On, Off

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. God-fearing, 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 makeup.”

“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 postmen 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