Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein

Prodigal Son
City of Night
The Dead Town
Dean Koontz

Table of Contents

Prodigal Son

City of Night

The Dead Town

Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein

1

Prodigal Son
Dean Koontz

For the power of man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

—C. S. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man

FIRST…

Although I’m a chatty kind of guy, never before have I found it necessary to explain up front how a book came to be written. In the case of the series to be known as Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, a few words of explanation seem necessary.

I wrote a script for a sixty-minute television-series pilot with this title. A producer and I made a deal for the pilot plus episodes to be broadcast on USA Network. Because he liked my script, Martin Scorsese—the legendary director—signed on as executive producer. A hot young director, also enamored of the script, signed on as well. At the request of USA Network, I wrote a two-hour version. On the basis of this script, a wonderful cast was assembled.

Then USA Network and the producer decided that major changes must be made. I had no interest in the show in its new form, and I withdrew from association with it. I wished them well—and turned to the task of realizing the original concept in book form. I hoped both versions would succeed in their different media.

Subsequently, Marty Scorsese also expressed the desire to exit the series. I am grateful to Marty for being so enthusiastic and insightful about the show we wanted to make. For a man of his accomplishments, he is refreshingly humble, the very definition of grace, and anchored to real-world values in a business where many are not.

I would also like to thank the late Philip K. Dick, great writer and nice man, who twenty-three years ago shared with me the story of asking for “something too exotic for the menu” in his favorite Chinese restaurant. I’ve finally found a novel in which the anecdote fits. The entree that sent Phil fleeing makes Victor Frankenstein lick his lips.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

FIRST…

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

CHAPTER 78

CHAPTER 79

CHAPTER 80

CHAPTER 81

CHAPTER 82

CHAPTER 83

CHAPTER 84

CHAPTER 85

CHAPTER 86

CHAPTER 87

CHAPTER 88

CHAPTER 89

CHAPTER 90

CHAPTER 91

CHAPTER 92

CHAPTER 93

CHAPTER 94

CHAPTER 95

CHAPTER 96

CHAPTER 97

Preview

About the Author

Also by Dean Koontz

ROMBUK MONASTERY TIBET

CHAPTER 1

DEUCALION SELDOM SLEPT, but when he did, he dreamed. Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares, after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.

During the afternoon, napping in his simple cell, he dreamed that a surgeon opened his abdomen to insert a mysterious, squirming mass. Awake but manacled to the surgical table, Deucalion could only endure the procedure.

After he had been sewn shut, he felt something crawling inside his body cavity, as though curious, exploring.

From behind his mask, the surgeon said, “A messenger approaches. Life changes with a letter.”

He woke from the dream and knew that it had been prophetic. He possessed no psychic power of a classic nature, but sometimes omens came in his sleep.

IN THESE MOUNTAINS OF TIBET, a fiery sunset conjured a mirage of molten gold from the glaciers and the snowfields. A serrated blade of Himalayan peaks, with Everest at its hilt, cut the sky

Far from civilization, this vast panorama soothed Deucalion. For several years, he had preferred to avoid people, except for Buddhist monks in this windswept rooftop of the world.

Although he had not killed for a long time, he still harbored the capacity for homicidal fury Here he strove always to suppress his darker urges, sought calm, and hoped to find true peace.

From an open stone balcony of the whitewashed monastery, as he gazed at the sun-splashed ice pack, he considered, not for the first time, that these two elements, fire and ice, defined his life.

At his side, an elderly monk, Nebo, asked, “Are you looking at the mountains—or beyond them, to what you left behind?”

Although Deucalion had learned to speak several Tibetan dialects during his lengthy sojourn here, he and the old monk often spoke English, for it afforded them privacy.

“I don’t miss much of that world. The sea. The sound of shore birds. A few friends. Cheez-Its.”

“Cheeses? We have cheese here.”

Deucalion smiled and pronounced the word more clearly than he’d done previously. “Cheez-Its are cheddar-flavored crackers. Here in this monastery we seek enlightenment, meaning, purpose…God. Yet often the humblest things of daily life, the small pleasures, seem to define existence for me. I’m afraid I’m a shallow student, Nebo.”

Pulling his wool robe closer about himself as wintry breezes bit, Nebo said, “To the contrary. Never have I had one less shallow than you. Just hearing about Cheez-Its, I myself am intrigued.”

A voluminous wool robe covered Deucalion’s scarred patchwork body, though even the harshest cold rarely bothered him.

The mandala-shaped Rombuk monastery—an architectural wonder of brick walls, soaring towers, and graceful roofs—clung precariously to a barren mountainside: imposing, majestic, hidden from the world. Waterfalls of steps spilled down the sides of the square towers, to the base of the main levels, granting access to interior courtyards.

Brilliant yellow, white, red, green, and blue prayer flags, representing the elements, flapped in the breeze. Carefully written sutras adorned the flags, so that each time the fabric waved in the wind, a prayer was symbolically sent in the direction of Heaven.

Despite Deucalion’s size and strange appearance, the monks had accepted him. He absorbed their teaching and filtered it through his singular experience. In time, they had come to him with philosophical questions, seeking his unique perspective.

They didn’t know who he was, but they understood intuitively that he was no normal man.

Deucalion stood for a long time without speaking. Nebo waited beside him. Time had little meaning in the clockless world of the monks, and after two hundred years of life, with perhaps more than that ahead of him, Deucalion often lived with no awareness of time.

Prayer wheels clicked, stirred by breezes. In a call to sunset prayer, one monk stood in the window of a high tower, blowing on a shell trumpet. Deep inside the monastery, chants began to resonate through the cold stone.

Deucalion stared down into the canyons full of purple twilight, east of the monastery. From some of Rombuk’s windows, one might fall more than a thousand feet to the rocks.

Out of that gloaming, a distant figure approached.

“A messenger,” he said. “The surgeon in the dream spoke truth.”

The old monk could not at first see the visitor. His eyes, the color of vinegar, seemed to have been faded by the unfiltered sun of extreme altitude. Then they widened. “We must meet him at the gates.”

SALAMANDERS OF TORCHLIGHT crawled the ironbound beams of the main gate and the surrounding brick walls.

Just inside the gates, standing in the open-air outer ward, the messenger regarded Deucalion with awe. “ Yeti,” he whispered, which was the name that the Sherpas had coined for the abominable snowman.

Words escaping him on plumes of frosted breath, Nebo said, “Is it custom now to precede a message with a rude remark?”

Having once been pursued like a beast, having lived two hundred years as the ultimate outsider, Deucalion was inoculated against all meanness. He was incapable of taking offense.

“Were I a yeti,” he said, speaking in the messenger’s language, “I might be as tall as this.” He stood six feet six. “I might be muscled this solidly. But I would be much hairier, don’t you think?”

“I…I suppose so.”

“A yeti never shaves.” Leaning close, as if imparting a secret, Deucalion said, “Under all that hair, a yeti has very sensitive skin. Pink, soft…quick to take a rash from a razor blade.”

Summoning courage, the messenger asked, “Then what are you?”

“Big Foot,” Deucalion said in English, and Nebo laughed, but the messenger did not understand.

Made nervous by the monk’s laughter, shivering not only because of the icy air, the young man held out a scuffed goatskin packet knotted tightly with a leather thong. “Here. Inside. For you.”

Deucalion curled one powerful finger around the leather thong, snapped it, and unfolded the goatskin wrapping to reveal an envelope inside, a wrinkled and stained letter long in transit.

The return address was in New Orleans. The name was that of an old and trusted friend, Ben Jonas.

Still glancing surreptitiously and nervously at the ravaged half of Deucalion’s face, the messenger evidently decided that the company of a yeti would be preferable to a return trip in darkness through the bitter-cold mountain pass. “May I have shelter for the night?”

“Anyone who comes to these gates,” Nebo assured him, “may have whatever he needs. If we had them, I would even give you Cheez-Its.”

From the outer ward, they ascended the stone ramp through the inner gate. Two young monks with lanterns arrived as if in answer to a telepathic summons to escort the messenger to guest quarters.

In the candlelit reception hall, in an alcove that smelled of sandalwood and incense, Deucalion read the letter. Ben’s handwritten words conveyed a momentous message in neatly penned blue ink.

With the letter came a clipping from a newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The headline and the text mattered less to Deucalion than the photograph that accompanied them.

Although nightmares could not frighten him, though he had long ago ceased to fear any man, his hand shook. The brittle clipping made a crisp, scurrying-insect sound in his trembling fingers.

“Bad news?” asked Nebo. “Has someone died?”

“Worse. Someone is still alive.” Deucalion stared in disbelief at the photograph, which felt colder than ice. “I must leave Rombuk.”

This statement clearly saddened Nebo. “I had taken comfort for some time that you would be the one to say the prayers at my death.”

“You’re too full of piss to die anytime soon,” Deucalion said. “As preserved as a pickle in vinegar. Besides, I am perhaps the last one on Earth to whom God would listen.”

“Or perhaps the first,” said Nebo with an enigmatic but knowing smile. “All right. If you intend to walk again in the world beyond these mountains, first allow me to give you a gift.”

LIKE WAXY STALAGMITES, yellow candles rose from golden holders, softly brightening the room. Gracing the walls were painted mandalas, geometric designs enclosed in a circle, representing the cosmos.

Reclining in a chair padded with thin red silk cushions, Deucalion stared at a ceiling of carved and painted lotus blossoms.

Nebo sat at an angle to him, leaning over him, studying his face with the attention of a scholar deciphering intricate sutra scrolls.

During his decades in carnivals, Deucalion had been accepted by carnies as though nothing about him was remarkable. They, too, were all outsiders by choice or by necessity.

He’d made a good living working the freak shows, which were called ten-in-ones because they offered ten exhibits under one tent.

On his small stage, he had sat in profile, the handsome side of his face turned to the sawdust aisle along which the marks traveled from act to act, from fat lady to rubber man. When they gathered before him, puzzling over why he was included in such a show, he turned to reveal the ruined side of his face.

Grown men gasped and shuddered. Women fainted, though fewer as the decades passed. Only adults eighteen and older were admitted, because children, seeing him, might be traumatized for life.

Face fully revealed, he had stood and removed his shirt to show them his body to the waist. The keloid scars, the enduring welts from primitive metal sutures, the strange excrescences…

Now beside Nebo stood a tray that held an array of thin steel needles and tiny vials of inks in many colors. With nimble skill, the monk tattooed Deucalion’s face.

“This is my gift to you, a pattern of protection.” Nebo leaned over to inspect his work, then began an even more intricate tracing in dark blues, blacks, greens.

Deucalion did not wince, nor would he have cried out at the stings of a thousand wasps. “Are you creating a puzzle on my face?”

“The puzzle is your face.” The monk smiled down at his work and at the uneven canvas on which he imprinted his rich designs.

Dripping color, dripping blood, needles pricked, gleamed, and clicked together when, at times, Nebo used two at once.

“With this much pattern, I should offer something for the pain. The monastery has opium, though we do not often condone its use.”

“I don’t fear pain,” Deucalion said. “Life is an ocean of pain.”

“Life outside of here, perhaps.”

“Even here we bring our memories with us.”

The old monk selected a vial of crimson ink, adding to the pattern, disguising grotesque concavities and broken planes, creating an illusion of normalcy under the decorative motifs.

The work continued in heavy silence until Nebo said, “This will serve as a diversion for the curious eye. Of course, not even such a detailed pattern will conceal everything.”

Deucalion reached up to touch the stinging tattoo that covered the surface of the cracked-mirror scar tissue. “I’ll live by night and by distraction, as so often I have before.”

After inserting stoppers in the ink vials, wiping his needles on a cloth, the monk said, “Once more before you leave…the coin?”

Sitting up straighter in his chair, Deucalion plucked a silver coin from midair with his right hand.

Nebo watched as Deucalion turned the coin across his knuckles—walked it, as magicians say—exhibiting remarkable dexterity considering the great size and brutal appearance of his hands.

That much, any good magician could have done.

With thumb and forefinger, Deucalion snapped the coin into the air. Candlelight winked off the piece as it flipped high.

Deucalion snatched it from the air, clutching it in his fist…opened his hand to show it empty

Any good magician could have done this, too, and could have then produced the coin from behind Nebo’s ear, which Deucalion also did.

The monk was mystified, however, by what came next.

Deucalion snapped the coin into the air again. Candlelight winked off it. Then before Nebo’s eyes, the coin just…vanished.

At the apex of its arc, turning head to tail to head, it turned out of existence. The coin didn’t fall to the floor. Deucalion’s hands were not near it when it disappeared.

Nebo had seen this illusion many times. He had watched it from a distance of inches, yet he couldn’t say what happened to the coin.

He had often meditated on this illusion. To no avail.

Now Nebo shook his head. “Is it truly magic, or just a trick?”

Smiling, Deucalion said, “And what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

“Even after all these years, you’re still a mystery.”

‘As is life itself.”

Nebo scanned the ceiling, as if expecting to see the coin stuck to one of the carved and painted lotus blossoms. Lowering his stare to Deucalion once more, he said, “Your friend in America addressed your letter to seven different names.”

“I’ve used many more than that.”

“Police trouble?”

“Not for a long time. Just…always seeking a new beginning.”

“Deucalion…,” the monk said.

“A name from old mythology—not known to many people anymore.” He rose from the chair, ignoring the throbbing pain of countless pinpricks.

The old man turned his face upward. “In America, will you return to the carnival life?”

“Carnivals have no place for me. There aren’t freak shows anymore, not like in the old days. They’re politically incorrect.”

“Back when there were freak shows, what was your act?”

Deucalion turned from the candlelit mandalas on the wall, his newly tattooed face hidden in shadows. When he spoke, a subtle pulse of luminosity passed through his eyes, like the throb of lightning hidden behind thick clouds.

“They called me…the Monster.”

CHAPTER 2

MORNING RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC on the 1-10 Expressway flowed as languidly as the Mississippi River that wound through New Orleans.

When Detective Carson O’Connor got off the expressway in the suburb of Metairie, intending to use surface streets to make better time, the morning took a turn for the worse.

Stopped interminably at an intersection, she impatiently kneaded the steering wheel of her plainwrap sedan. To dispel a growing sense of suffocation, she rolled down the window.

Already the morning streets were griddles. None of the airheads on the TV news, however, would try to cook an egg on the pavement. Even journalism school left them with enough brain cells to realize that on these streets you could flash-fry even ice cream.

Carson liked the heat but not the humidity. Maybe one day she’d move somewhere nicer, hot but dry, like Arizona. Or Nevada. Or Hell.

Without advancing a foot, she watched the minute change on the dashboard clock display—then spotted the reason for the jam-up.

Two young hoods in gang colors lingered in the crosswalk to block traffic each time the light turned green. Three others worked the line, car to car, tapping on windows, extorting payoffs.

“Clean your windshield. Two bucks.”

Like a patter of semiautomatic gunfire, car doors locked one after another as the young entrepreneurs made their sales pitch, but no car could move forward until the driver paid the tariff.

The apparent leader appeared at Carson’s window, smug and full of false good humor. “Clean your windshield, lady.”

He held a filthy rag that looked as if it had been fished out of one of the city’s many weedy canals.

A thin white scar on one darkly tanned cheek was puckered at several suture points, suggesting that he’d gotten into a knife fight on a day when the ER physician had been Dr. Frankenstein. His wispy beard implied testosterone deficiency

Getting a second, closer look at Carson, Scar-face grinned. “Hey, pretty lady What you doin’ in these shabby wheels? You was made for Mercedes.” He lifted one of the wipers and let it slap back onto the windshield. “Hello, where’s your mind? Not that a long-legged fresh like you needs a mind.”

An unmarked sedan had advantages in low-profile detective work; however, back when she’d driven a black-and-white patrol car, Carson had never been bothered by crap like this.

“You’re breaking the law,” she told him.

“Somebody in a mood this mornin’.”

“The windshield’s clean. This is extortion.”

“I charge two bucks to clean it.”

“I advise you to step back from the car.”

The kid lifted his rag, prepared to smear the windshield. “Two bucks to clean it, three bucks not to clean it. Most ladies, whether they’re male or female ladies, take option two.”

Carson unbuckled her seatbelt. “I asked you to step back from the car.”

Instead of retreating, Scarface leaned into the window, inches from her. Breath sweetened by a morning joint, soured by gum disease. “Gimme three bucks, your phone number, a nice apology—and maybe I don’t mess with your fine face.”

Carson grabbed the gink’s left ear, twisted it hard enough to crack cartilage, and slammed his head sideways against the door post. His howl sounded less like that of a wolf than like that of an infant.

She let go of his ear and, exiting the sedan, opened the door into him with enough force to knock him off his feet.

As he sprawled backward, rapping his head on the pavement hard enough to summon constellations to an inner planetarium, she planted one foot on his crotch, grinding down just enough to make him squirm and to pin him in place for fear that she’d make paste of his jewels.

Shoving her police ID toward his face, she said, “My phone number is nine-one-one.”

Among the hostage cars, heads up and alert, Scarface’s four ace kools were looking at him, at her, stunned and angry but also amused. The guy under her foot was a homey, and a humiliation to one home boy was a humiliation to all, even if maybe he was a little bit of what they called hook homey, a phony.

To the nearest of Scarface’s friends, Carson said, “Stall it out, shithead, unless you want a hole in your doo-rag.”

The gink under her foot tried to crab-walk away, but she stepped down harder. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he chose submission over the prospect of three days with an ice pack between his legs.

In spite of her warning, two of the other four gangbangers began to edge toward her.

Almost with the nimbleness of prestidigitation, Carson put away her ID and produced the pistol from her holster.

“Check it out, this lady under my foot, he’s been scratched”—which meant embarrassed—“but none of you has. Nothin’ here for you but two years in stir, maybe lit up and crippled for life.”

They didn’t split, but they stopped moving closer.

Carson knew they were less concerned about her pistol than about the fact that she talked the talk. Since she knew the lingo, they assumed—correctly—that she had been in situations like this before, lots of them, and still looked prime, and wasn’t afraid.

Even the dumbest gangbanger—and few would win a dime on Wheel of Fortune—could read her credentials and calculate the odds.

“Best to break, best to book,” she said, advising them to leave. “You insist on bumping titties, you’re gonna lose.”

Ahead of her plainwrap sedan, closer to the intersection, cars began to move. Whether or not they could see what was happening in their rearview mirrors, the drivers sensed the shakedown had ended.

As the cars around them began to roll, the young entrepreneurs decided there was no point to lingering when their customer base had moved on. They whidded away like walleyed horses stampeded by the crack of thunder.

Under her foot, the windshield-washer couldn’t quite bring himself to admit defeat. “Hey, bitch, your badge, it said homicide. You can’t touch me! I ain’t killed nobody.”

“What a moron,” she said, holstering the pistol.

“You can’t call me a moron. I graduated high school.”

“You did not.”

“I almost did.”

Before the creep—predictably—took offense at her impolite characterization of his mental acuity and threatened to sue for insensitivity, Carson’s cell phone rang.

“Detective O’Connor,” she answered.

When she heard who was calling and why, she took her foot off the gangbanger.

“Beat it,” she told him. “Get your sorry ass out of the street.”

“You ain’t lockin’ me?”

“You’re not worth the paperwork.” She returned to her phone call.

Groaning, he got to his feet, one hand clutching the crotch of his low-rider pants as if he were a two-year-old overwhelmed by the need to pee.

He was one of those who didn’t learn from experience. Instead of hobbling away to find his friends, telling them a wild story about how he’d gotten the best of the cop bitch after all and had punched out her teeth, he stood there holding himself, ragging her about abusive treatment, as though his whining and threats would wring from her a sudden sweat of remorse.

As Carson concluded the call, pressed END, and pocketed the phone, the offended extortionist said, “Thing is, I know your name now, so I can find out where you live.”

“We’re obstructing traffic here,” she said.

“Come jack you up real good one night, break your legs, your arms, break every finger. You got gas in your kitchen? I’ll cook your face on a burner.”

“Sounds like fun. I’ll open a bottle of wine, make tapas. Only thing is, the face gets cooked on the burner—I’m lookin’ at it.”

Intimidation was his best tool, but she had a screwhead that it couldn’t turn.

“You like tapas?” she asked.

“Bitch, you’re crazy as a red-eyed rat on meth.”

“Probably,” she agreed.

He backed away from her.

With a wink, she said, “I can find out where you live.”

“You stay away from me.”

“You got gas in your kitchen?” she asked.

“I mean it, you psycho twat.”

“Ah, now you’re just draggin’ me,” Carson said, draggiri meaning sweet-talking.

The gangbanger dared to turn his back on her and hobble away fast, dodging cars.

Feeling better about the morning, Carson got behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan, pulled her door shut, and drove off to pick up her partner, Michael Maddison.

They had been facing a day of routine investigation, but the phone call changed all that. A dead woman had been found in the City Park lagoon, and by the look of the body, she hadn’t accidentally drowned while taking a moonlight swim.

CHAPTER 3

WITHOUT USING HER SIREN and portable flasher, Carson made good time on Veterans Boulevard, through a kaleidoscope of strip malls, lube shops, car dealerships, bank branches, and fast-food franchises.

Farther along, subdivisions of tract homes alternated with corridors of apartment buildings and condos. Here Michael Maddison, thirty and still single, had found a bland apartment that could have been in any city in America.

Bland didn’t bother him. Working to the jazz beat and the hoodoo hum of New Orleans, especially as a homicide dick, he claimed that he ended every day in local-color overload. The ordinary apartment was his anchor in reality.

Dressed for work in a Hawaiian shirt, tan sports jacket that covered his shoulder holster, and jeans, Michael had been waiting for her to drive up. He looked wry and easy, but like certain deceptive cocktails, he had a kick.

Carrying a white paper bag in one hand, holding an unbitten doughnut in his mouth with the delicacy of a retriever returning to a hunter with a duck, Michael got into the passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut.

Carson said, “What’s that growth on your lip?”

Taking the doughnut from between his teeth, intact and barely marked, he said, “Maple-glazed buttermilk.”

“Gimme.”

Michael offered her the white bag. “One regular glazed, two chocolate. Take your pick.”

Ignoring the bag, snatching the doughnut from his hand, Carson said, “I’m crazy for maple.”

Tearing off a huge bite, chewing vigorously, she swung the car away from the curb and rocketed into the street.

“I’m crazy for maple, too,” Michael said with a sigh.

The yearning in his voice told Carson that he longed not only for the maple-glazed doughnut. For more reasons than merely the maintenance of a professional relationship, she pretended not to notice. “You’ll enjoy the regular glazed.”

As Carson took Veterans Avenue out of Jefferson Parish into Orleans Parish, intending to catch Pontchartrain Boulevard to Harrison and then head to City Park, Michael rummaged in the doughnut bag, making it clear that he was selecting one of the other treats only from cruel necessity.

As she knew he would, he settled on chocolate—not the glazed that she had imperiously recommended—took a bite, and scrunched the top of the paper bag closed.

Glancing up as Carson cruised through a yellow light an instant before it changed to red, he said, “Ease off the gas and help save the planet. In my church, we start every workday with an hour of sugar and meditation.”

“I don’t belong to the Church of Fat-Assed Detectives. Besides, just got a call—they found number six this morning.”

“Six?” Around another bite of chocolate doughnut, he said, “How do they know it’s the same perp?”

“More surgery—like the others.”

“Liver? Kidney? Feet?”

“She must’ve had nice hands. They found her in the City Park lagoon, her hands cut off.”

CHAPTER 4

PEOPLE CAME TO THE fifteen-hundred-acre City Park to feed the ducks or to relax under the spreading live oaks draped with gray-green curtains of Spanish moss. They enjoyed the well-manicured botanical gardens, the Art Deco fountains and sculptures. Children loved the fairy-tale theme park and the famous wooden flying horses on the antique merry-go-round.

Now spectators gathered to watch a homicide investigation in progress at the lagoon.

As always, Carson was creeped out by these morbidly curious onlookers. They included grandmothers and teenagers, businessmen in suits and grizzled winos sucking cheap blends out of bagged bottles, but she got a Night of the Living Dead vibe from every one of them.

Centuries-old oaks loomed over a pool of green water fringed with weeds. Paved paths wound along the edge of the lagoon, connected by gracefully arched stone bridges.

Some rubberneckers had climbed the trees to get a better view past the police tape.

“Doesn’t look like the same crowd you see at the opera,” Michael said as he and Carson shouldered through the gawkers on the sidewalk and the jogging path. “Or at monster-truck rallies, for that matter.”

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this area had been a popular place for hot-blooded Creoles to engage in duels. They met after sunset, by moonlight, and clashed with thin swords until blood was drawn.

These days, the park remained open at night, but the combatants were not equally armed and matched, as in the old days. Predators stalked prey and felt confident of escaping punishment in this age when civilization seemed to be unraveling.

Now uniformed cops held back the ghouls, any one of whom might have been the killer returned to revel in the aftermath of murder. Behind them, yellow crime-scene tape had been strung like Mardi Gras streamers from oak tree to oak tree, blocking off a section of the running path beside the lagoon.

Michael and Carson were known to many of the attending officers and CSI techs: liked by some, envied by others, loathed by a few.

She had been the youngest ever to make detective, Michael the second youngest. You paid a price for taking a fast track.

You paid a price for your style, too, if it wasn’t traditional. And with some of the cynical marking-time-till-pension types, you paid a price if you worked as if you believed that the job was important and that justice mattered.

Just past the yellow tape, Carson stopped and surveyed the scene.

A female corpse floated facedown in the scummy water. Her blond hair fanned out like a nimbus, radiant where tree-filtered Louisiana sunlight dappled it.

Because the sleeves of her dress trapped air, the dead woman’s arms floated in full sight, too. They ended in stumps.

“New Orleans,” Michael said, quoting a current tourist bureau come-on, “the romance of the bayou.”

Waiting for instruction, the CSI techs had not yet entered the scene. They had followed Carson and stood now just the other side of the marked perimeter.

As the investigating detectives, Carson and Michael had to formulate a systematic plan: determine the proper geometry of the search, the subjects and angles of photographs, possible sources of clues…

In this matter, Michael usually deferred to Carson because she had an intuition that, just to annoy her, he called witchy vision.

To the nearest uniform on the crime line, Carson said, “Who was the responding officer?”

“Ned Lohman.”

“Where is he?”

“Over there behind those trees.”

“Why the hell’s he tramping the scene?”. she demanded.

As if in answer, Lohman appeared from behind the oaks with two homicide detectives, older models, Jonathan Harker and Dwight Frye.

“Dork and Dink,” Michael groaned.

Although too far away to have heard, Harker glowered at them. Frye waved.

“This blows,” Carson said.

“Big time,” Michael agreed.

She didn’t bluster into the scene but waited for the detectives to come to her.

How nice it would have been to shoot the bastards in the knees to spare the site from their blundering. So much more satisfying than a shout or a warning shot.

By the time Harker and Frye reached her, both were smiling and smug.

Ned Lohman, the uniformed officer, had the good sense to avoid her eyes.

Carson held her temper. “This is our baby, let us burp it.”

“We were in the area,” Frye said, “caught the call.”

“Chased the call,” Carson suggested.

Frye was a beefy man with an oily look, as if his surname came not from family lineage but from his preferred method of preparing every food he ate.

“O’Connor,” he said, “you’re the first Irish person I’ve ever known who wasn’t fun to be around.”

In a situation like this, which had grown from one bizarre homicide to six killings in a matter of weeks, Carson and her partner would not be the only ones in the department assigned to research particular aspects of the case.

They had caught the first murder, however, and therefore had proprietary interest in associated homicides if and until the killer piled up enough victims to force the establishment of an emergency task force. And at that point, she and Michael would most likely be designated to head that undertaking.

