“I fancied seeing if I could grow the gourmet varieties,” Finch said, looking a little better. “Mushrooms are persnickety, but I don’t understand why when you see how they grow in a field.”
“Do you mind if we take your property apart, Doctor? I’m afraid that finding Margaretta here makes that necessary.”
“Do what you want, do what you need – just find this monster!” Finch got up like an old man. “However, I think I know why we didn’t hear anything, Lieutenant. Want to see?”
“I sure do.”
Cautioned not to step anywhere that looked as if the ground had been disturbed, Maurice Finch led Carmine across the area where his glasshouses stood, then in between the big, heated sheds that held Catherine’s chickens. Finally, a good third of a mile beyond the house, Finch stopped and pointed.
“See that little road? It comes up from a gate on Route 133 and ends at the foot of the orchard. We put it in with a blade on the front of our truck because of the brook – when the brook floods, it cuts our house off from access to Route 133. If the Monster knew it existed, he could use it to drive in and we’d never hear him.”
“Thank you for that, Dr. Finch. Go back to your wife.”
Finch did as he was told without protest, while Carmine went to find Abe and Corey, explain whereabouts they should look for signs of the Ghost. He is a ghost, ghosted in and ghosted out again, but he’s a very knowledgeable ghost, the Ghost. Maurice Finch has crisscrossed his property with homemade tracks, but the Ghost is aware of every one of them. And you asked a good question, Dr. Finch: “Why me?” Why, indeed?
Carmine made sure he was back at the County Services building before Patrick brought Margaretta’s body in; this was one autopsy he wanted to see from start to finish.
“She was put on top of a snowbank frozen to solid ice, but I suspect that she was already frozen when he dumped her there,” said Patrick as he and Paul tenderly lifted the long frame out of its bag. “The ground everywhere is frozen, nothing smaller than a backhoe could have broken it to bury her, but this time he wasn’t concerned about hiding her, even for a short while. He dumped her in the open in a sparkling dress.”
The three men stood looking at Margaretta, and at that very peculiar dress.
“I didn’t see Sophia enough during the years when she wore party dresses,” Carmine said, “but with all those girls, Patsy, you must have seen dozens of party dresses. This isn’t a young woman’s dress, is it? It’s a child’s party dress she’s been wedged into.”
“Yes. When we lifted her we found that it wasn’t buttoned up the back. Margaretta’s shoulders are way too broad, but her arms are thin, so he was able to make her look okay from the front.”
The dress had small, puffed sleeves with narrow cuffs, and a waist that allowed for a child’s body – wide and a little tubby. On a ten-year-old child it would probably have reached the knees; on this young woman it barely covered the tops of her thighs. The shell-pink lace was French-made, Carmine guessed; expensive, proper lace embroidered on to a base of fine, strong net. Then later someone else had sewn what looked like several hundred transparent rhinestones all over it in a pattern that echoed that of the lace; each rhinestone was perforated at its tip to take a fine needle and thread. Painstaking manual labor that would add multibucks to its price tag. He would have to show this to Desdemona for a really accurate estimate of its quality and cost.
He watched Patrick and Paul ease Margaretta out of the odd garment, which had to be preserved intact. One of the reasons why he loved his cousin so much lay in Patrick’s respect for the dead. No matter how repulsive some of the bodies he encountered were – fecal matter, vomitus, unmentionable slimes – Patrick handled them as if God had made them, and made them with love.
Deprivation of the dress left Margaretta in a pair of pink silk panties reaching up to her waist and down to her thighs: modest panties. The crotch was bloodstained, but not grossly so. When they were peeled off, there was the plucked pudendum.
“It’s our guy for sure,” Carmine said. “Any idea before you start how she died?”
“Not from blood loss, for certain. Her skin’s just about its right color and there’s only one incision of the neck, the one that decapitated her. No ligature marks on her ankles, though I think she was tied down with the usual canvas band across her chest. He might have put another over her lower legs between rapes, but I’ll have to look a lot closer to verify that.” His lips thinned. “I think this time he raped her to death. Not much blood externally, but she’s very swollen in the abdomen for someone who hasn’t begun to decay. Once she was dead, he put her in a freezer until he was ready to dump her.”
“Then,” said Carmine, backing away from the table, “I’ll wait for you in your office, Patsy. I was going to see this one through, but I don’t think I can.”
Marciano met him outside. “You look kinda white around the gills, Carmine. Had any breakfast?”
“No, and I don’t want any either.”
“Sure you do.” He sniffed Carmine’s breath. “Your trouble is, you’ve been drinking.”
“You call Manischevitz drinking?”
“No. Even Silvestri would classify it as grape juice. Come on, pal, you can fill me in at Malvolio’s.”
He hadn’t managed much of the French toast and maple syrup, but he went back to his office feeling better for trying to eat. Today was going to bring worse mental punishment than it had thus far; he had a premonition that Mr. Bewlee would insist on seeing his daughter’s remains, no matter what his minister of religion said, or who volunteered to do this awful task. Some parts of her he just couldn’t be let see, but he’d know every crease in the palms of her hands, maybe some tiny scar where he’d removed a big splinter from her foot, the shape of her nails…The sweet and lovely intimacies of fatherhood that Carmine had never experienced. How strange it is, to sire a child you don’t honestly know, who has lived far from you and in whose company you feel an exile.
Now that he had taken to calling the killer a ghost, some corners and crevices in his mind had shifted to permit faint rays of light down their depths; Carmine had found himself thinking in new channels since that night when he had gazed across Holloman’s harbor in the snow, and seeing Margaretta Bewlee in her party dress on that icy bank had unlocked another avenue that beckoned to him alluringly, just out of his grasp, a ghost of an idea. A ghost…
Then he had it. Not a ghost. Two ghosts.
How much easier two of them would make it! The speed and the silence, the invisibility. Two of them: one to dangle a bait, the other to execute the snatch. There had to be a bait, something that a sixteen-year-old girl as pure as the driven snow would take as eagerly as a salmon the right fly. A waif of a kitten, a puppy all grimed and abused?
Ether…Ether! One of them dangled the bait, the other came up behind like lightning and clamped a pad soaked in ether over the girl’s face – no chance to scream, no risk of a bite or a hand’s slipping for a moment to allow a cry. The girl would be out to it in seconds, sucking ether into her lungs as she struggled. Then two of them to whisk her away, give her a shot, get her into a vehicle or into a temporary hiding place. Ether…The Hug.
Sonia Liebman was in the Hug’s O.R. tidying up after rat brain soup. When she saw Carmine, her face darkened – but not due to him.
“Oh, Lieutenant, I heard! Is poor Maurie okay?”
“He’s okay. Couldn’t not be, with that wife.”
“So the Hug’s still up shit creek, right?”
“Or someone wants to make it seem that way, Mrs. Liebman.” He paused, could see no point in dissimulating. “Do you have any ether in the O.R.?” he asked.
“Sure, but it’s not anesthetic ether, just ordinary anhydrous ether. Here,” she said, leading the way into the anteroom, where she pointed at a row of cans sitting on a high shelf.