Naked Cruelty (35 page)

“What have I done wrong?” he asked Patrick O'Donnell later.

The blue eyes twinkled. “Nothing, cuz, nothing! You've hit a patch of doldrums, is all. Until the wind fills your sails again, you just have to sit becalmed.”

“I wouldn't mind, except that I'm missing something, Patsy. Every time I think I've sunk my teeth into the Dodo, a distraction intrudes—Vasquez with some new scheme, or John in need of yet another report, or, or, or!” Carmine said passionately.

“I know the feeling. Now that I'm fifty-seven, John wants to know whether I'm going for retirement at sixty or sixty-five—how the hell do I know yet? A lot depends on Ness, whether she retires at sixty. We're the same age, our kids are grown and off our hands—work fills our lives, damn it!”

Carmine knew that his cousin's decision rested ultimately on whether he felt the empire he had built was built on solid foundations. When he had begun as Medical Examiner, forensics were virtually non-existent; now it occupied more floor space and staff than necrology, and more of his time too. And it kept expanding as new discoveries were made. Had Patsy prepared for them sufficiently? Would sixty-five be better?

“How's Desdemona?” Patrick asked.

“Recovering from the depression, but now she's got a new bogey—sons and guns,” Carmine said.

“Oh, that one! Maybe you should send her to talk to Ness. Even primary school has its share of gun worries, but they have to be put into perspective. There's a huge cultural gap too.”

“Tell me something I don't know! But actually it's not Desdemona worrying me as much as my detectives. When a man eats his gun, it's the culmination of a whole slew of problems that ought never to have been allowed get that far. Or that big. Any fool can see that, yet Corey refuses to—and he's no fool! I can't trust him to see what's under his nose in foot-high letters.”

Patrick opened a filing cabinet drawer and removed a full bottle. 200ml beakers made great glasses, there was a carboy of distilled water, and every laboratory had an ice machine.

“The sun's been over the yard arm for hours, and John does not rule here. You've been in that uniform for days, so don't refuse me.” He put a clinking beaker in Carmine's hand.

“I have no intention of refusing. Cheers!”

“Cheers! The trouble with Corey, cuz, is that the canker eating at him you can't remove—Maureen the snake, Maureen the scorpion. I hear he was reprimanded.”

“Rumor does not lie. Unfortunately Maureen was planning on a move to police captain some place other than Holloman. Well, the reprimand kills any hope of that, which is good for Corey.”

“I agree. He couldn't thrive out of his home town. Is he cooking any more reprimands?”

“It depends whose side you want to take in his little team war. Buzz Genovese says there are still weapons at Taft High, but Corey is adamant there aren't. I gave Corey Nick Jefferson and Delia, but he wouldn't use them until I told him in person. He thinks I've planted them as spies.”

“Jesus, he's paranoid! As if you'd ever do that. You're quite capable of doing your own dirty work.” Patrick put his beaker down. “Corey has to go, Carmine, you realize that. He's running a personal agenda and sees you as his enemy.”

“I know, but I haven't worked out how to do it. Nor, more importantly has the Commissioner. We won't lose another man by a cop suicide, but there are other ways. Corey's not capable of looking after his men properly.”

“Have you talked to John about it?”

“Only briefly.”

“Time to sit down with John and get it all out in the open, cuz. If anyone has a solution, it will be John Silvestri.”

“I can't be sure how he'll react, Patsy. He might jump too brutally. He's capable of great mercy and sympathy, but also of putting a man's head on the chopping block.”

“When he decapitates, the circumstances are different. Corey is a seventeen-year veteran who's spent his whole cop career in the Holloman PD. The mercy and sympathy will be there. He knows dear sweet Maureen, just like the rest of us. Nasty bitch!”

“I guess you're right.” Carmine drained his beaker and stood. “Thanks, Patsy. I'll lay everything out for John scrupulously.”

***

On his way across the building, Carmine looked at his watch. Six o'clock. Too late for Desdemona to salvage her dinner, but early enough to put parts of it in the refrigerator. He disliked destroying her work, but he had a job to do that couldn't wait.

