Naked Cruelty

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Authors: Colleen McCullough
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Walkers, lived in a small cottage on Curzon Close just two doors down from Kurt von Fahlendorf. A man named Dave Feinman lived in a neat little cottage on Spruce Street just around the corner from Curzon Close. He was a widower and was listed as a retired freelance statistician who still took an occasional commission.
    No Walker seemed impoverished, and hardly any were married or lived with a woman. Probably because wives were not likely to want their husbands off patrolling for the benefit of other women when they had a woman at home. Privately Carmine thought that the reason for 146 unattached men in Carew lay in its hordes of young women. Carew was rich pickings for one kind of man in particular: a gentleman. And what else were the Gentleman Walkers?
    Arnold Hedberg, a professor of history at East Holloman State College, lived his on-the-verge-of-forty existence in the bottom third of a three-family house on Oak Lane that he owned outright, no mortgages. Mike Donahue, a plumber with a thriving business, was young enough at thirty-one to live in a block of apartments he too owned, though he had a mortgage. He had plenty of women tenants under his own roof, but none had been targeted by the Dodo. Gregory Pendleton was a forty-five-year-old assistant district attorney; he occupied the top floor of a six-storey apartment block on State Street that he owned outright. Bill Mitski was another who lived in a private house he owned; he had an accounting business that specialized in taxation. And more, and more … Few Gentleman Walkers were genuine bachelors. Most seemed to be men who had suffered so badly in the divorce court that they were once bitten, twice shy. Sugarman, Mitski, Novak and von Fahlendorf described themselves as “single”—which didn’t say that they weren’t towing more wives than Bluebeard. If his divorce was through, a man was legally single.
    After due consideration Carmine decided that his entire team, including Helen, should accompany him to the Gentleman Walkers’ meeting at six o’clock on the seventh floor of the Susskind Science Tower on Chubb’s Science Hill campus. This was Henry Blackburn’s brain child, and a good one. The President of Chubb just after the Second World War, Blackburn had sequestered 29 acres of Chubb land on Cedar to the east of the Green, and given it to the Chubb School of Architecture to turn into a science campus. Both the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower hadn’t gone up until 1960, but there were plenty of smaller buildings dotted around, as well as the great truncated, grassy pyramid that was the physics bunker, where all work went on way underground in cooled and filtered air. This grassiness was a perpetual frustration as far as the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament was concerned; they had nowhere to paint their CND symbols, so had to content themselves by parading with placards that said BAN THE BOMB.
    Having heard the widely disseminated news of Maggie Drummond’s rape, all the Gentleman Walkers came to a venue Carmine thought ideal for an observer down on the podium, as every face was visible in the curved tiers of seats.
    Delia and Helen sat on the podium flanking Mark Sugarman on one side, with Carmine and Nick on his other side. The Walkers stared hard at them, but hardest at Helen, whom most of them seemed to know. Probably, thought Delia, we don’t look much like cops, between two women and a black man.
    Mark Sugarman began. “I’m sure you know that Maggie Drummond has been raped, but what you won’t know is that six other girls have come forward—I won’t name names, but some of you will make educated guesses. You’re here tonight to meet the police in charge of the case, answer their questions, and ask questions.”
    He introduced Carmine and his team, while Carmine’s eyes continued to rove across the assembled ranks. Easy to decide who was Mason Novak and who

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