"So, I guess that covers everything," Rickey said, clapping her hands.
"Not quite," Casey chimed in. "How did you know it wasn't just Caldwell? What made you connect Amsterdam to all this business?"
"Well, there's the question of money and resources. But that wasn't the main thing. It just didn't fit Caldwell. But it did fit Amsterdam."
"Didn't fit?" Casey seemed puzzled.
"Yes. Didn't fit what one might call the psychological profile of Jack Caldwell. On the other hand, from what I knew and deduced about Amsterdam, it fit him perfectly. I believe he is what G. E. Partridge calls a sociopath-- a man devoid of empathy and conscience. Not really insane in a strict clinical sense, but capable of any act of depravity that would get him what he wants. And what he wants is not money-- he wants thrills, the feeling of control. Well, I don't think he'll be in control of anything for a very long time. We were lucky to nab him, Casey. There are dozens more just like him out there, who will probably never be caught.
"I foresee a day when scientific criminology will delve much more deeply into the psychology of the antisocial personality. The science of the mind is every bit as important as the physical sciences when dealing with criminal behavior. Traditional forensics tells us what happened at a particular crime scene, and perhaps even who made it happen-- if we have enough data. Forensic psychology may one day be able to tell us why."
"More futuristic stuff," Casey said gruffly. "Haven't we had enough of that?"
"It doesn't look like you have," Lash observed. "That newspaper in your jacket pocket is folded with the comics on the outside. Is that Killer Kane peeking out at us?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. Weren't you giving us a science lecture or something?"
"No lecture," said Lash. "Just a few observations. This may be 1938, but we are still in the dark ages, as far as crime detection is concerned."
Casey gave Lash an arch look. "Did you just insult me?"
"No, Casey," replied the scientific investigator. "I insulted your profession. There's a difference."
Rickey laughed. After a couple seconds, the men joined in.
END
THE RIVER PIG
by Jim Beard
Chapter One
TWO MYSTERIES
“MONSTER!”
The frenzied cry split the chilly October air right through its heart. Al Cord jumped, startled. Swiveling his head around, peering into the mist, he homed in on its source and picked up his feet to run like the devil.
The stocky reporter shuffled hurriedly down 37th and crossed Eleventh Ave, his eyes searching for the crier. The voice had sounded male, and though Cord would always prefer to race to a damsel in distress, he moved nonetheless speedily into the night.
He reached Twelfth and pitched himself toward the docks, huffing and puffing from his exertions. Spying the river through the gloom, he pulled up short of lunging over a short wall and into the water itself.
“Monster!” came the terrible cry once more!
Off to one side, Al Cord spotted two forms, huddled together and tripping over their feet as they wobbled to and fro away from the river. He jogged over to them, his mind whirling with confusion. It was a man and a woman, both of them sans hats, but bundled up in heavy garments.
“I’m a reporter!” he bellowed at the duo. “What’s all the hubbub for?”
The male of the two looked up at Cord with rheumy eyes full of fear. The girl he was with – might’ve been the man’s daughter – hid her face in his coat sleeve.
“Th—there! In the—the water!” he pointed with a single, shaky digit. “M—m—monster!”
Al Cord thrilled to the word! If the man was right, it was just what the reporter had been looking for…and just what the doctor ordered.
He leapt over to the short wall and planted one foot upon it, leaning forward. Cord peered out over the Hudson River, every nerve on edge, every ounce of his attention riveted to the scene before him. A cold, wide, dreary looking river met his wide-eyed stare.
At first he was surprised to see virtually no sign of the Midtown Tunnel construction project, but he quickly chided himself – the work was almost completely under the river bed below him. The tunnel that would soon connect Manhattan with the Jersey shore was hidden away, an underground realm for sandhogs and immense, heavy equipment. That night, nothing of its lengthy creation could be seen.
But something else made itself visible in its stead.
The Hudson River Monster!
