Scalpers

'I was acting on information I ... learned from Dr. Grant, sir—but believe me, I swear it's the truth when I tell you—'

'Then Dr. Grant is to share the limelight as well. Right, Dr. Grant?'

'Hold your commendations, limelight and all your congratulations, Chief,” said Dean, who now turned out the light switch and asked Dyer to do the same with the light in the bath. The seconal spray turned splat marks and sprays of blood both large and small all about the room into eerie irregular shapes over walls and floor, but nothing on the bed. It were as if the blood was telling a tale. Most of the story was in the shaggy, near black-green carpet. The seconal told Dean Grant that Park's blood had created a clear and eerie trail between here and the bath. To Dean's trained eye it meant only one thing.

Pointing to the floor on the far side of Park's body where the seconal spray indicated more than one trail of blood from the bath to where the body now lay at the foot of the bed, Dean said, “Lt. Park's not the Scalper and he never was.'

'That's nonsense,” said Hodges, not wanting to believe Dean. “No one can make that kind of judgment based on a can of spray—'

'Chief, Dean's right,” said Sid Corman, who entered in darkness from outside, where now a police barricade had formed to keep people back. “Park would have had to stagger back and forth two, maybe three times, to lose that much blood in that section of carpet from just a single knife wound.'

'Bullshit,” replied Hodges. “I've known cases, even seen men with knife wounds to walk blocks to get to a hospital and survive!'

'Not with a knife shoved all the way into the heart, I'm afraid,” said Dean. “Besides, if all that blood on Park's chest is his, it's been pumping out of him for at least an hour. It's so coagulated that—'

'Shit, I saw a man once in a bar fight who took a knife to the brain, right down the middle, and he was rushed to a hospital. Didn't survive the removal of the blade, but he lived for hours after the initial—'

'The brain and the heart are two entirely different organs, Chief,” said Sid.

'God damn it, you two aren't going to tell me that we don't have solid proof against this crazed cop! We've got two scalps! We've got a knife and a scalpel! We've got all those news stories and the man's record with the Michigan cops. He was there and now he's here. We've got him!'

The lights were returned and the men squared off at one another with darting eyes. Hodges, understandably, wanted what all of the others wanted: an end to the madness in his city. “I want the same as you, Chief, but we can't whitewash this thing simply because it will please everyone to do so. Suppose for a moment that—'

'Screw you, Grant. This is no longer your concern. Corman's the coroner of Orlando, and if you'll just hand over what you've taken here, you can get on a plane for Chicago and we'll all be much better off burying our own trash.'

'Burying, Chief? Or sweeping it under the rug?'

'You are no longer needed here, Grant. Now do you go, or do I have my officers take you out bodily?'

Dean looked to Sid for support. “Chief, please—let us do our job. Grant's concern is only for the truth,” said Sid. “Give us time to prove Park guilty, and we will ... we will.'

Hodges gritted his teeth. He was a man unaccustomed to backing down from a directive already issued, or a fight he knew he could win. “You've got twenty-four hours.” Hodges then tossed the seconal spray can down and stormed out as an ambulance, siren blaring, rushed into the lot outside. This time, Hodges wisely dodged the press. His last remarks in the press had been an embarrassment even to himself.

Soon enough the tragic and awful tale of a cop turned psycho would be spread across the front pages, Dean thought, unless he could prove otherwise. At the moment “otherwise” amounted to a series of oddities about the scene and his own gut reaction. They were not enough to save Park, and whatever family he had, from the merciless scrutiny of the public. No one in Dean's position, no policeman on any force in the nation wanted to point the finger at an innocent cop, dead and unable to tell his side of the story—no more so than, say, the Pilot's Association wanted to see the finger pointed at a defenseless and dead pilot after a 747 crash. As much as he'd suspected Park of keeping secrets, Dean could not now condemn him out of hand as the so-called Scalper. Maybe, just maybe, it was exactly what the real killer or killers wanted him and Sid Corman and the rest of the city to believe. Time would tell. Time, and tests which they must begin immediately.

