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Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein
Prodigal Son
City of Night
The Dead Town
Dean Koontz
Table of Contents
Prodigal Son
City of Night
The Dead Town
Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein
1
Prodigal Son
Dean Koontz
For the power of man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.
—C. S. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man
FIRST…
Although I’m a chatty kind of guy, never before have I found it necessary to explain up front how a book came to be written. In the case of the series to be known as Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, a few words of explanation seem necessary.
I wrote a script for a sixty-minute television-series pilot with this title. A producer and I made a deal for the pilot plus episodes to be broadcast on USA Network. Because he liked my script, Martin Scorsese—the legendary director—signed on as executive producer. A hot young director, also enamored of the script, signed on as well. At the request of USA Network, I wrote a two-hour version. On the basis of this script, a wonderful cast was assembled.
Then USA Network and the producer decided that major changes must be made. I had no interest in the show in its new form, and I withdrew from association with it. I wished them well—and turned to the task of realizing the original concept in book form. I hoped both versions would succeed in their different media.
Subsequently, Marty Scorsese also expressed the desire to exit the series. I am grateful to Marty for being so enthusiastic and insightful about the show we wanted to make. For a man of his accomplishments, he is refreshingly humble, the very definition of grace, and anchored to real-world values in a business where many are not.
I would also like to thank the late Philip K. Dick, great writer and nice man, who twenty-three years ago shared with me the story of asking for “something too exotic for the menu” in his favorite Chinese restaurant. I’ve finally found a novel in which the anecdote fits. The entree that sent Phil fleeing makes Victor Frankenstein lick his lips.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
FIRST…
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
Preview
About the Author
Also by Dean Koontz
ROMBUK MONASTERY TIBET
CHAPTER 1
DEUCALION SELDOM SLEPT, but when he did, he dreamed. Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares, after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.
During the afternoon, napping in his simple cell, he dreamed that a surgeon opened his abdomen to insert a mysterious, squirming mass. Awake but manacled to the surgical table, Deucalion could only endure the procedure.
After he had been sewn shut, he felt something crawling inside his body cavity, as though curious, exploring.
From behind his mask, the surgeon said, “A messenger approaches. Life changes with a letter.”
He woke from the dream and knew that it had been prophetic. He possessed no psychic power of a classic nature, but sometimes omens came in his sleep.
IN THESE MOUNTAINS OF TIBET, a fiery sunset conjured a mirage of molten gold from the glaciers and the snowfields. A serrated blade of Himalayan peaks, with Everest at its hilt, cut the sky
Far from civilization, this vast panorama soothed Deucalion. For several years, he had preferred to avoid people, except for Buddhist monks in this windswept rooftop of the world.
Although he had not killed for a long time, he still harbored the capacity for homicidal fury Here he strove always to suppress his darker urges, sought calm, and hoped to find true peace.
From an open stone balcony of the whitewashed monastery, as he gazed at the sun-splashed ice pack, he considered, not for the first time, that these two elements, fire and ice, defined his life.
At his side, an elderly monk, Nebo, asked, “Are you looking at the mountains—or beyond them, to what you left behind?”
Although Deucalion had learned to speak several Tibetan dialects during his lengthy sojourn here, he and the old monk often spoke English, for it afforded them privacy.
“I don’t miss much of that world. The sea. The sound of shore birds. A few friends. Cheez-Its.”
“Cheeses? We have cheese here.”
Deucalion smiled and pronounced the word more clearly than he’d done previously. “Cheez-Its are cheddar-flavored crackers. Here in this monastery we seek enlightenment, meaning, purpose…God. Yet often the humblest things of daily life, the small pleasures, seem to define existence for me. I’m afraid I’m a shallow student, Nebo.”
Pulling his wool robe closer about himself as wintry breezes bit, Nebo said, “To the contrary. Never have I had one less shallow than you. Just hearing about Cheez-Its, I myself am intrigued.”
A voluminous wool robe covered Deucalion’s scarred patchwork body, though even the harshest cold rarely bothered him.
The mandala-shaped Rombuk monastery—an architectural wonder of brick walls, soaring towers, and graceful roofs—clung precariously to a barren mountainside: imposing, majestic, hidden from the world. Waterfalls of steps spilled down the sides of the square towers, to the base of the main levels, granting access to interior courtyards.
Brilliant yellow, white, red, green, and blue prayer flags, representing the elements, flapped in the breeze. Carefully written sutras adorned the flags, so that each time the fabric waved in the wind, a prayer was symbolically sent in the direction of Heaven.
Despite Deucalion’s size and strange appearance, the monks had accepted him. He absorbed their teaching and filtered it through his singular experience. In time, they had come to him with philosophical questions, seeking his unique perspective.
They didn’t know who he was, but they understood intuitively that he was no normal man.
Deucalion stood for a long time without speaking. Nebo waited beside him. Time had little meaning in the clockless world of the monks, and after two hundred years of life, with perhaps more than that ahead of him, Deucalion often lived with no awareness of time.
Prayer wheels clicked, stirred by breezes. In a call to sunset prayer, one monk stood in the window of a high tower, blowing on a shell trumpet. Deep inside the monastery, chants began to resonate through the cold stone.
Deucalion stared down into the canyons full of purple twilight, east of the monastery. From some of Rombuk’s windows, one might fall more than a thousand feet to the rocks.
Out of that gloaming, a distant figure approached.
“A messenger,” he said. “The surgeon in the dream spoke truth.”
The old monk could not at first see the visitor. His eyes, the color of vinegar, seemed to have been faded by the unfiltered sun of extreme altitude. Then they widened. “We must meet him at the gates.”
SALAMANDERS OF TORCHLIGHT crawled the ironbound beams of the main gate and the surrounding brick walls.
Just inside the gates, standing in the open-air outer ward, the messenger regarded Deucalion with awe. “ Yeti,” he whispered, which was the name that the Sherpas had coined for the abominable snowman.
Words escaping him on plumes of frosted breath, Nebo said, “Is it custom now to precede a message with a rude remark?”
Having once been pursued like a beast, having lived two hundred years as the ultimate outsider, Deucalion was inoculated against all meanness. He was incapable of taking offense.
“Were I a yeti,” he said, speaking in the messenger’s language, “I might be as tall as this.” He stood six feet six. “I might be muscled this solidly. But I would be much hairier, don’t you think?”
“I…I suppose so.”
“A yeti never shaves.” Leaning close, as if imparting a secret, Deucalion said, “Under all that hair, a yeti has very sensitive skin. Pink, soft…quick to take a rash from a razor blade.”
Summoning courage, the messenger asked, “Then what are you?”
“Big Foot,” Deucalion said in English, and Nebo laughed, but the messenger did not understand.
Made nervous by the monk’s laughter, shivering not only because of the icy air, the young man held out a scuffed goatskin packet knotted tightly with a leather thong. “Here. Inside. For you.”
Deucalion curled one powerful finger around the leather thong, snapped it, and unfolded the goatskin wrapping to reveal an envelope inside, a wrinkled and stained letter long in transit.
The return address was in New Orleans. The name was that of an old and trusted friend, Ben Jonas.
Still glancing surreptitiously and nervously at the ravaged half of Deucalion’s face, the messenger evidently decided that the company of a yeti would be preferable to a return trip in darkness through the bitter-cold mountain pass. “May I have shelter for the night?”
“Anyone who comes to these gates,” Nebo assured him, “may have whatever he needs. If we had them, I would even give you Cheez-Its.”
From the outer ward, they ascended the stone ramp through the inner gate. Two young monks with lanterns arrived as if in answer to a telepathic summons to escort the messenger to guest quarters.
In the candlelit reception hall, in an alcove that smelled of sandalwood and incense, Deucalion read the letter. Ben’s handwritten words conveyed a momentous message in neatly penned blue ink.
With the letter came a clipping from a newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The headline and the text mattered less to Deucalion than the photograph that accompanied them.
Although nightmares could not frighten him, though he had long ago ceased to fear any man, his hand shook. The brittle clipping made a crisp, scurrying-insect sound in his trembling fingers.
“Bad news?” asked Nebo. “Has someone died?”
“Worse. Someone is still alive.” Deucalion stared in disbelief at the photograph, which felt colder than ice. “I must leave Rombuk.”
This statement clearly saddened Nebo. “I had taken comfort for some time that you would be the one to say the prayers at my death.”
“You’re too full of piss to die anytime soon,” Deucalion said. “As preserved as a pickle in vinegar. Besides, I am perhaps the last one on Earth to whom God would listen.”
“Or perhaps the first,” said Nebo with an enigmatic but knowing smile. “All right. If you intend to walk again in the world beyond these mountains, first allow me to give you a gift.”
LIKE WAXY STALAGMITES, yellow candles rose from golden holders, softly brightening the room. Gracing the walls were painted mandalas, geometric designs enclosed in a circle, representing the cosmos.
Reclining in a chair padded with thin red silk cushions, Deucalion stared at a ceiling of carved and painted lotus blossoms.
Nebo sat at an angle to him, leaning over him, studying his face with the attention of a scholar deciphering intricate sutra scrolls.
During his decades in carnivals, Deucalion had been accepted by carnies as though nothing about him was remarkable. They, too, were all outsiders by choice or by necessity.
He’d made a good living working the freak shows, which were called ten-in-ones because they offered ten exhibits under one tent.
On his small stage, he had sat in profile, the handsome side of his face turned to the sawdust aisle along which the marks traveled from act to act, from fat lady to rubber man. When they gathered before him, puzzling over why he was included in such a show, he turned to reveal the ruined side of his face.
Grown men gasped and shuddered. Women fainted, though fewer as the decades passed. Only adults eighteen and older were admitted, because children, seeing him, might be traumatized for life.
Face fully revealed, he had stood and removed his shirt to show them his body to the waist. The keloid scars, the enduring welts from primitive metal sutures, the strange excrescences…
Now beside Nebo stood a tray that held an array of thin steel needles and tiny vials of inks in many colors. With nimble skill, the monk tattooed Deucalion’s face.
“This is my gift to you, a pattern of protection.” Nebo leaned over to inspect his work, then began an even more intricate tracing in dark blues, blacks, greens.
Deucalion did not wince, nor would he have cried out at the stings of a thousand wasps. “Are you creating a puzzle on my face?”
“The puzzle is your face.” The monk smiled down at his work and at the uneven canvas on which he imprinted his rich designs.
Dripping color, dripping blood, needles pricked, gleamed, and clicked together when, at times, Nebo used two at once.
“With this much pattern, I should offer something for the pain. The monastery has opium, though we do not often condone its use.”
“I don’t fear pain,” Deucalion said. “Life is an ocean of pain.”
“Life outside of here, perhaps.”
“Even here we bring our memories with us.”
The old monk selected a vial of crimson ink, adding to the pattern, disguising grotesque concavities and broken planes, creating an illusion of normalcy under the decorative motifs.
The work continued in heavy silence until Nebo said, “This will serve as a diversion for the curious eye. Of course, not even such a detailed pattern will conceal everything.”
Deucalion reached up to touch the stinging tattoo that covered the surface of the cracked-mirror scar tissue. “I’ll live by night and by distraction, as so often I have before.”
After inserting stoppers in the ink vials, wiping his needles on a cloth, the monk said, “Once more before you leave…the coin?”
Sitting up straighter in his chair, Deucalion plucked a silver coin from midair with his right hand.
Nebo watched as Deucalion turned the coin across his knuckles—walked it, as magicians say—exhibiting remarkable dexterity considering the great size and brutal appearance of his hands.
That much, any good magician could have done.
With thumb and forefinger, Deucalion snapped the coin into the air. Candlelight winked off the piece as it flipped high.
Deucalion snatched it from the air, clutching it in his fist…opened his hand to show it empty
Any good magician could have done this, too, and could have then produced the coin from behind Nebo’s ear, which Deucalion also did.
The monk was mystified, however, by what came next.
Deucalion snapped the coin into the air again. Candlelight winked off it. Then before Nebo’s eyes, the coin just…vanished.
