“Really well,” Silvestri answered. “It’s going to be much harder for him to snatch this kind of girl. In another week the warnings will be going out — newspapers, radio, TV — with good pictures of the girls and emphasis on Caribbean Catholic origin.”
“What if he switches his type of girl?” asked Marciano.
“I am assured by every goddamn psychiatrist I consult that he won’t do that, Danny. Their contention is that he’s snatched eleven girls who could be sisters, therefore he’s fixated on a package consisting of skin color, face, size, age, geography and religion,” Carmine said. “The trouble is all the psychiatrists can go on are patients who haven’t yet murdered, though some have multiply raped.”
“Carmine, all of us in this room know that most murderers are pretty dumb,” Patrick said, sounding thoughtful, “and that even when they’re smart, they’re not brilliant. Rat cunning, or lucky, or maybe competent. But this guy is way ahead of the pack — including us. What I’m wondering is, will he obey the rules the psychiatrists have laid down? What if he’s a psychiatrist himself? Like Professor Smith? Polonowski? Ponsonby? Finch? Forbes? I looked them up in the Chubb book, and they’ve all got D.P.M.s — Diplomas of Psychiatric Medicine. They’re not merely neurologists, they’ve gone the whole hog.”
“Shit,” said Carmine. “I just saw D.P.M. I don’t deserve to be heading this task force.”
“Task forces are cooperatives,” Silvestri soothed. “We know now, and what difference does it make?”
“Could it be a woman?” Marciano asked, frowning.
“According to the psychiatrists, no, and for once I agree with them,” Carmine said positively. “This kind of killer preys on women but isn’t one. Maybe he’d like to be one who looks like our girls — who the hell knows? We’re fumbling in the dark.”
Desdemona had abandoned walking to and from work, telling herself she was a fool, but unable to conquer the feeling that dogged her every step through those fallen leaves — someone was following her, someone too clever to be caught. The very thought of leaving her beloved Corvette in an open parking lot on the edge of a ghetto went against the grain, but she couldn’t help herself. If the thing was stolen, then she’d have to pray it came back in one piece. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to tell Carmine what had happened, though she knew he wouldn’t laugh. And as she was neither of Caribbean ancestry nor a bare five feet tall, she didn’t think for a moment that her stalker had anything to do with what plagued him.
Eating pizza with him in his apartment, she thought him as tense as a cat whose territory had been usurped by a dog; not that he was curt, just — the Americans had an excellent word for it — twitchy.
Well, she was twitchy herself, blurted out her news. “Kurt Schiller attempted suicide today.”
“And no one told me?” he demanded.
“I’m sure the Prof will tomorrow,” she said, wiping tomato off her chin with fingers that trembled slightly. “It didn’t happen until shortly before I left.”
“Shit! How?”
“He’s a doctor, Carmine. He took a cocktail of morphine, phenothiazine and Seconal to cause cardiac and respiratory failure, with Stemetil to make sure he didn’t vomit them up.”
“You mean he’s dead?”
“No. Maurie Finch found him shortly after he’d taken everything and kept him alive until they could transfer him to the emergency room at Holloman Hospital. A lot of antidotes and gastric lavage later, he passed the crisis. Poor Maurie was shocked to pieces and blaming himself.” She put down her half-eaten pizza. “Talking about it takes the edge off one’s appetite.”
“I’m inured,” he said, taking another slice. “Is Schiller the only casualty?”
“No, just the most dramatic. Though I predict that after he has recovered enough to return to work, those who have made his life a misery will let him be. No more swastikas inked on his rats — that I found so disgustingly petty! Emotions can be — oh, terribly destructive.”
“Sure. Emotions get in the way of common sense.”
“Is this murderer emotional?”
“Cold as outer space, hot as the center of the sun,” Carmine said. “He’s a cauldron of emotions that he thinks he controls.”
“You don’t believe he does control them?”
