Jack fell back in the chair, laughing harder.
Rebecca stood over him, looking down, grinning. "I saw saw the way you were drooling over her." the way you were drooling over her."
"Not me," he managed between gales of laughter.
"Yes, you. Positively drooling. But you might as well forget about her, Jack. She wouldn"t have you."
"Oh?"
"Well, you"ve got a bit of Irish blood in you. Isn"t that right? Your grandmother was Irish, right?" Imitating Sh.e.l.ly Parker"s voice again, she said, " "Oh, there"s nothing worse than those d.a.m.ned, Pope- kissing, potato-sucking Irish.""
Jack howled.
Rebecca sat on the sofa. She was laughing, too. "And you"ve got some British blood, too, if I remember right."
"Oh, yes," he said, gasping. "I"m a tea- swilling limey, too."
"Not as bad as a Sherpa," she said.
They were convulsed with laughter when one of the uniformed cops looked in from the hallway. "What"s going on?" he asked.
Neither of them were able to stop laughing and tell him.
"Well, show some respect, huh?" he said. "We have two dead men here."
Perversely, that admonition made everything seem even funnier.
The patrolman scowled at them, shook his head, and went away.
Jack knew it was precisely because because of the presence of death that Sh.e.l.ly Parker"s conversations with Rebecca had seemed so uproariously funny. After having encountered four hideously mutilated bodies in as many days, they were desperately in need of a good laugh. of the presence of death that Sh.e.l.ly Parker"s conversations with Rebecca had seemed so uproariously funny. After having encountered four hideously mutilated bodies in as many days, they were desperately in need of a good laugh.
Gradually, they regained their composure and wiped the tears from their eyes. Rebecca got up and went to the windows and stared out at the snow flurries. For a couple of minutes, they shared a most companionable silence, enjoying the temporary but nonetheless welcome release from tension that the laughter had provided.
This moment was the sort of thing Jack couldn"t have explained to the guys at the poker game last week, when they"d been putting Rebecca down. At times like this, when the other Rebecca revealed herself-the Rebecca who had a sly sense of humor and a gimlet eye for life"s absurdities-Jack felt a special kinship with her. Rare as those moments were, they made the partnership workable and worthwhile-and he hoped that eventually this secret Rebecca would come into the open more often. Perhaps, someday, if he had enough patience, the other Rebecca might even replace the ice maiden altogether.
As usual, however, the change in her was short-lived. She turned away from the window and said, "Better go talk with the M.E. and see what he"s found."
"Yeah," Jack said. "And let"s try to stay glum-faced from now on, Chandler. Let"s show them we really do do have the proper respect for death." have the proper respect for death."
She smiled at him, but it was only a vague smile now.
She left the room.
He followed.
II.
As Nayva Rooney stepped into the hall, she closed the door to the kids" bedroom behind her, so that the rat-or whatever it was-couldn"t scurry back in there.
She searched for the intruder in Jack Dawson"s bedroom, found nothing, and closed the door on that one, too.
She carefully inspected the kitchen, even looked in cupboards. No rat. There were two doors in the kitchen; one led to the hall, the other to the dining alcove. She closed them both, sealing the critter out of that room, as well.
Now, it simply had to be hiding in the dining alcove or the living room.
But it wasn"t.
Nayva looked everywhere. She couldn"t find it.
Several times she stopped searching just so she could hold her breath and listen. Listen* Not a sound.
Throughout the search, in all the rooms, she hadn"t merely looked for the elusive little beast itself but also for a hole in a part.i.tion or in the baseboard, a breach big enough to admit a largish rat. She discovered nothing of that sort.
At last, she stood in the archway between the living room and the hall. Every lamp and ceiling light was blazing. She looked around, frowning, baffled.
Where had it gone? It still had to be here-didn"t it?
Yes. She was sure of it. The thing was still here.
She had the eerie feeling that she was being watched.
III.
The a.s.sistant medical examiner on the case was Ira Goldbloom, who looked more Swedish than Jewish. He was tall, fair-skinned, with hair so blond it was almost white; his eyes were blue with a lot of gray speckled through them.
