House of Skin

BODY DUMP

“A fisherman found them,” Detective Moore explained. “He was out for some kingfish and he hooked this instead. When the uniforms got down here, they found the second one.”

They were standing on the banks near Candlestick Point Pier. A cool mist was drizzling from a sky the color of dirty cotton, a chill breeze coming in off the bay. Fenn could feel it deep in his bones and beyond. He shivered.

“Fuck of a day for this,” Moore went on. “Looks like Eddy was a busy boy last night. There’s no end to this shit.”

Fenn nodded. He stooped down next to the first corpse and pulled back the plastic sheet that had been draped over it. It was a woman, they knew that much, and only because Eddy hadn’t gashed up her sex. Beyond that, it was hard to tell. She had been peeled and ritually dissected as usual. Her skin was missing along with most major organs. Whether he had tossed her off the pier or not was anybody’s guess. The coroner figured she’d been in the water since last night and the fish had wasted no time nibbling on her.

“How’s a guy supposed to sleep at night after looking at this butchery?” Moore wanted to know. “How the hell can you ever let your kids leave the house without wondering if you’ll see ’em again?” He shook his head and stalked off, chewing antacid tablets.

Fenn could say nothing. There was no longer anything left in him. He’d spent what cold comfort he’d had on himself, there was nothing to give. Nothing at all but a black knowledge that Eddy Zero was only just beginning.

“We’ve got to get a handle on this,” he told Gaines. “The bodies are piling up like cordwood and we’re sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”

“Everybody’s doing their best, Jim. You know that.”

“It’s not enough.”

And it wasn’t. They had a name, a face, but they still couldn’t find Eddy.

Fenn walked up the bank, a stink of dead fish and industrial waste in his nostrils. Roget was finishing his cursory examination of the second body. It had been skinned, too, opened from crotch to throat, a great deal of the anatomy cut free and placed in bleeding piles next to the body. Fenn looked away. The carved, skullish face was leering up at him with empty sockets.

“The same?” he asked.

Roget shook his head. “Not exactly. Your boy removed the entire reproductive system this time. Clean job. He’d have made quite a surgeon.”

“It runs in the family.”

A car pulled up in the distance and he saw Lisa step out. She was wearing a brown leather skirt and blazer, dark stockings embroidered with leaves. Her hair was pulled back in a braid, her glasses on. The other men watched her legs as she came forward and so did Fenn. In his mind, he pictured the two of them fucking like dogs in the backseat of his car.

He went to meet her.

“Don’t bother,” he said, going up to her and looking hopeless. “There’s nothing to see.”

She touched his hand. “Let me look anyway.”

He wanted to say no, but he couldn’t. Just gazing into her face took his breath away and he knew he’d give her his soul if she but asked. Sometimes, like now, her beauty frightened him. It was so cold, like river ice. Cold and emotionless.

“I’ll be all right,” she assured him.

They toured the bodies and she looked, unmoved, at them. Then she broke free of his hand and stalked away.

“Everybody done here?” Fenn called out.

No one said anything; a few CSI techs nodded, pale and beaten wrecks.

“Then let’s clean this mess up.”

He followed Lisa back to her car. She sat behind the wheel, her face colorless, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel.

“You okay?”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said honestly.

Her door opened and she did as she promised.

Fenn wished it were that easy for him. Murder scenes gave him a bad feeling inside, but he was never disturbed the way he figured he should have been. And sometimes that worried him. It was as if he’d waded through corpses in another life, become immune to the carnage, and was unable to feel anything.

They weren’t hungry again that night.

They spent the evening in Lisa’s hotel room, before the blaring TV set, making love and saying very little. When they got back from the shore, Lisa took a bath and Fenn drank three gin and tonics, courtesy of room service. Everything seemed to be out of the question but getting drunk. He’d never felt so hopeless in all his born days. He hadn’t told Lisa about Spider’s body being missing or the theft of the obscure objects from his flat. He would eventually, he knew, to get her opinion on it all. But later. The last thing he wanted was to talk about any of that. It only made him feel that much more helpless.

When Lisa finished her bath, she came out in a robe and gave him a massage. It felt good, releasing the day’s tensions and igniting new ones. They made love orally and drank wine from room service. As they grew more intoxicated, they became more adventurous and began pouring the wine on each other and sucking it free. Fenn wasn’t sure how it came about, but he ended up cuffing her to the bed and fucking her from behind. Afterwards, they slept.

