On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  “Wait until spring,” Carmine said grimly. “We’ve bought some time with the weather, but when it gets warmer, all hell is going to break loose.”

  “Anna Donato’s husband is a plumber.”

  “Anna Donato…Refresh my memory.”

  “She looks after all the cranky equipment, has the touch.”

  “The Kyneton ménage?”

  “Oh, dear! The fourth floor is a circus these days. Hilda and Tamara are at daggers drawn. Mostly screaming matches, but on one occasion they rolled around the floor, kicking and biting. It took our four office workers and me to drag them apart. So we are profoundly glad that the Prof isn’t there to see women at their worst. However, Hilda will be gone before the Prof is due to come back. Dearest, darlingest Keith got the partnership he was after in New York City.”

  “What about Schiller?”

  “Not handy. He can’t even sharpen a microtome blade. Mind you, he doesn’t have to. That’s what technicians are for.”

  “How about coming back to my place for a cognac?”

  Desdemona slid out of the booth. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Carmine walked her down the block back in that high school happy haze after his prom date had told him she’d loved the evening and offered him her lips. Not that Desdemona was about to offer her lips. A pity. They were full and unlipsticked. He started to laugh at the memory of trying to scrub off bright red lipstick.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Not a thing, not a thing.”

  Chapter 19

  Monday, January 24th, 1966

  Commissioner Silvestri held a discreet conference to which he invited all the various heads of the Ghost investigations throughout Connecticut. “In a week’s time it will be thirty days,” he said to the room of silent men, “and we have no idea whether the Ghost or Ghosts have switched their pattern to one a month or are still on the two-month pattern, just rung in the New Year with a special spree.”

  Though the press still referred to the killer as the Monster, most of the police involved now alluded to him as the Ghost or the Ghosts. Carmine’s ideas had taken root because men like Lieutenant Joe Brown from Norwalk saw the sense in them.

  “Between this Thursday, the twenty-seventh, and the following Thursday, February third, all departments will put a surveillance team on any suspect they have twenty-four hours a day. If we get no results, at least it’s an elimination process. If we know a suspect was watched and the suspect didn’t elude us, then that suspect can be crossed off the list if a girl goes missing.”

  “And if no girl goes missing?” asked a cop from Stamford.

  “Then we do it all again at the end of February. I agree with Carmine that everything we know points to a bunch of changes — time interval, a night abduction, the party dress, decapitation only — but we can’t be sure he’s into a new pattern permanently. One or two of him, he’s way ahead of us. We just gotta keep on pluggin’ on, guys, best way we know how.”

  “What if a girl goes missing and no suspect is involved?” a cop from Hartford asked.

  “Then we think again, but in a different way. We broaden the net to bring in new suspects, but we won’t abandon the old. I’ll hand you over to Carmine.”

  Who had little more to say, except upon the subject of their present suspects. “Holloman is in the unique position of having many more than one suspect,” he said. “The rest of the departments will be watching known rapists with a track record of violence, whereas Holloman has a group of suspects with no known track record of rape or violence. The staff of the Hug, plus two others. All up, thirty-two people. We can’t manage to keep that many under twenty-four-hour observation, which is why I’m asking for volunteers from other departments to give us a hand. Our teams have to be experienced men, not liable to sleep on the job or drift into a waking dream. If any of you can spare men who can be trusted, I’d appreciate the help.”

  And so it was arranged. Twenty-nine Huggers, Professor Frank Watson, Wesley le Clerc and Professor Robert Mordent Smith were to be watched around the clock by men whose attention wouldn’t waver. A formidable task, even logistically.

  A surprising number of the Holloman suspects either lived on Route 133 or just off it, and Route 133 was a typical state road: one lane either way, meandering, yet not endowed with much shelter; no wide verges, no shopping centers or concomitant parking lots, no bays or rest stops. All that went on along the Boston Post Road, while Route 133 ambled from village to village inland, gave off an occasional side street of houses, more often didn’t. Tamara Vilich and Marvin Schulman, both on Sycamore close to Holloman’s center, were easy; so were Cecil and Otis on Eleventh Street. But the Smiths, the Ponsonbys, the Finches, Mrs. Polonowski, the Frank Watsons, the Chandras and the Kynetons were all somehow attached to Route 133.

