House of Skin

HOUSE OF MIRRORS

“I don’t know what I expect to find,” Lisa said. “Probably nothing. But it seems like a good place to start. If Eddy’s in this town at all, then I’m sure he’ll go there.”

Fenn nodded. “I’m taking a lot of chances with you,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I know why.”

“Because you want to stop him as I do.”

Fenn looked thoughtful as he drove. “Yes, I suppose I do.” But even with all that she told him, he still wasn’t sure. He had other work to do, yet he was willing to help her track down some guy who might have been a thousand miles away. He was surprised at himself. He’d always been one who went with a sure thing and here he was tracking down a maybe. He supposed, realistically, homicide work was really just a loose collection of maybes that you fit together into a pattern. Yet, there was more involved here than just that. Yes, he wanted to stop Eddy Zero if he was indeed in the city; that was his job. But ever since he’d talked with Soames, there were suddenly too many questions in his mind. And, madman or not, Soames had seemed quite lucid on certain points. There was a hidden agenda here somewhere and Fenn wanted to know what it was.

Lisa said, “If you didn’t want to be here, Mr. Fenn, you wouldn’t be. I imagine you’re a careful man. I’m sure that you weren’t as sold on me and what I said the other day as you acted. But you’ve done some checking since then, and you know I’m not some crusading nut.”

Fenn laughed. “You’re a smart cookie, Doc. I did check you and our boy out.”

“And?”

“And I trust my instincts. You’re okay.”

“Good.”

“One thing, though. Probably none of my business, but why did you leave the prison? I got the impression you liked it there. I talked with your superiors there. Hope you don’t mind. They were impressed with you. Couldn’t say enough good things about you.”

“I needed time for other things. Research, mainly, for a book I was working on.”

“Where are you working now?”

“I’m not. I’m doing research.”

“Listen, I was just curious.”

“So now you know everything.”

She was lying and he knew it, but he wasn’t going to press it. There was a lot more to know about her. Maybe in time she’d be truthful with him. She was just another part of this mysterious puzzle.

“I’m sure it’ll be a good book,” he said.

She smiled and looked out the window.

“This house we’re going to, I take it you’ve been by there already?”

“Yeah. I’ve driven by it, but I didn’t bother going in. It looks like a bad neighborhood. I didn’t want to get out alone.”

Fenn chuckled. “Not too bad by day, but definitely sketchy by night.”

“About what I thought.”

He was watching her out of the corner of his eye as he spoke. Her hair was pulled back tight in a blonde braid and she wore glasses. Her face looked experienced, tough even. In her business suit and skirt, she looked like a lawyer. Emotionless, dedicated, and breastless. But her legs were nice: soft, tapered, sexy. He wondered what she’d look like without the glasses and her hair down. He found the idea exciting.

She looked at him. “Has anyone lived there since Zero occupied it?”

“No, not a person. It’s been more or less up for sale for twenty years. Although, I imagine it’s had its share of transients.”

The streets and buildings became shabbier as Fenn drove. There was litter on the walks. Rusting, stripped cars at the curbs. Everything, both house and building and avenue alike, seemed to be painted a weathered gray. The people who watched them drive by all had the same hungry desperation in their yearning eyes.

And finally, the house.

The scene of the crimes of Dr. Blood-and-Bones.

“I almost hate leaving the car out here,” Fenn told her.

“It’s a police car.”

“Doesn’t matter in this neighborhood.”

They got out and went up the walk. The street was deserted in either direction. Leaves and litter blew up the pavement.

The house was big and ugly and ominous. Like something lifted out of Poe or Lovecraft and dumped in this filthy back street. It was set up on a hill and they had to follow a set of crumbling, frost-heaved stone steps up to its door. The other houses were packed up against it, but beneath its towers and leaning turrets, they were unnoticeable.

“What a place,” Fenn said, studying the sloping yard and its dead trees and arid grasses.

“It’s very atmospheric,” Lisa agreed.

“Most of the houses around here were like this at one time,” Fenn told her. “But most were razed for housing and building space. But not this one.”

Lisa tried the peeling, faded door. It was open. “Who owns it now?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” he asked. “I spoke with the family lawyer. Eddy owns it now that his old lady bought it.”

They went in and were struck by a feeling of desolation, of emptiness. It was impossible to imagine anyone actually living here. Laughter, joy, love, life—those things didn’t belong. The place seemed haunted by itself, by its own flat neutrality. Dust twisted in the air and a cool breeze played in the halls. There was an entrenched feeling of insanity as if the house itself had lost its mind.

