His innate obsession with detail, the obsession that made him perfect for his job, caused him to check the door for any sign of tampering. As always, there was none. He slipped the key into the lock, turned it, pushed the door open, then closed it behind him before turning on the lights. One of the tubes in the overhead fixtures flickered a few times before settling in to join the others in flooding the room with a bright white light-a light that Baldridge had insisted be matched to that of sunlight.
It was a matter of aesthetics, and aesthetics were important to Baldridge.
Indeed, his sense of aesthetics was another of his prime qualifications for his job.
Before he did anything else besides pull on a pair of the thin latex gloves he always wore when he worked in this room, he went to one of the supply closets, took a replacement tube from the stock on the top shelf, and replaced the offending tube in the overhead fixture.
No sense being needlessly distracted from his work if the faulty tube began flickering again.
Then he set to work.
As always, the carcass was precisely where the team left it on nights when the hunt was successfuclass="underline" laid out on a gurney in the walk-in refrigerator. The refrigerator had been expensive, and the renovations required for its installation even more so, but Baldridge had insisted on it. "The odor can sometimes become offensive," he'd explained, "and far more quickly than you might think." Also in accordance with Baldridge's precise instructions, nothing at all had been done to the carcass. "Restoration is my job," he'd explained. "It's best left to experts." Baldridge's own expertise was unquestionable. He'd apprenticed under his uncle, who was still working up in New Hampshire, and gained further training in a funeral home in California, moving to New York at the same time his employer in California moved across the border to Arizona in hopes of escaping prosecution for certain irregularities, only a few of which had taken place in Baldridge's area of the operation.
Baldridge had been in his present position for nearly five years, and though few people ever saw the results of his work, he was content. Tonight he whistled softly as he removed the blankets that had been wrapped around the carcass to make it easier to transport from the site of the kill to the refrigerator.
Wheeling the gurney out of the refrigerator, he removed one tattered layer of blanketing after another, appreciating- not for the first time-the supple layer of latex that prevented him from soiling his fingers on the filthy material that always covered the carcasses. He carefully placed the blankets in a bag that would be removed to the incinerator before he left for the night, then turned his attention to the carcass itself.
A buck, perhaps twenty-five years old-certainly no older than thirty.
The carcass was in fair condition. Most of the teeth were intact, though the hide was defaced with three tattoos. One depicted a serpent, which was coiled around the left bicep, and another proclaimed love for Mother in ornate, Old English-style letters across the left breast. The third, looking exactly like a meat stamp, was stenciled across the right buttock, and identified the posterior to be us grade-a prime.
The blond hair was limp and greasy, but at least it wasn't matted into the kind of dreadlocks Baldridge found not only unsightly, but almost impossible to work with.
The carcass was clad in the usual array of clothing, and although all of Baldridge's aesthetic instincts told him to cut it away and dispose of it in the same manner as the blankets, he instead carefully removed it, piece by piece, and transferred it to another bag, which was destined for the laundry. After the clothes were washed and pressed, Baldridge himself would make the decision if they could be used in the final presentation. If it was only a matter of replacing a few buttons, or re-sewing a hem, he would perform the repairs himself. If the damage or wear proved too extensive, however, he would take them to a discreet seamstress just off Seventh Avenue down in the Thirties and have them copied.
Finally, the carcass lay naked on the gurney, and it was time to transfer it to the worktable. He slid the carcass onto the table and began preparing for the real work.
His knives, all honed razor sharp, were kept in a velvet-lined drawer that slid out from beneath the worktable's granite surface.
He placed several large cardboard cartons-manufactured for the ice cream trade, but perfect for Baldridge's use-in a specially constructed trough running completely around the edges of the table's surface.
Using a digital camera, Baldridge photographed the carcass from every angle, then took careful note of all the pertinent measurements: not merely the girth of the breast, waist, and hips, though these were noted to within a quarter of an inch, but also the upper arms, lower arms, thighs, and calves.
Finally satisfied, he turned the carcass over so it lay face down, and carefully made an incision from just behind the crown of the head all the way down to the base of the spine. Then, using a variety of knives-most of which were of his own design-he began working the hide away from the carcass, his fingers wielding the knives quickly but expertly, never penetrating the hide but leaving nearly nothing of either the fatty tissue or the muscle that separated the hide from the bones and soft tissues.
The back was relatively easy-flat planes, a broad expanse of hide, and plenty of room to work. Peeling the hide away from the back of the skull was just as easy, though it had taken Baldridge several months to master the ears, the trick being to cut deeply enough so that no incision would show in the final product. After that it was relatively simple to peel everything away except the lips and nostrils. The eyelids simply lifted off once the membranes around the eye sockets themselves were cut away. The nostrils and lips were merely a repeat of the ears-cut deeply enough inside those orifices so the loose edges would disappear completely when the remounting process was finished.
Once the hide was completely removed from the skull and face, it was nothing more than a careful stripping process, no more difficult than removing opera-length gloves from the arms or pantry hose from the legs. A little care around the anus-more around the genitals-but that was really more for Baldridge's own sense of pride in his work than out of necessity, since those areas would not be visible in the end product.
When the hide, still in a single, nearly unblemished piece, was finally separated from the carcass, Baldridge inspected it once more, noting with a certain degree of satisfaction that the only repair that would be necessary was the small hole in the forehead where the bullet had entered. His own work had left not even the tiniest of cuts or nicks. He then transferred the hide to the first of the vats in the row of tanning tanks that lined the opposite wall, and turned his attention to the remainder of the carcass.
Baldridge worked even more quickly now, for most of what still lay on the worktable was nothing more than garbage. Within twenty minutes all the muscles, organs, ligaments, and other soft tissue had been stripped away from the skeleton and deposited in the large ice cream cartons. Finally, he pulled the head away from the spine, carefully using one of his favorite knives to separate vertebrae from brain.
Abandoning the skeleton for a moment, he opened the glass top of a large box-seven feet long and two feet wide- that appeared to rest directly on the floor against the back wall. The box's bottom was covered with a coarse screen, and it was upon this screen that Baldridge laid the skeleton. Closing the top of the box, he peered down through the glass until he saw the first of the ants scurry up through the mesh, confirm what they'd found, and hurry back down to communicate their discovery to the rest of the huge colony that lived beneath the floor of the laboratory. Satisfied that the formicans had busily begun their work and that by morning they would have eaten the cartilage away while leaving the bones intact, he turned his full attention to the skull.