that’s what this was. Christ, if I didn’t know better, I’d say these
three here had been chewed, just chewed to pieces.”
The scene of the crime was a two-room suite. The door had been broken
down by the first officers to arrive. An assistant medical examiner, a
police photographer, and a couple of lab technicians were at work in
both rooms.
The parlor, decorated entirely in beige and royal blue, was elegantly
appointed with a stylish mixture of French provincial and understated
contemporary furniture.
The room would have been warm and welcoming if it hadn’t been thoroughly
splattered with blood.
The first body was sprawled on the parlor floor, on its back, beside an
overturned, oval-shaped coffee table. A man in his thirties. Tall,
husky. His dark slacks were torn. His white shirt was torn, too, and
much of it was stained crimson. He was in the same condition as
Vastagliano and Ross: savagely bitten, mutilated.
The carpet around the corpse was saturated with blood, but the battle
hadn’t been confined to that small portion of the room. A trail of
blood, weaving and erratic, led from one end of the parlor to the other,
then back again; it was the route the panicked victim had taken in a
futile attempt to escape from and slough off his attackers.
Jack felt sick.
“It’s a damned slaughterhouse,” Rebecca said.
The dead man had been packing a gun. His shoulder holster was empty. A
silencer-equipped .38 pistol was at his side.
Jack interrupted one of the lab technicians who was moving slowly around
the parlor, collecting blood samples from various stains. “You didn’t
touch the gun? ”
“Of course not,” the technician said. “We’ll take it back to the lab in
a plastic bag, see if we can work up any prints.”
“I was wondering if it’d been fired,” Jack said.
“Well, that’s almost a sure thing. We’ve found four expended shell
casings.”
“Same caliber as this weapon?”
“Yep.”
“Find any of the loads?” Rebecca asked.
“All four,” the technician said. He pointed: “Two in that wall, one in
the door frame over there, and one right through the upholstery button
on the back of that armchair.”
“So it looks as if he didn’t hit whatever he was shooting at,” Rebecca
said.
“Probably not. Four shell casings, four slugs. Everything’s been
neatly accounted for.”
Jack said, “How could he have missed four times in such close quarters?”
“Damned if I know,” the technician said. He shrugged and went back to
work.
The bedroom was even bloodier than the parlor. Two dead men shared it.
There were two living men, as well. A police photographer was snapping
the bodies from every angle. An assistant medical examiner named
Brendan Mulgrew, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple, was
studying the positions of both corpses.
One of the victims was on the king-size bed, his head at the foot of it,
his bare feet pointed toward the headboard, one hand at his torn throat,
the other hand at his side, the palm turned up, open. He was wearing a
bathrobe and a suit of blood.
“Dominick Carramazza,” Jack said.
Looking at the ruined face, Rebecca said, “How can you tell?”
“Just barely.”
The other dead man was on the floor, flat on his stomach, head turned to
one side, face torn to ribbons.
He was dressed like the one in the parlor: white shirt open at the neck,
dark slacks, a shoulder holster.
Jack turned away from the gouged and oozing flesh.
His stomach had gone sour; an acid burning etched its way up from his
gut to a point under his heart. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a
roll of Tums.
Both of the victims in the bedroom had been armed.
But guns had been of no more help to them than to the man in the parlor.
The cadaver on the floor was still clutching a silencer equipped pistol,
which was as illegal as a howitzer at a presidential press conference.
It was like the gun on the floor in the first room.
The man on the bed hadn’t been able to hold on to his weapon. It was