Scalpers dgmm-2 Page 2

  "Then what about you? All expenses paid, compliments of the Orlando City Police. Free citrus. Hell, boy, you're more famous now than Peter Hukros ever was."

  Dean laughed at the reference to the famous pyschic. “They're not likely to roll out any red carpets for an M.E."

  "Try me."

  Dean hesitated a moment. “You've got that much pull down there, huh? Must be nice."

  "Don't give me that shit, doctor. I know you've got that fat cop, Kelso, wrapped around your pinkie."

  Dean thought of all the reasons not to make the trip. He also thought of all the reasons it might do him some good—and his standing at home, and the job downtown. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought.

  No doubt his taking some of the years of accrued vacation time he had coming to him would be frowned upon. Such an act would be construed as a cover for a job-hunting foray into the sunbelt. Orlando sends for Grant with a cock-a-mamy story about rampant scalping in order to woo him away from Chicago. Once he saw what Orlando had to offer ... all that. Even if it weren't true, he could jockey for better treatment and conditions at home, get some of that money they kept so tightly balled in their fists.

  Besides, he'd been promising himself for years he would one day visit Sid's so-called “dynamite” set-up in Orlando, to see his sleek, modern forensics lab that was supposed to be housed in a newly built skyscraper overlooking a lake filled with boats. The building also housed all administrative law enforcement agencies in the rapidly expanding city where, by all accounts, new towers sprouted as quickly as beanstalks.

  "I know you want to see some sunshine, and we've got it, even if it is December,” Corman promised.

  "It'll have to be short, Sid."

  "Have you back before Christmas."

  Dean left off by saying he had to make arrangements, and told Sid it would take him perhaps forty-eight hours to get out of Chicago. Dean then set about making those difficult arrangements. His hardest task was talking with Jackie. She remained shaken at having nearly been a floater casualty herself, and her nights were frequented by Angel Rae's ghost. But Dean believed she must confront the situation to become whole again, and that his being so close at hand only made her hide within herself more. Dean was not at all sure if this time their marriage could survive the onslaught of his work. He'd convinced her to see a psychiatrist, to go to work at chipping away at the horror retained in her psyche from a close call with drowning and murder.

  Chief Ken Kelso did not make Dean's junket to Florida any easier, either. In fact, they had had a fight over it. Ken thought him foolish and heartless to leave Jackie at a time like this, while Dean argued that it was necessary for her as well as for him. Kelso also tried to tell Dean he had much too much work in the crime lab to go off looking for more, and he reminded him of the ongoing investigation into possible links with other floating deaths across the nation. “Am I supposed to do it all on my own?” he'd screamed.

  Sybil alone had thought Dean's taking off was great. It would leave her in charge at the lab, and she could lord it over the new man even more than she did now.

  Telling Borel, their superior, was easy. It jolly well left a good feeling in Dean's heart because it left the little four-eyed pimp guessing and begging information all over the building. Dean had calculated right on that score.

  Now he was on United Flight 217, with a briefcase full of news accounts and papers forwarded to him by Sid to review before his touchdown in Orlando.

  Dean now opened up a copy of yesterday's Orlando Sentinel to stare again at the headline and the splatter picture across the front which looked vaguely like a poster for the latest horror movie. It was actually a colored photograph of a scalping victim. The sprawled, partially clad figure of a woman looked like a manikin dropped from a height, broken and disfigured. The head was ghastly, missing a wide splotch of hair and skin. Dean wondered how on earth police had allowed a photographer in so close to get such a shot, and how a responsible paper could come to the conclusion that it was proper to use it. But then, anything could be justified, and if community feeling was aroused enough, as it seemed to be, the mayor of the city himself may well have seen to it the papers got the photo. It could be a cautionary tale: lock your doors, and do not wander about after dark, for the thing that kills is loose again.

  Dean saw that Sid, as expected, had run every test imaginable at the crime scenes, but had come up with only the minutest evidence. It appeared that Sid was looking for a miracle, and Dean was not at all sure he could produce one. The trip would likely do little more than bolster Sid's spirits, but if it helped, why not? Still, the whole case was as intriguing as it was disturbing.

