Scalpers

FIVE

Dean wondered if there were any similarities between the killer in Chicago, who enjoyed drowning people to watch them float to God, and this vicious bastard who cut people's heads apart while they were still alive. It was suddenly and cruelly apparent that in the case of both the young Jane Doe in the park and Officer Peggy Carson, this son-of-a-bitch didn't care whether the victim felt pain.

"You're saying she was completely conscious when the scalp was taken?” asked Frank Dyer as he leaned into the discussion Dean and Sid were conducting over the nude and mutilated body of the black teenager.

"That's a distinct possibility, yes,” Dean said firmly. “And we both know that it was the case with Carson when the knife wound to her head was done. In the earlier cases, I could not say for certain, what with the multiple contusions and abrasions, any number of which could have been a killing blow. But this ... look at her. Other than the scalp removal, there's nothing beyond a patch of skin and hair in the pubic area."

"Was she sexually molested?” It was Park asking.

"No,” Dean replied.

"You can tell just like that?"

"I can."

"It's our man, or men, all right,” said Sid.

"Yeah, neuter cases,” agreed Park. “Pricks without pricks."

"Impotent, or sexless, or both, like Dr. Hamel said,” added Dyer.

"Maybe the Scalpers are working out some sort of religious fantasy, you know, appeasing some—” Dean stopped himself from exploring ideas aloud. He knew it could lead to an investigator down the wrong path. As it was, it sounded as though Dyer and Park were already confused enough by Dr. Hamel's assessment of the killers.

"Can you definitely say, doctors, that this young woman was killed by two men and not one?” asked Dyer.

"The wounds indicate two instruments were used. The head wound is neat, the tool a precision instrument, quite likely a scalpel. The other cut is careless, hurried, the result of a serrated knife, most likely a switchblade, and one that could cut much more deeply."

"I've seen scalpels that are made to close and switch open, Dean,” said Sid.

Dean agreed with a nod. “Whoever's behind this seems to have taken parts of skin and hair from each victim for a reason; and however sick that reason, perhaps if we could understand it, we might have a clue as to who it is we are searching for, gentlemen."

Sid nodded over the bloody corpse, recalling Dean's final assessment in the Floater case.

"You know,” began Dyer, sounding confused, “the wounds to this girl, they just don't seem enough to ... to kill a person, Dr. Grant. I mean, they are not that deep, and she hasn't lost near as much blood as I've seen in accident victims on the highway...."

"Trauma killed her in the end, Dyer. The trauma of having your scalp ripped from you is enough to devastate the mind and cause enough pain and fear to kill the average person."

"Only a few people in all of history have survived and lived to tell about a scalping,” said Park, surprising Dean.

"You've done some reading on the subject."

Park nodded, “Part of the job. Get to know the enemy, right?"

"Good strategy, yes."

Park ambled off, deciding there was no more he could learn from Grant and Corman. Dyer hung closer by again, taking in as much as he was capable of.

"Guess we'd best finish up here, Dean,” said Sid as Dean stared after Park. Park's quiet, rough exterior had reminded Dean of a young Marlon Brando, but the act was wearing thin. But Sid was right, and so Dean turned his attention toward the dead girl, whose bag had been rifled by the police who had discovered her. She'd had a change of clothes stuffed into the handbag, and a clutch purse with the usual makeup and loose change, but there was also a crumpled fifty, a ten, and a five-dollar bill which the murderers hadn't taken. They were not after money. They were not after sex. They were after scalps, and this night in particular, it seemed they were bent on gaining the scalp of a black female. Failing with Peggy Carson, they had found this poor soul.

Dean and Sid began the laborious work of clipping and brushing the body for fingernails and the residue of foreign fibers and hair. As they worked, dark turned into day, and Dean's knees began to throb. While they worked over the body, Dyer searched about the park for footprints they might take molds of, but there were none. Yet he found something else, a pair of surgical scissors which he promptly placed into an evidence bag, to be dusted for prints at the lab. Sid took custody of them.

When they were nearly finished, Sid suggested they lift the girl's arms overhead for a look at her armpits. “Once burned, you know,” he said.