She behaved, as always, like the perfect policeman's wife. “Never mind, my love,” she said over the phone, “it was only a beef roast. Prunella and I will have some tonight, and the rest can go into a shepherd's pie tomorrow. What flavor would you like the minced beef to have? Curry? Italian? Plain old Limey? I'd top a curry or an Italian one with risotto, an English one with mashed potatoes.”

“English,” he said promptly. “How's the kids?”

“Like runner beans—I can almost see them growing. Oh, I do hope they don't shoot to seven feet!”

“So do I. That means custom-made beds, mattresses, sheets, blankets, watching for round shoulders and sway backs—”

“Carmine, stop! They might inherit their height from you.”

“Well, we're not short. I'm five-eleven, my pa was six-one, and the Ceruttis are taller than the Delmonicos. Whether you like it or not, wife, our sons will play basketball.”

“Rather that than American football! Wake me up when you come to bed, please.”

And that was that. He phoned Malvolio's and got Luigi.

“Do you ever go home, Luigi?” he asked, suddenly curious.

“Home is Malvolio's. I live upstairs anyway.”

“Jesus! How long have I known you?”

“Um … 1950 or thereabouts, Carmine.”

“So it's only taken me eighteen years to learn that you live upstairs. Any family?”

“Four boys, all in the armed services.”

“And the wife?”

“Took off with a sailor in 1944.”

“So you raised your boys alone.”

“The family helped.”

“I don't even know your last name!”

“Silvestri. What can I do you for, Captain?”

“Is there someone can bring me over meat loaf and rice pudding in about an hour, Luigi?”

“Sure thing. I got some juicy shrimps, want a cocktail?”

“Why not?”

He fetched all the relevant files—and some that only he felt were relevant—and put them on his table. The only way to tackle the case of
Didus ineptus
was to go through it from its beginning to its present end in the peace of a deserted office. After a pensive look at the number of files and the area of his table, he went to Stella Pulaski's office and took the two folding banquet tables stored behind her door. Once they were up, he decided he had sufficient room, and began the business of distributing the files widely separated enough to allow their contents space if they needed laying out. The last series of interviews Delia and Helen had conducted with the victims went into each victim's pile.

Then he proceeded to break the files up: uniformed reports, detective reports, witness reports, victim reports. By the time that he was satisfied that everything was arranged according to his needs, Minnie arrived with his dinner, which went on to his formal desk together with a giant thermos of Luigi's coffee.

He sat and ate—Luigi was right, the shrimps were juicy—until the plates were clean, then sent them back to Malvolio's in the custody of a desk cop. Under Danny Marciano, it would have simply happened; under Fernando Vasquez, he had to fill in a form explaining why he had used a uniformed cop as a personal servant. Jesus, how he hated the bureaucratic mentality! An imp whispered that he should fill out a form explaining why he'd ordered a uniform to shine his shoes, but he pushed the little devil away; he was too busy for pranks.

Stomach full, coffee mug steaming, he started work.

Considering that the first inkling the police had of the Dodo's existence was the rape of Maggie Drummond on Tuesday, September 24, and it was now Tuesday, November 19, Carmine realized that at no time had he been free to examine the case from its actual start on March 3 until this moment. But after tonight, that would change; he would have the Dodo at his fingertips. Even as he worked it nagged at Carmine that if the Dodo switched to two weeks, tomorrow they would have another victim, and she would be dead. Yet he couldn't seriously think that: the Dodo might tell himself that nothing temporal ruled his forays, but three weeks did.

