“I wish we had the arms and legs at least, Patsy.”
“So do I, but I suspect they went into the fridge yesterday, together with the head.”
Carmine spoke so positively that Patrick jumped. “Oh, no! He’s still got her head. He won’t part with that.”
“Carmine! That kind of thing doesn’t happen! Or if it does, it’s some maniac west of the Rockies. This is Connecticut!”
“He’s still got the head, no matter where he comes from.”
“I’d say he works at the Hug, or if not at the Hug, then at some other part of the medical school,” Patrick said.
“A butcher? A slaughterman?”
“Possible.”
“You said, the second most important thing, Patsy. What’s the first?”
“Here.” Patrick turned the lower torso over and pointed to the right buttock, where a heart-shaped scab about an inch long showed dark and crusted against the flawless skin. “At first I thought he had cut it there on purpose – heart, love, that kind of thing. But he made no template incision around the edge. It’s simply one neat transverse slice, the way I’ve seen a knife man slice off a woman’s nipple. So I wondered if she’d had a nevus there, a birthmark raised well above the surface of the skin.”
“Something that offended him, destroyed her perfection,” said Carmine thoughtfully. “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t know she had it until he got her to wherever he did his nasty things to her. Depends if he picked her up or knew her previously. Any idea about her racial background?”
“No idea, other than that she’s more Caucasian than anything else. Some Negroid or Mongoloid blood, or both.”
“Are you picking that she’s a prostitute?”
“Without arms to look for needle tracks, Carmine, difficult, but this girl is – I don’t know, healthy looking. I’d search the Missing Persons files.”
“Oh, I intend to,” said Carmine, and went back to the Hug.
Where to begin, given that Otis Green couldn’t be questioned until tomorrow at the earliest? Cecil Potter, then.
“This is a real good job,” Cecil said, sitting on a steel chair with Jimmy on his knee, and apparently indifferent to the fact that the macaque was busy grooming Cecil’s hair, picking with delicate fingers through its dense closeness in a kind of intent ecstasy. Jimmy, he had explained, was still very upset over his ordeal. Carmine would have found the entire bizarre sight easier to cope with if the big monkey hadn’t been wearing half a tennis ball on top of his head; this, said Cecil, was to protect the electrode assembly implanted in his brain and the bright green female connector embedded in pink dental cement on his skull. Not that the half a tennis ball seemed to worry Jimmy; he ignored it.
“What makes the job so good?” Carmine asked, aware that his belly was rumbling. Everyone at the Hug had been fed, but thus far Carmine had missed out on breakfast and lunch.
“I’m the boss,” Cecil said. “When I worked over in P.P. I was just one more shit shoveler. At the Hug, animal care is mine. I like it, specially ’cos we got the monkeys. Dr. Chandra – they his, really – knows I am the best monkey man on the east coast, so he leaves them to me. I even get to put them in the chair for their sessions. They crazy about their sessions.”
“Don’t they like Dr. Chandra?” Carmine asked.
“Oh, sure, they like him fine. But me, they love.”
“Do you ever empty the refrigerator, Cecil?”
“Sometimes, not much. If Otis goes on vacation, we hire a man off of P.P.’s plant physical reserves. Otis don’t work this floor with me much – he the upstairs man. Gets to change the lightbulbs an’ dispose of the hazardous waste too. I can mostly manage this floor’s animal care on my own, ’cept for bringing the cages up an’ down from the other floors. Our animals get clean cages Mondays through Fridays.”
“They must hate the weekends,” said Carmine solemnly. “If Otis doesn’t work with you much, how do you clean the cages?”
“See that door there, Lieutenant? Goes to our cage washer. Automated like a fancy car wash, but better. The Hug got everything, man, everything.”
“Getting back to the refrigerator. When you do empty it, Cecil, what size are the bags? Is it strange to see bags as big as the – er -?”
Cecil thought, his fine head to one side, the monkey seizing the chance to look behind his ear. “Ain’t strange, Lieutenant, sir, but you best ask Otis, he the expert.”
“Did you notice anyone yesterday putting bags in the fridge who doesn’t usually do that?”
“Nope. The researchers mostly bring their bags down theirselves after Otis an’ me are gone for the day. Technicians bring bags down too, but small. Rat bags. Only technician brings down big bags is Mrs. Liebman from the O.R., but not yesterday.”
“Thanks, Cecil, you’ve been a great help.” Carmine extended his hand to the monkey. “So long, Jimmy.”
Jimmy held out his hand and shook Carmine’s gravely, his big round amber eyes so full of awareness that Carmine felt his skin prickle. They looked so human.
“Just as well you a man,” Cecil said, laughing, escorting Carmine to the door with Jimmy on his hip.
“Why’s that?”
“All six of my babies are male, an’ man, they hate women! Can’t stand a woman in the same room.”
Don Hunter and Billy Ho were working together on some sort of Rube Goldberg apparatus they were assembling out of electronic components, Plexiglass extrusions and a pump designed to take a small glass syringe. Two mugs of coffee stood nearby, looking cold and scummy.
That they had both been trained in the armed services was plain the moment Carmine uttered the word “Lieutenant.” They sprang away from the gadget and stiffened to attention. Billy was of Chinese ancestry; he had become an electronics engineer in the U.S. Air Force. Don was an Englishman from what he called “the north” and had served in the Royal Armoured Corps.
“What’s that gizmo?” Carmine asked.
“A pump we’re fitting to some circuitry so it only delivers one-tenth of one em-el every thirty minutes,” said Billy.
Carmine picked up the mugs. “I’ll bring you some fresh from that urn I saw in the hall if you’ll let me have a mug of it and shovel in plenty of sugar.”
“Gee, thanks, Lieutenant. Take the whole sugar jar.”
If he didn’t get some sugar into his system, Carmine knew, his attention would start to flag. He detested very sweet coffee, but it stopped his belly growling. And over it, he could settle to a friendly chat. They were loquacious men, eager to explain their jobs and very keen to assure Carmine that the Hug was great. Billy was the electronics engineer, Don the machinist. Between the two of them they painted Carmine a fascinating picture of a life largely spent designing and building things no sane person could envisage. Because researchers, Carmine learned, were not sane persons. They were mostly pain-in-the-ass maniacs.
“A researcher can fuck up a carload of steel balls,” Billy said. “They might have brains the size of Madison Square Garden and win Nobel Prizes all over the shop, but man, can they be dumb! Know what their main problem is?”
“It’ll be a help,” said Carmine.
“Common sense. They got fuck-all common sense.”
“Yoong Billy is raht abaht thaht,” said Don. Or at least it sounded as if that was what he had said.
When he departed Carmine was convinced neither Billy Ho nor Don Hunter had left two pieces of woman in the dead animal refrigerator. Though whoever had was not lacking in common sense.