  The sleazy motel rejoicing in the name of Major Minor’s was adjacent to Ponsonby Lane on 133, and hadn’t seen so much after-dark business in years as it promised to during that coming week.

  Carmine, Corey and Abe split up surveillance on the Ponsonby house into three eight-hour shifts; that Carmine chose the Ponsonbys was purely because he didn’t think any of the suspects would yield fruit, and thus far the Ponsonbys had received less attention than, for instance, had the Smiths or the Finches. They found a place to hide behind a clump of mountain laurels fifty yards on the 133 side of the Ponsonby driveway, having ascertained that Ponsonby Lane was a dead end and that the Ponsonby house had absolutely no other vehicular access than the driveway.

  He checked everything out himself ahead of time, to discover that the Forbeses were the most difficult to observe, thanks to their water frontage and the steep, bushy slope that led down from East Circle, their road frontage, to the water; the house sat on a shelf halfway down. Nor were the Smiths easy, between that knoll where the house was, the dense woods, and that twisting driveway. However, the Prof was definitely incarcerated in Marsh Manor on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport, under guard by the Bridgeport police. As for the Finches — a good thing, really, that he had virtually eliminated them from his list. They had no less than four gates opening on to Route 133, none of them where an unmarked car could hunker down undetected by sharp eyes. Norwalk was taking care of Kurt Schiller, and Torrington was watching Walter Polonowski and his mistress in their upstate cabin.

  So why didn’t Carmine think that this massive surveillance exercise would bear fruit? He genuinely didn’t know why, save that the Ghosts were ghosts, and you only saw ghosts when they wanted you to see them.

  Chapter 20

  Monday, January 31st, 1966

  There had been twenty-two inches of snow on the preceding Wednesday, and no thaw to follow, not unusual in January. Instead, the temperature plummeted to twenty below freezing, even less after dark. The surveillance became a nightmare, men rugged in every fur coat wives or mothers could donate, fur rugs, bearskins, blankets, layers of wool, thermal underwear, electric blankets that could be wired to a DC battery, nineteenth-century warming pans filled with barbecue charcoal, anything that staved off freezing. For of course the moment the mercury went lower than 28°F, no engine could be left running because of the thick white vapor that came pouring out of a tailpipe to betray a tenanted car. The luckiest men were huddled inside Alaskan hunting hides.

  Carmine took the midnight to 8 A.M. shift each night, his car a tan Buick with a velvet interior for which he thanked every saint there was.

  The night between Sunday and Monday was the coldest yet at zero Fahrenheit. Bundled in two cashmere blankets, he sat with the wing windows open just enough to prevent fogging, his teeth chattering like castanets. The evergreen mountain laurels hid him well, but on Thursday, the first night of his vigil, he had worried about Biddy — would the dog sense his presence and bark? It had not, nor did it on this night. Only a decerebrated man, he thought, would venture out; this was the season of fires, of lovely heat wafting through ventilators, of finding things to do at home. If the Ghosts had pla
nned an abduction, surely this terrible freeze would deter them.

  The Ponsonby property had been a headache. A five-acre block longer than it was wide, it sloped down steeply from a ridge that formed a spine as well as the back boundary; the ancient house was near the road, with thinned forest around it. The ridge that ran behind all the blocks on that side of Ponsonby Lane was actually the commencement of a twenty-acre forest reserve donated not to the state but to Holloman County Council by Isaac Ponsonby, grandfather of Charles and Claire. Isaac had been a deer lover who deplored hunting; these twenty acres, said his will, were to be reserved as a deer park within the county near the city. Beyond tacking up a few signs that said NO HUNTING, the council had paid the bequest no mind. Today it was much as it had been in Isaac’s day, a fairly dense forest thickly populated by deer. It ran from the ridge down a slope to Deer Lane, a short dead end with four houses on its far side; the deer park continued across the circular terminus of Deer Lane and had prevented further building. Though Carmine was sure that Charles Ponsonby wasn’t athlete enough to make that kind of hike in zero Fahrenheit weather, he had to station other cars in the vicinity: on Deer Lane, its corners, and Route 133. These watchers informed him that no other cars were parked on Deer Lane.

