Chapter 20
It was three thirty and the bell over the door of Town Taxidermy rang.
Mike Lunde emerged from a door behind the counter with a pair of reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
“Detective Oz,” he said, wiping his hands dry on his rough blue apron.
“Lunde.” Bob looked around. Apart from the animals the place was as deserted as it had been the previous time.
“What can I do for you?”
Bob smiled and patted a white-tailed deer. “I was wondering if I could hang around here for a while this afternoon.”
Lunde gave Bob a look of mild astonishment.
“We don’t have any other leads on Gomez,” Bob explained. “This is the only place where we can expect him to show up.”
“You’re welcome to stay,” said Lunde. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath. I don’t have a definite appointment with Tomás.”
“I know that.”
“Okay then. Coffee?”
Bob followed Lunde through the door behind the counter and into what was evidently a workshop.
It was a large room with several workbenches, tools hanging on the walls.
The smell, probably glue, reminded him of something from his childhood, recalling Christmas and candy, only a little more pungent.
Lunde moved four yellowish-white figures that looked like they were carved in polystyrene so Bob could sit down.
One resembled a deer, the others were smaller mammals, maybe lynxes or wolves.
“What are these?”
“We call them mannequins,” said Lunde as he poured coffee from a stained pot. “We order them and they come ready-cut like that.”
“But that’s cheating.”
Lunde laughed and handed Bob a mug with National Taxidermist Association written on it.
“I still need to file them down a bit, where you can see the crosses I’ve made.
But yes, the days when we used formalin and the soft parts of the animal are over.
Now it’s just the hide and the horns. And the teeth, if the customer requests it. ”
Lunde walked over to the head and neck of a deer mounted on a stand. The hide around the nose and eyeholes was dotted with what looked like needle pricks. He pressed a small ball of clay into one of the eyeholes, opened a drawer in a plastic box and took out two eyes.
“Plastic?”
“Glass. These are special order. I’m very particular about the eyes. Too particular, according to some of my suppliers.” Lunde pushed an eye into the clay. Studied it, turned it a little. “The hart has oblong pupils that have to be positioned horizontally,” he explained.
“Why?”
“So that they can take in the horizon in one look. They’re prey.”
“They’re on the lookout for predators?”
“Precisely.”
After he had inserted both eyes and added more clay around them and sculpted to shape, Lunde sat on one of the workbenches, picked up a hide and showed Bob a hole.
“Bullet hole.”
Working from the inside, he cut the hole a little larger before starting to sew it closed. Burned off the end of the thread with a lighter.
“It’s quiet here,” said Bob.
“Yes it is,” said Lunde. He walked over to the deer mannequin, applied glue to the clay surrounding the eyes and fit the hide over the head, pulling it forward over the head like a sweater.
“Right now it looks more like an ass,” he said as he lifted up the floppy ears. “But we’ll deal with that later.”
“How long does it take you to, er…make an animal?”
“That depends. Anything from a week to six months. A head like this is a lot less work than if you want the whole animal. A lot of the procedures take time. Flaying, salting, drying the skin. Then you have to find the right expression.”
He picked up a scalpel from the table and started cutting and shaping the white skin around the eyes. “This one, for example, I need to give a look of ease and power. A so-called alpha male.”
“Oh?”
“That’s the way the client recalled the animal when he shot it, so that’s what he’s ordered.”
“A hunter who wants to capture his moment of triumph over an animal that thought it was in control,” said Bob.
“Very poetic. And in this particular case, very accurate.”
“And you can do it? Give the animal this type of authentic expression?”
“Well,” said Lunde, “of course, I don’t know if it’s authentic. What does an animal feel? I just have to use my imagination and end up, I’m sure, giving it a more or less human look. The thing is, anyway, to see it through the client’s eye. To show what the client wants to see.”
“What if you don’t like what the client wants to see?”
Lunde shrugged. “I’m a barber. The customer decides the style.
But, within limits, I have a certain degree of freedom to produce something that exceeds the customer’s expectations.
Their pleasure is mine too.” Lunde looked up.
The bell above the door had sounded again.
He went out, with Bob following three paces behind.