Jack and Rebecca found him on the second floor, in the master bedroom. He had completed his examination of the bodyguard"s corpse in the kitchen, had taken a look at Vince Vastagliano, and was getting several instruments out of his black leather case.
"For a man with a weak stomach," he said, "I"m in the wrong line of work."
Jack saw that Goldbloom did appear paler than usual.
Rebecca said, "We figure these two are connected with the Charlie Novello homicide on Sunday and the Coleson murder yesterday. Can you make the link for us?"
"Maybe."
"Only maybe?"
"Well, yeah, there"s a chance we can tie them together," Goldbloom said. "The number of wounds* the mutilation factor* there are several similarities. But let"s wait for the autopsy report."
Jack was surprised. "But what about the wounds? Don"t they establish a link?"
"The number, yes. Not the type. Have you looked at these wounds?"
"At a glance," Jack said, "they appear to be bites of some kind. Rat bites, we thought."
"But we figured they were just obscuring the real real wounds, the stab wounds," Rebecca said. wounds, the stab wounds," Rebecca said.
Jack said, "Obviously, the rats came along after the men were already dead. Right?"
"Wrong," Goldbloom said. "So far as I can tell from a preliminary examination, there aren"t any stab wounds in either victim. Maybe tissue bisections will reveal wounds of that nature underneath some of the bites, but I doubt it. Vastagliano and his bodyguard were savagely bitten. They bled to death from those bites. The bodyguard suffered at least three torn arteries, major vessels: the external carotid, the left brachial, and the femoral artery in the left thigh. Vastagliano looks like he was chewed up even worse."
Jack said, "But rats aren"t that aggressive, d.a.m.nit. You just don"t get attacked by packs of rats in your own home."
"I don"t think these were rats," Goldbloom said. "I mean, I"ve seen rat bites before. Every now and then, a wino will be drinking in an alley, have a heart attack or a stroke, right there behind the garbage bin, where n.o.body finds him for maybe two days. Meanwhile, the rats get at him. So I know what a rat bite looks like, and this just doesn"t seem to match up on a number of points."
"Could it have been* dogs?" Rebecca asked.
"No. For one thing, the bites are too small. I think we can rule out cats, too."
"Any ideas?" Jack asked.
"No. It"s weird. Maybe the autopsy will pin it down for us."
Rebecca said, "Did you know the bathroom door was locked when the uniforms got here? They had to break it down."
"So I heard. A locked room mystery," Goldbloom said.
"Maybe there"s not much of a mystery to it," Rebecca said thoughtfully. "If Vastagliano was killed by some kind of animal, then maybe the thing was small enough to get under the door."
Goldbloom shook his head. "It would"ve had to"ve been real real small to manage that. No. It was bigger. A good deal bigger than the crack under the door." small to manage that. No. It was bigger. A good deal bigger than the crack under the door."
"About what size would you say?"
"As big as a large rat."
Rebecca thought for a moment. Then: "There"s an outlet from a heating duct in there. Maybe the thing came through the duct."
"But there"s a grille over the duct," Jack said. "And the vents in the grille are narrower than the s.p.a.ce under the door."
Rebecca took two steps to the bathroom, leaned through the doorway, looked around, craning her neck. She came back and said, "You"re right. And the grille"s firmly in place."
"And the little window is closed," Jack said.
"And locked," Goldbloom said.
Rebecca brushed a shining strand of hair from her forehead. "What about the drains? Could a rat come up through the tub drain?"
"No," Goldbloom said. "Not in modern plumbing."
"The toilet?"
"Unlikely."
"But possible?"
"Conceivable, I suppose. But, you see, I"m sure it wasn"t just one animal."
"How many?" Rebecca asked.
"There"s no way I can give you an exact count. But* I would think, whatever they were, there had to be at least* a dozen of them."
"Good heavens," Jack said.
"Maybe two dozen. Maybe more."
"How do you figure?"
