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“Raped to death, like Margaretta. What I don’t know is if their new ultimate tool is deliberately designed to kill, or whether they would prefer it did its job more slowly — over, say, several assaults with it. As soon as Faith died they put her in a freezer, but not a household job. More like a supermarket one. It’s long enough to fit Margaretta flat out, and wide enough that both girls were positioned in it with their arms extended away from their bodies and their legs somewhat apart. They dressed both girls after they were hard as rocks. Faith’s panties were modest, but lilac instead of pink. Bare feet, bare hands. Faith has two misshapen toes from an old break, left foot. That will make her easy to identify if her family ever comes out of its furor.”

“Do you think the same person made both dresses?” Silvestri asked. “I mean, they’re different yet the same.”

“I’m no expert on party dresses. I think Carmine’s lady should look at them and tell us,” Patrick said with a wink.

Carmine flushed. So it’s that obvious, is it? So what if it is, anyway? It’s a free country, and I’ll just have to hope that we never need Desdemona’s testimony to nail these sons of bitches. A police lawyer would tell me that Desdemona is the most serious mistake I’ve made on this case, but I’m prepared to go with my gut instinct that she’s irrelevant, despite the attempt on her life. Love wouldn’t cause me to lose my cop instincts. God, but I love her! When she appeared on my balcony I knew in a second that she meant more to me than I do. She’s the light of my entire existence.

“Have you had any joy tracing the pink dress, Carmine?” Danny Marciano asked.

“No, none. I’ve had someone check in every store that sells kids’ dresses from one end of the state to the other, but hundred-dollar-plus party dresses seem too rich for Connecticut tastes. And that’s weird, considering that Connecticut has some of the wealthiest areas in the whole nation.”

“Wealthy mothers of little girls spend their lives driving their Caddies from one shopping center to another,” Silvestri said. “They go to Filene’s in Boston, for Chrissake! And Manhattan.”

“Point taken,” said Carmine with a grin. “We’re examining Yellow Pages from Maine to Washington, D.C. Who’s for a stack of hotcakes with bacon and syrup next door?”

At least he’s eating again, thought Patrick, nodding his consent to this plan. God knows what he sees in that Limey woman, but his ex-wife she ain’t. He’s not hooked on a looker for the second time, though the more I see of her, the less I think of her as downright unattractive. One thing for sure, she has a brain and she knows how to use it. That’s bound to entrance a man like Carmine.

“Lieutenant, for three years I’ve lived in hell,” she said, moving around with a spring in her walk. “After he had that massive heart attack, Addison became convinced that he was living on borrowed time.
So afraid!
The jogging, nothing but raw fruit and vegetables — I’d drive all the way to Rhode Island to find a piece of fish he wouldn’t reject. He was positive that a shock would kill him, so he’d go to any lengths to avoid a shock. Then this morning he finds that poor little girl, and he’s shocked — really shocked. But he doesn’t even feel a twinge, let alone die.” Eyes twinkling, she jigged. “We’ve returned to a normal life.”

Having no idea that Addison Forbes harbored homicidal fantasies about his wife, Carmine left after another walk around the property thinking that it was indeed an ill wind blew nobody any good. Dr. Addison Forbes would be a much happier man — at least until Roger Parson Junior’s lawyers found a challengeable clause in Uncle William’s will. Was it a part of the Ghosts’ scheme to destroy the Hug as well as beautiful young girls? And if it was, why? Could it be that in destroying the Hug, they were really destroying Professor Robert Mordent Smith? If so, then they were well along the road to success. And whereabouts did Desdemona fit? He had spent their breakfast together grilling her in true, remorseless police fashion: had she seen something she’d buried below all conscious memory, had she been walking some street when a girl had been abducted, had someone at the Hug said something inappropriate to her, had anything unusual entered the tenor of her days? To all of which, bearing his questions patiently, even taking the time to puzzle over them, she returned firm negatives.

“It’s highly inconvenient,” said Dr. Nur Chandra, speaking to Carmine in his imposing library, “but necessary, Lieutenant. The Hug was perfect for my needs, even to — and including — Cecil.”

“Then why go?” Carmine asked.

Chandra looked scornful. “Oh, come, my good man, surely you can see that the Hug is past tense? Robert Smith won’t return, and I am told that the Parson Governors are seeking a way out of financing the Hug. So I would rather go now, while things are in flux, than wait until I have to step over yet more bodies. I need to get out while this monster is still killing, so that I am quite removed from suspicion. For you won’t catch him, Lieutenant.”

