Skin: A Mike Hammer Story (A Dutton Guilt Edged Mystery) by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Author:Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins [Spillane, Mickey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

I sat across from Sergeant Mal Tooney in a booth in a diner about five miles from where I’d found Victor King’s hand next to that ghastly pile.

“I’m glad to meet with you, Mr. Hammer,” he said. “Because I am concerned.”

The heavyset cop had a cup of black coffee in front of him but hadn’t touched it. He was in uniform, his cap off, exposing his dying hair. By way of contrast, his eyebrows were wild, shaggy patches.

I had called Tooney from the office this morning, before taking the meeting with Mrs. King, to ask him to check up on the absent Melodie Anderson. I’d already tried the TV station, and she hadn’t shown up for work. Neither had her cameraman. Calls from the station manager to both had come up bupkes. I asked Tooney to look into it.

That was this morning in New York. This was that afternoon, upstate.

“I checked both the Anderson woman’s house and this Jason kid’s apartment,” he said. “Talked to neighbors, got the super to let me in the kid’s place. No sign of either of them.”

“They were in a TV station van.”

“Yes, and it’s still signed out to them. Both their cars are in the station’s parking lot. Listen, this could be bad.”

“Yeah. Can you rally the troops?”

“Not for twenty-four hours I can’t. They aren’t missing persons yet. But considering what we . . . what you . . . found yesterday? I just have a bad, sick feeling.”

A waitress came over and refilled my coffee, which made Tooney remember his. He sipped it.

“Sarge,” I said, “I know for a fact Melodie Anderson was running down leads on this thing. She told me so. I think she may have been on to something—she didn’t show for a meeting with me last night.”

“She really could be in trouble.”

“She could be dead,” I said. I stirred sweetener and half-and-half in. “She mentioned something about grave robberies in this neck of the woods.”

He frowned and the shaggy eyebrows met, making one big caterpillar. “That goes back a while. There was a string of ’em, but the latest was over a year ago. Why, you think what you found was a dug-up corpse?”

“No. That was fresh meat.”

An old gal in the booth behind Tooney turned and gave me a dirty look.

“And the lab reports,” I went on, giving her a wink, “didn’t mention anything like embalming procedures having been done. But maybe the Anderson girl had a hunch there was a connection, so any leads she was chasing down could have had something to do with that.”

“Well, it was young women’s corpses,” he said, “exclusively. I just figured it was some nut who liked to have sex with dead bodies. What do they call those guys?”

The gal and her companion, another biddy, huffed and got up and left. They may have been disgusted with us, but they sure finished their food first.

“Necrophiliacs,” I said.

Tooney’s shaggy eyebrows were in two pieces again and climbing up his forehead. “You know, we had this report .

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