Harker tended to burn easily—from sunshine, from envy, from imagined slights to his competence, from just about anything. The Southern sun had bleached his blond hair nearly white; it lent his face a perpetually parboiled look.

His eyes, as blue as a gas flame, as hard as gemstones, revealed the truth of him that he attempted to disguise with a soft smile. “We needed to move fast, before evidence was lost. In this climate, bodies decompose quickly”

“Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Michael said. “With a gym membership and a little determination, you’ll be looking good again.”

Carson drew Ned Lohman aside. Michael joined them as she took out her notebook and said, “Gimme the TPO from your involvement.”

“Listen, Detectives, I know you’re the whips on this. I told Frye and Harker as much, but they have rank.”

“Not your fault,” she assured him. “I should know by now that vultures always get to dead meat first. Let’s start with the time.”

He checked his watch. “Call came in at seven forty-two, which makes it thirty-eight minutes ago. Jogger saw the body, called it in. When I showed up, the guy was standing here running in place to keep his heart rate up.”

In recent years, runners with cell phones had found more bodies than any other class of citizens.

‘As for place,” Officer Lohman continued, “the body’s just where the jogger found it. He made no rescue attempt.”

“The severed hands,” Michael suggested, “were probably a clue that CPR wouldn’t be effective.”

“The vic is blond, maybe not natural, probably Caucasian. You have any other observations about her?” Carson asked Lohman.

“No. I didn’t go near her either, didn’t contaminate anything, if that’s what you’re trying to find out. Haven’t seen the face yet, so I can’t guess the age.”

“Time, place—what about occurrence?” she asked Lohman. “Your first impression was…?”

“Murder. She didn’t cut her hands off herself.”

“Maybe one,” Michael agreed, “but not both.”

CHAPTER 5

THE STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS teemed with possibilities: women of every description. A few were beautiful, but even the most alluring were lacking in one way or another.

During his years of searching, Roy Pribeaux had yet to encounter one woman who met his standards in every regard.

He was proud of being a perfectionist. If he had been God, the world would have been a more ordered, less messy place.

Under Roy Almighty, there would have been no ugly or plain people. No mold. No cockroaches or even mosquitoes. Nothing that smelled bad.

Under a blue sky that he could not have improved upon, but in cloying humidity he would not have allowed, Roy strolled along the Riverwalk, the site of the 1984 Louisiana World’s Fair, which had been refurbished as a public gathering place and shopping pavilion. He was hunting.

Three young women in tank tops and short shorts sashayed past, laughing together. Two of them checked Roy out.

He met their eyes, boldly ogled their bodies, then dismissed each of them with a glance.

Even after years of searching, he remained an optimist. She was out there somewhere, his ideal, and he would find her—even if it had to be one piece at a time.

In this promiscuous society, Roy remained a virgin at thirty-eight, a fact of which he was proud. He was saving himself. For the perfect woman. For love.

Meanwhile, he polished his own perfection. He undertook two hours of physical training every day. Regarding himself as a Renaissance man, he read literature for exactly one hour, studied a new subject for exactly one hour, meditated on the great mysteries and the major issues of his time for another hour every day

He ate only organic produce. He bought no meat from factory farms. No pollutants tainted him, no pesticides, no radiological residue, and certainly no strange lingering genetic material from bioengineered foods.

Eventually, when he had refined his diet to perfection and when his body was as tuned as an atomic clock, he expected that he would cease to eliminate waste. He would process every morsel so completely that it would be converted entirely to energy, and he would produce no urine, no feces.

Perhaps he would then encounter the perfect woman. He often dreamed about the intensity of the sex they would have. As profound as nuclear fusion.

Locals loved the Riverwalk, but Roy suspected that most people here today were tourists, considering how they paused to gawk at the caricature artists and street musicians. Locals would not be drawn in such numbers to the stands piled with New Orleans T-shirts.

At a bright red wagon where cotton candy was sold, Roy suddenly halted. The fragrance of hot sugar cast a sweet haze around the cart.

The cotton-candy vendor sat on a stool under a red umbrella. In her twenties, less than plain, with unruly hair. She looked as baggy and as simply made as a Muppet, though without as much personality

But her eyes. Her eyes.

Roy was captivated. Her eyes were priceless gems displayed in a cluttered and dusty case, a striking greenish blue.

The skin around her eyes crinkled alluringly as she caught his attention and smiled. “Can I help you?”

Roy stepped forward. “I’d like something sweet.”

‘All I’ve got is cotton candy.”

“Not all,” he said, marveling at how suave he could be.

She looked puzzled.

Poor thing. He was too smooth for her.

He said, “Yes, cotton candy, please.”

She picked up a paper cone and began to twirl it through the spun sugar, wrapping it with a cloud of sugary confection.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She hesitated, seemed embarrassed, averted her eyes. “Candace.”

“A girl named Candy is a candy vendor? Is that destiny or just a good sense of humor?”

She blushed. “I prefer Candace. Too many negative connotations for a…a heavy woman to be called Candy.”

“So you’re not an anorexic model, so what? Beauty comes in lots of different packages.”

Candace obviously had seldom if ever heard such kind words from an attractive and desirable man like Roy Pribeaux.

If she herself ever thought about a day when she would excrete no wastes, she must know that he was far closer to that goal than she was.

“You have beautiful eyes,” he told her. “Strikingly beautiful eyes. The kind a person could look into for years and years.”

Her blush intensified, but her shyness was overwhelmed by astonishment to such a degree that she made eye contact with him.

Roy knew he dared not come on to her too strong. After a life of rejection, she’d suspect that he was setting her up for humiliation.

“As a Christian man,” he explained, though he had no religious convictions, “I believe God made everyone beautiful in at least one respect, and we need to recognize that beauty Your eyes are just…perfect. They’re the windows to your soul.”

Putting the cloud of cotton candy on a counter-top holder, she averted her eyes again as though it might be a sin to let him enjoy them too much. “I haven’t gone to church since my mother died six years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. She must have died so young.”

“Cancer,” Candace revealed. “I got so angry about it. But now…I miss church.”

“We could go together sometime, and have coffee after.”

She dared his stare again. “Why?”

“Why not?”

“It’s just…You’re so…”

Pretending a shyness of his own, he looked away from her. “So not your type? I know to some people I might appear to be shallow—”

“No, please, that’s not what I meant.” But she couldn’t bring herself to explain what she had meant.

Roy withdrew a small notepad from his pocket, scribbled with a pen, and tore off a sheet of paper. “Here’s my name—Ray Darnell—and my cellphone number. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

Staring at the number and the phony name, Candace said, “I’ve always been pretty much a…private person.”

The dear, shy creature.

“I understand,” he said. “I’ve dated very little. I’m too old-fashioned for women these days. They’re so…bold. I’m embarrassed for them.”

When he tried to pay for his cotton candy, she didn’t want to take his money He insisted.

He walked away, nibbling at the confection, feeling her gaze on him. Once out of sight, he threw the cotton candy in a trash can.

Sitting on a bench in the sun, he consulted the notepad. On the last page at the back of it, he kept his checklist. After so much effort here in New Orleans and, previously, elsewhere, he had just yesterday checked off the next-to-last item: hands.

Now he put a question mark next to the final item on the list, hoping that he could cross it off soon.

EYES?

CHAPTER 6

HE IS A CHILD of Mercy, Mercy-born and Mercy-raised.

In his windowless room he sits at a table, working with a thick book of crossword puzzles. He never hesitates to consider an answer. Answers come to him instantly, and he rapidly inks letters in the squares, never making an error.

His name is Randal Six because five males have been named Randal and have gone into the world before him. If ever he, too, went into the world, he would be given a last name.

In the tank, before consciousness, he’d been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading. Once brought to life, he had continued to learn during sessions of drug-induced sleep.

He knows nature and civilization in their intricacies, knows the look and smell and sound of places he has never been. Yet his world is largely limited to a single room.

The agents of Mercy call this space his billet, which is a term to describe lodging for a soldier.

In the war against humanity—a secret war now but not destined to remain secret forever—he is an eighteen-year-old who came to life four months ago.

To all outward appearances, he is eighteen, but his knowledge is greater than that of most elderly scholars.

Physically, he is sound. Intellectually, he is advanced.

Emotionally, something is wrong with him.

He does not think of his room as his billet. He thinks of it as his cell.

He himself, however, is his own prison. He lives mostly within himself. He speaks little. He yearns for the world beyond his cell, beyond himself, and yet it frightens him.

Most of the day he spends with crossword puzzles, immersed in the vertical and horizontal patterns of words. The world beyond his quarters is alluring but it is also…disorderly, chaotic. He can feel it pressing against the walls, pressing, pressing, and only by focusing on crosswords, only by bringing order to the empty boxes by filling them with the absolutely right letters can he keep the outer disorder from invading his space.

Recently, he has begun to think that the world frightens him because Father has programmed him to be afraid of it. From Father, he has received his education, after all, and his life.

This possibility confuses him. He cannot understand why Father would create him to be…dysfunctional. Father seeks perfection in all things.

One thing gives him hope. Out in the world, and not far away, right here in New Orleans, is another like him. Not one of Father’s creations, but likewise afflicted.

Randal Six is not alone. If only he could meet his equal, he would better understand himself…and be free.

CHAPTER 7

AN OSCILLATING FAN riffled the documents and case notes—held down by makeshift paperweights—on Carson’s desk. Beyond the windows, an orange sunset had deepened to crimson, to purple.

Michael was at his desk in the Homicide Division, adjacent to Carson’s, occupied by much of the same paperwork. She knew that he was ready to go home, but he usually let her define the workday.

“You checked our doc box lately?” she asked.

“Ten minutes ago,” Michael reminded her. “You send me out there one more time, I’m going to eat a get-small mushroom and just stay in the doc box until the report shows up.”

“We should’ve had the prelim autopsy on that floater hours ago,” she complained.

“And I shoulda been born rich. Go figure.”

She consulted photos of cadavers in situ while Michael watched.

The first victim, a young nurse named Shelley Justine, had been murdered elsewhere and dumped beside the London Street Canal. Tests revealed the chemical signature of chloroform in her blood.

After the killer rendered her unconscious, he killed her with a knife to the heart. With exquisite precision he removed her ears. A peptide profile found no elevated endorphin levels in the blood, indicating that the surgery occurred after she was dead. Had she been alive, the pain and terror would have left telltale chemistry.

The second victim, Meg Saville, a tourist from Idaho, had also been chloroformed and knifed while unconscious. The Surgeon—the press’s name for him—had neatly sawed off Saville’s feet.

“If he’d just always take feet,” Michael said, “we’d know he was a podiatrist, and we’d have found him by now.”

Carson shuffled the next photo to the top of the stack.

The first two victims had been women; however, neither Shelley Justine nor Meg Saville had been molested.

When the third victim was a man, the killer established his bona fides as an equal-opportunity maniac. The body of Bradford Walden—a young bartender from a hole-in-the-wall across the river in Algiers—had been found with the right kidney surgically removed.

The switch to souvenirs of internal origin wasn’t troubling—an urge to collect feet and ears was no less disturbing than a fancy for kidneys—but it was curious.

Chemical traces of chloroform were found, but this time peptide profiles showed that Walden had been alive and awake for the surgery Had the chloroform worn off too soon? Or had the killer intentionally let the man wake up? In either case, Walden died in agony, his mouth stuffed with rags and sealed with duct tape to muffle his screams.

The fourth victim, Caroline Beaufort, Loyola University student, had been discovered with both legs missing, her torso propped on an ornate bench at a trolley-car stop in the upscale Garden District. She had been chloroformed and unconscious when murdered.

For his fifth kill, the Surgeon dispensed with the anesthetic. He murdered another man, Alphonse Chaterie, a dry cleaner. He collected Chaterie’s liver while the victim was alive and fully awake: not a trace of chloroform.

Most recently, this morning’s body in the City Park lagoon was missing both hands.

Four women, two men. Four with chloroform, one without, one set of results pending. Each victim missing one or more body parts. The first three women were killed before the trophies were removed, while the men were alive and conscious for the surgery.

Apparently none of the victims had known any of the others. Thus far no mutual acquaintances had come to light, either.

“He doesn’t like to see women suffer, but men in agony are okay with him,” Carson said, and not for the first time.

Michael had a new thought. “Maybe the killer’s a woman, has more sympathy for her own gender.”

“Yeah, right. How many serial killers have ever been women?”

“There’ve been a few,” he said. “But, I am proud to say, men have been a lot more successful at it.”

Carson wondered, “Is there a fundamental difference between lopping off female body parts and digging out male internal organs?”

“We’ve been down this road. Two serial killers collecting body parts in the same city in the same three-week period? ‘Is such a coincidence logical, Mr. Spock?’ ‘Coincidence, Jim, is just a word superstitious people use to describe complex events that in truth are the mathematically inevitable consequences of a primary cause.’”

Michael made this work a lot less gruesome and more tolerable, but sometimes she wanted to thump him. Hard.

“And what does that mean?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I never did understand Spock.”

Appearing as if conjured into a pentagram, Harker dropped an envelope on Carson’s desk. “ME’s report on the floater. Delivered to my doc box by mistake.”

Carson didn’t want a push-and-shove with Harker, but she could not let obvious interference pass unremarked. “One more time your foot’s on mine, I’ll file a complaint with the chief of detectives.”

“I’m so afraid,” Harker dead-panned. His reddened face glistened with a sheen of sweat. “No ID on the floater yet, but it looks pretty much like she was chloroformed, taken someplace private, and killed with a stiletto to the heart before her hands were taken.”

When Harker continued to stand there, the day’s sun bottled in his glassy face, Michael said, “And?”

“You’ve checked out everyone with easy access to chloroform. Researchers doing animal experimentation, employees at medical supply companies…But two sites on the Internet offer formulas for making it in the kitchen sink, out of stuff you can buy at the supermarket. I’m just saying this case doesn’t fit in any standard box. You’re looking for something you’ve never seen before. To stop this guy, you’ve got to go to a weirder place—one level below Hell.”

Harker turned from them and walked away across the squad room.

Carson and Michael watched him leave. Then Michael said, “What was that} It almost seemed like genuine concern for the public.”

“He was once a good cop. Maybe a part of him still is.”

Michael shook his head. “I liked him better as an asshole.”

CHAPTER 8

OUT OF THE LAST of the twilight came Deucalion with a suitcase, in clothes too heavy for the sultry night.

This neighborhood offered markedly less glamour than the French Quarter. Seedy bars, pawn shops, liquor stores, head shops.

Once a grand movie house, the Luxe Theater had become a shabby relic specializing in revivals. On the marquee, unevenly spaced loose plastic letters spelled out the current double feature:

THURS THRU SUNDAY

DON SIEGEL REVIVAL

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

HELL IS FOR HEROES

The marquee was dark, the theater closed either for the night or permanently.

Not all of the streetlamps were functioning. Approaching the Luxe, Deucalion found a route of shadows.

He passed a few pedestrians, averting his face without seeming to, and drew attention only for his height.

He slipped into a service walk beside the movie palace. For more than two centuries, he had used back doors or even more arcane entrances.

Behind the theater, a bare bulb in a wire cage above the back door shed light as drab and gray as this litter-strewn alleyway.

Sporting multiple layers of cracked and chipped paint, the door was a scab in the brick wall. Deucalion studied the latch, the lock…and decided to use the bell.

He pushed the button, and a loud buzz vibrated through the door. Inside the quiet theater, it must have echoed like a fire alarm.

Moments later, he heard heavy movement inside. He sensed that he was being studied through the fish-eye security lens.

The lock rattled, and the door opened to reveal a sweet face and merry eyes peering out of a prison of flesh. At five feet seven and perhaps three hundred pounds, this guy was twice the man he should have been.

“Are you Jelly Biggs?” Deucalion asked.

“Do I look like I’m not?”

“You’re not fat enough.”

“When I was a star in the ten-in-one, I weighed almost three hundred more. I’m half the man I used to be.”

“Ben sent for me. I’m Deucalion.”

“Yeah, I figured. In the old days, a face like yours was gold in the carnival.”

“We’re both blessed, aren’t we?”

Stepping back, motioning Deucalion to enter, Biggs said, “Ben told me a lot about you. He didn’t mention the tattoo.”

“It’s new.”

“They’re fashionable these days,” said Jelly Biggs.

Deucalion stepped across the threshold into a wide but shabby hallway “And me,” he said drily, “I’ve always been a fashion plate.”

BEHIND THE BIG theater screen, the Luxe featured a labyrinth of passages, storage closets, and rooms that no patron had ever visited. With a rolling gait and heavy respiration, Jelly led the way past crates, mildewed cardboard boxes, and moisture-curled posters and stand-ups that promoted old films.

“Ben put seven names on the letter he sent me,” Deucalion said.

“You once mentioned Rombuk monastery, so he figured you might still be there, but he didn’t know what name you’d be using.”

“He shouldn’t have shared my names.”

“Just knowin’ your aliases doesn’t mean I can mojo you.”

They arrived at a door that wore an armor-thick coat of green paint. Biggs opened it, switched on a light, gestured for Deucalion to enter ahead of him.

A windowless but cozy apartment lay beyond. A kitchenette was adjacent to the combination bedroom and living room. Ben loved books, and two walls were lined with them.

Jelly Biggs said, “It’s a sweet place you inherited.”

The key word whipped through Deucalion’s mind before lashing back with a sharp sting. “Inherited. What do you mean? Where’s Ben?”

Jelly looked surprised. “You didn’t get my letter?”

“Only his.”

Jelly sat on one of the chrome and red-vinyl chairs at the dinette table. It creaked. “Ben was mugged.”

The world is an ocean of pain. Deucalion felt the old familiar tide wash through him.

“This isn’t the best part of town, and getting worse,” Biggs said. “Ben bought the Luxe when he retired from the carnival. The neighborhood was supposed to be turning around. It didn’t. The place would be hard to sell these days, so Ben wanted to hold on.”

“How did it happen?” Deucalion asked.

“Stabbed. More than twenty times.”

Anger, like a long-repressed hunger, rose in Deucalion. Once anger had been his meat, and feasting on it, he had starved.

If he let this anger grow, it would quickly become fury—and devour him. For decades he had kept this lightning in a bottle, securely stoppered, but now he longed to pull the cork.

And then…what? Become the monster again? Pursued by mobs with torches, with pitchforks and guns, running, running, running with hounds baying for his blood?

“He was everybody’s second father,” said Jelly Biggs. “Best damn carnie boss I ever knew.”

During the past two centuries, Ben Jonas had been one of a precious handful of people with whom Deucalion had shared his true origins, one of the few he had ever trusted completely.

He said, “He was murdered after he contacted me.”

Biggs frowned. “You say that like there’s a connection.”

“Did they ever find the killer?”

“No. That’s not unusual. The letter to you, the mugging—just a coincidence.”

At last putting down his suitcase, Deucalion said, “There are no coincidences.”

Jelly Biggs looked up from the dinette chair and met Deucalion’s eyes. Without a word they understood that in addition to years in the carnival, they shared a view of the world that was as rich with meaning as with mysteries.

Pointing toward the kitchenette, the fat man said, “Besides the theater, Ben left you sixty thousand cash. It’s in the freezer.”

Deucalion considered this revelation for a moment, then said, “He didn’t trust many people.”

Jelly shrugged. “What do I need with money when I’ve got such good looks?”

CHAPTER 9

SHE WAS YOUNG, poor, inexperienced. She’d never had a manicure before, and Roy Pribeaux proposed that he give her one.

“I give myself manicures,” he said. “A manicure can be erotic, you know Just give me a chance. You’ll see.”

Roy lived in a large loft apartment, the top half of a remodeled old building in the Warehouse District. Many rundown structures in this part of the city had been transformed into expansive apartments for artists.

A printing company and a computer-assembly business shared the main floor below. They existed in another universe, as far as Roy Pribeaux was concerned; he didn’t bother them, and they reciprocated.

He needed his privacy, especially when he took a new and special woman to his loft. This time, her name was Elizabeth Lavenza.

As odd as it might seem on a first date—or a tenth, for that matter—to suggest a manicure, he had charmed Elizabeth into it. He knew well that the modern woman responded to sensitivity in men.

First, at the kitchen table, he placed her fingers in a shallow bowl of warm oil to soften both the nails and the cuticles.

Most women also liked men who enjoyed pampering them, and young Elizabeth was no different in this regard.

In addition to sensitivity and a desire to pamper, Roy had a trove of amusing stories and could keep a girl laughing. Elizabeth had a lovely laugh. Poor thing, she had no chance of resisting him.

When her fingertips had soaked long enough, he wiped them with a soft towel.

Using a natural, nonacetone polish remover, he stripped the red color from her nails. Then with gentle strokes of an emery board, he sculpted the tip of each nail into a perfect curve.

He had only begun to trim the cuticles when an embarrassing thing happened: His special cell phone rang, and he knew that the caller had to be Candace. Here he was romancing Elizabeth, and the other woman in his life was calling.

He excused himself and hurried into the dining area, where he had left the phone on a table. “Hello?”

“Mr. Darnell?”

“I know that lovely voice,” he said softly, moving into the living room, away from Elizabeth. “Is this Candace?”

The cotton-candy vendor laughed nervously. “We talked so little, how could you recognize my voice?”

Standing at one of the tall windows, his back to the kitchen, he said, “Don’t you recognize mine?”

He could almost feel the heat of her blush coming down the line when she admitted, “Yes, I do.”

“I’m so glad you called,” he said in a discreet murmur.

Shyly, she said, “Well, I thought…maybe coffee?”

“A get-acquainted coffee. Just say where and when.”

He hoped she didn’t mean right now. Elizabeth was waiting, and he was enjoying giving her the manicure.

“Tomorrow evening?” Candace suggested. “Usually business on the boardwalk dies down after eight o’clock.”

“Meet you at the red wagon. I’ll be the guy with the big smile.”

Unskilled at romance, she said awkwardly, ‘And…I guess I’ll be the one with the eyes.”

“You sure will,” he said. “Such eyes.”

Roy pressed END. The disposable phone wasn’t registered to him. Out of habit, he wiped it clean of prints, tossed it on the sofa.

His modern, austere apartment didn’t contain much furniture. His exercise machines were his pride. On the walls were reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches, the great man’s studies of the perfect human form.

Returning to Elizabeth at the kitchen table, Roy said, “My sister. We talk all the time. We’re very close.”

When the manicure was complete, he exfoliated the skin of her perfect hands with an aromatic mixture of almond oil, sea salt, and essence of lavender (his own concoction), which he massaged onto her palms, the backs of the hands, the knuckles, the fingers.

Finally, he rinsed each hand, wrapped it in clean white butcher paper, and sealed it in a plastic bag. As he placed the hands in the freezer, he said, “I’m so happy you’ve come to stay, Elizabeth.”

He didn’t find it peculiar to be talking to her severed hands. Her hands had been the essence of her. Nothing else of Elizabeth Lavenza had been worth talking about or to. The hands were her.

CHAPTER 10

THE LUXE WAS an ornate Deco palace, glamorous in its day, a fit showcase for the movies of William Powell and Myrna Loy, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman. Like many a Hollywood face, this glamour had peeled and sagged.

Deucalion accompanied Jelly Biggs down the center aisle, past rows of musty, patched seats.

“Damn DVDs screwed the revival business,” Jelly said. “Ben’s retirement didn’t turn out like he expected.”

“Marquee says you’re still open Thursday through Sunday.”

“Not since Ben died. There’s almost enough thirty-five-millimeter fanatics to make it worthwhile. But some weekends we run up more expenses than receipts. I didn’t want to take responsibility for that since it’s become your property.”

Deucalion looked up at the screen. The gold and crimson velvet curtains drooped, heavy with dust and creeping mildew. “So…you left the carnival when Ben did?”

“When freak shows took a fade, Ben made me theater manager. I got my own apartment here. I hope that won’t change…assuming you want to keep the place running.”

Deucalion pointed to a quarter on the floor. “Finding money is always a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

Stooping to pick up the quarter, Deucalion said, “Heads, you’re out of a job. Tails, you’re out of a job.”

“Don’t like them odds.”

Deucalion snapped the coin into the air, snatched it in midflight. When he opened his fist, the coin had disappeared.

“Neither heads nor tails. A sign for sure, don’t you think?”

Instead of relief at having kept his job and home, Jelly’s expression was troubled. “I been having a dream about a magician. He’s strangely gifted.”

“Just a simple trick.”

Jelly said, “I’m maybe a little psychic. My dreams sometimes come sorta true.”

Deucalion had much he could have said to that, but he remained silent, waiting.

Jelly looked at the moldering drapes, at the threadbare carpet, at the elaborate ceiling, everywhere but at Deucalion. At last he said, “Ben told me some about you, things that don’t seem they could be real.” He finally met Deucalion’s eyes. “Do you have two hearts?”

Deucalion chose not to reply.

“In the dream,” Jelly said, “the magician had two hearts…and he was stabbed in both.”

A flutter of wings overhead drew Deucalion’s attention.

“Bird got in yesterday,” Jelly said. “A dove, by the look of it. Haven’t been able to chase it out.”

Deucalion tracked the trapped bird’s flight. He knew how it felt.

CHAPTER 11

CARSON LIVED ON A tree-lined street in a house nondescript except for a gingerbread veranda that wrapped three sides.

She parked at the curb because the garage was packed with her parents’ belongings, which she never found time to sort through.

On her way to the kitchen door, she paused under an oak draped with Spanish moss. Her work hardened her, wound her tight. Arnie, her brother, needed a gentle sister. Sometimes she couldn’t decompress during the walk from car to house; she required a moment to herself.

Here in the humid night and the fragrance of jasmine, she found that she couldn’t shift into domestic gear. Her nerves were twisted as tight as dreadlocks, and her mind raced. As never before, the scent of jasmine reminded her of the smell of blood.

The recent killings had been so gruesome and had occurred in such rapid succession that she could not put them aside during her personal time. Under normal circumstances, she was seventy percent cop, thirty percent woman and sister; these days, she was all cop, twenty-four/seven.

When Carson entered the kitchen, Vicky Chou had just loaded the dishwasher and switched it on. “Well, I screwed up.”

“Don’t tell me you put laundry in the dishwasher.”

“Worse. With his brisket of beef, I gave him carrots and peas.”

“Oh, never orange and green on the same plate, Vicky.”

Vicky sighed. “He’s got more rules about food than kosher and vegan combined.”

On a cop’s salary, Carson could not have afforded a live-in caregiver to look after her autistic brother. Vicky took the job in return for room and board—and out of gratitude.

When Vicky’s sister, Liane, had been indicted with her boyfriend and two others for conspiracy to commit murder, she seemed helplessly snared in a web of evidence. She’d been innocent. In the process of sending the other three to prison, Carson had cleared Liane.

As a successful medical transcriptionist, Vicky worked flexible hours at home, transcribing micro-cassettes for physicians. If Arnie had been a more demanding autistic, Vicky might not have been able to keep up with her work, but the boy was mostly quiescent.

Widowed at forty, now forty-five, Vicky was an Asian beauty, smart and sweet and lonely. She wouldn’t grieve forever. Someday when she least expected it, a man would come into her life, and the current arrangement would end.

Carson dealt with that possibility the only way that her busy life allowed: She ignored it.

“Other than green and orange together, how was he today?” Carson asked.

“Fixated on the castle. Sometimes it seems to calm him, but at other times…” Vicky frowned. “What is he so afraid of?”

“I don’t know. I guess…life.”

BY REMOVING A WALL and combining two of the upstairs bedrooms, Carson had given Arnie the largest room in the house. This seemed only fair because his condition stole from him the rest of the world.

His bed and nightstand were shoved into a corner. A TV occupied a wheeled metal stand. Sometimes he watched cartoons on DVD, the same ones over and over.

