Scalpers dgmm-2

by Robert W. Walker

  "Maybe he tossed them after a while .. smells, don't it?"

  It had an animal odor, yes, like wet leather. Dean went back to his case, took out a pair of forceps, returned to the scalp, snatched it off the rod, and stuffed it into another of his plastic bags. “What the hell's keeping Corman?” he wondered aloud. “Weren't you able to get him?"

  "I know dispatch is beeping him. He's got to know by now."

  "I'm not waiting all night for him.” Dean returned to the body and began taking scrapings, scrapings of coagulated blood from the chest and from the hands. “I'll want the clothing once he's transported, including the shoes,” he told Dyer. Dean allowed a momentary glance into Park's open eyes and face. It was always a mistake to do so, and now he wished he hadn't. They'd been talking earlier that day in Dean's lab, the man's mind active and alive, his muscle, nerves, and senses working, and now he was as lifeless and still as a mound of sand. Something in the dead man's eyes or expression told Dean he had been taken by surprise by Peggy Carson, shocked, perhaps, by her forcing her way in at gunpoint. But how, then, did he die as a result of his own knife?

  Dean went to Peggy to ask her if she could now tell him exactly what had happened between her and Park. But Peggy seemed totally confused, telling him that she had not confronted Park, that he hadn't been in the room until she was grabbed from behind and choked unconscious.

  "Choked?"

  "Yes, and I must've fainted."

  "Where were you when you were grabbed from behind?"

  Dean sat at the very spot she indicated and glanced over his shoulder to where the bath was. “Had you secured the bathroom, Peggy, before going over the news clippings, you might not have been surprised by Park."

  "No, I thought he was out ... thought I was alone. Then somebody grabbed me and I ... I lost consciousness.'

  This sounded odd to Dean. He slipped out a slide from his valise and asked Peggy to exhale on it."

  "What for?"

  "Call it a breathalizer test."

  "I wasn't drinking!"

  "I just want a sample, Peggy, please. Humor me, all right?"

  She looked deeply into Dean's eyes. Seeing the concern there, she did as he asked. He immediately treated the slide with a fixative, covered it, and clamped the two together. Later he'd analyze it in the lab.

  "What in God's name!” It was Chief Hodges in evening attire. His bulk filled the doorway. “I was just across at Nero's when I heard."

  "Come on, give me a hand,” Dean said to him.

  "With what?"

  "Spray."

  "Spray?"

  "Seconal."

  "Oh, yeah ... that shit."

  "I want the whole carpet covered with it,” said Dean.

  "The whole damned carpet, huh?” Hodges wasn't use to taking orders, but the situation called for cooperation, and soon he was going about the room with the can of seconal spray as if it were Lysol.

  "The bed, too, Chief."

  Hodges frowned, but did as he was told.

  "It'll highlight any blood spots, give us a trail, if there is one, tell us exactly where Park was when he died and if he did any twisting,” said Dean. “More to the point, we'll know if he died here, or was carried here."

  "That's rather obvious, isn't it?” asked Dyer from his knees at the bed. He was searching between the springs and the mattress for any additional incriminating scalps. "Ugh," he said, his hand touching hair. “I think I've got another one, Dr. Grant"

  Dean rushed to the spot, telling Dyer to keep his mitts off. With the foreceps, Dean again had the prized evidence put into a sealed bag. Dean had already gathered up the newspaper clippings, pointing them out to Hodges who, by this time, was embarrassed and delighted at once. Embarrased because he believed all that David Park had led him to believe, and had been led to believe so by someone in faraway Michigan as well. Delighted because now he could return to the Mayor and tell him that the Scalper was a thing of the past. The two scalps in Park's room alone were enough to convict him, in Hodges’ book.

  Even so, the more evidence Dean and Dyer unearthed in the tiny apartment, the more Dean wondered. Something smelled here, and it was more than just the scalps. It would take a little more time for the seconal spray to work, and in the meantime, Dean went again to Peggy Carson and asked her questions. “Did you hear Park come up on you? Did he say anything to you?"

  "No, nothing."

  "When did you grab hold of the knife?"

