Fat Ollie Weeks waddled over, grinning, a nine-millimeter Glock in his hand.
He flipped back his jacket, holstered the gun, and said, “You owe me one, Steve-a-rino.”
OVER ALFRED HARDY’S VIOLENT OBJECTIONS , the SWAT team disposed of the remaining four lions in short order. Honey Blair got some nice shots of the sharpshooters doing their job, aiming down their rifle barrels and all, the lions happily munching away on the lady out there, whoever she was, unaware that in minutes they would be merely trophies. Hardy refused to let Honey take any pictures of the carcasses on the island, animal or human, and ordered her off the premises. She went over to where a pair of paramedics were searching Carella for any cuts or bruises caused by what they insisted was a “mauling.”
“I wasnot mauled,” Carella told them over and over again. “I was almosteaten,but I was not mauled.”
“Sounds like a good idea either way,” Honey said, and smiled. “Here’s my card. You ever feel like discussing police work or television reportage, give me a ring. Or even just a cappuccino, mm?” she said, and smiled again.“Ciao, bambino.”
Carella watched her walking off.
He looked at the card.
And tossed it into the trash bin near the railing where he sat.
The paramedics thought the lion mauling him had damaged his brain.
THE THING THAT BOTHERED CARELLA MOST about the dead woman—or what was left of her, which wasn’t very much—was that she was naked.
“Woman wandering around the zoo without any clothes on, dead of winter,” Carella said.
“Which does seem peculiar,” Meyer agreed.
“Almost makes it seem as if she didn’twant to be identified.”
He was thinking that this was the worst time of the year for suicides. Girl loses her man, her job, her mind, her gold watch—she wasn’t wearing a watch, he noticed, unless one of the lions ate it—she decides to end it all. Ashamed of the act she’s about to commit, she strips herself naked, goes for a bare-assed walk in the zoo, straight into the lion’s den.
Another thing that bothered him was the fact that Ollie Weeks had saved his life. Once upon a time, Bert Kling had saved a Puerto Rican courier from a near-fatal baseball-bat beating. The man’s name was José Herrera, and he had informed Kling that in certain cultures—Asian or North American Indian, he wasn’t sure which—if you saved a person’s life, you were responsible for that person’s life forever. The one thing Carella did not want was Fat Ollie Weeks being responsible for his life forever.
“You think somebodythrew her to those lions?” he asked Meyer.
“Be a new one, all right,” Meyer answered.
CARL BLANEY HATED EXAMINING BODIES that were in parts. If he’d wanted to become a butcher, he would not have gone to medical school. This one was particularly disgusting. All chewed over and everything. Your cases involving severed parts were usually your blunt force injuries, where a person got run over by a truck or a subway train. The other times you got a bundle of disconnected arms and legs was when somebody was trying to dispose of a murder victim, and sawed the body up into pieces and packed them in a trunk. This particular corpse, he’d been told, had been attacked by lions, of all things, you’d think this city was the African veldt.
There was not much more than the bare bones remaining of the victim’s left leg. All the tissue and muscle had been torn away, leaving the exposed femur, patella, tibia, and fibula, portions of which had been gnawed through as well. The right leg was in a similar state of obliteration, the bones cracked open, the marrow sucked out. The woman’s right breast was completely gone, her left breast consumed to almost where it joined the chest. Her right arm was still connected to the body, but the hand had been consumed, bones and all, and from the wrist up to the elbow, the tissue and muscle were gone, exposing the ulna and radius.
The heart, the liver, the pancreas, the stomach—all the tasty parts—were gone. He was examining the woman’s head and face, which had been partially consumed, the nose and ears gone, the lips gone, the eyes gone, when he noticed—
But how could that be?
He was looking at a tiny circular perforation in the skull, just above what was left of the woman’s hairline.
To the naked eye, it looked a great deal like a small-caliber pistol wound.
IT WAS TWO-THIRTY THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON when the phone on Carella’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver.
“Carella,” he said.
“Blaney here.”
“Hey, Carl.”
“On this dead girl who got eaten by lions?” Blaney said, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. “I’ve lifted a good thumbprint and two fingerprints. I don’t imagine you know much about her …”
“Not a thing so far.”
“Reason I’m asking … I’ve come up with something interesting.”
“What’s that, Carl?”
“I found a tiny perforation in the left temporal region of the skull. At first, it looked like a bullet wound, but upon further …”
“Looked like awhat?” Carella said.
“But it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“An ice-pick wound. Somebody stabbed her with an ice pick.”
He waited while Carella absorbed this.
“The tract passed into the brain as deep as the left cerebral peduncle,” he said. “Now, the reason this is interesting, such a wound will rarely cause instant death. Absent concussion of the brain, we’ve had victims surviving for as long as five days after an assault.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Carl.”
“I’m saying there are cases on record of victims walking long distances from the scene of the trauma. Eventually, there’ll be either subcortical or subdural hemorrhaging from the wound, with subsequent compression of the brain and resultant death. Butbefore then …”
“Before then, she could’ve walked to the park, is that it?”
“Yes. Or someone could have transferred her there from wherever the trauma occurred. In either case, I’m merely stating as a positive fact that she was stabbed first. With an ice pick.”
“When will I have those prints?” Carella asked.
“They’re on the way now,” Blaney said.
THE PRINTS REACHED CARELLA by messenger at three-seventeen that afternoon. A half-hour later, AFIS—the automated fingerprint identification system—got back to him with a hit on a United States Army lieutenant named Cassandra Jean Ridley.
3 .
THE TELEPHONE DIRECTORY gave them a listing for a C J Ridley on South Ealey Street in Silvermine. Carella and Ollie went there at once. They had phoned ahead and a pair of technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit were waiting for them downstairs. The building was a twelve-story red brick a block away from the oval. They introduced themselves to the doorman, and asked to speak to the superintendent, a man named Peter Dooley, who immediately took them up to apartment 9C and unlocked the door for them.
Carella and Ollie stayed out in the hall with Dooley while the techs got to work. The super was a tall, wide-shouldered man with a shock of black hair and piercing blue eyes. He was wearing wide-wale blue corduroy trousers and a navy blue sweater vest over a red plaid shirt. He told them the woman lived here alone, took the apartment in November, was gone for a little while, came back again early in December. He figured she was worth a little something, the fur coats and all, don’t y’know.