Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  Bockem felt the skins slide a little inside their container as he pulled it from the rear compartment—their juices would have been seeping to the bottom. Momentarily setting it down on the ground, he slammed the hatch shut and locked the car with his keychain remote. Then he bent to lift the bin and carry it into the cabin.

  A sound, soft but recognizable, snared his attention before it was back in his hands.

  He straightened and saw the coyote skulking toward him, its head hung in abject submission. It moved another half foot and stopped, and he smiled. How quickly it had grown dependent on him.

  “Pathetic, needful thing,” he said quietly. “I think you will miss me when I leave.”

  The coyote stared at him with its insipid brown eyes, keeping its head lowered below the bony shoulders of its forelegs.

  “Come to me,” Bockem said, gesturing for it to come closer with a wag of his fingers. “Do not be afraid—you know better, do you not?”

  Its natural suspicion diminished, the creature inched closer. Needful, cringing, weak. Bockem all at once felt wiry inside, his mouth full of metal.

  “Hoppe hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er, fällt er in de Hecken, tut er sich erschrecken,” he sang in a gentle voice, reaching under his jacket for his holstered pistol. The coyote looked at him timidly as he raised the Glock in both hands and slid his right index finger out along its barrel, first aiming at its head, then changing his mind and shifting the bore of the gun toward its hindquarters.

  “Hoppe hoppe Reite, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er, fällt er auf die Steine, tun ihm weh die Beine.”

  The animal watched him, sloe-eyed and docile, expecting fresh morsels for its belly. Bockem held the gun steady, his extended arms slightly bent, hands wrapped around the grip, their thumbs married against it.

  “Hoppe hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er, fällt er in den Graben, fressen ihn die Raben.”

  The creature watched. Bockem’s index finger dropped from the barrel and curled around the trigger.

  “Fällt er in den Sumpf, dann macht der Reiter… plumps! ” he sang in his utter loathing.

  And then his heart beat faster, and he fired his pistol, the weapon’s recoil bouncing his arms upward as the coyote howled out in pain. Bockem had hit the creature in its right rear leg, the bullet shattering its thigh bones with an explosive spray of blood, instantly laming it. His eyes followed it now, watched it break away from the clearing in shock and panic, seeking cover in the chamise scrub along the mountain trail it had come from days ago. It scrambled for the brush with its leg dragging behind its body, bent at a loose, crooked angle, bleeding out a trail of bright, venous red.

  Bockem let the gun sink in his hands until its snout was pointing straight down at the hard, dry earth, stood listening to the coyote crash through the bushes along the trail. Its wild, shrill cries reminded him of the screams of a tortured woman or child.

  “Trust no one,” he said into the high desert silence. “And beware.”

  He returned the pistol to its holster and brought his container inside to the kitchen sink.

  Now and then throughout the day, Bockem paused in his work to hear the coyote’s fading yelps and whimpers. It was not till quite late that he realized he would need to find a new way to dispose of his scrapings.

  8

  “CATHERINE,” SAID Dave Phillips, sounding as though his head was stuffed with cotton. “Got a second?”

  Catherine paused in the corridor outside her office. It was a little after eight o’clock in the morning, and she’d just returned from Floyd Lamb Park to type out her crime-scene reports and supervise the processing of evidence. She’d already phoned Lindsey to apologize and cancel their planned Sunday crêpe brunch at the new neighborhood trattoria, saying she’d try to make up for it with dinner reservations. Lindsey hadn’t sounded convinced, and Catherine didn’t blame her. She hadn’t bought it, either.

  She turned to face the assistant coroner. His eyes swollen and red, his nostrils chafed, he’d reached the park twenty minutes after she and Langston arrived and returned with the bodies in the meat wagon well before the CSIs wrapped up there.

  “Dave, you look awful,” she said, thinking she’d been too busy to mention it earlier. “Have you got a cold or something?”

  “No,” he said. “Cats. A pair. They’re kittens. Cute white ones. From the shelter.”

  “But aren’t you allergic to cats?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My wife isn’t, though.”

  “Did you ever bother telling her you’re allergic?”