The remainder of the room had been devoted to the castle.

Four low sturdy tables formed a twelve-by-eight-foot platform. Upon the tables stood an architectural wonder in Lego blocks.

Few boys of twelve would have been able to create a model castle without a plan, but Arnie had put together a masterpiece: walls and wards, barbicon and bastions, ramparts and parapets, turreted towers, the barracks, the chapel, the armory, the castle keep with elaborate bulwark and battlements.

He’d been obsessed with the model for weeks, constructing it in an intense silence. Repeatedly he tore down finished sections only to remodel and improve them.

Most of the time he was on his feet while adding to the castle—an access hole in the table arrangement allowed him to build from within the project as well as from every side—but sometimes, like now, he worked while sitting on a wheeled stool. Carson rolled a second stool to the table and sat to watch.

He was a dark-haired, blue-eyed boy whose looks alone would have ensured him a favored place in the world if he’d not been autistic.

At times like this, when his concentration on a task was total, Arnie would not tolerate anyone being too near to him. If Carson drew closer than four or five feet, he would grow agitated.

When enthralled by a project, he might pass days in silence except for wordless reactions to any attempt to interrupt his work or to invade his personal space.

More than eighteen years separated Carson from Arnie. He’d been born the year that she moved out of her parents’ house. Even if he’d been spared from autism, they would not have been as close as many brothers and sisters, for they would have shared so few experiences.

Following the death of their parents four years ago, Carson gained custody of her brother. He had been with her ever since.

For reasons that she could not fully articulate, Carson had come to love this gentle, withdrawn child. She didn’t think she could have loved him more if he had been her son rather than her brother.

She hoped that someday there would be a breakthrough either in the treatment of autism in general or in Arnie’s particular case. But she knew her hope had little chance of being fulfilled.

Now she pondered the most recent changes he had made to the outer curtain wall of the castle compound. He had fortified it with regularly spaced buttresses that doubled as steep flights of stairs by which defenders could reach the walkways behind the battlements.

Recently Arnie had seemed to be more fearful than usual. Carson could not shake the feeling that he sensed some trouble coming and that he was urgently determined to prepare for it. He could not build a real castle, so he took refuge in this fantasy of a fortress home.

CHAPTER 12

RANDAL SIX CROSSES SPHINX with XENOPHOBE, finishing the last crossword puzzle in the book.

Other collections of puzzles await him. But with the completion of this current book, he is armored against the fearsome disorder of the world. He has earned protection.

He will be safe for a while, although not forever. Disorder builds. Chaos presses at the walls. Eventually he will have to fill more patterns of empty boxes with more judiciously chosen letters for the purpose of denying chaos entrance to his private space.

Temporarily safe, he gets up from the worktable, sits on the edge of his bed, and presses a call button on his nightstand. This will summon lunch.

He is not served meals on a regular schedule because he cannot eat when obsessed with crossword puzzles. He will let food grow cold rather than interrupt the important work offending off chaos.

A man in white brings his tray and places it on the worktable. While this attendant is present, Randal Six keeps his head bowed to discourage conversation and to prevent eye contact.

Every word he speaks to another person diminishes the protection that he has earned.

Alone again, Randal Six eats his lunch. Very neatly.

The food is white and green, as he likes it. Sliced turkey breast in cream sauce, mashed potatoes, white bread, peas, beans. For dessert, vanilla ice cream with creme de menthe.

When he finishes, he dares to open his door and slide the tray into the corridor. He quickly closes the door again, and feels as safe now as he ever does.

He sits on the edge of his bed and opens his nightstand drawer. The drawer contains a few magazines.

Having been educated by direct-to-brain data downloading, Randal Six is encouraged by Father to open himself to the world, to stay abreast of current events by the more ordinary means of reading various periodicals and newspapers.

He cannot tolerate newspapers. They are unwieldy The sections become confused; the pages fall out of order.

Worse, the ink. The ink comes off on his hands, as if it is the dirty disorder of the world.

He can wash the ink away with enough soap and hot water in the bathroom that adjoins this chamber, but surely some of it seeps into his pores and thence into his bloodstream. By this means, a newspaper is an agent of contagion, infecting him with the world’s disorder.

Among the magazines in the drawer, however, is a story that he tore from a local newspaper three months ago. This is his beacon of hope.

The story concerns a local organization raising research funds to find a cure for autism.

By the strictest definition of the affliction, Randal Six might not have autism. But he suffers from something very much like that sad condition.

Because Father has strongly encouraged him to better understand himself as a first step toward a cure, Randal reads books on the subject. They don’t give him the peace he finds in crossword puzzles.

During the first month of his life, when it wasn’t yet clear what might be wrong with him, when he had still been able to tolerate newspapers, he read about the local charity for autism research and at once recognized himself in descriptions of the condition. He then realized that he was not alone.

More important, he has seen a photo of another like himself: a boy of twelve, photographed with his sister, a New Orleans police officer.

In the photo, the boy isn’t looking at the camera but to one side of it. Randal Six recognizes the evasion.

Incredibly, however, the boy is smiling. He looks happy.

Randal Six has never been happy, not in the four months since he has come out of the creation tank as an eighteen-year-old. Not once. Not for a moment. Occasionally he feels sort of safe…but never happy

Sometimes he sits and stares at the newspaper clipping for hours.

The boy in the photo is Arnie O’Connor. He smiles.

Maybe Arnie is not happy all the time, but he must be happy sometimes.

Arnie has knowledge that Randal needs. Arnie has a secret to happiness. Randal needs it so bad he lies awake at night desperately trying to think of some way to get it.

Arnie is in this city, so near. Yet for all practical purposes, he is beyond reach.

In his four months of life, Randal Six has never been outside the walls of Mercy. Just being taken to another floor in this very building for treatment is traumatic.

Another neighborhood of New Orleans is as unaccessible to him as a crater on the moon. Arnie lives with his secret, untouchable.

If only Randal can get to the boy, he will learn the secret of happiness. Perhaps Arnie will not want to share it. That won’t matter. Randal will get it from him. Randal will get it.

Unlike the vast majority of autistics, Randal Six is capable of extreme violence. His inner rage is almost equal to his fear of the disordered world.

He has hidden this capacity for violence from everyone, even from Father, for he fears that if it is known, something bad will happen to him. He has seen in Father a certain…coldness.

He puts the newspaper photo in the drawer once more, under the magazines. In his mind’s eye, he stills sees Arnie, smiling Arnie.

Arnie is out there on the moon in New Orleans, and Randal Six is drawn to him like the sea to lunar tides.

CHAPTER 13

IN THE SMALL dimly lighted projection booth, a sprung sofa slumped against one wall, and stacks of paperbacks stood on every flat surface. Evidently Jelly liked to read while the movie ran.

Pointing to a door different from the one by which they had entered, the fat man said, “My apartment’s through there. Ben left a special box for you.”

While Jelly went to fetch the box, Deucalion was drawn to the old projector, no doubt original to the building. This monstrous piece of machinery featured enormous supply and take-up reels. The 35mm film had to be threaded through a labyrinth of sprockets and guides, into the gap between the high-intensity bulb and the lens.

He studied the adjustment knobs and worked forward until he could peer into the Cyclopean eye of the projector. He removed a cover plate to examine the internal gears, wheels, and motors.

Across the balcony, the mezzanine, and the lower seats, this device could cast a bright illusion of life upon the big screen.

Deucalion’s own life, in its first decade, had often seemed like a dark illusion. With time, however, life had become too real, requiring him to retreat into carnivals, into monasteries.

Returning with an old shoebox full of papers, Jelly halted when he saw Deucalion tinkering with the projector. “Makes me nervous, you messing with that. It’s an antique. Hard to get parts or a repairman. That thing is the life’s blood of this place.”

“It’s hemorrhaging.” Deucalion replaced the cover to protect the delicate parts. “Logic reveals the secrets of any machine—whether it’s a projector, a jet engine, or the universe itself.”

“Ben warned me you think too much.” Jelly set the shoebox on a stack of entertainment-gossip magazines. “He sent you one newspaper clipping with his letter, right?”

‘And it brought me halfway around the world.”

Jelly took the lid off the box. “Ben collected lots of this.”

Deucalion picked up the top clipping, scanned the photo, then the headline: VICTOR HELIOS GIVES ONE MILLION TO SYMPHONY.

The sight of the man in the photo, virtually unchanged after so much time, jolted Deucalion as before, in the monastery.

SCIMITARS OF LIGHTNING gut a black-bellied night, and then crashes of thunder shake darkness across the tall casement windows once more. From flickering gas lamps, light capers over the stone walls of a cavernous laboratory. An electric arc crackles between the copper wire-wrapped poles of eldritch equipment. Sparks spray from dangerously overloaded transformers and piston-driven machinery.

The storm grows more violent, hurling bolt after bolt into the collector rods that stud the tallest towers. The incredible energy is channeled down into—

—him.

He opens his heavy eyelids and sees another’s eye magnified by an ocular device resembling a jeweler’s loupe. The loupe flips up, and he sees the face of Victor. Toung earnest, hopeful.

In white cap and blood-spattered gown, this creator, this would-be god…

HANDS TREMBLING, Deucalion dropped the clipping, which fluttered to the floor of the projection room.

Ben had prepared him for this, but he was shocked anew. Victor alive. Alive.

For a century or more, Deucalion had explained his own longevity to himself by the simple fact that he was unique, brought to life by singular means. He might therefore exist beyond the reach of death. He never had a cold, the flu, no ailment or physical complaint.

Victor, however, had been born of man and woman. He should be heir to all the ills of the flesh.

From an inner jacket pocket, Deucalion withdrew a rolled sheet of heavy paper, which he usually kept in his carryall. He slipped the knot of the securing ribbon, unrolled the paper, and stared at it for a moment before showing it to Jelly.

Scrutinizing the pencil portrait, Jelly said, “That’s Helios.”

“A self-portrait,” Deucalion said. “He’s…talented. I took this from a frame in his study…more than two hundred years ago.”

Jelly evidently knew enough to receive that statement without surprise.

“I showed this to Ben,” Deucalion said. “More than once. That’s how he recognized Victor Helios and knew him for who he really is.”

Setting aside Victor’s self-portrait, Deucalion selected a second clipping from the box and saw a photo of Helios receiving an award from the mayor of New Orleans.

A third clipping: Victor with the district attorney during his election campaign.

A fourth: Victor and his lovely wife, Erika, at a benefit auction.

Victor purchasing a mansion in the Garden District.

Victor endowing a scholarship at Tulane University.

Victor, Victor, Victor.

Deucalion did not recall casting aside the clippings or crossing the small room, but he must have done so, for the next thing he knew, he had driven his right fist and then his left into the wall, through the old plaster. As he withdrew his hands, clutching broken lengths of lath, a section of the wall crumbled and collapsed at his feet.

He heard himself roar with anger and anguish, and managed to choke off the cry before he lost control of it.

As he turned to Jelly, Deucalion’s vision brightened, dimmed, brightened, and he knew that a subtle pulse of luminosity, like heat lightning behind clouds on a summer night, passed through his eyes. He had seen the phenomenon himself in mirrors.

Wide-eyed, Jelly seemed ready to bolt from the room, but then let out his pent-up breath. “Ben said you’d be upset.”

Deucalion almost laughed at the fat man’s understatement and aplomb, but he feared that a laugh would morph into a scream of rage. For the first time in many years, he had almost lost control of himself, almost indulged the criminal impulses that had been a part of him from the moment of his creation.

He said, “Do you know what I am?”

Jelly met his eyes, studied the tattoo and the ruin that it only half concealed, considered his hulking size. “Ben…he explained. I guess it could be true.”

“Believe it,” Deucalion advised him. “My origins are a prison graveyard, the cadavers of criminals—combined, revitalized, reborn.”

CHAPTER 14

OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT was hot and humid. In Victor Helios’s library, the air-conditioning chilled to the extent that a cheerful blaze in the fireplace was necessary

Fire featured in some of his less pleasant memories. The great windmill. The bombing of Dresden. The Israeli Mossad attack on the secret Venezuelan research complex that he had shared with Mengele in the years after World War II. Nevertheless he liked to read to the accompaniment of a cozy crackling fire.

When, as now, he was perusing medical journals like The Lancet, JAMA, and Emerging Infectious Diseases, the fire served not merely as ambience but as an expression of his informed scientific opinion. He frequently tore articles from the magazines and tossed them into the flames. Occasionally, he burned entire issues.

As ever, the scientific establishment could teach him nothing. He was far ahead of them. Yet he felt the need to remain aware of advancements in genetics, molecular biology, and associated fields.

He felt the need, as well, for a wine that better complemented the fried walnuts than did the Cabernet that Erika had served with them. Too tannic. A fine Merlot would have been preferable.

She sat in the armchair opposite his, reading poetry. She had become enthralled with Emily Dickinson, which annoyed Victor.

Dickinson had been a fine poet, of course, but she had been God-besotted. Her verses could mislead the naive. Intellectual poison.

Whatever need Erika might have for a god could be satisfied here in this room. Her maker, after all, was her husband.

Physically, he had done a fine job. She was beautiful, graceful, elegant. She looked twenty-five but had been alive only six weeks.

Victor himself, though two hundred and forty, could have passed for forty-five. His youthful appearance had been harder to maintain than hers had been to achieve.

Beauty and grace were not his only criteria for an ideal wife. He also wished her to be socially and intellectually sophisticated.

In this regard, in many small ways, Erika had failed him and had proved slow to learn in spite of direct-to-brain downloads of data that included virtual encyclopedias of etiquette, culinary history, wine appreciation, witticisms, and much else.

Knowledge of a subject did not mean that one could apply that knowledge, of course, but Erika didn’t seem to be trying hard enough. The Cabernet instead of the Merlot, Dickinson…

Victor had to admit, however, that she was a more appealing and acceptable creature than Erika Three, her immediate predecessor. She might not be the final version—only time would tell—but whatever her faults, Erika Four was not a complete embarrassment.

The drivel in the medical journals and Erika reading Dickinson at last drove him up from his armchair. “I’m in a creative mood. I think I’ll spend some time in my studio.”

“Do you need my help, darling?”

“No. You stay here, enjoy yourself.”

“Listen to this.” Her delight was childlike. Before Victor could stop her, she read from Dickinson: “The pedigree of honey / Does not concern the bee / A clover, any time, to him / Is aristocracy”

“Charming,” he said. “But for variety, you might read some Thorn Gunn and Frederick Seidel.”

He could have told her what to read, and she would have obeyed. But he did not desire an automaton for a wife. He wanted her to be free-spirited. Only in sexual matters did he demand utter obedience.

In the immense restaurant-quality kitchen from which staff could serve a sit-down dinner for a hundred without problem, Victor entered the walk-in pantry. The shelves at the back, laden with canned goods, slid aside when he touched a hidden switch.

Beyond the pantry, secreted in the center of the house, lay his windowless studio.

His public labs were at Helios Biovision, the company through which he was known to the world and by which he had earned another fortune atop those he had already accrued in earlier ages.

And in the Hands of Mercy, an abandoned hospital converted to serve his primary work and staffed with men of his making, he pursued the creation of the new race that would replace flawed humanity.

Here, behind the pantry, measuring twenty by fifteen feet, this retreat provided a place for him to work on small experiments, often those on the leading edge of his historic enterprise.

Victor supposed that he was to arcane laboratory equipment what Santa Claus was to gizmo-filled toy workshops.

When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she’d made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and as a failure.

Her judgment of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead—and who was not?

Although her novel suggested his workplace was a phantasmagoria of gizmos as ominous in appearance as in purpose, she had been vague on details. Not until the first film adaptation of her book did the name Frankenstein become synonymous with the term “mad scientist” and with laboratories buzzing-crackling-humming with frightening widgets, thingums, and doohickeys.

Amusingly, Hollywood had the set design more than half right, not as to the actual machines and objects, but as to ambience. Even the studio behind the pantry had a flavor of Hell with machines.

On the center worktable stood a Lucite tank filled with a milky antibiotic solution. In the tank rested a man’s severed head.

Actually, the head wasn’t severed. It had never been attached to a body in the first place.

Victor had created it only to serve as a braincase. The head had no hair, and the features were rough, not fully formed.

Support systems serviced it with nutrient-rich, enzyme-balanced, oxygenated blood and drained away metabolic waste through numerous plastic tubes that entered through the neck.

With no need to breathe, the head was almost dead still. But the eyes twitched behind the lids, which suggested that it was dreaming.

The brain within the skull was self-aware but had only the most rudimentary personality, sufficient to the experiment.

Approaching the table, Victor addressed the resident of the open Lucite tank: “Time to work, Karloff.”

No one could say that Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, was a humorless man.

In the head, the eyes opened. They were blue and bloodshot.

Karloff had been selectively educated by direct-to-brain data downloading; therefore, he spoke English. “Ready,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse.

“Where is your hand?” Victor asked.

The bloodshot eyes shifted at once to regard a smaller table in a far corner of the room.

There, a living hand lay in a shallow bowl of milky antibiotic solution. As in the case of the head, this five-fingered wonder was served by numerous tubes and by a low-voltage electrical pump that could empower its nerves and, thereby, its musculature.

The systems sustaining the head and those sustaining the hand were independent of each other, sharing no common tubing or wiring.

After reading the status displays on the equipment and making a few adjustments, Victor said, “Karloff, move your thumb.”

In the dish, the hand lay motionless. Motionless. And then…the thumb twitched, bent at the knuckle, straightened again.

Victor had long sought those genes that might carry the elusive psychic powers that humankind had sometimes experienced but had never been able to control. Recently he had achieved this small success.

This ultimate amputee, Karloff, had just exhibited psychomotor telekenesis, the control of his entirely detached hand strictly by means of mental exertion.

“Give me an arpeggio,” Victor said.

In the shallow bowl, the hand raised on the heel of its palm and strummed the air with all fingers, as if plucking at the strings of an invisible harp.

Pleased by this display, Victor said, “Karloff, make a fist.”

The hand slowly clenched, tighter, tighter, until the knuckles were sharp and white.

No emotion showed in Karloff’s face, yet the hand seemed to be an exquisite expression of anger and the will to violence.

CHAPTER 15

NEW DAY, NEW DEATH. For the second morning in a row, Carson chased breakfast with the discovery of a mutilated corpse.

A TV crew was at the library, hauling gear out of a satellite van, when Carson jammed the brakes, twisted the wheel, and slotted her plainwrap between two black-and-whites that were angled to the curb.

“I break land-speed records getting here,” she grumbled, “and the media’s already on the scene.”

“Bribe the right people,” Michael suggested, “and next time you might get the call before Channel 4.”

As she and Michael crossed the sidewalk toward the library, a reporter shouted to her, “Detective O’Connor! Is it true the Surgeon cut out a heart this time?”

“Maybe they’re so interested,” she told Michael, “because none of those bastards has a heart.”

They hurried up stone steps to the ornate red-stone building with gray granite arches and columns.

Admitting them, the police guard at the door said, “It fits the pattern, guys. It’s one of his.”

“Seven murders in a little over three weeks isn’t a pattern anymore,” Carson replied. “It’s a rampage.”

As they entered the reading foyer with the elevated main desk, Michael said, “I should’ve brought my overdue book.”

“You checked out a book? Mr. DVD with a book?”

“It was a DVD guide.”

Crime-scene techs, police photographers, criminalists, jakes, and personnel from the medical examiner’s office served as Indian guides without saying a word. Carson and Michael followed their nods and gestures through a labyrinth of books.

Three quarters of the way along an aisle of stacks, they found Harker and Frye, who were cordoning off the scene with yellow tape.

Establishing that the territory belonged to him and Carson, Michael said, “Yesterday’s hand bandit is this morning’s thief of hearts.”

Frye managed to look greasy and blanched. His face had no color. He kept one hand on his expansive gut as if he had eaten some bad pepper shrimp for breakfast.

He said, “Far as I’m concerned, you take the lead on this one. I’ve lost my taste for the case.”

If Harker, too, had a change of heart, his reasons were not identical to Frye’s. His face was as boiled red as ever, his eyes as challenging.

Running one hand through his sun-bleached hair, Harker said, “Looks to me like whoever has point position on this is walking a high wire. One mistake on a case this high profile, the media will flush your career down the toilet.”

“If that means cooperation instead of competition,” Michael said, “we accept.”

Carson wasn’t as ready as Michael to forgive the toe-tramping they had received from these two, but she said, “Who’s the vie?”

“Night security man,” Harker said.

While Frye remained behind, Harker ducked under the yellow tape and led them to the end of the aisle, around the corner to another long row of stacks.

The end-stack sign declared ABERRANT PSYCHOLOGY. Thirty feet away, the dead man lay on his back on the floor. The victim looked like a hog halfway through a slaughterhouse.

Carson entered the new aisle but did not proceed into the blood spatter, leaving the wet zone unspoiled for CSI.

As she quietly sized the scene and tried to fit herself to it, planning the approach strategy, Harker said from behind her, “Looks like he cracked the breastbone neat as a surgeon. Went in there with complete professionalism. The guy travels with tools.”

Moving to Carson’s side, Michael said, “At least we can rule out suicide.”

“Almost looks like suicide,” Carson murmured thoughtfully.

Michael said, “Now, let’s remember the fundamentals of this relationship. Tou are the straight man.”

“There was a struggle,” Harker said. “The books were pulled off the shelves.”

About twenty books were scattered on the floor this side of the dead man. None was open. Some were in stacks of two and three.

“Too neat,” she said. “This looks more like someone was reading them, then set them aside.”

“Maybe Dr. Jekyll was sitting on the floor, researching his own insanity,” Michael conjectured, “when the guard discovered him.”

“Look at the wet zone,” Carson said. “Tightly contained around the body. Not much spatter on the books. No signs of struggle.”

“No struggle?” Harker mocked. “Tell that to the guy without a heart.”

“His piece is still in his holster,” Carson said. “He didn’t even draw, let alone get off a shot.”

“Chloroform from behind,” Michael suggested.

Carson didn’t respond at once. During the night,

madness had entered the library, carrying a bag of surgical tools. She could hear the soft footsteps of madness, hear its slow soft breathing.

The stench of the victim’s blood stirred in Carson’s blood a quivering current of fear. Something about this scene, something she could not quite identify, was extraordinary, unprecedented in her experience, and so unnatural as to be almost supernatural. It spoke first to her emotions rather than to her intellect; it teased her to see it, to know it.

Beside her, Michael whispered, “Here comes that old witchy vision.”

Her mouth went dry with fear, her hands suddenly icy. She was no stranger to fear. She could be simultaneously afraid but professional, alert and quick. Sometimes fear sharpened her wits, clarified her thinking.

“Looks more,” she said at last, “as if the vic just laid down there and waited to be butchered. Look at his face.”

The eyes were open. The features were relaxed, not contorted by terror, by pain.

“Chloroform,” Michael suggested again.

Carson shook her head. “He was awake. Look at the eyes. The cast of the mouth. He didn’t die unconscious. Look at the hands.”

The security guard’s left hand lay open at his side, palm up, fingers spread. That position suggested sedation before the murder.

The right hand, however, was clenched tight. Chloroformed, he would have relaxed the fist.

She jotted down these observations in her notebook and then said, “So who found the body?”

“A morning-shift librarian,” Harker said. “Nancy Whistler. She’s in the women’s lav. She won’t come out.”

CHAPTER 16

THE WOMEN’S REST ROOM smelled of pine-scented disinfectant and White Diamonds perfume. Regular janitorial service was the source of the former, Nancy Whistler of the latter.

A young, pretty woman who put the lie to the stereotypical image of librarians, she wore a clingy summer dress as yellow as daffodils.

She bent to one of the sinks and splashed cold water in her face from a running faucet. She drank from cupped hands, swished the water around her mouth, and spat it out.

“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” she said.

“No problem,” Carson assured her.

“I’m afraid to leave here. Every time I think I just can’t puke again, I do.”

“I love this job,” Michael told Carson.

“The officers who did a perimeter check tell me there are no signs of forced entry. So you’re sure the front door was locked when you arrived for work?” Carson pressed.

“Absolutely. Two deadbolts, both engaged.”

“Who else has keys?”

“Ten people. Maybe twelve,” said Nancy Whistler. “I can’t think names right now.”

You could only push a witness so far in the aftermath of her encounter with a bloody corpse. This wasn’t a time to be hard-assed.

Carson said, “E-mail a list of keyholders to me. Soon.”

‘All right, sure. I understand.” The librarian grimaced as if she might hurl again. Instead she said, “God, he was such a toad, but he didn’t deserve that.” Michael’s raised eyebrows drew an explanation from her: “Bobby Allwine. The guard.”

“Define toad,” Michael requested.

“He was always…looking at me, saying inappropriate things. He had a way of coming on to me that was…just weird.”

“Harassment?”

“No. Nothing forceful. Just weird. As if he didn’t get a lot of things, the way to act.” She shook her head. “And he went to funeral homes for fun.”

Carson and Michael exchanged a look, and he said, “Well, who doesn’t?”

“Viewings at funeral homes,” Whistler clarified. “Memorial services. For people he didn’t even know. He went two, three times a week.”

“Why?”

“He said he liked to look at dead people in their caskets. Said it…relaxed him.” She cranked off the water faucet. “Bobby was sort of a geek. But…why would someone cut out his heart?”

Michael shrugged. “Souvenir. Sexual gratification. Dinner.”

Appalled, repelled, Nancy Whistler bolted for a toilet stall.

To Michael, Carson said, “Oh, nice. Real nice.”

CHAPTER 17

PEELING PAINT, crumbling stucco, rusting wrought iron, sagging trumpet vines yellowing in the heat, and a pustulant-looking fungus flourishing in the many cracks in the concrete walkway established a design motif carried out in every aspect of the apartment building.

On the patchy lawn, which looked as if someone had salted it, a sign announced APARTMENT AVAILABLE / ONLY LOSERS NEED APPLY.

Actually, only the first two words were on the sign. The other four didn’t have to be spelled out; Carson inferred them from the condition of the place as she parked at the curb.

In addition to the sign, the front lawn actually contained a flock of seven pink flamingos.

“Bet my ass there’s a couple plastic gnomes somewhere around here,” Michael said.

Someone had painted four of the flamingos other tropical hues—mango green, pineapple yellow—perhaps hoping that a color change would render these lawn ornaments less absurd if not less tacky. The new paint had worn off in places; the pink shone through.

Not because of the implication of borderline poverty but because of the weirdness of the place, it was an ideal building for odd ducks and geeks like Bobby Allwine, he of the stolen heart. They would be drawn here, and in the company of their own kind, no one among them would receive particular attention.

A grizzled old man knelt on the front steps, fixing a railing brace.

“Excuse me. You work here?” Michael asked, flashing his ID.

“No more than I have to.” The old man looked Carson up and down appreciatively, but still spoke to Michael. “Who’s she?”

“It’s bring-your-sister-to-work day at the department. Are you the super here?”

“ ‘Super’ don’t seem to be a word that fits anyone or anything about this dump. I’m just sort of the jack-of-all around here. You come to see Bobby Allwine’s place?”

“News travels fast.”

Putting down his screwdriver, getting to his feet, the jack-of-all said, “Good news does. Follow me.”

Inside, the public stairwell was narrow, dark, peeling, humid, and malodorous.

The old guy didn’t smell so good, either, and as they followed him up to the second floor, Michael said, “I’ll never complain about my apartment again.”

At the door to 2-D, as he fumbled in his pockets for a passkey, the jack-of-all said, “Heard on the news his liver was cut out.”

“It was his heart,” Carson said.

“Even better.”

“You didn’t like Bobby Allwine?”

Unlocking the door, he said, “Hardly knew him. But this makes the apartment worth fifty bucks more.” He read their disbelief and assured them, “There’s people that’ll pay extra.”