“No. They control him. What makes him such a successful killer is the counterpoise between outer space and the center of the sun.” He took the remains of the pizza from her plate and substituted a fresh slice. “Here, this is warmer.”
She tried, but gagged; Carmine handed her a balloon of XO cognac, frowning. “My mother would say grappa, but cognac’s far better. Drink it, Desdemona. Then tell me who else at the Hug is a casualty.”
Heat flowed through her body, followed by the most marvelous sense of well-being. “The Prof,” she said then. “All of us think he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Issues directives, then forgets he has, countermands things he shouldn’t, lets Tamara Vilich get away with murder —” She put her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t mean that literally. Tamara is a right cow, but I think her crimes are moral, not homicidal. She’s having it off with someone, and she’s terrified of it getting out. Knowing her, I think it’s more than just that he’s forbidden fruit. She’s in love with him, but he’s put a condition on it — secrecy or else.”
“That means he’s either important, or afraid of his wife. Who else besides the Prof?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Carmine, really! We are all feeling the strain! All hoping and praying that if this — this monster strikes again, he won’t implicate the Hug. Morale is so low that the research is suffering dreadfully. Chandra and Satsuma are muttering about moving away, and Chandra in particular is our bright, light hope. Eustace has had another focal seizure — even the Prof cheered up. It’s Nobel Prize material.”
“One up for the Hug,” said Carmine dryly. His face changed, he dropped to his knees in front of her chair and took her hands. “You’re holding something back, and it’s about you. Tell me.”
She twisted away. “Why should I be troubled?” she asked.
“Because you’re driving to and from work. I see the Corvette in the Hug parking lot — I drive past quite often these days.”
“Oh, that! It’s getting too cold to walk.”
“That’s not what my little bird says about you.”
She got to her feet, walked across to the window. “It’s just silly. Imaginitis.”
“What’s imaginitis?” he asked, coming to stand beside her.
He radiated warmth; she had noticed it before, and found it curiously comforting. “Oh, well —” she said, stopped, then hurried on as if to get the words out before she could regret them. “I was being followed home each evening.”
He didn’t laugh, though he didn’t tense either. “How do you know? Did you see someone?”
“No, no one. That’s the frightening part. I’d hear the rustle of footsteps through the dead leaves, and they’d stop when I stopped, but not quite quickly enough. Yet — no one!”
“Spooky, huh?”
“Yes.”
He sighed, put his arm around her and led her to an easy chair, gave her another cognac. “You’re not the kind to panic, and I doubt it’s imaginitis. However, I don’t think it’s the Monster. Lock up that grunty pig of a car. My mother’s got an old Merc she doesn’t use, you can have that. No temptation to the local hoods, and maybe your stalker will get the message.”
“I couldn’t impose like that.”
“It’s no imposition. Come on, I’ll follow you home and see you in your door. The Merc will be there in the morning.”
“In England,” she said as he walked her to the Corvette, “a Merc would be a Mercedes-Benz.”
“Here,” he said, opening her door, “it’s a Mercury. You’ve had two cognacs and you’ve got a police lieutenant on your tail, so drive carefully.”
He was so kind, so generous. Desdemona eased the bright red sports
car away from the curb the moment Carmine was in his Ford, and drove home conscious of the fact that her fear had vanished. Was that all it took? A strong man on one’s side?
He supervised the locking up of the Corvette, then escorted her to the front door.
“I’ll be all right now,” she said, and held out her hand.
“Oh, no, I’ll check upstairs too.”
“It’s pretty messy,” she said, commencing to climb the stairs.
But the mess that met her eyes wasn’t what she had meant. Her work box was on the floor, its contents scattered far and wide, and her new piece of embroidery, a priest’s chasuble, was draped across her chair slashed to ribbons.
Desdemona reeled, was steadied. “My work, my beautiful work!” she whispered. “He didn’t go this far before.”
“You mean he’s been in here before?”
“Yes, at least twice. He moved my work, but he didn’t ruin it. Oh, Carmine!”
