On, Off

Chapter 7

Wednesday, December 1st, 1965

The students tumbled out of Travis High in hundreds, some to walk short distances to their homes in the Hollow, some to board dozens of school buses lined up along Twentieth and around the corners into Paine. In the old days they would simply have gone to any bus serving their particular destination, but ever since the advent of the Connecticut Monster each student was given a particular bus, emblazoned by a number. The driver was provided with a list of names and was under orders not to move until every student was aboard. So careful had the administration of Travis become that an absent student’s name was erased from the day’s list before it was given to the driver. Going to school was not such a problem; what everyone feared was going home.

Travis was the biggest public high school in Holloman, its intake spreading from the Hollow to the northern outskirts of the city on this western side. The majority of the students were black, but not by many, and while there were occasional racial problems there, the bulk of the students mixed and mingled according to their personal affinities. So while the Black Brigade had its supporters at Travis High, various churches and societies did too, as well as those individuals who trod a midline of reasonable grades and no trouble. Any teacher on the staff would have said that hormones caused more problems than race.

Though it was the Catholic high schools under strictest police attention, Travis hadn’t been neglected. When Francine Murray, a sixteen-year-old sophomore who lived out in the Valley, failed to board her bus, its driver climbed out and ran to the Holloman squad car parked on the sidewalk near the front gates. Within moments a controlled chaos reigned; buses were pulled over as uniformed men asked if Francine Murray was a passenger, others asked for Francine’s friends to come forward, and Carmine Delmonico was racing to Travis High with Corey and Abe.

Not that he forgot the Hug. Before the Ford took off he gave Marciano instructions to make sure that everyone at the Hug was present and accounted for. “I know we can’t afford to send a car there, so call Miss Dupre and tell her from me that I want every last one of them tagged down to visits to the john. You can trust her, Danny, but don’t tell her more than you have to.”

Having searched the vast and rambling school from attics to gymnasiums, the teachers were huddled in the yard while Derek Daiman, the highly respected black principal, paced up and down. Squad cars were still arriving as other schools were pronounced free of missing students, their contingents of cops dispersing to question everybody they could see, search Travis all over again, round up milling students dying of curiosity.

“Her name is Francine Murray,” said Mr. Daiman to Carmine. “She ought to have been on that bus over there” – he pointed – “but she didn’t turn up. She was present for her last period, Chemistry, and as far as I can ascertain, she left the building with a group of friends. They scatter once they’re in the yard, depending which bus they’re on or if they’re walking – Lieutenant Delmonico, this is terrible, terrible!”

“Getting upset won’t help her or us, Mr. Daiman,” Carmine said. “The most important thing is, what does Francine look like?”

“Like the missing girls,” Daiman said, beginning to weep. “So pretty! So popular! A grades, never any trouble, a great example to her fellow students.”

“Is she of Caribbean origin, sir?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the principal said, wiping his eyes. “I guess that’s why we didn’t notice – the news items all said part Hispanic, and she isn’t. One of those real Old Connecticut black families, white intermarriage. It happens, Lieutenant, no matter how much people oppose it. Oh, dear God, dear God, what am I going to do?”

“Mr. Daiman, are you trying to say that one of Francine’s parents is black and the other white?” Carmine asked.

“I believe so, yes, I believe so.”

Abe and Corey had gone to talk to the uniforms, tell them to search each bus and then get it on its way, but keep Francine’s friends in a group until they could be interviewed.

“You’re sure she’s not in the school somewhere?” Carmine asked Sergeant O’Brien when he led his cops and teacher guides out of the enormous building.

“Lieutenant, she is not inside, I swear. We opened every closet, looked under every desk, in every rest room, the cafeteria, the gyms, the classrooms, the assembly room, storage rooms, the furnace room, attics, the science labs, janitor’s room – every goddamn corner,” O’Brien said, sweating.

“Who saw her last?” Carmine asked the teachers, some in tears, all shaking with shock.

“She walked out of my classroom with her friends,” said Miss Corwyn of Chemistry. “I stayed behind to straighten up, I didn’t follow them. Oh, I wish I had!”

“Don’t castigate yourself, ma’am, you weren’t to know,” said Carmine, assessing the others. “Anyone else see her?”

No, no one had. And no, no one had seen any strangers.

He’s done it again, thought Carmine, walking up to the knot of frightened young people who had claimed friendship with Francine Murray. He’s snatched her away without a soul’s seeing him. It’s sixty-two days since Mercedes Alvarez disappeared, we’ve been on our toes, warned people, showed photos of the kind of girl he targets, tightened up on school security, thrown all our resources into this. We ought to have caught him! So what does he do? He lulls us into certainty that the Caribbean is a mandatory part of his obsessions, then switches to a different ethnic group. And I put Danny Marciano down for suggesting it. Oh, Travis, of all places! An ant heap! Fifteen hundred students! Half of this city thinks of Travis as a training ground for hoods, punks and low life, forgetting that it’s also a place where whole bunches of decent kids, black and white, get a pretty good education.

Francine’s best friend was a black girl named Kimmy Wilson.

“She was with us when we came out of Chemistry, sir,” Kimmy said through sniffles.

“You’re all in Chemistry?”

“Yes, sir, we’re all planning pre-med.”

“Go on, Kimmy.”

“I thought she’d gone to the rest room. Francine has a weak bladder, she’s always going to the rest room. I didn’t think about it because I know what she’s like. I didn’t think!” The tears gushed. “Oh, why didn’t I go with her?”

“Do you travel on the same bus, Kimmy?”

“Yes, sir.” Kimmy made a huge effort to master her feelings. “We both live on Whitney out in the Valley.” She pointed at two weeping white girls. “So do Charlene and Roxanne. None of us thought about her until the bus driver called the roll and she didn’t answer.”

“Do you know your bus driver?”

“Not her name, sir, not today’s. I know her face.”

By five o’clock Travis High was deserted. Having combed it and the neighborhood, the police cordon was spreading ever outward while word ran through the Hollow that the Connecticut Monster had struck again. Not a spic. A genuine black girl. While Carmine was on his way to the Murray house, Mohammed el Nesr, informed by Wesley le Clerc, was calling his troops together.

Halfway to the Valley the Ford pulled up at a phone booth and Carmine talked to Danny Marciano without the annoyances of a car radio; some of the press could tune into that, and it was noisy into the bargain.

“No absentees at the Hug, Danny?”

“Only Cecil Potter and Otis Green, who’d already finished for the day. Both of them were at home when Miss Dupre called. She says everyone else was present and accounted for.”

“What can you tell me about the Murrays? All I managed to find out is that one parent is black, the other white.”

“They’re just like all the rest, Carmine – the salt of the earth,” said Marciano, sighing. “Only difference is no Caribbean connection as far as anyone knows. They’re regulars at the local Baptist church, so I took the liberty of calling its minister, a Leon Williams, and asking him to go over and break the news. It’s spreading at the speed of light, and I didn’t want some bug-eyed neighbor getting there first.”

“Thanks for that, Danny. What else?”

“The black half is the father. He’s a research associate in electrical engineering in the Susskind Science Tower, which means he’s junior faculty on reasonable pay. Mom is white. She works the lunch rush in the Susskind cafeteria, so she’s there to see the kids off to school, and home again before they are. They have two boys, both younger than Francine, who go to the Higgins middle school. The Reverend Williams told me that the Murrays caused a bit of talk when they moved to Whitney nine years ago, but the novelty faded and now they’re just a part of the local woodwork. Very well liked, have friends of both colors.”

“Thanks, Danny. See you later.”

The Valley was an area with a fairly mixed population, not affluent, but not impoverished either. Racial tensions broke out there from time to time, usually when a new white family arrived, but property rates were not sufficiently high to make blackness a real financial liability. It was not an area famous for hate mail, killing of pets, dumping of trash, graffiti.

As the Ford turned onto Whitney, all half-acre blocks with modest houses, Carmine could feel Abe and Corey stiffen.

“Jesus, Carmine, how did we let this happen?” Abe burst out.

“Because he changed pace, Abe. He outfoxed us.”

As they drew up to a yellow-painted house Carmine put his hand on Corey’s shoulder. “You guys stay here. If I need you, I’ll holler, okay?”

The Reverend Leon Williams admitted him to the Murray house. This is becoming a habit, Carmine.

The two sons were elsewhere; sounds from a TV came faintly. Seated together on a sofa, the parents were trying valiantly to remain composed; she held his hand as if it were a lifeline.

“You’re not Caribbean, Mr. Murray?” Carmine asked.

“No, definitely not. The Murrays have been in Connecticut since before the Civil War, fought for the North. And my wife is from Wilkes-Barre.”

“Have you a recent photograph of Francine?”

A sister to the other eleven.

And so it went all over again, the same questions he’d asked eleven other families: whom Francine saw, what good deeds she did, if she’d mentioned any new friend or acquaintance, if she’d noticed anyone watching her, following her. As always, the answers were no.

Carmine didn’t stay a moment longer than he had to. Their minister is a greater comfort to them in their pain than I could ever be. I’m the agent of doom, maybe of retribution, and that’s how they see me. They’re in there praying that their little girl is fine, but terrified that she is not. Waiting for me, the agent of doom, to return and tell them that she is not.

Commissioner John Silvestri appeared on local TV after the six o’clock news was finished, appealing to the people of Holloman and Connecticut to help search for Francine, to come forward if they had seen anything unusual. A desk cop had his uses, and one of Silvestri’s best was his public image – that leonine head, superb profile, calm dignity, air of candor. He didn’t try to parry the anchorwoman’s questions the way a politician would, so shrewd a politician was he. Her rebarbative remarks about the fact that the Connecticut Monster was still at large and still abducting innocent young women didn’t dent his composure in the least; somehow he managed to make her look like a handsome wolf.

“He’s smart,” said Silvestri simply. “Very smart.”

“He must be,” said Surina Chandra to her husband as they sat in front of their gigantic TV screen. They had paid a fortune to bring in a special line from New York City so they could channel-hop on cable until eight, when they sat to eat dinner. What they hoped to see was an item about India, but that was a rare occurrence indeed. The U.S.A., they had discovered, wasn’t a scrap interested in India; it was involved in its own problems.

“Yes, he must be,” said Nur Chandra absently, his mind on a triumph so great he wanted to shout it to the world. Only he dare not risk it, dare not. It had to remain his secret. “I’ll be sleeping in my cottage for the next few days,” he added. A smile curved his perfect lips. “I have important work to do.”

“How can anyone call the Monster smart?” Robin demanded. “It isn’t smart to murder children, it’s – it’s stupid and inhuman!”

I wonder, Addison Forbes asked himself, what her definition of “smart” might be if I pushed her to explain it?

