The Skin Collector (47 page)

He picked up the gun and turned it on.

Bzzzz.

He touched it to her skin. The sensation was a tickle.

Then came the pain.

The point of the American Families First Council attack was now clear.

Among the documents in the dead unsub’s pocket, in addition to the name of the Stantons’ hotel, Sachs had found a rambling letter.

It reminded Rhyme of the Unabomber’s manifesto – a diatribe against modern society. The difference, though, was that the unsub’s screed didn’t offer up the AFFC’s own racist and fundamentalist
views; just the opposite, in fact. The document, intended to be found by the police after the citywide poisoning, purported to be written by the
enemy
– some unnamed coalition of black and Latino activists, affiliated with Muslim fundamentalists, all of whom were taking credit for the poisoning of New York City to get even with the white capitalist oppressors. The statement called for an uprising
against them, proclaiming that the poison attack was just the start.

Characterizing the attack in this way was rather clever, Rhyme decided. It would take suspicion off the AFFC and would galvanize sentiment against the council’s enemies. It would also cause immeasurable damage to the Sodom of New York City, bastion of globalization, mixed races and liberalism.

Rhyme suspected there was more
at work as well. ‘Power play within the militia movement? If word gets around that AFFC pulled this off, their stock would rise through the roof.’

A call came in from the federal building in Manhattan.

‘The Stantons are
not
doin’ the talkie-talkie, Lincoln,’ said Fred Dellray, the FBI agent who was running the federal side of the attempted attack. The couple and their son were now in federal
custody but apparently not – to translate Dellray’s distinctive lingo – cooperating at all.

‘Well, sweat ’em or something, Fred. I want to know who the hell our unsub was. Prints came back negative and he wasn’t in CODIS.’

‘I saw those pictures of your boy in the tunnel, after the run-in with the H two Oh. My, my, that was a
Breaking Bad
moment, no? How fast they think that water was going?’

He was on speaker and, from a nearby evidence table, Sachs called, ‘They don’t know, Fred, but after it cut him in half it also cut through a concrete wall and a steam pipe on the other side. I had to haul ass out of there ’fore I got scalded.’

‘You catch anything helpful in the tunnel?’

‘Got a few things, not much. It was pretty much toast. Well, more oatmeal than toast, what with the steam
and water.’

She explained about the letter, intended to start a race riot.

The agent sighed. ‘Just when you think the world’s a-changin’ …’

‘We’ll work up the evidence, Fred, and be in touch.’

‘Thanks mightily.’

They disconnected and Sachs returned to helping Mel Cooper analyze the trace and isolate and run the friction ridges from the Stantons’ hotel suite. Regarding the prints, though,
only one set was on file, though they knew the perpetrator’s identity already: Joshua Stanton had a prior in Clayton County for assaulting a gay man. Hate crime.

Rhyme glanced up at the crime scene pictures, immune to the gruesome images. He looked once more at the stark tattoo, the centipede in red on the left arm. The eyes eerily human. It was, as Sachs had told him, very well done. Had he
inked it himself? Rhyme wondered. Or was it painted by a friend? The unsub probably. Point of pride.

Sachs took a phone call.

‘No, no,’ she whispered, drawing the attention of everybody in the room. Her face revealed dismay.

What now? Rhyme wondered, frowning.

She disconnected. Looked at them all.

‘Lon’s taken a turn for the worse. He went into cardiac arrest. They’ve revived him but it’s
not looking good. I should be with Rachel.’

‘You go on, Sachs. We’ll take care of this.’ Rhyme hesitated. Then asked: ‘You want to give Pam a call and see if she wants to go with you? She always liked Lon.’

Pulling her coat off the hook, Sachs debated. Finally she said, ‘Naw. Frankly, I don’t think I could handle any more rejection.’

Apparently, though, Billy wasn’t going to kill her.

Not yet, at any rate.

It was ink, not poison, he’d loaded into the tattoo gun.

‘Stop fidgeting,’ he instructed. He was on his knees in front of the couch she lay on.

Pam said, ‘My hands hurt behind me. Please. Undo the tape. Please.’

‘No.’

‘Just tape them in front of me.’

‘No. Stay still.’ He glared and she stopped squirming.