  Dean knew that scalping alone could cause enough trauma and blood loss to end in death, but he also knew that there were recorded cases of people who had survived the butcherous work of a scalper. He wondered if there was anyone anywhere in the state of Florida, or in the nation for that matter, who was going about today with his scalp missing, a ball cap pulled tightly across the forehead to hide the disfigurement. It was one of those thoughts that came in at him from out of nowhere, for no particular reason. But it led to a second thought: he wondered if anyone had ever lived through a scalping recently, and if so, could he or she identify—or help to identify—this assailant? If there were such a person, how would he go about finding him? Hospital records? Clinics, perhaps? Such a victim would have to create vivid memories at the late-night emergency ward. Dean wondered if the cops had given it a thought.

  Tired, feeling drained, Dean nevertheless considered the many unanswered questions. He wondered if the guy who was responsible for the scalping might not be missing his own scalp, either due to a chemical accident or a war wound, or malformation at birth. For one reason or another, the killer seemed to have a bizarre fetish for this piece of skin and hair. Was he just a crazed bald man? Dean chuckled inwardly at the thought. A stewardess came by with the beverage cart, asking if he would care to have anything to drink. He ordered a Tom Collins and made a mess of moving his papers about locating his wallet. In a moment she was gone and he was left with his drink and his questions.

  He scanned some of Sid's workups on the earlier victims and saw what he expected: multiple contusions, knife wounds, punctures. He noticed the killer's habit of not only taking the scalp, but leaving a design on the victim's head: a triangle, a circular pattern, a square. What was that all about? The victims’ hair color and gender didn't seem important. One victim was a man, middle fifties, small in stature. Dean wondered if there was any way to connect the victims. This was important, for if the victims knew one another or lived within a certain radius, then there was not only somewhere to begin, but it meant the killer's work was not completely and utterly random.

  God forbid the killer did his work without knowing something about his victims. Without connecting them in some way in his mind, he was leaving no scent and no trail. A patternless, random killer, selecting his victims on a whim, at any time of the day or night and in any setting, was a law enforcement agent's worst nightmare. Such a killer was the hardest to catch. His or her movements left no trail; his so-called serial acts had no serial nature about them, beyond the dire results: bodies. All the cops had to go on were corpses. They could not put together much of a psychological profile, they could not point to a victim type which triggered in this killer the desire to destroy a given face, a given shape, a given creature with platinum hair or gray eyes. Instead, all answers were smoke.

  An even more gruesome photo slipped from one of the files Sid had forwarded Dean, a picture of what was once a middle-aged redhead, the latest victim. She bore no resemblance to the others, beyond the ugly scar—a deep wound over the eyes. The shiny veins and blood pool beneath the layers of skin removed from the skull glossed in the photo. That strange, rectangular wound haunted Dean's mind as had the others. This time the killer had carved a rectangle out of the flesh.

  The woman's head where her hair had been ripped from her show
ed ugly, scarred, puckered skin. The idea that someone was going about actually scalping people, men as well as women, even with this evidence before him, seemed more than ludicrous. It made Dean think of the woman, Angel Rae, who had stalked her victims to drown them out of a mistaken religious notion handed down by generations.

  Dean felt the drink begin to calm him. He called for another and downed it too fast. He closed his eyes and began to think, only half-wondering where his thoughts might take him. Hopefully he'd sleep and wake up in Orlando. He didn't particularly care for flying and got through it only by keeping his mind busy, or on hold. He thought about something he'd read somewhere about the Plains Indians, who'd mutilated and scalped the bodies of General George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry. They had done so for religious and ritual purposes—the scalp of an enemy represented the enemy's head taken in mortal combat.

