Billy Haven now examined his victim again.
Chloe.
He’d noted the name on the tag on her chest and the pretentious Je m’appelle preceding it. Whatever that meant. Maybe Hello. Maybe Good morning. French. He lowered his gloved hand — double-gloved — and stroked her skin, pinching, stretching, noting the elasticity, the texture, the fine resilience.
Billy noted too the faint rise between her legs, beneath the forest-green skirt. The lower line of the bra. But there was no question of misbehaving. He never touched a client anywhere he shouldn’t touch.
That was flesh. This was skin. Two different things entirely, and it was skin that Billy Haven loved.
He wiped more sweat with a new tissue, carefully tucked it away again. He was hot, his own skin prickling. Though the month was November the tunnel was stifling. Long — about a hundred yards — yet sealed at both ends, which meant no ventilation. It was like many of the passages here in SoHo, south of Greenwich Village. Built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these tunnels honeycombed the neighborhood and had been used for transporting goods underground to and from factories and warehouses and transfer stations.
Abandoned now, they were perfect for Billy’s purposes.
The watch on his right wrist hummed again. A similar sound from a backup watch in his pocket came a few seconds later. Reminding him of the time; Billy often got lost in his work.
Just let me get God’s knuckle perfect, just a minute more …
A clattering came from a bud microphone in his left ear. He listened for a moment then ignored the noise and took up the American Eagle machine once more. It was an old-style model, with a rotary head, which moved the needle like a sewing machine’s, rather than modern devices that used a vibrating coil.
He clicked it on.
Bzzzz …
Face shield down.
A millimeter at a time, he inked with a lining needle, following the bloodline he’d done quickly. Billy was a natural-born artist, brilliant at pencil and ink drawing, brilliant at pastels. Brilliant at needles. He drew freehand on paper, he drew freehand on skin. Most mod artists, however talented, used stencils, prepared ahead of time or — for the untalented — purchased and then placed on the skin for the inker to trace. Billy rarely did this. He didn’t need to. From God’s mind to your hand, his uncle had said.
Now time to fill. He swapped needles. Very, very carefully.
For Chloe’s tat, Billy was using the famous Blackletter font, known more commonly as Gothic or Old English. It was characterized by very thick and very thin strokes. The particular family he used was Fraktur. He’d selected this font because it was the typeface of the Gutenberg Bible — and because it was challenging. He was an artist and what artist didn’t like to show off his skills?
Ten minutes later he was nearly done.
And how was his client doing? He scanned her body then lifted her lids. Eyes still unfocused. Her face gave a few twitches, though. The propofol wouldn’t last much longer. But of course by now one drug was replacing the other.
Suddenly pain coursed through his chest. This alarmed him. He was young and in very good shape; he dismissed the thought of a heart attack. But the big question remained: Had he inhaled something he shouldn’t have?
That was a very real, and lethal, possibility.
Then he probed his own body and realized the pain was on the surface. And he understood. When he’d first grabbed her, Chloe had fought back. He’d been so charged he hadn’t noticed how hard she’d struck him. But now the adrenaline had worn off and the pain was throbbing. He looked down. Hadn’t caused any serious damage, except for tearing his shirt and the coveralls.
He ignored the ache and kept going.
Then Billy noted Chloe’s breathing becoming deeper. The anesthetic would soon wear off. He touched her chest — Lovely Girl wouldn’t have minded — and beneath his hand he could feel her heartbeat thudding more insistently.
It was then that a thought occurred to him: What would it be like to tattoo a living, beating heart? Could it be done? Billy had broken into a medical supply company a month ago in anticipation of his plans here in New York. He’d made off with thousands of dollars in equipment, drugs, chemicals and other materials. He wondered if he could learn enough to put someone under, crack open the chest, ink a design or words onto the heart itself and sew the victim back up. Living out his or her life with the altered organ.
What would the work be?
A cross.
The words: The Rule of Skin
Maybe:
Billy + Lovely Girl 4 Ever
Interesting idea. But thinking about Lovely Girl made him sad and he returned to Chloe, finishing the last of the letters.
Good.
A Billy Mod.
But not quite finished yet. He extracted a scalpel from a dark-green toothbrush container and reached forward, stretching out the marvelous skin once more.
CHAPTER 3
One can view death in two ways.
In the discipline of forensic science an investigator looks at death abstractly, considers it to be merely an event that gives rise to a series of tasks. Good forensic cops view that event as if through the lens of history; the best see death as fiction, and the victim as someone who never existed at all.
Detachment is a necessary tool for crime scene work, just like latex gloves and alternative light sources.
As he sat in the red-and-gray Merits wheelchair in front of the window of his Central Park West town house, Lincoln Rhyme happened to be thinking of a recent death in just this way. Last week a man had been murdered downtown, a mugging gone wrong. Just after leaving his office in the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, mid-evening, he’d been pulled into a deserted construction site across the street. Rather than give up his wallet, he’d chosen to fight and, no match for the perp, he’d been stabbed to death.
The case, whose file sat in front of him now, was mundane, and the sparse evidence typical of such a murder: a cheap weapon, a serrated-edge kitchen knife, dotted with fingerprints not on file at IAFIS or anywhere else, indistinct footprints in the slush that had coated the ground that night, and no trace or trash or cigar-ette butts that weren’t day- or week-old trace or trash or cigarette butts. And therefore useless. To all appearances it was a random crime; there were no springboards to likely perps. The officers had interviewed the victim’s fellow employees in the public works department and talked to friends and family. There’d been no drug connections, no dicey business deals, no jealous lovers, no jealous spouses of lovers.
Given the paltry evidence, the case, Rhyme knew, would be solved only one way: Someone would carelessly boast about scoring a wallet near City Hall. And the boastee, collared for drugs or domestic abuse or petty larce, would cut a deal by giving up the boaster.
This crime, a mugging gone wrong, was death observed from a distance, to Lincoln Rhyme. Historical. Fictional.
View number one.
The second way to regard death is from the heart: when a human being with whom you have a true connection is no longer of this earth. And the other death on Rhyme’s mind on this blustery, grim day was affecting him as deeply as the mugging victim’s killing was not.
Rhyme wasn’t close to many people. This was not a function of his physical condition — he was a quadriplegic, largely paralyzed from the neck down. No, he’d never been a people person. He was a science person. A mind person.
Oh, there’d been a few friends he’d been close to, some relatives, lovers. His wife, now ex.