On, Off

Chapter 14

Saturday, January 1st, 1966

The phone woke Carmine from a deep sleep shortly before 8 A.M. on New Year’s Day, one of the few times in almost three months that he had decided to let body and brain sleep themselves out. Not because he had celebrated the passing of the old year; though it had been the most harrowing of his life, he had many reasons to think that the new one might be even worse. Therefore, his New Year’s Eve had been spent alone in his apartment watching the crowd in Times Square on TV. It had occurred to him to invite Desdemona up from two floors down, but he decided against it because it worried him that perhaps she was very tired of his company. If she ate out, he was the one who escorted her, paid for their dinner no matter how she carped about what he deemed no more than common courtesy. The result was that he went to bed long before midnight, had a fantastic sleep and was ready to be awakened when the phone rang.

“Delmonico,” he said.

“It’s Danny,” came Marciano’s voice. “Carmine, get up to New London right now. There’s been another abduction. Dublin Road, on the Groton side of the river. Abe and Corey are on their way in, so is Patrick. The New London cops will wait for you.”

He was upright immediately, conscious of a sweat the 50°F thermostat hadn’t produced; he liked to sleep cold, it kept him from throwing the covers off. “But it can’t be,” he said, shivering. “It’s only been thirty days since Francine, the guy isn’t due to strike until the end of the month.”

“We’re not sure it’s the same guy – the abduction took place during the night, for starters, and this is a new experience for the New London cops. Get up there and tell them what they’ve got.”

Abe driving, they screamed the forty miles to New London, Paul and Patrick in their van behind them.

“Thirty days, it’s only been thirty days!” Abe said as I-95 began to run into New London; he hadn’t said a word until then.

“Take the Groton turnoff just over the bridge,” said Corey, a map spread on his knees. “It can’t be the same guy, Carmine.”

“We’ll know in a few minutes, so take it easy.”

The location wasn’t hard to find; every squad car in all of New London County looked to be parked up and down the verges of a street containing modest houses in fifth-of-an-acre blocks; Dublin Road, Groton.

The house a patrolman indicated was grey-painted, a single-storey dwelling too small to qualify as ranch style. Very much the home of a workingman having pride in himself and his property. One glance at it, and Carmine knew with sinking heart that the people who lived inside were as respected as respectable. A perfect family for the killer’s purposes.

“Tony Dimaggio,” said a man in captain’s uniform, hand out to Carmine. “A sixteen-year-old black girl named Margaretta Bewlee was snatched during the night. Mr. Bewlee seems to think through the bedroom window, but I haven’t let any of my guys near it for fear they’d destroy evidence – this is way out of our league if the Monster’s got her. Come inside,” he said, preceding Carmine. “The mother’s a basket case, but Mr. Bewlee’s holding up.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I take Dr. O’Donnell to the outside of the window. Thanks for your forbearance, Tony.”

The family was blue-black: father, mother, a young teenaged girl and two boys coming up toward their teens.

“Mr. Bewlee? Lieutenant Delmonico. Tell me what happened.”

He was that shade of grey that spoke of extreme travail in dark-skinned people, but he managed to control his feelings; to lose hold of them might mean all the difference to Margaretta, and he knew it. His wife, still in robe and slippers, sat as if turned to stone, eyes glazed over.

Mr. Bewlee drew a breath. “We toasted the New Year, then we went to bed, Lieutenant. All of us – no night owls here, so we could hardly keep our eyes open.”

“Did you drink something alcoholic, like sparkling wine?”

“No, just fruit punch. This isn’t a drinking house.”

His face was clouding; when he couldn’t seem to grasp what came next, he gazed at Carmine imploringly. Help me, help me!

“Where do you work, Mr. Bewlee?”

“I’m a precision welder at Electric Boat, due for a pay raise in a couple of weeks. We’ve just been waiting for the raise to move house, buy something bigger.” The tears flowed and he halted.

“Introduce your children to me, Mr. Bewlee.”

Their father collected himself, sure he could manage that. “This is Linda, she’s fourteen. Hank’s eleven, Ray’s ten. We have a little guy, Terence. He’s two and sleeps in our bedroom. Linda took him next door to Mrs. Spinoza. We figured he didn’t need – didn’t need -” He broke down, buried his face in his hands, battled to compose himself. “I’m sorry, I can’t -”

“Take your time, Mr. Bewlee.”

“Etta – that’s what we call her – and Linda share a room.”

“Share?”

“That’s right, Lieutenant. There’s two of them in there. We didn’t get up real early, but when my wife started making us some breakfast, she called out to the girls. Linda said Etta was in the bathroom, but it turned out the boys were, not Etta. So we started looking for her, couldn’t find her. That was when I called the police. All I could think of was the Monster. But it can’t be him, can it? He’s not due yet, and Etta’s like the rest of us – black. I mean, we’re real black. He wouldn’t want our little girl, Lieutenant.”

How could he answer that? Carmine turned to Etta’s sister. “Linda, is that right?” he asked, smiling at her.

“Yes, sir,” she managed, weeping.

“I’m not going to say, don’t cry, Linda, but you can help your sister best if you answer me, okay?”

“Okay.” She mopped her face.

“You and Etta went to bed at the same time, right?”

“Yes, sir. Half after midnight.”

“Your daddy says all of you were sleepy. Is that true?”

“Whacked,” said Linda simply.

“So you both went straight to bed.”

“Yes, sir, soon as we said our prayers.”

“Does Etta mind saying her prayers?”

Linda’s eyes dried; she looked shocked. “No, sir, no!”

“Did you talk any after you were in bed?”

“No, sir, least I didn’t. I was asleep soon as I lay down.”

“Did you hear any noises during the night? Wake up to go to the bathroom?”

“No, sir, I slept until Mom called us. Though I did think it was funny that Etta was up ahead of me. She’s a real tiger for sleeping in. Then I thought she must have snuck off to beat me to the bathroom, but when I banged on the door, Hank answered.”

The child had a beautiful face, liquid dark eyes, a perfect skin, very full lips that would drive a dedicated monk to break his vows, with their clean-cut margins and a turn to them that always whispered to Carmine of tragedy. A black girl’s lips, dark maroon shading to pink where they met in that heart-rending fold. Did Margaretta have this same face?

“You don’t think that Etta could have snuck out, Linda?”

The big eyes grew bigger. “Why would she?” Linda asked, as if that was an answer in itself.

Yes, why would she? She’s as sweet and docile and lovely as all the others. She still says her prayers at bedtime.

“How tall is Etta?”

“Five-nine, sir.”

“Has she got a good figure?”

“No, she’s thin. It depresses her because she wants to be a star like Dionne Warwick,” said Linda, who showed every evidence that she too would be tall and thin. Tall and thin. Black.

“Thank you, Linda. Did anyone else hear a noise last night?”

Nobody had.

Then Mr. Bewlee produced a photograph; Carmine found himself gazing at a girl who looked just like Linda. And like the others.

Patrick came in on his own, carrying his bag.

“Which door down the hall, Linda?”

“The second on the right, sir. My bed’s on the right.”

“See anything to say that he came in the window, Patsy?”

“Not a thing, except that both the inner and the outer set have ordinary window locks that weren’t engaged. The ground outside is frozen solid. Grassy in summer, but died right back at the moment. The sill looks as if it hasn’t been touched since the outer windows went on last October, or whenever the insect screens were removed. I left Paul out there to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but I don’t think I did.”

They entered a room barely large enough to accommodate two burgeoning young women, but it was extremely neat and well cared for; pink-painted walls, a braided pink mat between two single beds, one to left and right of the window. Each girl had a closet beyond the foot of her bed. A big poster of Dionne Warwick and a smaller one of Mary Bell were tacked on the wall above Margaretta’s bed; Linda’s bed was provided with a shelf that held a half dozen teddy bears.

“Quiet, sound sleepers,” said Patrick. “The bedclothes are hardly disturbed.” He moved to Margaretta’s bed and bent to put his nostrils a scant millimeter from the pillow. “Ether,” he said. “Ether, not chloroform.”

“Are you sure? It evaporates within seconds.”

“I’m sure. My nose is good enough to go into the perfume trade. It got trapped in this fold, see? Gone already. Our pal clamped a pad soaked in ether over her face, picked her up and took her out through the window.” Patrick went to the window and pushed the inner one up with a gloved hand, then the outer one. “Listen to that – not a sound. Mr. Bewlee takes care of his home.”

“Unless our pal did the lubricating.”

“No, my money’s on Mr. Bewlee.”

“Jesus, Patsy, he’s cool! A girl who measures five-nine in bare feet, would weigh one-ten, and her sister sleeping not three yards away – if Linda had woken -”

“Kids sleep like the dead, Carmine. Margaretta probably never really woke up, looking at the bedclothes – no sign of a struggle. Linda slept through it, oblivious. He would have done the whole thing in two minutes, tops.”

“Then the question is, who left the windows unlocked? Did Mr. Bewlee not check them regularly, or did our pal pay a visit ahead of time and do it?”

“He visited ahead of time. I figure Mr. Bewlee locks them at the start of the real cold weather and then doesn’t unlock them until the first thaw. The house has real good forced-air heating, and it’s far too cold for the girls to open a window. The winter’s ten degrees colder here than it is in Holloman.”

Paul came in, shaking his head.

“Then let’s start looking at every inch in here – we bag all Margaretta’s bedclothes, with special attention to that pillowcase. Carmine,” Patrick said as his cousin was leaving the room, “if this girl is tall, thin and black black, he’s changed all of his parameters. Maybe it’s not the same guy.”

“Care to bet?”

“Thirty days – a different abduction technique – a different type of girl – that’s what you’re asking me to believe.”

“Yes, I am. The most important factor hasn’t changed. This girl is as pure and untouched as the others. What changes there are don’t tell me that we’ve managed to scare him much. He’s working to a master plan, and this is a part of it. Twelve girls in twenty-four months. Maybe now he’s going to do twelve girls in twelve months. It’s New Year’s Day. Maybe their size and skin color are irrelevant to his second dozen, or else Margaretta is his new type.”

Patrick sucked in his breath audibly. “You think he’s going to change what he does to them too, don’t you?”

“That’s what my instincts are telling me, yes. But never doubt one thing, Patsy. This is our guy. It’s not someone else.”

Carmine left Abe and Corey to come back with Patrick; it fell to them to do the plod from door to door on Dublin Road, to ask if anyone had seen or heard anything. Not much chance on New Year’s, between the parties and the booze.

It was 10.30 A.M. when the Ford turned into the Smith driveway, a long, twisting one ending at a very large and traditional white clapboard house on a knoll, its Georgian-paned windows flanked by dark green shutters. Not pre-Revolutionary, but not new either. Five acres of land, naturally forested save for where the house stood; no gardeners in the Smith family.

A pretty woman around forty answered the door; the Prof’s wife, no doubt. When Carmine introduced himself she held the door wide open and admitted him to a house as traditionally furnished as its exterior suggested; nice things, no expense spared, but unadventurous tastes guiding the decor. Clearly the Smiths could afford to buy whatever they fancied.

“Bob’s here somewhere,” Eliza said vaguely. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Thanks, I would.” Carmine followed her through to a kitchen artfully tweaked to look a hundred years older than it was, from wormholes to fading paint.

Two teenaged boys came in as Eliza handed the visitor his coffee. The eagerness natural in males of their age was absent; Carmine was used to boys who bombarded him with questions, as they invariably thought his calling a glamorous one and murder better than anything on TV. Yet the Smith sons, introduced as Bobby and Sam, looked more frightened than curious. As soon as their mother gave them permission they left, under orders to find their father.

“Bob’s not well,” Eliza said, sighing.

“The strain must be considerable.”

“No, it’s not really that. His trouble is that he’s not used to things going wrong, Lieutenant. Bob has led a charmed life. The proper Yankee forebears, a lot of money in the family, top of every class he’s ever been in, got everything he ever wanted, including the William Parson Chair. I mean, he’s only forty-five – do you realize that he wasn’t turned thirty when the Chair was handed to him? And it’s gone like a dream! Accolades galore.”

“Until now,” said Carmine, stirring his coffee, which smelled too old to taste good. He sipped, discovered his nose was right.

“Until now,” she agreed.

“Last time I saw him, I thought he seemed depressed.”

“Very depressed,” Eliza said. “The only time he ever cheers up is when he goes down to the basement. That’s what he’ll do today. And again tomorrow.”

Professor Smith came in, looking hunted. “Lieutenant, this is unexpected. Happy New Year.”

“No, sir, it isn’t happy. I’ve just come from Groton and another abduction a month too early.”

Smith slumped into the nearest chair, face bleached to chalk. “Not at the Hug,” he said. “Not at the Hug.”

“In Groton, Professor. Groton.”

Eliza got to her feet briskly, beamed artificially. “Bob, show the Lieutenant your folly,” she said.

You are brilliant, Mrs. Smith, said Carmine to himself. You know I’m not visiting to wish anyone a happy New Year, and am about to ask if I can take an unofficial look around. But you don’t want your husband refusing a pleasant request, so you’ve taken the bull by the horns and pushed the Prof into a co-operation he won’t feel like tendering.

“My folly? Oh, my folly!” Smith said, then brightened. “My folly, of course! Would you like to see it, Lieutenant?”

“I would indeed.” Carmine abandoned the coffee without regret.

The door to the basement was equipped with several locks that had been installed by a professional, and took Bob Smith some time to open. The wooden stairway was poorly lit; at its bottom the Prof flicked a switch that threw the whole of a huge room into stark, shadowless light. Jaw dropped, Carmine gaped at what Eliza Smith had called a folly.

A roughly square table fifty feet on each side filled the basement. Its surface was realistically landscaped into rolling hills, valleys, a range of alps, several plains, forests of perfect, tiny trees; rivers flowed, a lake sat beneath the flanks of a volcanic cone, water fell over a cliff. Farmhouses peeped, a town lay on one plain, another town lay wedged between two hills. And everywhere glittered the twin silver tracks of a miniature railroad. The rivers were bridged with steel girders correct down to rivet bumps, a chain-driven ferry crossed the lake, a beautiful arched viaduct carried the tracks through the alps. On the outskirts of the towns were railroad stations.

And what trains! The streamlined Super Chief ran at a fast clip amid the trees of a forest, negotiated a towering suspension bridge flawlessly. Two diesel locomotives hauled a freight train of coal wagons; another consisted of oil and chemical tanks, and a third of wooden boxcars. A local suburban train stood at one town station.

