I had been working more of the tape free from my mouth, and I turned to see he was beside me again.
“Then one day, I met him,” he said. “He invited me here, Agent Camden. Here! That’s when he told me he was scared to leave this house.”
“Donnie,” I said.
“My brother and I are one life, Agent Camden. Edward took the first thirty-seven years. I get the next.”
Lightning broke against the sky and lit up the dark room. In its flash, I saw him unfold something from his pocket. A picture of his half brother. He pulled down his mask for me to compare his surgeries to the photo of Edward Burrows.
“What do you think?” he asked, his face earnest, his eyes searching mine.
The dark marks the sketch artist had drawn, I saw now, were scars left from earlier surgeries. Filler had made his nose wider. And sure, there was a family resemblance to begin with. But onlya madman would have thought he was getting better at the craft of plastic surgery.
I turned my face away, and he grabbed my hair and pulled me back.
“What. Do. You. Think?”
“You look nothing like him,” I said.
He struck me across the face.
From the beach side of the house, the storm gained energy.
“I’m gonna cut you for that,” he said. I heard him move across the room. There was the noise of a medical tray shifting. Of instruments being moved around.
“You buried Edward here on the property?” I asked.
“He didn’t want to leave the house.” He was yelling over the storm. “I gave him his wish.”
I heard a screeching sound. A tray of scalpels, being dragged closer.
I swallowed. I didn’t want to be found with my skin cut away from my skull. My face floating in some solution.
“Those women were innocent,” I said.
“Who?” he asked, his voice still coming from across the room. “Mavreen? Dragging her sister around without a care? She was one of the most selfish people I ever met.”
“And Natalie Kastner?”
Lightning came again, and his grotesque face appeared above me, smiling.
“She dated him,” he said, his look incredulous, his head shaking. “My half brother.”
This was the face that had helped me connect the pieces. A strip of Edward Burrows’s eyes and nose in the article about professionalshut-ins. The same eyes from a photo Frank and I had seen in Natalie’s home.
“Did she tell you that?” he asked. “She lost her virginity to Edward. If she had told you that, you would’ve run here this afternoon. Arrested me. But she didn’t, did she?”
I studied El Médico’s face without the mask. The cinch marks of a botched nose job. A scar along his jawline. It was a face of horror.
“And Julie Gilliam?” I asked.
“She was a sweet girl. If I could fix that lip, I knew I could take my own philtrum.” He motioned at the strip between his nose and the top of his lips. “Make it like Edward’s.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
I knew he was going to hurt me, and I pulled my head away as he held up a syringe.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about a new type of operation, Agent Camden. It’s very hip here in Florida. Drugless plastic surgery.”