"Well," Goldbloom said, "Vastagliano was a big man, a strong man. He"d be able to handle one, two, three rat- size animals, no matter what sort of things they were. In fact, he"d most likely be able to deal with half a dozen of them. Oh, sure, he"d get bitten a few times, but he"d be able to take care of himself. He might not be able to kill all of them, but he"d kill a few and keep the rest at bay. So it looks to me as if there were so many of these things, such a horde of them, that they simply overwhelmed him."
With insect-quick feet, a chill skittered the length of Jack"s spine. He thought of Vastagliano being borne down onto the bathroom floor under a tide of screeching rats-or perhaps something even worse than rats. He thought of the man harried at every flank, bitten and torn and ripped and scratched, attacked from all directions, so that he hadn"t the presence of mind to strike back effectively, his arms weighed down by the sheer numbers of his adversaries, his reaction time affected by a numbing horror. A painful, b.l.o.o.d.y, lonely death. Jack shuddered.
"And Ross, the bodyguard," Rebecca said. "You figure he was attacked by a lot of them, too?"
"Yes," Goldbloom said. "Same reasoning applies."
Rebecca blew air out through clenched teeth in an expression of her frustration. "This just makes the locked bathroom even more difficult to figure. From what I"ve seen, it looks as if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were both in the kitchen, making a late- night snack. The attack started there, evidently. Ross was quickly overwhelmed. Vastagliano ran. He was chased, couldn"t get to the front door because they cut him off, so he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. Now, the rats-or whatever- weren"t in there when he locked the door, so how did they get get in there?" in there?"
"And out again," Goldbloom reminded her.
"It almost has to be plumbing, the toilet."
"I rejected that because of the numbers involved," Goldbloom said. "Even if there weren"t any plumbing traps designed to stop a rat, and even if it held its breath and swam through whatever water barriers there were, I just don"t buy that explanation. Because what we"re talking about here is a whole pack of creatures slithering in that way, one behind the other, like a commando team, for G.o.d"s sake. Rats just aren"t that smart or that* determined. No No animal is. It doesn"t make sense." animal is. It doesn"t make sense."
The thought of Vastagliano wrapped in a cloak of swarming, biting rats had caused Jack"s mouth to go dry and sour. He had to work up some saliva to unstick his tongue. Finally he said, "Another thing. Even if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were overwhelmed by scores of these* these things things, they"d still have killed a couple-wouldn"t they? But we haven"t found a single dead rat or a single dead anything else-except, of course, dead people."
"And no droppings," Goldbloom said.
"No what?"
"Droppings. Feces. If there were dozens of animals involved, you"d find droppings, at least a few, probably piles of droppings."
"If you find animal hairs-"
"We"ll definitely be looking for them," Goldbloom said. "We"ll vacuum the floor around each body, of course, and a.n.a.lyze the sweepings. If we could find a few hairs, that would clear up a lot of the mystery." The a.s.sistant medical examiner wiped one hand across his face, as if he could pull off and cast away his tension, his disgust. He wiped so hard that spots of color actually did rise in his cheeks, but the haunted look was still in his eyes. "There"s something else that disturbs me, too. The victims weren"t* eaten. Bitten, ripped, gouged* all of that* but so far as I can see, not an ounce of flesh was consumed. Rats would"ve eaten the tender parts: eyes, nose, earlobes, t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es* They"d have torn open the body cavities in order to get to the soft organs. So would any other predator or scavenger. But there was nothing like that in this case. These things killed purposefully, efficiently, methodically* and then just went away without devouring a sc.r.a.p of their prey. It"s unnatural. Uncanny. What motive or force was driving them? And why? why?"
IV.
After talking with Ira Goldbloom, Jack and Rebecca decided to question the neighbors. Perhaps one of them had heard or seen something important last night.
Outside Vastagliano"s house, they stood on the sidewalk for a moment, hands in their coat pockets.
The sky was lower than it had been an hour ago. Darker, too. The gray clouds were smeared with others that were soot-dark.
Snowflakes drifted down; not many; they descended lazily, except when the wind gusted, and they seemed like fragments of burnt sky, cold bits of ash.
Rebecca said, "I"m afraid we"ll be pulled off this case."
"You mean* off these two murders or off the whole business?"