On, Off
Colleen McCullough

For Helen Sanders Brittain With fond memories of the old days, and much love.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

PART ONE October & November, 1965

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

PART TWO December, 1965

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

PART THREE January & February, 1966

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

PART FOUR February & March, 1966

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

PART FIVE Spring & Summer, 1966

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE October & November, 1965

Chapter One

JIMMY WOKE UP GRADUALLY, conscious at first of only one thing: the perishing cold. His teeth were chattering, his flesh ached, his fingers and toes were numb. And why couldn’t he see? Why couldn’t he see? All around him was pitch darkness, a blackness so dense he had never known anything like it. As he grew wider awake he realized too that he was imprisoned in something close, smelly, alien. Wrapped up! Panic set in and he began to scream, to claw frantically at whatever was confining him. It ripped and tore, but when the stygian coldness persisted after he managed to free himself, his terror drove him mad. There were other things all around him, the same smelly kind of restraints, but no matter how he shrieked, ripped, tore, he couldn’t find a way out, couldn’t see a particle of light or feel a puff of warmth. So he shrieked, ripped, tore, his heart roaring in his ears and the only noises his own.

Otis Green and Cecil Potter came into work together, having hooked up on Eleventh Street with a broad grin for each other. Dead on 7 a.m., but wasn’t it great not to have to punch a time clock? Their place of work was civilized, man, no arguments there. They put their lunch pails in the small stainless steel cupboard they had reserved for their own use—no need for locks, there were no thieves here. Then they started the business of their day.

Cecil could hear his babies calling for him; he went straight to their door and opened it, speaking to them in a tender voice.

“Hi, guys! How ya doin’ huh? Everybody sleep well?”

The door was still hissing shut behind Cecil when Otis saw to the least palatable job of his day, emptying the refrigerator. His wheeled plastic bin smelled clean and fresh; he put a new liner in it and pushed it over to the refrigerator door, a heavy steel one with a snap lock handle. What happened next was a blur: something streaking past him as he opened the door, screaming like a banshee.

“Cecil, get out here!” he yelled. “Jimmy’s still alive, we gotta catch him!”

The big monkey was in a state of gibbering frenzy, but after Cecil talked to him a little while and then held out his arms, Jimmy bolted into them, shivering, his shrieks dying to whimpers.

“Jesus, Otis,” Cecil said, cradling the beast like a father his child, “how did Dr. Chandra miss that? The poor little guy’s been locked in the fridge all night. There there, Jimmy, there there! Daddy’s here, little man, you’re okay now!”

Both men were shocked and Otis’s heart had a jelly roll beat to it, but no real harm was done. Dr. Chandra would be pleased as punch that Jimmy hadn’t died after all, thought Otis, returning to the refrigerator. Jimmy was worth a hundred big ones.

Even two cleanliness fanatics like Cecil and Otis couldn’t banish the smell of death from the refrigerator, scrub it with disinfectant and deodorant though they did. The stench, not of decay but of something subtler, surrounded Otis as he flipped the light switch to reveal the chamber’s stainless steel interior. Oh, man, Jimmy had made a regular mess of it! Torn paper bags were strewn everywhere, headless rat carcasses, stiff white hair, obscenely naked tails. And, behind the dozen rat bags, a couple of much bigger bags, torn up too. Sighing, Otis went to fetch more bags from a cupboard and began to make order out of Jimmy’s chaos. The dead rats properly bagged again, he reached in to the chilly chamber and pulled the first of the two big bags forward. It had been rent from top to bottom, most of its contents on full display.

Otis opened his mouth and screamed as shrilly as Jimmy, was still screaming when Cecil erupted out of the monkey room. Then, not seeming to notice Cecil, he turned and ran out of animal care, down the halls, into the foyer, out the entrance, legs opening and closing in a punishing run down Eleventh Street to his home on the second floor of a shabby three-family house.

Celeste Green was having coffee with her nephew when Otis burst into the kitchen; they leaped to their feet, Wesley’s passionate diatribe about Whitey’s crimes forgotten. Celeste went for the smelling salts while Wesley put Otis on a chair. Back with the bottle, she pushed Wesley roughly out of her way.

“You know your trouble, Wes? You always in the way! You didn’t get in Otis’s way all the time, he wouldn’t call you a good for nothin’ kid! Otis! Otis, honey, wake up!”

Otis’s skin had faded from a warm deep brown to a pasty grey that didn’t improve when the ammoniac vapors were jammed under his nose, but he came around, jerked his head away.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Wesley was asking.

“A piece of woman,” Otis whispered.

“A what?” sharply from Celeste.

“A piece of woman. In the fridge at work with the dead rats. A pussy and a belly.” He began to shake.

Wesley asked the only question that mattered to him. “Was she a white woman or a black woman?”

“Don’t bother him with that, Wes!” Celeste cried.

“Not black,” Otis said, hands going to his chest. “But not white neither. Colored.” He added, slipped forward off the chair and fell to the floor.

“Call an ambulance! Go on, Wes, call an ambulance!”

Which came very quickly, due to two fortunate facts: one, that the Holloman Hospital was just around the corner, and the other, that business was slack this hour of morning. Still very much alive, Otis Green was put into the ambulance with his wife crouched beside him; the apartment was left to Wesley le Clerc.

He didn’t linger there, not with news like this. Mohammed el Nesr lived at 18 Fifteenth Street, and he had to be told. A piece of woman! Not black, but not white either. Colored. That meant black to Wesley, as it did to all the members of Mohammed’s Black Brigade. Time that Whitey was called to account for two hundred years and more of oppression, of treating black people as second rate citizens, even as beasts without immortal souls.

When he’d gotten out of prison in Louisiana he’d decided to come north to Tante Celeste in Connecticut. He yearned to make a reputation as a black man who mattered, and that was easier to do in a part of the nation less prone than Louisiana to throw blacks in jail if they looked sideways. Connecticut was where Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade hung out. Mohammed was educated, had a doctorate in law—he knew his rights! But for reasons that Wesley saw every day when he looked in a mirror, Mohammed el Nesr had dismissed Wesley as worthless. A plantation black, a nobody nothing. Which hadn’t dampened Wesley’s ardor; he intended to prove himself in Holloman, Connecticut! So much so that one day Mohammed would look up to him, Wesley le Clerc, plantation black.

Cecil Potter had soon discovered what sent Otis screeching out of animal care, but he wasn’t a panicky man. He did not touch the contents of the refrigerator. Nor did he call the cops. He picked up the phone and dialed the Prof’s extension, knowing full well that the Prof would be in his office, even at this hour. His only peace happened early in the mornings, he always said. But not, thought Cecil, this morning.

“It’s a sad case,” said Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico to his uniformed colleague and nominal superior, Captain Danny Marciano. “With no other relatives we can find, the kids will have to go into the system.”

“You’re sure he did it?”

“Positive. The poor guy tried to make it look like some stranger busted in, but there’s his wife and her lover in the bed and her lover’s cut up some but she’s mincemeat—he did it. My bet is that he’ll confess later today voluntarily.”

Marciano rose to his feet. “Then let’s get some breakfast.”

His phone rang; Marciano wriggled his brows at Carmine and picked up. Within three seconds the police captain had stiffened, lost all contentment. He mouthed “Silvestri!” at Carmine and commenced a series of nods. “Sure, John. I’ll start Carmine now and get Patsy there as soon as I can.”

“Trouble?”

“Big trouble. Silvestri’s just had a call from the head of the Hug—Professor Robert Smith. They’ve found part of a female body in their dead animal refrigerator.”

“Christ!”

Sergeants Corey Marshall and Abe Goldberg were breakfasting at Malvolio’s, the diner the cops used because it was next door to headquarters in the County Services building on Cedar Street. Carmine didn’t bother walking in; he rapped his knuckles on the glass of the booth where Abe and Corey were washing down hotcakes and maple syrup with big mugs of coffee. Lucky stiffs, he thought. They get to eat, I get to give my report to Danny, now I don’t get to eat. Seniority’s a pain in the ass.

The car Carmine regarded as his own (it was really a Holloman Police Department unmarked) was a Ford Fairlane with a souped up V8 engine and cop springs and shocks. If the three of them were in it, Abe always drove, Corey rode shotgun, and Carmine spread himself and his papers in the back. Telling Corey and Abe took half a minute, the trip from Cedar Street to the Hug less than five.

Holloman lay about halfway up the Connecticut coast, its spacious harbor looking across the Sound to Long Island. Founded by dissenting Puritans in 1632, it had always prospered, and not only because of the numerous factories that lay on its outskirts as well as up the Pequot River. A good proportion of its 150,000 people were connected in some way to Chubb University, an Ivy League institution that admitted itself inferior to none, even Harvard and Princeton. Town and Gown were inextricably intertwined.

Chubb’s main campus lay around three sides of the big Green, its early colonial Georgian and nineteenth century gothic buildings joined by some startlingly modern edifices tolerated only because of the august architectural names associated with each; but there was also Science Hill to the east, where the science campus was located in square towers of dark brick and plate glass, and, way across town to the west, the Chubb medical school.

Because medical schools grew up alongside hospitals, by 1965 they tended to be situated in the worst part of any city; in this respect Holloman was no different. The Chubb medical school and the Holloman Hospital straggled down Oak Street on the southern border of the larger of Holloman’s two black ghettoes, called the Hollow because it lay in a hollow that had once been a swamp. To compound the health care woes, in 1960 the oil reservoirs of East Holloman were relocated at the end of Oak Street on waste ground between I–95 and the harbor.

The Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research sat on Oak Street right opposite the Shane–Driver medical student apartments, 100 for 100 students. Next to the Shane–Driver was the Parkinson Pavilion for medical research. It faced the Hug’s neighbor, the Holloman Hospital, a twelve-storey pile that had been rebuilt in 1950, the same year that saw the Hug go up.

“Why do they call it the Hug?” Corey asked as the Ford swung into the temporary road that bisected a gigantic parking lot.

“First three letters of Hughlings, I guess,” said Carmine.

“Hug? It’s got no dignity. Why not the first four letters? Then it’d be the Hugh.”

“Ask Professor Smith,” said Carmine, eyeing their destination.

The Hug was a shorter, smaller twin of the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower cross-campus on Science Hill; a baldly square, squat pile of dark brick with plenty of big plate glass windows. It sat in three acres of what had used to be slum dwellings, demolished to make way for this monument perpetuating the name of a mystery man who had had absolutely nothing to do with its genesis. Who on earth was this Hughlings Jackson? A question all of Holloman asked. By rights the Hug should have been named after its donor, the enormously wealthy, late Mr. William Parson.

Having no gate key to the parking lot, Abe put the Ford on Oak Street right outside the building. Which had no entrance onto Oak Street; the three men tramped down a gravel path along the north side to a single glass door, where a very tall woman was waiting for them.

It’s like a child’s building block in the middle of a huge room, Carmine thought; three acres is a lot of land for something only a hundred feet per side. And shit, she’s holding a clipboard. Office, not medical. His mind automatically registered the physical details of every person who swam into his piece of the human sea, so it was busy as she drew closer: six-three in bare feet, early thirties, navy pant suit on the baggy side, flat lace-up shoes, mouse-brown hair, a face with a biggish nose and a prominent chin. She’d never have made Miss Holloman ten years ago, let alone Miss Connecticut. Once he halted in front of her, however, he noted that she had very fine, interesting eyes the color of thick ice, which he had always found beautiful.

“Sergeants Marshall and Goldberg. I’m Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico,” he said curtly.

“Desdemona Dupre, the business manager,” she said as she took them into a tiny foyer, apparently only there to accommodate two elevators. But instead of pressing the UP button, she opened a door in the opposite wall and led them into a wide corridor.

“This is our first floor, which contains the animal care facilities and the workshops,” she said, her accent placing her as someone from the other side of the Atlantic. Turning a corner put them in another hall. She pointed to a pair of doors farther down. “There you are, animal care.”

“Thanks,” said Carmine. “We’ll take it from here. Please wait for me back at the elevators.”

Her brows rose, but she turned on her heel and disappeared without comment.

Carmine found himself inside a very large room lined with cupboards and bins. Tall racks of clean cages big enough to take a cat or dog stood in neat rows in an area fronting a service elevator many times the size of the two in the foyer. Other racks held plastic boxes topped with wire grids. The room smelled good, pungent like a pine forest, with only the faintest hint of something less pleasant below it.

Cecil Potter was a fine looking man, tall, slender, very well kept in his pressed white boiler suit and canvas bootees. His eyes, Carmine fancied, smiled a lot, though not smiling now.

One of Carmine’s most important policies in this year of bussing turmoil was that the black people he met in the course of his job or social life be treated courteously; he held out his hand, shook Cecil’s firmly, performed the introductions without barking them or looking rushed. Corey and Abe were his men through thick and thin, they followed suit with the same courtesy.

“It’s here,” said Cecil, moving to a closed stainless steel door with a snap lock handle. “I didn’t touch a thing, just shut the door.” He hesitated, decided to risk it. “Uh, Lieutenant, do you mind if I get back to my babies?”

“Babies?”

“The monkeys. Macaques. Rhesus mean anything to you? Well, that’s them. They in there, an’ very upset. Jimmy won’t lay off telling them where he been, an’ they very upset.”

“Jimmy?”

“The monkey Dr. Chandra thought was dead, an’ put in a bag in the fridge last night. Jimmy really found her—tore the place apart when he woke up in the dark freezing his buns off. When Otis—he my assistant as well as the handyman—went to empty the fridge, Jimmy came outta there screeching and yelling. Then Otis found her, an’ he was outta here screeching worse than Jimmy. I looked, an’ called the Prof. I guess the Prof called you.”

“Where’s Otis now?” Carmine asked.

“Knowing Otis, he run home to Celeste. She his mama as well as his wife.”

They were gloved now; Abe wheeled the bin away from the door and Carmine opened it as Cecil, already crooning and clucking, went into the monkey room.

Of the two big bags, one still lay at the back of the chamber. The other, rent from where the top folded over clear to the bottom, had exposed the lower half of a female torso. When Carmine noted its size and its lack of pubic hair his heart sank—a pre-pubescent child? Oh, please, not that! He made no movement to touch a thing, just leaned his shoulders against the wall.

“We wait for Patrick,” he said.

“I never smelled a smell like it—dead, but not decomposing,” said Abe, dying for a cigarette.

“Abe, go find Mrs. Dupre and tell her she can go upstairs as soon as the uniforms arrive,” Carmine said, knowing that expression well. “Post them on all the entrances and emergency exits.” Then, alone with Corey, he rolled his eyes. “Why in there?” he asked.

Patrick O’Donnell enlightened him.

Sporting the very modern title of Medical Examiner in a city that had always had a coroner without forensic skills in earlier days, Patrick had espoused pathology because he didn’t like patients who talked back, and the life of a public pathologist because it meant plenty of criminal cases as well as all the other kinds of sudden or mysterious death. Thanks to Patrick’s ruthless campaign to bring Holloman into the latter half of the twentieth century, he had managed to shed most of a coroner’s court duties on to a deputy coroner and build a little empire that encompassed far more than mere autopsies. He believed in the new science of forensics, and played an active part in any case that interested him, even if no body was involved.

He looked as Irish as his name from the reddish hair to the bright blue eyes, but in actual fact he and Carmine were first cousins, the sons of two sisters of Italian extraction. One married a Delmonico, the other an O’Donnell. Ten years older than Carmine and a happily married man with six children, Patrick let neither of these impediments spoil their deep friendship.

“I don’t know much, but here’s what I do know,” said Carmine, and filled him in. “Why in there?” he repeated at the end of it.

“Because if Jimmy the monkey hadn’t woken up undead and flown into a panic, these two brown bags, unmarked and intact, would have been dumped into some kind of receptacle and taken to the animal care incinerator,” Patrick said, grimacing. “This is the perfect way to get rid of human remains. Poof! Up in smoke.”

Abe came back in time to hear this, and went pale. “Jeez!” he breathed, horrified.

Photographs taken, Patrick lifted the first bag onto a gurney and tucked it inside an open body bag. Then he examined what he could see without disturbing the torn brown paper.

“No pubic hair,” said Carmine. “Patsy, if you love me, tell me this isn’t a child.”

