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“Positive. The poor guy tried to make it look like some stranger busted in, but there’s his wife and her lover in the bed and her lover’s cut up some but she’s mincemeat — he did it. My bet is that he’ll confess later today voluntarily.”

Marciano rose to his feet. “Then let’s get some breakfast.”

His phone rang; Marciano wriggled his brows at Carmine and picked up. Within three seconds the police captain had stiffened, lost all contentment. He mouthed “Silvestri!” at Carmine and commenced a series of nods. “Sure, John. I’ll start Carmine now and get Patsy there as soon as I can.”

“Trouble?”

“Big trouble. Silvestri’s just had a call from the head of the Hug — Professor Robert Smith. They’ve found part of a female body in their dead animal refrigerator.”

“Christ!”

Sergeants Corey Marshall and Abe Goldberg were breakfasting at Malvolio’s, the diner the cops used because it was next door to headquarters in the County Services building on Cedar Street. Carmine didn’t bother walking in; he rapped his knuckles on the glass in front of the booth where Abe and Corey were washing down hotcakes and maple syrup with big mugs of coffee. Lucky stiffs, he thought. They get to eat, I get to give my report to Danny, now I don’t get to eat. Seniority’s a pain in the ass.

The car Carmine regarded as his own (it was really a Holloman Police Department unmarked) was a Ford Fairlane with a souped-up V-8 engine and cop springs and shocks. If the three of them were in it, Abe always drove, Corey rode shotgun, and Carmine spread himself and his papers in the back. Telling Corey and Abe took half a minute, the trip from Cedar Street to the Hug less than five.

Because medical schools grew up alongside hospitals, by 1965 they tended to be situated in the worst part of any city; in this respect Holloman was no different. The Chubb Medical School and the Holloman Hospital straggled down Oak Street on the southern border of the larger of Holloman’s two black ghettoes, called the Hollow because it lay in a hollow that had once been a swamp. To compound the health care woes, in 1960 the oil reservoirs of East Holloman were relocated at the end of Oak Street on waste ground between I-95 and the harbor.

The Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research sat on Oak Street right opposite the Shane-Driver medical student apartments, 100 for 100 students. Next to the Shane-Driver was the Parkinson Pavilion for medical research. It faced the Hug’s neighbor, the Holloman Hospital, a twelve-storey pile that had been rebuilt in 1950, the same year that saw the Hug go up.

“Why do they call it the Hug?” Corey asked as the Ford swung into the temporary road that bisected a gigantic parking lot.

“First three letters of Hughlings, I guess,” said Carmine.

“Hug?
It’s got no dignity. Why not the first four letters? Then it’d be the Hugh.”

“Ask Professor Smith,” said Carmine, eyeing their destination.

The Hug was a shorter, smaller twin of the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower cross-campus on Science Hill; a baldly square, squat pile of dark brick with plenty of big plate-glass windows. It sat in three acres of what had used to be slum dwellings, demolished to make way for this monument perpetuating the name of a mystery man who had had absolutely nothing to do with its genesis. Who on earth was this Hughlings Jackson? A question all of Holloman asked. By rights the Hug should have been named after its donor, the enormously wealthy, late Mr. William Parson.

Having no gate key to the parking lot, Abe put the Ford on Oak Street right outside the building. Which had no entrance onto Oak Street; the three men tramped down a gravel path along the north side to a single glass door, where a very tall woman was waiting for them.

It’s like a child’s building block in the middle of a huge room, Carmine thought; three acres is a lot of land for something only a hundred feet per side. And shit, she’s holding a clipboard. Office, not medical. His mind automatically registered the physical details of every person who swam into his piece of the human sea, so it was busy as she drew closer: six-three in bare feet, early thirties, navy pant suit on the baggy side, flat lace-up shoes, mouse-brown hair, a face with a biggish nose and a prominent chin. She’d never have made Miss Holloman ten years ago, let alone Miss Connecticut. Once he halted in front of her, however, he noted that she had very fine, interesting eyes the color of thick ice, which he had always found beautiful.

“Sergeants Marshall and Goldberg. I’m Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico,” he said curtly.

“Desdemona Dupre, the business manager,” she said as she took them into a tiny foyer, apparently only there to accommodate two elevators. But instead of pressing the
UP
button, she opened a door in the opposite wall and led them into a wide corridor.

