Читать книгу Sins of the Flesh - Колин Маккалоу, Colleen McCullough - Страница 6

“I told you, Abe, I told you,” Delia said, “but you and Carmine were being typical men—wouldn’t listen to a woman, oh, no!”

She and Abe were sitting in a booth at Malvolio’s waiting for their lunch, and Abe had miscalculated his moment: Delia’s gauzy outfit of mustard yellow and coral pink had seemed tame to him, an indication that today’s Delia was placidly bored. But her reaction to his news said otherwise; Abe heaved an internal sigh and revised his mental chart labeled DELIA CARSTAIRS.

“It’s taken this one to convince me,” he said in undefeated tones. “Until now, the evidence was insufficient.”

“No evidence, but no guts either,” she said, disgusted.

“I don’t see why you’re crowing so loud,” he said.

“Minnie is coming with our omelets,” she said in the voice of a prissy schoolmarm, “and I propose we eat before we discuss.”

Ah, that was it! Delia was plain hungry! Meekly Abe ate. Luigi’s summer cook produced superb Western omelets, and Delia hadn’t grown tired of them yet. Which didn’t mean Abe’s mental chart of Delia could stay unamended. The real problem was, did he modify CLOTHES, COLOR or FOOD, and how much ought he to cross-index? A very complicated mental chart, Delia’s.

The eating dealt with, Delia leaned forward, her bright brown jewels of eyes glittering. “Enlighten me,” she commanded.

Abe began. “Same as James Doe. Gus has named him Jeb Doe until he’s identified—if he ever is. I know you maintained James Doe was related to the four earlier bodies, but decomposition did not permit any positivity, whereas Jeb Doe does.” His cigarette kindled, he inhaled with obvious pleasure. “Gus hasn’t posted Jeb yet, but the preliminary examination is uncannily like James. The body was found on Willard two blocks farther out than Caterby, where Little San Juan has taken to dumping trash. No apparent cause of death, except that starvation sure played a part in it. His testicles had been removed some weeks prior to death.”

“Cause of death will be starvation,” Delia said confidently, “and the perpetrator is a multiple murderer, you must admit that now. Jeb and James Doe are preceded by four John Does whose bones we’ve found. My guess is that there are a lot more than four.”

“If so, not in Holloman. We’ve looked back twenty years, and found nothing before John Doe One in 1966.” Abe puffed away luxuriously, then gazed at his dwindling cigarette in real grief. “Why do they go so fast?”

“Because you’re quitting, Abe dear, and you can’t have your next ciggy until after dinner tonight. Are you sure there are no other John Does elsewhere in Connecticut?”

“At this moment, yes, but I’ll have Liam and Tony repeat our enquiries.” Abe smiled wryly. “At least we can be pretty sure no bodies will turn up in idyllic rustic settings.”

“Yes, this chap definitely thinks of his victims as garbage the moment they’re dead.” Delia put her hand on Abe’s arm when he rose to go. “No, let’s stay here a minute more, please. I love the air-conditioning.”

Abe sat with the alacrity of a trained husband. “It’s cool, yeah, but the smoke torments me,” he said plaintively.

She gave a mew of exasperation. “I love you dearly, Abraham Samuel Goldberg, but you have to get through kicking the habit, and in one respect Jews are like Catholics—they find it easier to suffer one torture when they have to suffer more than one. Well, I am not sweltering in County Services just so you can, a, swelter, and b, withdraw simultaneously. Set your mind where it ought to be—on Jeb Doe, not the Marlboro Man.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, wrestling a grin. “If Jeb Doe’s cause of death is starvation, then we know that the last two Does were definitely starved to death, as well as emasculated. In turn, it suggests an MO for all of them. Gruesome!”

“Yes, quite horrible,” said Delia, grimacing. “It’s a very unusual way to murder because the degree of premeditation is truly formidable—I mean, it takes weeks if not months, and can be stopped at any time. While it may not be messy, it’s certainly the opposite of most murder.”

“You mean it’s colder than ice, harder than steel?”

“Yes, whereas murder of its very nature suggests passion and rage,” said Delia, frowning.

“How would anyone light on starvation as a modus operandi? You’d need a dungeon.” Abe’s freckled face betrayed dismay. “We have had our share of underground premises in Holloman lately.”

“Exactly!” Delia cried, excited. “Starvation is a Middle Ages form of murder. Endowed with dungeons galore, the less civilized monarchs indulged in starving people to death. Aunt Sophonisba offended the King and the King threw her into a dungeon where—oh, how could it have happened?—they forgot to feed her. However, the victims were almost always women. Sort of murder by proxy, which lessens the guilt.”

Cigarettes forgotten, Abe stared at her, intrigued. “I hear you, but am I getting the correct message? Are you implying that our Doe murderer is a woman? Or that the victims should be women?”

Delia went wildly tangential. “Confining the word ‘homosexual’ to the male of our species while putting lesbians on a back burner, may I say that while a number of homosexuals may feel like women trapped inside men’s bodies, I believe the majority do not? After all, homosexuality isn’t exclusively the preserve of human beings. Animals practice it too,” she said.

Abe’s luminous grey eyes mirrored his brain’s confusion. “Are you saying these are homosexual murders? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the killer is definitely not homosexual.”

Abe continued to stare at her, mesmerized. How did Delia’s mind work? Greater intellects than his had failed to find the answer to that question, thus he was able to view his defeat with equanimity. “So you’re hypothesizing that the four John Does, James Doe and Jeb Doe are all the work of the same heterosexual killer?”

“Definitely. Come, Abe, you think the same.”

“After Jeb, the same killer, yes. Heterosexual? Search me.”

“The real question is, how long ago were his trial runs?”

“Easing his way into his MO, you mean?”

“I do indeed.” Delia gave a wriggle of anticipatory delight. “James Doe was your case, Abe, so I need filling in.”

“The consensus of opinion at the time was that it was a homosexual murder, pure and simple. But after Liam and I had a talk with Professor Eric Soderstern, we had to can that,” Abe said.