Altogether Carmine counted eleven trains, each in motion save for the humble local at its station, their speeds varying from the rush of the Super Chief down to the crawl of one freight train hauling so many oil tanks that it had pairs of diesel locomotives inserted throughout its formidable length. And all in miniature! To Carmine it was a wonder of the world, a toy to die for.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in all my life,” he said huskily. “There aren’t the words to describe it.”

“I’ve been building it since we moved in here sixteen years ago,” said the Prof, who was cheering up rapidly. “They’re all powered by electricity, but later on today I’ll switch to steam.”

“Steam? You mean locomotives powered by wood? Coal?”

“Actually I generate the steam by burning alcohol, but the principle’s the same. It’s a lot more fun than just sending them around on household electricity.”

“I bet you and your boys have a marvelous time down here.”

The Prof stiffened, a look in his eyes that gave Carmine a chill: he might have led a charmed life, but below the depression and self-indulgence was at least some steel. “My boys don’t come down here, they’re banned,” he said. “When they were younger and the door had no locks, they trashed the place. Trashed it! It took me four years to repair the damage. They broke my heart.”

It was on the tip of Carmine’s tongue to expostulate that surely the boys were old enough now to respect the trains, but he decided not to horn in on Smith’s domestic business. “How do you ever get to the middle of it?” he asked instead, squinting up into the lights. “A hoist?”

“No, I go in underneath. It’s assembled in sections, each fairly small. I had a hydraulics engineer install a system that enables me to jack a section up as much as necessary, and move it to one side so I can make my alterations standing up. Though it’s more for cleaning than anything else. If I’m changing from diesel to steam, I just drive a train to the edge, see?”

The Super Chief left its route, crossed via several sets of points while other trains were stopped or diverted, and drew up at the table edge. Carmine almost imagined he could hear it clanking and hissing.

“Do you mind if I take a look at your hydraulics, Professor?”

“No, not at all. Here, you’ll need this, it’s dark under there.” The Prof handed over a large flashlight.

Of rams, cylinders and rods there were aplenty, but though he crawled through every part of the table’s underside, Carmine could find no hidden trapdoors, no concealed compartments; the floor was concrete, kept very clean, and somehow an alliance between trains and young girls seemed unlikely.

The kid in him would have been ecstatic to spend the rest of the day playing with the Prof’s trains, but once he was satisfied that the Smith basement held nothing but trains, trains, and more trains, Carmine took his leave. Eliza conducted him through the house when he asked if he might inspect it. The only thing that gave her an anxious moment was a switch lying on the sideboard in the dining room, its end ominously frayed. So the Prof beats his boys, and not softly. Well, my dad beat me until I got too big for him, mean-tempered little runt that he was. After him, U.S. Army drill sergeants were a piece of cake.

From the Smiths he went to the Ponsonbys, not far away, but the place was deserted. The open garage doors revealed a scarlet Mustang, but not the station wagon Carmine had seen parked in the Hug lot. Weird, the people who drove V-8 convertibles! Desdemona, and now Charles Ponsonby. Today he must be out with his sister in the station wagon; sister and guide dog probably demanded room.

He decided not to visit the Polonowskis; instead he stopped at a phone booth and called Marciano. “Danny, send someone upstate to look at Walter Polonowski’s cabin. If he’s there with Marian, don’t disturb him, but if he’s there alone or not there at all, then your guys should look around politely enough that Polonowski doesn’t remember things like search warrants.”

“What’s your verdict on the Groton abduction, Carmine?”

“Oh, it’s our man, but proving that is going to be hard. He has changed his pattern, rung in the new year with a new tune. As soon as Patrick gets back, talk to him. I’m taking a drive around the Hugger homes. No, no, don’t panic! Just a look-see. Though if I find anyone at home, I’m going to ask to inspect places like basements and attics. Danny, you should see what’s in the Prof’s basement! Wowee wow!”

While he was in the booth he tried the Finches, whose phone rang out unanswered. The Forbeses, he discovered, used an answering service, probably because Forbes saw so many human patients. Its cooing operator informed Carmine that Dr. Forbes was in Boston for the weekend, and gave him a Boston number. When he called it, Dr. Addison Forbes barked at him irritably.

“I’ve just heard that another girl’s been taken,” Forbes said, “but don’t look at me, Lieutenant. My wife and I are up here with our daughter Roberta. She’s just been accepted into ob-gyn.”

I am running out of suspects, Carmine thought, hung up and went back to the Ford.

Coming into Holloman city on Sycamore, he decided to see what Tamara Vilich got up to on a holiday weekend.

Having checked who it was through the glass panel, she opened her front door clad in very non-Hugger clothes: a floating garment of filmy scarlet silk slit up both sides to her hips, very sexy, not much left to the imagination. She is one of those women, he thought, who never wears underpants. A female flasher.

“You look as if you could use a decent cup of coffee. Come in,” she said, smiling, the scarlet of her raiment turning her chameleon eyes quite red and devilish.

“Nice place you have here,” he said, gazing about.

“That,” she said, “is so hackneyed it sounds insincere.”

“Just making polite conversation.”

“Then make it with yourself for a minute while I deal with the coffee.”

She vanished in the direction of the kitchen, leaving him to absorb her decor at his leisure. Her taste ran to ultra modern: brilliant colors, good leather seating, chrome and glass rather than wood. But he hardly noticed, his attention riveted on the paintings assaulting her defenseless walls. In pride of place was a triptych. The left panel showed a nude, crimson-colored woman with a grotesquely ugly face kneeling to adore a phallic-looking statue of Jesus Christ; the center panel showed the same woman sprawled on her back with her legs wide open and the statue in her left hand; the right panel showed her with the statue jammed into her vagina and her face flying into pieces as if struck by a mercury-tipped bullet.

Having taken in its message, he chose a seat from which he couldn’t see the revolting thing.

The other paintings displayed more violence and anger than obscenity, but he wouldn’t hang a one of them on his walls. A faint reek of oil paints and turpentine told him that Tamara was probably the artist, but what drove her to these subjects? A rotting male corpse hanging upside down from a gallows, a quasi-human face snarling and slavering, a clenched fist oozing blood from between its fingers. Charles Ponsonby might approve, but Carmine’s eye was shrewd enough to judge that her technique wasn’t brilliant; no, these weren’t good enough to interest a finicky connoisseur like Chuck. All they had was the power to offend.

Either she’s sick, or she’s more cynical than I suspected, he thought.

“Like my stuff?” she asked, rejoining him.

“No. I think it’s sick.”

Her fine head went back, she laughed heartily. “You mistake my motives, Lieutenant. I paint what a certain market wants so badly it can’t get enough. The trouble is my technique isn’t as good as the masters in the field, so I can only sell my work for its subject matter.”

“The implication, for peanuts. Right?”

“Yes. Though one day maybe I will be able to earn a living at it. The real money is in limited editions of prints, but I’m not a lithographer. I need lessons I can’t afford.”

“Still paying off the Hug embezzlement, huh?”

She uncoiled from her chair like a spring and returned to the kitchen without answering.

Her coffee was very good; he drank thirstily, helped himself to an apple Danish fresh out of the freezer.

“You own the premises, I believe,” he said, feeling better.

“Been checking up on people?”

“Sure. It’s a part of the job.”

“Yet you have the gall to sit in judgement of my work. Yes,” she went on, stroking her throat with one long, beautiful hand, “I own this house. I rent the second floor to a radiology resident and his nurse wife, and the top floor to a couple of lesbian ornithologists who work at the Burke Biology Tower. The rent’s saved my bacon since my – er – little slip.”

That’s right, Tamara, brazen it out, it suits you better than indignation. “Professor Smith implied that your husband of that time masterminded you.”

She leaned forward, feet tucked under her, lifted her lip in contempt. “They say you won’t do what you don’t want to do, so what do you think?”

“That you loved him a great deal.”

“How perceptive of you, Lieutenant! I suppose I must have, but it seems an eternity ago.”

“Do you let your tenants use the basement?” he asked.

Her creamy lids fell, her mouth curved slightly. “No, I do not. The basement is mine.”

“I have no warrant, but would you mind if I looked around?”

Her nipples popped out as if she were suddenly cold. “Why? What’s happened?” she asked sharply.

“Another abduction. Last night, in Groton.”

“And you think, because I paint what I paint, that I’m a psycho with a basement soaked in blood. Look where you want, I don’t give a fuck,” she said, and walked into what he realized had once been a second bedroom, but now was her studio.

Carmine took her at her word, prowled around the basement to find nothing worse than a dead rat in a trap; had he liked her, he would have removed it for her, but as he didn’t, he didn’t.

Her bedroom was very interesting; black leather, black satin sheets on a bed whose frame was stout enough to take manacles, a zebra skin on the black carpet with its head intact and two glowing red-glass eyes. I bet, he thought, walking about quietly, that you’re not on the receiving end of the whips, honey. You are a dominatrix. I wonder who is being flogged?

A photograph in an ornate silver frame stood on the bedside table on what he guessed was her side of the bed; an elderly, stern woman who looked enough like Tamara to be Mom. He picked it up in what, had she entered the room, would have seemed an idle manner, then slid its back out quickly. Bingo! Paydirt. Behind Mom lay a full-length picture of Keith Kyneton; he was stark naked, built like Mr. Universe, and up like a fifteen-year-old. Another thirty seconds and Mom was back on the table. Why don’t they realize that hiding one photo behind another is the oldest trick in the Book of Deceptions? Now I know all about you, Miss Tamara Vilich. You might be flogging others, but not him – his work would suffer. Do you play games together, then? Dress him up as a baby and paddle his backside? Play a nurse giving him an enema? Or a strict schoolteacher dishing out humiliations? A hooker picking him up in a bar? Well, well!

With nowhere else left to go, he went home, but got off the elevator on the tenth floor and pressed Desdemona’s intercom. Her voice answered tonelessly – not evidence of distaste, evidence of technology.

“There’s been another one,” he said baldly, peeling off his outdoor layers.

“Carmine, no! It’s only been a month!”

He gazed around, located the work basket and a tablecloth that was being finished more rapidly than it would have been in her hiking days. “Why,” he demanded, mood darkened to utter discouragement and in need of someone to lash out at, “are you such a miser, Desdemona? Why don’t you spend money on yourself? What’s with this frugal living? Can’t you buy a nice dress once in a while?”

She stood absolutely still, a white line about her compressed lips, her eyes displaying a grief he hadn’t seen there even for Charlie. “I am a spinster, I save for my old age,” she said levelly, “but more than that. In five more years I’m going home – home to a place with no violence, no gun-toting cops, and no Connecticut Monster. That’s why.”

“I’m sorry, I had no right to ask. Forgive me.”

“Not today, and perhaps not ever,” she said, opening the door. The outdoor clothes followed their owner, tossed in a heap on the floor. “Goodbye, Lieutenant Delmonico.”

Chapter 15

Tuesday, January 4th, 1966

The first working day of the New Year was blowy and snowy, but the weather hadn’t prevented someone from daubing the Hug with graffiti – KILLERS, BLACK HATERS, PIGS, FASCISTS, swastikas, and, right along the front façade, HOLLOMAN KU KLUX KLAN.

When the Prof arrived and saw what had been done to the apple of his eye, he collapsed. Not with a heart attack; Robert Mordent Smith’s crisis was of the spirit. An ambulance bore him away, the team manning it well aware that when they arrived one building down at Emergency, they would be shouting not for cardiologists but for psychiatrists. He wept, he moaned, he raved, he babbled, the words he uttered complete gibberish.

Carmine came over to see the Hug for himself, as thankful as John Silvestri that the winter was proving a hard one after all; the real racial turmoil wouldn’t explode until spring. Only two black men had braved the elements to brandish placards already torn to tatters by the wind. One’s face was familiar; he halted outside the entrance and studied it. Its owner was small, thin, insignificant, very dark skinned, neither handsome nor sexy. So where, where, where? Buried memories tended to surface suddenly, as this one did; once things were in Carmine’s mind, they stayed there, resurrected when given a nudge by events. Otis Green’s wife’s nephew. Wesley le Clerc.

He tramped across to le Clerc and his companion, another would-be-if-he-could-be who looked less determined than Wesley.

“Go home, guys,” he said pleasantly, “otherwise we’ll have to dig you out or plough you under. Except, Mr. le Clerc, a word first. Come in out of the cold. I’m not arresting you, I just want to talk, scout’s honor.”

A little to his surprise, Wesley followed him docilely while the other man scuttled away as if let out of school.

“You’re Wesley le Clerc, right?” he asked after they moved inside, stamping the caked snow off their boots.

“What if I am, huh?”

“Mrs. Green’s nephew from Louisiana.”

“Yeah, and I got a record, save you the time looking me up. I’m a known agitator. In other words, a nigger nuisance.”

“How much time have you served, Wes?”

“All up, five years. No stealing hub caps or armed robberies. Just beatin’ on redneck nigger haters.”

“And what do you do in Holloman apart from demonstrating in a peaceful manner and wearing a Black Brigade jacket?”

“Make instruments at Parson Surgical Supplies.”

“That’s a good job, takes some manual and intellectual skill.”

Wesley shaped up to the much bigger Carmine like a bantam rooster to a fighting cock. “What do you care what I do, huh? Think I painted that stuff out there, huh?”

“Oh, grow up, Wes!” said Carmine wearily. “The graffiti’s not Black Brigade, it’s kids from Travis High, you think I don’t know that? What I want to know is why you’re out there freezing your ass off while the weather’s too bad to attract an audience.”

“I’m there to tell Whitey that it’s time to worry, Mr. Smart Cop. You won’t catch this killer ’cos you don’t want to. For all I know, Mr. Smart Cop, you’re the one killing black girls.”

“No, Wes, he’s not me.” Carmine leaned against the wall and eyed Wesley with unmistakable sympathy. “Give up on Mohammed’s way! It’s the wrong way. A better life for black people isn’t going to come through violence, no matter what Lenin said about terror. After all, a good many white people have terrorized black Americans for two hundred years, but has that destroyed the black spirit? Go back to school, Wes, get a law degree. That will help the black cause more than Mohammed el Nesr can.”

“Oh, sure! Where am I going to get the money for that?”