At the apex of its arc, turning head to tail to head, it turned out of existence. The coin didn’t fall to the floor. Deucalion’s hands were not near it when it disappeared.
Nebo had seen this illusion many times. He had watched it from a distance of inches, yet he couldn’t say what happened to the coin.
He had often meditated on this illusion. To no avail.
Now Nebo shook his head. “Is it truly magic, or just a trick?”
Smiling, Deucalion said, “And what is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“Even after all these years, you’re still a mystery.”
‘As is life itself.”
Nebo scanned the ceiling, as if expecting to see the coin stuck to one of the carved and painted lotus blossoms. Lowering his stare to Deucalion once more, he said, “Your friend in America addressed your letter to seven different names.”
“I’ve used many more than that.”
“Police trouble?”
“Not for a long time. Just…always seeking a new beginning.”
“Deucalion…,” the monk said.
“A name from old mythology—not known to many people anymore.” He rose from the chair, ignoring the throbbing pain of countless pinpricks.
The old man turned his face upward. “In America, will you return to the carnival life?”
“Carnivals have no place for me. There aren’t freak shows anymore, not like in the old days. They’re politically incorrect.”
“Back when there were freak shows, what was your act?”
Deucalion turned from the candlelit mandalas on the wall, his newly tattooed face hidden in shadows. When he spoke, a subtle pulse of luminosity passed through his eyes, like the throb of lightning hidden behind thick clouds.
“They called me…the Monster.”
CHAPTER 2
MORNING RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC on the 1-10 Expressway flowed as languidly as the Mississippi River that wound through New Orleans.
When Detective Carson O’Connor got off the expressway in the suburb of Metairie, intending to use surface streets to make better time, the morning took a turn for the worse.
Stopped interminably at an intersection, she impatiently kneaded the steering wheel of her plainwrap sedan. To dispel a growing sense of suffocation, she rolled down the window.
Already the morning streets were griddles. None of the airheads on the TV news, however, would try to cook an egg on the pavement. Even journalism school left them with enough brain cells to realize that on these streets you could flash-fry even ice cream.
Carson liked the heat but not the humidity. Maybe one day she’d move somewhere nicer, hot but dry, like Arizona. Or Nevada. Or Hell.
Without advancing a foot, she watched the minute change on the dashboard clock display—then spotted the reason for the jam-up.
Two young hoods in gang colors lingered in the crosswalk to block traffic each time the light turned green. Three others worked the line, car to car, tapping on windows, extorting payoffs.
“Clean your windshield. Two bucks.”
Like a patter of semiautomatic gunfire, car doors locked one after another as the young entrepreneurs made their sales pitch, but no car could move forward until the driver paid the tariff.
The apparent leader appeared at Carson’s window, smug and full of false good humor. “Clean your windshield, lady.”
He held a filthy rag that looked as if it had been fished out of one of the city’s many weedy canals.
A thin white scar on one darkly tanned cheek was puckered at several suture points, suggesting that he’d gotten into a knife fight on a day when the ER physician had been Dr. Frankenstein. His wispy beard implied testosterone deficiency
Getting a second, closer look at Carson, Scar-face grinned. “Hey, pretty lady What you doin’ in these shabby wheels? You was made for Mercedes.” He lifted one of the wipers and let it slap back onto the windshield. “Hello, where’s your mind? Not that a long-legged fresh like you needs a mind.”
An unmarked sedan had advantages in low-profile detective work; however, back when she’d driven a black-and-white patrol car, Carson had never been bothered by crap like this.
“You’re breaking the law,” she told him.
“Somebody in a mood this mornin’.”
“The windshield’s clean. This is extortion.”
“I charge two bucks to clean it.”
“I advise you to step back from the car.”
The kid lifted his rag, prepared to smear the windshield. “Two bucks to clean it, three bucks not to clean it. Most ladies, whether they’re male or female ladies, take option two.”
Carson unbuckled her seatbelt. “I asked you to step back from the car.”
Instead of retreating, Scarface leaned into the window, inches from her. Breath sweetened by a morning joint, soured by gum disease. “Gimme three bucks, your phone number, a nice apology—and maybe I don’t mess with your fine face.”
Carson grabbed the gink’s left ear, twisted it hard enough to crack cartilage, and slammed his head sideways against the door post. His howl sounded less like that of a wolf than like that of an infant.
She let go of his ear and, exiting the sedan, opened the door into him with enough force to knock him off his feet.
As he sprawled backward, rapping his head on the pavement hard enough to summon constellations to an inner planetarium, she planted one foot on his crotch, grinding down just enough to make him squirm and to pin him in place for fear that she’d make paste of his jewels.
Shoving her police ID toward his face, she said, “My phone number is nine-one-one.”
Among the hostage cars, heads up and alert, Scarface’s four ace kools were looking at him, at her, stunned and angry but also amused. The guy under her foot was a homey, and a humiliation to one home boy was a humiliation to all, even if maybe he was a little bit of what they called hook homey, a phony.
To the nearest of Scarface’s friends, Carson said, “Stall it out, shithead, unless you want a hole in your doo-rag.”
The gink under her foot tried to crab-walk away, but she stepped down harder. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he chose submission over the prospect of three days with an ice pack between his legs.
In spite of her warning, two of the other four gangbangers began to edge toward her.
Almost with the nimbleness of prestidigitation, Carson put away her ID and produced the pistol from her holster.
“Check it out, this lady under my foot, he’s been scratched”—which meant embarrassed—“but none of you has. Nothin’ here for you but two years in stir, maybe lit up and crippled for life.”
They didn’t split, but they stopped moving closer.
Carson knew they were less concerned about her pistol than about the fact that she talked the talk. Since she knew the lingo, they assumed—correctly—that she had been in situations like this before, lots of them, and still looked prime, and wasn’t afraid.
Even the dumbest gangbanger—and few would win a dime on Wheel of Fortune—could read her credentials and calculate the odds.
“Best to break, best to book,” she said, advising them to leave. “You insist on bumping titties, you’re gonna lose.”
Ahead of her plainwrap sedan, closer to the intersection, cars began to move. Whether or not they could see what was happening in their rearview mirrors, the drivers sensed the shakedown had ended.
As the cars around them began to roll, the young entrepreneurs decided there was no point to lingering when their customer base had moved on. They whidded away like walleyed horses stampeded by the crack of thunder.
Under her foot, the windshield-washer couldn’t quite bring himself to admit defeat. “Hey, bitch, your badge, it said homicide. You can’t touch me! I ain’t killed nobody.”
“What a moron,” she said, holstering the pistol.
“You can’t call me a moron. I graduated high school.”
“You did not.”
“I almost did.”
Before the creep—predictably—took offense at her impolite characterization of his mental acuity and threatened to sue for insensitivity, Carson’s cell phone rang.
“Detective O’Connor,” she answered.
When she heard who was calling and why, she took her foot off the gangbanger.
“Beat it,” she told him. “Get your sorry ass out of the street.”
“You ain’t lockin’ me?”
“You’re not worth the paperwork.” She returned to her phone call.
Groaning, he got to his feet, one hand clutching the crotch of his low-rider pants as if he were a two-year-old overwhelmed by the need to pee.
He was one of those who didn’t learn from experience. Instead of hobbling away to find his friends, telling them a wild story about how he’d gotten the best of the cop bitch after all and had punched out her teeth, he stood there holding himself, ragging her about abusive treatment, as though his whining and threats would wring from her a sudden sweat of remorse.
As Carson concluded the call, pressed END, and pocketed the phone, the offended extortionist said, “Thing is, I know your name now, so I can find out where you live.”
“We’re obstructing traffic here,” she said.
“Come jack you up real good one night, break your legs, your arms, break every finger. You got gas in your kitchen? I’ll cook your face on a burner.”
“Sounds like fun. I’ll open a bottle of wine, make tapas. Only thing is, the face gets cooked on the burner—I’m lookin’ at it.”
Intimidation was his best tool, but she had a screwhead that it couldn’t turn.
“You like tapas?” she asked.
“Bitch, you’re crazy as a red-eyed rat on meth.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
He backed away from her.
With a wink, she said, “I can find out where you live.”
“You stay away from me.”
“You got gas in your kitchen?” she asked.
“I mean it, you psycho twat.”
“Ah, now you’re just draggin’ me,” Carson said, draggiri meaning sweet-talking.
The gangbanger dared to turn his back on her and hobble away fast, dodging cars.
Feeling better about the morning, Carson got behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan, pulled her door shut, and drove off to pick up her partner, Michael Maddison.
They had been facing a day of routine investigation, but the phone call changed all that. A dead woman had been found in the City Park lagoon, and by the look of the body, she hadn’t accidentally drowned while taking a moonlight swim.
CHAPTER 3
WITHOUT USING HER SIREN and portable flasher, Carson made good time on Veterans Boulevard, through a kaleidoscope of strip malls, lube shops, car dealerships, bank branches, and fast-food franchises.
Farther along, subdivisions of tract homes alternated with corridors of apartment buildings and condos. Here Michael Maddison, thirty and still single, had found a bland apartment that could have been in any city in America.
Bland didn’t bother him. Working to the jazz beat and the hoodoo hum of New Orleans, especially as a homicide dick, he claimed that he ended every day in local-color overload. The ordinary apartment was his anchor in reality.
Dressed for work in a Hawaiian shirt, tan sports jacket that covered his shoulder holster, and jeans, Michael had been waiting for her to drive up. He looked wry and easy, but like certain deceptive cocktails, he had a kick.
Carrying a white paper bag in one hand, holding an unbitten doughnut in his mouth with the delicacy of a retriever returning to a hunter with a duck, Michael got into the passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut.
Carson said, “What’s that growth on your lip?”
Taking the doughnut from between his teeth, intact and barely marked, he said, “Maple-glazed buttermilk.”
“Gimme.”
Michael offered her the white bag. “One regular glazed, two chocolate. Take your pick.”
Ignoring the bag, snatching the doughnut from his hand, Carson said, “I’m crazy for maple.”
Tearing off a huge bite, chewing vigorously, she swung the car away from the curb and rocketed into the street.
“I’m crazy for maple, too,” Michael said with a sigh.
The yearning in his voice told Carson that he longed not only for the maple-glazed doughnut. For more reasons than merely the maintenance of a professional relationship, she pretended not to notice. “You’ll enjoy the regular glazed.”
As Carson took Veterans Avenue out of Jefferson Parish into Orleans Parish, intending to catch Pontchartrain Boulevard to Harrison and then head to City Park, Michael rummaged in the doughnut bag, making it clear that he was selecting one of the other treats only from cruel necessity.
As she knew he would, he settled on chocolate—not the glazed that she had imperiously recommended—took a bite, and scrunched the top of the paper bag closed.
Glancing up as Carson cruised through a yellow light an instant before it changed to red, he said, “Ease off the gas and help save the planet. In my church, we start every workday with an hour of sugar and meditation.”
“I don’t belong to the Church of Fat-Assed Detectives. Besides, just got a call—they found number six this morning.”
“Six?” Around another bite of chocolate doughnut, he said, “How do they know it’s the same perp?”
“More surgery—like the others.”
“Liver? Kidney? Feet?”
“She must’ve had nice hands. They found her in the City Park lagoon, her hands cut off.”
CHAPTER 4
PEOPLE CAME TO THE fifteen-hundred-acre City Park to feed the ducks or to relax under the spreading live oaks draped with gray-green curtains of Spanish moss. They enjoyed the well-manicured botanical gardens, the Art Deco fountains and sculptures. Children loved the fairy-tale theme park and the famous wooden flying horses on the antique merry-go-round.
Now spectators gathered to watch a homicide investigation in progress at the lagoon.
As always, Carson was creeped out by these morbidly curious onlookers. They included grandmothers and teenagers, businessmen in suits and grizzled winos sucking cheap blends out of bagged bottles, but she got a Night of the Living Dead vibe from every one of them.
Centuries-old oaks loomed over a pool of green water fringed with weeds. Paved paths wound along the edge of the lagoon, connected by gracefully arched stone bridges.