‘What the fuck are—’

Another fierce slap. ‘We have an image to maintain. Do you understand me? You will never use the F word and you will never take that tone!’ He gripped her hair and shook her head like prey in a fox’s mouth. ‘From now on your role is to be my woman. Our people will see you by my side. The loyal wife.’

He returned to the inking.

Pam thought of screaming but she was sure he’d
beat the crap out of her if she tried. Besides, there was no one else in the building. One unit was empty and the other tenants were on a cruise.

He was speaking to her absently. ‘We’ll have to go deep underground for a while. My aunt and uncle won’t give me up. But my cousin, Joshua? It’s just a matter of time until he gets tricked into telling them everything he knows. Me included. We can’t
go back to Southern Illinois. Your friend Lincoln will have the FBI picking up all the senior people at the AFFC now. And he’ll suspect the Larchwood crowd again, so Missouri’s out. We’ll have to go someplace else. Maybe the Patriot Assembly in upstate New York. They’re pretty much off the grid.’ He turned to her. ‘Or Texas. There’re people there who remember my parents as martyred freedom fighters.
We could live with them.’

‘But, Seth—’

‘We’ll lie low for a few years. Call me “Seth” again and I’ll hurt you. I can do tattooing work for cash. You can teach Sunday school. Little by little we can reemerge. New identities. The AFFC’s over now, but maybe it’s just as well – we’ll move on. Start a new movement. And do a hell of a better job. We’ll do it the right way. We’ll place our women into
schools – and I don’t just mean church schools. I mean public and private. Get the kids young. Break them in. We men will run for office, low level, cities and counties – at first. We’ll start local and then move up. Oh, it’s going to be a whole new world. You don’t think that way now. But you’ll be proud to be part of it.’

He lifted the machine off her leg, looked over the work and returned
to inking her.

‘My uncle was backward in a lot of ways. But he had one moment of genius. He came up with the Rule of Skin. He’d lecture about it all over the country – at other militias, at revival meetings, at churches, at hunting camps.’ Billy’s eyes shone. ‘The Rule of Skin … It’s brilliant. Think about it: Skin tells us about our physical health, right? It’s flushed or pale. Glowing or dull.
Shrunken or swollen. Broken out or clear … And it tells us our spiritual development too. And intellectual. And emotional. White is good and smart and noble. Black and brown and yellow are subversive and dangerous.’

‘You can’t be serious!’

He made a fist and Pam cringed and fell silent.

‘You want proof. The other day I was in the Bronx and this guy stopped me. A young man, I don’t know. About
your age. Black. He had keloids on his face – scars, like tattoos. They were beautiful. A real artist had done them.’ His eyes looked off slightly. ‘And you know why he stopped me? To sell me drugs. That’s the truth about people like that. The Rule of Skin. You can’t fool it.’

Pam laughed bitterly. ‘A black kid tried to sell you drugs in the Bronx? Guess what? Go to West Virginia and a white
kid’ll try to sell you drugs.’

Billy wasn’t listening. ‘There’s been an argument about Hitler: whether he genuinely hated Jews and Gypsies and gays and wanted to make the world a better place by eliminating them. Or whether he didn’t actually care but thought that German citizens hated them, so he used that hate and fear to seize power.’

‘You’re holding up Hitler as a role model?’

‘There are
worse choices.’

‘So? What is it for you, Billy? Do you believe in the Rule of Skin or are you using it for power, for yourself, your ego?’

‘Isn’t it clear?’ He gave a laugh. ‘You’re smarter than that, Pam.’

She said nothing and he dabbed the tears of pain off her cheeks. And she did know the answer. And something occurred to her, hit her like one of his blows. It had to do with the blog she
and Seth had worked on together. She whispered, ‘Our blog? That’s the opposite of everything you’re saying. What … what did you create the blog for?’

‘What do you think? Everybody who posts a favorable comment is on our list. Pro-abortion, pro food stamps, pro immigration reform. Their day of judgment’s coming.’

There were probably fifteen thousand people who’d posted something on the site.
What was going to happen to them? Would Billy’s followers track them down and kill them? Firebomb their houses or apartments?

