Afterwards, in the privacy of her study, Dr Carpaccia can let some of the emotion show, but for now she must continue with the operation.
Her assistant has passed her a Petri dish of some of the butter-yellow emollient they use as a humectant to increase the water-holding capacity of the body’s stratum corneum, as well as to provide a layer of oil on the surface of the skin which further slows water loss and thus increases its moisture content. Dr Carpaccia takes some of the emollient on her hands and rubs it all over the chicken, paying particular attention to the thin skin of the breast. When that is done, she collects the husks of the lemon she had previously had her assistant squeeze dry and these she inserts into the cavity created by the removal of the internal organs. In addition to the lemon halves, she carefully inserts two cloves of garlic (skin on), and while her assistant holds the chicken upside down, a handful of thyme leaves and stalks and a generous scoop of salt and another extensive grind of the pepper from the mill she had previously used. There is a risk of cross-contamination, which is why Carpaccia is so careful.
Her assistant returns the chicken to a special body dish and again Carpaccia leans over and applies the salt-and-pepper coating. The crystals of the salt and the dark flakes of pepper stick in the butter and it is true to say that the chicken did not look as good as this when she was alive.
Carpaccia nods at her assistant.
‘Is the OVEN ready?’ she asks, referring to the Occluded Vector Electron Neuroscope that needs to be pre-heated to gas mark eight before it can successfully treat the chicken’s body. From the outside all that is visible of the oven is a set of dials and a steel-framed laminated heatproof hinged-glass window.
The assistant nods. The OVEN is ready. She opens the door and a wave of heat emerges like a physical force. The assistant backs away slightly, but Carpaccia is used to the heat. She has done this too often, she thinks.
Together they wheel the gurney to the OVEN and then, again on the count of three, they pick the chicken up in her special Teflon-covered body dish and slide her into the OVEN. Carpaccia’s Mexican assistant closes the door and Carpaccia checks her Rolex watch, a gift from the grateful people of Bratislava.
A tear snakes its way down the smooth cheek of the doctor as she removes her gloves and balls them into a flip-top bin that she keeps for just such a purpose. She retreats along the corridor of the Facility to her study, where she sits at her desk and bites her knuckle, desperately fighting against the feelings that well up inside her, fighting the darkness.
In her career to date Dr Carpaccia has seen some horrific sights and she is all too aware of what a damaged human being is capable of, but this case touches her deeply. The chicken is so young, so full of energy, with so much to give. She still has her whole life to enjoy. Or not.
2
Detective Rambouillet knocks on Dr Carpaccia’s ash-framed door. He is holding two Styrofoam cups of coffee. It is 3.30 in the afternoon and outside the storm that Carpaccia had predicted seems to have not materialised, but it is still hot in her study and she can feel the heat pressing down upon her head and upon her shoulders as if it were a living thing.
‘So what we got?’ Detective Rambouillet asks. He places the cups on the desk and sits heavily down in the chair opposite her.
He seems not to have noticed that Dr Carpaccia does not like milk-free coffee and this hurts her, because she knows how he takes his coffee, so why should he not know how she takes hers? Once again she considers firing him. But he leans forward now and pours a sachet of refined sugar into his own coffee cup. He knows this is not good for him, and that it will make him sweat later on when he feels the sugar rush, and that it will make him fat and out of condition, but he does not seem to care and goes ahead and does it anyway.
They are sitting in Dr Carpaccia’s red satinwood-panelled study. On the wall behind her is her extensive collection of what she humorously calls ‘sheepskins’: diplomas from various universities including The American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders, based in Holy Toledo, Utah, and the New Hope Bioresonance University of Holistic and Drug Free Medicine based in a small but pleasant suburban villa in Maryland.
‘Is it the Butcher?’ Rambouillet asks taking a good long slurp of his coffee. Carpaccia forces herself to concentrate and she nods and wishes that she had not so recently given up smoking. At times like this she misses her ex-lover, who was killed in the line of duty – the one with the strong warm tongue, who kissed and touched her, but fatally fell into the fire at the FBI clambake. Or was that another lover? She cannot recall.
‘So how’d he find her?’ Rambouillet asks. It’s a cop question. Not one that Dr Carpaccia is qualified to answer, but she has let herself become involved. She shrugs.