There were many occasions, thought Delia, when being a minor police department in a small city could possess unexpected bonuses. The Holloman PD had all the resources and expertise of one of the world’s greatest universities at its fingertips; these included the Chubb University Medical School professors of psychiatry. Dr. Eric Soderstern, a famous authority on the psychology of homosexuality, had been consulted in Abe’s need.

“The prof said that castration of the victim indicated rape was the precipitating factor for murder, not homosexuality. We’d gotten nowhere with our enquiries among Holloman’s homosexual contingent.” Abe’s beautiful smile appeared. “We were also told that with this new decade coming up and so many guys coming out of the closet, homosexuality was taking a new lease on life with the word ‘gay.’ We have to educate ourselves to say gay rather than homosexual.”

“I’ve heard gay around a little,” said Delia. “It goes back at least as far as Oscar Wilde. But continue, dear.”

“Anyway, now at least we had a reason for the gay community’s ignorance—apparently James Doe wasn’t a homosexual and his murder had no gay aspects. Instead, we had to ask ourselves if he might have raped someone.”

“Perhaps he was homosexual, and raped a male?”

“Delia! That implication I don’t need!” Abe glowered at her, “Hot weather and you don’t mix, lady. I need a smoke.”

“Codswallop, of course you don’t. You’re down in the mouth, Abe dear, because the discovery of Jeb Doe does rather put the kibosh on rape theories of any kind. The killer lives for the act of murder, and has to be regarded as a multiple. His reasons for castration will be absolutely individual, not due to some Freudian generalization.” Delia arose in a mustard and coral cloud. “Come on, let’s see if Gus has done the autopsy.”

They stepped out into the August humidity, up near saturation point, and gasped.

“There’s method in my madness,” Delia said cheerfully as they descended to the Morgue, one floor below ground. “Everywhere in the ME’s is air-conditioned.” Her face saddened. “It’s still a wee bit of a shock, not seeing Patrick’s cheeky face. He seemed to resign his coroner’s duties overnight.”

“You can’t blame him.”

“No, of course not. But miss him, I do.”

Gustavus Fennell had stepped into Patrick O’Donnell’s shoes as Medical Examiner, a decision that had pleased everybody in the aftermath of Patrick’s sudden illness, a particularly malevolent arthritis. To have replaced a forceful, vital, pioneering man like Patrick with another of the same sort would have led to all kinds of wars, internal and external, whereas dear old Gus (who in fact was neither very old nor very much of a dear) knew all the ropes and could be relied upon to run the Medical Examiner’s department smoothly. Lacking his retired chief’s good looks and charm, Gus had gotten along as Second-in-Command by consciously playing the second lead, as Commissioner John Silvestri was well aware. Now, after three months as ME, the real Gus was starting to shed his veils in an intricate dance that would, Silvestri knew, finally end in revealing a gentle yet obdurate autocrat who would push his department onward and upward with extreme efficiency.

Like Patrick, Gus enjoyed performing criminal autopsies, the more complicated or mysterious, the better. When Delia and Abe walked, gowned and booteed, into his autopsy room, he was just stripping off his gloves, leaving an assistant to close for him. If the cause of death were unknown and might conceivably have a contagious factor, he worked masked, as he had on Jeb Doe.

Mask off, he led his visitors to several steel chairs in a quiet corner of the room, and sat with a sigh of relief. His face and hair, stripped of their coverings, were displayed as—no other word would do—nondescript. Mr. Average Everything, to which add, fade into the wallpaper. However, his slight body had a wiry strength its proportions belied, and his face said its owner could be trusted. That he had certain crotchets Abe and Delia knew: he was a strict vegetarian who forbade smoking anywhere in his department, and if circumstances deprived him of his two generous pre-dinner sherries or after-dinner ports, then mild-mannered Dr. Fennell became a hideous Mr. Hyde. His passion was bridge, at which he was an acknowledged master.

“Unless the fluid or tissue assays come back to show some toxin—I doubt they will—the cause of death is simple starvation,” Gus said, kicking off his chef’s clogs. “My feet are so sore today, I don’t know why. The testicles were enucleated about six weeks before death, by someone who knew exactly how to do it. There was nothing in the alimentary canal that I could call a food residue, but he wasn’t dehydrated.”

“Water, Gus? Or fruit juice, maybe?” Abe asked.

“Nothing but plain water is my guess. Certainly nothing with fiber of any kind in it, or indigestible end products. If he were given plain water the starvation metabolism would proceed smooth as silk, and it did. There were no substances under his nails.”

“May we have a look at him?” Delia asked.

“Sure.”

Delia and Abe moved to the dissecting table, where the body now lay unattended.

Thick, waving black hair, cut to cover the neck and ears but not long enough to be tied back, they noted; it was almost the sole evidence of normality that the corpse displayed, so dynamic were the ravages of a metabolism forced to digest itself to obtain sustenance. The skin was very yellow and waxy, stretched fairly tautly over the skeleton, which showed in vivid detail.

“His teeth are perfect,” Delia said.

“Good nutrition and fluoride in the water supply. The latter says he wasn’t raised in Connecticut.” Abe shook his head angrily, balked. “I’ll get Ginny Toscano to flesh out the skull for me, no matter how bad her hysterics are. Jeb needs an artist’s sketch.”

“Haven’t you heard? We have a new artist,” said Delia, first with this news too. “His name is Hank Jones, and he’s a child just out of art school with a cast iron digestion, absolutely no finer feelings, and a macabre sense of humor.”

“A child?” Abe asked, grinning.

“Nineteen, bless him. Ethnicity—you name it, he has at least a drop of it in his veins. His hobby is drawing cadavers at the Medical School, but I met him in our parking lot sketching Paul Bachman’s 1937 Mercedes roadster. He’s gorgeous!”

“Gorgeous I can live without, but if he doesn’t mind the sight of a nasty dead body, he’s worth knowing,” Abe said.

“Those who’ve seen his work say he’s good.” Delia raised her voice. “Gus, does starvation make body hair fall out, or has someone depilated the poor little blighter?”