“Who,” Michael asked, “the Addams family?”

“Just people who like some history about a place.”

Carson pushed inside the apartment, and when the old man would have followed her, Michael eased him aside and said, “We’ll call you when we’re done.”

The blinds were drawn. The room was uncommonly dark for a bright afternoon.

Carson found the switch for the ceiling fixture and said, “Michael, look at this.”

In the living room, the ceiling and walls were painted black. The wood floors, the baseboards, the door and window casings were black, as well. The blinds were black.

The sole piece of furniture was a black vinyl armchair in the center of the room.

Closing the front door behind him, Michael said, “Does Martha Stewart have an emergency design hotline?”

The windows were closed. No air conditioning. The moist heat and the blackness and a tauntingly familiar sweet fragrance made Carson feel slow, stupid.

“What’s that smell?” she asked.

“Licorice.”

Thick, sweet, pervasive, the aroma was indeed licorice. Though it should have been pleasant, the smell half nauseated Carson.

The black floor had a glossy sheen, unmarred by dust or lint. She wiped a hand along a windowsill, down a door casing, and found no grime.

As it had in the library with Allwine’s corpse, fear found Carson, a creeping disquiet that climbed her spine and pressed a cold kiss to the back of her neck.

In the meticulously clean kitchen, Michael hesitated to open the black door of the refrigerator. “This feels like a Jeffrey Dahmer moment, severed heads among the bottles of pickles and mayonnaise, a heart in a OneZip bag.”

Even the interior of the refrigerator had been spray-painted black, but it held no heads. Just a coffee cake and a quart of milk.

Most of the cupboards were empty, too. A drawer contained three spoons, two forks, two knives.

According to his employee file, Allwine had lived here for two years. An inventory of his possessions would give the impression that he’d been prepared to leave on a moment’s notice and to travel light.

The third room was the bedroom. The ceiling, the walls, and the floor were black. Even the bed and sheets: black. A black nightstand, black lamp, and black radio with glowing green numbers.

“What is this place?” Carson wondered.

“Maybe he’s a satanist? Or just an over-the-top metal fan.”

“No music system. No TV.”

Michael found the source of the licorice odor. On the unpadded windowseat sat a tray holding several fat black candles, none burning at the moment. Bending down to sniff, he said, “Scented.”

Carson considered the time and effort required to create this unrelieved blackness, and suddenly she thought of Arnie and his Lego castle. Bobby Allwine held a job and interacted with the world, but on some level he was as dysfunctional as her brother.

Arnie was benign, however, whereas judging by the available evidence, Allwine’s psychology must be, at the core, malignant.

“This place is worth an extra hundred bucks a month,” Michael declared.

When Carson switched on the light in the adjacent bathroom, the startling contrast stung her eyes. Paint, floor tile, sink, toilet—everything was a dazzling white, assiduously polished. The pungent smell of ammonia allowed no intrusion of the scent of licorice.

Opposite the vanity mirror, hundreds of single-edged razor blades bristled from the wall. Each had been pressed at the same angle into the sheetrock, leaving half of the blade exposed, like a wicked silver fang. Row after row after row of clean, sparkling, unused razor blades.

“Seems like,” she said, “the victim was even crazier than his killer.”

CHAPTER 18

IN NEW ORLEANS uptown society, formal dinner parties were a political necessity, and Victor took his responsibilities seriously.

Inside the sprawling Garden District mansion, his housekeepers—Christine and Sandra—and his butler, William, had spent the day preparing for the evening’s event. They cleaned every room, added flowers and candles, swept the covered porches. Gardeners tended to the lawn, trees, flower beds, and shrubs.

These people were all his creations, made at the Hands of Mercy, and were therefore tireless and efficient.

In the formal dining room, the table was set for twelve with Pratesi linens, Buccelatti silverware, Limoges china, historic Paul Storr silver chargers, and a monumental Storr candelabrum featuring Bacchus and attendants. The sparkle factor was greater—and embodied greater value—than any display case of diamonds at Tiffany’s.

The housekeepers and butler awaited their master’s inspection. He entered the dining room, already dressed for dinner, and considered the preparations.

“Sandra, you’ve selected the right china for tonight’s guests.”

His approval drew a smile from her, though it was uneasy

“But, William, there are fingerprints on a couple of these glasses.”

At once the butler took the indicated glasses away.

Two centerpieces of cream-colored roses flanked the candelabrum, and Victor said of them, “Christine, too much greenery Strip some of it out to emphasize the blooms.”

“I didn’t arrange the roses, sir,” she said, and seemed to be dismayed to have to reveal that his wife had taken charge of the roses. “Mrs. Helios preferred to do it herself. She read a book on flower arranging.”

Victor knew that the staff liked Erika and worried that she should do well.

He sighed. “Redo the arrangements anyway, but don’t say anything to my wife.” Wistfully, he removed one of the white roses and slowly turned it between thumb and forefinger. He sniffed it, noting that a few of the petals already showed early signs of wilt. “She’s so…young. She’ll learn.”

AS THE HOUR drew near, Victor went to the master bedroom suite to determine what had delayed Erika.

He found her in the dressing room, at her vanity. Her shoulder-length bronze hair was as lustrous as silk. The exquisite form and buttery smoothness of her bare shoulders stirred him.

Unfortunately, she had too much enthusiasm for the effects of makeup.

“Erika, you can’t improve on perfection.”

“I so much want to look nice for you, Victor.”

“Then wash most of that stuff off. Let your natural beauty shine through. I’ve given you everything you need to dazzle.”

“How sweet,” she said, but she seemed uncertain whether she had been complimented or criticized.

“The district attorney’s wife, the university president’s wife—none of them will be painted like pop-music divas.”

Her smile faltered. Victor believed that directness with a subordinate—or a wife—was always preferable to criticism couched to spare feelings.

Standing close behind her, he slid his hands along her bare shoulders, bent close to smell her hair. He pulled that glorious mane aside, kissed the nape of her neck—and felt her shiver.

He fingered her emerald necklace. “Diamonds would be a better choice. Please change it. For me.”

In the vanity mirror, she met his eyes, then lowered her gaze to the array of makeup brushes and bottles before her. She spoke in a whisper: “Your standards for everything are…so high.”

He kissed her neck again and matched her whisper: “That’s why I made you. My wife.”

CHAPTER 19

IN THE CAR, on the way to the Quarter for a grab-it dinner in Jackson Square, Carson and Michael ping-ponged the case.

She said, “Allwine wasn’t chloroformed.”

“We don’t have blood results yet.”

“Remember his face. He wasn’t chloroformed. That makes him and the dry cleaner, Chaterie, the exceptions.”

“The other male, Bradford Walden, was chloroformed,” Michael said. “Otherwise, those three make a set.”

“The Surgeon took their internal organs as souvenirs.”

“But from the women he only takes ears, feet, hands…Did Nancy Whistler e-mail you that list of people with library keys?”

“Yeah. But after seeing Allwine’s apartment, I think he opened the door for the killer, the guy didn’t need a key.”

“How do you get to that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

“Let’s do some victimology analysis,” Michael suggested. “First…I’ve given up on the idea the victims are connected to one another somehow. They’re random prey.”

“How did you analyze your way to that?”

“Now and then,” he said, “I have a feeling of my own.”

“Any significance to which body part he takes from any particular victim?”

“Elizabeth Lavenza, swimming without her hands. Are hands of special importance in her life, her work? Is she a pianist? Maybe an artist? Maybe a massage therapist?”

“As you know, she was a clerk in a bookstore.”

“Meg Saville, the tourist from Idaho.”

“Took her feet.”

“She wasn’t a ballet dancer. Just a receptionist.”

“He takes a nurse’s ears, a university student’s legs,” Carson said. “If there’s significance, it’s inscrutable.”

“He takes the dry cleaner’s liver, the bartender’s kidney. If he’d carved the bartender’s liver, we might build a theory on that.”

“Pathetic,” she said.

“Totally,” he agreed. “The bartender had a Goth lifestyle, and Allwine lived in black. Is that a connection?”

“I didn’t get Goth from his apartment, just crazy.”

She parked illegally in Jackson Square, near a Cajun restaurant favored by cops.

Just as they reached the entrance, Harker exited the place with a large bag of takeout, bringing with him the mouthwatering aroma of blackened catfish, reminding Carson that she’d skipped lunch.

As if not in the least surprised to see them, as if picking up in midconversation, Harker said, “Word is the mayor might push for a task force as early as the weekend. If we’ll be teaming this later, we might as well start swapping thoughts now.”

To Harker, Carson said, “Surely you gotta know your reputation. Everyone in the department pegs you and Frye for glory hogs.”

“Envy,” Harker said dismissively “We close more cases than anyone.”

“Sometimes by popping the suspect,” Michael said, referring to a recent officer-involved shooting for which Harker had narrowly avoided being brought up on charges.

Harker’s smile was contemptuous. “You want my theory about the library security guard?”

Michael said, “Do I want pancreatic cancer?”

“The black rooms are a death wish,” Harker conjectured.

“Damn,” Carson said.

“He tried to slash his wrists with each of those razor blades in the bathroom wall,” Harker continued. “But he just couldn’t find the courage.”

“You and Frye went to Allwine’s apartment?”

“Yeah. You two,” Harker said, “you’re our babies, and we sometimes feel the need to burp you.”

He pushed between them, walked away, glanced back after a few steps. “When you have a theory, I’ll be happy to listen to it.”

To Carson, Michael said, “I’ve got a short list of hearts I’d like to cut out.”

CHAPTER 20

AFTER VICTOR LEFT the master suite, Erika slipped into a St. John dress that managed to be sensational yet respectable, subtly sexy but classy

Standing in front of a full-length mirror in her enormous walk-in closet, which was as big as most master bedrooms, she knew that she looked enchanting, that she would leave an indelible impression on every man at the dinner. Nevertheless, she felt inadequate.

She would have tried other dresses if the first guests had not been scheduled to arrive in mere minutes. Victor expected her to be at his side to greet each arrival, and she dared not fail him.

All of her clothes were behind doors or in drawers along three aisles. She owned literally hundreds of outfits.

She hadn’t shopped for any of them. Having created her to his ideal measurements, Victor had purchased everything while she had still been in the tank.

Perhaps he’d bought some of these things for the previous Erika. She didn’t like to think about that.

She hoped that someday she would be allowed to shop for herself. When Victor allowed that, she would know she had at last met his standards and earned his trust.

Briefly, she wondered what it would be like not to care what Victor—or anyone—thought of her. To be herself. Independent.

Those were dangerous thoughts. She must repress them.

At the back of the closet, perhaps two hundred pairs of shoes were stored on canted shelves. Although she knew that time was of the essence, she dithered between Gucci and Kate Spade.

Behind her in the closet, something rustled, something thumped.

She turned to look back at the center aisle but saw only closed cherrywood doors behind which hung some of her seasonal wardrobe, and pale yellow carpet. She peeked into the right-hand aisle, then into the left, but they were also deserted.

Refocusing on her dilemma, she finally resolved it by choosing the Kate Spades. Carrying them in one hand, she hurried out of the closet into her dressing room.

Entering, she thought she saw movement from the corner of her eye, on the floor at the open doorway to the bedroom. When she turned her head, nothing was there.

Curious, she went into the bedroom nevertheless—just in time to see the silk spread flutter behind something that had just slipped under the king-size bed.

They had no house pets, no dog, no cat.

Victor would be furious if it turned out that a rat had gotten into the house. He had zero tolerance for vermin.

Erika had been made to be cautious of danger but to fear nothing in the extreme—although her programmed respect for her maker came close to fear at times.

If a rat had gotten into the house and if now it hid under the bed, she would not hesitate to snare it and dispose of it.

She set aside the Kate Spades and dropped to her knees beside the bed. She had no doubt that her reflexes were quick enough to snatch a scurrying rat.

When she lifted the spread and looked under the bed, her superb vision required no flashlight. But nothing lurked beneath the boxed springs.

She got to her feet and turned, surveying the room. She sensed that something was here, but she didn’t have time to search behind every piece of furniture.

Conscious of time racing rat-fast, she sat on the edge of an armchair, near the fireplace, and pulled on her shoes. They were beautiful, but she would have liked them more if she had bought them herself.

She sat for a moment, listening. Silence. But this was the kind of silence that suggested something might be listening to her as she listened for it.

When she left the master suite for the upstairs hall, she closed the door behind her. It fit tight. Nothing could get under it. If a rat was loose in the bedroom, it couldn’t get downstairs to spoil the dinner party.

She descended the grand staircase, and as she reached the foyer, the doorbell rang. The first guests had arrived.

CHAPTER 21

AS ROY PRIBEAUX dressed in black slacks, a pale-blue silk sport jacket, and a white linen shirt for his date with Candace—those eyes!—an all-news channel on TV did a segment about the Surgeon.

What an absurd name they had given him. He was a romantic. He was an idealist from a family of idealists. He was a purist. He was many things, but he was not a surgeon.

He knew they were talking about him, though he did not closely follow the media response to his harvests. He hadn’t begun his collection of female perfection with the hope that he would become a celebrity. Fame had no appeal for him.

Of course his quest generated public interest for all the wrong reasons. They saw violence, not art. They saw blood, not the work of a dreamer who sought perfection in all things.

He had only contempt for the media and for the audience to which they pandered. Knaves speaking to fools.

Having come from a prominent family of politicians—his father and grandfather had served the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana—he had seen with what ease the public could be manipulated by the clever use of envy and fear. His family had been expert at it.

In the process, the Pribeauxs had greatly enriched themselves. His grandfather and father had done so well in public service that Roy himself had never needed to work and never would.

Like great artists during the Renaissance, he had patrons: generations of taxpayers. His inheritance allowed him to devote his life to the pursuit of ideal beauty.

When the TV reporter mentioned the most recent two victims, Roy’s attention was suddenly focused by the coupling of an unknown name—Bobby Allwine—with that of Elizabeth Lavenza. He had harvested Elizabeth’s lovely hands before consigning the depressingly imperfect remainder of her to the City Park lagoon.

The heart had been removed from this Allwine person.

Roy had no interest in hearts. He wasn’t about internals. He was about externals. The kind of beauty that moved Roy was skin deep.

Furthermore, this Allwine person was a man. Roy had no interest in the ideal beauty of men—except in the constant refinement and perfection of his own physique.

Now, standing before the TV, he was further surprised to hear that Allwine was the third man whom the Surgeon had murdered. From the others he had taken a kidney and a liver.

These murders were linked to those of the women by the fact that at least one of the male victims had been chloroformed.

Copycat. Misguided imitator. Out there somewhere in New Orleans, an envious fool had been inspired by Roy’s murders without understanding the purpose of them.

For a moment, he was offended. Then he realized that the copycat, inevitably less intelligent than Roy himself, would eventually screw up, and the police would pin all these killings on the guy. The copycat was Roy’s get-out-of-jail-free card.

CHAPTER 22

THE PROJECTION BOOTH might have seemed too small for two men as large—in different ways—as Jelly Biggs and Deucalion. Nevertheless, it became the space they shared when they preferred not to be alone.

The booth was cozy, perhaps because of Jelly’s collection of paperback books, perhaps because it felt like a high redoubt above the fray of life.

For extended periods of his long existence, Deucalion had found solitude appealing. One of those periods had ended in Tibet.

Now, with the discovery that Victor was not dead, solitude disturbed Deucalion. He wanted companionship.

As former carnies, he and Jelly had a world of experience in common, tales to tell, nostalgic reminiscences to share. In but one day they found that they fell into easy conversation, and Deucalion suspected that in time they would become true friends.

Yet they fell into silences, as well, for their situation was similar to that of soldiers in a battlefield trench, in the deceptive calm before the mortar fire began. In this condition, they had profound questions to ponder before they were ready to discuss them.

Jelly did his thinking while reading mystery novels of which he was inexpressibly fond. Much of his life, imprisoned in flesh, he had lived vicariously through the police, the private investigators, and the amateur detectives who populated the pages of his favorite genre.

In these mutual silences, Deucalion’s reading consisted of the articles about Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, that Ben had accumulated. He pored through them, trying to accustom himself to the bitter, incredible truth of his creator’s continued existence, while also contemplating how best to destroy that pillar of arrogance.

Again and again, he caught himself unconsciously fingering the ruined half of his face until eventually Jelly could not refrain from asking how the damage had been done.

“I angered my maker,” Deucalion said.

“We all do,” Jelly said, “but not with such consequences.”

“My maker isn’t yours,” Deucalion reminded him.

A life of much solitude and contemplation accustomed Deucalion to silence, but Jelly needed background noise even when reading a novel. In a corner of the projection booth, volume low, stood a TV flickering with images that to Deucalion had no more narrative content than did the flames in a fireplace.

Suddenly something in one of the droning newscast voices caught his attention. Murders. Body parts missing.

Deucalion turned up the volume. A homicide detective named Carson O’Connor, beseiged by reporters outside the city library, responded to most of their questions with replies that in different words all amounted to no comment.

When the story ended, Deucalion said, “The Surgeon How long has this been going on?”

As a mystery novel aficionado, Jelly was interested in true crime stories, too. He not only knew all the gory details of the Surgeon’s murder spree; he also had developed a couple of theories that he felt were superior to any that the police had thus far put forth.

Listening, Deucalion had suspicions of his own that grew from his unique experience.

Most likely, the Surgeon was an ordinary serial killer taking souvenirs. But in a city where the god of the living dead had taken up residence, the Surgeon might be something worse than the usual psychopath.

Returning the clippings to the shoe box, rising to his feet, Deucalion said, “I’m going out.”

“Where?”

“To find his house. To see in what style a self-appointed god chooses to live these days.”

CHAPTER 23

ILLEGALLY PARKED IN Jackson Square, the hood of the plainwrap sedan served as their dinner table.

Carson and Michael ate corn-battered shrimp, shrimp étouffée with rice, and corn maque choux from take-out containers.

Strolling along the sidewalk were young couples hand-in-hand. Musicians in black suits and porkpie hats hurried past, carrying instrument cases, shouldering between slower-moving older Cajun men in chambray shirts and Justin Wilson hats. Groups of young women showed more skin than common sense, and drag queens enjoyed the goggling of tourists.

Somewhere good jazz was playing. Through the night air wove a tapestry of talk and laughter.

Carson said, “What pisses me off about guys like Harker and Frye—”

“This’ll be an epic list,” Michael said.

“—is how I let them irritate me.”

“They’re cheesed off because no one makes detective as young as we did.”

“That was three years ago for me. They better adjust soon.”

“They’ll retire, get shot. One way or another, we’ll eventually have our chance to be the old cranks.”

After savoring a forkful of corn maque choux, Carson said, “It’s all about my father.”

“Harker and Frye don’t care about what your father did or didn’t do,” Michael assured her.

“You’re wrong. Everyone expects that sooner or later it’ll turn out I carry the dirty-cop gene, just like they think he did.”

Michael shook his head, “I don’t for a minute think you carry the dirty-cop gene.”

“I don’t give a shit what you think, Michael, I know what you think. It’s what everyone else thinks that makes this job so much harder for me than it ought to be.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, pretending offense, “I don’t give a shit that you don’t give a shit what I think.”

Chagrined, Carson laughed softly. “I’m sorry, man. You’re one of a handful of people I do care what they think of me.”

“You wounded me,” he said. “But I’ll heal.”

“I’ve worked hard to get where I am.” She sighed. “Except where I am is eating another meal on my feet, in the street.”

“The food’s great,” he said, “and I’m glittering company.”

“Considering the pay, why do we work so hard?”

“We’re genuine American heroes.”

“Yeah, right.”

Michael’s cell phone rang. Licking Creole tartar sauce off his lips, he answered the call: “Detective Maddison.” When he hung up moments later, he said, “We’re invited to the morgue. No music, no dancing. But it might be fun.”

CHAPTER 24

CARESSED BY CANDLELIGHT, the chased surfaces of classic silver seemed perpetually about to melt.

“With five movers and shakers and their spouses gathered in his dining room, Victor looked forward to stimulating conversation that he could guide subtly into channels that would serve his interests long after the mayor, the district attorney, the university president, and the others had left his table. To Victor, every social occasion was primarily an opportunity to influence political and cultural leaders, discreetly advancing his agenda.

Initially, of course, the talk was of frivolous things, even among such accomplished guests. But Victor fancied himself to be as capable of light chatter as anyone and could enjoy this witty froth because it sharpened his anticipation for meatier discussion.

William and Christine served the soup, the butler holding the tureen while the maid ladled a creamy pink richness into the bowls.

This was Erika’s third dinner party in the five weeks since she had risen from the tank, and she exhibited some improvement in her social skills, though less than he had hoped.

He saw her frown as she noticed that the flower arrangements were different from those that she had painstakingly created. She possessed the good sense to say nothing of the change.

When his wife glanced at him, however, Victor said, “The roses are perfect,” so she would learn from her error.

District Attorney Watkins, whose once-patrician nose had begun subtly to deform as inhaled cocaine ate away supporting cartilage, used one hand to fan the rising aroma from the bowl to his nostrils. “Erika, the soup smells delicious.”

John Watkins’s opponent in the next election—Buddy Guitreau—was one of Victor’s people. With all the dirt about Watkins that Victor could provide, Buddy would romp to victory at the polls. In the months until then, however, it was necessary to flatter Watkins with dinner invitations and to work with him.

“I love lobster bisque,” said Pamela Watkins. “Is this your recipe, Erika?”

“No. I found it in a magazine, but I added some spices. I doubt I’ve improved it, probably the opposite, but I like even lobster bisque to have a little bite.”

“Oh, it’s divine,” the university president’s wife declared after her first taste.

This compliment, at once echoed by others, brought a glow of pride to Erika’s face, but when she herself raised a spoonful to her mouth, she took it with a soft, protracted slurp.

Appalled, Victor watched her dip the spoon into the bowl once more.

Soup had not been on the menu at either of their previous dinner parties, and Victor had taken a meal with Erika only twice otherwise. Her faux pas surprised and unsettled him.

She sucked in the second spoonful no less noisily than she had the first.

Although none of the guests appeared to notice this ghastly play of tongue and lips, Victor took offense that as his wife she should risk being mocked. Those who might laugh at her behind her back would also laugh at him.

He announced, “The bisque is curdled. William, Christine, please remove it at once.”

“Curdled?” the mayor’s wife asked, bewildered. “Not mine.”

“Curdled,” Victor insisted as the servants quickly retrieved the soup bowls. ‘And you don’t want to eat a lobster dish when it might be in any way off.”

Stricken, Erika watched as the bowls were removed from the table.

“I’m sorry, Erika,” Victor said, into an awkward silence. “This is the first time I’ve ever found fault with your cooking—or with anything about you.”

John Watkins protested, “Mine was delicious.”

Although she might not have understood the cause of Victor’s action, Erika recovered quickly. “No, John. You’ve always got my vote for district attorney. But in culinary matters, I trust Victor. His palate is as refined as any chef’s.”

Victor felt his clenched jaw relaxing into a genuine smile. In part, Erika had redeemed herself.

CHAPTER 25

THE GRAY VINYL-TILE FLOOR squeaked under Carson’s and Michael’s shoes. Although subtle, the sounds seemed loud in the otherwise silent hallway.

The forensic pathology unit appeared to be deserted. At this hour, staffing should have been reduced but not this drastically

They found Jack Rogers where he said he’d be—in Autopsy Room Number 2. With him were the professionally fileted corpse of Bobby Allwine, supine upon a guttered steel table, and a lanky young assistant whom Jack introduced as Luke.

“Trumped up an excuse to send the rest of the night staff home,” Jack said. “Didn’t want to take a chance of some chatterbox getting a glimpse of what we’ve got here.”

“And what do we have?” Carson asked.

“A miracle,”Jack said. “Except I get a squamous feeling, like it’s too dark a miracle to have anything to do with God. That’s why only Luke and I are here. Luke isn’t a gossiping jackass, are you, Luke?”

“No, sir.”

Luke’s slightly protuberant eyes, long nose, and longer chin gave him a scholarly look, as if books exerted such an attraction on him that they had pulled his features toward the contents of their pages.

Potbellied, with a hound-dog face full of sags and swags that added years to his true age, Jack Rogers looked older now than he usually did. Although his excitement was palpable, his face had a gray tinge.

“Luke’s got a good eye for physiological anomalies,” Jack said. “He knows his guts.”

Luke nodded, taking pride in his boss’s praise. “I’ve just always been interested in viscera since I was a kid.”

“With me,” Michael said, “it was baseball.”

Jack said, “Luke and I completed every phase of the internal examination. Head, body cavities, neck, respiratory tract—”

“Cardiovascular system,” Luke continued, “gastrointestinal tract, biliary tract, pancreas, spleen, adrenals—”

“Urinary tract, reproductive tract, and musculoskeletal system,” Jack concluded.

The cadaver on the table certainly appeared to have been well explored.

If the body had not been so fresh, Carson would have wanted to grease her nostrils with Vicks. She could tolerate this lesser stench of violated stomach and intestines.

“Every phase revealed such bizarre anatomy,” Jack said, “we’re going back through again to see what we might’ve missed.”

“Bizarre? Such as?”

“He had two hearts.”

“What do you mean two hearts?”

“Two. The number after one, before three. Uno, dos.”

“In other words,” Luke said earnestly, “twice as many as he should have had.”

“We got that part,” Michael assured him. “But at the library, we saw Allwine’s chest open. You could have parked a Volkswagen in there. If everything’s missing, how do you know he had two hearts?”

“For one thing, the associated plumbing,” Jack said. “He had the arteries and veins to serve a double pump. The indicators are numerous. They’ll all be in my final report. But that’s not the only thing weird about Allwine.”

“What else?”

“Skull bone’s as dense as armor. I burnt out two electric trepanning saws trying to cut through it.”

“He had a pair of livers, too,” said Luke, “and a twelve-ounce spleen. The average spleen is seven ounces.”

“A more extensive lymphatic system than you’ll ever see in a textbook,” Jack continued. “Plus two organs—I don’t even know what they are.”

“So he was some kind of freak,” Michael said. “He looked normal on the outside. Maybe not a male model, but not the Elephant Man, either. Inside, he’s all screwed up.”

“Nature is full of freaks,” Luke said. “Snakes with two heads. Frogs with five legs. Siamese twins. You’d be surprised how many people are born with six fingers on one hand or the other. But that’s not like”—he patted Allwine’s bare foot—“our buddy here.”

Having trouble getting her mind around the meaning of all this, Carson said, “So what are the odds of this? Ten million to one?”

Wiping the back of his shirt sleeve across his damp brow, Jack Rogers said, “Get real, O’Connor. Nothing like this is possible, period. This isn’t mutation. This is design.”

For a moment she didn’t know what to say, and perhaps for the first time ever, even Michael was at a loss for words.

Anticipating them, Jack said, “And don’t ask me what I mean by design. Damn if I know.”

“It’s just,” Luke elaborated, “that all these things look like they’re meant to be…improvements.”

Carson said, “The Surgeon’s other victims…you didn’t find anything weird in them?”

“Zip, zero, nada. You read the reports.”

Such an aura of unreality had descended upon the room that Carson wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if the eviscerated cadaver had sat up on the autopsy table and tried to explain itself.

Michael said, “Jack, we’d sure like to embargo your autopsy report on Allwine. File it here but don’t send a copy to us. Our doc box is being raided lately, and we don’t want anyone else to know about this for…say forty-eight hours.”

“And don’t file it under Allwine’s name or the case number where it can be found,” Carson suggested. “Blind file it under…”

“Munster, Herman,” Michael suggested.

Jack Rogers was smart about a lot more things than viscera. The bags under his eyes seemed to darken as he said, “This isn’t the only weird thing you’ve got, is it?”