“Here, sit down.” He pushed her into another chair and went to the phone. “Mike?” he asked somone. “Delmonico. I need two men to watch a witness. Yesterday, understand?”
His calm was unimpaired, but he prowled all the way around the work chair without touching anything, then sat on the arm of her chair. “It’s an unusual hobby,” he said then, casually.
“I love it.”
“So it’s a heartbreak to see this. Were you working on it when he visited earlier?”
“No, I was doing a sideboard cloth for Chuck Ponsonby. Very elegant, but not the same kind of thing as this. I gave it to him a week ago. He was delighted.”
He said nothing further until the flashing lights of a squad car reflected through the front windows, then patted her shoulder and left, apparently to give the men instructions.
“There’s one guy just outside your own door at the top here, and another at the top of the back stairs. You’ll be safe,” he said when he returned. “I’ll drop off the Merc first thing, but you won’t be able to go straight in to work. Leave everything exactly as it is until my technicians get here in the morning to see if our destructive friend left any clues behind.”
“He did the first time,” she said.
“What?” he asked sharply, and she knew he was asking what clue, not simply exclaiming. Carmine on the job didn’t waste time.
“A tiny bunch of short black hairs.”
His face went suddenly expressionless. “I see.” Then he was gone, as if he didn’t know what to say to leave her.
Desdemona went to bed, though not to sleep.
Part Two
December 1965
Chapter 7
Wednesday, December 1st, 1965
The students tumbled out of Travis High in hundreds, some to walk short distances to their homes in the Hollow, some to board dozens of school buses lined up along Twentieth and around the corners into Paine. In the old days they would simply have gone to any bus serving their particular destination, but ever since the advent of the Connecticut Monster each student was given a particular bus, emblazoned by a number. The driver was provided with a list of names and was under orders not to move until every student was aboard. So careful had the administration of Travis become that an absent student’s name was erased from the day’s list before it was given to the driver. Going to school was not such a problem; what everyone feared was going home.
Travis was the biggest public high school in Holloman, its intake spreading from the Hollow to the northern outskirts of the city on this western side. The majority of the students were black, but not by many, and while there were occasional racial problems there, the bulk of the students mixed and mingled according to their personal affinities. So while the Black Brigade had its supporters at Travis High, various churches and societies did too, as well as those individuals who trod a midline of reasonable grades and no trouble. Any teacher on the staff would have said that hormones caused more problems than race.
Though it was the Catholic high schools under strictest police attention, Travis hadn’t been neglected. When Francine Murray, a sixteen-year-old sophomore who lived out in the Valley, failed to board her bus, its driver climbed out and ran to the Holloman squad car parked on the sidewalk near the front gates. Within moments a controlled chaos reigned; buses were pulled over as uniformed men asked if Francine Murray was a passenger, others asked for Francine’s friends to come forward, and Carmine Delmonico was racing to Travis High with Corey and Abe.
Not that he forgot the Hug. Before the Ford took off he gave Marciano instructions to make sure that everyone at the Hug was present and accounted for. “I know we can’t afford to send a car there, so call Miss Dupre and tell her from me that I want every last one of them tagged down to visits to the john. You can trust her, Danny, but don’t tell her more than you have to.”
Having searched the vast and rambling school from attics to gymnasiums, the teachers were huddled in the yard while Derek Daiman, the highly respected black principal, paced up and down. Squad cars were still arriving as other schools were pronounced free of missing students, their contingents of cops dispersing to question everybody they could see, search Travis all over again, round up milling students dying of curiosity.
“Her name is Francine Murray,” said Mr. Daiman to Carmine. “She ought to have been on that bus over there” — he pointed — “but she didn’t turn up. She was present for her last period, Chemistry, and as far as I can ascertain, she left the building with a group of friends. They scatter once they’re in the yard, depending which bus they’re on or if they’re walking — Lieutenant Delmonico, this is terrible, terrible!”