“The latter, Delia,” Gus answered. “He wasn’t hirsute by nature, but what body hair he had was plucked. Further to hair, his head hair has been dyed black, which was also true of James Doe. The natural color was fairish, for James as well as Jeb. Both had very blue eyes, and skins that tanned well. Bone structure—Caucasian.” Gus spoke from his chair, still waggling his feet.

Delia and Abe continued to cruise around the table, curiously unsettled by Jeb Doe, who was far from the most horrible body either had ever seen, yet had a power to impress beyond most victims of a violent end. His smell was oddly wrong, which Abe, better educated scientifically than Delia, put down to the beginnings of decay minus some of the usual murder concomitants—no blood, vomitus, open rot. Delia simply thought of it as an utterly bloodless murder, as murder by inches over months. Jeb’s body didn’t look moist or damp, and the head, with its black mop of hair, was a terrifying sight, the skull showing fully under its wrapping of veined skin, which of course gave it the death grin, emphasized by a pair of brown lips drawn back and up in a rictus. Appalling! The eyelids were closed, but Jeb had been gifted with dense, long dark lashes and arched, definitive brows. Nothing about the body suggested mummification—those, Abe and Delia had seen aplenty.

Finally, convinced Jeb Doe had nothing more to tell them, Abe and Delia thanked Gus and departed.

Detectives Division was a trifle scattered through the big police presence in County Services, but Carmine’s (and Delia’s) end was easier to access from the ME’s domain by taking the first flight of stairs or elevator; she started up with a wave, leaving Abe to wend his way to his end alone, and grateful for that—with Delia, you never could tell where the conversation might go, and he wanted to hang on to his current thoughts undeflected. Her technique was oblique or tangential because she never saw things as mere mortals did, but that, of course, was exactly why Carmine so valued her. And, he amended, be fair, Abe Goldberg! You value her just as much.

Carmine had taken Desdemona and their sons to visit his old pal, the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum, in Beverly Hills, and wasn’t due back for three weeks. He had bribed Delia by giving her permission to work on a series of missing women that had been bothering her for months, and telling her that the usual crimes and suspects were safe in Abe’s hands, so butt out unless Abe orders you in, okay? Since she had never dreamed of having a whole month to ride her hobbyhorse, Delia took the unspoken implication philosophically, and left Abe alone. The however-many Doe victims seemed likely to blow up into a big case, but it would continue to move at a snail’s pace for some time; she wasn’t needed there.

Abe collected Liam Connor and Tony Cerutti on his way through, then, settled in his desk chair, gave them the news that the four Johns and James Doe had a new member of the family, Jeb.

“Looks like Professor Soderstern’s rape theory is out,” said Liam sadly. “Are we back to homosexual?”

“If we are, no nancy-boys or pansies, understood? Homosexual or the prof’s word, gay,” said Abe severely. “However, castration says not, unless the perpetrator is a fanatical homo-hater.”

“Then as a theory it stays in,” Tony Cerutti said. He was young, handsome, and still a bachelor, related to Commissioner Silvestri, Captain Delmonico and about a third of the Holloman PD, and while he could be impatient and tactless, he was an excellent detective whose speciality was street crime. “The homo-haters hate the ones who hide their inclinations because they marry and have kids. Then about ten years later the wife wakes up that she’s married to a queer—I can’t use that either? Anyway, she’s all screwed up, the kids are screwed up—yeah, castration can fit into the picture just fine if her father or her brother is—uh—offended. Can I say offended?”

“Don’t be smart, Tony,” Abe said calmly.

“You’re talking about a different age group, Tony,” said Liam, a quiet, understated man who formed an ideal contrast to Tony. Married, he never brought his domestic woes—if, indeed, he had any—to work, and had few prejudices. “The Doe victims are too young to have wives and kids. It does have to stay in our list of possibles, though. If a guy’s wife knows he’s homosexual and goes along with it, okay, but if he has deceived her, the results when she finds out are bound to be messy in all kinds of ways.”

“But messy to the point of a string of murders?” Abe looked skeptical. “I suggest we look at militantly anti-homosexual movements, including Neo-Nazis and assorted racial screwballs. Racial prejudice is usually linked to other social prejudices.”

“We can’t exclude a solitary psychopath,” Liam said, frowning. “One at a time suggests one perpetrator.”

“Definitely.”

Tony’s eyes were closed, a sign of deep thought. “Who done it won’t be easy to find,” he said in his attractively gravelly voice, “but where might be. Did Gus find evidence this latest Doe was gagged for long periods of time?”

“The mouth tissues were unbruised.”

“So wherever he was held was soundproof twenty-four-seven for at least a couple of months. Shades of Kurt von Fahlendorf, huh? A lot of the work looking for where has been done relatively recently looking for Kurt,” Tony said eagerly. “We need to take a look at those files, then we’ll have a list of possibles.”

“The Does must have screamed the place down,” Liam said.

“But we have a list of places to check,” said Abe, pleased. “With Delia head down, tail up on the trail of her Shadow Women, she won’t mind lending us her plans and schematics of Holloman—they’ll be a help too. If we were on a classic paper trail, I’d bring her in, but this is secret compartment stuff.” Abe rubbed his palms together; his speciality was locating secret compartments.

Carmine Delmonico had a daughter old enough to be a pre-med student at Chubb’s Paracelsus College, but he saw nothing of Sophia during school vacations. Her mother had left Carmine to marry the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum while Sophia was still a baby; the marriage had quickly foundered, but not the bond between Myron and his step-daughter, with the result that Sophia had grown up with two fathers, each of whom adored her. It was generally understood that the girl would fall heir to Myron’s empire one day, but in the meantime her inclinations led her in the direction of medicine; during school semesters she lived with Carmine and his second family in Holloman, and during vacations she lived with Myron on the West Coast. A brilliant, capable and down-to-earth young woman, she was sufficiently detached from her biological father’s spell to see how she could best help him, and proceeded to do so.