  He nodded. “Before we were married.”

  “And she brought them home anyway?”

  “Actually, I did it. For her birthday.”

  Catherine raised an eyebrow. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Kitties make you gag and sneeze, but you go out and adopt not one but two at the same time.”

  “For my wife who loves cats and who celebrated a special birthday yesterday,” Phillips said, dabbing his runny left eye with a tissue. “It is possible to develop an immunological tolerance to allergens through prolonged exposure.”

  “And what? You figured a double dose of fur would do it twice as fast?”

  Phillips shrugged. “Snowflake and Sugar are litter mates,” he said. “I didn’t have the heart to separate them.”

  Catherine looked at him. “Dave,” she said, grinning.

  “Yes?”

  “Your wife is one lucky woman.”

  Phillips stood there a moment, his cheeks turning the same shade of red as the tip of his nose. “Uh,” he said, “did I mention why I came to see you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Something occurred to me while I was zipping that man and woman in the park into body bags,” he said. “A professor who taught a basic forensics course—this was in my second year of college—he took us to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. It’s run by AFIP, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in D.C.”

  “On the Walter Reed campus,” Catherine said, nodding. “If you’ve paid the price of admission, you’re probably a forensics expert researching an obscure subject or a weirdo looking for the two-headed grail.”

  “Since when is there a difference?” Phillips said with a morbid grin. “Anyway, the museum’s got hundreds of specimens. The bullet that killed Lincoln, the leg of an amputated Civil War soldier, preserved organs and skeletons taken from people who had rare diseases, genetic conditions, anatomical deviations—it’s an amazing collection.”

  It had abruptly struck Catherine that if Gil Grissom were God, that museum would be the afterworld he chose to create. “So what made you think of it while you were packing up the DBs?” she asked.

  “The skinnings,” Phillips said. His tone had sobered. “Most of the exhibits at the museum were open to the public. But there was a roomful of stuff, environmentally controlled and with restricted access. Our class never would’ve been granted permission to get in, but our professor had written a book or article and talked our way into a walkthrough. Not that I’m sure we were grateful afterward.”

  Catherine was silent. Phillips was not easily overcome. But there was a look in his eyes, a recalled horror and disgust, that bore no resemblance to anything she’d ever glimpsed in them. “What is it, Dave?”

  “We saw five tattooed human skins taken from the bodies of Holocaust victims,” he said. “The cabinets in that room were numbered, and they were in cabinet twenty-four. I can picture them. They were in acrylic frames. I remember the curator explaining that they were seized from Buchenwald’s pathology section when American GIs liberated the concentration camps back in World War II. The Germans claimed to be using them for research. One scientist even wrote a dissertation on the sociology of tattooing.”

  “Scientist, huh?”

  “Scientist, sadist, for the Nazis, those terms could be interchangeable,” Phillips said. “The fact is that they took the skins as keepsakes or artwork to exhibit on their walls.
”

  As she had the day before, Catherine felt an icy finger in her belly. She was becoming far too well acquainted with its touch. “Wasn’t there a conviction for that at Nuremberg?”

  “Ilse Koch,” Phillips said. “The Witch of Buchenwald. She didn’t bother with scholarly pretenses. Inmates testified that she kept a whole collection of skins. Some were tanned and sewn into lampshades. Billy Wilder, the Hollywood director, documented the liberation on film for the U.S. Army. He took footage of a whole table full of Ilse’s souvenirs. There were preserved human organs, two shrunken heads, and fourteen tattooed skins. And a lamp with one of the shades.”

  “But didn’t you say there were only five at the museum?”

  “Right,” Phillips said. “And just one skin was entered into evidence at the trial, a woman with butterfly wings.” He paused. “Ilse got a life sentence before an Army review board commuted it to four years.”

  “They let her walk?”

  “And the story gets worse before it gets better,” Phillips said. “A couple of years later, the military governor of the American zone in Germany pardoned her.”

  “Why?”

  “Good question.” Phillips shrugged, shaking his head. “Luckily, it caused such an international commotion that the Germans rearrested her to save face and gave her a new life sentence. She served fifteen, sixteen years before she hung herself in her cell.”