“The hair’s been—not shaved—no, plucked—so she’s post-pubescent. Small girl, though. As if what our killer really yearned for was a child, but wasn’t game to follow through on all his disgusting desires.” He lifted out the second bag, not as mangled, and placed it beside the first. “I’ll get back to the morgue—you’ll want my report a.s.a.p.” His chief technician, Paul, was already preparing to vacuum the chamber’s interior; after that he would dust for fingerprints. “Lend me Abe and Corey as well, Carmine, and we can let Cecil get on with his work. Except for the monkeys, they must keep their experimental animals elsewhere—these are the day’s clean cages ready to go.”

“Leave no stone unturned, guys,” said Carmine, following his cousin and the gurney’s grisly contents out.

Desdemona Dupre—what a strange name!—was in the foyer waiting, flicking through the contents of a thick sheaf of papers on her clipboard.

“Mrs. Dupre, this is Dr. Patrick O’Donnell,” said Carmine.

Whereupon the woman bristled! “I am not a missus, I am a miss!” she said with a snap, that odd accent pronounced. “Are you coming upstairs with me, Lieutenant [she pronounced it leftenant], or may I go? I have work to do.”

“Catch you later, Patsy,” said Carmine, following Miss Dupre into an elevator.

“You’re from, uh, England?” he asked as they ascended.

“Correct.”

“How long have you been at the Hug?”

“Five years.”

They left the elevator on the fourth floor, which was the top floor, though the last button said ROOF. Here the Hug’s interior décor was better displayed. It was little different from the first floor: walls painted institution cream, dark oak woodwork, banks of fluorescent ceiling lights under plastic diffusers. Back down a twin of that first floor corridor to a door opposite its far end, where it met another hall at right angles.

Miss Dupre knocked, was bidden enter, and pushed Carmine into Professor Smith’s private domain without entering herself.

He found himself staring at one of the most strikingly handsome men he had ever seen. Robert Mordent Smith, William Parson Chair Professor at the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research, was over six feet tall, on the thin side, and possessed an unforgettable face: wonderful bone structure, black brows and lashes, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of wavy, streaky white hair. On someone still young enough not to have lines or wrinkles, the hair set him off to perfection. His smile revealed even white teeth, though the smile wasn’t reaching those marvelous eyes this morning. No surprise.

“Coffee?” he asked, gesturing Carmine to the big, costly chair on the opposite side of his big, costly desk.

“Thanks, yes. No cream, no sugar.”

While the Prof ordered two of the same via his intercom, his guest inspected the room, a generous 20 x 25 feet, with those huge glass windows on two walls. The Prof’s office occupied the northeast corner of the floor, so the view was of the Hollow, the Shane–Driver dormitory, and the parking lot. The décor was expensive but chintzy, the furniture walnut, the rug Aubusson. An imposing assemblage of degrees, diplomas and honors sat on a green-striped wall, and what looked to be an excellent copy of a Watteau landscape hung behind the Prof’s desk.

“It’s not a copy,” said the Prof, following Carmine’s gaze. “I have it on loan from the William Parson Collection, the largest and best collection of European art in America.”

“Wow,” said Carmine, thinking of the cheap print of Van Gogh’s irises behind his own desk.

A woman in her middle thirties entered bearing a silver tray on which stood a vacuum flask, two delicate cups and saucers, two crystal glasses and a crystal carafe of iced water. They sure do themselves proud at the Hug!

A severely tailored looker, thought Carmine, examining her: black hair piled up in a beehive, a broad, smooth, rather flat face with hazel eyes, and a terrific figure. Her suit was coat and skirt, snugly cut, and her shoes were Ferragamo flatties. That Carmine knew such things could be laid at the door of a long career in a profession that required intimate knowledge of all aspects of human beings and their behavior. This woman was what Mom called a man-eater, though she didn’t seem to have an atom of appetite for the Prof.

“Miss Tamara Vilich, my secretary,” said the Prof.

No atom of appetite for Carmine Delmonico either! She smiled, nodded and departed without lingering.

“Two mature misses on your staff,” said Carmine.

“They are just wonderful if you can find them,” said the Prof, who seemed anxious to postpone the reason for this interview. “A married woman has family responsibilities that sometimes tend to eat into her working day. Whereas single women give their all to the job—don’t mind working late without notice, for example.”

“More juice to pump into it, I can see that,” said Carmine. He sipped his coffee, which was terrible. Not that he had expected it to be good. The Prof, he observed, drank water from the lovely carafe, though he poured Carmine’s coffee himself.

“Professor, have you been down to the animal care room to see what’s been found?”

The Prof blanched, shook his head emphatically. “No, no, of course not! Cecil called me to tell me what Otis found, and I called Commissioner Silvestri at once. I did remember to tell Cecil not to let anyone into animal care until the police came.”

“And have you found Otis—Otis who?”

“Green. Otis Green. It seems he has sustained a mild heart attack. At the moment he’s in the hospital. However, his cardiologist says it’s not a severe ictus, so he should be discharged in two or three days.”

Carmine put down his coffee cup and leaned back in his chintz chair, hands folded in his lap. “Tell me about the dead animal refrigerator, Professor.”

Smith looked a little confused, clearly had to summon up inner reserves of courage; maybe, thought Carmine, his brand of courage doesn’t run to coping with a murder crisis, just grant committees and awkward researchers. How many Chubb receptions have I stood through listening to those?

“Well, every research institute has one. Or, if it isn’t a big unit, shares one with other laboratories nearby. We are researchers, and, given that ethically we cannot use human beings as experimental animals, we use animals lower on the evolutionary scale than ourselves. The kind of animal depends on the kind of research—guineapigs for skin, rabbits for lungs, and so on. As we are interested in epilepsy and mental retardation and they are situated in the brain, our research animals go rat, cat and primate—here at the Hug, macaques. At the end of an experimental project, the creatures are sacrificed—with extreme care and kindness, I hasten to add. The carcasses are put into special bags and taken to the refrigerator, where they remain until about seven each weekday morning. At that hour Otis empties the contents of the refrigerator into a bin and wheels the bin through the tunnel to the Parkinson Pavilion, where the medical school’s main animal care facility is located. The incinerator that disposes of all animal carcasses is a part of P.P.’s animal care, but it also is available to the hospital, which sends amputated limbs and the like to it.”

His speech patterns are so formal, thought Carmine, that he talks as if he’s dictating an important letter. “Did Cecil tell you how the human remains were discovered?” he asked.

“Yes.” The Prof’s face was beginning to look pinched.

“Who has access to the refrigerator?”

“Anyone here in the Hug, though I doubt anyone from outside could use it. Our entrances are few, and barred.”

“Why’s that?”

“My dear Lieutenant, we are on the very end of the Oak Street medical school–hospital line! Beyond us is Eleventh Street and the Hollow. An unsavory neighborhood, as I’m sure you know.”

“I notice that you call it the Hug too, Professor. Why?”

The slightly tragic mouth twisted. “I blame Frank Watson,” he said through his teeth.

“Who’s he?”

“Professor of Neurology in the medical school. When the Hug was opened in 1950 he wanted to head it, but our benefactor, the late William Parson, was adamant that his Chair should go to a man experienced in epilepsy and mental retardation. As Watson’s field is demyelinating diseases, naturally he wasn’t suitable. I told Mr. Parson that he ought to have chosen an easier name than Hughlings Jackson, but he was determined. Oh, a very determined man, always! Of course one expects to see the name abbreviated, but I had thought it would be the Hughlings, or the Hugh. However, Frank Watson had a small revenge. He thought it terribly clever to call it the Hug, and the name stuck. Stuck!”

“Exactly who was or is Hughlings Jackson, sir?”

“A pioneer British neurologist, Lieutenant. His wife had a slow-growing tumor on the motor strip—the gyrus anterior to the Fissure of Rolando that represents the cortical end of the body’s voluntary motor function—muscles, that is.”

I do not understand a single word of this, Carmine thought as the level voice continued, but does he care? No.

“Mrs. Jackson’s epileptic seizures were of a very curious kind,” the Prof went on. “They were limited to one side of her body, started on one side of her face, marched down to the arm and hand on that same side, and finally involved the leg. They are still known as Jacksonian marches. From them Jackson put together the first hypotheses about motor function, that each part of the body had its own invariable place in the cerebral cortex. However, what fascinated people was the indefatigable way that he sat beside his dying wife’s bed hour after hour, taking notes on her seizures with the most minute attention to detail. The researcher par excellence.”

“Pretty heartless, if you ask me,” said Carmine.

“I prefer to call it dedication,” Smith said icily.

Carmine rose. “No one can leave this building unless I give them permission. That means you too, sir. There are police on the entrances, including the tunnel. I suggest you say nothing about what’s happened to anyone.”

“But we have no cafeteria!” said the Prof blankly. “What can the staff do about lunch if they don’t bring it from home?”

“One of the police can take orders and bring food back.” He paused in the doorway to look back. “I’m afraid we’ll have to take fingerprints from everyone here. An inconvenience worse than lunch, but I’m sure you understand.”

The Holloman County Medical Examiner’s offices, laboratories and morgue were located in the County Services building, which also housed the Holloman Police Department.

When Carmine entered the morgue he found two pieces of a female torso fitted together and laid out on a steel autopsy table.

“Well nourished, a part-colored female about sixteen years of age,” Patrick said. “He plucked the mons Veneris before introducing the first of several implements—might be dildoes, might be penis sheaths—hard to tell. She’s been raped many times by increasingly large objects, but I doubt she died of that. There’s so little blood in what we have of the body that I suspect she was bled out the way you would an animal for slaughter on a farm. No arms or hands, no legs or feet, and no head. These two pieces have been scrupulously washed. Thus far I’ve found no traces of semen, but there’s so much contusion and swelling up there—she’s been anally raped too—that I’ll need a microscope. My personal bet is that there will be no semen. He’s gloved and probably used his sheaths as condoms. If he comes at all.”

The girl’s skin was that lovely color called café au lait, despite its bleached bloodlessness. Her hips swelled, her waist was small, her breasts beautiful. As far as Carmine could see, she bore no insults outside the pubic area—no bruises, slashes, cuts, bites, burns. But without the arms and legs, there was no way to tell if or how she had been tied down.

“She looks like a child to me,” he said. “Not a big girl.”

“I’d say about five-one, tops. The second most interesting thing,” Patrick went on, “is that the dismemberment has been done by a real professional. One sweep with something like a filleting knife or a post mortem scalpel, and look at the thigh and shoulder joints—disarticulation without force or trauma.” He pulled the two sections of torso apart. “The transverse section was done just below the diaphragm. The cardia of the stomach has been ligated to prevent leakage of the contents, and the esophagus has been ligated too. Disarticulation of the spinal column is just as professional as the joints. No blood in the aorta or the vena cava. However,” he said, pointing to the neck, “her throat was cut some hours before he removed her head. Jugulars incised, but not carotids. She would have bled out slowly, no spurting. Hung upside down, of course. When he took her head, he separated it at the C–4 to C–5 junction of the spine, which gave him a small amount of neck as well as the entire skull.”

“I wish we had the arms and legs at least, Patsy.”

“So do I, but I suspect they went into the fridge yesterday, together with the head.”

Carmine spoke so positively that Patrick jumped. “Oh, no! He’s still got her head. He won’t part with that.”

“Carmine! That kind of thing doesn’t happen! Or if it does, it’s some maniac west of the Rockies. This is Connecticut!”

“He’s still got the head, no matter where he comes from.”

“I’d say he works at the Hug, or if not at the Hug, then at some other part of the medical school,” Patrick said.

“A butcher? A slaughterman?”

“Possible.”

“You said, the second most important thing, Patsy. What’s the first?”

“Here.” Patrick turned the lower torso over and pointed to the right buttock, where a heart-shaped scab about an inch long showed dark and crusted against the flawless skin. “At first I thought he had cut it there on purpose—heart, love, that kind of thing. But he made no template incision around the edge. It’s simply one neat transverse slice, the way I’ve seen a knife-man slice off a woman’s nipple. So I wondered if she’d had a nevus there, a birthmark raised well above the surface of the skin.”

“Something that offended him, destroyed her perfection,” said Carmine thoughtfully. “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t know she had it until he got her to wherever he did his nasty things to her. Depends if he picked her up or knew her previously. Any idea about her racial background?”

“No idea, other than that she’s more Caucasian than anything else. Some Negroid or Mongoloid blood, or both.”

“Are you picking that she’s a prostitute?”

“Without arms to look for needle tracks, Carmine, difficult, but this girl is—I don’t know, healthy looking. I’d search the Missing Persons files.”

“Oh, I intend to,” said Carmine, and went back to the Hug. Where to begin, given that Otis Green couldn’t be questioned until tomorrow at the earliest? Cecil Potter, then.

“This is a real good job,” Cecil said, sitting on a steel chair with Jimmy on his knee, and apparently indifferent to the fact that the macaque was busy grooming Cecil’s hair, picking with delicate fingers through its dense closeness in a kind of intent ecstasy. Jimmy, he had explained, was still very upset over his ordeal. Carmine would have found the entire bizarre sight easier to cope with if the big monkey hadn’t been wearing half a tennis ball on top of his head; this, said Cecil, was to protect the electrode assembly implanted in his brain and the bright green female connector embedded in pink dental cement on his skull. Not that the half a tennis ball seemed to worry Jimmy; he ignored it.

“What makes the job so good?” Carmine asked, aware that his belly was rumbling. Everyone at the Hug had been fed, but thus far Carmine had missed out on breakfast and lunch.

“I’m the boss,” Cecil said. “When I worked over in P.P. I was just one more shit shoveler. At the Hug, animal care is mine. I like it, specially ‘cos we got the monkeys. Dr. Chandra—they his, really—knows I am the best monkey man on the east coast, so he leaves them to me. I even get to put them in the chair for their sessions. They crazy about their sessions.”

“Don’t they like Dr. Chandra?” Carmine asked.

“Oh, sure, they like him fine. But me, they love.”

“Do you ever empty the refrigerator, Cecil?”

“Sometimes, not much. If Otis goes on vacation, we hire a man off of P.P.’s plant physical reserves. Otis don’t work this floor with me much—he the upstairs man. Gets to change the light bulbs an’ dispose of the hazardous waste too. I can mostly manage this floor’s animal care on my own, ‘cept for bringing the cages up an’ down from the other floors. Our animals get clean cages Mondays through Fridays.”

“They must hate the weekends,” said Carmine solemnly. “If Otis doesn’t work with you much, how do you clean the cages?”

“See that door there, Lieutenant? Goes to our cage washer. Automated like a fancy car wash, but better. The Hug got everything, man, everything.”

“Getting back to the refrigerator. When you do empty it, Cecil, what size are the bags? Is it strange to see bags as big as the—er—?”

Cecil thought, his fine head to one side, the monkey seizing the chance to look behind his ear. “Ain’t strange, Lieutenant, sir, but you best ask Otis, he the expert.”

“Did you notice anyone yesterday putting bags in the fridge who doesn’t usually do that?”

“Nope. The researchers mostly bring their bags down theirselves after Otis an’ me are gone for the day. Technicians bring bags down too, but small. Rat bags. Only technician brings down big bags is Mrs. Liebman from the O.R., but not yesterday.”

“Thanks, Cecil, you’ve been a great help.” Carmine extended his hand to the monkey. “So long, Jimmy.”

Jimmy held out his hand and shook Carmine’s gravely, his big round amber eyes so full of awareness that Carmine felt his skin prickle. They looked so human.

“Just as well you a man,” Cecil said, laughing, escorting Carmine to the door with Jimmy on his hip.

“Why’s that?”

“All six of my babies are male, an’ man, they hate women! Can’t stand a woman in the same room.”

Don Hunter and Billy Ho were working together on some sort of Rube Goldberg apparatus they were assembling out of electronic components, plexiglass extrusions and a pump designed to take a small glass syringe. Two mugs of coffee stood nearby, looking cold and scummy.

That they had both been trained in the armed services was plain the moment Carmine uttered the word “Lieutenant”. They sprang away from the gadget and stiffened to attention. Billy was of Chinese ancestry; he had become an electronics engineer in the U.S. Air Force. Don was an Englishman from what he called “the north” and had served in the Royal Armoured Corps.

“What’s that gizmo?” Carmine asked.

“A pump we’re fitting to some circuitry so it only delivers one-tenth of one em-el every thirty minutes,” said Billy.

Carmine picked up the mugs. “I’ll bring you some fresh from that urn I saw in the hall if you’ll let me have a mug of it and shovel in plenty of sugar.”

“Gee, thanks, Lieutenant. Take the whole sugar jar.”