Billy set the tattoo gun aside, smeared Vaseline on the ink on her thighs and blotted.

He smiled and said, ‘Look. What do you think?’

Reading upside down, she saw two words on the front of her thighs.

PAM

WIL

What the hell was he doing? What did he mean?

And he
pulled his jeans down. She read similar tattoos on his thighs, in matching type fonts.

ELA

LIAM

When read together:

PAM   ELA

WIL   LIAM

‘We call them splitters. Lovers get parts of their names tattooed on each other. They can only be read when they’re together. It’s us, see? Separately, we’re missing something. Together, we’re whole.’ What passed for a smile crossed his sallow face.

‘Lovers?’ she whispered. Looking at his inking – it’d been done years ago.

He was gazing at her confused face. He pulled up his, then her pants, and zippered and buttoned them.

‘I knew someday I’d get you back.’ Billy was gesturing at the tattoos. ‘“Pamela”, “William”. Nice touch, don’t you think? Our names will be whole when we lie together to make our children.’

He noted her expression of
dismay. ‘What’s that look about?’ As if speaking to a daughter upset about a bad day at school.

‘I loved you!’ she cried.

‘No, you loved somebody who was part of the cancer of this country.’ His eyes softened and he whispered, ‘What about me, Pam? The woman I’ve loved all my life turns out to be the enemy? They took your mind and heart away from me.’

‘Nobody changed me. I never believed what
my mother did. What you believe.’

He stroked her hair, smiling, murmuring, ‘You were brainwashed. I understand that. I’ll fix you, honey. I’ll bring you back into the fold. Now let’s go pack.’

‘All right, all right.’

He pulled her to her feet.

She turned and looked into his eyes. ‘You know, Billy,’ she said in a soft voice.

‘What?’ He seemed pleased to note her smile.

‘You should’ve checked
my pockets.’

Pam swung her right arm toward his face as hard as she could, holding tight, fiercely tight, to the box cutter she’d used to cut through the duct tape – the same as she’d carried in her hip pocket ever since those terrible days in Larchwood.

The blade connected with Billy’s cheek and mouth. Not like the slush sound of a stabbing in movies. Only the silent cutting of flesh.

As he
howled and gripped his face, spinning away, Pam leapt over the coffee table and headed for the front door, calling, ‘Okay,
there’s
a mod for you, asshole.’

Pam’s hands were slick with Billy’s blood, but she got the door open and stumbled into the front hallway of the building.

She’d get outside onto the street and start screaming her head off. Maybe there was no one to hear her pleas for help in the building. But there were plenty of neighbors.

Ten feet, five feet …

Yes! She was going to—

But then fingers grabbed her ankles and she
was falling to the lobby floor, with a cry. Her head bounced on the hardwood.

The knife went flying. Pam squirmed around and faced Billy, kicking furiously toward his groin.

His face was a mess – the image both pleased and shocked her. The gash began below his eye and continued to the middle of his cheek. She’d hoped to blind him but he could see all right, it seemed. Still, blood poured from
his cheek and bubbled from his lips and she knew the blade had cut clean through to the inside of his mouth. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. Threats, of course. Rage.

Blood flecked her jacket, her arm, her hand. The spray spattered her face.

The horrific expression revealed the pain he’d be feeling.

Good!

She gave up fighting. He was weakened but still much stronger than she was.
Escape, she told herself. Just get the hell out!

Clawing at the floor, she managed to move a foot or so away from him, closer to the door.

But he stopped her and spun her onto her back, landing a blow in her solar plexus, knocking the air from her lungs again and doubling her over. She broke away momentarily – thanks to the slick blood, he’d lost his grip. She made it up on her knees. But fury
possessed him. Billy planted his foot against the hallway wall and lunged forward, wrapping his sinewy hands around her throat. On her back again, gasping for air.

She kicked upward once more and connected, knee to groin. He gasped, inhaling hard, and began coughing blood. He reseated himself on top of her. His grip relaxed and he drew back and pounded her own cheek and jaw, sputtering words
she couldn’t understand, flecking her with more blood.

She tried to kick again, tried to punch, but she could get no leverage.

And all the while she was gasping, trying to draw air into her lungs and cry for help.