Blood Royal by Harold Robbins Page A

girl?” Someone he shared needles with? he was tempted to ask.
    “No, he broke up with Betty over a year ago, when she went back to jail. Walter was very particular about his women friends, you know. He couldn’t afford to have his reputation tarnished.”
    He signed off and hung up after assuring Mrs. Howler that Walter was being well taken care of and swearing her to secrecy about his call. He wondered what it was about mothers that made them blind to the fact their Johnny was a serial killer, rapist, or druggie.
    He got another beer from the fridge and sat on the couch with pen and paper. He outlined what he knew.
    Bodies or the parts thereto were found at Westminster Abbey.
    Howler had tipped him that a body would be there and that there was a royal connection. How did Howler know the body would be there? Did he put it there? And what about the letter Howler mentioned. Where was it?
    The Prince of Wales was dead.
    Before he died, the prince invited a notorious drug addict to his hunt and charity ball.
    No way! The last “fact” was nonsense. There was no possibility Howler was invited to the ball. He obviously made up that story to cover something else he was doing.
    But …
    The police told Howler’s mother that her son was on a special assignment. Okay, Howler did special assignments for the coroner’s office, reconstructing bodies. That’s police-connected activity. But what kind of assignment could the man have that was secret ? And that included an invitation to the prince’s ball?
    Dutton underlined special assignment. It stank of more of that Danish stink Hamlet complained about.
    The body parts were dressed in a Tudor-era costume—the era of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Queen Mary, and the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. The present royal family weren’t Tudors, but would be related because the crown kept going to cousins and such after the main houses ran out of heirs. But why historical royal garb? What was the message?
    They had been frozen.
    Why? To make it hard to tell time of death? To make them easy to transport? Those were the easy answers. But were they also frozen to preserve them until they could be placed at Westminster?
    Why Westminster? One thing he had learned about covering the crime beat was that serial killers are crazy … but that there was always a method to their madness. That’s why they were called “serial” killers—they had a game plan they usually stuck to. And they not uncommonly operated off of messages—ones from God, Satan, voices in their head, telepathy with their victims.
    The killer didn’t dress up the body, body parts, whatever they were, and leave it in the Abbey as a matter of caprice. The stuff had been frozen and transported into a national shrine.
    There was a message involved, maybe a series of information that added up to a single statement. He had to find out what it was before a loose-cannon cop and an avaricious tabloid editor got him hanged.
    He telephoned the number Howler’s mother had been using to call the police.
    “Royal Protection Service,” a male voice answered.
    Now, that was mind-blowing. The RPS unit was composed of top officers recruited from other police branches to provide protection for the Royals. They had essentially the same function as the Secret Service officers who protected the U.S. President and Vice President. That they could have business with Howler made as much sense as Howler rubbing shoulders with the prince.
    He turned on the telly to see what the evening news had to say about the break-in at the Abbey. And caught Archer grinning for the camera.
    “Is this tabloid reporter, the man you have identified as Tony Dutton, suspected of being the killer?” a TV reporter asked Archer.
    “Dutton is a very dangerous character, a man who broke into a national shrine and was caught red-handed with bodies—actually, they were body parts.”
    “Bastard. Hanging me with rumor and innuendo,” Dutton told the television set.
    But not