EIGHT

They took a streetcar back to Flip’s neighborhood. The sun began to set. Flip thought the shadows crept oddly over Tark, seeming to linger and settle on him. Cloaking him.

Despite consuming the rich cake, Tark looked dried out and beat. Flip wondered if gin were needed, or if that would only make things worse. Whichever it was, Flip knew the tonic would almost certainly be applied vigorously within the hour.

Flip still felt alert and focused. He was thinking about the man they had to find.

When they reached the building where he lived, they saw two people waiting out front. Flip had never had so many visitors in a 24-hour period. One visitor had been his previous record, and that had been tied last night.

Curious neighbors peered furtively out at the waiting pair from behind ratty curtains or—if they didn’t have curtains—unabashedly and straight through window glass. One of the visitors was a uniformed police officer. A white man, tall and broad in the shoulders. The other was a Negro woman in a fine hobble skirt. She wore no cosmetics on her face, and her hat was large and ornate. Still, it took Flip only a moment to recognize her as Sally Battle.

“Officer?” the policeman said.

Flip nodded and showed his badge.

“She came to the station,” the policeman explained. “Said she had something that would help with your case. Said she knew you. Normally, we wouldn’t do this, but the captain said the mayor-”

“It’s all right,” Flip told him. “You did right. I know her.”

The officer was visibly relieved. He excused himself and hurried up the block as the shadows lengthened. Flip said nothing until the cop was out of earshot.

“You can leave a message for me at the precinct,” Flip said. “I’ll get it. You don’t have to come to my damn house.”

Sally was silent.

“And if you wanted to know where I lived, you could have just asked,” Flip added.

“You wouldn’t have told me straight,” Sally said.

“No,” Flip said. “Probably not. What do you need?”

Sally eyed the young magician.

“First of all, it is something to be discussed in private,” she said. “It concerns your investigation.”

“Which investigation is that?” Flip said.

“Twins,” Sally said. “Dead twins.”

“Which you know about how?” Flip asked sternly.

Sally did not respond. She glanced at the magician again.

“This man is Drextel Tark,” Flip said, indicating the faded conjurer. “I don’t think anybody could have a more relevant connection to this case than he does. Now tell me why you are here.”

Sally reached into her purse and carefully withdrew a photograph. It was small—the kind family portrait studios produced to be placed inside a locket. She handed it to Flip. He looked it over carefully.

“I think we all need to go inside,” he said.

“Are they yours, or do they belong to one of your girls?” Flip asked, tossing the photo of the swaddled twin newborns onto the table beside his notes.

Sally said nothing, and looked around his dingy apartment doubtfully.

“Yours then,” Flip declaimed, and sat down at his table.

Sally and Tark also reluctantly found seats.

Tark immediately magicked a glass bottle. He took small sips straight from the mouth, and a smile slowly spread across his face. Then he looked at the photo on the table.

“Hey, they are twins, aren’t they?” Tark said. “Took me a second.”

Flip leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head.

“I’ll help you Sally, but first you have to reveal how you know about this,” Flip said to her.

Sally sat up straight. Her jaw became hard and firm. Her eyes narrowed.

“What don’t I know?” she said. “At the Palmerton House, we hear more than at any police station. And we keep files on customers just like the police do.”

“You keeping a file on me?” Flip asked, half-serious.

“Maybe,” Sally said. “We keep all sorts of information on men. What they like. What they don’t. What job they have. What they’ll pay extra for. Some of the Palmerton’s clients work for the mayor, and maybe they heard about a special meeting between you and the big man. Maybe they even had an idea of what you talked about at that meeting. You’d be surprised what a man will tell when he’s buttoning up his shirt and pulling his socks back on. It’s more than he’ll say when the boys in blue are beating on him down at the station, that’s for sure.”

Flip smiled at Sally. He did not take his eyes off her, but at the same time leaned over to Tark and made a “gimmie” motion with his right hand. Tark surrendered the bottle. Flip took it and brought it up to his lips, eyes still on Sally’s. He had two good swallows, then passed it back.

“I thought I was a man who noticed things,” Flip told her, “but I’ll be damned if I ever noticed you were with child. And I visit with you at least once a month. Twice, probably.”

