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connected to the Hug, that he harbors a grudge against someone there — and that he isn’t a scrap worried that we might find him.”
“I think we have to search the Hug,” Silvestri said.
“Yes, sir, and more to the point, we have to search it tomorrow, a Saturday. But we won’t get a warrant out of Judge Douglas Thwaites.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Silvestri growled. “What time is it?”
“Six,” said Carmine, looking at the antique railroad clock behind Silvestri’s head.
“I’ll call M.M. and see if he can’t persuade the Hug Board to give us permission to search. Of course they can have as many Huggers as they want to watch us search, but whom would you prefer, Carmine?”
“Professor Smith and Miss Dupre,” said Carmine promptly.
“It’s called a parenteral injection, mixes the drug with the fluid of the abdominal cavity. Next best thing to a vein. I’d picked that he’d use Demerol, it’s a fast-acting opiate. Generic name, meperidine, and more addictive even than heroin, so getting a prescription for the
oral
version isn’t easy. Only medical people would have access to ampoules. Anyway, I was right. Up came the meperidine signature.”
“Any idea how much he gave her?”
“No. I found my trace in the dermal cells where the needle went in. But either he miscalculated the dosage or Francine had a better resistance to it than usual. If she managed to hide her jacket, then she came around much sooner than he counted on.”
“No gag, but muffled in a super-thick mat. Tied with maybe duct tape over her pants legs and her blouse. He might have taken the jacket off her himself to tape her blouse cuffs,” Carmine said. “When she woke up, she couldn’t move much, though it’s possible she managed to start freeing her hands. I think Francine was a formidable young woman. The kind we can’t afford to lose.”
“They’re all that kind.” Patrick frowned. “Still, he ought to have seen a pink sleeve poking out of a black mat.”
“The place was dark and he was in a hurry. It’s possible Francine had moved enough to hide what she’d done, or maybe when he opened the locker she came out fighting.”
“Either or,” Patrick said.
“Have you missed dinner, Patsy?”
“Nessie’s gone to a Chubb concert, so it’s Malvolio’s for me.”
“And for me. Meet you there as soon as I tell Silvestri where I’m going.” Carmine grinned. “He’ll be on that phone for at least an hour.”
“M.M. was easy. He appreciated our situation. But Roger Parson Junior was like getting blood out of a stone. He refuses to see any connection to his precious Hug.”
“How did you get around him, John?” Carmine asked.
The Scotch came; Silvestri swallowed some and looked like one of Hell’s executive demons. “I told him to put his money where his mouth is. If there’s no link to the Hug, then the sooner we ransack the joint, the better his case. Though,” he added, still wearing that diabolical look, “I paid a price for his permission.”
“And why,” asked Carmine warily, “do I think someone else is paying the price?”
“Because, Carmine, you’re smart. Next Thursday at noon you have an appointment with Parson at his office in New York City. He wants to know everything we know.”
“I need that like a hole in the head.”
“Pay the price, Carmine, pay the price.”
he best laid schemes can go awry, Carmine reflected on that Saturday morning. There had been an armed robbery at a gas station that the thieves followed up by hitting two liquor stores, a jeweler and another gas station, which thinned his reserve of men down to a point where he knew the search was going to take all day. Corey and Abe and four other detectives, all rookies who would have to be supervised. Right. Two parties of three, Abe leading one, Corey the other, while he himself floated. Paul was on hand in case evidence came to light that needed his touch.
A.M.
to be greeted in the foyer by the Prof and Desdemona, neither of them pleased but each under Board instructions to be co-operative.
“Miss Dupre, you go with Sergeant Marshall and his men on this floor. I presume you have keys to everything that’s locked? Professor, you go one floor up with Sergeant Goldberg. Do you have keys?” Carmine asked.
“Yes,” whispered the Prof, who looked as if he might faint.
“Cecil is in,” Desdemona said to Carmine as they walked down the north hall.
“Because of this search?”
“No, because of his babies. He’s always in weekend mornings. I’ll wait outside in case he has one in the main room. They abhor women,” she said.
“So he told me. You can go with Corey to look in the machine shop and the electronics lab. The last thing I want is Roger Parson Junior accusing us of stealing something. I’ll search animal care myself.”
“I am grateful for that, Lieutenant,” said Cecil, who didn’t seem annoyed at this invasion. “Want to see where my babies live? They in a good mood today.”
