Free On Off by Colleen McCullough Page A

to become high profile. Only a small paragraph in the Holloman Post this morning, but as soon as the details leaked, it would be front-page news.
    “I can tell you,” said Patrick, “that whoever dumped the torso in the Hug’s dead animal refrigerator left no fingerprints, fibers or any other trace of himself. The victim is in her middle teens, and has some colored blood. She’s small in size, and she looks well cared for.” He leaned forward in his chair, eyes glistening. “On her right buttock she has a heart-shaped scab. A nevus, removed around ten days ago. However, it wasn’t a pigmented birthmark, it was a hemangioma — a tumor made up of blood vessels. The killer used a pair of diathermy forceps to nip off every feeder to the growth, coagulate it. Must have taken him hours. Then he packed it with gelfoam to assist clotting, and after that he let the wound crust over, get nice and dry. I found traces of what I thought was an oil-based ointment, but it wasn’t.” He drew a deep breath. “It was greasepaint exactly the same color as her skin.”
    Carmine’s own skin began to creep; he shivered. “She still didn’t look perfect after he removed the birthmark, so he covered it with greasepaint to make her perfect. Oh, Patsy, this is one weird dude!”
    “Yeah,” said Patrick.
    “So he’s a surgeon?” asked Marciano, pushing Silvestri’s ashtray and its contents away from his nose.
    “Not necessarily” from Carmine. “Yesterday I talked to a lady who does micro surgery on the Hug’s animals. She doesn’t have a medical degree. There are probably dozens of technicians in any big center for research like the Chubb Medical School who can operate as well as any surgeon. For that matter, until Patsy just told us how the guy coagulated the bleeding nevus, I was considering butchers and slaughtermen. Now I think I can safely rule them out.”
    “But you do think that the Hug’s involved,” said Silvestri, picking up the disgusting cigar and sucking on it.
    “I do.”
    “What’s next?”
    Carmine got up, nodding to Corey and Abe. “Missing Persons. Probably statewide. Holloman doesn’t have one on the files unless the killer held her for much longer than it took him to do what he did. Because we don’t know what she looked like, we’ll concentrate on the birthmark.”
    Patrick walked out with him. “You won’t break this one in a hurry,” he said. “The bastard’s left you nothing to go on.”
    “Don’t I know it. If that monkey hadn’t woken up in an icehouse, we wouldn’t even know a crime had been committed.”
    Holloman’s Missing Persons having yielded nothing, Carmine began to phone around the other police departments in the state. The State cops had found the body of a ten-year-old girl in the woods just off the Appalachian Trail — a big, part-colored child reported missing by camping parents. But she had died of a cardiac arrest, and there were no suspicious circumstances.
    The Norwalk police came up with a missing sixteen-year-old girl of Dominican extraction named Mercedes Alvarez, who had disappeared ten days ago.
    “Five feet tall, curly but not kinky dark hair, dark brown eyes — a real pretty face — mature figure,” said someone who had announced himself as Lieutenant Joe Brown. “Oh, and a large heart-shaped birthmark on her right buttock.”
    “Don’t go away, Joe, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
    He put the flashing light on the Ford’s roof and gunned the car down I-95, siren screaming; the forty miles took him slightly more than twenty minutes.
    Lieutenant Joe Brown was around his own age, early forties, and more excited than Carmine had expected him to be. Brown was on edge, so were the other cops in the vicinity. Carmine studied the color photo in the file, looked for the reference to the birthmark, which some untutored hand had attempted to sketch.
    “She’s our girl, all right,” he said. “Man, she’s pretty! Fill me in, Joe.”
    “She’s a