“Don’t blame yourself, Carmine, please.”
He got up. “Does anything ever make you scream, Desdemona?”
“Oh, yes,” she said gravely. “Spiders and cockroaches.”
“Zilch as usual,” Patrick said in Silvestri’s office. “No fingerprints, no fibers, no detritus of any kind. He must have used a measure on the window, the notice – it’s too big to be called a note – was so perfectly placed. Equidistant to a millimeter. And he fixed it with four little balls of Plasticene, pressed the four corners into it, even adjusted the left side to raise it a fraction. And he’s an original! It was done in forty-eight-point Times Bold Letraset. On paper thin enough to have put a lined graticule behind it – every letter is dead even. Cheap cartridge drawing block, the kind kids buy at any big chain store. He pressed the Letraset down with something rounded and metal – a knife handle or maybe a scalpel handle. Not a stylus, too blunt.”
“Can you get any idea of how big his hands are from the way he pressed the paper into the Plasticene?” Marciano asked.
“No. I think he put a rag between his fingers and the paper.”
“What made you say the garotte was unusual, Patsy?” Carmine asked, sighing. “A loop and handle’s not that unique.”
“This one is. The handle isn’t wood as I thought. It’s a carved human femur. But he didn’t carve it. It looks incredibly old, so I’m carbon dating it. The wire is piano wire.”
“Did it bite in hard enough to cut the skin?” Silvestri asked.
“No, just hard enough to occlude the airway and carotids.”
“He’s used one before.”
“Oh, yes, he’s had plenty of practice.”
“But he left his garotte behind. Does that mean he’s finished playing with this toy?” Abe asked.
“I’d say so.”
“Do you still think Desdemona Dupre is a red herring?” asked Corey, more upset then the others; Charlie’s wife was great friends with his own wife.
“I can’t believe she’s anything else!” Carmine cried, hands in his hair. “She’s no dummy – if she knew anything, she’d have told me.”
“What’s your theory on her, Carmine?” Silvestri asked.
“That he picked her for several reasons. One, that she’s a loner. Easier to get at. Another, that she’s about as far from his victim type as women can get. And maybe most important of all, he knows that Desdemona is the one Hugger I make use of, always have done. The note – notice – calls her a sneak.”
“What about the notice?” Silvestri pressed.
“Oh, it’s a doozy, sir! I mean, the phraseology is more an international English than it is American. He
“Is he setting you up?” Patrick asked.
“I doubt it. He’s set her up. What he was really doing was showing us that nothing we do can protect her if he decides to act.”
“A cop killer!” said Corey savagely.
“A child killer,” said Marciano. “We gotta stop him, Carmine!”
“We will. I’m not letting go, Danny, no matter what.”
The only way into Desdemona’s apartment on the tenth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building was by speaking into an intercom and then punching a ten-number code on a special lock. The code would be changed every day and no one was permitted to write it down, even Desdemona.
Who didn’t complain when Carmine let himself in that evening bearing brown bags full of groceries.
“Darjeeling tea from Scrivener’s – Colombian coffee from the same – brown bread – butter – sliced ham – some TV dinners – fresh raisin bagels – mayonnaise – pickles – chocolate chip cookies – anything I thought you might like,” he said, depositing his bags on the kitchen counter.
“Am I under siege?” she asked. “Am I not allowed to go to work or hike at the weekends?”
“Hiking’s out, that’s for sure, but we’ll eat at Malvolio’s tonight or anywhere else you want. You don’t go out without two cops, and they won’t be reading books,” he said. “The door means I don’t have to waste good men on surveillance, but once you step through it, you’re government property.”
“I shall hate it,” she said, plucking her coat off a hook.
“Then let’s hope it won’t be for very long.”
Part Three
January & February 1966
Chapter 14
The phone woke Carmine from a deep sleep shortly before 8 A.M. on New Year’s Day, one of the few times in almost three months that he had decided to let body and brain sleep themselves out. Not because he had celebrated the passing of the old year; though it had been the most harrowing of his life, he had many reasons to think that the new one might be even worse. Therefore, his New Year’s Eve had been spent alone in his apartment watching the crowd in Times Square on TV. It had occurred to him to invite Desdemona up from two floors down, but he decided against it because it worried him that perhaps she was very tired of his company. If she ate out, he was the one who escorted her, paid for their dinner no matter how she carped about what he deemed no more than common courtesy. The result was that he went to bed long before midnight, had a fantastic sleep and was ready to be awakened when the phone rang.
“Delmonico,” he said.
“It’s Danny,” came Marciano’s voice. “Carmine, get up to New London right now. There’s been another abduction. Dublin Road, on the Groton side of the river. Abe and Corey are on their way in, so is Patrick. The New London cops will wait for you.”
He was upright immediately, conscious of a sweat the 50°F thermostat hadn’t produced; he liked to sleep cold, it kept him from throwing the covers off. “But it can’t be,” he said, shivering. “It’s only been thirty days since Francine, the guy isn’t due to strike until the end of the month.”
“We’re not sure it’s the same guy – the abduction took place during the night, for starters, and this is a new experience for the New London cops. Get up there and tell them what they’ve got.”
Abe driving, they screamed the forty miles to New London, Paul and Patrick in their van behind them.
“Thirty days, it’s only been thirty days!” Abe said as I-95 began to run into New London; he hadn’t said a word until then.
“Take the Groton turnoff just over the bridge,” said Corey, a map spread on his knees. “It can’t be the same guy, Carmine.”
“We’ll know in a few minutes, so take it easy.”
The location wasn’t hard to find; every squad car in all of New London County looked to be parked up and down the verges of a street containing modest houses in fifth-of-an-acre blocks; Dublin Road, Groton.
The house a patrolman indicated was grey-painted, a single-storey dwelling too small to qualify as ranch style. Very much the home of a workingman having pride in himself and his property. One glance at it, and Carmine knew with sinking heart that the people who lived inside were as respected as respectable. A perfect family for the killer’s