The grime and dust were disturbed at the bottom of the steps. There were dozens of footprints in this area.

Fenn’s temples were beginning to throb.

“That’s where they found the girl,” he said. “Right at the foot of the steps. She was probably stabbed up there and fell.”

“No idea who she was?”

“Nothing. No identification. Nothing on her prints. Her face was butchered so badly I don’t think her own mother would have recognized her.”

Lisa walked around, looking down corridors and into rooms. “I wonder if he came here, knowing what his father had done.”

“You think Eddy killed her?”

She shrugged. “Who can say? The M.O. wasn’t the same as his father’s, certainly, but that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s just getting going.”

“Wouldn’t that be something.” Fenn shook his head.

“I know I’m grasping at straws here, Mr. Fenn, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Somebody killed her.”

“But in the same place as his father?” he said. “It’s incredible. I’ve got an A.P.B. out on our boy. Maybe it’ll turn up something.”

They checked the house room by room. As they did, Fenn described to her where the girl had died and how. Lisa told him of the elder Zero and where in the house he had committed his own atrocities. It wasn’t very appetizing conversation, but in this place, such talk seemed fitting. Its atmosphere demanded talk of dread and dismemberment; it had no use for anything but the darker prospects of human endeavor.

After a time, he chuckled and said, “You’re not much of a first date.”

“I’ve never been known to be.”

Fenn was intrigued by her encyclopedic knowledge of crime and insanity, but mostly by the woman herself. He liked the way she looked at him, the way she called him Mr. Fenn rather than Lt. Fenn—there was something almost endearing about that, like a pet name—although he would’ve preferred just Jim. He liked her husky, sexy voice. And despite her catalog of grue and grim, she had a soft, winning quality about her that could reach right into your heart, he thought. The sort of woman who was a wonderful combination of beauty, brains, and confidence. She gave her best at all times and it made Fenn want to do the same. He felt he would follow her anywhere. He almost hoped that they never would find Eddy Zero, so their time together would never end.

But it would.

It had to and he knew it.

But there was always the present and it would have to enough. He could be with her now, listen to her voice, pretend that there was more here than there actually was. He told himself that he could merely ask her out to dinner, but he was afraid of the consequences. Her possible refusal was something he didn’t think he could bear. That it would end before it really began.

He almost wished he were still married so there would be a reason he couldn’t pursue her. If it hadn’t been for the mystery surrounding her, surrounding Soames, surrounding all of this, he would’ve fallen completely.

“What do you make of all the mirrors?” he asked. There were dozens upon dozens.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Zero had them installed here. We know that much. But not why.”

“Crazy fuck.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything here,” she said.

“No, I guess not. But we had to try.” He popped a couple of aspirins and chewed them vigorously, willing the headache not to start.

“You should do something about those headaches,” she said.

“I’ve tried. The doctors said there was nothing they could do.”

“How often do you get them?”

“Irregularly,” he lied. The truth being that they were starting to be very regular. “I’ve tried to figure out when they happen, like the doc said, so I could figure out if they were caused by some kind of stress. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason. They just happen.”

She touched his hand and it was nearly too much. “I want to thank you for being so helpful, Mr. Fenn,” she said. “This is probably all a wild goose chase. You’ve been very understanding, very cooperative.”

“Just doing my job,” he said and they both knew it was a lie.

They walked back to the car, each secretly relieved to be out of the house.

“What now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll spend a few more weeks at this. I’m not beaten yet. I know he’s here somewhere.”

Fenn started the car. “If there’s anything I can do…”

“I could go for a cup of coffee.”

“You had only to ask.”

He drove them quickly away from that malignant house and its decaying neighborhood. He chose a small diner that wasn’t far from his own apartment. They sat and drank their coffee and he asked her about herself and all the while he thought about other things. How her lips might feel against his. How she might smell if he held her close. How she might look in the morning.

He was more than a little surprised at himself. Although he’d been divorced some six years, he’d had few dates… outside of a few sleazy onenighters. Relationships could be ugly things, he knew, and he had no interest going back into that arena of psychological and emotional barbarity. And now this. He was quite happily falling in love like some giddy teenager. It was totally out of character for him. Yet, he was enjoying it. Enjoying the fact that love had put a new glow in his cheeks, new wind in his lungs, and a new and necessary need to keep living.

Last year, his fortieth birthday had come and gone and he’d consoled himself to the fact that this would never happen again. He was glad to be proven wrong.

