Skin Deep (29 page)

“Hey, Dana, nice eagle beak.”

The words were the witless comeback for some offense she could no longer recall and hurled by little Billy Conroy, a mean kid she hadn't seen since junior high. But she had dated the calendar from that moment a quarter of a century ago.
Eagle beak
—a dumb insult on tap, but it left a scab that she had picked at every day until Lanie drove her to Aaron Monks's that Sunday morning.

In reality, self-consciousness about her nose had predated Billy Conroy. For as long as she could remember, her nose never looked right for her face. It was too big and looked nothing like the cute noses of other girls. By the time she was in her middle teens, she was convinced her nose made her unattractive. That belief crossed with anger and guilt—anger that she had inherited her father's Attic feature; guilt for resenting it. Her mother had a perfectly normal nose, so why hadn't she gotten that? she had lamented. Her mother quietly sympathized. Her father offered only useless consolation. “
It gives you character
”—an expression equivalent to “She has a
great
personality”—a feeble attempt to make people with a problem feel better as in, your scar, bald head, birthmark, gap between your teeth, mole, suffering, financial destitution…
gives you character
. She had enough character, she had told her father. What she wanted was to be pretty.

To make matters worse, her father had claimed that she should be proud of her nose for its ethnic identity. Back in Thessaloníki it would have bespoken a noble heritage, serving as a major asset of her dowry. That would have been funny were he joking. But part of him was serious—the part that didn't accept the mobile and fluid society of America, where it was not an asset to have a big Greek nose. On the contrary, all the noses in her teen magazines were adorable little pixie pugs that made her hate her own all the more. Likewise, the most popular girls were those with “reasonable” noses. Unfortunately, this was not Thessaloníki but the image-frantic American Northeast, where the proboscis was not an erogenous zone.

When she heard about cosmetic surgery it was like discovering the key to the magic kingdom. Something could actually be done. Not only could a surgeon transform her face but her damning self-perception. The more she researched the subject, the more she realized it was no big deal. Women got nose jobs all the time. Here was an alternative to a life of eagle beakness.

By her senior year, she had come to regard her nose as a birth defect—a kind of homely second self. Cosmetic surgery, it followed, would be the way to kill that self, that half that imperiled her potential for confidence. When she raised the issue, her mother empathized. But her father was against it: cosmetic surgery was an act of vanity, something that a good Catholic girl should be above. Besides, he was already paying thousands of dollars for her college education. If she wanted a nose job, she could get it when she was gainfully employed.

By the time she reached college, she moved beyond emotional desperation and accepted her face. It helped that she was lean, athletic, and attractive. She was also preoccupied with her studies. She had met Steve, who loved her the way she was. After graduating college she took her teaching job at Carleton High, which was barely gainful employment. So she tucked away her Sleeping Beauty fantasies and grew up around them.

As she looked back, it occurred to her that in all their years together—five years of dating and twelve of marriage—Steve never seemed to notice that she even had a nose.

 

Steve had called while she was getting ready for Lanie to pick her up. He had said that he wanted to get together, that he had had a change of heart and wanted to talk. He was off the booze and was ready to commit to having a child. She had told him that this was not the right time. She was on her way to getting her nose fixed—something she had wanted to do for more than half her life. And that for the next few days she'd be in no condition to take visitors or to think beyond postop recovery. He said he'd call to see how she was doing. Before he hung up, he asked, “Do we still have a chance?”

“This is not the right time to ask.”

“You mean you want to see what life is like with your new face.”

“I really have to go.”

“Are we still in the trial stage of separation?”

“Yes.”

“Then please explain the trial part because I'm beginning to see it as a false dawn.”

“Steve, I don't want to discuss this now.”

“Just give me some idea where we stand.”

“I want to be on my own for a while.”

“Because you want me to help pay for your nose job before you file for divorce.”

“No, that's not the reason.”

“Then what is?”

After a long moment of silence, she said, “I'm not ready to end it with you, okay.”

