Without Remorse

CHAPTER 20

Depressurization

It was after four when Kelly pulled into the marina. He backed the Scout to the transom of his boat and got out to open the cargo hatch after checking the darkness for spectators, of which, thankfully, there were none.

'Hop,' he told Billy, and that he did. Kelly pushed him aboard, then directed him into the main salon. Once there, Kelly got some shackles, regular marine handware, and fastened Billy's wrists to a deck fitting. Ten minutes more and he had cast off, heading out to the Bay, and finally Kelly allowed himself to relax. With the boat on autopilot, he loosed the wires on Billy's arms and legs.

Kelly was tired. Moving Billy from the back of the VW into the Scout had been harder than he'd expected, and at that he'd been lucky to miss the newspaper distributor, dumping his bundles on street corners for the paper boy to unwrap and deliver before six. He settled back into the control chair, drinking some coffee and stretching by way of reward to his body for its efforts.

Kelly had the lights turned way down so that he could navigate without being blinded by the internal glow of the salon. Off to port were a half-dozen cargo ships tied up at Dundalk Marine Terminal, but very little in his sight was moving. There was always something relaxing about the water at a time like this, the winds were calm, and the surface a gently undulating mirror that danced with lights on the shore. Red and green lights from buoys blinked on and off while telling ships to stay out of dangerous shallows. Springer passed by Fort Carroll, a low octagon of gray stone, built by First Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, US Army Corps of Engineers; it had held twelve-inch rifles as recently as sixty years before. The orange fires of the Bethlehem Steel Sparrow's Point Works glowed to the north. Tugboats were starting to move out of their basins to help various ships out of their berths, or to help bring new ones alongside, and their diesels growled across the flat surface in a distant, friendly way. Somehow that noise only emphasized the pre-dawn peace. The quiet was overwhelmingly comforting, just as things should be in preparation for the start of a new day.

'Who the fuck are you?' Billy asked, relieved of his gag and unable to bear the silence. His arms were still behind him, but his legs were free, and he sat up on the deck of the salon.

Kelly sipped his coffee, allowing his tired arms to relax and ignoring the noise behind him.

'I said, who the fuck are you!' Billy called more loudly.

It was going to be a warm one. The sky was clear. There were plenty of stars visible, with not even a hint of gathering clouds. No 'Red Sky at Morning' to cause Kelly concern, but the outside temperature had dipped only to seventy-seven, and that boded ill for the coming day, with the hot August sun to beat down on things.

'Look, asshole, I want to know who the fuck you are.'

Kelly shifted a little in the wide control chair, taking another sip of his coffee. His compass course was one-two-one, keeping to the southern edge of the shipping channel, as was his custom. A brightly lit tug was coming in, probably from Norfolk, towing a pair of barges, but it was too dark to see what sort of cargo they bore. Kelly checked the lights and saw that they were properly displayed. That would please the Coast Guard, which wasn't always happy with the way the local tugs operated. Kelly wondered what sort of life it was, moving barges up and down the Bay. Had to be awfully dull doing the same thing, day in and day out, back and forth, north and south, at a steady six knots, seeing the same things all the time. It paid well, of course. A master and a mate, and an engineer, and a cook - they had to have a cook. Maybe a deckhand or two. Kelly wasn't sure about that. All taking down union wages, which were pretty decent.

'Hey, okay. I don't know what the problem is, but we can talk about it, okay?'

The maneuvering in close was probably pretty tricky, though. Especially in any kind of wind, the barges had to be unhandy things to bring alongside. But not today. Today it wouldn't be windy. Just hotter than hell. Kelly started his turn south as he passed Bodkin Point, and he could see the red lights blinking on the towers of the Bay Bridge at Annapolis. The first glow of dawn was decorating the eastern horizon. It was kind of sad, really. The last two hours before sunrise were the best time of the day, but something that few ever bothered to appreciate. Just one more case of people who never knew what was going on around them. Kelly thought he saw something, but the glass windsheld interfered with visibility, and so he left the control station and went topside. There he lifted his marine 7 x 50s, and then the microphone of his radio.

'Motor Yacht Springer calling Coast Guard forty-one-boat, over.'

'This is Coast Guard, Springer. Portagee here. What are you doing up so early, Kelly? Over.'

'Carrying out my commerce on the sea, Oreza. What's your excuse? Over.'

'Looking out for feather merchants like you to rescue, getting some training done, what do you think? Over.'

'Glad to hear that, Coast Guard. You push those lever-things towards the front of the boat - that's the pointy part, usually - and she goes faster. And the pointy part goes the same way you turn the wheel - you know, left to go left, right to go right. Over.'

Kelly could hear the laughter over the FM circuit. 'Roger, copy that, Springer, I will pass that along to my crew. Thank you, sir, for the advice. Over.'

The crew on the forty-one-foot boat was howling after a long eight hours of patrol, and doing very little. Oreza was letting a young seaman handle the wheel, leaning on the wheelhouse bulkhead and sipping his own coffee as he played with the radio mike.

'You know, Springer, I don't take that sort of guff off many guys. Over.'

