of Doctor Moreau. The H. G. Wells novel was about an Englishman shipwrecked on an island, on which the doctor of the title surgically combined humans and animals. Hyena-men, Leopard-men ... Billy had read and reread the book the way other kids would read Harry Potter or Twilight.

  Vivisection and recombination were the ultimate modding, of course. And Doctor Moreau was the perfect example of the application of the Rule of Skin.

  All right. Time to get back to reality, he chided himself.

  Billy now stepped to the door and looked up and down the corridor. Still deserted. He continued his way to the hospital and knew when he'd crossed into the building. The neutral scent of cleanser and mold from the office building was overrun by a melange of smells. Sweet disinfectants, alcohol, Lysol, Betadine.

  And the others, repulsive to some, but not to Billy: the aromas of skin in decay, skin melting under infection and bacteria, skin burning to ash ... perhaps from lasers in operating rooms.

  Or maybe hospital workers were disposing of discarded tissue and organs in an oven somewhere. He couldn't think of this without recalling the Nazis, who had used the skin of Holocaust victims for practical purposes, like lamp shades and books. And who had devised a system of tattooing that was the simplest - and most significant - in history.

  The Rule of Skin ...

  Billy inhaled deeply.

  He sensed some other aroma: extremely offensive. What, what?

  Oh, he understood. With so many foreign workers in the medical fields, the foods the hospital prepared included those aromatic with curry and garlic.

  Disgusting.

  Billy finally entered the heart of the hospital, the third sub-basement. It was completely deserted here. A perfect place to bring a victim for some deadly modding, he reflected.

  The elevator would have surveillance cameras so he found the stairwell, entered it and started to climb. At the next sub-basement, number two, he paused and peeked out. It was the morgue, presently unstaffed. Apparently the medicos had not managed to kill anyone yet today.

  Up another flight to the basement level, a floor with patient rooms. Peering out through the fire door's greasy glass, crosshatched with fine metal mesh, he could see a flash of color, then motion: a woman walking down the corridor, her back to him.

  Ah, he thought, noting that while her skirt and jacket were navy blue, the scarf around her neck was red-and-white shimmery silk. It stood out like a flag in the drab setting. She was alone. He eased through the door and followed. He noted her muscular legs - revealed clearly by the knee-length skirt - noted the slim waist, noted the hips. The hair, in a tight bun, was brown with a bit of gray. Although the sheer pantyhose revealed a few purplish veins near the ankle, her skin was superb for an older woman's.

  Billy found himself aroused, heart pounding, the blood throbbing in his temples. And elsewhere.

  Blood. The Oleander Room ... blood on the carpet, blood on the floor.

  Put those thoughts away. Now! Think of Lovely Girl.

  He did and the urges dimmed. But dimming isn't vanishing.

  Sometimes you just gave in. Whatever the consequences might be.

  Oleander ...

  He moved more quickly now, coming up behind her.

  Thirty feet away, twenty-five ...

  Billy closed the distance to about fifteen feet, ten, three, his eyes staring at her legs. It was then that he heard a woman's no-nonsense voice behind him.

  'You, in the cap. Police! Drop the backpack. Put your hands on your head!'

  CHAPTER 20

  About thirty feet away from the man, Amelia Sachs steadied her Glock and repeated, more harshly, 'Backpack on the ground. Hands on your head! Now!'

  The woman he'd been about to assault, only a few feet from him, turned. The confusion in her face became horror as she stared at her would-be assailant and understood what was happening. 'No, please, no!'

  The attacker was in a jacket, not the longer thigh-length coat that the witness reported their unsub wore, but he had the same telltale stocking cap and black backpack. If she was wrong, she'd apologize. 'Now!' Sachs called again.

  With his back to her still, he slowly lifted his hands. As his sleeve rode up she got a glimpse of a red tattoo of some kind on his left arm, starting at the back of his hand and disappearing under his coat. A snake, a dragon?

  He was raising his hands, yes, but not dropping the backpack.

  Shit. He's going to rabbit.

  And, sure enough, in an instant, he tugged his hat down into a ski mask and leapt forward, grabbing the woman, spinning her around. He got his arm around her neck. She cried out and struggled. Her dark eyes were wide with fear.

  Okay. He's Unsub 11-5.

  Sachs eased forward slowly, the blade sights of the Glock searching for a clear target.

