“Wow,” said Carmine, thinking of the cheap print of Van Gogh’s irises behind his own desk.
A woman in her middle thirties entered bearing a silver tray on which stood a vacuum flask, two delicate cups and saucers, two crystal glasses and a crystal carafe of iced water. They sure do themselves proud at the Hug!
A severely tailored looker, thought Carmine, examining her: black hair piled up in a beehive, a broad, smooth, rather flat face with hazel eyes, and a terrific figure. Her suit was coat and skirt, snugly cut, and her shoes were Ferragamo flatties. That Carmine knew such things could be laid at the door of a long career in a profession that required intimate knowledge of all aspects of human beings and their behavior. This woman was what Mom called a man-eater, though she didn’t seem to have an atom of appetite for the Prof.
“Miss Tamara Vilich, my secretary,” said the Prof.
No atom of appetite for Carmine Delmonico either! She smiled, nodded and departed without lingering.
“Two mature misses on your staff,” said Carmine.
“They are just wonderful if you can find them,” said the Prof, who seemed anxious to postpone the reason for this interview. “A married woman has family responsibilities that sometimes tend to eat into her working day. Whereas single women give their all to the job—don’t mind working late without notice, for example.”
“More juice to pump into it, I can see that,” said Carmine. He sipped his coffee, which was terrible. Not that he had expected it to be good. The Prof, he observed, drank water from the lovely carafe, though he poured Carmine’s coffee himself.
“Professor, have you been down to the animal care room to see what’s been found?”
The Prof blanched, shook his head emphatically. “No, no, of course not! Cecil called me to tell me what Otis found, and I called Commissioner Silvestri at once. I did remember to tell Cecil not to let anyone into animal care until the police came.”
“And have you found Otis—Otis who?”
“Green. Otis Green. It seems he has sustained a mild heart attack. At the moment he’s in the hospital. However, his cardiologist says it’s not a severe ictus, so he should be discharged in two or three days.”
Carmine put down his coffee cup and leaned back in his chintz chair, hands folded in his lap. “Tell me about the dead animal refrigerator, Professor.”
Smith looked a little confused, clearly had to summon up inner reserves of courage; maybe, thought Carmine, his brand of courage doesn’t run to coping with a murder crisis, just grant committees and awkward researchers. How many Chubb receptions have I stood through listening to those?
“Well, every research institute has one. Or, if it isn’t a big unit, shares one with other laboratories nearby. We are researchers, and, given that ethically we cannot use human beings as experimental animals, we use animals lower on the evolutionary scale than ourselves. The kind of animal depends on the kind of research—guineapigs for skin, rabbits for lungs, and so on. As we are interested in epilepsy and mental retardation and they are situated in the brain, our research animals go rat, cat and primate—here at the Hug, macaques. At the end of an experimental project, the creatures are sacrificed—with extreme care and kindness, I hasten to add. The carcasses are put into special bags and taken to the refrigerator, where they remain until about seven each weekday morning. At that hour Otis empties the contents of the refrigerator into a bin and wheels the bin through the tunnel to the Parkinson Pavilion, where the medical school’s main animal care facility is located. The incinerator that disposes of all animal carcasses is a part of P.P.’s animal care, but it also is available to the hospital, which sends amputated limbs and the like to it.”
His speech patterns are so formal, thought Carmine, that he talks as if he’s dictating an important letter. “Did Cecil tell you how the human remains were discovered?” he asked.
“Yes.” The Prof’s face was beginning to look pinched.
“Who has access to the refrigerator?”
“Anyone here in the Hug, though I doubt anyone from outside could use it. Our entrances are few, and barred.”
“Why’s that?”
“My dear Lieutenant, we are on the very end of the Oak Street medical school–hospital line! Beyond us is Eleventh Street and the Hollow. An unsavory neighborhood, as I’m sure you know.”
“I notice that you call it the Hug too, Professor. Why?”
The slightly tragic mouth twisted. “I blame Frank Watson,” he said through his teeth.
“Who’s he?”
