On Off (3 page)

“Well nourished, a part-colored female about sixteen years of age,” Patrick said. “He plucked the mons Veneris before introducing the first of several implements — might be dildoes, might be penis sheaths — hard to tell. She’s been raped many times by increasingly larger objects, but I doubt she died of that. There’s so little blood in what we have of the body that I suspect she was bled out the way you would an animal for slaughter on a farm. No arms or hands, no legs or feet, and no head. These two pieces have been scrupulously washed. Thus far I’ve found no traces of semen, but there’s so much contusion and swelling up there — she’s been anally raped too — that I’ll need a microscope. My personal bet is that there will be no semen. He’s gloved and probably uses his sheaths as condoms. If he comes at all.”

The girl’s skin was that lovely color called café au lait, despite its bleached bloodlessness. Her hips swelled, her waist was small, her breasts beautiful. As far as Carmine could see, she bore no insults outside the pubic area — no bruises, slashes, cuts, bites, burns. But without the arms and legs, there was no way to tell if or how she had been tied down.

“She looks like a child to me,” he said. “Not a big girl.”

“I’d say about five-one, tops. The second most interesting thing,” Patrick went on, “is that the dismemberment has been done by a real professional. One sweep with something like a fileting knife or a postmortem scalpel, and look at the thigh and shoulder joints — disarticulation without force or trauma.” He pulled the two sections of torso apart. “The transverse section was done just below the diaphragm. The cardia of the stomach has been ligated to prevent leakage of the contents, and the esophagus has been ligated too. Disarticulation of the spinal column is just as professional as the joints. No blood in the aorta or the vena cava. However,” he said, pointing to the neck, “her throat was cut some hours before he removed her head. Jugulars incised, but not carotids. She would have bled out slowly, no spurting. Hung upside down, of course. When he took her head, he separated it at the C-4 to C-5 junction of the spine, which gave him a small amount of neck as well as the entire skull.”

“I wish we had the arms and legs at least, Patsy.”

“So do I, but I suspect they went into the fridge yesterday, together with the head.”

Carmine spoke so positively that Patrick jumped. “Oh, no! He’s still got her head. He won’t part with that.”

“Carmine! That kind of thing doesn’t happen! Or if it does, it’s some maniac west of the Rockies. This is Connecticut!”

“He’s still got the head, no matter where he comes from.”

“I’d say he works at the Hug, or if not at the Hug, then at some other part of the medical school,” Patrick said.

“A butcher? A slaughterman?”

“Possible.”

“You said, the second most important thing, Patsy. What’s the first?”

“Here.” Patrick turned the lower torso over and pointed to the right buttock, where a heart-shaped scab about an inch long showed dark and crusted against the flawless skin. “At first I thought he had cut it there on purpose — heart, love, that kind of thing. But he made no template incision around the edge. It’s simply one neat transverse slice, the way I’ve seen a knife man slice off a woman’s nipple. So I wondered if she’d had a nevus there, a birthmark raised well above the surface of the skin.”

“Something that offended him, destroyed her perfection,” said Carmine thoughtfully. “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t know she had it until he got her to wherever he did his nasty things to her. Depends if he picked her up or knew her previously. Any idea about her racial background?”

“No idea, other than that she’s more Caucasian than anything else. Some Negroid or Mongoloid blood, or both.”

“Are you picking that she’s a prostitute?”

“Without arms to look for needle tracks, Carmine, difficult, but this girl is — I don’t know,
healthy
looking. I’d search the Missing Persons files.”

“Oh, I intend to,” said Carmine, and went back to the Hug.

“What makes the job so good?” Carmine asked, aware that his belly was rumbling. Everyone at the Hug had been fed, but thus far Carmine had missed out on breakfast
and
lunch.

“I’m the boss,” Cecil said. “When I worked over in P.P. I was just one more shit shoveler. At the Hug, animal care is mine. I like it, specially ’cos we got the monkeys. Dr. Chandra — they his, really — knows I am the best monkey man on the east coast, so he leaves them to me. I even get to put them in the chair for their sessions. They crazy about their sessions.”

“Don’t they like Dr. Chandra?” Carmine asked.

“Oh, sure, they like him fine. But me, they love.”

“Do you ever empty the refrigerator, Cecil?”

“Sometimes, not much. If Otis goes on vacation, we hire a man off of P.P.’s plant physical reserves. Otis don’t work this floor with me much — he the upstairs man. Gets to change the lightbulbs an’ dispose of the hazardous waste too. I can mostly manage this floor’s animal care on my own, ’cept for bringing the cages up an’ down from the other floors. Our animals get clean cages Mondays through Fridays.”

“They must hate the weekends,” said Carmine solemnly. “If Otis doesn’t work with you much, how do you clean the cages?”

“See that door there, Lieutenant? Goes to our cage washer. Automated like a fancy car wash, but better. The Hug got everything, man, everything.”

