Skin Deep

95

The pilot lowered them to the beach, guided by the dock lights. The boat looked empty, although a night-light burned in the pilot compartment.

Dacey, Neil, and Steve got out with their weapons drawn. While Neil covered them from the beach, Steve and Dacey headed for the boat. Nobody was aboard, but a laptop and navigation charts were laid out on a table beside the steering wheel in the fore cabin. One chart showed the entire eastern seaboard, with details of the inland water ways. Others were of the eastern waters of Florida and the West Indies.

At the end of the dock rose a long set of wooden stairs leading up to Vita Nova, which glowed at the cliff top. There was no movement anywhere, no sounds but the waves and the chittering of cicadas. Overhead brooded a thick ceiling of clouds.

The chopper pilot had cut the engines and waited as the others climbed the stairs to the top of the cliff.

Neil and Dacey each carried a shotgun and a Glock in a shoulder holster, while Steve had his service weapon and a belt of stun grenades.

No one was certain what they would find in the mansion, but every fiber of Steve’s being told him that Dana was here and in trouble.

At the top, they split but kept in whispered contact by their PDAs. They circled the house to determine any activity inside. Exterior lights burned as did two rooms at the rear, including the kitchen. An upstairs room was also lit. But no sounds came from the house. And no cars in the driveway, although there were two golf carts.

Steve and Dacey reconnoitered at the front while Neil covered the kitchen in the rear.

The front door was locked, but Dacey was prepared. From her pack she removed a handgrip plunger that she fastened to the glass panel near the handle and cut an arc with a glass cutter, then snapped it off, incised the sector, put her hand through the hole, and unlocked the door from the inside.

The interior was dead silent. A light burned in rear rooms, and in the parlor on the right. Steve pointed for Neil and Dacey to check the lit bedroom upstairs while he headed for the kitchen, his weapon gripped in both hands.

There was no sign of life in the kitchen, but there was a single champagne glass and an open bottle of Taittinger.

Neil French and Dacey came down shaking their heads. “Two packed travel bags,” Dacey whispered. “Women’s clothes.”

Steve motioned for them to spread throughout the rest of the first floor. As they headed into the other rooms, he stopped in his tracks.

On a stool at a counter in the kitchen he saw Dana’s bright green leather handbag. The one she had bought last summer when they were in New York for a long weekend.

When Neil and Dacey looked back, Steve held up the bag and mouthed: “Dana.”

Steve raised his gun and moved down the hall behind Dacey. She took only a few steps when she stopped and cupped her hand to her ear.

A sound. She turned and pointed to a door in a hall just off the kitchen.

Steve moved to it and nodded. A faint beeping. Neil nodded and they readied their weapons at the door. At a nod from Steve, Dacey pulled open the door.

The beeping was louder and more distinct. Like what you heard in hospitals. Heart monitors. Then from someplace below they heard muffled voices.

They were standing at the top of a long wooden staircase leading down to a lit basement. Steve led the way, Dacey behind while Neil waited at the top until they were below.

Steve found himself at the head of a long fluorescent-lit corridor with rooms on either side. The place looked like a replica of Monks’s clinic except for a reception desk.

Steve followed the beeping past two rooms, one of which was open and a light inside fell on a hospital gurney. He had been to the Medical Examiner’s office more times than he chose, and become all too familiar with the profile of a sheeted body.

His heart nearly stopped mid-beat. He moved to the body and braced himself, muttering a silent prayer as he gripped the edge of the sheet. Then he pulled it back.

Aaron Monks stared up at him through slitted eyes. A wad of gauze had been taped shut in his mouth and his hands had been tethered to the gurney rails.

He was dead.

Neil tugged at Steve’s arm. He had found something in the corridor. He pointed to a room across the hall—it was the last door on that side. Inside they heard voices and more electronic beeps.

They braced at the door, and when Steve gave the nod they burst in.

“Freeze!”

For a moment Steve’s eyes tried to process what his brain was registering.

In the middle of the room under operating room lights were two gurneys lying side by side with a person on each, draped but for their faces. Standing amidst beeping monitors and hanging IVs and a lot of other medical apparatus were four people in scrubs, masks and hair nets frozen in place. One of them was holding a scalpel wire as an electric cauterizer, the others had suctioning tube for the blood running down Dana’s face.

The heart monitor showed a steady strong beat. And Steve sent up a prayer of thanks.

“Mother of God,” Dacey said.

On the other gurney beside a table piled with bloody sponges and cloths lay a body whose face had been completely removed but for the nose, lips, and patches over the eyes. All that they could make out under the hairline was a glistening mass of red muscle and fat.

“What the fuck..,” Neil said.

Overhead were two large flat screen monitors each with a split-screen image. One had the head of Dana side by side with a three-dimensional contour of her facial muscles and skull bone. Beside it were the same split-screen images of another muscle-bone contoured head and beside it a genderless blank. Overlaid on each were grids that segmented the faces into neat square tiles.

They were in the process of removing Dana’s face to be transplanted onto that of the person on the other gurney.

But Steve could see that the incision on Dana’s face was only partly made, from the forehead down to her right ear.

Steve had his pistol trained on the face of the man with the scalpel and closed in on him. “Drop it and sew her up.”

The man laid down the scalpel and said something in another language to the other man.

The other man looked back at Steve.

“Do it now or I’ll blow your fucking heads off. Do it!”

The scalpel guy nodded then began to blot the blood where the incision had stopped.

Dacey pulled alongside of Steve while Neil moved to the other two surgeons, his gun raised three feet from his head. “Who’s that?” Dacey asked.

Neither of the men responded.

“I said who’s that man?”

Finally in a soft accented voice, one of them said, “Aaron Monks.”

“What? Who the fuck’s out there?” Neil asked, the gun poised in aim at the other surgeon.

“I don’t know his name,” said the taller one. “He was someone Dr. Monks had found.”

“Found for what?” Steve asked.

The man did not answer.

“For what?”

“To be his double.”

“The guy’s dead.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly Steve felt as if the oxygen had been drained from the room. He moved to the gurney where Aaron Monks lay waiting for the face of Dana, his own in bloody scraps in a stainless-steel pan on the side table, some kind of glistening solution over the open tissue like an aspic.

Steve took a deep breath and lifted the bottom of the sheet draped over Monks’s body then raised the bottom of the Johnny he wore.

Aaron Monks was a woman.