No one paid any attention to the slim young man, like so many slim young men in New York, an artist, a musician, a wishful actor.

Just like them.

Though their backpacks didn’t contain what his did.

Billy pushed through the fire door and started down the stairs. He descended to the basement level and followed the signs to the hospital proper, through a long, dim corridor. It was deserted, as if not many workers knew about it. More likely, they were aware of the dingy route but preferred to walk from office building to hospital on the surface, where you could not only find a Starbucks or buy a slice of Ray’s original pizza but not get dragged into a closet and raped.

The tunnel leading to the hospital was long – several hundred feet – and painted a gray that you associated with warships. Pipes ran overhead. It was dark because the hospital, perhaps in a move to save money, had placed a bulb in every third socket. There were no security cameras.

Billy knew time was critical but he, of course, had to make one stop. He’d noted the detour yesterday, when he’d checked to see if this would be a suitably private route into the hospital.

The sign on the door had intrigued him.

He’d simply had  to go inside.

And he did so now, aware of the time pressure. But feeling like a kid playing hooky to hang out in a toy store.

The large room, labeled by the sign Specimens , was dim but lit well enough by the emergency exit lights, which cast an eerie rosy glow on the contents: a thousand jars filled with body parts floating in a jaundiced liquid, presumably formaldehyde.

Eyes, hands, livers, hearts, lungs, sexual organs, breasts, feet. Whole fetuses too. Billy noted that most of the samples dated to the early twentieth century. Maybe back then medical students used the real thing to learn anatomy, while today’s generation went for high def computer images.

Against the wall were shelves of bones, hundreds of them. He thought back to the infamous case Lincoln Rhyme had worked years ago, the Bone Collector crimes. Yet bones held little interest for Billy Haven.

The Rule of Bone?

No, didn’t resonate like the Rule of Skin. No comparison.

He now walked up and down the aisles, examining the jars, which ranged from a few inches to three feet in height. He paused and stared, eye to eye with a severed head. The features seemed of South Pacific heritage to Billy, or so he wanted to believe – because, to his delight, the head sported a tattoo: a cross just below where the hairline would have been.

Billy took this as a good sign. The word ‘tattoo’ comes from the Polynesian or Samoan tatau , the process of inking the lower male torso with an elaborate geometric design, called a pe’a  (and a woman’s with a similar inking, called a malu ). The process takes weeks and is extremely painful. Those who finish the inking get a special title and are respected for their courage. Those who don’t even try are called ‘naked’ in Samoan and marginalized. The worst stigma, though, was awarded to the men and women who started the procedure but didn’t finish it because they couldn’t stand the pain. The shame remained with them forever.

Billy liked the fact that they defined themselves according to their relationship to inking.

He decided to believe that the man he was staring at had endured getting his pe’a  and had gone on to be a force in his tribe. Heathen though he might have been, he was brave, a good warrior (even if not clever enough to avoid having his head end up on a steel shelf in the New World).

Billy held the jar in one hand and leaned forward until he was only a few inches from the severed head, separated by thick glass and thin liquid.

He thought about one of his favorite books. The Island of Doctor Moreau . The H. G. Wells novel was about an Englishman shipwrecked on an island, on which the doctor of the title surgically combined humans and animals. Hyena men, Leopard men … Billy had read and reread the book the way other kids would read Harry Potter  or Twilight .

Vivisection and recombination were the ultimate modding, of course. And Doctor Moreau  was the perfect  example of the application of the Rule of Skin.

All right. Time to get back to reality, he chided himself.

Billy now stepped to the door and looked up and down the corridor. Still deserted. He continued his way to the hospital and knew when he’d crossed into the building. The neutral scent of cleanser and mold from the office building was overrun by a mélange of smells. Sweet disinfectants, alcohol, Lysol, Betadine.

And the others, repulsive to some, but not to Billy: the aromas of skin in decay, skin melting under infection and bacteria, skin burning to ash … perhaps from lasers in operating rooms.

Or maybe hospital workers were disposing of discarded tissue and organs in an oven somewhere. He couldn’t think of this without recalling the Nazis, who had used the skin of Holocaust victims for practical purposes, like lamp shades and books. And who had devised a system of tattooing that was the simplest – and most significant – in history.

The Rule of Skin …

Billy inhaled deeply.

He sensed some other aroma: extremely offensive. What, what?

Oh, he understood. With so many foreign workers in the medical fields, the foods the hospital prepared included those aromatic with curry and garlic.

Disgusting.

Billy finally entered the heart of the hospital, the third sub basement. It was completely deserted here. A perfect place to bring a victim for some deadly modding, he reflected.

The elevator would have surveillance cameras so he found the stairwell, entered it and started to climb. At the next sub basement, number two, he paused and peeked out. It was the morgue, presently unstaffed. Apparently the medicos had not managed to kill anyone yet today.

Up another flight to the basement level, a floor with patient rooms. Peering out through the fire door’s greasy glass, crosshatched with fine metal mesh, he could see a flash of color, then motion: a woman walking down the corridor, her back to him.

Ah, he thought, noting that while her skirt and jacket were navy blue, the scarf around her neck was red and white shimmery silk. It stood out like a flag in the drab setting. She was alone. He eased through the door and followed. He noted her muscular legs – revealed clearly by the knee length skirt – noted the slim waist, noted the hips. The hair, in a tight bun, was brown with a bit of gray. Although the sheer pantyhose revealed a few purplish veins near the ankle, her skin was superb for an older woman’s.

Billy found himself aroused, heart pounding, the blood throbbing in his temples. And elsewhere.

Blood. The Oleander Room … blood on the carpet, blood on the floor.

Put those thoughts away. Now! Think of Lovely Girl.

He did and the urges dimmed. But dimming isn’t vanishing.

Sometimes you just gave in. Whatever the consequences might be.

Oleander …

He moved more quickly now, coming up behind her.

Thirty feet away, twenty five …

Billy closed the distance to about fifteen feet, ten, three, his eyes staring at her legs. It was then that he heard a woman’s no nonsense voice behind him.

‘You, in the cap. Police! Drop the backpack. Put your hands on your head!’

About thirty feet away from the man, Amelia Sachs steadied her Glock and repeated, more harshly, ‘Backpack on the ground. Hands on your head! Now!’

The woman he’d been about to assault, only a few feet from him, turned. The confusion in her face became horror as she stared at her would be assailant and understood what was happening. ‘No, please, no!’

The attacker was in a jacket, not the longer thigh length coat that the witness reported their unsub wore, but he had the same telltale stocking cap and black backpack. If she was wrong, she’d apologize. ‘Now!’ Sachs called again.