“I agree with the police commissioner,” he said, discovering a crushed cashew nut hiding beneath some lettuce. “A very smart fellow. What the Monster does is disgusting, but I do admire his competence. He’s made total fools out of the police.” The nut melted on his tongue like nectar. “Who,” he said bitterly, “had the gall to order Desdemona Dupre to hunt us down like animals and ask us where we’d been! We have a spy in our midst, and I for one will not forget that. What her idiocies mean is that I’m behind in my clinical notes. Don’t wait up for me. And throw out that quart of ice cream in the freezer, do you hear me?”

“Yes, he is smart,” said Catherine Finch. She eyed Maurie anxiously; he hadn’t been the same since that Nazi schmuck tried to kill himself. With more steel in her character than Maurie had in his, she thought it a pity the Nazi schmuck hadn’t succeeded, but Maurie had a great big conscience and it was telling him that he was the schmuck. Nothing she could say prevented Maurie from blaming himself, poor baby.

He didn’t bother answering her, just pushed his brisket away and got up from the table. “Maybe I’ll work a little on my mushrooms,” he said, plucking a flashlight from the pungent porch as he passed through.

“Maurie, you don’t need to be in the dark tonight!” she cried.

“I’m in the dark all the time, Cathy. All the time.”

The Ponsonbys didn’t see Commissioner Silvestri on TV because they didn’t own one. TV was lost on Claire, and Charles referred to it as “the opiate of the uncultivated herd.”

Tonight the music was Hindemith’s Concerto for Orchestra, a windy, brassy blare that they enjoyed most when Charles had found a particularly good bottle of pouilly fumé. They were eating lightly, a fines herbs omelet followed by fillets of sole poached in water liberally laced with very dry white vermouth; no starches, just some romaine lettuce with a walnut oil vinaigrette, and a champagne sorbet to finish. Not a coffee and cigars meal.

“How they do insult my intelligence sometimes,” Charles said to Claire as Hindemith entered a quieter phase. “Desdemona Dupre came looking for all of us with some tale of needing all of our signatures on a document that Bob certainly knew nothing about, then an hour later the police arrived in their thousands. Just when I was in the middle of a train of thought that did not need the thump of jackboots. Where was I all afternoon? Tchah! I was tempted to tell them to go to hell, but I didn’t. I must say that Delmonico runs a smooth operation, though. He didn’t deign to grace us with his own presence, but his minions betray the stamp of his style.”

“Dear, dear,” she said placidly, fingers twined loosely about the stem of her wine glass. “Are they going to persecute the Hug every time a girl is abducted?”

“I imagine so. Don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. How sad a place the world becomes. Sometimes, Charles, I am very glad that I walk through it blind.”

“You walked through it blind today, you always do. Though I wish you wouldn’t. There’s some story going around that Desdemona Dupre is being stalked. Though what she could have to do with the other business is a bit of a mystery.” He giggled. “Such a vast and unprepossessing creature!”

“Threads weave predictable patterns, Charles.”

“That,” he said, “depends upon who’s making the predictions.”

The Ponsonbys laughed, the dog wuffed, Hindemith let loose.

Much to Carmine’s surprise, he found his mother’s car parked outside Malvolio’s when he pulled up shortly after 7 P.M., Corey and Abe delivered to their long-suffering wives.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, helping her out. “More problems?”

“I thought you might need company. How’s the food in there? Any hamburgers to take away?”

“No burgers to go, but let’s eat inside. It’s warm.”

“I did my best for Captain Marciano this afternoon,” she said, eating a fry (she called it a chip) in her fingers, “but it took half an hour to track them all down. I couldn’t find a one of the researchers themselves until I realized that it might be the first of December, but up on the roof it was warm and sheltered from the wind. They were up there having a round table discussion on Eustace. All of them, and they looked as if they hadn’t moved in yonks.”

“Yonks?”

“A long time.”

“I’m sorry to have inflicted it on you, but I couldn’t spare any cops while there was a hope of finding Francine.”

“It’s all right, I blamed you. Very caustically.” She picked up another fry. “Ever since word got round about my police guard, I’m regarded differently. Most of them think I’m putting it on.”

“Putting it on?”

“Making it up. Tamara says I’m trying to catch you.”

He grinned. “A tortuous scheme, Desdemona.”

“A pity my ruined work didn’t yield that clue.”

“Oh, he’s far too smart to have left one beyond the first time. He knew you wouldn’t report it.”

She shivered. “Why do I think you think it’s the Monster?”

“Because it’s a red herring, woman.”

“You mean I’m not in danger?”

“I didn’t say that. The cops stay.”

“Is it possible he thinks I know something?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Red herrings don’t need reasons apart from creating illusions.”

“Let’s go back to your apartment and watch the Commissioner on the late news,” she said.

Then, afterward, she smiled. “The Commissioner looks like a sweetie. Didn’t he handle madam smarty-pants anchorwoman well?”

Carmine’s brows rose. “Next time I see him I’ll tell him that you think he’s a sweetie. Cute word, but your sweetie once took on a twelve-man German machine gun nest single-handed and saved a whole company. Among other things.”

“Yes, I can see that side of him too. But you won’t mention me. When you see him it will be a very serious meeting because the situation is very serious. The Monster is really clever, though perhaps that’s to underestimate him.”

“He’s a whole bunch of things, Desdemona. Smart – clever – insane – maybe a genius. What I do know is that the façade he presents to the world is totally believable. His guard never drops. If it had, someone would have noticed. I think he might be a married man whose wife doesn’t suspect him. Oh, yeah, he’s one smart cookie.”

“You’re pretty smart yourself, Carmine, but you’ve got more going for you than that. You’re a bulldog. Once the teeth lock in, you can’t let go. Eventually the extra weight of dragging you around with him will exhaust him.”

Warmth flooded through him, whether from the cognac or the compliment he wasn’t sure; Carmine preened a little inside his mind, very careful that the rest of him didn’t bat an eyelash.

Chapter 8

Thursday, December 2nd, 1965

Francine Murray hadn’t turned up by the following day, nor did anyone save her parents doubt that the Monster had gotten her. Oh, the parents knew it too, but how can the human heart exist in such a sea of crushing pain until there is no other alternative? She’d gone to a pajama party once without telling them – just plain forgotten, but it had happened. So they waited and prayed, hoping against hope that it was all a mistake and Francine would come bouncing in the door.

When Carmine returned to his office at 4 P.M., he had nothing positive to show for a day of talking to people, including at the Hug. Two months on a case and zilch. His phone rang.

“Delmonico.”

“Lieutenant, this is Derek Daiman from Travis High. Could you possibly come up here straightaway?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Derek Daiman, thought Carmine, was probably always the last teacher to leave Travis; his gigantic, polyglot baby must be hell to run, but he managed to run it well.

He was standing inside the doors of Travis’s main building, but the moment the Ford pulled into the schoolyard he emerged, ran down the steps to the car.

“I haven’t said anything to anyone, Lieutenant, I just asked the boy who found it to stay where he was.”

Carmine followed him around the left-hand corner of the main block to where an ungainly, shedlike structure had been tacked on adjacent to the brick side wall through a short passageway that gave the brick wall’s windows nine feet of light and air as well as a view of buff-painted metal siding.

Education was a municipal responsibility; cities like Holloman, handicapped by soaring populations in their poorer areas, struggled to provide adequate facilities. Thus the shed had come into being, a hangar that held a basketball court, bleachers for spectators, and, at its far end, gymnastic equipment – vaulting horses, rings suspended from the ceiling, parallel bars, and what looked like two posts and a cross bar for high jumps or pole vaults. Another gym mirrored this one on the right side, held a swimming pool and bleachers where the basketball court was here, and a far end devoted to boxing, wrestling and working out. The girls here to perform graceful leaps, the boys there to beat the crap out of punching bags.

Though they entered the gym from the yard, they could have done so from the building; the short passageway allowed students direct access, mandatory in bad weather, but it too had a door.

Derek Daiman led Carmine past the basketball court and its bleachers to the gymnastic end, provided with seating down either side by what looked like big wooden footlockers. His was the old army term; in high school, he seemed to remember, they were just called boxes. Alongside the last box in the row on the passageway wall stood a tall, athletic-looking black youth whose face was marked with tears.

“Lieutenant, this is Winslow Searle. Winslow, tell Lieutenant Delmonico what you found.”

“This,” said the boy, and held up a candy-pink jacket. “It belongs to Francine. Her name’s in it, see?”

FRANCINE MURRAY, machine-embroidered on the stout strip that enabled the jacket to be hung on a hook.

“Where was it, Winslow?”

“In there, pushed inside one of the mats with its cuff poking out.” Winslow lifted the lid of the box to reveal that it still held two gym mats, one rolled up, the other folded loosely.

“How did you come to find it?”

“I’m a high jumper, Lieutenant, but I have a glass jaw. If I land too hard, I get concussed,” Winslow said in a pure Holloman accent, his sentence construction indicating that he kept up good grades in English and didn’t hang out with a gang.

“Potential Olympic standard, lots of offers from colleges,” Daiman whispered in Carmine’s ear. “He’s thinking of Howard.”

“Go on, Winslow, you’re doing fine,” Carmine said.

“There’s one super-thick mat, and I always use it. Coach Martin keeps it in the same box for me, but it wasn’t there when I came in to do some jumping after school today. I went looking, found it at the bottom of this one. It was weird, sir.”

“How, weird?”

“The box should be full, the mats stacked like frankfurters. Some of the other boxes had too many – more like sardines. And my super-thick mat wasn’t rolled up at all. It was folded back and forth from side to side of the box. The one with the cuff of Francine’s jacket showing was right on top of it. I had a funny feeling, so I pulled the cuff and it slid right out.”

The floor around the box was strewn with five unrolling mats; Carmine surveyed them with a sinking heart. “I don’t suppose you remember which mat held the jacket?”

“Oh, yes, sir. The one still in the box on top of my mat.”

“Winslow, my man,” said Carmine, shaking the youth’s hand warmly, “I am rooting for you for a gold medal in sixty-eight! Thank you for your care and your good sense. Now go home, but don’t talk about any of this, okay?”

“Sure,” said Winslow, wiped his cheeks and walked off, his gait reminiscent of a big cat.

“The whole school is grieving,” said the principal.

“With good reason. Can I dial out on that phone? Thanks.”

He asked for Patrick, still there. “Come yourself if you can, but if you can’t, send Paul, Abe, Corey and all your gear, Patsy. Maybe we’ve found something useful.”

“Do you mind waiting with me, Mr. Daiman?” he asked when he returned to the box, lid down, Francine’s jacket lying on it.

“No, of course not.” Daiman cleared his throat, shifted on his feet, took a deep breath. “Lieutenant, I would not be doing my duty if I didn’t inform you that trouble is coming.”

“Trouble?”

