The Skin Collector (7 page)

Sachs turned up the volume to the headset.

‘I’m below the manhole, Rhyme.’ She explained where it was and that this was likely how he’d gotten in, because there was significant moisture on the ground; the manhole cover had probably been removed in the past hour or so, she estimated. ‘It’s muddy here.’ A sigh. ‘But there’re
no prints. Naturally. Let’s have Lon canvass the stores and apartments around the neighborhood, see if anybody saw the perp.’

‘I’ll call him. And get any security CCTVs too.’ Rhyme was skeptical about witnesses. He believed that in most cases they were more trouble than they were worth. They misobserved, they had bad memories – intentionally and otherwise – and they were afraid to get involved.
A digital image was far more trustworthy. This was not necessarily Sachs’s opinion.

She swabbed the rungs as she climbed the ladder, depositing the adhesive cloth in plastic evidence collection bags.

At the top she rolled the underside of the manhole cover, then lifted a small alternative light source unit to check for fingerprints on the surface. ALS’s are lamps that use colors of the spectrum
of visible light (like blue or green) combined with filters to make apparent evidence that’s impossible to see under regular bulbs or in daylight. ALS sources also include invisible light, like ultraviolet, which makes certain substances glow.

The scan, of course, revealed no prints or other evidence from their unsub. She tested the manhole cover’s weight; she could budge it but just barely.
She supposed it weighed close to a hundred pounds. Hard to push open but not impossible for a strong individual.

She heard traffic overhead, the
shushhh
sound of tires cutting through the wet sleet. She was shining the light straight up, looking into the hole through which a worker would feed the hook to remove the cover. Wondering about marks that might lead them to a particular brand of tool
the perp had used. Nothing.

It was then that an eye appeared through the hole.

Jesus … Sachs gasped.

Inches away, on the street above her, someone was crouching and looking through the pry hole, down at her. For a moment nothing happened; then the eye narrowed, as if the person – a man, she sensed – squinted slightly. Maybe smiling, maybe troubled, maybe curious about why a flashlight beam
was firing out of a manhole cover in SoHo.

She spun away, thinking he’d seat a pistol muzzle in the hole and start shooting. The Maglite plummeted as she grabbed the top rung with both hands to keep from falling.

‘Rhyme!’

‘What? What’s going on? You’re moving fast.’

‘There’s somebody on top of the manhole. Did you call Lon?’

‘Just. You think it’s the perp?’

‘Could be. Call Dispatch! Get
somebody to Elizabeth Street now!’

‘I’m calling, Sachs.’

She pressed her hand against the bottom of the manhole and pushed. Once. Twice. All her strength.

The slab of iron rose a fraction of an inch. But no more.

Rhyme said, ‘I got Lon. He’s sending uniforms. Some ESU too. They’re on their way, getting close.’

‘I think he’s gone. I tried to open the cover, Rhyme. I couldn’t. Goddamn it. I
couldn’t. I was looking right at him. Had to be the perp. Who else’d kneel down in the middle of the street on a day like this and look through a manhole cover?’

She tried once more, thinking maybe he’d been squatting on it and that’s what had prevented her from pushing it up. But, no, it was impossible to move with her one free hand.

Shit.

‘Sachs?’

‘Go ahead.’

Rhyme said, ‘An officer saw
somebody at the manhole in a short dark-gray coat, stocking cap. He took off running. Disappeared into the crowd on Broadway. White male. Slim or medium build.’

‘Damn it!’ she muttered. ‘It was him! Why run otherwise? Have somebody pop the cover, Rhyme!’

‘Look, there’re plenty of people after him. Keep walking the grid. That’s our priority.’

Heart racing, she shoved a palm into the manhole
cover once more. Convinced, unreasonably, that if she could get to the surface she could find him, even if the others couldn’t.

She pictured his eye. She saw the narrowing lid.

She believed the perp was laughing at her, taunting her because she hadn’t been able to open the cover.

What color was the iris? she wondered. Green, gray, hazel? She hadn’t thought to register the color. This lapse
infuriated her.

‘One thing occurs to me.’ Rhyme brought her back to earth.

