Skin Deep

  Nick Stokes had never seen anything like this dump job—not as an experienced criminalist for the Las Vegas police, not in his three years with the crime lab back in Dallas.

  He moved past the detective and squatted over it with his digital camera. The victim’s hard-core body mod was grotesque but masterfully intricate—his eyeballs dyed black around their irises, a large round monocle tattooed over one eye, the area from the middle of the brow up transformed into a gold crown. It curved around the front of the head from temple to temple, its five evenly spaced points raised above the hairline.

  “Implants,” Nick said.

  “You mean the crown points?”

  “They’re subdermals.” Nick took some snapshots. “Inserted under the skin, that is.”

  Dressed in a sport jacket and jeans, Louis Vartan stood with his arms crossed and an expression of weary horror on his face.

  “The Tattoo Man strikes again,” he said. “At least, the third case in as many months that fits the profile.”

  “Except none of the others left anyone dead.”

  Vartan expelled a breath. “True enough,” he said, looking down at the vic. “His eyes… were they inked that color?”

  Nick nodded and adjusted his lens for a close-up. “Eye tats have been around for a while,” he said. “There’re also legit medical procedures for tinting the eyes of people with visible defects.” Of course, he’d never heard of a doctor who’d tattoo anyone’s eyeballs solid black, though anything was possible these days, especially in this town.

  Original novels in the CSI series:

  CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

  Double Dealer

  Sin City

  Cold Burn

  Body of Evidence

  Grave Matters

  Binding Ties

  Killing Game

  Snake Eyes

  In Extremis

  Nevada Rose

  Headhunter

  Brass in Pocket

  The Killing Jar

  Blood Quantum

  Dark Sundays

  Skin Deep

  Serial (graphic novel)

  CSI: Miami

  Florida Getaway

  Heat Wave

  Cult Following

  Riptide

  Harm for the Holidays: Misgivings

  Harm for the Holidays: Heart Attack

  Cut & Run

  Right to Die

  CSI: NY

  Dead of Winter

  Blood on the Sun

  Deluge

  Four Walls

  Pocket Star Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuter.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Entertainment

  AB Funding LLC. All rights reserved.

  CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and related marks, CBS and the CBS Eye Design™ CBS Broadcasting Inc. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and all elements and characters thereof © 2000 –2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Entertainment AB Funding LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Pocket Star Books paperback edition September 2010

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Cover design and illustration by David Stevenson, based on a

  photograph © Vasily Smirnov/Shutterstock

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6082-4

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6929-2 (ebook)

  For Kirby, who passed through as swiftly as life itself.

  And always and again, for Suzanne.

  We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

  How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

  Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon

  Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

  Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

  Give various response to each varying blast,

  To whose frail frame no second motion brings

  One mood or modulation like the last.

  We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;

  We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;

  We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;

  Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

  It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,

  The path of its departure still is free:

  Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;

  Nought may endure but Mutability.

  —Mutability, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For those with an obsession for continuity similar to my own, the events of Skin Deep occur during Season 10 of the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation television series, which is, of course, its driving inspiration.

  While the narrative is entirely a work of fiction, I would like to acknowledge my debt to several people who helped give it some verisimilitude… in other words, let me pull off another one.

  Thanks go to Victoria Ramone for her introductions and to Brian Decker, Joy Rumore, and master tattoo artist Logan Aguilar for their assistance with various aspects of my research—and their forbearance as I relentlessly picked their brains. My conversations with Brian and Logan resonated throughout the manuscript in ways that extended far beyond the technical to greatly deepen my understanding of—and respect for—the tattoo and body-modification community. They deserve all the credit for whatever I got right. The inevitable errors and inaccuracies are my responsibility alone.

  Readers familiar with Nevada and Las Vegans in particular might notice that I’ve taken occasional geographic liberties to suit the needs of my story. I wish that I could as easily shift places around in real life, but the world is ever quick to remind me that it does not exist at my convenience.

  A very special word of appreciation goes to Ed Schlesinger, my editor at Pocket Star Books. I suspect he knows why. What he might not realize is the extent to which I value his humanity and decency.

  PROLOGUE

  THE GOOSENECK LAMPS cast a wide fluorescent oval around his surgeon’s stool, making him feel afloat in the surrounding darkness, like some lost, forgotten castaway drifting on a remote sea of night.

  Lost, forgotten… it suited him. And served him, no? He surely wasn’t eager to be remembered at this late stage.

