Then, the answer occurring to her, her lips tightened. That Nosey Parker of a landlord of hers who lived in the apartment below had been snooping. Only what could one do about it? His wife was so nice; so too was he in his way. And where else would she get a fully furnished apartment for seventy a month in a safe neighborhood? The hairs went in to her trash bin in the kitchen, and she settled, feet under her, in the big old chair to continue with what she privately considered the best piece of embroidery she’d ever done. A complicated, curving pattern of several reds from pinkish to blackish on a background of pale pink silk.
But bugger her landlord! He deserved a booby trap.
Tamara, tired of the painting, her imagination incapable for once of envisioning a face ugly enough, terrifying enough. It would come, but not tonight. Not so soon after today’s disaster. That insolent cop Delmonico, his bullish walk, the shoulders so broad that he looked much shorter than he was, the neck so huge that on anyone else the head would have been dwarfed—but not his head. Massive. Yet try though she would, eyes shut, teeth clenched, she couldn’t make his face assume a piggish cast. And after he made her miss her appointment, she wanted badly to paint him as the ugliest pig in creation.
She couldn’t sleep, and what else was there to do? Read one of her whodunits for the millionth time? She flopped into a big magenta leather chair and reached for the phone.
“Darling?” she asked when a drowsy voice answered.
“I’ve told you, never call me here!”
Click. The line went back to its dial tone.
Cecil, lying in bed with his cheek on Albertia’s beautiful breast, trying to forget Jimmy’s terror.
Otis, listening to the rhythmic beep-beep-beep of his own heart, the tears rolling down his seamed face. No more lead bricks to move, no more cylinders of gas to wriggle onto a dolly, no more cages to shove into the elevator. How much would his pension be?
Wesley, too happy and excited to sleep. How Mohammed had straightened up at his news! Suddenly the hick postulant from Louisiana loomed important; he, Wesley le Clerc, had been given the job of keeping Mohammed el Nesr informed about the murder of a black woman at the Hug. He was on his way.
Nur Chandra, exiled to his cottage in the grounds where only he and his whipping-boy, Misrarthur, ever came. He sat, legs crossed and braided, hands on his knees with palms upraised, each finger precisely positioned. Not asleep, but not awake either. A different place, a different plane. There were monsters to be banished, terrible monsters.
Maurice and Catherine Finch, sitting in the kitchen poring over the accounts.
“Mushrooms, schmushrooms!” said Catherine. “They’ll cost you more than you can make, Maurie, and my chickens won’t eat them.”
“But it’s something different to do, sweetheart! You said yourself that digging out the tunnel was good exercise, and now it’s dug, what have I got to lose by trying? Exotic varieties for a few exclusive shops in New York City.”
“It’ll cost a lot of money,” she said stubbornly.
“Cathy, we’re not short of a dime! No kids of our own—for why do we need to worry about money? What are your nieces and my nephews going to do about this place, huh? Sell it, Cathy, sell it! So let’s get all the fun we can out of it first.”
“Okay, okay, grow your mushrooms! Only don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
He smiled, reached over to squeeze her roughened hand. “I promise I won’t gripe if it fails, but I just don’t think it is going to fail.”
Chapter Two
CARMINE’S DAY BEGAN IN Commissioner John Silvestri’s office, where he sat in the middle of a semi-circle around the desk. On his left were Captain Danny Marciano and Sergeant Abe Goldberg, on his right Dr. Patrick O’Donnell and Sergeant Corey Marshall.
Not for the first time by any means, Carmine thanked his lucky stars for the two men senior to himself in the hierarchy.
Dark and handsome, John Silvestri was a desk cop, had always been a desk cop, and confidently expected that when he retired in five years’ time, he would be able to say that he had never drawn his side arm in a fracas, let alone fired a rifle or a shotgun. Which was odd, since he had joined the U.S. Army in 1941 as a lieutenant and emerged in 1945 bedaubed with decorations, including the Medal of Honor. His most irritating habit concerned cigars, which he sucked rather than smoked, leaving slimy butts in his wake to impart an odor to the air Carmine fancied might resemble the odor given off by a spittoon in an 1890s Dodge City saloon.