“Racial trouble. The Black Brigade is campaigning hard for support using Francine’s disappearance as a platform. She’s not Hispanic, and on the forms she fills out she calls herself black. I never argue with my light-colored students about how they think of themselves racially, Lieutenant – to me, that would be a denial of their rights. Like the new concepts about indigenousness, that only an indigenous person can decide whether they are or are not.” He shook himself, looked wry. “I’m straying. The point is that some of my more irascible students have been saying that this is a white killer of black girls, and that the police aren’t bothering to catch him because he’s a powerful member of the Hug with all kinds of political influence. Since my school is fifty-two percent black and forty-eight percent white, unless I can keep the lid on the Black Brigade kids, we could have a mess of trouble.”

“Jesus, that’s all we need! Mr. Daiman, we are busting our guts to find this killer, you have my word on that. Simply, we know nothing about him, least of all that he’s a member of the Hug – no one at the Hug has any political power! But I thank you for the warning and I’ll make sure that Travis has some protection.” He glanced from the box to the door barring the passageway that led into the main school. “Mind if I look around? And where’s the Chemistry classroom from here? Is it a lab, or a classroom?”

“It’s just up the hall from the gym, and it’s the classroom. The lab is in the general lab area. Go ahead, Lieutenant, look wherever you like,” said Daiman, went to a chair and sat on it with his head in his hands.

The passageway door was single, not double locked: was it ever double locked? On the tunnel side it couldn’t be opened without a key – or a credit card if it wasn’t double locked. Carmine entered the nine-foot-long tube and emerged to find himself staring at a girls’ toilet block directly across the hall.

This killer knows everything! he thought, staggered. He grabbed her when she went into the toilets – she was notorious for that – dragged her across a three-yard hall into a three-yard tunnel and a deserted gym. Most likely he opened the door before he grabbed her. And he knew the gym would be deserted! It is on every Wednesday after school because that’s when the contractors come in to treat the floors. But they didn’t treat them yesterday because Francine went missing and they weren’t allowed in. Once he was in the gym, he rearranged the mats, put her in the bottom of the nearest box and made sure Winslow’s super-thick mat covered her completely. Did he gag her and tie her, or did he give her a shot of something to keep her out for a few hours?

We searched every square inch of this school twice, but we didn’t find her. And when we didn’t find her, we knew she was the twelfth victim, spirited out of Travis before the squad car outside could radio base. Both times some searcher would have opened that locker and seen what was in all the others: rolled-up gym mats. Maybe whoever looked poked around inside it, but Francine didn’t move or make a noise. Then, when we were satisfied that Francine was gone – when Travis had ceased to be of any interest to us – he came back and retrieved her. I’ll put Corey on the door lock, he’s the best in the business.

Maybe where we keep going wrong is in underrating the grind, the pain of his planning. It’s as if he had nothing else to do between each abduction than spend all of every single day scheming how he’s going to grab the next one. How far in advance does he know the identity of his next victim? Did he pick them out years ago, when they were on the brink of puberty? Has he got them all listed on a wall chart, carefully ruled in columns – name, date of birth, address, school, religion, race, habits? He has to watch them, he must have known about Francine’s weak bladder. Is he a substitute teacher, flitting from school to school with glowing references and a great reputation? That, we have to investigate starting right now.

“Did he leave the jacket behind to jerk our strings, or did Francine manage to hide it in the mat?” he asked Patrick as he watched Paul delicately ease the unwieldy coat into a plastic bag.

“I’d say Francine hid it,” Patrick answered. “He’s arrogant, but to leave us the jacket betrays one of his craftiest tricks. Until now, we’ve been convinced that the girls are snatched and whisked away immediately. Why tell us that he doesn’t always do that? I believe that he wants to keep us peering down the same tunnel at the same ray of light. Which means, Carmine, that this new development can’t possibly be leaked to the press. Do you trust the boy who found it? The principal?”

“Yes, I do. How did he keep her quiet in the locker, Patsy?”

“He drugged her. Someone this meticulous wouldn’t have made the mistake of gagging her before putting her in a relatively airless, smelly sports locker. There’s no sign she did throw up, but human beings vary and some are the vomiting type. Gagged, she would have drowned in her own vomit. No, he wouldn’t risk that. She’s too valuable, he’s planned her for at least two months.”

“If we find her body -”

“You don’t think we’ll find her alive?”

Carmine gazed at his cousin with what Patrick called his “scornfully stern look.” “No, we’re not going to find her alive. We don’t know where to search, and all the places we’d like to search, we can’t. So when we find her body,” he went on, “you’d better go over her skin with a microscope. There’s a prick in it somewhere because he wouldn’t have had time to inject her where a good pathologist couldn’t find the mark. Odds are he’ll have used a very fine needle, and this time the body parts might not be in such good shape.”

“Maybe,” said Patrick wryly, “I could borrow the Hug’s Zeiss operating microscope. Mine’s shit by comparison.”

“With our unlimited budget, I don’t see why you can’t order one. It mightn’t come in time for Francine, but once you have it, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of use for it.”

“What I love most about you, Carmine, is your gall. They’ll crucify you, because I won’t put my name on the requisition.”

“Fuck them,” said Carmine. “They don’t have to see all those poor families. I have nightmares about the heads.”

Chapter 9

Friday, December 10th, 1965

Ten days went by with no sign of Francine Murray, though Francine Murray was not on Ruth Kyneton’s mind that morning. Even through the worst of winter, Ruth Kyneton preferred to use the outside line than shove her freshly laundered linens in one of those dryer things. You couldn’t beat the smell of clothes dried in sweet, clean air. Besides, she strongly suspected that the artificially scented anti-static fabric conditioners advertised on TV were actually a government plot to impregnate the skins of loyal, law-abiding Americans with substances designed to turn them into zombies. Every time you turned around, Congress was trampling on someone’s rights in favor of drunks, skunks and punks, so why not fabric conditioners, bathroom deodorants and fluoride?

She hung out her washing the proper way: fold a corner over the previous one to make it thick, pin them together, then tuck its far corner under the corner of the next item and pin them together, her mouth stuffed with pins, more in the pockets of her apron. Yep, her way meant half the number of pins and a line so crowded that no wire showed; finished, she levered a forked sapling under the line to stop it from sagging. The good thing about today was that it wasn’t cold enough to freeze things while they were wet. Purist though she was, Ruth never relished wrestling with frozen washing.

Throughout this exercise she had been aware that the three curs from farther down Griswold Lane were fighting at the bottom of her yard; they were bound to move on up because curs always did, and she was not about to let curs soil her blindingly white whites, her vividly vivid colors. So she returned to the house to fetch a straw broom and marched resolutely down the yard to where, at the end of it, a streamlet trickled. The streamlet was a nuisance – kept the ground from freezing quickly, admittedly, but it created mud. The curs would be caked in slimy black mud.

“Git!” she shouted, descending like a witch dismounted from her broom, waving it about viciously. “Git, you mangy critters, git! Go on, git!”

The dogs were squabbling amicably rather than fighting, all three tugging at a long, fleshy bone smeared in mud, and were unwilling to give up this prize until Ruth’s broom swiped two of them so hard that they fled, yelping, to stand some distance off and wait for her to give up. The third dog, pack leader, crouched and put its ears back, growling and snarling at her. But Ruth had lost interest in the curs; the bone was double, and had a human foot attached.

She didn’t scream or faint. The broom still in her hands, she walked back to the house to call the Holloman police. That done, she stationed herself on the edge of the mud to stand guard until help arrived while the dogs, thwarted yet undefeated, circled.

Patrick cordoned off the whole area of the streamlet and concentrated first on the grave, only ten yards from where the dogs had competed for their find.

“My guess is that the raccoons were first,” he said to Carmine, “but I’m positive that she – yes, this has to be Francine – was deliberately buried in order to be unearthed soon after. Just twelve inches down. Eight of the ten pieces are still in situ. Paul found the right humerus in some bushes – raccoons. The left tib-fib and foot were what alerted Mrs. Kyneton. I’ve got reliable people searching, but I don’t think the head is here.”

“Nor do I,” Carmine said. “And it comes back to the Hug.”

“Looks that way. My guess is he’s got a grudge.”

Carmine left Patrick to it and plodded up to the house to find Ruth Kyneton ready and able to talk, though she was by no means indifferent to Francine Murray’s fate.

“Poor little baby! Shoulda been him dog’s meat, only that’s too good. I’d boil him in oil – sit him in it and light the fire with my own hands, then watch him cook real slow,” she said, one hand pressed against her midriff. “Mind if I have a drink of tea, Lieutenant? It settles my stomach.”

“If I can have one too, ma’am.”

“Why us?” she asked. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

“So would I, Mrs. Kyneton. But more importantly, did you see or hear anything last night?”

“You sure it was last night?”

“Fairly sure, but tell me anything unusual that’s happened on any night for the last nine of them.”

“Nothing,” she said, putting a tea bag in each of two mugs. “Never heard no noises. Oh, them dogs barked, but they bark all the time. The Desmonds had a barney – screams, yells, things breaking – night before last. That happens regular. He’s an alkie.” She reflected for a moment. “So’s she.”

“Would you hear anything if you were asleep?”

“Don’t sleep much, and never until my son comes home,” Ruth said, swelling with pride. “He’s a brain surgeon at Chubb, deals with them little bubbles on veins that burst like a water main.”

“Arteries,” Carmine corrected automatically; a Hug education was beginning to make itself apparent.

“Right, arteries. Keith’s the best they got at repairing them bubbles. I always think of it like patching the inner tube on an old bicycle. Did a lot of that when I was a girl. Maybe that’s where Keith gets it from. Dunno where else.”

If I were not so worried and angry, Carmine thought, I could fall in love with this woman. She’s an original.

“Keith. He’s Miss Silverman’s husband.”

“Yep. They’ve been married coming up for three years.”

“I take it that Dr. Kyneton comes home late often?”

“All the time. The operations take hours and hours. He’s a tiger for work, my Keith. Not like his old man. He couldn’t work on a chain gang. Yep, I always wait up for Keith, make sure he eats. Can’t sleep until he’s in.”

“Was he late last night? The night before?”

“Two-thirty last night, one-thirty the night before.”

“Does he make a lot of noise when he comes in?”

“Nope. Quiet as a corpse. Makes no difference – I still hear him. He cuts the engine on his car and coasts down the lane, but I can hear him,” said Ruth Kyneton positively. “I listen.”

“Was there a moment last night when you thought you heard him, but he didn’t come in? Or the night before?”

“Nope. The only one I heard was Keith.”

Carmine drank his tea, thanked her, decided to go. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about this to anyone except your family, Mrs. Kyneton,” he said at the door. “I’ll be back to see them as soon as I can.”

