We walk out of the cooler and he goes to the “clean hands” wall phone. “Can you find your way back to the conference room?” I ask Berger.
“Sure.” She looks almost glazed, maybe puzzled as distant thoughts show in her eyes.
“I’ll be right there,” I say to her. “I’m sorry for the interruption.”
She hovers in the doorway, untying her surgical gown in back. “Strange. But I had a case a couple months back, a woman tortured with a heat gun. Burns looked a lot like the ones in these two cases.” She bends over to pull off her booties and drop them in the trash. “Gagged, tied up and had these round burns on her face, her breasts.”
“Did they catch who did it?” I am quick to ask, not happy
about the parallel.
“A construction guy working in her apartment building,” she says with a small frown. “The heat gun was for burning off paint. A real dumb shit, loserbroke into her apartment about three o’clock in the morning, raped, strangled her and all the rest, and when he went out several hours later, his truck had been stolen. Welcome to New York. So hello, he calls the cops and next thing is in a patrol car, a duffel bag in his lap, giving a statement about his stolen truck at the same time the victim’s housekeeper shows up, finds the body, starts screaming hysterically and calls nine-one-one. The killer’s sitting right there in the cop car when the detectives roar up, and he tries to run. A clue. Turns out the asshole has clothesline and a heat gun inside the duffel bag.”
“Was there a lot about the case in the news?” I ask.
“Locally. The Times, the tabloids.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t give someone else the idea,” I reply.[“_Toc37098912”]
CHAPTER 10
I AM SUPPOSED TO HANDLE ANY SIGHT, ANY IMAGE, any smell, any sound without flinching. I am not allowed to react to horror the way normal people do. It is my job to reconstruct pain without feeling it vicariously, to conjure up terror and not allow it to follow me home. I am supposed to submerge myself in Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s sadistic art without imagining that his next mutilated work was supposed to be me.
He is one of the few killers I have seen who looks like what he does, the classic monster. But he didn’t step from the pages of Mary Shelley. Chandonne is real. He is hideous, his face formed of two halves set together unevenly, one eye lower than the other, teeth widely spaced, small and pointed like an animal’s. His entire body is covered with long, unpigmented, baby-fine hair, but it is his eyes that disturb me most. I saw hell in that stare, a lust that seemed to light up the air when he pushed his way into my house and back-kicked the door shut behind him. His evil intuition and intelligence are palpable, and although I resist feeling even a breath of mercy for him, I know the suffering Chandonne causes others is a projection of his own wretchedness, a transient re-creation of the nightmare he endures with every beat of his hateful heart.
I found Berger in my conference room and now she accompanies me down a corridor as I explain that Chandonne suffers from a rare disorder called congenital hypertrichosis. It afflicts only one in a billion people, if such statistics are to be trusted. Before him, I had encountered only one other case of this cruel genetic disorder, when I was a resident physician in Miami, rotating through pediatrics, and a Mexican woman gave birth to one of the ghastliest deformities of human life I have ever seen. The infant girl was covered with long, gray hair that spared only her mucous membranes, her palms and the soles of her feet. Long tufts protruded from her nostrils and ears, and she had three nipples. Hypertrichotic people can be overly sensitive to light and suffer anomalies of their teeth and genitalia. They might have extra fingers and toes. In earlier centuries these wretched people were sold to carnivals or royal courts. Some were accused of being werewolves.