Dean, Sid, Frank Dyer stared at the bare armpits which were not shaven, Dean guessed, but shorn, shorn with the surgical scissors discovered by Dyer a few yards away. But there was no blood. There were no cuts, no skin peeled away, just the clipped nubs of hair.

"Bastards like hair,” said Dean.

"We've gotta take clippings from this area, too,” said Sid.

"Right,” agreed Dean.

Dyer shook his head, wondering why, but saying nothing.

Sid began a casual search through his own surgical kit for the proper tool to take hair samples from the deep groove of the armpit. It took time and Dean saw a strange look come over Sid's face, and he then saw the empty space in Sid's black case where his scissors should be. Alongside the empty space were a pair of smaller nail scissors, and Sid, closing the valise to prying eyes, made do with these.

Dean watched Sid's work closely and clinically now, assessing his friend's method as he had not done before. Dean wondered if there could possibly be more to Sid's major oversight on the redhead. He wondered if Sid, for some as-yet-unaccountable reason, was hiding a great deal more than a lack of professional bearing in the case. He even allowed himself the ugly thought that Sid, in some other mental state, could possibly be the scalpel-wielding killer, who with his medical knowledge had faked the appearance of a second set of wounds that might look, even to a trained eye, like the work of a second murderer. But this thought was simply foolish, Dean told himself. Sid was no more guilty of this horrid business than his wife, Jackie, had been of the drowning of that old woman at her hospital. Dean's imagination was running away with him, and Sid could easily explain the loss of his surgical scissors and would do so if Dean put the question to him.

Then Dyer, watching as Sid cut miniscule nubs of hair at their base from the dead girl's armpit and carefully placed them into a bag no larger than those used by stamp collectors, said in disgust, “Christ, Dr. Corman, do you have to do everything the fuckin’ murderer did to her all over again?” Not answering, and with great care, Sid clipped and numbered the bag as Dean, equally calm, helped in recording the clippings.

"Like vultures,” Dean heard a uniformed cop tell another some distance off.

Dean took in a deep breath of the dew-wet air. He then stood, his legs aching, his back throbbing, his nerves on edge. “Dyer, we're here to speak for this girl through scientific investigation. We're not vultures, nor are we delighting in our work, not here, not now."

But even as he said it, Dean wondered if he were speaking for Sid as well as himself. Sid's surgical scissors were missing from his valise. Dyer had found just such a pair of scissors only a few yards off. Sid had lied to Dean before, and now this.

"What're you going to do with armpit hair?” Dyer wanted to know.

"Determine if it was cropped or torn out, determine if it was cut by one blade or two, as with scissors, like those you found, or a knife; match the hair against any found on the scissors from which, hopefully, we'll find prints."

"Forget the scissors, Dean,” said Sid suddenly.

Dean and Sid stared at one another for a moment as Dyer asked, “Whataya mean, forget the scissors?"

"They're mine,” said Sid. “I must've dropped them earlier. When I first arrived on the scene, my case popped coming down the incline, and ... well, they must have just come out. I didn't know until I reached for them."

Dean knew Sid was missing them earlier, when he had taken samples from the crown of the head and from the pubic area, but he had not said anything then. Now, faced with his own surgical scissors impounded as evidence in a slaying, he had to come out with it. His prints were on those scissors.

"You're sure, Sid?” asked Dean.

"Yes, it's the only explanation."

"Did anyone else see the case come open?"

"You think I'm lying?"

"Sid, you need some corroboration here. If these are your scissors, and they've been missing—"

"All right ... all right."

Dyer's face went from confusion to wonder in the process of Dean's interrogation. “What gives?"

"I didn't know the scissors were missing until I went to look for them. I don't know what happened to them, and now ... well, I must've dropped them somehow."

"Dr. Corman,” said Dyer, “this'll have to be reported."

"Dyer,” said Dean, “can you just give us time to run the scissors through routine tests first? They may not be Dr. Corman's. In fact, they may have the killer's fingerprints on them."

"Or mine,” added Sid.