“This is our first floor, which contains the animal care facilities and the workshops,” she said, her accent placing her as someone from the other side of the Atlantic. Turning a corner put them in another hall. She pointed to a pair of doors farther down. “There you are, animal care.”

“Thanks,” said Carmine. “We’ll take it from here. Please wait for me back at the elevators.”

Her brows rose, but she turned on her heel and disappeared without comment.

Carmine found himself inside a very large room lined with cupboards and bins. Tall racks of clean cages big enough to take a cat or dog stood in neat rows in an area fronting a service elevator many times the size of the two in the foyer. Other racks held plastic boxes topped with wire grids. The room smelled good, pungent like a pine forest, with only the faintest hint of something less pleasant below it.

Cecil Potter was a fine-looking man, tall, slender, very well kept in his pressed white boiler suit and canvas bootees. His eyes, Carmine fancied, smiled a lot, though they were not smiling now.

One of Carmine’s most important policies in this year of busing turmoil was that the black people he met in the course of his job or social life be treated courteously; he held out his hand, shook Cecil’s firmly, performed the introductions without barking them or looking rushed. Corey and Abe were his men through thick and thin, they followed suit with the same courtesy.

“It’s here,” said Cecil, moving to a closed stainless steel door with a snap-lock handle. “I didn’t touch a thing, just shut the door.” He hesitated, decided to risk it. “Uh, Lieutenant, do you mind if I get back to my babies?”

“Babies?”

“The monkeys. Macaques. Rhesus mean anything to you? Well, that’s them. They in there, an’ very upset. Jimmy won’t lay off telling them where he been, an’ they very upset.”

“Jimmy?”

“The monkey Dr. Chandra thought was dead, an’ put in a bag in the fridge last night. Jimmy really found her — tore the place apart when he woke up in the dark freezing his buns off. When Otis — he my assistant as well as the handyman — went to empty the fridge, Jimmy came outta there screeching and yelling. Then Otis found
her,
an’ he was outta here screeching worse than Jimmy. I looked, an’ called the Prof. I guess the Prof called you.”

“Where’s Otis now?” Carmine asked.

“Knowing Otis, he run home to Celeste. She his mama as well as his wife.”

They were gloved now; Abe wheeled the bin away from the door and Carmine opened it as Cecil, already crooning and clucking, went into the monkey room.

Of the two big bags, one still lay at the back of the chamber. The other, rent from where the top folded over clear to the bottom, had exposed the lower half of a female torso. When Carmine noted its size and its lack of pubic hair his heart sank — a prepubescent child? Oh, please, not that! He made no movement to touch a thing, just leaned his shoulders against the wall.

“We wait for Patrick,” he said.

“I never smelled a smell like it — dead, but not decomposing,” said Abe, dying for a cigarette.

“Abe, go find Mrs. Dupre and tell her she can go upstairs as soon as the uniforms arrive,” Carmine said, knowing that expression well. “Post them on all the entrances and emergency exits.” Then, alone with Corey, he rolled his eyes. “Why in there?” he asked.

He looked as Irish as his name from the reddish hair to the bright blue eyes, but in actual fact he and Carmine were first cousins, the sons of two sisters of Italian extraction. One married a Delmonico, the other an O’Donnell. Ten years older than Carmine and a happily married man with six children, Patrick let neither of these impediments spoil their deep friendship.

“I don’t know much, but here’s what I do know,” said Carmine, and filled him in. “Why in there?” he repeated at the end of it.

“Because if Jimmy the monkey hadn’t woken up undead and flown into a panic, these two brown bags, unmarked and intact, would have been dumped into some kind of receptacle and taken to the animal care incinerator,” Patrick said, grimacing. “This is the perfect way to get rid of human remains. Poof! Up in smoke.”

Abe came back in time to hear this, and went pale. “Jeez!” he breathed, horrified.

Photographs taken, Patrick lifted the first bag onto a gurney and tucked it inside an open body bag. Then he examined what he could see without disturbing the torn brown paper.

“No pubic hair,” said Carmine. “Patsy, if you love me, tell me this isn’t a child.”

“The hair’s been — not shaved — no, plucked — so she’s postpubescent. Small girl, though. As if what our killer really yearned for was a child, but wasn’t game to follow through on all his disgusting desires.” He lifted out the second bag, not as mangled, and placed it beside the first. “I’ll get back to the morgue — you’ll want my report a.s.a.p.” His chief technician, Paul, was already preparing to vacuum the chamber’s interior; after that he would dust for fingerprints. “Lend me Abe and Corey as well, Carmine, and we can let Cecil get on with his work. Except for the monkeys, they must keep their experimental animals elsewhere — these are the day’s clean cages ready to go.”

