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“Not until there’s a trial.”

“But first, find the Ghosts,” said Marciano. “Who do you think Grandma is, Carmine?”

“One of the Ghosts.”

“But you said these aren’t women’s crimes.”

“I still say that, Danny. However, it’s much easier for a man to disguise himself as an elderly woman than a young one. Rougher skin and creases don’t matter as much.”

“I love the props,” Silvestri said dryly. “Sable coats, a chauffeur and limo. Could we try the limo angle?”

“I’ll get Corey on to it tomorrow, John, but don’t hope. The chauffeur was the other Ghost, I’m picking. Funny, that. Mrs. Dobchik could remember every detail about Grandma down to bifocal glasses, but not a thing about the chauffeur apart from a black suit, cap, and leather gloves.”

“No, it’s logical,” said Patrick. “Your Mrs. Dobchik is in the clothing business. She caters to wealthy women every day, but not to workingmen. The women she files in her memory, and she knows every kind of fur, every make of French bags and shoes. I’ll bet Grandma never took her kid gloves off for a second, even when she peeled hundreds off her stack.”

“You’re right, Patsy. Gloved throughout.”

Silvestri growled. “So we’re no closer to the Ghosts.”

“In one way, John, yet we have made progress. Since they leave no evidence and no one has come forward with a description, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. How many people in Connecticut, three million? As states go it’s pretty small — no big cities, a dozen small ones, a hundred towns. Well, that’s our haystack. But I wasn’t long into this case before I realized that looking for the needle isn’t the way to go. The Tinker Bell dresses may seem like one more dead end, but I don’t think that’s true. They’re a new nail in the coffin, another piece of evidence. Anything that tells us a fact about the Ghosts gets us that much closer to them. What we’re looking at is a jigsaw puzzle made of cloudless blue sky, but the Tinker Bell dresses have filled in a blank space. The amount of sky is growing.”

Carmine leaned forward, running with his idea. “First off, one Ghost has become two Ghosts. Secondly, the two Ghosts are as close as brothers. I don’t know what color their skin is, but what they see in their collective mind is a face. More than anything else, a face. The kind of face you don’t see on white white girls, nor very often on black black girls. The Ghosts work as a team in the true sense — each has a specific set of tasks, areas of expertise. That probably extends to what they do with and to their victims once captured. The rape turns them on, but the victim has to be a virgin in
every
sense — they’re not interested in heavy petters with intact hymens. One Ghost gives the victim her first kiss, so maybe the other Ghost deflowers her. I see the teamwork persisting — you get to do this, I get to do that. About the actual killing, I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the subservient Ghost does it. He cleans up. The only reason they keep the heads is the face, which means that when we find them we are going to find every head going back to Rosita Esperanza. While ever their activities weren’t known to the police, they got a kick out of the daylight abductions, but from Francine Murray on, they sweated. I’m beginning to think that they switched to the night because of police awareness, not as part of a consciously designed new method. Night abductions are less risky, simple as that.”

Patrick sat with eyes narrowed as if focused on something very small. “The face,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve heard you discard all the other criteria, Carmine. What makes you think it’s just the face? Why have you discarded color, creed, race, size, innocence?”

“Oh, Patsy, you know how often I’ve been fixed on all of them and each of them, but I’ve finally settled for the face. It came to me on the drive — wham!” He palmed a fist, wham! “Margaretta Bewlee told me. My black pearl after a dozen creamy ones. What
did
she have in common with the other girls? And the answer is, a face. Nothing
except
a face. Feature by feature, hers is the same as all the others. I got sidetracked by her differences, so much so that I overlooked the one similarity — the face.”

“What about the innocence?” Marciano asked. “She had that too.”

“Yes, it’s a given. But innocence isn’t what drives our pair of Ghosts to abduct these particular girls. The face does. If a girl doesn’t have the face, all the innocence in the world won’t interest the Ghosts in her.” He paused, frowning.

“Go on, Carmine,” Silvestri prompted.

“The Ghosts — or maybe one Ghost — knew someone with the face. Someone they hate more than the rest of humanity put together.”

He dropped his head in his hands, clutched at his hair. “One of them, or both of them? The dominant one, for sure, whereas the submissive one might just be along for the ride on one fantastic roller-coaster — he’s the servant, he hates whomever the dominant one hates. When you said to me that the Ghosts aren’t interested in breasts, Patsy, you filled in another chunk of sky. The flat chest, the plucked pubes. They should suggest that the owner of the face was pre-pubescent, and yet — if so, why don’t they abduct pre-pubescent girls? They don’t lack the balls or the brains to do it. So is the owner of the face someone that at least one of the Ghosts knew from childhood to young womanhood? Hated more as woman than as child? That’s the riddle I have no answer for.”

Silvestri spat out his cigar in excitement. “But they have gone further with the child aspect on this second dozen, Carmine. A little girl’s party dress.”

“If we knew who owned the face, we’d know who the Ghosts are. I spent the whole drive back from White Plains mentally searching through every Hugger’s house looking for that face on someone’s walls, but it isn’t on any Hugger’s walls.”

“You still believe it’s the Hug?” Marciano asked.