  The night was typical of such arctic conditions: a sky that was not as much black as mottled indigo, webs and spangles of brilliantly blazing stars, not a cloud to be seen. Beautiful! No sound apart from his own teeth, no movements or flashlights outside, no crunch of car wheels on a frozen driveway.

  And because inertia was foreign to him, he began to toy with an idea that popped into his brain at the exact same second that a shooting star carved its fiery path across the vault.

  Look at the religious side of things, Carmine. Think back over the thirteen girls, all the way to Rosita Esperanza, the first to be grabbed…ten of them Catholic. Rachel Simpson was the child of an Episcopalian minister. Francine Murray and Margaretta Bewlee were Baptists. But none of the Protestant girls was from a white church. So why not add Catholicism to black Protestantism? What does that get you, Carmine? A white Protestant fanatic is what it gets you. We’ve lost sight of the enormous preponderance of Catholic girls, maybe because the Ghosts seemed to swing away from them with Francine and Margaretta. Over 75 percent Catholic, plus a black Protestant minister’s daughter, the child of a racially split marriage, and — Margaretta. Margaretta, the one who doesn’t fit. Is there something about the Bewlee family that we don’t know?

  The cold forgotten, he sat itching for the morning to come, to liberate him from this unproductive, fruitless graveyard shift and let him go talk to Mr. Bewlee.

  His radio emitted a short, low sound, the signal that a cop was approaching his car. A glance at his watch told Carmine that it was 5 A.M., too late for anything to happen if a night abduction was the plan. One thing for sure, the Ponsonbys hadn’t stirred.

  Patrick slid into the passenger’s seat and held out a thermos with a grin. “Malvolio’s best. I stood over Luigi and made him brew a fresh pot, and the raisin bagels had just come in.”

  “Patsy, I love you.”

  They drank and chewed for five minutes, then Carmine told his cousin about this new theory. Much to his disappointment, Patrick didn’t think highly of it.

  “The trouble is that you’ve been on this case now for so long that you’ve exhausted all the probables and have nowhere to look except at the improbables.”

  “There is a religious bias, and it’s tied up with race!”

  “I agree, but religion isn’t what interests the Ghosts. What interests them is the fact that God-fearing families produce the kind of girl they’re after.”

  “The Bewlees are hiding something, they have to be,” Carmine muttered. “Otherwise Margaretta doesn’t fit.”

  “She doesn’t fit,” said Patrick patiently, “because yours is a crazy hypothesis. Get back to basics! If you think of the Ghosts as rapists ahead of killers, then you’re not looking for a religious fanatic of any color or denomination, Christian or otherwise. You are looking for a man or two men who hate all women, but some more than others. The Ghosts hate virtue allied to youth allied to color allied to a face allied to other things we don’t know. But we do know about the virtue, the youth, the face, the color. None of them have been white white, and none of them will be white white, I know it in my bones. Their best sample pool is Latin Catholics, is all. The children are brought up young for their age, strictly supervised, and greatly loved. You know that, Carmine! But the families are not newcomers to America, and I think that a religious fanatic killer would be targeting new immigrants — keep down the influx, spread the word that if you immigrate here, your children will be raped and slaughtered. The answer lies in the case basics.”

  “I’m still going to see Mr. Bewlee,” Carmine said stubbornly.

  “If you have to, you have to. But she won’t fit because the pattern you’re seeing is a figment of your imagination. You’re a victim of battle fatigue.”

  They fell silent; less than three hours to go, and the shift would be over.

  Shortly before 7 A.M. the radio emitted a different stealthy noise: the one that said get out of there unobtrusively and go to your rendezvous, because a girl has been taken.

  Carmine’s rendezvous was Major Minor’s motel, where he and Patrick requisitioned use of the phone in Reception. The Major was on the desk himself, eager to learn what was happening. All his rooms had been booked by the Holloman police for a sum they — and he — knew was exorbitant, especially since no one used them. The NO VACANCY sign was additional camouflage for parked cars, and the Major wasn’t about to turn that on unless it spelled out the truth.