“Well, you know the crime scene was strange,” Carson said.

“That’s not all you’ve got, either.”

“His apartment was a freak’s crib,” Michael revealed. “The guy was as psychologically weird as anything you found inside him.”

“What about chloroform?” Carson asked. “Was it used on Allwine?”

“Won’t have blood results until tomorrow,” Jack said. “But I’m not going out on a limb when I say we won’t find chloroform. This guy couldn’t have been overcome by it.”

“Why not?”

“Given his physiology, it wouldn’t have worked as fast on him as on you or me.”

“How fast?”

“Hard to say. Five seconds. Ten.”

“Besides,” Luke offered, “if you tried to clamp a chloroform-soaked cloth over his face, Allwine’s reflexes would have been faster than yours…or mine.”

Jack nodded agreement. “And he would have been strong. Far too strong to have been restrained by an ordinary man for a moment, let alone long enough for the chloroform to work.”

Remembering the peaceful expression on Bobby Allwine’s face when his body lay on the library floor, Carson considered her initial perception that he had welcomed his own murder. She could make no more sense of that hypothesis, however, than she had done earlier.

Moments later, outside in the parking lot, as she and Michael approached the sedan, the light of the moon seemed to ripple through the thick humid air as it might across the surface of a breeze-stirred pond.

Carson remembered Elizabeth Lavenza, handless, floating facedown in the lagoon.

Suddenly she seemed half-drowned in the murky fathoms of this case, and felt an almost panicky need to thrash to the surface and leave the investigation to others.

CHAPTER 26

TO ALL OUTWARD APPEARANCES, Randal Six, Mercy-born and Mercy-raised, has been in various degrees of autistic trance all day, but inwardly he has passed those hours in turmoil.

The previous night, he dreamed of Arnie O’Connor, the boy in the newspaper clipping, the smiling autistic. In the dream, he requested the formula for happiness, but the O’Connor boy mocked him and would not share his secret.

Now Randal Six sits at his desk, at the computer on which he occasionally plays competitive crossword puzzles with gamers in far cities. Word games are not his purpose this evening.

He has found a site on which he can study maps of the city of New Orleans. Because this site also offers a city directory of all property owners, he has been able to learn the address of Detective Carson O’Connor, with whom the selfish Arnie resides.

The number of blocks separating Randal from their house is daunting. So much distance, so many people, untold obstacles, so much disorder.

Furthermore, this web site offers three-dimensional maps of the French Quarter, the Garden District, and several other historic areas of the city. Every time he makes use of these more elaborate guides, he is quickly overcome by attacks of agoraphobia.

If he responds with such terror to the virtual reality of the cartoonlike dimensional maps, he will be paralyzed by the vastness and chaos of the world itself if ever he steps beyond these walls.

Yet he persists in studying the three-dimensional maps, for he is motivated by intense desire. His desire is to find happiness of the kind that he believes he has seen in the smile of Arnie O’Connor.

In the virtual reality of New Orleans on his computer screen, one street leads to another. Every intersection offers choices. Every block is lined with businesses, residences. Each of them is a choice.

In the real world, a maze of streets might lead him a hundred or a thousand miles. In that journey, he would be confronted with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of choices.

The enormity of this challenge overwhelms him once more, and he retreats in a panic to a corner, his back to his room. He cannot move forward. Nothing confronts him except the junction of two walls.

His only choices are to stay facing the corner or turn to the larger room. As long as he doesn’t turn, his fear subsides. Here he is safe. Here is order: the simple geometry of two walls meeting.

In time he is somewhat calmed by this pinched vista, but to be fully calmed, he needs his crosswords. In an armchair, Randal Six sits with another collection of puzzles.

He likes crosswords because there are not multiple right choices for each square; only one choice will result in the correct solution. All is predestined.

Cross YULETIDE with CHRISTMAS, cross CHRISTMAS with MYRRH…Eventually every square will be filled; all words will be complete and will intersect correctly. The predestined solution will have been achieved. Order. Stasis. Peace.

As he fills the squares with letters, a startling thought occurs to Randal. Perhaps he and the selfish Arnie O’Connor are predestined to meet.

If he, Randal Six, is predestined to come face to face with the other boy and to take the precious secret of happiness from him, what seems now like a long harrowing journey to the O’Connor house will prove to be as simple as crossing this small room.

He cannot stop working the crossword, for he desperately needs the temporary peace that its completion will bring him. Nevertheless, as he reads the clues and inks the letters in the empty squares, he considers the possibility that finding happiness by relieving Arnie O’Connor of it might prove to be not a dream but a destiny.

CHAPTER 27

DRIVING AWAY FROM the medical examiner’s office, into a world transformed by what they had just learned, Carson said, “Two hearts? Strange new organs? Designer freaks?”

“I’m wondering,” Michael said, “if I missed a class at the police academy.”

“Did Jack smell sober to you?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. Maybe he’s nuts.”

“He’s not nuts.”

“People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.”

“What people?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Stalin.”

“Stalin was not perfectly sane on Tuesday. Besides, he wasn’t insane, he was evil.”

“Jack Rogers isn’t evil,” Michael said. “If he’s not drunk, insane, or evil, I guess we’re going to have to believe him.”

“You think somehow Luke might be hoaxing old Jack?”

“Luke ‘been-interested-in-viscera-since-I-was-a-kid’? First of all, it would be a way elaborate hoax. Second, Jack is smarter than Luke. Third, Luke—he’s got about as much sense of humor as a graveyard rat.”

A disguise of clouds transformed the full moon into a crescent. The pale flush of streetlamps on glossy magnolia leaves produced an illusion of ice, of a northern climate in balmy New Orleans.

“Nothing is what it seems,” Carson said.

“Is that just an observation,” Michael asked, “or should I worry about being washed away by a flood of philosophy?”

“My father wasn’t a corrupt cop.”

“Whatever you say You knew him best.”

“He never stole confiscated drugs out of the evidence lockup.”

“The past is past,” Michael advised.

Braking to a stop at a red traffic light, she said, “A man’s reputation shouldn’t have to be destroyed forever by lies. There ought to be a hope of justice, redemption.”

Michael chose respectful silence.

“Dad and Mom weren’t shot to death by some drug dealer who felt Dad was poaching on his territory. That’s all bullshit.”

She hadn’t spoken aloud of these things in a long time. To do so was painful.

“Dad had discovered something that powerful people preferred to keep secret. He shared it with Mom, which is why she was shot, too. I know he was troubled about something he had seen. I just don’t know what it was.”

“Carson, we looked at the evidence in his case a hundred times,” Michael reminded her, “and we agreed it’s too airtight to be real. No file of evidence is ever braided that tight unless it’s concocted. In my book, it’s proof of a frame. But that’s the problem, too.”

He was right. The evidence had been crafted not only with the intent of convicting her father postmortem, but to leave no clue as to the identity of those who had crafted it. She had long sought the one loose thread that would unravel it, but no such thread could be found.

As the traffic light turned green, Carson said, “We’re not far from my place. I’m sure Vicky’s got everything under control, but I feel like I ought to check on Arnie, if that’s okay.”

“Sure. I could use some of Vicky’s bad coffee.”

CHAPTER 28

IN THE MASTER BEDROOM of the Helios estate, all was not well.

What Victor wanted from sex exceeded mere pleasure. Furthermore, he did not merely want to be satisfied but fully expected to be. His expectation was in fact a demand.

According to Victor’s philosophy, the world had no dimension but the material. The only rational response to the forces of nature and of human civilization was to attempt to dominate them rather than be humbled by them.

There were serfs and there were masters. He himself would never wear a slave’s collar.

If there was no spiritual side to life, then there could be no such thing as love except in the minds of fools; for love is a state of spirit, not of flesh. In his view, tenderness had no place in a sexual relationship.

At its best, sex was a chance for the dominant person to express control of the submissive partner. The fierceness of the dominance and the completeness of the submission led to satisfaction of greater intensity than love could have provided even if love had existed.

Erika Four, like the three before her and like the other brides that he had made for himself, was not a partner in the traditional sense of marriage. To Victor, she was an accoutrement that allowed him to function more effectively in social situations, a defense against the annoyance of women who saw in him the prospect of wealth by marriage, and an instrument of pleasure.

Because pleasure and power were synonymous to him, the intensity of his satisfaction was directly proportional to the cruelty with which he used her. He was often very satisfied.

Like all of his modern creations, in a crisis she could block the perception of pain at will. During sex, he did not permit her to do so. Her submission would be more satisfyingly complete and genuine if she were made to suffer.

If he struck her particularly hard, the evidence would be gone in hours, for like all his people, she healed rapidly. Bleeding lasted less than a minute. Cuts healed without scars in a few hours. Bruises sustained in the night would have faded by dawn.

Most of his people were psychologically engineered to be utterly incapable of humiliation, for shame in all its shades grew from an acceptance of the belief that Moral Law lay at the heart of creation. In the war against ordinary humanity, which he would one day launch, he required soldiers without moral compunctions, so certain of their superiority that no ruthlessness would be beyond them.

He allowed Erika humility, however, because from humility arose a quality of innocence. Although he was not entirely sure why this should be the case, the mildest abuse of a delicate sensibility was more thrilling than committing savageries against a woman who lacked all innocence.

He forced her to endure the things that most shamed her because, ironically, the greater her shame and self-disgust, the further she would lower herself and the more obedient she would become. He had made her strong in many ways, but not so strong that he could not break her will and mold her as he wished.

He valued subservience in a wife more if it had been beaten into her than if it had been engineered in the tank, for in the latter case, her slavish obedience felt mechanical and dull.

Although he could remember a time, centuries ago in his youth, when he had felt differently about women and marriage, he could not recall or understand why that young Victor had felt the way he did, what belief had motivated him. He didn’t actually try to understand, however, because he had for a long time taken this different road, and there was no going back.

Young Victor had also believed in the power of the human will to bend nature to its desires; and it was that aspect of his early self with which Victor could still identify. All that mattered was the triumph of the will.

What was wrong here in the bedroom was that for once his will failed to bend reality to its desire. He wanted sexual satisfaction, but it eluded him.

His mind kept straying back to the dinner party, to the sight and sound of Erika noisily sucking soup from spoon.

At last he rolled off her, onto his back, defeated.

They stared at the ceiling in silence until she whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe the fault is mine,” he said, meaning that perhaps he had made some mistake in the creation of her.

“I don’t excite you.”

“Usually, yes. Not tonight.”

“I’ll learn,” she promised. “I’ll improve.”

“Yes,” he said, for that was what she must do if she hoped to keep her role, but he had begun to doubt that Erika Four would be the final Erika.

“I’m going to the hospital,” he said. “I’m in a creative mood.”

“The Hands of Mercy” She shuddered. “I think I dream of it.”

“You don’t. I spare all of you from dreams of your origins.”

“I dream of someplace,” she persisted. “Dark and strange and full of death.”

“There’s your proof that it’s not the Hands of Mercy. My labs are full of life.”

Both bored with Erika and troubled by the direction of her musings, Victor rose from the bed and went naked into the bathroom.

A jewel in this mounting of gold-plated fixtures and marble-clad walls, he looked at himself in the beveled mirrors and saw something much more than human.

“Perfection,” he said, though he knew that he was just shy of that ideal.

Looping through his torso, embedded in his flesh, entwining his ribs, spiraling around his spine, a flexible metallic cord and its associated implants converted simple electrical current—to which he submitted himself twice a day—into a different energy, a stimulating charge that sustained a youthful rate of cellular division and held biological time at bay.

His body was a mass of scars and strange excrescences, but he found them beautiful. They were the consequences of the procedures by which he’d gained immortality; they were the badges of his divinity.

One day he would clone a body from his DNA, enhance it with the many improvements he had developed, expedite its growth, and with the assistance of surgeons of his making, he’d have his brain transferred to that new home.

When that work was finished, he would be the model of physical perfection, but he would miss his scars. They were proof of his persistence, his genius, and the triumph of his will.

Now he got dressed, looking forward to a long night in his main laboratory at the Hands of Mercy.

CHAPTER 29

WHILE CARSON CHECKED on her castle-building brother, Michael stood at a kitchen counter with a mug of Vicky’s coffee.

Having just finished cleaning the oven, Vicky Chou said, “How’s the java?”

“As bitter as bile,” he said.

“But not acidic.”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t know how you manage to make it bitter without it being acidic, but you do.”

She winked. “My secret.”

“Stuff’s as black as tar. This isn’t a mistake. You actually try to get it like this, don’t you?”

“If it’s so terrible,” she said, “why do you always drink it?”

“It’s a test of my manhood.” He took a long swallow that made his face pucker. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, but you’ll tell me to shut up, you don’t want to know.”

Washing her hands at the sink, she said, “I have to listen to you, Michael. It’s part of my job description.”

He hesitated but then said, “I’ve been thinking how things might be if Carson and I weren’t partners.”

“What things?”

“Between her and me.”

“Is there something between you and her?”

“The badge,” he said mournfully. “She’s too solid a cop, too professional to date a partner.”

“The bitch,” Vicky said drily.

Michael smiled, sampled the coffee, grimaced. “Problem is, if I changed partners so we could date, I’d miss kicking ass and busting heads together.”

“Maybe that’s how the two of you relate best.”

“There’s a depressing thought.”

Vicky clearly had more to say, but she clammed up when Carson entered the kitchen.

“Vicky,” Carson said, “I know you’re good about keeping doors locked. But for a while, let’s be even more security conscious.”

Frowning, Vicky asked, “What’s wrong?”

“This weird case we’re on…it feels like…if we’re not careful, it could come home to us, right here.” She glanced at Michael. “Does that sound paranoid?”

“No,” he said, and finished the rest of the bitter coffee as though the taste of it would make their unsatisfying relationship seem sweeter by comparison.

IN THE CAR AGAIN, as Carson swung away from the curb, Michael popped a breath mint in his mouth to kill the sour stench of Vicky’s death brew. “Two hearts…organs of unknown purpose…I can’t get Invasion of the Body Snatchers out of my head, pod people growing in the basement.”

“It’s not aliens.”

“Maybe not. Then I think…weird cosmic radiation, pollution, genetic engineering, too much mustard in the American diet.”

“Psychological profiles and CSI techs won’t be worth a damn on this one,” Carson said. She yawned. “Long day. Can’t think straight anymore. What if I just drive you home and we call it a wrap?”

“Sounds swell. I’ve got a new pair of monkey-pattern jammies I’m eager to try on.”

She took a ramp to the expressway, headed west toward Metairie. The traffic was mercifully light.

They rode in silence for a while, but then he said, “You know, if you ever want to petition the chief of detectives to reopen your dad’s case and let us take a whack at it, I’m game.”

She shook her head. “Wouldn’t do it unless I had something new—a fresh bit of evidence, a different slant on the investigation, something. Otherwise, we’d just be turned down.”

“We sneak a copy of the file, review the evidence on our own time, look into it until we turn up the scrap we need.”

“Right now,” she said wearily, “we don’t really have any time of our own.”

As they exited the expressway, he said, “The Surgeon case will break. Things will ease up. Just remember, I’m ready when you are.”

She smiled. He loved her smile. He didn’t see enough of it.

“Thanks, Michael. You’re a good guy.”

He would have preferred to hear her say that he was the love of her life, but “good guy” was at least a starting point.

When she pulled to the curb in front of his apartment house, she yawned again and said, “I’m beat. Exhausted.”

“So exhausted, you can’t wait to go straight back to Allwine’s apartment.”

Her smile was smaller this time. “You read me too well.”

“You wouldn’t have stopped to check on Arnie if you intended to go home after dropping me off.”

“I should know better than to bullshit a homicide dick. It’s those black rooms, Michael. I need…to work them alone.”

“Get in touch with your inner psychic.”

“Something like that.”

He got out of the car, then leaned in through the open door. “Ditch the twelve-hour days, Carson. There’s no one you’ve got to prove anything to. Not anyone on the force. Not your dad.”

“There’s me.”

He closed the door and watched her drive away. He knew that she was tough enough to take care of herself, but he worried about her.

He almost wished that she were more vulnerable. It half broke his heart that she didn’t need him desperately.

CHAPTER 30

ROY PRIBEAUX ENJOYED the date more than he expected. Usually it was an annoying interlude between the planning of the murder and the commission of it.

Candace proved to be shy but charming, genuinely sweet with a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor.

They had coffee in a riverfront café. When they fell at once into easy conversation about a host of subjects, Roy was surprised but also pleased. The lack of any initial awkwardness would more quickly disarm the poor thing.

After a while she asked him exactly what he’d meant the previous night when he’d called himself a Christian man. Of what denomination, what commitment?

He knew at once that this was the key with which to unlock her trust and win her heart. He had used the Christian gambit in a couple of other instances, and with the right woman, it had worked as well as the expectation of great sex or even of love.

Why he, an Adonis, should be interested in a schlump like her—that mystery fed her suspicion. It made her wary.

If she believed, however, that he was a man of genuine moral principle who sought a virtuous companion and not just a good hump, she would see him as one with higher standards than physical beauty. She would convince herself that her lovely eyes were enough physical beauty for him and that what he really prized was her innocence, her chastity, her personality, and her piety.

The trick was to divine the brand of Christianity that she had embraced, then convince her that they shared that particular flavor of the faith. If she was a Pentecostal, his approach would have to be far different from that required if she was a Catholic, and much different from the worldly and ironic style that he must assume if she was Unitarian.

Fortunately, she proved to be an Episcopalian, which Roy found markedly easier to fake than one of the more passionate sects. He might have been lost if she’d been a Seventh Day Adventist.

She proved to be a reader, too, and especially a fan of C. S. Lewis, one of the finest Christian writers of the century just past.

In his quest to be a Renaissance man, Roy had read Lewis: not all of his many books, but enough. The Screwtape Letters. The Problem of Pain. A Grief Observed. Thankfully they had been short volumes.

Dear Candace was so enchanted to have a handsome and interested man as a conversationalist that she overcame her shyness when the subject turned to Lewis. She did most of the talking, and Roy needed only to insert a quote here and a reference there to convince her that his knowledge of the great man’s work was encyclopedic.

Another fortunate thing about her being an Episcopalian was that her denomination did not forbid drink or the joy of sensuous music. From the café, he talked her into a jazz club on Jackson Square.

Roy had a capacity for alcohol, but one potent hurricane erased whatever lingering caution Candace might otherwise have harbored.

After the jazz club, when he suggested they take a walk on the levee, her only concern was that it might be closed at this hour.

“It’s still open to pedestrians,” he assured her. “They just don’t keep it lit for the roller skaters and fishermen.”

Perhaps she would have hesitated to stroll the unlighted levee if he hadn’t been such a strong man, and so good, and capable of protecting her.

They walked toward the river, away from the shopping district and the crowds. The full moon provided more light than he would have liked but also enough to allay any of Candace’s lingering concern about their safety

A brightly decorated riverboat chattered by, its great paddle wheel splashing through warm water. Passengers stood on the decks, sat at tables. This late-night river cruise wouldn’t stop at any nearby docks. Roy had checked the schedules, always planning ahead.

They ambled to the end of the pavement atop the breakwater of boulders. Fishermen were more likely to come this far in daylight. As he expected, here in the night, he and Candace were alone.

The lights of the receding riverboat painted serpentine ribbons of oily color on the dark water, and Candace thought this was pretty, and in fact so did Roy, and they watched it for a moment before she turned to him, expecting a chaste kiss, or even one not so chaste.

Instead, he squirted her in the face with the squeeze bottle of chloroform that he had withdrawn from a jacket pocket.

He had found this saturation technique to be far quicker, more effective, and less of a struggle than a soaked cloth. The fluid penetrated her nostrils, splashed her tongue.

Choking, gasping for breath and thereby inhaling the anesthetic, Candace dropped as suddenly and as hard as if she had been shot.

She fell on her side. Roy rolled her onto her back and knelt next to her.

Even in the insistent silvery moonlight, they presented a low profile to anyone who might look this way from a craft on the river. Glancing back the way they had come, Roy saw no other late strollers.

From an inside jacket pocket, he produced a stiletto and a compact kit of scalpels and other instruments.

He didn’t need larger tools for this one. The eyes would be simple to extract, though he must be careful not to damage the part of them that he considered to be perfectly beautiful.

With the stiletto, he found her heart and conveyed her from sleep to death with only the faintest liquid sound.

Soon the eyes were his, safely in a small plastic bottle full of saline solution.

On his way back to the lights and the jazz, he was surprised when he suddenly had a taste for cotton candy, not a treat that he had ever before craved. But of course the red wagon was closed and might not open for days.

CHAPTER 31

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY stonemason had chiseled HANDS OF MERCY into a limestone block above the hospital entrance. A weathered image of the Virgin Mary overlooked the front steps.

The hospital had closed long ago, and after the building had been sold to a shell corporation controlled by Victor Helios, the windows had been bricked shut. Steel doors had been installed at every entrance, equipped with both mechanical and electronic locks.

A tall wrought-iron fence surrounded the oak-shaded property, like a stockpile of spears from a full Roman legion. To the rolling electric gate was affixed a sign: PRIVATE WAREHOUSE / NO ADMITTANCE.

Hidden cameras surveyed the grounds, the perimeter. No nuclear weapons storage depot had a larger or more dedicated security force, or one more discreet.

The forbidding structure stood silent. No beam of light escaped it, though here the new rulers of the Earth were designed and made.

A staff of eighty lived and worked within these walls, assisting in experiments in a maze of laboratories. In rooms that had once held hospital patients, newly minted men and women were housed and rapidly educated until they could be infiltrated into the population of the city.

The armored doors of certain other rooms were locked. The creations within them needed to be restrained while being studied.

Victor conducted his most important work in the main laboratory. This vast space had a techno sensibility with some Art Deco style and a dash of Wagnerian grandeur. Glass, stainless steel, white ceramic: All were easy to sterilize if things got…messy.

Sleek and arcane equipment, much of which he himself designed and built, lined the chamber, rose out of the floor, depended from the ceiling. Some of the machines hummed, some bubbled, some stood silent and menacing.

In this windowless lab, if he put his wristwatch in a drawer, he could labor long hours, days, without a break. Having improved his physiology and metabolism to the point that he needed little or no sleep, he was able to give himself passionately to his work.

Tonight, as he arrived at his desk, his phone rang. The call came on line five. Of eight lines, the last four—rollovers that served a single number—were reserved for messages and inquiries from those creations with which he had been gradually populating the city.

He picked up the handset. “Yes?”

The caller, a man, was struggling to repress the emotion in his voice, more emotion than Victor ever expected to hear from one of the New Race: “Something is happening to me, Father. Something strange. Maybe something wonderful.”

Victor’s creations understood that they must contact him only in a crisis. “Which one are you?”

“Help me, Father.”

Victor felt diminished by the word father. “I’m not your father. Tell me your name.”

“I’m confused…and sometimes scared.”

“I asked for your name.”

His creations had not been designed to have the capability to deny him, but this one refused to identify himself: “I’ve begun to change.”

“You must tell me your name.”

“Murder,” said the caller. “Murder…excites me.”

Victor kept the growing concern out of his voice. “No, your mind is fine. I don’t make mistakes.”

“I’m changing. There’s so much to learn from murder.”

“Come to me at the Hands of Mercy.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve killed three men…without remorse.”

“Come to me,” Victor insisted.

“Your mercy won’t extend to one of us who has…fallen so far.”

A rare queasiness overcame Victor. He wondered if this might be the serial killer who enchanted the media. One of his own creations, breaking programming to commit murder for no authorized reason?

“Come to me, and I’ll provide whatever guidance you need. There is only compassion for you here.”

The electronically disguised voice denied him again. “The most recent one I killed…was one of yours.”

Victor’s alarm grew. One of his creations killing another by its own decision. Never had this happened before. A programmed injunction against suicide was knit tightly into their psyches, as was a stern commandment that permitted murder for just two reasons: in self-defense or when instructed by their maker to kill.

“The victim,” Victor said. “His name?”

“Allwine. They found his corpse inside the city library this morning.”

Victor caught his breath as he considered the implications.

The caller said, “There was nothing to learn from Allwine. He was like me inside. I’ve got to find it elsewhere, in others.”

“Find what?” Victor asked.

“What I need,” said the caller, and then hung up.

Victor keyed in *69—and discovered that the caller’s phone was blocked for automatic call-back.

Furious, he slammed down the handset.

He sensed a setback.

CHAPTER 32

FOR A WHILE AFTER Victor left for the Hands of Mercy, Erika remained in bed, curled in the fetal position that she’d never known in the creation tank. She waited to see if her depression would pass or thicken into the darker morass of discouragement.

The flux of her emotional states sometimes seemed to have little relation to the experiences from which they proceeded. After sex with Victor, depression always followed without fail, and understandably; but when it should have ripened into something like despondency, it sometimes did not. And though her future seemed so bleak that her despondency should have been unshakable, she often shook it off.

Remembering verses by Emily Dickinson could lift her out of gloom: “Hope” is the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—/ And sings the tune without the words—/ And never stops at all.

The art on Victor’s walls was abstract: oddly juxtaposed blocks of color that loomed oppressively, spatterings of color or smears of gray on black that to Erika seemed like chaos or nullity. In his library, however, were large books of art, and sometimes her mood could be improved simply by immersing herself in a single painting by Albert Bierstadt or Childe Hassam.

She has been taught that she is of the New Race, posthuman, improved, superior. She is all but impervious to disease. She heals rapidly, almost miraculously.

Yet when she needs solace, she finds it in the art and music and poetry of the mere humanity that she and her kind are intended to replace.

When she has been confused, has felt lost, she’s found clarity and direction in the writings of imperfect humanity. And the writers are those of whom Victor would especially disapprove.

This puzzles Erika: that a primitive and failed species, infirm humanity, should by its works lift her heart when none of her own kind is able to lift it for her.

She would like to discuss this with others of the New Race, but she is concerned that one of them will think her puzzlement makes her a heretic. All are obedient to Victor by design, but some view him with such reverential fear that they will interpret her questions as doubts, her doubts as betrayals, and will then in turn betray her to her maker.

And so she keeps her questions to herself, for she knows that in a holding tank waits Erika Five.

Abed, with the smell of Victor lingering in the sheets, Erika finds this to be one of the times when poetry will prevent depression from ripening toward despair. If I shouldn’t be alive / When the Robins come / Give the one in Red Cravat / A Memorial crumb.

She smiled at Dickinson’s gentle humor. That smile might have led to others if not for a scrabbling noise under the bed.

Throwing back the sheets, she sat up, breath held, listening.

As though aware of her reaction, the scrabbler went still—or if not still, at least silent, creeping now without a sound.

Having neither heard nor seen any indication of a rat when she and Victor had returned to the bedroom following the departure of their guests, Erika had assumed that she’d been mistaken in thinking one had been here. Or perhaps it had found its way into a wall or a drain and from there to another place in the great house.

Either the vermin was back or it had been here all along, quiet witness to the terrible tax Victor placed upon Erika’s right to live.

A moment passed, and then a sound issued from elsewhere in the room. A short-lived furtive rustle.

Shadows veiled the room, were lifted only where the light of a single bedside lamp could reach.

Naked, Erika slipped out of bed and stood, poised and alert.

Although her enhanced eyes made the most of available light, she lacked the penetrating night vision of a cat. Victor was conducting cross-species experiments these days, but she was not one of them.

Desirous of more light, she moved toward a reading lamp beside an armchair.

Before she reached the lamp, she sensed more than heard a thing on the floor scurry past her. Startled, she pulled her left foot back, pivoted on her right, and tried to sight the intruder along the path that instinct told her it must have taken.

When there was nothing to be seen—or at least nothing that she could see—she continued to the reading lamp and switched it on. More light revealed nothing that she hoped to find.