“Leave no stone unturned, guys,” said Carmine, following his cousin and the gurney’s grisly contents out.

Desdemona Dupre — what a strange name! — was in the foyer waiting, flicking through the contents of a thick sheaf of papers on her clipboard.

“Mrs. Dupre, this is Dr. Patrick O’Donnell,” said Carmine.

Whereupon the woman bristled! “I am not a missus, I am a miss!” she said with a snap, that odd accent pronounced. “Are you coming upstairs with me, Lieutenant, or may I go? I have work to do.”

“Catch you later, Patsy,” said Carmine, following
Miss
Dupre into an elevator.

“You’re from, uh, England?” he asked as they ascended.

“Correct.”

“How long have you been at the Hug?”

“Five years.”

They left the elevator on the fourth floor, which was the top floor, though the last button said
ROOF
. Here the Hug’s interior decor was better displayed. It was little different from the first floor: walls painted institution cream, dark oak woodwork, banks of fluorescent ceiling lights under plastic diffusers. Back down a twin of that first-floor corridor to a door opposite its far end, where it met another hall at right angles.

Miss Dupre knocked, was bidden enter, and pushed Carmine into Professor Smith’s private domain without entering herself.

He found himself staring at one of the most strikingly handsome men he had ever seen. Robert Mordent Smith, William Parson Chair Professor at the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research, was over six feet tall, on the thin side, and possessed an unforgettable face: wonderful bone structure, black brows and lashes, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of wavy, streaky white hair. On someone still young enough not to have lines or wrinkles, the hair set him off to perfection. His smile revealed even white teeth, though the smile wasn’t reaching those marvelous eyes this morning. No surprise.

“Coffee?” he asked, gesturing Carmine to the big, costly chair on the opposite side of his big, costly desk.

“Thanks, yes. No cream, no sugar.”

While the Prof ordered two of the same via his intercom, his guest inspected the room, a generous 20 x 25 feet, with those huge glass windows on two walls. The Prof’s office occupied the northeast corner of the floor, so the view was of the Hollow, the Shane-Driver dormitory, and the parking lot. The decor was expensive, the furniture walnut, the fabric chintz, the rug Aubusson. An imposing assemblage of degrees, diplomas and honors sat on a green-striped wall, and what looked to be an excellent copy of a Watteau landscape hung behind the Prof’s desk.

“It’s not a copy,” said the Prof, following Carmine’s gaze. “I have it on loan from the William Parson Collection, the largest and best collection of European art in America.”

“Wow,” said Carmine, thinking of the cheap print of van Gogh’s irises behind his own desk.

A woman in her middle thirties entered bearing a silver tray on which stood a vacuum flask, two delicate cups and saucers, two crystal glasses and a crystal carafe of iced water. They sure do themselves proud at the Hug!

A severely tailored looker, thought Carmine, examining her: black hair piled up in a beehive, a broad, smooth, rather flat face with hazel eyes, and a terrific figure. Her suit was coat and skirt, snugly cut, and her shoes were Ferragamo flatties. That Carmine knew such things could be laid at the door of a long career in a profession that required intimate knowledge of all aspects of human beings and their behavior. This woman was what Mom called a man-eater, though she didn’t seem to have an atom of appetite for the Prof.

“Miss Tamara Vilich, my secretary,” said the Prof.

No atom of appetite for Carmine Delmonico either! She smiled, nodded and departed without lingering.

“Two mature misses on your staff,” said Carmine.

“They are just wonderful if you can find them,” said the Prof, who seemed anxious to postpone the reason for this interview. “A married woman has family responsibilities that sometimes tend to eat into her working day. Whereas single women give their all to the job — don’t mind working late without notice, for example.”

“More juice to pump into it, I can see that,” said Carmine. He sipped his coffee, which was terrible. Not that he had expected it to be good. The Prof, he observed, drank water from the lovely carafe, though he poured Carmine’s coffee himself.

“Professor, have you been down to the animal care room to see what’s been found?”

The Prof blanched, shook his head emphatically. “No, no, of course not! Cecil called me to tell me what Otis found, and I called Commissioner Silvestri at once. I did remember to tell Cecil not to let anyone into animal care until the police came.”

