Free The Pressure of Darkness by Harry Shannon

stays awake, that is. Let's you ride it out without worrying too much, even when you're awake for the procedure."
    "He was in medical school for a while. Would have known about stuff like that."
    "Yeah, but this type of junk distorts depth perception, your sense of time, even makes you laugh a lot. It's hard to imagine anybody having all this in his system and still doing relatively delicate surgery on his own damned body."
    "Unless, like you said, he was pretty used to large amounts of dope."
    "Well, there you go," Doc said. "Prove that and we figure the dude just shot himself up. Case closed. So he checks in, has a light supper, pumps himself full of painkillers and stimulants. Over the next few hours he slices off several patches of his own skin and then cauterizes the wounds with a small blowtorch. He cuts off his little fingers and the tip of his nose. He then sets a mirror up at the end of the tub, gets in and lightly turns the faucets, opens up his own belly and watches as his guts fall out. This is not the dude you want dating your daughter."
    Burke grinned. "He was a nut job for sure. But let's be thorough anyway, okay? I need to know if anything, anything at all, looks out of place to you. Check it out."
    Doc sorted through the files. "Mr. Stryker wasn't dead more than six to eight hours, not quite long enough for serious rigor to set in, so he was a little stiff, but not too bad. Everything in the suite was clean and organized, which I'm told is in keeping with this dude's anal and obsessive personality."
    "Seems like."
    "Okay," Doc continued. "Like I said, six to eight, so we have some distinct lividity in the lower body, even though he bled out. Kind of a purple patch on his ass, and more on the soles of his feet hanging out the tub. That fits with the time frame, too."
    "Okay." Burke was actually feeling a bit queasy, picturing what happened.
    "Get this," Doc said, grinning, "along with this lividity thing. The guy probably stops somewhere and buys some decals to stick to the tub so he won't slip in the mess and the blood, I guess. Little yellow duck decals. So now he's got the imprint of one on each ass cheek, like a tattoo. Nice touch, huh?"
    "Go on. I don't like hearing this shit as much as you do." He ticked a fingernail on the metal desk. The sound boomed.
    "He skinned himself exactly thirteen times," Doc continued. "He took strips about two inches wide and six to seven inches long each time. He sliced the pattern in a fatty area, well clear of arteries, and flayed his own body. We found a pile of alcohol swabs and some strips of bandage."
    Burke shook his head. "How could he tolerate that kind of pain?"
    "Drugs would help, but believe me, he felt it."
    "Why." It is a statement, not a question.
    Doc arched an eyebrow. "Pain seems to have been the point, man. Very self-punishing behavior. He doped himself up enough that he wouldn't pass out and be discovered before he could finish the job, but not enough so that he didn't feel every hellish second of the agony. Tissue samples indicate about twenty to thirty minutes went by between sessions of skinning and peeling."
    "Jesus."
    "Jesus had nothing to do with this one, Burke." Gears whirred as Doc turned the wheelchair. He pointed to a particularly grisly crime scene photo on the monitor. It showed an angry, reddish patch of flesh that had been blackened by flame. "He dabbed the open wounds with alcohol just a few minutes after inflicting them, see? Damn, that would hurt. Beats me why, since if he was planning on dying he didn't need to worry much about infection, but he did it. And then he fucking burned the wound with the small torch. After that he'd start again on some other part of his body."
    Burke stood. He massaged his stomach unconsciously. "How did he stay silent? The classical music?"
    "I guess," Doc replied. "That and the chewed dishrag he had in his mouth. Somewhere toward the end he fixed it to his face with some surgical tape."
    Burke paced,