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  "Crouch down back there. If she sees you, it's all over,” Ian told him.

  Van mumbled an obscenity as he complied, but from time to time he peeked out over the edge, unable to control his urges as the car slowly crept toward the prey. The hunt was on again.

  "What's the plan ... what's the plan?” He whispered from behind.

  "Shh!"

  "What's the plan!"

  "Follow her up the street. She's going for the bus stop."

  "How'd you know that?"

  "Going that way, trust me."

  "Then what? What then?"

  "I'll talk to her, say something..."

  "What?"

  "Something..."

  "How close are we?"

  "Close! Get down. There, at the alleyway. You just get ready when I pull her into the alley.” Ian told Van.

  "Why're you bullying me?"

  "Don't be silly."

  "Nagging ... you're nagging."

  "I am not, now will you get down!"

  For now, Van would just say what he was expected to say, “Good ... good..."

  Ian pulled the car alongside the woman and girl, tooting his horn in a quick salutation. Van, deep in the back, listened to Ian charm them, and Van felt proud he understood the nonstop change in plans as his brother spoke. Ian often did that, changed in mid-stream. He was trying to talk them into the car for a ride.

  The woman had come to the window when Ian lowered it from his side automatically and called her by name. She said hello, recalling having seen him around the clinic. “Want a ride? I'm going that way."

  "No, no...” she answered.

  "No problem, really..."

  "Naw, naw, sir, it is too far. Bus is place for me, bus to home..."

  She stepped away from the car, snatching the child, perhaps thirteen.

  "Do something,” Van whispered.

  Ian got quickly from the car and went after the woman, saying, “I'll just walk you to the stop, then."

  "Is not necessary,” she complained.

  "But I want to, Mrs. Jimenez. You and your girl shouldn't be out alone so late.” He said it in his best, most polite manner, just the way his mother had taught him to speak to a lady. He continued talking to the confused woman amiably, about the weather and such, and asking her questions. “How many children do you have? Two? Three?"

  "Four, it will be.” She patted her stomach, indicating she was pregnant. “Four ... four now ... a girl, I wish, but my husband, he don't want me to take the test to find out for sure."

  From the back of the Mercedes, Van crept out and looked once more up and down the street, paying particular attention to doorways and windows, and the hospital's emergency room, where beneath the sign some nurses and orderlies took a smoke. He slipped quietly from the car to the sidewalk, his dark cloak masking the sheen of the two large knives he held beneath it. They were brand new knives, brought to him by Ian to replace the ones they had discarded at Park's. It was to keep the police from matching that knife to new wounds, or so Ian said. Ian knew a lot of things about the police. He knew how to be cautious. He had managed to keep them safe all these years.

  He worked his way through the shadows to within a few feet of Ian and the woman, just passing where she stood and hiding deep in the dark of the alleyway. Ian, moments later, stopped her at the entranceway with more of his questions.

  "Why ... why isn't your husband here? Is it too much to ask? If you're carrying his child? that he—"

  "He is working, you know...."

  Only a block away, the traffic bustled by. Just a block away, the woman might catch the bus and they'd lose their chance at her child. It'd been a spontaneous idea to strike again tonight, spontaneity brought about by exuberance. Van couldn't recall a time when they'd been so full of power, so proud at having done away with Park; Ian kept talking about making a fool of this man Grant, who Van heard of only through Ian. Ian was smarter than the entire police force, leaving the policewoman at Park's room with the body.

  Ian had suggested they come to the clinic to get what they and their gods called for next, the ingredient that must work! Now, it appeared, Ian had been right to bring them here ... the payoff was close at hand.

  The woman was raising her voice at Ian, now, and trying to pull away from him. But Ian, calm and resolute, said in a shocked voice, “My God, what is that?” He was pointing into the depths of the alley, giving Van his cue to show himself, but Van wasn't sure it was exactly the right moment. She was too far away from him. Ian needed to guide them into the mouth of the alley, closer ... closer.

  But he was somehow managing it.