Some rubberneckers had climbed the trees to get a better view past the police tape.
“Doesn’t look like the same crowd you see at the opera,” Michael said as he and Carson shouldered through the gawkers on the sidewalk and the jogging path. “Or at monster-truck rallies, for that matter.”
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this area had been a popular place for hot-blooded Creoles to engage in duels. They met after sunset, by moonlight, and clashed with thin swords until blood was drawn.
These days, the park remained open at night, but the combatants were not equally armed and matched, as in the old days. Predators stalked prey and felt confident of escaping punishment in this age when civilization seemed to be unraveling.
Now uniformed cops held back the ghouls, any one of whom might have been the killer returned to revel in the aftermath of murder. Behind them, yellow crime-scene tape had been strung like Mardi Gras streamers from oak tree to oak tree, blocking off a section of the running path beside the lagoon.
Michael and Carson were known to many of the attending officers and CSI techs: liked by some, envied by others, loathed by a few.
She had been the youngest ever to make detective, Michael the second youngest. You paid a price for taking a fast track.
You paid a price for your style, too, if it wasn’t traditional. And with some of the cynical marking-time-till-pension types, you paid a price if you worked as if you believed that the job was important and that justice mattered.
Just past the yellow tape, Carson stopped and surveyed the scene.
A female corpse floated facedown in the scummy water. Her blond hair fanned out like a nimbus, radiant where tree-filtered Louisiana sunlight dappled it.
Because the sleeves of her dress trapped air, the dead woman’s arms floated in full sight, too. They ended in stumps.
“New Orleans,” Michael said, quoting a current tourist bureau come-on, “the romance of the bayou.”
Waiting for instruction, the CSI techs had not yet entered the scene. They had followed Carson and stood now just the other side of the marked perimeter.
As the investigating detectives, Carson and Michael had to formulate a systematic plan: determine the proper geometry of the search, the subjects and angles of photographs, possible sources of clues…
In this matter, Michael usually deferred to Carson because she had an intuition that, just to annoy her, he called witchy vision.
To the nearest uniform on the crime line, Carson said, “Who was the responding officer?”
“Ned Lohman.”
“Where is he?”
“Over there behind those trees.”
“Why the hell’s he tramping the scene?”. she demanded.
As if in answer, Lohman appeared from behind the oaks with two homicide detectives, older models, Jonathan Harker and Dwight Frye.
“Dork and Dink,” Michael groaned.
Although too far away to have heard, Harker glowered at them. Frye waved.
“This blows,” Carson said.
“Big time,” Michael agreed.
She didn’t bluster into the scene but waited for the detectives to come to her.
How nice it would have been to shoot the bastards in the knees to spare the site from their blundering. So much more satisfying than a shout or a warning shot.
By the time Harker and Frye reached her, both were smiling and smug.
Ned Lohman, the uniformed officer, had the good sense to avoid her eyes.
Carson held her temper. “This is our baby, let us burp it.”
“We were in the area,” Frye said, “caught the call.”
“Chased the call,” Carson suggested.
Frye was a beefy man with an oily look, as if his surname came not from family lineage but from his preferred method of preparing every food he ate.
“O’Connor,” he said, “you’re the first Irish person I’ve ever known who wasn’t fun to be around.”
In a situation like this, which had grown from one bizarre homicide to six killings in a matter of weeks, Carson and her partner would not be the only ones in the department assigned to research particular aspects of the case.
They had caught the first murder, however, and therefore had proprietary interest in associated homicides if and until the killer piled up enough victims to force the establishment of an emergency task force. And at that point, she and Michael would most likely be designated to head that undertaking.
Harker tended to burn easily—from sunshine, from envy, from imagined slights to his competence, from just about anything. The Southern sun had bleached his blond hair nearly white; it lent his face a perpetually parboiled look.
His eyes, as blue as a gas flame, as hard as gemstones, revealed the truth of him that he attempted to disguise with a soft smile. “We needed to move fast, before evidence was lost. In this climate, bodies decompose quickly”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Michael said. “With a gym membership and a little determination, you’ll be looking good again.”
Carson drew Ned Lohman aside. Michael joined them as she took out her notebook and said, “Gimme the TPO from your involvement.”
“Listen, Detectives, I know you’re the whips on this. I told Frye and Harker as much, but they have rank.”
“Not your fault,” she assured him. “I should know by now that vultures always get to dead meat first. Let’s start with the time.”
He checked his watch. “Call came in at seven forty-two, which makes it thirty-eight minutes ago. Jogger saw the body, called it in. When I showed up, the guy was standing here running in place to keep his heart rate up.”
In recent years, runners with cell phones had found more bodies than any other class of citizens.
‘As for place,” Officer Lohman continued, “the body’s just where the jogger found it. He made no rescue attempt.”
“The severed hands,” Michael suggested, “were probably a clue that CPR wouldn’t be effective.”
“The vic is blond, maybe not natural, probably Caucasian. You have any other observations about her?” Carson asked Lohman.
“No. I didn’t go near her either, didn’t contaminate anything, if that’s what you’re trying to find out. Haven’t seen the face yet, so I can’t guess the age.”
“Time, place—what about occurrence?” she asked Lohman. “Your first impression was…?”
“Murder. She didn’t cut her hands off herself.”
“Maybe one,” Michael agreed, “but not both.”
CHAPTER 5
THE STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS teemed with possibilities: women of every description. A few were beautiful, but even the most alluring were lacking in one way or another.
During his years of searching, Roy Pribeaux had yet to encounter one woman who met his standards in every regard.
He was proud of being a perfectionist. If he had been God, the world would have been a more ordered, less messy place.
Under Roy Almighty, there would have been no ugly or plain people. No mold. No cockroaches or even mosquitoes. Nothing that smelled bad.
Under a blue sky that he could not have improved upon, but in cloying humidity he would not have allowed, Roy strolled along the Riverwalk, the site of the 1984 Louisiana World’s Fair, which had been refurbished as a public gathering place and shopping pavilion. He was hunting.
Three young women in tank tops and short shorts sashayed past, laughing together. Two of them checked Roy out.
He met their eyes, boldly ogled their bodies, then dismissed each of them with a glance.
Even after years of searching, he remained an optimist. She was out there somewhere, his ideal, and he would find her—even if it had to be one piece at a time.
In this promiscuous society, Roy remained a virgin at thirty-eight, a fact of which he was proud. He was saving himself. For the perfect woman. For love.
Meanwhile, he polished his own perfection. He undertook two hours of physical training every day. Regarding himself as a Renaissance man, he read literature for exactly one hour, studied a new subject for exactly one hour, meditated on the great mysteries and the major issues of his time for another hour every day
He ate only organic produce. He bought no meat from factory farms. No pollutants tainted him, no pesticides, no radiological residue, and certainly no strange lingering genetic material from bioengineered foods.
Eventually, when he had refined his diet to perfection and when his body was as tuned as an atomic clock, he expected that he would cease to eliminate waste. He would process every morsel so completely that it would be converted entirely to energy, and he would produce no urine, no feces.
Perhaps he would then encounter the perfect woman. He often dreamed about the intensity of the sex they would have. As profound as nuclear fusion.
Locals loved the Riverwalk, but Roy suspected that most people here today were tourists, considering how they paused to gawk at the caricature artists and street musicians. Locals would not be drawn in such numbers to the stands piled with New Orleans T-shirts.
At a bright red wagon where cotton candy was sold, Roy suddenly halted. The fragrance of hot sugar cast a sweet haze around the cart.
The cotton-candy vendor sat on a stool under a red umbrella. In her twenties, less than plain, with unruly hair. She looked as baggy and as simply made as a Muppet, though without as much personality
But her eyes. Her eyes.
Roy was captivated. Her eyes were priceless gems displayed in a cluttered and dusty case, a striking greenish blue.
The skin around her eyes crinkled alluringly as she caught his attention and smiled. “Can I help you?”
Roy stepped forward. “I’d like something sweet.”
‘All I’ve got is cotton candy.”
“Not all,” he said, marveling at how suave he could be.
She looked puzzled.
Poor thing. He was too smooth for her.
He said, “Yes, cotton candy, please.”
She picked up a paper cone and began to twirl it through the spun sugar, wrapping it with a cloud of sugary confection.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She hesitated, seemed embarrassed, averted her eyes. “Candace.”
“A girl named Candy is a candy vendor? Is that destiny or just a good sense of humor?”
She blushed. “I prefer Candace. Too many negative connotations for a…a heavy woman to be called Candy.”
“So you’re not an anorexic model, so what? Beauty comes in lots of different packages.”
Candace obviously had seldom if ever heard such kind words from an attractive and desirable man like Roy Pribeaux.
If she herself ever thought about a day when she would excrete no wastes, she must know that he was far closer to that goal than she was.
“You have beautiful eyes,” he told her. “Strikingly beautiful eyes. The kind a person could look into for years and years.”
Her blush intensified, but her shyness was overwhelmed by astonishment to such a degree that she made eye contact with him.
Roy knew he dared not come on to her too strong. After a life of rejection, she’d suspect that he was setting her up for humiliation.
“As a Christian man,” he explained, though he had no religious convictions, “I believe God made everyone beautiful in at least one respect, and we need to recognize that beauty Your eyes are just…perfect. They’re the windows to your soul.”
Putting the cloud of cotton candy on a counter-top holder, she averted her eyes again as though it might be a sin to let him enjoy them too much. “I haven’t gone to church since my mother died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. She must have died so young.”
“Cancer,” Candace revealed. “I got so angry about it. But now…I miss church.”
“We could go together sometime, and have coffee after.”
She dared his stare again. “Why?”
“Why not?”
“It’s just…You’re so…”
Pretending a shyness of his own, he looked away from her. “So not your type? I know to some people I might appear to be shallow—”
“No, please, that’s not what I meant.” But she couldn’t bring herself to explain what she had meant.
Roy withdrew a small notepad from his pocket, scribbled with a pen, and tore off a sheet of paper. “Here’s my name—Ray Darnell—and my cellphone number. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
Staring at the number and the phony name, Candace said, “I’ve always been pretty much a…private person.”
The dear, shy creature.
“I understand,” he said. “I’ve dated very little. I’m too old-fashioned for women these days. They’re so…bold. I’m embarrassed for them.”
When he tried to pay for his cotton candy, she didn’t want to take his money He insisted.
He walked away, nibbling at the confection, feeling her gaze on him. Once out of sight, he threw the cotton candy in a trash can.
Sitting on a bench in the sun, he consulted the notepad. On the last page at the back of it, he kept his checklist. After so much effort here in New Orleans and, previously, elsewhere, he had just yesterday checked off the next-to-last item: hands.
Now he put a question mark next to the final item on the list, hoping that he could cross it off soon.
EYES?
CHAPTER 6
HE IS A CHILD of Mercy, Mercy-born and Mercy-raised.
In his windowless room he sits at a table, working with a thick book of crossword puzzles. He never hesitates to consider an answer. Answers come to him instantly, and he rapidly inks letters in the squares, never making an error.
His name is Randal Six because five males have been named Randal and have gone into the world before him. If ever he, too, went into the world, he would be given a last name.
In the tank, before consciousness, he’d been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading. Once brought to life, he had continued to learn during sessions of drug-induced sleep.
He knows nature and civilization in their intricacies, knows the look and smell and sound of places he has never been. Yet his world is largely limited to a single room.
The agents of Mercy call this space his billet, which is a term to describe lodging for a soldier.
In the war against humanity—a secret war now but not destined to remain secret forever—he is an eighteen-year-old who came to life four months ago.
To all outward appearances, he is eighteen, but his knowledge is greater than that of most elderly scholars.
Physically, he is sound. Intellectually, he is advanced.
Emotionally, something is wrong with him.
He does not think of his room as his billet. He thinks of it as his cell.
He himself, however, is his own prison. He lives mostly within himself. He speaks little. He yearns for the world beyond his cell, beyond himself, and yet it frightens him.
