Where Monsters Dwell (21 page)

But the numbness would occasionally leave her, and then she could almost taste Shaun’s dick shoving into her mouth. A rank, ammonia-like smell. The gag reflex when the head of his dick pressed against the back of her throat and the suction when it pulled back for a new lunge. She could remember how she wanted to bite it, clamp down on it as hard as she could when he was all the way in, and maybe bite off the whole fucking thing. But she hadn’t dared. Once in a while she would lay there thinking about it for hours, not noticing that she was grinding her teeth or tensing her jaw muscles so tight that they started to ache. Then she would realize that she needed more pills or beer or booze. In the beginning she only drank in the morning, so the smell would be gone by the time her parents got home from work. Then she would manage to get through the rest of the evening with pills. There was no problem getting a ready supply. Brad was helpful. Felicia got them so cheap that even she realized that Brad was taking a loss for her sake. But he never mentioned it. He must have concluded long ago that she was worrying about something bigger than finals. Still, it was obvious that Brad thought he was helping her. And he was.

Eventually she stopped caring. She would drink all day long and try to avoid her parents in the evenings. Either she stayed in her room or pretended that she was out late, and she made sure to come home when her father was at work and her mother had gone to bed. But it was only a matter of time before someone noticed something. She was getting less and less able to hide her situation. Even through the haze, she was aware of that. But as the summer progressed she grew increasingly indifferent, and escaped more and more from real life. Luckily, both her girlfriends went off on vacation before they managed to grow too suspicious. This was something she didn’t mention to her parents, so that she could still use her friends as alibis. But even her parents were going to find out soon. She knew that, and she also knew what they would do when they found out. She’d be sent to rehab. What Felicia feared most of all was that there might still be hope for her. That somebody could actually help her escape from this world of fog she was living in now, which meant she would have to live with the taste of Shaun Nevins’s prick in her mouth for the rest of her life. At last she realized that there was only one way out.

One morning in early August she opened the mail her mother had left for her on the kitchen table. It was an answer from the university in Richmond. Felicia had been accepted to the bachelor’s program in English literature. She crumpled up the acceptance letter and stuffed it in her pocket without feeling a thing. Then she went out. She went next door and rang the doorbell at the Davises’ house. As she had hoped, Brad opened the door.

“Did you run out again?” he asked. He invited her in.

“No, this won’t take long,” said Felicia. “I’m not here to get pills this time.”

“No?”

“No, I came to ask if you could get hold of something else for me.”

“What would that be?”

“Heroin,” she said flatly.

Brad gave her a long look, his pupils tiny.

“Heroin? Are you trying to kill yourself?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Felicia, realizing that that was exactly what she was thinking of doing, but the slow way.

20

Richmond, September 2010

September looked like it
was going to be as hot as August, the air heavy with humidity. After the police got the results on the five-hundred-year-old piece of human skin that Efrahim Bond had sent to VCU for analysis, the investigation of the murder took a new turn. The volume that Mrs. Price had observed without a leather spine came into focus, and both the book and the binding were quickly located by Laubach in one of the desk drawers in Bond’s office.

“A book bound in human skin. Have you ever heard of something like this?” Felicia Stone asked her boss, shaking her head. They were sitting alone in her boss’s office, and Morris was loudly eating a carrot.

“Actually, I have. I’ve even seen one,” said Morris, a bit smug about the answer. She gave him an expectant look. She had long ago given up being surprised by Morris’s vast store of knowledge.

“The book is in the anatomy museum at Edinburgh University. My wife and I went there on our honeymoon a long time ago. That museum is unforgettable.”

“Really? What poor soul did the skin come from?”

“Not a poor soul—William Burke, a serial killer. One of the first we know of. You’ve studied serial killers—haven’t you heard of William Burke and William Hare?”

“Yes, that does ring a bell. They were grave robbers in Scotland in the nineteenth century, weren’t they? They sold corpses to anatomists.”