‘Until we know who she is,’ she says, ‘we won’t know for sure how he found her.’
‘But you got your own theory, right?’ the burly detective asks.
Dr Carpaccia is once again startled by Detective Rambouillet. These are the moments during which she knows that she will not fire him. These are the moments she knows that she does not have the power to fire him. He knows her too well. He knows that she has a theory about how the killer found his victim. He knows that she does not have the power to fire him, since his pay comes from someone else’s budget.
‘Any matches on the FMP?’ he asks. He is referring to the Fingerprint Matching Processor, a high-speed computer that is capable of comparing 800 fingerprints a second.
‘Chickens do not have fingerprints,’ she calmly explains, thinking that these are the moments when she perhaps she ought to fire him.
‘Good point, Doc. And anyway, even if they did, there’s no guarantee of a match. I mean she mightn’t ever have committed a federal crime and had her ten prints taken, might she?’
The FMP is a wonderful invention, Carpaccia thinks; capable of matching a fingerprint taken at the scene of a crime with any other print ever taken by the police, but then again when did it last solve a case? She tries to imagine herself coming back from a crime scene with a smudged print, feeding it into the computer, getting a match, calling Rambouillet or someone very much like him on the cell phone and have them go over to someone’s house and arrest that person. It might happen in real life, she supposes, but – she stops. She has no idea how to finish that sentence. It might take her to a very dark place. Successful, run-of-the-mill police procedure is not what Dr Carpaccia is about.
Rambouillet is explaining his own theory about these machines.
‘I call ’em RHGs,’ he is saying. ‘Red Herring Generators. You use some fancy piece of machinery and it tells you some damn thing that you could have guessed anyway. That freaking wand full of sea water you’re always waving around? What’s it ever told you? Some guy uses soap. So what? So does everybody else, but now you’re all gussied up about soap. You overlook the important things like hockey masks, chainsaws and hard-ons.’
‘Can we just go through his MO one more time?’ Carpaccia calmly asks, ignoring him. ‘So we can be really gory?’
‘Right,’ Rambouillet cautiously agrees. ‘Well, like last time, he probably got in through the door.’
‘She left her door unlocked?’ Carpaccia incredulously asks. It was always through an open window or an open door. An open window is an open invitation, Carpaccia thinks. How soon would it be before compulsive murderers would be able to use the open window as a defence, just as molesters do with short skirts?
‘Probably open,’ Rambouillet emphasisingly says. ‘Although we haven’t exactly traced who “she” is yet. I’ve put out an APB on her and contacted the Missing Chickens Bureau but we don’t have a lot to go on. Without the head, you know?’
Carpaccia nods.
‘And there is no sign of it?’ she asks. ‘Or her feet or her intestine?’
Rambouillet shakes his head and leans forward to remove a notebook from his back pocket.
‘Do you have the time to speculate on what the Butcher might do with th
e head?’ he asks.
Dr Carpaccia glances at her watch. She is a busy woman but can usually make time to speculate on such matters.
‘I think he may stab them in the eyes with school compasses,’ she begins. ‘And then stop up their nostrils with a waxy substance that glitters under SEM, then put lighted matches in their ears and pluck out their tongues.’
Rambouillet takes a deep breath. He hates it when Carpaccia talks about Scanning Electron Microscopy, although he cannot really figure out why.
‘Okay,’ he cautiously agrees. ‘Is this done before or after he has chopped the heads off the rest of the body?’
‘Whenever. Both. It doesn’t matter.’
‘So why does he do it?’
‘Because he does not want them to see how small his penis is,’ she calmly states.
This is too much for Rambouillet. He folds his notebook up with a snap.
‘Okay,’ he says after a pause. ‘Back to the MO. We know that the man – and I’m assuming it is a man – whom the newspapers have come to call the Butcher, enters his victim’s coop through an open door. Then he takes his victims by their feet and he hangs them from an S-hook. And then he slits their throats, right?’
‘Yes,’ she answers his question. ‘With a lateral incision through which they exsanguinate.’
‘Right,’ he interrupts. ‘Exsanguinate.’
