On, Off. Colleen McCullough

in 1960 the oil reservoirs of East Holloman were relocated at the end of Oak Street on waste ground between I–95 and the harbor.

      The Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research sat on Oak Street right opposite the Shane–Driver medical student apartments, 100 for 100 students. Next to the Shane–Driver was the Parkinson Pavilion for medical research. It faced the Hug’s neighbor, the Holloman Hospital, a twelve-storey pile that had been rebuilt in 1950, the same year that saw the Hug go up.

      “Why do they call it the Hug?” Corey asked as the Ford swung into the temporary road that bisected a gigantic parking lot.

      “First three letters of Hughlings, I guess,” said Carmine.

      “Hug? It’s got no dignity. Why not the first four letters? Then it’d be the Hugh.”

      “Ask Professor Smith,” said Carmine, eyeing their destination.

      The Hug was a shorter, smaller twin of the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower cross-campus on Science Hill; a baldly square, squat pile of dark brick with plenty of big plate glass windows. It sat in three acres of what had used to be slum dwellings, demolished to make way for this monument perpetuating the name of a mystery man who had had absolutely nothing to do with its genesis. Who on earth was this Hughlings Jackson? A question all of Holloman asked. By rights the Hug should have been named after its donor, the enormously wealthy, late Mr. William Parson.

      Having no gate key to the parking lot, Abe put the Ford on Oak Street right outside the building. Which had no entrance onto Oak Street; the three men tramped down a gravel path along the north side to a single glass door, where a very tall woman was waiting for them.

      It’s like a child’s building block in the middle of a huge room, Carmine thought; three acres is a lot of land for something only a hundred feet per side. And shit, she’s holding a clipboard. Office, not medical. His mind automatically registered the physical details of every person who swam into his piece of the human sea, so it was busy as she drew closer: six-three in bare feet, early thirties, navy pant suit on the baggy side, flat lace-up shoes, mouse-brown hair, a face with a biggish nose and a prominent chin. She’d never have made Miss Holloman ten years ago, let alone Miss Connecticut. Once he halted in front of her, however, he noted that she had very fine, interesting eyes the color of thick ice, which he had always found beautiful.

      “Sergeants Marshall and Goldberg. I’m Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico,” he said curtly.

      “Desdemona Dupre, the business manager,” she said as she took them into a tiny foyer, apparently only there to accommodate two elevators. But instead of pressing the UP button, she opened a door in the opposite wall and led them into a wide corridor.

      “This is our first floor, which contains the animal care facilities and the workshops,” she said, her accent placing her as someone from the other side of the Atlantic. Turning a corner put them in another hall. She pointed to a pair of doors farther down. “There you are, animal care.”

      “Thanks,” said Carmine. “We’ll take it from here. Please wait for me back at the elevators.”

      Her brows rose, but she turned on her heel and disappeared without comment.

      Carmine found himself inside a very large room lined with cupboards and bins. Tall racks of clean cages big enough to take a cat or dog stood in neat rows in an area fronting a service elevator many times the size of the two in the foyer. Other racks held plastic boxes topped with wire grids. The room smelled good, pungent like a pine forest, with only the faintest hint of something less pleasant below it.

      Cecil Potter was a fine looking man, tall, slender, very well kept in his pressed white boiler suit and canvas bootees. His eyes, Carmine fancied, smiled a lot, though not smiling now.

      One of Carmine’s most important policies in this year of bussing turmoil was that the black people he met in the course of his job or social life be treated courteously; he held out his hand, shook Cecil’s firmly, performed the introductions without barking them or looking rushed. Corey and Abe were his men through thick and thin, they followed suit with the same courtesy.

      “It’s here,” said Cecil, moving to a closed stainless steel door with a snap lock handle. “I didn’t touch a thing, just shut the door.” He hesitated, decided to risk it. “Uh, Lieutenant, do you mind if I get back to my babies?”

      “Babies?”

      “The monkeys. Macaques. Rhesus mean anything to you? Well, that’s them. They in there, an’ very upset. Jimmy won’t lay off telling them where he been, an’ they very upset.”

      “Jimmy?”

      “The monkey Dr. Chandra thought was dead, an’ put in a bag in the fridge last night. Jimmy really found her—tore the place apart when he woke up in the dark freezing his buns off. When Otis—he my assistant as well as the handyman—went to empty the fridge, Jimmy came outta there screeching and yelling. Then Otis found her, an’ he was outta here screeching worse than Jimmy. I looked, an’ called the Prof. I guess the Prof called you.”

      “Where’s Otis now?” Carmine asked.

      “Knowing Otis, he run home to Celeste. She his mama as well as his wife.”

      They were gloved now; Abe wheeled the bin away from the door and Carmine opened it as Cecil, already crooning and clucking, went into the monkey room.

      Of the two big bags, one still lay at the back of the chamber. The other, rent from where the top folded over clear to the bottom, had exposed the lower half of a female torso. When Carmine noted its size and its lack of pubic hair his heart sank—a pre-pubescent child? Oh, please, not that! He made no movement to touch a thing, just leaned his shoulders against the wall.

      “We wait for Patrick,” he said.

      “I never smelled a smell like it—dead, but not decomposing,” said Abe, dying for a cigarette.

      “Abe, go find Mrs. Dupre and tell her she can go upstairs as soon as the uniforms arrive,” Carmine said, knowing that expression well. “Post them on all the entrances and emergency exits.” Then, alone with Corey, he rolled his eyes. “Why in there?” he asked.

      

      Patrick O’Donnell enlightened him.

      Sporting the very modern title of Medical Examiner in a city that had always had a coroner without forensic skills in earlier days, Patrick had espoused pathology because he didn’t like patients who talked back, and the life of a public pathologist because it meant plenty of criminal cases as well as all the other kinds of sudden or mysterious death. Thanks to Patrick’s ruthless campaign to bring Holloman into the latter half of the twentieth century, he had managed to shed most of a coroner’s court duties on to a deputy coroner and build a little empire that encompassed far more than mere autopsies. He believed in the new science of forensics, and played an active part in any case that interested him, even if no body was involved.

      He looked as Irish as his name from the reddish hair to the bright blue eyes, but in actual fact he and Carmine were first cousins, the sons of two sisters of Italian extraction. One married a Delmonico, the other an O’Donnell. Ten years older than Carmine and a happily married man with six children, Patrick let neither of these impediments spoil their deep friendship.

      “I don’t know much, but here’s what I do know,” said Carmine, and filled him in. “Why in there?” he repeated at the end of it.

      “Because if Jimmy the monkey hadn’t woken up undead and flown into a panic, these two brown bags, unmarked and intact, would have been dumped into some kind of receptacle and taken to the animal care incinerator,” Patrick said, grimacing. “This is the perfect way to get rid of human remains. Poof! Up in smoke.”

      Abe came back in time to hear this, and went pale. “Jeez!” he breathed, horrified.

      Photographs taken, Patrick lifted the first bag onto a gurney and tucked it inside an open body bag. Then he examined what he could see without disturbing the torn brown