The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents, some more helpful than others. The Field Guide to Poisonous Plants was sumptuously illustrated but didn't have quite the same level of useful information as the underground blog called Knock 'Em Off: A Dozen Deadly Recipes for When the Revolution Comes and We Have to Fight Back!!

All arranged neatly on the workspace, just like in his tattoo parlor back home. The far corner of the room was pooled in the cool glow of ultraviolet lights that illuminated eight terrariums. He walked to these now and examined the plants inside. The leaves and flowers comforted him, they were so reminiscent of home. Pinks and whites and purples and greens in a thousand shades. The colors fought against the dull mud tone of the city, whose hateful spirit lapped every minute at Billy Haven's heart. Suitcases contained changes of clothes and toiletries. A gym bag held several thousand dollars, sorted by denomination but wrinkled and old and very untraceable.

He watered the plants and spent just a few minutes finishing a sketch of one of them, an interesting configuration of leaves and twigs. Even as someone who'd drawn all his life, Billy sometimes wondered where the urge came from. Sometimes he just had to take out a pencil or crayon and transfer something from life, which would fade, into something that would not. That would last forever.

He'd sketched Lovely Girl a thousand times.

The pencil now drooped in his hand and he left a sketch of a branch half-finished, tossing the pad aside.

Lovely Girl ...

He couldn't think of her without hearing his uncle's somber voice, the deep baritone: 'Billy. There's something I have to tell you.' His uncle had gripped him by the shoulders and looked down into his eyes. 'Something's happened.'

And, with those simple, horrific words, he'd learned she was gone.

Billy's parents too were gone - though their deaths had been years ago and he'd come to some terms with the loss.

Lovely Girl's? No, never.

She was going to be his companion forever. She was going to be his wife, the mother of his children. She was going to be the one to save him from the past, from all the bad, from the Oleander Room.

Gone, just like that.

But today he wasn't thinking so much of the terrible news, wasn't thinking of the unfairness of what had happened, though what had happened was unfair.

And he wasn't thinking of the cruelty, though what had happened was cruel.

No, at the moment, having just finished inking Chloe, Billy was thinking that he was on the road to the end of pain.

The Modification was under way.

Billy sat at the rickety table in the kitchen area of the basement apartment and removed from his shirt pocket the pages of the book he'd found that morning.

He'd found out about the volume weeks ago and knew he needed a copy to complete his planning for the Modification. It was out of print, though he'd found a few copies he could buy online through secondhand-book sellers. But he couldn't very well order one with a credit card and have it shipped to his home. So Billy had been searching through used-book shops and libraries. There were two copies in the New York Public Library but they weren't where they should have been in the stacks, in either the Mid-Manhattan branch or a satellite branch in Queens.

But he'd tried once more, earlier today, returning on a whim to the library on Fifth Avenue.

And there it was, reshelved and Dewey Decimaled into place. He'd pulled the book down from the shelf and stood in the shadows, skimming.

Badly written, he'd noted from his brief read in the stacks. An absurdly sensational cover in black, white, red. Both the style and the graphics helped explain the out-of-print status. But what the book contained? Just what he needed, filling in portions of the plan the way flats or round shader needles filled in the space between the outlines of a tattoo.

Billy had worried about getting the book out of the library - he couldn't check it out, of course. And there'd been security cameras near the photocopiers. In the end he'd decided to slice out the chapter he wanted with a razor blade. He'd cut deep and carefully before hiding the book away so no one else could find it. He knew that the book itself probably contained a chip in the spine that would have set off the alarm at the front doors if he'd tried to walk out with the entire thing. Still, he'd flipped through all the pages he'd stolen, one by one, to search for a second chip. There'd been none and he'd walked out of the library without a blare of alarms.

Now he was eager to study the pages in depth, to help with the rest of the plans for the Modification. But as he spread them out before him, he frowned. What was this? The first page was damaged, the corner torn off. But he was sure that he'd extracted all of them intact from the spine without any tearing. Then he glanced at his shirt breast pocket and noted it too was torn. He remembered that Chloe'd ripped his coveralls when she'd fought back. That's what had happened. She'd torn both the clothing and the page.

But the damage wasn't too bad though and only a small portion was missing. He now read carefully. Once, twice. The third time he took notes and tucked them into the Commandments.

Helpful. Good. Real helpful.

Setting the pages aside, he answered some texts, received some. Staying in touch with the outside world.

Now it was cleaning time.

No one appreciates germs, bacteria and viruses more than a skin artist. Billy wasn't the least concerned about infecting his victims - that was, really, the whole point of the Modification - but he was very concerned about infecting himself, with whatever tainted the blood of his clients and, in particular, with the wonderful substances he was using in place of ink.

He walked to the sink and unzipped his backpack. Pulling on thick gloves, he took the American Eagle tattoo machine to the sink and dismantled it. He drained the tubes of liquid and washed them in two separate gallon buckets of water, rinsing them several times and drying them with a Conair. The water he poured into a hole he'd cut in the floor, letting it soak into the earth beneath the building. He didn't want to flush or pour the water down the drain. That little matter of evidence, once again.

This bath was just the start, however. He cleaned each piece of the machine with alcohol (which sanitizes only; it doesn't sterilize). He placed the parts in an ultrasonic bath of disinfectants. After that he sealed them in bags and popped them into the autoclave - a sterilization oven. Normally needles are disposed of but these were very special ones and hard to come by. He autoclaved these too.