Sins of the Flesh (23 page)

S
he hadn’t known quite how hard it was going to be living in a world devoid of Ivy. The shock had taken two days to dissipate, and it was followed not by depression, but by something worse; apathy. To Jess Wainfleet, psychiatrist, there was a difference between the two. Yes, depression could mean flatness of mood, but deep emotions continued to exist far down—there
were
pain and suffering. But not this time: Jess felt only an awful apathy, a total absence of any sort of suffering or pain.

Of course it had one advantage. She could work—and work well, efficiently, swiftly, unerringly. Grateful for that, she took her hundred cases out of the safe and ploughed through them one by one, suddenly shown the insights those traitorous emotions had masked. To bury oneself in work was a universal panacea, a technique she preached to her patients and to her staff—even preached to Walter, whose concern for her, she was aware, was steadily growing. The excitement this realization would have provoked only days before was utterly lacking, but she knew it would return as the vacuum in her life created by the death of Ivy began to fill up, as vacuums did; then she would turn to Walter with renewed energy and enthusiasm.

“Bear with me,” she said to him, “just bear with me for a few more days, Walter, then we’ll embark on some really fantastic stuff together, I promise. You’re the center of my whole world.”

The aquamarine eyes studied her intently, then he nodded.

No more was ever said about it, or needed to be said. Walter took himself off to the workshop to build something, while Jess kept on looking at her hundred cases.

She was groping through the labyrinth of words again, still convinced that the clue to those elusive pathways lay in words, and fascinated by the phrase “I want!” Corpus callosum, globus pallidus, rhinencephalon, hypothalamus, substantia nigra …

“Jess?”

Startled, she glanced up to see Ari Melos in her doorway, an odd expression on his face.

“Yes?”

“Captain Carmine Delmonico is here, asking to see you.”

An explosive sigh escaped; she looked down at the files, at striped and coded ribbons. “Oh, damn the man!” she said. “Ari, offer him two alternatives. If he can wait half an hour, I’ll see him then, or he can go away and come back later to risk it again.”

But she knew what he’d answer; when Ari came back to say he had elected to wait, she was already retying the files, and when Jenny Marx her secretary ushered Captain Delmonico in, the safe was closed, every file gone.

“Captain, I apologize to have kept you waiting, but my desk was littered with confidential files when you arrived, and they had to be put away—by me.”

“No trouble,” he said cheerfully as he sat down again, for she was smiling too and he wondered if he would ever receive a truthful answer—why this winning smile? “It’s a rare waiting room offers reading material like
Scientific American.
”

Simultaneously she was wondering how she had failed to notice the Captain’s amazing attractiveness—had she honestly been that keyed up during her interview with him and Delia? He was dynamite! Had it been Delia blinded her? Or her mood that day?

Some men, she reflected, whether by accident or design, fell into their proper professions, the only ones they were properly suited to do, and this man was one such. Highly intelligent without the spark of genius, well educated without being entrapped by Academia, nigh infinitely patient, rational to the core yet subtle, emphatic when it suited him, and endowed with an analytical brain. A policeman by nature who might successfully have done a dozen things for a living, but had lit upon the one he was made for. His masculine appeal was undeniable but not a part of his arsenal because it didn’t loom large in his own idea of himself. Unaware she did so, Jess Wainfleet licked her lips and swallowed, her mind girding itself for battle.

“I’ve come to talk to you,” Delmonico said, “understanding that I’ll get no answers worth their salt, but rather to see if you’re the kind of person I can wear down, literally and metaphorically. You will never be free of me. Just when you think I’ve given up, I’ll be knocking at your door again. You see, I
know
that you murdered six women in cold blood, and I’m not going to let you get away with it. Commencing with Margot Tennant in 1963, and at the rate of one per year, you killed six women. Why? is my chief question, and the chief reason why I refuse to let you go. What could possibly be the answer? I serve you warning, Dr. Wainfleet, I’m going to find out.” The unusual eyes bored into her. “No. I won’t let go!”

She sighed. “Captain Delmonico, there is an entity called harassment, and what you propose sounds very like it. Rest assured, I’ll be telling my counsel, Mr. Bera, what you’re threatening to do.”