"Do you know of any reason anyone would deliberately set you up, Sid?"

"I've got my share of enemies in the department, sure, but this?"

"Who'd be in a position to get hold of your surgical equipment?"

"Any number of lab techs, attendents—you name it."

"What about it, Detective Dyer?” Dean asked again stalling for time.

"Dyer! Corman, why in the hell didn't you contact me about this?” shouted someone from above them on the ridge, making Dean look over his shoulder. It was Chief Hodges, and beside him loomed the tall, slender figure of Dr. Hamel, the two of them looking like angry Gestapo figures out of an old movie. “I told you men I wanted first notice on this case!"

"We tried to reach you, Chief,” Dyer began to explain, but Hodges exploded.

"More goddamned excuses, Frank! I don't want to hear them. I want this freak caught.” Hodges and Hamel came down from the police barricade where reporters and people had gathered to gawk and speculate and wonder.

"We're finished here, medic,” Dean announced to the waiting attendents who moved in to take the body to the morgue. Dean urged Sid off. A glance in Dyer's direction told them nothing. They could only hope that Frank Dyer would cooperate, at least for now.

Before they could successfully escape, however, Chief Hodges cornered Sid and began to ask questions. “Anything new, Corman? What can you give me?"

"Nothing right now, Chief, except to say that it does look like the work of more than one man."

"Great ... a lot of help. Am I supposed to give that to the friggin’ papers?"

"I don't give a sand flea's fart what you give the—"

"Sid, Sid,” Dean urged him off, saying to Hodges, “Look, Chief, this has been rough on us all, and the best thing for everyone now is to get Dr. Corman and me back to the crime lab."

Hodges frowned but backed off and went for Dyer's jugular, transferring his questions and anger to the detective. Dean saw that Park stood far off, shaking his head, while the quiet, unassuming Dr. Hamel was on his knees over the victim, where he'd managed to get the medics to lay the stretcher down in the grass. Hamel looked like he was praying over the dead girl. Dean thought the psychiatrist was dedicated for a man in his position, to come out to the crime scene and view the body in such a way. It wasn't in his job description, Dean was certain, and yet the work of the Scalpers had affected them all very deeply, hadn't it?

Park had lit up a cigarette and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

A sergeant rushed down the incline to Chief Hodges, pleading in a polite way for the Chief to speak to the reporters. Dean and Sid watched from a distance, Sid saying sourly, “Hodges likes to play bigshot for the press and cameras."

"Is that right?"

"He has real ambitions to climb.'

"Close to the Mayor?"

"He likes to make you believe it."

Dean wondered about the Mayor's poor redheaded relation.

"The man knows how to stroke the press. It was he who convinced the Mayor to allow the photos of his niece to be splattered on the front pages. Convinced His Honor that it'd be like that television show, you know, America's Most Wanted, and it might have the effect of getting the whole city involved in this manhunt, but all it's done is cause chaos and panic."

But to Dean's observant eye, Hodges didn't look like a man who relished the idea of facing reporters now. Still, he pulled himself upward, heaving up both stomach and shoulders, and marched toward the crowd.

"Let ‘em through to take their pictures,” Hodges said, knowing this would appease the press more than any statement.

"I can't believe he's doing that,” said Dean, amazed.

"Watch, he'll turn it into hay. On camera he'll plead for anyone watching who might recognize the dead girl to come forward. Who knows, maybe someone will."

"Then Jane Doe'll have a name, at least ... and people to bury her."

"I'm starved,” said Sid as they drove for the Municipal Center and Sid's lab. With them they had all the samples taken from the crime scene. As always, when Dean had every shread of evidence gathered and every hair vacuumed from a body, every fiber and print and clipping, he felt like the custodial guardian angel of the deceased: the one long shot, the only possible hope remaining that the victim might have left her own message to her scientific pallbearer, and hidden within the folds of that message, the answer to the questions of who had so ruthlessly robbed her of life.

"How Brando about you?” Sid asked.

"What?"

"Hungry ... are you hungry?"

"Yeah, I guess I could eat, but—"

"In the lab, you mean, right?"