  While Carmine talked, Patrick watched Major Minor, wondering idly if, like so many people owning suggestive names, young F. Sharp Minor had gone to West Point determined to attain the rank that would make him a contradiction in terms. In his fifties now, with the swollen purple nose of a heavy drinker and the attitude of a desk warrior: if the forms are correctly filled in and the paperwork is adequate, do whatever you like from beating the crap out of a soldier to stealing firearms from the cage. This quirk in Major Minor’s nature helped a business where the guests came for an hour in mid-afternoon; the main parking lot was around the back so that no wife cruising down Route 133 could spot her old man’s car outside. At one stage Carmine had been desperate enough to classify Major F. Sharp Minor as a suspect, for no better reason than that he knew all the rooms were fitted with spy holes. The elderly villain had gotten rid of the cameras after a private detective caught him filming a company director and his secretary, but Major Minor could still look.

  “Norwich,” Carmine said. “Corey, Abe and Paul will be here in about a minute.” He moved farther from the Major. “She’s of Lebanese extraction, but the family has been in Norwich since 1937. Her name is Faith Khouri.”

  “They’re Moslems?” Patrick asked, looking incredulous.

  “No, Catholics of the Maronite sect. I doubt there’d be a Maronite church, so they’d go to the ordinary Catholic one.”

  “Norwich is a pretty big town.”

  “Yes, but they live out of it quite a way. Mr. Khouri runs a convenience store in Norwich. His home is north, about halfway to Willimantic.”

  Abe pulled up in the Ford, Paul right behind in Patrick’s unmarked black van.

  “I don’t even know why we’re bothering to go up there,” said Corey as the Ford moved off at a normal pace; no siren or light until they were well away from Ponsonby Lane.

  That, thought Carmine, inwardly sighing, is the remark of a man who despairs. I’m not the only one suffering from a bad case of battle fatigue. We are beginning to believe that we will never catch the Ghosts. This is the fourth girl since we’ve known the Ghosts exist, and we’re no closer, no closer. Corey’s hit the bottom of his particular pit, and I don’t know how far I am from the bottom of mine.

  “We are going, Cor,” he said as if Corey’s statement had bee
n routine, “because we have to see the abduction site for ourselves. Abe, if we go north on I-91 to Hartford and then strike east, we’ll have better road conditions than I-95 to New London.”

  “Can’t,” said Abe briefly. “Five trailer trucks jackknifed.”

  “At least,” said Carmine, settling into his beloved backseat comfortably, “the heater’s on. I’m going to get some sleep.”

  The Khouri house was on a winding lane that ran not far from the Shetucket River, and was as charming as its setting. The house itself was traditional, but built in fits and starts that lent it alluring angles as well as three levels. Between it and the road was an enormous pond, frozen solid at this time of year, as was the brook that led from it to the icebound river; it had been ploughed free of snow so it could be used as a skating rink, but a tiny wooden jetty spoke equally loudly of canoes in summer. A patch of rushes clattered hollowly against each other, and everywhere in the distances a golden sheen of sun overlay sleek white fields. Around the house were the winter skeletons of birches and willows, with a massive old oak atop a rise beyond the little lake. Picnics in the shade in summer, it said. What lovelier environment could there be for children than this perfect American dream?

  There were seven children, Carmine learned: only a nineteen-year-old boy, Anthony, was away from home. His brother Mark was seventeen, then came Faith at sixteen, Nora at fourteen, Emily at twelve, Matthew at ten; Philippa, at eight, was the youngest.

  The wildness of the family’s grief made it impossible to question any of them, including the father. Almost thirty years in America had not cancelled out their Levantine reaction to the loss of a child. When Carmine managed to find a photograph of Faith, he saw what Patrick had been trying to make him see on Ponsonby Lane. Faith looked like the sister of the other victims, from her mass of curly black hair to her wide dark eyes and her lush mouth. In skin color she was the fairest; about like a southern Italian or Sicilian girl, Mediterranean tawny.