A clatter in the bathroom sounded like the small waste can being knocked over.

That door stood ajar. Darkness lay beyond.

She started toward the bathroom, moving quickly but coming to a stop short of the threshold.

Because members of the New Race were immune to most diseases and healed rapidly, they were afraid of fewer things than were ordinary human beings. That didn’t mean they were utter strangers to fear.

Although hard to kill, they were not immortal, and having been made in contempt of God, they could have no hope of a life after this one. Therefore, they feared death.

Conversely, many of them feared life because they had no control of their destinies. They were indentured servants to Victor, and there was no sum they could work off to gain their freedom.

They feared life also because they could not surrender it if the burden of serving Victor became too great. They had been created with a deeply embedded psychological injunction against suicide; so if the void appealed to them, they were denied even that.

Here but a step from the bathroom threshold, Erika experienced another kind of fear: of the unknown.

That which is abnormal to nature is a monster, even if it might be beautiful in its way. Erika, created not by nature but by the hand of man, was a lovely monster but a monster nonetheless.

She supposed that monsters should not fear the unknown because, by any reasonable definition, they were part of it. Yet a tingle of apprehension traced the contours of her spine.

Instinct told her that the rat was not a rat, that instead it was a thing unknown.

From the bathroom came a clink, a clatter, a metallic rattle, as if something had opened a cabinet and set about exploring the contents in the dark.

Erika’s two hearts beat faster. Her mouth went dry. Her palms grew damp. In this vulnerability, but for the double pulse, she was so human, regardless of her origins.

She backed away from the bathroom door.

Her blue silk robe was draped over the armchair. With her gaze fixed on the bathroom door, she slipped into the robe and belted it.

Barefoot, she left the suite, closing the hall door behind her.

As the midnight hour came, she descended through the house of Frankenstein, to the library where, among the many volumes of human thought and hope, she felt safer.

CHAPTER 33

AT VICTOR’S SUMMONS, they came to him in the main lab, two young men as ordinary in appearance as any in New Orleans.

Not all the men of the New Race were handsome. Not all the women were beautiful.

For one thing, when at last he had secretly seeded enough of his creations in society to exterminate the Old Race, humanity would put up a better defense if it could identify its enemy by even the most subtle telltales of appearance. If all members of the New Race looked like gorgeous fodder for the box-office battlefields of Hollywood, their beauty would make them objects of suspicion, subject them to testing and interrogation, and ultimately expose them.

Their infinite variety, on the other hand, would ensure the winning of the war. Their variety, their physical superiority, and their ruthlessness.

Besides, though he sometimes crafted specimens breathtaking in appearance, this enterprise was not fundamentally about beauty. It was at root about power and the establishment of a New Truth.

Consequently, the young men he summoned might be considered extraordinary in appearance only because, considering what they were inside, they looked so common. Their names were Jones and Picou.

He told them about Bobby Allwine in a drawer at the morgue. “His body must disappear tonight. And all confirming evidence—tissue samples, photographs, video.”

“The autopsy report, tape recordings?” asked Jones.

“If they’re easily found,” Victor said. “But by themselves, they confirm nothing.”

Picou said, “What about the medical examiner, anyone who might have been there when the body was opened?”

“For now, let them live,” Victor said. “Without the body or any evidence, all they’ll have is a wild story that’ll make them sound like drunks or druggies.”

Although they were intellectually capable of greater work than this garbage detail, neither Jones nor Picou complained or found their assignments demeaning. Their patient obedience was the essence of the New Race.

In the revolutionary civilization that Victor was making, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, everyone in the social order would have a rank. And all would be content, without envy.

Huxley ordered his world with Alphas at the top, the ruling elite, followed by Betas and Gammas. Brute laborers were designated Epsilons, born to their positions in a designed society.

To Huxley, this vision had been a dystopia. Victor saw it more clearly: Utopia.

He’d once met Huxley at a cocktail party. He considered the man to be an officious little prig who worried ridiculously about science becoming a juggernaut and more dogmatic than any religion could hope to be, crushing everything human from humanity. Victor found him to be rich in book knowledge, light on experience, and boring.

Nevertheless, Huxley’s nightmare vision served well as Victor’s ideal. He would make the Alpha class almost equal to himself, so they would be challenging company and capable of carrying out his plans for the day after humanity had been liquidated, when the Earth would serve as a platform for great accomplishments by a race of posthumans who would work together as industriously as a hive.

Now these two Epsilons, Oliver Jones and Byron Picou, set out like two good worker bees, eager to fulfill the roles for which they had been designed and built. They would steal Allwine’s remains and dispose of them in a landfill that operated in higher ground outside the city

The landfill was owned by Victor through another shell company, and it employed only members of the New Race. He regularly required a secure disposal site to bury forever those interesting but failed experiments that must never be discovered by ordinary humans.

Under those mountains of garbage lay a city of the dead. If ever they fossilized and were excavated by paleontologists a million years hence, what mysteries they would present, what nightmares they would inspire.

Although problems existed with the comparatively small hive—as yet only two thousand of the New Race—that he had established here in New Orleans, they would be solved. Week by week he made advances in his science and increased the number in his implacable army. He would soon begin to mass produce the tanks, creating his people not in a laboratory but by the many thousands in much larger facilities that might accurately be called farms.

The work was endless but rewarding. The Earth had not been made in a day, but he had the necessary patience to remake it.

Now he was thirsty. From a lab refrigerator, he got a Pepsi. A little plate of chocolate chip cookies was in the fridge. He adored chocolate chip cookies. He took two.

CHAPTER 34

SOMEONE HAD PUT a police seal on Bobby Allwine’s apartment door. Carson broke it.

This was a minor infraction, considering that the place was not actually a crime scene. Besides, she was, after all, a cop.

Then she used a Lockaid lock-release gun, sold only to police agencies, to spring the deadbolt. She eased the thin pick of the gun into the keyway under the pin tumblers, and pulled the trigger. She pulled it four times before lodging all the pins at the shear line.

The Lockaid gun was more problematic than breaking the seal. The department owned several. They were kept in the gun locker with spare weapons. You were supposed to requisition one, in writing, through the duty officer each time that you had a legal right to use it.

No detective was authorized to carry a Lockaid gun at all times. Because of a screwup in the requisition process, Carson had come into permanent possession of one—and chose not to reveal that she had it.

She had never used it in violation of anyone’s rights, only when it was legal and when precious time would be saved by dispensing with a written requisition. In the current instance, she couldn’t violate the rights of Bobby Allwine for the simple reason that he was dead.

Although she liked those old movies, she wasn’t a female Dirty Harry. She’d never yet bent a rule far enough to break it, not in a situation of true importance.

She could have awakened the superintendent and gotten a pass key. She would have enjoyed rousting the rude old bastard from his bed.

However, she remembered how he’d looked her up and down, licking his lips. Without Michael present, roused from sleep perhaps induced by wine, the super might try to play grab-ass.

Then she would have to reacquaint him with the effect of a knee to the gonads. That might necessitate an arrest, when all she wanted was to meditate on the meaning of Allwine’s black-on-black apartment.

She switched on the living-room ceiling fixture, closed the door behind her, and put the Lockaid gun on the floor.

At midnight, even with a light on, the blackness of the room proved so disorienting that she had half an idea what an astronaut might feel during a space walk, tethered to a shuttle, on the night side of Earth.

The living room offered nothing but the black vinyl armchair. Because it stood alone, it seemed a little like a throne, one that had been built not for earthly royalty but for a middle-rank demon.

Although Allwine had not been killed here, Carson sensed that getting a handle on the psychology of this particular victim would contribute to her understanding of the Surgeon. She sat in his chair.

Harker claimed that the black rooms expressed a death wish, and Carson grudgingly conceded that his interpretation made sense. Like a stopped clock, Harker could be right now and then, although not as often as twice a day

A death wish did not, however, entirely explain either the décor or Allwine. This black hole was also about power, just as real black holes, in far reaches of the universe, exert such gravitational pull that not even light can escape them.

These walls, these ceilings, these floors had not been painted by a man in a state of despair; despair enervated and did not inspire action. She could more easily imagine Allwine blackening these walls in an energetic anger, in a frenzy of rage.

If that was true, then at what had his rage been directed?

The arms of the chair were wide and plumply padded. Under her hands, she felt numerous punctures in the vinyl.

Something pricked her right palm. From the padding beneath a puncture, she extracted a pale crescent: a broken-off fingernail.

A closer look revealed scores of curved punctures.

The chair and the room chilled her as deeply as if she had been sitting on a block of ice in a cooler.

Carson hooked her hands, spread her fingers. She discovered that each of her nails found a corresponding slit in the vinyl.

The upholstery was thick, tough, flexible. Extreme pressure would have been required for fingernails to puncture it.

Logically, despair would not produce the intensity of emotion needed to damage the vinyl. Even rage might not have been sufficient if Allwine had not been, as Jack Rogers had said, inhumanly strong.

She rose, wiping her hands on her jeans. She felt unclean.

In the bedroom, she switched on the lights. The pervasive black surfaces soaked up the illumination.

Someone had opened one of the black blinds. The apartment was such a grim world unto itself that the streetlamps, the distant neon, and the glow of the city seemed out of phase with Allwine’s realm, as if they should have existed in different, isolated universes.

Beside the bed, she opened the nightstand drawer, where she discovered Jesus. His face looked out at her from a litter of small pamphlets, His right hand raised in blessing.

From among perhaps a hundred pamphlets, she selected four and discovered that they were memorial booklets of the kind distributed to mourners at funerals. The name of the deceased was different on each, though all came from the Fullbright Funeral Home.

Nancy Whistler, the librarian who had found Allwine’s body, said he went to mortuary viewings because he felt at peace there.

She pocketed the four booklets and closed the drawer.

The smell of licorice hung on the air as thick as it had been earlier in the day Carson couldn’t shake the disturbing idea that someone had recently been burning the black candles that stood on a tray on the windowseat.

She crossed to the candles to feel the wax around the wicks, half expecting it to be warm. No. Cold and hard, all of them.

Her impression of the scene beyond the window was unnerving but entirely subjective. Enduring New Orleans hadn’t changed. In the grip of creeping paranoia, however, she saw not the festive city that she knew, but an ominous metropolis, an alien place of unnatural angles, throbbing darkness, eerie light.

A reflection of movement on the glass pulled her focus from the city to the surface of the pane. A tall figure stood in the room behind her.

She reached under her jacket, placing her hand upon the 9mm pistol in her shoulder holster. Without drawing it, she turned.

The intruder was tall and powerful, dressed in black. Perhaps he had entered from the living room or from the bathroom, but he seemed to have materialized out of the black wall.

He stood fifteen feet away, where shadows hid his face. His hands hung at his sides—and seemed as big as shovels.

“Who’re you?” she demanded. “Where’d you come from?”

“You’re Detective O’Connor.” His deep voice had a timbre and a resonance that in another man would have conveyed only self-assurance but that, combined with his size, suggested menace. “You were on TV.”

“What’re you doing here?”

“I go where I want. In two hundred years, I’ve learned a great deal about locks.”

His implication left Carson no choice but to draw her piece. She pointed the muzzle at the floor, but said, “That’s criminal trespass. Step into the light.”

He did not move.

“Don’t be stupid. Move. Into. The. Light.”

“I’ve been trying to do that all my life,” he said as he took two steps forward.

She could not have anticipated his face. Handsome on the left, somehow wrong on the right side. Over that wrongness, veiling it, was an elaborate design reminiscent of but different from a Maori tattoo.

“The man who lived here,” the intruder said, “was in despair. I recognize his pain.”

Although he had already stopped, he loomed and could have been upon her in two strides, so Carson said, “That’s close enough.”

“He was not made of God…and had no soul. He agonized.”

“You have a name? Very carefully, very slowly, show me some ID.”

He ignored her order. “Bobby Allwine had no free will. He was in essence a slave. He wanted to die but couldn’t take his own life.”

If this guy was correct, Harker had nailed it. Each razor blade in the bathroom wall marked a failed attempt at self-destruction.

“We have,” the intruder said, “a built-in proscription against suicide.”

“We?”

‘Allwine was full of fury, too. He wanted to kill his maker. But we are also designed to be incapable of raising a hand against him. I tried long ago…and he nearly killed me.”

Every modern city has its crazies, and Carson thought she knew all the tropes, but this guy had a different edge from what she had encountered before, and a disturbing intensity.

“I tried going to his house to study it from a distance…but if I’d been seen, he might have finished me. So I came here. The case interested me, because of the missing heart. I was in part made from such stolen essentials.”

Whether this hulk was the Surgeon or not, he didn’t sound like the kind of citizen who made the city safer by being on the streets.

She said, “Too weird. Spread your arms, get on your knees.”

Although it must have been a trick of light, she thought a luminous pulse passed through his eyes as he said, “I bow to no one.”

CHAPTER 35

I BOW TO NO ONE.

No suspect had ever challenged her in such a poetic fashion.

Wound tight, wary, edging sideways from the window because her back felt exposed, she said, “I wasn’t asking.”

She took a two-hand grip on the pistol, pointed it at him.

“Will you shoot me in the heart?” he asked. “You’ll need two rounds.”

Allwine lying on the autopsy table. Chest open. The associated plumbing for two hearts.

“I came here thinking Allwine was an innocent man,” he said, “torn open to provide the heart for another…experiment. But it’s not that simple anymore.”

He moved, and for an instant she thought he was coming at her: “Don’t be stupid.”

Instead he went past her to the window. “Every city has its secrets, but none as terrible as this. Your quarry isn’t a crazed murderer. Your real enemy is his maker…and mine, too.”

Still reeling from his apparent claim to have two hearts, she said, “What do you mean, I’ll need two rounds?”

“His techniques are more sophisticated now. But he created me with bodies salvaged from a prison graveyard.”

When he turned away from the window, facing Carson again, she glimpsed that subtle pulse of luminosity passing through his eyes.

“My one heart from a mad arsonist,” he said. “The other from a child molester.”

Their positions had been reversed. His back was to the window, hers to the bathroom door. Suddenly she wondered if he’d come alone.

She put herself at an angle to him, trying to watch him directly while keeping the bathroom threshold in her peripheral vision.

This put the door to the living room behind her. She could not cover every approach by which she might be assaulted, overwhelmed.

“My hands were taken from a strangler,” he said. “My eyes from an ax murderer. My life force from a thunderstorm. And that strange storm gave me gifts that Victor couldn’t grant. For one thing…”

He moved so fast that she did not see him take a step. He was at the window but then right in her face.

Not since her first days at the police academy, when she’d been in training, had Carson been outmaneuvered, overpowered. Even as he seemed to materialize in front of her, he boldly wrenched the pistol out of her hand—a shot discharged, shattering a window—and then he was around her, behind her.

She thought he went behind her, but when she turned, he seemed to have vanished.

Even dressed in black in this black room, he could not make a shadow of himself. He was too big to play chameleon in a dark corner.

His unmistakable voice came from the windowseat—“I’m not the monster anymore”—but when Carson spun to face him, he wasn’t there.

Again he spoke, seemingly from the doorway to the living room—“I’m your best hope”—yet when she turned a third time in search of him, she was still alone.

She didn’t find him in the living room, either, though she did recover her service pistol. The weapon lay on the floor beside the Lockaid lock-release gun, which she had left there earlier.

The door to the public hallway stood open.

Wishing that her thudding heart would quiet, she ejected the magazine. The telltale gleam of brass confirmed that the weapon was loaded but for the one expended round.

Slamming the magazine into the pistol, she cleared the doorway fast, staying low, weapon in front of her.

The corridor was deserted. She held her breath but did not hear any footsteps thundering down the stairs. All quiet.

Considering the shot that had accidentally discharged, she could be reasonably sure that someone in the apartment across the hall was watching her through the fish-eye lens in that door.

She stepped back into the black hole, snatched up the Lockaid gun, and pulled the door shut. She left the building.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she realized that she had not switched off the lights in the apartment. To hell with it. Allwine was too dead to care about his electric bill.

CHAPTER 36

IN A CORNER of the main lab, Randal Six had been strapped in a cruciform posture at the center of a spherical device that resembled one of those exercise machines that could rotate a person on any imaginable axis, the better to stress all muscles equally. This, however, was not an exercise session.

Randal would not move the machine; the machine would move him, and not for the purpose of building mass or maintaining muscle tone. From head to both feet, to the tip of every finger on both hands, he was locked into a precisely determined position.

A rubber wedge in his mouth prevented him from biting his tongue if he suffered convulsions. A chin strap did not allow him to open his mouth and perhaps accidentally swallow the wedge.

These precautions would also effectively muffle his screams.

The Hands of Mercy had been insulated against the escape of any sound that might attract attention. A researcher involved in cutting-edge science, however, Victor could not be too cautious.

And so…

The brain is an electrical apparatus. Its wave patterns can be measured with an EEG machine.

After Randal Six had been extensively educated by direct-to-brain data downloading but while the boy had remained unconscious in the forming tank, Victor had established in his creation’s brain electrical patterns identical to those found in several autistic people that he had studied.

His hope had been that this would result in Randal being “born” as an eighteen-year-old autistic of a severe variety. This fond hope had been realized.

Having imposed autism upon Randal, Victor sought to restore normal brain function through a variety of techniques. Thus far he had not been successful.

His purpose in reverse-engineering Randal’s release from autism was not to find a cure. Finding a cure for autism interested him not at all, except that it might be a source of profits if he chose to market it.

Instead, he pursued these experiments because if he could impose and relieve autism at will, he should be able to learn to impose selected degrees of it. This might have valuable economic and social benefits.

Imagine a factory worker whose productivity is low due to the boring, repetitive nature of his job. Selective autism might be a means by which said worker could be made to focus intently on the task with an obsession that would make him as productive as—but cheaper than—a robot.

The lowest level of Epsilons in the precisely ranked social strata of Victor’s ideal society might be little more than machines of meat. They would waste no time in idle chatter with their fellow workers.

Now he threw the switch that activated the spherical device in which Randal Six was strapped. It began to rotate, three revolutions on one axis, five on another, seven on yet another, slowly at first but steadily gaining speed.

A nearby wall contained a high-resolution nine-foot-square plasma screen. A colorful ultrasound display revealed the movement of blood through Randal Six’s cerebral veins and arteries as well as the subtlest currents in his cerebrospinal fluid as it circulated between the meninges, through the cerebral ventricles, and in the brain stem.

Victor suspected that with the properly calculated application of extreme centrifugal and centripetal forces, he could establish unnatural conditions in cerebral fluids that would improve his chances of converting Randal’s autism-characteristic brainwaves into normal cerebral electrical patterns.

As the machine spun faster, faster, the subject’s groans and terrified wordless pleas escalated into screams of anguish and agony. His shrieks would have been annoying if not for the wedge in his mouth and the chin strap.

Victor hoped to achieve a breakthrough before he tested the boy to destruction. So much time would have been wasted if he had to start all over again with Randal Seven.

Sometimes Randal bit the rubber wedge so hard for so long that his teeth sank in it to the gum line, whereafter it had to be cut out of his locked jaws in pieces. This sounded as if it might be one of those occasions.

CHAPTER 37

A WHITE PICKET FENCE met white gateposts inlaid with seashells. The gate itself featured a unicorn motif.

Under Carson’s feet, the front walkway twinkled magically as flecks of mica in the flagstones reflected moonlight. Moss between the stones softened her footsteps.

Almost thick enough to feel, the fragrance of the magnolia-tree flowers swagged the air.

The windows of the fairy-tale bungalow were flanked by blue shutters from which had been cut star shapes and crescent moons.

Trellises partially enclosed the front porch, entwined by leafy vines graced with trumpetlike purple blooms.

Kathleen Burke, who lived in this little oasis of fantasy, was a police psychiatrist. Her work demanded logic and reason, but in her private life, she retreated into gentle escapism.

At three o’clock in the morning, the windows revealed no lights.

Carson rang the bell and then at once knocked on the door.

A soft light bloomed inside, and quicker than Carson expected, Kathy opened the door. “Carson, what’s up, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Halloween in August. We gotta talk.”

“Girl, if you were a cat, you’d have your back up and your tail tucked.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t show up with a load in my pants.”

“Oh, that’s an elegant thing to say. Maybe you’ve been partnered too long with Michael. Come in. I just made some hazelnut coffee.”

Entering, Carson said, “I didn’t see any lights.”

“At the back, in the kitchen,” Kathy said, leading the way.

She was attractive, in her late thirties, molasses-black with Asian eyes. In Chinese-red pajamas with embroidered cuffs and collar, she cut an exotic figure.

In the kitchen, a steaming mug of coffee stood on the table. Beside it lay a novel; on the cover, a woman in a fantastic costume rode the back of a flying dragon.

“You always read at three in the morning?” Carson asked.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

Carson was too edgy to sit. She didn’t pace the kitchen so much as twitch back and forth in it. “This is your home, Kathy, not your office. That matters—am I right?”

Pouring coffee, Kathy said, “What’s happened? What’re you so jumped up about?”

“You’re not a psychiatrist here. You’re just a friend here. Am I right?”

Putting the second mug of coffee on the table, returning to her own chair, Kathy said, “I’m always your friend, Carson—here, there, anywhere.”

Carson stayed on her feet, too wound up to sit down. “None of what I tell you here can end up in my file.”

“Unless you killed someone. Did you kill someone?”

“Not tonight.”

“Then spit it out, girlfriend. You’re getting on my nerves.”

Carson pulled a chair out from the table, sat down. She reached for the mug of coffee, hesitated, didn’t pick it up.

Her hand was trembling. She clenched it into a fist. Very tight. Opened it. Still trembling.

“You ever see a ghost, Kathy?”

“I’ve taken the haunted New Orleans tour, been to the crypt of Marie Laveau at night. Does that count?”

Clutching the handle of the mug, staring at her white knuckles, Carson said, “I’m serious. I mean any weird shit you can’t wrap your head around. Ghosts, UFO, Big Foot…” She glanced at Kathy. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“What way?”

“Like a psychiatrist.”

“Don’t be so defensive.” Kathy patted the book with the dragon on the cover. “I’m the one reads three fantasy novels a week and wishes she could actually live in one.”

Carson blew on her coffee, tentatively took a sip, then a longer swallow. “I need this. Haven’t slept. No way I’ll sleep tonight.”

Kathy waited with professional patience.

After a moment, Carson said, “People talk about the unknown, the mystery of life, but I’ve never seen one squirt of mystery in it.”

“Squirt?”

“Squirt, drop, spoonful—whatever. I want to see mystery in life—who doesn’t?—some mystical meaning, but I’m a fool for logic.”

“Until now? So tell me about your ghost.”

“He wasn’t a ghost. But he sure was something. I’ve been driving around the past hour, maybe longer, trying to find the right words to explain what happened…”

“Start with where it happened.”

“I was at Bobby Allwine’s apartment—”

Leaning forward, interested, Kathy said, “The Surgeon’s latest victim. I’ve been working up a profile on the killer. He’s hard to figure. Psychotic but controlled. No obvious sexual component. So far he hasn’t left much forensic evidence at the scene. No fingerprints. A garden-variety psychopath isn’t usually so prudent.”

Kathy seemed to realize that she had seized the wheel of the conversation. Relinquishing it, she sat back in her chair.

“Sorry, Carson. We were talking about your ghost.”

Kathy Burke could probably keep her police work separate from their friendship, but she would find it more difficult to take off her psychiatrist hat and keep it off when she heard what Carson had come here to tell her.

A giant with a strangely deformed face, claiming to have been made from the body parts of criminals, claiming to have been brought to life by lightning, capable of such nimbleness of movement, such uncanny stealth, such inhuman speed that he could be nothing less than supernatural and, therefore, might be what he claimed to be…

“Hello? Your ghost?”

Instead of replying, Carson drank more coffee.

“That’s it?” Kathy asked. “Just the tease, and then good-bye?”

“I feel a little guilty”

“Good. I was ready for some spooky dish.”

“If I tell you as a friend, I compromise you professionally.fessionally. You’ll need to report my ass for an OIS investigation.”

Kathy frowned. “Officer involved shooting? Just how serious is this, Carson?”

“I didn’t smoke anybody. Didn’t even wing him, as far as I know.”

“Tell me. I won’t report you.”

Carson smiled affectionately. “You’d do the right thing. You’d report me, all right. And you’d write me up an order for some couch time.”

“I’m not as righteous as you think I am.”

“Yes, you are,” Carson said. “That’s one reason I like you.”

Kathy sighed. “I’m all primed for a campfire tale, and you won’t spook me. Now what?”

“We could make an early breakfast,” Carson suggested. “Assuming you’ve got any real food here in elfland.”

“Eggs, bacon, sausages, hash browns, brioche toast.”

“All of the above.”

“You’re going to be one of those blimp cops.”

“Nah. I’ll be dead long before that,” Carson said, and more than half believed it.

CHAPTER 38

ROY PRIBEAUX LIKED TO RISE well before dawn to undertake his longevity regimen—except on those occasions when he had been up late the previous night murdering someone.

Nothing was quite as luxurious as lingering in bed with the knowledge that a new piece of the ideal woman had so recently been wrapped, bagged, and stored in the freezer. One felt the satisfaction of accomplishment, the swelling pride of work well done, which made an extra hour in the sheets seem justified and therefore sweet.

Getting Candace’s eyes and preserving them had not required him to be out as late as he’d been on other harvests, but he still would have lazed in bed if he hadn’t been amazingly energized by the fact that his collection was complete. The perfect eyes had been the last item on his list.

He slept deeply but for just a few hours, every minute in the arms of rapturous dreams, and sprang out of bed profoundly rested and with enthusiasm for the day ahead.

An array of high-end exercise machines occupied a portion of his loft. In shorts and tank top, he followed a circuit of weight machines that brought a burn to every muscle group in graduated sets ending in his maximum resistance. Then he worked up a positively tropical sweat on the treadmill and the ski trainer.

His morning shower always took a while. He lathered with two soaps: first an exfoliating bar with a loofa sponge, followed by a moisturizing bar and soft cloth. For the most complete cleanliness achievable and perfect follicle health, he used two natural shampoos, followed by a cream conditioner that he rinsed out after precisely thirty seconds.

The sun finally rose as he applied a skin-conditioning lotion from his neck to the bottoms of his feet. He did not neglect a single square inch of his magnificently maintained body, and used a spatula-style sponge to reach the middle of his back.

This lotion wasn’t merely a moisturizer, but also a youthenizing emollient rich in free-radical-scavenging vitamins. If he had left the bottoms of his feet untreated, he’d have been an immortal walking on a dying man’s soles, a thought that made him shudder.

After applying the usual series of revitalizing substances to his face—including a cream enriched with liquified monkey embryos—Roy regarded his reflection in the vanity mirror with satisfaction.

For a few years, he had succeeded in fully arresting the aging process. More exciting, he had recently begun to reverse the effects of time, and week by week he had watched himself grow younger.

Others deluded themselves into thinking they were rolling back the years, but Roy knew his success was real. He had arrived at the most perfectly effective combination of exercise, diet, nutritional supplements, lotions, and meditation.

The final key ingredient had been purified New Zealand lamb’s urine, of which he drank four ounces a day With a lemon wedge.

This turning back of the clock was highly desirable, of course, but he reminded himself that he could youthenize himself too far. If he reversed himself to the condition of a twenty-year-old and stayed there for a hundred years, that would be good; but if he got carried away and made himself twelve again, that would be bad.

He had not enjoyed his childhood and adolescence the first time around. Repeating any portion of them, even if solely in physical appearance, would be a glimpse of Hell.

After Roy dressed, as he stood in the kitchen, washing down twenty-four capsules of supplements with grapefruit juice prior to preparing breakfast, he was abruptly struck by the realization that his life now had no purpose.

