The Sculptor

Chapter 23

As Cathy finally drifted off to sleep, Sam Markham—at home in his study with his feet on his desk—felt not the slightest bit sleepy when the clock in the bookcase ticked past 3:00 A.M. He would be flying back to Rhode Island in a few hours, and would have plenty of time to once again look over the material from Thursday’s briefing in the FBI plane that would transport him from Quantico to Providence. But something was bothering him; something wasn’t right; something needed to be addressed now.

In his lap was the report on the Plastination process from Dr. Morris—much of which had been taken from the Body Worlds/Institute for Plastination Web sites. And after carefully reviewing the entire printout, Markham had to agree with Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of Plastination, who said in his introduction that, like most successful inventions, Plastination is simple in theory.

Simple.

That was the word that kept bothering Markham.

Simple.

Yes, with the right equipment, it seemed to Markham that—at least on the surface—the Plastination process would be “simple” enough for anyone to execute. After decomposition was halted by pumping formalin into the veins and arteries, the key, as von Hagens said, was having the means to pull the liquid polymer into each cell by a process he called “forced vacuum impregnation,” wherein, after the initial fluid exchange step—the step in which water and fatty tissues are removed by submerging the body in an acetone bath—the specimen is placed in a vacuum chamber and the pressure reduced to the point where the acetone boils. The acetone is then suctioned out of the tissue the moment it vaporizes, and the resulting vacuum in the specimen causes the polymer solution to permeate the tissue. This exchange process is allowed to continue until all of the tissue has been completely saturated—a few days for thin slices; weeks for whole bodies.

Weeks.

And simple in theory, yes. But even if The Michelangelo Killer did have the money and intelligence to set up his own Plastination lab, unless he had a bunch of body parts lying around—

Yes. It was that little detail that was bothering Sam Markham the most. The printout from the Body Worlds Web site made it abundantly clear where the Institute for Plastination (IFP) in Heidelberg, Germany, “acquired” its specimens—the majority of which came from its “donation program,” wherein IFP donors legally signed over their bodies to be Plastinated by von Hagens and his crew after their deaths.

“But who are these people?” Markham asked out loud. “What are their names?”

Markham sifted through the printout again, unable to find the names of donors anywhere. Yes. It was the feel of the information he was reading; the feel of the whole von Hagens/Body Worlds/Institute for Plastination mind-set. A mind-set that, despite a brief and somewhat hollow overture of thanks to its donors both dead and alive, spoke of their bodies simply as a commodity, as material for the wide-ranging industry of anatomical study—an industry that was sorely in need of plastinated supplies.

Having been around many dead bodies himself, Sam Markham understood the need for objectivity in the world of medicine and anatomical study as much as he did the need for it in his line of work—understood all too well the need for detachment when looking at a murder victim in order to get his job done. So, yes, Markham could on one hand see the practicality of the industry—the need to treat the donated bodies simply as material. However, it was also clear to Markham that, with regard to the Body World exhibits themselves—exhibits in which its skinless subjects were posed sipping coffee, throwing karate kicks, even riding horses—the creators were subconsciously sending a message to the public that they should see the figures not only as “frozen in life,” but at the same time were asking them to look at just the body itself, completely divorced from the real life that had once activated it.

No, we should never ask who these people really were.

Markham thought of The Michelangelo Killer—of the kind of mind, the kind of spirit it would take to create the horror that was his Bacchus. Over his thirteen-year career with the FBI, Markham had learned there was always a certain amount of objectification that went on in the mind of a serial killer with regard to the perception of his victims. But with The Michelangelo Killer, things seemed quite different.

Tommy Campbell and Michael Wenick were just material for his exhibition, he said to himself. Just as the epoxy compound and the wood and the iron and everything else was. Just one component of his art, of his message, of his quest to wake us from our slumber.

Material.

Markham flipped to the page in Slumbering in the Stone that he had dog-eared a couple of hours earlier—to the quote from Michelangelo which he had underlined in red: “The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.”

Marble. Michelangelo’s material—some of which he would transform into works of artistic brilliance; some of which, depending on its location in the block itself, he would damn to the studio floor, to the garbage heap. Hence, both a reverence for the material itself, but yet the understanding that some would have to be discarded.

Dead bodies. The Michelangelo Killer’s material. He had to have experimented on others before Campbell and Wenick, had to have used humans before perfecting his technique—some of whom, perhaps just pieces at first, he transformed into plastinated works of art; others he simply discarded as waste. Hence, both a reverence for the material, the male figure as aesthetically superior, and the understanding that he would need to waste some of his victims to achieve greatness.

Marble. Material. Waste. Dead bodies. The male figure as aesthetically superior.

Something didn’t quite add up.

Something that was so close, so simple, yet still just so far out of reach.

Markham sighed and flicked off his desk lamp. He would force himself to sleep, to think about something else for a while. And as he crawled into bed, his thoughts immediately ran to Cathy Hildebrant. Markham hated to admit how much he had missed her over the last three days; he hated even more to admit how much he was looking forward to seeing her again. However, what really bothered Markham was the nagging suspicion that he was missing something very important; something that might put the art history professor in danger; something that might make him lose someone he cared about all over again.