If he didn’t get some sugar into his system, Carmine knew, his attention would start to flag. He detested very sweet coffee, but it stopped his belly growling. And over it, he could settle to a friendly chat. They were loquacious men, eager to explain their jobs and very keen to assure Carmine that the Hug was great. Billy was the electronics engineer, Don the machinist. Between the two of them they painted Carmine a fascinating picture of a life largely spent designing and building things no sane person could envisage. Because researchers, Carmine learned, were not sane persons. They were mostly pain in the ass maniacs.

“A researcher can fuck up a carload of steel balls,” Billy said. “They might have brains the size of Madison Square Garden and win Nobel Prizes all over the shop, but man, can they be dumb! Know what their main problem is?”

“It’ll be a help,” said Carmine.

“Common sense. They got fuck-all common sense.”

“Yoong Billy is raht abaht thaht,” said Don. Or at least it sounded as if that was what he had said.

When he departed Carmine was convinced neither Bill Ho nor Don Hunter had left two pieces of woman in the dead animal refrigerator. Though whoever had was not lacking in common sense.

Neurophysiology lived on the next floor up, the second. It was headed by Dr. Addison Forbes, who had two colleagues, Dr. Nur Chandra and Dr. Maurice Finch. Each man had a spacious laboratory and a roomy office; beyond Chandra’s suite was the operating room and its anteroom.

The animal room was large and held cages containing two dozen big male cats as well as cages for several hundred rats. He started there. Each cat, he noted, lived in a spotlessly clean cage, dined on canned food as well as kibble, and did its business in a deep tray filled with aromatic cedar shavings. They were friendly beasts, neither spooked nor depressed, and seemed quite oblivious to the presence of half a tennis ball on their heads. The rats lived in deep plastic bins filled with finer shavings through which they dived like dolphins through the sea. In, out, around and about, curling their little handlike paws around the steel gratings covering their bins with a great deal more joy than human prisoners grabbed the bars of their cells. Rats, Carmine saw, were happy.

His tour guide was Dr. Addison Forbes, who was not happy.

“The cats belong to Dr. Finch and Dr. Chandra. The rats are Dr. Finch’s. I don’t have any animals, I’m a clinician,” he said. “Our appointments are excellent,” he droned on as he conducted his guest down the hall between the animal room and the elevators. “Each floor has a male and a female rest room”—he pointed—“and a coffee urn that our glass washer, Allodice, takes care of. The cylindered gases live in this closet, but oxygen is piped in, as are coal gas and compressed air. The fourth line of pipe is for vacuum suction. Particular attention was paid to grounding and copper shielding—we work in millionths of one volt, and that means amplification factors that make interference a nightmare. The building is air-conditioned and the air is filtered minutely, hence the no smoking regulation.”

Forbes ceased the drone to look surprised. “The thermostats actually work.” He opened a door. “Our reading and conference room. Which completes the floor. Shall we go to my office?”

Addison Forbes, Carmine had decided within a very few moments, was a complete neurotic. He sported a sinewy, gaunt leanness that suggested an exercise freak with vegetarian tendencies, was about forty-five years of age—the same age as the Prof—and not much to look at if you were a movie director searching for a new star. Facial tics and abrupt, meaningless gestures with his hands larded his conversation. “I had a most severe coronary exactly three years ago,” he said, “and it’s a miracle that I survived.” Clearly it obsessed him, not unusual in medical doctors, who, Patrick had told him, never thought that they could die, and became atrocious patients when mortality thrust itself upon them. “Now I jog the five miles between the Hug and my home every evening. My wife drives me in of a morning and picks up yesterday’s suit. We don’t need two cars anymore, a welcome economy. I eat vegetables, fruit, nuts and an occasional piece of steamed fish if my wife can find some that’s genuinely fresh. And I must say that I feel wonderful.” He patted his belly, so flat that it caved in. “Good for another fifty years, ha ha!”

Jeez! thought Carmine. I think I’d rather be dead than give up the greasies at Malvolio’s. Still, it takes all kinds. “How often do you or your technician take dead animals down to the first floor refrigerator?” he asked.

Forbes blinked, looked blank. “Lieutenant, I have already told you that I am a clinician! My research is clinical, I don’t use experimental animals.” His brows tried to go in opposite directions. “Even if I have to say so myself, I have a genius for giving each individual patient exactly the right anticonvulsant medication. It is a widely abused field—can you imagine the gall of a fool general practitioner taking it upon himself to prescribe anticonvulsants? He diagnoses some poor patient as idiopathic and stuffs the poor patient full of dilantin and phenobarb, when all the time the poor patient has a temporal lobe spike you could impale yourself on! Tch! I run the epilepsy clinics at the Holloman Hospital and the special EEG unit attached to them. I don’t concern myself with ordinary EEGs, you understand. There is another unit for Frank Watson and his neurological and neurosurgical minions. What I’m interested in are spikes, not delta waves.”

“Uhuh,” said Carmine, whose eyes had begun to glaze halfway through this semi-diatribe. “So you definitely don’t ever dispose of dead animals?”

“Never!”

Forbes’s technician, a nice girl named Betty, confirmed this. “His work here concerns the level of anticonvulsant medications in the bloodstream,” she explained in words Carmine had a hope of understanding. “Most doctors over-medicate because they don’t keep track of drug levels in the bloodstream in long term disorders like epilepsy. He’s also the one the pharmaceutical companies ask to try new drugs out. And he has an uncanny instinct for what a particular patient needs.” Betty smiled. “He’s weird, really. Art, not science.”

And how, Carmine wondered as he went in search of Dr. Maurice Finch, do I get out of being buried under medical gobbledygook?

But Dr. Finch wasn’t the man to bury anyone under medical gobbledygook. His research, he said briefly, concerned movement of things called sodium and potassium ions through the wall of the nerve cell during an epileptic seizure.

“I work with cats,” he said, “on a long-term basis. Once their electrodes and perfusion cannulae are implanted in their brains—under general anesthesia—they suffer no trauma at all. In fact, they look forward to their experimental sessions.”

A gentle soul, was Carmine’s verdict. That did not put Finch out of the murder stakes, of course; some brutal killers seemed the gentlest of souls when you met them. At fifty-one he was older than most of the researchers, so the Prof had said; research was a young man’s game, apparently. A devout Jew, he and his wife, Catherine, lived on a chicken farm; Catherine bred for the kosher table. Her chickens kept her busy, Finch explained, as they had never managed to have any children.

“Then you don’t live in Holloman?” he asked.

“Just within the county line, Lieutenant. We have twenty acres. Not all chickens! I’m an ardent cultivator of vegetables and flowers. I have an apple orchard and several glasshouses too.”

“Do you bring your dead animals downstairs, Dr. Finch, or does your technician—Patricia?—do that?”

“Sometimes I do it, sometimes Patty does,” Finch said, his wide grey eyes looking at Carmine without guilt or unease. “Mind you, my kind of work means I don’t do a lot of sacrificing. When I finish with a pussy-cat, I take the electrodes and cannulae out, castrate him, and try to give him to someone as a pet. I don’t harm him, you see. However, a cat may develop a brain infection and die, or simply die of natural causes. Then they go downstairs to the refrigerator. Mostly I take them—they’re heavy.”

“How often does a dead cat happen, Doctor?”

“It’s hard to say. Once a month, maybe only every six months.”

“I see you take good care of them.”

“One cat,” said Dr. Finch patiently, “represents an investment of at least twenty thousand dollars. He has to come with papers that satisfy the various authorities, including the A.S.P.C.A. and the Humane Society. Then there is the cost of his upkeep, which has to be first class or he doesn’t survive. I need healthy cats. Therefore a death is unwelcome, not to say exasperating.”

Carmine moved on to the third researcher, Dr. Nur Chandra.

Who took his breath away. Chandra’s features were cast in a patrician mold, his lashes were so long and thick that they seemed false, his brows were finely arched and his skin the color of old ivory. His wavy black hair was cut short, in keeping with his European clothes; except that a master cut the hair, and the clothes were cashmere, vicuna, silk. A buried memory unearthed itself: this man and his wife were known as the handsomest couple in all of Chubb. Ah, he had Chandra now! The son of some maharajah, rolling in riches, married to the daughter of another Indian potentate. They lived on ten acres just inside the Holloman County line, together with an army of servants and several children who were tutored at home. Apparently the swanky Dormer Day School was not swanky enough. Or might give the kids too many American ideas? They enjoyed diplomatic immunity, quite how, Carmine didn’t know. That meant kid gloves, and pray he wasn’t the one!

“My poor Jimmy,” said Dr. Chandra, voice sympathetic but not oozing the tenderness Cecil’s did when speaking of Jimmy.

“Give me Jimmy’s story, please, Doctor,” Carmine said, gaze riveted on another monkey, its legs crossed nonchalantly, seated in a complicated plexiglass chair inside an enormous box with its door open. The beast was minus its tennis ball hat, revealing a pink mass of dental cement in which was embedded a bright green female connector. A bright green male plug had been inserted into it, and a thick, twisted cable of wires in many colors ran to a panel on the box wall. Presumably the panel connected the monkey to a lot of electronic equipment in 19-inch racks around the box.

“Cecil called me yesterday to tell me he’d found Jimmy dead when he went in to see the monkeys after lunch,” the researcher said in the most pearshaped English accent Carmine had ever heard. Nothing in common with Miss Dupre’s or Don Hunter’s accents, different though they were from each other. Amazing that such a tiny country had so many accents. “I went downstairs to see for myself, and I swear to you, Lieutenant [another leftenant], that I deemed Jimmy dead. No pulse, no respiration, no heart sounds, no reflexes, both pupils dilated. Cecil asked me if I wished Dr. Schiller to perform an autopsy, but I declined. Jimmy hasn’t had his electrodes implanted for long enough to have been of any experimental value to me. But I told Cecil to leave him be, that I’d check again at five, and if he hadn’t changed, I’d pop him in the refrigerator myself. Which is what I did.”

“What about this guy?” Carmine asked, pointing at the monkey, which bore the same expression as Abe when dying for a cigarette.

“Eustace? Oh, he’s of immense value! Aren’t you, Eustace?”

The monkey transferred its gaze from Carmine to Dr. Chandra, then grinned ghoulishly. You are one arrogant bastard, Eustace, thought Carmine.

Chandra’s technician was a young man name Hank, who took Carmine to the O.R.

Sonia Liebman greeted him in the anteroom, describing herself as the O.R. technician. The anteroom was given over to shelves of stores to do with surgery; it also contained two autoclaves and a formidable looking safe.

“For my restricted drugs,” Mrs. Liebman said, indicating the safe. “Opiates, pentothal, potassium cyanide, a bunch of nasties.” She handed Carmine a pair of canvas bootees.

“Who knows the combination?” he asked, putting them on.

“I do, and it is not written down anywhere,” she said firmly. “If they have to carry me out feet first, they’ll have to bring in a safe cracker. Share a secret, and it’s no secret.”

The O.R. itself looked like any other operating room.

“I don’t operate under fully sterile conditions,” she said, leaning her rump on the operating table, which was an expanse of clean linen savers and had a curious apparatus mounted at one end, all aluminum sticks, frames, knobs geared down to Vernier scale. She herself was clad in a clean boiler suit—ironed—and canvas bootees. An attractive woman of about forty, he decided, slim and businesslike. Her dark hair was drawn back in a no-nonsense bun, her eyes were dark and intelligent, and her lovely hands were marred by nails cut very short.

“I thought an O.R. had to be sterile,” he said.

“Scrupulous cleanliness is far more important, Lieutenant. I’ve known O.R.s more sterile than a zapped fruit fly, but no one ever really cleaned them.”

“So you’re a neurosurgeon?”

“No, I’m a technician with a Master’s. Neurosurgery is a man’s field, and they give women neurosurgeons hell. But at the Hug I can do what I love to do without that kind of trauma. Due to the size of my patients, it’s very high powered neurosurgery. See that? My Zeiss operating microscope. They don’t have one in the Chubb neurosurgery O.R.s, not one,” said the lady with great satisfaction.

“You operate on what?”

“Monkeys for Dr. Chandra. Cats for him and Dr. Finch. Rats for the neurochemists upstairs, and cats for them too.”

“Do they die on the table often?”

Sonia Leibman looked outraged. “What do you think I am, ham-fisted? No! I sacrifice animals for the neurochemists, who don’t often work on live brains. Neurophysiologists work on live brains. That’s the main difference between the two disciplines to me.”

“Uh, what do you sacrifice, Mrs. Liebman?” Tread carefully Carmine, tread carefully!

“Rats in the main, but I do Sherringtonian decerebrations on cats too.”

“What’s that?” he asked, writing in his notebook, but not really wanting to know—more abstruse details coming up!

“Removal of a brain from the tentorium up under ether anesthesia. The moment I shell the brain out, I inject pentothal into the heart and wham! The animal’s dead. Instantaneous.”

“So you put fairly large animals into bags and take them to the refrigerator for disposal?”

“Yes, on decerebration days.”

“How often do these decerebration days happen?”

“It depends. If Dr. Ponsonby or Dr. Polonowski ask for cat forebrains, about every two weeks for a couple of months, at the rate of three to four cats on any one day. Dr. Satsuma doesn’t ask nearly as often—maybe once a year, six cats.”

“How big are these decerebrated cats?”

“Monsters. Males about twelve to fifteen pounds.”

Right, two floors down and two to go. Utilities, workshops and neurophysiology done. Now it’s up to see the office staff on the fourth floor, then down to the third and neurochemistry.

There were three medical typists, all with science degrees, and a filing clerk who had nothing more imposing than a high school diploma—how lonely she must feel! Vonnie, Dora and Margaret used big IBM golfball typewriters, and could type electroencephalography faster than a cop could type DUI. Nothing there; he left them to it, Denise the filing clerk sniffling and mopping her eyes as she peered into open drawers, the typists clattering like machine guns.

Dr. Charles Ponsonby was waiting for him at the elevator. He was, he said to Carmine as he escorted the visitor to his office, the same age as the Prof, forty-five, and filled in for the Prof when he was away. They’d gone to the Dormer Day School together, did their pre-med at Chubb together, then their medical degrees at Chubb. Both, Ponsonby explained gravely, were Connecticut Yankees back to the beginning. But after medical school their paths had diverged. Ponsonby had preferred to stay at Chubb to do his neurological residency, while Smith had gone to Johns Hopkins. Not that the separation had been a long one: Bob Smith came back to head up the Hug, and invited Ponsonby to join him there. That had been in 1950, when both were thirty years old.

Now why did you stay home? Carmine wondered, studying the chief of neurochemistry. A mediumsized man of medium height, Charles Ponsonby had brown hair streaked with grey, watery blue eyes above a pair of half glasses perched on a long, narrow nose, and the air of an absent-minded professor. His clothes were shabby and tweedy, his hair wisped about, and his socks, Carmine saw, were mismatched: navy on the right foot, grey on the left. All this might confirm that Ponsonby was an unadventurous man who saw no virtue in going farther afield than Holloman, yet something in those rheumy eyes said he might have ended a different kind of man had he too gone elsewhere after finishing his medical degree. An hypothesis based on gut instinct; something had kept Ponsonby at home, something concrete and compelling. Not a wife, because he had said, quite indifferently, that he was a lifelong bachelor.

Interesting too to discover the contrasts between their offices. Forbes’s had been awesomely neat with no room for plush furniture or wall hangings; books and papers everywhere, even the floor. Finch went in for potted plants and actually had a stunning orchid in bloom; his walls cascaded ferns. Chandra preferred the leather Chesterfield look, with leaded glass-paned book cabinets and a few exquisite Indian art works. And Dr. Charles Ponsonby lived tidily among gruesome artefacts like shrunken heads and death masks of people like Beethoven and Wagner; he also had four reproductions of famous paintings on his walls—Goya’s Cronus eating a child, two sections of Bosch’s Hell, and Munch’s screaming face.

“Do you like surrealist art?” Ponsonby asked with animation.

“I’m into oriental art myself, Doctor.”

“I’ve often thought, Lieutenant, that I mischose my calling. Psychiatry fascinates me, particularly psychopathia. Look at that shrunken head—what beliefs can provoke that? Or what visions my paintings?”

Carmine grinned. “No use asking me. I’m just a cop.” And you, he ended in a silent comment, are not my man. Too obvious.

Up here, he saw as Ponsonby conducted him through the labs, the equipment was more familiar: an atomic absorption unit, a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, centrifuges large and small—the kind of apparatus Patrick had in his forensic lab, just newer and grander. Patrick had to scrape; here, they spent and spent.