"I'm anxious to get started on what we've got,” Dean told Sid. “I need coffee and something in my stomach, and I need to telephone Jackie, and check in with my own lab, and maybe call Kelso in Chicago."

"Hey, my phone is your phone, Dean ... my office is your office, and please treat it as such."

"Thanks."

"Ahh, you're a pain in the ass sometimes."

"How's that?"

"You stand on ceremony too damned much, Dean. Cool it—relax a little. Di and I are taking you to Church Street Exchange, tonight ... whaddya say?"

"Church Street?"

"Orlando's newest attraction, kinda like Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Al Hirt-type bands playing, good food and drink."

"Sounds great!"

"You'll love it, and it's just a block or so from here."

"You think after a day like the one we've got ahead of us, we'll be up for partying?"

"Hell, Dean, we got to eat a sit-down meal sometime ... it might as well be I n a good restaurant. I'm paying."

Dean replied that he could, at the moment, use coffee and a roll. “But I'm damned anxious to look over what we've got here."

"We'll have some coffee brought in."

"Any word on the Carson woman at Mercy?"

"Nothing yet, but I'll be the first to know. I have friends at Mercy."

They pulled into Sid's parking place and took the elevator up to the labs, carrying with them the oversized black valise that contained vials, packets, and bags filled with samples. Dean carried a mold of a single footprint which Dyer had been able to locate after all.

"Damned footprint is probably mine, too,” said Sid.

Dean had taken the mold from Dyer just before leaving the crime scene, and he and Dyer had been the only ones who'd actually examined it closely. It seemed only half a foot, or a fist driven into the earth, or the ball of a child's foot, it was so small.

"I rather doubt that possibility,” Dean answered Sid groggily, still sleepy.

Coffee and croissants were brought in and the scientist in Sid kicked in. He was fast at work while Dean telephoned Jackie, finally reaching her at home.

"Where've you been?” Jackie demanded. “When you didn't call, I thought all sorts of horrible things had happened."

"I tried reaching you, but you were out—"

"When? At what time?"

"Jackie, it doesn't matter. I'm talking to you now, and I'm fine."

"When are you coming home?"

"I ... I can't say just yet."

"In a week, in a month, for New Year's?"

She was angry and her tone was biting.

"Listen, Sid's ... well, Sid's in a bad jam here, and I think I can help him out.... “Dean had no idea how long it would take, or if there would ever be a resolution to the case. Some cases resolved themselves, even serial cases such as this, when the killing simply stopped, the murderer's taste for blood coming to an end. But no one was counting on that ... least of all Dean.

"You do what you have to do, Dean,” she said, and for a moment Dean thought it sincere. “But don't lie to me. You're not there for Sid. You're down there for yourself ... yourself and your sick killer."

"I'm trying to help resolve a serial murder case, to save lives. You can understand—"

"Yeah ... I understand only too well...."

Dean knew what she meant: Angel Rae, and Jackie's near-death encounter with her. Jackie still had gruesome nightmares in which Lake Michigan was so filled with floating corpses you might walk across it over their backs.

"Are you still seeing—"

"Dean, a shrink's no replacement for you!"

"This dependence upon me, Jackie—it isn't good. Love is one thing, and I love you dearly, but dependence on another human being as much as this—it's destructive to both of us."

She hung up.

Dean started to re-dial, but then forced himself not to ... for her, he told himself, though wondering if it were not for him. He had been so bad at helping her through this ordeal. Perhaps he'd made all the wrong moves and said all the wrong things, yet his instincts told him he was right, that Jackie must face down her own fears rather than buffer them with his constant presence.

Dean dialed the number for Chief Kelso, but learned only that his friend was in New York City. He missed Kelso's camaraderie, his backup both professionally and personally. Dean thought about how Kelso had almost died with stab wounds not five months ago. Now he was chasing criminals again.

Dean checked in with his right hand and associate at the lab, Dr. Sybil Shanley. She informed him that everything was running smoothly without him. This had the effect of making him feel both secure and insecure at once. Getting right to business, he replied, “I'm sending you some samples and want you to run backup tests on some items for us, Sybil."

