Read Online The Skin Collector by Jeffery Deaver - Free Book Online

despised.
    The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents, some more helpful than others. The
Field Guide to Poisonous Plants
was sumptuously illustrated but didn’t have quite the same level of usefulinformation as the underground blog called
Knock ’Em Off: A Dozen Deadly Recipes for When the Revolution Comes and We Have to Fight Back!!
    All arranged neatly on the workspace, just like in his tattoo parlor back home. The far corner of the room was pooled in the cool glow of ultraviolet lights that illuminated eight terrariums. He walked to these now and examined the plants inside. The leavesand flowers comforted him, they were so reminiscent of home. Pinks and whites and purples and greens in a thousand shades. The colors fought against the dull mud tone of the city, whose hateful spirit lapped every minute at Billy Haven’s heart. Suitcases contained changes of clothes and toiletries. A gym bag held several thousand dollars, sorted by denomination but wrinkled and old and very untraceable.

    He watered the plants and spent just a few minutes finishing a sketch of one of them, an interesting configuration of leaves and twigs. Even as someone who’d drawn all his life, Billy sometimes wondered where the urge came from. Sometimes he just
had
to take out a pencil or crayon and transfer something from life, which would fade, into something that would not. That would last forever.
    He’dsketched Lovely Girl a thousand times.
    The pencil now drooped in his hand and he left a sketch of a branch half-finished, tossing the pad aside.
    Lovely Girl …
    He couldn’t think of her without hearing his uncle’s somber voice, the deep baritone: ‘Billy. There’s something I have to tell you.’ His uncle had gripped him by the shoulders and looked down into his eyes. ‘Something’s happened.’
    And,with those simple, horrific words, he’d learned she was gone.
    Billy’s parents too were gone – though their deaths had been years ago and he’d come to some terms with the loss.
    Lovely Girl’s? No, never.
    She was going to be his companion forever. She was going to be his wife, the mother of his children. She was going to be the one to save him from the past, from all the bad, from the OleanderRoom.
    Gone, just like that.
    But today he wasn’t thinking so much of the terrible news, wasn’t thinking of the unfairness of what had happened, though what had happened was unfair.
    And he wasn’t thinking of the cruelty, though what had happened was cruel.
    No, at the moment, having just finished inking Chloe, Billy was thinking that he was on the road to the end of pain.
    The Modification wasunder way.
    Billy sat at the rickety table in the kitchen area of the basement apartment and removed from his shirt pocket the pages of the book he’d found that morning.
    He’d found out about the volume weeks ago and knew he needed a copy to complete his planning for the Modification. It was out of print, though he’d found a few copies he could buy online through secondhand-book sellers. But hecouldn’t very well order one with a credit card and have it shipped to his home. So Billy had been searching through used-book shops and libraries. There were two copies in the New York Public Library but they weren’t where they should have been in the stacks, in either the Mid-Manhattan branch or a satellite branch in Queens.
    But he’d tried once more, earlier today, returning on a whim to thelibrary on Fifth Avenue.
    And there it was, reshelved and Dewey Decimaled into place. He’d pulled the book down from the shelf and stood in the shadows, skimming.
    Badly written, he’d noted from his brief read in the stacks. An absurdly sensational cover in black, white, red. Both the style and the graphics helped explain the out-of-print status. But what the book contained? Just what he needed,filling in portions of the