“Making instruments at Parson Surgical Spplies. Holloman has good night schools, and there are bunches and bunches of people in Holloman eager to help.”

“Whitey can shove his lordly patronage up his ass!”

“Who says I’m talking about Whitey? Many of them are black. Businessmen, professional men. I don’t know if they exist in Louisiana yet, but they sure do in Connecticut, and none of them are Uncle Toms. They are working for their people.”

Wesley le Clerc turned on his heel and left, flinging his right fist into the air.

“At least, Wes,” said Carmine, smiling at Wesley’s retreating back, “you didn’t flip me the bird.”

But Wesley le Clerc wasn’t thinking of rude gestures as he scrunched through the worsening snow. He was thinking of Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico in a different way. Bright, very bright. Too cool and sure of himself to give anyone an excuse to cry persecution or even discrimination; his was the soft answer turned away wrath. Only not this time. Not my wrath. Through Otis I have the means to feed Mohammed information he will need come spring. Mohammed looks at me with a little more respect these days, and what’s he going to say when I tell him that the Holloman pigs are still nosing around the Hug? The answer is inside the Hug. Delmonico knows that as well as I do. Rich, privileged Whitey. When every black American is a disciple of Mohammed el Nesr, things are gonna change.

“The way is hard,” said Mohammed el Nesr to Ali el Kadi. “Too many of our black brothers are brainwashed, and too many more have been seduced by Whitey’s greatest weapons – drugs and booze. Even now the Monster has taken a real black girl, our recruitment isn’t picking up enough.”

“Our people need more provocation,” Ali el Kadi answered; that was the name Wesley le Clerc had chosen when he espoused Islam.

“No,” said Mohammed strongly. “Our people don’t need, the Black Brigade does. And not provocation. We need a martyr, Ali. A shining example who will bring us men in tens of thousands.” He patted Wesley/Ali on the arm. “In the meantime, go to your job, do good work there. Enroll in night school. Cultivate that infidel pig, Delmonico. And find out everything you can.”

The Forbeses were still in Boston, would be until the roads were safer, and the Finches were snowbound. Walt Polonowski had spent the weekend in his cabin, but with a living girl, Marian. The men Danny Marciano had sent up there to investigate hadn’t announced their presence; it was no part of Carmine’s intentions to render any Hugger more miserable than he needed to be, and that meant helping Polonowski keep his secret – for the moment.

Patrick had found nothing in the house on Dublin Road either to confirm or deny that Margaretta’s abductor was their man, though he had established that the method of choice had been ether.

“He wears some kind of protective suit,” Patrick said to his cousin. “It’s made of a fabric that doesn’t shed any fibers, and whatever he wears on his feet have smooth soles that don’t make footprints unless he steps in mud, which he doesn’t. The suit has a close-fitting bonnet or hood that covers his hair completely, and he’s gloved. With this night abduction, obviously everything he wears is black. He may blacken his face. I’m picking that the suit is rubber and form fitting, like a diving suit.”

“They’re clumsy to move in, Patsy.”

“Not these days, if you can afford the best.”

“And he can afford the best, because I think he has money.”

Corey and Abe’s investigations in Groton had yielded nothing; New Year’s was always rackety.

“Thanks, guys,” Carmine said to them.

No one stated the obvious: that they would know more when Margaretta’s body turned up.

The previous evening had seen Carmine ascend in the elevator of the Nutmeg Insurance building to its top floor, where he sought out Dr. Hideki Satsuma. Who was willing to admit him.

“Oh, this is nice,” said Carmine, gazing around. “I tried you last night, Doctor, but you weren’t at home.”

“No, I was up at my place on Cape Cod. The Chathams. When I heard the weather forecast, I decided to come home today.”

So Satsuma had a place in the Chathams, did he? A three-hour drive in that maroon Ferrari. But shorter if the drive had begun in Groton.

“Your courtyard is beautiful,” Carmine said, going over to the transparent wall to gaze through it.

“It used to be, but there are imbalances I am trying to correct. I have not yet succeeded, Lieutenant. Perhaps it is the Hollywood cypress – not a Japanese tree. I put it there because I thought a strand of America was necessary, but perhaps I am wrong.”

“To me, Doctor, it makes the garden – taller, twisted around itself like a double helix. Without it, there’s nothing high enough to reach the top of the walls, and nothing symmetrical.”

“I take your point.”

Like hell you do, thought Carmine. What does a gaijin know about gardening the universe?

“Sir, will you give me permission to have someone look at your house on Cape Cod?”

“No, Lieutenant Delmonico, I will not. If you so much as try, I will sue.”

Thus had Monday ended, with nothing to show.

At six on Tuesday evening he arrived at number 6, Ponsonby Lane, to beard the Ponsonbys in their den. The deep baying of a large dog greeted his car, and when Charles Ponsonby opened the front door he was hanging on to the collar of – his sister’s guide dog?

“A weird breed,” he said to Ponsonby as he divested himself of layers in the weather porch.

“Half golden labrador, half German shepherd,” said Charles, hanging up the clothing. “We call her a labrashep, and her name is Biddy. It’s okay, sweetheart, the Lieutenant is a friend.”

The dog wasn’t so sure. It decided to allow him in, but it kept a wary eye on him.

“We’re in the kitchen, starting to make a Beethoven dinner. Numbers three, five and seven – we always prefer his odd-numbered symphonies to his even-numbered. Come through. I hope you don’t mind if we sit in the kitchen?”

“I’m glad to sit anywhere, Dr. Ponsonby.”

“Call me Chuck, though for form’s sake, I’ll stick to your official title. Claire always calls me Charles.”

He led Carmine through one of those genuinely 250-year-old houses that sag at the beams and have floors full of undulations and jogs, into a more modern dining room that opened into what was definitely the original kitchen. Here, the wormholes, the fading paint and the splintering wood were authentic: eat your heart out, Mrs. Eliza Smith.

“This must have been separate from the house in the old days,” said Carmine as he shook hands with a woman in her late thirties who looked just like her brother, even to the watery eyes.

“Sit over there, Lieutenant,” she said in a Lauren Bacall voice, waving a hand at a Windsor chair. “Yes, it was separate. Kitchens back then had to be, in case of fire. Otherwise the whole house burned down. Charles and I joined it to the house with a dining room, but oh, what a headache the building process was!”

“Why’s that?” he asked, taking a glass of amontillado sherry from Charles.

“The ordinances insist that we have to build in timber of the same age as the house,” Charles said, seating himself opposite Carmine. “I finally located two ancient barns in upstate New York and bought them both. Too much timber, but we’ve stored it for any future repairs. Good, hard oak.”

Claire was standing in profile to Carmine, wielding a thin-bladed, supple knife that she was using to prepare two thick cuts of filet steak. Awestruck, Carmine watched her deft fingers get the knife under a tendon and strip it off without losing any of the meat; she performed the task better than he could have.

“Do you like Beethoven?” she asked him.

“Yes, very much.”

“Then why not eat with us? There’s plenty of food, I do assure you, Lieutenant,” she said, rinsing the knife under a brass tap over a stone sink. “A cheese and spinach soufflé first, a lemon sorbet to clear the palate, then beef fillet with Bearnaise sauce, new potatoes simmered in homemade beef stock, and petits pois.”

“Sounds delicious, but I can’t stay too long.” He sipped the sherry to find it a very good one.

“Charles tells me another girl is missing,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Ponsonby.”

“Call me Claire.” She sighed, put the knife away and joined them at the table, accepting a sherry as if she could see it.

The kitchen was much as it must always have been, save that where once the great chimney would have held the spits, hooks and bread oven of eighteenth-century cooking, it now held a massive slow combustion stove. The room was too warm for Carmine.

“An Aga stove? I don’t know it,” he said, draining his sherry.

“We bought it in England on our one adventure abroad years ago,” said Charles. “It has a very slow oven for all-day baking, and an oven fast enough to do justice to pastry or French bread. Lots of hot-plates. It supplies us with hot water in winter too.”

“Oil fired?”

“No, it’s wood fired.”

“Isn’t that expensive? I mean, heating oil is only nine cents a gallon. Wood must cost a lot more.”

“It would if I had to buy it, Lieutenant, but I don’t. We have twenty acres of loggable forest up beyond Sleeping Giant, the last land we own apart from these five acres. I cut what I need each spring, replant the trees I take down.”

Jesus, here we go again! thought Carmine. How many Huggers have these secret retreats tucked away? Abe and Corey will have to go up there tomorrow and comb his twenty acres of forest – how they’ll love that with all this snow on the ground! Benjamin Liebman the undertaker has a mortuary so clean that we’d have to catch him in the act and the Prof has a basement full of trains, but a whole goddamn forest -!

A second glass of the Ponsonby sherry made Carmine conscious that he hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch: time to go.

“I hope you won’t consider my question rude, Claire, but have you always been blind?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said cheerfully. “I’m one of those incubator babies got fed pure oxygen. Blame it on ignorance.”

His rush of pity made him look away, up to where on one wall hung a group of framed photographs, some of them old enough to be sepia daguerrotypes. A strong family resemblance ran through the faces: square adamantine features, fiercely marked brows and thick dark hair. The only different one was clearly the latest of them: an elderly woman whose face was far more reminiscent of Charles and Claire, from its wispy hair to watery pale eyes and long, lugubrious features. Their mother? If so, then they were not in the Ponsonby mold, they were in hers.

“My mother,” Claire said with that uncanny ability to pick out what was going on in the sighted world. “Don’t let my prescience bother you, Lieutenant. To some extent, it’s legerdemain.”

“I can tell she’s your mother, and that you both resemble her rather than the Ponsonby line.”

“She was a Sunnington from Cleveland, and we do take after the Sunningtons. Mama died three years ago, a merciful release. Very severe dementia. But one cannot put a Daughter of the American Revolution in a home for senile old ladies, so I cared for her myself until the bitter end. With some excellent help from the county authorities, I add.”

So it’s a D.A.R. household, Carmine thought. Ponsonby and his sister probably don’t vote for anyone left of Genghiz Khan.

He got up, his head spinning slightly; the Ponsonbys served their sherry in wine glasses, not little sherry glasses. “Thanks for the hospitality, I appreciate it.” He glanced across at the dog, lying with eyes fixed on him. “So long, Biddy. Nice to meet you too.”

“What do you think of the good Lieutenant Delmonico?” Charles Ponsonby asked his sister when he returned to the kitchen.

“That he doesn’t miss much,” she said, folding stiff egg whites into her cheese and spinach sauce.

“True. They’ll be tramping all over our forest tomorrow.”

“Do you care?”

“Not a bit,” said Charles, scraping the raw soufflé into its dish and putting it in the hot oven. “Though I do feel sorry for them. Futile searches are exasperating.”

Chapter 16

Thursday, January 13th, 1966

“Carmine looks down,” Marciano whispered to Patrick.

“He and Desdemona aren’t playing speaks.”

Commissioner Silvestri cleared his throat. “So how many of them refused to let us look around without a search warrant?”

“In general they’ve been pretty co-operative,” said Carmine, who did indeed look down. “I get to see anything I ask to see, though I’m careful to make sure one of them at least is with me. I didn’t ask Charles Ponsonby for permission to search his forest because I didn’t see the point. If Corey and Abe find any fresh tracks through all this snow, or evidence that fresh tracks have been covered up, then I’ll ask. My bet is that all twenty acres are pristine, so why give Chuck and Claire anguish ahead of time?”

“You like Claire Ponsonby,” said Silvestri, stating a fact.

“Yes, I do. An amazing woman, doesn’t harbor any grudges.” He put her out of his mind. “To answer your original question, so far I’ve had refusals from Satsuma, Chandra and Schiller, the three aliens. Satsuma shipped his private peon, Eido, up to his Cape Cod cottage about ten seconds after I left his penthouse, is my guess. Chandra is an arrogant bastard, but that’s probably understandable in a maharajah’s number one son. Even if we did manage to get a warrant, he’d complain to the Indian Embassy, and that is one very aggressively touchy nation. Schiller is a more pathetic case. I don’t suspect him of anything more unorthodox than lots of photos of naked young men on his walls, but I haven’t pushed him because of his suicide attempt. It was a serious one, not a grandstand.”

Carmine grinned. “Speaking of photos of naked men, I found a doozy in Tamara Vilich’s chains-and-leather bedroom. None other than that ambitious neurosurgeon, Keith Kyneton, who strips better than Mr. Universe. They say these muscle-building guys do it to compensate for an undersized dick, but I can’t say that of him. He’s hung like a porn star.”

“Well, what do you know?” asked Marciano, leaning back in his chair to avoid Silvestri’s cigar – why did it always have to be his nose it got shoved under? “Does that eliminate the Kynetons? Or Tamara Vilich?”

“Not entirely, Danny, though they’ve never been high on my list. She paints very sick pictures and she’s a dominatrix.”

“So Keith baby likes having the shit beaten out of him.”

“Seems so. However, Tamara can’t mark him much or his doting wife would notice. It’s his mother I feel sorriest for.”

“Another one you like,” said Silvestri.

“Yeah, well, time to worry when there’s nobody I like.”

“What do you plan now?” Marciano asked.

“Taxing Tamara with the Kyneton business.”

“That won’t cost you any pain. Her, you don’t like.”

He bearded her in her office. “I found the picture of Dr. Keith Kyneton under the one of your mom,” he said bluntly, admiring her spirit; her eyes, more khaki in this light, lifted to his face fearlessly.

“Fucking isn’t murder, Lieutenant,” she said. “It isn’t even a crime between consenting adults.”

“I’m not interested in the fucking, Miss Vilich. I want to know whereabouts you meet to fuck.”

“At my house, in my apartment.”

“With half of the neighborhood working somewhere in the Chubb Medical School or on Science Hill? Someone who knows Kyneton or his car would be sure to spot him sooner or later. I think you have a hideaway somewhere.”

“You’re wrong, we don’t. I’m single, I live alone, and Keith makes sure there’s no one about if he arrives before dark. Though he never does arrive before dark. That’s why I love winter.”

“What about the faces peering behind a lace curtain? Your affair with Dr. Kyneton gives him a double connection with the Hug. Wife and mistress work there. Does his wife know?”

“She lives in complete ignorance, but I suppose you’ll yap far and wide about Keith and me,” Tamara said sulkily.