‘Have we any news on the blood?’ she coldly asks, trying to ignore his dig at her needless use of technical jargon. For a second the idea of having him fired flits back and forth across her mind again like a silk stocking blowing in the wind. Not that, she ought to state here and now, she has seen or heard of any such thing and is in fact puzzled by what sound such a thing might make. Nevertheless, Rambouillet admits that they have had no luck in finding the blood.
‘It could be that he lets it drain away but my guess is that he finds some sort of use for it. All we have to do when we find it is get a DNA match.’
They continue to discuss the Butcher’s MO. Once the Butcher has let his victims bleed to death, he removes their feathers until they are bald and then he makes a vertical lateral cut from the pubis to the breast bone and he pulls out the intestines and the internal organs.
Dr Carpaccia stares out of the window as Rambouillet talks. The rain has come now and water is running down the outside of the window. It is dark, despite the lights.
‘… We’re yet to find the intestines,’ Rambouillet is saying. ‘But he puts the kidneys and the heart and the neck back into a plastic bag, which the sick badger then knots, and then he inserts the plastic bag into the cavity of the chicken.’
There seems nothing more to say for a minute and they sit in silence, comfortable with one another, thinking about the dead chicken until the phone rings.
Carpaccia picks it up and snaps into the receiver.
‘I thought I told you I was not to be disturbed?’
She is good and kind, if not a whole barrel of laughs, but she will not tolerate people of lesser importance disobeying her. The voice at the other end is given five seconds to explain why they have put a call through or else they will be bundled into the back of a car and taken to a crocodile swamp that Dr Carpaccia’s Creepy Lesbian Niece keeps expressly for this purpose in Florida. The voice, high-pitched now, explains that it is the Dean of her College.
‘Which one?’ Carpaccia asks, genuinely puzzled. Could it be the Dean of the University of Spectrology and Forestry, Palmer’s Green, she wonders, a man whom she did not imagine to exist? When the caller is put through, she is surprised to hear a British voice on the end of the line. She had expected the usual Romanian accent. It is the Dean of Cuff College in Oxford, a college from which she was sent down for bringing adverbs back to her rooms after midnight.
‘What can I do for you, Dean?’ she politely asks.
The Dean sounds almost apologetic as he explains that a murder has been committed and the killer has left a trail of clues that one of the lecturers, a man called Tom Hurst, believes links him to Richmond, Virginia.
‘I’m not in Richmond at the moment,’ Carpaccia straightawayly tells the Dean. ‘So I really don’t see how I can be of assistance.’
She replaces the receiver.
‘Those British,’ she says. ‘They are all in denial.’
Had the Dean but known it, he had called at a bad time in Anglo-Carpaccian relations. Carpaccia’s proof that the Second World War was really won by Dick Van Dyke disguised as Winston Churchill has been critically mauled by The Times of London. There is an urgent knock at the door and the Mexican woman, who has removed her mask and goggles, but is still wearing her scrubs, which is something that Dr Carpaccia would never do, puts her head round the corner of the door. She addresses Dr Carpaccia.
‘Dr Crapaccia,’ she irritatingly and quite incorrectly states. ‘You had better come quick. There is a problem with the evidence in the walk-in fridge.’
Carpaccia and Rambouillet exchange glances. This has a familiar ring. They get up from their chairs and follow the Mexican woman, whose name Carpaccia thinks is Carmen, down the corridor to the cooking suite.
The Mexican woman is flustered. When they reach one of the three walk-in fridges she cannot speak very clearly and jabbers in a strange foreign language.
‘Calm down,’ Rambouillet aggressively snaps. Carpaccia thinks that she would not talk to staff so rudely and once again she wonders about firing him.
‘What is wrong, Carmen?’ she most non-aggressively asks, and she slaps the woman across her cheek with the back of her right hand. The ploy works and the woman calms down almost at once.
Carmen, whose name is really Juanita, explains something about someone mixing up the evidence tags so that the evidence bag that she has just placed in the walk-in fridge, which included the sell-by date label of the chicken on the gurney, now reads as if it were placed in the walk-in fridge some time last week. Getting the labels mixed up can happen, but it is a complicated and uninvolving process and all that you really need to know is that it happened and that Carpaccia and Rambouillet and the others can no longer be sure that the chicken in the OVEN is not past its sell-by date.
