The No. 2 Global Detective (21 page)

‘Any matches on the FMP?' he asks. He is referring to the Fingerprint Matching Processor, a high-speed computer that is capable of comparing 800 fingerprints a second.

‘Chickens do not have fingerprints,' she calmly explains, thinking that these are the moments when she perhaps she ought to fire him.

‘Good point, Doc. And anyway, even if they did, there's no guarantee of a match. I mean she mightn't ever have committed a federal crime and had her ten prints taken, might she?'

The FMP is a wonderful invention, Carpaccia thinks; capable of matching a fingerprint taken at the scene of a crime with any other print ever taken by the police, but then again when did it last solve a case? She tries to imagine herself coming back from a crime scene with a smudged print, feeding it into the computer, getting a match, calling Rambouillet or someone very much like him on the cell phone and have them go over to someone's house and arrest that person. It might happen in real life, she supposes, but – she stops. She has no idea how to finish that sentence. It might take her to a very dark place. Successful, run-of-the-mill police procedure is not what Dr Carpaccia is about.

Rambouillet is explaining his own theory about these machines.

‘I call 'em RHGs,' he is saying. ‘Red Herring Generators. You use some fancy piece of machinery and it tells you some damn thing that you could have guessed anyway. That freaking wand full of sea water you're always waving around? What's it ever told you? Some guy uses soap. So what? So does everybody else, but now you're all gussied up about soap. You overlook the important things like hockey masks, chainsaws and hard-ons.'

‘Can we just go through his MO one more time?' Carpaccia calmly asks, ignoring him. ‘So we can be really gory?'

‘Right,' Rambouillet cautiously agrees. ‘Well, like last time, he probably got in through the door.'

‘She left her door unlocked?' Carpaccia incredulously asks. It was always through an open window or an open door. An open window is an open invitation, Carpaccia thinks. How soon would it be before compulsive murderers would be able to use the open window as a defence, just as molesters do with short skirts?

‘Probably open,' Rambouillet emphasisingly says. ‘Although we haven't exactly traced who “she” is yet. I've put out an APB on her and contacted the Missing Chickens Bureau but we don't have a lot to go on. Without the head, you know?'

Carpaccia nods.

‘And there is no sign of it?' she asks. ‘Or her feet or her intestine?'

Rambouillet shakes his head and leans forward to remove a notebook from his back pocket.

‘Do you have the time to speculate on what the Butcher might do with the head?' he asks.

Dr Carpaccia glances at her watch. She is a busy woman but can usually make time to speculate on such matters.

‘I think he may stab them in the eyes with school compasses,' she begins. ‘And then stop up their nostrils with a waxy substance that glitters under SEM, then put lighted matches in their ears and pluck out their tongues.'

Rambouillet takes a deep breath. He hates it when Carpaccia talks about Scanning Electron Microscopy, although he cannot really figure out why.

‘Okay,' he cautiously agrees. ‘Is this done before or after he has chopped the heads off the rest of the body?'

‘Whenever. Both. It doesn't matter.'

‘So why does he do it?'

‘Because he does not want them to see how small his penis is,' she calmly states.

This is too much for Rambouillet. He folds his notebook up with a snap.

‘Okay,' he says after a pause. ‘Back to the MO. We know that the man – and I'm assuming it is a man – whom the newspapers have come to call the Butcher, enters his victim's coop through an open door. Then he takes his victims by their feet and he hangs them from an S-hook. And then he slits their throats, right?'

‘Yes,' she answers his question. ‘With a lateral incision through which they exsanguinate.'

‘Right,' he interrupts. ‘Exsanguinate.'

‘Have we any news on the blood?' she coldly asks, trying to ignore his dig at her needless use of technical jargon. For a second the idea of having him fired flits back and forth across her mind again like a silk stocking blowing in the wind. Not that, she ought to state here and now, she has seen or heard of any such thing and is in fact puzzled by what sound such a thing might make. Nevertheless, Rambouillet admits that they have had no luck in finding the blood.

‘It could be that he lets it drain away but my guess is that he finds some sort of use for it. All we have to do when we find it is get a DNA match.'