After the birth of their second son, Alex, only fifteen months later than his brother, Julian, Carmine and Desdemona had run into trouble; Desdemona suffered a post-partum depression made worse by her streak of obsessiveness. A health administrator whom Carmine had met during a case, Desdemona refused to concede her weakness, and thus was slow recovering. At which point Sophia stepped in. His wife, said Sophia to Carmine, needed a long rest being pampered, and since she wouldn’t be separated from her sons, they too must become a part of her rest-and-recreation holiday. The result was that Carmine took Desdemona, Julian and Alex to California at the end of July; they were to stay in Myron’s enormous mansion for as long as Sophia felt necessary, though Carmine would have to return to Holloman when his annual leave was up. That Desdemona consented to such a colossal upheaval was hard evidence that, in her heart of hearts, she knew she needed a long rest. The little boys were no problem in that world of make-believe Myron could tap at will; with so many treats, excursions and people at their beck and call, they didn’t need to badger Mommy, who could enjoy them without being bullied or dominated as she had been in Holloman.

Knowing all this, Delia could settle to her task in peace and quiet; the Shadow Women were elusive, and continued to defy analysis. Six cases considered open in only the loosest way, certainly not urgent; cases that enabled her to quit work on time every day, and count on free weekends. That was important at the moment, for Delia had made two new friends, and looked forward to her leisure hours very much.

She had met Jessica Wainfleet and Ivy Ramsbottom near Millstone Beach at the beginning of June, when they combined forces to rescue a cat stranded up a tree, yowling piteously. Of course when the creature was thoroughly satisfied that all three women had genuinely risked their necks on its behalf, it descended daintily of its own accord and vanished in a tabby blur. Jess and Ivy had laughed until they wept; Delia laughed until she had a stitch in her side. This feline practical joke had occurred very near Delia’s condo, so they had repaired to the condo to drink sherry, send out for pizza, and make mutual discoveries about each other. Jess and Ivy had been friends for years. Each lived in the region; Jess had a small house a block behind Delia, and Ivy lived in Little Busquash, a cottage on the huge grounds of Busquash Manor, the great pile atop Busquash Peninsula just to Delia’s west.

“But you outclass both of us, Delia,” said Jess with a sigh. “I’d kill to have a condo right on the beach—top floor too!”

“A bequest from a rich aunt I didn’t even know I had, some luck, and some useful relatives,” Delia said happily. “Yes, I have everything I want.”

“Except a husband?” Jess asked slyly.

“Oh, dear me, no! I don’t want a husband. I like my life as it is—except that I am in need of two new chums.”

All three women were spinsters; in America, very rare, even for lesbians. Though Delia sensed no undercurrents suggesting that, thank the Lord! It had broken up several new friendships, for Delia was conservative in her social attitudes, and disliked sex rearing its (to her) ugly, destructive head. Simply, she was one of those lucky women whose sexual urges were neither powerful nor frequent. Her self-image was of an eccentric, and she cultivated it assiduously, helped by a patrician Englishness she also made capital out of. The sooner after meeting her that people adjudged her eccentric, the better, as far as Delia was concerned.

Ivy Ramsbottom was an extremely tall woman, though not at all obese; her exact height she declined to give, but Delia put it at about Desdemona’s height, six feet three, and deemed Ivy of the same athletic bent. There the comparison faded; Ivy had curly corn-gold hair, fine features and cornflower-blue eyes. She was so well-dressed that only Gloria Silvestri eclipsed her. Her casual walk-on-the-beach-in-early-summer costume was so perfect that not even a mad scramble after a cat had mussed it.

“Clothes are my trade,” she said to Delia, manipulating her pizza slice so deftly that it wouldn’t have dared drip on her sweater. “I manage my brother’s clothing businesses.”

“What sort of clothes?” asked Delia, who adored dressing only a little less than police work.

“All varieties these days, though he started out among the forgotten women, as he calls them—women who are too tall, too fat, or disproportionate in some way. Why should they be doomed to dismal or unfashionable things? A tiny segment of one percent of women wear clothes well anyway. I can only think of Gloria Silvestri, Mrs. William Paley Jr., and the Duchess of Windsor, though a number of women can pass muster, and a few almost make it to the top. However, the majority of women look like something the cat dragged in.”

“I quite agree!” cried Delia.

“But most of all,” said Ivy, continuing, “he’s famous for his bridal gowns. I manage Rha Tanais Bridal in person.”

“Rha Tanais is your brother?” Delia asked, squeaking.

“Yes,” said Ivy, amused.

“Different name?”

“Ramsbottom is not euphonious,” Ivy said with a grin. “Gown by Ramsbottom doesn’t quite get there, somehow.”

“Gown by Rha Tanais is far more exotic.”

“And Rha Tanais is exotic,” said Jess, laughing. “But come, Delia, why should a mere purveyor of clothes be more exciting than a psychiatrist like me or a detective like you?”

“The sheer fame, no other reason. Fame is exciting.”

“I concede your point, it’s a valid one.”

Jess Wainfleet was forty-five years old, a slender woman with a good figure for clothes, since she wasn’t busty; most men would have called her attractive rather than pretty or beautiful, despite her small, fine, regular features. Her black hair was cropped very short, her make-up restrained yet flattering, and her creamy-white skin endowed her with a certain allure. Her chief glory was her eyes, dark enough to seem black, large, and doed.

By rights Delia should have met Jess somewhere along the way, but she never had, a curious omission. Dr. Jessica Wainfleet was the director of the Holloman Institute for the Criminally Insane, always called the Holloman Institute (HI) for short. It had begun 150 years earlier as a jail for dangerous criminals, and so was off the beaten track to the north of route 133, set in fifteen acres walled in by bastions thirty feet high that were surmounted at intervals by watchtowers fifteen feet higher again. Soon the locals called it the Asylum, and though from time to time efforts were made to scotch the unofficial name, it remained the Asylum. In the explosion of infrastructure building that had gone on after the Second World War it underwent extensive renovations, and now housed two separate but allied activities; one was the prison itself, tailored for incarceration of men too unstable for life in an ordinary prison, and the other was a research facility in its own building. Jess Wainfleet headed the research facility.