Patrick had finished washing the body parts and assembling them on his table when Carmine walked in.

“They were so covered in mud, humus and leaves that getting anything useful will be a miracle,” Patrick said. “I’ve saved all the washing fluid – distilled water – and I took a sample of the stream water. This time I have more to work with,” he went on, sounding content. “The rape pattern is the same – a succession of increasingly large sheaths or dildoes, vaginal and anal penetration. But see that straight line of bruising on the upper arms just below the shoulders, and that other straight line of bruising below the elbows? She was tied down with something about fifteen inches wide, heavy fabric like canvas. The contusions occurred when she struggled, but she couldn’t free herself. It also tells us that this killer isn’t interested in breasts. He bound them flat under a canvas restraint that hid them from sight. That means she was lying on a table. As to why he didn’t just manacle her wrists or tie her hands down, I don’t know. Keeping her legs free is more logical, he needed to move them around.”

“How long was she alive after she was grabbed, Patsy?”

“About a week, but I don’t think he fed her. The digestive tract was empty. Mercedes had been fed on cornflakes and milk. Though all we had of Mercedes was the torso, I think he changed some of his habits for Francine. Or maybe each victim is a little different. Without the bodies, we’ll never know.”

“How long had she been dead?” Carmine asked.

“Maximum, thirty hours. Probably less. She was buried last night, not the night before, but I’d say before midnight. He didn’t keep her long after she died, but I can tell you that she died from loss of blood. Look at her ankles.” Patrick pointed.

Carmine hadn’t gotten that far; he stiffened. “Ligature welts,” he breathed.

“Not a part of his method of restraint. They weren’t on for more than an hour. Oh, but he’s clever! No fibers or slivers from those welts, I know it in my bones. My guess is that he strung her up with single-strand stainless steel wire that he rigged to make sure that the joins were never in contact with her flesh. The wire bit in, but it didn’t break the skin by sawing at it or catching on it anywhere. These kids are small and light, weigh about eighty pounds. Like Mercedes, he cut her throat to bleed her out first, then decapitated her later – not such a long wait between the two for Francine compared to Mercedes.”

“Tell me there’s semen.”

“I doubt it.”

“You’ll test the wash water for semen too?”

“Carmine! Is the Pope a Catholic?”

“I hope so,” said Carmine, squeezing his cousin’s arm.

From there it was on to Silvestri’s office, Marciano ambling in his wake; Abe and Corey were still out at Griswold Lane, asking its inhabitants if they had seen or heard anything unusual.

He filled Silvestri and Marciano in.

“Is it possible,” Marciano asked afterward, “that this guy doesn’t belong to the Hug, but has a grudge against the place or someone in it?”

“That begins to look more and more likely, Danny. Though I wish I could be sure that all the Huggers really were where they were supposed to be Wednesday of last week when Francine was snatched. It would have taken a good twenty minutes to get from the Hug to Travis and back again – at a jog. Whereas Miss Dupre didn’t locate the senior Huggers for thirty minutes. However, they do seem to have been together on the roof, and as there are only seven of them, I’m sure a twenty-minute absence followed by heavy breathing on return would have caused comment. Dr. Addison Forbes might not have reappeared breathing heavily, I take that into account. Leaving that aside, the killer definitely wants us to believe that his murders are connected to the Hug. Otherwise why choose the Kynetons’ as a dump site? He wanted her found quickly, so he hardly scraped away enough mud to cover her. Every scavenger for a mile must have come running. He’s pissing on someone or something, but who or what I don’t know.”

“You don’t think the Kynetons have anything to do with it?” Silvestri asked.

“I haven’t checked Hilda and Keith out yet, but Ruth Kyneton is a straight shooter.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“I’ll see Hilda and Keith today, but I’m going to put off the other Huggers until Monday. I want them to stew over the weekend watching news bulletins and listening to all the TV couch cops.”

“He’s going to keep on killing, isn’t he?” Marciano asked.

“He can’t stop, Danny. We have to stop him.”

“What about that new bunch of psychiatrists the FBI and NYPD consult? No help from them?” Silvestri demanded.

“Same old song, John. Nobody knows much about the multiple killer. The shrinks yack about ritual and obsession, but they can’t come up with anything helpful. They can’t tell me what this guy looks like, or how old he is, or what kind of job he has, or his childhood, or his level of education – he’s an enigma, a total fucking mystery -” Carmine stopped, swallowed, closed his eyes. “Sorry, sir. It’s getting to me.”

“It’s getting to all of us. Thing is, maybe there are more of these multiple killers out there than we know about,” Silvestri said. “Too many more like our killer, and someone’s going to have to do something to help catch them. Our guy got away with ten murders before we even knew he existed.” He got out a new cigar to chew. “Just plug away at it, Carmine.”

“I intend to,” said Carmine, getting to his feet. “Sooner or later the bastard’s going to slip, and when he does, I’ll be there to break his fall.”

“Oh, this could ruin Keith!” Hilda Silverman cried, her face white. “Just when he’s got a great offer – it isn’t fair!”

“Offer of what?” Carmine asked.

“A partnership in a private practice. He’ll have to buy in, of course, but we’ve managed to save enough to do that.”

Which answers the riddle of why they live in this semi-slum, thought Carmine, his gaze passing from Hilda to Ruth, who looked just as worried about Keith. The United Women of Keith.

“What time did you get home last night, Miss Silverman?”

“Not long after six.”

“What time did you go to bed?”

“At ten. I always do.”

“So you don’t wait up for your husband?”

“There’s no need. Ruth does. I’m the major earner at the moment, you see.”

The sound of a car pulling into the drive galvanized both women; they leaped up, rushed to the front door and hopped about like two basketballers jockeying for position.

Wow! was Carmine’s reaction when Keith Kyneton walked in. Definitely a prince, not a frog from Dayton, Ohio, anymore. How had the transformation happened, and where? His looks and his physique were undeniable, but what fascinated Carmine were the clothes. Everything of the very best, from his tailored gabardine slacks to his tawny cashmere sweater. The well-dressed neurosurgeon after a hard day in the O.R., while his wife and mother bought off the rack at Cheap & Nasty.

Having shaken off his women, Keith stared at Carmine with hard grey eyes, his generous lips thinned. “Are you the one who pulled me out of the O.R.?” he demanded.

“That’s me. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico. Sorry about it, but I presume Chubb’s got another neurosurgeon to pinch-hit?”

“Yes, of course it has!” he snapped. “Why am I here?”

When he heard why he was here, Keith collapsed into a chair. “Our backyard?” he whispered. “Ours?”

“Yours, Dr. Kyneton. What time did you come in last night?”

“About two-thirty, I think.”

“Did you notice anything different about the place where you parked your car? Do you always park it out front, or do you put it in the garage?”

“In dead of winter I put it in the garage, but I’m still leaving it outside,” he said, gazing not at Ruth but at Hilda. “It’s a year-old Cadillac, starts like a dream on a cold morning.” He was regaining his high opinion of himself. “Truth is, I am whacked by the time I get home, really whacked.”

A new Caddy while your wife and your mother drive fifteen-year-old clunkers. What a piece of shit you are, Dr. Kyneton. “You didn’t answer my question, Doctor. Did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you got home last night?”

“No, nothing.”

“Did you notice that last night was kinda damp and soggy?”

“I can’t say that I did.”

“Your driveway is unsealed. Were there strange tire tracks?”

“I told you, I didn’t notice anything!” he cried fretfully.

“How often do you work late, Dr. Kyneton? I mean, is Holloman overloaded with patients requiring your particular skills?”

“Since ours is the only unit in the state with the equipment to perform cerebrovascular surgery, we do tend to be overloaded.”

“So coming home at two or three in the morning is the norm?”

Kyneton chewed his lip, suddenly looked away from his mother, his wife, his interrogator. Hiding something. “It’s not always the O.R.,” he said sulkily.

“If not the O.R., then what?”

“I am a postdoctoral fellow, Lieutenant. I give lectures that have to be prepared, I have to write extremely detailed case notes, I have to do teaching rounds in the hospital, and I’m kept busy training neurosurgical residents.” His gaze remained deflected.

“Your wife tells me that you’re going to buy into a private neurosurgical practice.”

“That’s right, I am. A group in New York City.”

“Thank you, Miss Silverman, Dr. Kyneton. I may have other questions later, but this will do for the present.”

“I’ll walk you out,” said Ruth Kyneton.

“I really don’t need walking out,” Carmine said gently when they reached the porch and the front door was shut.

“Glad to know there’s two of us ain’t fools.”

“Is that your opinion of them, Mrs. Kyneton? Fools?”

She sighed, kicked a pebble off the boards into the night. “I reckon the fairies musta brought Keith – never fitted in, all airs and graces before he went to kindergarten. But I’ll give him this – he worked his guts out to get an education, improve himself. And I love him for it something chronic. Hilda suits him, y’know. I guess it don’t look like that, but she does.”

“If this private practice comes off, what about you?” he asked, sounding gruff.

“Oh, I ain’t going with them!” she said cheerfully. “I’m gonna stay right here on Griswold Lane. They’ll look after me.”

There were a lot of things Carmine wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, “Good night, Mrs. Kyneton. You’re some woman.”

All the way back to Cedar Street, Carmine struggled with the unexpected discovery that the killer sometimes secreted the girls on the spot and removed them later. It preyed on his mind more than the change in ethnicity did.

“He isn’t begging us to catch him,” he said to Silvestri, “nor is he jerking our strings just to show us how clever he is. I don’t believe that his ego needs that kind of stimulation. If he jerks our strings, it’s because he has to, as part of his plans rather than as a cute aside. Like burying Francine in the Kynetons’ backyard. In my book, that’s a defense mechanism. And it says to me that the killer is connected to the Hug, that he harbors a grudge against someone there – and that he isn’t a scrap worried that we might find him.”

“I think we have to search the Hug,” Silvestri said.

“Yes, sir, and more to the point, we have to search it tomorrow, a Saturday. But we won’t get a warrant out of Judge Douglas Thwaites.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Silvestri growled. “What time is it?”

“Six,” said Carmine, looking at the antique railroad clock behind Silvestri’s head.

“I’ll call M.M. and see if he can’t persuade the Hug Board to give us permission to search. Of course they can have as many Huggers as they want to watch us search, but whom would you prefer, Carmine?”

“Professor Smith and Miss Dupre,” said Carmine promptly.

“He gave her a shot of Demerol,” Patrick said when Carmine walked in. “He couldn’t have gone into a vein with a struggling girl on his hands, but he needed the drug to work as soon as possible. So I looked at her abdomen first, and there it was. With the risk of puncturing intestine or liver, he had to use a big-bore hypodermic – a fine twenty-five-gauge tuberculin syringe would have kept on going rather than pushed things aside. And that was our saving grace. A twenty-five-gauge pinprick would have healed completely in the seven days he kept her alive. The eighteen-gauge made a hole.”

