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A shudder, a twisted grimace. “Terrible. He knew why we couldn’t let him see more than the birthmark, but he begged and begged, cried so much that I had to hide my own tears. His priest and the couple of nuns were a blessing. They carried him out in a state of collapse.”

“Have a whiskey on me.”

“That’s what I hoped you’d say.”

Carmine ordered two double Irishes from the ogling waitress and said nothing more until Patrick had swallowed a good half of his drink and the color began to return to his fresh face.

“You know as well as I do that our kind of work hardens a man,” Patrick said then, turning the glass between his hands, “but at least most of the time the crimes are sordid and the victims, even if pitiable, don’t have the power to haunt our dreams. Oh, but this one! A downright preying on the innocent. The death of Mercedes is going to tear that family apart.”

“It’s worse than you know, Patsy,” Carmine said, glanced about swiftly to make sure they couldn’t be overheard, and told him of the four other girls.

“He’s a
multiple?”

“I’d stake my life on it.”

“So he’s cutting a swath through those in our society who least deserve to be preyed on. People who give no one any trouble, or cost governments money, or make nuisances of themselves phoning up about barking dogs, the party two doors down, or rude bastards in the IRS. People my Irish grandfather would have called the salt of the earth,” said Patrick, finishing his drink in a gulp.

“I’d agree with you, except on one point. So far they’re all part-colored, and there are some would take offense at that, as you well know. Despite long residence in Connecticut, their roots are Caribbean. Even Rachel Simpson from Bridgeport turns out to have been of Barbadian origins. So it begins to look as if there is some kind of racial vendetta involved.”

Down went the empty glass with a thump; Patrick slid out of the booth. “I’m going home, Carmine. If I don’t, I’ll stay here and keep on drinking.”

Carmine wasn’t far behind his cousin; he paid his check, gave the waitress a two-dollar tip for Sandra’s sake, and walked the half block to his apartment eight floors below Dr. Hideki Satsuma’s penthouse in the Nutmeg Insurance building.

Since Patrick was just an elevator ride away, Carmine went to see him first. He was in his office, his desk littered with brown paper bags.

“I know you’ve seen plenty of these already, but you don’t know as much about them as I do,” Patrick said, waiting while his cousin poured freshly brewed coffee from a percolator.

“So tell me,” said Carmine, sitting down.

“As you see, they do indeed come in all shapes and sizes.” Patrick held up a specimen 12 x 6 inches. “This holds six hundred-gram rats, this rather larger one holds four two-hundred-fifty-gram rats. A researcher rarely uses rats bigger than two-hundred-fifty grams, but as rats continue to grow for as long as they live, they can get up to the size of a cat or even a small terrier. However, no one at the Hug uses rats that large.” He held up a 24 x 18 inch bag. “For reasons that escape me, the Hug cats are all large male animals, just as the rats are all males. And the monkeys. This is a cat bag. I went over to the Hug first thing this morning and managed to have words” — not an unfair summary of the encounter, Carmine was sure — “with Miss Dupre, who deals with all purchasing
and
stock taking. The bags are specially made by a firm in Oregon. They consist of two layers of very stout brown paper separated by a three-millimeter-thick padding of fiber made from sugarcane bagasse. You’ll note that there are two plastic discs on the outside of the bag. Fold the top of the bag over twice and the two discs lie in close proximity to each other. The picture wire on the top disc is twisted in a figure-of-eight around the bottom one and the bag can’t come open. Same way you’d close an interdepartmental memo envelope, except that its tie is thread. A dead animal will keep inside a bag without body fluids leaking through for up to seventy-two hours, but no carcass is kept half so long in a bag. Any animals that die over the weekend aren’t found until Monday unless the researcher is in over the weekend. He’ll put the carcass in a bag, but then throws the bag into one of the freezers that dot his floor. His technician then takes it down to animal care on Monday morning, though it won’t go to the incinerator until Tuesday morning.”

Carmine held a bag up to his nose and sniffed intently. “I see that they’re treated with a deodorant.”

“Correct, as Miss Dupre would put it. What a snooty bitch!”

Smith rocked.
“A number?
You mean more than one?”

Sit on your rage, Carmine, don’t let this introverted specimen of splendid isolation get under your skin! “Yes, I mean a number! Yes, I mean more than one — many more! You have to know, Professor, but the information is strictly classified. It’s high time you took this seriously, because your singularity is anything but a singularity! It’s multiple! Hear me? Multiple!”

