The Lair
November 17, 4.34 p.m.
There was no doubting any longer that he was an artist. He could feel it more than anything else. It had become as real as the sky and the moon. He was the artist, the creator, the great artisan. The creative flow had just kept coming, bursting out of him like a fountain from a snapped hydrant. His masterpiece was finally coming together. Twenty-five years in the making. Twenty-five years of slow-burning these images and ideas inside his mind. He had waited and waited and now he was emerging from the close sweaty chrysalis of patience with great wings and enormous power.
He rested his arms either side of the table to steady himself and looked down at the evidence. Amy Lloyd-Gardner’s small dark heart rested in a shallow aluminium tray. It had all happened, every moment. It really had happened. The girl’s heart had been steeping in the formaldehyde solution for nearly sixteen hours. The killer wanted to preserve it just as it was, full of beauty and mystery, but it wasn’t easy. He’d already filled each of its chambers with wax to keep the full rounded shape of the muscle; then he’d injected the tissue itself with a concentrated formaldehyde solution. He was desperate for it to work, but he was still experimenting and couldn’t tell whether the heart would disintegrate or hold its shape.
He’d used small animals to test various ways of preserving specimens and thought he had his technique just about right: injecting the tissue with the right solution of formaldehyde, then steeping the organs in the chemical solution so that it entered every cell and stopped the process of decomposition. It sometimes worked well, but other times it didn’t. He didn’t know why. After all, he wasn’t a scientist, he was an artist.
Still, it was the overall effect of his sculpture that would make his name, not the small, less-than-perfect parts. He looked across to the small glass vitrine that contained Mary-Jane’s two eyeballs. They were less than perfect too. The dazzling blue that had drawn him to her in the first place had turned cloudy. That was what was so interesting about sculpting with real human remains: you couldn’t always get it the way it was in your head. You had to work harder and harder to bring off the things you had seen in your daydreams.
Still, when he looked into Mary-Jane’s dull eyes through the carefully made solution, he recalled the moment of her death with perfect clarity. Her look of fear, the slow, tormented cry and guttural pleas. He wanted to relive it all. He wanted every acknowledgement of his sick transgression locked into his little glass cages and preserved in formaldehyde. It was his museum of experiences: the artistic impression of his own dead heart.
After Amy, the killer had cleaned himself up, dumped the car, then gone home and crashed for twelve hours solid in a deep, dreamless sleep. The kills really took it out of him. He felt like a victim in the warm aftermath of a car crash when you sit there flooded with every chemical the body can throw at you, your pants warm from your own urine, your vision crystal clear and images racing at different speeds through your shocked mind. God, it felt good. And then, what’s even more thrilling is that you realize you’re still alive and the crash wasn’t an ending, but a beginning, and you can do it all again. It was like being reborn with more power than ever before.
After Mary-Jane, fear was something he knew about only from memory. He no longer felt it. The killer moved along his gallery to Grace’s long golden tresses. He passed his hand over the silky fine hairs, stroking them slowly and tenderly. He felt the moment of her capture with a shiver of excitement.
Early that day, he had scoped another of his targets. He’d watched her for a while in Central Park, staring through his binoculars. She was sitting with her friends, chatting and laughing. A good student. A real grade-A brain. She was rich and well connected but slumming it with the real students out in Yorkville. He only ever wanted the best. She was a smart cookie, but even she didn’t know that he’d been watching her for eight months, ever since she’d caught his attention at one of the art history lectures he’d attended.
He’d been searching out and following his girls for years. He had seven of them now. Seven girls all with the same look, the same smell of money about them, the same wide blue eyes with their look of endless innocence.
He’d been scoping them for a long time. His little lair was plastered with their pictures. He liked to watch them grow up, he liked to see the way their hair changed over the years, their clothes too. He liked to know just about everything about them, even how they responded to threat. He tested them out with all kinds of little things. A dead rat on a car seat, a nasty grope on the subway, threatening graffiti, and sometimes just plain old-fashioned love letters. He liked to watch them as he interfered with their lives. They were his puppets. All along, he knew he was watching dead people. It was just a matter of time, and now the time had come. It was time to reap.
Three of the specimens were now dead. He had the evidence right there: eyes, hair, heart. Four more girls and he could construct the image that had been with him for so long.
He’d soon have every last one in his gallery. Seven body parts to shape his sculpture. The world would see his talent, his brilliance. They’d hate him, he knew that, but they’d have to admit his brilliance. The daring nature of his scheme.
He was going to complete his masterwork and then open his gallery to the world. He called it The Progression of Love. Each time he killed, he felt invigorated, and his sculpture was growing.
The killer looked over at the newspapers he’d bought. He needed the headlines and stories for his gallery. It showed how the world was already responding to his work. His reviews. He sat down and started clipping out the pictures and articles and pasting them on the cold stone walls of his lair. He was a little disappointed in the press coverage. They’d not really grasped the significance of what was happening to the city. They didn’t seem to get it. They even dared to suggest that Mary-Jane’s murder was a break-in gone wrong. How many thieves would take a girl’s eyeballs and pose her like that? It took inspiration to work a body like he did, inspiration and hours of mental preparation. It wasn’t a random strike, it wasn’t anger: it was a culmination of everything he’d ever felt.