“Why is going into the abdomen quicker than into muscle?”

“It’s called a parenteral injection, mixes the drug with the fluid of the abdominal cavity. Next best thing to a vein. I’d picked that he’d use Demerol, it’s a fast-acting opiate. Generic name, meperidine, and more addictive even than heroin, so getting a prescription for the oral version isn’t easy. Only medical people would have access to ampoules. Anyway, I was right. Up came the meperidine signature.”

“Any idea how much he gave her?”

“No. I found my trace in the dermal cells where the needle went in. But either he miscalculated the dosage or Francine had a better resistance to it than usual. If she managed to hide her jacket, then she came around much sooner than he counted on.”

“No gag, but muffled in a super-thick mat. Tied with maybe duct tape over her pants legs and her blouse. He might have taken the jacket off her himself to tape her blouse cuffs,” Carmine said. “When she woke up, she couldn’t move much, though it’s possible she managed to start freeing her hands. I think Francine was a formidable young woman. The kind we can’t afford to lose.”

“They’re all that kind.” Patrick frowned. “Still, he ought to have seen a pink sleeve poking out of a black mat.”

“The place was dark and he was in a hurry. It’s possible Francine had moved enough to hide what she’d done, or maybe when he opened the locker she came out fighting.”

“Either or,” Patrick said.

“Have you missed dinner, Patsy?”

“Nessie’s gone to a Chubb concert, so it’s Malvolio’s for me.”

“And for me. Meet you there as soon as I tell Silvestri where I’m going.” Carmine grinned. “He’ll be on that phone for at least an hour.”

“The saints preserve me from tycoons,” Silvestri grumbled when he slid into their booth. “At least I’m on my own time, so I can have a drink. Coffee and a double Scotch on the rocks,” he said to the waitress who reminded Carmine of Sandra.

“That bad, huh?” Patrick asked sympathetically.

“M.M. was easy. He appreciated our situation. But Roger Parson Junior was like getting blood out of a stone. He refuses to see any connection to his precious Hug.”

“How did you get around him, John?” Carmine asked.

The Scotch came; Silvestri swallowed some and looked like one of Hell’s executive demons. “I told him to put his money where his mouth is. If there’s no link to the Hug, then the sooner we ransack the joint, the better his case. Though,” he added, still wearing that diabolical look, “I paid a price for his permission.”

“And why,” asked Carmine warily, “do I think someone else is paying the price?”

“Because, Carmine, you’re smart. Next Thursday at noon you have an appointment with Parson at his office in New York City. He wants to know everything we know.”

“I need that like a hole in the head.”

“Pay the price, Carmine, pay the price.”

Chapter 10

Saturday, December 11th, 1965

The best laid schemes can go awry, Carmine reflected on that Saturday morning. There had been an armed robbery at a gas station that the thieves followed up by hitting two liquor stores, a jeweler and another gas station, which thinned his reserve of men down to a point where he knew the search was going to take all day. Corey and Abe and four other detectives, all rookies who would have to be supervised. Right. Two parties of three, Abe leading one, Corey the other, while he himself floated. Paul was on hand in case evidence came to light that needed his touch.

They arrived at the Hug at 9 A.M. to be greeted in the foyer by the Prof and Desdemona, neither of them pleased but each under Board instructions to be co-operative.

“Miss Dupre, you go with Sergeant Marshall and his men on this floor. I presume you have keys to everything that’s locked? Professor, you go one floor up with Sergeant Goldberg. Do you have keys?” Carmine asked.

“Yes,” whispered the Prof, who looked as if he might faint.

“Cecil is in,” Desdemona said to Carmine as they walked down the north hall.

“Because of this search?”

“No, because of his babies. He’s always in weekend mornings. I’ll wait outside in case he has one in the main room. They abhor women,” she said.

“So he told me. You can go with Corey to look in the machine shop and the electronics lab. The last thing I want is Roger Parson Junior accusing us of stealing something. I’ll search animal care myself.”

“I am grateful for that, Lieutenant,” said Cecil, who didn’t seem annoyed at this invasion. “Want to see where my babies live? They in a good mood today.”

I’d be in a good mood too if I lived like this, Carmine said to himself, entering a small foyer shut off from the main macaque room by heavy iron bars. They were so strong, Cecil explained, that, if enraged, they could break chain link like candy canes. The area, very large considering its small population, was landscaped like rocky savannah – a wall of rugged boulders pocked with holes, bushes, tufts of grass, logs, limbed concrete trees, warm light that felt like a hot sun. Rheostats connected to timers ensured that there was a dawn and a dusk.

“Isn’t it unkind to deprive them of females?” Carmine asked.

Cecil chuckled. “They make do, Lieutenant, same as men make do in prison. Hump the shit outta each other. But there’s a pecking order, an’ Eustace, he The Man. New guy arrives, he gets grabbed by Eustace, humped, then he gets passed to Clyde, an’ ol’ Clyde, he passes the new guy on, an’ so on. Jimmy, he the last in the pecking order. Never gets to do more than jerk hisself off.”

“Well, thanks for showing me, Cecil, but I doubt any girl has ever been hidden in here.”

“You dead right there, Lieutenant.”

“What exactly are you looking for?” Desdemona asked when he joined Corey’s group in a workshop that was a machinist’s dream.

“A cupboard with a human hair in it, a shred of clothing, a broken fingernail, a scrap of duct tape, a bloodstain. Anything that shouldn’t be there.”

“Ah, so that’s why the magnifying glasses and the bright lights! I thought that sort of thing went out with Sherlock Holmes.”

“They’re the tools of choice in a search like this. All these men are experts at looking for evidence.”

“Mr. Roger Parson Junior is not amused.”

“So I gather, but ask me if I care. The answer is, I don’t.”

Room by room, closet by closet, cupboard by cupboard, the search went on; satisfied that the first floor had nothing to offer, Corey and his team went up to the third floor, Desdemona and Carmine tagging along.

During this more leisurely inspection of the third floor, Carmine realized that under ordinary circumstances life at the Hug was pleasant; most of the technicians had attempted to turn cold science into warm familiarity. Walls and doors were plastered with cartoons that only someone in the game would find funny; pictures of people were there too, and landscapes, and posters of vividly colored things whose nature Carmine couldn’t begin to fathom, though he could appreciate their beauty.

“Crystals under polarized light,” Desdemona explained, “or pollen, dust mites, viruses under an electron microscope.”

“Some of these work niches look like Mary Poppinsville.”

“Marvin’s, you mean?” she asked, pointing to an area where everything from drawers to boxes and books had been covered with Contact adhesive paper in pink and yellow butterflies. “Think about it, Carmine. People like Marvin spend the most concerted stretch of each twenty-four hours rooted to one spot. Why should that spot be grey and anonymous? Employers don’t stop to think that if the cells people work in were more individual and harmonious, the quality of output might rise. Marvin is the poet, is all.”

“Ponsonby’s technician, right?”

“Correct.”

“Doesn’t Ponsonby object? He doesn’t strike me as a yellow and pink butterfly man, not when he’s got Bosch and Goya on his walls.”

“Chuck would like to object, but the Prof wouldn’t back him up. Theirs is an interesting relationship, goes back to childhood, and the Prof was the boss then as much as now, I suspect.” She spotted Corey about to move an apparatus of fine glass columns on a levered stand, and shrieked. “Don’t you dare touch the Natelson! Stuff it up, mate, and you’ll be singing soprano in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”

“I don’t think,” Carmine said solemnly, “that it’s big enough to hide anything. Look in that closet.”

They looked in every closet from the first floor clear to the roof, but found nothing. Paul came to go over the O.R., swabbing any surface that could possibly collect fluid.

But, said Paul, “I doubt there’s anything to find. This Mrs. Liebman is immaculate, never forgets to clean the corners or the under sides.”

“My feeling,” said Abe, contributing his mite to the gloom, “is that the Hug may have received parts of bodies, but that they were bagged before they arrived, and went straight from someone’s car trunk to the dead animal fridge.”

“A negative exercise, guys, that tells us something,” Carmine said.

“Whatever role the Hug plays in this business, it isn’t a holding pen or a slaughter yard.”

Chapter 11

Monday, December 13th, 1965

The trouble with a case growing as old as the Monster’s was that the amount of work that could be done gradually tapered off; Sunday had been a day of trying to read, flicking from one TV channel to another, some pacing the floor. So it was with relief that Carmine arrived at the Hug at 9 A.M. on Monday morning. To find a crowd of black men clustered outside it bearing placards that said CHILD KILLERS and BLACK HATERS. Most of them wore a Black Brigade jacket over combat fatigues. Two squad cars were parked nearby, but the picketers were orderly, content to shout and lift their fists in Mohammed el Nesr’s personally coined gesture. No Black Brigade chiefs were there, Carmine noted; these were small fry, hoping to catch a TV journalist or two in their net. When Carmine walked up the path to the entrance door, they ignored him apart from a flurry of yelled “Pig!”

Of course the weekend news had been full of Francine Murray. Carmine had passed on Derek Daiman’s warning to Silvestri at the time, but although nothing had happened until today, any sensitive cop nose could sniff trouble coming. Holloman wasn’t the only town involved, but it seemed to have become the focus of all indignation, general and particular. The Hug’s part in things ensured that, and one thing for sure, the newspapers weren’t crowning their pictures of John Silvestri and Carmine Delmonico with laurels; the weekend editorials had been diatribes against police incompetency.

“Did you see them?” the Prof spluttered when Carmine entered his office. “Did you see them?” Demonstrators, here!”

“Hard not to see them, Professor,” Carmine said dryly. “Calm down and listen to me. Is there anyone you can think of who might bear a grudge against the Hug? Like a patient?”

The Prof hadn’t washed his magnificent hair, and his shave had missed as many bristles as it caught. Evidence of a crumbling ego or personality or whatever the shrinks called it. “I don’t know,” he said, as if Carmine had come out with something just too ludicrous to imagine.

“Do you see any patients yourself, sir?”

“No, not in years, except for an occasional consultation on some case that has everyone baffled. Since the Hug was opened, my function has been to be here for my researchers, discuss their problems with them if they’re in a dilemma or things haven’t gone the way they hoped. I advise them, sometimes suggest new avenues for them to explore. Those, my teaching and lecture schedule and my reading leave me too busy to see patients.”

“Who does see patients? Refresh my memory.”

“Addison Forbes, most of all, as his research is entirely clinical. Dr. Ponsonby and Dr. Finch see a few patients, while Dr. Polonowski has a big clinic. He’s very good on malabsorption syndromes.”

Why can’t they speak English? Carmine wanted to ask. But he said, “So you suggest I should see Dr. Forbes first?”