  "I didn't. I swear, I didn't see the knife until you and Frank came through the door. I didn't kill him!"

  "Don't worry, Officer Carson,” said Hodges, “you did this city a service, and it's going to be written up that way. Don't be surprised if you get a commendation, young lady."

  "I don't want a commendation for killing someone I had no part in—” But Hodges wasn't listening to Peggy. He merely continued on.

  "But how did you know Park was the man who had attacked you before?"

  "I was acting on information I ... learned from Dr. Grant, sir—but believe me, I swear it's the truth when I tell you—"

  "Then Dr. Grant is to share the limelight as well. Right, Dr. Grant?"

  "Hold your commendations, limelight and all your congratulations, Chief,” said Dean, who now turned out the light switch and asked Dyer to do the same with the light in the bath. The seconal spray turned splat marks and sprays of blood both large and small all about the room into eerie irregular shapes over walls and floor, but nothing on the bed. It were as if the blood was telling a tale. Most of the story was in the shaggy, near black-green carpet. The seconal told Dean Grant that Park's blood had created a clear and eerie trail between here and the bath. To Dean's trained eye it meant only one thing.

  Pointing to the floor on the far side of Park's body where the seconal spray indicated more than one trail of blood from the bath to where the body now lay at the foot of the bed, Dean said, “Lt. Park's not the Scalper and he never was."

  "That's nonsense,” said Hodges, not wanting to believe Dean. “No one can make that kind of judgment based on a can of spray—"

  "Chief, Dean's right,” said Sid Corman, who entered in darkness from outside, where now a police barricade had formed to keep people back. “Park would have had to stagger back and forth two, maybe three times, to lose that much blood in that section of carpet from just a single knife wound."

  "Bullshit,” replied Hodges. “I've known cases, even seen men with knife wounds to walk blocks to get to a hospital and survive!"

  "Not with a knife shoved all the way into the heart, I'm afraid,” said Dean. “Besides, if all that blood on Park's chest is his, it's been pumping out of him for at least an hour. It's so coagulated that—"

  "Shit, I saw a man once in a bar fight who took a knife to the brain, right down the middle, and he was rushed to a hospital. Didn't survive the removal of the blade, but he lived for hours after the initial—"

  "The brain and the heart are two entirely different organs, Chief,” said Sid.

  "God damn it, you two aren't going to tell me that we don't have solid proof against this crazed cop! We've got two scalps! We've got a knife and a scalpel! We've got all those news stories and the man's record with the Michigan cops. He was there and now he's here. We've got him!"

  The lights were returned and the men squared off at one another with darting eyes. Hodges, understandably, wanted what all of the others wanted: an end to the madness in his city. “I want the same as you, Chief, but we can't whitewash this thing simply because it will please everyone to do so. Suppose for a moment that—"

  "Screw you, Grant. This is no longer your concern. Corman's the coroner of Orlando, and if you'll just hand over what you've taken here, you can get on a plane for Chicago and we'll all be much better off burying our own trash."

  "Burying, Chief? Or sweeping it under the rug?"

  "You are no longer needed here, Grant. Now do you go, or do I have my officers take you out bodily?"

  Dean looked to
Sid for support. “Chief, please—let us do our job. Grant's concern is only for the truth,” said Sid. “Give us time to prove Park guilty, and we will ... we will."

  Hodges gritted his teeth. He was a man unaccustomed to backing down from a directive already issued, or a fight he knew he could win. “You've got twenty-four hours.” Hodges then tossed the seconal spray can down and stormed out as an ambulance, siren blaring, rushed into the lot outside. This time, Hodges wisely dodged the press. His last remarks in the press had been an embarrassment even to himself.

  Soon enough the tragic and awful tale of a cop turned psycho would be spread across the front pages, Dean thought, unless he could prove otherwise. At the moment “otherwise” amounted to a series of oddities about the scene and his own gut reaction. They were not enough to save Park, and whatever family he had, from the merciless scrutiny of the public. No one in Dean's position, no policeman on any force in the nation wanted to point the finger at an innocent cop, dead and unable to tell his side of the story—no more so than, say, the Pilot's Association wanted to see the finger pointed at a defenseless and dead pilot after a 747 crash. As much as he'd suspected Park of keeping secrets, Dean could not now condemn him out of hand as the so-called Scalper. Maybe, just maybe, it was exactly what the real killer or killers wanted him and Sid Corman and the rest of the city to believe. Time would tell. Time, and tests which they must begin immediately.

