Two of the RRT officers were standing in the house's large garden.
"Here," said one, "we've just pulled this one out of the bushes; he was lying under a tarpaulin."
It was the body of a man.
"Sure," said Katherine, "the tarpaulin, so that the smell isn't so noticeable and nobody discovers it for as long as possible." The smell of decay was overpowering. The man was wearing a cloth mask and gloves.
"What's with the mask?" Nikki wanted to know. "Can we pull it off him, or will an explosive device go off?"
Karras shook his head. "As long as he's been here, I don't think any explosive device would work."
The officer was still wearing latex gloves. She took the mask and pulled it off the corpse's head.
She couldn't suppress a short scream. The man's face was also without skin. A gruesome, gray-red mass of dried blood, decomposed muscles, and white bones. But that was not all. Someone had severed the man's lower jaw and pulled out all the teeth in his upper jaw. The huge hole that opened up in the lower part of the face, together with the blind eyes that had dried up into crumbs of protein, looked like a perpetual scream. Old leather gloves on the fingers of the corpse.
"Someone wanted to make it difficult to identify the victim," Katherine observed. "The gloves. See if --"
"I was thinking the same thing," Nikki interrupted her aunt. She took off the body's gloves. The fingertips were cut off on all the fingers. Nikki frowned deeply and shook her head. "Okay," she said, "I guess that's it for the quick identification." Her gaze flitted back to the man's face. Or what was left of it. Then she remembered the man in the cellar who had been taken away by the ambulance. "Anyway, his skin was flayed off too."
"Just like the guy in the basement," Katherine replied.
Nikki squinted hard. "Listen," she said, "it was only one victim who got his face skin ripped off in the snuff movie, right?"
Katherine drew her eyebrows together and nodded slowly.
"But there are two victims here, two men without facial skin. We've just had one taken away; the other is lying here. But there was only one in the video."
Elizabeth frowned a little. "You took a picture of the other one."
The officer nodded slowly. "I did," she said, pulling out her smartphone and opening the picture.
Katherine nodded slowly. "This one had his skin completely ripped off. While the man from the basement --"
Nikki was hit like a sledgehammer by the realization. "...while the one in the picture still has scraps of skin on his face. That could mean --" She didn't finish the sentence and looked at the lieutenant wide-eyed. Then she turned around and activated her radio.
xxx
The ambulance sped down the road.
The driver, one of the paramedics, couldn't deny that he enjoyed driving fast with so-called 'special rights'. There were no red lights and no traffic rules; it was only the speed that counted. However, that was the only fun thing about being a paramedic in the Boston area, apart from the satisfaction of saving other people's lives. Being a paramedic in Boston was no fun, but like everything else here, it was awful and usually worse. The fact that accident victims were gawked at and filmed and rubberneckers stood in the way was nothing new. What was new, and the politicians couldn't care less, was that emergency services, firefighters, paramedics, and police officers were spat at, beaten, and pelted with firecrackers. At the same time, the tires of the emergency vehicles were punctured.
As always, two other paramedics were in the ambulance alongside the patient. One helped the other with patient care.
"Yes," said the paramedic caring for the man over his radio, "extensive skin injuries, no, no burns. He was ... skinned. Excuse me? Good question --" He looked at his face. "Here, it looks as if they didn't just peel off his skin but also put some flaps of skin on his face."
His colleague nodded slowly. Cut off and placed on top. But I wouldn't try it out on the way to see if the skin flaps are just there."
The paramedic shook his head. "Not. It could already be infected anyway, so let the doctors at Mass Gen take a look."
"How is he?" the driver asked over his shoulder. There was an intersection ahead. He turned on the sirens. Once again, everyone was too stupid to form an emergency lane ...
"Not good," he heard his colleague's voice from behind. "He --"
At that moment, he saw the truck from the corner of his eye.
xxx
The truck crashed into the ambulance's side, pushing its feet over the road, metal crunching, tires squealing. The ambulance almost tipped over but then swayed and finally came to a halt, smoking.
The truck driver looked at the scene with wide eyes. A young woman was sitting next to him. She had plunged a knife into his thigh. As soon as I pulled it out of there, she said, I'll ram it down your throat, and then you'll be dead. So you better hope it stays in your leg!