Fully aware that Danny Marciano hated the cigar butts most, Silvestri loved to push his ash tray under Marciano’s snub nose; north Italian blood had given Marciano a fair and freckled complexion and blue eyes, and sitting at a desk had given him a few extra pounds. A good second man who lacked the cunning patience to wind up Commissioner.
They left Carmine and his two fellow lieutenants to get on with the real police work, ignored political pressures from Town, Gown and Hartford, and could be relied upon to go to bat for their men. That Carmine was their favorite everybody knew; hardly any resentment stemmed from that fact because what it really meant was that Carmine inherited the ticklish cases requiring diplomacy or liaison with other law enforcement agencies. He was also the department’s top murder man.
He had just finished his freshman year at Chubb when Pearl Harbor was attacked, so he postponed his education and enlisted. By sheer chance he was seconded to the military police, and once he got past guard duty and arresting drunken soldiers he found that he loved the work; there were as many violent or crafty crimes in the teeming wartime Army as on the streets of any city. When the War and an occupation stint in Japan were over, he was a major, eligible to complete his degree at Chubb under an accelerated program. Then, a sheepskin in his hand that would have let him teach English literature or mathematics, he decided that he liked police work best. In 1949 he joined the Holloman Police. Silvestri, a desk bound lieutenant at the time, soon spotted his potential and put him in Detectives, where he was now the senior lieutenant. Holloman was not big enough to have a homicide squad or any of the subdivisions larger city police forces had, so Carmine might find himself working all kinds of crime. However, murder was his speciality and he had a formidable solve rate: just about a hundred per cent—not all convicted, of course.
He sat looking eager yet relaxed; this would be juicy.
“You go first, Patsy,” said Silvestri, who disliked the Hug case already because it was certain to become high profile. Only a small paragraph in the Holloman Post this morning, but as soon as the details leaked, it would be front page news.
“I can tell you,” said Patrick, “that whoever dumped the torso in the Hug’s dead animal refrigerator left no fingerprints, fibers or any other trace of himself. The victim is in her middle teens, and has some colored blood. She’s small in size, and she looks well cared for.” He leaned forward in his chair, eyes glistening. “On her right buttock she has a heart-shaped scab. A nevus, removed around ten days ago. However, it wasn’t a pigmented birthmark, it was a hemangioma—a tumor made up of blood vessels. The killer used a pair of diathermy forceps to nip off every feeder to the growth, coagulate it. Must have taken him hours. Then he packed it with gelfoam to assist clotting, and after that he let the wound crust over, get nice and dry. I found traces of what I thought was an oil-based ointment, but it wasn’t.” He drew a deep breath. “It was grease-paint exactly the same color as her skin.”
Carmine’s own skin began to creep; he shivered. “She still didn’t look perfect after he removed the birthmark, so he covered it with grease-paint to make her perfect. Oh, Patsy, this is one weird dude!”
“Yeah,” said Patrick.
“So he’s a surgeon?” asked Marciano, pushing Silvestri’s ash tray and its contents away from his nose.
“Not necessarily” from Carmine. “Yesterday I talked to a lady who does microsurgery on the Hug’s animals. She doesn’t have a medical degree. There are probably dozens of technicians in any big center for research like the Chubb Medical School who can operate as well as any surgeon. For that matter, until Patsy just told us how the guy coagulated the bleeding nevus, I was considering butchers and slaughtermen. Now I think I can safely rule them out.”
“But you do think that the Hug’s involved,” said Silvestri, picking up the disgusting cigar and sucking on it.
“I do.”
“What’s next?”
Carmine got up, nodding to Corey and Abe. “Missing Persons. Probably statewide. Holloman doesn’t have one on the files unless the killer held her for much longer than it took him to do what he did. Because we don’t know what she looked like, we’ll concentrate on the birthmark.”
Patrick walked out with him. “You won’t break this one in a hurry,” he said. “The bastard’s left you nothing to go on.”
“Don’t I know it. If that monkey hadn’t woken up in an ice house, we wouldn’t even know a crime had been committed.”
Holloman’s Missing Persons having yielded nothing, Carmine began to phone around the other police departments in the state. The State cops had found the body of a ten-year-old girl in the woods just off the Appalachian Trail—a big, part-colored child reported missing by camping parents. But she had died of a cardiac arrest, and there were no suspicious circumstances.
The Norwalk police came up with a missing sixteen-year-old girl of Dominican extraction named Mercedes Alvarez, who had disappeared ten days ago.