Or so Al Cord, roving reporter for the Times-Dispatch hoped and prayed. He desperately needed a break on the story and no two ways about it.
For near to forty days and forty nights, eyewitness reports of the creature had landed on his desk at the paper, and, finally sick of them, he decided that monster hunting was preferable to yet another article for which he would receive little or no recognition. With an improbable water beastie he’d at the very least get a rise out of a few people – so what the heck. The reporter began a series of nightly vigils along the Hudson, claimed by some as the favorite swimming hole of the phantom Monster, and was making no real headway on the case.
But, he thought to himself as he noticed something in the water, perhaps his sea horse was finally going to cross the finish line.
A wake of sorts could be seen out on the river. Something was chugging along, splitting the water as it moved. The reporter rubbed at his eyes, took another look. It was as if he was seeing the impossible progress of an invisible boat.
Cursing himself for not bringing a pair of binoculars, Cord shifted back and forth, trying to get a better view of it. The thing in the water then turned abruptly, forcing a sharp, barking yelp of surprise from him.
He ran into a policeman, literally. Then another.
“Well, Clancey,” said one of the cops, “what do we have here?”
His fellow officer squinted at the reporter, smiled. “Well, it looks like – no, it is! The right honorable Alfred Cord, of that fine newspaper, the Times-Dispatch…”
“Look!” hissed Cord, pointing at the Hudson. “Look, you guys!”
The first officer frowned, sniffed at the brisk air. “Doesn’t seem shikkered, Clancey. Maybe—“
The reporter clutched at the man’s coatsleeve, tried to pull him around to face the river. “There, in the water! Gimme the jokes later, but for now, look, dammit!”
The two cops looked. Their eyes widened into saucers.
A form had risen out of the water. Cord and the policemen stared as the bulbous, dark thing as it loomed, dripping water, and swiveled around to face them. It was as if the thing – whatever it was – had heard their exchange, though it was at least a hundred yards away.
Dumbfounded, the reporter could only stand there meekly as the cops shakily pulled out their revolvers and took aim at the swimming behemoth before them.
Cord swore he could make out two eyes on the swollen mass, glinting from the lights of the city behind him. Gaining more of his senses, he could also discern a kind of neck, long like a stout tree branch, supporting what he now believed to be a head.
Suddenly, the thing darted forward. Al Cord saw its target: a metal construction crane that sat perched at the edge of a dock. Involuntarily, another boisterous yelp sprang from his gaping mouth.
As the monster – what else could it be? – crashed into the crane, the two policemen let loose with a cacophony of bullets.
Cord had been near gunplay before, too near at times, but on that chilly night he thought he’d go deaf from the crashing booms of the revolvers. When the officers had emptied their pistols and a slight breeze off the river lazily cleared the smoke from their discharge, three sets of eyes pierced the darkness to once again glom onto the creature.
Gone! Nothing to be seen, save a crushed and mangled crane, lying half in, half out of the water.
The Hudson River Monster had disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.
*****
“Nothing d
oing,” said Lynn Lash. “Scram, Al.”
Al Cord unhooked his thumbs from his lower vest pockets and held out his hands, palms up, plaintively. Hovering over the crouched form of the living Sherlock Holmes at work, he grimaced like a dog robbed of its supper.
“But, Lash! I tell ya, I know what I saw! You gotta come out there with me and look into this thing!”
The man stood up, his long gangling form clad in a neat, expensively tailored blue suit a striking counterpoint to the turned over bedroom of a brownstone in the One Hundreds. He glanced around the room, avoiding the impressed stares of the police officers and plainclothesmen who also stood around the apartment in awe of him.
“Al, it sounds fascinating, albeit ridiculous, but, as you can see, I’m busy at the moment.” Lynn Lash waved one hand around the room, distractedly.
