House of Skin (7 page)

“You’re wrong,” said Soames.

“I’d like to ask you about Dr. Lochmere. Do you remember her?”

Soames began to laugh. It was a broken and pitiful sound. “Of course. She started this mess, didn’t she? Or did I?” He laughed again.

“What can you tell me of her?”

Soames looked to be in pain. His lips twisted in a grimace, his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. A tear stained his cheek. He fought at his bonds to no avail, then he settled down. “Do you have a knife?” he asked.

“No.”

“A gun?”

“No.”

“You’re lying!” he snapped. “You’re a cop. I know you have a gun. I can smell a cop a mile away.”

“I checked it at the desk.”

“Too bad.” He fell silent for a moment. “There’s no hope for me, then.”

“Did you ever meet Dr. Lochmere?” Fenn pressed on.

“Oh yes. I met her. And she met me.”

Fenn let that one go. “What did she want you to do?”

“Look for Eddy Zero.” He began to laugh at that.

“And you found him?”

“Yeah, nothing to it. It took time, but I found him.” He was sobbing now.

“I don’t understand.”

“No, and I won’t let you,” Soames said. “It’s too dangerous. It’s better to be ignorant.”

“Just tell me about Lochmere.”

“What’s to tell? She hired me to find Zero and I did. I kept track of his movements best I could. He’s a slippery one, that Eddy. Just like his dad.” He looked around with bloodshot eyes. “Is that what you want to know? It’s almost the truth.”

“Tell me the rest.”

“Never.”

“Why?”

He ignored this. “Did I tell you I helped nail his old man? Dr. Bloodand-Bones? I did. If it wasn’t for me, they would never have stopped him.”

“He was never caught.”

“No, but we drove him into hiding. It was something. I knew Zero. When I suspected what he was up to, I did a little digging. I had photos of Grimes doing things his wife wouldn’t care for too much. I threatened to show them to her and, boy, did that old boy start talking then. He spilled it all about their little society and what they’d been up to.” Soames looked weary. “I didn’t believe it at first, so I checked. I went over there. To that house Zero kept.”

“And?”

His eyes filled with tears. “It was a nightmare. I should’ve told the cops then, but I didn’t. I waited. God knows why. Finally, I did, though. You know the rest, I’m sure. Zero got away. So did that other one. If only I’d told the cops sooner …”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I guess I was afraid.” He swallowed. “I’m afraid now.”

“You think Zero’s coming back?”

Soames ignored him again. “Get me a knife or razor, will ya? Anything’ll do.”

It was ridiculous. Soames was obsessed with taking his own life. He saw nothing else, save that William Zero apparently was coming to kill him. The rest of it … who could say if there was any truth to it?

“Well, rest up, my friend. You’ll be okay,” Fenn told him and made a hasty retreat.

He’d gone there with questions and come out with more. Dr. Lochmere
had
apparently hired him to track Eddy Zero. That much checked out. But how could any of that be related to his attempts at self-destruction? And what of this business about Dr. Blood-and-Bones? Was there a common thread here or just a lot of nonsense spewed by a crazy man? What secrets was he keeping?

It would take time to sort out. And Fenn decided he had all the time in the world to get to the bottom of it.

Thinking about it all gave him another headache.

Dear Eddy,

This is a letter you’ll never read. This is a letter that not you or anyone else will ever see, because I’m going to burn it to ash as soon as I’m done committing my thoughts to it.

If I don’t, God help me.

I know you’re out there somewhere, waiting for me. Just as I wait for you. We didn’t know each other long. You maybe glimpsed me once or twice at that awful place, I can’t say for sure. But I saw you. When they used to let you walk in the courtyard, I watched you. I began to time my life by your appearance below in the yard. I watched you through the steel mesh of my window. I envied you. Ultimately, I loved you. I wished I could walk with you. But they never let me out. No one from D-ward ever gets out.

Long after you were gone, I thought of you. I never stopped. I wanted nothing more than to be with you, to help you through the confusion of your life.

How can I do this, my love?

