Scalpers

They wanted other things from the girl before they'd leave her to die here.

He wanted a patch of skin from her left thigh, some pubic hair for another ritual meal, more skin from around her breast—just a little nip—and he wanted her nails, painted and long as they were. Her toenails, too.

He went about the work of stripping what he wished from her, paying little heed now to the gory baldness or the satisfied look on the pinched features of the little man working at the other end of the woman. The little man's total concentration was on the items he had come to fetch, and he took them from his perch over her chest like a succubus. Ian tried to remember all the items his dwarf brother, Van, had come to fetch. Van took each item with careless cuts. Ian placed the scalp in a large plastic baggie and went about doing the same for the other items, each to its own bag. As he worked, he stuffed the full plastic bags into his sport coat pocket.

This would take time, and they did want to take their time over the still-breathing woman. Ian dragged her down onto the floor beneath a window in the semi-dark room where he occasionally looked out, listening to the chirping of cicadas, crickets, and an annoyed squirrel. He saw movement at the house next door, so he reached over to the lamp and flicked it off. They could see out, but no one could see in. Adjusting their eyes to the dark, they began to take their choice picks. It was not unlike the work of a medical doctor over a corpse, Ian thought as Van worked. Then a disturbing feeling of foreboding came into his head: a sinister feeling, a feeling that someone or something was, at this very moment, stalking them.

The victim regained consciousness and screamed before he dug the knife into her throat, cutting short her cry. She blacked out and began to bleed to death as Van, a little shaken, continued his incisions.

Had they done right in choosing this one, in coming here and carrying out their plan? Or had they made a fatal error? Ian cursed himself for the indecision and the sudden fear and doubt.

'It's going to be all right ... all right,” Van said, taking his hand, reassuring him with a squeeze and a munchkin smile. Then he got back to cutting up the dying woman.

ONE

O'Hare International Airport held no allure for Dean Grant. He'd had to sit in bars and lounges and cafes too often and too long at airports all over the country to find any fascination with planes and the people who moved them. He had had to wait too often for his bags, and he had sat in too damned many holding patterns to wish it upon himself again. “Holding pattern” was a nice way of putting it, a euphemism for incompetence and disorder, yet it might do for the Chicago City Morgue at times, too. Grant's thoughts were never far from his work and his workplace.

When he could, he flew out of Midway Airport to avoid the O'Hare crowds, from the cabs, buses, and cars going in, to the hawkers and press stringers that hung on like kudzu. But this time out, he hadn't a chance of getting to Orlando quickly from Midway, and for the past month—since his publication of a medical paper detailing the floater cases—news reporters had been dogging his every step, despite his advice that they read the article in M.E., the magazine for medical examiners who kept up with current practices and news in the field. Since his article's publication, filled as it was with startling evidence of a horrid serial murderer, the drowning deaths, and the possible involvement of killers remaining at large, Dean's phone had not stopped ringing. Boston, L.A., as well as Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and New York were continuing to uncover mysterious deaths that had gone on record as insoluble and which seemed to fit the modus operandi of one Angel Rae, a.k.a. Brother Timothy.

Officer Ken Kelso was following up the most promising leads in an effort to uncover a nest of Angel Raes, sick family members with the same mental aberration, people prepared to turn any helpless victim into a floater in order to float them to the “other side” in God's name, enjoying their work so immeasurably as to keep scrapbooks and pictures. However, to date no significant leads had surfaced. Ken was shuttling back and forth from Chicago to Boston and New York a lot lately.

Kelso, like Dean, had argued hotly for more manpower, to hire someone to compile and correlate all data that could be assembled on such deaths nationwide. Such things were time-consuming and costly. Dean and his friend, Kelso, kept after their superiors on this one, determined as two pit bulls. But bureacratic minds moved even more slowly than bureacratic wheels. As with everything in the Chicago police and crime divisions, the rule from on top was: Ignore it long enough and it will go away. The sad thing was, all that went away were helpless old people and children suckered into a pool of water somewhere, and convinced that drowning was the answer to life's problems.

The plane was finally on line for takeoff and the sound of the idling engines became a roar. Dean felt the power build in the jet as it seemed held against its will, then suddenly released to speed down the runway. Now it was a charge, the wheels beneath them unheard, whirring and bumpy, until the giant creature in whose belly he rode lifted off the ground.

As the plane slowly worked its way out of the pattern and wound around Lake Michigan, Dean felt better, finally on his way. Maybe a change of place and a change of people would help his troubled mind. Lately he feared he was beginning to act and sound like Irwin Cook, an old friend who had worked himself into an early grave over the floater business. Dean's own health was failing over it, along with his relationships with others: co-workers, friends, his wife, Jackie, and most of all, his knuckle-headed superior.

In the meantime, Sid Corman, an old friend who'd gone through Korea with Dean, and the Orlando, Florida, Chief Medical Examiner, telephoned with a request for Dean to help him out on a case which promised to be more bizarre and puzzling than even the case of the Chicago floaters. Dean had put Sid off for weeks, and in that time another beaten body had been found in Orlando, missing patches of skin and scalp.

When Sid first contacted Dean, he listened patiently to the larger man, whose voice boomed over the wires. He finally said, “Sid, we see a lotta battered people with pieces of scalp and skin torn away. I don't see what you're driving at.'

'Damn it, Dean, this isn't just a little scalp, it's the whole damned scalp—you know, like in John Wayne's westerns, when the Indians get fuckin’ mad.'

'You mean scalped scalped?'

'That's right.'

'How many victims did you say?'

'Three so far, and now the whole damned city's going crazy for revenge or something. A guy just shot down one of our original natives on 436.'

'Original natives?'

'A Seminole!'

'Indian?'

'Yes, damn it, right near here! Altamonte Springs Road. The papers put it down as another pissed commuter going nuts in the congestion out that way—we've got terrible traffic problems here, what with tripling our damned population—but it's not the roads, you know?'

'Sid, this is long-distance.'

'Anyway, turns out under interrogation that this guy confesses to having shot the Seminole to put an end to the scalping murders. People're going nuts.'

'What can I do to help?'

'I read about your work on the floaters up there—and, well, Dean, you're the only man I know that might come up with something we could've overlooked. Would you come and—'

'To Orlando? Just drop everything here, Sid? Come on!'

'You've got Sybil! She could—'

'She could, but I'm also breaking in a new man.'

'Yeah, I heard about Huxsoll. How's he holding up?'

'He isn't, Sid.'

'The hell you say! He went that quick?'

'He didn't wait, Sid.” Dean had a flash back to the funeral, a picture of the man's broken parents at the casket. He'd cursed the ugly disease that had taken a sensitive, caring man who was the best laboratory assistant Dean had ever worked with. Huxsoll had only been twenty-nine.

'Damn...” Sid had muttered, unable to say anything the least bit philosophic or useful.

'Precisely.” Dean had added that Huxsoll had left a note, saying he wished no one to suffer any further grief