“That sounds good and logical, Dr. Chandra, but I suspect that the real reason you’re anxious to hustle yourself off right now concerns your monkeys. Your chances of taking them with you in the middle of the present chaos is much higher than after the Hug’s situation occupies more Parson attention than a will. You are, in effect, making off with close to a million dollars in Hug property, however your contract may be worded.”

“Oh, very shrewd, Lieutenant!” Chandra said appreciatively. “That is precisely why I am leaving now. Once I am gone and my macaques gone with me, it will be a fait accompli. Disentangling the situation, legally and logistically, would be hideous.”

“Are the macaques still at the Hug?”

“No, they’re here in temporary quarters. With Cecil Potter.”

“And when are you leaving for Massachusetts?”

“Things are already in motion. I myself will go on Friday with my wife and children. Cecil and the macaques go tomorrow.”

“I hear you’ve bought a nice place outside Boston.”

“Yes. Very much like this, actually.”

In walked Surina Chandra clad in a scarlet sari encrusted with embroidery and gold thread, her arms, neck and hair blazing with jewels. Behind her were two little girls about seven years of age — twins, Carmine thought, astonished at their beauty. But the emotion was gone in a second as his eyes took in their apparel. Matching dresses of lace covered in rhinestones, with stiff, full skirts and little puffed sleeves. Both an ethereal ice-green.

Somehow he got through the introductions. The girls, Leela and Nuru, were indeed twins; demure souls with enormous black eyes and black hair in braids as thick as hawsers straying over their shoulders. Like their mother, they smelled of some eastern perfume Carmine couldn’t like — musky, heavy, tropical. They had diamonds in their earlobes that left the rhinestones for dead.

“I love your dresses,” he said to the twins, hunkering down to their level without approaching them too closely.

“Yes, they are pretty,” said their mother. “It’s difficult to find this sort of children’s wear in America. Of course they have lots sent from home, but when we saw these, they appealed.”

“If it isn’t a rude question, Mrs. Chandra, where did you find the dresses?”

“In a mall not far from where we’re going to live. A lovely shop for girls, better than any I’ve found in Connecticut.”

“Can you tell me where the mall is?”

“Oh, dear, I’m afraid not. They all look much the same to me, and I don’t know the area yet.”

“I don’t suppose you remember the name of the store, then?”

She laughed, white teeth flashing. “Having been brought up on J. M. Barrie and Kenneth Graham, of course I do! Tinker Bell.”

And off they drifted, the twins waving back at him shyly.

“My children have taken a fancy to you,” said Chandra.

Nice, but unimportant. “May I use your phone, Doctor?”

“Certainly, Lieutenant. I’ll leave you in private.”

You sure can’t fault them on manners, even if their ethics are different, Carmine thought as he dialed Marciano, his fingers trembling.

“I know where the dresses come from,” he said without preamble. “Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell, two words. There’s one in a mall outside Boston, but there may be others. Start looking.”

“White Plains. It’s closer unless they live near the Mass border. That’s possible, of course.”

“Then Abe can go to Boston tomorrow, while I take White Plains. Jesus, Danny, we’ve got a break at last!”

He entered with as much confidence as he could muster, looking — and feeling — utterly incongruous. Apparently he had a neon sign on his forehead blinking
COP
on and off, as women moved quickly away from him and the store assistants started to huddle.

“May I see the manager, please?” he asked one hapless girl who didn’t make the huddle in time.

Oh, good, they could remove him from the floor! The girl led him immediately to the back of the merchandise and knocked on an unmarked door.

Mrs. Giselle Dobchik ushered him into a tiny cubicle stuffed with cardboard boxes and filing cabinets; a safe sat to one side of a table that served as Mrs. Dobchik’s desk, but there was no room for a visitor’s chair. Her response to the sight of his badge was unruffled interest; but then, Mrs. Dobchik struck him as the kind whom little ruffled. Mid-forties, very well dressed, blonde hair, red-varnished nails not long enough to snag the goods.

“Do you recognize this, ma’am?” he asked, removing the shell-pink lace dress Margaretta had worn from his briefcase. Out came Faith’s lilac dress. “Or this?”

“Almost certainly Tinker Bells,” she said, beginning to feel the inside seams, and frowning. “Our labels have been removed, but yes, I can assure you that they’re genuine Tinker Bells. We have special tricks with the beading.”

“I don’t suppose you know who bought them?”

“Any number of people, Lieutenant. They’re both size tens — that is, for girls between ten and twelve years of age. Once past twelve, a girl tends to want to look more like Annette Funicello than a fairy. We always have one of each model and color in each size in stock, but two is a strain. Here, come with me.”