  “Let’s just hope she dangled awhile before she died.” Catherine regarded Phillips for a long moment, those cold fingers leaving their prints everywhere inside her now. “Dave… what happened to the other tattooed skins in the film?”

  “Another good question,” Phillips said. “We know the tattoo of the woman with wings is in the National Archives.”

  “And the rest?”

  “They disappeared.”

  “What about the lampshade?”

  “Gone, too,” he said. “So are the shrunken heads and preserved organs… for reasons unknown.”

  “Anybody ever try figuring out those reasons? Or where everything that’s missing went?”

  “I talked about it with somebody around here once,” Phillips said. And then he gave her a look that told her exactly who that somebody had been.

  “Grissom?” she said.

  Phillips nodded. “It was a while ago,” he said. “I think he mentioned that he was also in the nonpublic room at the museum once. I wish I could remember how the subject came up. Wish even more that he wasn’t off in Europe somewhere so you could ask him yourself. But I was thinking…”

  “Sara’s back with us.” Catherine looked at him. “She ought to be able to help with it.”

  “Exactly.”

  Catherine looked at him another second, smiling a little. “Dave,” she said, “if anyone ever wants to know why we call you ‘super’ around here, just send that person straight to me.”

  * * *

  Vern and Reginald Miriam founded the town that would take on their family name in 1858, the same year that arid Comstock territory revealed its silver lode to the brothers and six years before it became part of the newly recognized state of Nevada. In 1866, Our Lady of Guidance Church had its cornerstone set at the north end of Miriam, the construction financed by Catholic miners who were grateful for their inestimable success, eager to ensure heaven’s continued generosity with the earth’s precious resources, and keen on a good, strong dose of Sunday worship to mitigate the sins of their weeklong excesses in local saloons and brothels.

  In their religious dedication, and possibly to one-up the competitive miners building their own church over in Carson City, the Miriams and other wealthy local mining families spared no expense giving the towering structure every ornamental and architectural adornment to fall within the era’s bounds of tastefulness. Slender minarets lined up around its soaring bell tower. The sun entering its stained-glass windows spilled onto elaborate painted wall mosaics, delicately sculpted saints and archangels, and sacramental vessels of fine gold and silver. During services, tapering candelabras flickered in a choir loft supported by massive wooden pillars, its cedar rail carved with winged, prayerful cherubs.

  Although still several months shy of his tenth birthday, Jake Clarkson knew a great deal about Miriam’s olden days. Father Molanez, who relished telling stories about them—along with occasional corny bathroom jokes (“What did the toilet say to the other toilet? You look flushed!”)—had never spoken a word to him about Sugar Alley, but he was an intelligent, inquisitive boy and had picked up a tale or two on his own. It wasn’t hard. Lying midway between Carson City and Reno, with Lake Tahoe only forty miles east across the state border, Miriam was itself a minor tourist stop, and many of the brochures in its little visitors’ center made mention of the Sunday morning in 1874 when Judith Abigail, “Hatchet Judy,” led her Women’s Christian Temperance League on a furious rampage that left the district’s saloons and brothels in splintered ruins. His omission of that episode aside, Father Molanez did regale the altar boy with stories of the Trappist order known to villagers as the Crazy Monks, who purchased the church from the parish in the 1930s after the silver ore dried up and three-quarters of the congregation went away with it, leaving Miriam’s population more than halved. In their avowed silence and austerity, the Trappists were quick to strip away the building’s classically beautiful features. The terraces around the minarets were dismantled, the art torn from the walls, the precious vessels and appointments sold or traded off for mules, hoes, and sacks of alfalfa seed for planting in the field. But for some reason, the choir loft was overlooked.

  Then one day, as Father Molanez often told it with a mischievous lilt in his voice, the abbott sternly gathered his brothers in the nave, looked toward the back of the church, and turned his deep-set eyes up to the loft, lacing his hands over the middle of his apron.

  “This abbott had kept a strict silence for ten years,” Father Molanez would say. “The sign meant he’d been deep in thought.”