“Getting upset won’t help her or us, Mr. Daiman,” Carmine said. “The most important thing is, what does Francine look like?”
“Like the missing girls,” Daiman said, beginning to weep. “So pretty! So popular! A grades, never any trouble, a great example to her fellow students.”
“Is she of Caribbean origin, sir?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the principal said, wiping his eyes. “I guess that’s why we didn’t notice — the news items all said part Hispanic, and she isn’t. One of those real Old Connecticut black families, white intermarriage. It happens, Lieutenant, no matter how much people oppose it. Oh, dear God, dear God, what am I going to do?”
“Mr. Daiman, are you trying to say that one of Francine’s parents is black and the other white?” Carmine asked.
“I believe so, yes, I believe so.”
Abe and Corey had gone to talk to the uniforms, tell them to search each bus and then get it on its way, but keep Francine’s friends in a group until they could be interviewed.
“You’re sure she’s not in the school somewhere?” Carmine asked Sergeant O’Brien when he led his cops and teacher guides out of the enormous building.
“Lieutenant, she is not inside, I swear. We opened every closet, looked under every desk, in every rest room, the cafeteria, the gyms, the classrooms, the assembly room, storage rooms, the furnace room, attics, the science labs, janitor’s room — every goddamn corner,” O’Brien said, sweating.
“Who saw her last?” Carmine asked the teachers, some in tears, all shaking with shock.
“She walked out of my classroom with her friends,” said Miss Corwyn of Chemistry. “I stayed behind to straighten up, I didn’t follow them. Oh, I wish I had!”
“Don’t castigate yourself, ma’am, you weren’t to know,” said Carmine, assessing the others. “Anyone else see her?”
No, no one had. And no, no one had seen any strangers.
He’s done it again, thought Carmine, walking up to the knot of frightened young people who had claimed friendship with Francine Murray. He’s snatched her away without a soul’s seeing him. It’s sixty-two days since Mercedes Alvarez disappeared, we’ve been on our toes, warned people, showed photos of the kind of girl he targets, tightened up on school security, thrown all our resources into this. We ought to have caught him! So what does he do? He lulls us into certainty that th
e Caribbean is a mandatory part of his obsessions, then switches to a different ethnic group. And I put Danny Marciano down for suggesting it. Oh, Travis, of all places! An ant heap! Fifteen hundred students! Half of this city thinks of Travis as a training ground for hoods, punks and low life, forgetting that it’s also a place where whole bunches of decent kids, black and white, get a pretty good education.
Francine’s best friend was a black girl named Kimmy Wilson.
“She was with us when we came out of Chemistry, sir,” Kimmy said through sniffles.
“You’re all in Chemistry?”
“Yes, sir, we’re all planning pre-med.”
“Go on, Kimmy.”
“I thought she’d gone to the rest room. Francine has a weak bladder, she’s always going to the rest room. I didn’t think about it because I know what she’s like. I didn’t think!” The tears gushed. “Oh, why didn’t I go with her?”
“Do you travel on the same bus, Kimmy?”
“Yes, sir.” Kimmy made a huge effort to master her feelings. “We both live on Whitney out in the Valley.” She pointed at two weeping white girls. “So do Charlene and Roxanne. None of us thought about her until the bus driver called the roll and she didn’t answer.”
“Do you know your bus driver?”
“Not her name, sir, not today’s. I know her face.”
By five o’clock Travis High was deserted. Having combed it and the neighborhood, the police cordon was spreading ever outward while word ran through the Hollow that the Connecticut Monster had struck again. Not a spic. A genuine black girl. While Carmine was on his way to the Murray house, Mohammed el Nesr, informed by Wesley le Clerc, was calling his troops together.
Halfway to the Valley the Ford pulled up at a phone booth and Carmine talked to Danny Marciano without the annoyances of a car radio; some of the press could tune into that, and it was noisy into the bargain.
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