  He put on a thin nitrile exam glove, snapped it at the wrist, and slipped a second glove over the fingers of his other hand. Then he rotated his stool toward the stainless-steel counter along the wall, where he had mounted the young swine’s pink, fleshy head on the platform of an adjustable sculpting stand.

  Rolling forward on silent castors, he swung a lamp directly over the head and then turned a handle to raise it several inches. Better. The light would sharply highlight the grain of the skin and allow him to sit up straighter as he worke
d. Bending forward for any length of time had become painful, even agonizing, as had many things he’d taken for granted in the past. He needed to avoid distractions and maintain a sure, steady hand.

  Now he turned toward the equipment cart at his elbow and examined the implements and supplies on its upper tray—three ink caps, a disposable hypodermic syringe with a fine thirty-gauge needle, a set of surgical scalpels and graded circle elevators, and his silicone elastomer implants. Also on the tray was a row of glass sundry jars containing suture, cotton pads, bandages, and other medical supplies.

  He swiveled back around and brought his face up close to the pig’s head, studying it for a moment before beginning his work. With its large blue eyes and static grin, it had a humanlike appearance that once might have surprised him. He couldn’t say for certain, not anymore, after so much had gone by. Experience bred familiarity—wasn’t that the saying? Or was he confusing things?

  He’d learned, regardless, that porcine and human flesh were close biological matches. They had nearly identical hair follicles and sweat glands and a layer of subcutaneous fat that distinguished them from other species. Their color, surface texture, and dermal absorption rates were comparable. And both had large bare, hairless areas. It was the reason pig skin was often used for plastic-surgery research… and why he had chosen the swine’s head as a surrogate.

  He would have ample negative space for his modifications.

  Finding a blue-eyed specimen had been another bit of luck. He might have settled for one with brown pupils if nothing else had been available at the slaughterhouse. But it would have made it harder to notice ink bleeding from the sclera. If he pierced the cornea or pupil of a live subject and the color seeped through the eye’s connective tissues, it could lead to complete blindness.

  He didn’t intend for that to happen. This would be a difficult, complicated piece of transformative art that would be ruined by the smallest mistake in preparation. He was determined that it be flawless.

  “Manpig, pigman, we’re going to show the world what’s inside you,” he said huskily into the silence, hardly realizing his lips had almost brushed the flap of the swine’s ear. “The flesh follows the spirit.”

  He reached for the slender hypodermic syringe, took an ink cap from his cart, and inserted the needle into its rubber stopper. With the needle still inside it, he turned the bottle upside down, depressed the plunger to force any air from the shaft, and then lifted it back up to draw in the ink, filling it with double the amount he meant to use. Finally, he thumbed the plunger again as a further precaution against air bubbles, squirting out the excess before he withdrew the needle from the cap.

  Ready now. Pulling the skin around the swine’s eyeball taut with his gloved middle and index fingers, he slid the tip of the needle into its white and injected a small amount of ink. As he’d anticipated, a slight overflow bubbled up from its outer membrane, pooled at the corner of the socket, and then began draining out, spilling over its bottom lid like a runny black teardrop.

  He took a cotton pad from his cart and dabbed the eyelid clean. Then he reached for the bottle of saline solution, flushed out the eye, and blotted the rest of the ink from the pig’s face with another pad. A colored spot about the size of a small mole remained where his ink had penetrated the white.

  It would take thirty to forty pricks of the needle to stain the eye completely. With a voluntary recipient, he would mix his color with liquid antibiotic and inject it in multiple sessions—two or three weeks apart—to prevent irritation, infection, and cysts. But he wouldn’t have that luxury and was practicing for what would be relatively quick work.

  When the blotch’s edges stopped spreading out, he reinserted the syringe and squeezed another milliliter of ink into it. He repeated his injections twice more, dabbing after each of them. After a while, he wiped the syringe clean and laid it back on the tray, watching the ink spread across the eyeball’s curvature.

  He inhaled, exhaled, and flexed his neck, back, and shoulders to ease their tightness. There was no relief from the burning in his chest, and he’d expected none, but he had found meditations for when it became intolerable. In the Mirror Chamber, he could rise beyond pain.

  He was ready to move ahead to the next step.

  With the pencil grip of a fine-edged scalpel resting against his thumb, he wheeled back up to the swine’s head and made his incision. Blood welled up in a thin line as he carefully ran the blade down and in across its brow. Practice. When he did his actual modifications, he would want to avoid nerve damage and, for aesthetic reasons, cause the least possible amount of scarring.