“Because we have something that you don't want to break?”

“Yes.”

“I'm putting words in your mouth, and that's not what I want to hear.”

“Jesus, Stephen.”

“Then tell me.”

“I'm enjoying my freedom.”

“Then why is this still a trial separation and not the real thing?”

“Because I still want you in my life but I'm not ready to get back. Okay?”

“Well, I'm here when you are.”

She heard the relief in his voice. “Thanks.”

 

Dana and Lanie arrived at Dr. Monks's clinic an hour before the operation. Lanie said hello to the staff then left. She'd return in two hours to bring Dana home.

As with the previous procedure, Dana had fasted since midnight. She wasn't hungry because her stomach felt as if a flock of birds were fluttering around inside. Dr. Monks came out wearing a white smock and a bright smile. He introduced her to the nurse assistant and the anesthesiologist. He then brought her into his office and closed the door.

“How you doing?”

“I'm a bit nervous.”

“Of course, you are. It's only natural.” He took her hand. “It's a big step and something you've been anticipating for years, and now you're here. Every patient goes through it.”

“I'm sure.”

“You're going to be fine,” he continued. “And in a few weeks you're going to have the face you've always wanted. You're going to look great.”

She nodded. His cool touch and soothing manner were geared toward a calming effect. But in truth her need to look great was something in the past, when it was important to be socially marketable. Now she just wanted to look younger to be professionally marketable. Yet, ironically, she had let herself be convinced that she needed a
Vogue
nose. Some things don't die. Although she could hear her father's consolation
(It gives you character)
and Steve's vow
(I like you the way you are),
here she was at the cusp of a transformation she had been yearning for since Billy Conroy. For the last time, her hand went to her face and she fingered the hump.

Dr. Monks handed her the computer-generated postop images—front and profile. “Just tell yourself: ‘No more big, fat, Greek nose.'”

She nodded.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

The nurse assistant brought her to a changing room where she put on a hospital gown then lay down on a gurney while an IV was attached to her arm. The doctor returned with the anesthesiologist and nurse. They reviewed the procedure. As was the current practice, she would not be put under general anesthesia. Instead, she would be sedated into a twilight state and local anesthesia would be applied. She would feel no pain since the interior of her nose would be numbed. All she would experience was the pressure of the hammering on the chisel. She might also hear the cracking of bone. But the sedative would dull her perceptions, and since the operation would be under the focal point or her eyes, she would see nothing but the blur of hands.

The procedure would take about an hour and a half, after which a splint would be put on her nose with a soft web roll and bandages across her forehead and cheeks. For the swelling, she would apply a cold compress lightly across her eyes for the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours. There would be some light blood discharge from her nostrils, but only for a day or so. After a week she'd come into the office for Dr. Monks to remove the dressing and check up on her progress.

The bruising on the upper part of her face would last for two to three weeks. The swelling would no longer be noticeable after three. Then final definition would set in, although her nose would be considerably smaller. For discomfort, he prescribed Tylenol with codeine.

After the briefing, the nurse assistant applied the IV drip and rolled her into the operating room. Dr. Monks was wearing his green scrubs and smiling down at her. Overhead was a bank of lights. To her left were the anesthesiologist and nurse assistant.

“How you doing?” Monks asked.

“Fine,” she said, feeling the drowsiness flow through her like lava.

“Good.” He smiled down on her warmly.

She fixed on that smile and drifted into the twilight.

Steve spent the next two days with Dacey at headquarters checking out what cyber had found on the hard drive of Neil's office computer. They had scoured his files, e-mails, and Internet sites and so far had come up with nothing connecting him to Terry Farina—no correspondences and no incriminating links. There was more still to cover, but by the time he got home that Tuesday evening, he was mentally wrung out and frustrated—and crackling in the background like white noise was that mounting sense of guilt.

Before he took a shower, he gave Dana another call. The operation was on Sunday, and she had left a brief message to say it went well, but he still hadn't talked with her. There was no answer, so he left a message that he called.