“And have you found Otis — Otis who?”

“Green. Otis Green. It seems he has sustained a mild heart attack. At the moment he’s in the hospital. However, his cardiologist says it’s not a severe ictus, so he should be discharged in two or three days.”

Carmine put down his coffee cup and leaned back in his chintz chair, hands folded in his lap. “Tell me about the dead animal refrigerator, Professor.”

Smith looked a little confused, clearly had to summon up inner reserves of courage; maybe, thought Carmine, his brand of courage doesn’t run to coping with a murder crisis, just grant committees and awkward researchers. How many Chubb receptions have I stood through listening to those?

“Well, every research institute has one. Or, if it isn’t a big unit, shares one with other laboratories nearby. We are researchers, and, given that ethically we cannot use human beings as experimental animals, we use animals lower on the evolutionary scale than ourselves. The kind of animal depends on the kind of research — guinea pigs for skin, rabbits for lungs, and so on. As we are interested in epilepsy and mental retardation and they are situated in the brain, our research animals go rat, cat and primate — here at the Hug, macaques. At the end of an experimental project, the creatures are sacrificed — with extreme care and kindness, I hasten to add. The carcasses are put into special bags and taken to the refrigerator, where they remain until about seven each weekday morning. At that hour Otis empties the contents of the refrigerator into a bin and wheels the bin through the tunnel to the Parkinson Pavilion, where the medical school’s main animal care facility is located. The incinerator that disposes of all animal carcasses is a part of P.P.’s animal care, but it also is available to the hospital, which sends amputated limbs and the like to it.”

His speech patterns are so formal, thought Carmine, that he talks as if he’s dictating an important letter. “Did Cecil tell you how the human remains were discovered?” he asked.

“Yes.” The Prof’s face was beginning to look pinched.

“Who has access to the refrigerator?”

“Anyone here in the Hug, though I doubt anyone from outside could use it. Our entrances are few, and barred.”

“Why’s that?”

“My dear Lieutenant, we are on the very end of the Oak Street medical school–hospital line! Beyond us is Eleventh Street and the Hollow. An unsavory neighborhood, as I’m sure you know.”

“I notice that you call it the Hug too, Professor. Why?”

The slightly tragic mouth twisted. “I blame Frank Watson,” he said through his teeth.

“Who’s he?”

“Professor of Neurology in the medical school. When the Hug was opened in 1950 he wanted to head it, but our benefactor, the late William Parson, was adamant that his Chair should go to a man experienced in epilepsy and mental retardation. As Watson’s field is demyelinating diseases, naturally he wasn’t suitable. I told Mr. Parson that he ought to have chosen an easier name than Hughlings Jackson, but he was determined. Oh, a very determined man, always! Of course one expects to see the name abbreviated, but I had thought it would be the Hughlings, or the Hugh. However, Frank Watson had a small revenge. He thought it terribly clever to call it the Hug, and the name stuck.
Stuck!”

“Exactly who was or is Hughlings Jackson, sir?”

“A pioneer British neurologist, Lieutenant. His wife had a slow-growing tumor on the motor strip — the gyrus anterior to the fissure of Rolando that represents the cortical end of the body’s voluntary motor function — muscles, that is.”

I do not understand a single word of this, Carmine thought as the level voice continued, but does he care? No.

“Mrs. Jackson’s epileptic seizures were of a very curious kind,” the Prof went on. “They were limited to one side of her body, started on one side of her face, marched down to the arm and hand on that same side, and finally involved the leg. They are still known as Jacksonian marches. From them Jackson put together the first hypotheses about motor function, that each part of the body had its own invariable place in the cerebral cortex. However, what fascinated people was the indefatigable way that he sat beside his dying wife’s bed hour after hour, taking notes on her seizures with the most minute attention to detail. The researcher par excellence.”

“Pretty heartless, if you ask me,” said Carmine.

“I prefer to call it dedication,” Smith said icily.

Carmine rose. “No one can leave this building unless
I
give them permission. That means you too, sir. There are police on the entrances, including the tunnel. I suggest you say nothing about what’s happened to anyone.”

“But we have no cafeteria!” said the Prof blankly. “What can the staff do about lunch if they don’t bring it from home?”

“One of the policemen can take orders and bring food back.” He paused in the doorway to look back. “I’m afraid we’ll have to take fingerprints from everyone here. An inconvenience worse than lunch, but I’m sure you understand.”