“I know as many tricks as your magician,” Sally said. “And just like him, a lot of mine involve costumes.”

Flip was genuinely astounded. Sally had never seemed to be the slightest bit pregnant.

As Flip mulled his recent oversights, Sally took her turn motioning for the bottle. The magician carefully passed it, and the madam took a dainty sip.

“That is horrible,” she pronounced. “Come to my place one day—when you’re old enough and can afford it—and I’ll set you up with some proper gin, like the British drink.”

Sally turned back to the policeman.

“Why is he even here, Flip? You said before that he had something relevant?”

Flip informed her, in broad strokes, of Tark’s connection to the case. Sally knit her brow as Flip told the tale, and her jaw became softer.

“Then I’m sorry,” Sally said when Flip had finished. “My babies have me thinking a bit selfishly. I’m not the only one with something at stake, am I? You love your brother.”

It was not a question.

“I’m all he has,” Tark said softly. “He can’t function on his own.”

Sally turned back to Flip.

“Well then,” she said to the policeman, straightening the front of her hobble skirt with flattened palms.

“Well then, what?” said Flip.

“Well then I also want to help you,” Sally told him.

“You can help . . . by telling me how you know what you know,” Flip said. “Who your leaky sources are that work with the mayor.”

“You know what I mean,” Sally said. “People saw you asking around today. Asking at the settlement agencies. I heard about that too! Please? I want to be a part of this.”

“You got a business to run,” Flip reminded her.

“My place can run itself for a while,” Sally said. “If there’s people aiming to stop this killer—and I don’t help out?—I’ll never forgive myself, Flip. Never ever.”

Flip considered.

“I don’t know what you think you can do for us,” he told her. “I already have resources. If I needed more men, the department would give them to me in an instant.”

“This is for me, Flip,” she said, pleading now. “You don’t got babies. You don’t know what it is to imagine a thing in the world waiting to kill them . . .. You can’t know Flip. You have to trust me.”

“Sally, when I asked you to keep an eye out for things, I didn’t mean-”

“It’s too late, Flip,” she said. “I’m here. I’m involved whether you like it or not.”

Flip sighed.

“Sally. . . I . . . Yes, then. You can come along and help. . . if you truly want to. But. . . This is not going to be nice.”

“Nice?” she said. “Nice? What world you think I live in?”

Flip nodded silently. He had, perhaps, forgotten just a little bit.

They sat and drank gin. Even Sally had more. At one point, it occurred to her to ask the magician: “Young man, if you can simply make this beverage appear from out of the ether—as it appears you can—then why not prestidigitate finer quality stuff?”

Tark smiled but did not reply.

They discussed what Flip and Tark had discovered so far. Flip wrote the details of every location they had visited, and all the people they had talked to. Tark and Sally conjectured further.

“You ain’t never seen a customer with a lump taken out of his head?” the magician asked.

“We’ve seen men with all sorts of injuries, of course,” Sally replied thoughtfully. “But none like what you are describing. How about you? Have you ever seen that?”

“Fewer circuses like to have a freak show these days,” Tark said. “More of an east coast thing. Once, I saw ‘The Man with No Brain.’ His skull stopped right above his eyes. But he seemed otherwise like you or me. Could walk and talk and everything. We played a game of poker. He had a deck of cards with full naked women on the backs—real photos, not drawings. I-”

Tark suddenly clammed up, as if remembering a lady was present.

Sally smiled.

“Oh dear boy, you’re blushing?” she said. “How darling!”

“I think. . .” Flip said, sitting up and staring intently into his pad of notes. “I think . . . we have two stops tomorrow. One is the Illinois State Penitentiary. The other is the Chicago Defender. I don’t have to tell you that the latter is the more dangerous.”

“Former, you mean,” said Sally.

“No,” said Flip.

The Chicago Defender was the largest Negro newspaper in Chicago, and probably the United States. It was the paper Negro train porters most frequently distributed throughout the South. Its editorials urged Negroes from everywhere to move to Chicago at all costs, to come and make the city their home. Its role in fomenting the new migration to Chicago could not be overestimated.