How can I hope to bring order to your life when I can’t do the same to my own? I have no answer for that, I only have hope. I’ve made mistakes with my own affairs. I always choose the wrong men and this is something beyond my power to change (maybe I’ll tell you why some day; it’s a dark and twisted tale). I enter into relationships without much thought. I tell myself it’s for love when in reality it’s probably infatuation. I give myself totally to my men. Give them anything they ask and usually a lot more. They worship my face and my body and never, somehow, get any further than that. It’s something I’ve accepted and decided I can’t change. My mother was a beautiful woman and I inherited her looks, God help me.

One of my first lovers was a man named Rick and (as I learned later) he had been raised in a strict fundamentalist religious household. You wouldn’t have known it at first. He was intense and seductive and given to violent outbursts that usually ended in passion for us. Those three things seemed to go hand in hand for me: intensity, seduction, and violence. And not necessarily in that order. If I was to tell you why, I’d have to tell you of my first lover and I don’t think I’m ready to do that.

Let’s just talk about Rick for a moment.

We had, in the three or four months of our relationship, explored nearly all forms of sexual pleasure. In fact, we’d exhausted most of the ordinary ones and it was at this time that I suggested we begin experimenting. I told Rick a few things I’d like to try.

“You can’t be serious.” He said this to me, storm clouds darkening in his eyes. Seeing that I was, he rushed about the room, destroying everything in his path. I found it all terribly exciting as I always did. I expected his tantrum to end in the usual manner, with him making violent love to me. It didn’t. “What you’re suggesting is perverted, it’s disgusting. I won’t be part of it.” He said other things, none of which are important. I’d struck some puritanical nerve in him and there was no going back.

He walked out of my life.

And what did I ask him to do? You can use your imagination. Once accepted routes of sexual creativity have been exhausted, it requires one to walk darker, forbidden paths. Paths I’ve been down countless times.

I tell you of Rick as an example and nothing more. It will give you an idea of the course my loves generally take. They are disasters from the beginning and, as I have said, this is beyond my power to change.

But I can help you, Eddy. Believe me, I can. Because you’re not going anywhere I haven’t been. I know about lunacy. It rules my life.

And I love you. God, yes, I do.

When I find you, we’ll help each other.

Yours,

Cherry

“I don’t know what I expect to find,” Lisa said. “Probably nothing. But it seems like a good place to start. If Eddy’s in this town at all, then I’m sure he’ll go there.”

Fenn nodded. “I’m taking a lot of chances with you,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I know why.”

“Because you want to stop him as I do.”

Fenn looked thoughtful as he drove. “Yes, I suppose I do.” But even with all that she told him, he still wasn’t sure. He had other work to do, yet he was willing to help her track down some guy who might have been a thousand miles away. He was surprised at himself. He’d always been one who went with a sure thing and here he was tracking down a
maybe.
He supposed, realistically, homicide work was really just a loose collection of maybes that you fit together into a pattern. Yet, there was more involved here than just that.
Yes,
he wanted to stop Eddy Zero if he was indeed in the city; that was his job. But ever since he’d talked with Soames, there were suddenly too many questions in his mind. And, madman or not, Soames had seemed quite lucid on certain points. There was a hidden agenda here somewhere and Fenn wanted to know what it was.

Lisa said, “If you didn’t want to be here, Mr. Fenn, you wouldn’t be. I imagine you’re a careful man. I’m sure that you weren’t as sold on me and what I said the other day as you acted. But you’ve done some checking since then, and you know I’m not some crusading nut.”

Fenn laughed. “You’re a smart cookie, Doc. I did check you and our boy out.”

“And?”

“And I trust my instincts. You’re okay.”

“Good.”

“One thing, though. Probably none of my business, but why did you leave the prison? I got the impression you liked it there. I talked with your superiors there. Hope you don’t mind. They were impressed with you. Couldn’t say enough good things about you.”

“I needed time for other things. Research, mainly, for a book I was working on.”

“Where are you working now?”

“I’m not. I’m doing research.”

“Listen, I was just curious.”

“So now you know everything.”

She was lying and he knew it, but he wasn’t going to press it. There was a lot more to know about her. Maybe in time she’d be truthful with him. She was just another part of this mysterious puzzle.

“I’m sure it’ll be a good book,” he said.

She smiled and looked out the window.

“This house we’re going to, I take it you’ve been by there already?”

“Yeah. I’ve driven by it, but I didn’t bother going in. It looks like a bad neighborhood. I didn’t want to get out alone.”

