"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 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 clichés 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 foolishness. For many, the easy way out was a word shouted in anger: divorce. It presented a quick-fix route to tying off the loosened and severed ropes of one's mental balance and emotional needs. Remove the object—in this case a person—of distress from sight, and pretend it never existed.
For Dean himself, it was an ugly word to be ranked alongside cancer: it was a cancer of relationships.
The very thought of divorce for him brought on an image of a barbed corkscrew that turned hideously round and round in his stomach. The awful instrument was turned on memories, and it made an ever-widening cut.
Dean decided he could not waste a moment more in telephoning Jackie to tell her he loved her, and that he planned to be on a plane for home tonight. Sid could now finish up this case without him, regardless of the fact that somewhere in the city, or maybe far from the city now, the Scalpers had left a trail to a man named Park in order to escape. It might very well mean that their scalping days were over, for now if Dean and Sid kept quiet to the press, the killers could do as they wished, so long as no one was ever again mutilated for a scalp. No, they didn't have the guilty parties behind bars. No, they had not yet identified the killers. No, justice was not served, and yes, an innocent man and his memory had been destroyed in the process. So what, Dean's exhausted mind told him, so what? He was no avenging angel. He was only one man, a man who had more pressing personal and professional problems awaiting him at home.
Sid's face drained of color when Dean told him of his plans, but he understood. In a controlled fashion, he thanked Dean for all he'd done. “You've been a considerable godsend, Dean. You saved my ass and put my mind right. I needed your support, and you gave it."
A look at Dean's watch told him it was already late afternoon. Sid had allowed him to sleep much more than he should have. He had much to do if he was going to make his way back to Chicago and Jackie.
"Peggy Carson came by, Dean. She tried to get me to fill her in on what we've found, but given the situation, I stonewalled her. This isn't the time for leaks, and you know how word gets out, guys like that reporter Evans last night. Hell, they're everywhere—"
"You did the right thing, Sid. Keep the jar and the chloroform between you and me. Don't even bring Tom Warner in on it."
"Warner's okay, Dean, just a little green."
"Defend him if you like, Sid, but like many of us, he's also easily swayed by a pretty face, and if by a pretty face, no telling who else might control him. Frankly, given all that's happened around here, with your scissors turning up like they did ... don't know if I wouldn't clean house, if it were my house to clean."
Sid looked down the corridor to where he'd last seen Warner. “You really think ... naw!"
"I didn't say he might be the killer. But if you can't be sure your people are with you one hundred percent, no matter how dire the situation, well, old friend, you've got people putting little pins in your balloon and the results can be ... explosive. How, for instance, did Hodges know enough to double back on your reports early on in the case? Who provided the odor for them to sniff at?"
"Tom?"
"Like Dyer told you, Sid, watch your backside."
Sid had a lot to think about. Dean got his things together from the lab and started out. Sid stopped him at the door. “I sure wish you didn't have to go, Dean, but I understand. Really. Have a safe trip, and I'll keep in touch."
"Before you take anything to Hodges, make sure it's everything. Overwhelm him with the evidence and he'll have to back whatever play you make."
"Right, standard practice time. I guess I let a lot go by the wayside here. Too cushy a job. Tell you what, if Hodges throws me out, I may show up on your doorstep."
"Brr! Don't forget Chicago winters!"
The two men laughed as Tom Warner looked on with what might be envy in his eyes. Dean noticed the assistant had begun to rummage near Sid's office, and now he stepped inside with some papers in hand to lay on Sid's desk.
"Sneaky fellow, that Warner,” Dean said.
Sid turned to see Warner in his office where both jar and chloroform result lay exposed. Sid rushed to the attack, shouting at Warner, whose face drained of color.
Dean chose the moment to escape without further discussion. Sid could give his regards to Chief Hodges, Frank Dyer, and Hamel, if necessary, but Dean wanted to say a personal good-bye to Peggy Carson. It only seemed right. He'd return to his hotel, shave and shower, get a change of clothes, and from there make his flight reservations and telephone Jackie. He'd then have a brief and final phone talk with Peggy Carson, unsure what he might tell her beyond the fact that both he and Sid Corman knew that she was telling the truth, that she had not killed Park, and that the case was now in Sid's hands.
As Dean was passing through the lobby of the municipal building, Frank Dyer came racing after him, shouting for his attention. Dyer seemed shaken.
"Corman tells me you're leaving."
"That's right."
"Because of Hodges, last night?"
"Among other things."
"You can't do it."
"Yes I can."
"All right, all right, you can ... but you may like to do some reading while you're running away.” Frank tossed a police report at him, which indicated that the Scalper had struck again, this time killing a woman and almost the woman's child as well. “Last night, after Park?” Dean could hardly believe it. “Why the elaborate set up to make Park the fall guy if the killers then go out and announce to the world they're still on the loose?"
"Hey, we're not dealing with rational people here."
"Oh, but the set up at Park's that was rational, calculated."
"Double personality, then, a schizo, right?"
"Has to be. What about the kid, you talk with him?"
"Her. A little girl named Nola Jimenez. She was in shock when found wandering into traffic."
"When do you intend to talk to her?"
Dyer shook his head. “She saw her mother murdered."
"And she may be able to give us a clue."
"Not for a while. The trauma center has her, and there's no way to get to her for the time being. What do you care, anyway? You're heading for home."
"I care, Frank ... that's my problem."
"Good, then maybe you'd like to talk to another witness to last night's homicide?"
"Another witness? Who, where?"
"Sid didn't tell you anything about it. He said he was about
to when you got it in your head to run out on us, like Hodges wants. Hell, man, we need you here now more than ever!"
"You're sure, Frank, this isn't the work of a copycat killer? It still makes no sense that they should attack again after the setup at Park's. Did you question the woman's husband, boyfriend, relatives—anyone? You know as well as I do that more than eighty percent of crimes committed against people are by people they know—"
"We've got a witness says one man he saw was pintsized, a dwarf."
"Damn, then it was them. Where's this witness?"
"Sobering up, downstairs, in holding."
"A drunk?"
"He was in the alley where they did the woman, says he saw the whole thing. When we arrived he was there. He didn't call it in, he says, ‘cause he didn't have a quarter and believed he was hallucinating from the drink. Says he didn't dare move, though, the whole time. He was in behind some cans, in a doorway. Says the girl hid right alongside him for a little bit, before racing off. The dwarf was after her. Says the other guy was normal in size, well-dressed ... said the dwarf looked like a refugee from a circus, like a clown or monkey, covered with hair, except for a section of head—"
"The scalp?"
"You got it."
"These two make no sense. There's no pattern, no handle here, except maybe..."
"Maybe what?"
"The other victims stack up each a different nationality or color. Now here comes a woman named Jimenez, Spanish—"
"And her kid. We might've had to call it double homicide if the old man can be believed. Nobody outside the few of us on the case—and Peggy Carson—knew of the dwarf. And Peggy was sworn to keep it in house. The papers, the TV people, nobody knew. Now we've got this old souse who says right out it was a dwarf and another man. So you tell me—is it or isn't it our Scalpers?"
"Guess these men are truly driven,” said Dean. He struggled for an answer within. The killers so far had displayed an unusual fixation on hair, and if the drunk could be believed, now a desire for the scalp of a child. Hair had always been the killers’ reason for taking a life. A child's scalp now, was that the new atrocity they planned for the city? It was as if just thinking the awful thought made it so. Like Sid, Dean felt like he was the cause of the horror, rather than an agent bent on ending it.
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