Scalpers

EPILOGUE

Some weeks later, Dean was back at his own lab in Chicago working on more routine matters when a package arrived from Florida. It had the rubber stamp of Sid's lab in the upper left-hand corner, and Dean ripped the small package open hastily, curious. He and Jackie had just finished opening Christmas packages a few days before, on New Year's Day, holding the celebration they'd missed on December 25 until then. Dean wondered if Sid was now playing Santa Claus. “Some sand, no doubt,” Dean told Sybil as she looked on. Sybil had done an excellent job of maintaining the pathology lab in Dean's absence, and Dean had spent the day alternately telling her so and filling her in on all the details of the scalping case in Orlando. Unlike Jackie, she was fascinated with all the gory details.

Dean lifted from the unwrapped box a small book, aged and crumbling, no thicker than the end of Dean's thumb, the pages a brownish-yellow. It seemed ready to fall apart. A note fell from the box as Dean slipped the delicate book from it. “What the hell is this?” he wondered aloud.

Sybil snatched up the note and handed it to her boss. “What's it say?"

Dean read it aloud. "Dean, thought you might like to see this. It was found beneath some boards in the old house the Bennimin boys used here in Florida as their headquarters. Light reading. When're you coming to Florida with Jackie just for the sights? Don't be a stranger." It was signed, "Sid."

Dean saw there was no title on the worn cloth cover, and he believed, from the look of it, that the title had simply worn away. Though he opened the cover carefully, pages pulled off the binding, breaking even with his light touch. He saw inside the title: Treatment, Curing and Preserving of Tissues.

It was an ancient textbook on taxidermy, used by the dwarf as a guide to his hideous taxidermy.

The book was so old that its author filled the pages with questionable, personal asides on skin and hair, speaking of hair as the source of vital strength and magic power, “for the life principle resides therein."

"Jesus," moaned Dean.

"What is it?"

"Listen to this,” said Dean, reading aloud: “Hair belongs to the element of earth, as it is a tangible; to the element of water, since it is free and flowing; to the element of fire, since it is fed from the furnace of the brain; and from the element of air, since it is light and can be blown by the wind."

"That's ... crazy."

"To you and me, yes ... but the way it reads to a madman? Ian Bennimin and his deformed twin, looking for answers? Apparently, there was more method to their madness than we knew."

"Method?"

"Listen to this. It—hair—is animal, since other animals also have hair; it is special to humans, since no animal has hair quite like a man's; it is vegetable, since it is parasitic, like a plant. Hair is both living, since it grows, and dead, since it is without sensibility. As such, it forms a link between this world and the next. It has its own life ... it grows more rapidly than anything else and continues to grow after the death of the body."

Dean thought of all the mythical and magical religions and superstitions surrounding hair, from the tonsure of monks to young virgins having to shave their heads in order to symbolically give their heads over to deities.

"God, I sure hope that alligator really did get this creep,” said Sybil.

"You and me both ... you and me both,” agreed Dean, putting down the book, feeling strange just holding it. Yet he was drawn back to it all day long.

Sybil began to regard him. It was that same look she'd shown when he'd first suspected wrongdoing in a little girl's “accidental” drowning in a Gary, Indiana quarry so many months ago. She looked at him as if he was not only strange, but unstable as well, and he didn't like the reaction he was getting from her. Yet the book drew him to it like a magnet.

Each line he read, he tried to decipher through the mind of the deformed Bennimin child, possibly as it was read to him by his beautiful brother. Dean tried to interpret each section and imbue it with meaning as it applied to the meaninglessness of multiple murder by scalp-taking. He put every line side-by-side with what little he knew of the deadly brothers and their horrifying acts.

The integration of so many pieces of the puzzle was slow in coming. Yet Dean persevered, trying desperately and perhaps futilely to understand that which could not possibly be comprehended any more than the mind of God: the mind of a madman. His hammering away at the little book was slow-going, too, and he hadn't gotten beyond page 13 before the day was out.

At closing time, when Sybil gave him an uncalled-for hug and a “welcome back,” Dean took the slim volume with him to finish at home.

Earlier in the day he'd spent time with Ken Kelso, assuring his friend that he was definitely back in the city of Chicago in both mind and body, and that Orlando's problems were once again Sid Corman's concerns, not Dean Grant's.

Dean took a ribbing from Ken about becoming a celebrity, saying that Johnny Carson had called to ask him on the Tonight Show, but that Ken had had to decline for him because he was damned well needed in Chicago.

"Besides,” added Ken over lunch, “they didn't say word one about my going on the show."

"As what?” Dean had jested.

"Hey, you forget I strum a guitar."

"Which makes sounds like an accordian. Now there's a novelty!"

But then Ken became serious, telling Dean that the leads on the Rae sister had turned cold as ice. Dean suggested that since it appeared no one was calling any longer about Angel Rae and the case involving undue numbers of corpses found floating face-down in pools and lakes, maybe Ken ought to let things rest.

Finally, Dean said to him bluntly, “No use getting an ulcer over it."

"You're one to talk."

"Meaning?"

"I heard tell of the little book Corman sent you from the tropics."

"Oh, Sybil, huh?"

"The kid's just worried about you, Dean. What about it? Case closed? Or not?"