I’d be in a good mood too if I lived like this, Carmine said to himself, entering a small foyer shut off from the main macaque room by heavy iron bars. They were so strong, Cecil explained, that, if enraged, they could break chain link like candy canes. The area, very large considering its small population, was landscaped like rocky savannah — a wall of rugged boulders pocked with holes, bushes, tufts of grass, logs, limbed concrete trees, warm light that felt like a hot sun. Rheostats connected to timers ensured that there was a dawn and a dusk.
“Isn’t it unkind to deprive them of females?” Carmine asked.
Cecil chuckled. “They make do, Lieutenant, same as men make do in prison. Hump the shit outta each other. But there’s a pecking order, an’ Eustace, he The Man. New guy arrives, he gets grabbed by Eustace, humped, then he gets passed to Clyde, an’ ol’ Clyde, he passes the new guy on, an’ so on. Jimmy, he the last in the pecking order. Never gets to do more than jerk hisself off.”
“Well, thanks for showing me, Cecil, but I doubt any girl has ever been hidden in here.”
“You dead right there, Lieutenant.”
“Ah, so that’s why the magnifying glasses and the bright lights! I thought that sort of thing went out with Sherlock Holmes.”
“They’re the tools of choice in a search like this. All these men are experts at looking for evidence.”
“Mr. Roger Parson Junior is not amused.”
“So I gather, but ask me if I care. The answer is, I don’t.”
Room by room, closet by closet, cupboard by cupboard, the search went on; satisfied that the first floor had nothing to offer, Corey and his team went up to the third floor, Desdemona and Carmine tagging along.
During this more leisurely inspection of the third floor, Carmine realized that under ordinary circumstances life at the Hug was pleasant; most of the technicians had attempted to turn cold science into warm familiarity. Walls and doors were plastered with cartoons that only someone in the game would find funny; pictures of people were there too, and landscapes, and posters of vividly colored things whose nature Carmine couldn’t begin to fathom, though he could appreciate their beauty.
“Crystals under polarized light,” Desdemona explained, “or pollen, dust mites, viruses under an electron microscope.”
“Some of these work niches look like Mary Poppinsville.”
“Marvin’s, you mean?” she asked, pointing to an area where everything from drawers to boxes and books had been covered with Contact adhesive paper in pink and yellow butterflies. “Think about it, Carmine. People like Marvin spend the most concerted stretch of each twenty-four hours rooted to one spot. Why should that spot be grey and anonymous? Employers don’t stop to think that if the cells people work in were more individual and harmonious, the quality of output might rise. Marvin is the poet, is all.”
“Ponsonby’s technician, right?”
“Correct.”
“Doesn’t Ponsonby object? He doesn’t strike me as a yellow and pink butterfly man, not when he’s got Bosch and Goya on his walls.”
“Chuck would like to object, but the Prof wouldn’t back him up. Theirs is an interesting relationship, goes back to childhood, and the Prof was the boss then as much as now, I suspect.” She spotted Corey about to move an apparatus of fine glass columns on a levered stand, and shrieked. “Don’t you dare touch the Natelson! Stuff it up, mate, and you’ll be singing soprano in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”
“I don’t think,” Carmine said solemnly, “that it’s big enough to hide anything. Look in that closet.”
They looked in every closet from the first floor clear to the roof, but found nothing. Paul came to go over the O.R., swabbing any surface that could possibly collect fluid.
But, said Paul, “I doubt there’s anything to find. This Mrs. Liebman is immaculate, never forgets to clean the corners or the under sides.”
“My feeling,” said Abe, contributing his mite to the gloom, “is that the Hug may have received parts of bodies, but that they were bagged before they arrived, and went straight from someone’s car trunk to the dead animal fridge.”
“A negative exercise, guys, that tells us something,” Carmine said.
“Whatever role the Hug plays in this business, it isn’t a holding pen or a slaughter yard.”
he trouble with a case growing as old as the Monster’s was that the amount of work that could be done gradually tapered off; Sunday had been a day of trying to read, flicking from one TV channel to another, some pacing the floor. So it was with relief that Carmine arrived at the Hug at 9
A.M.
on Monday morning. To find a crowd of black men clustered outside it bearing placards that said
CHILD KILLERS
and
BLACK HATERS
. Most of them wore a Black Brigade jacket over combat fatigues. Two squad cars were parked nearby, but the picketers were orderly, content to shout and lift their fists in Mohammed el Nesr’s personally coined gesture. No Black Brigade chiefs were there, Carmine noted; these were small fry, hoping to catch a TV journalist or two in their net. When Carmine walked up the path to the entrance door, they ignored him apart from a flurry of yelled “Pig!”