For the past two years, he had been collecting the anatomical components of the perfect woman, first in a variety of locations far removed from New Orleans, then lately and with particular frenzy here in his own backyard. But as of Candace, he had them all. Hands, feet, lips, nose, hair, breasts, eyes, and so much more—he had forgotten nothing.

Now what?

He was surprised that he had not thought further than this. Being a man of leisure, he had a lot of time on his hands; being an immortal, he had eternity.

This thought proved suddenly daunting.

Now he slowly realized that during the years of searching and harvesting, he had superstitiously and unconsciously assumed that when his collection was complete, when the freezer was filled with all the jigsaw pieces of the most perfectly beautiful woman, then a living woman, embodying every one of those features and qualities, would magically come into his life. He had been engaged on a kind of hoodoo quest with the purpose of shaping his romantic destiny.

Perhaps this mojo would work. Perhaps this very afternoon, as he strolled the Quarter, he would come face to face with her dazzling, bewitching self.

If the days passed without this desired encounter, however, days and weeks and months…what then?

He yearned to share his perfection with a woman who would be his equal. Until that moment came, life would be empty, without purpose.

An uneasiness overcame him. He tried to quell it with breakfast.

As he ate, he became fascinated with his hands. They were more than beautiful male hands; they were exquisite.

Oh, but until he found his goddess—not in pieces but whole and alive, without fault or deficiency—his flawless hands would not be able to caress the perfection that was their erotic destiny

His uneasiness grew.

CHAPTER 39

AT DAYBREAK, with the rising sun not yet at an angle to fire the stained-glass windows, Our Lady of Sorrows sheltered a congregation of shadows. The only light came from the illuminated stations of the cross and from the candles in the ruby-red glass votive cups.

The humidity and early heat ripened the fragrances of incense, tallow, and lemon-scented wax. Inhaling this mélange, Victor imagined he would be sweating it through every pore for the rest of the day.

His footsteps on the marble floor echoed from the groin vaults overhead. He liked the crisp coldness of this sound, which he fancied spoke truth to the cloying atmosphere of the church.

With the first Mass of the day still half an hour away, the only person present, other than Victor, was Patrick Duchaine. He waited, as instructed, on a pecan pew in the front row.

The man rose nervously, but Victor said, “Sit, sit,” not quite in the tone he might use to decline a courtesy, but in a tone rather like the one in which he might speak with impatience to a vexing dog.

At sixty, Patrick had white hair, an earnest grandfatherly face, and eyes moist with perpetual compassion. His looks alone inspired the trust and affection of his parishioners.

Add to appearances a gentle, musical voice. A warm, easy laugh. Furthermore, he had the genuine humility of a man who knew too well his place in the scheme of things.

Father Duchaine was the image of an unassailably good priest to whom the faithful would give their hearts. And to whom they would confess their sins without hesitation.

In a community with many Catholics—practicing and not—Victor found it useful to have one of his people manning the confessional in which some of the city’s more powerful citizens went to their knees.

Patrick Duchaine was one of those rare members of the New Race who had been cloned from the DNA of an existing human being rather than having been designed from scratch by Victor. Physiologically, he had been improved, but to the eye he was the Patrick Duchaine who had been born of man and woman.

The real Father Duchaine had donated to a Red Cross blood drive, unwittingly providing the material from which he could be replicated. These days, he rotted under tons of garbage, deep in the landfill, while his Doppelgänger tended to the souls at Our Lady of Sorrows.

Replacing real human beings with replicas entailed risks that Victor seldom wished to take. Although the duplicate might look and sound and move exactly like its inspiration, the memories of the original could not be transferred to him.

The closest relatives and friends of the replaced individual were certain to notice numerous gaps in his knowledge of his personal history and relationships. They wouldn’t imagine he was an imposter, but they would surely think that he was suffering from a mental or physical ailment; they would press him to seek medical attention.

In addition, out of concern, they would watch him closely and would not entirely trust him. His ability to blend in with society and to carry out his work in the service of the New Race would be compromised.

In the case of the priest, he’d had no wife, of course, and no children. His parents were dead, as was his only brother. While he had many friends and parishioners to whom he was close, no intimate family existed to note his memory gaps throughout the day.

In the lab Victor raised this Father Duchaine from spilled blood before the real Father Duchaine had died, a trick more complicated than the one that the man from Galilee had performed with Lazarus.

Sitting in the front pew beside his priest, Victor said, “How do you sleep? Do you dream?”

“Not often, sir. Sometimes…a nightmare about the Hands of Mercy. But I can never recall the details.”

‘And you never will. That’s my gift to you—no memory of your birth. Patrick, I need your help.”

“Anything, of course.”

“One of my people is having a serious crisis of the mind. I don’t know who he is. He called me…but he is afraid to come to me.”

“Perhaps…not afraid, sir,” the priest said. ‘Ashamed. Ashamed that he has failed you.”

That statement troubled Victor. “How could you suggest such a thing, Patrick? The New Race has no capacity for shame.”

Only Erika had been programmed to know shame, and only because Victor found her more erotic in the throes of it.

“Shame,” he told Patrick, “isn’t a virtue. It’s a weakness. No Natural Law requires it. We rule nature…and transcend it.”

The priest evaded Victor’s gaze. “Yes, sir, of course. I think what I meant was…maybe he feels a sort of…regret that he hasn’t performed to your expectations.”

Perhaps the priest would need to be watched closely or even subjected to a day-long examination in the lab.

“Search the city, Patrick. Spread the word among my people. Maybe they’ve seen one of their kind behaving oddly. I’m charging you and a few other key people with this search, and I know that you will perform up to my expectations.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you find him and he runs…kill him. You know how your kind can be killed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Be cautious. He’s already killed one of you,” Victor revealed.

Surprised, the priest met his eyes again.

“I’d prefer to have him alive,” Victor continued. “But at least I need his body. To study Bring him to me at the Hands of Mercy.”

They were near enough to the rack of votive candles that the pulsing crimson reflections of the flames crawled Patrick’s face.

This inspired Victor to ask “Do you sometimes wonder if you’re damned?”

“No, sir,” the priest answered, but with a hesitation. “There is no Hell or Heaven. This is the one life.”

“Exactly. Your mind is too well made for superstition.” Victor rose from the pew. “God bless you, Patrick.” When the priest’s eyes widened with surprise, Victor smiled and said, “That was a joke.”

CHAPTER 40

WHEN CARSON PICKED UP Michael at his apartment house, he got in the car, looked her over, and said, “Those are yesterday’s clothes.”

“Suddenly you’re a fashion critic.”

“You look…rumpled.”

As she pulled away from the curb, she said, “Rumpled, my ass. I look like a cow pie in a bad wig.”

“You didn’t get any sleep?”

“Maybe I’m done with sleep forever.”

“If you’ve been up more than twenty-four hours, you shouldn’t be driving,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it, Mom.” She took a tall Starbucks cup from between her thighs, drank through a straw. “I’m so wired on caffeine, I’ve got the reflexes of a pit viper.”

“Do pit vipers have quick reflexes?”

“You want to get in a pit with one and see?”

“You are wound tight. What’s happened?”

“Saw a ghost. Scared the crap out of me.”

“What’s the punch line?”

What she hadn’t been able to say to Kathy Burke, she could say to Michael. In police work, partners were closer than mere friends. They had better be. They daily trusted each other with their lives.

If you couldn’t share everything with your partner, you needed a new partner.

Nevertheless, she hesitated before she said, “He seemed to walk out of walls, disappear into them. Big sucker, but he moves quicker than the eye.”

“Who?”

“You listening to anything I’m saying? The ghost, that’s who.”

“You spiking that coffee with something?”

“He said he’s made from pieces of criminals.”

“Slow down. You’re driving too fast.”

Carson accelerated. “The hands of a strangler, one heart from a mad arsonist, one from a child molester. His life force from a thunderstorm.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.”

BY THE TIME Carson parked in front of Fullbright’s Funeral Home, she had told Michael everything that happened in Allwine’s apartment.

His face revealed no skepticism, but his tone of voice was the equivalent of raised eyebrows: “You were tired, in a weird place—”

“He took a gun away from me,” she said, which might have been the essence of her astonishment, the one thing about the experience that had seemed the most supernatural. “No one takes a gun away from me, Michael. You want to try?”

“No. I enjoy having testicles. All I’m saying is that he was dressed in black, the apartment is black, so the disappearing trick was probably just a trick.”

“So maybe he manipulated me, and I saw what he wanted me to see. Is that it?”

“Doesn’t that make more sense?”

“Sure damn does. But if it was a trick, he should be headlining a magic act in Vegas.”

Looking at the funeral home, Michael said, “Why’re we here?”

“Maybe he didn’t really move faster than the eye, and maybe he didn’t in fact vanish into thin air, but he was dead-on when he said Allwine was in despair, wanted to die…but couldn’t kill himself.”

From a pocket she withdrew the four memorial booklets and handed them to Michael.

“Bobby had like a hundred of these,” she continued, “in a drawer of his nightstand. All from different funerals at this place. Death appealed to him.”

She got out of the car, slammed the driver’s door, and met Michael on the sidewalk.

He said, “‘Life force from a thunderstorm.’ What the hell does that mean?”

“Sometimes like a soft lightning throbs through his eyes.”

Hurrying at her side, Michael said, “You’ve always been stone solid until now, like Joe Friday with no Y chromosome. Now you’re Nancy Drew on a sugar rush.”

Like so many things in New Orleans, the mortuary seemed as much a dream place as a reality. It had once been a Gothic Revival mansion and no doubt still served as the mortician’s residence as well as his place of business. The weight of the lavish rococo millwork must have been only a few pounds shy of the critical load needed to buckle the eaves, implode the walls, and collapse the roof.

Live oaks dating to the plantation era shaded the house, while camellias, gardenias, mimosa, and tea roses cast a scene-saturating perfume. Bees buzzed lazily from bloom to bloom, too fat and happy to sting, besotted by rich nectar.

At the front door, Carson rang the bell. “Michael, don’t you sometimes sense there’s more to life than the grind—some amazing secret you can almost see from the corner of your eye?” Before he could reply, she plunged on: “Last night I saw something amazing…something I can’t put into words. It’s almost like UFOs exist.”

“You and me—we’ve put guys in psych wards who talk like that.”

A bearish, dour-looking man answered the door and acknowledged in the most somber tones that he was indeed Taylor Fullbright.

Flashing her police ID, Carson said, “Sir, I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead, but we’re here on a rather urgent matter.”

Brightening at the discovery that they were not a bereaved couple in need of counseling, Fullbright revealed his true convivial nature. “Come in, come in! I was just cremating a customer.”

CHAPTER 41

FOR A LONG TIME after the session in the spinning rack, Randal Six lies on his bed, not sleeping—for he seldom sleeps—facing the wall, his back to the room, shutting out the chaos, allowing his mind slowly, slowly to grow still.

He does not know the purpose of the treatment, but he is certain that he cannot endure many more of those sessions. Sooner than later, he will suffer a massive stroke; the failure of an inner vessel will do what a bullet to his armored skull cannot as easily achieve.

If a cerebral aneurysm does not finish him, he will surely trade the developmental disability called autism for genuine psychosis. He will seek in madness the peace that mere autism is not always able to ensure.

In his darkest moments, Randal wonders whether the spinning rack is a treatment, as Father has repeatedly called it, or if it might be intended as torture.

Not born of God and alienated from belief, this is the closest he can come to a blasphemous thought: that Father is a cruel rather than a caring maker, that Father himself is psychotic and his entire enterprise an insane endeavor.

Whether Father is sincere or deceitful, whether his project is genius or dementia, Randal Six knows that he himself will never find happiness in the Hands of Mercy.

Happiness lies streets away, a little less than three miles from here, at the home of one Carson O’Connor. In that house lies a secret to be taken if it isn’t freely offered: the cause of Arnie O’Connor’s smile, the reason for the moment of joy captured in the newspaper photo, no matter how brief it might have been.

As soon as possible, he must get to the O’Connor boy, before the cerebral aneurysm that kills him, before the spinning rack whirls him into madness.

Randal is not locked in his room. His autism, which is at times complicated by agoraphobia, keeps him this side of the threshold more securely than could locks or chains.

Father often encourages him to explore from end to end of the building, even floors above and below this one. Adventurousness will be a first proof that his treatments are working.

No matter where he goes in the building, he cannot leave, for the exterior doors are wired to a security system. He would be caught before he escaped the grounds…and might be punished with a very long session in the spinning rack.

Anyway, when he occasionally leaves his room and wanders the halls, he never dares to go far, never a fraction as far as Father would like to see him travel. Sometimes even a distance of thirty feet presents him with an overload of sights and sounds that brings him trembling to his knees.

In his self-isolation, he nonetheless sees. He hears. He learns. He knows of a way out of Mercy that will not trigger an alarm.

He may not have sufficient fortitude to reach that special door, let alone to confront the busier world beyond. But his despondency has recently advanced to desperation, and the reckless action that is the whip of desperation may lash into him a kind of courage.

He will leave this coming night, in little more than twelve hours.

CHAPTER 42

THE QUIET RECEIVING FOYER featured a baroque frieze instead of traditional crown moldings: deeply carved acanthus leaves punctuated every two feet and at the corners by the heads of angels alternating with gargoyles or perhaps mocking demons.

Inlaid in the forest-green marble floor, a foot-wide circular work of marquetry employed lighter marbles to portray mythological beings—gods, goddesses, and demigods—in perpetual pursuit. Even without dropping to his knees, Michael could see that some of the pursuit involved sexual fondling.

Only in New Orleans would either of these elements have seemed suitable to a funeral home. The house had probably been built around 1850 by nou-veau riche newcomers who hadn’t been welcome in the Creole sections of town. In this city, time eventually conferred dignity on what had once been outrageous as well as on what had been classic from the day it had been erected.

Studying a photo of Bobby Allwine that Carson had given him, Taylor Fullbright said, “This is the very gentleman, yes. I felt sorry for the poor soul—so many of his friends were dying. Then I realized he didn’t know any of the deceased.”

Carson said, “He—what?—just got a thrill being around dead people?”

“Nothing that kinky,” said Fullbright. “He just…seemed to be at peace around them.”

“That’s what he said—he was at peace?”

“The only thing I can remember he said was ‘Death can be as much a gift as a curse,’ which is often true.”

“Did you confront him about coming to all these viewings?”

“Confrontation isn’t my style, Detective. Some funeral directors are solemn to the point of seeming stern. I’m more of a hugger and a consoler. Mr. Allwine and his friend, they were never a problem. More melancholy than weird.”

Carson’s phone rang, and when she stepped away to answer it, Michael said to Fullbright, “He came with a friend? Can you give us a description?”

Smiling, nodding, as affable as a cartoon bear, the mortician said, “I can see him as clear in memory as if he were standing here. He was ordinary to a fault. Average height. A little heavier than average weight. Middle-aged. Brown hair—or maybe blond. Blue or green eyes, maybe hazel.”

With a sarcasm that sounded like earnest praise, Michael said, “Amazing. That’s as good as a photo.”

Pleased, Fullbright said, “I’ve got a sharp eye for detail.”

Putting away her phone, Carson turned to Michael: “Jack Rogers wants to see us at the morgue.”

“You might mention to the coroner,” Fullbright said, “that while I don’t extend commissions to those who send us business, I do offer discounts for referrals.”

“I can’t wait to tell him,” Michael said. Pointing to the marble marquetry at their feet, he asked, “Who’s that figure?”

“The one with the winged feet? That’s Mercury.”

“And that one next to him?”

“Aphrodite,” said Fullbright.

‘Are they…?”

“Engaged in sodomy?” the mortician asked jovially. “Indeed they are. You’d be amazed how many mourners notice and are cheered by it.”

“I am amazed,” Michael agreed.

CHAPTER 43

THE LONGER ROY PRIBEAUX roamed his expansive loft apartment, gazing out of the tall windows, brooding about his future, the more troubled he became.

When a brief midmorning shower pelted the panes, blurring the city, he felt as if his future also blurred further, until it was a meaningless smear. He might have cried if crying had been his thing.

Never in his young—and getting steadily younger—life had he been without a purpose and a plan. Meaningful work kept the mind sharp and the heart uplifted.

Meaningful work, having a worthwhile purpose, was as crucial to longevity and to enduring youthfulness as were megadoses of Vitamin C and Coenzyme Q10.

Without a purpose to inspire him, Roy feared that in spite of a perfect diet, ideally balanced nutritional supplements, an array of exotic emollients, and even purified lamb’s urine, he would begin to grow old mentally. The more he brooded, the more it seemed that the path to senility loomed before him, as steep as a luge chute.

Mind and body were inextricably linked, of course, so a year of mental senescence would inevitably lead to lines at the corners of his eyes, the first gray hairs at his temples. He shuddered.

He tried to muster the desire to take a walk, but if he spent the day in the Quarter, among the throngs of celebratory tourists, and if he failed to encounter the radiant goddess of his destiny, his uneasiness would deepen.

Because he himself was very close to perfect, perhaps now that he had collected all the parts of an ideal woman, he should make it his goal to refine himself that final degree. He could now focus on achieving the perfect metabolism until he ceased to excrete wastes.

Although this was a noble undertaking, it didn’t promise as much fun as the quest he had recently completed.

Finally, out of desperation, he found himself wondering—indeed hoping—that he had erred when he concluded that he had completed his collection. He might have overlooked an anatomical feature that, while minor, remained essential to beauty’s jigsaw.

For a while he sat at the kitchen table with da Vinci’s famous anatomical charts and several old Playboy centerfolds. He studied the female form from every angle, looking for a morsel that he might have overlooked.

When he made no discovery that allowed him to cry Eureka, he began to consider the possibility that he had not been sufficiently specific in his collecting. Was it possible that he had collected from too macro a perspective?

Were he to take Elizabeth Lavenza’s lovely pale hands from the freezer and review them critically, he might be surprised to find that they were perfect, yes, in every detail but one. Perhaps she had a single thumb that fell short of perfection.

Perhaps the lips he had harvested were not both perfect as he had remembered. The upper might be perfect, the lower not quite.

If he needed to set out on a search for the perfect left thumb to marry to Elizabeth’s otherwise faultlessly fair hands, if he must find a bee-stung lower lip to match the exquisite upper already in his possession, then his quest had not been completed, after all, and he would for a while have meaningful…

“No,” he declared aloud. “That way lies madness.”

Soon he would be reduced to harvesting one toe per donor and killing for mere eyelashes. A thin line separated serious homicidal purpose from buffoonery.

Realizing that a blind alley lay before him, Roy might at that moment have fallen into a swoon of despair, even though at heart he was an optimistic person. Fortunately, he was saved by a new thought.

From his nightstand he retrieved his original list of wanted anatomical delights. He had drawn a line through every item as he acquired it, concluding with EYES.

The list was long, and perhaps early in the quest he had crossed off an item out of wishful thinking, before he had taken possession of it. His memory of certain periods in his past was somewhat hazy, not because of any mental deficiency, but solely because he was such a tomorrow-oriented person, focused on the future in which he would grow younger and closer to perfection.

He vaguely recalled, over the years, killing a woman or two for an ideal feature, only to discover, in the intimate presence of the corpse, that the wanted item was minutely flawed and therefore not worth harvesting. Perhaps more than a woman or two. Maybe as many as four had disappointed him. Maybe five.

He supposed it was possible that he had crossed off an item or two on his list only to discover, after the kill, that he had been too easy in his judgment—and then in his busyness had forgotten to restore the needed item to the list.

Either to confirm or eliminate this possibility, he needed to compare the contents of his special freezer to his original list.

Despondency quickly faded and a happy anticipation filled him. He opened a bottle of apple juice and sectioned a raisin muffin to sample as he worked.

All the appliances in his roomy kitchen boasted stainless-steel finishes, including the ovens, microwave, dishwasher, icemaker, Sub-Zero refrigerator, and two enormous freezers.

In the first freezer he stored the parts of the perfect woman. He playfully referred to this as the love locker.

The second freezer contained an assortment of dairy-free, soy-based ice creams, free-range chicken breasts, and quarts of rhubarb puree. In the event that a major act of terrorism led to a disruption in the distribution of vital nutritional supplements, he also stored five-pound packages of powdered saw palmetto, St. John’s wort, bee pollen, and other items.

When he lifted the lid on the first freezer, a cloud of frosted air wafted past him, crisp with a faint scent vaguely like that of frozen fish. He saw at once that the freezer contained items that did not belong with his collection.

His larger treasures—legs and arms—were tightly sealed in multiple layers of Reynolds Plastic Wrap. The smaller lovelies were sealed first in One-Zip bags and then in Tupperware containers with dependably tight lids.

Now he found among his collection three containers that were not Tupperware. They were cheap knockoffs of that desired brand: opaque plastic bottoms with ugly green lids.

This discovery mystified him. Although certain events in the more distant past might be blurry in his memory, these unacceptable containers were set atop the rest of his collection; they could have been placed here only recently. Yet he had never seen them before.

Curious but not yet alarmed, he took the three containers from the freezer. He put them on a nearby counter.

When he opened them, he found what might have been human organs. The first resembled liver. The second might have been a heart. With no real interest in things internal, he couldn’t guess whether the third item was a kidney, spleen, or something even more arcane.

Pausing for some raisin muffin and apple juice, he could not avoid considering that these three specimens might be the souvenirs taken by the other killer currently making the news in New Orleans.

Being a Renaissance man who had educated himself in a variety of disciplines, Roy knew more than a little about psychology. He could not help but give some consideration now to the concept of multiple personalities.

He found it interesting to consider that he might be both the original killer and the copycat, might have murdered three men while in a fugue state, and that even now, confronted with evidence, he couldn’t remember popping or chopping them. Interesting…but in the end not convincing. He and himself, working separately, were not, together, the Surgeon.

The true explanation eluded him, but he knew that it would prove to be more bizarre than multiple personalities.

Instinct drew his attention to the second freezer.

If the first had contained the unexpected, might not the second hold surprises, too? He might find gallons of high-fat ice cream and pounds of bacon among the herbs and health foods.

Instead, when he opened the lid and blinked away the initial cloud of frosted air, he discovered Candace’s eyeless corpse jammed atop the supplements and foodstuffs.

Roy was certain that he had not brought this cotton-candy person home with him.

CHAPTER 44

LIKE THE SOMEWHAT disheveled medical examiner himself, Jack Rogers’s private office was a classic example of managed chaos. The desktop overflowed with papers, notebooks, folders, photos. Books were jammed in the shelves everywhichway. Nevertheless, Jack would be able to find anything he needed after mere seconds of searching.

Only partly because of sleep deprivation and too much coffee, Carson’s mind felt as disordered as the office. “Bobby Allwine’s gone?”

Jack said, “The cadaver, the tissue samples, the autopsy video—all gone.”

“What about the autopsy report and photos?” Michael asked. “Did you file them under ‘Munster, Herman’ like I suggested?”

“Yeah. They found them, took them.”

“They thought to look under ‘Munster, Herman?” Michael asked in disbelief. “Since when do grave robbers double as trivia mavens?”

“Judging by the mess in the file room,” Jack said, “I think they just tore through all the drawers till they got what they wanted. We could have filed it under ‘Bell, Tinker,’ and they would have found it. Anyway, they weren’t grave robbers. They didn’t dig Allwine out of the ground. They took him from a morgue drawer.”

“So they’re bodysnatchers,” Michael said. “Getting the term right doesn’t change the fact that your ass is in a sling, Jack.”

“It feels like a barbed-wire thong,” Jack said. “Losing evidence in a capital case? Man, there goes the pension.”

Trying to make sense of the situation, Carson said, “Did the city cut your security budget or what?”

Jack shook his head. “We’re as tight as a prison here. It has to be an inside job.”

Simultaneously, Carson and Michael looked at Luke, who sat on a stool in a corner.

“Hey,” he said, “I never stole a dime in my life, let alone a dead guy”

“Not Luke,” Jack Rogers assured them. “He couldn’t have pulled it off. He’d have screwed up.”

Luke winced. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Luke and I were here for a while after you two left, but not all night. We hit a wall, needed sleep. Because I’d sent home the night staff to keep the lid on this, the place was deserted.”

“You forget to lock up?” Carson asked.

Jack glowered at her. “No way.”

“Signs of forced entry?”

“None. They must’ve had keys.”

“Somebody knew what you’d find in Allwine,” she said, “because maybe he’s not unique. Maybe there’re others like him.”

“Don’t go off in the Twilight Zone again,” Michael half warned, half pleaded.

“At least one other,” she said. “The friend he went to funerals with. Mr. Average Everything.”

Almost simultaneous with a knock, the door opened, and Frye, Jonathan Harker’s partner, entered. He looked surprised to see them.

“Why so glum?” he asked. “Did somebody die?”

Weariness and caffeine sharpened Carson’s edge. “What don’t you understand about ‘buzz off?”

“Hey, I’m not here about your case. We’re on that liquor-store shooting.”

“Yeah? Is that right? Is that what you were doing yesterday at Allwine’s apartment—looking for clues in the liquor-store shooting?”

Frye pretended innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. O’Connor, you’re wound as tight as a golf ball’s guts. Get a man, relieve some tension.”

She wanted to shoot him accidentally.

As if reading her mind, Michael said, ‘A gun can always go off accidentally, but you’d have to explain why you drew it in the first place.”

CHAPTER 45

COMFORTABLE IN HER ROBE, ensconced in a wing-back chair, Erika spent the night and the morning with no company but books, and even took her breakfast in the library.

Reading for pleasure, lingering over the prose, she nevertheless covered a hundred pages an hour. She was, after all, an Alpha-class member of the New Race, with superb language skills.

She read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and when she finished it, she did something that she had not done before in her weeks of life. She wept.

The story was about the power of love, the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the horrors of revolution in the name of political ideology, among other things.

Erika understood the concept of love and found it appealing, but she didn’t know if she would ever feel it. The New Race was supposed to value reason, to eschew emotion, to reject superstition.

She had heard Victor say that love was superstition. One of the Old Race, he’d made himself New. He claimed that perfect clarity of mind was a pleasure greater than any mere sentiment.

Nevertheless, Erika found herself intrigued by the concept of love and longed to experience it.

She found hope in the fact that she was capable of tears. Her built-in disposition toward reason at the expense of emotion had not prevented her from identifying with the tragic lawyer who, at the end of Dickens’s novel, went to the guillotine in place of another man.

The lawyer had sacrificed himself to ensure that the woman he loved would have happiness with the man she loved. That man was the one whose name the lawyer had assumed and in whose place he had been executed.

Even if Erika was capable of love, she would not be capable of self-sacrifice, for it violated the proscription against suicide that had been embedded in every member of the New Race. Therefore, she was in awe of this capacity in ordinary human beings.

As for revolution…A day would come when Victor would give the command, and the New Race living secretly among the Old would pour down upon humanity a storm of terror unprecedented in history.

She’d not been created to serve in the front lines of that war, only to be a wife to Victor. When the time came, she supposed that she would be as ruthless as her maker had created her to be.

If they knew what she was, ordinary humans would consider her a monster. Members of the Old Race weren’t her brothers and sisters.

Yet she admired much about them and, in truth, envied some of their gifts.

She suspected that it would be a mistake to let Victor know that her interest in the arts of the Old Race had evolved into admiration. In his view, they deserved only contempt. If she could not sustain that contempt, Erika Five could always be activated.

As noon drew near, when she was certain that the household staff had cleaned the master suite and made the bed, she went upstairs.

If the maids had found something extraordinary or just peculiar in the bedroom, if they had uncovered even a few rat droppings, she would have been told. Whatever had been in the bedroom the previous night must not be there now.

She prowled the suite anyway, listening for furtive sounds, looking behind furniture.