Shirley Constable, the first victim, on March 3, a Sunday. An embryonic Dodo, not even named because she had been so terrified that she hadn't even remembered his notice. But in her last interview, after some weeks of treatment, she had told Liz Meyers that the man definitely wasn't Mason Novak. The Dodo's touch was alien. Mercedes Mendes, ten weeks later, on Monday, May 13. Even after weeks of therapy she maintained she had no boyfriend; Dr. Meyers had elicited an unknown fact about her that solved the puzzle. Mercedes was a lesbian. Leonie Coustain, raped on Tuesday, June 25, which was six weeks after Mercedes. The Dodo was growing into his final shape, gaining confidence. From then on his intervals were roughly three weeks; Esther Dubrowski on Tuesday, July 16, Marilyn Smith on Tuesday, August 6, Natalie Goldfarb on Friday, August 30, Maggie Drummond on Tuesday, September 24, Melantha Green on Tuesday, October 15, and the attempt on Catherine dos Santos on Tuesday, November 5. Why with some victims he had varied by a few days Carmine couldn't begin to fathom. Personality traits, linked as they always were to career choices and life styles, were as varied as ethnic backgrounds, religions, family histories. Two were religiously motivated virgins, two were lesbians, the rest had fairly active sex lives without sleeping around. If they had anything in common, it was a professional career; apparently the Dodo was not drawn to women in menial jobs. All were strong personalities, if very different, and it occurred to Carmine that the Dodo harbored a degree of hatred for outgoing, independent professional women. Had he been publicly laughed at by one such? The first of his victims, for instance? The pre-rape Shirley Constable had been noted for her outspoken frankness. She had “caught” a much wanted fish, Mason Novak, who hadn't looked at another woman since they became an item, but she was one of Carmine's two religiously motivated virgins—a wedding ring came before sex.

Easy to see why Maggie Drummond was his last living victim; she had flipped him a more insulting bird than a dodo when she survived her rape unintimidated, despite its new horrors—his fist, the asphyxiations.

The Dodo murdered Melantha Green. She had a boyfriend steady enough to be gifted with a key to her apartment, and apparently enjoyed a safe, comfortable relationship with a fellow black in medicine. Why had the Dodo chosen her for his first killing? Her blackness? No, somehow that didn't fit. The Dodo did nothing unreasonable according to his lights. What was unique about her?

Catherine dos Santos was not a virgin, she had admitted, though she didn't indulge in sex regularly. Maybe she would qualify as a nun-like person, but only so far. She hadn't put up the bars on her windows, but she had hailed them in delight when she was looking for a place to live. Why was a mystery, but Carmine felt that a part at least of her defenses—the sirens, definitely—contained an element of the practical joke. She had been dying to try her sirens out! Well, they had done their job. That she had been spared the Dodo's attentions had to be attributed to her own ingenuity; the police had done nothing to help her, any more than had the abominable Hochners.

All of which, he decided at midnight, stretching painfully, pointed to a part of a motive for
Didus ineptus:
he intended to ruin the happiness and contentment of a number of professional women who irked him more than most of the breed. What Carmine couldn't come to grips with was the exact nature of the Dodo's sexual motives. No victim had been cut, hacked, mutilated, burned or endured the tortures usually inflicted by the multiple offender. He bruised, and with numbers seven and eight, he had used a rope, probably of human hair, to asphyxiate. If he wasn't caught, would he progress to other forms of torture? Carmine didn't think so.

Accepted thinking had it that rapists who murdered preyed on prostitutes because such crimes went almost unnoticed: who misses a whore? Whereas the Dodo preyed on women who were noticed. Nine women thus far, and we didn't know about him until the seventh.

What if this kind of predator is common? Police notice boards are full of the pictures of missing young women, pretty, from good families, pursuing careers. What if a number of them can be traced to a horrifying death at the hands of a raping killer? I am looking, Carmine thought, at the tip of an iceberg.

Our Dodo knows every single one of his victims, but whatever his victims do to be entered on his list, no one save he knows. At first raping them was enough; he used them, abused them, and left them emotionally handicapped for life. Until Maggie Drummond spoke out, exposed him. My two women, Delia and Helen, brought in Dr. Liz Meyers and the rape clinic, and now he sees the damage he inflicted start to heal. But no one can heal a dead victim, so he moved up and on to murder.