From Ponsonby he learned more about the cat brains that were made into what Ponsonby called “brain soup” so naturally that it had no element of jocularity about it. They used rat brain soup too. And Dr. Polonowski was conducting some experiments on the giant axon of a lobster leg—not the big claws, the little legs. Those axons were huge! Polonowski’s technician, Marian, often had to call into the fish shop on her way to work to buy the four biggest lobsters in the tank.

“What happens to the lobsters afterward?”

“They are rostered between those who like lobster,” Ponsonby said, as if the question had no merit whatsoever when the answer was so patently clear. “Dr. Polonowski doesn’t do anything to the rest of the beast. It is very kind of him to rotate them, actually. They are his experimental animals, he could eat them all himself. But he takes his turn with the rest of us. Except for Dr. Forbes, who has gone vegetarian, and Dr. Finch, who is too orthodox to eat crustacea.”

“Tell me, Dr. Ponsonby, do people notice bags of dead animals? If you saw a big dead animal bag stuffed full and you did notice it, what would you think about it?”

Ponsonby’s face registered mild surprise. “I doubt I would think about it, Lieutenant, because I doubt I would notice it.”

Miraculously, Ponsonby wasn’t agog to go into detail about his work, which he simply said had to do with the chemistry of a brain cell involved in the epileptic process.

“So far everybody seems to be into epilepsy. Is anyone into mental retardation? I thought the Hug was for both.”

“Unfortunately we lost our geneticist several years ago, and Professor Smith hasn’t found a suitable man to replace him. The DNA business is attracting them, you see. More exciting.” He giggled. “Their soup is made out of E. coli.”

And thus to Dr. Walter Polonowski, who had a big chip on his shoulder having nothing to do with his Polish ancestry: that, like Ponsonby’s art, would have been too simple.

“It isn’t fair,” he said to Carmine.

“What isn’t fair, Doctor?”

“The division of labor here. If you have a medical degree, like me, Ponsonby, Finch and Forbes, you have to see patients at the Holloman Hospital, and seeing patients eats into research time. Whereas Ph.D.s like Chandra and Satsuma do research all the time. Is it any wonder that they’re way ahead of the rest of us? When I agreed to come here, the understanding was that I’d see idiopathic retards as patients. And what happens? I inherit the patients with malabsorption syndromes!” Polonowski said angrily.

Oh, Jesus, here we go again! “Aren’t they retarded, Doctor?”

“Yes, of course they are, but secondary to their malabsorption! They are not idiopathic!”

“What does idiopathic mean, sir?”

“A disorder of unknown etiology—no known cause.”

“Uhuh.”

Walt Polonowski was a very presentable man, tall, well built, his dark gold hair and eyes blending into a dark gold skin. The kind of man, Carmine judged, who wasn’t really griping about his patient load because that was what bothered him; what bothered him were core emotions like love and hate. The guy was miserable all the time, it was there in the set of his face.

But, like all the others, he never noticed anything as mundane as a dead animal bag, let alone noticed how big a dead animal bag was. And why am I fixated on dead animal bags anyway? Carmine asked himself. Because someone very clever took advantage of the dead animal refrigerator knowing that the Hug personnel never ever noticed dead animal bags. That’s why, yet—by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. It isn’t over. Yeah, I know it, I know it!

Polonowski’s technician, Marian, was a pretty girl who told Carmine that she took Dr. Polonowski’s bags downstairs herself. Her manner was wary and defensive, but not about dead animal bags was his guess. This was an unhappy girl, and unhappy girls were usually unhappy over personal problems, not their workplace. Jobs were easy to find for these young people, all science graduates, some with little projects on the side that would count toward a Master’s or a Ph.D. Marian, Carmine was willing to bet, sometimes came into the Hug wearing dark glasses to hide the fact that she’d been crying half the night.

After the others, Dr. Hideki Satsuma was great. His English was perfect and American; his father, he explained, had been at the Japanese Embassy in Washington D.C. from the time diplomatic relations had been reopened after the War. Satsuma’s schooling had finished in America, and his degrees came from Georgetown.

“I’m working on the neurochemistry of the rhinencephalon,” he said, caught the blank look on Carmine’s face, and laughed. “What is sometimes called the ‘smell brain’—the most primitive of human grey matter. It’s very involved in the epileptic process.”

Satsuma was another looker; the Hug sure had its share of them among the men! His features were patrician too, and he had undergone surgery to retract the epicanthal folds of his upper eyelids, thus liberating a pair of twinkling black eyes. Quite tall for a Japanese. He moved with the grace of Rudolf Nureyev, had that same slightly Tartar look. Carmine summed him up as an unerring kind of person who would never fumble a catch or drop a beaker. Likeable too, which troubled Carmine, who had spent his War years in the Pacific, and had no love for the Japs.

“You must understand, Lieutenant,” Satsuma said earnestly, “that we who work in a place like the Hug are not the noticing kind unless it involves our actual work, when we become endowed with X-ray vision better than Superman’s. A brown paper dead animal bag might intrude as an offense, but otherwise would not intrude at all. As the Hug technicians are very good, dead animal bags do not lie around intruding. I never carry them downstairs. My technician does that.”

“He’s Japanese too, I see.”

“Yes. Eido is my assistant in every way. He and his wife live on the tenth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building, where I have the penthouse. As you well know, since you live in the Nutmeg building yourself.”

“Actually I didn’t know. The penthouse has a private elevator. Eido and his wife I’ve seen. Are you married, Doctor?”

“Not I! There are too many beautiful fish in the sea for me to have singled just one out. I am a bachelor.”

“Do you have a girlfriend here at the Hug?”

The black eyes flashed—amusement, not anger. “Oh, dear me, no! As my father told me many years ago, only a foolish bachelor mixes business with pleasure.”

“A good rule of life.”

“Would you like me to introduce you to Dr. Schiller?” Satsuma asked, sensing that the interview was over.

“Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”

Well, well, another Hug looker! A Viking. Kurt Schiller was the Hug’s pathologist. His English had a very slight Germanic inflection, which no doubt accounted for the look of savage dislike Dr. Maurice Finch had produced when he mentioned Schiller’s name. No love lost there. Schiller was tall, a trifle on the willowy side, with flaxen-blond hair and pale blue eyes. Something about him irritated Carmine, though it had nothing to do with his nationality; the sensitive cop nose smelled homosexuality. If Schiller isn’t one, there’s something wrong with my cop nose, and there isn’t, Carmine thought.

The pathology lab occupied the same site as the O.R. did on the floor below, save that it was somewhat larger thanks to an animal room without any cats. Schiller worked with two technicians, Hal Jones, who did the Hug’s histology, and Tom Skinks, who worked exclusively on Schiller’s projects.

“Sometimes I am sent brain samples from the hospital,” said the pathologist, “due to my experience in cortical atrophy and cerebral scar tissue. My own work involves searching for scarring of the hippocampus and uncinate gyrus.”

And de-de-da-de-da. By this, Carmine had learned to switch off when the big words started. Though it wasn’t the size of the words, it was their abstruseness. Like Bill Ho the electronics engineer talking about a magnetic mu of less than one as if Carmine would automatically know what he meant. We all speak our own kind of specialized lingo, even cops, he thought with a sigh.

By this time it was 6 p.m. and Carmine was ravenous. However, best to finish seeing everyone so they could all go home, then he could eat at leisure. Only four on the fourth floor to go.

He started with Hilda Silverman, the research librarian, who ruled over a huge room packed with steel bookshelves and banks of drawers that held books, cards, papers, abstracts, reprinted papers, articles, significant excerpts of tomes.

“I keep my records on our computer these days,” she said, waving her unmanicured hand at a thing the size of a restaurant refrigerator, equipped with two 14-inch tape reels, and, on a console in front of it, a typewriter keyboard. “Such a help! No more punch cards! I’m much luckier than the medical school library, you know. They still have to do things the old way. At the moment there is a facility being put together in Texas that we’ll be able to tap into. Enter key words like ‘potassium ions’ and ‘seizures’ and we’ll be sent the abstracts of every paper ever written as fast as a teleprinter can produce them. Just one more reason why I quit the main library to come here and have my own domain. Lieutenant, the Hug is swimming in money! Though it’s hard to be so far from Keith,” she ended with a sigh.

“Keith?”

“My husband, Keith Kyneton. He’s a postgraduate fellow in neurosurgery, which is right down the other end of Oak Street. We used to eat lunch together, now we can’t.”

“So Silverman is your maiden name?”

“That’s right. I had to keep it—easier, when all the pieces of paper say Silverman.”

He guessed her at the middle thirties, but she could have been younger; her expression was a little careworn. She wore a badly tailored coat and skirt that had seen better days, scuffed shoes, and no jewelry other than her wedding band. The wavy auburn hair was badly cut and held back with ugly bobby pins, her rather nice brown eyes were diminished by a pair of Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, and her face was free of makeup, neutrally pleasant.

I wonder, asked Carmine of himself, what makes librarians look like librarians? Paper mites? Dust bunnies? Printer’s ink?

“I wish I could help you more,” she said a little later, “but I really can’t ever remember seeing one of those bags. Nor have I ever visited the first floor, except for the elevator foyer.”

“Who are your friends?” he asked.

“Sonia Liebman in the O.R. No one else, really.”

“Not Miss Dupre or Miss Vilich on your own floor?”

“That pair?” she asked scornfully. “They’re too busy feuding to notice my existence.”

Well, well, a useful item of information at last!

Who next? Dupre, he decided, and knocked on her door. She had the southeast corner room, which meant windows on two sides, one looking over the city, the other looking south across the misty harbor. Now why hadn’t the Prof grabbed it? Or didn’t he trust himself not to waste time looking at a gorgeous view? Miss Dupre, who was definitely not gorgeous, also had enough steel, he judged, to resist what lay outside her windows.

She rose from her desk to tower over him, something she clearly enjoyed doing. A dangerous hobby, madam. You too can be cut down to size. But you’re very clever, and very efficient, and very observant; they’re all there in your beautiful eyes.

“What brought you to the Hug?” he asked, sitting down.

“A green card. I used to be a deputy administrator in one of England’s regional health care areas. I had responsibility for all the research facilities in the area’s various hospitals and red brick universities.”

“Uh—red brick universities?”

“The ones they send the working class students to—my sort. We don’t get into Oxford or Cambridge, which are not red brick, even when their new buildings are.”

“What don’t you know about this place?” he asked.

“Very little.”

“How about brown paper dead animal bags?”

“Your inexplicable fixation upon dead animal bags has been noticed by many more than me, but none of us have any idea what their significance may be, though I can guess. Why not tell me all the truth, Lieutenant?”

“Just answer my questions, Miss Dupre.”

“Then ask me one.”

“Do you ever see the dead animal bags?”

“Of course. As the business manager, I see everything. The consignment before the last one consisted of an inferior product, which led me to go into the matter exhaustively,” said Miss Dupre. “However, as a usual event I don’t see them at all, especially when occupied by a corpse.”

“At what hour do Cecil Potter and Otis Green finish work?”

“Three in the afternoon.”

“Does everybody know that?”

“Naturally. From time to time it leads to complaints from a researcher—they sometimes assume that the whole world exists to service their needs.” Her pale brows flew up. “My answer to them is to say that Mr. Potter and Mr. Green work animal care hours. The Circadian rhythms of animals like attention within three or four hours after sunrise. Evenings matter less, provided they have been well serviced with food and clean premises.”

“What other jobs does Otis do apart from animal care?”

“Mr. Green’s day is largely taken up by his duties in the upstairs animal rooms; his other duties are not terribly demanding. He does the heavy lifting, maintenance of light fixtures, and the disposal of hazardous wastes. It might surprise you to know that female technicians ask Mr. Green to fetch them cylinders of gas. We used to let the girls move their own until a full cylinder was accidentally knocked over and the pressurized contents escaped. No harm was done, but if the gas had not been an inert one—” She looked rueful. “There are also times when one of the researchers works with substances giving off gamma radiation. That requires the erection of barriers consisting of lead bricks—very heavy.”

“I’m surprised that in this Hilton of a place everything is not piped in or laid on.”

She rose to her feet to tower. “Have you anything more to ask me, sir?”

“No. Thanks for your time.”

How do I get on the right side of her? he wondered as he walked up the hall to Tamara Vilich’s office. She’s a fount of information that I need badly.

The Prof’s secretary’s office had a door that directly communicated with his own office, Carmine noted as he entered.

“Do you realize,” Tamara Vilich said with a touch of acid in her voice, “that leaving us until last has created considerable inconvenience? I am late for an appointment.”

“The penalties of power,” Carmine said, not sitting. “You know, I’ve heard more stilted language and technical jargon today than I usually hear in months? I’m inconvenienced too, Miss Vilich. No breakfast, no lunch, and so far no dinner.”

“Then get on with it! I have to go!”

Desperation in her voice? Interesting. “Do you ever see the dead animal bags, ma’am?”

“No, I don’t.” She looked fretfully at her watch. “Damn!”

“Ever?”

“No, never!”

“Then you can keep your appointment, Miss Vilich. Thanks.”

“I’m too late!” she cried in despair. “Too late!”

But she was gone, running, before Carmine could knock on the communicating door.

The Prof was looking more worried than he had that morning, maybe, thought Carmine, because nothing’s happened since then to soothe his anxieties or satisfy his curiosity.

“I will have to inform the Board of Governors,” Smith said before Carmine had a chance to speak.

“Board of Governors?”

“This is a privately endowed institution, Lieutenant, that is supervised from on high by a board. You might say that we all have to sing for our suppers. The generosity of the Board of Governors is in direct proportion to the amount of genuinely original and significant work the Hug produces. Our reputation is second to none, the Hug has indeed made a difference. Now this—this—this singularity happens! A random event that has the power to affect the quality of our work drastically.”

“A random event, Professor? I don’t call murder random. But let’s leave that aside for a moment. Who’s on this board?”

“William Parson himself died in 1952. He left two nephews, Roger Junior and Henry Parson, in control of his empire. Roger Junior is Governor-in-Chief of the Board. Henry is his deputy. Their sons Roger III and Henry Junior are also Board members. The fifth Parson member is Richard Spaight, director of the Parson Bank and the son of William Parson’s sister. President Mawson MacIntosh of Chubb is a Governor, as is the Dean of Medicine, Dr. Wilbur Dowling. I, as Chair Professor, am the last,” said Smith.

“That gives the Parson contingent a strong majority. They must crack the whip hard.”

Smith looked astonished. “No, indeed! Anything but! As long as we produce the kind of brilliant work we have done for fifteen years, we have a virtual carte blanche. William Parson’s will was very specific. ‘Pay peanuts and you get monkeys’ was one of his favorite maxims. Therefore we do not pay peanuts at the Hug, and our researchers are infinitely brighter than the macaques downstairs. Hence my concern over this singularity, Lieutenant. Half of me insists it is a dream.”

“Professor, the body is real and the situation is real. But I want to digress for a moment.” Carmine’s face assumed a look that most who saw it found disarming. “What’s going on between Miss Dupre and Miss Vilich?”

Smith’s long face puckered. “Is it that obvious?”

“To me, yes.” No need to mention Hilda Silverman.

“For the first nine years of the Hug’s existence, Tamara was both my secretary and the business manager. Then she married. I assure you that I know absolutely nothing about the husband, except that after a few months he left her. During the time they were together, her work suffered terribly. With the result that the Board of Governors decided that we needed a qualified person to head our business affairs.”

“Was Miss Vilich’s husband a Hug-ite?”

“The term is ‘Hugger’, Lieutenant,” Smith said as if he were chewing wool. “Frank Watson’s barb went deep. If there are Chubbers, he said, then there ought to be Huggers as well. And no, the husband was not a Hugger or a Chubber.” He drew a deep breath. “To be perfectly candid, he led the poor girl into an embezzlement. We worked it out and took no further action.”

“I’m surprised the Board didn’t insist you fire her.”

“I couldn’t have done that, Lieutenant! She came to me from the Kirk Secretarial College here in Holloman, and has never had another job.” A huge sigh. “However, it was inevitable that when Miss Dupre arrived, Tamara took against her. A pity. Miss Dupre is excellent at her job—much better than Tamara was, in all honesty! Degrees in medical administration and accountancy.”

“A tough lady. Maybe they’d have gotten on better together if Miss Dupre was more of a glamour girl, huh?”

