Scalpers
( Dean Grant ME Mystery - 2 )
Robert W. Walker
BLOOD RITES
There seemed to be no reason behind the series of grisly murders plaguing Orlando. The victims were young and old, women and men, destitute and well-off. Only two shocking similarities linked the deceased; before dying, they had been horribly brutalized..and they were all found with their scalps removed.
SLICE OF DEATH
Medical Examiner Dr. Dean Grant had previous success teaming with police to hunt down serial killers. But a maniac is lurking in the shadows, secretly studying the M.E.'s every move. And if Grant doesn't crack the gruesome case very soon, he could end up the next victim...
(Approximately 80,000 words, the second book in the Dean Grant series.)
SCALPERS
by Robert W. Walker
www.Fictionwise.com
Copyright ©1989 by Robert W. Walker
For my big brother, James Wesley Walker, to whom I owe my scalp many times over, and who, once or twice, would have liked to have had my scalp.
PROLOGUE
He held up her limp form by her long, flowing red hair, which he wrapped tightly about his fist. With his left hand he reached for the knife, the blade clicking out with a noise like a viper's hiss. Unconscious, or half-conscious, he knew not which, the woman now would give over the prize he sought. It was this that made the hunt worthwhile. All the searching, the watching and waiting, all of it came to this end.
He had lured her away from the noise and crowd of the bar with a promise of a secret place where they could smoke grass. She was all for that.
She was not a beautiful woman up close, yet her flaming hair was irresistible, and her willingness made his work simpler. And now he held her radiant hair in his hand and pulled back so tightly on it that the scalp rose by degrees. It was this that made life bearable and worthwhile. She would be a fine addition to his collection.
A broken jaw had left her unconscious. She'd wised up at the last, torn loose from him and run into the trees in blind search for safety. They were miles off the main road. He tracked her easily, knocked her down, and pummeled her into submission. But that was then and this was now, a different time, a different woman.
Now it was time to enjoy her. He wanted to extend every enervating moment, yet he could hardly hold back as he played the knife over the forehead, just above the eyes.
He had lightly joked with her, and they'd spoken of the impending hurricane season, which usually drenched central Florida, sometimes for weeks at a time, despite the fact that the storm was way out to sea, or in the Gulf of Mexico. He told her lies about himself, from a bogus name to an imagined job teaching at the local high school, and that he sometimes enjoyed scuba diving in order to relax. She ate it up, especially the scuba diving, saying that, to her, took guts. She claimed to be a complete klutz in the water, even in the bathtub. He had countered with a smirky little remark about how he could teach her to dive for something in her tub, but that he'd have to be there with her for it to work. They'd laughed, giggled, kissed, and petted before he could wait no longer to take what he'd come for.
They had gone to her place. She'd apologized for the mess in the dingy little bungalow, which sat in a row of houses along a canal. There were neighbors on both sides of her, but trees obscured the view and the lights were out—and he felt safe to proceed with her as he'd planned. By the time they'd smoked two joints, he was ready to explode with anxiety and agitation, ready to take what was his. She kept asking him if he'd take her to the new theme park that had opened near Disney World sometime, a place called Wet ‘n Wild, to enjoy water sports of all kinds. He'd finally had enough of her palaver and raised up over her to knock her hard into a table lamp with his first blow. She was no trouble from that moment on—she was his. His and the little one's, but she hadn't seen the other one as he crawled through the unlatched window.
His scowling face would be her last earthly memory. She succumbed to the blows he rained upon her.
Now his large, cold hand knotted her curls and pulled the hair so tight that it simply lifted her weight, and with his razor-sharp knife he began carefully to cut away at her forehead, an incision an inch above the eyes. Blood began to collect in her eyebrows and over the closed eyelids as he worked the incision deeper, going up at the ends toward the crown. He was doing it, parting the scalp from the skull in a wide, rectangular pattern. He was scalping her cleanly and efficiently.
Even unconscious, she seemed to shrivel with the operation, contracting within herself, as if he were pulling her brain somehow through her pores. All he wanted was the brain crop of fire-red hair and the square of skin that nettled the hair together at its roots. In his haste he realized only now that the hair color was not natural. Still, it was something, and it must be made to do.
