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Sins of the Flesh
Colleen McCullough
A Captain Carmine Delmonico mystery from the bestselling author of The Thorn BirdsAugust 1969. Two anonymous male corpses are discovered in the sleepy college town of Holloman, Connecticut. After connecting the emaciated bodies to four other victims, the police realise that Holloman has a psychopathic killer on the loose.Captain Carmine Delmonico’s team begins to circle a trio of eccentrics who share family ties, painful memories, and a dark past. Things become even murkier when one of them turns out to be a friend of Sergeant Delia Carstairs. Delia has also recently befriended the head of the local mental hospital, who has been trying to rehabilitate a very difficult patient.When another vicious murder rocks Holloman, Carmine realises that two killers are at large with completely different modus operandi. Suddenly the summer isn’t so sleepy anymore. ..
DEDICATION (#u1b8bf95e-18d2-571b-ad86-f1cd2cc8795c)
For KAREN QUINTAL
All the many loyal and loving years are deeply appreciated.
Here’s hoping there are just as many more to come.
Thanks, pal.
CONTENTS
COVER (#u7d00c5b6-50f3-5d54-943a-e74de5988c13)
TITLE PAGE (#ue869406d-6e72-55ba-93e5-6a3f5f28a846)
DEDICATION
MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY/MONDAY, AUGUST 3–4, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1969
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1969
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1969
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1969
THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 1969
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
SATURDAY/SUNDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 16–17, 1969
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1969
SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1969
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 1969
SATURDAY, AUGUST 30, 1969
SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 1969
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1969, LABOR DAY
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1969
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1969
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1969
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1969
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1969
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY/MONDAY, AUGUST 3–4, 1969 (#u1b8bf95e-18d2-571b-ad86-f1cd2cc8795c)
He had no idea it was midnight. In actual fact, he didn’t know whether the sun was shining or the stars were twinkling. Nor could he work out how long he’d been here, so timelessly did time pass. One moment he had been free, smiling with happiness, at the center of a world that had opened its arms wide to embrace him; the next moment he had fallen into a sleep so deep that he remembered not even the tiniest fragment of a dream.
When he woke he was here, to live a different life. Here, in a big, featureless room that contained a padded toilet and a plastic water bubbler that produced a slim fountain whenever he put his foot down on a button in the floor below it. So he could drink, and he had a tidy place in which to excrete. Here only had one color: a dirty beige, not from squalor but from the poor lighting of one dim bulb, center-ceiling behind a tough glass case wrapped in steel rods.
He was stark naked, though he wasn’t hot, and he wasn’t cold. Everything was oddly soft—the floor and the walls sighed and gently gave way wherever he touched them, akin to leather squabs on a car seat. What at first he thought were seams around the bottom of the walls turned out to be the exact opposite of seams: tucks, as if this cushioning surface were rammed down inside a crevice, together with the edges of the floor. No matter how he tried to dig with his fingertips, the fabric refused to move one single millimeter.
Soon his ravenous hunger became the be-all and the end-all of his entire existence, for though he could always drink, and as much as he wished, he had no particle of food. At times, coming in and going out of the sleeps, he vaguely remembered a taste of food, and understood that he was fed something that sat in his belly like a coal of such glorious warmth and comfort that even the most fleeting memory of it caused him to weep.
His panics belonged to differently befogged and shrouded periods, when he had screamed on and on and on, crashed against the walls, flailed his fists against those yielding surfaces, howled like an old dog, bleated and bayed and bellowed and bawled. No one ever answered. All he heard was himself. Emerging from the panic exhausted, he would drink thirstily and sleep the sleep of the dead, featureless, his last thought the hope of food.
He had nothing to do, nothing to look at—not even a mirror! Nothing to pass the time, he who had passed so much of it gazing at his own reflection, marveling at the perfection of his beauty. All he had to do to get what he wanted was to smile. But in here there was no one to smile at. Just one little chance to smile, that was all he needed! A smile would get him out—no one could ever, ever, ever resist his smile! A smile would get him food. It always came in his sleeps, the food, therefore he must go to sleep smiling.
He was weakening, it seemed the way a snail dragged itself around, with mind-numbing slowness and enormous effort, a visible labor just to hold the house of his life up off his head, for if it slipped, he was gone like a drop of slime on a white-hot stove. He didn’t want to part with his beauty yet! Or his smile!
“Why are you so cruel?” He smiled. “Who are you?”
This time his awakening brought changes: he was still hungry, and he was in pain.
No glowing coal of food lingered in his belly—it hadn’t fed him! But at least the pain said he was still alive, and it wasn’t agonizing—more an ache in the groin. One of the things he couldn’t fathom was its attention to his groin, stripped of all hair, since it had never, as far as he knew, subjected him to any kind of abuse. This wakening’s pain made him doubt, and he groped for his penis; it was there, unharmed. No, the soreness was behind it, in his ball-sack. Something was wrong! Each testicle should roll under his fingers as if it were free inside the sack, but no testicles rolled. His ball-sack was empty. Empty!