“One of the Ghosts is definitely a Hugger. The other one is not. He’s the half who does the staking out, maybe some of the abductions unaided. It has always had to be a Hugger, Danny. Yes, you can argue that bodies might have been put in any of the medical school dead animal refrigerators, but where else than the Hug is it possible to get two to ten bulky bags from a vehicle to the refrigerator unobserved? The fewer in one trip, the more trips. People come and go in the parking lots twenty-four hours a day, whereas the Hug’s parking lot is key-card gated and utterly deserted at, say, five in the morning. I noticed that there’s a big shopping cart chained to the Hug’s back wall to help a researcher take his books and papers inside. I am
not
saying that the Ghosts couldn’t have used other refrigerators, I am simply saying that using the Hug’s is simplest and easiest.”

“Simple and easy is better,” said Silvestri. “The Hug it is.”

“You’d best hope it isn’t Desdemona, Carmine,” said Patrick.

“Oh, I’m positive it isn’t Desdemona.”

“Ah!” Patrick cried, tensing. “You suspect someone!”

Carmine drew in a deep breath. “I don’t suspect anyone, and that’s my worst worry. I
should
suspect someone, so why don’t I? What I do have is a sense that I’m missing something right under my nose. In my sleep it’s crystal clear, but when I wake it’s gone. All I can do is go on thinking.”

“Certainly not! To some extent I travel on an outer orbit that’s out of step with all the other orbits — a bit like four-five music. I’m seen as an accountant, not as a scientist, and that makes me of no importance to the Prof.” She snuggled. “I’m serious, Carmine. Talk to Eliza Smith. You know perfectly well that it’s talk will solve this case.”

In Holloman, Mohammed el Nesr sternly forbade rioting, as it was no part of his plans at this stage in his genesis to court arrest and search warrants. Alone among the discontented clots of black people raising hell, the Black Brigade and its leaders were sitting on a formidable arsenal of weapons rather than whatever firearms could be looted from gun shops or private houses. And now was not the time to reveal the presence of that arsenal. Despite which, Mohammed demonstrated relentlessly. If he had hoped for bigger crowds, the numbers who congregated were sufficiently large to put shouting, fist-waving groups outside City Hall, the County Services building, Chubb Administration, the railroad station, the bus station, M.M.’s official residence, and, of course, the Hug. All the placards dwelt upon the Connecticut Monster’s whiteness, inviolability and racially selective murder victims.

“After all,” said Wesley/Ali eagerly to Mohammed, “what we want is to highlight racial
discrimination.
Whitey’s teenaged girls are safe but no one else’s are — and that’s a fact not even the Governor’s ivory tower can dispute. Every industrial city in Connecticut is at least eighty percent black, which puts us in the catbird seat.”

Mohammed el Nesr looked like the eagle he was named for, a magnificently proud, hawk-nosed man of imposing height and build, his cropped hair hidden beneath a hat he had designed himself, with some of the look of a turban, yet flatter on top. At first he had worn a beard, then decided that a beard obscured too much of a face no camera could make seem bestial, or cruel, or ugly. His leather Black Brigade jacket’s white fist was embroidered rather than stamped, he wore it on top of combat fatigues, and he moved like the ex-military man he was. As Peter Scheinberg, he had risen to the rank of full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, so he was indeed an eagle. An eagle with two law degrees.

Inside their lining of mattresses his headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street were stuffed with books, for he read insatiably on the law, politics and history, studied his Koran fervently, and knew himself a leader of men. Yet he was still groping for the right way to accomplish his revolution; industrial cities might enjoy big black majorities, but Whitey owned the entire nation, which by and large wasn’t hugely urban. His first inspiration had been to recruit Black Brigaders among the armed services’ plethora of black men, only to find that very few black soldiers, no matter how they privately felt about Whitey, were inclined to enlist. So upon discharge — an honorable one — he had migrated to Holloman, thinking that a small city was the best place to start wooing the restless ghetto masses. That the stone he threw into the Holloman pond would spread its ripples ever outward to embrace other and far bigger places. A superlative orator, he did get invitations to speak at rallies in New York City, Chicago, L.A. But the local leaders in each place were jealous of their sway, didn’t regard Mohammed el Nesr as important. At fifty-two years of age, he knew that he lacked the money and the nationwide organization to weld his people as they needed to be welded. As was equally true for other autocrats, the people were pointing out to him that they refused to be led whither he would take them. Infinitely more wanted to follow Martin Luther King, a pacifist and a Christian.

Now here was this skinny little sansculotte from Louisiana giving him advice — how had he let that happen?

“I’ve been thinking too,” Wesley/Ali burbled on, “about what you said a couple of months ago — do you remember? You said our movement needed a martyr. Well, I’m working on it.”

“Good, Ali, you work on it, man. In the meantime, get back to your brainchild, the Hug. And Eleventh Street.”

“How’s next Sunday’s rally coming on?”

“Great. Looks like we’ll pull in fifty thousand black people on the Green come midday. Now fuck off, Ali, let me get on with writing my speech.”

As ordered, Wesley/Ali fucked off to Eleventh Street, there to spread the word that Mohammed el Nesr was going to speak next Sunday on Holloman Green. Not only did everyone have to be there, but everyone also had to persuade their neighbors and friends to be there. Mohammed was a brilliant, charismatic orator, raved his disciple, well worth listening to. Come along, find out just how thoroughly Whitey was screwing black people. No black girl child was safe, but Mohammed el Nesr had answers.

What a pity, thought Wesley/Ali in one corner of his perpetually busy mind, that no one white would think to shoot Mohammed el Nesr down. What a martyr he would make! But this was staid old Connecticut, not the South or the West: no neo-Nazis, Klanners or even typical rednecks. One of the original thirteen states, a haven of free speech.