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.
There was never a genuine quarrel, nor even much discontent. The baby was the image of her mother, which pleased everyone; no one knows better than the Italians that they paint the angels fair.
As a matter of course Carmine was in line for free tickets whenever a play on