She had hit on him early that morning at a highway service station. The guy had believed what she had told him. They would run away together and have lots of fun. He liked young girls. Very young girls. He had gone to the highway toilet and waited for her there. She had promised him she would be right behind him. But she hadn't followed him. It would have been too lovely if a young woman had wanted to have sex with him without him having to pay for it.
He had left the keys to the truck in the ignition. When he came back, he had seen the girl. He had been pleased; perhaps he had misunderstood the meeting place. At that moment, he saw a young man out of the corner of his eye. Both of them, the girl and the boy, had a knife in their hands, and both had rammed it into his thigh. Only the boy had pulled his out again. He hadn't felt any pain; it had felt more like being punched. Then he felt the warm blood running down his thighs.
"If you scream, you're dead," the girl had breathed into his ear. "If you join in, we might let you live."
He had looked at the young man and immediately noticed the insane glint in his eyes.
Then they had set off. They had left the semi-trailer at the rest stop. The cab was enough. It had enough rumble to ram other vehicles out of the way.
"Keep an eye on him," Melanie said as she exited the truck.
"I will," her brother Noah replied, the bloody knife in his hand as he jumped out of the truck, leaving the door open to keep a better eye on the man. There were countless beads of sweat on the driver's forehead.
The two paramedics emerged from the ambulance. The driver was hanging unconscious over the steering wheel.
Suddenly, two shots with silencers rang out, hitting the paramedics in the back. Both fell to the ground and were dead before they hit the asphalt.
The man on the stretcher had sat up and was holding a smoking gun. Also, a Glock.
Then he pulled off the bloody flap of skin. His face was revealed underneath. Bloodied but intact.
"Fools," the man boomed, "clueless, naive, without any real imagination, overwhelmed by life, completely out of their depth." And as if to himself, he muttered: "No one was a match for Hannibal Lecter either. No one --"
He nodded at Melanie.
She met his gaze with flashing eyes as if she knew what was coming. As if she was waiting for it with dark anticipation.
He almost solemnly said, "You don't need a brother if you have me, Báthory. You can still learn an infinite amount from me."
"No, my God of Blood, I don't need him."
"Do you want me to do it for you?"
"Yes, my God of Blood."
The God of Blood raised his gun, squinted one eye in his bloodied face, and fired. Again, the hiss of the silencer. The bullet whizzed through the morning air and hit Noah in the temple.
He was thrown to the side and fell into the ditch, spinning on his axis.
A second shot through the open door of the truck killed the driver. He slumped in his seat, a wreath of blood and brain splatter behind him.
"On to bloody adventures," said the God of Blood. He went to the cab and dragged the dead driver outside, dropping him on the road like a bloody sack.
"Let's get out of here," he said.
"Can you drive one of these things?" asked Melanie as she sat in the truck.
"Of course I can. The ambulance with its special rights would be even better, but we'd arouse too much suspicion the way it looks now." He started the engine, and the truck started moving, rumbling, and hissing.
Melanie hadn't been sure for a long time whether what she was doing was right. Now she knew that she had made the right decision. She had wanted to become an ME and help the BPD hunt monsters. Still, when the BPD had started making the videos, Melanie had realized that there was something else inside her, something else that had been awakened in her by those wonderful videos, something dark, bloody, brutal. Something upliftingly evil. She had taken a liking to the black opposite side, wrong; she was almost inflamed, animated, as if possessed. And wildly determined. Perhaps she should even be grateful to the BPD and this Nikki O'Laighin because it was they, Melanie thought, who had enabled her to become a murderer, a much better Báthory, a blood-loving playmate of the abysmal.
Together with her mentor, she would ride a bloody and gruesome future. She looked at the God of Blood from the side and felt strangely drawn to his bloodied face. Maybe, she thought, someday she would turn a pupil into a lover. Perhaps soon.
A radio call from Nikki O'Laighin crackled in the ambulance's radio.
"Please check the patient carefully," the officer kept repeating. "Something is wrong. Please check if he's armed. We may have been fooled. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"
But no one answered.