Most of the day he spends with crossword puzzles, immersed in the vertical and horizontal patterns of words. The world beyond his quarters is alluring but it is also…disorderly, chaotic. He can feel it pressing against the walls, pressing, pressing, and only by focusing on crosswords, only by bringing order to the empty boxes by filling them with the absolutely right letters can he keep the outer disorder from invading his space.
Recently, he has begun to think that the world frightens him because Father has programmed him to be afraid of it. From Father, he has received his education, after all, and his life.
This possibility confuses him. He cannot understand why Father would create him to be…dysfunctional. Father seeks perfection in all things.
One thing gives him hope. Out in the world, and not far away, right here in New Orleans, is another like him. Not one of Father’s creations, but likewise afflicted.
Randal Six is not alone. If only he could meet his equal, he would better understand himself…and be free.
CHAPTER 7
AN OSCILLATING FAN riffled the documents and case notes—held down by makeshift paperweights—on Carson’s desk. Beyond the windows, an orange sunset had deepened to crimson, to purple.
Michael was at his desk in the Homicide Division, adjacent to Carson’s, occupied by much of the same paperwork. She knew that he was ready to go home, but he usually let her define the workday.
“You checked our doc box lately?” she asked.
“Ten minutes ago,” Michael reminded her. “You send me out there one more time, I’m going to eat a get-small mushroom and just stay in the doc box until the report shows up.”
“We should’ve had the prelim autopsy on that floater hours ago,” she complained.
“And I shoulda been born rich. Go figure.”
She consulted photos of cadavers in situ while Michael watched.
The first victim, a young nurse named Shelley Justine, had been murdered elsewhere and dumped beside the London Street Canal. Tests revealed the chemical signature of chloroform in her blood.
After the killer rendered her unconscious, he killed her with a knife to the heart. With exquisite precision he removed her ears. A peptide profile found no elevated endorphin levels in the blood, indicating that the surgery occurred after she was dead. Had she been alive, the pain and terror would have left telltale chemistry.
The second victim, Meg Saville, a tourist from Idaho, had also been chloroformed and knifed while unconscious. The Surgeon—the press’s name for him—had neatly sawed off Saville’s feet.
“If he’d just always take feet,” Michael said, “we’d know he was a podiatrist, and we’d have found him by now.”
Carson shuffled the next photo to the top of the stack.
The first two victims had been women; however, neither Shelley Justine nor Meg Saville had been molested.
When the third victim was a man, the killer established his bona fides as an equal-opportunity maniac. The body of Bradford Walden—a young bartender from a hole-in-the-wall across the river in Algiers—had been found with the right kidney surgically removed.
The switch to souvenirs of internal origin wasn’t troubling—an urge to collect feet and ears was no less disturbing than a fancy for kidneys—but it was curious.
Chemical traces of chloroform were found, but this time peptide profiles showed that Walden had been alive and awake for the surgery Had the chloroform worn off too soon? Or had the killer intentionally let the man wake up? In either case, Walden died in agony, his mouth stuffed with rags and sealed with duct tape to muffle his screams.
The fourth victim, Caroline Beaufort, Loyola University student, had been discovered with both legs missing, her torso propped on an ornate bench at a trolley-car stop in the upscale Garden District. She had been chloroformed and unconscious when murdered.
For his fifth kill, the Surgeon dispensed with the anesthetic. He murdered another man, Alphonse Chaterie, a dry cleaner. He collected Chaterie’s liver while the victim was alive and fully awake: not a trace of chloroform.
Most recently, this morning’s body in the City Park lagoon was missing both hands.
Four women, two men. Four with chloroform, one without, one set of results pending. Each victim missing one or more body parts. The first three women were killed before the trophies were removed, while the men were alive and conscious for the surgery.
Apparently none of the victims had known any of the others. Thus far no mutual acquaintances had come to light, either.
“He doesn’t like to see women suffer, but men in agony are okay with him,” Carson said, and not for the first time.
Michael had a new thought. “Maybe the killer’s a woman, has more sympathy for her own gender.”
“Yeah, right. How many serial killers have ever been women?”
“There’ve been a few,” he said. “But, I am proud to say, men have been a lot more successful at it.”
Carson wondered, “Is there a fundamental difference between lopping off female body parts and digging out male internal organs?”
“We’ve been down this road. Two serial killers collecting body parts in the same city in the same three-week period? ‘Is such a coincidence logical, Mr. Spock?’ ‘Coincidence, Jim, is just a word superstitious people use to describe complex events that in truth are the mathematically inevitable consequences of a primary cause.’”
Michael made this work a lot less gruesome and more tolerable, but sometimes she wanted to thump him. Hard.
“And what does that mean?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I never did understand Spock.”
Appearing as if conjured into a pentagram, Harker dropped an envelope on Carson’s desk. “ME’s report on the floater. Delivered to my doc box by mistake.”
Carson didn’t want a push-and-shove with Harker, but she could not let obvious interference pass unremarked. “One more time your foot’s on mine, I’ll file a complaint with the chief of detectives.”
“I’m so afraid,” Harker dead-panned. His reddened face glistened with a sheen of sweat. “No ID on the floater yet, but it looks pretty much like she was chloroformed, taken someplace private, and killed with a stiletto to the heart before her hands were taken.”
When Harker continued to stand there, the day’s sun bottled in his glassy face, Michael said, “And?”
“You’ve checked out everyone with easy access to chloroform. Researchers doing animal experimentation, employees at medical supply companies…But two sites on the Internet offer formulas for making it in the kitchen sink, out of stuff you can buy at the supermarket. I’m just saying this case doesn’t fit in any standard box. You’re looking for something you’ve never seen before. To stop this guy, you’ve got to go to a weirder place—one level below Hell.”
Harker turned from them and walked away across the squad room.
Carson and Michael watched him leave. Then Michael said, “What was that} It almost seemed like genuine concern for the public.”
“He was once a good cop. Maybe a part of him still is.”
Michael shook his head. “I liked him better as an asshole.”
CHAPTER 8
OUT OF THE LAST of the twilight came Deucalion with a suitcase, in clothes too heavy for the sultry night.
This neighborhood offered markedly less glamour than the French Quarter. Seedy bars, pawn shops, liquor stores, head shops.
Once a grand movie house, the Luxe Theater had become a shabby relic specializing in revivals. On the marquee, unevenly spaced loose plastic letters spelled out the current double feature:
THURS THRU SUNDAY
DON SIEGEL REVIVAL
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
HELL IS FOR HEROES
The marquee was dark, the theater closed either for the night or permanently.
Not all of the streetlamps were functioning. Approaching the Luxe, Deucalion found a route of shadows.
He passed a few pedestrians, averting his face without seeming to, and drew attention only for his height.
He slipped into a service walk beside the movie palace. For more than two centuries, he had used back doors or even more arcane entrances.
Behind the theater, a bare bulb in a wire cage above the back door shed light as drab and gray as this litter-strewn alleyway.
Sporting multiple layers of cracked and chipped paint, the door was a scab in the brick wall. Deucalion studied the latch, the lock…and decided to use the bell.
He pushed the button, and a loud buzz vibrated through the door. Inside the quiet theater, it must have echoed like a fire alarm.
Moments later, he heard heavy movement inside. He sensed that he was being studied through the fish-eye security lens.
The lock rattled, and the door opened to reveal a sweet face and merry eyes peering out of a prison of flesh. At five feet seven and perhaps three hundred pounds, this guy was twice the man he should have been.
“Are you Jelly Biggs?” Deucalion asked.
“Do I look like I’m not?”
“You’re not fat enough.”
“When I was a star in the ten-in-one, I weighed almost three hundred more. I’m half the man I used to be.”
“Ben sent for me. I’m Deucalion.”
“Yeah, I figured. In the old days, a face like yours was gold in the carnival.”
“We’re both blessed, aren’t we?”
Stepping back, motioning Deucalion to enter, Biggs said, “Ben told me a lot about you. He didn’t mention the tattoo.”
“It’s new.”
“They’re fashionable these days,” said Jelly Biggs.
Deucalion stepped across the threshold into a wide but shabby hallway “And me,” he said drily, “I’ve always been a fashion plate.”
BEHIND THE BIG theater screen, the Luxe featured a labyrinth of passages, storage closets, and rooms that no patron had ever visited. With a rolling gait and heavy respiration, Jelly led the way past crates, mildewed cardboard boxes, and moisture-curled posters and stand-ups that promoted old films.
“Ben put seven names on the letter he sent me,” Deucalion said.
“You once mentioned Rombuk monastery, so he figured you might still be there, but he didn’t know what name you’d be using.”
“He shouldn’t have shared my names.”
“Just knowin’ your aliases doesn’t mean I can mojo you.”
They arrived at a door that wore an armor-thick coat of green paint. Biggs opened it, switched on a light, gestured for Deucalion to enter ahead of him.
A windowless but cozy apartment lay beyond. A kitchenette was adjacent to the combination bedroom and living room. Ben loved books, and two walls were lined with them.
Jelly Biggs said, “It’s a sweet place you inherited.”
The key word whipped through Deucalion’s mind before lashing back with a sharp sting. “Inherited. What do you mean? Where’s Ben?”
Jelly looked surprised. “You didn’t get my letter?”
“Only his.”
Jelly sat on one of the chrome and red-vinyl chairs at the dinette table. It creaked. “Ben was mugged.”
The world is an ocean of pain. Deucalion felt the old familiar tide wash through him.
“This isn’t the best part of town, and getting worse,” Biggs said. “Ben bought the Luxe when he retired from the carnival. The neighborhood was supposed to be turning around. It didn’t. The place would be hard to sell these days, so Ben wanted to hold on.”
“How did it happen?” Deucalion asked.
“Stabbed. More than twenty times.”
Anger, like a long-repressed hunger, rose in Deucalion. Once anger had been his meat, and feasting on it, he had starved.
If he let this anger grow, it would quickly become fury—and devour him. For decades he had kept this lightning in a bottle, securely stoppered, but now he longed to pull the cork.
And then…what? Become the monster again? Pursued by mobs with torches, with pitchforks and guns, running, running, running with hounds baying for his blood?
“He was everybody’s second father,” said Jelly Biggs. “Best damn carnie boss I ever knew.”
During the past two centuries, Ben Jonas had been one of a precious handful of people with whom Deucalion had shared his true origins, one of the few he had ever trusted completely.
He said, “He was murdered after he contacted me.”
Biggs frowned. “You say that like there’s a connection.”
“Did they ever find the killer?”
“No. That’s not unusual. The letter to you, the mugging—just a coincidence.”
At last putting down his suitcase, Deucalion said, “There are no coincidences.”
Jelly Biggs looked up from the dinette chair and met Deucalion’s eyes. Without a word they understood that in addition to years in the carnival, they shared a view of the world that was as rich with meaning as with mysteries.
Pointing toward the kitchenette, the fat man said, “Besides the theater, Ben left you sixty thousand cash. It’s in the freezer.”
Deucalion considered this revelation for a moment, then said, “He didn’t trust many people.”
Jelly shrugged. “What do I need with money when I’ve got such good looks?”
CHAPTER 9
SHE WAS YOUNG, poor, inexperienced. She’d never had a manicure before, and Roy Pribeaux proposed that he give her one.
“I give myself manicures,” he said. “A manicure can be erotic, you know Just give me a chance. You’ll see.”
Roy lived in a large loft apartment, the top half of a remodeled old building in the Warehouse District. Many rundown structures in this part of the city had been transformed into expansive apartments for artists.
A printing company and a computer-assembly business shared the main floor below. They existed in another universe, as far as Roy Pribeaux was concerned; he didn’t bother them, and they reciprocated.
He needed his privacy, especially when he took a new and special woman to his loft. This time, her name was Elizabeth Lavenza.
As odd as it might seem on a first date—or a tenth, for that matter—to suggest a manicure, he had charmed Elizabeth into it. He knew well that the modern woman responded to sensitivity in men.
First, at the kitchen table, he placed her fingers in a shallow bowl of warm oil to soften both the nails and the cuticles.
Most women also liked men who enjoyed pampering them, and young Elizabeth was no different in this regard.
