fitted in, all airs and graces before he went to kindergarten. But I’ll give him this – he worked his guts out to get an education, improve himself. And I love him for it something chronic. Hilda suits him, y’know. I guess it don’t look like that, but she does.”
“If this private practice comes off, what about you?” he asked, sounding gruff.
“Oh, I ain’t going with them!” she said cheerfully. “I’m gonna stay right here on Griswold Lane. They’ll look after me.”
There were a lot of things Carmine wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, “Good night, Mrs. Kyneton. You’re some woman.”
All the way back to Cedar Street, Carmine struggled with the unexpected discovery that the killer sometimes secreted the girls on the spot and removed them later. It preyed on his mind more than the change in ethnicity did.
“He isn’t begging us to catch him,” he said to Silvestri, “nor is he jerking our strings just to show us how clever he is. I don’t believe that his ego needs that kind of stimulation. If he jerks our strings, it’s because he has to, as part of his plans rather than as a cute aside. Like burying Francine in the Kynetons’ backyard. In my book, that’s a defense mechanism. And it says to me that the killer
“I think we have to search the Hug,” Silvestri said.
“Yes, sir, and more to the point, we have to search it tomorrow, a Saturday. But we won’t get a warrant out of Judge Douglas Thwaites.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Silvestri growled. “What time is it?”
“Six,” said Carmine, looking at the antique railroad clock behind Silvestri’s head.
“I’ll call M.M. and see if he can’t persuade the Hug Board to give us permission to search. Of course they can have as many Huggers as they want to watch us search, but whom would you prefer, Carmine?”
“Professor Smith and Miss Dupre,” said Carmine promptly.
“He gave her a shot of Demerol,” Patrick said when Carmine walked in. “He couldn’t have gone into a vein with a struggling girl on his hands, but he needed the drug to work as soon as possible. So I looked at her abdomen first, and there it was. With the risk of puncturing intestine or liver, he had to use a big-bore hypodermic – a fine twenty- five-gauge tuberculin syringe would have kept on going rather than pushed things aside. And that was our saving grace. A twenty-five-gauge pinprick would have healed completely in the seven days he kept her alive. The eighteen-gauge made a hole.”
“Why is going into the abdomen quicker than into muscle?”
“It’s called a parenteral injection, mixes the drug with the fluid of the abdominal cavity. Next best thing to a vein. I’d picked that he’d use Demerol, it’s a fast-acting opiate. Generic name, meperidine, and more addictive even than heroin, so getting a prescription for the
“Any idea how much he gave her?”
“No. I found my trace in the dermal cells where the needle went in. But either he miscalculated the dosage or Francine had a better resistance to it than usual. If she managed to hide her jacket, then she came around much sooner than he counted on.”
“No gag, but muffled in a super-thick mat. Tied with maybe duct tape over her pants legs and her blouse. He might have taken the jacket off her himself to tape her blouse cuffs,” Carmine said. “When she woke up, she couldn’t move much, though it’s possible she managed to start freeing her hands. I think Francine was a formidable young woman. The kind we can’t afford to lose.”
“They’re all that kind.” Patrick frowned. “Still, he ought to have seen a pink sleeve poking out of a black mat.”
“The place was dark and he was in a hurry. It’s possible Francine had moved enough to hide what she’d done, or maybe when he opened the locker she came out fighting.”
“Either or,” Patrick said.
“Have you missed dinner, Patsy?”
“Nessie’s gone to a Chubb concert, so it’s Malvolio’s for me.”
“And for me. Meet you there as soon as I tell Silvestri where I’m going.” Carmine grinned. “He’ll be on that phone for at least an hour.”
“The saints preserve me from tycoons,” Silvestri grumbled when he slid into their booth. “At least I’m on my own time, so I can have a drink. Coffee and a double Scotch on the rocks,” he said to the waitress who reminded Carmine of Sandra.
“That bad, huh?” Patrick asked sympathetically.
“M.M. was easy. He appreciated our situation. But Roger Parson Junior was like getting blood out of a stone. He refuses to see any connection to his precious Hug.”
“How did you get around him, John?” Carmine asked.
The Scotch came; Silvestri swallowed some and looked like one of Hell’s executive demons. “I told him to put his money where his mouth is. If there’s no link to the Hug, then the sooner we ransack the joint, the better his case. Though,” he added, still wearing that diabolical look, “I paid a price for his permission.”
“And why,” asked Carmine warily, “do I think someone else is paying the price?”
“Because, Carmine, you’re smart. Next Thursday at noon you have an appointment with Parson at his office in New York City. He wants to know everything we know.”
“I need that like a hole in the head.”
“Pay the price, Carmine, pay the price.”
Chapter 10
The best laid schemes can go awry, Carmine reflected on that Saturday morning. There had been an armed robbery at a gas station that the thieves followed up by hitting two liquor stores, a jeweler and another gas station, which thinned his reserve of men down to a point where he knew the search was going to take all day. Corey and Abe and four other detectives, all rookies who would have to be supervised. Right. Two parties of three, Abe leading one, Corey the other, while he himself floated. Paul was on hand in case evidence came to light that needed his touch.
They arrived at the Hug at 9 A.M. to be greeted in the foyer by the Prof and Desdemona, neither of them pleased but each under Board instructions to be co-operative.
“Miss Dupre, you go with Sergeant Marshall and his men on this floor. I presume you have keys to everything that’s locked? Professor, you go one floor up with Sergeant Goldberg. Do you have keys?” Carmine asked.
“Yes,” whispered the Prof, who looked as if he might faint.
“Cecil is in,” Desdemona said to Carmine as they walked down the north hall.
“Because of this search?”
“No, because of his babies. He’s always in weekend mornings. I’ll wait outside in case he has one in the main room. They abhor women,” she said.
“So he told me. You can go with Corey to look in the machine shop and the electronics lab. The last thing I want is Roger Parson Junior accusing us of stealing something. I’ll search animal care myself.”
“I am grateful for that, Lieutenant,” said Cecil, who didn’t seem annoyed at this invasion. “Want to see where my babies live? They in a good mood today.”
I’d be in a good mood too if I lived like this, Carmine said to himself, entering a small foyer shut off from the main macaque room by heavy iron bars. They were so strong, Cecil explained, that, if enraged, they could break chain link like candy canes. The area, very large considering its small population, was landscaped like rocky savannah – a wall of rugged boulders pocked with holes, bushes, tufts of grass, logs, limbed concrete trees, warm light that felt like a hot sun. Rheostats connected to timers ensured that there was a dawn and a dusk.
“Isn’t it unkind to deprive them of females?” Carmine asked.