"It might have to take a back seat to—"

"No, Sybil, this takes top priority."

"How am I supposed to explain that to the boss?"

"Don't explain, just tell him your orders came directly from me, should he ask. I'll take the heat."

"That's easy for you to say. You're a thousand miles away."

"Sybil"

"Right, Dean. We've been reading about the Scalper up here. Sounds really sicko."

"Scalpers, sweetheart ... we think it's two men."

"God, really? That's—why, that's even sicker!"

Dean didn't bother to ask her why she thought so. Instead, he told her it was costing Sid Corman too much for them to yammer on his phone any longer. “How's the new man working out?"

"Great! Got him trained the way I want."

"Don't get yourself spoiled."

"Say, are you still dating Carl Prather?"

"Why the sudden interest in my love life?

"You think Carl might do me a favor?"

"Sure, he thinks the world of you, Dean—just as I do."

"Good. Here it is."

As Dean relayed his message to the former Gary, Indiana, policeman, now with the Chicago force, he saw that Sid was staring through the glass from the other room. No doubt Sid wondered just how many calls Dean planned to make to Chicago, and to whom.

"You got that now?” Dean asked Sybil. “Read it back to me."

Sybil did so. “This seems strange, Dean,” she said.

"Just do it, Dr. Shanley,” Dean said loudly when Sid opened the door and entered. “Talk to you soon."

"Hope you told Sybil hello for me,” Sid said.

"Yeah, and she sends her regards."

"Get Jackie?"

"Yeah, all's well."

"Didn't look that way from my standpoint."

"Sid, I'm going to work."

"Same old Dean."

"Yeah, that's right ... same old Dean, Sid."

Sid stared into Dean's eyes for a long time. “I'm the same old Sid, too. Maybe a little bigger around the gut, and my hair's thinned out considerably.” He ran his right hand over his scalp. “But Christ, Dean, I'm still your old war buddy, and if you're having problems—"

"No problems, Sid, except the one we're faced with right here. And I suggest we stop talking and get to work on it"

Dean left the office for the lab. Sid shook his head. “Same old Dean. Buries it all inside of him. The man's going to have a heart attack some day."

The pathologists went to work trying to match fiber and hair samples taken from the black Jane Doe with samples from earlier victims. It was mid-morning before Dean had what amounted to a positive, if preliminary, matchup between any of the strands of hair. He called Sid over to confirm what his eyes had already told him via the comparison microscope.

The hair Dean was working with was body hair, and at first the samples had been considered minor, since Sid's assistant had made the false assumption that they'd come off the victim. It was a natural enough mistake, and one that Dean himself might have made, given the circumstances and the earlier lack of evidence, or the theorem that more than one attacker was at work here. The fact that it was body hair, and not scalp or facial hair, further compounded the mystery. Yet a close analysis of the victim's body hair yielded a no-match, and in fact showed the hair to be that of a male, a third party, since the hair did not match that of either the victim or that of the primary attacker, dug out from beneath the victim's nails.

So Sid had been working with a complex of problems which had gotten away from him. Now there was thin, brown-to-sandy hair from the head of the murderer, and thick, coarse, dark and curly hair from the body of a second killer. The samples of body hair were far and away greater in number than those from the scalp, and there was no true correlation to be made between these either—they could not have come from the same man. All this the electron microscope had proved, yet the proof had been put aside, had gone unrecognized all this time.

Dean pointed out these facts to Sid now. They had found both kinds of hairs again on the latest Scalper victim.

Sid's phone rang almost as much as Dean's in Chicago, and again Dean paid no attention to it. This time, however, Sid had been summoned by his young assistant, Tom Warner. Something was afoot. Sid waved Dean over, cupped the receiver in his hand, and said, “Peggy Carson's come around, and she's talking."

"Damn, let's get over there."

Dean stopped in his mad rush long enough to tell Sid's lab assistant how vitally important the materials and slides they were working on were, and to leave them untouched. Then they were off for the hospital to speak to the only eyewitness they had in the case.