“Brr!” said Delia, mock-shivering. “How do you work there and stay sane yourself?”

“Most of my work is clerical,” said Jess apologetically. “I deal with lists, rosters, schedules. Interesting, however, that both of us are in a criminal field. I get scads of would-be PhDs wanting to interview this or that inmate, including a few who turn out to be journalists.” She snorted. “Why do people assume you must be a fool if you sit behind a desk?”

“Because they equate a desk with a bureaucratic mind,” said Delia, grinning, “whereas in actual fact,” she went on in casual tones, “I imagine that at this moment you’re being self-deprecating. There are some first-rate papers come out of HI—even detectives keep up with the literature on certain types among the criminally insane. Sorry, my friend, you’re found out. Lists and rosters? Rubbish! You see and follow the progress of inmates.”

Jess laughed, hands up in surrender. “I give in!”

“One of my jobs in Detectives is to chase bits of paper, I admit. Not a sexist directive, but self-appointed. I have a mind just made for statistics, plans, tabulations, the written word,” Delia said, anxious to explain. “My boss, Captain Carmine Delmonico, is another who reads, though his forte is the oversized tome. We do notice the work of places like HI, and it’s a real pleasure to meet you, Jess.”

By the end of June the three were fast friends, and agreed that when 1970 rolled around, they would go on vacation together to some alluring destination they could wrangle about for months to come. They met at least twice a week to talk about nearly everything under the sun, their favorite meeting place Delia’s condo. Little Busquash was a strenuous uphill walk for the other two, and Jess’s place, she confessed, was wall to wall papers.

Why neither Jess nor Ivy had ever married was not discussed, though Delia thought it was because they, like she, lived inside their minds. If Delia had ever questioned her own taste in clothes she might have wondered why clothes weren’t talked about either, but it simply didn’t occur to her that Jess and Ivy avoided the subject of clothes out of affection for their new pal, who they soon saw was at perfect peace with the way she dressed.

Removing the 8 × 10-inch photographs from each of six very thin files, Delia lined them up on her desk in two rows of three, one row above the other, so her eyes could take in all of them at once. Each was a studio portrait, unusual in itself; most file photos of missing persons were blow-ups of smaller, casual shots. Under ordinary circumstances the portrait artist’s name or studio would be indicated somewhere on the back of the paper: a rubber stamp, or an ink signature, or at the very least a pencil mark of some kind, But none of these photos held a clue as to its portrait artist, just an area on the back of each where a pencil mark had been erased, and never in the same spot—two were near the center, one high to the left, a random business. Paul Bachman and his team hadn’t been able to discern a residuum.

1963	TENNANT, Margot. Thirtyish. Brown hair, brown eyes. Average height and shape. 3/23 Persimmon St., Carew.
1964	WOODROW, Donna. Thirtyish. Red hair, green eyes. Average height and shape. 222c Sycamore St., Holloman.
1965	SILBERFEIN, Rebecca. Thirtyish. Fair hair, blue eyes. Average height and shape. 12th fl., Nutmeg Insurance Bldg.
1966	MORRIS, Maria. Thirtyish. Black hair, black eyes. Average height and shape. 6 Craven Lane, Science Hill, Holloman.
1967	BELL-SIMONS, Julia. Thirtyish. Blonde, blue eyes. Average height and shape. 21/18 Dominic Rd., the Valley.
1968	CARBA, Elena. Thirtyish. Peroxide blonde, brown eyes. Average height and shape. 5b Paterson Rd., North Holloman.

Apart from their average height and shape and the fact that each looked to be about thirty years old, the six missing women had little in common physically. Hair and eyes went from near-black to near-white, with red and brown thrown in—or so the studio portraits indicated. 1965’s Rebecca Silberfein was the fairest; her hair was a streaky natural flaxen blonde and her eyes so pale and washed out they looked whitish. Her nose wasn’t long, but it was broad and beaky. Maria Morris, blackish of hair and eyes, had a very olive skin and a crookedly flat nose. 1964’s Donna Woodrow had really green eyes, the color of spring leaves rather than the more usual muddy combat tinge, and her carroty hair was definitely not out of a dye bottle—no henna highlights. She had, besides, a fine crop of camouflaged freckles. None of them could be called beautiful, but none was unattractive, and none gave off a smell of the streets. The fashion of the times meant hair styles bouffant from back-combing, and heavily lipsticked mouths tended to hide their natural shape, but everyone connected with the case had reason to thank each woman’s impulse to have a fine photograph of herself in color. Only why leave it behind?

The shape of the skull was similar in all six cases, suggesting Caucasian of Celtic or Teutonic kind. Allowing for the hair, the cranium looked to be very round, the brow broad and high, the chin neither prominent nor receding. About the cheekbones it was harder to tell, due to weight differences and, probably, how many molars were missing. Sighing, Delia pushed the photos together.

Nothing was known about these six women save their names, an approximate age, faces, and their last known addresses. Notification of missing person status had been extremely slow, depending as it had upon individuals engaged in an occupation wary of creating fusses—landlords.

Delia sighed again, aware that sheer over-familiarity with the case carried its own, very special, dangers.

Starting with Mary Tennant in 1963, each case followed an identical course. Tennant had rented the top floor of an old three-family house in Persimmon Street, Carew, very early in January of that year; she signed a one-year lease and paid, in cash, her first month’s rent, her last month’s rent, and a damages deposit of $100. If she had a car it must have been randomly parked on the street, as no one knew it or was aware of its existence. As a tenant she was remarkable in only one respect: she was extremely unobtrusive. No one ever heard her music or her TV or noises of her moving around; she passed people on the stairs in silence, and never seemed to entertain visitors. The details furnished by the rental agency were scant: she had said she was a secretary, gave two written references and a driver’s license in verification, and presented so favorably in an anonymous kind of way that the agency never bothered checking. Most three-family houses saw the landlord living on the premises, but Carew was a student-resident district, so Tennant’s landlord owned fifteen three-family houses, and used his realty business as a rental agency. When July’s rent came due on the first of the month, Miss Tennant didn’t pay it, and ignored the agency’s reminders. This led to the discovery that Miss Tennant had no telephone—amazing! Several personal visits to her home by the clerk delegated to handle the affair never found Miss Tennant there, and thus matters stood when August arrived. She was now well and truly in arrears, and no one could remember seeing her since June.

