On Off by Colleen McCullough

all?” Abe asked, not wanting to believe it.
    “Oh, sure. Look at their backgrounds. God-fearing, respectable families, all Catholic except for Rachel Simpson, whose father is an Episcopalian minister. Simpson and Olivaro went to their local high schools, the other three went to Catholic high schools, two at the same one, St. Martha’s in Norwalk. Then there’s the time span. One every two months. Corey, go back to the phone and ask for all missing persons who fit this description from as far back as — say, ten years. The background is as important as the physical criteria, so I’d be willing to bet that all these girls were famous for — well, if chasteness is too old-fashioned a word, at least goodness. They probably volunteered for things like Meals on Wheels or were candy stripers in some hospital. Never missed on church, did their homework, kept their hems at knee level, maybe wore a touch of lipstick, but never full makeup.”
    “The girls you’re describing are thin on the ground, Carmine,” Corey said, his dark and beaky face serious. “If he’s snatched one every two months, he must waste a lot of time finding her. Look at how far afield he’s gone. Norwalk, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain — why no girls from Holloman? Mercedes at least was dumped in Holloman.”
    “They’re all dumped in Holloman. We’ve only got five girls so far, Corey. We won’t know his pattern until we’ve traced him back as far as he goes. In Connecticut, at any rate.”
    Abe swallowed audibly, his fair, broken-nosed countenance pale and sick looking. “But we’re not going to find any of the bodies prior to Mercedes, are we? He cut them up and put the pieces in at least one dead animal refrigerator, and from there they went to the medical school incinerator.”
    “I’m sure you’re right, Abe,” said Carmine, who to his loyal and most constant companions looked unusually cast down. No matter what the case, Carmine sailed through it and over it with the ponderous grace and power of a battle wagon. He felt — he bled — he pitied — he understood — but until this case he had let nothing burrow in as far as his central core.
    “What else does all this tell you, Carmine?” Corey asked.
    “That he’s gotten a picture of perfection in his mind’s eye that these girls resemble, but that there’s always something wrong with each of them. Like the birthmark on Mercedes. Maybe one of them told him to go fuck himself — he’d hate language like that coming from virginal lips. But what he gets off on is their suffering, like any rapist. That’s why I don’t honestly know if we should be cataloging him as a killer or a rapist. Oh, he’s both, but how does his mind work? What’s the real purpose of what he does to him?”
    Carmine grimaced. “We know what kind of victim he likes and that they’re relatively rare, but ghosts are more visible than he is. In Norwalk, with two abductions on their plate, the cops have busted their asses looking for prowlers, peeping Toms, strangers on the street around the school, strangers contacting the school or the families. They’ve looked at everybody from United Way collectors to garbage collectors to postmen to encyclopedia salesmen to people purporting to be Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses or any other proselytizing religious group. Meter readers, council workers, tree surgeons, power and phone linesmen. They actually formed a think tank and tried to work out how he might have gotten close enough to abduct the girls, but so far they’ve come up with zilch. No one remembers anything that might help.”
    Corey got to his feet. “I’ll start calling around,” he said.
    “Okay, Abe, fill me in on the Hug,” Carmine said.
    Out came Abe’s notepad. “There are thirty people on the Hug staff, if you count Professor Smith at one end and Allodice Miller the bottle washer at the other end.” He fished two pieces of paper from a file folder under his elbow and handed them to