'A good sailor respects his betters, Coast Guard. Hey, is it true your boats have wheels on the bottom? Over.'

'Ooooooo,' observed a new apprentice.

'Ah, that's a negative, Springer. We take the training wheels off after the Navy pukes leave the shipyard. We don't like it when you ladies get seasick just from looking at them. Over!'

Kelly chuckled and altered course to port to stay well clear of the small cutter. 'Nice to know that our country's waterways are in such capable hands, Coast Guard, 'specially with a weekend coming up.'

'Careful, Springer, or I'll hit you for a safety inspection!'

'My federal tax money at work?'

'I hate to see it wasted.'

'Well, Coast Guard, just wanted to make sure y'all were awake.'

'Roger and thank you very much, sir. We were dozing a little. Nice to know we have real pros like you out here to keep us on our toes.'

'Fair winds, Portagee.'

'And to you, Kelly. Out.' The radio frequency returned to the usual static.

And that took care of that, Kelly thought. It wouldn't do to have him come alongside for a chat. Not just now. Kelly secured the radio and went below. The eastern horizon was pink-orange now, another ten minutes or so until the sun made its appearance.

'What was that all about?' Billy asked.

Kelly poured himself another cup of coffee and checked the autopilot. It was warm enough now that he removed his shirt. The scars on his back from the shotgun blast could hardly have been more clear, even in the dim light of a breaking dawn. There was a remarkable long silence, punctuated by a deep intake of breath.

'You're...'

This time Kelly turned, looking down at the naked man chained to the deck. 'That's right.'

'I killed you,' Billy objected. He'd never gotten the word. Henry hadn't passed it along, deeming it to be irrelevant to his operation.

'Think so?' Kelly asked, looking forward again. One of the diesels was running a little warmer than the other, and he made a note to check the cooling system after his other business was done. Otherwise the boat was behaving as docilely as ever, rocking gently on the almost invisible swells, moving along at a steady twenty knots, the bow pitched up at about fifteen degrees on an efficient planing angle. On the step, as Kelly called it. He stretched again, flexing muscles, letting Billy see the scars and what lay under them.

'So that's what it's about... she told us all about you before we snuffed her.'

Kelly scanned the instrument panel, then checked the chart as he approached the Bay Bridge. Soon he'd cross over to the eastern side of the channel. He was now checking the boat's clock - he thought of it as a chronometer - at least once a minute.

'Pam was a great little fuck. Right up to the end,' Billy said, taunting his captor, filling the silence with his own malignant words, finding a sort of courage there. 'Not real smart, though. Not real smart.'

Just past the Bay Bridge, Kelly disengaged the autopilot and turned the wheel ten degrees to port. There was no morning traffic to speak of, but he looked carefully anyway before initiating the maneuver. A pair of running lights just on the horizon announced the approach of a merchant ship, probably twelve thousand yards off. Kelly could have flipped on the radar to check, but in these weather conditions it just would have been a waste of electricity.

'Did she tell you about the passion marks?' Billy sneered. He didn't see Kelly's hands tighten on the wheel.

The marks about the breasts appear to have been made with an ordinary set of pliers, the pathology report had said. Kelly had it all memorized, every single word of the dry medical phraseology, as though engraved with a diamond stylus on a plate of steel. He wondered if the medics had felt the same way he did. Probably so. Their anger had probably manifested itself in the increased detachment of their dictated notes. Professionals were like that.

'She talked, you know, she told us everything. How you picked her up, how you partied. We taught her that, mister. You owe us for that! Before she ran, I bet she didn't tell you, she nicked us all, three, four times each. I guess she thought that was pretty smart, eh? I guess she never figured that we'd all get to fuck her some more.'

O+, O- , AB-, Kelly thought. Blood type O was by far the most common of all, and so that meant there could well have been more than three of them. And what blood type are you, Billy?

'Just a whore. A pretty one, but just a fucking little whore. That's how she died, did you know? She died while she was fucking a guy. We strangled her, and her cute little ass was pumping hard, right up till the time her face turned purple. Funny to watch,' Billy assured him with a leer that Kelly didn't have to see. 'I had my fun with her - three times, man! I hurt her, I hurt her bad, you hear me?'

Kelly opened his mouth wide, breathing slowly and regularly, not allowing his muscles to tense up now. The morning wind had picked up some, letting the boat rock perhaps five degrees left and right of the vertical, and he allowed his body to ride with the rolls, commanding himself to accept the soothing motion of the sea.

'I don't know what the big deal is, I mean, she's just a dead whore. We should be able to cut a deal, like. You know how dumb you are? There was seventy grand back in the house, you dumb son of a bitch. Seventy grand!' Billy stopped, seeing it wasn't working. Still, an angry man made mistakes, and he'd rattled the guy before. He was sure of that, and so he continued.

'You know, the real shame, I guess, is she needed drugs. You know, if she just knew another place to score, we never woulda seen y'all. Then you fucked up, too, remember.'

Yes, I remember.

'I mean, you really were dumb. Didn't you know about phones? Jesus, man. After our car got stuck, we called Burt and got his car, and just went cruisin', like, and there you were, easy as hell to spot in that jeep. You must've really been under her spell, man.'