  "Do as you're told and your daughter will not be harmed."

  "Oh, please! Please, sir."

  "Just do as you're told.” He had a knife held against the child's throat.

  "Ahh,” moaned Van, making them turn to find him in the dark.

  Mrs. Jimenez shouted for her daughter to run, and the child twisted free of Ian. Her legs worked like pistons down the alleyway, and suddenly she disappeared ahead of Ian, who gave chase.

  Mrs. Jimenez, meanwhile, had gone down as a result of a blow from Ian and, angry as hell with her, Van repeatedly kicked her in the temple and leaped atop her with his long knife. She had fainted and lay helpless now. He'd do what came naturally, straddling her neck, grinning, the large carving knife in his hands. He ran it across her forehead, drawing an outline of the scalp he intended taking, drawing it in blood. Carving, he thought her unconscious when she made a final plea: "My baby ... !"

  "Precisely," said Van, carving deeper. The scalp came almost willingly. When he looked up, holding the long, black tresses of the Spanish woman, he studied the dark in an attempt to make out where Ian had got off to. Then he saw him coming back, shaking his head, empty-handed. Van cursed his brother's stupidity at having let the child escape. At the very least, he thought, they had a fresh scalp. But when Ian had seen what Van had done, he crumpled to his knees beside him, telling him he was a damned fool. He reiterated it several times before saying, “We've got to take the body with us. Hide it, bury it—maybe in the swamp."

  "Why? Why bother?"

  "They'll know we're still at large!"

  "It doesn't matter what they know or think they know. He, our great god, will protect us if they come near us."

  Then the noise of approaching men frightened them off and they were forced to leave Mrs. Jimenez where she lay. Deep in the dark shadows was the girl, hiding, fearful, stunned and in shock, and suddenly terrified into running again when something in the dark beside her moved and reached out a skeletal hand to her. She only saw the hand and the eyes, deep in their sockets, staring up at her as if they were lying on the ground.

  She ran back toward what she thought was the hospital, but her mind was out of control, and she wandered the wrong way.

  Lionel Morton Silbey the Third lay in a dung heap of his own making at the end of the alley where he'd taken up residence since October of the previous year. He hadn't long been a resident of Orlando, or of Florida, but he liked it so far and believed he would make it his permanent home, permanent, at least, until his Maker should call for his infernal, inebriated soul. God forbid it should be as put-upon as his physical self all these years. First it was by the pain of a loss so great that to this day his heart might burst if he allowed an hour's sober thought to it, the loss of Chrissy, the only child of a marriage destroyed by Chrissy's disease, a brave little three-and-half-month-old child which asked only for life, but instead got a cruel, painful affliction Silbey could not any longer pronounce.

  Where his woman was, he had no idea. The city he once called home, he had a vague inkling to be St. Louis. As to his parents, he'd washed their memories from his mind with a conscious flow of booze.

  But Lionel had fallen on hard times here in Florida. He hadn't enough money to stay drunk, and people here, they didn't treat a man like him as they did in St. Louis. Here, the weather was kind to an alcoholic—but the people weren't
. They made him go to the mission if he begged for handouts. Police arrested him every other night. Only the man that gave him the job of cleaning his kitchen, the Chinaman, gave him what he needed. The Chinaman understood Lionel and paid him in booze, which was all he wanted. It was a proper good bargain, as the British would say in that Limey talk of theirs, a bloody good wage for a bloody good job....

  Lionel's thoughts were interrupted where he slept at the back of Chung Fat's Chop Suey House behind some cans when he heard a woman's muffled cry. He groggily straightened up, but froze when his bleary eyes focused on some odd commotion going on. He saw through the space between Chung Fat's trash cans what appeared to be a family. There was the tall, strong, straight-backed father, his arms tightly around the neck of the mother, who was far shorter and fatter. Then, down about their knees, was the little kid, playing around some boxes with what appeared to be two toy swords. The sight, dim and dark as it was in the poor light, and within the limited confines of a drunken eye, brought a phantom tear to the old man's eye. The sight made him think of little Chrissy, reason and eternal excuse for his own living death. These dancing figures before his eyes, this family, this was a taunting, hellish thing that God, in his infinite and mysterious wisdom, tortured a weak and lonely man with.