“I don’t yap, Miss Vilich, but I will have to talk to Keith Kyneton, make sure there isn’t a hideaway somewhere. I smell violence in your relationship, and violence usually means a safe hideaway.”

“Where the screams can’t be heard. We never go that far, Lieutenant, it’s more a matter of playing out some scenario,” she said. “Strict teacher with naughty little boy, lady cop with her handcuffs and sandbag baton – you know.” Her face changed, she shuddered. “He’ll dump me. Oh, God, what will I do? What will I do after he dumps me?”

Which only goes to show, thought Carmine, departing, just how wrong assumptions can be. I thought the only person she loves is herself, but she’s nuts about a turkey like Keith Kyneton, which may account for her paintings. They’re how she feels about love – how sad, to hate love! Because she knows that Keith is only there for the sex. It’s Hilda he loves – if he’s capable of love.

Tamara caught him at the elevator.

“If you hurry, Lieutenant, you’ll find Dr. Kyneton between operations,” she said. “Holloman Hospital, tenth floor. The best way to get there is through the tunnel.”

It was as spooky as all tunnels; after exploring the warren of tunnels the Japs had lived in on some of the Pacific islands during the War, Carmine feared them, had had to force himself to descend into the bowels of the earth in London to walk the tunnels between tube connections. Tunnels had a growl to them, an anger transmitted from the outraged, invaded earth. No matter how dry or brightly lit, a tunnel suggested lurking terrors. He strode the hundred yards of the Hug tunnel, took its right-hand fork and came into the hospital basement near the laundry.

All the operating rooms were on the tenth floor, but Dr. Keith Kyneton was waiting for him at the elevator block, clad in greens, a pair of cotton masks dangling around his neck.

“Private, I insist on keeping this private,” the neurosurgeon said in a whisper. “In here, quick!”

“Here” was a storeroom choked with boxes of supplies, devoid of chairs or an atmosphere Carmine could use to good effect.

“Miss Vilich told you, huh?” he asked. “I never wanted her to take that goddamn photograph!”

“You should have torn it up.”

“Oh, Jesus, Lieutenant, you don’t understand! She wanted it! Tamara is – is fantastic!”

“That I can believe if you like kinky. Nurse Catheter and her enema kit. Who started it, you or her?”

“I don’t honestly remember. We were both drunk, a hospital party Hilda couldn’t make.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Two years. Christmas of 1963.”

“Where do you meet?”

“At Tamara’s place. I’m very careful going in and out.”

“Nowhere else? No little hideaway in the country?”

“No, just at Tamara’s.”

Suddenly Kyneton turned, put both hands on Carmine’s forearm and clung, trembling, tears coursing down his face.

“Lieutenant! Sir! Please, I beg of you, don’t tell anyone! My partnership in New York City is almost set, but if they find out about this, I’ll lose it!” he cried.

His mind full of Ruth and Hilda, their constant sacrifices for this big, spoiled baby, Carmine shook the grip off savagely.

“Don’t touch me, you selfish fuck! I don’t give a shit about your precious practice in New York, but I happen to like your mother and your wife. You don’t deserve either of them! I won’t mention this to anyone, but you can’t be stupid enough to think that Miss Tamara Vilich will be so charitable, surely! You’ll dump her, no matter how fantastic the kinky sex with her is, and she’ll retaliate like any other scorned woman. By tomorrow everyone who matters to you will know. Your professor, mother, wife, and the New York bunch.”

Kyneton sagged, looked around vainly for a chair, hung on to a case of swabs instead. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, I’m ruined!”

“Straighten up, Kyneton, for God’s sake!” Carmine snapped. “You’re not ruined – yet. Find someone to do your next operation, send your wife home, and follow her. Once you’ve gotten her and your mother to yourself, confess. Go down on your knees and beg forgiveness. Swear never to do it again. And don’t hold anything back. You’re a sweet-talking con merchant, you’ll bring them round. But God help you if you don’t treat those two women right in future, hear me? I’m not charging you with anything at the moment, but don’t think I can’t find something to charge you with if I want, and I’ll be keeping my eye on you: for however many years I’m a cop. One last thing. Next time you shop at Brooks Brothers, buy your mother and wife something nice at Bonwit’s.”

Did the bastard listen? Yes, but only to what he divined would save him. “None of that helps me with the partnership.”

“Sure it does! Provided your mother and wife stand by you. Between the three of you, you can make Tamara Vilich sound like a frustrated woman telling a whole mess of lies.”

The cog wheels were clunking around; Kyneton brightened visibly. “Yes, yes, I see what you mean! That’s how to do it!”

A moment later, Carmine was alone. Keith Kyneton had raced off to mend his fences without a word of thanks.

“And just what,” demanded an irate female voice, “do you think you’re doing in here?”

Carmine flapped his impressive gold badge at the nurse, who looked ready to call hospital security.

“I’m doing penance, ma’am,” he said. “Terrible penance.”

The world when covered with fresh snow was so beautiful; as soon as he shed his outdoor layers Carmine turned one of his easy chairs to face the huge window that looked out across the harbor, and switched off all the interior lights. The strident yellow of highway illuminations offended him, but washed across sheets of snow it was softer, more golden. The ice was beginning to creep out from the eastern shore, though the wharves were still a black vacancy chipped by sparkles; too much wind for long, rippling reflections. No car ferries now until May.

What was he going to do about Desdemona? All his overtures had been repulsed, all his notes of apology returned unopened, thrust under his door. To this moment he didn’t honestly know why she had been so mortally offended, so unrelenting – sure, he had over-stepped the mark, but didn’t everyone sometimes have words, not see eye to eye? Something to do with her pride, but just what escaped him. That barrier different nationalities could erect, too high to see over. Was it his remark about buying a new dress occasionally, or simply that he’d dared to query her behavior? Had he made her feel unfeminine, or grotesque, or – or -

“I give up,” he said, leaned his chin on his hand, and tried to think about the Ghost. That was his new name for the Monster, who had nothing in common with popular conceptions of monsters. He was a ghost.

Chapter 17

Wednesday, January 19th, 1966

“I’m going for a walk, dear,” Maurice Finch said to Catherine as he got up from the breakfast table. “I don’t feel much like going in to work today, but I’ll think about it while I walk.”

“Sure, you do that,” his wife said, glancing through the window at the outside thermometer. “It’s fifteen below, so dress warm – and if you do decide to go to work, start the car on your way back.” He seemed, she felt, considerably more cheerful these days, and she knew why. Kurt Schiller had returned to the Hug and approached Maurie to assure him that their quarrel had not been the cause of his suicide attempt. Apparently the love of his life had thrown him over for someone else. The Nazi schmuck (Catherine’s opinion of Schiller hadn’t budged) didn’t go into details, but she supposed that men who liked men were as vulnerable as men who liked women; some floozie – what did the sex of the floozie matter? – had gotten tired of being adored, needed someone with a new approach and maybe a bigger bank balance.

She watched Maurie from the window as he scrunched off down the frozen path that led to his apple orchard, always his favorite place. They were old trees, had never been pruned to keep the fruit pickably low, but in spring that made them a soaring froth of white blossoms that took the breath away, and in fall they were smothered with glossy red globes like Christmas tree decorations. Several years ago Maurie had been inspired to train some of their branches into arches; the old wood had creaked in protest, but Maurie did it so gently and slowly that now the spaces between the trees were like the aisles in a cathedral.

He disappeared; she went to wash the dishes.

Then came a high, horrifying shriek. A plate crashed to the floor in shards as Catherine grabbed a coat and ran for dear life. Her slippered feet slid and skidded on the ice, but somehow she kept her balance. Another shriek! Not even feeling the 17°F temperature, she raced faster.

Maurie was standing by the wonderful dry stone wall encircling his orchard, staring over it at something glittering on the bank of iron-hard snow that had piled against it during the last blizzard.

One glance, and she led him away, back to the warmth of the kitchen, back to sanity. Back to where she could call the police.

Carmine and Patrick stood where Maurice Finch had, since his feet had obliterated any other footprints that might have been there before his – highly unlikely, both men felt.

Margaretta Bewlee was in one piece apart from her head, which wasn’t anywhere to be found. Against the stark whiteness her dark chocolate skin was even darker, the pink of palms and soles of feet echoing the color of the dress she wore: a confection of pink lace embroidered all over with sparkling rhinestones. It was short enough to see the crotch of a pair of pink silk panties, ominously stained.

“Jesus, everything’s different!” Patrick said.

“I’ll see you in the morgue,” Carmine said, turning away. “If I stay here, I’ll retard your progress.”

He went inside to where the Finches huddled together at their breakfast table, a bottle of Manischevitz wine before them.

“Why me?” Finch asked, face ghastly.

“Have some more wine, Dr. Finch. And if we knew why you, we might have a chance to catch this bastard. May I sit down?”

“Sit, sit!” Catherine gasped, indicating an unused glass. “Have some, you need it too.”

Though he didn’t care for sweet wine, the Manischevitz did help; Carmine put his glass down and looked at Catherine. “Did you hear anything during the night, Mrs. Finch? It’s snapped so cold that everything makes a noise.”

“Not a thing, Lieutenant. Maurie put peat moss and mulch in his mushroom tunnel for a while after he came home yesterday, but we were in bed by ten and slept through until six this morning.”

“Mushroom tunnel?” Carmine asked.

“I fancied seeing if I could grow the gourmet varieties,” Finch said, looking a little better. “Mushrooms are persnickety, but I don’t understand why when you see how they grow in a field.”

“Do you mind if we take your property apart, Doctor? I’m afraid that finding Margaretta here makes that necessary.”

“Do what you want, do what you need – just find this monster!” Finch got up like an old man. “However, I think I know why we didn’t hear anything, Lieutenant. Want to see?”

“I sure do.”

Cautioned not to step anywhere that looked as if the ground had been disturbed, Maurice Finch led Carmine across the area where his glasshouses stood, then in between the big, heated sheds that held Catherine’s chickens. Finally, a good third of a mile beyond the house, Finch stopped and pointed.

“See that little road? It comes up from a gate on Route 133 and ends at the foot of the orchard. We put it in with a blade on the front of our truck because of the brook – when the brook floods, it cuts our house off from access to Route 133. If the Monster knew it existed, he could use it to drive in and we’d never hear him.”

“Thank you for that, Dr. Finch. Go back to your wife.”

Finch did as he was told without protest, while Carmine went to find Abe and Corey, explain whereabouts they should look for signs of the Ghost. He is a ghost, ghosted in and ghosted out again, but he’s a very knowledgeable ghost, the Ghost. Maurice Finch has crisscrossed his property with homemade tracks, but the Ghost is aware of every one of them. And you asked a good question, Dr. Finch: “Why me?” Why, indeed?

Carmine made sure he was back at the County Services building before Patrick brought Margaretta’s body in; this was one autopsy he wanted to see from start to finish.

“She was put on top of a snowbank frozen to solid ice, but I suspect that she was already frozen when he dumped her there,” said Patrick as he and Paul tenderly lifted the long frame out of its bag. “The ground everywhere is frozen, nothing smaller than a backhoe could have broken it to bury her, but this time he wasn’t concerned about hiding her, even for a short while. He dumped her in the open in a sparkling dress.”

The three men stood looking at Margaretta, and at that very peculiar dress.

“I didn’t see Sophia enough during the years when she wore party dresses,” Carmine said, “but with all those girls, Patsy, you must have seen dozens of party dresses. This isn’t a young woman’s dress, is it? It’s a child’s party dress she’s been wedged into.”

“Yes. When we lifted her we found that it wasn’t buttoned up the back. Margaretta’s shoulders are way too broad, but her arms are thin, so he was able to make her look okay from the front.”

The dress had small, puffed sleeves with narrow cuffs, and a waist that allowed for a child’s body – wide and a little tubby. On a ten-year-old child it would probably have reached the knees; on this young woman it barely covered the tops of her thighs. The shell-pink lace was French-made, Carmine guessed; expensive, proper lace embroidered on to a base of fine, strong net. Then later someone else had sewn what looked like several hundred transparent rhinestones all over it in a pattern that echoed that of the lace; each rhinestone was perforated at its tip to take a fine needle and thread. Painstaking manual labor that would add multibucks to its price tag. He would have to show this to Desdemona for a really accurate estimate of its quality and cost.

He watched Patrick and Paul ease Margaretta out of the odd garment, which had to be preserved intact. One of the reasons why he loved his cousin so much lay in Patrick’s respect for the dead. No matter how repulsive some of the bodies he encountered were – fecal matter, vomitus, unmentionable slimes – Patrick handled them as if God had made them, and made them with love.

Deprivation of the dress left Margaretta in a pair of pink silk panties reaching up to her waist and down to her thighs: modest panties. The crotch was bloodstained, but not grossly so. When they were peeled off, there was the plucked pudendum.

“It’s our guy for sure,” Carmine said. “Any idea before you start how she died?”

“Not from blood loss, for certain. Her skin’s just about its right color and there’s only one incision of the neck, the one that decapitated her. No ligature marks on her ankles, though I think she was tied down with the usual canvas band across her chest. He might have put another over her lower legs between rapes, but I’ll have to look a lot closer to verify that.” His lips thinned. “I think this time he raped her to death. Not much blood externally, but she’s very swollen in the abdomen for someone who hasn’t begun to decay. Once she was dead, he put her in a freezer until he was ready to dump her.”

“Then,” said Carmine, backing away from the table, “I’ll wait for you in your office, Patsy. I was going to see this one through, but I don’t think I can.”

Marciano met him outside. “You look kinda white around the gills, Carmine. Had any breakfast?”

“No, and I don’t want any either.”

“Sure you do.” He sniffed Carmine’s breath. “Your trouble is, you’ve been drinking.”

“You call Manischevitz drinking?”

“No. Even Silvestri would classify it as grape juice. Come on, pal, you can fill me in at Malvolio’s.”

He hadn’t managed much of the French toast and maple syrup, but he went back to his office feeling better for trying to eat. Today was going to bring worse mental punishment than it had thus far; he had a premonition that Mr. Bewlee would insist on seeing his daughter’s remains, no matter what his minister of religion said, or who volunteered to do this awful task. Some parts of her he just couldn’t be let see, but he’d know every crease in the palms of her hands, maybe some tiny scar where he’d removed a big splinter from her foot, the shape of her nails…The sweet and lovely intimacies of fatherhood that Carmine had never experienced. How strange it is, to sire a child you don’t honestly know, who has lived far from you and in whose company you feel an exile.