In addition to sensitivity and a desire to pamper, Roy had a trove of amusing stories and could keep a girl laughing. Elizabeth had a lovely laugh. Poor thing, she had no chance of resisting him.
When her fingertips had soaked long enough, he wiped them with a soft towel.
Using a natural, nonacetone polish remover, he stripped the red color from her nails. Then with gentle strokes of an emery board, he sculpted the tip of each nail into a perfect curve.
He had only begun to trim the cuticles when an embarrassing thing happened: His special cell phone rang, and he knew that the caller had to be Candace. Here he was romancing Elizabeth, and the other woman in his life was calling.
He excused himself and hurried into the dining area, where he had left the phone on a table. “Hello?”
“Mr. Darnell?”
“I know that lovely voice,” he said softly, moving into the living room, away from Elizabeth. “Is this Candace?”
The cotton-candy vendor laughed nervously. “We talked so little, how could you recognize my voice?”
Standing at one of the tall windows, his back to the kitchen, he said, “Don’t you recognize mine?”
He could almost feel the heat of her blush coming down the line when she admitted, “Yes, I do.”
“I’m so glad you called,” he said in a discreet murmur.
Shyly, she said, “Well, I thought…maybe coffee?”
“A get-acquainted coffee. Just say where and when.”
He hoped she didn’t mean right now. Elizabeth was waiting, and he was enjoying giving her the manicure.
“Tomorrow evening?” Candace suggested. “Usually business on the boardwalk dies down after eight o’clock.”
“Meet you at the red wagon. I’ll be the guy with the big smile.”
Unskilled at romance, she said awkwardly, ‘And…I guess I’ll be the one with the eyes.”
“You sure will,” he said. “Such eyes.”
Roy pressed END. The disposable phone wasn’t registered to him. Out of habit, he wiped it clean of prints, tossed it on the sofa.
His modern, austere apartment didn’t contain much furniture. His exercise machines were his pride. On the walls were reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches, the great man’s studies of the perfect human form.
Returning to Elizabeth at the kitchen table, Roy said, “My sister. We talk all the time. We’re very close.”
When the manicure was complete, he exfoliated the skin of her perfect hands with an aromatic mixture of almond oil, sea salt, and essence of lavender (his own concoction), which he massaged onto her palms, the backs of the hands, the knuckles, the fingers.
Finally, he rinsed each hand, wrapped it in clean white butcher paper, and sealed it in a plastic bag. As he placed the hands in the freezer, he said, “I’m so happy you’ve come to stay, Elizabeth.”
He didn’t find it peculiar to be talking to her severed hands. Her hands had been the essence of her. Nothing else of Elizabeth Lavenza had been worth talking about or to. The hands were her.
CHAPTER 10
THE LUXE WAS an ornate Deco palace, glamorous in its day, a fit showcase for the movies of William Powell and Myrna Loy, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman. Like many a Hollywood face, this glamour had peeled and sagged.
Deucalion accompanied Jelly Biggs down the center aisle, past rows of musty, patched seats.
“Damn DVDs screwed the revival business,” Jelly said. “Ben’s retirement didn’t turn out like he expected.”
“Marquee says you’re still open Thursday through Sunday.”
“Not since Ben died. There’s almost enough thirty-five-millimeter fanatics to make it worthwhile. But some weekends we run up more expenses than receipts. I didn’t want to take responsibility for that since it’s become your property.”
Deucalion looked up at the screen. The gold and crimson velvet curtains drooped, heavy with dust and creeping mildew. “So…you left the carnival when Ben did?”
“When freak shows took a fade, Ben made me theater manager. I got my own apartment here. I hope that won’t change…assuming you want to keep the place running.”
Deucalion pointed to a quarter on the floor. “Finding money is always a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
Stooping to pick up the quarter, Deucalion said, “Heads, you’re out of a job. Tails, you’re out of a job.”
“Don’t like them odds.”
Deucalion snapped the coin into the air, snatched it in midflight. When he opened his fist, the coin had disappeared.
“Neither heads nor tails. A sign for sure, don’t you think?”
Instead of relief at having kept his job and home, Jelly’s expression was troubled. “I been having a dream about a magician. He’s strangely gifted.”
“Just a simple trick.”
Jelly said, “I’m maybe a little psychic. My dreams sometimes come sorta true.”
Deucalion had much he could have said to that, but he remained silent, waiting.
Jelly looked at the moldering drapes, at the threadbare carpet, at the elaborate ceiling, everywhere but at Deucalion. At last he said, “Ben told me some about you, things that don’t seem they could be real.” He finally met Deucalion’s eyes. “Do you have two hearts?”
Deucalion chose not to reply.
“In the dream,” Jelly said, “the magician had two hearts…and he was stabbed in both.”
A flutter of wings overhead drew Deucalion’s attention.
“Bird got in yesterday,” Jelly said. “A dove, by the look of it. Haven’t been able to chase it out.”
Deucalion tracked the trapped bird’s flight. He knew how it felt.
CHAPTER 11
CARSON LIVED ON A tree-lined street in a house nondescript except for a gingerbread veranda that wrapped three sides.
She parked at the curb because the garage was packed with her parents’ belongings, which she never found time to sort through.
On her way to the kitchen door, she paused under an oak draped with Spanish moss. Her work hardened her, wound her tight. Arnie, her brother, needed a gentle sister. Sometimes she couldn’t decompress during the walk from car to house; she required a moment to herself.
Here in the humid night and the fragrance of jasmine, she found that she couldn’t shift into domestic gear. Her nerves were twisted as tight as dreadlocks, and her mind raced. As never before, the scent of jasmine reminded her of the smell of blood.
The recent killings had been so gruesome and had occurred in such rapid succession that she could not put them aside during her personal time. Under normal circumstances, she was seventy percent cop, thirty percent woman and sister; these days, she was all cop, twenty-four/seven.
When Carson entered the kitchen, Vicky Chou had just loaded the dishwasher and switched it on. “Well, I screwed up.”
“Don’t tell me you put laundry in the dishwasher.”
“Worse. With his brisket of beef, I gave him carrots and peas.”
“Oh, never orange and green on the same plate, Vicky.”
Vicky sighed. “He’s got more rules about food than kosher and vegan combined.”
On a cop’s salary, Carson could not have afforded a live-in caregiver to look after her autistic brother. Vicky took the job in return for room and board—and out of gratitude.
When Vicky’s sister, Liane, had been indicted with her boyfriend and two others for conspiracy to commit murder, she seemed helplessly snared in a web of evidence. She’d been innocent. In the process of sending the other three to prison, Carson had cleared Liane.
As a successful medical transcriptionist, Vicky worked flexible hours at home, transcribing micro-cassettes for physicians. If Arnie had been a more demanding autistic, Vicky might not have been able to keep up with her work, but the boy was mostly quiescent.
Widowed at forty, now forty-five, Vicky was an Asian beauty, smart and sweet and lonely. She wouldn’t grieve forever. Someday when she least expected it, a man would come into her life, and the current arrangement would end.
Carson dealt with that possibility the only way that her busy life allowed: She ignored it.
“Other than green and orange together, how was he today?” Carson asked.
“Fixated on the castle. Sometimes it seems to calm him, but at other times…” Vicky frowned. “What is he so afraid of?”
“I don’t know. I guess…life.”
BY REMOVING A WALL and combining two of the upstairs bedrooms, Carson had given Arnie the largest room in the house. This seemed only fair because his condition stole from him the rest of the world.
His bed and nightstand were shoved into a corner. A TV occupied a wheeled metal stand. Sometimes he watched cartoons on DVD, the same ones over and over.
The remainder of the room had been devoted to the castle.
Four low sturdy tables formed a twelve-by-eight-foot platform. Upon the tables stood an architectural wonder in Lego blocks.
Few boys of twelve would have been able to create a model castle without a plan, but Arnie had put together a masterpiece: walls and wards, barbicon and bastions, ramparts and parapets, turreted towers, the barracks, the chapel, the armory, the castle keep with elaborate bulwark and battlements.
He’d been obsessed with the model for weeks, constructing it in an intense silence. Repeatedly he tore down finished sections only to remodel and improve them.
Most of the time he was on his feet while adding to the castle—an access hole in the table arrangement allowed him to build from within the project as well as from every side—but sometimes, like now, he worked while sitting on a wheeled stool. Carson rolled a second stool to the table and sat to watch.
He was a dark-haired, blue-eyed boy whose looks alone would have ensured him a favored place in the world if he’d not been autistic.
At times like this, when his concentration on a task was total, Arnie would not tolerate anyone being too near to him. If Carson drew closer than four or five feet, he would grow agitated.
When enthralled by a project, he might pass days in silence except for wordless reactions to any attempt to interrupt his work or to invade his personal space.
More than eighteen years separated Carson from Arnie. He’d been born the year that she moved out of her parents’ house. Even if he’d been spared from autism, they would not have been as close as many brothers and sisters, for they would have shared so few experiences.
Following the death of their parents four years ago, Carson gained custody of her brother. He had been with her ever since.
For reasons that she could not fully articulate, Carson had come to love this gentle, withdrawn child. She didn’t think she could have loved him more if he had been her son rather than her brother.
She hoped that someday there would be a breakthrough either in the treatment of autism in general or in Arnie’s particular case. But she knew her hope had little chance of being fulfilled.
Now she pondered the most recent changes he had made to the outer curtain wall of the castle compound. He had fortified it with regularly spaced buttresses that doubled as steep flights of stairs by which defenders could reach the walkways behind the battlements.
Recently Arnie had seemed to be more fearful than usual. Carson could not shake the feeling that he sensed some trouble coming and that he was urgently determined to prepare for it. He could not build a real castle, so he took refuge in this fantasy of a fortress home.
CHAPTER 12
RANDAL SIX CROSSES SPHINX with XENOPHOBE, finishing the last crossword puzzle in the book.
Other collections of puzzles await him. But with the completion of this current book, he is armored against the fearsome disorder of the world. He has earned protection.
He will be safe for a while, although not forever. Disorder builds. Chaos presses at the walls. Eventually he will have to fill more patterns of empty boxes with more judiciously chosen letters for the purpose of denying chaos entrance to his private space.
Temporarily safe, he gets up from the worktable, sits on the edge of his bed, and presses a call button on his nightstand. This will summon lunch.
He is not served meals on a regular schedule because he cannot eat when obsessed with crossword puzzles. He will let food grow cold rather than interrupt the important work offending off chaos.
A man in white brings his tray and places it on the worktable. While this attendant is present, Randal Six keeps his head bowed to discourage conversation and to prevent eye contact.
Every word he speaks to another person diminishes the protection that he has earned.
Alone again, Randal Six eats his lunch. Very neatly.
The food is white and green, as he likes it. Sliced turkey breast in cream sauce, mashed potatoes, white bread, peas, beans. For dessert, vanilla ice cream with creme de menthe.
When he finishes, he dares to open his door and slide the tray into the corridor. He quickly closes the door again, and feels as safe now as he ever does.
He sits on the edge of his bed and opens his nightstand drawer. The drawer contains a few magazines.
Having been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading, Randal Six is encouraged by Father to open himself to the world, to stay abreast of current events by the more ordinary means of reading various periodicals and newspapers.
He cannot tolerate newspapers. They are unwieldy The sections become confused; the pages fall out of order.
Worse, the ink. The ink comes off on his hands, as if it is the dirty disorder of the world.
He can wash the ink away with enough soap and hot water in the bathroom that adjoins this chamber, but surely some of it seeps into his pores and thence into his bloodstream. By this means, a newspaper is an agent of contagion, infecting him with the world’s disorder.
Among the magazines in the drawer, however, is a story that he tore from a local newspaper three months ago. This is his beacon of hope.
The story concerns a local organization raising research funds to find a cure for autism.
By the strictest definition of the affliction, Randal Six might not have autism. But he suffers from something very much like that sad condition.
Because Father has strongly encouraged him to better understand himself as a first step toward a cure, Randal reads books on the subject. They don’t give him the peace he finds in crossword puzzles.