  Talk outside was running to a lover's quarrel between Park and Peggy Carson. Sid had heard the wild rumor on his way in, along with the fact that Park had taken a knife to the heart.

  "Lay you ten-to-one, Sid, the knife I took out of Dave Park's chest will fit contour for contour the wounds inflicted on our scalping victims."

  "And the scalpel?"

  "Neat switchblade job, just as you thought."

  "You ever get a strange, kinda sick feeling, Dean, when you're right about such things? Almost like ... like if you say something, it then happens?"

  Dean knew the feeling well. It was a kind of déjâ vu. When a man spent so much time thinking, contemplating, and gathering information on a case he'd become obsessed with, it was not uncommon.

  "Yeah, Sid ... I know the feeling.” Dean then asked Dyer to take Peggy home. She was being charged with nothing, and in fact had been commended by the Chief of Police for bravery above and beyond the call of duty.

  "Are you going to be all right, Peggy?” Dean asked her at the door.

  "I ... I'm a survivor.” She managed a weak, less-than-persuasive smile as her hand went to grip his.

  Dean almost said obviously, but instead, he gave her a warm hug. “Hopefully, by sunrise Sid and I will have made some sense of all this. As soon as I know—"

  "Thanks ... thanks so much."

  "It wasn't wise of you to rush out on me tonight,” he reprimanded her.

  She dropped her gaze. “I'm sorry I betrayed our friendship. I just felt I had to do something ... and now this. I can't remember killing Park. I don't believe I did, and if I didn't—God, they might've killed me, too. When I came to, my shirt was torn open, my belt unbuckled, and the zipper on my uniform opened, and something ... or someone ... had touched me. I was shivering from it."

  "Go with Frank now,” Dean advised her. “Get some rest, and tomorrow we'll talk more."

  Dean turned to find Sid working over Dave Park's inert form. “What do you think, Sid?"

  "What do I think? What do I think? Well, I'll tell you, Dean, old boy, I think we're both goddamned fools."

  "How's that, Sid?"

  "Figure it out, Dean. We're here ulcerating inside over a dead body and trying to put all the pieces together again, at least so no seams show while other doctors are in bed. I know you enjoy being a member of a rare breed, and I know that guys in our profession are in short supply, but that doesn't cut it with me anymore. I tell you, I'm about ready to hang out my shingle, become a G.P.” While Sid talked, he worked. He was taking a car vacuum to Park's body, the little machine sifting fibers, loose hairs, any minute evidence that could tell them something about how the man might have died.

  Dean knew exactly what Sid's complaints were. He had heard them recounted a hundred times by every M.E. he'd ever met. Only a fraction of the medical examiners around the country were even qualified as forensic pathologists, and only a few of these worked at it fulltime. Maybe forty or forty-five doctors in the whole United States had the requisite extra five years of medical training and were full-time M.E.'s like himself.

  When the money end of it was looked at, Dean realized why most doctors opted for hospital and private practice, where they could pull down $175,000 a year. Maybe Sid was right. Maybe the two of them, making in the neighborhood of $75,000 yearly, were fools after all.

  Outside, Dean could hear a strident woman's voice, shouting such things as, “I saw she had blood in her eyes, I knew she'd come for no good reason. God help me, I just knew—I knew!—shouldn't've let her go bustin’ in, but I, I didn't know what else to do...."

  Somehow, a sharp-eyed reporter had gotten through the door with the medics, and Dean found him looking over his shoulder at Park's remains just before the medics were allowed their way with the body, Sid instructing them to bag the clothing and deliver the corpse to Sid's slab room for an autopsy.

  "Did the policewoman kill him, Dr. Grant?” asked the reporter.