‘What’s that?’

‘We know that’s how he got into the tunnel – through the manhole. And that means he’d’ve rigged a work zone. He’d have cones and tape or a barricade of some kind. And that might show up on video.’

‘Or a witness might’ve seen.’

‘Well. Yes, maybe. For what
that’s
worth.’

Sachs climbed back down the ladder
and returned to the victim. She had done a fast sex-crime exam of Chloe’s body but now wanded it with the ALS to look for traces of the three S’s present in most sexual assault cases – semen, sweat and saliva.

Negative on that but it was clear he’d probed her skin with his gloved fingers – or at least the abdomen, arms, neck and face. No other parts of the body appeared to have been touched.

She used the light on the rest of the scene – from the manhole to the breadbasket – and found nothing.

All that remained for her was removing the flashlight that the unsub had left as a beacon.

‘Sachs,’ Rhyme called.

‘Yeah?’

‘Why don’t we have city workers pop the manhole and you come out that way? You’ll have to search that area on the street anyway. We know that’s how he got in – and he was
there about five minutes ago. Could have some trace.’

But she knew he was suggesting this so she could avoid the smaller of the two tunnels.

The circular coffin …

Sachs glanced at the black maw. It seemed even smaller now. ‘It’s a thought, Rhyme. But I think I’ll go out the way I came in.’

She’d beaten the fear once; she wasn’t going to let it win now.

Using a rough ledge on the brick wall
to support her weight, she stepped up and boosted herself to within reach of the unsub’s flashlight. She took the surgical scissors from her pocket and cut the tape.

Pulling it down, she dislodged a handful of grayish powder, which she suddenly realized the perp had set as a trap for the crime scene officers. That’s why he’d left the light! The material poured straight into her eyes and, desperately
brushing it away, she dislodged the N95 respirator and inhaled a good amount of the toxin.

‘No!’

Choking, choking, drowning on the stinging powder. Instantly the fierce burn began. She fell to the ground and stumbled back, nearly tripping over Chloe’s body.

Rhyme’s voice was in her ear. ‘Sachs! What was that? I couldn’t see.’

She struggled to inhale, to clear the poison from her lungs. The
barbed hooks scorched her windpipe and eyes and nose. She ripped off the face mask, spitting, aware that she was contaminating the scene but she was unable to stop.

Rhyme was shouting. It was hard for her to hear but she believed he was calling, probably into his phone, ‘Medics down there! Now!’ And ‘I don’t care.’ And ‘Poison control. Fast.’

But then she heard nothing more than the choking
that consumed her.

Making his way back to his workshop off Canal Street, west of Chinatown, Billy Haven was thinking of Lovely Girl again, after the memories of her face, her voice, her touch had arisen so persistently during the modding session with Little Miss Pretentious, Chloe.

He was thinking of the letters he’d done:
the second
. The borders too.

Yes, a good work.

A Billy Mod.

He’d changed out
of his coveralls, which had possibly been contaminated with poison (why take chances?), and had slipped them into a garbage bag. Then into a Dumpster a long way from the boutique. He was wearing street clothes underneath: black jeans, leather gloves, also black. His dark-gray wool coat. It was short – to mid-thigh. Warm enough and not so long that it might interfere if he had to sprint to escape
from someone, which as Billy was well aware was a very real possibility at some point over the next few days.

On his head was the ski mask scrunched up as a stocking cap, also wool. He looked like any other young man in Manhattan heading to his apartment through the freezing rain, hunched over, cold.

Lovely Girl …

Billy remembered seeing her for the first time, years ago. It was a photograph,
actually, not even the girl herself. But he’d fallen in love – yes, yes, at first sight. Not long after that his aunt had commented, ‘Oh, she’s a lovely girl. You could do much worse than her.’

Billy immediately took that as the pet name for his beloved.

The girl with the beautiful ivory skin.

Squinting against the crappy weather – the wind firing BBs of ice and freezing rain into his face
– Billy pulled his coat tighter around him. Concentrated on avoiding icy patches. This was difficult.