“That’s right. In Great Britain back then they could only perform dissections on people who’d been executed. But that couldn’t meet the increasing demand for corpses from a medical field that was rapidly expanding. So anatomists bought corpses from grave robbers to use in their studies and lectures. The authorities turned a blind eye to this practice. The problem with Burke and Hare was that they gradually switched from stealing corpses to producing their own. Altogether they killed at least seventeen people, and they sold the corpses to a doctor named Robert Knox. To this day we don’t know whether or not Knox knew where the bodies came from.”

“But how did Burke’s skin wind up on the spine of a book?”

“Well, the law finally caught up with Burke and Hare, and they were executed. Since they’d been sentenced to death, their bodies were legally available for dissection, ironically enough. During the dissection of Burke’s body, his skin was stolen. It resurfaced some weeks later as decorations on a number of objects, among them the notebook that I saw.”

“I have goose bumps!” said Felicia, looking at her arm. Her thoughts shifted to Ed Gein, the murderer Laubach had mentioned the first time they saw the body of Efrahim Bond. She recalled that after Gein was caught, they found a whole bunch of things at his home that had been made of human skin. Among them was a woman’s dress that Gein used to put on to play his dead mother, but also lamp shades and chair upholstery.

“Pretty creepy,” said Morris. “But Burke was probably not the only one in history that had happened to. The museum guide told us that there was a famous anatomical atlas written by an Italian Renaissance anatomist, Vesalius or some such name, and the nineteenth-century edition was bound in human skin. There’s also supposed to be memoirs by a noted robber named James Walton, also known as The Highwayman. The memoirs were apparently bound in his own skin.”

“Please tell me that you looked this up right before I got here, and that you don’t remember all this from your honeymoon,” she said.

“A policeman has to have a good memory, you know. It was a fine trip, otherwise. And now we’ve got another example of this macabre form of bookbinding. I think we ought to have a talk with the curator of the Poe Museum ASAP,” Morris said. “The first priority should be to find out more about the Lord Byron book with the missing spine, and the human skin that was attached to it. The big question, after all, is why Efrahim Bond removed the spine from the book.”

“Where do I find the curator, and what’s his name?”

“Just a minute,” said Morris, rotating a half-chewed mass of carrot in his mouth as he searched through one of the big notepads he used to record his notes. Only an investigator who rarely left his office for fieldwork would take notes in such an impractical way.

“John S. Nevins,” he said eventually. “His office is in the Boatwright Memorial Library on the campus of the University of Richmond.”

Felicia Stone had a sudden feeling of weightlessness. She was not only dizzy, but she was also trembling. A feeling she thought she had learned to control was about to get the upper hand.

“John Shaun Nevins,” she said dully, mostly to herself.

“Yes, I think the ‘S’ is for Shaun. Curator, professor, and something of a book collector, I noted here. Fifty-nine years old. That’s all we’ve got. Do you know him?”

“I knew his son, Shaun,” she replied.

“I see. He must be about your age, right?” said Morris, apparently in the mood for some small talk.

“Yes, unfortunately,” she said, her voice ice cold. She was not in the mood to chat.

“Not a pleasant acquaintance, in other words,” he said. “But I hope you won’t mind talking to his father. You’d be the best person to follow up this lead. Since you pointed us in this direction.”

She thought about it and felt her vertigo begin to subside.

“I’ll do it,” she said and got up, surprised that her knees didn’t buckle. “Have you transferred your notes on Nevins to the case file?”

“We haven’t started a separate file on him, if that’s what you mean,” replied Morris. “He’s hardly a central figure in the investigation. For the time being I thought we’d regard him as a specialist. For consultation purposes.”

“OK,” she said.

“Do you think he’s involved?”

“I have no idea. It’s just an uneasy feeling.”

“This case is wide open, so why not?” said Morris. “I mean, human skin that’s five hundred years old. What does that make you think of?”