Talk outside was running to a lover's quarrel between Park and Peggy Carson. Sid had heard the wild rumor on his way in, along with the fact that Park had taken a knife to the heart.

'Lay you ten-to-one, Sid, the knife I took out of Dave Park's chest will fit contour for contour the wounds inflicted on our scalping victims.'

'And the scalpel?'

'Neat switchblade job, just as you thought.'

'You ever get a strange, kinda sick feeling, Dean, when you're right about such things? Almost like ... like if you say something, it then happens?'

Dean knew the feeling well. It was a kind of deja vu. When a man spent so much time thinking, contemplating, and gathering information on a case he'd become obsessed with, it was not uncommon.

'Yeah, Sid ... I know the feeling.” Dean then asked Dyer to take Peggy home. She was being charged with nothing, and in fact had been commended by the Chief of Police for bravery above and beyond the call of duty.

'Are you going to be all right, Peggy?” Dean asked her at the door.

'I ... I'm a survivor.” She managed a weak, less-than-persuasive smile as her hand went to grip his.

Dean almost said obviously, but instead, he gave her a warm hug. “Hopefully, by sunrise Sid and I will have made some sense of all this. As soon as I know—'

'Thanks ... thanks so much.'

'It wasn't wise of you to rush out on me tonight,” he reprimanded her.

She dropped her gaze. “I'm sorry I betrayed our friendship. I just felt I had to do something ... and now this. I can't remember killing Park. I don't believe I did, and if I didn't—God, they might've killed me, too. When I came to, my shirt was torn open, my belt unbuckled, and the zipper on my uniform opened, and something ... or someone ... had touched me. I was shivering from it.'

'Go with Frank now,” Dean advised her. “Get some rest, and tomorrow we'll talk more.'

Dean turned to find Sid working over Dave Park's inert form. “What do you think, Sid?'

'What do I think? What do I think? Well, I'll tell you, Dean, old boy, I think we're both goddamned fools.'

'How's that, Sid?'

'Figure it out, Dean. We're here ulcerating inside over a dead body and trying to put all the pieces together again, at least so no seams show while other doctors are in bed. I know you enjoy being a member of a rare breed, and I know that guys in our profession are in short supply, but that doesn't cut it with me anymore. I tell you, I'm about ready to hang out my shingle, become a G.P.” While Sid talked, he worked. He was taking a car vacuum to Park's body, the little machine sifting fibers, loose hairs, any minute evidence that could tell them something about how the man might have died.

Dean knew exactly what Sid's complaints were. He had heard them recounted a hundred times by every M.E. he'd ever met. Only a fraction of the medical examiners around the country were even qualified as forensic pathologists, and only a few of these worked at it fulltime. Maybe forty or forty-five doctors in the whole United States had the requisite extra five years of medical training and were full-time M.E.'s like himself.

When the money end of it was looked at, Dean realized why most doctors opted for hospital and private practice, where they could pull down $175,000 a year. Maybe Sid was right. Maybe the two of them, making in the neighborhood of $75,000 yearly, were fools after all.

Outside, Dean could hear a strident woman's voice, shouting such things as, “I saw she had blood in her eyes, I knew she'd come for no good reason. God help me, I just knew—I knew!—shouldn't've let her go bustin’ in, but I, I didn't know what else to do....'

Somehow, a sharp-eyed reporter had gotten through the door with the medics, and Dean found him looking over his shoulder at Park's remains just before the medics were allowed their way with the body, Sid instructing them to bag the clothing and deliver the corpse to Sid's slab room for an autopsy.

'Did the policewoman kill him, Dr. Grant?” asked the reporter.

For the first time Dean looked at the extra pair of eyes in the room. The man looked remarkably like Tom Warner without the glasses. “We're not soothsayers or seers, young man, we're pathologists. And pathology takes