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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 prepubescent 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 paper.
    “No pubic hair,” said Carmine. “Patsy, if you love me, tell me this isn’t a child.”
    “The hair’s been — not shaved — no, plucked — so she’s postpubescent. Small girl, though. As if what our killer really yearned for was a child, but wasn’t game to follow through on all his disgusting desires.” He lifted out the second bag, not as mangled, and placed it beside the first. “I’ll get back to the morgue — you’ll want my report a.s.a.p.” His chief technician, Paul, was already preparing to vacuum the chamber’s interior; after that he would dust for fingerprints. “Lend me Abe and Corey as well, Carmine, and we can let Cecil get on with his work. Except for the monkeys, they must keep their experimental animals elsewhere — these are the day’s clean cages ready to go.”
    “Leave no stone unturned, guys,” said Carmine, following his cousin and the gurney’s grisly contents out.
    Desdemona Dupre — what a strange name! — was in the foyer waiting, flicking through the contents of a thick sheaf of papers on her clipboard.
    “Mrs. Dupre, this is Dr. Patrick O’Donnell,” said Carmine.
    Whereupon the woman bristled! “I am not a missus, I am a miss!” she said with a