“That two people were flayed by two different sick fucks,” she said firmly. “There are five hundred years between the cases. But I’m thinking that we shouldn’t view this type of sadistic murder as a purely modern phenomenon. Europe in the fifteen hundreds was a much more violent place. There were vicious, wacko criminals back then, too. But I can’t see the connection between the cases.”

“A phantom from the past,” said Morris with a smile, taking another bite of carrot. “It’s almost in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. A psychotic killer is reanimated from the spine of a book.”

“The flayer returns,” she laughed with gallows humor. “But to be serious, we have to consider the distinct possibility that the murderer knew about this book and was somehow inspired by it. And if there’s anyone who ought to be familiar with the books in the museum and the material they were bound with, it’s definitely the curator.”

“True enough. But for the moment, let’s consider it merely a hypothesis. I want to have the curator on our side, at least to start with.”

“Certainly. A woman is entitled to voice her opinions, that’s all,” said Felicia Stone, and she left.

Naturally, it was more than merely opinions. She was actually thinking that a man with a shithead for a son is probably a sick bastard himself. Such thoughts ought to have convinced her to leave the interview to someone else. But this was precisely why she wanted to do it herself. This investigation would eventually lead them to a pitiful sociopath. And she had gotten wind of one. If only she could follow the trail.

*   *   *

Boatwright Memorial Library was a big, redbrick building that overlooked the small Westhampton Lake located at the heart of the university campus. Like most of the other buildings, the library was built in the neo-Gothic style. For many Americans this style symbolized the height of old, venerable academe. The building itself was erected in the 1950s to organize a book collection that was about to get out of control. So even though the building was venerable, it wasn’t particularly old. Felicia also knew that the big, ostentatious bell tower was equipped with a digital carillon that entertained students and teachers in deep concentration with music twice a day.

She parked in the lot closest to the lake and took the path past the bell tower and into the library. On the third floor she found the office of Nevins Sr. She knocked on the door and was invited in by a deep bass voice.

Nevins’s office obviously belonged to someone who used books as a status symbol as much as a source of knowledge. All the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Nevins stood in front of a large, heavy desk and held out his hand. To Felicia’s great surprise, he looked friendly. He was dressed informally in a short-sleeved shirt with the top button undone and beige chinos. His hair was completely gray but still thick. The furrows in his brow and the bags under his eyes made him look peaceful and grandfatherly. He looked like a man who would be utterly incapable of raising a crowbar to strike someone, let alone flay someone alive. She shook his hand and noticed that he had a pleasantly firm grip. She reluctantly had to admit that she had a good first impression of him.

Reynolds had interviewed Nevins earlier, so they didn’t need to go through the formal details. Felicia Stone had also called in advance to tell him what she wanted to discuss.

“The book by Byron that Poe owned, well, that was actually a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows where he got it from. It’s a valuable treasure, of course. A first edition of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
is a rarity under any circumstance. But this one had several things about it that were especially interesting. First of all, there’s the spine. I always thought that it had a unique quality about it; look at the color, almost grayish white. But human skin? That’s horrible. A few months ago we discovered that the spine is most probably a palimpsest.”

“And by that you mean that something was written on it earlier?” she asked, proud of what she’d learned recently. At the same time she was annoyed that she felt she had something to prove to Shaun Nevins’s father.

“That’s right,” said Nevins, impressed. “Do you have it with you?”

She opened a briefcase she’d been carrying as a shoulder bag and took out a clear plastic bag containing the book spine made of human skin. She also took out the book itself and placed both of them on Nevins’s desk.

“May I?” he asked politely, picking up the bag to remove the spine.

“Do you have gloves?”

“Of course, that’s basic equipment for a curator,” he said with a smile, taking a pair of white silk gloves from a desk drawer. He put them on, and then took the spine out of the plastic bag.

“Come over here,” he said, going over to a high white table in one corner of the room. He placed the spine on the table and smoothed it out. Then he turned on the work lamp and picked up a magnifying glass. He held it over the skin and let her look through it. It was possible to see letters, as if printed on the skin. But she couldn’t decipher any of the words.