“That newspaper office involves more danger to our investigation, and, therefore, to the city,” Flip said. “We are stalking big game. One of the only advantages we have is that the killer does not know we are looking for him. But the killer will know if the Defender begins to connect the twin murders and prints something. I want to look in their archive for anything about twin murders previous to this summer. Have you two ever been there? It’s run out of a converted apartment building. They don’t have a proper newsroom like the Tribune or the Daily News, but they do keep an archive in a couple of closets by the back stair. They’ll let you go poking around if you’ve got a reason.”

“You think we’ll really find reports of dead twins?” Sally asked.

“Or twins attacked,” Flip said with a shrug. “Or twins disappeared. Though, so far, our man hasn’t really tried to hide the bodies. I’d say he goes for the opposite. He goes for display.”

Sally pursed her mouth and nose, as though she smelled a bad smell.

“Anyhow, Bob Abbot, the editor; he and his team are sharp,” Flip continued. “They know me, and it’d be easy for them to find out what I’m sniffing for. Too easy. That’s why I want the two of you to go.”

“Us?” Sally and Tark said at the same time.

“Yes, and separately,” Flip told them. “You’ll cover more ground that way, and it will be harder for the newspapermen to guess your aim. Sally, if and when they inquire, you had a relative come up north and you’re looking to see if she might have put a notice in a back issue. Tark, you don’t say at first why you want to see the old issues. Then, if they press, you confide that another circus posted some ads a few months back—and you’re trying to track ’em down and see if they’re still hiring. Both of you, make up details as you see fit, but not too many. Go as your real selves. Give your real names. But whatever you do, don’t let on that you’re looking for anything about twins.”

“How far back do we look?” Sally asked.

“This is an all-day thing,” Flip stated. “I want you there early—arrive within an hour of one another—and stay until they kick you out.”

“Or ‘till we find something,” Tark said.

“Even then, keep looking,” Flip replied.

“What’re you gonna do tomorrow?” Tark said.

“Ride out to the state pen and have a talk with Claude Chalifour,” Flip said.

“Beef-Fist Chalifour!” Tark said brightly, to show he was familiar. “I won money on him. Lost money on him too.”

“Did you bet on his fights, or on the outcome of his trial?” Sally asked.

“Both, if you gotta know,” Tark told her.

Tark suddenly became thoughtful.

“But Flip. . . what you want with a crazy boxer kept people skinned-up in his basement?”

“Oh,” Flip replied. “All sorts of things.”

As they prepared to depart, it was grudgingly agreed that Tark—who still could not go home—would spend the evening at the Palmerton.

“I’m serious now,” Flip said, taking Sally by the shoulder. “You keep the girls away from him. Give him a cot in the kitchen with the cooks. Something like that. If he’s awake all night carrying on, doing tricks for the girls, he’s useless tomorrow.”

“No worries there,” Sally said in a confident whisper. “I can put something in his gin . . . make him fall to sleep immediately.”

Flip opened his mouth to object to this—perhaps reflexively—but then found he saw no drawback and nodded with a shrug.

The magician and the madam departed.

When they had been gone for some time, Flip retrieved the fireplace poker that he had taken from the home of Miss Heloise. He wondered what it would take to drive it—front to back—through an orphan girl, as the killer had apparently done. He wondered if he had the strength to do such a thing himself. He figured almost certainly not.

For some time, Flip held the fireplace poker, waiting for it to vibrate. Waiting for it to glow. Waiting for it to do something. To call to him, as things apparently called to Ursula Green. And yet the poker—near as he could tell—wished to do nothing at all.

Flip thought again of Ursula’s words.

The one you seek. Right here. In this very place.

But Flip knew—Ursula being Ursula—that that ‘place’ could be anywhere.

He went to bed with the poker under his pillow, hoping it might infect his dreams.

The next morning—early, as was his wont—Flip rose, bathed, made coffee, and headed to the precinct station. There he requested that two telephone calls be made—one to the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, and the other to a car service.

