Scalpers

with them.

Lionel, sickened, filled with fear, wondering if he were deranged beyond all help now, still could not take his eyes off the horror before him. God, he felt alone ... and afraid. And if he felt so, what about the little girl, inching closer in the darkness, still unaware of Lionel?

If the murdering pair saw the girl or Lionel, they'd come for them, rip them open with their knives for some senseless end. Now Lionel saw that the boy was not a boy, but a very small man, a devilish gnome of some sort, perhaps a dwarf.

Shaken badly, Lionel lay back down, fearing to breathe, fearing to make a sound, fearing even to drink what remained of his Black Label. Then they were gone, hearing some commotion at the other end of the alleyway, and he thought that perhaps it was safe, though perhaps not. He then recalled the hiding girl, so like his Chrissy, so alone and unreachable ... for he knew he could not help her. Still, he looked for her and found she had moved even closer and had seen the horror as he had. He reached out a hand to her, to touch her, to determine if it were all a bad dream, when suddenly their eyes met and she got up and ran and ran....

Lionel wondered if he'd ever know if all this madness were real or not. He lay back, wanting only for sleep to overtake him. He lay this way for hours, waiting desperately for the Florida sun to return and blanket his alley with light; to burn away all the ugly sights from his mind, to show him that it had all been a most hideous nightmare brought on by his inebriated brain.

But when the light finally came, Lionel dared look to where the gnome and the other man had scalped the woman and he saw something large and bloody and attracting flies by the hundreds, and he realized the sun wasn't going to wash it away or burn it from his sight. He brought his knees together and huddled there, and he couldn't bring himself to take one step from his home behind the restaurant, which wouldn't open for hours. He needed a drink and saw his bottle, nearly full. He began slowly to drain it in an attempt to blot out the events of the night before and what lay out there, not twelve yards from him. He would talk to Mr. Chung Fat. He would tell him. He might know what do....

ELEVEN

Dean and Sid, despite the discomfort of having had very little sleep and the grandiose notion that one day they would chuck M.E. work for the ideal, high-paying work of an ordinary doctor, became so intensely involved in what had apparently occurred at Park's apartment that no one, no amount of money could have pulled them from the lab this night. So intense had their investigation become that neither man even knew that it was light out. But both knew that Park had been murdered by the Scalping Crew, even though it had appeared as if Peggy Carson had, in self-defense, killed Park, who'd been made to look the part of a mass murderer. They had more than enough evidence to prove it.

Hairs on Park's clothes were neither his nor Peggy's, but they matched up perfectly with the coarse black hair of one of the Scalpers. The turgidness of the body and the condition of the spilled blood proved Dean right, that Park was dead for at least an hour before Peggy entered the room. The blood trail was unmistakable, leading the two M.E.s to the same contention, that the bleeding man was moved in and out of the bathroom at one point—most probably when Peggy entered. There were also trace fibers of tawny, sand-colored hairs in the bathroom.

The knife plunged into Park was unquestionably the knife that had inflicted upper-chest and lower-region damage on earlier victims of the Scalpers. Its edges, when magnified, matched perfectly earlier magnification shots of the wounds. The scalpel, too, proved to be an extremely likely instrument for the head wounds.

The two scalps found were taken from the two most recent female victims, the redhead and the Jane Doe found in the park. If they were not evidence in the case, a good mortician would sew them back onto the deceased and bury them with their scalps intact. As it was, however, they must remain as the morbid exhibits they were, under lock and key.

As they had uncovered more and more possibilities, Dean came to believe that Sid, too, loved the work, and had simply been overwhelmed and bullied by his superiors at a time when very little else was going right in his life. Somehow he had succumbed to the criticism being leveled at him.

To help them during the all-nighter, Sid had called in Tom Warner, his lab assistant, and a young lady Dean had met only in passing. Warner did excellent work, Dean thought, but he was most uneasy around Dean, very likely due to the incident earlier with Peggy Carson in the slab room.

Dean and Sid talked as they worked, and it seemed almost like old times for the two doctors.

'What if Peggy was set up? Who'd have known she was going to Park's just at that time, Dean?'

Dean thought of how Peggy had learned about his suspicions regarding Park. He told Sid about this, and added, “Perhaps someone else was on that line, too? But my guess is that Peggy surprised Park's killers and they got the notion to put it off on Peggy in order to cover their own tracks.'

'Yeah, more likely ... you know, the amount of blood on the carpet there, I'd be willing to bet those guys left Park's with blood on their shoes.'

'Pretty good chance of that.'

Both men knew how blood not only randomly lodged in cloth, but on shoes, and how, even if washed, often trace elements remained. Just a minute amount could tell Dean if it were Park's blood he found on a man's shoe, but then, whose shoe might it be?

By now they had drawn a schematic of Park's little room. Inside the refrigerator, after Peggy and Dyer had left, Sid had discovered a final and insulting piece of evidence to incriminate Park: a pickle jar filled with something besides pickles, filled with bits of human flesh that floated in the brine. It had even made Dean gag, and he'd thought he'd seen everything. For Dean it said one more thing about the real killers—that they were involved in some cannibalistic act as well as the scalping. Anyone who took the time to pickle something might find the time to eat it. Beyond Sid and Dean, only the killers knew of this final evidence of Park's supposed depravity.

The more they looked, the more both men felt that the entire thing was a put-up job, Sid at one point raising the specter of doubt over Peggy Carson with a few casual remarks. “Strange that of all the people attacked by the scalpers, she alone escaped with her life.'

'She's a cop.'

Sid frowned, “So was Park.... Listen, pal, I know you find her a dreamboat, but take a step back and ask if she's tough enough to self-inflict that wound. And if so, and if she starts talking about some midget, and that gets us all going one way when it's hardly likely—and then she turns up in a room full of incriminating evidence designed to incriminate Park ... well, you figure it out.'

Sid was brainstorming the way any good M.E. must, and it did have the effect of making Dean wonder, but Dean just didn't believe it possible. He believed Peggy Carson just another victim, however lucky.

'To believe her, Dean, you have to place her in the clutches of this blood-thirsty killer twice, twice, and she lives through it all. Pretty farfetched, isn't it?'

'Now you're thinking like an M.E., Sid, but I think you need to direct your darts elsewhere.'

'Elsewhere, you say ... might not you be a little less objective nowadays, Dean?'

Dean wondered how in the world Sid could possibly know of his feelings toward Peggy. Was it suddenly general knowledge? Had he simply been too protective of her the evening before—Sid, a trained observer, not missing it? Or had she said something to someone who passed it along to Sid?

'Look at this and tell me what you see.” Dean instructed his colleague to glance into an ordinary microscope at a slide.

'All right.” Sid looked into the light at the configurations there. “Want to tell me what it is I'm looking at?'

'A slide I prepared at the scene, taken before you arrived. It's Peggy's breath.'

'I don't get it.'

'We can run this through for trace elements, and what do you bet we find chloroform, or some other asphyxiate?'

'How can you know?'

'Call it a guesstimate, like our reporter friends. But Peggy complained of blacking out. If we assume she's telling the truth, and if we don't find excessive alcohol on her breath, then we might assume it's something in the nature of chloroform. And if that's the case, then along with our pickle jar, my friend, we have at least two items no