That bait was ignored; the Prof chose to say, “Miss Dupre is very well liked in all other quarters.”

Carmine glanced at his watch. “Time I let you go home, sir. Thanks for being so co-operative.”

“You don’t really think that the body has anything to do with the Hug and my people?” the Prof asked as he walked with Carmine down the hall.

“I think that the body has everything to do with the Hug and your people. And, Professor, postpone your board meeting until next Monday, please. You’re at liberty to explain the situation to Mr. Roger Parson Junior and President MacIntosh as of now, but the information chain cuts off right there. No exceptions, from wives to colleagues.”

Being next door to the Holloman County Services building meant that Malvolio’s found it profitable to stay open 24 hours a day. Perhaps because so many of its patrons wore navy-blue, the décor was after the manner of a powder-blue Wedgwood plate, with white molded plaster maidens, garlands and curliques to break up the blueness. Corey and Abe had long gone home when Carmine parked the Ford outside it and went in to order meatloaf with gravy and mashed potatoes, a side salad with Green Goddess dressing, and two wedges of apple pie à la mode.

Stomach full at last, he walked home to take a long shower, then fell naked into bed and didn’t remember his head hitting the pillow.

Hilda Silverman, home to find that Ruth had already made the dinner: a casserole of pork chops she hadn’t bothered to de-fat, Smash powdered mashed potatoes, a salad of iceberg lettuce limp and transparent from Italian dressing applied far too early, and a Sara Lee frozen chocolate cake for dessert. At least I have no trouble keeping my figure, Hilda thought; the miracle is how Keith manages to keep his, because he loves his mom’s cooking. That is about the only evidence of his poor white trash origins left in his character. No, Hilda, be fair! He loves his mom just as much as he loves her cooking.

Not that he was present. His plate was sitting, covered in foil, atop a pot of water that Ruth kept on the simmer until her son came in, even if that meant two or three in the morning.

Hilda disliked her mother-in-law because she was so defiantly poor white trash to this day, but they were joined at the hip—a hip named Keith—and jealousy did not enter the picture. Keith was all, that simple. If Keith preferred people not to know of his background, that was fine by his mom, who would have died for him as cheerfully as Hilda would have.

Ruth made a great deal of difference to Keith’s and Hilda’s comfort in that her presence enabled Hilda to continue in her very well paid job. Even better, Ruth actually liked living in an awful house in an awful neighborhood; it reminded her (and a shrinking Keith) of her old house in Dayton, Ohio. Another place where people filled their backyards with dead washing machines and rusted car bodies. As damp, as depressing, as cold as Griswold Lane in Holloman, Connecticut.

Keith and Hilda lived in the worst house on Griswold Lane because its rent was a pittance, enabling them to save most of their combined salaries (hers was twice his). Now that Keith was out of his residency and marking time as a post-doctoral fellow, he was planning to buy into a lucrative neurosurgical practice, preferably located in New York City. Not for Keith Kyneton the lowpaid drag of academic medicine! Mother and wife struggled heroically to help him achieve his ambition. Ruth was a natural cheapskate who deemed J.C. Penney’s outrageously expensive and bought the day before yesterday’s produce at the supermarket; Hilda scrimped over something as trivial as a haircut, wouldn’t buy a nice pair of barettes, and suffered her Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. Whereas Keith’s clothing and car had to be the best, and his work made the huge expense of contact lenses mandatory. What Keith wanted, Keith must have.

At which moment, just as Ruth and Hilda were sitting down, in breezed Keith, and with him the sun, the moon, the stars and all the angels in heaven. Hilda leaped to throw her arms around him, nuzzle her head under his chin—oh, he was so tall, so—so fantastic!

“Hi, honey,” he said, one arm about her, and leaning across the top of her head to peck his mother on the cheek. “Hi, Mom, what’s for dinner? Is that your pork chops I smell?”

“Sure is, son. Sit down while I get your plate.”

So they sat around three sides of the small square table in the kitchen, Keith and Ruth devouring the greasy, rather ersatz meal with gusto, Hilda picking at it.

“We had a murder today,” Hilda said, sawing at a chop.

Keith looked up, too busy to comment; Ruth put down her fork and stared.

“Criminy!” she said. “An honest-to-God murder?”

“Well, a body, at any rate. That’s why I was so late home. The police were all over the place and wouldn’t let any of us leave, even for lunch. For some reason they left the fourth floor until last, though how would anybody on the fourth floor know anything about a body in animal care on the first floor?” Hilda huffed indignantly and succeeded in de-fatting her chop.

“It’s all around the hospital and medical school,” Keith said, pausing to help himself to two more chops. “I’ve been in the O.R. all day, but even in there the anesthetist and the instrument nurse were full of it. As if a bifurcated aneurysm on the middle cerebral artery weren’t enough! Then the radiologist came in with the news that there’s another aneurysm on the basilar artery, so all our work will probably go for nothing.”

“Surely the angiogram showed that before you started?”

“Basilar didn’t fill properly and Missingham didn’t see the films until we were almost done—he’d been in Boston. His deputy couldn’t find his ass with both hands inside his shorts, let alone an aneurysm on a poorly filled basilar artery! Sorry, Mom, but it was a frustrating day. Nothing went right.”

Eyes soft, Hilda gazed at him adoringly. How had she ever managed to capture Keith Kyneton’s attention? A mystery, but one she was permanently grateful for. He was all her dreams rolled in one, from his height to his curly fair hair, his beautiful grey eyes, his chiseled facial bones, his muscular body. And he was so charming, so well spoken, so eminently likeable! Not to mention a highly able neurosurgeon who’d chosen a good speciality, cerebral aneurysms. Until recently they had been inoperable death sentences, but now that neurosurgery had body-freezing techniques and the heart could be stopped for a few precious minutes while an aneurysm was clipped off, Keith’s future was assured.

“Go on, give us the details,” said Ruth, eyes glistening.

“I can’t, Ruth, because I don’t have any. The police were very close-mouthed about it, and the lieutenant who talked to me could have given lessons in discretion to a Catholic priest. Sonia told me he impressed her as a very intelligent and quite well educated man, and I saw what she meant.”

“What was his name?”

“Something Italian.”

“Aren’t they all?” Keith asked, and laughed.

Professor Bob Smith, home with his wife, Eliza, after dinner was finished and the boys sent to do homework.

“It’s going to make life difficult.”

“The Board, you mean?” she asked, pouring him more coffee.

“Yes, the Board, but more the work, dear. You know just how temperamental they can be! The only one who doesn’t bug me is Addison. He’s grateful to be alive, his ideas on anticonvulsants are as pleasing to him as they are to me, and provided none of his equipment breaks down, he’s content. Though how anybody can jog five miles a day and be content, I don’t know. Lazarus complex.” He grinned, which did wonders for his already striking face. “Oh, how upset he was when I told him jogging to work in the mornings was not going to happen! But he managed to sit on his rage.”

She giggled, an attractive sound. “You’d think it would occur to the jogger that having to smell his B.O. after he jogs doesn’t make him an ideal work companion.” She sobered. “It’s his poor wife I feel sorriest for.”

“Robin? That nonentity? Why?”

“Because Addison Forbes treats her like a servant, Bob. Yes, he does! The lengths she has to go to to find food he’ll eat! And washing smelly clothes—she has no kind of life.”

“That sounds rather petty to me, dear.”

“Yes, I suppose it does, but she’s—well, not the world’s brightest person, and Addison makes her feel it. Sometimes I’ve caught him looking sideways at her and had the heeby-jeebies—I swear he hates her, really hates her!”

“It can happen when a medical student has to marry a nurse to get through,” Smith said rather dryly. “There’s no intellectual equality, and after he makes his mark, she’s an embarrassment.”

“You’re such a snob.”

“No, a pragmatist. I’m right.”

“So okay, maybe you do have a point, but it’s a pitiless attitude just the same,” Eliza said valiantly. “I mean, even in their own home he locks her out! There they have this gorgeous turret with a widow’s walk overlooking the harbor, and he won’t let her up there! What is it, Bluebeard’s chamber?”

“Evidence of her untidiness, and his obsession with order. I lock you out of the basement, don’t forget.”

“You’ll get no complaints from me about that, but I do think you’re too hard on the boys. They’re way past the destructive age now. Why not let them go down?”

His jaws clamped, hardening his face. “The boys are barred from the basement permanently, Eliza.”

“Then it isn’t fair, because you spend every free second you have down there. You ought to spend more time with the boys, so let them share your folly.”

“I wish you wouldn’t refer to it as a folly!”

She changed the subject; he had that obdurate look now, he wasn’t about to listen. “Is this murder really such a problem, Bob? I mean, it can’t possibly have anything to do with the Hug.”

“I agree, dear, but the police think otherwise,” said Smith mournfully. “Would you believe that we’ve been fingerprinted? Lucky we’re a research lab. The ink came off in xylene.”

Walt Polonowski, to his wife, his tone ungracious.

“Have you seen my red checkered jacket?”

She paused in her rounds of the kitchen, Mikey straddling her hip, Esther clinging to her skirt, and looked at him in mingled scorn and exasperation. “Christ almighty, Walt, it can’t be the hunting season yet!” she snapped.

“Just around the corner. I’m going up to the cabin this weekend to get it ready—and that means I need my jacket—and I can’t find it because it isn’t where it ought to be.”

“Nor are you.” She put Mikey in his high chair and Esther on a chair with a fat cushion, then hollered for Stanley and Bella. “Dinner’s ready!”

A boy and a girl galloped into the room, whooping that they were starving. Mom was a great cook who never made them eat things they didn’t like—no spinach, no carrots, no cabbage unless she’d made it into coleslaw.

Walter sat at one end of the long table, Paola at its other end where she could spoon slop into Mikey’s mouth, open like a bird’s, and correct Esther’s table manners, still far from perfect. “The other thing I can’t stand,” she said as soon as everyone was eating, “is your selfishness. It would be great to have somewhere to take the kids on a weekend, but no! It’s your cabin, and we can whistle—Stanley, that is not permission to whistle!”

“You’re right when you say the cabin is mine,” he said coldly, cutting his very good lasagna with a fork. “My grandfather left me the cabin, Paola—to me, and me alone. It’s the one place where I can get away from all this mayhem!”

“Your wife and four children, you mean.”

“Yes, I do.”

“If you didn’t want four children, Walt, why didn’t you tie a knot in the goddam thing? It takes two to tango.”

“Tango? What’s that?” asked Stanley.

“A sexy dance,” said his mother curtly.

An answer that for some reason inexplicable to Stanley caused Dad to roar with laughter.

“Shut up!” Paola growled. “Shut up, Walt!”

He wiped his eyes, put another piece of lasagna on Stanley’s empty plate and then replenished his own plate. “I am going up to the cabin on Friday night, Paola, and I won’t be home until dawn on Monday. I have a mountain of reading to do, and as God is my witness, I cannot read in this house!”

“If you’d only give up this stupid research and go into a good private practice, Walt, we could live in a house big enough for twelve kids without destroying your peace!” Her big brown eyes sparkled with angry tears. “You’ve gotten this fantastic reputation for dealing with all those weird and wonderful diseases that have people’s names—Wilson, Huntington, don’t ask me to remember all of them!—and I know you get offers to go into private practice in much better places than Holloman—Atlanta, Miami, Houston—warm places. Places where house help is cheap. The children could have music lessons, I could go back to college—”

His hand came down on the table violently; the children went still, shivered. “Just how do you know I’ve had offers, Paola?” he asked dangerously.

Her face paled, but she defied him. “You leave the letters lying around, I find them everywhere.”

“And read them. Yet you wonder why I have to get away? My mail is private, do you hear me? Private!”

Walt threw his fork down, shoved his chair away from the table and stalked from the kitchen. His wife and children stared after him, then Paola wiped Mikey’s slimed face and rose to get the ice cream and Jell-o.

There was an old mirror on the wall to one side of the fridge; Paola caught a glimpse of herself in it and felt the tears overflow. Eight years had been enough to turn the vivacious and very pretty young woman with the great body into a thin, downright plain woman who looked years older than she was.

Oh, the joy of meeting Walt, of captivating Walt, of catching Walt! A fully qualified medical doctor who was so brilliant that they would soon be rich. What she hadn’t counted on was that Walt had no intention of leaving academic medicine—plumbers earned more! And the children just kept coming, coming. The only way she could prevent a fifth child was to sin—Paola was taking The Pill.

The quarrels, she understood, were totally destructive. They upset the children, they upset her, and they were driving Walt to seek his cabin more and more often. His cabin—she’d never even seen it! Nor would she. Walt refused to tell her where it was.

“Oh, wow, fudge ripple!” cried Stanley.

“Fudge ripple doesn’t go with grape Jell-o,” said Bella, who was the fussy one.

According to her own lights Paola was a good mother. “Would you prefer your Jell-o and your ice cream in separate bowls, honey?”

Dr. Hideki Satsuma, letting himself into his penthouse apartment atop Holloman’s tallest building, and feeling the day’s stresses slide from his shoulders.

Eido had come home earlier than he, set everything out as his master liked, then gone ten floors down to the far less elegant apartment where he lived with his wife.

The décor was deceptively simple: walls of beaten copper sheeting; checkered doors of black wood and frail paper; one very old three-leafed screen of expressionless slit-eyed women with pompadour hair styles and ribby parasols; a plain polished black stone pedestal that held one perfect flower in a twisted Steuben vase; glossy black wooden floors.

A cold sushi supper was laid out on the black lacquer table sunk into a well, and when he went through to his bedroom he found his kimono spread out, his Jacuzzi giving off lazy tendrils of steam, his futon down.

Bathed, fed, relaxed, he went then to the glass wall that framed his courtyard and stood absorbing its perfection. To have it built had put him to a great deal of expense, but money wasn’t a commodity Hideki needed to worry about. So beautiful, living as it did inside the apartment where once had been an open area of roof garden. On the courtyard side its walls were transparent. Its contents were sparse to the point of austerity. A few bonsaied conifers, a tall Hollywood cypress growing in a double helix, an incredibly old bonsaied Japanese maple, perhaps two dozen rocks of assorted sizes and shapes, and varicolored marble pebbles laid down in a complex pattern not meant to be walked upon. Here the forces of his private universe came together in the way most felicitous to his own well-being.

But tonight, his fingertips still reeking faintly of xylene to his exquisitely sensitive nose, Hideki Satsuma stared at his courtyard in the sure knowledge that his private universe had shifted on its foundations; that he had to rearrange the pots, the rocks, the pebbles, to neutralize this profoundly disturbing development. A development beyond his control, he who was driven to control everything. There…There, where that pink rivulet meandered through the glowing jade pebbles…And there, where the sharp grey rock leaped like a sword blade in front of the tender vulvar roundness of the cloven red rock…And there, where the double helix of the Hollywood cypress tapered up to the sky…They were suddenly wrong, he would have to start again.

His mind went wistfully to his beach house up on the elbow of Cape Cod, but what had happened there recently required a period of recovery. Besides, the drive was too long, even in his maroon Ferrari through the night marches. No, that house had a different purpose, and while it was connected to the shifting of his universe, the epicenter of the disturbance lay in his Holloman courtyard.

Could it wait until the weekend? No, it could not. Hideki Satsuma pressed the buzzer that would summon Eido upstairs.

Desdemona, erupting into her apartment on the third floor of a three-family house on Sycamore Street just beyond the Hollow. Her first stop was the bathroom, where she ran a warm bath and removed the lingering traces of her two-mile walk home. Then it was into the kitchen to open a can of Irish stew and another of creamed rice pudding; Desdemona was no cook. The eyes that Carmine had been surprised to find beautiful took no notice of the pitted linoleum or the wallpaper lifting around the edges; Desdemona did not live for creature comforts.

Finally, clad in a checkered flannel man’s dressing gown, she went to the living room, where her cherished work lay in a big wicker basket atop a tall cane stand beside her favorite chair, whose herniating springs she didn’t notice. Frowning, she dug in the basket to find the long piece of silk on which she was embroidering a sideboard panel for Charles Ponsonby—surely it had been right on top? Yes, it had, she was positive of the fact! No chaos for Desdemona Dupre; everything had its place, and lived in it. But the embroidery wasn’t there. Instead, she found a small clump of tightly curling, short black hairs, picked them out and studied them. At which moment she saw the panel, its rich blood reds muddled on the floor behind the chair.

Down went the hairs; she scooped up the embroidery and spread it out to see if it had sustained an injury, but, though a little creased, it was fine. How odd!