The delinquency now attained a certain urgency, for early September saw the new academic year’s influx of students pour into rental agencies looking for furnished accommodations: Miss Tennant had to go, and go fast. In mid-August the realtor went to the Holloman PD and requested that he be accompanied to Miss Tennant’s apartment by a police officer, as enquiries suggested she hadn’t been seen since June, and her rent was overdue.

Missing Persons leaped to the same conclusion the Realtor had, that Miss Margot Tennant would be found inside her apartment, very dead: but such was not the case. A faint and noisome smell proved to emanate from the refrigerator, where two-month-old fish and meat were in a slow decay. Miss Tennant’s few possessions were removed from the premises and stored until garnishment proceedings saw them auctioned to pay rent and damages, the latter to the refrigerator. Said possessions were meager: a cheap radio, a black-and-white TV, a few clothes and a cigar box of imitation jewelry—no books, magazines, letters or other private papers. Thanks to the refrigerator, they didn’t fetch enough to pay what the missing Mary Tennant owed.

Each year since had seen the same pattern. Locations were scattered all over Holloman County, but the renting was always at New Year or scant days after, and June the last rent paid by the missing woman before the six-to-eight-week period leading to a report with Missing Persons. The few things in common lent the task of finding the missing women a nightmare quality because the differences only pointed up the similarities.

Missing Persons had handed the Shadow Women to Detectives and Carmine Delmonico when the third woman vanished from her studio flat on the twelfth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building; now the total had escalated to six. “Ghost” was the sobriquet of a famous case, therefore couldn’t be applied to the missing women, but Delia had suggested “Shadow” as apt, and the Shadow Women they became.

Something was going on, but what on earth could it be? The Commissioner, John Silvestri, found the case fascinating and kept tabs on it through his regular breakfast meetings with his detectives; since she was his blood niece, Delia yearned to be able to produce something brand-new to offer him, but thus far the pickings were nonexistent.

One promising hypothesis had been promulgated by Silvestri’s wife, Gloria, who was the best-dressed woman in Connecticut. She decided that each woman was having cosmetic plastic surgery, and that in her own identity she was too well known not to be hounded and embarrassed if news of the surgery leaked. So she became a Shadow Woman for six months.

“As you well know, John,” said Gloria, stroking her smooth, unscragged throat, “any woman in that predicament would die sooner than confess, even if the price is a murder hunt.”

“Yes, dear,” said the Commissioner, dark eyes twinkling.

“The cops never find any clothes worth wearing, do they?”

“No, dear.”

“Then that’s it. They’re all movie stars and socialites.”

“I appreciate your submitting your theory to me in writing, dear, but why have you signed it Maude Hathaway?”

“I like the name. Gloria Silvestri sounds like old vaudeville programs and fish on Fridays.”

Enquiries produced no professional cosmetic plastic surgeon operating in the vicinity of Holloman, though the Chubb Medical School had plastic surgeons aplenty, but attached to a famous burn unit. What Maude Hathaway’s effort said was that no stone would go unturned.

Delia had long passed beyond practical considerations. Her mind had fixed on the reason why any reasonably attractive woman in her late twenties to early thirties would voluntarily isolate herself from her fellow human beings? Not that Delia was fool enough to exclude the possibility that obedience was ensured by a hostage situation like the kidnapping of a beloved man, woman or child, but that stretched the chain laterally as well as added to its length, and the more people were involved, the greater the chances of a situation falling apart. If not a hostage situation, then a death threat of some kind? Yet wouldn’t a woman tortured by worry about a loved one have a telephone in her house? None of the Shadow Women had telephones. Was there a set of rules involved? That hinted at a genuine mania, psychopathy, an utter absence of morals, ethics, principles. Easy enough to impose for a short period, but six months of living under the rigid quasi-mathematical torture of rules was a very long time indeed unless the subject had first been exhaustively brainwashed, which seemed impossible. Had the Shadow Women been jailed for long enough to turn them into semi-zombies? No, because what people they had met had seen them as nice, conversable, ordinary. Prison left visible scars.

There was something Delia called a “gibber factor,” though only a Jess Wainfleet would fully understand what she meant by the term. To Delia, no human being was truly inviolate, meaning that he or she could not be broken. Everyone had a breaking point wherein mental torture caused the mind to snap. The human being shattered into small pieces, unable to cope. In Delia’s world, they became a “gibbering idiot”—her father’s phrase—and resigned their hold on sanity. Six months of relentless mental torture would trigger the gibber factor, Delia was sure, yet what evidence was there that the Shadow Women had spent six months under relentless mental torture? The answer: there was no evidence. Each woman, she was sure, had commenced her strange six-month isolation voluntarily, and nothing left behind in the rented premises suggested that July and early August were any different from the earlier months.

That told Delia each of them owned an average intellect; that they were satisfyingly entertained by whatever their radio and television broadcast, and that if they read at all, it was newspapers, magazines and throw-away paperbacks. If they played solitaire or dominoes or did crosswords, any evidence was gone, and that probably meant they hadn’t. Everything left behind was cheap, ordinary and uninspiring: over-the-counter medicines, supermarket cosmetics. After Mary Tennant, no perishable foods were left behind, and none of the six had left household cleaners or a stock of plastic bags. Had someone cleaned up? If so, no attention had been paid to fingerprints, for the same set was found all over each apartment, presumably the occupant’s. None was on file with any large agency—a dead end.

