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left. All this might confirm that Ponsonby was an unadventurous man who saw no virtue in going farther afield than Holloman, yet something in those rheumy eyes said he might have ended a different kind of man had he too gone elsewhere after finishing his medical degree. An hypothesis based on gut instinct; something had kept Ponsonby at home, something concrete and compelling. Not a wife, because he had said, quite indifferently, that he was a lifelong bachelor.
    Interesting too to discover the contrasts between their various offices. Forbes’s had been awesomely neat with no room for plush furniture or wall hangings; books and papers everywhere, even the floor. Finch went in for potted plants and actually had a stunning orchid in bloom; his walls cascaded ferns. Chandra preferred the leather Chesterfield look, with leaded glass-paned book cabinets and a few exquisite Indian artworks. And Dr. Charles Ponsonby lived tidily among gruesome artifacts like shrunken heads and death masks of people like Beethoven and Wagner; he also had four reproductions of famous paintings on his walls — Goya’s Cronus eating a child, two sections of Bosch’s Hell, and Munch’s screaming face.
    “Do you like surrealist art?” Ponsonby asked with animation.
    “I’m into Oriental art myself, Doctor.”
    “I’ve often thought, Lieutenant, that I mischose my calling. Psychiatry fascinates me, particularly psychopathia. Look at that shrunken head — what beliefs can provoke that? Or what visions my paintings?”
    Carmine grinned. “No use asking me. I’m just a cop.” And you, he ended in a silent comment, are not my man. Too obvious.
    Up here, he saw as Ponsonby conducted him through the labs, the equipment was more familiar: an atomic absorption unit, a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, centrifuges large and small — the kind of apparatus Patrick had in his forensic lab, just newer and grander. Patrick had to scrape; here, they spent and spent.
    From Ponsonby he learned more about the cat brains that were made into what Ponsonby called “brain soup” so naturally that it had no element of jocularity about it. They used rat brain soup too. And Dr. Polonowski was conducting some experiments on the giant axon of a lobster leg — not the big claws, the little legs. Those axons were huge! Polonowski’s technician, Marian, often had to call into the fish shop on her way to work to buy the four biggest lobsters in the tank.
    “What happens to the lobsters afterward?”
    “They are rostered between those who like lobster,” Ponsonby said, as if the question had no merit whatsoever when the answer was so patently clear. “Dr. Polonowski doesn’t do anything to the rest of the beast. It is very kind of him to rotate them, actually. They are his experimental animals, he could eat them all himself. But he takes his turn with the rest of us. Except for Dr. Forbes, who has gone vegetarian, and Dr. Finch, who is too orthodox to eat crustacea.”
    “Tell me, Dr. Ponsonby, do people notice bags of dead animals? If you saw a big dead animal bag stuffed full and you did notice it, what would you think about it?”
    Ponsonby’s face registered mild surprise. “I doubt I would think about it, Lieutenant, because I doubt I would notice it.”
    Miraculously, Ponsonby wasn’t agog to go into detail about his work, which he simply said had to do with the chemistry of a brain cell involved in the epileptic process.
    “So far everybody seems to be into epilepsy. Is anyone into mental retardation? I thought the Hug was for both.”
    “Unfortunately we lost our geneticist several years ago, and Professor Smith hasn’t found a suitable man to replace him. The DNA business is attracting them, you see. More exciting.” He giggled. “Their soup is made out of E. coli.”
    And thus to Dr. Walter Polonowski, who had a big chip on his shoulder having nothing to do with his Polish ancestry: that, like Ponsonby’s art, would have been too