Scalpers

one else knows of except the killers.'

'Let's run the slide through the tracer, then. What're we waiting for?'

Everything had taken much time, due largely to the deliberate care both men were taking keeping accurate records. Warner was put in charge of these and told how very vital they were, that everything discovered in the lab was of an extremely confidential nature, that careers and lives hung in the balance—including his own.

The slide was deposited in an oval machine which fired a laser beam at its center, turning Peggy's breath back into gas. The beam shut down and the gaseous residue was spun at high speed like a miniature cloud in the chamber until it reached the high speed necessary to separate the atoms of one element from another. This done, two graphs resulted, printed out via computer, showing both the quantity and density of each element. The process took several hours—though without the laser, it would have taken a day and a night. While the test was being run, Dean caught some sleep.

But it was fitful at best. Dean had a recurrent nightmare, one he'd learned was common to many people, a dream of panic over an examination being given to him. He sometimes arrived late for the exam and entered having had no knowledge he was supposed to take it. At other times, he could not find the examination room and spent the entire time racing from door to door in search of it until, finally finding it, he learned that time had run out. Psychologists theorized that the exam dream which so many people shared wasn't at all what it must first appear to be; apprehension and fear of ineptitude and inability. Instead, it was the mind's way of telling Dean that he had beaten the exam fear in the past and could do so again. It came on as a result of an impending test of a man, a test or difficulty Dean must face, fight, and overcome. For Dean it meant facing down the Scalpers as he had faced down Brother Timothy and Angel Rae.

Something warm, like sweat, began to pour from Dean's sleeping head, draining down the sides of his temples—and irritating his ears. The sweat was thick, gummy—when his sleeper's hand reached up to wipe it from his blinking eyes, he realized with a start that the perspiration wasn't sweat, but blood. Where his hand touched his forehead, he had no scalp, only a gaping hole through which his brain fluids drained and mixed with the blood, his life going slowly out of him with the mixture....

'Dean ... Dean.... “It was Sid's voice coming through to him, and Dean pulled open a door in his mind to an exam room in which all the students in the class were large-headed, puffy-eyed dwarfs staring back at him and grinning. The teacher was a shadow man with Sid's voice and now, coming into focus, Sid's face!

Dean awoke with a start, Sid shaking him gently, calling his name.

'Damn!” Dean muttered to himself, his hand instantly registering the fact that he'd not been scalped in his sleep, that it was all a nightmare. What the hell would the experts say to an exam dream that ended in a bloody scalping? His breath came short and his body was damp with perspiration.

'You were having a bad one, Dean ... thought I'd better wake you. You okay?'

Dean was a bit disoriented, but tried not to let Sid see how shaken he'd become. It all seemed to have come over him in an earthshaking, violent instant. One moment he was having an uneasy but familiar bad dream, one so familiar that he'd begun analyzing it in his sleep, wondering when he would awaken. Then, suddenly, he was sure that he'd awakened to find himself scarred and bloodied. But his familiar nightmare had simply taken on a new and bizarre twist, responding, he assumed, to his present troubles. “I'm okay ... okay, Sid. Bad dream.” He tried as best he could to make light of it, but Sid, knowing something about bad dreams himself, wasn't convinced.

'Just sit down here a minute, Dean. Want some coffee? Jean, get us a cup over here, will you?'

Dean's massive chest heaved with a great intake of air, and he found his way to a window, taking the coffee from the lab tech as he went, but the window was sealed; there was no way to open it. “Could use some real air,” he moaned.

'Come on, I know where there's some,” said Sid, escorting Dean to a room with oxygen tanks in it. He hooked one up to a mask and Dean took in a few breathfuls, making him feel better instantly.

'Working too hard, my man,” said Sid. “Not enough sleep.'

'Yeah, I suppose so.'

'I played a part in your bad dream, huh?'

'No, can't recall that you were—'

'You called out my name.'

'For help, I suppose.'

Sid smiled and nodded. “Count on it, pal. Oh, yeah, your breathalyzer on Peggy?'

'Yes?'

'Traces of chloroform, just like the magician predicted. You're good, Dean ... damned good.'

Dean shook his head, “You'd have caught it yourself if—'

'No, not a chance!'

'—if you'd been there sooner and seen the condition that Peggy was in. When I could smell no alcohol on her—'

You're just damned good at what you do, doctor. I would have missed it, and it does support your contention that someone else, a third party, came into that room where Park died. That, with our combined belief that Park had to have been dead earlier, had to have been moved in and out of the room—I mean, we've got Peggy and Park off their respective hooks, but it still leaves us with who done it? Who is the Scalper —'

'Or Scalpers, Sid.'

'Right, Scalpers.'

Tom Warner located them. “Dr. Corman, Dr. Grant, I thought you'd like to see this.” He handed Sid the morning paper. Dean stood and looked over Sid's shoulder. It was pretty much as Dean had predicted. The story hinted at a liaison between Carson and Park, and did more than hint at the possibility that Park was the deadly Orlando Scalper. Dean scanned for anything in quotes with his name behind it. He was mildly pleased to see that he was kept out of it, except to be mentioned, along with Sid, as an investigating coronor who would be performing an autopsy on Park.

* * * *

Time passed, and still they ran test upon test on the Park murder evidence.

As they worked, Dean asked Sid, “Any truth to Peggy and Park's having had a thing going?'

'Let's just say that Peggy Carson doesn't like sleeping alone, Dean. I mean, she's not a whore, but she doesn't care for long nights alone.'

'She ever ... you ever...'

'She wouldn't take me up on the offer. But you weren't the only one she said yes to.'

'How'd you know about it?'

'This ain't Chicago, Dean ... word gets around a smaller operation like ours, you know, as to who's going with whom. The only secret I've ever been able to keep is me and Karen the judge, and now that's been blown to hell.'

'And Diana, does she know?'

Sid frowned, “Di and me, we've sorta drifted apart—quietly but effectively drifted way apart. Kids are interested in other things, too. Take a lot to get us all into the happy niche we were in when I returned from Korea, let me tell you....'

Sid sounded deeply saddened over the condition of his family, a trace of guilt in his voice. Dean thought again of Jackie and his relationship, which had, until the Floaters case, been so strong he'd felt nothing on earth could wedge them apart. Things fall apart, people change; it was funny how all the old cliches suddenly took on powerful meaning in a crisis, Dean thought. Words seemed empty until you were drowning in a quagmire of them, in a situation out-of-hand, a circumstance that screamed for fast, sure ropes to bind a man's wounds.

Life was filled with wounds.

Wounds and pitfalls: deep and gaping wells into which people plummeted without the slightest notion they'd ever been near the edge. The condition of marriage—or any relationship, Dean believed—was a microcosm of the larger, dangerous territory of life. A relationship between a man and a woman was peppered with minefields, large or small, but often deadly. Mind fields, actually, since most were linked to emotional time bombs ticking away, ready to explode over the weakening of some small detail.

It wasn't something the therapists or the manuals were likely to help people with, but rather one of the countless truisms people learned by experience. Getting out of the situation was done either with finesse or with