As he waited for the car, Flip looked idly for the officers with whom he usually worked. Few passed through, and those who did weren’t angling for a conversation today. In fact, Flip noticed, they seemed to struggle just to meet his eyes. Flip worked for Big Bill Thompson now. That fact had become known, he realized. And it meant Flip existed in close proximity to a terrifying power. Now his colleagues were apparently nervous even to ask the details of the assignment. Better, they decided, simply not to poke the sleeping bear.

Inside of an hour, a green Hudson pulled up to the station. It had front and back seats, and a tan cloth roof blown ragged. Seeking to minimize any further awkwardness with the other officers, Flip bounded down the station steps and jumped into the back seat before the driver could kill the engine. The driver was a young man wearing aviator goggles and a long white scarf. The rear of the vehicle had been stocked with metal containers of gasoline.

Flip handed the driver ten dollars.

“State Pen?” the driver asked.

“Yes,” said Flip. “You know where that is? I can draw you a map if you want.”

The aviator tapped the side of his head with two fingers to say it was all up there.

The roads to Joliet were not good. Outside of cities, most thoroughfares were still not paved properly. They could be brick or cobblestone or simply dirt. Flip braced himself against the side of the car as the terrain under the wheels changed every few minutes.

The sky promised another bright morning with no risk of rain. At least they would not be pushing the car out from the mud. Flip could not say the same for ditches. The young man drove wildly, weaving in and out of traffic, swerving around carts carrying goods, scaring horses (purposefully, it sometimes seemed), and forcing pedestrians to jump back for safety.

Outside the Chicago city limits, the roar of the Hudson’s engine steadied and became almost pleasant. As they neared Joliet, they passed crews putting down new asphalt mixed with hot, pungent tar.

The Wilson administration had undertaken a program to pave a single mile of road in each major American town. The thinking went that if the locals saw firsthand how much better paved roads were than dirt, they would swallow a local tax increase to pay for the rest themselves, sparing the federal government the expense.

“Another Seedling Mile?” Flip asked the driver, pointing at the giant black tar-dispenser they had narrowly missed.

“That was last year,” the wild driver called with a grin. “It took! They done seeded!”

The Illinois State Penitentiary was a massive structure dating from before the Civil War. It looked shat out of limestone by workers who didn’t particularly care what they were building. The architect, for his part, seemed to have been ambivalent about whether he was designing a castle or a mental asylum, and so had settled on the least-attractive elements of both. The facility had tall walls with medieval-looking tower houses at the corners, and a stern administration building rising immediately within. It held over a thousand inmates, all men.

The Hudson pulled into the gravel lot beside the entrance. Flip told the driver to wait, and got out. He took his badge from of his coat and held it up as he approached. The guard at the door looked on doubtfully, but let him pass with a forced a smile. Most guards at the state pen wanted to be police one day. Being nice to an officer from the city was as good a place as any to start.

Claude Chalifour—known as Beef-Fist or CeeCee behind his back—was, like the first man to settle in Chicago, a Negro from the Caribbean. But unlike Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—who had only ever wanted to sell meat and whiskey and possibly opium to the area’s peripatetic trappers—Claude Chalifour had killed three people, removed their bones, and kept their skins hanging as mementoes inside his garden apartment on the South Side of the city. Claude had arrived in Chicago in 1902, eventually finding employment as a beef boner in the stockyards during the day, and as a boxer nights and weekends. (Nobody in Claude’s neighborhood had found it odd that such a man should be seen with shoes or hands occasionally caked in blood.) Claude was large, but not a heavyweight. And when he opened his mouth, it became clear to any observer that his mind was childlike.

A deft lawyer had argued that Claude had not murdered the people whose skins had been found hanging in his apartment, but had merely found the bodies. (Claude’s neighborhood was rough, and corpses were known to turn up.) Because of Claude’s simple-mindedness—the lawyer further insisted—he had been unable to restrain himself from carrying out the same grisly procedures he practiced—all day, every day—in the stockyards upon animals. A judge had found this argument at least somewhat compelling, and Claude been given life without parole instead of execution.

The Joliet jailers took Flip to a bare concrete room with two wooden stools. On one stool sat Claude Chalifour. He wore manacles and leg irons connected to a steel ring in the center of the floor, adjacent to a dirty drain. Seeing the drain gave Flip renewed purpose; he thought about why he was there.