Working over her, he felt her body jerk as the scalp released itself, one section at a time, like an adhesive label in the way it peeled away—as if grateful and wanting and urgent.
It was his now, and she was left uglier than before, but it mattered not a whit. She'd die before dawn, and any disfigurement wasn't likely to disturb her then. He chuckled over the joking thought he had made: it wasn't often he felt amused, only at moments such as this, when he could lift the bloody, dank scalp up to the light and examine it to his full satisfaction. It wasn't likely to ruin her modeling career, he thought, recalling how she had shown him pictures of herself in tight skirts and tall boots, posing draped over stools and the back of a couch, when she spoke of how, if she'd like, she could be a model.
Orlando, Florida, as filled as it was with discos and bars, singles hangouts, shopping malls, and the weak and helpless and elderly, presented a challenge: a familiar, yet different, even odd terrain for him. The environment here was filled with strange monoliths, the dirt replaced by tarmac, bush all but nonexistent, but the prey—that remained the same: human.
Feeling good was easy when you could achieve what you set out to achieve, bring down the foe, skin it, tear off its hair. This negated all the illogical truths surrounding him, corrected the limitations of terrain and topography. So it wasn't a real jungle. When the prey was beneath the spear, a man was still a man in the deepest sense. A man could give vent to his spleen, his reptilian tastes, his reptilian brain, if he knew how to go about it.
It was this that made all the searching and waiting and wondering worth it, made life bearable, and rounded out the collection back at his digs. The girl would likely die of her wounds, and even if she did not, she'd seen nothing. He struck with the speed and accuracy of a leopard, knocked her unconscious, and brought his knife to bear. She never knew what hit her. She'd not even had a second to scream. Again he was confusing her with another victim. The little man told him so when he came slavering his way up her legs, slitting her skirt with his knife and beginning to take what he wished off her body.
The man he had pretended to be, to entice the woman to give herself to him, did not exist. That man had never been in the room with her ... he'd been only an illusion. What crawled in over the ledge and thudded to the floor, now that was no illusion, that was the little man with the power. While he himself worried all day long if the rains would let up, the little man fasted and prayed, telling his god they didn't hunt well in heavy, wet, rain-drenched clothing. The little man had to feel light, be ready to spring at a moment's notice.
Her long hair, limp with the weight of the scalp at the end now, tickled between his fingers. It was so like vines ripped from a trellis, the scalp the fruit, dripping blood. He held it up to the weak light coming from a nearby bulb. His eyes fastened on the long, red hair. It would be a beautiful addition to the home, and if found to be potent in its power, a fine ingredien
t in their next soup. Lots of things went into his stews and soups, strained out only after they'd released their potency through a steady boil, a day's patient cooking. But this, this looked to him like a wall ornament to accompany his macramé, and the other scalps tethered there.
All it needs is a good curing and drying out. He could put it up and take it down and fondle and caress it, rub it into his groin or chest whenever he liked, partake of it in a wholly different fashion. He liked to fulfill his needs, from hunger to tactile desires to capturing such a prize. It all went together to make of him a well-rounded personality. He laughed inwardly at the thought.
Hair was interesting and wonderful, but it wasn't hair alone that motivated him. Nor was it envy or jealousy, or a sick hatred of women brought on by his mother's cruel treatment of him—none of that nonsense. His desire was motivated by the potency factor of hair. All of life, according to scientists, resided in a single strand of hair, all the DNA of any individual. In a sense, he had just escaped with the soul of the dying “model.” Vain bitch ... beauty was only skin-deep, but hair—now that was forever. After all, wasn't it hair that made the beast so attractive to the beauty?
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?"
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"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 or pain on his account.
"Guess maybe if I had AIDS, I'd shoot myself, too."
"Warren jumped from the roof of his apartment building."
"Sorry, Dean ... really sorry."
"Makes you wonder about a lot of things, my friend, like when's it going to stop—"
"If ever."
Dean nodded at his end of the phone. “You always could finish a sentence for me."
"Dean, old buddy, you damn sure could use time away from that chilly city. Tell you what, you come on down, bring Jackie with you, and when we get a moment—"
"Jackie can't pick up and go parading to Florida anymore than I can, and even if she could—"
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