Then, the answer occurring to her, her lips tightened. That Nosey Parker of a landlord of hers who lived in the apartment below had been snooping. Only what could one do about it? His wife was so nice; so too was he in his way. And where else would she get a fully furnished apartment for seventy a month in a safe neighborhood? The hairs went in to her trash bin in the kitchen, and she settled, feet under her, in the big old chair to continue with what she privately considered the best piece of embroidery she’d ever done. A complicated, curving pattern of several reds from pinkish to blackish on a background of pale pink silk.

But bugger her landlord! He deserved a booby trap.

Tamara, tired of the painting, her imagination incapable for once of envisioning a face ugly enough, terrifying enough. It would come, but not tonight. Not so soon after today’s disaster. That insolent cop Delmonico, his bullish walk, the shoulders so broad that he looked much shorter than he was, the neck so huge that on anyone else the head would have been dwarfed—but not his head. Massive. Yet try though she would, eyes shut, teeth clenched, she couldn’t make his face assume a piggish cast. And after he made her miss her appointment, she wanted badly to paint him as the ugliest pig in creation.

She couldn’t sleep, and what else was there to do? Read one of her whodunits for the millionth time? She flopped into a big magenta leather chair and reached for the phone.

“Darling?” she asked when a drowsy voice answered.

“I’ve told you, never call me here!”

Click. The line went back to its dial tone.

Cecil, lying in bed with his cheek on Albertia’s beautiful breast, trying to forget Jimmy’s terror.

Otis, listening to the rhythmic beep-beep-beep of his own heart, the tears rolling down his seamed face. No more lead bricks to move, no more cylinders of gas to wriggle onto a dolly, no more cages to shove into the elevator. How much would his pension be?

Wesley, too happy and excited to sleep. How Mohammed had straightened up at his news! Suddenly the hick postulant from Louisiana loomed important; he, Wesley le Clerc, had been given the job of keeping Mohammed el Nesr informed about the murder of a black woman at the Hug. He was on his way.

Nur Chandra, exiled to his cottage in the grounds where only he and his whipping-boy, Misrarthur, ever came. He sat, legs crossed and braided, hands on his knees with palms upraised, each finger precisely positioned. Not asleep, but not awake either. A different place, a different plane. There were monsters to be banished, terrible monsters.

Maurice and Catherine Finch, sitting in the kitchen poring over the accounts.

“Mushrooms, schmushrooms!” said Catherine. “They’ll cost you more than you can make, Maurie, and my chickens won’t eat them.”

“But it’s something different to do, sweetheart! You said yourself that digging out the tunnel was good exercise, and now it’s dug, what have I got to lose by trying? Exotic varieties for a few exclusive shops in New York City.”

“It’ll cost a lot of money,” she said stubbornly.

“Cathy, we’re not short of a dime! No kids of our own—for why do we need to worry about money? What are your nieces and my nephews going to do about this place, huh? Sell it, Cathy, sell it! So let’s get all the fun we can out of it first.”

“Okay, okay, grow your mushrooms! Only don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

He smiled, reached over to squeeze her roughened hand. “I promise I won’t gripe if it fails, but I just don’t think it is going to fail.”

Chapter Two

CARMINE’S DAY BEGAN IN Commissioner John Silvestri’s office, where he sat in the middle of a semi-circle around the desk. On his left were Captain Danny Marciano and Sergeant Abe Goldberg, on his right Dr. Patrick O’Donnell and Sergeant Corey Marshall.

Not for the first time by any means, Carmine thanked his lucky stars for the two men senior to himself in the hierarchy.

Dark and handsome, John Silvestri was a desk cop, had always been a desk cop, and confidently expected that when he retired in five years’ time, he would be able to say that he had never drawn his side arm in a fracas, let alone fired a rifle or a shotgun. Which was odd, since he had joined the U.S. Army in 1941 as a lieutenant and emerged in 1945 bedaubed with decorations, including the Medal of Honor. His most irritating habit concerned cigars, which he sucked rather than smoked, leaving slimy butts in his wake to impart an odor to the air Carmine fancied might resemble the odor given off by a spittoon in an 1890s Dodge City saloon.

Fully aware that Danny Marciano hated the cigar butts most, Silvestri loved to push his ash tray under Marciano’s snub nose; north Italian blood had given Marciano a fair and freckled complexion and blue eyes, and sitting at a desk had given him a few extra pounds. A good second man who lacked the cunning patience to wind up Commissioner.

They left Carmine and his two fellow lieutenants to get on with the real police work, ignored political pressures from Town, Gown and Hartford, and could be relied upon to go to bat for their men. That Carmine was their favorite everybody knew; hardly any resentment stemmed from that fact because what it really meant was that Carmine inherited the ticklish cases requiring diplomacy or liaison with other law enforcement agencies. He was also the department’s top murder man.

He had just finished his freshman year at Chubb when Pearl Harbor was attacked, so he postponed his education and enlisted. By sheer chance he was seconded to the military police, and once he got past guard duty and arresting drunken soldiers he found that he loved the work; there were as many violent or crafty crimes in the teeming wartime Army as on the streets of any city. When the War and an occupation stint in Japan were over, he was a major, eligible to complete his degree at Chubb under an accelerated program. Then, a sheepskin in his hand that would have let him teach English literature or mathematics, he decided that he liked police work best. In 1949 he joined the Holloman Police. Silvestri, a desk bound lieutenant at the time, soon spotted his potential and put him in Detectives, where he was now the senior lieutenant. Holloman was not big enough to have a homicide squad or any of the subdivisions larger city police forces had, so Carmine might find himself working all kinds of crime. However, murder was his speciality and he had a formidable solve rate: just about a hundred per cent—not all convicted, of course.

He sat looking eager yet relaxed; this would be juicy.

“You go first, Patsy,” said Silvestri, who disliked the Hug case already because it was certain to become high profile. Only a small paragraph in the Holloman Post this morning, but as soon as the details leaked, it would be front page news.

“I can tell you,” said Patrick, “that whoever dumped the torso in the Hug’s dead animal refrigerator left no fingerprints, fibers or any other trace of himself. The victim is in her middle teens, and has some colored blood. She’s small in size, and she looks well cared for.” He leaned forward in his chair, eyes glistening. “On her right buttock she has a heart-shaped scab. A nevus, removed around ten days ago. However, it wasn’t a pigmented birthmark, it was a hemangioma—a tumor made up of blood vessels. The killer used a pair of diathermy forceps to nip off every feeder to the growth, coagulate it. Must have taken him hours. Then he packed it with gelfoam to assist clotting, and after that he let the wound crust over, get nice and dry. I found traces of what I thought was an oil-based ointment, but it wasn’t.” He drew a deep breath. “It was grease-paint exactly the same color as her skin.”

Carmine’s own skin began to creep; he shivered. “She still didn’t look perfect after he removed the birthmark, so he covered it with grease-paint to make her perfect. Oh, Patsy, this is one weird dude!”

“Yeah,” said Patrick.

“So he’s a surgeon?” asked Marciano, pushing Silvestri’s ash tray and its contents away from his nose.

“Not necessarily” from Carmine. “Yesterday I talked to a lady who does microsurgery on the Hug’s animals. She doesn’t have a medical degree. There are probably dozens of technicians in any big center for research like the Chubb Medical School who can operate as well as any surgeon. For that matter, until Patsy just told us how the guy coagulated the bleeding nevus, I was considering butchers and slaughtermen. Now I think I can safely rule them out.”

“But you do think that the Hug’s involved,” said Silvestri, picking up the disgusting cigar and sucking on it.

“I do.”

“What’s next?”

Carmine got up, nodding to Corey and Abe. “Missing Persons. Probably statewide. Holloman doesn’t have one on the files unless the killer held her for much longer than it took him to do what he did. Because we don’t know what she looked like, we’ll concentrate on the birthmark.”

Patrick walked out with him. “You won’t break this one in a hurry,” he said. “The bastard’s left you nothing to go on.”

“Don’t I know it. If that monkey hadn’t woken up in an ice house, we wouldn’t even know a crime had been committed.”

Holloman’s Missing Persons having yielded nothing, Carmine began to phone around the other police departments in the state. The State cops had found the body of a ten-year-old girl in the woods just off the Appalachian Trail—a big, part-colored child reported missing by camping parents. But she had died of a cardiac arrest, and there were no suspicious circumstances.

The Norwalk police came up with a missing sixteen-year-old girl of Dominican extraction named Mercedes Alvarez, who had disappeared ten days ago.

“Five feet tall, curly but not kinky dark hair, dark brown eyes—a real pretty face—mature figure,” said someone who had announced himself as Lieutenant Joe Brown. “Oh, and a large heart-shaped birthmark on her right buttock.”

“Don’t go away, Joe, I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He put the flashing light on the Ford’s roof and gunned the car down I–95, siren screaming; the forty miles took him slightly more than twenty minutes.

Lieutenant Joe Brown was around his own age, early forties, and more excited than Carmine had expected him to be. Brown was on edge, so were the other cops in the vicinity. Carmine studied the color photo in the file, looked for the reference to the birthmark, which some untutored hand had attempted to sketch.

“She’s our girl, all right,” he said. “Man, she’s pretty! Fill me in, Joe.”

“She’s a sophomore at St. Martha’s high school—good grades, no trouble, no boyfriends. It’s a Dominican family been here in Norwalk for twenty years—the father’s a toll collector on the Turnpike, the mother’s a housewife. Six kids—two boys, four girls. Mercedes is—was—the eldest. Youngest is three, a boy. They live in a quiet old neighborhood, mind their own business.”

“Did anyone see Mercedes abducted?” Carmine asked.

“No one. We busted our asses to find her because”—he paused, looked worried—“she was the second girl of that type to go missing within two months. Both sophomores at St. Martha’s, in the same class, friends but not bosom buddies, if you get me. Mercedes had piano practice after school finished, was due home at four-thirty. When she didn’t turn up by six and the nuns said she had definitely left when she was supposed to, Mr. Alvarez called us. They were already upset over Verina.”

“Verina was the first girl?”

“Yeah. Verina Gascon. A Creole family from Guadeloupe, been here a long time too. She disappeared on her way to school. Both familie s live within walking distance of St. Martha’s, just a block away in either direction. We ransacked Norwalk looking for Verina, but she’d gone without a trace. And now this one, the same.”

“Any possibility either girl took off with a secret boyfriend?”

“Nope,” Brown said emphatically. “Maybe you should see both families, then you’d understand better. They’re old-fashioned Latin Catholics, bring their kids up strict but with lots of love.”

“I’ll see them, but not yet.” said Carmine, shrinking inside. “Can you organize Mr. Alvarez to identify Mercedes on the basis of the birthmark? We can’t show him more than a tiny patch of skin, but he’ll have to know beforehand that—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the job of telling the poor bastard that someone chopped his beautiful little daughter into pieces,” said Brown. “Oh, Jesus! Sometimes this is a shit job.”

“Would their priest be willing to go with him?”

“I’ll make sure. And maybe a nun or two for extra support.”

Someone came in with coffee and jelly donuts; both men wolfed down a couple, drank thirstily. While he waited for copies of the files of both girls, Carmine called Holloman.

Corey, said Abe, was already at the Hug, and he himself was about to see Dean Wilbur Dowling to find out how many dead animal refrigerators existed within the medical school.

“Did we get any other missing persons who might have fitted our girl’s description?” Carmine asked, feeling better for the food.

“Yeah, three. One from Bridgeport, one from New Britain, and one from Hartford. But when none of them had the birthmark, we didn’t follow up. They all happened months ago,” said Abe.

“Things have taken a turn, Abe. Call Bridgeport, Hartford and New Britain back, and tell them to send us copies of those files as fast as a siren can travel.”

When Carmine walked in, Abe and Corey got up from their desks and followed him into his office, where three files lay waiting. Down went the two files Carmine carried; he unclipped the five photographs, all in color, and laid them out in a row. Like sisters.

Nina Gomez was a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan girl from Hartford, and had disappeared four months ago. Rachel Simpson was a sixteen-year-old light-skinned black girl from Bridgeport, disappeared six months ago. Vanessa Olivaro was a sixteen-year-old girl from New Britain of mixed Chinese, black and white blood whose parents hailed from Jamaica; she had disappeared eight months ago.

“Our killer likes curly but not kinky hair, faces that are fantastically pretty in a certain way—full but well delineated lips, wide set and wide open dark eyes, a dimpled smile—a height of no more than five feet, a mature figure, and light but not white skin,” Carmine said, flicking the photos.

“You really think the same guy snatched them all?” Abe asked, not wanting to believe it.

“Oh, sure. Look at their backgrounds. Godfearing, respectable families, all Catholic except for Rachel Simpson, whose father is an Episcopalian minister. Simpson and Olivaro went to their local high schools, the other three went to Catholic high schools, two at the same one, St. Martha’s in Norwalk. Then there’s the time span. One every two months. Corey, go back to the phone and ask for all missing persons who fit this description from as far back as—say, ten years. The background is as important as the physical criteria, so I’d be willing to bet that all these girls were famous for—well, if chasteness is too old-fashioned a word, at least goodness. They probably volunteered for things like Meals on Wheels or were candy-stripers in some hospital. Never missed on church, did their homework, kept their hems at knee level, maybe wore a touch of lipstick, but never full make-up.”

“The girls you’re describing are thin on the ground, Carmine,” Corey said, his dark and beaky face serious. “If he’s snatched one every two months, he must waste a lot of time finding her. Look at how far afield he’s gone. Norwalk, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain—why no girls from Holloman? Mercedes at least was dumped in Holloman.”

“They’re all dumped in Holloman. We’ve only got five girls so far, Corey. We won’t know his pattern until we’ve traced him back as far as he goes. In Connecticut, at any rate.”

Abe swallowed audibly, his fair, broken-nosed countenance pale and sick looking. “But we’re not going to find any of the bodies prior to Mercedes, are we? He cut them up and put the pieces in at least one dead animal refrigerator, and from there they went to the medical school incinerator.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Abe,” said Carmine, who to his loyal and most constant companions looked unusually cast down. No matter what the case, Carmine sailed through it and over it with the ponderous grace and power of a battle wagon. He felt—he bled—he pitied—he understood—but until this case he had let nothing burrow in as far as his central core.

“What else does all this tell you, Carmine?” Corey asked.

“That he’s gotten a picture of perfection in his mind’s eye that these girls resemble, but that there’s always something wrong with each of them. Like the birthmark on Mercedes. Maybe one of them told him to go fuck himself—he’d hate language like that coming from virginal lips. But what he gets off on is their suffering, like any rapist. That’s why I don’t honestly know if we should be cataloging him as a killer or a rapist. Oh, he’s both, but how does his mind work? What’s the real purpose of what he does to him?”

Carmine grimaced. “We know what kind of victim he likes and that they’re relatively rare, but ghosts are more visible than he is. In Norwalk, with two abductions on their plate, the cops have busted their asses looking for prowlers, peeping Toms, strangers on the street around the school, strangers contacting the school or the families. They’ve looked at everybody from United Way collectors to garbage collectors to mailmen to encyclopedia salesmen to people purporting to be Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses or any other proselytizing religious group. Meter readers, council workers, tree surgeons, power and phone linesmen. They actually formed a think-tank and tried to work out how he might have gotten close enough to abduct the girls, but so far they’ve come up with zilch. No one remembers anything that might help.”

Corey got to his feet. “I’ll start calling around,” he said.

“Okay, Abe, fill me in on the Hug,” Carmine said.

Out came Abe’s notepad. “There are thirty people on the Hug staff, if you count Professor Smith at one end and Allodice Miller the bottle washer at the other end.” He fished two pieces of paper from a file folder under his elbow and handed them to Carmine. “Here’s your copy of their names, ages, positions, how long they’ve worked there, and anything else I thought might be useful. The only one thought to have real surgical expertise is Sonia Liebman in the O.R. The two foreigners aren’t even medically qualified, and Dr. Forbes said he passed out watching a circumcision.”

He cleared his throat, flipped a page over. “There are any number of people who wander in and out pretty much at will, but their faces are well known—animal care, salesmen, doctors from the medical school. Mitey Brite Scientific Cleaners have the contract to clean the Hug, which they do between midnight and 3 a.m. Mondays to Fridays, but they don’t handle the hazardous waste. Otis Green does that. Apparently you have to be trained, which adds a few bucks to Otis’s pay packet. I doubt that Mitey Brite have anything to do with the crime because Cecil Potter walks back to the Hug at 9 p.m. each evening and locks animal care up better than Fort Knox in case a cleaner pokes around in there. It’s his babies—the monkeys. They hear the slightest noise at night, they raise a helluva rumpus.”