During the first month of his life, when it wasn’t yet clear what might be wrong with him, when he had still been able to tolerate newspapers, he read about the local charity for autism research and at once recognized himself in descriptions of the condition. He then realized that he was not alone.
More important, he has seen a photo of another like himself: a boy of twelve, photographed with his sister, a New Orleans police officer.
In the photo, the boy isn’t looking at the camera but to one side of it. Randal Six recognizes the evasion.
Incredibly, however, the boy is smiling. He looks happy.
Randal Six has never been happy, not in the four months since he has come out of the creation tank as an eighteen-year-old. Not once. Not for a moment. Occasionally he feels sort of safe…but never happy
Sometimes he sits and stares at the newspaper clipping for hours.
The boy in the photo is Arnie O’Connor. He smiles.
Maybe Arnie is not happy all the time, but he must be happy sometimes.
Arnie has knowledge that Randal needs. Arnie has a secret to happiness. Randal needs it so bad he lies awake at night desperately trying to think of some way to get it.
Arnie is in this city, so near. Yet for all practical purposes, he is beyond reach.
In his four months of life, Randal Six has never been outside the walls of Mercy. Just being taken to another floor in this very building for treatment is traumatic.
Another neighborhood of New Orleans is as unaccessible to him as a crater on the moon. Arnie lives with his secret, untouchable.
If only Randal can get to the boy, he will learn the secret of happiness. Perhaps Arnie will not want to share it. That won’t matter. Randal will get it from him. Randal will get it.
Unlike the vast majority of autistics, Randal Six is capable of extreme violence. His inner rage is almost equal to his fear of the disordered world.
He has hidden this capacity for violence from everyone, even from Father, for he fears that if it is known, something bad will happen to him. He has seen in Father a certain…coldness.
He puts the newspaper photo in the drawer once more, under the magazines. In his mind’s eye, he stills sees Arnie, smiling Arnie.
Arnie is out there on the moon in New Orleans, and Randal Six is drawn to him like the sea to lunar tides.
CHAPTER 13
IN THE SMALL dimly lighted projection booth, a sprung sofa slumped against one wall, and stacks of paperbacks stood on every flat surface. Evidently Jelly liked to read while the movie ran.
Pointing to a door different from the one by which they had entered, the fat man said, “My apartment’s through there. Ben left a special box for you.”
While Jelly went to fetch the box, Deucalion was drawn to the old projector, no doubt original to the building. This monstrous piece of machinery featured enormous supply and take-up reels. The 35mm film had to be threaded through a labyrinth of sprockets and guides, into the gap between the high-intensity bulb and the lens.
He studied the adjustment knobs and worked forward until he could peer into the Cyclopean eye of the projector. He removed a cover plate to examine the internal gears, wheels, and motors.
Across the balcony, the mezzanine, and the lower seats, this device could cast a bright illusion of life upon the big screen.
Deucalion’s own life, in its first decade, had often seemed like a dark illusion. With time, however, life had become too real, requiring him to retreat into carnivals, into monasteries.
Returning with an old shoebox full of papers, Jelly halted when he saw Deucalion tinkering with the projector. “Makes me nervous, you messing with that. It’s an antique. Hard to get parts or a repairman. That thing is the life’s blood of this place.”
“It’s hemorrhaging.” Deucalion replaced the cover to protect the delicate parts. “Logic reveals the secrets of any machine—whether it’s a projector, a jet engine, or the universe itself.”
“Ben warned me you think too much.” Jelly set the shoebox on a stack of entertainment-gossip magazines. “He sent you one newspaper clipping with his letter, right?”
‘And it brought me halfway around the world.”
Jelly took the lid off the box. “Ben collected lots of this.”
Deucalion picked up the top clipping, scanned the photo, then the headline: VICTOR HELIOS GIVES ONE MILLION TO SYMPHONY.
The sight of the man in the photo, virtually unchanged after so much time, jolted Deucalion as before, in the monastery.
SCIMITARS OF LIGHTNING gut a black-bellied night, and then crashes of thunder shake darkness across the tall casement windows once more. From flickering gas lamps, light capers over the stone walls of a cavernous laboratory. An electric arc crackles between the copper wire-wrapped poles of eldritch equipment. Sparks spray from dangerously overloaded transformers and piston-driven machinery.
The storm grows more violent, hurling bolt after bolt into the collector rods that stud the tallest towers. The incredible energy is channeled down into—
—him.
He opens his heavy eyelids and sees another’s eye magnified by an ocular device resembling a jeweler’s loupe. The loupe flips up, and he sees the face of Victor. Toung earnest, hopeful.
In white cap and blood-spattered gown, this creator, this would-be god…
HANDS TREMBLING, Deucalion dropped the clipping, which fluttered to the floor of the projection room.
Ben had prepared him for this, but he was shocked anew. Victor alive. Alive.
For a century or more, Deucalion had explained his own longevity to himself by the simple fact that he was unique, brought to life by singular means. He might therefore exist beyond the reach of death. He never had a cold, the flu, no ailment or physical complaint.
Victor, however, had been born of man and woman. He should be heir to all the ills of the flesh.
From an inner jacket pocket, Deucalion withdrew a rolled sheet of heavy paper, which he usually kept in his carryall. He slipped the knot of the securing ribbon, unrolled the paper, and stared at it for a moment before showing it to Jelly.
Scrutinizing the pencil portrait, Jelly said, “That’s Helios.”
“A self-portrait,” Deucalion said. “He’s…talented. I took this from a frame in his study…more than two hundred years ago.”
Jelly evidently knew enough to receive that statement without surprise.
“I showed this to Ben,” Deucalion said. “More than once. That’s how he recognized Victor Helios and knew him for who he really is.”
Setting aside Victor’s self-portrait, Deucalion selected a second clipping from the box and saw a photo of Helios receiving an award from the mayor of New Orleans.
A third clipping: Victor with the district attorney during his election campaign.
A fourth: Victor and his lovely wife, Erika, at a benefit auction.
Victor purchasing a mansion in the Garden District.
Victor endowing a scholarship at Tulane University.
Victor, Victor, Victor.
Deucalion did not recall casting aside the clippings or crossing the small room, but he must have done so, for the next thing he knew, he had driven his right fist and then his left into the wall, through the old plaster. As he withdrew his hands, clutching broken lengths of lath, a section of the wall crumbled and collapsed at his feet.
He heard himself roar with anger and anguish, and managed to choke off the cry before he lost control of it.
As he turned to Jelly, Deucalion’s vision brightened, dimmed, brightened, and he knew that a subtle pulse of luminosity, like heat lightning behind clouds on a summer night, passed through his eyes. He had seen the phenomenon himself in mirrors.
Wide-eyed, Jelly seemed ready to bolt from the room, but then let out his pent-up breath. “Ben said you’d be upset.”
Deucalion almost laughed at the fat man’s understatement and aplomb, but he feared that a laugh would morph into a scream of rage. For the first time in many years, he had almost lost control of himself, almost indulged the criminal impulses that had been a part of him from the moment of his creation.
He said, “Do you know what I am?”
Jelly met his eyes, studied the tattoo and the ruin that it only half concealed, considered his hulking size. “Ben…he explained. I guess it could be true.”
“Believe it,” Deucalion advised him. “My origins are a prison graveyard, the cadavers of criminals—combined, revitalized, reborn.”
CHAPTER 14
OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT was hot and humid. In Victor Helios’s library, the air-conditioning chilled to the extent that a cheerful blaze in the fireplace was necessary
Fire featured in some of his less pleasant memories. The great windmill. The bombing of Dresden. The Israeli Mossad attack on the secret Venezuelan research complex that he had shared with Mengele in the years after World War II. Nevertheless he liked to read to the accompaniment of a cozy crackling fire.
When, as now, he was perusing medical journals like The Lancet, JAMA, and Emerging Infectious Diseases, the fire served not merely as ambience but as an expression of his informed scientific opinion. He frequently tore articles from the magazines and tossed them into the flames. Occasionally, he burned entire issues.
As ever, the scientific establishment could teach him nothing. He was far ahead of them. Yet he felt the need to remain aware of advancements in genetics, molecular biology, and associated fields.
He felt the need, as well, for a wine that better complemented the fried walnuts than did the Cabernet that Erika had served with them. Too tannic. A fine Merlot would have been preferable.
She sat in the armchair opposite his, reading poetry. She had become enthralled with Emily Dickinson, which annoyed Victor.
Dickinson had been a fine poet, of course, but she had been God-besotted. Her verses could mislead the naive. Intellectual poison.
Whatever need Erika might have for a god could be satisfied here in this room. Her maker, after all, was her husband.
Physically, he had done a fine job. She was beautiful, graceful, elegant. She looked twenty-five but had been alive only six weeks.
Victor himself, though two hundred and forty, could have passed for forty-five. His youthful appearance had been harder to maintain than hers had been to achieve.
Beauty and grace were not his only criteria for an ideal wife. He also wished her to be socially and intellectually sophisticated.
In this regard, in many small ways, Erika had failed him and had proved slow to learn in spite of direct-to-brain downloads of data that included virtual encyclopedias of etiquette, culinary history, wine appreciation, witticisms, and much else.
Knowledge of a subject did not mean that one could apply that knowledge, of course, but Erika didn’t seem to be trying hard enough. The Cabernet instead of the Merlot, Dickinson…
Victor had to admit, however, that she was a more appealing and acceptable creature than Erika Three, her immediate predecessor. She might not be the final version—only time would tell—but whatever her faults, Erika Four was not a complete embarrassment.
The drivel in the medical journals and Erika reading Dickinson at last drove him up from his armchair. “I’m in a creative mood. I think I’ll spend some time in my studio.”
“Do you need my help, darling?”
“No. You stay here, enjoy yourself.”
“Listen to this.” Her delight was childlike. Before Victor could stop her, she read from Dickinson: “The pedigree of honey / Does not concern the bee / A clover, any time, to him / Is aristocracy”
“Charming,” he said. “But for variety, you might read some Thorn Gunn and Frederick Seidel.”
He could have told her what to read, and she would have obeyed. But he did not desire an automaton for a wife. He wanted her to be free-spirited. Only in sexual matters did he demand utter obedience.
In the immense restaurant-quality kitchen from which staff could serve a sit-down dinner for a hundred without problem, Victor entered the walk-in pantry. The shelves at the back, laden with canned goods, slid aside when he touched a hidden switch.
Beyond the pantry, secreted in the center of the house, lay his windowless studio.
His public labs were at Helios Biovision, the company through which he was known to the world and by which he had earned another fortune atop those he had already accrued in earlier ages.
And in the Hands of Mercy, an abandoned hospital converted to serve his primary work and staffed with men of his making, he pursued the creation of the new race that would replace flawed humanity.
Here, behind the pantry, measuring twenty by fifteen feet, this retreat provided a place for him to work on small experiments, often those on the leading edge of his historic enterprise.
Victor supposed that he was to arcane laboratory equipment what Santa Claus was to gizmo-filled toy workshops.
When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she’d made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and as a failure.
Her judgment of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead—and who was not?
Although her novel suggested his workplace was a phantasmagoria of gizmos as ominous in appearance as in purpose, she had been vague on details. Not until the first film adaptation of her book did the name Frankenstein become synonymous with the term “mad scientist” and with laboratories buzzing-crackling-humming with frightening widgets, thingums, and doohickeys.
Amusingly, Hollywood had the set design more than half right, not as to the actual machines and objects, but as to ambience. Even the studio behind the pantry had a flavor of Hell with machines.
On the center worktable stood a Lucite tank filled with a milky antibiotic solution. In the tank rested a man’s severed head.
Actually, the head wasn’t severed. It had never been attached to a body in the first place.
Victor had created it only to serve as a braincase. The head had no hair, and the features were rough, not fully formed.
Support systems serviced it with nutrient-rich, enzyme-balanced, oxygenated blood and drained away metabolic waste through numerous plastic tubes that entered through the neck.
With no need to breathe, the head was almost dead still. But the eyes twitched behind the lids, which suggested that it was dreaming.
The brain within the skull was self-aware but had only the most rudimentary personality, sufficient to the experiment.