  Jake always humored him with a nod, as if he’d never heard it before. “Then, slowly, the abbott—did I ever tell you he had long white hair and a wild, shaggy beard to match?”

  “That’s how I picture him!” Jake would say to avoid admitting he’d heard that a hundred times, too, or having to lie that he hadn’t. The father had silver hair himself and tended to be forgetful.

  “Well, very slowly, the abbott did this.” Father Molanez touched a fingertip to his lips and drew it away, little by little to build suspense. “It signaled he was about to speak, the rarest of things for any Trappist monk, and we know all about that fellow, Jakey. So naturally, the brothers thought their leader was about to share an important nugget of wisdom or reveal some glorious truth that came upon him in his silent meditations.”

  Jake would give a dutiful nod, waiting for the climactic line.

  “Next, he thrusts his arm toward the choir loft like so.” Father Molanez would spear the air with his finger to dramatize the moment. “And with his wild hair and beard flying this way and that, he shouts, ‘A mouse up there just peed on my head! Now get rid of it before I pee on yours!’”

  In the small room off the vestry used by the altar boys and choirboys, Jake reached into a large wooden chest for his neatly folded cassock and surplice, shrugged into them, then carefully snapped, buttoned, and straightened them over the dress shirt and slacks his dad had laid out for him that morning. Soon after he’d arrived at church to prepare for Sunday mass, Father Molanez was once again moved to tell his tale of the Crazy Monks and the choir loft, and Jake had forced a laugh, although its humor had long since grown stale. The story’s timing wasn’t at all unusual. Sunday communion—or, really, the part of the service that followed the sharing of the host—was when Jake got to take his brief turn with the choir, leaving the sanctuary for a hurried trip down the aisle that always drew glances and smiles from the congregation.

  Although Jake found the attention a little embarrassing, he also secretly enjoyed it. He liked to sin
g, liked attending practices with the ensemble’s regulars, and liked how he felt when Father Molanez and the instructors told him his voice was a special gift. He also liked how he felt inside when he sang the hymns at church—warm and settled, as if he was wrapped in a soft down blanket. Dad, who’d been saying a novena for his safety since the first time he stepped aboard a school bus, had told him it meant Jesus had placed a caring, protective hand on his shoulder as a reward for his devotion. When he’d mentioned the feeling to Father Molanez, the good-humored priest had joked that God was showing that he was grateful the choir had one member who could manage to stay on key. For his part, Jake only knew it was a very different kind of satisfaction from what he got out of anything else.

  Now he went through the vestry door into the sacristy, still grinning over Father Molanez’s favorite story. While his version of the abbott’s decree was beyond goofy, Jake knew those monks had, in fact, torn down the loft way back when. As it turned out, though, they’d been experts at growing high-quality hay to sell to local horse ranchers but weren’t too slick when it came to knowing how things were built… or stayed built.

  The same tourist booklets that contained tales of Judith Abigail’s Temperance League storming through Sugar Alley had sections about the history of the church, which was given official landmark status right around the year Jake was born and underwent a major restoration about three years later. According to what he’d read, the original pillars that held up the choir loft had also partly supported the roof above the entrance lobby—or the narthex, as Father Molanez always called it. A thin wall between the narthex and the main area of the church had hidden those huge structural beams, but when the Crazy Monks decided the loft had to go, they’d smashed through the wall so they could saw the pillars into scrap wood, then rebuilt the wall without the pillars, leaving nothing to help keep the roof of the narthex from falling in.

  By the 1950s, the Trappists and their mules had quit the scene—Jake had no idea why or where they went—and Our Lady of Guidance had been returned to general usage by the town’s Catholics. But over the decades, the roof over the narthex had begun to sag dangerously. When architects sketched out their plans for the church’s refurbishment, they reviewed its early blueprints and agreed that the best way to prop up the roof was to replace the long-gone pillars with new ones that pretty much had identical dimensions. With that decided, one of the church’s wealthier sponsors suggested that they might as well take things a step further and build a new choir loft right where the original had overhung the pews.