  Lionel then saw the little kid, a boy from the look of him (yet there was something not boyish at all in his movements, his clothes looking like a shaggy-dog costume), pounce on the mother. He was kicking her violently as the father raced after a second child, a terrified little girl who gave him the slip, dropping into a recess just down from where Lionel was, trying to work her way back, closer. The violence terrified Lionel, and yet he could not tear his eyes away, wondering if the family were real or imagined, and wondering what, if anything, the boy might do next. He was soon rewarded with a ghastly show as the ugly child sat over the woman's head and began to carve away at her scalp, her scalp!

  Lionel heard the woman's last words repeat themselves in his brain, "My baby."

  The boy's sword was really a large knife! Lionel's thinned blood chilled at the next instant as if coagulating in his veins when, with the father returning, the boy jumped up and down on the woman's carcass, holding her hair up for approval.

  Lionel reeled from the shock of what he was witness to. He questioned his senses, yet he had only just begun to drink this night, and had been nearly sober only two hours before. Was this a horror playing out in the real world, or something his fevered brain had prepared just for the third-generation Silbey, who'd had a great-grandfather who'd been a Confederate general?

  He feared to glance again, yet he prayed and half-believed that another look at the awful scene would reveal that it had all been a delirious hallucination brought on by all the alcohol of a troubled life.

  Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes in an attempt to banish the sight, Lionel looked out to where he'd seen the mutilation of the mother by the father and son. He was confident nothing, no one, would be there when he looked again.

  But it was not to be so.

  The two males worked over the corpse, trying, it seemed, to pry something further from it, or drag it away with them.

  Lionel, sickened, filled with fear, wondering if he were deranged beyond all help now, still could not take his eyes off the horror before him. God, he felt alone ... and afraid. And if he felt so, what about the little girl, inching closer in the darkness, still unaware of Lionel?

  If the murdering pair saw the girl or Lionel, they'd come for them, rip them open with their knives for some senseless end. Now Lionel saw that the boy was not a boy, but a very small man, a devilish gnome of some sort, perhaps a dwarf.

  Shaken badly, Lionel lay back down, fearing to breathe, fearing to make a sound, fearing even to drink what remained of his Black Label. Then they were gone, hearing some commotion at the other end of the alleyway, and he thought that perhaps it was safe, though perhaps not. He then recalled the hiding girl, so like his Chrissy, so alone and unreachable ... for he knew he could not help her. Still, he looked for her and found she had moved even closer and had seen the horror as he had. He reached out a hand to her, to touch her, to determine if it were all a bad dream, when suddenly their eyes met and she got up and ran and ran....

  Lionel wondered if he'd ever know if all this madness were real or not. He lay back, wanting only for sleep to overtake him. He lay this way for hours, waiting desperately for the Florida sun to return and blanket his alley with light; to burn away all the ugly sights from his mind, to show him that it had all been a most hideous nightmare brought on by his inebriated brain.

  But when the light finally came, Lionel dared look to where the gnome and the other man had scalped the woman and he saw something large and bloody and attracting flies by the hundreds, and he realized the sun wasn't going to wash it away or burn it from his sight. He brought his knees together and huddled there, and he couldn't bring himself to take one step from his home behind the restaurant, which wouldn't open for hours. He needed a drink and saw his bottle, nearly full. He began slowly to drain it in an attempt to blot out the events of the night before and what lay out there, not twelve yards from him. He would talk to Mr. Chung Fat. He would tell him. He might know what do....