"She should probably do less worrying about me and more about her work."

"Come on, she's shaped up beautifully. While you were gone—"

"And I'm getting a little tired of hearing how well things were run while I was gone!"

Ken laughed at this, first lightly and then it became a full-fledged belly laugh. “Come on, let's have lunch,” he said when he got control of himself. “I'm buying."

Dean smiled and laughed with his best friend, and as they made their way to a nearby deli-style restaurant, he did some thinking aloud, sharing his thoughts with Ken, trying to explain what had gone down in that Florida swamp, droning on about the finale brought about via the inevitable publicity.

"Can't tolerate newsmen,” said Ken loudly, purposefully, knowing the place they were in was full of them, “Vultures ... most of ‘em, anyway."

"Our guys are? You should've been with me in the land of sunshine and oranges."

Over pastrami, Dean detailed how the press operated over the Scalper case. Newspaper, radio, and television coverage had just about exhausted every possible angle on the case, all but the one Dean and Sid decided to keep to themselves, since, on analysis of the blood on the dwarf's clothing, it had turned out to be animal blood, the dog's.

Now that the sensationalism had petered out, the case had become old news, like everything else, and the story writers were anxious for some new tale of terror they might feed to their seemingly insatiable readers. The papers had taken fiendish delight in retelling the events leading up to the end, and television accounts had quoted Orlando's Commissioner of Police as having retired Chief Hodges along with the closing out of this case. The pressure from the top for the man to take an early retirement wasn't even disguised. One or two newsmen had taken gruesome delight in unraveling the chief's hold on the department—all to the good, Dean felt in the long run. It came out that Bennimin, a.k.a. Ben Hamel, had been brought on by Hodges and that Hodges had been seeing the shrink regularly. The entire investigation of the Scalpers was then, in fact, shadowed easily by the bloody pair.

Meanwhile, Sid Corman's position in the department was safe—and the peace of the city of Orlando was secured. In fact, Sid was proclaimed “the watchful eyes of the city,” a valiant hero wounded in the battle against the most notorious criminal pair in the history of the city.

As for Dean's own notoriety, it had doubled, even quadrupled, not surprisingly. The year 1988 had become one of horror, the kind upon which men like himself built a career. What with summer casework involving the floaters here in Chicago, and the winter weeks he'd spent in Florida tracking the elusive Scalping Crew, Dean knew he could write his own ticket downtown, get some much-needed equipment and additional help.

The Orlando papers in particular had made much of the fact that he, like Sid, had been wounded in the struggle with Ian and Van Bennimen. His arm was still in a sling, in fact, and stiff as a board. Dean had been designated by the press as the man who had masterminded Hamel's downfall. His photograph, exhibited alongside an array of scalps which some enterprising photographer had arranged in a montage of bad taste, blared it to the world: Dean Grant, Chicago Medical Examiner, Scalps Hair-Raising Duo.

"I tell you, I never posed for that damned picture!” he'd had to shout at Ken Kelso, who was showing it around in the lab on his return.

The stories were picked up by every major network and news agency in the country, and some overseas. Dean's reputation as one of the nation's top M.E.'s was given solidity as a result, yet Dean felt himself a failure. If he'd been smarter, sharper—if he'd read the signs—he might have put Hamel out of business sooner—and much more neatly. Maybe Dyer'd be alive, and maybe even Park as well, the unsung hero, the man to whom Dean pointed again and again as being the bull terrier in all this. But news agencies thrived on live heroes, men who walk away from the wreckage. Survivors.

Dean had even gotten that raise he deserved, along with more funds for the lab, a promise of an additional M.E. position to be filled before spring, and monies earmarked specifically to combat serial killers nationwide, monies that would go into a computer network that might avert unnecessary death via matchups on pattern killings before such evil struck again. This business of relying on clues via the brutal work of the killer himself—it simply had to go. There was no place for it in a modern program.

Regardless of it all, however, Dr. Dean Grant did not feel the hero. In fact, he hadn't ever felt the hero. Heroes were supposed to know when and if they'd beaten down a foe, destroyed an enemy, snuffed out a dragon, cut down an evil knight. And while the papers went with the official notification that both the Bennimin brothers were dead and could therefore be of no threat to anyone again, Dean knew nothing of the kind. All that was certain, he knew, was that tomorrow, or the next day, he'd be face-to-face again with some tormented and ugly form of humanity, some horror of the worst kind, another human monster like the dwarf and his equally twisted brother, Dr. Benjamin Ian Hamel.

It was three in the morning when Dean finally shut the taxidermy text. There was no date of publication, it was probably worth a small fortune to some collector somewhere. It had probably been found by the dwarf in that Montana basement years ago, in the wall or below the floor, cherished by him and Hamel as their bible. It was filled with lurid and wrongful notions of anatomy and physiology, with an occasional flight into the metaphysical. The whole thing was an esoteric diatribe, intended only for a select group, a master taxidermist putting down his thoughts—often far afield of taxidermy and leather curing—for a small group of adherents.

It made a mockery of the old saying, “Believe in something, or you'll believe in anything...."

And with that thought Dean, his wife molding her body close to his, went to sleep, forcing his mind to free itself of the horrors of his work and this life.