“Thanks for that, Abe. I hadn’t thought of Mitey Brite.” Carmine looked at Abe with great affection. “Any impressions of the inmates worth reporting?”

“They make godawful coffee,” said Abe, “and some smart-ass in neurochemistry fills a beaker with these delicious looking candies—pink, yellow, green. But they’re not candies, they’re polystyrene packing material.”

“You got caught.”

“I got caught.”

“Anything else?”

“Negative information only. You can rule Allodice the bottle washer out—too dumb. I doubt the bags were put in the fridge while Cecil and Otis were on duty. Later in the day, is my bet.”

“What about the possible number of dump sites?”

“I finally found seven different dead animal refrigerators, excluding the Hug’s. Dean Dowling wasn’t amused to have to talk to a cop about something so far underneath his job description, and no one seemed to have a list. No way any of them once I found them would have been as easy as using the Hug’s—all more public, busier. Man, they must get through millions of rats! I hate ‘em alive, but I hate ‘em dead a lot worse after today. I’m putting my money on the Hug.”

“So am I, Abe, so am I.”

Carmine spent the rest of his day at his desk studying the case files until he could recite them off by heart. Each was fairly thick because of the quality of the victims. Clearly the police of each city had put a great deal more work into their investigations than was usual; the average sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared had a reputation (sometimes a rap sheet) that fitted in with disappearance. But not these girls. The pity of it is, thought Carmine, that we don’t liaise with each other enough. If we did, we might have gotten on to this guy earlier. However, no body and there’s no physical evidence of murder. No matter how many bodies there have been—and I won’t know that for a while yet—I know that they wound up in the medical school incinerator. So much safer than, say, burying them in the woods. Connecticut has plenty of forests, but they’re used, they’re not limitless like Washington State forests.

My gut instinct says that he’s keeping their heads as memorabilia. Or else if he disposes of their heads too, he’s got the girls on film. Super–8 in color, maybe several cameras to catch every angle of their suffering, his own power. I know he’s a memorabilia man. This is his private fantasy, he’ll be compelled to record it. So he’s either filming it or he’s keeping the heads in a freezer or in glass jars of formalin. How many cases have I investigated involving memorabilia? Five. But never a multiple killer. That is so rare! And the others left me evidence. This guy doesn’t. When he looks at his films or his heads, what does he feel? Exultation? Disappointment? Excitement? Remorse? I wish I knew, but I don’t.

When he went into Malvolio’s to eat dinner he sat in his usual booth aware that he wasn’t hungry, even if he knew he had to eat. Early days; he had to keep his strength up for this one.

The waitress was a new girl, so he had to let her write it down, from the yankee pot roast to the rice pudding. A beautiful girl, but not his killer’s type; the way she eyed Carmine up and down was a blatant invitation that he ignored. Sorry, baby, he said silently, those days are over. Though she did remind him a little of Sandra: a looker marking time for some better job like acting or modeling. New York City was just down the road.

How many things had happened in 1950! He was a brand new detective; the Hug was built; the Holloman Hospital was built; and Sandra Tolley had come to wait on table at Malvolio’s. She had knocked him off his feet at first glance. Tall, stacked like Jane Russell, legs six feet long, a mass of gold hair and wide, myopic eyes in a gorgeous face. Full of herself and the career she knew she was going to have as a model; she’d put her portfolio in to all the New York agencies, but couldn’t afford to live there. So she had moved a two-hour train ride into Connecticut, where she could rent for less than $30 a month and eat for free if she was a waitress.

And then all her ambitions went west because the sight of Carmine Delmonico had knocked her off her feet too. Not that he was handsome or more than acceptably tall at five-eleven, but he had the kind of beat-up face that women adored, and a body bulging with natural muscle. They met at New Year’s; they were married within the month; and she was pregnant within three. Sophia, their daughter, was born right at the end of 1950. In those days he’d rented a nice house in East Holloman, which was the Italian quarter of town, thinking that if he surrounded Sandra with hordes of his relatives and friends she wouldn’t feel so alone when his job kept him working long hours. But she was from Montana ranching stock, and neither understood nor liked the way of life that East Holloman practised. When Carmine’s mother called in to see her, Sandra thought that Mom was checking up on her, and by extension she saw all the kind visits and invitations from his family circle and his friends as evidence that they didn’t trust her to behave.

There was never a genuine quarrel, nor even much discontent. The baby was the image of her mother, which pleased everyone; no one knows better than the Italians that they paint the angels fair.

As a matter of course Carmine was in line for free tickets whenever a play on tryout for Broadway had its final airing at the Schumann Theater; at the end of 1951, when Sophia was a year old, his turn for free tickets came. The attraction was an important play that had already received rave reviews from tryouts in Boston and Philadelphia, so everyone from New York City would be there. Sandra was ecstatic, dug out her most glamorous strapless dress, cyclamen satin that fitted like a second skin and then flared at the knees, a white mink stole to keep her warm against what was a cold winter. She pressed Carmine’s dinner suit, frilled shirt and cummerbund and bought him a gardenia buttonhole. Oh, how excited she had been! Like a kid going to Disneyland.

A case intruded and he couldn’t go. Looking back on it, he was glad now that he hadn’t seen her face when she found out; he had called her on the phone. Sorry, honey, I have to work tonight. But she went to the play anyway, all on her own in the cyclamen satin strapless dress and the white mink wrap. When she told him later that night, he hadn’t minded a bit. But what she didn’t tell him was that she had met Myron Mendel Mandelbaum the movie producer in the Schumann’s foyer, and that Mandelbaum had usurped Carmine’s seat, though his own was in a box much nearer to the stage.

A week later Carmine came home to find Sandra and Sophia gone, a brief note on the mantel to say that Sandra had fallen in love with Myron and was taking the train to Reno; Myron was divorced already and wanted desperately to marry her. Sophia was the icing on the wedding cake, as Myron couldn’t have children.

It came like a bolt from the blue to Carmine, who hadn’t begun to realize how unhappy his wife was. He didn’t do any of the things wronged husbands were supposed to do. He didn’t try to kidnap his daughter, beat up Myron Mendel Mandebaum, take to the bottle, or fail to give of his best to his work. Not for want of encouragement; his outraged family would have done the first two of those things for him gladly, and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let them. Simply, he admitted to himself that his had been a misalliance based on profound physical attraction and nothing else. Sandra wanted glamor, glitz, gallivanting, a life he couldn’t give her. His pay was good but not princely, and he was too in love with his job to lavish attention on his wife. In many ways, he decided, Sandra and Sophia would be better off in California. Oh, but it hurt! A hurt he mentioned to no one, even Patrick (who guessed), just buried deeper than remembrance.

Every August he went to L.A. to see Sophia, for he loved his daughter dearly. But this year’s visit had revealed to him a burgeoning facsimile of Sandra, limo’d every day to a fancy school where booze, pot, cocaine and LSD were easier to buy than candy, bored by possessions. Poor Sandra had become a coke-head on the Hollywood party circuit; it was Myron who tried to give the child a life, out of his depth though he was. Luckily Sophia shared some of her father’s inquisitiveness, was intellectually bright, and had gained a little wisdom from watching her mother’s deterioration. Between them, Carmine and Myron had spent three weeks persuading Sophia that if she stayed off the booze, pot, cocaine and LSD and worked on her education, she wouldn’t end like Sandra. Over the years Carmine had come to like Sandra’s second husband more and more; this last trip had cemented a strong bond, the cause of which was Sophia.

“You ought to get married again, Carmine,” Myron had said, “bring our little girl to some place saner than here. I’d miss her like hell, but I love her enough to know it would be better.”

But, never again, Carmine had vowed after Sandra, and was as true to that vow today as ever. For sexual solace he had Antonia, a widowed remote cousin in Lyme; she had offered him this with great candor and no love.

“We can get our rocks off without driving each other crazy,” she had said. “You don’t need the shenanigans of a Sandra, and I can’t ever replace Conway. So when you need it, or I need it, we can call each other.”

An admirable arrangement that had lasted now for six years.

Patrick came into Malvolio’s just as he was finishing his rice pudding, a creamy, succulent, sweet mush liberally laced with ribbons of nutmeg and cinnamon.

“How’d it go with Mr. Alvarez?” Carmine asked.

A shudder, a twisted grimace. “Terrible. He knew why we couldn’t let him see more than the birthmark, but he begged and begged, cried so much that I had to hide my own tears. His priest and the couple of nuns were a blessing. They carried him out in a state of collapse.”

“Have a whiskey on me.”

“That’s what I hoped you’d say.”

Carmine ordered two double Irishes from the ogling waitress and said nothing more until Patrick had swallowed a good half of his drink and the color began to return to his fresh face.

“You know as well as I do that our kind of work hardens a man,” Patrick said then, turning the glass between his hands, “but at least most of the time the crimes are sordid and the victims, even if pitiable, don’t have the power to haunt our dreams. Oh, but this one! A downright preying on the innocent. The death of Mercedes is going to tear that family apart.”

“It’s worse than you know, Patsy,” Carmine said, glanced about swiftly to make sure they couldn’t be overheard, and told him of the four other girls.

“He’s a multiple?”

“I’d stake my life on it.”

“So he’s cutting a swathe through those in our society who least deserve to be preyed on. People who give no one any trouble, or cost governments money, or make nuisances of themselves phoning up about barking dogs, the party two doors down, or rude bastards in the IRS. People my Irish grandfather would have called the salt of the earth,” said Patrick, finishing his drink in a gulp.

“I’d agree with you, except on one point. So far they’re all part-colored, and there are some would take offense at that, as you well know. Despite long residence in Connecticut, their roots are Caribbean. Even Rachel Simpson from Bridgeport turns out to have been of Barbadian origins. So it begins to look as if there is some kind of racial vendetta involved.”

Down went the empty glass with a thump; Patrick slid out of the booth. “I’m going home, Carmine. If I don’t, I’ll stay here and keep on drinking.”

Carmine wasn’t far behind his cousin; he paid his check, gave the waitress a two-dollar tip for Sandra’s sake, and walked the half block to his apartment eight floors below Dr. Hideki Satsuma’s penthouse in the Nutmeg Insurance building.

Chapter Three

BY FRIDAY, THE Holloman Post and other Connecticut papers were full of the murder of Mercedes Alvarez and the disappearance of Verina Gascon, also feared dead, but no sharp reporter had yet picked up on police vibes that they were dealing with a multiple rapist/killer of carefully reared, sheltered, teenage girls—or that Caribbean origins might play a part.

There was a message on Carmine’s desk that Otis Green was out of the hospital, at his home, and anxious to see him. Another said Patrick also wanted to see him. Abe was in Bridgeport making enquiries about Rachel Simpson, and Corey had been given the double job of Nina Gomez in Hartford and Vanessa Olivaro in New Britain. As Guatemala had one coast on the Caribbean, the new emphasis was definitely Caribbean.

Since Patrick was just an elevator ride away, Carmine went to see him first. He was in his office, his desk littered with brown paper bags.

“I know you’ve seen plenty of these already, but you don’t know as much about them as I do,” Patrick said, waiting while his cousin poured freshly brewed coffee from a percolator.

“So tell me,” said Carmine, sitting down.

“As you see, they do indeed come in all shapes and sizes.” Patrick held up a specimen 12 x 6 inches. “This holds six hundred-gram rats, this rather larger one holds four two-hundred-fifty-gram rats. A researcher rarely uses rats bigger than two-hundred-fifty grams, but as rats continue to grow for as long as they live, they can get up to the size of a cat or even a small terrier. However, no one at the Hug uses rats that large.” He held up a 24 x 18 inch bag. “For reasons that escape me, the Hug cats are all large male animals, just as the rats are all males. And the monkeys. This is a cat bag. I went over to the Hug first thing this morning and managed to have words”—not an unfair summary of the encounter, Carmine was sure—“with Miss Dupre, who deals with all purchasing and stocktaking. The bags are specially made by a firm in Oregon. They consist of two layers of very stout brown paper separated by a three-millimeter-thick padding of fiber made from sugar cane bagasse. You’ll note that there are two plastic discs on the outside of the bag. Fold the top of the bag over twice and the two discs lie in close proximity to each other. The picture wire on the top disc is twisted in a figure-of-eight around the bottom one and the bag can’t come open. Same way you’d close an inter-departmental memo envelope, except that its tie is thread. A dead animal will keep inside a bag without body fluids leaking through for up to seventy-two hours, but no carcass is kept half so long in a bag. Any animals that die over the weekend aren’t found until Monday unless the researcher is in over the weekend. He’ll put the carcass in a bag, but then throws the bag into one of the freezers that dot his floor. His technician then takes it down to animal care on Monday morning, though it won’t go to the incinerator until Tuesday morning.”

Carmine held a bag up to his nose and sniffed intently. “I see that they’re treated with a deodorant.”

“Correct, as Miss Dupre would put it. What a snooty bitch!”

“It’s just too much!” cried the Prof to Carmine when they met in the Hug foyer. “Did you read what that antivivisectionist idiot wrote in the Holloman Post? We medical researchers are pure sadists, indeed! It’s your fault, trumpeting about the murder!”

Carmine had a temper, usually well controlled, but this was more than he could stomach. “Considering,” he said bitingly, “that I’m only here in the Hug because a number of innocent young girls have suffered as I’m darned sure no animal ever has in the Hug, you would do better to focus your attention on rape and murder than on antivivisectionism, sir! Where the hell are your priorities?”

Smith rocked. “A number? You mean more than one?”

Sit on your rage, Carmine, don’t let this introverted specimen of splendid isolation get under your skin! “Yes, I mean a number! Yes, I mean more than one—many more! You have to know, Professor, but the information is strictly classified. It’s high time you took this seriously, because your singularity is anything but a singularity! It’s multiple! Hear me? Multiple!”

“You must be mistaken!”

“I am not,” Carmine snarled. “Grow up! Antivivisectionism is the least of your worries, so don’t come whining to me!”

There were three-family houses in the Hollow in far worse condition than Otis’s. Around Fifteenth Street, where Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade lived, the houses had been gutted, their windows boarded up with plywood, their walls inside lined with mattresses. Here on Eleventh Street was shabbiness, peeling paint, evidence that the absentee landlords didn’t bother with maintenance, but when a still simmering Carmine trod up the stairs to the Greens’ apartment on the second floor he found what he had expected to find: clean premises, nice home-made drapes and dust covers on the upholstery, polished wooden surfaces, rugs on the floor.

Otis lay on the sofa, a man of about 55 years, fairly trim but with enough loose skin to suggest that at one time he had carried 40 pounds more than he did now. His wife, Celeste, hovered aggressively. She was somewhat younger than Otis and dressed with a certain elegant flashiness that fell into place after he learned she was from Louisiana. Frenchified. A third person cluttered up the room, a young, very black man with the same mannerisms as Celeste, though he utterly lacked her looks or her way with clothes; he was introduced as Wesley le Clerc, Celeste’s nephew and the Green’s boarder. The look in his eyes told Carmine that he had a very big racial chip on his shoulder.

Neither wife nor her nephew was willing to leave, but Carmine didn’t have to exert his authority: Otis exerted his.

“Go away and leave us be,” he said curtly.

Both of them left immediately, Celeste with warnings of what would happen to Carmine if he upset her husband.

“You have a loyal family,” said Carmine as he perched on a large, clear plastic ottoman filled with red plastic roses.

“I got a loyal wife” from Otis, followed by a snort. “That kid’s a menace. Wants to make a name for hisself in the Black Brigade, says he’s found the prophet Mohammed an’ is gonna call hisself Ali somethin’ or other. It’s the roots thing, like with any people stolen in millions, but far as I know, the le Clercs come from a part of Africa worshiped King Kong, not Allah. I am an old-fashioned man, Lieutenant, don’t hold with tryin’ to be someone I ain’t. I go to the Baptist church an’ Celeste goes to the Catholic church. I been a black man in a white man’s army, but if the Germans and the Japs had won, I’d a been a helluva lot worse off, is how I see it. I got a little money in the bank, an’ when I retire, I am goin’ back to Georgia to farm. I had it up to here”—he put his hand to his throat—“with Connecticut winters. Still an’ all, that’s not why I wanted to see you, sir.”

“Why did you want to see me, Mr. Green?”