They continue to discuss the Butcher's MO. Once the Butcher has let his victims bleed to death, he removes their feathers until they are bald and then he makes a vertical lateral cut from the pubis to the breast bone and he pulls out the intestines and the internal organs.

Dr Carpaccia stares out of the window as Rambouillet talks. The rain has come now and water is running down the outside of the window. It is dark, despite the lights.

‘… We're yet to find the intestines,' Rambouillet is saying. ‘But he puts the kidneys and the heart and the neck back into a plastic bag, which the sick badger then knots, and then he inserts the plastic bag into the cavity of the chicken.'

There seems nothing more to say for a minute and they sit in silence, comfortable with one another, thinking about the dead chicken until the phone rings.

Carpaccia picks it up and snaps into the receiver.

‘I thought I told you I was not to be disturbed?'

She is good and kind, if not a whole barrel of laughs, but she will not tolerate people of lesser importance disobeying her. The voice at the other end is given five seconds to explain why they have put a call through or else they will be bundled into the back of a car and taken to a crocodile swamp that Dr Carpaccia's Creepy Lesbian Niece keeps expressly for this purpose in Florida. The voice, high-pitched now, explains that it is the Dean of her College.

‘Which one?' Carpaccia asks, genuinely puzzled. Could it be the Dean of the University of Spectrology and Forestry, Palmer's Green, she wonders, a man whom she did not imagine to exist? When the caller is put through, she is surprised to hear a British voice on the end of the line. She had expected the usual Romanian accent. It is the Dean of Cuff College in Oxford, a college from which she was sent down for bringing adverbs back to her rooms after midnight.

‘What can I do for you, Dean?' she politely asks.

The Dean sounds almost apologetic as he explains that a murder has been committed and the killer has left a trail of clues that one of the lecturers, a man called Tom Hurst, believes links him to Richmond, Virginia.

‘I'm not in Richmond at the moment,' Carpaccia straightawayly tells the Dean. ‘So I really don't see how I can be of assistance.'

She replaces the receiver.

‘Those British,' she says. ‘They are all in denial.'

Had the Dean but known it, he had called at a bad time in Anglo-Carpaccian relations. Carpaccia's proof that the Second World War was really won by Dick Van Dyke disguised as Winston Churchill has been critically mauled by
The Times
of London. There is an urgent knock at the door and the Mexican woman, who has removed her mask and goggles, but is still wearing her scrubs, which is something that Dr Carpaccia would never do, puts her head round the corner of the door. She addresses Dr Carpaccia.

‘Dr Crapaccia,' she irritatingly and quite incorrectly states. ‘You had better come quick. There is a problem with the evidence in the walk-in fridge.'

Carpaccia and Rambouillet exchange glances. This has a familiar ring. They get up from their chairs and follow the Mexican woman, whose name Carpaccia thinks is Carmen, down the corridor to the cooking suite.

The Mexican woman is flustered. When they reach one of the three walk-in fridges she cannot speak very clearly and jabbers in a strange foreign language.

‘Calm down,' Rambouillet aggressively snaps. Carpaccia thinks that she would not talk to staff so rudely and once again she wonders about firing him.

‘What is wrong, Carmen?' she most non-aggressively asks, and she slaps the woman across her cheek with the back of her right hand. The ploy works and the woman calms down almost at once.

Carmen, whose name is really Juanita, explains something about someone mixing up the evidence tags so that the evidence bag that she has just placed in the walk-in fridge, which included the sell-by date label of the chicken on the gurney, now reads as if it were placed in the walk-in fridge some time last week. Getting the labels mixed up can happen, but it is a complicated and uninvolving process and all that you really need to know is that it happened and that Carpaccia and Rambouillet and the others can no longer be sure that the chicken in the OVEN is not past its sell-by date.

This in itself is not so bad, but if it leaks out to the newspapers that this sort of thing is happening in her suite, it might cause a scandal and unfairly bring Dr Carpaccia down from her position at the top of the heap, which is always vulnerable because she is a woman and some people would stop at nothing to see her fired. Someone somewhere might even wish to ruin Dr Carpaccia's career and reputation.

