Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

“You, uh, might as well stick around, see what the M.E. has to say.” That was offered in such an offhand way that she half expected him to dig a self-conscious toe in the lawn and give her an aw shucks shrug. Instead, he glared at her, his wide mouth compressed to a razor slash. A body language “Well?”

“Thanks,” she said. “I will.”

Cal Hewlett, the county medical examiner, looked up from the body that he had rolled over then back again to its original facedown position. Kat had noted that the wiry little M.E. with feathers of white hair curling front under his Orioles baseball cap had spent most of his time fingering the head wound.

“Typical floater,” he announced. “Best guess, he’s been dead two days, three at the most. More likely three, considering the condition of the nails. ’Bout to fall off. No ID on him.”

Duckworth gazed down from the dock. “Any chance of prints?”

“Nope. Scavengers have seen to that.” Hewlett stripped off his latex gloves and dropped them in a plastic bag. He pulled off his cap and ran his fingers through unruly white hair. “Mighty peculiar, that ding on the back of his skull.”

“How so?”

“The lacerations, Moby.”

On the dock near Duckworth, Kat suppressed a grin. The nickname had spread to the M.E.’s office.

“Thought it was a blunt-instrument job.”

“I think it is, with an added attraction. Under all that hair, he’s full of little cuts.”

“Cuts?” Duckworth stepped to the edge of the dock and peered down.

Hewlett slapped his baseball cap back in place and pulled its long bill low over his eyes. “ ’Nuff said for the moment. Fax you my report tomorrow morning, latest.”

At his rubber-topped steel desk in Malabar police headquarters, Duckworth scowled at the fax that had just rolled out of the department’s Murata. Nursing her Styrofoam cup of dense coffee at the desk in front of his, Kat had swung her chair around.

“Well?” she prompted.

“Weird,” Duckworth offered. He handed her the three-page fax. “You make anything out of that?”

Death, she read, resulted from massive cranial trauma caused by two nonpenetrating and sixteen penetrating wounds.

What in the world?

The M.E. had shaved the back of the head and found two parallel nonpenetrating injuries, four and a half inches apart and three inches long. Each was depressed into the skull a quarter of an inch.

Between them were four rows of incisions, four per row, each incision penetrating the skull three-eighths of one inch. The incisions were at approximate one-inch intervals in one direction, one-half inch intervals in the other, all within a four-inch by two-inch rectangular pattern.

“Uh huh, Bela. What do you make of that?”

“I can’t even begin to guess.”

He nodded. “Thought so.”

“And you?”

“Same. Look, I’m going over to the mainland to check possible missing persons reports. You... do whatever you can here.”

“Do I gather that I’m working with you on this thing?”

“ ’Fraid so. Not my idea. Chief McCready says it’ll get you some experience.” He raised a forefinger. “But I’m not nursemaiding, y’understand. You fiddle around on your own.”

Oh, nicely put, Moby. “Yeah,” she said through clenched teeth, “I’ll do some fiddling.”

Funny. Kat had felt sublimely confident when she was verbally jousting with Moby Duck. But now that he had, in effect, put her on her own without him here to riposte her wit, she felt as if she were about to fall facedown in the sand. She had completed an exhausting house-to-house on both sides of the canal. Half the homes were owned by winter residents and currently stood empty. The seven year-rounders whom she’d caught at home stated they had neither seen nor heard anything useful.

The sky had cleared. Now the South Florida sun beat down mercilessly. She walked from the last occupied house to her car. Dead end. Except for the peculiar configuration of the fatal wound. What could possibly inflict that geometrically perfect square of sixteen little stabs? Some New Age meat tenderizer mallet? The only such mallet she was familiar with had blunt knobs on its striking face.

She buckled her seat belt, turned the key, flipped the A/C to MAX, and backed the Plymouth out of the sand-and-shell drive. Could the odd pattern have been carefully inflicted by a crazy perp with... with maybe an X-Acto knife or a scalpel? Were they dealing with a nutso model builder? A mad doctor?

But what about the two long parallel dents on either side of the square of stab wounds? They sure put a damper on any specialized-mallet theory.

Back at MPD headquarters she pulled in just as Moby Duck was dismounting his own unmarked unit. “Anything?” she called across the roof of the car between them.

“Only missing persons listed with the county sheriff are kids. You got anything?”

“Nope. Half the homeowners are north. The other half neither saw nor heard any evil.”