Now that he had taken to calling the killer a ghost, some corners and crevices in his mind had shifted to permit faint rays of light down their depths; Carmine had found himself thinking in new channels since that night when he had gazed across Holloman’s harbor in the snow, and seeing Margaretta Bewlee in her party dress on that icy bank had unlocked another avenue that beckoned to him alluringly, just out of his grasp, a ghost of an idea. A ghost…

Then he had it. Not a ghost. Two ghosts.

How much easier two of them would make it! The speed and the silence, the invisibility. Two of them: one to dangle a bait, the other to execute the snatch. There had to be a bait, something that a sixteen-year-old girl as pure as the driven snow would take as eagerly as a salmon the right fly. A waif of a kitten, a puppy all grimed and abused?

Ether…Ether! One of them dangled the bait, the other came up behind like lightning and clamped a pad soaked in ether over the girl’s face – no chance to scream, no risk of a bite or a hand’s slipping for a moment to allow a cry. The girl would be out to it in seconds, sucking ether into her lungs as she struggled. Then two of them to whisk her away, give her a shot, get her into a vehicle or into a temporary hiding place. Ether…The Hug.

Sonia Liebman was in the Hug’s O.R. tidying up after rat brain soup. When she saw Carmine, her face darkened – but not due to him.

“Oh, Lieutenant, I heard! Is poor Maurie okay?”

“He’s okay. Couldn’t not be, with that wife.”

“So the Hug’s still up shit creek, right?”

“Or someone wants to make it seem that way, Mrs. Liebman.” He paused, could see no point in dissimulating. “Do you have any ether in the O.R.?” he asked.

“Sure, but it’s not anesthetic ether, just ordinary anhydrous ether. Here,” she said, leading the way into the anteroom, where she pointed at a row of cans sitting on a high shelf.

“Would it act as an anesthetic?” he asked, plucking a can off the shelf to examine it. About the size of a large can of peaches, but with a short, narrow neck surmounted by a metal bulb. Not a lid, but a seal. The stuff must be so volatile, he thought, that not the tightest lid known would keep it from evaporating.

“I use it as an anesthetic when I’m decerebrating cats.”

“You mean when you remove their brains?”

“You’re learning, Lieutenant. Yes.”

“How do you etherize them, ma’am?”

For answer she hauled a container made of clear Plexiglass out of a corner; it was about thirteen inches square, thirty inches high, and had a tightly fitting lid secured by clamps. “This is an old chromatography chamber,” she said. “I put a thick towel on the bottom, empty a whole can of ether onto the towel, pop the cat inside and shut the lid. Actually I do it outside on the fire stairs, better ventilation. The animal passes out very quickly, but can’t hurt itself on these smooth sides before it does.”

“Does it matter if it hurts itself when it’s about to lose its brain without ever waking up?” Carmine asked.

She reared back like a cobra about to strike. “Yes, you sap, of course it matters!” she hissed. “No animal is ever subjected to pain or suffering in my O.R.! What do you think this is, the cosmetic industry? I know some vets who don’t treat their animals as well as we do!”

“Sorry, Mrs. Liebman, I didn’t mean to offend you. Blame it on ignorance,” said Carmine, groveling abjectly. “How do you get the can open?” he asked, to change the subject.

“There’s probably a tool for it,” she said, mollified, “but I don’t have one, so I use an old pair of rongeurs.”

These looked like a large pair of pliers, except that two scooped ends met in opposition and nibbled away at whatever was put between them. Like the soft metal bulb of a can of ether, as Sonia Liebman proceeded to demonstrate. Carmine retreated from the smell that seemed to spring out of the can faster than a genie.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked, surprised. “I love it.”

“Do you know how much ether you have in stock?”

“Not to an accurate count – it’s neither valuable nor important. When I notice the shelf supply is getting low, I simply order more. I use it for decerebrations, but it’s also used to clean glassware if an investigator is going to do a test that requires no residues of any kind.”

“Why ether?”

“Because we have plenty of it, but some investigators prefer chloroform.” She frowned, looked suddenly enlightened. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at! Ether doesn’t last in the body, Lieutenant, anymore than it clings to glassware. A few respirations blow it away, straight out of the lungs and the bloodstream. I can’t use Pentothal or Nembutal to anesthetize a decerebrate because they hang around in the brain for hours. Ether is gone – poof!”

“Couldn’t you use an anesthetic gas?”

Sonia Liebman blinked, as if amazed at his density. “Sure I could, but why? Humans can co-operate, and they don’t have fangs or claws. With animals, it’s a shot of parenteral Nembutal or the ether chamber.”

“Is the ether chamber common in research laboratories?”

That did it! She turned away and began to sort through a pile of surgical instruments. “I wouldn’t know,” she said, voice as cold as the air outside. “I worked out the technique for myself, and that’s all that matters as far as I’m concerned.”

Feeling as if he should back out of her presence, bowing deeply all the way, Carmine left Mrs. Liebman to fulminate about the total stupidity of cops.

“Mercedes and Francine were brutally raped with a succession of implements, and I can only guess that he did the same to begin on Margaretta,” said Patrick to Carmine, Silvestri, Marciano, Corey and Abe. “Then he graduated to some new device that must have been encrusted with barbs and spikes, maybe tipped with a blade. It tore her to shreds inside – bowels, bladder, kidneys, even as high as the liver. Massive, multiple lacerations. She died of shock before she could bleed to death internally. There was a little Demerol in her bloodstream, so wherever he took Margaretta after he abducted her was too far from Groton to rely on ether beyond the initial few minutes. I found no trace of ether on the pillowcase, by the way.”

“Did you expect to find any?” Marciano asked.

“No, but I smelled it in a tight fold of the pillowcase at the time we reached the Bewlee house.”

“Did she lose blood when her head was removed?” Abe asked.

“Only a very little. She’d been dead for some hours when he did that. Because of her height, he seems to have used a band across each leg as well as the chest band to restrain her.”

“If she died prematurely, why wait thirteen days to dump her? What did he do with her?” Corey asked.

“Put her in a freezer big enough to lie her flat.”

“Has she been identified?” Carmine asked.

Patrick’s face twisted. “Yes, by her father. He was so calm! She has a small scar on her left hand – a dog bite. The moment he found it, he said she was his daughter, thanked us, and left.”

The room fell silent. How could I deal with that were she Sophia? Carmine wondered. No doubt the rest of us here feel the blade more keenly, they’ve all got daughters who didn’t go to California before the ties were properly forged. Hell is too good for this beast.

“Patsy,” Carmine said, breaking the moment, “is it possible that there were two of them?”

“Two?” Patrick asked blankly. “You mean two killers?”

“Yes.”

Silvestri chewed on his cigar, grimaced, dropped it in his waste-basket. “Two like him? You’re joking!”

“No, John, I’m not. The longer I think about this series of abductions, the more convinced I become that it took two people to do them. From there to two killers is an obvious step.”

“A step a thousand feet high, Carmine,” said Silvestri. “Two monsters? How could they find each other?”

“I don’t know, but maybe something as common as an ad in the National Enquirer personal columns. Guarded, but clear as crystal to someone with the same tastes. Or maybe they’ve known each other for years, even grew up together. Or maybe they met by accident at a cocktail party.”

Abe looked at Corey and rolled his eyes; they were thinking about sitting for days in the National Enquirer morgue reading to find an ad at least two years old.

“You’re shoveling shit uphill, Carmine,” said Marciano.

“I know, I know! But forget for a moment how they got together and concentrate on what happens to the victim. I realized that there has to be a bait. These aren’t the kind of young women who would be lured off by an invitation from some man, or fall for an offer of a screen test, any of the ploys that work on less carefully brought up girls. But think how hard it would be for one man to make the snatch without a bait!”

Carmine leaned forward, getting into stride. “Take Mercedes, who closes the lid on the piano, says goodbye to Sister Theresa, and lets herself out the music annex door. And somewhere quiet, with nobody else around, Mercedes sees something so irresistible that she has to go closer. Something her heart goes out to, like a half-starved kitten or puppy. But as it’s got to be in the exact right spot, there’s someone else mourning over the animal too. While Mercedes is engrossed, the other man strikes. One to dangle the bait, one to grab. Or Francine, somewhere near the toilet block, or else actually inside it. She sees the bait, her heart goes out, she’s grabbed. There are just too many people still in the school to risk getting her out of Travis, so they put her in the sports locker. How much easier to do that in a hurry if there are two of them! It’s Wednesday, the gyms are deserted, and the Chemistry classroom is right near to that toilet block. With Margaretta, there’s a sister sleeping not three yards away. No bait, but would this killer run the risk of Linda when he plans so meticulously? The bait half has a new role, to watch Linda and act if she stirs. When she doesn’t, it’s a piece of cake for two men to get a tall girl out a window, one inside, one outside.”

“Why do you make things so hard for yourself?” Patrick asked.

“Things are as hard as they have to be, Patsy. If one killer isn’t enough, then we have to think there are two.”

“I agree,” Silvestri said suddenly, “but we don’t breathe a word about Carmine’s theory outside the people in this room.”

“One other thing, John. The party dress. I’d like to show it to Desdemona Dupre.”

“Why?”

“Because she does incredible embroidery. There are no labels on the dress, no one’s ever seen anything like it before, and I want to try to find out where to start looking for the person who made it. That means I need to know how much it would cost if it was bought in a store, or how much someone like Desdemona would charge for custom making it. She does commissions, she’ll know.”

“Sure, once it’s had the works from Paul – and if you trust her not to spill the beans about it.”

“I trust her.”

Chapter 18

Monday, January 24th, 1966

The logical journal to search for a person advertising for a partner in anything from business through sex to murder was the National Enquirer, which was read clear across the country and available in any supermarket at the cashier’s desk among the gum and magazines. After talking to the three psychiatrists who made murder their speciality, Carmine was able to equip Abe and Corey with some key words before shipping them off to read the personals between January of 1963 and June of 1964. The Ghost may have been in his gruesome collaboration before the first girl disappeared, or he might have seen how much easier his task would be with a helper after he commenced his killing career.

The nature of the bait was now fairly clear to Carmine: an object of pity, of irresistible appeal to a soft-hearted, sensitive young woman. So he abandoned that line of thought to move on to what kind of premises housed the girls while they were raped and killed and stored. The general police feeling was that the killing premises were makeshift; only Patrick saw Carmine’s point that the killing premises were anything but makeshift. Anyone so persnickety that he lined up a notice would want his “laboratory” perfect.

After the discovery of Margaretta Bewlee’s body on a Hugger property, the Huggers fell over themselves to offer permission to the police to search anywhere they liked. Even Satsuma, Chandra and Schiller crumbled. Maurice Finch’s mushroom tunnel was just that; another search of Benjamin Liebman’s mortuary yielded nothing; Addison Forbes’s “eyrie” consisted of two round rooms, one above the other, overfilled with neatly stacked or shelved professional reading materials; the Smith basement was pure train heaven; Walter Polonowski’s cabin was a love nest, decorously posed photographs of Marian everywhere, a big bed, not much of a kitchen. Paola Polonowski had seized her opportunity and gone up to the cabin in the wake of the police, with the result that Polonowski was now living in it with Marian, and looking a great deal happier. Hideki Satsuma’s retreat turned out to be near the corner of the Cape Cod elbow in Orleans, an architect-designed bachelor pad that held nothing more indictable than a huge amount of pornography heavily into violence, though not murder. No real surprise to Carmine, whose time in Japan had shown him the Japanese penchant for pictorial pornography. Dr. Nur Chandra was just “being bloody-minded” as Desdemona would have phrased it; his secret activity in the cottage he used consisted of a new generation computer that he was trying to program without enlisting one of those amazing young Chubb medical students who paid their way through school by devising programs for specific scientific purposes. Chandra was so sure of his Nobel Prize that he would speak of his work to no one, especially a super-bright, ambitious young Chubb medical student. The Ponsonby forest was a forest; no cabins, sheds, barns, underground anythings. And Kurt Schiller’s worst secret was a photograph of himself, his father, and Adolf Hitler. Papa had been a highly decorated U-boat captain invited to meet der Führer and bring his towheaded little son along; Hitler loved towheaded children with brave fathers. Schiller Senior had gone down with his submarine when it encountered a depth-charge in 1944; Kurt was ten years old at the time.

Therefore, according to Silvestri, Marciano and the rest of Connecticut’s various senior policemen, the killing premises must be makeshift. Were they not, someone would have noticed.

But they are not makeshift, Carmine said to himself. If I were the Ghost, what would I want? Pristine surroundings, that’s what. Surfaces that could be hosed down, scrupulously cleaned. That means tiles rather than concrete, metal rather than wood or rock. I’d want an operating room. Two Ghosts could build it if they were both skilled with their hands; they could even wire it for electricity. What they probably couldn’t do was plumb it, yet it had to be plumbed. A high-pressure water supply, adequate drains, and connection to either a sewer or a septic system. The Ghosts would want a bathroom too, for themselves if not for their victim. Her they probably bed panned, sponge bathed.

So while Abe and Corey waded their way through the National Enquirer personals, Carmine checked every Hugger property for unsuitably large power or water bills. Unfortunately the more prosperous Huggers lived where they tapped for well water rather than used a piped supply, but no one’s electricity bill was huge. A generator? Possible, if the noise could be muffled. From that fruitless exercise he waded through plumbing contractors and more humble self-employed plumbers from one end of Connecticut to the other. Looking for a lucrative job that involved installation of what would have been described as a private gymnasium or a plush recreational facility or even a pool house. Those he did find turned out to be genuine, all located in Fairfield or Litchfield counties. He was aware that the kind of thing he was asking about spelled someone with money, but he had always thought that the Ghost had plenty of money. Wherever he looked, he came up with nothing. That said one of three things: the first, that the two Ghosts were able to do their own plumbing; the second, that they had hired a plumber whom they paid generously with cash so he would keep quiet about the job and not pay tax; and the third, that the Ghosts had rented or bought premises already suitable for their purposes, such as a veterinary clinic or surgeon’s rooms. He called around to see how many veterinary clinics and surgeons’ rooms had changed hands late in 1963, but those that had changed hands were bona fide. The usual nothing, nothing, nothing.

