The Faceless One (17 page)

* * *

On the floor, Bobby leaned back against his father’s legs. He was playing Space Rescue, which was his own version of
Star Wars
combined with
Star Trek
in a crossover mythology that was fairly complex. He was Bobby Supernova, who looked a lot like Buzz Lightyear. His pal, First Officer Bonomo, had been captured by Darth Pikachu and the Klingon Monkey-People of Mount Olympus. It was up to him to fly through deadly meteor storms and laser cannons to rescue his friend. He glanced up to see if his daddy was watching, but his daddy looked like he was taking a nap.

Bobby was zooming his Buzz Lightyear low over the floor of the terminal when he felt an unpleasant tingle at the back of his neck.

Bobby looked up. There, across the aisle, was a man in a long black coat and a black fedora. His coat and hat were as black as ink. The fabric wasn’t just dark; it seemed to swallow any light that came into contact with it. The man was seated, his hands folded on his lap. His head lolled forward, as if he were sleeping, and the brim of his hat obscured his face.

Bobby stared at the man. He was sure he hadn’t been there moments before.

As if sensing Bobby’s stare, the man looked up.

The man had no face. In its place were thick cobwebs, as if the entire skull had been wrapped in silk by a monstrous spider. Bobby could see slight depressions where eye sockets would be and the outline of a skull or impossibly gaunt head. The thing looked at him, and he could see the jaw working. Underneath that gossamer shroud, the thing was smiling. It was a large, hideous smile, filled with what seemed to be too many large and pointed teeth.

Bobby wanted to call to his daddy, but no words would come.

hello

The word popped into his head, like magic.

do you want to play?

One of its hands came up, and he saw they were skeleton hands, covered with gray mold and strips of pale, leathery flesh. The thing gestured at him, as if welcoming him. It reached into its coat, down into a deep pocket.

i have a present for you

The thing withdrew a stuffed animal from its coat. It was Bonomo Bear, but in place of his smiling bear face was a small skull. The eye sockets seemed impossibly deep. They were pits you could fall into and never find your way out.

come here, bobby

At the mention of his name, Bobby’s skin went cold, and he wet himself.

The thing nodded as if happy with this, then got up from the chair. Bobby saw but didn’t register that the thing cast no shadow or reflection on the tiled floor. It moved with fluid grace toward the bank of windows facing out onto the jetway.

Bobby sat there, shivering. He was scared out of his wits and ashamed that he had wet himself. He looked up guiltily at his father, who had a faraway look in his eyes. Bobby looked again at the thing with the spiderweb face.

It waved at him, its other hand holding the hideous toy.

Terrified, Bobby dropped his toys and clambered up into his daddy’s lap.

Steven was torn from his troubled reverie by Bobby’s frantic scrambling. He was about to scold the boy when he saw he was crying, terrified.

“What is it, baby?” he asked.

“Do you see him, Daddy?” he whined, almost crying.

“See who, honey?” Bobby buried his head in Steven’s chest. “Who?” he asked again.

Bobby spoke, his voice muffled against the fabric of Steven’s tee shirt.

“Sweetie, I can’t hear you.”

Bobby looked up at him.

“Mr. Manyteeth,” he answered, and Steven felt a chill go through him.

“Where?”

Bobby pointed to the windows, not looking. Steven looked in the direction he was pointing. The only people by the window were an Asian family and a young girl with a backpack.

“Bobby, I don’t see anyone bad.”

Bobby hesitated, then looked toward the windows. He sighed with relief, and it went through his entire body.

“He’s gone.” He smiled at his father.

“Maybe you dreamed it?”

“Uh-uh.” Bobby shook his head emphatically.

Steven was about to question him further when Bobby hopped off his lap. He then realized that the boy had wet himself.

“Cookie cookie coo-kie!” he yelled, adopting as deep a bass as a five-year-old could muster. The boy was cheerful again, as if whatever had troubled him had been literally wiped from his mind. It didn’t seem normal.

Liz walked up with two coffees and a large cookie in a brown bag.

“Caffeine and sugar, the preflight diet recommended by astronauts and pilots the world over.”