Approaching the table, Victor addressed the resident of the open Lucite tank: “Time to work, Karloff.”
No one could say that Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was a humorless man.
In the head, the eyes opened. They were blue and bloodshot.
Karloff had been selectively educated by direct-to-brain data downloading; therefore, he spoke English. “Ready,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse.
“Where is your hand?” Victor asked.
The bloodshot eyes shifted at once to regard a smaller table in a far corner of the room.
There, a living hand lay in a shallow bowl of milky antibiotic solution. As in the case of the head, this five-fingered wonder was served by numerous tubes and by a low-voltage electrical pump that could empower its nerves and, thereby, its musculature.
The systems sustaining the head and those sustaining the hand were independent of each other, sharing no common tubing or wiring.
After reading the status displays on the equipment and making a few adjustments, Victor said, “Karloff, move your thumb.”
In the dish, the hand lay motionless. Motionless. And then…the thumb twitched, bent at the knuckle, straightened again.
Victor had long sought those genes that might carry the elusive psychic powers that humankind had sometimes experienced but had never been able to control. Recently he had achieved this small success.
This ultimate amputee, Karloff, had just exhibited psychomotor telekenesis, the control of his entirely detached hand strictly by means of mental exertion.
“Give me an arpeggio,” Victor said.
In the shallow bowl, the hand raised on the heel of its palm and strummed the air with all fingers, as if plucking at the strings of an invisible harp.
Pleased by this display, Victor said, “Karloff, make a fist.”
The hand slowly clenched, tighter, tighter, until the knuckles were sharp and white.
No emotion showed in Karloff’s face, yet the hand seemed to be an exquisite expression of anger and the will to violence.
CHAPTER 15
NEW DAY, NEW DEATH. For the second morning in a row, Carson chased breakfast with the discovery of a mutilated corpse.
A TV crew was at the library, hauling gear out of a satellite van, when Carson jammed the brakes, twisted the wheel, and slotted her plainwrap between two black-and-whites that were angled to the curb.
“I break land-speed records getting here,” she grumbled, “and the media’s already on the scene.”
“Bribe the right people,” Michael suggested, “and next time you might get the call before Channel 4.”
As she and Michael crossed the sidewalk toward the library, a reporter shouted to her, “Detective O’Connor! Is it true the Surgeon cut out a heart this time?”
“Maybe they’re so interested,” she told Michael, “because none of those bastards has a heart.”
They hurried up stone steps to the ornate red-stone building with gray granite arches and columns.
Admitting them, the police guard at the door said, “It fits the pattern, guys. It’s one of his.”
“Seven murders in a little over three weeks isn’t a pattern anymore,” Carson replied. “It’s a rampage.”
As they entered the reading foyer with the elevated main desk, Michael said, “I should’ve brought my overdue book.”
“You checked out a book? Mr. DVD with a book?”
“It was a DVD guide.”
Crime-scene techs, police photographers, criminalists, jakes, and personnel from the medical examiner’s office served as Indian guides without saying a word. Carson and Michael followed their nods and gestures through a labyrinth of books.
Three quarters of the way along an aisle of stacks, they found Harker and Frye, who were cordoning off the scene with yellow tape.
Establishing that the territory belonged to him and Carson, Michael said, “Yesterday’s hand bandit is this morning’s thief of hearts.”
Frye managed to look greasy and blanched. His face had no color. He kept one hand on his expansive gut as if he had eaten some bad pepper shrimp for breakfast.
He said, “Far as I’m concerned, you take the lead on this one. I’ve lost my taste for the case.”
If Harker, too, had a change of heart, his reasons were not identical to Frye’s. His face was as boiled red as ever, his eyes as challenging.
Running one hand through his sun-bleached hair, Harker said, “Looks to me like whoever has point position on this is walking a high wire. One mistake on a case this high profile, the media will flush your career down the toilet.”
“If that means cooperation instead of competition,” Michael said, “we accept.”
Carson wasn’t as ready as Michael to forgive the toe-tramping they had received from these two, but she said, “Who’s the vie?”
“Night security man,” Harker said.
While Frye remained behind, Harker ducked under the yellow tape and led them to the end of the aisle, around the corner to another long row of stacks.
The end-stack sign declared ABERRANT PSYCHOLOGY. Thirty feet away, the dead man lay on his back on the floor. The victim looked like a hog halfway through a slaughterhouse.
Carson entered the new aisle but did not proceed into the blood spatter, leaving the wet zone unspoiled for CSI.
As she quietly sized the scene and tried to fit herself to it, planning the approach strategy, Harker said from behind her, “Looks like he cracked the breastbone neat as a surgeon. Went in there with complete professionalism. The guy travels with tools.”
Moving to Carson’s side, Michael said, “At least we can rule out suicide.”
“Almost looks like suicide,” Carson murmured thoughtfully.
Michael said, “Now, let’s remember the fundamentals of this relationship. Tou are the straight man.”
“There was a struggle,” Harker said. “The books were pulled off the shelves.”
About twenty books were scattered on the floor this side of the dead man. None was open. Some were in stacks of two and three.
“Too neat,” she said. “This looks more like someone was reading them, then set them aside.”
“Maybe Dr. Jekyll was sitting on the floor, researching his own insanity,” Michael conjectured, “when the guard discovered him.”
“Look at the wet zone,” Carson said. “Tightly contained around the body. Not much spatter on the books. No signs of struggle.”
“No struggle?” Harker mocked. “Tell that to the guy without a heart.”
“His piece is still in his holster,” Carson said. “He didn’t even draw, let alone get off a shot.”
“Chloroform from behind,” Michael suggested.
Carson didn’t respond at once. During the night,
madness had entered the library, carrying a bag of surgical tools. She could hear the soft footsteps of madness, hear its slow soft breathing.
The stench of the victim’s blood stirred in Carson’s blood a quivering current of fear. Something about this scene, something she could not quite identify, was extraordinary, unprecedented in her experience, and so unnatural as to be almost supernatural. It spoke first to her emotions rather than to her intellect; it teased her to see it, to know it.
Beside her, Michael whispered, “Here comes that old witchy vision.”
Her mouth went dry with fear, her hands suddenly icy. She was no stranger to fear. She could be simultaneously afraid but professional, alert and quick. Sometimes fear sharpened her wits, clarified her thinking.
“Looks more,” she said at last, “as if the vic just laid down there and waited to be butchered. Look at his face.”
The eyes were open. The features were relaxed, not contorted by terror, by pain.
“Chloroform,” Michael suggested again.
Carson shook her head. “He was awake. Look at the eyes. The cast of the mouth. He didn’t die unconscious. Look at the hands.”
The security guard’s left hand lay open at his side, palm up, fingers spread. That position suggested sedation before the murder.
The right hand, however, was clenched tight. Chloroformed, he would have relaxed the fist.
She jotted down these observations in her notebook and then said, “So who found the body?”
“A morning-shift librarian,” Harker said. “Nancy Whistler. She’s in the women’s lav. She won’t come out.”
CHAPTER 16
THE WOMEN’S REST ROOM smelled of pine-scented disinfectant and White Diamonds perfume. Regular janitorial service was the source of the former, Nancy Whistler of the latter.
A young, pretty woman who put the lie to the stereotypical image of librarians, she wore a clingy summer dress as yellow as daffodils.
She bent to one of the sinks and splashed cold water in her face from a running faucet. She drank from cupped hands, swished the water around her mouth, and spat it out.
“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” she said.
“No problem,” Carson assured her.
“I’m afraid to leave here. Every time I think I just can’t puke again, I do.”
“I love this job,” Michael told Carson.
“The officers who did a perimeter check tell me there are no signs of forced entry. So you’re sure the front door was locked when you arrived for work?” Carson pressed.
“Absolutely. Two deadbolts, both engaged.”
“Who else has keys?”
“Ten people. Maybe twelve,” said Nancy Whistler. “I can’t think names right now.”
You could only push a witness so far in the aftermath of her encounter with a bloody corpse. This wasn’t a time to be hard-assed.
Carson said, “E-mail a list of keyholders to me. Soon.”
‘All right, sure. I understand.” The librarian grimaced as if she might hurl again. Instead she said, “God, he was such a toad, but he didn’t deserve that.” Michael’s raised eyebrows drew an explanation from her: “Bobby Allwine. The guard.”
“Define toad,” Michael requested.
“He was always…looking at me, saying inappropriate things. He had a way of coming on to me that was…just weird.”
“Harassment?”
“No. Nothing forceful. Just weird. As if he didn’t get a lot of things, the way to act.” She shook her head. “And he went to funeral homes for fun.”
Carson and Michael exchanged a look, and he said, “Well, who doesn’t?”
“Viewings at funeral homes,” Whistler clarified. “Memorial services. For people he didn’t even know. He went two, three times a week.”
“Why?”
“He said he liked to look at dead people in their caskets. Said it…relaxed him.” She cranked off the water faucet. “Bobby was sort of a geek. But…why would someone cut out his heart?”
Michael shrugged. “Souvenir. Sexual gratification. Dinner.”
Appalled, repelled, Nancy Whistler bolted for a toilet stall.
To Michael, Carson said, “Oh, nice. Real nice.”
CHAPTER 17
PEELING PAINT, crumbling stucco, rusting wrought iron, sagging trumpet vines yellowing in the heat, and a pustulant-looking fungus flourishing in the many cracks in the concrete walkway established a design motif carried out in every aspect of the apartment building.
On the patchy lawn, which looked as if someone had salted it, a sign announced APARTMENT AVAILABLE / ONLY LOSERS NEED APPLY.
Actually, only the first two words were on the sign. The other four didn’t have to be spelled out; Carson inferred them from the condition of the place as she parked at the curb.
In addition to the sign, the front lawn actually contained a flock of seven pink flamingos.
“Bet my ass there’s a couple plastic gnomes somewhere around here,” Michael said.
Someone had painted four of the flamingos other tropical hues—mango green, pineapple yellow—perhaps hoping that a color change would render these lawn ornaments less absurd if not less tacky. The new paint had worn off in places; the pink shone through.
Not because of the implication of borderline poverty but because of the weirdness of the place, it was an ideal building for odd ducks and geeks like Bobby Allwine, he of the stolen heart. They would be drawn here, and in the company of their own kind, no one among them would receive particular attention.
A grizzled old man knelt on the front steps, fixing a railing brace.
“Excuse me. You work here?” Michael asked, flashing his ID.
“No more than I have to.” The old man looked Carson up and down appreciatively, but still spoke to Michael. “Who’s she?”
“It’s bring-your-sister-to-work day at the department. Are you the super here?”
“ ‘Super’ don’t seem to be a word that fits anyone or anything about this dump. I’m just sort of the jack-of-all around here. You come to see Bobby Allwine’s place?”
“News travels fast.”
Putting down his screwdriver, getting to his feet, the jack-of-all said, “Good news does. Follow me.”
Inside, the public stairwell was narrow, dark, peeling, humid, and malodorous.
The old guy didn’t smell so good, either, and as they followed him up to the second floor, Michael said, “I’ll never complain about my apartment again.”
At the door to 2-D, as he fumbled in his pockets for a passkey, the jack-of-all said, “Heard on the news his liver was cut out.”
“It was his heart,” Carson said.
“Even better.”
“You didn’t like Bobby Allwine?”
Unlocking the door, he said, “Hardly knew him. But this makes the apartment worth fifty bucks more.” He read their disbelief and assured them, “There’s people that’ll pay extra.”
“Who,” Michael asked, “the Addams family?”
“Just people who like some history about a place.”
Carson pushed inside the apartment, and when the old man would have followed her, Michael eased him aside and said, “We’ll call you when we’re done.”
The blinds were drawn. The room was uncommonly dark for a bright afternoon.
Carson found the switch for the ceiling fixture and said, “Michael, look at this.”
In the living room, the ceiling and walls were painted black. The wood floors, the baseboards, the door and window casings were black, as well. The blinds were black.
The sole piece of furniture was a black vinyl armchair in the center of the room.
