Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

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       CHAPTER 7

      AN OSCILLATING FAN riffled the documents and case notes – held down by makeshift paperweights – on Carson’s desk. Beyond the windows, an orange sunset had deepened to crimson, to purple.

      Michael was at his desk in the Homicide Division, adjacent to Carson’s, occupied by much of the same paperwork. She knew that he was ready to go home, but he usually let her define the workday.

      “You checked our doc box lately?” she asked.

      “Ten minutes ago,” Michael reminded her. “You send me out there one more time, I’m going to eat a get-small mushroom and just stay in the doc box until the report shows up.”

      “We should’ve had the prelim autopsy on that floater hours ago,” she complained.

      “And I shoulda been born rich. Go figure.”

      She consulted photos of cadavers in situ while Michael watched.

      The first victim, a young nurse named Shelley Justine, had been murdered elsewhere and dumped beside the London Street Canal. Tests revealed the chemical signature of chloroform in her blood.

      After the killer rendered her unconscious, he killed her with a knife to the heart. With exquisite precision he removed her ears. A peptide profile found no elevated endorphin levels in the blood, indicating that the surgery occurred after she was dead. Had she been alive, the pain and terror would have left telltale chemistry.

      The second victim, Meg Saville, a tourist from Idaho, had also been chloroformed and knifed while unconscious. The Surgeon – the press’s name for him – had neatly sawed off Saville’s feet.

      “If he’d just always take feet,” Michael said, “we’d know he was a podiatrist, and we’d have found him by now.”

      Carson shuffled the next photo to the top of the stack.

      The first two victims had been women; however, neither Shelley Justine nor Meg Saville had been molested.

      When the third victim was a man, the killer established his bona fides as an equal-opportunity maniac. The body of Bradford Walden – a young bartender from a hole-in-the-wall across the river in Algiers – had been found with the right kidney surgically removed.

      The switch to souvenirs of internal origin wasn’t troubling – an urge to collect feet and ears was no less disturbing than a fancy for kidneys – but it was curious.

      Chemical traces of chloroform were found, but this time peptide profiles showed that Walden had been alive and awake for the surgery. Had the chloroform worn off too soon? Or had the killer intentionally let the man wake up? In either case, Walden died in agony, his mouth stuffed with rags and sealed with duct tape to muffle his screams.

      The fourth victim, Caroline Beaufort, Loyola University student, had been discovered with both legs missing, her torso propped on an ornate bench at a trolley-car stop in the upscale Garden District. She had been chloroformed and unconscious when murdered.

      For his fifth kill, the Surgeon dispensed with the anesthetic. He murdered another man, Alphonse Chaterie, a dry cleaner. He collected Chaterie’s liver while the victim was alive and fully awake: not a trace of chloroform.

      Most recently, this morning’s body in the City Park lagoon was missing both hands.

      Four women, two men. Four with chloroform, one without, one set of results pending. Each victim missing one or more body parts. The first three women were killed before the trophies were removed, while the men were alive and conscious for the surgery.

      Apparently none of the victims had known any of the others. Thus far no mutual acquaintances had come to light, either.

      “He doesn’t like to see women suffer, but men in agony are okay with him,” Carson said, and not for the first time.

      Michael had a new thought. “Maybe the killer’s a woman, has more sympathy for her own gender.”

      “Yeah, right. How many serial killers have ever been women?”

      “There’ve been a few,” he said. “But, I am proud to say, men have been a lot more successful at it.”

      Carson wondered, “Is there a fundamental difference between lopping off female body parts and digging out male internal organs?”

      “We’ve been down this road. Two serial killers collecting body parts in the same city in the same three-week period? ‘Is such a coincidence logical, Mr. Spock?’ ‘Coincidence, Jim, is just a word superstitious people use to describe complex events that in truth are the mathematically inevitable consequences of a primary cause.’”

      Michael made this work a lot less gruesome and more tolerable, but sometimes she wanted to thump him. Hard.

      “And what does that mean?” she asked.

      He shrugged. “I never did understand Spock.”

      Appearing as if conjured into a pentagram, Harker dropped an envelope on Carson’s desk. “ME’s report on the floater. Delivered to my doc box by mistake.”

      Carson didn’t want a push-and-shove with Harker, but she could not let obvious interference pass unremarked. “One more time your foot’s on mine, I’ll file a complaint with the chief of detectives.”

      “I’m so afraid,” Harker dead-panned. His reddened face glistened with a sheen of sweat. “No ID on the floater yet, but it looks pretty much like she was chloroformed, taken someplace private, and killed with a stiletto to the heart before her hands were taken.”

      When Harker continued to stand there, the day’s sun bottled in his glassy face, Michael said, “And?”

      “You’ve checked out everyone with easy access to chloroform. Researchers doing animal experimentation, employees at medical supply companies … But two sites on the Internet offer formulas for making it in the kitchen sink, out of stuff you can buy at the supermarket. I’m just saying this case doesn’t fit in any standard box. You’re looking for something you’ve never seen before. To stop this guy, you’ve got to go to a weirder place – one level below Hell.”

      Harker turned from them and walked away across the squad room.

      Carson and Michael watched him leave. Then Michael said, “What was that? It almost seemed like genuine concern for the public.”

      “He was once a good cop. Maybe a part of him still is.”

      Michael shook his head. “I liked him better as an asshole.”