  For the first time Dean looked at the extra pair of eyes in the room. The man looked remarkably like Tom Warner without the glasses. “We're not soothsayers or seers, young man, we're pathologists. And pathology takes a great deal of careful reading of scientific evidence. I'm afraid I can't answer you one way or another at this time. Now please, if you will—"

  "But Dr. Grant, your reputation, your years of experience ... can't you give me at least your best ‘guesstimate'?"

  "Guesstimate—do you people want to print guesses and hunches and gossip, or do you want facts, figures and informed opinions?"

  "We're in the business of reporting to the public, and the public has a right to know if it's true or not, if the Scalper has been killed by an Orlando policewoman tonight, a policewoman who was attacked by the Scalper not two days ago!"

  "Yeah, all right, then ... you've already got your story outside in the parking lot. You don't need me to add anything to it."

  "Can I take that as confirmation, sir?"

  "You may not."

  "But you said—"

  "I said, if you were listening, that at this point nobody knows what happened here, and nobody knows if David Park was or was not the Scalper. Is that clear enough? Sorry to spoil the headline you'd probably already fashioned and sent to your editor. Officer, will you get this man out of here?"

  "Come on, Murphy!” shouted a cop at the reporter. “How'd you slide in here, on your own grease, or VO-5?"

  "Damned reporters,” muttered Sid. “They always want to try people in the press."

  "Everyone wants assurances, Sid—assurances from men like us—that everything's right with the world again, and that God has seen to the punishment of the wicked."

  "Ain't it the truth. Looks like we got an all-nighter ahead of us, my friend. Are you up for it?"

  "Hodges hasn't given us much choice."

  "Got a cot in the lab. We'll try and catch forty winks between tests. Got to keep the coffee coming, and somehow make my wife believe I'm working again."

  "Come on, let's get out of here and get to it,” said Dean.

  "Got everything?"

  "It's all here,” Dean said, patting his valise, “all the real story, if we can rightly decipher it."

  "Hate to imagine what tomorrow's headlines'll say."

  "Pretty good notion,” Dean muttered as they arrived at the coroner's car and began putting their wares into the back seat. “I know I'll be misquoted, and have my words twisted or given some innuendo I hadn't intended—or taken out of context."

  "It's an occupational hazard,” replied Sid. “It's why I try my best to leave the
talking to others."

  They pulled out of the lot, driving down 436 to Denny's for two takeout meals and coffee, and soon they were racing back downtown.

  TEN

  Van almost burst with squeals of delighted laughter, squeals of pleasure more happy that Ian had thought possible, and to add to the merriment, Ian snapped on a pounding Bob Seeger tape, the ear-shattering music causing Van to bounce in the back seat like a little kid until he bumped his head hard against the top, giving Ian cause to laugh. They were giddy with accomplishment. So much had been done to protect them from the creeping steps of Park, who'd followed them from Michigan. This feeling, together with the enormous feeling of a sense of unfolding fate, combined to fill them with excitement and anticipation. Their fate tied to beings more powerful than anything on earth or in the mythical heavens, beings that directed their every step.

  They were now parked outside the outpatient clinic of Mercy Hospital, where Ian knew the string of helpless women with tots in tow to be never-ending.

  "More than we can use. Just watch, I promise you, Van,” Ian vowed. “There, there comes one now.” Ian had seen her in and out of the clinic before. Diaz—no, Jimenez—and one of her kids on her arm. Ian pointed as he spoke. Van pressed his eyes to the glass, seeing them half a block away, mother and child. The streetlamps silhouetted their forms.

  Van had reconsidered Ian's idea, his new, assertive nature. And the thought of getting a child back to the house in the woods to take all night with, as Ian had put it, pleased Van's sense of play, as well as his undeniable urge to have the child at his complete mercy. He told Ian he wanted a girl child.

  Ian had obliged. There they were, just ahead, mother and child.

  Ian said if they took no scalps, if they just kidnapped the child, then all the work of setting up Park would mean something. He actually ordered Van to not scalp the mother, forbidding it. Ian was indeed getting carried away with himself.

  Still, Van promised. At the moment, he was so excited, he thought he was going to bounce through the roof of the Mercedes. He squealed in delight.