  If this modern-day scalper were some displaced Indian, his mutilation hardly seemed correct, even by eighteenth-century standards. The stalking of an unarmed, helpless woman for her scalp seemed a perversion of the notion of the right to slash away at a corpse you claim for having beaten in a fair and equitable fight. Still, a madman—and the killer was a madman—could be counted on to pervert any notion, be it social, psychological, or ritualistic. The mind of man hadn't, after all, changed in its physical makeup since the first men ran about wielding flint spears to kill game.

  If Sid could be believed, today's popular, mistaken notion that scalping and the American Indian went hand-in-hand seemed to be motivating a backlash against reservation Indians outside Orlando. It was complete nonsense to blame Seminole Indians out of hand, Dean thought—or any other person of Indian heritage, because scalping was not ever an art exclusively Indian. It was Spanish, it was French, it was English, and it went back so far into man's history that stone-age evidence had been unearthed to support the now widely held belief that man had, from the time of fashioning the first deadly weapons, taken scalps.

  All this Dean thought about as he sipped his third powdery-tasting Tom Collins at thirty-two thousand feet.

  Dean's sudden fascination with Orlando started with his having stared down at the shining city and its mirrored buildings, separated like fine jewels in a jeweler's case. The downtown, if it could be called that, had nothing of the skyline of Chicago or New York. It was as if the city fathers had said there shall be no building to rival the stars or the sky, nothing to cast too long a shadow or interfere with the work of the sun. The work of the sun was to bake this sprawling metropolis, which had, since the last time he'd seen the place, sprawled at every conceivable chance and seemed to become a city of connected suburban townships.

  Tourist attractions like Sea World and Disney World aside, Dean wondered if anyone in his right mind would settle here. But news of widespread growth and new industry, like the new Universal Studios and Disney Studios setting up shop here, drew people like bees to nectar, and given the year-round balmy temperatures, how many could resist? The climate even excited Dean, who was normally calm about such things as weather.

  From the bright sunshine to the impossibly warm air that hit him like a wall as they exited the terminal for Sid's waiting car, Dean felt he was in another country. He hadn't felt such a transformation since the time he'd vacationed in Mexico. Orlando spread lazily amid the arched palms, hiding its bare, spots as best it could. From ground level, as from overhead, it seemed to be concealing something harsh and daunting just beneath its surface—something unseen. Superficially, like most cities, Dean decided, the place gave off an air of the unreal, as if nothing bad could ever happen here, so close to Mickey Mouse Land, so filled as it was with tourists and the people who made their living pleasing them. But here was Sid Corman, and here was the Orlando City Police Force. The city, like any other, had its soft and slimy underbelly, regardless of the sheen and tiles on top of what was lately being dubbed, “The Big Orange."

  Maybe part of Dean's feeling had to do with the very real ugliness of Chicago in winter—brown, ice-scarred earth, bare, prickly trees, a white-gray, cold sky for months at a time. Here it was clean, save for the trash along the highways. There were sand piles, but no snow piles or street-blackened, sooty mounds for block after block. Here it never snowed. Dean's lightest trenchcoat wound up on his arm as he and Sid Corman ambled out of the terminal together.

  From the air, the city had looked like San Diego. The center of the city was a low and unimposing skyline, and from it the arteries and veins of streets spread away, hugging the earth, it seemed, for moisture and relief from the sun and heat even in December.

  Tourism was far and away the largest draw for the city coffers. But Dean had the feeling that it was hardly the only way to make a buck here, either legally or illegally.

  Sid Corman looked robust and larger than Dean remembered, and when the two men found each other at the airline terminal, they warmly shook hands and exchanged an old greeting that dated back to their Korea days. “Seen the sunrise!"

  "Damn straight, partner,” said Sid after the exchange. “Seen so many, I'd almost forgot all that nonsense."

  In Korea it had been an expression used between combat personnel. “Seen the sunrise lately?” one would ask and the other would reply, “Yeah, up the captain's ass."

  It didn't go over so well at the United desk.

  The two M.E.'s laughed over it now.

  "So good to see you, Dean.” Sid climbed into his side of the car, automatically unlocking Dean's door. The M.E.'s car in Orlando was a fully air-conditioned, full-sized Chrysler. Dean was impressed, but he tried not to show it.

