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Contrary to popular belief, the human cranium isn't a single helmet-- shaped bone but eight bones fused together, and the facial mask is fourteen bones fused together, and these, in the victim, had been smashed with a blunt object, smashed, dented, and pierced, as if the unknown killer had wanted not merely to kill his victim but to obliterate her. No hair remained on any skull fragments, for no scalp remained to contain hair, but swaths of sun-- bleached brown hair had been found with the skeleton and had been brought to him in a separate plastic bag. Since rotted clothing found at the scene was a female's clothing, the victim had been identified as female. A woman, or an older adolescent girl.
"A jigsaw puzzle. In three dimensions." He smiled. Since boyhood he'd been one to love puzzles.
He was not old. Didn't look old, didn't behave old, didn't perceive himself as old. Yet he knew that others, envious of him, wished to perceive him as old, and this infuriated him. He was a stylish dresser. Often he was seen in dark turtleneck sweaters, a wine-- colored leather coat that fell below his knees. In warm weather he wore shirts open at the throat, sometimes T-shirts that showed to advantage his well-- developed arm and shoulder muscles. When his hair had begun to thin in his mid-fifties he had simply shaved his head, which tended to be olive-hued, veined, with the look of an upright male organ throbbing with vigor, belligerence, good humor. You couldn't help but notice and react to Kyle Cassity: to label such a man a "senior citizen" was absurd and demeaning.
Now he was sixty-seven, and of that age. He would have had to concede that as a younger man he'd often ignored his elders. He'd taken them for granted, he'd written them off as irrelevant. Of course, Kyle Cassity was a different sort of elder. There was no one quite like him.
A maverick, he thought himself. Unlabelable. Born in 1935 in Harrisburg, Pa., a long-time resident of Wayne, N.J.: unique and irreplaceable.
Among his numerous relatives he'd long been an enigma: generous in times of crisis; otherwise distant, indifferent. True, he'd had something of a reputation as...