“Getting back to the refrigerator. When you do empty it, Cecil, what size are the bags? Is it strange to see bags as big as the — er —?”

Cecil thought, his fine head to one side, the monkey seizing the chance to look behind his ear. “Ain’t
strange,
Lieutenant, sir, but you best ask Otis, he the expert.”

“Did you notice anyone yesterday putting bags in the fridge who doesn’t usually do that?”

“Nope. The researchers mostly bring their bags down theirselves after Otis an’ me are gone for the day. Technicians bring bags down too, but small. Rat bags. Only technician brings down big bags is Mrs. Liebman from the O.R., but not yesterday.”

“Thanks, Cecil, you’ve been a great help.” Carmine extended his hand to the monkey. “So long, Jimmy.”

Jimmy held out his hand and shook Carmine’s gravely, his big round amber eyes so full of awareness that Carmine felt his skin prickle. They looked so human.

“Just as well you a man,” Cecil said, laughing, escorting Carmine to the door with Jimmy on his hip.

“Why’s that?”

“All six of my babies are male, an’ man, they hate women! Can’t stand a woman in the same room.”

“What’s that gizmo?” Carmine asked.

“A pump we’re fitting to some circuitry so it only delivers one-tenth of one em-el every thirty minutes,” said Billy.

Carmine picked up the mugs. “I’ll bring you some fresh from that urn I saw in the hall if you’ll let me have a mug of it and shovel in plenty of sugar.”

“Gee, thanks, Lieutenant. Take the whole sugar jar.”

If he didn’t get some sugar into his system, Carmine knew, his attention would start to flag. He detested very sweet coffee, but it stopped his belly growling. And over it, he could settle to a friendly chat. They were loquacious men, eager to explain their jobs and very keen to assure Carmine that the Hug was great. Billy was the electronics engineer, Don the machinist. Between the two of them they painted Carmine a fascinating picture of a life largely spent designing and building things no sane person could envisage. Because researchers, Carmine learned, were not sane persons. They were mostly pain-in-the-ass maniacs.

“A researcher can fuck up a carload of steel balls,” Billy said. “They might have brains the size of Madison Square Garden and win Nobel Prizes all over the shop, but man, can they be dumb! Know what their main problem is?”

“It’ll be a help,” said Carmine.

“Common sense. They got fuck-all common sense.”

“Yoong Billy is raht abaht thaht,” said Don. Or at least it sounded as if that was what he had said.

When he departed Carmine was convinced neither Billy Ho nor Don Hunter had left two pieces of woman in the dead animal refrigerator. Though whoever had was not lacking in common sense.

His tour guide was Dr. Addison Forbes, who was not happy.

“The cats belong to Dr. Finch and Dr. Chandra. The rats are Dr. Finch’s. I don’t have any animals, I’m a clinician,” he said. “Our appointments are excellent,” he droned on as he conducted his guest down the hall between the animal room and the elevators. “Each floor has a male and a female rest room” — he pointed — “and a coffee urn that our glass washer, Allodice, takes care of. The cylindered gases live in this closet, but oxygen is piped in, as are coal gas and compressed air. The fourth line of pipe is for vacuum suction. Particular attention was paid to grounding and copper shielding — we work in millionths of one volt, and that means amplification factors that make interference a nightmare. The building is air-conditioned and the air is filtered minutely, hence the no smoking regulation.”

Forbes ceased the drone to look surprised. “The thermostats actually work.” He opened a door. “Our reading and conference room. Which completes the floor. Shall we go to my office?”

Addison Forbes, Carmine had decided within a very few moments, was a complete neurotic. He sported a sinewy, gaunt leanness that suggested an exercise freak with vegetarian tendencies, was about forty-five years of age — the same age as the Prof — and not much to look at if you were a movie director searching for a new star. Facial tics and abrupt, meaningless gestures with his hands larded his conversation. “I had a most severe coronary exactly three years ago,” he said, “and it’s a miracle that I survived.” Clearly it obsessed him, not unusual in medical doctors, who, Patrick had told him, never thought that
they
could die, and became atrocious patients when mortality thrust itself upon them. “Now I jog the five miles between the Hug and my home every evening. My wife drives me here in the morning and picks up yesterday’s suit. We don’t need two cars anymore, a welcome economy. I eat vegetables, fruit, nuts and an occasional piece of steamed fish if my wife can find some that’s genuinely fresh. And I must say that I feel wonderful.” He patted his belly, so flat that it caved in. “Good for another fifty years, ha ha!”

Jeez! thought Carmine. I think I’d rather be dead than give up the greasies at Malvolio’s. Still, it takes all kinds. “How often do you or your technician take dead animals down to the first-floor refrigerator?” he asked.

