“Yes, I can see that side of him too. But you won’t mention me. When you see him it will be a very serious meeting because the situation is very serious. The Monster is really clever, though perhaps that’s to underestimate him.”
“He’s a whole bunch of things, Desdemona. Smart – clever – insane – maybe a genius. What I do know is that the façade he presents to the world is totally believable. His guard never drops. If it had, someone would have noticed. I think he might be a married man whose wife doesn’t suspect him. Oh, yeah, he’s one smart cookie.”
“You’re pretty smart yourself, Carmine, but you’ve got more going for you than that. You’re a bulldog. Once the teeth lock in, you can’t let go. Eventually the extra weight of dragging you around with him will exhaust him.”
Warmth flooded through him, whether from the cognac or the compliment he wasn’t sure; Carmine preened a little inside his mind, very careful that the rest of him didn’t bat an eyelash.
Chapter 8
Thursday, December 2nd, 1965
Francine Murray hadn’t turned up by the following day, nor did anyone save her parents doubt that the Monster had gotten her. Oh, the parents knew it too, but how can the human heart exist in such a sea of crushing pain until there is no other alternative? She’d gone to a pajama party once without telling them – just plain forgotten, but it had happened. So they waited and prayed, hoping against hope that it was all a mistake and Francine would come bouncing in the door.
When Carmine returned to his office at 4 P.M., he had nothing positive to show for a day of talking to people, including at the Hug. Two months on a case and zilch. His phone rang.
“Delmonico.”
“Lieutenant, this is Derek Daiman from Travis High. Could you possibly come up here straightaway?”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Derek Daiman, thought Carmine, was probably always the last teacher to leave Travis; his gigantic, polyglot baby must be hell to run, but he managed to run it well.
He was standing inside the doors of Travis’s main building, but the moment the Ford pulled into the schoolyard he emerged, ran down the steps to the car.
“I haven’t said anything to anyone, Lieutenant, I just asked the boy who found it to stay where he was.”
Carmine followed him around the left-hand corner of the main block to where an ungainly, shedlike structure had been tacked on adjacent to the brick side wall through a short passageway that gave the brick wall’s windows nine feet of light and air as well as a view of buff-painted metal siding.
Education was a municipal responsibility; cities like Holloman, handicapped by soaring populations in their poorer areas, struggled to provide adequate facilities. Thus the shed had come into being, a hangar that held a basketball court, bleachers for spectators, and, at its far end, gymnastic equipment – vaulting horses, rings suspended from the ceiling, parallel bars, and what looked like two posts and a cross bar for high jumps or pole vaults. Another gym mirrored this one on the right side, held a swimming pool and bleachers where the basketball court was here, and a far end devoted to boxing, wrestling and working out. The girls here to perform graceful leaps, the boys there to beat the crap out of punching bags.
Though they entered the gym from the yard, they could have done so from the building; the short passageway allowed students direct access, mandatory in bad weather, but it too had a door.
Derek Daiman led Carmine past the basketball court and its bleachers to the gymnastic end, provided with seating down either side by what looked like big wooden footlockers. His was the old army term; in high school, he seemed to remember, they were just called boxes. Alongside the last box in the row on the passageway wall stood a tall, athletic-looking black youth whose face was marked with tears.
“Lieutenant, this is Winslow Searle. Winslow, tell Lieutenant Delmonico what you found.”
“This,” said the boy, and held up a candy-pink jacket. “It belongs to Francine. Her name’s in it, see?”
FRANCINE MURRAY, machine-embroidered on the stout strip that enabled the jacket to be hung on a hook.
“Where was it, Winslow?”
“In there, pushed inside one of the mats with its cuff poking out.” Winslow lifted the lid of the box to reveal that it still held two gym mats, one rolled up, the other folded loosely.
“How did you come to find it?”
“I’m a high jumper, Lieutenant, but I have a glass jaw. If I land too hard, I get concussed,” Winslow said in a pure Holloman accent, his sentence construction indicating that he kept up good grades in English and didn’t hang out with a gang.
“Potential Olympic standard, lots of offers from colleges,” Daiman whispered in Carmine’s ear. “He’s thinking of Howard.”
“Go on, Winslow, you’re doing fine,” Carmine said.
“There’s one super-thick mat, and I always use it. Coach Martin keeps it in the same box for me, but it wasn’t there when I came in to do some jumping after school today. I went looking, found it at the bottom of this one. It was weird, sir.”
“How, weird?”
“The box should be full, the mats stacked like frankfurters. Some of the other boxes had too many – more like sardines. And my super-thick mat wasn’t rolled up at all. It was folded back and forth from side to side of the box. The one with the cuff of Francine’s jacket showing was right on top of it. I had a funny feeling, so I pulled the cuff and it slid right out.”
The floor around the box was strewn with five unrolling mats; Carmine surveyed them with a sinking heart. “I don’t suppose you remember which mat held the jacket?”
“Oh, yes, sir. The one still in the box on top of my mat.”
“Winslow, my man,” said Carmine, shaking the youth’s hand warmly, “I am rooting for you for a gold medal in sixty-eight! Thank you for your care and your good sense. Now go home, but don’t talk about any of this, okay?”
“Sure,” said Winslow, wiped his cheeks and walked off, his gait reminiscent of a big cat.
“The whole school is grieving,” said the principal.
“With good reason. Can I dial out on that phone? Thanks.”
He asked for Patrick, still there. “Come yourself if you can, but if you can’t, send Paul, Abe, Corey and all your gear, Patsy. Maybe we’ve found something useful.”
“Do you mind waiting with me, Mr. Daiman?” he asked when he returned to the box, lid down, Francine’s jacket lying on it.
“No, of course not.” Daiman cleared his throat, shifted on his feet, took a deep breath. “Lieutenant, I would not be doing my duty if I didn’t inform you that trouble is coming.”
“Trouble?”
“Racial trouble. The Black Brigade is campaigning hard for support using Francine’s disappearance as a platform. She’s not Hispanic, and on the forms she fills out she calls herself black. I never argue with my light-colored students about how they think of themselves racially, Lieutenant – to me, that would be a denial of their rights. Like the new concepts about indigenousness, that only an indigenous person can decide whether they are or are not.” He shook himself, looked wry. “I’m straying. The point is that some of my more irascible students have been saying that this is a white killer of black girls, and that the police aren’t bothering to catch him because he’s a powerful member of the Hug with all kinds of political influence. Since my school is fifty-two percent black and forty-eight percent white, unless I can keep the lid on the Black Brigade kids, we could have a mess of trouble.”
“Jesus, that’s all we need! Mr. Daiman, we are busting our guts to find this killer, you have my word on that. Simply, we know nothing about him, least of all that he’s a member of the Hug – no one at the Hug has any political power! But I thank you for the warning and I’ll make sure that Travis has some protection.” He glanced from the box to the door barring the passageway that led into the main school. “Mind if I look around? And where’s the Chemistry classroom from here? Is it a lab, or a classroom?”