He shrieked, and a voice spoke from every square inch of the room, impossible to pinpoint.
“Poor eunuch,” it cooed, dovelike. “You did well, my poor eunuch. No bleeding. They came out as easily as the stone out of a fleshless avocado. Snip, snip! Snip, snip! No balls.”
He screamed, and went on screaming, long shrill wails of grief and despair that finally died away into gibberish; and from that he passed to a silence flirting with catatonia, moving not the tiniest muscle. The pain was dying away to nothing, more bearable than the pain of no food, and even that didn’t matter the way it had before the discovery of his neutering. Without his manhood, there was nothing to smile about. An utterly weary hopelessness moved into his soul and took up residence there.
Though he didn’t know it was midnight, the savage hack of Time’s scythe that shoved Sunday the 3rd into the past and Monday the 4th into the present, he suddenly knew there would be no more food. Curling up to hug himself, arms around his knees, he gazed across the vast expanse of the floor into a dirty beige eternity.
The chair came down out of the ceiling behind him, descending silently to a halt with its foot platform still a meter short of the floor. Had he turned his head, he would have seen it and the person who occupied it, but he didn’t turn his head. Everything that was left of him was focused on his contemplation of eternity, though he was a long way off dying yet. A complete authority on the matter, his observer estimated that he had about forty days left before the very last flicker of life snuffed out. Forty days of ecstatic conversation and study—but how interesting! He still wore a kind of a smile ….
The chair lifted itself back into the ceiling while the dying man on the floor continued to plumb his perspective on eternity.
MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1969 (#u1b8bf95e-18d2-571b-ad86-f1cd2cc8795c)
“I told you, Abe, I told you,” Delia said, “but you and Carmine were being typical men—wouldn’t listen to a woman, oh, no!”
She and Abe were sitting in a booth at Malvolio’s waiting for their lunch, and Abe had miscalculated his moment: Delia’s gauzy outfit of mustard yellow and coral pink had seemed tame to him, an indication that today’s Delia was placidly bored. But her reaction to his news said otherwise; Abe heaved an internal sigh and revised his mental chart labeled DELIA CARSTAIRS.
“It’s taken this one to convince me,” he said in undefeated tones. “Until now, the evidence was insufficient.”
“No evidence, but no guts either,” she said, disgusted.
“I don’t see why you’re crowing so loud,” he said.
“Minnie is coming with our omelets,” she said in the voice of a prissy schoolmarm, “and I propose we eat before we discuss.”
Ah, that was it! Delia was plain hungry! Meekly Abe ate. Luigi’s summer cook produced superb Western omelets, and Delia hadn’t grown tired of them yet. Which didn’t mean Abe’s mental chart of Delia could stay unamended. The real problem was, did he modify CLOTHES, COLOR or FOOD, and how much ought he to cross-index? A very complicated mental chart, Delia’s.
The eating dealt with, Delia leaned forward, her bright brown jewels of eyes glittering. “Enlighten me,” she commanded.
Abe began. “Same as James Doe. Gus has named him Jeb Doe until he’s identified—if he ever is. I know you maintained James Doe was related to the four earlier bodies, but decomposition did not permit any positivity, whereas Jeb Doe does.” His cigarette kindled, he inhaled with obvious pleasure. “Gus hasn’t posted Jeb yet, but the preliminary examination is uncannily like James. The body was found on Willard two blocks farther out than Caterby, where Little San Juan has taken to dumping trash. No apparent cause of death, except that starvation sure played a part in it. His testicles had been removed some weeks prior to death.”
“Cause of death will be starvation,” Delia said confidently, “and the perpetrator is a multiple murderer, you must admit that now. Jeb and James Doe are preceded by four John Does whose bones we’ve found. My guess is that there are a lot more than four.”
“If so, not in Holloman. We’ve looked back twenty years, and found nothing before John Doe One in 1966.” Abe puffed away luxuriously, then gazed at his dwindling cigarette in real grief. “Why do they go so fast?”
“Because you’re quitting, Abe dear, and you can’t have your next ciggy until after dinner tonight. Are you sure there are no other John Does elsewhere in Connecticut?”
“At this moment, yes, but I’ll have Liam and Tony repeat our enquiries.” Abe smiled wryly. “At least we can be pretty sure no bodies will turn up in idyllic rustic settings.”
“Yes, this chap definitely thinks of his victims as garbage the moment they’re dead.” Delia put her hand on Abe’s arm when he rose to go. “No, let’s stay here a minute more, please. I love the air-conditioning.”