Closing the front door behind him, Michael said, “Does Martha Stewart have an emergency design hotline?”
The windows were closed. No air conditioning. The moist heat and the blackness and a tauntingly familiar sweet fragrance made Carson feel slow, stupid.
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
“Licorice.”
Thick, sweet, pervasive, the aroma was indeed licorice. Though it should have been pleasant, the smell half nauseated Carson.
The black floor had a glossy sheen, unmarred by dust or lint. She wiped a hand along a windowsill, down a door casing, and found no grime.
As it had in the library with Allwine’s corpse, fear found Carson, a creeping disquiet that climbed her spine and pressed a cold kiss to the back of her neck.
In the meticulously clean kitchen, Michael hesitated to open the black door of the refrigerator. “This feels like a Jeffrey Dahmer moment, severed heads among the bottles of pickles and mayonnaise, a heart in a OneZip bag.”
Even the interior of the refrigerator had been spray-painted black, but it held no heads. Just a coffee cake and a quart of milk.
Most of the cupboards were empty, too. A drawer contained three spoons, two forks, two knives.
According to his employee file, Allwine had lived here for two years. An inventory of his possessions would give the impression that he’d been prepared to leave on a moment’s notice and to travel light.
The third room was the bedroom. The ceiling, the walls, and the floor were black. Even the bed and sheets: black. A black nightstand, black lamp, and black radio with glowing green numbers.
“What is this place?” Carson wondered.
“Maybe he’s a satanist? Or just an over-the-top metal fan.”
“No music system. No TV.”
Michael found the source of the licorice odor. On the unpadded windowseat sat a tray holding several fat black candles, none burning at the moment. Bending down to sniff, he said, “Scented.”
Carson considered the time and effort required to create this unrelieved blackness, and suddenly she thought of Arnie and his Lego castle. Bobby Allwine held a job and interacted with the world, but on some level he was as dysfunctional as her brother.
Arnie was benign, however, whereas judging by the available evidence, Allwine’s psychology must be, at the core, malignant.
“This place is worth an extra hundred bucks a month,” Michael declared.
When Carson switched on the light in the adjacent bathroom, the startling contrast stung her eyes. Paint, floor tile, sink, toilet—everything was a dazzling white, assiduously polished. The pungent smell of ammonia allowed no intrusion of the scent of licorice.
Opposite the vanity mirror, hundreds of single-edged razor blades bristled from the wall. Each had been pressed at the same angle into the sheetrock, leaving half of the blade exposed, like a wicked silver fang. Row after row after row of clean, sparkling, unused razor blades.
“Seems like,” she said, “the victim was even crazier than his killer.”
CHAPTER 18
IN NEW ORLEANS uptown society, formal dinner parties were a political necessity, and Victor took his responsibilities seriously.
Inside the sprawling Garden District mansion, his housekeepers—Christine and Sandra—and his butler, William, had spent the day preparing for the evening’s event. They cleaned every room, added flowers and candles, swept the covered porches. Gardeners tended to the lawn, trees, flower beds, and shrubs.
These people were all his creations, made at the Hands of Mercy, and were therefore tireless and efficient.
In the formal dining room, the table was set for twelve with Pratesi linens, Buccelatti silverware, Limoges china, historic Paul Storr silver chargers, and a monumental Storr candelabrum featuring Bacchus and attendants. The sparkle factor was greater—and embodied greater value—than any display case of diamonds at Tiffany’s.
The housekeepers and butler awaited their master’s inspection. He entered the dining room, already dressed for dinner, and considered the preparations.
“Sandra, you’ve selected the right china for tonight’s guests.”
His approval drew a smile from her, though it was uneasy
“But, William, there are fingerprints on a couple of these glasses.”
At once the butler took the indicated glasses away.
Two centerpieces of cream-colored roses flanked the candelabrum, and Victor said of them, “Christine, too much greenery Strip some of it out to emphasize the blooms.”
“I didn’t arrange the roses, sir,” she said, and seemed to be dismayed to have to reveal that his wife had taken charge of the roses. “Mrs. Helios preferred to do it herself. She read a book on flower arranging.”
Victor knew that the staff liked Erika and worried that she should do well.
He sighed. “Redo the arrangements anyway, but don’t say anything to my wife.” Wistfully, he removed one of the white roses and slowly turned it between thumb and forefinger. He sniffed it, noting that a few of the petals already showed early signs of wilt. “She’s so…young. She’ll learn.”
AS THE HOUR drew near, Victor went to the master bedroom suite to determine what had delayed Erika.
He found her in the dressing room, at her vanity. Her shoulder-length bronze hair was as lustrous as silk. The exquisite form and buttery smoothness of her bare shoulders stirred him.
Unfortunately, she had too much enthusiasm for the effects of makeup.
“Erika, you can’t improve on perfection.”
“I so much want to look nice for you, Victor.”
“Then wash most of that stuff off. Let your natural beauty shine through. I’ve given you everything you need to dazzle.”
“How sweet,” she said, but she seemed uncertain whether she had been complimented or criticized.
“The district attorney’s wife, the university president’s wife—none of them will be painted like pop-music divas.”
Her smile faltered. Victor believed that directness with a subordinate—or a wife—was always preferable to criticism couched to spare feelings.
Standing close behind her, he slid his hands along her bare shoulders, bent close to smell her hair. He pulled that glorious mane aside, kissed the nape of her neck—and felt her shiver.
He fingered her emerald necklace. “Diamonds would be a better choice. Please change it. For me.”
In the vanity mirror, she met his eyes, then lowered her gaze to the array of makeup brushes and bottles before her. She spoke in a whisper: “Your standards for everything are…so high.”
He kissed her neck again and matched her whisper: “That’s why I made you. My wife.”
CHAPTER 19
IN THE CAR, on the way to the Quarter for a grab-it dinner in Jackson Square, Carson and Michael ping-ponged the case.
She said, “Allwine wasn’t chloroformed.”
“We don’t have blood results yet.”
“Remember his face. He wasn’t chloroformed. That makes him and the dry cleaner, Chaterie, the exceptions.”
“The other male, Bradford Walden, was chloroformed,” Michael said. “Otherwise, those three make a set.”
“The Surgeon took their internal organs as souvenirs.”
“But from the women he only takes ears, feet, hands…Did Nancy Whistler e-mail you that list of people with library keys?”
“Yeah. But after seeing Allwine’s apartment, I think he opened the door for the killer, the guy didn’t need a key.”
“How do you get to that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”
“Let’s do some victimology analysis,” Michael suggested. “First…I’ve given up on the idea the victims are connected to one another somehow. They’re random prey.”
“How did you analyze your way to that?”
“Now and then,” he said, “I have a feeling of my own.”
“Any significance to which body part he takes from any particular victim?”
“Elizabeth Lavenza, swimming without her hands. Are hands of special importance in her life, her work? Is she a pianist? Maybe an artist? Maybe a massage therapist?”
“As you know, she was a clerk in a bookstore.”
“Meg Saville, the tourist from Idaho.”
“Took her feet.”
“She wasn’t a ballet dancer. Just a receptionist.”
“He takes a nurse’s ears, a university student’s legs,” Carson said. “If there’s significance, it’s inscrutable.”
“He takes the dry cleaner’s liver, the bartender’s kidney. If he’d carved the bartender’s liver, we might build a theory on that.”
“Pathetic,” she said.
“Totally,” he agreed. “The bartender had a Goth lifestyle, and Allwine lived in black. Is that a connection?”
“I didn’t get Goth from his apartment, just crazy.”
She parked illegally in Jackson Square, near a Cajun restaurant favored by cops.
Just as they reached the entrance, Harker exited the place with a large bag of takeout, bringing with him the mouthwatering aroma of blackened catfish, reminding Carson that she’d skipped lunch.
As if not in the least surprised to see them, as if picking up in midconversation, Harker said, “Word is the mayor might push for a task force as early as the weekend. If we’ll be teaming this later, we might as well start swapping thoughts now.”
To Harker, Carson said, “Surely you gotta know your reputation. Everyone in the department pegs you and Frye for glory hogs.”
“Envy,” Harker said dismissively “We close more cases than anyone.”
“Sometimes by popping the suspect,” Michael said, referring to a recent officer-involved shooting for which Harker had narrowly avoided being brought up on charges.
Harker’s smile was contemptuous. “You want my theory about the library security guard?”
Michael said, “Do I want pancreatic cancer?”
“The black rooms are a death wish,” Harker conjectured.
“Damn,” Carson said.
“He tried to slash his wrists with each of those razor blades in the bathroom wall,” Harker continued. “But he just couldn’t find the courage.”
“You and Frye went to Allwine’s apartment?”
“Yeah. You two,” Harker said, “you’re our babies, and we sometimes feel the need to burp you.”
He pushed between them, walked away, glanced back after a few steps. “When you have a theory, I’ll be happy to listen to it.”
To Carson, Michael said, “I’ve got a short list of hearts I’d like to cut out.”
CHAPTER 20
AFTER VICTOR LEFT the master suite, Erika slipped into a St. John dress that managed to be sensational yet respectable, subtly sexy but classy
Standing in front of a full-length mirror in her enormous walk-in closet, which was as big as most master bedrooms, she knew that she looked enchanting, that she would leave an indelible impression on every man at the dinner. Nevertheless, she felt inadequate.
She would have tried other dresses if the first guests had not been scheduled to arrive in mere minutes. Victor expected her to be at his side to greet each arrival, and she dared not fail him.
All of her clothes were behind doors or in drawers along three aisles. She owned literally hundreds of outfits.
She hadn’t shopped for any of them. Having created her to his ideal measurements, Victor had purchased everything while she had still been in the tank.
Perhaps he’d bought some of these things for the previous Erika. She didn’t like to think about that.
She hoped that someday she would be allowed to shop for herself. When Victor allowed that, she would know she had at last met his standards and earned his trust.
Briefly, she wondered what it would be like not to care what Victor—or anyone—thought of her. To be herself. Independent.
Those were dangerous thoughts. She must repress them.
At the back of the closet, perhaps two hundred pairs of shoes were stored on canted shelves. Although she knew that time was of the essence, she dithered between Gucci and Kate Spade.
Behind her in the closet, something rustled, something thumped.
She turned to look back at the center aisle but saw only closed cherrywood doors behind which hung some of her seasonal wardrobe, and pale yellow carpet. She peeked into the right-hand aisle, then into the left, but they were also deserted.
Refocusing on her dilemma, she finally resolved it by choosing the Kate Spades. Carrying them in one hand, she hurried out of the closet into her dressing room.
Entering, she thought she saw movement from the corner of her eye, on the floor at the open doorway to the bedroom. When she turned her head, nothing was there.
Curious, she went into the bedroom nevertheless—just in time to see the silk spread flutter behind something that had just slipped under the king-size bed.
They had no house pets, no dog, no cat.
Victor would be furious if it turned out that a rat had gotten into the house. He had zero tolerance for vermin.
Erika had been made to be cautious of danger but to fear nothing in the extreme—although her programmed respect for her maker came close to fear at times.
If a rat had gotten into the house and if now it hid under the bed, she would not hesitate to snare it and dispose of it.
She set aside the Kate Spades and dropped to her knees beside the bed. She had no doubt that her reflexes were quick enough to snatch a scurrying rat.
When she lifted the spread and looked under the bed, her superb vision required no flashlight. But nothing lurked beneath the boxed springs.
She got to her feet and turned, surveying the room. She sensed that something was here, but she didn’t have time to search behind every piece of furniture.
Conscious of time racing rat-fast, she sat on the edge of an armchair, near the fireplace, and pulled on her shoes. They were beautiful, but she would have liked them more if she had bought them herself.
She sat for a moment, listening. Silence. But this was the kind of silence that suggested something might be listening to her as she listened for it.
When she left the master suite for the upstairs hall, she closed the door behind her. It fit tight. Nothing could get under it. If a rat was loose in the bedroom, it couldn’t get downstairs to spoil the dinner party.
She descended the grand staircase, and as she reached the foyer, the doorbell rang. The first guests had arrived.
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