Scalpers

or pain on his account.

'Guess maybe if I had AIDS, I'd shoot myself, too.'

'Warren jumped from the roof of his apartment building.'

'Sorry, Dean ... really sorry.'

'Makes you wonder about a lot of things, my friend, like when's it going to stop—'

'If ever.'

Dean nodded at his end of the phone. “You always could finish a sentence for me.'

'Dean, old buddy, you damn sure could use time away from that chilly city. Tell you what, you come on down, bring Jackie with you, and when we get a moment—'

'Jackie can't pick up and go parading to Florida anymore than I can, and even if she could—'

'Then what about you? All expenses paid, compliments of the Orlando City Police. Free citrus. Hell, boy, you're more famous now than Peter Hukros ever was.'

Dean laughed at the reference to the famous pyschic. “They're not likely to roll out any red carpets for an M.E.'

'Try me.'

Dean hesitated a moment. “You've got that much pull down there, huh? Must be nice.'

'Don't give me that shit, doctor. I know you've got that fat cop, Kelso, wrapped around your pinkie.'

Dean thought of all the reasons not to make the trip. He also thought of all the reasons it might do him some good—and his standing at home, and the job downtown. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought.

No doubt his taking some of the years of accrued vacation time he had coming to him would be frowned upon. Such an act would be construed as a cover for a job-hunting foray into the sunbelt. Orlando sends for Grant with a cock-a-mamy story about rampant scalping in order to woo him away from Chicago. Once he saw what Orlando had to offer ... all that. Even if it weren't true, he could jockey for better treatment and conditions at home, get some of that money they kept so tightly balled in their fists.

Besides, he'd been promising himself for years he would one day visit Sid's so-called “dynamite” set-up in Orlando, to see his sleek, modern forensics lab that was supposed to be housed in a newly built skyscraper overlooking a lake filled with boats. The building also housed all administrative law enforcement agencies in the rapidly expanding city where, by all accounts, new towers sprouted as quickly as beanstalks.

'I know you want to see some sunshine, and we've got it, even if it is December,” Corman promised.

'It'll have to be short, Sid.'

'Have you back before Christmas.'

Dean left off by saying he had to make arrangements, and told Sid it would take him perhaps forty-eight hours to get out of Chicago. Dean then set about making those difficult arrangements. His hardest task was talking with Jackie. She remained shaken at having nearly been a floater casualty herself, and her nights were frequented by Angel Rae's ghost. But Dean believed she must confront the situation to become whole again, and that his being so close at hand only made her hide within herself more. Dean was not at all sure if this time their marriage could survive the onslaught of his work. He'd convinced her to see a psychiatrist, to go to work at chipping away at the horror retained in her psyche from a close call with drowning and murder.

Chief Ken Kelso did not make Dean's junket to Florida any easier, either. In fact, they had had a fight over it. Ken thought him foolish and heartless to leave Jackie at a time like this, while Dean argued that it was necessary for her as well as for him. Kelso also tried to tell Dean he had much too much work in the crime lab to go off looking for more, and he reminded him of the ongoing investigation into possible links with other floating deaths across the nation. “Am I supposed to do it all on my own?” he'd screamed.

Sybil alone had thought Dean's taking off was great. It would leave her in charge at the lab, and she could lord it over the new man even more than she did now.

Telling Borel, their superior, was easy. It jolly well left a good feeling in Dean's heart because it left the little four-eyed pimp guessing and begging information all over the building. Dean had calculated right on that score.

Now he was on United Flight 217, with a briefcase full of news accounts and papers forwarded to him by Sid to review before his touchdown in Orlando.

Dean now opened up a copy of yesterday's Orlando Sentinel to stare again at the headline and the splatter picture across the front which looked vaguely like a poster for the latest horror movie. It was actually a colored photograph of a scalping victim. The sprawled, partially clad figure of a woman looked like a manikin dropped from a height, broken and disfigured. The head was ghastly, missing a wide splotch of hair and skin. Dean wondered how on earth police had allowed a photographer in so close to get such a shot, and how a responsible paper could come to the conclusion that it was proper to use it. But then, anything could be justified, and if community feeling was aroused enough, as it seemed to be, the mayor of the city himself may well have seen to it the papers got the photo. It could be a cautionary tale: lock your doors, and do not wander about after dark, for the thing that kills is loose again.

Dean saw that Sid, as expected, had run every test imaginable at the crime scenes, but had come up with only the minutest evidence. It appeared that Sid was looking for a miracle, and Dean was not at all sure he could produce one. The trip would likely do little more than bolster Sid's spirits, but if it helped, why not? Still, the whole case was as intriguing as it was disturbing.

Dean knew that scalping alone could cause enough trauma and blood loss to end in death, but he also knew that there were recorded cases of people who had survived the butcherous work of a scalper. He wondered if there was anyone anywhere in the state of Florida, or in the nation for that matter, who was going about today with his scalp missing, a ball cap pulled tightly across the forehead to hide the disfigurement. It was one of those thoughts that came in at him from out of nowhere, for no particular reason. But it led to a second thought: he wondered if anyone had ever lived through a scalping recently, and if so, could he or she identify—or help to identify—this assailant? If there were such a person, how would he go about finding him? Hospital records? Clinics, perhaps? Such a victim would have to create vivid memories at the late-night emergency ward. Dean wondered if the cops had given it a thought.

Tired, feeling drained, Dean nevertheless considered the many unanswered questions. He wondered if the guy who was responsible for the scalping might not be missing his own scalp, either due to a chemical accident or a war wound, or malformation at birth. For one reason or another, the killer seemed to have a bizarre fetish for this piece of skin and hair. Was he just a crazed bald man? Dean chuckled inwardly at the thought. A stewardess came by with the beverage cart, asking if he would care to have anything to drink. He ordered a Tom Collins and made a mess of moving his papers about locating his wallet. In a moment she was gone and he was left with his drink and his questions.

He scanned some of Sid's workups on the earlier victims and saw what he expected: multiple contusions, knife wounds, punctures. He noticed the killer's habit of not only taking the scalp, but leaving a design on the victim's head: a triangle, a circular pattern, a square. What was that all about? The victims’ hair color and gender didn't seem important. One victim was a man, middle fifties, small in stature. Dean wondered if there was any way to connect the victims. This was important, for if the victims knew one another or lived within a certain radius, then there was not only somewhere to begin, but it meant the killer's work was not completely and utterly random.

God forbid the killer did his work without knowing something about his victims. Without connecting them in some way in his mind, he was leaving no scent and no trail. A patternless, random killer, selecting his victims on a whim, at any time of the day or night and in any setting, was a law enforcement agent's worst nightmare. Such a killer was the hardest to catch. His or her movements left no trail; his so-called serial acts had no serial nature about them, beyond the dire results: bodies. All the cops had to go on were corpses. They could not put together much of a psychological profile, they could not point to a victim type which triggered in this killer the desire to destroy a given face, a given shape, a given creature with platinum hair or gray eyes. Instead, all answers were smoke.

An even more gruesome photo slipped from one of the files Sid had forwarded Dean, a picture of what was once a middle-aged redhead, the latest victim. She bore no resemblance to the others, beyond the ugly scar—a deep wound over the eyes. The shiny veins and blood pool beneath the layers of skin removed from the skull glossed in the photo. That strange, rectangular wound haunted Dean's mind as had the others. This time the killer had carved a rectangle out of the flesh.

The woman's head where her hair had been ripped from her showed ugly, scarred, puckered skin. The idea