“You must be mistaken!”

“I am not,” Carmine snarled. “Grow up! Antivivisectionism is the least of your worries, so don’t come whining to me!”

Neither wife nor her nephew was willing to leave, but Carmine didn’t have to exert his authority: Otis exerted his.

“Go away and leave us be,” he said curtly.

Both of them left immediately, Celeste with warnings of what would happen to Carmine if he upset her husband.

“You have a loyal family,” said Carmine as he perched on a large, clear plastic ottoman filled with red plastic roses.

“I got a loyal
wife”
from Otis, followed by a snort. “That kid’s a menace. Wants to make a name for hisself in the Black Brigade, says he’s found the prophet Mohammed an’ is gonna call hisself Ali somethin’ or other. It’s the roots thing, like with any people stolen in millions, but far as I know, the le Clercs come from a part of Africa worshipped King Kong, not Allah. I am an old-fashioned man, Lieutenant, don’t hold with tryin’ to be someone I ain’t. I go to the Baptist church an’ Celeste goes to the Catholic church. I been a black man in a white man’s army, but if the Germans and the Japs had won, I’d a been a helluva lot worse off, is how I see it. I got a little money in the bank, an’ when I retire, I am goin’ back to Georgia to farm. I had it up to here” — he put his hand to his throat —

“with Connecticut winters. Still an’ all, that’s not why I wanted to see you, sir.”

“Why did you want to see me, Mr. Green?”

“Otis. To get it outta the way. How many people know what I found in that fridge?”

“Hardly any, and we’re trying to keep it that way.”

“It was a little girl, wasn’t it?”

“No. Not a child, at any rate. We know she was from a family of Dominicans, and we know she was sixteen years old.”

“So she black, not white.”

“I’d prefer to say she was neither, Otis. A mixture.”

“Lieutenant, this is a terrible sin!”

“Yes, it is.”

Carmine paused while Otis muttered under his breath, let him calm down, then broached the subject of bags.

“Is there a usual pattern to the number and size of the bags in the fridge, Otis?”

“I guess so,” Otis said after some thought. “I mean, I know when Mrs. Liebman’s doin’ decerebrations ’cos there’s four to six cat bags. Otherwise, it’s mostly rat bags. If a macaque dies, the way we thought Jimmy had, then there’s a real big bag, but I will always know what’s in it ’cos Cecil will be cryin’ his heart out.”

“So when there are four to six cat bags in the fridge, you know that Mrs. Liebman has been decerebrating.”

“’s right, Lieutenant.”

“Can you remember any time in the past when there were four to six cat bags in the fridge that Mrs. Liebman couldn’t have had anything to do with?”

Otis looked surprised, tried to sit up.

“You want your wife in jail for murdering me, Otis? Lie back down, man!”

“About six months ago. Six cat bags when Mrs. Liebman was away on vacation. I remember wonderin’ who was fillin’ in for her, but then I was needed, so I just threw them bags into my bin an’ wheeled them off to the incinerator.”

Carmine rose. “That’s a great help. Thanks, Otis.”

The visitor hadn’t let himself out of the downstairs front door before Celeste and Wesley were back.

“You okay?” Celeste demanded.

“Better than before he came,” said Otis sturdily.

“What color’s the body?” Wesley demanded. “Did the cop say?”

“Not white, but not black either.”

“A mulatto?”

“He didn’t say that. That’s a Louisiana word, Wes.”

“Mulatto’s black, not white,” said Wesley with satisfaction.

“Don’t you go makin’ mountains outta molehills!” Otis cried.

“I gotta see Mohammed” was Wesley’s rejoinder. He zipped himself into his black imitation leather jacket with the white fist painted on its back.

“You’re not seeing Mohammed, boy, you’re going to work this minute! You do not qualify for welfare and I am not boarding you for nothing!” Celeste snapped. “Go on, shoo!”

Sighing, Wesley divested himself of his passport to Mohammed el Nesr’s headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street, put on a down jacket instead, and hied himself off in his battered 1953 De Soto to Parson Surgical Instruments. Where, if he had bothered to enquire, which he didn’t, he could have discovered that his dexterity at crafting mosquito forceps had more than once made the difference between continued employment and a pink slip.