“Nonsense!” he said. “I’m very well known, Doctor, and
not
for harassment. I wish you luck proving that! Why did you kill Margot Tennant? Or Elena Carba, for that matter? Julia Bell-Simon?”

“I have killed no one,” Jess Wainfleet said, voice obdurate.

Carmine shifted in his chair; somehow it came as no surprise that he also shifted subject. “Ernest Leto … A most elusive character. In fact, he seems to have no existence apart from work he did here in the Holloman Institute. He has a social security number, and according to the Internal Revenue Service paid tax on unspecified work he did here between 1963 and 1968. Part-time only. We have a description of Mr. Leto, furnished by HI staff: about five feet eight inches tall, thin and whippy in build, with black hair and a swarthy complexion. That could be Dr. Ari Melos, don’t you think?”

“It could be, but it isn’t!” she snapped, eyes flashing. “Ari Melos is a fully trained and qualified neurosurgeon who served his time at Johns Hopkins! If you look at the amounts Ernest Leto was paid, you’ll see they’re a pittance compared to what a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon would ask. Ernie Leto was paid a technician’s fees.”

“Did Dr. Melos ever operate here?” Carmine asked.

“Naturally!” Wainfleet said haughtily. “He has his patients in the prison, two of whom are with him in HI at the moment, and he takes an occasional private patient, just as I do myself.”

Carmine put an envelope on the desk. “This is a subpoena for the records in your possession pertaining to Ernest Leto,” he said. “It’s a duplicate, actually. I’ve already served the original on your director of personnel.”

“We will endeavor to help in any way we can,” she said in colorless tones. “Is there anything else?”

“A hypothetical question,” he said.

Her brows rose. “Hypothetical?”

“Yes. Unlike the hypothetical situation Sir Richard Rich posed to Sir Thomas More, my question isn’t designed to trip you up in a court of law.”

“I am intrigued,” she said lightly, feeling her curiosity stir. “Ask your hypothetical question.”

“First, Mr. Leto,” the Captain said. “He’s a very difficult man to find. Your staff have verified that he does exist, that he came here to assist you on a number of neurosurgical interventions which the pair of you did alone, but that he did no other work here. What concerns me is that he assisted you in not merely six procedures, but forty-eight. That’s a multiple of six, so were the forty-eight operations all on the six missing Shadow Women, or are there as many as forty-two unknown patients Mr. Leto helped you with? His IRS records list eight periods of employment per year, totaling in each year sufficient to live quite comfortably provided he doesn’t have twelve children. Does he?”

“Does he what?” she asked blankly, her mind fixed on the hypothetical question.

“Have twelve children?”

Her hand slapped on the desk. “Oh, really, Captain!” she cried.

“I take that as a no,” he said, writing in his notebook.

“Mr. Leto has no children—or a wife!” she snarled as he continued writing. “Forty-eight procedures sounds correct, given the number of years. I always used him for stereotaxy.”

“What kind of stereotaxy do you do, Doctor?”

“Obviously, more than prefrontal lobotomies,” she said tartly. “Operations in keeping with my interest and training. Walter Jenkins is my most ambitious project to date.”

“Yet you didn’t use Mr. Leto for Jenkins?”

Her brows rose. “When did I say that?”

“So you did use him for Jenkins?”

Her patience snapped, but not explosively; more, Carmine thought, like the final severing of a piece of very old elastic. “Enough!” she said. “Mr. Ernest Leto is very much alive and well, wherever he may be at the moment, and you, Captain, are groping in the dark. Either desist, or charge me with a crime.”

“Then I’ll desist. But I’ll be back.”

“Like summer influenza, you imply.”

“As a metaphor, Doctor, it will do.”

She laughed. “A waste of time for both of us. In my kind of surgery, bleeds and seizures are the major hazards, not cops. Talk to the Chubb Chairman of Neurosurgery, he’ll tell you that no one ventures into the wildernesses of the brain without plenty of help on hand, from an anesthetist to instrument assistants. There had to be an Ernest Leto.”

Carmine frowned. “You’re saying that no one at HI has ever objected to being denied a hand in the cookie jar? Ernest Leto, says the IRS, received two thousand dollars per operation. If they were genuinely non-American patients, I’m going to say ten big ones. Leto probably took four and declared two. Plus travel expenses.”