The jailers closed the metal door behind Flip, locking the two men inside together. There was natural light from the barred windows set into the wall, but no electricity. Claude smiled like a dog hoping for a treat—or at least hoping not to be kicked.

Flip reached into his coat and pulled out a red handkerchief.

“This is called cherry clafoutis,” Flip said. “Some nuns gave it to me. Not but a day old. Still soft. You want to smell it?”

“I can smell it from here, mister sir,” Claude said, beginning to rock back and forth on his stool.

They sat ten feet apart. Their voices reverberated in the cavernous stone room. The ceiling was curved and white, like the roof of a sewer.

“This is all yours if you talk to me,” Flip said. “They tell you who I am?”

Claude shook his head no, shrugging off the question more than answering it. His eyes were now focused quite completely on the red handkerchief. His nostrils sucked up the cake-smell.

“You understand that whatever you tell me today, it don’t change your sentence,” Flip said. “I can’t get you out, but I can’t add to your time neither. Suppose you tell me you slit up a whole school full of children they don’t know about? Well, it doesn’t add a day to your sentence. It don’t get you hanged. Understand?”

“I don’t have the death sentence, but I am here forever,” Claude said in what seemed a practiced recitation.

“Mm hmm,” agreed Flip.

Claude’s focus was like a magnet. A vein in his forehead began to bulge. It was as though he were willing the handkerchief and its contents to float across the room into his lap.

Flip understood the killer might not be able to concentrate with the treat still in sight. He placed it back inside his coat. Immediately, it was as though a blinding light had been extinguished. Claude blinked and refocused his eyes. He stared hard at Flip. Stared angrily. That was when Flip saw it. Infantile mind or no, this man had the eyes of a killer. These were eyes that had seen unspeakable things.

“Claude, you’re the only person I can think of in the city of Chicago who drained a body like you did,” Flip began. “Your apartment. . . It didn’t have any special equipment. Just a tiny sink. A tiny sink that backed up easy. But you did it. You drained the bodies without spilling blood everywhere. There were only a few drops on your floor when the police came. Drops that could have come from your work in the stockyards.”

Claude, for just a moment, scanned the corners of the room. Then he looked over to the locked metal door. Then he looked back at Flip. His expression wondered if this was some kind of put-on. He did not appear uneasy precisely, but rather baffled that a visitor should bring up such mundane, pedestrian details.

He inclined his head cautiously.

“You want to know. . . about the drainin’?”

“Yes I do,” Flip said.

“And that get me the cake?”

Flip shrugged as though it might.

Claude smiled. His demeanor changed. He leaned back a bit on his stool and relaxed like a man at the bar about to tell a good story.

“I don’t know if you done a steer before,” Claude said. “Seen one slaughtered and de-boned, start to finish? But once you done a cow, a steer. . . Doing a man ain’t nothing.”

“Tell me,” said Flip. “You want that cake, you’ll tell me all about it.”

Claude explained how a steer’s throat was cut directly after it was stunned or shot in the head with a gun. He said that its legs would kick even after it was dead, and that this could result in a mess or injury, but not if you knew to anticipate it. The cries of pain would cease quickly. The breathing would cease too, but the legs were always the last thing to go.

Claude said if your goal was to avoid making a mess, slaughtering on the ground outdoors was always preferred—if it was a summer day and you had a grassy spot that would soak up the blood, or if you could do it in a river or lake, that was fine—but if you had the means to hang your subject by its feet over a drain, that was also acceptable. Claude told Flip about a hook he had positioned inside his apartment, just above his own modest sink. And how a subject knocked unconscious could be placed upon it with relative ease.

“So how did you. . .?” Flip interjected.

Claude laughed a horrible laugh and clapped his hands. He explained that he had killed his victims outdoors, always. Behind his building, in the darkness, over grass. Then he had moved the bodies inside. But he waited until they had been secured above his sink before properly opening the throats.

“You didn’t cut off the heads off of your victims,” Flip pointed out. It was a statement, not a question.

Claude spun his eyes in a circle, searching the dingy room for an explanation.

“The heads,” Flip said.

“I heard you,” Claude said. “I took out the skulls. Yes, I did that.”