This in itself is not so bad, but if it leaks out to the newspapers that this sort of thing is happening in her suite, it might cause a scandal and unfairly bring Dr Carpaccia down from her position at the top of the heap, which is always vulnerable because she is a woman and some people would stop at nothing to see her fired. Someone somewhere might even wish to ruin Dr Carpaccia’s career and reputation.
So the real problem is that this someone may have switched the labels deliberately and Dr Carpaccia ought to find out who this person is, and why they did it, or her tenure as chief might well be curtailed.
3
‘May I see the tag label?’ Dr Carpaccia is politely asking Juanita. Juanita turns and leads her and Detective Rambouillet into the walk-in fridge in order to show them the tag label, but once they are inside the walk-in fridge, in which there is enough space for three people to stand quite comfortably, Juanita looks stunned as she stares at a gap in the shelves.
Along the walls glass shelving is fronted with white plastic covering and on the shelves are various tins and jars and plastic evidence bags. Overhead a fluorescent light buzzes and against one wall is a blue filament designed to lure flies to their death.
‘Oh, Dr Crapaccia,’ she wails with a trembling finger outpointing. ‘The evidence! He is gone! Someone must have stolen him! Aiyeee! All is lost.’
Once again Carpaccia slaps the Mexican lady and this calms both of them down somewhat.
‘Have you seen anyone in the suite apart from Detective Rambouillet or myself?’ she calmly asks the weeping illegal immigrant. Juanita shakes her head and continues to sob. Carpaccia instinctively knows that they will get no more information out of her.
‘I left the room,’ Juanita is telling Detective Rambouillet, ‘to go to the little girls’ room for a minute. When I came back the window was
open.’
She points across the suite to where a window has been opened. Immediately Rambouillet makes a call on his cell phone.
‘Secure the perimeter,’ he snaps. ‘Don’t let anyone in or out unless I say so.’
He turns to Carpaccia.
‘Let’s go check the security cameras.’
As they walk down the corridor towards the basement and the communications room, their steps ringing on the tiled floor, it occurs to Carpaccia that the confusion over the tagging of the evidence might have worked in their favour. Whoever had broken into the walk-in fridge had taken the wrong evidence. All Carpaccia had to do was find the right evidence. It must carry powerful clues to be worth the risk of breaking in and stealing it. Juanita’s mistake had effectively saved a crucial piece of evidence, although this piece of good luck would not save her, since Carpaccia had already signed her cards and the Immigration Service would be stopping by to take her away in the back of a white flat-bed Ford even before her enchiladas hit the plate that evening.
Rambouillet stops and taps a series of numbers into an electronic access pad set at chest height in the beige-painted cinderblock wall. A red light blinks green and there is the sound of a bolt being withdrawn. Rambouillet opens the door. Inside is the communications centre that Dr Carpaccia’s Creepy Lesbian Niece has devised. It cost more than a successful moonshot, but it allows CSI: Miami to be shown in every room in the Facility.
In addition, it has the most advanced centrally managed PC-based hyperthreading CPU Windows Embedded XP real-time multi-tasking intruder detection operation system in the world. Nothing moves in the Facility without being logged, recorded and, in most circumstances, terminated with extreme prejudice thanks to the banks of M18 Claymore landmines that are sewn through the Facility’s acreage like contour lines on a map of the Rockies.
A man is sitting alone in a darkened section of the room. He is working the mouse of a computer and in front of him is a bank of twelve 22” flat liquid-crystal screens, the picture on each changing apparently at random. The view is somewhat monotonous, however. Although Dr Carpaccia is a nurturing person, who loves plants and gardens and especially hibiscus trees, and who loves it when neighbours pop in unannounced, she is also the sort of person who understands the need for basic security. This is why the land for a range of three miles around the Facility has been converted into a desert in which it is unsafe to walk for mines and pits with spikes at the bottom tipped with Ebola plague and HIV/AIDS and H5N1. Beyond that is a five-metre-high electrified fence. Security is also the reason Carpaccia never travels anywhere but by submarine. She is not interested in letting anyone know what type of submarine she drives, but it is expensive, anonymous and, above all, subtle.
The No. 2 Global Detective Page 16