Fenn chuckled. “Not too bad by day, but definitely sketchy by night.”

“About what I thought.”

He was watching her out of the corner of his eye as he spoke. Her hair was pulled back tight in a blonde braid and she wore glasses. Her face looked experienced, tough even. In her business suit and skirt, she looked like a lawyer. Emotionless, dedicated, and breastless. But her legs were nice: soft, tapered, sexy. He wondered what she’d look like without the glasses and her hair down. He found the idea exciting.

She looked at him. “Has anyone lived there since Zero occupied it?”

“No, not a person. It’s been more or less up for sale for twenty years. Although, I imagine it’s had its share of transients.”

The streets and buildings became shabbier as Fenn drove. There was litter on the walks. Rusting, stripped cars at the curbs. Everything, both house and building and avenue alike, seemed to be painted a weathered gray. The people who watched them drive by all had the same hungry desperation in their yearning eyes.

And finally, the house.

The scene of the crimes of Dr. Blood-and-Bones.

“I almost hate leaving the car out here,” Fenn told her.

“It’s a police car.”

“Doesn’t matter in this neighborhood.”

They got out and went up the walk. The street was deserted in either direction. Leaves and litter blew up the pavement.

* * *

The house was big and ugly and ominous. Like something lifted out of Poe or Lovecraft and dumped in this filthy back street. It was set up on a hill and they had to follow a set of crumbling, frost-heaved stone steps up to its door. The other houses were packed up against it, but beneath its towers and leaning turrets, they were unnoticeable.

“What a place,” Fenn said, studying the sloping yard and its dead trees and arid grasses.

“It’s very atmospheric,” Lisa agreed.

“Most of the houses around here were like this at one time,” Fenn told her. “But most were razed for housing and building space. But not this one.”

Lisa tried the peeling, faded door. It was open. “Who owns it now?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” he asked. “I spoke with the family lawyer. Eddy owns it now that his old lady bought it.”

They went in and were struck by a feeling of desolation, of emptiness. It was impossible to imagine anyone actually living here. Laughter, joy, love, life—those things didn’t belong. The place seemed haunted by itself, by its own flat neutrality. Dust twisted in the air and a cool breeze played in the halls. There was an entrenched feeling of insanity as if the house itself had lost its mind.

The grime and dust were disturbed at the bottom of the steps. There were dozens of footprints in this area.

Fenn’s temples were beginning to throb.

“That’s where they found the girl,” he said. “Right at the foot of the steps. She was probably stabbed up there and fell.”

“No idea who she was?”

“Nothing. No identification. Nothing on her prints. Her face was butchered so badly I don’t think her own mother would have recognized her.”

Lisa walked around, looking down corridors and into rooms. “I wonder if he came here, knowing what his father had done.”

“You think Eddy killed her?”

She shrugged. “Who can say? The M.O. wasn’t the same as his father’s, certainly, but that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s just getting going.”

“Wouldn’t that be something.” Fenn shook his head.

“I know I’m grasping at straws here, Mr. Fenn, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Somebody killed her.”

“But in the same place as his father?” he said. “It’s incredible. I’ve got an A.P.B. out on our boy. Maybe it’ll turn up something.”

They checked the house room by room. As they did, Fenn described to her where the girl had died and how. Lisa told him of the elder Zero and where in the house he had committed his own atrocities. It wasn’t very appetizing conversation, but in this place, such talk seemed fitting. Its atmosphere demanded talk of dread and dismemberment; it had no use for anything but the darker prospects of human endeavor.

After a time, he chuckled and said, “You’re not much of a first date.”

“I’ve never been known to be.”

Fenn was intrigued by her encyclopedic knowledge of crime and insanity, but mostly by the woman herself. He liked the way she looked at him, the way she called him
Mr.
Fenn rather than Lt. Fenn—there was something almost endearing about that, like a pet name—although he would’ve preferred just Jim. He liked her husky, sexy voice. And despite her catalog of grue and grim, she had a soft, winning quality about her that could reach right into your heart, he thought. The sort of woman who was a wonderful combination of beauty, brains, and confidence. She gave her best at all times and it made Fenn want to do the same. He felt he would follow her anywhere. He almost hoped that they never would find Eddy Zero, so their time together would never end.