“In any order you like,” said the Prof, buzzing for Tamara.

There’s another Hugger who doesn’t look too swift, Carmine noted. I wonder what she’s up to? Fine-looking and sexy woman, but she knows she hasn’t got too many good years left.

Addison Forbes looked blank. “See patients?” he asked. “I should say so, Lieutenant! My patient intake can run to thirty-plus a week. Certainly never less than twenty. I’m so well known that my patient pool is not only national, but international.”

“Is it possible that one of them harbors a grudge against you or the Hug, Doctor?”

“My dear man,” Forbes said loftily, “It’s a rare patient who understands his malady! The moment a treatment doesn’t perform miracles when he has led himself to believe it will, he blames his doctor. But I am particularly careful to point out to all my patients that I am an ordinary doctor, not a witch doctor, and that improvement in itself is an advance.”

He’s huffy, intolerant and patronizing as well as neurotic was Carmine’s opinion, which he didn’t voice. Instead he asked mildly, “Do any of them ever threaten you?”

Forbes looked shocked. “No, never! If you’re after patients who threaten, then you should be seeing surgeons, not physicians.”

“The Hug doesn’t have any surgeons.”

“Nor any threats from patients” was Forbes’s stiff reply.

From Dr. Walter Polonowski he found out that a malabsorption syndrome meant a patient couldn’t tolerate what Nature had intended as food for everyone, or else had developed a liking for substances Nature hadn’t intended as food for anyone.

“Amino acids, fruits or vegetables, lead, copper, gluten, all kinds of fats,” said Polonowski, taking pity on him. “If you see enough patients, the list of substances is almost endless. Honey can cause anaphylactic shock, for instance. But what I’m chiefly interested in are the group of substances that cause brain damage.”

“Have you any patients who resent you?”

“I guess any doctor must, Lieutenant, but personally I can’t recall any instances. With my patients, the harm has been done before ever they get to see me.”

Yet another worn-looking Hugger, Carmine thought.

Dr. Maurice Finch looked much worse.

“I blame myself for Dr. Schiller’s attempted suicide,” said Finch desolately.

“What’s done is done, and you can’t say that you were the cause, Dr. Finch, you really can’t. Dr. Schiller has a lot of problems, as I’m sure you know. Besides, you saved his life,” said Carmine. “Blame the person who put Mercedes Alvarez here. Now take your mind off Dr. Schiller for a moment and try to remember if any of your patients have ever threatened you. Or if you have ever heard a patient utter threats against the Hug itself?”

“No,” said Finch, looking bewildered. “No, never.”

An answer he also received from Dr. Charles Ponsonby, though Ponsonby’s face became alert, interested.

“It’s certainly a thought,” he said, frowning. “One forgets that that kind of thing happens, but of course it must. I will put my thinking cap on, Lieutenant, and try to remember on behalf of my colleagues as well as myself. Though I’m just about a hundred percent sure that it’s never happened to me. I’m too harmless.”

From the Hug Carmine walked down Oak Street in the teeth of a bitter wind to the Chubb Medical School, where he negotiated the usual maze of corridors and tunnels such institutions specialize in, and at last found the Department of Neurology. There he asked to see Professor Frank Watson.

Who saw him immediately, clearly reveling in the Hug’s misfortunes, though he did remember to deplore the murders.

“I hear that it was you who gave the Hughlings Jackson Center its nickname, Professor,” said Carmine, smiling a little.

Watson swelled like a toad, stroked his thin black mustache and lifted one mobile black eyebrow. “Yes, I did. They hate it, don’t they? Ab-so-lute-ly hate it. Especially Bob Smith.”

How you enjoy playing Mephistopheles! Carmine thought. “Do you hate the Hug?”

“With a passion,” the Professor of Neurology said candidly. “Here am I, with just as many brilliant people on my team, and I battle for every single cent of research money I can find. Do you know how many Nobel Prize winners there are in this medical school, Lieutenant? Nine! Imagine it – nine! And none of them is a Hugger. They’re in my camp, existing on beggarly grants. Bob Smith can afford to buy equipment he uses once in a blue moon if at all, while I have to count the number of gauze swabs I use! All that money was the ruin of Bob Smith, who might otherwise have discovered something neurologically significant. He doesn’t work, he languishes. A poseur.”

“Hurts that much, huh?” Carmine asked.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Frank Watson said savagely. “It’s pure, unadulterated agony!”

A trip back to Cedar Street revealed that Francine Murray’s jacket had yielded no clues apart from its presence in the locker, which also failed to help. From Silvestri he learned that Travis had survived the day thus far; there had actually been more trouble at Taft High, whose student intake included the Argyle Avenue ghetto. What they all need, he thought, is some sane political direction, but at least there’s one good thing about Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade: start on drugs, even something as innocuous as pot, and you’re out of his organization. He wants his soldiers clear of mind and firm of purpose. And that’s good, no matter what his purpose might be. Thank God for Silvestri and the Mayor: as long as the Black Brigade do nothing more than drill up and down Fifteenth Street with broomsticks over their left shoulders, they’re not hassled. Only what kind and how many armaments have they got behind those mattressed walls? One day someone will talk, and then we’ll get the warrant we need to take a look.

December first…Our man will strike again around the end of January or the beginning of February, and we’re as far from catching him as Mohammed el Nesr is from convincing the bulk of Holloman’s black population that revolution is the way to go.

He picked up his phone, dialed. “I know it’s not Wednesday, but any chance I could come pick you up and take you out for Chinese or something else with me?” he asked Desdemona.

He looked, she thought, extremely uncomfortable, though he smiled when she slid into his Ford and tried to make small talk until he bolted out of the car, into the Blue Pheasant, and out again with an armload of cardboard containers.

Then it was silence, even after he had done his finicky transferring of the food to covered white bowls and seated her at the table.

“You do make work for yourself,” she said, piling food on her plate and inhaling the aromas blissfully. “I’d be happy to eat it straight out of the boxes, you know.”

“That would be an insult,” he said, but absently.

Because she was hungry she said nothing more until the meal was finished, then she pushed her plate away and, when he reached to take it, grasped his arm firmly. “No, sit down, Carmine, and tell me what’s the matter.”

He looked down at her hand as if surprised at something, then sighed and sat. Before she could take her hand away he put his own over it and kept it there.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to remove your guards.”

“Is that all? Carmine, it’s been weeks since anything has happened. I’m sure whoever it was grew bored ages ago. Did it not occur to you that perhaps all this has been because sometimes I do embroidery for the Catholic church? After all, the only thing that was cut up was a priest’s vestment – it might be that whoever it was thought Chuck Ponsonby’s piece was suspicious but not definitely religious – it did have that long, narrow altar look to it. Sideboard cloths do.”

“It occurred to me,” he admitted.

“So there you are. I now do commissions for household napery only – tablecloths and serviettes – oops, napkins.”

“Commissions?”

“Yes, I charge for my work. Very heavily, as a matter of fact. People with means get tired of the same old cross-stitch or eyelet stuff they churn out by the bucketful in countries with cottage industries. What I do is unique. People love it, and my bank balance grows considerably.” She looked guilty. “I haven’t declared it – why should I, when I pay full taxes yet can’t vote? It doesn’t matter to you as a policeman, does it?”

His fingers had been moving over the skin of her forearm as if they liked the feel of it, but now they stopped. “Sometimes,” he said gravely, “I have attacks of deafness. What was that you said? Something about not voting?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She took her hand away, looking self-conscious. “We’ve solved the major matter, which is the removal of my guards. I am relieved, quite honestly. Though there are solid doors between me and them, I never feel really private. So good riddance to them, I say.” She hesitated. “When?”

“I’m not sure. The weather may be your best friend. In case you didn’t notice, the wind’s getting up and the chill factor will fall way below freezing tomorrow. That drives everyone indoors.” He rose from the table. “Come and sit over here, get nice and comfortable, have a cognac, and talk to me.”

“Talk to you?”

“Right, talk to me. I need to know certain things, and you are the only one I can ask.”

“Ask what?”

“About the Hug.”

She pulled a face, but accepted the cognac, which he took as acquiescence. “Very well, ask away.”

“I understand the Prof’s state of mind, also Dr. Finch’s, but why is Polonowski so edgy? I ask, Desdemona, because I want you to give me answers that don’t have to do with murder. If I don’t know why a Hugger acts suspiciously, I tend to think of murder, and maybe waste a lot of valuable time. I’d hoped that Francine would clear you all, but she hasn’t. This guy is as cunning as a sewer rat, so he had a way of being in two places at once. Give me the low-down on Polonowski.”

“Walt’s in love with his technician, Marian, but he’s also tied hand and foot to a marriage I think he regretted years ago,” she said, swirling the brandy in its balloon. “There are four children – they’re very Catholic, hence no contraception.”

“Loose not the stopper of thy wineskin until thou reachest Athens,” Carmine quoted.

“Well put!” she cried appreciatively. “I suppose poor Walt is one of those chaps whose wineskin has a mind of its own when he climbs into bed next to his wife’s wine cup. Her name’s Paola, and she’s a nice woman who’s turned into a shrew. Much younger than he, and blaming him for the loss of her youth and looks.”

“Is he having an out-and-out affair with Marian?”

“Yes, for months.”

“Where do they meet? At Major Minor’s some afternoons?” he asked, referring to the motel on Route 133 that did a brisk trade in illicit fornication.

“No. He has a cabin somewhere upstate.”

Shit, thought Carmine. The guy has a cabin we didn’t know about. How handy. “Do you know where it is?”

“Afraid not. He won’t even tell Paola.”

“Is the affair common knowledge?”

“No, they’re very discreet.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Because I found Marian in the fourth-floor toilet howling her eyes out. She thought she was pregnant. When I sympathized and advised her to have herself fitted with a diaphragm if she was hesitant about the Pill, the whole story tumbled out.”

“And was she pregnant?”

“No. False alarm.”

“Okay, let’s move on to Ponsonby. He’s got some weird art on his office walls, not to mention shrunken heads and devil masks. Torture, monsters swallowing their children whole, people screaming.”

Her laughter pealed out so infectiously that he felt warmed. “Oh, Carmine! That’s just Chuck! The art is simply one more facet of Chuck’s insufferable snobbishness. I feel sorry for him.”

“Why?”

“Hasn’t anyone told you that he has a blind sister?”

“I do my homework, Desdemona, so I do know that. I take it she’s the reason why he stayed in Holloman. But why do you feel sorry for him? Her, yes.”