“Five feet tall, curly but not kinky dark hair, dark brown eyes—a real pretty face—mature figure,” said someone who had announced himself as Lieutenant Joe Brown. “Oh, and a large heart-shaped birthmark on her right buttock.”
“Don’t go away, Joe, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
He put the flashing light on the Ford’s roof and gunned the car down I–95, siren screaming; the forty miles took him slightly more than twenty minutes.
Lieutenant Joe Brown was around his own age, early forties, and more excited than Carmine had expected him to be. Brown was on edge, so were the other cops in the vicinity. Carmine studied the color photo in the file, looked for the reference to the birthmark, which some untutored hand had attempted to sketch.
“She’s our girl, all right,” he said. “Man, she’s pretty! Fill me in, Joe.”
“She’s a sophomore at St. Martha’s high school—good grades, no trouble, no boyfriends. It’s a Dominican family been here in Norwalk for twenty years—the father’s a toll collector on the Turnpike, the mother’s a housewife. Six kids—two boys, four girls. Mercedes is—was—the eldest. Youngest is three, a boy. They live in a quiet old neighborhood, mind their own business.”
“Did anyone see Mercedes abducted?” Carmine asked.
“No one. We busted our asses to find her because”—he paused, looked worried—“she was the second girl of that type to go missing within two months. Both sophomores at St. Martha’s, in the same class, friends but not bosom buddies, if you get me. Mercedes had piano practice after school finished, was due home at four-thirty. When she didn’t turn up by six and the nuns said she had definitely left when she was supposed to, Mr. Alvarez called us. They were already upset over Verina.”
“Verina was the first girl?”
“Yeah. Verina Gascon. A Creole family from Guadeloupe, been here a long time too. She disappeared on her way to school. Both familie s live within walking distance of St. Martha’s, just a block away in either direction. We ransacked Norwalk looking for Verina, but she’d gone without a trace. And now this one, the same.”
“Any possibility either girl took off with a secret boyfriend?”
“Nope,” Brown said emphatically. “Maybe you should see both families, then you’d understand better. They’re old-fashioned Latin Catholics, bring their kids up strict but with lots of love.”
“I’ll see them, but not yet.” said Carmine, shrinking inside. “Can you organize Mr. Alvarez to identify Mercedes on the basis of the birthmark? We can’t show him more than a tiny patch of skin, but he’ll have to know beforehand that—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get the job of telling the poor bastard that someone chopped his beautiful little daughter into pieces,” said Brown. “Oh, Jesus! Sometimes this is a shit job.”
“Would their priest be willing to go with him?”
“I’ll make sure. And maybe a nun or two for extra support.”
Someone came in with coffee and jelly donuts; both men wolfed down a couple, drank thirstily. While he waited for copies of the files of both girls, Carmine called Holloman.
Corey, said Abe, was already at the Hug, and he himself was about to see Dean Wilbur Dowling to find out how many dead animal refrigerators existed within the medical school.
“Did we get any other missing persons who might have fitted our girl’s description?” Carmine asked, feeling better for the food.
“Yeah, three. One from Bridgeport, one from New Britain, and one from Hartford. But when none of them had the birthmark, we didn’t follow up. They all happened months ago,” said Abe.
“Things have taken a turn, Abe. Call Bridgeport, Hartford and New Britain back, and tell them to send us copies of those files as fast as a siren can travel.”
When Carmine walked in, Abe and Corey got up from their desks and followed him into his office, where three files lay waiting. Down went the two files Carmine carried; he unclipped the five photographs, all in color, and laid them out in a row. Like sisters.
Nina Gomez was a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan girl from Hartford, and had disappeared four months ago. Rachel Simpson was a sixteen-year-old light-skinned black girl from Bridgeport, disappeared six months ago. Vanessa Olivaro was a sixteen-year-old girl from New Britain of mixed Chinese, black and white blood whose parents hailed from Jamaica; she had disappeared eight months ago.
“Our killer likes curly but not kinky hair, faces that are fantastically pretty in a certain way—full but well delineated lips, wide set and wide open dark eyes, a dimpled smile—a height of no more than five feet, a mature figure, and light but not white skin,” Carmine said, flicking the photos.
“You really think the same guy snatched them all?” Abe asked, not wanting to believe it.