Plenty of people vanished for a few months, then turned up unwilling to give an explanation; Missing Persons was full of files solved that way—by the subject—and from thence were sent for permanent storage to the Holloman PD repository out on Caterby Street. But no matter how innocent a disappearance might be, the file on closure was a fat one, thanks to biographical data accumulated as the investigation ground on, always too slowly to please the relatives. Whereas the Shadow Women were thin files, devoid of biographical data; none had a past, none seemed likely to have a future. Certainly no one had ever come forward with information about any Shadow Woman, and the date was rapidly approaching for 1969’s victim to bob to the surface.

They rented at the beginning of January, paid first and last month’s rent, vanished by the end of June, and were invaded by the letting agent in mid-August, two weeks after the last month’s deposit was exhausted. Which was why Carmine had put her on the case. August. Who would 1969 be? By now every Realtor in the county was aware of the Shadow Women, and taking immense pains with the details of any rentals in early January. Two likely names had come up at the time, but neither turned out a possible candidate; whoever she was, her rental must have fallen down a crack. That was usually the way, Delia reflected. Monday the fourth day of August today, a matter of ten to fifteen days to go ….

She glanced at her watch. An hour more, and she’d scoot. The pathetic little bunch of skinny files needed their photos back inside, but suddenly she decided to take them instead to the new police artist, Hank Jones.

Then she noticed a file Carmine had withdrawn from Caterby Street, and realized that he must have left it for her to look at as well. Yes, he’d clipped a note to it that said “Our most famous Missing Persons file.” Oh, it was old! 1925. Sidetracked, Delia pulled it forward and opened it upon an 8 x 10 black-and-white head shot of a very beautiful young woman: Dr. Eleanor (Nell) Carantonio. An up and coming young anesthesiologist at the Holloman Hospital, Dr. Carantonio had failed to turn up to give a morning’s scheduled anesthetics, and was never seen again.

A haughty, white-skinned face framed by fashionably shingled black hair, with dark eyes that managed to flash fire even in the picture …. No Shadow, this! An opinion borne out by reading the forty-four-year-old file, which revealed circumstances very different from the Shadows. Dr. Nell’s profession was known, her life an open and unimpeachable book, and she was wealthy. Since she left no will, her nearest relative, a first cousin named Fenella (Nell) Carantonio, had had to wait over seven years to take possession of two million dollars and a huge mansion on the Busquash Peninsula. Eleanor—Nell. Fenella—Nell. No trace of the young woman’s body had ever been found, from 1925 to this day. Age twenty-seven when she vanished. The second Nell was nine years her junior, and her only known relative.

No help or guidance there, said Delia to herself, picked up her photos and got to her feet. Off to the ME’s air-conditioning and the artist the ME’s and PD shared. As she walked Delia continued to think about the most baffling puzzle of them all—why did the Shadow Women have studio portraits of themselves? And why had the portraits been left behind?

She was convinced the women were dead, but no bodies had ever come to light, and she had excellent reason to know that even the most bizarre methods of getting rid of bodies had been thoroughly explored. If a body were considered as over a hundred pounds of meat and fat plus some really big bones, then the disposal of that body was every killer’s worst nightmare.

Sadly (for Delia was a woman who adored flamboyance) what her case seemed to be boiling down to was rather humdrum. A killer who prowled in search of shy, retiring, very ordinary women, and, having found one, did whatever his fantasy prompted before taking her life, then managed to dispose of her invisibly. The rental of apartments was a year-round activity, and in a student town many of them were let furnished. The dates were his kinks, had nothing to do with the women. Delia was obliged to admit to herself that she was automatically drawn to the more extravagant explanations of these rare cases that made no sense. In the cold blast of air that assaulted her as she went around in ME’s revolving doors, she decided that the Shadow Women would end in a shabby, dreary manner satisfying no one. What an indictment her adjectives and adverbs were! Humdrum, shabby, dreary. Lives were being taken, and she was cataloguing the method of their taking on a scale graduated in degrees of glamour! Well, she knew why: it kept Delia the detective on her toes, whipped up energy, enthusiasm. Flippant it may be, but as a technique it worked a treat.

Ginny Toscano had attained sixty, and was retiring, which led to some quiet cop cheers; when she had started out as the police artist the work had been far more, to use her word, “civilized.” Some of what she was asked to do these days she found beyond her stomach or her talents, for the world—and her job—had changed almost out of recognition. And the very moment that a new artist was hired, Ginny used up the time until her birthday on annual leave.

The big studio and its accompanying laboratory/kitchen had been tastefully decorated in shell-pink, institution oak and off-white, but when Delia entered she found hardly a morsel of Ginny remained. I hope, thought Delia, that the poor dear is having a wonderful time in Florence!

The walls were almost completely papered in unframed posters of landscapes not from this Earth, their skies transected by sweeping curves of what looked like Saturn’s rings, or holding two suns as well as several moons, while the foregrounds were soaring multicolored crystals, or weird mountains, or erupting volcanoes, or cascades of rainbow-riddled fluid. One depicted a robot warrior mounted on a robot Tyrannosaurus rex at full trundle, and another was the famous half-buried Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes. Fabulous! thought Delia, bewitched.

In the midst of this other-worlds environment a thin young man was working on the top sheet of a slab of paper with a dark German pencil, his models clipped to the top of his architect’s table, well above the paper block: a series of photographs of Jeb Doe, with one of James Doe at either end of the row.

“Bugger!” Delia cried. “Lieutenant Goldberg beat me to it.”

He looked up, grinning. “Hi, Delia.”

“Any chance you can squeeze me in too, Hank?”

“For you, baby, I’d squeeze to death.” He put his pencil down and swiveled his high chair to face her. “Sit ye doon.”

In Delia’s estimation he had one of the most engaging faces she had ever seen—impish, happy, radiating life—and his eyes were unforgettable—greenish-yellow, large, well spaced and opened, and surrounded by long, dense black lashes. His negroidly curly hair was light red and his skin color that of a southern Chinese. His head was big but his face, delicately fine-featured, tapered from a high, wide brow to a pointed chin; a dimple was gouged in each cheek, this last a characteristic that made Delia weak at the knees. He made Delia weak at the knees—Platonic, naturally!