“Professor of Neurology in the medical school. When the Hug was opened in 1950 he wanted to head it, but our benefactor, the late William Parson, was adamant that his Chair should go to a man experienced in epilepsy and mental retardation. As Watson’s field is demyelinating diseases, naturally he wasn’t suitable. I told Mr. Parson that he ought to have chosen an easier name than Hughlings Jackson, but he was determined. Oh, a very determined man, always! Of course one expects to see the name abbreviated, but I had thought it would be the Hughlings, or the Hugh. However, Frank Watson had a small revenge. He thought it terribly clever to call it the Hug, and the name stuck. Stuck!”
“Exactly who was or is Hughlings Jackson, sir?”
“A pioneer British neurologist, Lieutenant. His wife had a slow-growing tumor on the motor strip—the gyrus anterior to the Fissure of Rolando that represents the cortical end of the body’s voluntary motor function—muscles, that is.”
I do not understand a single word of this, Carmine thought as the level voice continued, but does he care? No.
“Mrs. Jackson’s epileptic seizures were of a very curious kind,” the Prof went on. “They were limited to one side of her body, started on one side of her face, marched down to the arm and hand on that same side, and finally involved the leg. They are still known as Jacksonian marches. From them Jackson put together the first hypotheses about motor function, that each part of the body had its own invariable place in the cerebral cortex. However, what fascinated people was the indefatigable way that he sat beside his dying wife’s bed hour after hour, taking notes on her seizures with the most minute attention to detail. The researcher par excellence.”
“Pretty heartless, if you ask me,” said Carmine.
“I prefer to call it dedication,” Smith said icily.
Carmine rose. “No one can leave this building unless I give them permission. That means you too, sir. There are police on the entrances, including the tunnel. I suggest you say nothing about what’s happened to anyone.”
“But we have no cafeteria!” said the Prof blankly. “What can the staff do about lunch if they don’t bring it from home?”
“One of the police can take orders and bring food back.” He paused in the doorway to look back. “I’m afraid we’ll have to take fingerprints from everyone here. An inconvenience worse than lunch, but I’m sure you understand.”
The Holloman County Medical Examiner’s offices, laboratories and morgue were located in the County Services building, which also housed the Holloman Police Department.
When Carmine entered the morgue he found two pieces of a female torso fitted together and laid out on a steel autopsy table.
“Well nourished, a part-colored female about sixteen years of age,” Patrick said. “He plucked the mons Veneris before introducing the first of several implements—might be dildoes, might be penis sheaths—hard to tell. She’s been raped many times by increasingly large objects, but I doubt she died of that. There’s so little blood in what we have of the body that I suspect she was bled out the way you would an animal for slaughter on a farm. No arms or hands, no legs or feet, and no head. These two pieces have been scrupulously washed. Thus far I’ve found no traces of semen, but there’s so much contusion and swelling up there—she’s been anally raped too—that I’ll need a microscope. My personal bet is that there will be no semen. He’s gloved and probably used his sheaths as condoms. If he comes at all.”
The girl’s skin was that lovely color called café au lait, despite its bleached bloodlessness. Her hips swelled, her waist was small, her breasts beautiful. As far as Carmine could see, she bore no insults outside the pubic area—no bruises, slashes, cuts, bites, burns. But without the arms and legs, there was no way to tell if or how she had been tied down.
“She looks like a child to me,” he said. “Not a big girl.”
“I’d say about five-one, tops. The second most interesting thing,” Patrick went on, “is that the dismemberment has been done by a real professional. One sweep with something like a filleting knife or a post mortem scalpel, and look at the thigh and shoulder joints—disarticulation without force or trauma.” He pulled the two sections of torso apart. “The transverse section was done just below the diaphragm. The cardia of the stomach has been ligated to prevent leakage of the contents, and the esophagus has been ligated too. Disarticulation of the spinal column is just as professional as the joints. No blood in the aorta or the vena cava. However,” he said, pointing to the neck, “her throat was cut some hours before he removed her head. Jugulars incised, but not carotids. She would have bled out slowly, no spurting. Hung upside down, of course. When he took her head, he separated it at the C–4 to C–5 junction of the spine, which gave him a small amount of neck as well as the entire skull.”
“I wish we had the arms and legs at least, Patsy.”
“So do I, but I suspect they went into the fridge yesterday, together with the head.”
Carmine spoke so positively that Patrick jumped. “Oh, no! He’s still got her head. He won’t part with that.”
“Carmine! That kind of thing doesn’t happen! Or if it does, it’s some maniac west of the Rockies. This is Connecticut!”