“Because he’s built his entire life around her. Never married, no close relatives, though they’ve known the Smiths since childhood. There are just the two of them in a pre-Revolutionary house on Ponsonby Lane. Once they owned all the land for a mile around, but Claire’s education was expensive, so was Chuck’s, and I gather they were hard up in their parents’ day. They’ve certainly sold all the land off. Chuck adores surrealist art and classical music. Claire can’t see the art, but she’s a music fan too. They’re both gourmets and wine buffs. I suppose I feel sorry for him because when he speaks of their life together, he waxes rhapsodical, which is – well, strange. She’s his sister, not his wife, though some of the crueler members of the staff do joke about them. I think that in his heart of hearts Chuck must resent at least some aspects of being tied to Claire, but he’s far too loyal to admit that, even to himself. He certainly can’t be the Monster, he doesn’t have the time or the liberty.”

“I just found the artwork weird,” he said apologetically.

“I like the artwork. Either you do, or you don’t.”

“Okay, moving on again. Sonia Liebman.”

“A very nice woman, very good at her job. She’s married to an undertaker, Benjamin Liebman. Their one chick is at a college near Tucson, doing pre-med. Wants to be a general surgeon.”

An undertaker. Shit, I didn’t do enough homework. “Does Benjamin work for someone, or is he retired?”

“Good heavens, no! He has his own establishment somewhere near Bridgeport.” Desdemona closed her eyes, screwed them up. “Um – the Comfort Funeral Home, I think.”

Double shit. An ideal place for a killer into dissection. I’ll have to pay the Comfort Funeral Home a visit tomorrow.

“Satsuma and Chandra?”

“Looking for jobs elsewhere. Rumor hath it that Nur Chandra has already had an offer from Harvard, anxious to even the Nobel Prize score. Hideki is still not sure. His decision somehow rests on the harmonies in his garden.”

Carmine sighed. “Who’s your pick, Desdemona?”

She blinked. “No one at the Hug, I say that with truth. I’ve been there for five years, which makes me a latecomer. Most of the researchers are a bit bonkers in one way or another, but that goes with the territory. They’re so – harmless. Dr. Finch talks to his cats as if they could talk back, Dr. Chandra treats his macaques like Indian royalty – even Dr. Ponsonby, who’s less fond of his rats than the others, shows interest in their doings. None of the researchers is psychotic, I’d swear to that.”

“Ponsonby isn’t fond of his rats?”

“Carmine, truly! Dr. Ponsonby plain doesn’t like rats! A lot of people don’t like rats, including me. Most researchers get used to them and manage to develop great affection for them, but not all. Marvin will pick up a rat with his bare hand to give it a shot in the tummy, and it will kiss him with its whiskers for the attention. Whereas Dr. Ponsonby uses a furnace glove if he can’t get out of picking up a rat. Their incisors can go straight through a thinner glove – well, they can gnaw through concrete!”

“You are not helping, Desdemona.”

Tiny sharp taps on the window brought Desdemona to her feet. “Bugger, sleet! Just ducky for driving. Take me home, Carmine.”

And that, he thought with an inner sigh, is the end of any trying to hold her hand again. It’s not that she turns me on, it’s more that somewhere underneath all that competent independence is a darned nice woman struggling to get out.

Chapter 12

Thursday, December 16th, 1965

Since it hadn’t snowed before Thanksgiving and the first half of December had been no colder than usual, most Connecticut people thought Christmas might be green. Then it snowed heavily the night before Carmine was due to go to New York City to see the Parsons. As he loathed trains and was not about to make his journey jammed in a railroad car that stank of wet wool, bad breath and cigarettes, Carmine set out early in the Ford to find I-95 down from three to two lanes, but negotiable. Once he hit Manhattan only the avenues had been ploughed, chiefly because no one could ever get enough cars off the streets to plough. Where he was going to park the Ford he had no idea as he inched down Park Avenue until he could turn up Madison, but Roger Parson Junior had thought of it. When he stopped outside a building that was neither the largest nor the smallest on that block, a uniformed doorman rushed out to take the keys and shove them at a minion. He himself conducted Carmine into a purply princely lobby of Lovanto marble, past the bank of elevators to a single one at its end. The executive elevator: a lock on its controls and a decor fit for executives.

Roger Parson Junior met him when its doors opened on the forty-third floor, Richard Spaight at his shoulder but subtly behind.

“Lieutenant, I’m very glad that you braved the weather to come. Did you take the train?”

“No, I drove. It’s harder getting around in Manhattan than coming in from Connecticut,” said Carmine, handing over his coat, scarf and deerstalker hat.

Parson stared at the hat in fascination. “Ah – a conscious reminder of Sherlock Holmes?”

“If you mean joke, sir, I guess so. I bought it in London a few years ago, when Russian hats weren’t too popular with Joe McCarthy. Keeps the ears warm.”

A middle-aged secretary stomped off with the clothes while Parson ushered Carmine into a smallish conference room equipped with six easy chairs ringed around a coffee table, and six dining chairs ringed around a higher table. The floor was parquet scattered with silk Persian carpets, the furniture bird’s-eye maple, the bookcases fronted with leaded-glass diamonds. Plush but businesslike, except for the paintings on the walls.

“A part of Uncle William’s art collection,” said Spaight, indicating that Carmine should sit in an easy chair. “Rubens, Velásquez, Poussin, Vermeer, Canaletto, Titian. Strictly speaking the collection belongs to Chubb University, but we are at liberty to delay the bequest, and, candidly, we enjoy looking at them.”

“I don’t blame you,” Carmine said, wondering as he put his posterior on the maroon leather of his chair whether any fabric as cheap as that of his pants had ever before besmirched it.

“I understand,” said Roger Parson Junior, crossing one thin, elegantly sheathed leg over the other, “that the Hug is now the center of racial demonstrations.”

“Yes, sir, whenever the weather’s bearable.”

“Why aren’t you doing something about it?”

“The last time I looked at the Constitution, Mr. Parson, it permitted orderly demonstrations of any kind, including racial,” Carmine said in a neutral voice. “If riots occur, we can act, not otherwise. Nor do we think it wise to use strong-arm tactics that might provoke riots. It’s embarrassing for the Hug, but its staff aren’t being molested as they come and go.”

“You must admit, Lieutenant, that from where we stand, the Holloman police haven’t exactly shone at any time in the last two and a half months,” said Spaight, tight-lipped. “This murdering fellow seems to be running rings around all of you. Perhaps it’s time to call in the FBI.”

“We are consulting the FBI regularly, sir, I can assure you, but the FBI is just as short of leads as we are. We have asked every state in the Union for particulars of crimes of a similar nature, with no positive results. In the past two weeks we have, for instance, checked the credentials and placement of several hundred substitute schoolteachers, with no positive results. Nothing that might offer a solution has been ignored.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Parson peevishly, “is why he is still at large! You must have some idea who is responsible!”

“Police methodology depends on a network of connections,” Carmine said, having thought about what he was going to say as he made his long drive. “Under normal circumstances there is a pool of likely suspects, whether you’re talking murder or armed robbery or drug dealing. We all know each other, the criminals and the cops. We, the cop end of the equation, conduct our investigations down a well-worn track, because that’s how it works best. Men of my rank have been at the job long enough to have developed pretty shrewd instincts about who’s at the criminal end of the equation. Murders have patterns, signatures. Robberies have patterns, signatures. They lead us to those who did it.”

“This murderer has a pattern, a signature,” said Spaight.

“That’s not what I’m talking about, Mr. Spaight. This killer is a ghost. He abducts a girl, but he leaves not one single trace of himself behind. No one has ever seen him, even heard him. No girl seems to have known him. As soon as we realized he was into victims with a Caribbean background and had a chance to protect every girl of his type, he switched to a Connecticut black, Pennsylvania white cross. Same physical type of girl, but a different ethnic background. Taken from an inner-city high school with fifteen hundred students. He varied his technique in other ways I’m not at liberty to tell you. What I can tell you, sirs, is that we are no farther ahead than we were two and a half months ago. Because the network of connections isn’t there. He’s not a professional criminal, he’s an anonymous nonentity. A ghost.”

“Might he have a record of some other crime? Rape?”

“We’ve been there too, Mr. Parson, with a fine-toothed comb. My own feeling is that he’s as much a rapist as he is a killer, that maybe the rape is more important to him than the murder, that he only kills to make sure the victim can’t talk. I have personally gone through hundreds of files looking for anything that might suggest a rapist who’s raised the ante. When none of the convicted or accused rapists matched, I went to cases where the girl or woman dropped the charges – that happens often. I looked at pictures of girls, descriptions of their rape, but my cop instincts never stirred. If he was there, I’m sure they would have stirred.”

“Then he must be young,” said Spaight.

“What makes you say that, sir?”

“His history is two years old. Such shocking crimes would surely have produced symptoms of mania before that if he were an older man.”

“A good point, but I don’t think this killer is very young, no, sir. He’s cold, calculating, resourceful, without conscience or the shadow of a doubt. All that suggests maturity, not youth.”

“Might he be of the same ethnic background as his victims?”

“We had all thought of that possibility, Mr. Parson, until he crossed the ethnic line. One of the FBI psychiatrists thought he might look like his victims – same color, say – but if such a man exists, we haven’t spotted him and he doesn’t have a record.”

“So what you’re really saying, Lieutenant, is that if – or when – this murderer is caught, it won’t be by any of your more traditional methods.”

“Yes,” said Carmine flatly, “that’s what I’m really saying. Like so many others, he’ll crash by a fluke or an accident.”

“Not an opinion that inspires confidence,” said Parson dryly.

“Oh, we’ll get him, sir. We’ve pushed him into changes, and we’ll go on pushing him. I don’t think his frame of mind is as serene as it was.”

“Serene?” asked Spaight, astonished. “Surely not!”

“Why not?” Carmine countered. “He doesn’t have feelings, Mr. Spaight, as you and I understand feelings. He’s insane but sane.”

“How many more girls are going to die an agonizing death?” Parson asked, the words barbed.

Carmine’s face twisted. “If I could answer that question, I would know the killer’s identity.”

A uniformed maid came in wheeling a cart and proceeded to set the higher table.

“I trust you’ll stay for lunch, Lieutenant?” Roger Parson Junior asked, rising to his feet.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sit down, do.”

Carmine seated himself to look at Lenox tableware.

“We are patriots,” said Spaight, sitting on Carmine’s right as Parson went to Carmine’s left. Fenced in.

“In what way, Mr. Spaight?”

“American tableware, American linens. American everything, really. It was Uncle William who liked foreign matter.”

Foreign matter. Not the phrase I’d use to describe the rug, thought Carmine. Or the Velásquez.

A butler and the maid waited on table: Nova Scotia smoked salmon with thin brown bread-and-butter, roast veal au jus with pommes Lyonnaise and steamed spinach, a cheese plate and superb coffee. No alcohol.

“The martini lunch,” said Richard Spaight, “is a curse. If I know a client has indulged in one, I will not see him. Business requires a clear head.”

