They were standing at the top of a long wooden staircase leading down to a lit basement. Steve led the way, Dacey behind while Neil waited at the top until they were below.
Steve found himself at the head of a long fluorescent-lit corridor with rooms on either side. The place looked like a replica of Monks’s clinic except for a reception desk.
Steve followed the beeping past two rooms, one of which was open and a light inside fell on a hospital gurney. He had been to the Medical Examiner’s office more times than he chose, and become all too familiar with the profile of a sheeted body.
His heart nearly stopped mid-beat. He moved to the body and braced himself, muttering a silent prayer as he gripped the edge of the sheet. Then he pulled it back.
Aaron Monks stared up at him through slitted eyes. A wad of gauze had been taped shut in his mouth and his hands had been tethered to the gurney rails.
He was dead.
Neil tugged at Steve’s arm. He had found something in the corridor. He pointed to a room across the hall—it was the last door on that side. Inside they heard voices and more electronic beeps.
They braced at the door, and when Steve gave the nod they burst in.
“Freeze!”
For a moment Steve’s eyes tried to process what his brain was registering.
In the middle of the room under operating room lights were two gurneys lying side by side with a person on each, draped but for their faces. Standing amidst beeping monitors and hanging IVs and a lot of other medical apparatus were four people in scrubs, masks and hair nets frozen in place. One of them was holding a scalpel wire as an electric cauterizer, the others had suctioning tube for the blood running down Dana’s face.
The heart monitor showed a steady strong beat. And Steve sent up a prayer of thanks.
“Mother of God,” Dacey said.
On the other gurney beside a table piled with bloody sponges and cloths lay a body whose face had been completely removed but for the nose, lips, and patches over the eyes. All that they could make out under the hairline was a glistening mass of red muscle and fat.
“What the fuck..,” Neil said.
Overhead were two large flat screen monitors each with a split-screen image. One had the head of Dana side by side with a three-dimensional contour of her facial muscles and skull bone. Beside it were the same split-screen images of another muscle-bone contoured head and beside it a genderless blank. Overlaid on each were grids that segmented the faces into neat square tiles.
They were in the process of removing Dana’s face to be transplanted onto that of the person on the other gurney.
But Steve could see that the incision on Dana’s face was only partly made, from the forehead down to her right ear.
Steve had his pistol trained on the face of the man with the scalpel and closed in on him. “Drop it and sew her up.”
The man laid down the scalpel and said something in another language to the other man.
The other man looked back at Steve.
“Do it now or I’ll blow your fucking heads off. Do it!”
The scalpel guy nodded then began to blot the blood where the incision had stopped.
Dacey pulled alongside of Steve while Neil moved to the other two surgeons, his gun raised three feet from his head. “Who’s that?” Dacey asked.
Neither of the men responded.
“I said who’s that man?”
Finally in a soft accented voice, one of them said, “Aaron Monks.”
“What? Who the fuck’s out there?” Neil asked, the gun poised in aim at the other surgeon.
“I don’t know his name,” said the taller one. “He was someone Dr. Monks had found.”
“Found for what?” Steve asked.
The man did not answer.
“For what?”
“To be his double.”
“The guy’s dead.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly Steve felt as if the oxygen had been drained from the room. He moved to the gurney where Aaron Monks lay waiting for the face of Dana, his own in bloody scraps in a stainless-steel pan on the side table, some kind of glistening solution over the open tissue like an aspic.
Steve took a deep breath and lifted the bottom of the sheet draped over Monks’s body then raised the bottom of the Johnny he wore.
Aaron Monks was a woman.
96
For days the media fed upon the story like jackals.
And every day was a jubilee for the headline makers, trying to outdo each other with lurid catchiness as details spurted out from the investigation:
NOTED COSMETIC SURGEON TURNED SERIAL KILLER
FAMOUS FACE DOC KILLS TO REMAKE STEPMOM
TRANSSEX FACE—OFF, DOC WANTED TO BE MUM
One tabloid even filled the front page with the King Kong declaration: IT WAS BEAUTY KILLED THE BEAST.
The investigation carried on for weeks during which time Monks’s office, Lexington home, and Vita Nova site had been thoroughly searched. He had been meticulous in not leaving incriminating evidence linking him to the murders of the other women. He either had doctored his records or had arranged for the women to pay by cash so as to eliminate any paper trails.
Likewise, no physical evidence connected him to any of the crime scenes—no black stocking collection, no photographs, no journal, no correspondences. Because he had used freelance surgical teams and conducted all reconstructions at the offsite location, anonymity was maintained.
The only trophy of his crimes would have been Dana’s face.
Following extensive interrogations, the three surgical assistants had confessed to being accomplices to the attempted transplant of Dana, although they pleaded not guilty to murder. Each had been trained in the country of his origin—Korea and Martinique. However, they became associated with Monks when accepted for advanced fellowship training in transplantation under a program allied with the prestigious Institute of Reconstructive Surgery headed up by him. He had taken them under mentorship, and in exchange for the opportunity to work with the renowned leader in facial transplantation—which eventually would help establish them in successful practices back home—they went along with his scheme. Allegedly Dr. Monks had claimed that Dana was suffering from terminal cancer, thus minimizing her sacrifice.
They also claimed to have known nothing of Monks’s other killings. According to the U.S. Immigration Service, none of them was in the country when the others were committed. On those Monks had apparently acted alone. Subsequent autopsies showed that he had made implants on other women to assimilate the facial structure of Lila Monks, his stepmother, a woman whose beauty had gotten her modeling jobs and a few small parts in movies and television.
It was not clear the exact hold she had had on his psyche, but it was assumed that she had sexualized him as a child to the point that he never developed a normal, healthy relationship with other females. Following her alleged murder of his father, she committed suicide by hanging herself with a black Wolford stocking. According to police records, young Monks had found her and suffered her loss. Nearly inseparable from her, he fell into deep depression, according to sources. Twice during college he attempted suicide. It was hypothesized that Lila Monks’s death had permanently scarred him, possibly rendering him sexually dysfunctional and bitter.
Over the years, his obsession morphed into the quiet hunt for patients whose facial structure resembled that of his stepmother, iconized in the sepia illustration in the negative that hung in his office. With the use of old photographs and MRI software, he had approximated the muscle-skeletal contours of her face to the point of calculating the exact requirements necessary to refashion hers from others.