Cord would not give up that easily. “But, this is right up your alley, Lash – I seen it myself and so did two flatfoots and I can get you a bunch of others who seen it and then there’s the crane—“
The detective swung around on the reporter, angrily. “Cord, I said no! I’m deep within a case now – this case - and the department is counting on me. I can’t just drop it to go running off to hunt monsters in the river!” He turned back to his work, tried to regain his composure.
If there was one thing Al Cord knew for sure would hook Lynn Lash, special consultant to the New York City Police Department, it was a scientific puzzle. And if the thing in the Hudson wasn’t one of the biggest, fattest scientific puzzles of the century, he’d eat his own hat with onions and mustard.
In a conciliatory tone, the reporter glanced down at an array of apparatus and asked Lash what he was doing.
“Olfaction,” said the man.
“Huh?” said Cord. “Come again?”
Lynn Lash bent down to pick up a vial from a tray of similar glass containers and pulled out its rubber stopper.
“Smells. The science of scents,” he explained. “Nine young women have been abducted over the past nine weeks, each of them gone as if they never existed and almost always from their own homes.” His eyes traveled over the entire room, floor to ceiling, trying to imagine the latest victim’s last moments within it. “The department is baffled. There’s very little to go on, you see…”
“Yeah, yeah,” interjected Cord. “The news is my business, remember? Hardly any signs of disturbance at the scenes, no ransom notes or phonecalls, and no hard or soft connections between the girls that they can find. So what do smells have to do with it all?”
Lash swished the light colored liquid around in the vial he held and then dipped it up under his nose.
“Olfaction is a funny thing, Al. It can draw pictures in your head, so intertwined with memory at a very high degree. Some of us are deadened to smells, can barely distinguish one from another. But some people have a very fine-tuned sense of smell – that would be me. I can smell something here, and at a few of the other abduction sites, that I can’t quite grasp.”
Cord’s mouth twitched, nostrils flared. “Huh? It’s a dingy old apartment, no offense to its occupants, so how can you—“
“These vials,” explained Lash, “contain essences of many different exotic scents. By having an array of them with me, I can compare and contrast the scents with what I’m getting a whiff of right here in this room…and hopefully zero in on what exactly it is.
“And what it is is something far beyond the norm for a young woman’s bedroom in Upper Manhattan.”
Al Cord thought perhaps he had walked into the loony bin by accident. Never in all of his adventures with Lynn Lash, scientific genius, had he ever witnessed the man turn down one incredible puzzle like the Hudson River Monster for such a cockamamie case as smelling stuff in someone’s bedroom. But he was not entirely insensitive to the plight of the girls’ families, though the possibility existed that it was simply a rash of runaways.
“Lynn,” he said carefully, gauging his friend’s reaction, “this monster is—“
“A sensation, yes,” Lash noted. “Science is my business, remember? I’ve heard the scuttlebutt around the station, Al. But let me tell you a few things.
“One, the Hudson River is a very unlikely place for a creature the size of which some are proposing. There wouldn’t be enough food in it to keep the thing alive. Two, such a creature wouldn’t be attracted by the city – far from it. In fact, it would most likely completely shy away from it. And three, well, it’s simply preposterous. The whole thing.”
“But, Lash, I saw it myself” insisted the reporter, searching Lash’s eyes for a spark of interest. “It—it looked like, like one of those prehistoric whatchamacallits down in the Museum of Natural History!”
“A plesiosaur?”
Cord stared blankly back at him.
“Water dinosaur, long neck, little head, big flippers…?”
“Yeah, that’s it!” bellowed Cord, drawing the scowls of the policemen in the room. He had him now; the hook was in and all that was left was to jerk at it.
“Been extinct for millions of years, Al,” said Lash with the barest hint of a smirk. “Now, I’m sorry, but I have to get back to my work here. It’s important.”
The reporter hitched his thumbs into his vest pockets once again and shook his head from side to side. “Never thought I’d see the day when the great Lynn Lash would turn down the mystery of his career…” He pulled out a leather and nickel lighter and a cigarette.