“Oh, sure. Look at their backgrounds. Godfearing, respectable families, all Catholic except for Rachel Simpson, whose father is an Episcopalian minister. Simpson and Olivaro went to their local high schools, the other three went to Catholic high schools, two at the same one, St. Martha’s in Norwalk. Then there’s the time span. One every two months. Corey, go back to the phone and ask for all missing persons who fit this description from as far back as—say, ten years. The background is as important as the physical criteria, so I’d be willing to bet that all these girls were famous for—well, if chasteness is too old-fashioned a word, at least goodness. They probably volunteered for things like Meals on Wheels or were candy-stripers in some hospital. Never missed on church, did their homework, kept their hems at knee level, maybe wore a touch of lipstick, but never full make-up.”
“The girls you’re describing are thin on the ground, Carmine,” Corey said, his dark and beaky face serious. “If he’s snatched one every two months, he must waste a lot of time finding her. Look at how far afield he’s gone. Norwalk, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain—why no girls from Holloman? Mercedes at least was dumped in Holloman.”
“They’re all dumped in Holloman. We’ve only got five girls so far, Corey. We won’t know his pattern until we’ve traced him back as far as he goes. In Connecticut, at any rate.”
Abe swallowed audibly, his fair, broken-nosed countenance pale and sick looking. “But we’re not going to find any of the bodies prior to Mercedes, are we? He cut them up and put the pieces in at least one dead animal refrigerator, and from there they went to the medical school incinerator.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Abe,” said Carmine, who to his loyal and most constant companions looked unusually cast down. No matter what the case, Carmine sailed through it and over it with the ponderous grace and power of a battle wagon. He felt—he bled—he pitied—he understood—but until this case he had let nothing burrow in as far as his central core.
“What else does all this tell you, Carmine?” Corey asked.
“That he’s gotten a picture of perfection in his mind’s eye that these girls resemble, but that there’s always something wrong with each of them. Like the birthmark on Mercedes. Maybe one of them told him to go fuck himself—he’d hate language like that coming from virginal lips. But what he gets off on is their suffering, like any rapist. That’s why I don’t honestly know if we should be cataloging him as a killer or a rapist. Oh, he’s both, but how does his mind work? What’s the real purpose of what he does to him?”
Carmine grimaced. “We know what kind of victim he likes and that they’re relatively rare, but ghosts are more visible than he is. In Norwalk, with two abductions on their plate, the cops have busted their asses looking for prowlers, peeping Toms, strangers on the street around the school, strangers contacting the school or the families. They’ve looked at everybody from United Way collectors to garbage collectors to mailmen to encyclopedia salesmen to people purporting to be Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses or any other proselytizing religious group. Meter readers, council workers, tree surgeons, power and phone linesmen. They actually formed a think-tank and tried to work out how he might have gotten close enough to abduct the girls, but so far they’ve come up with zilch. No one remembers anything that might help.”
Corey got to his feet. “I’ll start calling around,” he said.
“Okay, Abe, fill me in on the Hug,” Carmine said.
Out came Abe’s notepad. “There are thirty people on the Hug staff, if you count Professor Smith at one end and Allodice Miller the bottle washer at the other end.” He fished two pieces of paper from a file folder under his elbow and handed them to Carmine. “Here’s your copy of their names, ages, positions, how long they’ve worked there, and anything else I thought might be useful. The only one thought to have real surgical expertise is Sonia Liebman in the O.R. The two foreigners aren’t even medically qualified, and Dr. Forbes said he passed out watching a circumcision.”
He cleared his throat, flipped a page over. “There are any number of people who wander in and out pretty much at will, but their faces are well known—animal care, salesmen, doctors from the medical school. Mitey Brite Scientific Cleaners have the contract to clean the Hug, which they do between midnight and 3 a.m. Mondays to Fridays, but they don’t handle the hazardous waste. Otis Green does that. Apparently you have to be trained, which adds a few bucks to Otis’s pay packet. I doubt that Mitey Brite have anything to do with the crime because Cecil Potter walks back to the Hug at 9 p.m. each evening and locks animal care up better than Fort Knox in case a cleaner pokes around in there. It’s his babies—the monkeys. They hear the slightest noise at night, they raise a helluva rumpus.”
