color or denomination, Christian or otherwise. You are looking for a man or two men who hate all women, but some more than others. The Ghosts hate virtue allied to youth allied to color allied to a face allied to other things we don’t know. But we
“I’m still going to see Mr. Bewlee,” Carmine said stubbornly.
“If you have to, you have to. But she won’t fit because the pattern you’re seeing is a figment of your imagination. You’re a victim of battle fatigue.”
They fell silent; less than three hours to go, and the shift would be over.
Shortly before 7 A.M. the radio emitted a different stealthy noise: the one that said get out of there unobtrusively and go to your rendezvous, because a girl has been taken.
Carmine’s rendezvous was Major Minor’s motel, where he and Patrick requisitioned use of the phone in Reception. The Major was on the desk himself, eager to learn what was happening. All his rooms had been booked by the Holloman police for a sum they – and he – knew was exorbitant, especially since no one used them. The NO VACANCY sign was additional camouflage for parked cars, and the Major wasn’t about to turn that on unless it spelled out the truth.
While Carmine talked, Patrick watched Major Minor, wondering idly if, like so many people owning suggestive names, young F. Sharp Minor had gone to West Point determined to attain the rank that would make him a contradiction in terms. In his fifties now, with the swollen purple nose of a heavy drinker and the attitude of a desk warrior: if the forms are correctly filled in and the paperwork is adequate, do whatever you like from beating the crap out of a soldier to stealing firearms from the cage. This quirk in Major Minor’s nature helped a business where the guests came for an hour in mid-afternoon; the main parking lot was around the back so that no wife cruising down Route 133 could spot her old man’s car outside. At one stage Carmine had been desperate enough to classify Major F. Sharp Minor as a suspect, for no better reason than that he knew all the rooms were fitted with spy holes. The elderly villain had gotten rid of the cameras after a private detective caught him filming a company director and his secretary, but Major Minor could still
“Norwich,” Carmine said. “Corey, Abe and Paul will be here in about a minute.” He moved farther from the Major. “She’s of Lebanese extraction, but the family has been in Norwich since 1937. Her name is Faith Khouri.”
“They’re Moslems?” Patrick asked, looking incredulous.
“No, Catholics of the Maronite sect. I doubt there’d be a Maronite church, so they’d go to the ordinary Catholic one.”
“Norwich is a pretty big town.”
“Yes, but they live out of it quite a way. Mr. Khouri runs a convenience store in Norwich. His home is north, about halfway to Willimantic.”
Abe pulled up in the Ford, Paul right behind in Patrick’s unmarked black van.
“I don’t even know why we’re bothering to go up there,” said Corey as the Ford moved off at a normal pace; no siren or light until they were well away from Ponsonby Lane.
That, thought Carmine, inwardly sighing, is the remark of a man who despairs. I’m not the only one suffering from a bad case of battle fatigue. We are beginning to believe that we will never catch the Ghosts. This is the fourth girl since we’ve known the Ghosts exist, and we’re no closer, no closer. Corey’s hit the bottom of his particular pit, and I don’t know how far I am from the bottom of mine.
“We are going, Cor,” he said as if Corey’s statement had been routine, “because we have to see the abduction site for ourselves. Abe, if we go north on I-91 to Hartford and then strike east, we’ll have better road conditions than I-95 to New London.”
“Can’t,” said Abe briefly. “Five trailer trucks jackknifed.”
“At least,” said Carmine, settling into his beloved backseat comfortably, “the heater’s on. I’m going to get some sleep.”
The Khouri house was on a winding lane that ran not far from the Shetucket River, and was as charming as its setting. The house itself was traditional, but built in fits and starts that lent it alluring angles as well as three levels. Between it and the road was an enormous pond, frozen solid at this time of year, as was the brook that led from it to the icebound river; it had been ploughed free of snow so it could be used as a skating rink, but a tiny wooden jetty spoke equally loudly of canoes in summer. A patch of rushes clattered hollowly against each other, and everywhere in the distances a golden sheen of sun overlay sleek white fields. Around the house were the winter skeletons of birches and willows, with a massive old oak atop a rise beyond the little lake. Picnics in the shade in summer, it said. What lovelier environment could there be for children than this perfect American dream?
There were seven children, Carmine learned: only a nineteen-year-old boy, Anthony, was away from home. His brother Mark was seventeen, then came Faith at sixteen, Nora at fourteen, Emily at twelve, Matthew at ten; Philippa, at eight, was the youngest.
The wildness of the family’s grief made it impossible to question any of them, including the father. Almost thirty years in America had not cancelled out their Levantine reaction to the loss of a child. When Carmine managed to find a photograph of Faith, he saw what Patrick had been trying to make him see on Ponsonby Lane. Faith looked like the sister of the other victims, from her mass of curly black hair to her wide dark eyes and her lush mouth. In skin color she was the fairest; about like a southern Italian or Sicilian girl, Mediterranean tawny.
Patrick looked defeated when he found Carmine outside on the cold porch. “The snow’s frozen so solid that they were able to lay a strip of straw matting from the road to the back porch – looks like cheap stair runner,” he said. “They scraped and salted the road where they parked, so no tire tracks that haven’t been obscured by the local cops. They opened the back door with a key or a set of picks, and I’d say they knew exactly which bedroom was Faith’s. She had her own room – all the kids do – on the second floor, which is the sleeping floor for everyone. They must have found her asleep. The only signs of a struggle are a few disturbances in the sheets at the bottom of her bed, maybe a few feeble kicks. Then they carried her out the way they came in, up the straw runner to the road and their vehicle. From what we can gather, no one heard a thing. She was missed when she didn’t appear for breakfast, which the mother puts on early at this time of year – it’s an hour’s drive into Norwich on badly ploughed roads. The kids go in with their father and stay at his shop until it’s time to go to school, just a short walk away.”
“You’re doing my job, Patsy. Do we have any idea of her height? Her weight?”
“Not until Father Hannigan and his nuns arrive. The grief in there is demented, and nobody will let me give anybody a shot. The hair’s coming out in handfuls.”
“And the blood’s flying where Mrs. Khouri keeps scratching herself. That’s why I’m out here, not in there,” Carmine said, sighing. “Not that flying blood and hair matter. The Ghosts won’t have left a shred of either behind.”
“The family’s given Faith up for dead already.”
“Do you honestly blame them, Patsy? We’re about as useful as tits on a bull, and it’s getting to Abe and Corey. They’re hurting bad, just can’t show it.”
Patrick squinted and heaved a gasp of relief. “Here come our priest and cohorts. Maybe they know how to calm everyone down.”
If they couldn’t do that, at least Father Hannigan and the three nuns with him were able to give Carmine the information he needed. Faith was five-two, and weighed about eighty-five pounds. Slender, not yet very developed. A dear girl, devout, maintained an A-plus average in all her subjects, which leaned to the sciences; her ambition had been to do medicine. She was due to join the ranks of the candy stripers at St. Stan’s Hospital this summer, but until now her mother and father had kept her at home, didn’t want her into good works too young. Anthony, the brother who wasn’t there, was doing pre-med at Brown; it seemed all the children were interested in the human sciences. The family itself was tightly knit and highly respected. Their shop was in a good part of Norwich and had never been held up, their house had never been burgled, nor had any among them been harassed or attacked.
“It keeps going back to the unimpeachable innocence, the face, and the age, with a possible for the religion,” Carmine said to Silvestri when he returned to Holloman. “Of late color hasn’t worried the Ghosts, or size, but we