Because the pink lace dress was adorned with 265 rhinestones, and every one had to be examined to make sure it held only one set of prints, presumably the seamstress’s, it was six days before Carmine could show the garment to Desdemona.

He buzzed her intercom feeling more goofy and anxious than he had in high school when the girl of his dreams at the time said yes, he could take her to the prom. Mouth dry, heart in it – all he lacked was the corsage.

“Desdemona, it’s Carmine. On business. Don’t open the door, I’ll key the combination in.”

“How are you?” he asked, shedding his layers and putting the dress box – shit, what would she think? – on the table.

She looked neither glad nor sorry to see him. “I’m well but bored to death,” she said. Then, flicking a finger at the dress box, “What’s that?”

“Something I had to assure the Commissioner you wouldn’t talk about to anyone. I knew you wouldn’t, he doesn’t. You mightn’t know that the last victim, Margaretta Bewlee, was found wearing a child’s party dress. We can’t trace it, but I thought maybe with your eye for fancy work, you could tell us something about it.”

She had the box open and was shaking out the dress in a second, then held it, turned it around, finally spread it on the table. “I take it that the last girl wasn’t chopped into bits?”

“No, just the head was removed.”

“The newspapers said she was tall. This wouldn’t fit her.”

“It didn’t, but she was wedged into it all the same. Her shoulders were too broad for him to button it down the back, and that leads to my first question – why buttons? Everything these days is zipped.”

Paul had fastened the buttons, which sparkled like genuine jewels under the table light. “That’s why,” she said, fingering one. “A zipper would have spoiled the effect. These glitter.”

“Have you ever seen a dress like this?”

“Only on a pantomime stage when I was a child, but it was makeshift due to clothes rationing. This is very pretentious.”

“Is it handmade?”

“To some extent, but probably not as much as you assume. The rhinestones have been sewn on, yes, but by a specialist who can wallop them on faster than you can eat pot roast. The person is a piece-worker, so she sticks her needle through the hole, loops her strand of cotton around the rhinestone once, then tacks her needle through the lace to the next rhinestone – see?”

Carmine saw.

“Some of them are missing because they weren’t sewn on firmly enough, and they come off in a chain as long as the strand of cotton in the needle – see?”

“I thought Paul might have done that in the lab.”

“No, it’s more likely to have happened with rough handling, and I can’t imagine it would receive that in a pathology lab.”

“So what you’re saying is that the dress is affordable?”

“If you have something over a hundred dollars to spend on a frock that the child would probably only wear once or twice, then yes. It’s a profit exercise, Carmine. Whoever makes and sells these knows how often the frock will be worn, so they cut as many corners as they can. The lining is synthetic, not silk, and the underskirt is cheap net stiffened with thick starch.”

“What about the lace?”

“French, but not top quality. Machine made.”

“With that kind of price tag, we should look in the children’s wear at places like Saks and Bloomingdale’s in New York City? Or maybe Alexander’s in Connecticut?”

“A fairly expensive shop or department store, certainly. I would call the frock showy, not elegant.”

“Like Astor’s pet horse,” he said absently.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just a saying.” He drew a deep breath. “Am I forgiven?”

Her eyes thawed, even twinkled. “I suppose so, you graceless twit. Too little Carmine Delmonico is worse than too much.”

“Malvolio’s?”

“Yes, please!”

“Now to a different subject,” he said over coffee. “It’s late, we can talk here. Manual skills.”

“Who at the Hug has them, and who doesn’t?”

“Exactly.”

“Starting with the Prof?”

“How is he, incidentally?”

“Shut up in an exclusive loony bin somewhere on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport. I imagine they’re loving him as a patient. Most of their intake consists of alcoholics or drug addicts drying out, plus heaps of anxiety neuroses. Whereas the poor old Prof has had a severe breakdown – illusions, delusions, hallucinations, loss of contact with reality. As to his manual skills, they are considerable.”

“Could he wire for electricity and plumb a house?”

“He wouldn’t want to, Carmine. Anything requiring hard manual labor he would regard as beneath his dignity. The Prof dislikes getting his hands dirty.”

“Ponsonby?”

“Couldn’t change the washer on a tap.”

“Polonowski?”

“A fairly skilled domestic handyman. He hasn’t the money to hire a carpenter when the children break a door or a plumber when the children stuff a cuddly toy down the lavatory.”

“Satsuma?”

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Lieutenant, really! What do you think Eido is for? There’s also Eido’s wife, she slaves. Chandra has a whole army of turbaned lackeys.”

“Forbes?”

“I’d say he was competent with his hands. He works on his house, I do know that. They were so lucky, the Forbeses! At the time they bought it, the mortgage rate was two percent, and they have thirty years to pay it off. Now it’s worth a fortune, of course – water frontage, two acres, no oil tanks next door.”

“Relocating those to the bottom of Oak Street helped everyone on the east shore. Finch?”

“Builds his own glasshouses and greenhouses. There is a big difference, he tells me. Isn’t above grubbing out a mushroom tunnel. But I’d say Catherine is even more competent. All those thousands of chickens.”

“Hunter and Ho the engineers?”

“Could construct the Empire State Building, with improvements.”

“Cecil?”

“Now isn’t that an indictment?” she asked, scowling. “I just can’t tell you, Carmine. He has skills, but in one’s mind he tends to be not only a flunky, but a black flunky into the bargain. No wonder they hate us. We deserve to be hated.”

“Otis?”

“At present Otis isn’t doing any heavy lifting. Apparently he has the beginnings of congestive cardiac failure, so I’m trying to arrange a nice pension for him with the Parsons. Personally I doubt his troubles have much to do with how hard he works. His bugbear is Celeste’s nephew, Wesley. Otis is terrified that the boy is going to make mischief for Celeste. The Hollow and Argyle Avenue are rather boiling.”

“Wait until spring,” Carmine said grimly. “We’ve bought some time with the weather, but when it gets warmer, all hell is going to break loose.”

“Anna Donato’s husband is a plumber.”

“Anna Donato…Refresh my memory.”

“She looks after all the cranky equipment, has the touch.”

“The Kyneton ménage?”

“Oh, dear! The fourth floor is a circus these days. Hilda and Tamara are at daggers drawn. Mostly screaming matches, but on one occasion they rolled around the floor, kicking and biting. It took our four office workers and me to drag them apart. So we are profoundly glad that the Prof isn’t there to see women at their worst. However, Hilda will be gone before the Prof is due to come back. Dearest, darlingest Keith got the partnership he was after in New York City.”

“What about Schiller?”

“Not handy. He can’t even sharpen a microtome blade. Mind you, he doesn’t have to. That’s what technicians are for.”

“How about coming back to my place for a cognac?”

Desdemona slid out of the booth. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Carmine walked her down the block back in that high school happy haze after his prom date had told him she’d loved the evening and offered him her lips. Not that Desdemona was about to offer her lips. A pity. They were full and unlipsticked. He started to laugh at the memory of trying to scrub off bright red lipstick.

“What’s so funny?”

“Not a thing, not a thing.”

Chapter 19

Monday, January 24th, 1966

Commissioner Silvestri held a discreet conference to which he invited all the various heads of the Ghost investigations throughout Connecticut. “In a week’s time it will be thirty days,” he said to the room of silent men, “and we have no idea whether the Ghost or Ghosts have switched their pattern to one a month or are still on the two-month pattern, just rung in the New Year with a special spree.”

Though the press still referred to the killer as the Monster, most of the police involved now alluded to him as the Ghost or the Ghosts. Carmine’s ideas had taken root because men like Lieutenant Joe Brown from Norwalk saw the sense in them.

“Between this Thursday, the twenty-seventh, and the following Thursday, February third, all departments will put a surveillance team on any suspect they have twenty-four hours a day. If we get no results, at least it’s an elimination process. If we know a suspect was watched and the suspect didn’t elude us, then that suspect can be crossed off the list if a girl goes missing.”

“And if no girl goes missing?” asked a cop from Stamford.

“Then we do it all again at the end of February. I agree with Carmine that everything we know points to a bunch of changes – time interval, a night abduction, the party dress, decapitation only – but we can’t be sure he’s into a new pattern permanently. One or two of him, he’s way ahead of us. We just gotta keep on pluggin’ on, guys, best way we know how.”

“What if a girl goes missing and no suspect is involved?” a cop from Hartford asked.

“Then we think again, but in a different way. We broaden the net to bring in new suspects, but we won’t abandon the old. I’ll hand you over to Carmine.”

Who had little more to say, except upon the subject of their present suspects. “Holloman is in the unique position of having many more than one suspect,” he said. “The rest of the departments will be watching known rapists with a track record of violence, whereas Holloman has a group of suspects with no known track record of rape or violence. The staff of the Hug, plus two others. All up, thirty-two people. We can’t manage to keep that many under twenty-four-hour observation, which is why I’m asking for volunteers from other departments to give us a hand. Our teams have to be experienced men, not liable to sleep on the job or drift into a waking dream. If any of you can spare men who can be trusted, I’d appreciate the help.”

And so it was arranged. Twenty-nine Huggers, Professor Frank Watson, Wesley le Clerc and Professor Robert Mordent Smith were to be watched around the clock by men whose attention wouldn’t waver. A formidable task, even logistically.

A surprising number of the Holloman suspects either lived on Route 133 or just off it, and Route 133 was a typical state road: one lane either way, meandering, yet not endowed with much shelter; no wide verges, no shopping centers or concomitant parking lots, no bays or rest stops. All that went on along the Boston Post Road, while Route 133 ambled from village to village inland, gave off an occasional side street of houses, more often didn’t. Tamara Vilich and Marvin Schulman, both on Sycamore close to Holloman’s center, were easy; so were Cecil and Otis on Eleventh Street. But the Smiths, the Ponsonbys, the Finches, Mrs. Polonowski, the Frank Watsons, the Chandras and the Kynetons were all somehow attached to Route 133.

The sleazy motel rejoicing in the name of Major Minor’s was adjacent to Ponsonby Lane on 133, and hadn’t seen so much after-dark business in years as it promised to during that coming week.

Carmine, Corey and Abe split up surveillance on the Ponsonby house into three eight-hour shifts; that Carmine chose the Ponsonbys was purely because he didn’t think any of the suspects would yield fruit, and thus far the Ponsonbys had received less attention than, for instance, had the Smiths or the Finches. They found a place to hide behind a clump of mountain laurels fifty yards on the 133 side of the Ponsonby driveway, having ascertained that Ponsonby Lane was a dead end and that the Ponsonby house had absolutely no other vehicular access than the driveway.

He checked everything out himself ahead of time, to discover that the Forbeses were the most difficult to observe, thanks to their water frontage and the steep, bushy slope that led down from East Circle, their road frontage, to the water; the house sat on a shelf halfway down. Nor were the Smiths easy, between that knoll where the house was, the dense woods, and that twisting driveway. However, the Prof was definitely incarcerated in Marsh Manor on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport, under guard by the Bridgeport police. As for the Finches – a good thing, really, that he had virtually eliminated them from his list. They had no less than four gates opening on to Route 133, none of them where an unmarked car could hunker down undetected by sharp eyes. Norwalk was taking care of Kurt Schiller, and Torrington was watching Walter Polonowski and his mistress in their upstate cabin.

So why didn’t Carmine think that this massive surveillance exercise would bear fruit? He genuinely didn’t know why, save that the Ghosts were ghosts, and you only saw ghosts when they wanted you to see them.

Chapter 20

Monday, January 31st, 1966

There had been twenty-two inches of snow on the preceding Wednesday, and no thaw to follow, not unusual in January. Instead, the temperature plummeted to twenty below freezing, even less after dark. The surveillance became a nightmare, men rugged in every fur coat wives or mothers could donate, fur rugs, bearskins, blankets, layers of wool, thermal underwear, electric blankets that could be wired to a DC battery, nineteenth-century warming pans filled with barbecue charcoal, anything that staved off freezing. For of course the moment the mercury went lower than 28°F, no engine could be left running because of the thick white vapor that came pouring out of a tailpipe to betray a tenanted car. The luckiest men were huddled inside Alaskan hunting hides.

Carmine took the midnight to 8 A.M. shift each night, his car a tan Buick with a velvet interior for which he thanked every saint there was.

The night between Sunday and Monday was the coldest yet at zero Fahrenheit. Bundled in two cashmere blankets, he sat with the wing windows open just enough to prevent fogging, his teeth chattering like castanets. The evergreen mountain laurels hid him well, but on Thursday, the first night of his vigil, he had worried about Biddy – would the dog sense his presence and bark? It had not, nor did it on this night. Only a decerebrated man, he thought, would venture out; this was the season of fires, of lovely heat wafting through ventilators, of finding things to do at home. If the Ghosts had planned an abduction, surely this terrible freeze would deter them.

The Ponsonby property had been a headache. A five-acre block longer than it was wide, it sloped down steeply from a ridge that formed a spine as well as the back boundary; the ancient house was near the road, with thinned forest around it. The ridge that ran behind all the blocks on that side of Ponsonby Lane was actually the commencement of a twenty-acre forest reserve donated not to the state but to Holloman County Council by Isaac Ponsonby, grandfather of Charles and Claire. Isaac had been a deer lover who deplored hunting; these twenty acres, said his will, were to be reserved as a deer park within the county near the city. Beyond tacking up a few signs that said NO HUNTING, the council had paid the bequest no mind. Today it was much as it had been in Isaac’s day, a fairly dense forest thickly populated by deer. It ran from the ridge down a slope to Deer Lane, a short dead end with four houses on its far side; the deer park continued across the circular terminus of Deer Lane and had prevented further building. Though Carmine was sure that Charles Ponsonby wasn’t athlete enough to make that kind of hike in zero Fahrenheit weather, he had to station other cars in the vicinity: on Deer Lane, its corners, and Route 133. These watchers informed him that no other cars were parked on Deer Lane.

The night was typical of such arctic conditions: a sky that was not as much black as mottled indigo, webs and spangles of brilliantly blazing stars, not a cloud to be seen. Beautiful! No sound apart from his own teeth, no movements or flashlights outside, no crunch of car wheels on a frozen driveway.

And because inertia was foreign to him, he began to toy with an idea that popped into his brain at the exact same second that a shooting star carved its fiery path across the vault.