His headache vanished as soon as they were free of the house.

When Lisa got back to her hotel room, she ordered some lunch and sat before the TV staring blindly at it. Things weren’t going well and even she saw this. San Francisco was a huge city and there were hundreds of places someone like Eddy Zero could hide.

She had only enough money to last a month, no more.

Maybe she’d been deluding herself into thinking that four weeks would be enough time to find and contain him. It took Soames three times as long just to locate him in the first place. Eddy could’ve been in another city entirely or out of the country for that matter. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe that. He was here, somewhere. And the murder of that girl in the old house only made her more sure of it.

It was over two years since the last time she’d seen Eddy. And in that time, her desire to work with him again had never dimmed. She supposed she was infatuated with him. Not physically, not emotionally, but professionally. A psychiatrist could spend a lifetime and never hope to meet a patient as interesting or challenging as Eddy Zero. He was the ultimate study. A pure psychopath who broke all of the rules and set new ones.

She pushed away from her lunch and went down to her rented car. She knew where she was going, even if she refused to even think about it. It took her about thirty minutes to reach Zero’s house.

The House of Mirrors.

The atmosphere of gloom and depravity was the same as she pushed through the door. But it meant nothing, she told herself, merely an association the mind made with an old, empty house that had been the scene of several grisly crimes. She went up the stairs and stood for a time in the hallway where the girl had been first stabbed. There was some dried blood spattering the walls. Just a few drops, but enough to kick her heart into her throat.

She went from room to room looking for she knew not what. She was here purely on impulse and nothing more. She felt like a fool for even coming. In such a neighborhood, she’d be lucky if her car was still there when she returned to it. And there were worse possibilities. She was a woman alone in an empty house in a bad neighborhood. If someone had been watching her, they might’ve followed her in. Things like that happened. And if she was raped or murdered, who would hear her screams in this huge, enclosing tomb? And if they did, would they even care? Unlikely. People in this quarter were desensitized to such things long ago. Just another screaming woman.

The police had been all over this place, she knew, as had Fenn and she. Nothing of any possible bearing had been left behind. She passed the door which led to the attic and stopped. Did she really want to go up there? Alone? The attic was where Dr. Blood-and-Bones and his associates had done their bits of work. But that was twenty years past and she didn’t believe in ghosts.

It was a nasty place, brimming with hate and pain. She told herself it was simple association once again, but she couldn’t believe it this time. The beams overhead were festooned with cobwebs, the warped flooring layered in dust and grime. It took great personal strength for her to proceed. In her mind, she saw the crime photos of this place that she knew so well. The blood, the carnage, the skins tacked to the walls. It seemed she could smell them, ripe and sour like hides stacked outside a skinning shack.

“It’s nothing,” she said aloud and continued on. The sound of her voice echoing and dying, being sucked into these rotting timbers that had known so much horror, was disturbing somehow. She rounded a bend and a damp, dirty smell touched her nostrils. The floor here had been vacuumed of dust, even the paint seemed to have been leeched free. There was a dead thing resting in a circle of clean: a twisted clot of bone and fur boiled into a central mass. A cat, maybe. Its blood and meat was gone, blasted from the bone by some impossible, hungry wind. She’d never seen anything like it. Even the bones themselves looked pitted, abraded somehow. There were bits of flesh clinging to the nearest wall like blown insulation. A full-length mirror hung there, its pane caked with twenty years of filth.

What could’ve happened to the poor creature?

None of this had been in evidence before. It had happened since she and Fenn had been here earlier. In those few short hours.

She found her feet and ran downstairs and out to her car. Her breath was coming in raw gasps and her heart thudded like a drum. And it had little to do with exertion.

She drove away, her mind filled with hideous thoughts.

When Lisa got back to her rooms, the phone rang. It was Fenn.

“There’s been another murder,” he said.

“Where?”

“Near the shore. We think the body was dumped there. It was hacked up pretty good. Not like the girl in the house. More methodical.”

“It’s him,” she said breathlessly.

“Maybe.”

“It is.”

“You can’t know that, Doc.”

“It’s him. I know it now,” was all she would say.

“Something else, too,” he said with a sigh. “It’s probably unrelated, but it concerns our Jane Doe. She was going to be buried tomorrow, but there was a fire at the mortuary. They’re still sifting through the ashes. So far, they haven’t found her remains.”

Lisa felt something twist in her chest. Somehow, this wasn’t unexpected.