So the real problem is that this someone may have switched the labels deliberately and Dr Carpaccia ought to find out who this person is, and why they did it, or her tenure as chief might well be curtailed.

‘May I see the tag label?' Dr Carpaccia is politely asking Juanita. Juanita turns and leads her and Detective Rambouillet into the walk-in fridge in order to show them the tag label, but once they are inside the walk-in fridge, in which there is enough space for three people to stand quite comfortably, Juanita looks stunned as she stares at a gap in the shelves.

Along the walls glass shelving is fronted with white plastic covering and on the shelves are various tins and jars and plastic evidence bags. Overhead a fluorescent light buzzes and against one wall is a blue filament designed to lure flies to their death.

‘Oh, Dr Crapaccia,' she wails with a trembling finger outpointing. ‘The evidence! He is gone! Someone must have stolen him! Aiyeee! All is lost.'

Once again Carpaccia slaps the Mexican lady and this calms both of them down somewhat.

‘Have you seen anyone in the suite apart from Detective Rambouillet or myself?' she calmly asks the weeping illegal immigrant. Juanita shakes her head and continues to sob. Carpaccia instinctively knows that they will get no more information out of her.

‘I left the room,' Juanita is telling Detective Rambouillet, ‘to go to the little girls' room for a minute. When I came back the window was open.'

She points across the suite to where a window has been opened. Immediately Rambouillet makes a call on his cell phone.

‘Secure the perimeter,' he snaps. ‘Don't let anyone in or out unless I say so.'

He turns to Carpaccia.

‘Let's go check the security cameras.'

As they walk down the corridor towards the basement and the communications room, their steps ringing on the tiled floor, it occurs to Carpaccia that the confusion over the tagging of the evidence might have worked in their favour. Whoever had broken into the walk-in fridge had taken the wrong evidence. All Carpaccia had to do was find the right evidence. It must carry powerful clues to be worth the risk of breaking in and stealing it. Juanita's mistake had effectively saved a crucial piece of evidence, although this piece of good luck would not save her, since Carpaccia had already signed her cards and the Immigration Service would be stopping by to take her away in the back of a white flat-bed Ford even before her enchiladas hit the plate that evening.

Rambouillet stops and taps a series of numbers into an electronic access pad set at chest height in the beige-painted cinderblock wall. A red light blinks green and there is the sound of a bolt being withdrawn. Rambouillet opens the door. Inside is the communications centre that Dr Carpaccia's Creepy Lesbian Niece has devised. It cost more than a successful moonshot, but it allows
CSI: Miami
to be shown in every room in the Facility.

In addition, it has the most advanced centrally managed PC-based hyperthreading CPU Windows Embedded XP real-time multi-tasking intruder detection operation system in the world. Nothing moves in the Facility without being logged, recorded and, in most circumstances, terminated with extreme prejudice thanks to the banks of M18 Claymore landmines that are sewn through the Facility's acreage like contour lines on a map of the Rockies.

A man is sitting alone in a darkened section of the room. He is working the mouse of a computer and in front of him is a bank of twelve 22” flat liquid-crystal screens, the picture on each changing apparently at random. The view is somewhat monotonous, however. Although Dr Carpaccia is a nurturing person, who loves plants and gardens and especially hibiscus trees, and who loves it when neighbours pop in unannounced, she is also the sort of person who understands the need for basic security. This is why the land for a range of three miles around the Facility has been converted into a desert in which it is unsafe to walk for mines and pits with spikes at the bottom tipped with Ebola plague and HIV/AIDS and H5N1. Beyond that is a five-metre-high electrified fence. Security is also the reason Carpaccia never travels anywhere but by submarine. She is not interested in letting anyone know what type of submarine she drives, but it is expensive, anonymous and, above all, subtle.

Be that as it may, Rambouillet does not like the look of the man in front of the screens and has a word with him.

‘Yo! Douche bag!' he calls. ‘Show some respect, huh?'

The man looks up. He is surprised to see Dr Carpaccia in this glamourless part of the building and he jumps to his feet. He is visibly sweating and even from the door Rambouillet can smell the sickly-sweet stench of pineapple.