"She's a cop."
Sid frowned, “So was Park.... Listen, pal, I know you find her a dreamboat, but take a step back and ask if she's tough enough to self-inflict that wound. And if so, and if she starts talking about some midget, and that gets us all going one way when it's hardly likely—and then she turns up in a room full of incriminating evidence designed to incriminate Park ... well, you figure it out."
Sid was brainstorming the way any good M.E. must, and it did have the effect of making Dean wonder, but Dean just didn't believe it possible. He believed Peggy Carson just another victim, however lucky.
"To believe her, Dean, you have to place her in the clutches of this blood-thirsty killer twice, twice, and she lives through it all. Pretty farfetched, isn't it?"
"Now you're thinking like an M.E., Sid, but I think you need to direct your darts elsewhere."
"Elsewhere, you say ... might not you be a little less objective nowadays, Dean?"
Dean wondered how in the world Sid could possibly know of his feelings toward Peggy. Was it suddenly general knowledge? Had he simply been too protective of her the evening before—Sid, a trained observer, not missing it? Or had she said something to someone who passed it along to Sid?
"Look at this and tell me what you see.” Dean instructed his colleague to glance into an ordinary microscope at a slide.
"All right.” Sid looked into the light at the configurations there. “Want to tell me what it is I'm looking at?"
"A slide I prepared at the scene, taken before you arrived. It's Peggy's breath."
"I don't get it."
"We can run this through for trace elements, and what do you bet we find chloroform, or some other asphyxiate?"
"How can you know?"
"Call it a guesstimate, like our reporter friends. But Peggy complained of blacking out. If we assume she's telling the truth, and if we don't find excessive alcohol on her breath, then we might assume it's something in the nature of chloroform. And if that's the case, then along with our pickle jar, my friend, we have at least two items no one else knows of except the killers."
"Let's run the slide through the tracer, then. What're we waiting for?"
Everything had taken much time, due largely to the deliberate care both men were taking keeping accurate records. Warner was put in charge of these and told how very vital they were, that everything discovered in the lab was of an extremely confidential nature, that careers and lives hung in the balance—including his own.
The slide was deposited in an oval machine which fired a laser beam at its center, turning Peggy's breath back into gas. The beam shut down and the gaseous residue was spun at high speed like a miniature cloud in the chamber until it reached the high speed necessary to separate the atoms of one element from another. This done, two graphs resulted, printed out via computer, showing both the quantity and density of each element. The process took several hours—though without the laser, it would have taken a day and a night. While the test was being run, Dean caught some sleep.
But it was fitful at best. Dean had a recurrent nightmare, one he'd learned was common to many people, a dream of panic over an examination being given to him. He sometimes arrived late for the exam and entered having had no knowledge he was supposed to take it. At other times, he could not find the examination room and spent the entire time racing from door to door in search of it until, finally finding it, he learned that time had run out. Psychologists theorized that the exam dream which so many people shared wasn't at all what it must first appear to be; apprehension and fear of ineptitude and inability. Instead, it was the mind's way of telling Dean that he had beaten the exam fear in the past and could do so again. It came on as a result of an impending test of a man, a test or difficulty Dean must face, fight, and overcome. For Dean it meant facing down the Scalpers as he had faced down Brother Timothy and Angel Rae.
Something warm, like sweat, began to pour from Dean's sleeping head, draining down the sides of his temples—and irritating his ears. The sweat was thick, gummy—when his sleeper's hand reached up to wipe it from his blinking eyes, he realized with a start that the perspiration wasn't sweat, but blood. Where his hand touched his forehead, he had no scalp, only a gaping hole through which his brain fluids drained and mixed with the blood, his life going slowly out of him with the mixture....
"Dean ... Dean.... “It was Sid's voice coming through to him, and Dean pulled open a door in his mind to an exam room in which all the students in the class were large-headed, puffy-eyed dwarfs staring back at him and grinning. The teacher was a shadow man with Sid's voice and now, coming into focus, Sid's face!
Dean awoke with a start, Sid shaking him gently, calling his name.
"Damn!” Dean muttered to himself, his hand instantly registering the fact that he'd not been scalped in his sleep, that it was all a nightmare. What the hell would the experts say to an exam dream that ended in a bloody scalping? His breath came short and his body was damp with perspiration.
"You were having a bad one, Dean ... thought I'd better wake you. You okay?"
Dean was a bit disoriented, but tried not to let Sid see how shaken he'd become. It all seemed to have come over him in an earthshaking, violent instant. One moment he was having an uneasy but familiar bad dream, one so familiar that he'd begun analyzing it in his sleep, wondering when he would awaken. Then, suddenly, he was sure that he'd awakened to find himself scarred and bloodied. But his familiar nightmare had simply taken on a new and bizarre twist, responding, he assumed, to his present troubles. “I'm okay ... okay, Sid. Bad dream.” He tried as best he could to make light of it, but Sid, knowing something about bad dreams himself, wasn't convinced.
"Just sit down here a minute, Dean. Want some coffee? Jean, get us a cup over here, will you?"
Dean's massive chest heaved with a great intake of air, and he found his way to a window, taking the coffee from the lab tech as he went, but the window was sealed; there was no way to open it. “Could use some real air,” he moaned.
"Come on, I know where there's some,” said Sid, escorting Dean to a room with oxygen tanks in it. He hooked one up to a mask and Dean took in a few breathfuls, making him feel better instantly.
"Working too hard, my man,” said Sid. “Not enough sleep."
"Yeah, I suppose so."
"I played a part in your bad dream, huh?"
"No, can't recall that you were—"
"You called out my name."
"For help, I suppose."
Sid smiled and nodded. “Count on it, pal. Oh, yeah, your breathalyzer on Peggy?"
"Yes?"
"Traces of chloroform, just like the magician predicted. You're good, Dean ... damned good."
Dean shook his head, “You'd have caught it yourself if—"
"No, not a chance!"
"—if you'd been there sooner and seen the condition that Peggy was in. When I could smell no alcohol on her—"
You're just damned good at what you do, doctor. I would have missed it, and it does support your contention that someone else, a third party, came into that room where Park died. That, with our combined belief that Park had to have been dead earlier, had to have been moved in and out of the room—I mean, we've got Peggy and Park off their respective hooks, but it still leaves us with who done it? Who is the Scalper—"
"Or Scalpers, Sid."
"Right, Scalpers."
Tom Warner located them. “Dr. Corman, Dr. Grant, I thought you'd like to see this.” He handed Sid the morning paper. Dean stood and looked over Sid's shoulder. It was pretty much as Dean had predicted. The story hinted at a liaison between Carson and Park, and did more than hint at the possibility that Park was the deadly Orlando Scalper. Dean scanned for anything in quotes with his name behind it. He was mildly pleased to see that he was kept out of it, except to be mentioned, along with Sid, as an investigating coronor who would be performing an autopsy on Park.