  Couldn't find one. Thanks largely to the panicked hostage, who was struggling to get away, kicking and twisting. He pressed his face close to her ear, apparently whispered something and, with wide eyes, she stopped struggling.

  'I have a gun!' he shouted. 'I'll kill her. Drop your gun. Now.'

  Sachs called back, 'No.'

  Because you never dropped your weapon, you never went off target. Period. She doubted he had a gun - because he would've pulled it out and started firing by now - but even if he did, you never lowered your aim.

  Sachs rested the sights on the new moon of his head. It was an easy shot with a static target but he was walking backward and sideways and kept ducking behind the hostage.

  'No, please don't hurt me! Please!' the woman cried in a low voice.

  'Shut up!' the unsub muttered.

  Reasonably, Sachs said, 'Listen, there's no way you're getting out of here. Raise your hands and--'

  A door nearby opened and a slim man in blue scrubs stepped into the corridor. It was just enough of a distraction to draw Sachs's eye for an instant.

  And that was enough for the unsub to seize his chance. He shoved his hostage directly toward Sachs and, before she could sidestep and draw a target, he crashed through another doorway and vanished.

  Sachs was sprinting past the woman in the navy suit. Terrified, she stared with wide eyes, backing up against the wall.

  'What was he--?'

  No time for back and forth. Sachs flung the door open and peered in fast. No threat, no target. She shouted over her shoulder to the woman and the medico, 'Get back to the lobby. Now! Wait there! Call nine one one.'

  'Who--?' the hostage called.

  'Go!' Sachs turned and eased through the doorway the unsub had just disappeared into. She listened. A faint click - from below. Made sense; he wasn't going to escape from the upper floors. Unsub 11-5 was their underground man.

  Sachs hadn't come here on a tactical mission so she didn't have a radio but she pulled her iPhone out and called 911. It was easier than going roundabout to Central Dispatch. She reported a 10-13, officer needing assistance. She supposed the hostage and the hospital worker might be calling too but they could also simply have vanished, not wanting to get involved.

  Down another flight of stairs. Steady but slow. Who's to say the guy hadn't clicked the ground-floor door latch to fool her and then returned to snipe away with the pistol he did, in fact, have in his
pocket?

  Sachs had never thought this trip would actually end up in a sighting of the unsub. She'd come here simply to see if any staffers had spotted anyone fitting the perp's description. Rhyme had speculated that there might be an attack at this hospital. Terry Dobyns's profile was that, as an organized offender, the unsub would plan the attacks ahead of time. That meant some of the trace they'd found at the Chloe Moore scene might have come from the sites of future poisonings.

  Ron Pulaski's find forty minutes ago was that the Inwood marble trace Sachs had collected was unique to this portion of Manhattan and that explosives permits had been issued to the general contractor building a new wing of the Upper Manhattan Medical Center. Other trace - the industrial cleanser quats and the adhesive that could be used in bandages - also suggested that he'd been inside the hospital to plan his attack on victim number two.

  Sachs had hardly expected to actually interrupt him.

  Breathing deeply, she paused at the fire door, pushed it open, dropping into a combat shooting pose. Swiveling back and forth. This was the morgue level; there were four employees in scrubs chatting and sipping coffee, standing beside two covered gurneys.

  They turned, saw the gun, then Sachs, and went wide-eyed, frozen.

  She held up her shield. 'White male in dark coat. About six feet, stocking cap or mask. Slim build. Come by here?'

  'No.'

  'How long you been here?'

  'Ten, fifteen min--'

  'Get inside and lock the door.'

  One attendant started to push the gurney through the door. Sachs called, 'Only the live ones.'

  Back to the dim stairwell. Down more stairs. She hit the lowest sub-basement. He had to've come here.

  Go.

  Fast.

  When you move, they can't getcha ...

  She pushed through the door, swinging the muzzle right and left.

  This floor was deserted, devoted mostly to infrastructure and storerooms, it seemed.

  She kept swiveling, right, left. Because in the back of her mind was the persistent thought that maybe this wasn't an escape at all. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe he was hiding here to kill a pursuer.

  She remembered the line from the book Serial Cities, about Rhyme: Experts in law enforcement universally voice the opinion of Lincoln Rhyme that his greatest skill was his ability to anticipate what the criminals he's pursuing will do next.