In the night, gripped by a surprising fear of the unknown, she had retreated. Fear, an important survival mechanism, had not been entirely denied to the New Race.

Superstition, on the other hand, was uncontestable proof of a weak mind. Victor had no tolerance for superstition. Those with weak minds would be recalled, terminated, replaced.

The most innocent-seeming superstition—such as a belief that ill fortune attended every Friday the thirteenth—could open a door in the mind to consideration of larger supernatural issues. The most essential purpose of Victor’s revolution was to complete the work of modernity and create a race of absolute materialists.

Erika searched the suite to quell the quasi-superstitious dread that had seized her the previous night and that still lingered. When she found nothing untoward, her confidence returned.

She enjoyed a long hot shower.

Members of the New Race, even Alphas like her, were encouraged to develop a keen appreciation for simple physical pleasures that could serve as an inoculation against emotions. Emotions themselves could be a form of pleasure, but also an antirevolutionary force.

Sex was among the approved pleasures, pure animal sex divorced from affection, from love. Sex between members of the New Race was also divorced from reproduction; they were engineered to be sterile.

Each new man and woman owed his or her existence to the direct action of Victor. The family was an antirevolutionary institution. Family fostered emotion.

Victor trusted no one but Victor to create life only for purely intellectual, solely rational reasons. Life from the lab will one day entirely replace life from the loins.

Shower completed, Erika opened the door of the stall, fished a towel from the nearby rack, stepped onto the bath mat—and discovered that she’d had a visitor. The splash of water and the clouds of steam had masked the movements of the intruder.

On the mat lay a scalpel. Stainless steel. Sparkling.

The scalpel must be one of Victor’s. He owned collections of surgical instruments acquired at various times during his two-century crusade.

Victor, however, had not put this blade on her bath mat. Nor had any member of the household staff. Someone else had been here. Something else.

Steam swirled around her. Yet she shivered.

CHAPTER 46

FOLLOWING THEIR STOP at the morgue, Michael made a play for the car keys, but Carson as usual took the wheel.

“You drive too slow,” she told him.

“You drive too asleep.”

“I’m fine. I’m cool.”

“You’re both,” he agreed, “but you’re not fully awake.”

“Unconscious, I wouldn’t drive as slow as you.”

“Yeah, see, I don’t want to test that claim.”

“You sound like your father’s a safety engineer or something.”

“You know he’s a safety engineer,” Michael said.

“What’s a safety engineer do, anyway?”

“He engineers safety”

“Life is inherently unsafe.”

“That’s why we need safety engineers.”

“You sound like probably your mother was obsessed with safe toys when you were growing up.”

“As you know perfectly well, she’s a product-safety analyst.”

“God, you must have had a boring childhood. No wonder you wanted to be a cop, get shot at, shoot back.”

Michael sighed. “None of this has anything to do with whether you’re fit to drive or not.”

“I am not only fit to drive,” Carson said, “I am God’s gift to Louisiana highways.”

“I hate it when you get like this.”

“I am what I am.”

“What you are, Popeye, is stubborn.”

“Look who’s talking—a guy who will never accept that a woman can drive better than he can.”

“This isn’t a gender thing, and you know it.”

“I’m female. You’re male. It’s a gender thing.”

“It’s a nut thing,” he said. “You’re nuts, I’m not, so I ought to drive. Carson, really, you need sleep.”

“I can sleep when I’m dead.”

The day’s agenda consisted of several interviews with friends of Elizabeth Lavenza, the floater without hands who had been found in the lagoon. After the second of these, in the bookstore where Lavenza had worked as a clerk, Carson had to admit that sleep deprivation interfered with her ability as an investigator.

Returning to the sedan, she said, “Okay, I gotta grab some sack time, but what’ll you do?”

“Go home, watch Die Hard.”

“You’ve watched it like fifty times.”

“It just gets better. Like Hamlet. Give me the car keys.”

She shook her head. “I’ll take you home.”

“You’ll drive me head-on into a bridge abutment.”

“If that’s what you want,” she said, getting behind the wheel.

In the passenger’s seat, he said, “You know what you are?”

“God’s gift to Louisiana highways.”

“Besides that. You’re a control freak.”

“That’s just a slacker’s term for someone who works hard and likes to do things right.”

“So I’m a slacker now?” he asked.

“I didn’t say that. All I’m saying, in a friendly way, is you’re using their vocabulary.”

“Don’t drive so fast.”

Carson accelerated. “How many times did your mother warn you not to run with scissors in your hand?”

“Like seven hundred thousand,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re fit to drive.”

“God, you’re relentless.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Where’d you get that word? The dialogue in Die Hard isn’t that sophisticated.”

When Carson stopped at the curb in front of Michael’s apartment house, he hesitated to get out. “I’m worried about you driving home.”

“I’m like an old dray horse. I know the route in my bones.”

“If you were pulling the car, I wouldn’t worry, but you’re gonna drive it at warp speed.”

“I’ve got a gun, but you aren’t worried about that.”

“All right, all right. Drive. Go. But if you get behind a slow motorist, don’t shoot him.”

As she drove away, she saw him in the rearview mirror, watching her with concern.

The question wasn’t whether she had fallen in love with Michael Maddison. The question was how deeply, how irretrievably?

Not that love was a sucking slough from which a person needed to be retrieved, like a drowner from the wild surf, like an addict from addiction. She was all for love. She just wasn’t ready for love.

She had her career. She had Arnie. She had questions about her parents’ deaths. Her life didn’t have room for passion right now.

Maybe she’d be ready for passion when she was thirty-five. Or forty. Or ninety-four. But not now.

Besides, if she and Michael went to bed together, departmental regulations would necessitate a new partner for each of them.

She didn’t like that many other homicide detectives. The chances were that she’d be paired with a fathead. Furthermore, right now she didn’t have the time or patience to break in a new partner.

Not that she always obeyed departmental regulations. She wasn’t a by-the-book i-dotter and t-crosser.

But the rule against cops copulating with cops and then sharing an assignment struck Carson as common sense.

Not that she always deferred to her common sense. Sometimes you had to take reckless chances if you trusted your instinct and if you were human.

Otherwise you might as well leave the force and become a safety engineer.

As for being human, there was the fright figure in Allwine’s apartment, who claimed not to be human, unless he believed that being cobbled together from pieces of criminals and being brought to life by lightning was not a sufficient deviation from the usual dad-makes-mom-pregnant routine to deny him human status.

Either the monster—that’s what he called himself; she was not being politically incorrect—had been a figment of her imagination, in which case she was crazy, or he had been real, in which case maybe the whole world had gone crazy.

In the midst of this gruesome and impossible case, she couldn’t just unzip Michael’s fly and say, I know you’ve been dreaming about this. Romance was a delicate thing. It needed tender care to grow and mature into something wonderful. Right now she didn’t have time for an orgasm, let alone for romance.

If she and Michael could have something meaningful together, she didn’t want to ruin it by rushing into bed, especially not at a time when the pressure of work was half crushing her.

And that indicated how deeply and irretrievably she loved him. She was in the water over her head.

She drove all the way home without killing herself or anyone else. If she had been as awake and clearheaded as she claimed to be, she wouldn’t have taken such goofy pride in this accomplishment.

Between the car and the house, the sunlight seemed bright enough to blind her. Even in her bedroom, daylight at the windows stung her bloodshot eyes and made her wince.

She shut the blinds. She closed the drapes. She considered painting the room black, but decided that would be going too far.

Fully clothed, she fell into bed and was asleep before the pillows finished compressing under her head.

CHAPTER 47

THE FOURTH TIME that Roy Pribeaux opened the freezer to see if Candace was still there, she was still there, so he decided to rule out the possibility that he might be delusional.

He had not taken his car the previous night. He lived within strolling distance of the Quarter. They had walked everywhere.

Yet he could not have carried her all the way from the levee to his loft. Although he was a strong man and getting stronger by the day, she was a heavy person.

Besides, you couldn’t carry an eyeless corpse around the heart of New Orleans without drawing comment and suspicion. Not even New Orleans.

He didn’t own a wheelbarrow. Anyway, that wouldn’t have been a practical solution.

He poured another glass of apple juice to accompany what remained of the muffin.

The only credible explanation for Candace’s surprise appearance was that someone had brought her here from the levee and stowed her in his food freezer. The same person had put the three plastic containers, with organs, in the other freezer, the love locker.

This meant that someone knew Roy had killed Candace.

Indeed, that someone must have watched him kill her.

“Spooky,” he whispered.

He had not been aware of being followed. If someone had been dogging him, watching him romance Candace, the guy had been a master of surveillance, nearly as ephemeral as a ghost.

Not just someone. Not just anyone. Considering the human organs in the three tacky containers with ugly green lids, the perpetrator could be none other than the copycat killer.

Roy’s work had inspired an imitator. The imitator had by these actions said, Hi there. Can we be friends? Why don’t we combine our collections?

Although Roy was flattered, as any artist might be flattered by the admiration of another artist, he didn’t like this development. He didn’t like it at all.

For one thing, this organ-obsessed individual was a burrower whose fascination with internals was gross and unsophisticated. He wasn’t of Roy’s caliber.

Besides, Roy didn’t need or want the admiration of anyone. He was sufficient unto himself—until the perfect woman of his destiny entered his life.

He wondered when the copycat had visited. Candace had donated her eyes only a little more than twelve hours before he had found her in his freezer. The intruder would have had only two opportunities to bring her to the loft.

Satisfied with his life, immensely satisfied with himself, Roy had no reason for insomnia. He slept soundly every night.

The copycat, however, could not have brought such a heavy person as Candace into the loft and to the freezer while Roy slept unawares.

The kitchen was open to the dining area. The dining area flowed into the living room. Only a pony wall separated the living room from the bedroom. Sound would have traveled unobstructed, and Roy would have been awakened.

Now he went into the bathroom at the far end of the loft from the kitchen. He shut the door. He turned on the water in the shower. He switched on the vent fan.

Yes. Entirely possible. The copycat could have brought Candace into the loft when Roy had been enjoying his predawn shower.

He took long showers: the exfoliating soap with loofa sponge, the moisturizing soap, two superb shampoos, a cream conditioner…

The visitor’s precise timing suggested that he knew a great deal about Roy’s domestic routine. And he must have a key.

Roy had no landlord. He owned the building. He possessed the only keys to the loft.

Standing in the bathroom, surrounded by the susurrant rush of water and vent-fan blades, he was overcome by the suspicion that the copycat was in the apartment even now, preparing another surprise.

This concern had no merit, based as it was on the requirements that the copycat be omniscient and omnipresent. Yet suspicion grew into conviction.

Roy cranked off the shower, switched off the fan. He burst out of the bathroom and searched the loft. No one.

Although alone, Roy was at last alarmed.

CHAPTER 48

SHE WAS RIDING a black horse across a desolate plain under a low and churning sky.

Cataclysmic blasts of lightning ripped the heavens. Where each bright sword stabbed to earth, a giant rose, half handsome and half deformed, tattooed.

Each giant grabbed at her, trying to pull her from her mount. Each grabbed at the horse, too, at its flashing hooves, at its legs, at its silky mane.

The terrified horse screamed, kicked, faltered, broke loose, plunged forward.

Without a saddle, she clamped the mount with her knees, clutched fistfuls of its mane, held on, endured. There were more giants in the earth than the horse could outrun. Lightning, the crash of thunder, yet another golem rising, a huge hand closing around her wrist—

Carson woke in unrelieved darkness, not thrown from sleep by the nightmare but pricked from it by a sound.

Piercing the soft thrum and shush of the air conditioner came the sharp creak of a floorboard. Another floorboard groaned. Someone moved stealthily through the bedroom.

She had awakened on her back, in a sweat, atop the bedclothes, in the exact position in which she’d fallen into bed. She sensed someone looming over her.

For a moment she couldn’t remember where she’d left her service pistol. Then she realized that she still wore her street clothes, her shoes, even her shoulder holster. For the first time in her life, she had fallen asleep while armed.

She slid a hand under her jacket, withdrew the gun.

Although Arnie had never previously entered her room in the dark and though his behavior was predictable, this might be him.

When she slowly sat up and with her left hand groped toward the nightstand lamp, the bedsprings sang softly

Floorboards creaked, perhaps because the intruder had reacted to the noise she made. Creaked again.

Her fingers found the lamp, the switch. Light.

She saw no one in the first flush of light. At once, however, she sensed more than saw movement from the corner of her eye.

Turning her head, bringing the pistol to bear, she found no one.

At one window, draperies billowed. For a moment she attributed that movement to the air conditioner. Then the billows subsided. The draperies hung limp and still. As if someone, leaving, had brushed against them.

Carson got out of bed and crossed the room. When she pulled the draperies aside, she found the window closed. And locked.

Maybe she hadn’t awakened as instantly as she’d thought. Maybe sleep had clung to her, and the dream. Maybe.

CARSON SHOWERED, changed clothes, and felt fresh but slightly disoriented. Having slept away the afternoon, she rose to the night, inner clock confused, lacking purpose.

In the kitchen, she scooped a serving of curried chicken salad from a bowl. With her dish and a fork, eating on the move, she went to Arnie’s room.

The castle glorious, fit for King Arthur, seemed to have grown higher towers.

For once, Arnie was not at work upon this citadel. Instead he sat staring at a penny balanced on his right thumbnail, against his forefinger.

“What’s up, sweetie?” she asked, though she expected no reply.

He met her expectation, but flipped the penny into the air. The copper winked brightly as it turned.

With quicker reflexes than he usually exhibited, the boy snatched the coin from the air, held it tightly in his right fist.

Carson had never seen him engaged in this behavior before. She watched, wondering.

Half a minute passed while Arnie stared at his clenched fist. Then he opened it and frowned as if with disappointment when he saw the penny gleaming on his palm.

As the boy flipped it and caught it in midair once more, Carson noticed a stack of bright pennies on the drawbridge to the castle.

Arnie had neither an understanding of money nor any need for it.

“Honey, where did you get the pennies?”

Opening his hand, Arnie saw the penny and frowned as before. He flipped it again. He seemed to have a new obsession.

At the open door, Vicky Chou peered in from the hallway. “How’s the chicken salad?”

“Fabulous. Every day, you make me feel inadequate in a new way.”

Vicky made a de nada gesture. “We all have our special talents. I couldn’t shoot anyone the way you do.”

‘Anytime you need it done, you know where to find me.”

“Where did Arnie get the pennies?” Vicky asked.

“That’s what I was gonna ask you.”

Having flipped the penny again, having found it in his palm after snatching it from the air, the boy looked puzzled.

“Arnie, where did you get the pennies?”

From his shirt pocket, Arnie withdrew a card. He sat staring at it in silence.

Aware that her brother might study the card for an hour before offering it to her, Carson gently plucked it from his fingers.

“What?” Vicky asked.

“It’s a pass to someplace called the Luxe Theater. One free movie. Where would he have gotten this?”

Arnie flipped the penny again, and as he snatched it out of the air, he said, “Every city has secrets—”

Carson knew she had heard those words somewhere—

“—but none as terrible as this.”

—and her blood chilled as she saw in her mind’s eye the tattooed man standing at the window in Bobby Allwine’s apartment.

CHAPTER 49

TWO HUNDRED YEARS of life can leave a man jaded.

If he is a genius, like Victor, his intellectual pursuits lead him always on new adventures. The mind can be kept fresh and forever engaged as it confronts and resolves increasingly complex problems.

On the other hand, repetition of physical pleasures eventually makes former delights seem dull. Boredom sets in. During the second century, a man’s appetites turn increasingly toward the exotic, the extreme.

This is why Victor requires violence with sex, and the cruel humiliation of his partner. He has long ago transcended the guilt that committing acts of cruelty might spawn in others. Brutality is an aphrodisiac; the exercise of raw power thrills him.

The world offers so many cuisines that conventional sex grows boring long before favorite dishes grow bland to the tongue. Only in the past decade has Victor developed a periodic craving for foods so exotic that they must be eaten with discretion.

At certain restaurants in the city, where the owners value his business, where the waiters value his generous gratuities, and where the chefs admire his uniquely sophisticated palate, Victor from time to time arranges special dinners in advance. He is always served in a private room, where a man of his refinement can enjoy dishes so rare that they might seem repulsive to the ignorant multitudes. He has no wish to explain these acquired tastes to the boorish diners—and they are virtually always boorish—at an adjoining table.

Quan Yin, a Chinese restaurant named for the Queen of Heaven, had two private dining rooms. One was suitable for a group of eight. Victor had reserved it for himself.

He frequently ate alone. With two hundred years of experience that no one of an ordinary life span could match, he found that he was virtually always his own best company

Teasing his appetite, allowing time to anticipate the exotic entrée, he began with a simple dish: egg drop soup.

Before he had half finished this first course, his cell phone rang. He was surprised to hear the voice of the renegade.

“Murder doesn’t scare me anymore, Father.”

With a note of authority that always secured obedience, Victor said, “You must talk to me about this in person.”

“I’m not as troubled about murder as when I called you before.”

“How did you get this number?”

The emergency contact number at Hands of Mercy, given to members of the New Race, did not transfer calls to Victor’s cell phone.

Instead of answering, the renegade said, “Murder just makes me more human. They excel at murder.”

“But you’re better than their kind.” The need to discuss this, to debate it, annoyed Victor. He was master and commander. His word was law, his desire obeyed, at least among his people. “You’re more rational, more—”

“We’re not better. There’s something missing in us…something they have.”

This was an intolerable lie. This was heresy.

“The help you need,” Victor insisted impatiently, “only I am able to give.”

“If I just cut open enough of them and look inside, sooner or later I’ll discover what makes them…happier.”

“That isn’t rational. Come to me at the Hands of Mercy—”

“There’s this girl I see sometimes, she’s particularly happy. I’ll find the truth in her, the secret, the thing I’m missing.”

The renegade hung up.

As before, Victor pressed *69. Also as before, the call had come from a number that blocked automatic call-backs.

His special dinner had not been ruined by this development, but his bright mood had dimmed. He decided to switch from tea to wine.

Beer often went with Chinese food better than wine did. Victor was not, however, a beer man.

Unlike many Chinese restaurants, Quan Yin had an extensive cellar full of the finest vintages. The waiter—in a ruffled white tuxedo shirt, bow tie, and black tuxedo pants—brought a wine list.

As he finished his soup and waited for a salad of hearts of palms and peppers, Victor studied the list. He wavered between a wine suitable for pork and one better matched with seafood.

He would be eating neither pork nor seafood. The entrée, which he’d had before, was such a rare delicacy that any connoisseur of wine must be of several minds about the most compatible selection.

Finally he chose a superb Pinot Grigio and enjoyed the first glass with his salad.

Much ceremony accompanied the presentation of the main course, beginning with the chef himself, a Buddha-plump man named Lee Ling. He sprinkled red rose petals across the white tablecloth.

Two waiters appeared with an ornately engraved red-bronze tray on which stood a legged, one-quart copper pot filled with boiling oil. A Sterno burner under the pot kept the oil bubbling.

They put the tray on the table, and Victor breathed deeply of the aroma rising from the pot. This peanut oil, twice clarified, had been infused with a blend of pepper oils. The fragrance was divine.

A third waiter put a plain white plate before him. Beside the plate, red chopsticks. So gently as to avoid the slightest clink, the waiter placed a pair of stainless-steel tongs on the plate.

The handles of the tongs were rubberized to insulate against the heat that the steel would draw from the boiling oil. The pincer ends were shaped like the petals of lotus blossoms.

The pot of oil stood to Victor’s right. Now a bowl of saffron rice was placed at the head of his plate.

Lee Ling, having retreated to the kitchen, returned with the entrée, which he put to the left of Victor’s plate. The delicacy waited in a silver serving dish with a lid.

The waiters bowed and retreated. Lee Ling waited, smiling.

Victor removed the lid from the silver server. The dish had been lined with cabbage leaves briefly steamed to wilt them and make them pliable.

This rare delicacy did not appear on the menu. It was not available at all times or on short notice.

In any event, Lee Ling would prepare it only for that one-in-a-thousand customer whom he’d known for years, whom he trusted, whom he knew to be a true gourmet. The customer must also be one so familiar with regional Chinese cuisine that he knew to request this very item.

Restaurant-licensing officials would not have approved of this offering, not even here in libertine New Orleans. No health risk was involved, but some things are too exotic even for the most tolerant of people.

In the dish, nestled in the cabbage, squirmed a double litter of live baby rats, so recently born that they were still pink, hairless, and blind.

In Chinese, Victor expressed his approval and gratitude to Lee Ling. Smiling, bowing, the chef retreated, leaving his guest alone.

Perhaps the excellent wine had restored Victor’s good mood or perhaps his own extraordinary sophistication so pleased him that he could not for long remain glum. One of the secrets to leading a life full of great accomplishment was to like oneself, and Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, liked himself more than he could express.

He dined.

CHAPTER 50

THE SECOND FLOOR of the Hands of Mercy is quiet.

Here the men and women of the New Race, fresh from the tanks, are undergoing the final stages of direct-to-brain data downloading. Soon they will be ready to go into the world and take their places among doomed humanity.

Randal Six will leave Mercy before any of them, before this night is over. He is terrified, but he is ready.

The computer maps and virtual reality tours of New Orleans have unnerved him as much as they have prepared him. But if he is to avoid the spinning rack and survive, he can wait no longer.

To make his way in the dangerous world beyond these walls, he should be armed. But he has no weapon and cannot see anything in his room that might serve as one.

If the journey is longer than he hopes, he will need provisions. He has no food in his room, only what is brought to him at mealtimes.

Somewhere in this building is a kitchen of considerable size. A pantry. There he would find the food he needs.

The prospect of searching for a kitchen, gathering food from among an overwhelming number of choices, and packing supplies is so daunting that he cannot begin. If he must provision himself, he will never leave Mercy.

So he will set out with nothing more than the clothes he wears, a fresh book of crossword puzzles, and a pen.

At the threshold between his room and the hallway, paralysis seizes him. He cannot proceed.

He knows that the floors of these two spaces are on the same plane, yet he feels certain that he will drop a killing distance if he dares cross into the corridor. What he knows is usually not as powerful as what he feels, which is the curse of his condition.

Although he reminds himself that perhaps an encounter with Arnie O’Connor is his destiny, he remains unmoved, unmoving.

His emotional weather worsens as he stands paralyzed. Agitation stirs his thoughts into confusion, like a whirl of wind sweeps autumn leaves into a colorful spiral.

He is acutely aware of how this agitation can quickly develop into a deeper disturbance, then a storm, then a tempest. He wants desperately to open the book of puzzles and put his pen to the empty boxes.

If he succumbs to the crossword desire, he will finish not one puzzle, not two, but the entire book. Night will pass. Morning will come. He will have lost forever the courage to escape.

Threshold. Hallway. With one step, he can cross the former and be in the latter. He has done this before, but this time it seems like a thousand-mile journey.

The difference, of course, is that previously he had intended to go no farther than the hallway This time, he wants the world.

Threshold, hallway.

Suddenly threshold and hallway appear in his mind as hand-inked black letters in rows of white boxes, two entries in a crossword puzzle, sharing the letter b.

When he sees the two words intersecting in this manner, he more clearly recognizes that the threshold and the hallway in reality also intersect on the same plane. Crossing the first into the latter is no more difficult than filling the boxes with letters.

He steps out of his room.

CHAPTER 51

THE GEOMETRIC DESIGNS on the Art Deco facade of the Luxe Theater were given greater depth and drama by the honing glow of a streetlamp and the shadows that it sharpened.

The marquee was dark, and the theater appeared to be closed if not abandoned until Carson peered through one of the doors. She saw soft light at the refreshment counter and someone at work there.

When she tried the door, it swung inward. She stepped into the lobby.

The glass candy cases were lighted to display their wares. On the wall behind the counter, an illuminated Art Deco-style Coca-Cola clock, frost white and crimson, was a surprisingly poignant reminder of a more innocent time.

The man working behind the counter was the giant she had met in Allwine’s apartment. His physique identified him before he turned and revealed his face.

She snapped the movie pass against the glass top of the counter. “Who are you?”

“I told you once.”

“I didn’t get your name,” she said tightly.

He had been cleaning out the popcorn machine. He turned his attention to it once more. “My name’s Deucalion.”

“First or last?”

“First and last.”

“You work here?”

“I own the theater.”

“You assaulted a police officer.”

“Did I? Were you hurt?” He smiled, not sarcastically but with surprising warmth, considering his face. “Or was the damage to your self-esteem?”

His composure impressed her. His intimidating size was not the source of his confidence; he was no bully. Instead, his calm nature approached the deeper serenity that she associated with monastics in their cowled robes.

Some sociopaths were serene, too, as collected as trapdoor spiders waiting in their lairs for prey to drop on them.

She said, “What were you doing in my house?”

“From what I’ve seen of how you live, I think I can trust you.”

“Why do I give a rat’s ass whether you trust me? Stay out of my house.”

“Your brother is a heavy burden. You carry him with grace.”

Alarmed, she said, “You. Aren’t. In. My Life.”

He put down the damp cloth with which he’d been wiping out the popcorn machine, and he turned to her again, with only the candy counter between them.

“Is that what you want?” he asked. “Is it really? If that’s what you want, why did you come to hear the rest of it? Because you didn’t come just to tell me to stay away. You came with questions.”

His insight and his quiet amusement did not comport with the brutal look of him.

When she stood nonplussed, he said, “I mean no harm to Arnie or to you. Your enemy is Helios.”

She blinked in surprise. “Helios? Victor Helios? Owns Biovision, big philanthropist?”

“He has the arrogance to call himself ‘Helios,’ after the Greek god of the sun. Helios…the life-giver. That isn’t his real name.” Without emphasis, without a raised eyebrow, with no apparent irony, he said, “His real name is Frankenstein.”

After what he had said in Bobby Allwine’s apartment, after his riff about being made from pieces of criminals and given life force by a thunderstorm, she should have expected this development. She did not expect it, however, and it disappointed her.

Carson had felt that Deucalion was special in some way other than his formidable size and appearance, and for reasons that she couldn’t articulate to her satisfaction, she had wanted him to be something special. She needed to have the rug of routine pulled out from under her, to be tumbled headlong into the mystery of life.

Maybe mystery was a synonym for change. Maybe she needed a different kind of excitement from what the job usually supplied. She suspected, however, that she needed more meaning in her life than the homicide assignment currently gave her, though she didn’t know quite what she meant by meaning.

Deucalion disappointed her because this Frankenstein business was just another flavor of the nutcase rants she encountered more days than not in the conduct of ordinary investigations. He’d seemed strange but substantive; now he sounded hardly different from the pinwheel-eyed ginks who thought that CIA operatives or aliens were after them.

“Yeah,” she said. “Frankenstein.”

“The legend isn’t fiction. It’s fact.”

“Of course it is.” Disappointment of various kinds had the same effect on her: a craving for chocolate. Pointing through the glass top of the counter, she said, “I’d like one of those Hershey’s bars with almonds.”

“Long ago, in Austria, they burned his laboratory to the ground. Because he created me.”

“Bummer. Where are your neck bolts? Did you have them surgically removed?”

“Look at me,” he said solemnly

She gazed longingly at the Hershey’s bar for a moment but at last met his gaze.

Ghostly radiance pulsed through his eyes. This time she was so close that even if she had wanted to, she could not have dismissed it as a reflection of some natural light source.

“I suspect,” he said, “that stranger things than I now roam this city…and he’s begun to lose control of them.”

He stepped to the cash register, opened a drawer beneath it, and withdrew a newspaper clipping and a rolled paper tied with a ribbon.

The clipping included a photo of Victor Helios. The paper was a pencil portrait of the same man a decade younger.

“I tore this from a frame in Victor’s study two centuries ago, so I would never forget his face.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.