Look at the religious side of things, Carmine. Think back over the thirteen girls, all the way to Rosita Esperanza, the first to be grabbed…ten of them Catholic. Rachel Simpson was the child of an Episcopalian minister. Francine Murray and Margaretta Bewlee were Baptists. But none of the Protestant girls was from a white church. So why not add Catholicism to black Protestantism? What does that get you, Carmine? A white Protestant fanatic is what it gets you. We’ve lost sight of the enormous preponderance of Catholic girls, maybe because the Ghosts seemed to swing away from them with Francine and Margaretta. Over 75 percent Catholic, plus a black Protestant minister’s daughter, the child of a racially split marriage, and – Margaretta. Margaretta, the one who doesn’t fit. Is there something about the Bewlee family that we don’t know?

The cold forgotten, he sat itching for the morning to come, to liberate him from this unproductive, fruitless graveyard shift and let him go talk to Mr. Bewlee.

His radio emitted a short, low sound, the signal that a cop was approaching his car. A glance at his watch told Carmine that it was 5 A.M., too late for anything to happen if a night abduction was the plan. One thing for sure, the Ponsonbys hadn’t stirred.

Patrick slid into the passenger’s seat and held out a thermos with a grin. “Malvolio’s best. I stood over Luigi and made him brew a fresh pot, and the raisin bagels had just come in.”

“Patsy, I love you.”

They drank and chewed for five minutes, then Carmine told his cousin about this new theory. Much to his disappointment, Patrick didn’t think highly of it.

“The trouble is that you’ve been on this case now for so long that you’ve exhausted all the probables and have nowhere to look except at the improbables.”

“There is a religious bias, and it’s tied up with race!”

“I agree, but religion isn’t what interests the Ghosts. What interests them is the fact that God-fearing families produce the kind of girl they’re after.”

“The Bewlees are hiding something, they have to be,” Carmine muttered. “Otherwise Margaretta doesn’t fit.”

“She doesn’t fit,” said Patrick patiently, “because yours is a crazy hypothesis. Get back to basics! If you think of the Ghosts as rapists ahead of killers, then you’re not looking for a religious fanatic of any color or denomination, Christian or otherwise. You are looking for a man or two men who hate all women, but some more than others. The Ghosts hate virtue allied to youth allied to color allied to a face allied to other things we don’t know. But we do know about the virtue, the youth, the face, the color. None of them have been white white, and none of them will be white white, I know it in my bones. Their best sample pool is Latin Catholics, is all. The children are brought up young for their age, strictly supervised, and greatly loved. You know that, Carmine! But the families are not newcomers to America, and I think that a religious fanatic killer would be targeting new immigrants – keep down the influx, spread the word that if you immigrate here, your children will be raped and slaughtered. The answer lies in the case basics.”

“I’m still going to see Mr. Bewlee,” Carmine said stubbornly.

“If you have to, you have to. But she won’t fit because the pattern you’re seeing is a figment of your imagination. You’re a victim of battle fatigue.”

They fell silent; less than three hours to go, and the shift would be over.

Shortly before 7 A.M. the radio emitted a different stealthy noise: the one that said get out of there unobtrusively and go to your rendezvous, because a girl has been taken.

Carmine’s rendezvous was Major Minor’s motel, where he and Patrick requisitioned use of the phone in Reception. The Major was on the desk himself, eager to learn what was happening. All his rooms had been booked by the Holloman police for a sum they – and he – knew was exorbitant, especially since no one used them. The NO VACANCY sign was additional camouflage for parked cars, and the Major wasn’t about to turn that on unless it spelled out the truth.

While Carmine talked, Patrick watched Major Minor, wondering idly if, like so many people owning suggestive names, young F. Sharp Minor had gone to West Point determined to attain the rank that would make him a contradiction in terms. In his fifties now, with the swollen purple nose of a heavy drinker and the attitude of a desk warrior: if the forms are correctly filled in and the paperwork is adequate, do whatever you like from beating the crap out of a soldier to stealing firearms from the cage. This quirk in Major Minor’s nature helped a business where the guests came for an hour in mid-afternoon; the main parking lot was around the back so that no wife cruising down Route 133 could spot her old man’s car outside. At one stage Carmine had been desperate enough to classify Major F. Sharp Minor as a suspect, for no better reason than that he knew all the rooms were fitted with spy holes. The elderly villain had gotten rid of the cameras after a private detective caught him filming a company director and his secretary, but Major Minor could still look.

“Norwich,” Carmine said. “Corey, Abe and Paul will be here in about a minute.” He moved farther from the Major. “She’s of Lebanese extraction, but the family has been in Norwich since 1937. Her name is Faith Khouri.”

“They’re Moslems?” Patrick asked, looking incredulous.

“No, Catholics of the Maronite sect. I doubt there’d be a Maronite church, so they’d go to the ordinary Catholic one.”

“Norwich is a pretty big town.”

“Yes, but they live out of it quite a way. Mr. Khouri runs a convenience store in Norwich. His home is north, about halfway to Willimantic.”

Abe pulled up in the Ford, Paul right behind in Patrick’s unmarked black van.

“I don’t even know why we’re bothering to go up there,” said Corey as the Ford moved off at a normal pace; no siren or light until they were well away from Ponsonby Lane.

That, thought Carmine, inwardly sighing, is the remark of a man who despairs. I’m not the only one suffering from a bad case of battle fatigue. We are beginning to believe that we will never catch the Ghosts. This is the fourth girl since we’ve known the Ghosts exist, and we’re no closer, no closer. Corey’s hit the bottom of his particular pit, and I don’t know how far I am from the bottom of mine.

“We are going, Cor,” he said as if Corey’s statement had been routine, “because we have to see the abduction site for ourselves. Abe, if we go north on I-91 to Hartford and then strike east, we’ll have better road conditions than I-95 to New London.”

“Can’t,” said Abe briefly. “Five trailer trucks jackknifed.”

“At least,” said Carmine, settling into his beloved backseat comfortably, “the heater’s on. I’m going to get some sleep.”

The Khouri house was on a winding lane that ran not far from the Shetucket River, and was as charming as its setting. The house itself was traditional, but built in fits and starts that lent it alluring angles as well as three levels. Between it and the road was an enormous pond, frozen solid at this time of year, as was the brook that led from it to the icebound river; it had been ploughed free of snow so it could be used as a skating rink, but a tiny wooden jetty spoke equally loudly of canoes in summer. A patch of rushes clattered hollowly against each other, and everywhere in the distances a golden sheen of sun overlay sleek white fields. Around the house were the winter skeletons of birches and willows, with a massive old oak atop a rise beyond the little lake. Picnics in the shade in summer, it said. What lovelier environment could there be for children than this perfect American dream?

There were seven children, Carmine learned: only a nineteen-year-old boy, Anthony, was away from home. His brother Mark was seventeen, then came Faith at sixteen, Nora at fourteen, Emily at twelve, Matthew at ten; Philippa, at eight, was the youngest.

The wildness of the family’s grief made it impossible to question any of them, including the father. Almost thirty years in America had not cancelled out their Levantine reaction to the loss of a child. When Carmine managed to find a photograph of Faith, he saw what Patrick had been trying to make him see on Ponsonby Lane. Faith looked like the sister of the other victims, from her mass of curly black hair to her wide dark eyes and her lush mouth. In skin color she was the fairest; about like a southern Italian or Sicilian girl, Mediterranean tawny.

Patrick looked defeated when he found Carmine outside on the cold porch. “The snow’s frozen so solid that they were able to lay a strip of straw matting from the road to the back porch – looks like cheap stair runner,” he said. “They scraped and salted the road where they parked, so no tire tracks that haven’t been obscured by the local cops. They opened the back door with a key or a set of picks, and I’d say they knew exactly which bedroom was Faith’s. She had her own room – all the kids do – on the second floor, which is the sleeping floor for everyone. They must have found her asleep. The only signs of a struggle are a few disturbances in the sheets at the bottom of her bed, maybe a few feeble kicks. Then they carried her out the way they came in, up the straw runner to the road and their vehicle. From what we can gather, no one heard a thing. She was missed when she didn’t appear for breakfast, which the mother puts on early at this time of year – it’s an hour’s drive into Norwich on badly ploughed roads. The kids go in with their father and stay at his shop until it’s time to go to school, just a short walk away.”

“You’re doing my job, Patsy. Do we have any idea of her height? Her weight?”

“Not until Father Hannigan and his nuns arrive. The grief in there is demented, and nobody will let me give anybody a shot. The hair’s coming out in handfuls.”

“And the blood’s flying where Mrs. Khouri keeps scratching herself. That’s why I’m out here, not in there,” Carmine said, sighing. “Not that flying blood and hair matter. The Ghosts won’t have left a shred of either behind.”

“The family’s given Faith up for dead already.”

“Do you honestly blame them, Patsy? We’re about as useful as tits on a bull, and it’s getting to Abe and Corey. They’re hurting bad, just can’t show it.”

Patrick squinted and heaved a gasp of relief. “Here come our priest and cohorts. Maybe they know how to calm everyone down.”

If they couldn’t do that, at least Father Hannigan and the three nuns with him were able to give Carmine the information he needed. Faith was five-two, and weighed about eighty-five pounds. Slender, not yet very developed. A dear girl, devout, maintained an A-plus average in all her subjects, which leaned to the sciences; her ambition had been to do medicine. She was due to join the ranks of the candy stripers at St. Stan’s Hospital this summer, but until now her mother and father had kept her at home, didn’t want her into good works too young. Anthony, the brother who wasn’t there, was doing pre-med at Brown; it seemed all the children were interested in the human sciences. The family itself was tightly knit and highly respected. Their shop was in a good part of Norwich and had never been held up, their house had never been burgled, nor had any among them been harassed or attacked.

“It keeps going back to the unimpeachable innocence, the face, and the age, with a possible for the religion,” Carmine said to Silvestri when he returned to Holloman. “Of late color hasn’t worried the Ghosts, or size, but we always have those first three, and in most cases the fourth. Margaretta Bewlee’s sixteenth birthday present from her mother was a visit to the beauty parlor to have her hair straightened and styled like Dionne Warwick – she was performing one of Dionne’s numbers in a school concert. That news made me wonder about her, but after I checked it out I realized it wasn’t evidence of – how can I put it? – declining virtue? Though Margaretta is the one who gnaws at me, John. She is the sole black pearl in a collection of creamy ones. Too tall, too black, too inappropriate.”

“Maybe the Ghosts are jumping on the racial bandwagon. Their activities sure aren’t helping the racial situation.”

“Then why not another equally dark victim now? The Times crossword had a clue recently – ‘go back to beige.’ Six letters. The answer was ‘rebuff.’ When I tumbled to it I laughed until I cried. Every place I go, I am rebuffed.”

Silvestri didn’t say what he was thinking: you need a long vacation in Hawaii, Carmine. But not yet. I can’t afford to take you off this case. If you can’t crack it, no one can. “It’s time I held a press conference,” he said. “I got nothing to tell the bastards, but I gotta eat crow in public.” He cleared his throat, munched on the end of a very tattered cigar. “The Governor agrees I should eat crow in public.”

“Out of favor with Hartford, huh?”

“No, not yet. How do you think I spend most of my days? On the phone to Hartford, that’s how.”

“None of the Huggers showed a whisker outside last night. Though that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to watch them thirty days from now, John. I still have a gut feeling that the Hug is very much involved, and not merely as the object of vendetta,” said Carmine. “How much truth are you going to tell the press?”

“A little this, a little that. Nothing about Margaretta’s party dress. And nothing about two killers.”

Chapter 21

Tuesday, February 1st, 1966

The Holloman City Hall was famous for its acoustics, and the administrative duties of the Mayor having been removed to the County Services building a decade earlier, Holloman City Hall was left to do what it did best: play host to the world’s greatest virtuosi and symphony orchestras.

Behind the auditorium was a rehearsal room designed for these artists to record in as well as rehearse in; its clutter of music stands and chairs arranged in semi-circular rows did not suggest the murder of anything more horrific than music. John Silvestri positioned himself on the conductor’s podium clad in his best uniform, with the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck. This plus the campaign ribbons on his chest said that he was no ordinary man.

About fifty journalists came, most from papers and magazines, one TV crew from the local station in Holloman, and one reporter from WHMN radio. The nation’s major dailies sent stringers; though the Connecticut Monster was big news, a canny editor understood that this police exercise wasn’t going to produce any startling new developments. What would come out of the conference was a chance to write scathing editorials about police incompetence.

But Silvestri in public mode was a smooth operator, especially when he was eating crow. No one, thought Carmine, listening, ate crow more gracefully, with more apparent relish.

“Despite the freezing conditions, various police departments throughout this state kept a total of ninety-six possible suspects under surveillance twenty-four hours a day from last Thursday until Faith Khouri’s abduction. Thirty-two of these people were in or around Holloman. None of them could have been implicated, which means we are no closer to knowing the identity of the man you call the Connecticut Monster, but we are now calling the Ghost.”

“Good name,” said the crime writer from the Holloman Post. “Have you any evidence to implicate anyone? Anyone at all?”

“I’ve just finished saying that, Mrs. Longford.”

“This killer – the Ghost, I rather like that – must have a special place to keep his victims. Isn’t it about time that you started looking for it more seriously? Like searching premises?”

“We can’t search any tenanted premises without a warrant, ma’am, you know that. What’s more, you’d be the first one to pounce if we did.”

“Under normal circumstances, yes. But this is different.”

“How, different? In the horrible nature of the crimes? I agree as a person, but as a lawman I can’t. A police force may be a vital arm of the law, but in a free society like ours it is also restrained by the same law it serves. The American people have constitutional rights that we, the police, are obliged to respect. Unsubstantiated suspicion doesn’t empower us to march into someone’s house and search for the evidence we haven’t been able to find elsewhere. The evidence must come first. We have to present an evidential case to the judicial arm of the law in order to be granted permission to search. Talking until we run out of spit won’t persuade any judge to issue a warrant without concrete facts. And we do not have concrete facts, Mrs. Longford.”

The rest of the journalists were happy to appoint Mrs. Diane Longford as their workhorse; nothing was going to come out of her inquisition anyway, and they could smell the coffee and fresh doughnuts laid out at the back of the hall.

“Why don’t you have concrete facts, Mr. Commissioner? I mean, it boggles the imagination to think that a great many experienced men have been investigating these murders since the beginning of last October without coming up with a single concrete fact! Or are you saying that the killer is a real ghost?”

