Cecil chuckled. “They make do, Lieutenant, same as men make do in prison. Hump the shit outta each other. But there’s a pecking order, an’ Eustace, he The Man. New guy arrives, he gets grabbed by Eustace, humped, then he gets passed to Clyde, an’ ol’ Clyde, he passes the new guy on, an’ so on. Jimmy, he the last in the pecking order. Never gets to do more than jerk hisself off.”
“Well, thanks for showing me, Cecil, but I doubt any girl has ever been hidden in here.”
“You dead right there, Lieutenant.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” Desdemona asked when he joined Corey’s group in a workshop that was a machinist’s dream.
“A cupboard with a human hair in it, a shred of clothing, a broken fingernail, a scrap of duct tape, a bloodstain. Anything that shouldn’t be there.”
“Ah, so that’s why the magnifying glasses and the bright lights! I thought that sort of thing went out with Sherlock Holmes.”
“They’re the tools of choice in a search like this. All these men are experts at looking for evidence.”
“Mr. Roger Parson Junior is not amused.”
“So I gather, but ask me if I care. The answer is, I don’t.”
Room by room, closet by closet, cupboard by cupboard, the search went on; satisfied that the first floor had nothing to offer, Corey and his team went up to the third floor, Desdemona and Carmine tagging along.
During this more leisurely inspection of the third floor, Carmine realized that under ordinary circumstances life at the Hug was pleasant; most of the technicians had attempted to turn cold science into warm familiarity. Walls and doors were plastered with cartoons that only someone in the game would find funny; pictures of people were there too, and landscapes, and posters of vividly colored things whose nature Carmine couldn’t begin to fathom, though he could appreciate their beauty.
“Crystals under polarized light,” Desdemona explained, “or pollen, dust mites, viruses under an electron microscope.”
“Some of these work niches look like Mary Poppinsville.”
“Marvin’s, you mean?” she asked, pointing to an area where everything from drawers to boxes and books had been covered with Contact adhesive paper in pink and yellow butterflies. “Think about it, Carmine. People like Marvin spend the most concerted stretch of each twenty-four hours rooted to one spot. Why should that spot be grey and anonymous? Employers don’t stop to think that if the cells people work in were more individual and harmonious, the quality of output might rise. Marvin is the poet, is all.”
“Ponsonby’s technician, right?”
“Correct.”
“Doesn’t Ponsonby object? He doesn’t strike me as a yellow and pink butterfly man, not when he’s got Bosch and Goya on his walls.”
“Chuck would like to object, but the Prof wouldn’t back him up. Theirs is an interesting relationship, goes back to childhood, and the Prof was the boss then as much as now, I suspect.” She spotted Corey about to move an apparatus of fine glass columns on a levered stand, and shrieked. “Don’t you dare touch the Natelson! Stuff it up, mate, and you’ll be singing soprano in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”
“I don’t think,” Carmine said solemnly, “that it’s big enough to hide anything. Look in that closet.”
They looked in every closet from the first floor clear to the roof, but found nothing. Paul came to go over the O.R., swabbing any surface that could possibly collect fluid.
But, said Paul, “I doubt there’s anything to find. This Mrs. Liebman is immaculate, never forgets to clean the corners or the under sides.”
“My feeling,” said Abe, contributing his mite to the gloom, “is that the Hug may have received parts of bodies, but that they were bagged before they arrived, and went straight from someone’s car trunk to the dead animal fridge.”
“A negative exercise, guys, that tells us something,” Carmine said.
“Whatever role the Hug plays in this business, it isn’t a holding pen or a slaughter yard.”
Chapter 11
The trouble with a case growing as old as the Monster’s was that the amount of work that could be done gradually tapered off; Sunday had been a day of trying to read, flicking from one TV channel to another, some pacing the floor. So it was with relief that Carmine arrived at the Hug at 9 A.M. on Monday morning. To find a crowd of black men clustered outside it bearing placards that said CHILD KILLERS and BLACK HATERS. Most of them wore a Black Brigade jacket over combat fatigues. Two squad cars were parked nearby, but the picketers were orderly, content to shout and lift their fists in Mohammed el Nesr’s personally coined gesture. No Black Brigade chiefs were there, Carmine noted; these were small fry, hoping to catch a TV journalist or two in their net. When Carmine walked up the path to the entrance door, they ignored him apart from a flurry of yelled “Pig!”
Of course the weekend news had been full of Francine Murray. Carmine had passed on Derek Daiman’s warning to Silvestri at the time, but although nothing had happened until today, any sensitive cop nose could sniff trouble coming. Holloman wasn’t the only town involved, but it seemed to have become the focus of all indignation, general and particular. The Hug’s part in things ensured that, and one thing for sure, the newspapers weren’t crowning their pictures of John Silvestri and Carmine Delmonico with laurels; the weekend editorials had been diatribes against police incompetency.
“Did you see them?” the Prof spluttered when Carmine entered his office. “Did you see them?” Demonstrators,
“Hard not to see them, Professor,” Carmine said dryly. “Calm down and listen to me. Is there anyone you can think of who might bear a grudge against the Hug? Like a patient?”
The Prof hadn’t washed his magnificent hair, and his shave had missed as many bristles as it caught. Evidence of a crumbling ego or personality or whatever the shrinks called it. “I don’t know,” he said, as if Carmine had come out with something just too ludicrous to imagine.
“Do you see any patients yourself, sir?”
“No, not in years, except for an occasional consultation on some case that has everyone baffled. Since the Hug was opened, my function has been to be here for my researchers, discuss their problems with them if they’re in a dilemma or things haven’t gone the way they hoped. I advise them, sometimes suggest new avenues for them to explore. Those, my teaching and lecture schedule
“Who does see patients? Refresh my memory.”
“Addison Forbes, most of all, as his research is entirely clinical. Dr. Ponsonby and Dr. Finch see a few patients, while Dr. Polonowski has a big clinic. He’s very good on malabsorption syndromes.”
Why can’t they speak English? Carmine wanted to ask. But he said, “So you suggest I should see Dr. Forbes first?”
“In any order you like,” said the Prof, buzzing for Tamara.
There’s another Hugger who doesn’t look too swift, Carmine noted. I wonder what she’s up to? Fine-looking and sexy woman, but she knows she hasn’t got too many good years left.
Addison Forbes looked blank. “See patients?” he asked. “I should say so, Lieutenant! My patient intake can run to thirty-plus a week. Certainly never less than twenty. I’m so well known that my patient pool is not only national, but international.”
“Is it possible that one of them harbors a grudge against you or the Hug, Doctor?”
“My dear man,” Forbes said loftily, “It’s a rare patient who understands his malady! The moment a treatment doesn’t perform miracles when he has led himself to believe it will, he blames his doctor. But I am particularly careful to point out to
