Robert Walker - Scalpers

Hairs on Park's clothes were neither his nor Peggy's, but they matched up perfectly with the coarse black hair of one of the Scalpers. The turgidness of the body and the condition of the spilled blood proved Dean right, that Park was dead for at least an hour before Peggy entered the room. The blood trail was unmistakable, leading the two M.E.s to the same contention, that the bleeding man was moved in and out of the bathroom at one point—most probably when Peggy entered. There were also trace fibers of tawny, sand-colored hairs in the bathroom.

The knife plunged into Park was unquestionably the knife that had inflicted upper-chest and lower-region damage on earlier victims of the Scalpers. Its edges, when magnified, matched perfectly earlier magnification shots of the wounds. The scalpel, too, proved to be an extremely likely instrument for the head wounds.

The two scalps found were taken from the two most recent female victims, the redhead and the Jane Doe found in the park. If they were not evidence in the case, a good mortician would sew them back onto the deceased and bury them with their scalps intact. As it was, however, they must remain as the morbid exhibits they were, under lock and key.

As they had uncovered more and more possibilities, Dean came to believe that Sid, too, loved the work, and had simply been overwhelmed and bullied by his superiors at a time when very little else was going right in his life. Somehow he had succumbed to the criticism being leveled at him.

To help them during the all-nighter, Sid had called in Tom Warner, his lab assistant, and a young lady Dean had met only in passing. Warner did excellent work, Dean thought, but he was most uneasy around Dean, very likely due to the incident earlier with Peggy Carson in the slab room.

Dean and Sid talked as they worked, and it seemed almost like old times for the two doctors.

"What if Peggy was set up? Who'd have known she was going to Park's just at that time, Dean?"

Dean thought of how Peggy had learned about his suspicions regarding Park. He told Sid about this, and added, “Perhaps someone else was on that line, too? But my guess is that Peggy surprised Park's killers and they got the notion to put it off on Peggy in order to cover their own tracks."

"Yeah, more likely ... you know, the amount of blood on the carpet there, I'd be willing to bet those guys left Park's with blood on their shoes."

"Pretty good chance of that."

Both men knew how blood not only randomly lodged in cloth, but on shoes, and how, even if washed, often trace elements remained. Just a minute amount could tell Dean if it were Park's blood he found on a man's shoe, but then, whose shoe might it be?

By now they had drawn a schematic of Park's little room. Inside the refrigerator, after Peggy and Dyer had left, Sid had discovered a final and insulting piece of evidence to incriminate Park: a pickle jar filled with something besides pickles, filled with bits of human flesh that floated in the brine. It had even made Dean gag, and he'd thought he'd seen everything. For Dean it said one more thing about the real killers—that they were involved in some cannibalistic act as well as the scalping. Anyone who took the time to pickle something might find the time to eat it. Beyond Sid and Dean, only the killers knew of this final evidence of Park's supposed depravity.

The more they looked, the more both men felt that the entire thing was a put-up job, Sid at one point raising the specter of doubt over Peggy Carson with a few casual remarks. “Strange that of all the people attacked by the scalpers, she alone escaped with her life."

"She's a cop."

Sid frowned, “So was Park.... Listen, pal, I know you find her a dreamboat, but take a step back and ask if she's tough enough to self-inflict that wound. And if so, and if she starts talking about some midget, and that gets us all going one way when it's hardly likely—and then she turns up in a room full of incriminating evidence designed to incriminate Park ... well, you figure it out."

Sid was brainstorming the way any good M.E. must, and it did have the effect of making Dean wonder, but Dean just didn't believe it possible. He believed Peggy Carson just another victim, however lucky.

"To believe her, Dean, you have to place her in the clutches of this blood-thirsty killer twice, twice, and she lives through it all. Pretty farfetched, isn't it?"

"Now you're thinking like an M.E., Sid, but I think you need to direct your darts elsewhere."

"Elsewhere, you say ... might not you be a little less objective nowadays, Dean?"

Dean wondered how in the world Sid could possibly know of his feelings toward Peggy. Was it suddenly general knowledge? Had he simply been too protective of her the evening before—Sid, a trained observer, not missing it? Or had she said something to someone who passed it along to Sid?

"Look at this and tell me what you see.” Dean instructed his colleague to glance into an ordinary microscope at a slide.

"All right.” Sid looked into the light at the configurations there. “Want to tell me what it is I'm looking at?"

"A slide I prepared at the scene, taken before you arrived. It's Peggy's breath."

"I don't get it."

"We can run this through for trace elements, and what do you bet we find chloroform, or some other asphyxiate?"

"How can you know?"

"Call it a guesstimate, like our reporter friends. But Peggy complained of blacking out. If we assume she's telling the truth, and if we don't find excessive alcohol on her breath, then we might assume it's something in the nature of chloroform. And if that's the case, then along with our pickle jar, my friend, we have at least two items no one else knows of except the killers."

"Let's run the slide through the tracer, then. What're we waiting for?"

Everything had taken much time, due largely to the deliberate care both men were taking keeping accurate records. Warner was put in charge of these and told how very vital they were, that everything discovered in the lab was of an extremely confidential nature, that careers and lives hung in the balance—including his own.

The slide was deposited in an oval machine which fired a laser beam at its center, turning Peggy's breath back into gas. The beam shut down and the gaseous residue was spun at high speed like a miniature cloud in the chamber until it reached the high speed necessary to separate the atoms of one element from another. This done, two graphs resulted, printed out via computer, showing both the quantity and density of each element. The process took several hours—though without the laser, it would have taken a day and a night. While the test was being run, Dean caught some sleep.

But it was fitful at best. Dean had a recurrent nightmare, one he'd learned was common to many people, a dream of panic over an examination being given to him. He sometimes arrived late for the exam and entered having had no knowledge he was supposed to take it. At other times, he could not find the examination room and spent the entire time racing from door to door in search of it until, finally finding it, he learned that time had run out. Psychologists theorized that the exam dream which so many people shared wasn't at all what it must first appear to be; apprehension and fear of ineptitude and inability. Instead, it was the mind's way of telling Dean that he had beaten the exam fear in the past and could do so again. It came on as a result of an impending test of a man, a test or difficulty Dean must face, fight, and overcome. For Dean it meant facing down the Scalpers as he had faced down Brother Timothy and Angel Rae.

Something warm, like sweat, began to pour from Dean's sleeping head, draining down the sides of his temples—and irritating his ears. The sweat was thick, gummy—when his sleeper's hand reached up to wipe it from his blinking eyes, he realized with a start that the perspiration wasn't sweat, but blood. Where his hand touched his forehead, he had no scalp, only a gaping hole through which his brain fluids drained and mixed with the blood, his life going slowly out of him with the mixture....