“But. . .” Flip pressed.

“No, you right,” the killer allowed. “I didn’t properly cut the heads off. With a beast in the slaughterhouse, you got to cut off the head right away. And if it’s a steer, the dick and balls. They got to go immediate. Meat gets tainted otherwise, and it don’t taste right. I heard a dead man can come. You heard that? I heard a dead man can get a stiff cock. I ain’t know if that’s true, but a dead steer’s dick sure as hell can do some things.”

“Let’s stay on heads,” Flip said. “You ever meet anybody who wanted to cut off heads—heads of people—for fun? Maybe switch around heads of two people as a joke? Put the head from one on another’s body?”

“Why would anybody do that?” Claude wondered. “That’s strange. Wouldn’t work neither. You take off a head, it ain’t gonna work on another body. Strange, strange.”

It was hard for Flip to resist pointing out to Claude that he had kept the whole, dried skins of three humans inside his home—something most people might find ‘strange’ if anything was.

Instead, Flip said: “You ever hear of Doctor Frankenstein and his monster?”

Claude shrank back in his seat.

“No doctors!” he called. “I don’t need one! I feel just fine.”

“I only wondered if you knew him.”

“Well, I don’t,” Claude snapped. “Why? What’d he do?”

“He did something very bad,” Flip said absently. “Now how about this: You ever hear of a man who had a divot taken out of his head? Like had dent in his head, up by his temples?”

“No,” Claude said. “Is that what Dr. Frankenstein look like?”

Flip shrugged to say it was possible.

A few moments passed while Flip thought.

“What else you want to know, then?” the killer said impatiently. “I want that cake.”

Flip stared at him hard.

“You’re certain you never heard of anybody who wanted to cut off a person’s head and switch it with another body?” Flip pressed. “Maybe even with a twin brother or sister? Keep it in the family?”

“No,” Claude said. “Like I told you, that’s strange.”

“I see . . .” Flip said.

“So now give it to me,” Claude said. “Give me that cake. I done what you asked.”

“One more answer first,” Flip said.

The killer motioned with his hand to say Flip should bring it on.

“Did the people you. . . the people you drained. Did they ever . . . cooperate?”

“Did they what?” said Claude.

“You know,” Flip said. “Did they agree to let you kill them? Maybe they walked outside with you, so you could stab them before you hung them over your sink? Help you not make such a mess?”

Claude’s demeanor changed. He looked Flip up and down disbelievingly. Then he shook his head with a violent series of jerks. Flip realized, astonishingly, that the killer was registering disgust.

“What kind of a man would agree to it?” Claude asked.

Flip turned up his palm to say ‘You tell me.’

“Naw,” Claude said. “They ain’t agree to nothin’. They fought me every inch of the way. Fought the whole damn time. That’s what made me smile. That’s what gave me the hardness in my nether parts. Not so much the killing itself, y’see. Not the draining afterwards, if I’m honest. Nor even the breaking down of the body. But the fighting. Watching ’em fight me. Feeling it. Better than boxing by tenfold. I think about it every night in my cell. And that’s the one thing they can’t take from me. Even though I’m stuck here, in my mind I get to be there every night and make them fight for it. And they always lose and I always win. Get to keep that in my head forever.”

Flip stood up from the stool. He brushed himself off, arranged his coat, and headed toward the door.

The stark betrayal registered full on Claude’s face.

“You gonna give me that cake!” he commanded. “I can smell it! You gonna give it to me!”

Flip knocked hard on the metal door with his bony, Abe Lincoln knuckles.

“We’re done!” he called to the guard. “Done in here!”

“You gonna give me that cake!” Claude screamed.

The killer stood from his stool and charged forward, seemingly forgetting his leg irons and manacles. After a few feet, the chains went taut and he slammed face first into the concrete floor. He pulled wildly against the irons. The chain itself seemed sure to hold, but the bolt in the floor looked less reliable. The killer’s wild tugging scraped the chains hard and kicked up silica dust. It hung in the air, catching the light streaming in through the barred windows.

Flip fingered his 1911. He knew the sound of a gun’s report in the cavernous room would be deafening, but stood ready to fire if the killer broke free. Something told Flip their both being Negro would at least make the aftermath go smoothly. There would be paperwork, but not too much.