She handed Steven his coffee as Bobby reached for the cookie. She put her coffee on the seat next to her book, then brought the cookie out and broke it in half. Using dexterity common only to mothers and certain Chinese acrobats, she deftly wrapped half the cookie in a napkin and handed it to Bobby while placing the other half in the bag and handing it to Steven. It was then that she noticed Bobby’s pants.

“I’ll handle it,” Steven told her. “Bobby,” he said softly.

Bobby turned, his mouth covered with crumbs and melted chocolate.

“Did you have an accident?” Steven asked gently.

Bobby went pale, as if he had just remembered what happened. Tearfully, he nodded.

Steven picked up his carry-on. He and Liz had divided some of Bobby’s clothes between them. They had lost luggage on a flight to Maui once and wanted at least a change of clothes on
them if it ever happened again. He led Bobby to the men’s room and into an empty stall.

Gently, he undressed his son, removing his sodden jeans and underwear.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Bobby said miserably. Bobby hadn’t had any accidents for close to a year now. Clearly, he was ashamed of this lapse.

“It’s okay, pal.” He cleaned him up with a Wet-Nap, then slipped on clean briefs and a small pair of Dockers.

“Better?” he asked. As he was kneeling by his son, Bobby hugged him fiercely, trying to impart in that one gesture how much he loved his father. Steven hugged him back. He felt a strange sense of dread creeping into his thoughts. He tried to block it, reasoning it was a response to the grisly photos in the
Post
, but it was a persistent feeling.

He looked at his son, whose eyes were large and intense.

“What did you see?”

Bobby thought a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“You asked me if I saw a man. Did someone try and touch you or something?”

Bobby thought and shook his head.

“Who’s ‘Mr. Manyteeth’?” he asked.

Bobby pondered this, then shrugged.

“I want my cookie,” he said. Steven looked at him and nodded.

He rinsed the wet spot on Bobby’s jeans and underwear under the faucet and tried to dry them under the hand dryer. After a couple of minutes, he gave up and rolled them up in a plastic bag.

Steven and Bobby went out to rejoin Liz at the gate. Liz handed Bobby the rest of his cookie, and he ate it while grabbing up Bonomo Bear. Steven sat down next to her. He stuffed the clothes into his carry-on and took a sip of his coffee.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Something scared him, but he doesn’t remember now what it was.”

“Probably all this talk about your brother. He hasn’t really dealt with death before.”

He nodded. “You’re probably right.” Something inside him told him she wasn’t.

“How about you? Are you all right?”

“Just some preflight jitters,” he said.

“I’ll hold your hand, big boy,” she said, smiling mischievously.

He took her hand, grateful for that soft warmth.

Mr. Manyteeth
.

He shivered at the thought of it.

Stan Roberts grimaced at the sharp taste of the Alka-Seltzer as it sluiced down his throat. It reminded him of all the times his ex-wife, Cherie, had told him he was giving himself an ulcer. She had suggested he give up the job and work for her father, who owned a tile business in Bed-Stuy. He had told her that the only time he’d bend over for her father was so the old man could kiss his ass, and that had pretty much been the end of their marriage.

Stan missed her sometimes. Cherie had been tough and she could make him laugh. She could also drink him under the table, which had led to some spectacular sex and some even more spectacular fights. He had been pretty drunk when he had made the infamous ass-kissing statement, but that didn’t cut any ice with Cherie. She told him that all alcohol did was loosen your tongue; it didn’t put words in your mouth. So three years ago last December, she had taken the kids and moved to Jersey to be closer to her sister.

Merry fucking Christmas.

He was studying a large bulletin board up near his desk. He and Richie had spent the better part of that Wednesday afternoon putting it together and been adding to it since.

It was a series of photos and data about all the victims of the Slater murders. Stan called them that because Slater was the first victim, and they all seemed to be tied together. He refused to call them the work of the Taxidermist, just as he refused to use Richie’s more alliterative label of the “Slater Slayings.”

Stan didn’t believe in the Taxidermist. Oh, he believed in serial killers, but they operated within certain routines. For them, it was the routine, however fucked up and perverted, that made them feel powerful, safe. The routine, the ritual, these gave a sense of control, of power. The murders in this case were inventive and grisly but far too varied to be the work of one man. Or woman.

There were four series of photos, each set containing a portrait of the victim in life and in death, as well as the murder scene and any relevant shots of the area.