It was now some hours after he’d finished with Chloe in the tunnel beneath the boutique. He’d stayed around the area, sticking to the shadows, to see about the police. Somebody had dialed 911 about five minutes after Billy had climbed from the manhole on Elizabeth Street. The cops had arrived
en masse and Billy’d checked out their procedures. He’d observed and taken mental notes and would later transcribe his thoughts. The Modification Commandments weren’t phrased like the biblical ones, of course. But if they had been, one would be:
Know thy enemy as thyself.

Trudging along, walking carefully. He was young and in good shape, agile, but he could hardly afford a fall. A broken arm
would be disastrous.

Billy’s workshop wasn’t far from the site of the attack but he was walking a complicated route back home, making sure no one had seen him near the manhole and followed.

He went around the block once, then twice, just to be safe, and returned to the ugly, squat four-story former warehouse, now a quasi-residential structure. That is, quasi-
legal
. Or maybe completely illegal.
We’re talking New York City real estate, after all. He’d paid cash for the short-term rental, a lot of cash. The agent had taken the money with a smile and made a point of not asking a single question.

Not that it mattered. He’d been prepared to spin a credible tale, forged documents included.

Thou shalt have thy cover story memorized.

Then, confirming that the sidewalk was deserted, Billy
walked down a short flight of stairs to his front door. Three clicks of three locks and he was inside, exchanging as a soundtrack the horns of irritated drivers stuck in Chinatown by the bad weather for the rumble and brake squeals of the subway cars running directly beneath his place.

Sounds from underground. Comforting.

Billy pressed a switch and anemic lights filled the twenty-by-twenty-five-foot
space – a combination living room/bedroom/kitchen/everything else. The room had a certain dungeon feel to it. One wall was exposed brick, the others halfhearted Sheetrock. He had a second rental, farther north, a safe house, which he’d planned to stay in more frequently than here on his mission for the Modification, but the workshop had turned out to be more comfortable than the safe house,
which was smack on a busy street populated with the sort of people he despised.

The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents, some more helpful than others. The
Field Guide to Poisonous Plants
was sumptuously illustrated but didn’t have quite the same level of useful
information as the underground blog called
Knock ’Em Off: A Dozen Deadly Recipes for When the Revolution Comes and We Have to Fight Back!!

All arranged neatly on the workspace, just like in his tattoo parlor back home. The far corner of the room was pooled in the cool glow of ultraviolet lights that illuminated eight terrariums. He walked to these now and examined the plants inside. The leaves
and flowers comforted him, they were so reminiscent of home. Pinks and whites and purples and greens in a thousand shades. The colors fought against the dull mud tone of the city, whose hateful spirit lapped every minute at Billy Haven’s heart. Suitcases contained changes of clothes and toiletries. A gym bag held several thousand dollars, sorted by denomination but wrinkled and old and very untraceable.

He watered the plants and spent just a few minutes finishing a sketch of one of them, an interesting configuration of leaves and twigs. Even as someone who’d drawn all his life, Billy sometimes wondered where the urge came from. Sometimes he just
had
to take out a pencil or crayon and transfer something from life, which would fade, into something that would not. That would last forever.

He’d
sketched Lovely Girl a thousand times.

The pencil now drooped in his hand and he left a sketch of a branch half-finished, tossing the pad aside.

Lovely Girl …

He couldn’t think of her without hearing his uncle’s somber voice, the deep baritone: ‘Billy. There’s something I have to tell you.’ His uncle had gripped him by the shoulders and looked down into his eyes. ‘Something’s happened.’

And,
with those simple, horrific words, he’d learned she was gone.

Billy’s parents too were gone – though their deaths had been years ago and he’d come to some terms with the loss.

Lovely Girl’s? No, never.

She was going to be his companion forever. She was going to be his wife, the mother of his children. She was going to be the one to save him from the past, from all the bad, from the Oleander
Room.

Gone, just like that.

But today he wasn’t thinking so much of the terrible news, wasn’t thinking of the unfairness of what had happened, though what had happened was unfair.

And he wasn’t thinking of the cruelty, though what had happened was cruel.

No, at the moment, having just finished inking Chloe, Billy was thinking that he was on the road to the end of pain.