  ELEVEN

  Dean and Sid, despite the discomfort of having had very little sleep and the grandiose notion that one day they would chuck M.E. work for the ideal, high-paying work of an ordinary doctor, became so intensely involved in what had apparently occurred at Park's apartment that no one, no amount of money could have pulled them from the lab this night. So intense had their investigation become that neither man even knew that it was light out. But both knew that Park had been murdered by the Scalping Crew, even though it had appeared as if Peggy Carson had, in self-defense, killed Park, who'd been made to look the part of a mass murderer. They had more than enough evidence to prove it.

  Hairs on Park's clothes were neither his nor Peggy's, but they matched up perfectly with the coarse black hair of one of the Scalpers. The turgidness of the body and the condition of the spilled blood proved Dean right, that Park was dead for at least an hour before Peggy entered the room. The blood trail was unmistakable, leading the two M.E.s to the same contention, that the bleeding man was moved in and out of the bathroom at one point—most probably when Peggy entered. There were also trace fibers of tawny, sand-colored hairs in the bathroom.

  The knife plunged into Park was unquestionably the knife that had inflicted upper-chest and lower-region damage on earlier victims of the Scalpers. Its edges, when magnified, matched perfectly earlier magnification shots of the wounds. The scalpel, too, proved to be an extremely likely instrument for the head wounds.

  The two scalps found were taken from the two most recent female victims, the redhead and the Jane Doe found in the park. If they were not evidence in the case, a good mortician would sew them back onto the deceased and bury them with their scalps intact. As it was, however, they must remain as the morbid exhibits they were, under lock and key.

  As they had uncovered more and more possibilities, Dean came to believe that Sid, too, loved the work, and had simply been overwhelmed and bullied by his superiors at a time when very little else was going right in his life. Somehow he had succumbed to the criticism being leveled at him.

  To help them during the all-nighter, Sid had called in Tom Warner, his lab assistant, and a young lady Dean had met only in passing. Warner did excellent work, Dean thought, but he was most uneasy around Dean, very likely due to the incident earlier with Peggy Carson in the slab room.

  Dean and Sid talked as they worked, and it seemed almost like old times for the two doctors.

  "What if Peggy was set up? Who'd have known she was going to Park's just at that time, Dean?"

  Dean thought of how Peggy had learned about his suspicions regarding Park. He told Sid about this, and added, “Perhaps someone else was on that line, too? But my guess is that Peggy surprised Park's killers and they got the notion to p
ut it off on Peggy in order to cover their own tracks."

  "Yeah, more likely ... you know, the amount of blood on the carpet there, I'd be willing to bet those guys left Park's with blood on their shoes."

  "Pretty good chance of that."

  Both men knew how blood not only randomly lodged in cloth, but on shoes, and how, even if washed, often trace elements remained. Just a minute amount could tell Dean if it were Park's blood he found on a man's shoe, but then, whose shoe might it be?

  By now they had drawn a schematic of Park's little room. Inside the refrigerator, after Peggy and Dyer had left, Sid had discovered a final and insulting piece of evidence to incriminate Park: a pickle jar filled with something besides pickles, filled with bits of human flesh that floated in the brine. It had even made Dean gag, and he'd thought he'd seen everything. For Dean it said one more thing about the real killers—that they were involved in some cannibalistic act as well as the scalping. Anyone who took the time to pickle something might find the time to eat it. Beyond Sid and Dean, only the killers knew of this final evidence of Park's supposed depravity.

  The more they looked, the more both men felt that the entire thing was a put-up job, Sid at one point raising the specter of doubt over Peggy Carson with a few casual remarks. “Strange that of all the people attacked by the scalpers, she alone escaped with her life."

  "She's a cop."

  Sid frowned, “So was Park.... Listen, pal, I know you find her a dreamboat, but take a step back and ask if she's tough enough to self-inflict that wound. And if so, and if she starts talking about some midget, and that gets us all going one way when it's hardly likely—and then she turns up in a room full of incriminating evidence designed to incriminate Park ... well, you figure it out."

  Sid was brainstorming the way any good M.E. must, and it did have the effect of making Dean wonder, but Dean just didn't believe it possible. He believed Peggy Carson just another victim, however lucky.