Forbes blinked, looked blank. “Lieutenant, I have already told you that I am a clinician! My research is
clinical,
I don’t use experimental animals.” His brows tried to go in opposite directions. “Even if I have to say so myself, I have a genius for giving each individual patient exactly the right anticonvulsant medication. It is a widely abused field — can you imagine the gall of a fool general practitioner taking it upon himself to prescribe anticonvulsants? He diagnoses some poor patient as idiopathic and stuffs the poor patient full of Dilantin and phenobarb, when all the time the poor patient has a temporal lobe spike you could impale yourself on!
Tch!
I run the epilepsy clinics at the Holloman Hospital, several other hospitals, and I’m in charge of the Holloman Hospital EEG unit attached to the epilepsy clinic. I don’t concern myself with
ordinary
EEGs, you understand. There is another unit for Frank Watson and his neurological and neurosurgical minions. What I’m interested in are spikes, not delta waves.”

“Uh-huh,” said Carmine, whose eyes had begun to glaze halfway through this semi-diatribe. “So you definitely don’t ever dispose of dead animals?”

“Never!”

Forbes’s technician, a nice girl named Betty, confirmed this. “His work here concerns the level of anticonvulsant medications in the bloodstream,” she explained in words Carmine had a hope of understanding. “Most doctors overmedicate because they don’t keep track of drug levels in the bloodstream in long-term disorders like epilepsy. He’s also the one the pharmaceutical companies ask to try new drugs out. And he has an uncanny instinct for what a particular patient needs.” Betty smiled. “He’s weird, really. Art, not science.”

And how, Carmine wondered as he went in search of Dr. Maurice Finch, do I get out of being buried under medical gobbledygook?

But Dr. Finch wasn’t the man to bury anyone under medical gobbledygook. His research, he said briefly, concerned movement of things called sodium and potassium ions through the wall of the nerve cell during an epileptic seizure.

“I work with cats,” he said, “on a long-term basis. Once their electrodes and perfusion cannulae are implanted in their brains — under general anesthesia — they suffer no trauma at all. In fact, they look forward to their experimental sessions.”

A gentle soul, was Carmine’s verdict. That did not put Finch out of the murder stakes, of course; some brutal killers seemed the gentlest of souls when you met them. At fifty-one he was older than most of the researchers, so the Prof had said; research was a young man’s game, apparently. A devout Jew, he and his wife, Catherine, lived on a chicken farm; Catherine bred for the kosher table. Her chickens kept her busy, Finch explained, as they had never managed to have any children.

“Then you don’t live in Holloman?” he asked.

“Just within the county line, Lieutenant. We have twenty acres. Not all chickens! I’m an ardent cultivator of vegetables and flowers. I have an apple orchard and several glasshouses too.”

“Do you bring your dead animals downstairs, Dr. Finch, or does your technician — Patricia? — do that?”

“Sometimes I do it, sometimes Patty does,” Finch said, his wide grey eyes looking at Carmine without guilt or unease. “Mind you, my kind of work means I don’t do a lot of sacrificing. When I finish with a pussycat, I take the electrodes and cannulae out, castrate him, and try to give him to someone as a pet. I don’t
harm
him, you see. However, a cat may develop a brain infection and die, or simply die of natural causes. Then they go downstairs to the refrigerator. Mostly I take them — they’re heavy.”

“How often does a dead cat happen, Doctor?”

“It’s hard to say. Once a month, maybe only every six months.”

“I see you take good care of them.”

“One cat,” said Dr. Finch patiently, “represents an investment of at least twenty thousand dollars. He has to come with papers that satisfy the various authorities, including the A.S.P.C.A. and the Humane Society. Then there is the cost of his upkeep, which has to be first-class or he doesn’t survive. I need healthy cats. Therefore a death is unwelcome, not to say exasperating.”

Carmine moved on to the third researcher, Dr. Nur Chandra.

Who took his breath away. Chandra’s features were cast in a patrician mold, his lashes were so long and thick that they seemed false, his brows were finely arched and his skin the color of old ivory. His wavy black hair was cut short, in keeping with his European clothes; except that a master cut the hair, and the clothes were cashmere, vicuña, silk. A buried memory unearthed itself: this man and his wife were known as the handsomest couple in all of Chubb. Ah, he had Chandra now! The son of some maharajah, rolling in riches, married to the daughter of another Indian potentate. They lived on ten acres just inside the Holloman County line, together with an army of servants and several children who were tutored at home. Apparently the swanky Dormer Day School was not swanky enough. Or might give the kids too many American ideas? They enjoyed diplomatic immunity, quite how, Carmine didn’t know. That meant kid gloves, and
pray
he wasn’t the one!

“My poor Jimmy,” said Dr. Chandra, voice sympathetic but not oozing the tenderness Cecil’s did when speaking of Jimmy.