Following her out of her office and over to a large area of glittery, frilly party dresses on dozens of long racks, Carmine understood what she meant when she said two the same size and type was a strain; there must have been upward of two thousand dresses in hues from white to dark red, all picked out in rhinestones or pearls or opalescent beads.

“Six sizes from three years to twelve years, twenty different models, and twenty different colors,” she said. “We’re famous for these dresses, you see — they walk out as fast as we can get them in.” A laugh. “After all, we can’t have two girls in the same model and color at the same party! Wearing a Tinker Bell is a sign of social status. Ask any Westchester County mom or child. The cachet extends into Connecticut — quite a few of our clients drive in from Fairfield or Litchfield Counties.”

“If I may collect my dresses and briefcase, Mrs. Dobchik, could I buy you some lunch? A cup of coffee? I feel like a bull in a china shop here, and I can’t be good for business.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate the break,” said Mrs. Dobchik.

“What you said about two girls wearing the same Tinker Bell to the same party leads me to assume that you do keep fairly detailed records,” he said, sucking at a chocolate malted through a straw — too much kid stuff.

“Oh, yes, we have to. It’s just that both the models you’ve shown me have been perennials for some years, so we’ve sold a big bunch of them. The pink lace has been out now for five years, the lilac one for four. Your samples have been so abused that it’s not possible to tell exactly when they were made.”

“Whereabouts are they made?”

She nibbled on a cruller, clearly enjoying her role as an expert.

“We have a small factory in Worcester, Mass. My sister runs Boston, I run White Plains, our brother runs the factory. A family business — we’re the sole owners.”

“Do men ever come in to buy?”

“Sometimes, Lieutenant, but on the whole Tinker Bell clients are women. Men may buy lingerie for their wives, but they usually avoid buying party dresses for their daughters.”

“Would you ever sell two dresses in the same size and color to the same buyer on the same day? Like, for twins?”

“Yes, it does happen, but it involves a wait of a day for us to get in the second dress. Women with twins order in advance.”

“What about someone’s buying, say, my pink lace and my lilac whatever-it-is —”

“Broderie Anglaise,” she interrupted.

“Thanks, I’ll write that down. Would someone buy two models in different colors in the same size on the same day?”

“Only once,” she said, and sighed in reminiscent pleasure. “Oh, what a sale that was! Twelve dresses in the ten-to-twelve size, each one a different model and color.”

The hair on Carmine’s neck stood up. “When?”

“Toward the end of 1963, I think it was. I can look it up.”

“Before we go back and I get you to do that, Mrs. Dobchik, do you remember who this buyer was? What she looked like?”

“I remember very well,” said the perfect witness. “Not her
name
— she paid cash. But she was in the grandmother age group. About fifty-five. Wore a sable coat and a snappy sable hat, had blue-rinsed hair, good but not overdone make-up, big nose, blue eyes, elegant bifocal glasses, a pleasant speaking voice. Her bag and shoes were matching Charles Jourdan, and she wore longish kid gloves in sable brown like the shoes and bag. A uniformed chauffeur carried all the boxes out to her limo. It was a black Lincoln.”

“Doesn’t sound as if she needed food stamps.”

“Heavens to Betsy, no! It remains the biggest single sale in party dresses we’ve ever had. One-fifty each, eighteen hundred bucks. She peeled hundred-dollar bills off a two-inch stack.”

“Did you happen to ask her why she was buying so many party dresses in the same size?”

“Sure I did — who wouldn’t? She smiled and said she was the local representative of a charity organization that was sending the dresses to an orphanage in Buffalo for Christmas gifts.”

“Did you believe her?”

Giselle Dobchik grinned. “It’s just as believable as buying twelve dresses in the same size, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

They returned to Tinker Bell, where Mrs. Dobchik produced her record of the sale. No name, cash tendered.

“You took the numbers of the bills,” Carmine said. “Why?”

“There was a counterfeit scare at the time, so I checked with my bank while the girls were boxing everything up.”

“And they weren’t counterfeit?”

“No, they were the real McCoy, but the bank was interested in them because they’d been issued in 1933 right after we went off the gold standard, and were in near-mint condition.” Mrs. Dobchik shrugged. “Ask me did I care? They were legal tender. My bank manager thought they’d been hoarded.”

Carmine scanned the list of eighteen numbers. “I agree. They’re consecutive. Very unusual, but no help to me.”

“Is this a part of some big, exciting case?” Mrs. Dobchik asked, walking him to the door.

“Afraid not, ma’am. Another hundred-dollar bill scare.”