He scanned some of Sid's workups on the earlier victims and saw what he expected: multiple contusions, knife wounds, punctures. He noticed the killer's habit of not only taking the scalp, but leaving a design on the victim's head: a triangle, a circular pattern, a square. What was that all about? The victims’ hair color and gender didn't seem important. One victim was a man, middle fifties, small in stature. Dean wondered if there was any way to connect the victims. This was important, for if the victims knew one another or lived within a certain radius, then there was not only somewhere to begin, but it meant the killer's work was not completely and utterly random.
God forbid the killer did his work without knowing something about his victims. Without connecting them in some way in his mind, he was leaving no scent and no trail. A patternless, random killer, selecting his victims on a whim, at any time of the day or night and in any setting, was a law enforcement agent's worst nightmare. Such a killer was the hardest to catch. His or her movements left no trail; his so-called serial acts had no serial nature about them, beyond the dire results: bodies. All the cops had to go on were corpses. They could not put together much of a psychological profile, they could not point to a victim type which triggered in this killer the desire to destroy a given face, a given shape, a given creature with platinum hair or gray eyes. Instead, all answers were smoke.
An even more gruesome photo slipped from one of the files Sid had forwarded Dean, a picture of what was once a middle-aged redhead, the latest victim. She bore no resemblance to the others, beyond the ugly scar—a deep wound over the eyes. The shiny veins and blood pool beneath the layers of skin removed from the skull glossed in the photo. That strange, rectangular wound haunted Dean's mind as had the others. This time the killer had carved a rectangle out of the flesh.
The woman's head where her hair had been ripped from her showed ugly, scarred, puckered skin. The idea that someone was going about actually scalping people, men as well as women, even with this evidence before him, seemed more than ludicrous. It made Dean think of the woman, Angel Rae, who had stalked her victims to drown them out of a mistaken religious notion handed down by generations.
Dean felt the drink begin to calm him. He called for another and downed it too fast. He closed his eyes and began to think, only half-wondering where his thoughts might take him. Hopefully he'd sleep and wake up in Orlando. He didn't particularly care for flying and got through it only by keeping his mind busy, or on hold. He thought about something he'd read somewhere about the Plains Indians, who'd mutilated and scalped the bodies of General George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry. They had done so for religious and ritual purposes—the scalp of an enemy represented the enemy's head taken in mortal combat.
If this modern-day scalper were some displaced Indian, his mutilation hardly seemed correct, even by eighteenth-century standards. The stalking of an unarmed, helpless woman for her scalp seemed a perversion of the notion of the right to slash away at a corpse you claim for having beaten in a fair and equitable fight. Still, a madman—and the killer was a madman—could be counted on to pervert any notion, be it social, psychological, or ritualistic. The mind of man hadn't, after all, changed in its physical makeup since the first men ran about wielding flint spears to kill game.
If Sid could be believed, today's popular, mistaken notion that scalping and the American Indian went hand-in-hand seemed to be motivating a backlash against reservation Indians outside Orlando. It was complete nonsense to blame Seminole Indians out of hand, Dean thought—or any other person of Indian heritage, because scalping was not ever an art exclusively Indian. It was Spanish, it was French, it was English, and it went back so far into man's history that stone-age evidence had been unearthed to support the now widely held belief that man had, from the time of fashioning the first deadly weapons, taken scalps.
All this Dean thought about as he sipped his third powdery-tasting Tom Collins at thirty-two thousand feet.
Dean's sudden fascination with Orlando started with his having stared down at the shining city and its mirrored buildings, separated like fine jewels in a jeweler's case. The downtown, if it could be called that, had nothing of the skyline of Chicago or New York. It was as if the city fathers had said there shall be no building to rival the stars or the sky, nothing to cast too long a shadow or interfere with the work of the sun. The work of the sun was to bake this sprawling metropolis, which had, since the last time he'd seen the place, sprawled at every conceivable chance and seemed to become a city of connected suburban townships.
Tourist attractions like Sea World and Disney World aside, Dean wondered if anyone in his right mind would settle here. But news of widespread growth and new industry, like the new Universal Studios and Disney Studios setting up shop here, drew people like bees to nectar, and given the year-round balmy temperatures, how many could resist? The climate even excited Dean, who was normally calm about such things as weather.
From the bright sunshine to the impossibly warm air that hit him like a wall as they exited the terminal for Sid's waiting car, Dean felt he was in another country. He hadn't felt such a transformation since the time he'd vacationed in Mexico. Orlando spread lazily amid the arched palms, hiding its bare, spots as best it could. From ground level, as from overhead, it seemed to be concealing something harsh and daunting just beneath its surface—something unseen. Superficially, like most cities, Dean decided, the place gave off an air of the unreal, as if nothing bad could ever happen here, so close to Mickey Mouse Land, so filled as it was with tourists and the people who made their living pleasing them. But here was Sid Corman, and here was the Orlando City Police Force. The city, like any other, had its soft and slimy underbelly, regardless of the sheen and tiles on top of what was lately being dubbed, “The Big Orange."
Maybe part of Dean's feeling had to do with the very real ugliness of Chicago in winter—brown, ice-scarred earth, bare, prickly trees, a white-gray, cold sky for months at a time. Here it was clean, save for the trash along the highways. There were sand piles, but no snow piles or street-blackened, sooty mounds for block after block. Here it never snowed. Dean's lightest trenchcoat wound up on his arm as he and Sid Corman ambled out of the terminal together.
From the air, the city had looked like San Diego. The center of the city was a low and unimposing skyline, and from it the arteries and veins of streets spread away, hugging the earth, it seemed, for moisture and relief from the sun and heat even in December.
Tourism was far and away the largest draw for the city coffers. But Dean had the feeling that it was hardly the only way to make a buck here, either legally or illegally.
Sid Corman looked robust and larger than Dean remembered, and when the two men found each other at the airline terminal, they warmly shook hands and exchanged an old greeting that dated back to their Korea days. “Seen the sunrise!"
"Damn straight, partner,” said Sid after the exchange. “Seen so many, I'd almost forgot all that nonsense."
In Korea it had been an expression used between combat personnel. “Seen the sunrise lately?” one would ask and the other would reply, “Yeah, up the captain's ass."