  Satisfied with his cut, he set down the scalpel and took his dermal elevator from the cart by its narrow handle. Slipping the instrument’s dull, round metal probe into the incision, he lifted away the skin to create a pocket between its subcutaneous layer and the thick fascial weave encasing the pig’s skull. He was very careful to go no deeper than a centimeter down and stay within a single layer of skin.

  After loosening up the adipose tissue inside the pocket, he scraped it out and used a towel to wipe the blood and tiny white gobbets of fat off his instrument. Then he reached for the elevator with the next-largest probe and inserted it to widen the pocket. The graduated method he had developed wouldn’t be nearly as traumatic as one that utilized a single elevator. It hastened the healing process and would be especially important given his difficult working conditions.

  Still gripping the elevator handle with his left hand, he picked up the first implant with his right and inspected it under his lamp. An inch wide and two inches high, it measured slightly less than the desired centimeter in thickness. The two others on his cart were perfect matches.

  He wheeled himself closer to the head again, stretched the skin a little farther away from the fascia and bone with his elevator, and pushed the smooth silicone triangle between his fingers into the widened pocket. It went in easily. A soft, moist sound as he pulled the skin up over the implant, applying some mild pressure with his fingertips to tuck it down at the suture line.

  He paused to briefly stare into the swine’s unseeing eyes.

  “Glory to the crown,” he whispered, reaching for the needle and thread.

  Alone, forgotten, attended only by darkness, he resumed his pressing and delicate work.

  1

  THE TOWN OF MIRIAM was some four hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas in the Virginia Mountains, a drive of less than seven hours when highway traffic was light and his radar detector showed the road to be clear of trolling state police. He had made the trip often in recent weeks and this time had set out late on a Wednesday night, pushing past the speed limit most of the way there. Because he’d taken a low dose of his painkiller, it had not made him drowsy, and he’d needed to stop only for gas.

  At around a quarter past six on Thursday morning, he had parked on the residential street where the father and son lived and then sat fifteen or twenty yards down from their home to wait. The tall evergreen hedge bordering the sidewalk screened the yard from view but also gave him some convenient, well-situated cover. He would not stay long; his intention was simply to observe their patterns and routines. By late afternoon, he would be on his way back to Vegas, giving him a full day to recover from the trip and prepare for his after-dinner appointment with the judge.

  The yellow school bus pulled up to the house at seven o’clock, flashing its lights and extending its stop sign. He had noted in his previous visits that it was always on schedule, and this morning was no different. The boy, too, was invariably prompt when it arrived—credit the father.

  Sipping the coffee he’d picked up at a diner near the railway depot outside town, he watched the father and son come down the gravel path to the street. Something inside him snarled as they hugged and the boy jumped aboard the bus. But he had managed to keep its bite in check so far and knew he could do so until the right moment came.

  Credit the man who once had been a father.

  Now the s
top sign folded back against the school bus, and it rumbled off. The father stood and watched its wide rear end for a moment before turning back to the house. He would typically leave for his job at the auto-repair shop forty-five minutes later.

  Straightening, the man in the car put his coffee cup in the holder beside his seat. On previous days, he’d waited to follow the father. On others, he’d charted the son. He had not decided between them. Or, more properly, the decision had yet to be revealed to him.

  After a minute or two, he drove on after the bus, remaining several car lengths behind. A few more pickups, and then it was out carrying the children over a local road that rolled west toward the edge of town, where the Catholic church and outbuildings stood between dun-colored mountain slopes to back defiantly on the sheer drop of the valley ridge. In Nevada, the desert wilderness always breathed close on civilization’s neck. Its people understood this secret in their bones but would never share it with the tourists for fear of scaring them off. Every beast needed to be fed, and it was important to keep the swarm, with its money and giddy excess, lured by the tantalizing lights.

  At the wrought-iron fence in front of the church grounds, the bus driver made a last stop to discharge his youthful passengers, idling at the gate as the students shouldered their bookbags and walked to the converted priory that served as their schoolhouse.

  In his car behind the bus, the visitor again waited for its stop sign to be retracted. Once its operator drove off, he would move on past the church, wait a few minutes, and then circumspectly double back to resume his watch.

  He never forced his inspirations and truly did not know whether it would be the father or the son. But time was growing short, that much was sure, and he felt confident the choice would present itself to him before long.

  When it did, he meant to be ready.

  Chinese food on Friday nights, Saturday mornings at the golf course, and Sundays out on the patio snoozing with his face under an outspread copy of the Wall Street Journal. Among the pleasures of retirement, Quentin Dorset supposed he placed the highest value on his leisurely, untroubled weekends.