Though the press still referred to the killer as the Monster, most of the police involved now alluded to him as the Ghost or the Ghosts. Carmine’s ideas had taken root because men like Lieutenant Joe Brown from Norwalk saw the sense in them.
“Between this Thursday, the twenty-seventh, and the following Thursday, February third, all departments will put a surveillance team on any suspect they have twenty-four hours a day. If we get no results, at least it’s an elimination process. If we know a suspect was watched and the suspect didn’t elude us, then that suspect can be crossed off the list if a girl goes missing.”
“And if no girl goes missing?” asked a cop from Stamford.
“Then we do it all again at the end of February. I agree with Carmine that everything we know points to a bunch of changes – time interval, a night abduction, the party dress, decapitation only – but we can’t be sure he’s into a new pattern permanently. One or two of him, he’s way ahead of us. We just gotta keep on pluggin’ on, guys, best way we know how.”
“What if a girl goes missing and no suspect is involved?” a cop from Hartford asked.
“Then we think again, but in a different way. We broaden the net to bring in new suspects, but we won’t abandon the old. I’ll hand you over to Carmine.”
Who had little more to say, except upon the subject of their present suspects. “Holloman is in the unique position of having many more than one suspect,” he said. “The rest of the departments will be watching known rapists with a track record of violence, whereas Holloman has a group of suspects with no known track record of rape or violence. The staff of the Hug, plus two others. All up, thirty-two people. We can’t manage to keep that many under twenty-four-hour observation, which is why I’m asking for volunteers from other departments to give us a hand. Our teams have to be experienced men, not liable to sleep on the job or drift into a waking dream. If any of you can spare men who can be trusted, I’d appreciate the help.”
And so it was arranged. Twenty-nine Huggers, Professor Frank Watson, Wesley le Clerc and Professor Robert Mordent Smith were to be watched around the clock by men whose attention wouldn’t waver. A formidable task, even logistically.
A surprising number of the Holloman suspects either lived on Route 133 or just off it, and Route 133 was a typical state road: one lane either way, meandering, yet not endowed with much shelter; no wide verges, no shopping centers or concomitant parking lots, no bays or rest stops. All that went on along the Boston Post Road, while Route 133 ambled from village to village inland, gave off an occasional side street of houses, more often didn’t. Tamara Vilich and Marvin Schulman, both on Sycamore close to Holloman’s center, were easy; so were Cecil and Otis on Eleventh Street. But the Smiths, the Ponsonbys, the Finches, Mrs. Polonowski, the Frank Watsons, the Chandras and the Kynetons were all somehow attached to Route 133.
The sleazy motel rejoicing in the name of Major Minor’s was adjacent to Ponsonby Lane on 133, and hadn’t seen so much after-dark business in years as it promised to during that coming week.
Carmine, Corey and Abe split up surveillance on the Ponsonby house into three eight-hour shifts; that Carmine chose the Ponsonbys was purely because he didn’t think any of the suspects would yield fruit, and thus far the Ponsonbys had received less attention than, for instance, had the Smiths or the Finches. They found a place to hide behind a clump of mountain laurels fifty yards on the 133 side of the Ponsonby driveway, having ascertained that Ponsonby Lane was a dead end and that the Ponsonby house had absolutely no other vehicular access than the driveway.
He checked everything out himself ahead of time, to discover that the Forbeses were the most difficult to observe, thanks to their water frontage and the steep, bushy slope that led down from East Circle, their road frontage, to the water; the house sat on a shelf halfway down. Nor were the Smiths easy, between that knoll where the house was, the dense woods, and that twisting driveway. However, the Prof was definitely incarcerated in Marsh Manor on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport, under guard by the Bridgeport police. As for the Finches – a good thing, really, that he had virtually eliminated them from his list. They had no less than four gates opening on to Route 133, none of them where an unmarked car could hunker down undetected by sharp eyes. Norwalk was taking care of Kurt Schiller, and Torrington was watching Walter Polonowski and his mistress in their upstate cabin.
So why didn’t Carmine think that this massive surveillance exercise would bear fruit? He genuinely didn’t know why, save that the Ghosts were ghosts, and you only saw ghosts when they wanted you to see them.
Chapter 20
Monday, January 31st, 1966
There had been twenty-two inches of snow on the preceding Wednesday, and no thaw to follow, not unusual in January. Instead, the temperature plummeted to twenty below freezing, even less after dark. The surveillance became a nightmare, men rugged in every fur coat wives or mothers could donate, fur rugs, bearskins, blankets, layers of wool, thermal underwear, electric blankets that could be wired to a DC battery, nineteenth-century warming pans filled with barbecue charcoal, anything that staved off freezing. For of course the moment the mercury went lower than 28°F, no engine could be left running because of the thick white vapor that came pouring out of a tailpipe to betray a tenanted car. The luckiest men were huddled inside Alaskan hunting hides.
Carmine took the midnight to 8 A.M. shift each night, his car a tan Buick with a velvet interior for which he thanked every saint there was.
The night between Sunday and Monday was the coldest yet at zero Fahrenheit. Bundled in two cashmere blankets, he sat with the wing windows open just enough to prevent fogging, his teeth chattering like castanets. The evergreen mountain laurels hid him well, but on Thursday, the first night of his vigil, he had worried about Biddy – would the dog sense his presence and bark? It had not, nor did it on this night. Only a decerebrated man, he thought, would venture out; this was the season of fires, of lovely heat wafting through ventilators, of finding things to do at home. If the Ghosts had planned an abduction, surely this terrible freeze would deter them.
The Ponsonby property had been a headache. A five-acre block longer than it was wide, it sloped down steeply from a ridge that formed a spine as well as the back boundary; the ancient house was near the road, with thinned forest around it. The ridge that ran behind all the blocks on that side of Ponsonby Lane was actually the commencement of a twenty-acre forest reserve donated not to the state but to Holloman County Council by Isaac Ponsonby, grandfather of Charles and Claire. Isaac had been a deer lover who deplored hunting; these twenty acres, said his will, were to be reserved as a deer park within the county near the city. Beyond tacking up a few signs that said NO HUNTING, the council had paid the bequest no mind. Today it was much as it had been in Isaac’s day, a fairly dense forest thickly populated by deer. It ran from the ridge down a slope to Deer Lane, a short dead end with four houses on its far side; the deer park continued across the circular terminus of Deer Lane and had prevented further building. Though Carmine was sure that Charles Ponsonby wasn’t athlete enough to make that kind of hike in zero Fahrenheit weather, he had to station other cars in the vicinity: on Deer Lane, its corners, and Route 133. These watchers informed him that no other cars were parked on Deer Lane.
The night was typical of such arctic conditions: a sky that was not as much black as mottled indigo, webs and spangles of brilliantly blazing stars, not a cloud to be seen. Beautiful! No sound apart from his own teeth, no movements or flashlights outside, no crunch of car wheels on a frozen driveway.