under round-the-clock surveillance from Monday, February twenty-eighth, until Friday, March fourth. That encompassed the thirty-two Holloman suspects. Their act had become tighter, more seamless; in the case of Professor Bob Smith, for instance, Marsh Manor’s deplorable security would be offset by four teams of watchers from the Bridgeport police. Unless he targeted a victim in Bridgeport, the Prof would have to swim the Housatonic River if he headed east, or evade six roadblocks if he headed west. That represented the greatest difference between last month’s plan and this new one: squad cars and uniforms as well as plain clothes and unmarkeds, and roadblocks everywhere. They had agreed at a statewide meeting that if the Ghosts were caught at a roadblock before they had a chance to abduct, then so be it. Any known suspect in a roadblock situation meant a large red mark in the record and concentrated surveillance. If that meant February/March was a bust for the Ghosts, then March/April would see new police methods and possible suspects.
Carmine himself had decided not to man a watch; it wasn’t likely that the beginning of March would see zero Fahrenheit temperatures, so he was better off somewhere in clear radio contact with everyone else, and with a gigantic map of Connecticut pinned to a wall at his elbow. Two consecutive Ghost strikes in the far east suggested that this time the Ghosts would head north or west or southwest. The Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island state police had agreed to patrol their Connecticut borders thicker than flies on a carcass. It was war to the teeth.
Thinking more of an evening with Desdemona than about a case grown so stale it was wearisome, late that afternoon Carmine took the Ponsonby case files back to Caterby Street.
“Do you still have unclaimed personal property going back to 1930?” he asked the Ph.D. half of the archive duo; the peon half was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the police pickup. And damn, he hadn’t remembered to tell Silvestri what was going on out here.
“We should have personal property going back to Paul Revere’s hat,” she said sarcastically, not amused that he had filched her files, nor worried at her own absence last Monday.
“These two murder victims,” he said, waving the very thin and unnamed file under her nose. “I want to see their personal effects.”
She yawned, examined her nails, glanced at the clock. “I’m afraid you’ve left your run too late, Lieutenant. It’s five and the place is closed for the day. Come back tomorrow, we’re open.”
Tomorrow Silvestri was going to have the whole tale, but why not give the bitch a sleepless night before the axe fell? “Then I suggest,” he said pleasantly, “that first thing in the morning you get your peon to use his pickup legally by delivering the box of personal effects to Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico at the County Services building. If the requested box isn’t delivered, my niece Gina will wind up sitting at your desk. She’s eager for a county job in an out-of-the-way corner because she needs to study. She wants to join the FBI, but it’s one helluva hard entrance exam for a woman.”
Chapter 26
At 11 A.M. on the Sunday before surveillance was due to begin Carmine walked into the police part of the County Services building feeling lonely, restless and tense.
Lonely because last Friday night Desdemona had announced that if the weekend was anything like bearable, she was hiking the Appalachian Trail right up on the Massachusetts border. Since he loved her presence in his bed, this took him aback; nor would she listen to his protests about wasting a squad car getting her there and back again. It worried him that his expectations from this relationship were so different from those he had felt with Sandra. Albeit incongruous in both roles, she had been wife and mother, tucked into a special compartment he never bothered to open while he was on the job. Whereas Desdemona hovered somewhere in his mind all the time, and it had nothing to do with the part she played in his case. Simply, he actively looked forward to his time with her. Maybe it was an age thing: still in his twenties when he had met Sandra, into his early forties when he met Desdemona. As a parent he hadn’t worked out too well, but as a husband he had been far worse. Yet he knew that the answer for Desdemona wasn’t as lover. Marriage, it had to be marriage. Only did she want marriage? He plain didn’t know. Hiking the Appalachian Trail seemed to argue that her need of him wasn’t in the same league as his of her. Yet she was so
Restless because Desdemona’s desertion had left him with two days to fill in and no one to fill them in with; Silvestri had forbidden him to poke his nose into any case other than the Ghosts, with the single exception of the racial situation if it exploded. And now, with a reasonably fine, above-freezing Sunday, was Mohammed el Nesr busy? Not busy demonstrating or rallying, at any rate. His quiescence was no mystery. Like Carmine, Mohammed was waiting for the Ghosts to abduct another victim this week, freshen up pain and indignation. The big rally would go on next Sunday, for sure. Taking desperately needed cops away from the Ghosts. A pain in the ass, but good strategy on Mohammed’s part.
Tense because Day Thirty was almost upon him.
“Lieutenant Delmonico?” asked the desk sergeant.
“That was me when I last looked,” Carmine said with a grin.
“I found an antique evidence box stuck behind those packages when I came in this morning. No name on it, which I guess is why you never got it. Then I found a tag with your name on it yards away.” He bent down, fumbled under his counter and came up with a big, square box that looked not unlike those in current use.
The belongings of the woman and child beaten to death in 1930! He’d forgotten all about them, so absorbed in surveillance planning had he become. Though he had remembered to ask Silvestri to light a fire under the archives bitch and her peon.
“Thanks, Larry, I owe you one,” he said, picked up the box and took it to his office.
Something to do with a Sunday morning if your beloved is on a route march through wet leaves.
No fetid relics of a crime thirty-six years old puffed out of it when he pulled the lid off; they hadn’t bothered keeping the clothes the pair were wearing, which meant there must have been blood all over them, including footwear. Since no one had thought to record the exact distance of “near” Leonard Ponsonby, for all that Carmine knew some of the blood might have been his. No one had even drawn a sketch to show how the bodies had lain in relation to each other. “Near” was as much as he had to go on.
The pocketbook was there, however. By habit he had donned gloves to remove it gingerly so he could examine it with his more sophisticated eyes. Homemade. Knitted, as women did in those days of no money, with two cane handles and a lining of coarse cotton fabric. No clasp. This woman couldn’t afford even the cheapest cowhide, let alone leather. The pocketbook contained a tiny purse in which sat a silver dollar, three quarters, one dime and one nickel. Carmine put the money purse on his desk. A man’s handkerchief, clean but not ironed; calico, not linen. And, in the bottom, fragments and crumbs of what he presumed were the two cookies. The mother had probably stolen them from the station cafe so the child would have something to eat on the train, and that might be why they were hiding out in the snow. The autopsies had said both stomachs were empty. Yes, she’d stolen the cookies.
The carpetbag wasn’t a large one, though it was old enough to have been one of those the northern predators had carried south with them after the Civil War. Faded, balding in places, never elegant even when new. He opened it with gentle reverence; in here resided almost everything that poor woman had owned, and no thing was more touching than the mute evidence of lives long over.
On top were two long woollen scarves, hand knitted in varicolored stripes, as if the knitter had scrounged for scraps. But why were the scarves in the bag when the weather was so awful? Spares? Under them were two pairs of clean women’s panties made of unbleached muslin, and two much smaller pairs that obviously belonged to the child. A pair of knitted kneesocks and a pair of knitted stockings. On the bottom, carefully folded between torn tissue paper, a little girl’s dress.
Carmine stopped breathing. A little girl’s dress. Made of pale blue French lace exquisitely embroidered with seed pearls. Puffed sleeves on dainty cuffs, pearl-studded buttons up the back, silk lining, and beneath that, stiffened net gathered to hold the skirt out like a ballerina’s tutu. A 1930 precursor of a Tinker Bell, except that this one had been completely handmade, every pearl sewn on separately and firmly, none of the stitching done by