Before anything could happen, a guard opened the door. It was an old man with a harelip and a single silver eyebrow.

“Y’all done then?” he asked.

“Surely,” Flip said, reaching into his coat.

The killer stopped tugging. A glimmer of hope.

“This some fine cake my wife made,” Flip said, handing it over to the old man. “Wonder if you wouldn’t accept it with my thanks. I appreciate you men arranging this.”

The guard took the red handkerchief with a smile.

Claude’s howl was like a dog’s.

“What’d you do to him?” the guard asked through a trifold grin.

The guard’s tone said that whatever it was, it was just fine.

“Damned if I know,” Flip replied. “Some people are a mystery.”

Heading back to Chicago in the Hudson, Flip regularly forgot to brace himself when the car took a bump in the road. He was too deep in thought about Claude Chalifour. How there had been so little blood. How it had been a simple thing.

Flip’s years on the force told him the mutilation of a person alreadydead arose only from one motive, one emotion. . . and that was hatred.

Anger—mere anger—faded, usually in the time it took to strangle someone, or in the sobering instant after the stark, sharp cry of a gun. Anybody could kill in anger. But you had to properly hate someone to tear off their face afterwards. To mutilate their genitals. Or, Flip assumed, to decapitate them. Maybe you hated them because they had abused you. Maybe because they had stolen your woman or man. Or because they had shamed or embarrassed you. Whatever the case, hatred was what it took.

Then Flip got to thinking about Crespo and the Black Hand.

The Black Hand never mutilated anybody’s body. To the contrary, they wanted the victims recognizable. When the Black Hand killed—by poison, a slit throat, or, as was most common, several stab wounds to the back—the victim had always stayed recognizable, because the bodies were the calling cards of the organization. If the Black Hand tapped you, you were either going to pay, or you were going to become advertising for them. Either way, they won. Either way, you were useful. You could provide something they wanted.

Flip thought about how the dead twins had been positioned. He thought carefully about each of the murders. The boy and girl in the alley. The boys beside the canal. The pair in the orphanage, with their friend pinned to the wall. The triplets at home. The killer had taken no pains to conceal them, but he had taken pains. He had mustered the effort to switch the heads—and in some cases to reattach them—and to make no mess as he did so.

This was a kind of a show, Flip thought. It was like the Black Hand in that respect. It was meant to be seen by someone. But . . .who was the audience? Who was supposed to see what the killer had accomplished? Was it the families that would discover these stomach-churning mutilations? The cops like him who would be called in afterwards? Or some entirely unknown audience, perhaps a private one?

Flip’s history was spotty, but he knew Egyptians had once mutilated their dead. He knew of mummies. Organs in jars. Skins dried with salt. Ornate tombs that took armies of slaves to build. Flip wondered if his killer could be operating on an extension of this thinking. Did he believe he was preparing his victims for an afterlife? Helping them? That was one possibility. But simple punishment seemed a possibility too. If ritual mutilation could whisk someone up to paradise, surely it could also ensure you found your way to the other place. Flip knew certain religions held that a stained body could render you irredeemable. That a tattooed man was cursed if he was a Jew. That a Mohammedan could not find paradise if he had eaten pork. That a follower of the Buddha could not reach true enlightenment if he consumed garlic.

And there—just as the road under the Hudson’s tires began to firm, and the skyline of Chicago came back into view—Flip began to wonder if he had found it. A hate for these twins that went beyond the moment of death. A hate intended to ensure they would find no peace in the afterlife. A hate that hoped to confuse god or the devil with switched heads. Who was who, and how should they be judged?

The Hudson pulled up in front of the precinct station where Flip had begun his day.

“This is good?” the driver asked. “I can drop you somewhere else. For what you paid me, that’s no problem. I can even wait and take you home after.”

“That’s not necessary,” Flip told him. “Thank you.”

The driver nodded and replaced his goggles. The man seemed to relish his job. With his eyewear and scarf, he looked as though he already fancied himself in an aeroplane, cruising high above European fields.

The way things were going, Flip wondered if he might soon get his wish.