Sins of the Flesh. Colleen McCullough

the case. August. Who would 1969 be? By now every Realtor in the county was aware of the Shadow Women, and taking immense pains with the details of any rentals in early January. Two likely names had come up at the time, but neither turned out a possible candidate; whoever she was, her rental must have fallen down a crack. That was usually the way, Delia reflected. Monday the fourth day of August today, a matter of ten to fifteen days to go ….

      She glanced at her watch. An hour more, and she’d scoot. The pathetic little bunch of skinny files needed their photos back inside, but suddenly she decided to take them instead to the new police artist, Hank Jones.

      Then she noticed a file Carmine had withdrawn from Caterby Street, and realized that he must have left it for her to look at as well. Yes, he’d clipped a note to it that said “Our most famous Missing Persons file.” Oh, it was old! 1925. Sidetracked, Delia pulled it forward and opened it upon an 8 x 10 black-and-white head shot of a very beautiful young woman: Dr. Eleanor (Nell) Carantonio. An up and coming young anesthesiologist at the Holloman Hospital, Dr. Carantonio had failed to turn up to give a morning’s scheduled anesthetics, and was never seen again.

      A haughty, white-skinned face framed by fashionably shingled black hair, with dark eyes that managed to flash fire even in the picture …. No Shadow, this! An opinion borne out by reading the forty-four-year-old file, which revealed circumstances very different from the Shadows. Dr. Nell’s profession was known, her life an open and unimpeachable book, and she was wealthy. Since she left no will, her nearest relative, a first cousin named Fenella (Nell) Carantonio, had had to wait over seven years to take possession of two million dollars and a huge mansion on the Busquash Peninsula. Eleanor—Nell. Fenella—Nell. No trace of the young woman’s body had ever been found, from 1925 to this day. Age twenty-seven when she vanished. The second Nell was nine years her junior, and her only known relative.

      No help or guidance there, said Delia to herself, picked up her photos and got to her feet. Off to the ME’s air-conditioning and the artist the ME’s and PD shared. As she walked Delia continued to think about the most baffling puzzle of them all—why did the Shadow Women have studio portraits of themselves? And why had the portraits been left behind?

      She was convinced the women were dead, but no bodies had ever come to light, and she had excellent reason to know that even the most bizarre methods of getting rid of bodies had been thoroughly explored. If a body were considered as over a hundred pounds of meat and fat plus some really big bones, then the disposal of that body was every killer’s worst nightmare.

      Sadly (for Delia was a woman who adored flamboyance) what her case seemed to be boiling down to was rather humdrum. A killer who prowled in search of shy, retiring, very ordinary women, and, having found one, did whatever his fantasy prompted before taking her life, then managed to dispose of her invisibly. The rental of apartments was a year-round activity, and in a student town many of them were let furnished. The dates were his kinks, had nothing to do with the women. Delia was obliged to admit to herself that she was automatically drawn to the more extravagant explanations of these rare cases that made no sense. In the cold blast of air that assaulted her as she went around in ME’s revolving doors, she decided that the Shadow Women would end in a shabby, dreary manner satisfying no one. What an indictment her adjectives and adverbs were! Humdrum, shabby, dreary. Lives were being taken, and she was cataloguing the method of their taking on a scale graduated in degrees of glamour! Well, she knew why: it kept Delia the detective on her toes, whipped up energy, enthusiasm. Flippant it may be, but as a technique it worked a treat.

      Ginny Toscano had attained sixty, and was retiring, which led to some quiet cop cheers; when she had started out as the police artist the work had been far more, to use her word, “civilized.” Some of what she was asked to do these days she found beyond her stomach or her talents, for the world—and her job—had changed almost out of recognition. And the very moment that a new artist was hired, Ginny used up the time until her birthday on annual leave.