“He’s still got the head, no matter where he comes from.”
“I’d say he works at the Hug, or if not at the Hug, then at some other part of the medical school,” Patrick said.
“A butcher? A slaughterman?”
“Possible.”
“You said, the second most important thing, Patsy. What’s the first?”
“Here.” Patrick turned the lower torso over and pointed to the right buttock, where a heart-shaped scab about an inch long showed dark and crusted against the flawless skin. “At first I thought he had cut it there on purpose—heart, love, that kind of thing. But he made no template incision around the edge. It’s simply one neat transverse slice, the way I’ve seen a knife-man slice off a woman’s nipple. So I wondered if she’d had a nevus there, a birthmark raised well above the surface of the skin.”
“Something that offended him, destroyed her perfection,” said Carmine thoughtfully. “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t know she had it until he got her to wherever he did his nasty things to her. Depends if he picked her up or knew her previously. Any idea about her racial background?”
“No idea, other than that she’s more Caucasian than anything else. Some Negroid or Mongoloid blood, or both.”
“Are you picking that she’s a prostitute?”
“Without arms to look for needle tracks, Carmine, difficult, but this girl is—I don’t know, healthy looking. I’d search the Missing Persons files.”
“Oh, I intend to,” said Carmine, and went back to the Hug. Where to begin, given that Otis Green couldn’t be questioned until tomorrow at the earliest? Cecil Potter, then.
“This is a real good job,” Cecil said, sitting on a steel chair with Jimmy on his knee, and apparently indifferent to the fact that the macaque was busy grooming Cecil’s hair, picking with delicate fingers through its dense closeness in a kind of intent ecstasy. Jimmy, he had explained, was still very upset over his ordeal. Carmine would have found the entire bizarre sight easier to cope with if the big monkey hadn’t been wearing half a tennis ball on top of his head; this, said Cecil, was to protect the electrode assembly implanted in his brain and the bright green female connector embedded in pink dental cement on his skull. Not that the half a tennis ball seemed to worry Jimmy; he ignored it.
“What makes the job so good?” Carmine asked, aware that his belly was rumbling. Everyone at the Hug had been fed, but thus far Carmine had missed out on breakfast and lunch.
“I’m the boss,” Cecil said. “When I worked over in P.P. I was just one more shit shoveler. At the Hug, animal care is mine. I like it, specially ‘cos we got the monkeys. Dr. Chandra—they his, really—knows I am the best monkey man on the east coast, so he leaves them to me. I even get to put them in the chair for their sessions. They crazy about their sessions.”
“Don’t they like Dr. Chandra?” Carmine asked.
“Oh, sure, they like him fine. But me, they love.”
“Do you ever empty the refrigerator, Cecil?”
“Sometimes, not much. If Otis goes on vacation, we hire a man off of P.P.’s plant physical reserves. Otis don’t work this floor with me much—he the upstairs man. Gets to change the light bulbs an’ dispose of the hazardous waste too. I can mostly manage this floor’s animal care on my own, ‘cept for bringing the cages up an’ down from the other floors. Our animals get clean cages Mondays through Fridays.”
“They must hate the weekends,” said Carmine solemnly. “If Otis doesn’t work with you much, how do you clean the cages?”
“See that door there, Lieutenant? Goes to our cage washer. Automated like a fancy car wash, but better. The Hug got everything, man, everything.”
“Getting back to the refrigerator. When you do empty it, Cecil, what size are the bags? Is it strange to see bags as big as the—er—?”
Cecil thought, his fine head to one side, the monkey seizing the chance to look behind his ear. “Ain’t strange, Lieutenant, sir, but you best ask Otis, he the expert.”
“Did you notice anyone yesterday putting bags in the fridge who doesn’t usually do that?”
“Nope. The researchers mostly bring their bags down theirselves after Otis an’ me are gone for the day. Technicians bring bags down too, but small. Rat bags. Only technician brings down big bags is Mrs. Liebman from the O.R., but not yesterday.”
“Thanks, Cecil, you’ve been a great help.” Carmine extended his hand to the monkey. “So long, Jimmy.”
Jimmy held out his hand and shook Carmine’s gravely, his big round amber eyes so full of awareness that Carmine felt his skin prickle. They looked so human.