“Otis. To get it outta the way. How many people know what I found in that fridge?”

“Hardly any, and we’re trying to keep it that way.”

“It was a little girl, wasn’t it?”

“No. Not a child, at any rate. We know she was from a family of Dominicans, and we know she was sixteen years old.”

“So she black, not white.”

“I’d prefer to say she was neither, Otis. A mixture.”

“Lieutenant, this is a terrible sin!”

“Yes, it is.”

Carmine paused while Otis muttered under his breath, let him calm down, then broached the subject of bags.

“Is there a usual pattern to the number and size of the bags in the fridge, Otis?”

“I guess so,” Otis said after some thought. “I mean, I know when Mrs. Liebman’s doin’ decerebrations ‘cos there’s four to six cat bags. Otherwise, it’s mostly rat bags. If a macaque dies, the way we thought Jimmy had, then there’s a real big bag, but I will always know what’s in it ‘cos Cecil will be cryin’ his heart out.”

“So when there are four to six cat bags in the fridge, you know that Mrs. Liebman has been decerebrating.”

“ ’s right, Lieutenant.”

“Can you remember any time in the past when there were four to six cat bags in the fridge that Mrs. Liebman couldn’t have had anything to do with?”

Otis looked surprised, tried to sit up.

“You want your wife in jail for murdering me, Otis? Lie back down, man!”

“About six months ago. Six cat bags when Mrs. Liebman was away on vacation. I remember wonderin’ who was fillin’ in for her, but then I was needed, so I just threw them bags into my bin an’ wheeled them off to the incinerator.”

Carmine rose. “That’s a great help. Thanks, Otis.”

The visitor hadn’t let himself out of the downstairs front door before Celeste and Wesley were back.

“You okay?” Celeste demanded.

“Better than before he came,” said Otis sturdily.

“What color’s the body?” Wesley demanded. “Did the cop say?”

“Not white, but not black either.”

“A mulatto?”

“He didn’t say that. That’s a Louisiana word, Wes.”

“Mulatto’s black, not white,” said Wesley with satisfaction.

“Don’t you go makin’ mountains outta molehills!” Otis cried.

“I gotta see Mohammed,” was Wesley’s rejoinder. He zipped himself into his black imitation leather jacket with the white fist painted on its back.

“You’re not seeing Mohammed, boy, you’re going to work this minute! You do not qualify for Welfare and I am not boarding you for nothing!” Celeste snapped. “Go on, shoo!”

Sighing, Wesley divested himself of his passport to Mohammed el Nesr’s headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street, put on a down jacket instead, and hied himself off in his battered 1953 De Soto to Parson Surgical Instruments. Where, if he had bothered to enquire, which he didn’t, he could have discovered that his dexterity at crafting mosquito forceps had more than once made the difference between continued employment and a pink slip.

For Carmine the day was depressing and bitter; the missing persons files that fitted the Mercedes description were beginning to arrive on his desk. Six more, to be exact, one every two months throughout 1964: Waterbury, Holloman, Middletown, Danbury, Meriden and Torrington. The only place where he had repeated himself in nearly two years was Norwalk. Every girl was sixteen years old and of mixed blood originating in the Caribbean, though never a family of recent immigrants. Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Martinique, Cuba. Five feet tall, stunningly pretty, of mature figure, extremely carefully reared. All the new arrivals on his desk were Catholic, though not all had gone to Catholic schools. None had had a boyfriend, all were straight-A students and popular with their classmates. More importantly, none had confided in a friend or a member of her family about having a new friend, or a new kind of good deed to practise, or even a new acquaintance.

At 3 p.m. he climbed alone into the Ford and started down I–95 to Norwalk, where Lieutenant Joe Brown had arranged for him to see the Alvarez family in their home. He couldn’t be there himself, he was quick to add; Carmine knew why. Joe couldn’t face another session with the Alvarezes.

The house was a three-family one that Jose Alvarez owned; he lived in the bottom floor apartment with his wife and children, and rented out the middle and top floor apartments. This was how all working people aspired to live: virtually rent free themselves, the middle apartment paying the mortgage and utilities, and the top one bringing in that little extra against repairs as well as to save for rainy days. Living on the bottom floor, they had the backyard, half of the four-car garage, and the basement for their own use. And a landlord who lived on the premises was able to keep a stern eye on the tenants.

Like all its neighbors, the house was painted a darkish grey, had double windows whose outer sets were replaced in summer by insect screens, a front porch right on the sidewalk, but a big backyard surrounded by a high chain link fence; the garage sat across its back beyond a driveway down one side of the house. As Carmine stood on the oak-lined street looking, he could hear the baying of a large dog; scant chance of anyone’s breaking in via the back porch with a hound on patrol.

The priest opened the front door, which was separate from the door leading to the two upstairs apartments. Carmine gave the cleric a smile and shrugged himself out of his overcoat.

“I’m sorry to have to do this, Father,” he said. “My name is Carmine Delmonico. Should I be Lieutenant or Carmine in there?”

After some consideration the priest said, “Lieutenant would be better, I think. I’m Bart Tesoriero.”

“Do you need to speak Spanish in your parish?”

Father Tesoriero opened the inner door. “No, though I do have a fair number of Hispanic parishioners. It’s an old part of town, they’ve all been here a long time. No Hell’s Kitchen, that’s for sure.”

The living room, quite a large one in this bottom apartment, was full of people and silence. Himself of Latin origins, Carmine knew that relatives would have come from everywhere to be with the Alvarezes in their time of need. This meant that he knew how to deal with them, but he didn’t have to. The priest ushered all save the immediate family into the kitchen, with a woman who looked like the grandmother leading a toddling boy.

That left Jose Alvarez, his wife, Concita, their eldest son, Luis, and three daughters—Maria, Dolores and Teresa—in the room. Father Tesoriero put Carmine in the best chair, and himself sat between husband and wife.

It was a home of lace doilies, lace curtains under drapes of synthetic velvet, respectable well-worn furniture and floors tiled in terracotta beneath busy rugs. The walls bore pictures of the Last Supper, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mary holding the Christ Child, and many framed photographs of the family. Vases of flowers were everywhere, each bearing a card; the perfume of freesias and jonquils was so heavy Carmine felt choked. Where did florists get them at this time of year? On the center of the mantelpiece was a silverframed photograph of Mercedes, in front of it a burning candle in a red glass bowl.

The first thing Carmine did when he entered a house of grief was to imagine how the bereaved must have looked before tragedy struck. Nigh impossible here, but nothing could alter bone structure. Strikingly handsome, all of them, and all with that café au lait skin color. A little Negro, a little Caribbean Indian, a great deal of Spanish. The parents were probably in their late 30s, but looked a decade and more older than that, sitting like two rag dolls in their own ghastly world. Neither of them seemed to see him.

“Luis, is it?” he asked the boy, whose eyes were swollen and reddened from tears.

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“And your sisters? How old are they?”

“Maria is twelve, Dolores is ten, and Teresa is eight.”

“Your baby brother?”

“Francisco is three.”

By now the boy was weeping again, the dreary, hopeless tears that can only fall after too many have gone before them. His sisters lifted their faces from soaked handkerchiefs for a moment, their little bony knees clenched together under the margins of matching plaid pleated skirts like pairs of ivory skulls. Shaken by great hiccoughs, they sat and writhed from the pain of it, the terrible shock that was now wearing itself down to exhaustion after the days of worry and then the news that Mercedes was dead, cut into pieces. Of course no one had intended that they should find that out, but they had.

“Luis, could you take your sisters into the kitchen, then come back for a minute?”

The father, he saw, had finally focused on his face, viewing it with confused wonder.

“Mr. Alvarez, would you rather we postponed this for a few more days?” Carmine asked softly.

“No,” the father whispered, dry-eyed. “We will manage.”

Yes, but can I?

Luis returned, tears gone.

“Just the same old questions, Luis. I know you’ve already been asked them a million times, but memories can bury themselves and then suddenly come back for no reason, which is why I’m asking them again. I understand that you and Mercedes went to different schools, but I’ve been told that you were great pals. Girls as pretty as Mercedes get noticed, that’s natural. Did she ever complain about being noticed? Followed? Watched from a car or by someone on the other side of the street?

“No, Lieutenant, honestly. Boys would wolf-whistle her, but she ignored them.”

“What about when she worked as a candystriper last summer?”

“She never said anything to me that wasn’t about the patients and how nice the sisters were to her. They only let her into the maternity hospital. She loved it.”

He was beginning to weep again: time to stop. Carmine smiled and nodded toward the kitchen.

“I apologize,” he said to Mr. Alvarez when the boy was gone.

“We realize that you must ask and ask, Lieutenant.”

“Was Mercedes a confiding child, sir? Did she discuss things with her mother or with you?”

“She confided in both of us all the time. Her life pleased her, she loved to talk about it.” A great spasm went through him, he had to cling to the arms of his chair to suppress it. The eyes that stared into Carmine’s own were transfixed with pain, while the mother’s seemed to stare into the depths of hell. “Lieutenant, we have been told what was done to her, but it is almost impossible to believe. We have been told that Mercedes is your case, that you know more about what happened to her than the Norwalk police do.” His voice went thin with urgency. “Please, I beg you, tell me! Did she—did my little girl suffer?”

Carmine swallowed, impaled on those eyes. “Only God really knows the answer, but I don’t think God could be so cruel. A murder of this kind needn’t be done to watch the victim suffer. The man may well have given Mercedes drugs to make her sleep through it. Of one thing you can be sure: it was not God’s purpose to make her suffer. If you believe in God, then believe that she didn’t suffer.”

And God forgive me for that lie, but how could I tell this devastated father the truth? He sits there, dead in mind, dead in spirit, sixteen years of love, care, worry, joy and minor sorrows gone up like a puff of smoke from an incinerator. Why should I share my opinion of God with him and make his loss worse? He has to pick up the pieces and continue; there are five other children who need him, and a wife whose heart isn’t merely broken—it’s mashed to pulp.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Alvarez suddenly.

“Thank you for bearing with me,” Carmine said.

“You comforted them immeasurably,” said Father Tesoriero on the way to the door. “But Mercedes did suffer, didn’t she?”

“My guess is, beyond description. It’s hard to be in my line of work and believe in God, Father.”

Two journalists had appeared on the street, one with a microphone, the other with a notepad. When Carmine emerged they ran toward him, only to be roughly shoved away.

“Fuck off, you vultures!” he snarled, climbed into the Ford and drove away in a hurry.

Several blocks later, sure no reporters were on his tail, he pulled in to the side of the road and let his feelings overwhelm him. Did she suffer? Yes, yes, yes, she suffered! She suffered hideously, and he made sure she stayed awake for all of it. Her last glimpse of life must have been her own blood flowing down a drain hole, but her family must never know that. I’ve gone way beyond disbelief in God. I believe that the world belongs to the Devil. I believe that the Devil is infinitely more powerful than God. And the soldiers of goodness, if not of God, are losing the war.

Chapter Four

AS COLUMBUS DAY wasn’t a public holiday, nothing impeded the gathering of the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research Board of Governors at 11 a.m. in the fourth floor boardroom. Well aware that he hadn’t been invited, Carmine had every intention of sitting in. So he arrived early, took a thin china mug to the hall coffee urn, helped himself to two jelly donuts on a thin china plate, and had the effrontery to sit in the far end chair, which he turned to face the window.

At least “effrontery” was what Miss Desdemona Dupre called it when she strode in to find him curling his tongue sensuously around the Board’s goodies.

“You’re lucky, you know,” was Carmine’s reply. “If the Holloman Hospital architects hadn’t decided to put the parking lot in front of the building, you’d have no view at all. As it is, you can see all the way to Long Island. Isn’t it a beautiful day? The fall is just about at its best, and while I mourn the passing of the elms, you can’t beat maples for color. Their leaves have invented new shades at the warm end of the spectrum.”

“I didn’t realize you had either the words or the science to express yourself!” she snapped, eyes like ice. “You are sitting in the Governor-in-Chief’s chair and partaking of refreshments to which you are not entitled! Kindly pick up your traps and go!”

At which moment the Prof walked in, propped at the sight of Lieutenant Delmonico, and sighed deeply. “Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of you,” he said to Carmine.

“Whether you like it or not, Professor, I have to be here.”

President Mawson MacIntosh of Chubb University arrived before the Prof could answer, beamed at Carmine and shook him warmly by the hand. “Carmine! I might have known that Silvestri would put you on this,” said M.M., as he was universally known. “I am tremendously cheered. Here, sit next to me. And don’t,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper, “waste your taste buds on the donuts. Try the apple Danish.”

Miss Desdemona Dupre made a small sound of suppressed fury and marched out of the room, colliding with Dean Dowling and his own neurology professor, Frank Watson. He who authored “the Hug” and its staff of “Huggers”.

M.M., whom Carmine knew well from several awkwardly delicate internal Chubb cases, looked far more imposing than that other President, he of the United States of America. M.M. was tall, perfectly dressed, trim in the waist, his handsome face crowned by a head of luxuriant hair whose original auburn had transformed to a wonderful apricot. An American aristocrat to his fingertips. Despite his height, L.B.J. paled to insignificance whenever the two men stood side by side, which they did occasionally. But persons of M.M.’s august lineage would far rather preside over a great university than over an undisciplined bunch of rowdies like Congress.

On the other hand, Dean Wilbur Dowling looked the psychiatrist he was: untidily dressed in a combination of tweed, flannel and a pink bow tie with red polka dots, he wore a bushy brown beard to counterbalance his egg-bald head, and stared at the world through horn-rimmed bifocals.

And on the few times that he had seen Frank Watson, Carmine was always reminded of Boris out of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Watson dressed in black and had a long, thin face whose upper lip bore a lounge-lizard black mustache; sleek black hair and a permanent sneer completed the Boris similarity. Yes, Frank Watson was definitely the kind of person who drank regularly from a cup of vitriol. But surely he wasn’t on the Hug’s Board of Governors?

No, he wasn’t. Watson ended his conversation with the Dean and slithered away with a metaphorical flourish of a black cape he wasn’t wearing. Interesting guy, thought Carmine. I will have to see him.

The five Parson Governors trooped in as a group, and knew better than to query Carmine’s presence when M.M. made a subtly effusive introduction.

“If anyone can get to the bottom of this unspeakable affair, Carmine Delmonico can,” M.M. ended.

“Then I suggest,” said Roger Parson Junior, taking the chair at the end of the table, “that we put ourselves at Lieutenant Delmonico’s disposal. After, that is, he has told us precisely what has happened and what he intends to do in the future.”

The Parson contingent looked so alike that anyone would have picked them as closely related; even the thirty years’ difference in age between the three elderly and two youthful members of the clan made little difference. They were a trifle over medium height, thinly stooped, with long necks, beaky noses, prominent cheekbones, downturned mouths and scant heads of lank, indeterminately brown hair. Their eyes, to a man, were grey-blue. Now M.M. looked like a regal tycoon, whereas the Parsons looked like academic paupers.

Carmine had spent some of his weekend in researching them and the Parson group of companies. William Parson, the founder (and uncle of the present Governor-in-Chief) had started with machine parts and parlayed his holdings until they stretched from motors to turbines, and surgical instruments through typewriters to artillery. The Parson Bank had come into being at exactly the right time to go from strength to strength. William Parson had left it rather late to marry. His wife produced one child, William Junior, who turned out to be mentally retarded and epileptic. The son died in 1945, aged seventeen, and the mother followed in 1946, leaving William Parson alone. His sister, Eugenia, had married and also produced only one child, Richard Spaight, now head of the Parson Bank and a Hug Governor.

William Parson’s brother, Roger, was a drunkard from an early age and absconded in 1943 to California with a sizeable slice of the company profits, abandoning his wife and two sons. The affair was hushed up, the loss absorbed, and both Roger’s boys had proven loyal, devoted and extremely capable heirs for William; their sons came out of the same mold, with the result that in this year of 1965 Parson Products stock had been blue chip for decades. Depressions? Chicken feed! People still drove cars that needed motors, Parson Turbines made diesel turbines and generators long before jet planes flew, girls went on pounding typewriters, surgical operations kept increasing, and countries were always blazing away at each other with Parson guns, howitzers and mortars, big, medium and small.

In an interesting aside, Carmine had discovered that the family black sheep, Roger, having sobered up in California, had founded the Roger’s Ribs chain, married a movie starlet, done very nicely for himself, and died on top of a whore in a seedy motel.

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