A woman was standing in the store. She and Lunde had obviously met before and they at once began talking about a job involving a dog. Lunde explained that he was waiting for new eyes, that he wasn’t satisfied with the ones that had been sent.
Bob returned to the workshop and to his coffee.
After a while Lunde returned and resumed work.
Bob closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the silence and the small sounds produced by Lunde’s work. It relaxed him, watching Lunde at work, seeing the result slowly taking shape. It was like medication. More calming than any pills.
“So you like to watch too,” said Lunde, as if he could read Bob’s thoughts.
“Maybe I do. Why do you say ‘too’?”
“Tomás. He used to sit there, like you. Not saying much, now and then asking a question about some technical aspect of what I was doing. Judging by his questions you would almost think he knew enough about taxidermy to do the cat himself. I told him that once. He said he didn’t know anything about the subject but that he was good with his hands.
” Lunde smiled. “But maybe he had hidden reasons, maybe he brought the cat along to steal some of my tricks.”
“Hidden reasons,” Bob echoed. “Like X-11.”
“X-11?” Lunde switched to a smaller scalpel.
“Yes. I think he infiltrated X-11 in order to avenge the death of his family.”
“Really?”
“He fed them some story about how he’d worked for a drug cartel south of the border and had been sent over here because the police were after him.
Because there was nothing that contradicted Gomez’s story, X-11 believed it.
He arranged for the killings of drug dealers inside and outside X-11 by starting gang wars.
When his bosses pulled him back from the front line he continued the vendetta against his own people. ”
“Without being exposed?” Lunde stepped back to study his work.
“One in four drug dealers die within four years. Think about it. In this country a prisoner with a death sentence has less chance of being executed than a crack dealer has of being shot dead in the street. Like the head of X-11 it means you’re used to natural attrition.
They probably didn’t respond immediately, but once they made the connection they threw Gomez out. Looks like he stopped after that.”
“Hm. Is this something you know, Oz, or what you might call speculation?”
“Let’s call it an educated guess. If he stopped then I have to wonder why he started up again.
Did he feel he hadn’t avenged his family’s deaths enough?
Some kind of bottled-up anger that was somehow triggered?
Like, for example, his cat dying. A lot of people just lose it when someone or something dies… you know, something close, much loved.”
“I’m sure you’re right there.” Lunde stepped back to the workbench and wiped off his scalpels.
“What I find a little strange is that he messed up so badly in Dante’s case,” Bob continued. “The distance was no more than three hundred yards and the rifle case was for an M24 with telescopic sights, same as the snipers in Afghanistan used, same as the police.”
“Maybe he hasn’t had much practice with that particular rifle?”
“When you prepare something as carefully as Gomez did then you’re pretty certain you’re going to get it right.
There was no wind to speak of, and the distance was too short for the temperature to make any difference.
If he made the beginner’s mistake of failing to adjust for the difference in elevation then he would have shot too high, not too low. ”
“Maybe he was nervous and his hand shook. A lot of the hunters I get in here talk about what they call ‘buck fever.’ Speaking of which, buck, I think we’re done with this for today.” Lunde pulled off his gloves. “Which means it’s time for a little con amore work.”
“Con amore?”
“A labor of love. Come.”
Bob followed Lunde into a smaller workshop.
There was just one workbench there, and the mannequin standing on it was quite different from the others in the larger workshop.
“Taxidermy the way it used to be done,” said Lunde as he stroked his hand over the hollow, wolflike figure.
“Wood, cotton and steel wire. I’ll dress this with treated skin the same as those back there, but here I’ll use the animal’s skull as well.
” He indicated a cranium resting on sawdust inside a glass case.
“Why?”
“At the customer’s request.”
Bob made a face. “I know something about corpses, Lunde. If there’s so much as a thread of organic material inside that head it’ll rot and start to stink.”
“That’s right. And that’s why the cranium is in that glass case.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a colony of carnivorous leather beetles inside that skull and they’ll eat it clean before I begin work.”
Bob stared at the cranium. He listened.
“Oh no,” Lunde said with a laugh, “you can’t hear them.”
“Okay. But isn’t there a simpler way?”
“Oh sure, I could have freeze-dried the whole animal so the customer would get the complete thing.”
“Then why not do that?”