It was a little after nine when he sank into his pillow, feeling the kind of total exhaustion that told him he'd make it through the night without medication. For more than a week he had gone to bed cold turkey in an effort to shake his dependency. Although a couple of tabs would put him under, he'd wake up a few hours later and toss and turn, leaving him with the option of taking another pill or settling for a night of spotty sleep and a next day of feeling lousy. On the upside, Ativan did get him through the night dream-free.

He had a glass of warm milk and turned off the light, sinking into sleep in a matter of minutes. But it was far from a dream-free night.

He found himself at the front door of the two-family house at 123 Payson Road—the large brass number plate glaring in the sunset. But, oddly enough, instead of a gray-sided two-family structure, it was a white colonial with a central entrance, green shutters, and a brick walk hedged with hostas.

He rang the doorbell, and a beautiful red-haired woman in a black satiny dress opened it. He knew her face and was about to say something when she smiled and without a word turned and began to climb the stairs. He followed her into a living room, which didn't make sense since the living room was downstairs on the left. But that's where she had led him, and he did not again question the oddity. Nor the non-Euclidian shapes and angles of things and the odd discontinuity in time.

Suddenly he was holding a cold bottle of champagne by the neck, and she had produced two fluted glasses. Then they were on the couch and kissing.

He knew it was a dream, because it had that spectator quality that dreams can create. Yet it felt so real, so tactile. He could taste the champagne. He could feel her mouth on his. He could detect the apricot scent of her blazing hair. He was also aware of a sense of guilt, the kind he had come to know—the kind that made him feel naughty.

Then like the snap of a magician's finger they were in a bedroom and she was lying naked on the bed, her arms raised to him. Her skin was an alabaster white and her mouth was moving. He felt the magnetic pull of her body, but he was transfixed on her face, which appeared to flicker between that of Terry Farina and Dana's—one then the other blurring into one and the same.

As he took in her nakedness, he felt the heat of desire rise up, but suddenly that yearning flamed into angry wrath, and he felt himself fill with fury and an intense desire for violence.

The next moment, he was straddling the woman and pulling tight a black stocking around her neck. With horror she looked up at him, her eyes bulging like hen's eggs, her mouth an O of soundless scream, her face swelling and darkening. For a brief moment, she thrashed under his weight and pounded his arms with her hands and tried to claw at the garrote, yet he pulled with all his might as if trying to snap her head off her spine.

With an explosive yelp he bolted upright in bed, panting, his chest jackhammering.

He kicked off the covers and leapt off the mattress as if it were contaminated ground and went into the bathroom and turned on the cold water, wishing it could flush the images from his mind. He splashed his face and looked at himself in the mirror.

Was that me?

Am I really insane?

He moved into the living room and sat on the couch in the dark. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt as if it were covered with fur. He felt the magnetic pull of the Chivas bottle in the kitchen cabinet, but resisted it.

God!
He could not believe how real that nightmare felt, how vivid.

Please don't let that be me.

Maybe, he told himself, the dream was not a re-creation of an act that belonged to him but autosuggestion, arising out of a vivid reconstruction of the killing of Terry Farina. That was possible, especially with his permanent guilt, wasn't it? He had spent his professional life tracking predators, trying to imagine their instincts, to identify with them so as to understand their MOs, maybe second-guess them. As for the fury, imprints from childhood—the angry, oppressive will of his father taking him over. That was entirely possible since his innocence had been forfeited at a young age, stripping him to an innate instinct to survive in an environment of bitterness and repression—an instinct nurtured in part by his mother who, in spite of her own neuroses, was protective and affectionate to a fault.

He poured himself another glass of milk and moved onto the porch. The night was mild and the breeze made the sweat-dampened T-shirt a cool second skin. Cicadas filled the night air with an electric chittering. Above, clouds fringed with light from a gibbous moon scudded across the sky in a diorama of light and shade.