      The big studio and its accompanying laboratory/kitchen had been tastefully decorated in shell-pink, institution oak and off-white, but when Delia entered she found hardly a morsel of Ginny remained. I hope, thought Delia, that the poor dear is having a wonderful time in Florence!

      The walls were almost completely papered in unframed posters of landscapes not from this Earth, their skies transected by sweeping curves of what looked like Saturn’s rings, or holding two suns as well as several moons, while the foregrounds were soaring multicolored crystals, or weird mountains, or erupting volcanoes, or cascades of rainbow-riddled fluid. One depicted a robot warrior mounted on a robot Tyrannosaurus rex at full trundle, and another was the famous half-buried Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes. Fabulous! thought Delia, bewitched.

      In the midst of this other-worlds environment a thin young man was working on the top sheet of a slab of paper with a dark German pencil, his models clipped to the top of his architect’s table, well above the paper block: a series of photographs of Jeb Doe, with one of James Doe at either end of the row.

      “Bugger!” Delia cried. “Lieutenant Goldberg beat me to it.”

      He looked up, grinning. “Hi, Delia.”

      “Any chance you can squeeze me in too, Hank?”

      “For you, baby, I’d squeeze to death.” He put his pencil down and swiveled his high chair to face her. “Sit ye doon.”

      In Delia’s estimation he had one of the most engaging faces she had ever seen—impish, happy, radiating life—and his eyes were unforgettable—greenish-yellow, large, well spaced and opened, and surrounded by long, dense black lashes. His negroidly curly hair was light red and his skin color that of a southern Chinese. His head was big but his face, delicately fine-featured, tapered from a high, wide brow to a pointed chin; a dimple was gouged in each cheek, this last a characteristic that made Delia weak at the knees. He made Delia weak at the knees—Platonic, naturally!

      If it were impossible to gauge all the kinds of blood in his veins, that went doubly so for his voice, unexpectedly deep and quite lacking an accent that pinned his origins down; he didn’t roll his r’s like an American, clip his word endings like an Oxonian, drawl his a’s like an Australia, reverse his o’s and u’s like a Lancastrian, twang like a hillbilly—she could go on and on, never reaching an answer. To hear him talk was to hear traces of every accent, adding up to none. No arguments, Hank Jones bore investigating.

      Delia laid out her six photographs on a vacant corner of the bench at her side; Hank wheeled over to study them closely.

      “I’m not sure that I need a drawing,” she said, “as much as I need an expert opinion. The idiotic hair-do fashion makes it hard to assess the shape of the cranium in the first three, but it seems to me that it’s likely to be quite round. In fact, I came to the conclusion that if I were to go on bone structure alone, in all six cases I could be looking at the same skull, despite the differing noses, eyebrows and cheeks. Actually, I want you to shoot down one of my more potty ideas—that these six women are in fact all the same woman, someone highly skilled in the use of prostheses and stage makeup. If her true eyes were light in color, she could achieve any color with contact lenses, and wigs and hair dyes in the Sixties are a piece of cake. So tell me I’m baying at the moon, please! Shoot me down!”

      His own eyes lifted from the six photographs to rest on her face thoughtfully, and with considerable affection. He didn’t know why he had taken one look at her in the parking lot and liked her so much, save that his eccentric soul recognized a partner in crime. That day she had been wearing a tie-dyed organdy dress in strident scarlet admixed with mauve and yellow; it was miniskirted at midthigh and displayed her grand piano legs clad in bright blue tights rendered queasily opalescent by the sheerness of their weave. Though in Hank’s judgment the outfit’s finishing touch was a pair of black lace-up nun’s shoes, which she told him owned both comfort and pursuit power. One day, he vowed, he would paint well enough to capture the character and lineaments of her face, from the mop of frizzy, brassy hair to the mascara-spiked lashes and the beefy nose; but how could he ever manage the mouth, so lipsticked that little streaks of red crept up into the fissures around it and made it look as if sewn shut with bloody sutures? Though she flirted with grotesquerie, she deftly