“Just as well you a man,” Cecil said, laughing, escorting Carmine to the door with Jimmy on his hip.
“Why’s that?”
“All six of my babies are male, an’ man, they hate women! Can’t stand a woman in the same room.”
Don Hunter and Billy Ho were working together on some sort of Rube Goldberg apparatus they were assembling out of electronic components, plexiglass extrusions and a pump designed to take a small glass syringe. Two mugs of coffee stood nearby, looking cold and scummy.
That they had both been trained in the armed services was plain the moment Carmine uttered the word “Lieutenant”. They sprang away from the gadget and stiffened to attention. Billy was of Chinese ancestry; he had become an electronics engineer in the U.S. Air Force. Don was an Englishman from what he called “the north” and had served in the Royal Armoured Corps.
“What’s that gizmo?” Carmine asked.
“A pump we’re fitting to some circuitry so it only delivers one-tenth of one em-el every thirty minutes,” said Billy.
Carmine picked up the mugs. “I’ll bring you some fresh from that urn I saw in the hall if you’ll let me have a mug of it and shovel in plenty of sugar.”
“Gee, thanks, Lieutenant. Take the whole sugar jar.”
If he didn’t get some sugar into his system, Carmine knew, his attention would start to flag. He detested very sweet coffee, but it stopped his belly growling. And over it, he could settle to a friendly chat. They were loquacious men, eager to explain their jobs and very keen to assure Carmine that the Hug was great. Billy was the electronics engineer, Don the machinist. Between the two of them they painted Carmine a fascinating picture of a life largely spent designing and building things no sane person could envisage. Because researchers, Carmine learned, were not sane persons. They were mostly pain in the ass maniacs.
“A researcher can fuck up a carload of steel balls,” Billy said. “They might have brains the size of Madison Square Garden and win Nobel Prizes all over the shop, but man, can they be dumb! Know what their main problem is?”
“It’ll be a help,” said Carmine.
“Common sense. They got fuck-all common sense.”
“Yoong Billy is raht abaht thaht,” said Don. Or at least it sounded as if that was what he had said.
When he departed Carmine was convinced neither Bill Ho nor Don Hunter had left two pieces of woman in the dead animal refrigerator. Though whoever had was not lacking in common sense.
Neurophysiology lived on the next floor up, the second. It was headed by Dr. Addison Forbes, who had two colleagues, Dr. Nur Chandra and Dr. Maurice Finch. Each man had a spacious laboratory and a roomy office; beyond Chandra’s suite was the operating room and its anteroom.
The animal room was large and held cages containing two dozen big male cats as well as cages for several hundred rats. He started there. Each cat, he noted, lived in a spotlessly clean cage, dined on canned food as well as kibble, and did its business in a deep tray filled with aromatic cedar shavings. They were friendly beasts, neither spooked nor depressed, and seemed quite oblivious to the presence of half a tennis ball on their heads. The rats lived in deep plastic bins filled with finer shavings through which they dived like dolphins through the sea. In, out, around and about, curling their little handlike paws around the steel gratings covering their bins with a great deal more joy than human prisoners grabbed the bars of their cells. Rats, Carmine saw, were happy.
His tour guide was Dr. Addison Forbes, who was not happy.
“The cats belong to Dr. Finch and Dr. Chandra. The rats are Dr. Finch’s. I don’t have any animals, I’m a clinician,” he said. “Our appointments are excellent,” he droned on as he conducted his guest down the hall between the animal room and the elevators. “Each floor has a male and a female rest room”—he pointed—“and a coffee urn that our glass washer, Allodice, takes care of. The cylindered gases live in this closet, but oxygen is piped in, as are coal gas and compressed air. The fourth line of pipe is for vacuum suction. Particular attention was paid to grounding and copper shielding—we work in millionths of one volt, and that means amplification factors that make interference a nightmare. The building is air-conditioned and the air is filtered minutely, hence the no smoking regulation.”
Forbes ceased the drone to look surprised. “The thermostats actually work.” He opened a door. “Our reading and conference room. Which completes the floor. Shall we go to my office?”