An hour later he was still sitting there, trying to shake the overwhelming sensation that that nightmare was reliving the hideous event—that he had been there, done that awful thing on some dark autopilot that was simply working out his conflicts.

Déjà vu all over again.

No!
protested his better mind.
Not autopilot. Autosuggestion. That was your cop imagination
—
you're projecting yourself into the movements and mind of the killer.

As he stared into the clouds, like a click in his head, something occurred to him.

He got up and went into the kitchen and opened the Farina file. In it were blowup reproductions of different latent fingerprints that had been found in her apartment and yet to be identified. Others included Katie Beals, the landlady, a plumber, and other individuals who had been investigated and cleared. But there were two that had still not been matched.

He retrieved his fingerprint kit from the hall closet and inked a pad and laid his own prints on a blank sheet of paper. He cleaned his fingers and took a deep breath, and with the magnifying glass he inspected the image of his forefinger and double-checked it with the blowup of the latent found on the lid of Terry Farina's mailbox.

An identical match.

 

Steve did not sleep for the next two hours then—unable to tolerate wakefulness—he took three tabs of Ativan and woke around eight to the sound of his alarm.

His eyes were burning and his head felt as if it were going to explode. His stomach was sour with aspirin. He showered and dressed and headed into headquarters.

As he turned onto Tremont Avenue, the communications tower of headquarters breaking the skyline in the distance, his phone rang.

His first thought was Dana. He had called her last evening to see how the operation went, but he only got her answering machine. So he had left a message for her to contact him when she felt up to it. But it was not Dana.

“Hey, where are you?” Dacey asked.

“On my way in.” And he wanted to add,
I was cop-clever not to leave a trail in the apartment, but my prints were on her mailbox. I'm coming in to lay it all out
.

“Well, we got bad news.”

“What?”

“Neil's prints weren't on record, so we took them off his desk and ran them through the checks. We've got matches to latents found in Farina's apartment.”

“What?”

“We got four locations—the big picture frame over her bed, a beer mug in the freezer, the photo of her near her bed, also a lamp in the living room.”

His head was spinning. “They could be old,” he said. “He claimed he'd dated her for months. Besides, he drank only beer and there wasn't any in her place.”

“I hear you, but that's not all,” Dacey said. “We got a big red flag.”

“What big red flag?”

“Six days before Farina was killed, his Visa account showed the purchase of fifty-one dollars' worth of women's underwear from the Copley Place outlet of Wolford's.”

Steve was nearly struck dumb. All he could say was, “Wolford's?”

“Yeah, they got their own store there now.”

“What was the purchase?”

“That's the bitch, it doesn't itemize. But they were having a special on lace-top stockings.”

“Did you go up there?”

“No, I just called them and asked what was on sale.”

“I'll take it.”

When he hung up, Steve's hands were shaking. A C-clamp had been released from his chest and his blood was charging.
Autosuggestion.
And to think he had all but convinced himself that in an alcohol-Lorazepam fog some evil ectoplasm took him over and murdered a woman he barely knew because she reminded him of Dana.
Jesus!

Steve turned the car around and called Vaughn, who was heading up one of the two teams keeping Neil and his daughter under surveillance. “Where is he?”

“Hasn't left his place since last night.”

“What about the kid?”

“Cambridge Galleria. She's got a summer job at Best Buy.”

“Okay, stay with them.”

Steve parked in the Copley Place mall. It was a little before noon, and the luncheon crowd filled the concourse. Located on the second level, Wolford's was a small store located in a corner near the escalator. Three women milled about. No other males. Toward the rear sat a display of fall hosiery on sale. What caught his eye was the mannequin, dressed only in a lacy bra, lacy panties, and black lace-top stockings that stayed up without a garter belt. On the wall was a photo of a long thin model in a high plaid skirt and white stockings, her legs innocently knocked at the knees like Little Bo Peep. The sign said
SEXY HI-THIGHS FOR FALL
.

The rack had packages in all colors and styles. On sale—two pairs for the price of one: forty-eight dollars. That plus tax was fifty-one and change.