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ABIGAIL MANGIN 33
Brother George crawled beneath his workbench, feeling his way across the ground, to find a kerosene lantern he stashed away. The tub beside him smelled of animal hides and lime. The ani- mal skins were stripped of their fur with lime to create leather. Brother George made medieval manuscripts, recreating the old masters’ artwork on parchment paper.
When the kerosene lantern burst with flames, the abbot huffed. “Speak of the devil.”
Sheepskins were stretched on a dozen wooden frames, pulled and dried until they became paper. And on clothing lines, large parchment papers sparkled with gold leaf. Intricate illustrations featured a naked Eve, neck arched, seductively chewing the apple among boa constrictors and golden chameleons. Decaying sheep hides were transformed into gold-plated masterpieces that could last over a thousand years.
But the bloody cardboard package took center stage.
The door burst open, and the usually stoic abbot screamed a high-pitched yelp. An NYPD detective shook his drenched head like a drowned rat.
The young male detective stood a foot shorter than Brother George and refused to look up at his face. The man had an inno- cent, doughboy look, except for the terribly crooked nose that had presumably been bent by the many people he irritated.
“Detective Tom Chandler,” he said, eyes scouring the animal skins. “Good with the epidermis, are we?”
“Yes. But I would’ve never put that corpse on the runway,” Brother George said.
“Why not?” Chandler put his hands on his hips, tilting his pelican beak of a nose.
“No artist would embroider a brunette corpse with purple bead- ing. Brunettes are autumns, not springs—that’s the real crime.”
Chandler snarled like a tiny Chihuahua. He raised his foot to stomp but seemed to think better of throwing a full-blown tan- trum. “Now isn’t the time to be making jokes.”
“If not now, when?” asked the other detective as she opened the door, completely dry beneath her umbrella.
The female detective was Chandler’s body opposite. She stood