“Thanks for that, Abe. I hadn’t thought of Mitey Brite.” Carmine looked at Abe with great affection. “Any impressions of the inmates worth reporting?”
“They make godawful coffee,” said Abe, “and some smart-ass in neurochemistry fills a beaker with these delicious looking candies—pink, yellow, green. But they’re not candies, they’re polystyrene packing material.”
“You got caught.”
“I got caught.”
“Anything else?”
“Negative information only. You can rule Allodice the bottle washer out—too dumb. I doubt the bags were put in the fridge while Cecil and Otis were on duty. Later in the day, is my bet.”
“What about the possible number of dump sites?”
“I finally found seven different dead animal refrigerators, excluding the Hug’s. Dean Dowling wasn’t amused to have to talk to a cop about something so far underneath his job description, and no one seemed to have a list. No way any of them once I found them would have been as easy as using the Hug’s—all more public, busier. Man, they must get through millions of rats! I hate ‘em alive, but I hate ‘em dead a lot worse after today. I’m putting my money on the Hug.”
“So am I, Abe, so am I.”
Carmine spent the rest of his day at his desk studying the case files until he could recite them off by heart. Each was fairly thick because of the quality of the victims. Clearly the police of each city had put a great deal more work into their investigations than was usual; the average sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared had a reputation (sometimes a rap sheet) that fitted in with disappearance. But not these girls. The pity of it is, thought Carmine, that we don’t liaise with each other enough. If we did, we might have gotten on to this guy earlier. However, no body and there’s no physical evidence of murder. No matter how many bodies there have been—and I won’t know that for a while yet—I know that they wound up in the medical school incinerator. So much safer than, say, burying them in the woods. Connecticut has plenty of forests, but they’re used, they’re not limitless like Washington State forests.
My gut instinct says that he’s keeping their heads as memorabilia. Or else if he disposes of their heads too, he’s got the girls on film. Super–8 in color, maybe several cameras to catch every angle of their suffering, his own power. I know he’s a memorabilia man. This is his private fantasy, he’ll be compelled to record it. So he’s either filming it or he’s keeping the heads in a freezer or in glass jars of formalin. How many cases have I investigated involving memorabilia? Five. But never a multiple killer. That is so rare! And the others left me evidence. This guy doesn’t. When he looks at his films or his heads, what does he feel? Exultation? Disappointment? Excitement? Remorse? I wish I knew, but I don’t.
When he went into Malvolio’s to eat dinner he sat in his usual booth aware that he wasn’t hungry, even if he knew he had to eat. Early days; he had to keep his strength up for this one.
The waitress was a new girl, so he had to let her write it down, from the yankee pot roast to the rice pudding. A beautiful girl, but not his killer’s type; the way she eyed Carmine up and down was a blatant invitation that he ignored. Sorry, baby, he said silently, those days are over. Though she did remind him a little of Sandra: a looker marking time for some better job like acting or modeling. New York City was just down the road.
How many things had happened in 1950! He was a brand new detective; the Hug was built; the Holloman Hospital was built; and Sandra Tolley had come to wait on table at Malvolio’s. She had knocked him off his feet at first glance. Tall, stacked like Jane Russell, legs six feet long, a mass of gold hair and wide, myopic eyes in a gorgeous face. Full of herself and the career she knew she was going to have as a model; she’d put her portfolio in to all the New York agencies, but couldn’t afford to live there. So she had moved a two-hour train ride into Connecticut, where she could rent for less than $30 a month and eat for free if she was a waitress.
And then all her ambitions went west because the sight of Carmine Delmonico had knocked her off her feet too. Not that he was handsome or more than acceptably tall at five-eleven, but he had the kind of beat-up face that women adored, and a body bulging with natural muscle. They met at New Year’s; they were married within the month; and she was pregnant within three. Sophia, their daughter, was born right at the end of 1950. In those days he’d rented a nice house in East Holloman, which was the Italian quarter of town, thinking that if he surrounded Sandra with hordes of his relatives and friends she wouldn’t feel so alone when his job kept him working long hours. But she was from Montana ranching stock, and neither understood nor liked the way of life that East Holloman practised. When Carmine’s mother called in to see her, Sandra thought that Mom was checking up on her, and by extension she saw all the kind visits and invitations from his family circle and his friends as evidence that they didn’t trust her to behave.