The doorframe behind him was suddenly filled by the muscle bound figure of a uniformed cop. The man held a strange expression on his wide, marble jawed face.
“Mr. Lash?” he inquired.
Lynn Lash looked up from the two vials he was passing back and forth from under his nose, one at a time.
“Yes? What is it now?”
The police officer glanced at Al Cord, then at his fellow officers and then back to Lash. He opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to find it difficult to do so.
“Well? What is it? Spit it out, man!”
The cop swallowed, frowned. “Someone to see you, Sir. Ehh, actually…a whole bunch of someones, and mighty strange to boot…”
Chapter Two
THE CULT OF NEGUS
Lynn Lash followed the officer out of the bedroom, through the apartment and out onto the brownstone’s front stoop. Al Cord tagged along, curious as to this new development.
Outside, piled together on the sidewalk and looking up at the detective, stood a dozen strangely attired individuals. Despite the chill that swirled about them, they were all dressed in white robes of a thin cotton bunting that looked to be wound around them. On their feet they wore only sandals and on their heads they each sported the queerest decorations that Cord had ever seen, a leather cap punctuated with feathers and other gewgaws, some of them shiny.
“I’m Lynn Lash,” said the detective from the top step. “You wanted to see me?”
One man from among the strange group stepped forward with assurance, his chin jutting out and his eyes of a piercing blue. He held a wooden staff that was taller then himself and from which hung a metal disc. The disc looked very old.
The man raised his hand and his voice. “We are the Followers of Negus, Lynn Lash! Harken to our words, oh man!”
Al Cord shook his head, leaned in to speak to Lash out of the side of his mouth. “’Oh man’ is right – I heard of these guys. A team of screwballs who worship the monster…”
“Hmm,” hummed Lash. “A cult, eh?” He began to walk down the steps to the group, waving off his police escorts. The reporter waited a moment, then followed.
“All right, I’m here. To what do I need to harken? Its cold out here and I have work to attend to.”
The presumed leader of the odd collection of cultists raised both his arms and again raised his voice, as if not only speaking to those assembled outside the brownstone, but the entire city.
“We have come down through the centuries from the lost continent of Atlantis to bring a recko
ning to this spoiled and debauched city! Mankind has reached a precipice and can no longer stand as it has, for only the humble and the sacrosanct may continue to exist! We the Followers of Negus have brought this message to you, Lynn Lash, as a representative of all that is despoiled in this modern world – a man of science!”
He spat out the last word of his tirade as if it were a filthy thing, a curse upon his tongue.
“Oh?” said Lash, scrutinizing the man. “And what do you propose to do about all the debauchery, etcetera?”
The man’s face split in two with a wide grin. “We have summoned Negus himself, the Serpent of Atlantis, to bring doom down upon the heads of the wicked!”
“Summoned…how?”
“With his sigil, the ancient icon of Atlantis!” And with this the man thrust forth his wooden stand and dangled the round piece of metal in front of Lash’s face. Al Cord, from behind the detective, could see that it looked very, very old indeed and on its face he could make out an odd symbol, one that looked nothing like anything he’d seen before.
Lash nodded, frowning. “How is that spelled?”
The cult leader frowned himself, blinked. “I—I beg your pardon?” He glanced back at the nearest of his people, then to Lash again.
The detective planted his fists on his hips and cocked his head to one side. “’Negus.’ How is that spelled?”
The man in the funny hat and robes blinked again, so violently that Al Cord thought he might hurt himself.
“I—I hardly think that matters – it is an ancient Atlantean name that—“
“You’re right,” interrupted Lynn Lash, holding up a hand to cease the man’s stammering. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all bupkis anyway.”
The leader of the Followers of Negus looked then like he’d been suddenly smacked in the face with a dead fish. He took a hesitant step backwards, away from Lash, and tried to compose himself.
The New Adventures of Lynn Lash Page 8