If it were impossible to gauge all the kinds of blood in his veins, that went doubly so for his voice, unexpectedly deep and quite lacking an accent that pinned his origins down; he didn’t roll his r’s like an American, clip his word endings like an Oxonian, drawl his a’s like an Australia, reverse his o’s and u’s like a Lancastrian, twang like a hillbilly—she could go on and on, never reaching an answer. To hear him talk was to hear traces of every accent, adding up to none. No arguments, Hank Jones bore investigating.

Delia laid out her six photographs on a vacant corner of the bench at her side; Hank wheeled over to study them closely.

“I’m not sure that I need a drawing,” she said, “as much as I need an expert opinion. The idiotic hair-do fashion makes it hard to assess the shape of the cranium in the first three, but it seems to me that it’s likely to be quite round. In fact, I came to the conclusion that if I were to go on bone structure alone, in all six cases I could be looking at the same skull, despite the differing noses, eyebrows and cheeks. Actually, I want you to shoot down one of my more potty ideas—that these six women are in fact all the same woman, someone highly skilled in the use of prostheses and stage makeup. If her true eyes were light in color, she could achieve any color with contact lenses, and wigs and hair dyes in the Sixties are a piece of cake. So tell me I’m baying at the moon, please! Shoot me down!”

His own eyes lifted from the six photographs to rest on her face thoughtfully, and with considerable affection. He didn’t know why he had taken one look at her in the parking lot and liked her so much, save that his eccentric soul recognized a partner in crime. That day she had been wearing a tie-dyed organdy dress in strident scarlet admixed with mauve and yellow; it was miniskirted at midthigh and displayed her grand piano legs clad in bright blue tights rendered queasily opalescent by the sheerness of their weave. Though in Hank’s judgment the outfit’s finishing touch was a pair of black lace-up nun’s shoes, which she told him owned both comfort and pursuit power. One day, he vowed, he would paint well enough to capture the character and lineaments of her face, from the mop of frizzy, brassy hair to the mascara-spiked lashes and the beefy nose; but how could he ever manage the mouth, so lipsticked that little streaks of red crept up into the fissures around it and made it look as if sewn shut with bloody sutures? Though she flirted with grotesquerie, she deftly avoided it by the force of her personality. Yes, she was definitely his kind of eccentric—only where did fact leave off and fantasy begin? Hank suspected that might take a long time to discover. In the meantime, the journey was going to be fun.

Today something had gotten her down. He had never seen her so dismally dressed. Wasn’t she enjoying life without the Captain?

After fifteen minutes by the clock, Hank put the photos in a pile and handed them to Delia.

“Very similar skulls, but each one is different,” he said. “I can see why you concluded they’re the same skull, so I may as well start with the matches. The ethnic group is northwestern European, with eyes set the same distance apart and near-identical orbits. Jeez, how I hate the air brush! I had to zap each one with my X-ray vision to find the true edge of the orbit, but I did, baby, I did! Eyes being the windows of the soul …. You based your same-skull hypothesis on the orbits and the zygomatic arches. But—but—the nasal bone and cartilage structure is different skull to skull—the width of the mouth—the height of the external auditory meatus—and the maxillary bone sprouting the upper teeth. The lower down the face, the more marked the differences become. Tendons and ligaments attach to their sites on the skull in highly individual ways. The differences in faces always go clear down to bone somehow. I hate to be flyin’ the Spitfire put your fuselage on the ground, honey-baby, but you are smokin’ wreckage in a Flanders field.”

He thrust his face close to hers and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Maybe I did shoot you down on the skull, but I’d swear on my collection of Blackhawk comics that the same guy snapped all the photos—he’s wall to wall idiosyncrasies with a camera.”

“Really?”

“My Captain Marvel comics too it’s the same guy, and he ain’t no professional. Good camera, no lighting but Nature.”

“No one has spotted that,” Delia said, very grateful. “We did think each woman had her portrait done by someone rather fly-by-night, but it’s a hugely over-populated field, photography, and we thought each one different enough.”

“Not in the ways that count,” Hank said positively.

“Oh, this is wonderful! It really, really helps.”

“How?” Hank asked, eager to learn.

“I won’t bore you by going on at length about how tenuous our theories have been—we’ve felt at times like dogs chasing their own tails. All that link these six disappearances are conjectures a good lawyer could demolish in a minute as wishful thinking. There are common elements: each follows the same calendar, was noticed for six months, then vanished leaving a few cheap possessions behind and the landlord out of pocket for two months’ rent. That’s it!” Delia clutched at her hair, growling. “However, Hank, there’s a smell about it that tells us the Shadow Women are linked, that foul play has been done, and that only one perpetrator is involved. In reality, they’re six entirely separate cases with no tangible evidence connecting any one of them to any other. Each woman left just one unusual thing behind—a studio portrait of herself. Hank, you’ve broken fresh ground for us, you’ve told us that the same person took all six Shadow portraits. As a lead it mightn’t go anywhere, but that’s not what’s so important about it. Its significance lies in the fact that it tells us the six cases are definitely linked, that the similarities are neither accidental nor coincidental.”

She waved the photos triumphantly. “Dear boy, you’re an absolute brick! An idiosyncratic amateur photographer, at that! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

And she was gone.

Hank stared after her for a moment, cast into the state of minor fugue Delia inspired in many. Smiling and shrugging, he wheeled his high chair back to the sloping drawing board and its slab of paper. Working on the Jeb Doe skull because his was the freshest corpse, Hank found the 6B pencil he had worn to the required slant of tip, and chuckled to himself.

From A to Z in a second, he thought: stripping the flesh off Delia’s heads to come at a skull, now laying flesh on Jeb’s skull. Man, what a cool way to earn a living! Sure beat imparting a white sparkle to teeth in an advertising agency, and how close had he come to that, huh? Who said learning anatomy from cadavers was a waste of time compared to a life class? If he hadn’t snuck into the Med School dissecting labs, he wouldn’t be here at all.