Free The Gorgon Festival by John Boyd Page A

remained.
    “There’s not a photograph in the album,” Cabroni said, “taken of Ruth Gordon when she was under thirty.” Suddenly his voice went flat. “Why?”
    Ward said nothing as he slowly leafed through the pages. Cabroni studied his profile, waiting for the lips to part, the eyes to narrow.
    Ward understood why the photographs were missing. Ruth had taken them to preclude recognition of herself when young, and by setting up this “mysterious disappearance” which pointed to his complicity, she was trying to force him to follow her. Hardened criminals broke under hours of police grilling, and she knew that he possessed a secret no police department, no authority, and no official of the Defense Department should ever share.
    Why had she done it? Surely not from feminine spite after Ester’s misdirected remarks. Perhaps, by forcing him to follow her she hoped to cure him of his imagined breast obsession, but if she had done it for his therapy she was being damned unethical.
    Cabroni saw a flicker of anger in Ward’s eyes and snapped, “Out with it, Doctor Ward. What’s your explanation?”
    Ward deliberated a moment and finally said, “You’re the specialist in solving mysteries, Joe. You explain it.”
    Ward continued to thumb through the album.
    “Then, I’ll explain it, Alex.” Cabroni’s voice was again gentle. “Down at headquarters, we get educated in perversions. There’s a type of sex maniac who murders a female and takes along her panties or her hosiery. Later, just by sniffing, he gets a helluva charge out of what he’s done. But the highbrow maniacs, the ones with imagination, take photographs to get their kicks. Necrophilia, we call it.”
    “You need more competent educators down at headquarters, Joe. The obsession you describe is called fetishism. Necrophilia is an abnormal love of the dead. The most interesting case of necrophilia I’ve encountered occurred in Florida, about forty years ago. A man spent eight years sleeping beside his dead wife at night. She was superbly embalmed, of course, because Florida’s hot and humid… Say, here I am! She kept the original print from the Ethan Allen yearbook, The Minuteman . This cadet’s uniform’s an authentic reproduction of that worn by the Continental Army… Have I put on the pounds!”
    “Let’s go to the bathroom,” Cabroni snapped.
    Over the bathtub, Cabroni explained the modus operandi of the murderer.
    “It was simple for him to lean over the old lady as she sat in the tub and flip on the maximum current switch and shoot the juice to her. As the gentle, cultivated type, he wouldn’t use even the minimal violence necessary to push her head under the water.”
    “If he did that, Joe, her next of kin would have an excellent suit against the Electrical Underwriters’ Association. That’s a step-down transformer which converts alternating current to direct current, and the maximum voltage is five volts.”
    Cabroni recovered fast. “He used a jumpwire to bypass the transformer.”
    If he had done that, Ward decided, with Ruth sitting there watching him, she would have seen what he was doing and protested so vehemently the murderer would have had to use more than minimal violence to force her head under.
    “Why would he have done that?” Ward mused aloud, still thinking of the jumpwire.
    “To get an undivided share of the Nobel loot,” Cabroni said.
    Cabroni had been talking to Carrick, Ward decided.
    “Money’s not the object in a Nobel award,” Ward said.
    Cabroni had Carrick’s opinion to the contrary, and he could read the genuine concern on Ward’s face.
    “Another aspect of this case which supports my theory that the murderer was an alleged gentleman is in the laboratory. Let’s go.”
    In the laboratory, Cabroni pointed out the pens and the fresh droppings.
    “She kept hamsters in those pens,” Ward agreed, “and she let them out to keep them from starving.”
    “Or her murderer was too tender-hearted to