First up was Daniel Slater. They had a picture of him from his NYU yearbook, blown up and slightly grainy. Slater had two “after” pictures because his killer had spread him over two areas. Under each eight-by-ten of his decapitated corpse and flayed skin were smaller Polaroids at various angles. There were shots of his trashed town house and one of the voodoo dolls—
fetishes, Stan corrected himself—from his front window.

Next was Martin Breckforth, represented by a photo where he was seen smiling in an expensive suit, one of the stain in his office, and one of his skin, laid out on an exam table in the coroner’s office. The medical experts (including a taciturn man from the CDC) still had no idea how Breckforth had been removed from his skin. Analysis of the ooze on his office carpet had shown it to be proteins and minerals from human tissue that had been dissolved by a powerful enzyme. One assistant had ventured that spiders often dissolve the internal organs of their prey, then suck them out, leaving the exoskeleton intact. This had prompted Richie to dub the murders “The Taxidermist and his Giant Spider Otto, a Very Fucking Special Afterschool Special.”

Sometimes, Richie Matthews was a real tool.

Because human tissue was made of protein and not chitin, there was no reason it shouldn’t have dissolved along with the internal organs and bones. The fact that it remained intact, a sort of Breckforth Halloween costume, was causing the science boys to scratch their heads.

Theresa Feldman was next, a pretty brunette in her forties and former secretary to the late Jackson Purcival. They had a photo of her from a company picnic. She was smiling and happy, wearing a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap. The other photo was of her skeleton, now occupying another slab in the morgue. No trace of her organs, skin, or musculature had been found, not even some enzyme-soaked sludge in the carpet. Stan suspected that she had been killed and rendered down to this immaculate set of bones elsewhere, then placed in her doorway as a grisly joke. They had found traces of human saliva on the skeleton, and the evidence seem to point to its being the saliva of several different individuals. If it was a cult, then they were either into cannibalism or at least the licking of human bones. Jesus.

The weirdest thing was that her skeleton had been covered in pink glitter, giving it a macabre fairy-tale aspect. The first cop on the scene, Eduardo Santos, had thought it was a large, rock-candy sculpture for the Day of the Dead. The glitter sprinkled over the skeleton had come from a large glass unicorn she had had in her living room. Someone had smashed it, then crushed it into a fine powder, but the rest of the apartment was untouched.

The other three figures in this macabre display were also tied to Daniel Slater but didn’t fit the pattern of skin removal.

Jackson Purcival, Slater’s attorney. Run down in the subway tunnel. Further examination had revealed that the acid that had been used on him was an organic substance. Another enzyme. Richie had started to joke about Otto the Spider, but a look from Stan had shut him up. Stan kept thinking about the sad-faced woman in the rose garden.

Keith Emery, former bank manager at Chase Manhattan. Emery was listed as missing, not officially deceased. Of course, they had found the guy’s dick on his dining-room table, next
to seven cents in change. There had been blood in the apartment, but no other trace of the man. Stan suspected that Emery was no longer among the living. He had managed the bank that held Daniel Slater’s safe-deposit box. He and Richie had interviewed Emery the day he disappeared. The photo had started a new joke in the department, the rejoinder “seven cents and Emery’s dick will get you …” Fill in the blank. A cup of coffee. A promotion. A ticket to the Super Bowl.

Stan didn’t find it funny.

A picture of the handsome UPS driver, Joseph Panucci, hung at the corner of the board. He usually did the pickup at Slater’s lawyer’s office, and the package that had caused Purcival to go ape-shit on his secretary Theresa was among Joey’s afternoon haul. Joey looked young and smug in his driver ID photo, like a kid who got everything he wanted with just a wink and a smile. Pinned next to his grinning, cock-of-the-walk face was a picture of a stiff, a one-armed old man outside a run-down tenement north of town. The guy could’ve been Joey’s grandfather, but DNA tests had confirmed that this geezer was the one and only Joseph Panucci. The techs were still coming up with crackpot theories as to how a twentysomething guy could wander into a house whole and healthy, then stumble out mutilated and eighty years older overnight. A lot of people wanted a look at that particular stiff. Trouble was, there was no body. Right after they had collected their DNA samples, Joey Panucci’s corpse had turned to dust and blown away, like some fucking vampire in a movie.