Addison Forbes, Carmine had decided within a very few moments, was a complete neurotic. He sported a sinewy, gaunt leanness that suggested an exercise freak with vegetarian tendencies, was about forty-five years of age—the same age as the Prof—and not much to look at if you were a movie director searching for a new star. Facial tics and abrupt, meaningless gestures with his hands larded his conversation. “I had a most severe coronary exactly three years ago,” he said, “and it’s a miracle that I survived.” Clearly it obsessed him, not unusual in medical doctors, who, Patrick had told him, never thought that they could die, and became atrocious patients when mortality thrust itself upon them. “Now I jog the five miles between the Hug and my home every evening. My wife drives me in of a morning and picks up yesterday’s suit. We don’t need two cars anymore, a welcome economy. I eat vegetables, fruit, nuts and an occasional piece of steamed fish if my wife can find some that’s genuinely fresh. And I must say that I feel wonderful.” He patted his belly, so flat that it caved in. “Good for another fifty years, ha ha!”
Jeez! thought Carmine. I think I’d rather be dead than give up the greasies at Malvolio’s. Still, it takes all kinds. “How often do you or your technician take dead animals down to the first floor refrigerator?” he asked.
Forbes blinked, looked blank. “Lieutenant, I have already told you that I am a clinician! My research is clinical, I don’t use experimental animals.” His brows tried to go in opposite directions. “Even if I have to say so myself, I have a genius for giving each individual patient exactly the right anticonvulsant medication. It is a widely abused field—can you imagine the gall of a fool general practitioner taking it upon himself to prescribe anticonvulsants? He diagnoses some poor patient as idiopathic and stuffs the poor patient full of dilantin and phenobarb, when all the time the poor patient has a temporal lobe spike you could impale yourself on! Tch! I run the epilepsy clinics at the Holloman Hospital and the special EEG unit attached to them. I don’t concern myself with ordinary EEGs, you understand. There is another unit for Frank Watson and his neurological and neurosurgical minions. What I’m interested in are spikes, not delta waves.”
“Uhuh,” said Carmine, whose eyes had begun to glaze halfway through this semi-diatribe. “So you definitely don’t ever dispose of dead animals?”
“Never!”
Forbes’s technician, a nice girl named Betty, confirmed this. “His work here concerns the level of anticonvulsant medications in the bloodstream,” she explained in words Carmine had a hope of understanding. “Most doctors over-medicate because they don’t keep track of drug levels in the bloodstream in long term disorders like epilepsy. He’s also the one the pharmaceutical companies ask to try new drugs out. And he has an uncanny instinct for what a particular patient needs.” Betty smiled. “He’s weird, really. Art, not science.”
And how, Carmine wondered as he went in search of Dr. Maurice Finch, do I get out of being buried under medical gobbledygook?
But Dr. Finch wasn’t the man to bury anyone under medical gobbledygook. His research, he said briefly, concerned movement of things called sodium and potassium ions through the wall of the nerve cell during an epileptic seizure.
“I work with cats,” he said, “on a long-term basis. Once their electrodes and perfusion cannulae are implanted in their brains—under general anesthesia—they suffer no trauma at all. In fact, they look forward to their experimental sessions.”
A gentle soul, was Carmine’s verdict. That did not put Finch out of the murder stakes, of course; some brutal killers seemed the gentlest of souls when you met them. At fifty-one he was older than most of the researchers, so the Prof had said; research was a young man’s game, apparently. A devout Jew, he and his wife, Catherine, lived on a chicken farm; Catherine bred for the kosher table. Her chickens kept her busy, Finch explained, as they had never managed to have any children.
“Then you don’t live in Holloman?” he asked.
“Just within the county line, Lieutenant. We have twenty acres. Not all chickens! I’m an ardent cultivator of vegetables and flowers. I have an apple orchard and several glasshouses too.”
“Do you bring your dead animals downstairs, Dr. Finch, or does your technician—Patricia?—do that?”
“Sometimes I do it, sometimes Patty does,” Finch said, his wide grey eyes looking at Carmine without guilt or unease. “Mind you, my kind of work means I don’t do a lot of sacrificing. When I finish with a pussy-cat, I take the electrodes and cannulae out, castrate him, and try to give him to someone as a pet. I don’t harm him, you see. However, a cat may develop a brain infection and die, or simply die of natural causes. Then they go downstairs to the refrigerator. Mostly I take them—they’re heavy.”
“How often does a dead cat happen, Doctor?”
“It’s hard to say. Once a month, maybe only every six months.”
