Naked Cruelty by Colleen McCullough

left no trophy of himself behind in Maggie Drummond’s apartment. Maggie told us he wears surgeon’s gloves, but she had no answer for his lack of blemishes.”
    â€œHe touched himself up with greasepaint,” Delia said.
    â€œ Greasepaint ?” Nick gaped.
    â€œThink about it,” Delia said eagerly. “I think we have to presume that the Dodo has beautiful skin—hardly a blemish. But no human being has absolutely flawless skin. If he’s sandy or red, he has freckles. If his skin’s olive, he has moles. And think of how many men have pimples on their bums. What flaws the Dodo has, he touches up with greasepaint. The Dodo is vain.”
    â€œGood girl!” Carmine said. “Three stars on your wall chart, Delia. We can add greasepaint to his repertoire, along with plucked body hair.”
    â€œWon’t greasepaint come off?” Nick asked.
    â€œNot very easily, if it’s top quality. It may also be that his blemishes are in places that don’t come in heavy contact with his victim. He may also wipe off any transferred greasepaint with an organic solvent—alcohol, xylene, chloroform.”
    â€œWe have enough to develop a protocol for questioning the victims,” Carmine said, looking pleased. “Girls, make sure you ask about smells, little scrubs of parts of their skins—you may get a clue as to where the Dodo wears his greasepaint from where he scrubs it off the victims.”
    Danny Marciano’s last day as Captain of Uniforms had come and gone; today, Thursday, September 26, was Fernando Vasquez’s first day in the same job. Though as he climbed the stairs Carmine’s mind was not on Fernando Vasquez or the uniformed division.
    What was he going to do with Corey Marshall? At their meeting this morning, Corey hadn’t turned up. Worse than that, Abe was smelling a rat now that the Tinnequa truck stop heist was out of his hair and he could assume a more regular schedule. Like so many of Abe’s cases, the gas station holdups were slow to start yielding pointers as to where a canny lieutenant ought to distribute his forces, and Abe was intelligent enough to go with the flow. So while Liam and Tony were out and about prowling, he was using his brain—and had sufficient vacant segments of it to notice something was up between Carmine and Corey.
    â€œI got into the elevator with him yesterday,” Abe said as the two of them concluded their business, “and he cut me dead. I wouldn’t worry, except that lately he’s been saying some hard things about you, Carmine.”
    â€œHe feels as if the whole world’s against him at the moment,” Carmine said, knowing he couldn’t palm Abe off with platitudes; Abe was almost preternaturally sensitive to atmosphere in a way that, for instance, seemed to give him second sight about secret compartments. So while he wasn’t in the slightest paranoid, he could see through evasions. “First, he inherited Morty while you got Liam and Tony, then Wes Cooper dropped dead—that’s more than anyone’s fair share of bad luck. And most of his cases haven’t worked out well. You know Corey—he takes things to heart, Abe, without always seeing the best way to fix them.”
    â€œSay no more,” Abe said with a wry smile, and took himself off to his own office.
    What do I do about Corey? Carmine wondered, reaching the top of the stairs.
    Having entered the Holloman PD straight from high school, Corey had been a cop for seventeen years, and spent the last five of them in Detectives: he knew the ropes. Yet he wasn’t making it as a lieutenant. Most of the considerable paperwork was devoted to interviews, simultaneously a cop’s nightmare and salvation; out of them came so many leads. But first, they had to be written down. If, for instance, a case went cold, like that triple murder at the railroad station in 1930, the written testimony was all