This time her laugh was a snigger. “Your imagination is really amazing, Captain!”

“Not at all,” he said cordially.

“Why don’t you ask your hypothetical question?” she asked.

“A good idea, Doctor. Let us say that a frantically busy, overworked psychiatrist at a famous institute for the criminally insane decides she needs a hobby—my hypothetical psychiatrist is a lady, I forgot to say—and espouses photography. Her duties stifle her, hence her need for a hobby. She takes head-and-shoulders portraits of youngish women who have all mysteriously disappeared. She knows she won’t see them again. Interestingly, among her patients are six women who have mysteriously disappeared. Oh, they don’t belong to her official institute! They’re private patients she doesn’t need to see again. My hypothetical question is: do the six studio portraits belong to the six women who have mysteriously disappeared?”

The dark eyes considered him as he sat, so comfortably ensconced, gazing at her blandly. While she fended him off, his eyes told her scornfully that she was losing the battle.

“Hypothetically,” she said smoothly, “I have no idea what you’re getting at. Oh, I believe you know where you’re going! It’s just that I don’t.” She looked at her nails. “Sorry, Captain.”

“Don’t be,” he said, getting up. “Hypothesis will become reality.”

Walter had used his time in the machine shop to good purpose in more than one way. If anyone approached to breathe down his neck and see what exactly he was doing, they would have been rewarded by the sight of two deft hands shaping a piece of soft steel on a metal lathe, the end result a complex, convoluted sculpture any discerning person would have delighted to display upon a prominent shelf. Oppositely, if anyone sneaked undetected into the workshop and observed what Walter was doing, they would have noted an ugly, lumpish chunk of iron like a shoddy imitation of a Moore. But if a fly had buzzed in and lighted on the wall, then crawled inside a locked cupboard, the fly would have seen that Walter was making a silencer for the .45 semi-automatic, and popping a little mercury into a box of .45 projectiles.

All research units had workshops: they had to. No professional inventor could dream up in his wildest fantasies the one-off Rube Goldberg devices that laboratory researchers demanded as if asking for a new toaster; then he breathed down the engineer’s neck until the Rube Goldberg was finished. Most of the work was exquisite. Tungsten or glass microelectrodes with tips so fine they could be seen only under a microscope sat in the appropriate storage; there were micro pumps capable of delivering a drop of a drop each hour; whatever was needed had to be produced, almost inevitably in the workshop. There was only one proviso: that it not be “large” in any functional way. What was large? A pound or a half-kilogram in weight, a foot or a third of a meter in length, breadth, or depth.

With Jess Wainfleet and Ari Melos in a non-operative phase of their research, the artisan who ran the workshop had been granted a three-month furlough with pay to travel abroad and study techniques in other laboratory workshops. This left the shop entirely to Walter Jenkins, who, should anything come up, could turn to with a will and produce the item required. No sweat, as he said laconically.

He loved Marty Fane’s pistol, a custom job right for a pimp; it was gold-plated and had a mock-ivory grip, and it blew a big hole in its target. After each projectile had been doctored by a plus of mercury, it blew a much bigger hole. The I-Walter was very pleased with it.

He was feeling emotions these days—or at least he thought he was feeling emotions. The only judge he had of truth or falsehood was himself, for Jess was in terrible trouble of some kind, and it had driven the I-Walter from the foreground of her mind. That didn’t kindle anger or grief, if what he read about anger and grief were true; rather, it set off a paroxysm of payback against the people who were upsetting her.

The first welling up of this payback feeling had pushed him into deciding to kill Captain Carmine Delmonico—and what a fiasco that had been! He’d chosen a nun as his female victim deliberately, intending to put her in the Captain’s bed, imply they were lovers, then have it look as if Delmonico had shot her before shooting himself. And it had all gone so wrong, though just afterward Walter had deemed it a triumph, not understanding his mistakes. But they had come to him upon reflection, and ruined his sense of triumph. So many mistakes! Like wiring her ankles and wrists together; easier to carry her, yes, but it left red welts on her skin. And he hadn’t done enough surveillance, so didn’t expect that fool of a kid to be on the Captain’s deck—
painting
, for God’s sake! All hell had broken loose, the kid screaming, the dog barking—what a fiasco!