Abe sat with the alacrity of a trained husband. “It’s cool, yeah, but the smoke torments me,” he said plaintively.
She gave a mew of exasperation. “I love you dearly, Abraham Samuel Goldberg, but you have to get through kicking the habit, and in one respect Jews are like Catholics—they find it easier to suffer one torture when they have to suffer more than one. Well, I am not sweltering in County Services just so you can, a, swelter, and b, withdraw simultaneously. Set your mind where it ought to be—on Jeb Doe, not the Marlboro Man.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, wrestling a grin. “If Jeb Doe’s cause of death is starvation, then we know that the last two Does were definitely starved to death, as well as emasculated. In turn, it suggests an MO for all of them. Gruesome!”
“Yes, quite horrible,” said Delia, grimacing. “It’s a very unusual way to murder because the degree of premeditation is truly formidable—I mean, it takes weeks if not months, and can be stopped at any time. While it may not be messy, it’s certainly the opposite of most murder.”
“You mean it’s colder than ice, harder than steel?”
“Yes, whereas murder of its very nature suggests passion and rage,” said Delia, frowning.
“How would anyone light on starvation as a modus operandi? You’d need a dungeon.” Abe’s freckled face betrayed dismay. “We have had our share of underground premises in Holloman lately.”
“Exactly!” Delia cried, excited. “Starvation is a Middle Ages form of murder. Endowed with dungeons galore, the less civilized monarchs indulged in starving people to death. Aunt Sophonisba offended the King and the King threw her into a dungeon where—oh, how could it have happened?—they forgot to feed her. However, the victims were almost always women. Sort of murder by proxy, which lessens the guilt.”
Cigarettes forgotten, Abe stared at her, intrigued. “I hear you, but am I getting the correct message? Are you implying that our Doe murderer is a woman? Or that the victims should be women?”
Delia went wildly tangential. “Confining the word ‘homosexual’ to the male of our species while putting lesbians on a back burner, may I say that while a number of homosexuals may feel like women trapped inside men’s bodies, I believe the majority do not? After all, homosexuality isn’t exclusively the preserve of human beings. Animals practice it too,” she said.
Abe’s luminous grey eyes mirrored his brain’s confusion. “Are you saying these are homosexual murders? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the killer is definitely not homosexual.”
Abe continued to stare at her, mesmerized. How did Delia’s mind work? Greater intellects than his had failed to find the answer to that question, thus he was able to view his defeat with equanimity. “So you’re hypothesizing that the four John Does, James Doe and Jeb Doe are all the work of the same heterosexual killer?”
“Definitely. Come, Abe, you think the same.”
“After Jeb, the same killer, yes. Heterosexual? Search me.”
“The real question is, how long ago were his trial runs?”
“Easing his way into his MO, you mean?”
“I do indeed.” Delia gave a wriggle of anticipatory delight. “James Doe was your case, Abe, so I need filling in.”
“The consensus of opinion at the time was that it was a homosexual murder, pure and simple. But after Liam and I had a talk with Professor Eric Soderstern, we had to can that,” Abe said.
There were many occasions, thought Delia, when being a minor police department in a small city could possess unexpected bonuses. The Holloman PD had all the resources and expertise of one of the world’s greatest universities at its fingertips; these included the Chubb University Medical School professors of psychiatry. Dr. Eric Soderstern, a famous authority on the psychology of homosexuality, had been consulted in Abe’s need.
“The prof said that castration of the victim indicated rape was the precipitating factor for murder, not homosexuality. We’d gotten nowhere with our enquiries among Holloman’s homosexual contingent.” Abe’s beautiful smile appeared. “We were also told that with this new decade coming up and so many guys coming out of the closet, homosexuality was taking a new lease on life with the word ‘gay.’ We have to educate ourselves to say gay rather than homosexual.”
“I’ve heard gay around a little,” said Delia. “It goes back at least as far as Oscar Wilde. But continue, dear.”
“Anyway, now at least we had a reason for the gay community’s ignorance—apparently James Doe wasn’t a homosexual and his murder had no gay aspects. Instead, we had to ask ourselves if he might have raped someone.”
“Perhaps he was homosexual, and raped a male?”
“Delia! That implication I don’t need!” Abe glowered at her, “Hot weather and you don’t mix, lady. I need a smoke.”
“Codswallop, of course you don’t. You’re down in the mouth, Abe dear, because the discovery of Jeb Doe does rather put the kibosh on rape theories of any kind. The killer lives for the act of murder, and has to be regarded as a multiple. His reasons for castration will be absolutely individual, not due to some Freudian generalization.” Delia arose in a mustard and coral cloud. “Come on, let’s see if Gus has done the autopsy.”
They stepped out into the August humidity, up near saturation point, and gasped.