Barbed irony affected Silvestri no more than did aggression or charm; he ploughed on regardless.

“Not a real ghost, ma’am. Someone far more dangerous, far more lethal. Think of our killer as a very strong hunting cat in his prime – a leopard, say. He lies comfortably in a tree on the edge of the forest, perfectly camouflaged, watching a whole herd of deer grazing their way closer to the forest and his tree. To a bird in that tree, every deer looks the same. But the leopard sees every deer as different, and his target is one particular deer. To him, she’s juicier, more succulent than the others. Oh, he’s very patient! The deer pass under him – he doesn’t move – the deer don’t see him or smell him on his branch – and then his deer wanders below him. The strike is so fast that the rest of the deer hardly have time to start running before he’s back up his tree with his catch, legs helpless, neck broken.”

Silvestri drew a breath; he had caught their attention. “I admit it’s not a brilliant metaphor, but I use it to illustrate the magnitude of what we’re up against with the Ghost. From where we are, he’s invisible. Just as it doesn’t occur to deer to look up into a tree, just as the smells the wind carries to deer nostrils originate on their level, not from up a tree, so it is with us. It hasn’t occurred to us to look or smell in the right place for him because we have no idea where his place is, what kind of place he uses. We might pass him on the street every day – you might pass him on the street every day, Mrs. Longford. But his face is ordinary, his walk is ordinary – everything about him is ordinary. On the surface he’s a little alley cat, not a leopard. Underneath, he’s Dorian Gray, Mr. Hyde, the faces of Eve, Satan incarnate.”

“Then what protection can the community have against him?”

“I’d say vigilance, except that vigilance didn’t prevent his taking girls of a specific type even after we saturated Connecticut with bulletins and warnings. However, it is clear to me that we have frightened him, forced him to give up his daylight abductions in favor of the night. That’s nothing to boast about because it hasn’t stopped him. It hasn’t so much as slowed him down. Yet it’s a ray of hope. If he’s more scared than he was, and we keep the pressure up, he’ll start to make a few mistakes. And, ladies and gentlemen of the press, you have my word that we will not miss his mistakes. They’ll make us the leopard up the tree, and him our particular deer.”

“He did well,” Carmine said to Desdemona that night. “The AP stringer asked him if he was planning to run for governor at the next elections. ‘No, sir, Mr. Dalby,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear, ‘compared to government, a policeman’s lot is a happy one, ghosts and all.’”

“People respond to him. When I saw him on the six o’clock news, he reminded me of a battered old teddy bear.”

“The Governor likes him, which is more to the point. You don’t dismiss war heroes as incompetent idiots.”

“He must have been quite an elderly war hero.”

“He was.”

“You sound a bit sniffly, Carmine. Are you coming down with a cold?” she asked, taking another slice of pizza. Oh, it was nice to be back on good terms with him!

“After sitting in unheated cars when the mercury’s zero, we are all coming down with colds.”

“At least you didn’t have to watch me.”

“But we did, Desdemona.”

“Oh, the manpower!” she breathed, the manager in her awestruck as always. “Ninety-six people?”

“Yep.”

“Whom did you inherit?”

“That’s classified, you can’t ask. What’s going on at the Hug since Faith disappeared?”

“The Prof is still in his loony bin. When he discovers that Nur Chandra has accepted a post at Harvard, he’ll crash all over again. It’s more than losing his brightest star, it’s the fact that Nur’s contract says the monkeys go with him. I gather Nur has extended an invitation to Cecil to move to Massachusetts too – Cecil is wild with joy about it. No more ghetto living. The Chandras have bought a posh estate and Cecil is to have a lovely house on it. I’m happy for him, but very sorry for the Prof.”

“Sounds weird to me. A contract that lets you take things with you that other people paid for? That’s like a congressman taking the Remington from his office wall when he’s voted out.”

“At the time Nur came to the Hug, the Prof had every reason in the world to discount that stipulation. He knew that Nur would never find anywhere as perfect for his research as the Hug. And that was true until this beastly monster of a murderer appeared.”

“Yeah, who could have foreseen that? I’m getting so paranoid that it suggests yet another motive. There’s a Nobel Prize at stake, after all.”

“Do you know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve always had an odd feeling that Nur Chandra won’t win the Nobel Prize? Somehow it’s all been too easy. The only one of the monkeys that has shown any evidence of a conditioned epileptic state is Eustace, and it’s very dangerous in science to pin all your hopes on a solitary star. What if Eustace was harboring an epileptic tendency all along, and something entirely unrelated to Nur’s stimuli suddenly brought it out? Stranger things have happened.”

“You’re a lot smarter than the rest of them rolled in one,” Carmine said appreciatively.

“Smart enough to know I won’t win any Nobel Prizes!”

They moved to the big chairs. Usually Carmine sat next to Desdemona, but tonight he sat opposite her, on the premise that looking at her sane and sensible face would cheer him a little.

Yesterday he had gone to Groton to talk to Edward Bewlee, a man as sane and sensible as Desdemona. But the interview had not solved any mysteries.

“Etta was so set on being a famous rock star,” Mr. Bewlee had said. “Her voice was beautiful, and she moved well.”

And she moved well. Was that what appealed to the Ghosts?

Back to the present – to Desdemona’s sane and sensible face.

“Any other news on the Hug front?” he asked.

“Chuck Ponsonby is filling in for the Prof. He’s not one of my favorite people, but at least he comes to me with his problems, rather than to Tamara. Apparently she tried to see Keith Kyneton, and he slammed the door of his office in her face. So Hilda is definitely wearing the victory laurels. Her appearance has improved no end – a well-cut black suit, tomato-red silk blouse, Italian shoes, new hair-do and rinse, proper make-up – and, if you believe it, contact lenses instead of spectacles! She looks like a perfect wife for a prominent neurosurgeon.”

“Ready to strut her New York City stuff,” said Carmine with a smile. “Nice to think that something I said to Kyneton penetrated the fog.” He shifted in his seat. “There’s a rumor going around this building that Satsuma’s not renewing his lease on the penthouse or Eido’s apartment.”

“That could well be true. He’s dithering between offers from Stanford, Washington State and Georgia. Which probably means he will end at Columbia.”

“How did you work that one out?”

“Hideki’s a city man, and New York City means he won’t need to give up his Cape Cod weekender. A longer drive, yes, but still a feasible one. He would have gone to Boston if Nur Chandra hadn’t beaten him to Massachusetts. Any other university than Harvard would have been a terrible comedown. Yet to me, Hideki’s a better bet for the Nobel Prize. The showy researchers may fascinate the scientific press, but they rarely follow through.” She hopped up nimbly. “Time for bed. Thank you for the pizza, Carmine.”

Bereft of a suitable reply, he took her two floors down to her steel door with its dead bolt and combination, made sure she was properly locked in, and returned to his own domain feeling curiously depressed. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask her if he stood any chance of moving their relationship on to a more intimate plane, only to have the words stilled by that athletic spring to her feet, her brisk, no-nonsense departure.

The truth was that Carmine’s overtures had not been obvious enough for Desdemona to divine they so much as existed, and if her own emotions were rather hankering for him, then she didn’t dare linger in his presence once they had said all they could say about the Hug and ordinary topics of conversation. What she had dreaded was a long silence, not sure she could deal with it.

Besides, she was very tired. After heated arguments, she had won the privilege of resuming her weekend hikes – on the proviso that she was driven to her starting point in a squad car whose cop denizens made sure it was not followed, then picked up at some point she designated as her finishing line. So she had hiked up in the northwestern corner of the state Saturday and Sunday, and ached from what had become an unaccustomed exercise. The Appalachian Trail had its winter charms, but at times she had regretted not packing her snow shoes.

Thus after a long soak in a hot bath she dried off well and donned her customary sleeping attire – a pair of flannel men’s pajamas and thick, woolly bedsocks. Not for Desdemona a thermostat producing warm air! In which, had she only known it, she was very like Carmine Delmonico.

She was asleep as soon as she lay down, to dream of nothing she could afterward remember, only that some peculiar noise woke her at a moment her alarm clock said was 4 A.M. A scrape with a slight screech to it.

Sitting bolt upright, she began to think that it wasn’t the noise wakened her; some primeval sense of impending doom had done that. The bedroom door was open, displaying the small apartment’s living area, plunged into darkness. As indeed was the bedroom. No bogeys demanding night lights haunted Desdemona’s sleep. Yet a sliver of light from the hall outside flickered briefly with a shadow in its midst, man-high, man-shaped. Gone in an instant as the outside door was closed. I am not alone. He is here inside, he has come to kill me.

On a chair near the bed lay today’s “smalls” washing she had not gotten around to – panties, bra, stockings, a single pair of knitted woollen gloves. Desdemona was out of the bed without a sound, across to the chair, her fingers scrabbling for the gloves. Once found, she slid one on to each hand and forced herself to edge out of any reflected light to where the balcony sliding door sat locked and barred with a steel rod that lay in its opening track. She bent, removed the rod, undid the latch, and slid the door open just enough to get through it onto the balcony, a shelf of concrete surmounted by a four-foot-high iron affair of pickets and a rail.

Carmine was two floors up on the northeastern side of the Nutmeg Insurance building, almost exactly opposite where she was. That meant that to reach him she had to get herself two floors up with a dozen apartments between them on his or her level. Did she go up two floors first, or along her own floor’s balconies until she stood directly below his? No, up first, Desdemona! Get off this level as soon as possible. Only how?

Each floor occupied ten feet of vertical space: nine-foot ceilings inside, plus a foot of concrete representing the floor of the next storey up, with its inclusions of water and drainage pipes, electricity conduits. Too far to reach up, too far…

The wind was whistling, but once she closed her sliding door that wouldn’t penetrate the double-glazed interior. Bitterly cold, cutting through her pajamas as if they were made of tissue. Only one thing for it. She scissored her long legs and vaulted up on to the balcony rail, paused there teetering ten floors above the street as the wind tore at her, groping past the foot-thick shelf to find the bottom of the balustrade one storey up. There! Only her height and a teenaged propensity for gymnastics made it possible, but she had that height, that propensity. Both hands gripping the bottom of the balustrade upstairs, she took her feet off the rail, twisted in midair until her body was perpendicular, then swung her legs inward to cradle the rail behind her bent knees. A huge lunge, and she stood on the balcony above her own.

One down, one to go. Teeth chattering, her body felt like ice beneath the heat her gymnastics generated; without pausing to rest she mounted that rail and reached for the bottom of the balustrade on Carmine’s level. Do it, Desdemona, do it before you can’t! Up again, safe again on the balcony two floors above her own.

Now all she had to do was travel on the same level from one balcony to the next – easier said than done, as a ten-foot gap lay between the end of one and the beginning of the next. She chose to bridge the gap by balancing her feet on the rail and springing with all her might at the next balustrade. How many such? Twelve. And her feet were turning numb, her hands inside the woolly gloves minus all sensation. But it could be done – had to be done, given what was waiting for her downstairs if she tarried. How could she be sure he wasn’t at least as agile as she?

Finally it was done; she stood on Carmine’s balcony, began pounding on the sliding door to his bedroom, at this end.

“Carmine, Carmine, let me in!” she screamed.

The door was yanked open; he stood wearing only boxer shorts, took in her presence in a millisecond, pulled her inside.

The next moment he had stripped the quilted down cover off his bed and was draping it around her.

“He’s in my apartment,” she managed to say.

“Stay here and concentrate on getting warm,” he said, cranked the thermostat up and vanished even as he pulled on his trousers.

“Look at this,” he said to Abe and Corey twenty minutes later at Desdemona’s door, gaping open.

The hard steel dead bolt had been cut through; a small pile of iron filings lay on the floor where it had sat in closed position.

“Jesus!” Abe breathed.

“We have a whole new trade to learn,” Carmine said grimly. “If this proves anything, it proves that our ideas of security suck. To keep him out, we’d have had to overlap the metal on the outside of the door, but we didn’t. Oh, he’s gone – gone the minute he found Desdemona gone, I reckon. Flitted out like a ghost.”

“How the hell did she get past him?” Corey asked.

“Went onto her balcony, vaulted two floors up, then came along the intervening apartment balconies between here and where I am. I heard her banging on my balcony door.”

“Then she’s a mess in this weather – metal rails, the wind.”

“Not her!” Carmine said, a hint of pride in his voice. “She put on gloves and she was wearing bedsocks.”

“One hell of a woman,” said Abe reverently.

“I have to get back to her. Set the wheels in motion, guys. Search the place from penthouse to basements. But he’s gone.”

Finding Desdemona still under his quilt, he unwrapped her. “Feeling better?”

“As if I’ve wrenched my arms out of their sockets, but – oh, Carmine, I got away! He was there, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just my imagination?”

“He was there, all right, though long gone. Cut through the dead bolt with something like a diamond-tipped fretsaw – thin, fine, cut through anything if used by an expert. Therefore we now know he’s an expert. Didn’t try to do it too fast and break his saw. The bastard! He spat on our security.” Carmine knelt to pull off her soaked bedsocks, examine the skin of her feet. “You survived at this end. Now let’s have a look at your hands.” They too had survived. “You’re some woman, Desdemona.”

Thoroughly warmed, she began to glow. “That’s a compliment I’ll treasure, Carmine.” Then she shivered. “Oh, but I was so terrified! All I saw was his shadow as he opened the front door, but I knew he’d come to kill me. Only why? Why me?”

“Maybe to get at me. To get at the cops. To prove that if and when he decides to act, nothing will stop him. Trouble is that we’re used to ordinary criminals, men who wouldn’t have the brains or the patience to try a stunt like sawing through a two-inch dead bolt. Diamond teeth or not, it must have taken him several hours.”

Suddenly he reached for her, pulled her hard against him in an almost frantic hold. “Desdemona, Desdemona, I nearly lost you! You had to save yourself while I snored! Oh, Jesus, woman, I’d have died had I lost you!”

“You are not going to lose me, Carmine,” she said on a sigh, nuzzling her head into his shoulder, her lips busy on his neck. “I was terrified, yes, but I never thought for one moment of going anywhere else than to you. With you, I knew I’d be safe.”

“I love you.”

“I love you back again. But I’d feel ever safer if you took me to bed,” said Desdemona, emerging from his neck. “There are some bits of me that haven’t thawed in years.”