“Give me Jimmy’s story, please, Doctor,” Carmine said, gaze riveted on another monkey, its legs crossed nonchalantly, seated in a complicated Plexiglass chair inside an enormous box with its door open. The beast was minus its tennis ball hat, revealing a pink mass of dental cement in which was embedded a bright green female connector. A bright green male plug had been inserted into it, and a thick, twisted cable of wires in many colors ran to a panel on the box wall. Presumably the panel connected the monkey to a lot of electronic equipment in nineteen-inch racks around the box.

“Cecil called me yesterday to tell me he’d found Jimmy dead when he went in to see the monkeys after lunch,” the researcher said in the most pear-shaped English accent Carmine had ever heard. Nothing in common with Miss Dupre’s or Don Hunter’s accents, different though they were from each other. Amazing that such a tiny country had so many accents. “I went downstairs to see for myself, and I swear to you, Lieutenant [another
left
enant], that I deemed Jimmy dead. No pulse, no respiration, no heart sounds, no reflexes, both pupils dilated. Cecil asked me if I wished Dr. Schiller to perform an autopsy, but I declined. Jimmy hasn’t had his electrodes implanted for long enough to have been of any experimental value to me. But I told Cecil to leave him be, that I’d check again at five, and if he hadn’t changed, I’d pop him in the refrigerator myself. Which is what I did.”

“What about this guy?” Carmine asked, pointing at the monkey, which bore the same expression as Abe when dying for a cigarette.

“Eustace? Oh, he’s of immense value! Aren’t you, Eustace?”

The monkey transferred its gaze from Carmine to Dr. Chandra, then grinned ghoulishly. You are one arrogant bastard, Eustace, thought Carmine.

Chandra’s technician was a young man named Hank, who took Carmine to the O.R.

Sonia Liebman greeted him in the anteroom, describing herself as the O.R. technician. The anteroom was given over to shelves of stores to do with surgery; it also contained two autoclaves and a formidable-looking safe.

“For my restricted drugs,” Mrs. Liebman said, indicating the safe. “Opiates, Pentothal, potassium cyanide, a bunch of nasties.” She handed Carmine a pair of canvas bootees.

“Who knows the combination?” he asked, putting them on.

“I do, and it is not written down
anywhere,”
she said firmly. “If they have to carry me out feet first, they’ll have to bring in a safe-cracker. Share a secret, and it’s no secret.”

The O.R. itself looked like any other operating room.

“I don’t operate under fully sterile conditions,” she said, leaning her rump on the operating table, which was an expanse of clean linen savers and had a curious apparatus mounted at one end, all aluminum sticks, frames, knobs geared down to Vernier scale. She herself was clad in a clean boilersuit — ironed — and canvas bootees. An attractive woman of about forty, he decided, slim and businesslike. Her dark hair was drawn back in a no-nonsense bun, her eyes were dark and intelligent, and her lovely hands were marred by nails cut very short.

“I thought an O.R. had to be sterile,” he said.

“Scrupulous cleanliness is far more important, Lieutenant. I’ve known O.R.s more sterile than a zapped fruit fly, but no one ever really
cleaned
them.”

“So you’re a neurosurgeon?”

“No, I’m a technician with a master’s. Neurosurgery is a man’s field, and they give women neurosurgeons hell. But at the Hug I can do what I love to do without that kind of trauma. Due to the size of my patients, it’s very high-powered neurosurgery. See that? My Zeiss operating microscope. They don’t have one in the Chubb neurosurgery O.R.s, not one,” said the lady with great satisfaction.

“You operate on what?”

“Monkeys for Dr. Chandra. Cats for him and Dr. Finch. Rats for the neurochemists upstairs, and cats for them too.”

“Do they die on the table often?”

Sonia Liebman looked outraged. “What do you think I am, hamfisted? No! I
sacrifice
animals for the neurochemists, who don’t often work on live brains. Neurophysiologists work on live brains. That’s the main difference between the two disciplines to me.”

“Uh, what do you sacrifice, Mrs. Liebman?” Tread carefully, Carmine, tread carefully!

“Rats in the main, but I do Sherringtonian decerebrations on cats too.”

“What’s that?” he asked, writing in his notebook, but not really wanting to know — more abstruse details coming up!

“Removal of a brain from the tentorium up under ether anesthesia. The moment I shell the brain out, I inject Pentothal into the heart and wham! the animal’s dead. Instantaneous.”

“So you put fairly large animals into bags and take them to the refrigerator for disposal?”

“Yes, on decerebration days.”

“How often do these decerebration days happen?”

“It depends. If Dr. Ponsonby or Dr. Polonowski asks for cat fore-brains, about every two weeks for a couple of months, at the rate of three to four cats on any one day. Dr. Satsuma doesn’t ask nearly as often — maybe once a year, six cats.”

“How big are these decerebrated cats?”

“Monsters. Males about twelve to fifteen pounds.”