Later, as they lay naked and sticky with wine, Lisa said, “You might as well tell me what’s on your mind.”

“You really want to know?”

“We’re in this together,” she told him. “Tell me.”

He did. And felt somewhat relieved in the telling. He proceeded in an almost soothing tone about Spider’s body and theft from his apartment. As he grew more calm, she seemed to slowly fill with anxiety and dread, almost as if she had drawn it from him.

“This is all so insane,” she said. “I never thought—”

He held her. “None of us did.”

“Who do you think robbed his flat?” she asked.

“I know what I think. But what do you?”

“Eddy.” The word fell from her lips heavily.

“Yeah. Who else would?”

Lisa looked into his eyes, her face lacking expression. “He took the body, too. I’m sure of it. No one else would have a reason.”

“And our Jane Doe?”

“Probably that one, too”

Fenn lit a cigarette. “I agree. But why? Why would he risk his own freedom by waltzing into a morgue and snatching a body?”

“He has his reasons.” She looked scared suddenly. “I don’t know what they are and in a way, I don’t want to. But it’s all tied up with this business of the Territories and the Sisters. It has to be.”

“If that’s the case, then he’s crazier than anyone thought.”

There seemed to be nothing further to say. They fell into their own respective silences and thought.

Fenn saw Eddy Zero as being more dangerous than ever. He didn’t put too much stock in any of this business about the Territories. It was a delusion shared by a couple of psychopaths and as such, it wasn’t something he planned to lose much sleep over. He didn’t really care why Eddy was doing what he was doing; that was the provenance of head doctors like Lisa. He saw only the basic, immutable facts of the situation: Eddy Zero was a pathological murderer and the sooner they got him behind bars, the better.

And once that happened, Eddy could dream of his never-never lands until his dying day. And that’s all that really mattered to Fenn and as a cop, he could let nothing else cloud his judgment. He didn’t give a good goddamn what Eddy was doing with Spider’s things or with the cadavers. It had little bearing in his mind. The only thing that threw a very large, untidy wrench into his thinking was Gulliver and his insistence that he’d seen these Sisters. That would work out in time, he decided.

Lisa, however, was very much concerned with the peculiarities of this case. Given what Gulliver had said and Spider’s firm belief in the Sisters, she was slowly being pushed towards acceptance. She couldn’t pretend to understand much more than the basics of it, but she had a nasty, undeniable feeling that there was a very real dark truth behind it all. And the fact that Eddy had chanced taking those things from Spider’s flat and stealing his body only made her that much more certain that there was a bit more to Heaven and Earth than she’d ever dared guess. It all decayed her belief in reality and she didn’t like it one bit. William Zero had known and now his son did, as Spider had. Not that any of this really changed anything. Even if the three of them thought in their own delusive ways that murder was only the means to an end, it was still murder. And the three of them were still quite insane, in her opinion, regardless of their motives.

And what about Cherry?

She refused to consider that just yet. She only knew without reservation now that she was not interested in Eddy in anything but a professional manner, that he was no better than his father. Just another deranged monster. If Eddy had set out to become William Zero, apparently he had finally succeeded. Like father, like son. Another butcher with a sense of self-importance bearing the family name. Zero. That pretty much said it all.

And what of Fenn?

Did she love him? She wasn’t entirely sure one way or another. She only knew that for the time being he made her feel good, safe. And what else really mattered?

“Where do we go from here?” Lisa said. “As far as Eddy Zero goes.”

“Good question.”

“He has to be seen eventually.”

“Yeah, but we can’t wait that long. We have to bring him in. I don’t know how, but we have to.” He took even, slow drags from his smoke. “Out there, somewhere, he’s probably at it again and we can’t do a fucking thing to stop him.”

“Have you given any thought to stationing a man in the old house?”

Fenn nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t like the idea. I have uniforms patrolling by every few hours, but putting a man in there… I don’t know. Too many risks.” He sighed and butted his smoke. “Eventually, I might not have a choice, though. It might be our best bet but I hate to have to order anyone to do it.”

“What if you had a volunteer, Mr. Fenn?”

“Who? Who would…”

But then he knew. He saw it in her eyes and he wished the subject had never come up. Because it was a good idea and he hated it.

And he felt frightened way down deep.