  "So good to see you,” Sid repeated himself.

  Dean replied agreeably, telling Sid that he had had time on the flight to go over the copies of the files and photos he had sent him. “Looks like one hell of a psycho on your hands, Sid."

  "You think it's the work of one man, then?"

  "I saw nothing to indicate otherwise."

  "There's lots of talk it's the work of a team of hoodlums."

  "Who's doing the talking, Sid?"

  "Cops."

  "Do they know something they're not sharing?"

  "Naw, it's just talk. Some shrink in the department has it that way ... you know how that is. Guy's an odd duck, name of Hamel. Says he believes it's the work of two men, or a man and woman working in connection."

  "This guy Hamel give you any reason to believe him?"

  "Lots of mumbo jumbo about strong wills overcoming weak wills, that the knife wielder is sometimes in the power of the one who plans the whole thing, then sends this shlep out to kill because he hasn't the stomach for it. Typical psychobabble that goes out to every division on a multiple-kill case, you know."

  "But what's he basing this on? Evidence or bull, or what? How does he know there's a second killer involved here?"

  "He doesn't. Nobody does. It was just an idea he tossed out, damned if people in Central didn't take the bait. Some of ‘em are actually arresting gay couples as a result."

  "How many cops they got on this case?"

  "It's got so big they're all on it."

  "All?"

  "From the lowliest traffic cop to the Mayor."

  "Isn't that kind of nuts? I mean, given the fact you don't have any kind of a make on the guy?"

  "Dean, I got some hair and few lint balls, and now they're looking for a light-haired, cheaply dressed man who probably shops at K-Mart."

  Dean laughed hysterically, recalling how Sid had kept them laughing at the MASH unit where they'd worked together years before. “Pared it down considerably, didn't you, Sid?"

  "Don't you know it."

  He turned the car off the toll road and they were weaving through downtown Orlando.

  "You know the type of case we got here, Dean.” He continued talking as he threaded through difficult traffic. “It's the kind where whoever gets the guy is going to wind up a hero in the eyes of the department, with a citation. Usually some faggot that's running nude thro
ugh the rhododendrons, but hell, Dean, we're talking about a mass murderer here."

  "Yeah, I seen that much."

  "Hold on, you're about to see more."

  "The redhead in the picture?"

  "Came up with something interesting on the slides."

  "Is that right?"

  "It's going to blow you away, Dean, old boy."

  "Anything like nail polish, or warpaint?"

  "You bastard,” shouted Sid, staring across at him and almost hitting someone in his lane before he put his foot hard on the break. “How'd you know?"

  "Just an educated guess. Where there's scalping, there's usually warpaint of one sort or another. The wounds were cut in shapes that mean something to the killer, perhaps, and I wondered if he might not use some sort of makeup on himself, or his victims, for some ritual purpose or other."

  "Damn, Dean, you're a little scary, you know that?"

  * * * *

  Dean was impressed by the glitteringly clean hallways and offices of the Orlando Central Forensics Division and Criminal Detection Agency, OCFDCD, or DCD, as Sid preferred. Sid's office was more spacious than Dean's lab back in Chicago, and all stops were pulled out to furnish the place with the best furniture. Mauve and pastels captured the eye along with sparkling glass and steel. Even the paintings and pictures on the walls were chosen with care. There were thriving plants everywhere, too. The effect was sterile, and the decidely Floridian growth in the planters in the halls and foyer and Sid's office were an attempt, perhaps, to compensate for the calculated pink-ness of the place.

  But when Dean was escorted to the slab room, it was like any other. There was an area with refrigerated drawers where cadavers were kept, and three operating theaters, since the place doubled as a teaching hospital. The clinical labs were beyond Dean's wildest dreams. He'd give his right arm to have any one of them in Chicago. The most modern equipment abounded, and there was even talk of setting up a DNA testing site on the premises, the newest technological advance in the war on crime. Sid had it all, and he didn't mind gloating about it.