“So does policing,” said Carmine. “In that respect, Commissioner Silvestri runs a dry ship. No alcohol unless off duty, and no lushes on the force.” He was facing the Poussin, dreamily beautiful. “It’s lovely,” he said to his host.

“Yes, we chose tranquil works for this room. The wartime Goyas are in my office. On your way out, however, don’t miss our one and only El Greco. It’s under armored glass at the end of the corridor,” Roger Parson Junior said.

“Have you ever been robbed of any art?” the cop had to ask.

“No, it’s too difficult to get in. Or perhaps it is that there are plenty of easier targets. This is a city of wonderful art. I often amuse myself by working out how I’d steal a good Rembrandt from the Metropolitan or a Picasso from the private dealer on Fifty-third. Were I serious, I believe neither would be impossible.”

“Maybe your Uncle William knew the tricks too.”

Richard Spaight tittered. “He certainly did! In his day it was a great deal easier, of course. If you were at Pompeii or in Florence, all you had to do was tip the guide ten dollars. You should see the Roman mosaic floor in the conservatory at the old house in Litchfield – magnificent.”

Merry Christmas, ha ha, Carmine thought as he climbed into the pre-warmed Ford to commence the drive home. It isn’t either of them, though if a Rembrandt goes missing from the Metropolitan, I can tip off the NYPD where to look. M.M. will be under the ground before that bunch give up Uncle William’s collection, even if it is foreign matter.

Chapter 13

Friday, December 24th, 1965

“Oh, bother!” said Desdemona, nose twitching. “That wretched sewer vent is playing up again.” For a moment she debated whether to knock on her landlord’s door as she went down the stairs, then decided against it. He wasn’t too pleased at the presence of cops on his premises, and had been hinting that it might be better if Desdemona found herself new digs. So she would bear the sewer vent without another confrontation.

When she opened her door the stench of feces hit her forcibly, but she didn’t notice. All she saw was the blackened, congested face of Charlie, the cop who usually took the night watch on a Thursday night. He was lying as if he had struggled desperately, arms and legs akimbo, but it was the face, the face…Swollen, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. Part of Desdemona wanted to scream, but that would have marked her as a typical woman, and Desdemona had spent half a lifetime proving to the world that she was any man’s equal. Hanging on to the door jambs, she forced herself to remain unmoving for long enough to be sure she could stand. Tears gathered, fell. Oh, Charlie! Such a boring duty, he had told her once, asking for a book. He’d gone through everything he fancied in the County Services library, which wasn’t many. A Raymond Chandler or a Mickey Spillane? But the best she had been able to offer him was an Agatha Christie, which he hadn’t liked or understood.

There, that did it. Desdemona let go of the jambs and began to turn to retreat to her phone. Then she noticed the big piece of paper stuck over the window that let light into the upper landing. Glaringly black on glaring white, immaculate printing.

YOU’RE A SNEAK,

YOU UTTER FREAK!

THAT DAGO FELLOW

IS NO OTHELLO,

BUT I’LL GET YOU YET!

UNTIL THAT DAY – SWEAT!

“Carmine,” she said calmly when he came on the line, “I need you. Charlie is dead. Murdered.” A gulp, a long intake of breath. “Right outside my door. Please come!”

“Is it still open?” he asked, equally calm.

“Yes.”

“Then shut it, Desdemona, right this minute.”

Hardly any desk sergeant had ever seen Carmine Delmonico go past at a run, but he was flying, Abe and Corey racing behind with his coat, his hat, his scarf. Not a minute later Patrick O’Donnell was on his tail.

“Wow!” said Sergeant Larry D’Aglio to his clerk. “The shit must be hitting the fan in all directions.”

“Not on a morning like this,” said the clerk. “Too cold.”

“Garotted with piano wire,” said Patrick. “The poor bastard! He put up a fight, but reflexive. The wire was round his neck and through the loop before he knew what was happening.”

“Loop?” asked Carmine, turning from the doggerel on the window.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it. A loop at one end of the wire, a wooden handle at the other. Slip the handle through the loop, step back, and yank with all your might. Charlie never managed to lay a hand on him.”

“Then he stuck up his notice cold as ice – look at it, Patsy! Absolutely straight, exactly in the middle of the pane – how did he fix it there?”

Patrick looked up and looked amazed. “Jesus!”

“Well, Paul can tell us when he takes it down.” Carmine squared his shoulders. “Time I knocked on her door.”

“How was she when she phoned it in?”

“Not gibbering, at any rate.” He knocked, called out loudly. “Desdemona, it’s Carmine! Let me in.”

Her face was pinched and white, her hands shook, but she was in command of herself. No excuse to take her in his arms and try to comfort her.

“Some red herring,” she said.

“Yes, he’s upped the ante. What have you got to drink?”

“Tea. I’m English, we don’t go in for cognac. Just tea. Made the proper way, on leaves, not bags. Holloman is quite a civilized place, you know. There’s a tea and coffee shop where I can get Darjeeling.” She led the way to her kitchen. “I made it when I heard the sirens.”

No mugs; cups and saucers, frail, hand painted. The teapot was covered with what looked like a Dolly Varden doll, its spout and handle poking out of opposite ends of a thickly padded crinoline finished with frills. Milk, sugar, cookies even. Well, maybe scrupulous attention to domestic rituals is her way of being strong. Coping.

“Milk in first,” she said, lifting the doll off the pot.

He wasn’t game to tell her that he took it the American way, weak, no milk, a slice of lemon. So he sipped the scalding liquid politely and waited.

“You saw the notice?” she asked, looking better for the tea.

“Yes. You can’t stay here now, of course.”

“I doubt I’d be let! My landlord wasn’t happy about my guards. Now he’ll be foaming at the mouth. But where can I go?”

“Protective custody. We keep an apartment in my building for people like you.”

“I can’t afford the rent.”

“Protective custody means no rent, Desdemona.”

Why was she such a miser?

“I see. Then I’d better start packing. I don’t have much.”

“Have some more tea first, and answer some questions. Did you hear anything unusual during the night? See Charlie?”

“No, I heard nothing. I’m a deep sleeper. Charlie said hello when he arrived – I heard him come in, even though it was later than my usual bedtime. He’s usually on the cadge for a book, even if he doesn’t like my choice of authors very much.”

“Did you give him one last night?” No need to tell her that Charlie wasn’t supposed to read on duty.

“Yes, a Ngaio Marsh. The name intrigued him, he didn’t know how to pronounce it. I thought he might like her better than Agatha Christie – Marsh’s victims usually die in a terrible mess of excrement.” She shuddered. “Just like Charlie.”

“Any sign that he actually entered this apartment?”

“No, and believe me, I’ve looked. Not a pin out of place.”

“But he could have. This is one thing I didn’t count on.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Carmine, please.”

He got up. “Does anything ever make you scream, Desdemona?”

“Oh, yes,” she said gravely. “Spiders and cockroaches.”

“Zilch as usual,” Patrick said in Silvestri’s office. “No fingerprints, no fibers, no detritus of any kind. He must have used a measure on the window, the notice – it’s too big to be called a note – was so perfectly placed. Equidistant to a millimeter. And he fixed it with four little balls of Plasticene, pressed the four corners into it, even adjusted the left side to raise it a fraction. And he’s an original! It was done in forty-eight-point Times Bold Letraset. On paper thin enough to have put a lined graticule behind it – every letter is dead even. Cheap cartridge drawing block, the kind kids buy at any big chain store. He pressed the Letraset down with something rounded and metal – a knife handle or maybe a scalpel handle. Not a stylus, too blunt.”

“Can you get any idea of how big his hands are from the way he pressed the paper into the Plasticene?” Marciano asked.

“No. I think he put a rag between his fingers and the paper.”

“What made you say the garotte was unusual, Patsy?” Carmine asked, sighing. “A loop and handle’s not that unique.”

“This one is. The handle isn’t wood as I thought. It’s a carved human femur. But he didn’t carve it. It looks incredibly old, so I’m carbon dating it. The wire is piano wire.”

“Did it bite in hard enough to cut the skin?” Silvestri asked.

“No, just hard enough to occlude the airway and carotids.”

“He’s used one before.”

“Oh, yes, he’s had plenty of practice.”

“But he left his garotte behind. Does that mean he’s finished playing with this toy?” Abe asked.

“I’d say so.”

“Do you still think Desdemona Dupre is a red herring?” asked Corey, more upset then the others; Charlie’s wife was great friends with his own wife.

“I can’t believe she’s anything else!” Carmine cried, hands in his hair. “She’s no dummy – if she knew anything, she’d have told me.”

“What’s your theory on her, Carmine?” Silvestri asked.

“That he picked her for several reasons. One, that she’s a loner. Easier to get at. Another, that she’s about as far from his victim type as women can get. And maybe most important of all, he knows that Desdemona is the one Hugger I make use of, always have done. The note – notice – calls her a sneak.”

“What about the notice?” Silvestri pressed.

“Oh, it’s a doozy, sir! I mean, the phraseology is more an international English than it is American. He punctuates. ‘Dago’ is used here, but it’s old-fashioned. These days we’re Wops. He indicated his degree of education by referring to me as Othello, whose wife was Desdemona.” He caught the look on Corey’s face and extrapolated. “A real piece of goods named Iago worked on Othello’s possessiveness, his passion for Desdemona. Made Othello think she was unfaithful. So Othello strangled her. Given the circumstances, a garotte was probably as close to strangulation as he could get.”

“Is he setting you up?” Patrick asked.

“I doubt it. He’s set her up. What he was really doing was showing us that nothing we do can protect her if he decides to act.”

“A cop killer!” said Corey savagely.

“A child killer,” said Marciano. “We gotta stop him, Carmine!”

“We will. I’m not letting go, Danny, no matter what.”

The only way into Desdemona’s apartment on the tenth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building was by speaking into an intercom and then punching a ten-number code on a special lock. The code would be changed every day and no one was permitted to write it down, even Desdemona.

Who didn’t complain when Carmine let himself in that evening bearing brown bags full of groceries.

“Darjeeling tea from Scrivener’s – Colombian coffee from the same – brown bread – butter – sliced ham – some TV dinners – fresh raisin bagels – mayonnaise – pickles – chocolate chip cookies – anything I thought you might like,” he said, depositing his bags on the kitchen counter.

“Am I under siege?” she asked. “Am I not allowed to go to work or hike at the weekends?”

“Hiking’s out, that’s for sure, but we’ll eat at Malvolio’s tonight or anywhere else you want. You don’t go out without two cops, and they won’t be reading books,” he said. “The door means I don’t have to waste good men on surveillance, but once you step through it, you’re government property.”

“I shall hate it,” she said, plucking her coat off a hook.

“Then let’s hope it won’t be for very long.”