Phones? It was something that simple that had killed Pam? Kelly thought. His muscles went taut. Youfucking idiot, Kelly. Then his shoulders went slack, just for a second, with the realization of how thoroughly he had failed her, and part of him recognized the emptiness of his efforts at revenge. But empty or not, it was something he would have. He sat up straighter in the control chair.

'I mean, shit, car easy to spot like that, how fuckin' dumb can a guy be?' Billy asked, having just seen real feedback from his taunts. Now perhaps he could start real negotiations. 'I'm kinda surprised you're alive - hey, I mean, it wasn't anything personal. Maybe you didn't know the work she did for us. We couldn't let her loose with what she knew, right? I can make it up to you. Let's make a deal, okay?'

Kelly checked the autopilot and the surface. Springer was moving on a safe and steady course, and nothing in sight was on a converging path. He rose from his chair and moved to another, a few feet from Billy.

'She told you that we were in town to score some drugs? She told you that?' Kelly asked, his eyes level with Billy's.

'Yeah, that's right.' Billy was relaxing. He was puzzled when Kelly started weeping in front of him. Perhaps here was a chance to get out of his predicament. 'Geez, I'm sorry, man,' Billy said in the wrong sort of voice. 'I mean, it's just bad luck for you.'

Bad luck for me? He closed his eyes, just a few inches from Billy's face. Dear God, she was protecting me. Even after I failed her. She didn't even know if 1 was alive or not, but she lied to protect me. It was more than he could bear, and Kelly simply lost control of himself for several minutes. But even that had a purpose. His eyes dried up after a time, and as he wiped his face, he also removed any human feelings he might have had for his guest.

Kelly stood and walked back to the control chair. He didn't want to look the little bastard in the face any longer. He might really lose control, and he couldn't risk that.

'Tom, I think you may be right after all' Ryan said.

According to his driver's license - already checked out: no arrest record, but a lengthy list of traffic violations - Richard Oliver Farmer was twenty-four and would grow no older. He had expired from a single knife thrust into the chest, through the pericardium, fully transiting the heart. The size of the knife wound - ordinarily such traumatic insults closed up until they became difficult for the layman to see - indicated that the assailant had twisted the blade as much as the space between the ribs allowed. It was a large wound, indicating a blade roughly two inches in width. More important, there was additional confirmation.

'Not real smart,' the ME announced. Ryan and Douglas both nodding, looking. Mr Farmer had been wearing a white cotton, button-down-collar shirt. There was a suit jacket, too, hanging on a doorknob. Whoever had killed him had wiped the knife on the shirt. Three wipes, it appeared, and one of them had left a permanent impression of the knife, marked in the blood of the victim, who had a revolver in his belt but hadn't had a chance to use it. Another victim of skill and surprise, but, in this case, less circumspection. The junior of the pair pointed to one of the stains with his pencil.

'You know what it is?' Douglas asked. It was rhetorical; he answered his own question immediately. 'It's a Ka-Bar, standard-issue Marine combat knife. I own one myself.'

'Niice edge on it, too,' the ME told them. 'Very clean cut, almost surgical in the way it went through the skin. He must have sliced the heart just about in half. A very accurate thrust, gentlemen, the knife came in perfectly horizontal so it didn't jam on the ribs. Most people think the heart's on the left. Our friend knew better. Only one penetration. He knew exactly what he was doing.'

'One more, Em. Armed criminal. Our friend got in close and did him so fast -'

'Yeah, Tom, I believe you now.' Ryan nodded and went upstairs to join the other detective team. In the front bedroom was a pile of men's clothes, a cloth satchel with a ton of cash in it, a gun, and a knife. A mattress with semen stains, some still moist. Also a lady's purse. So much evidence for the younger men to catalog. Blood types from the semen stains. Complete ID on all three - they assumed three - people who had been here. Even a car outside to run down. Finally something like a normal murder case. Latent prints would be all over the place. The photographers had already shot a dozen rolls of film. But for Ryan and Douglas the matter was already settled in its curious way.

'You know that guy Farber over at Hopkins?'

'Yeah, Em, he worked the Gooding case with Frank Allen. I set the date up. He's real smart,' Douglas allowed. 'A little peculiar, but smart. I have to be in court this afternoon, remember?'

'Okay, I think I can handle it. I owe you a beer, Tom. You figured this one faster than I did.'

'Well, thanks, maybe I can be a lieutenant, too, some-day.'

Ryan laughed, fishing out a cigarette as he walked down the stairs.

'You going to resist?' Kelly asked with a smile. He'd just come back into the salon after tying up to the quay.

'Why should I help you with anything?'?ill? asked with what he thought to be defiance.

'Okay.' Kelly drew the Ka-Bar and held it next to a particularly sensitive place. 'We can start right now if you want.'

The whole body shriveled, but one part more than the others. 'Okay, okay!'

'Good. I want you to learn a little from this. I don't want you ever to hurt another girl again.' Kelly loosed the shackles from the deck fitting, but his arms were still together, bolted in tight, as he stood Billy up.

'Fuck you, man! You're gonna kill me! And I ain't gonna tell you shit.'

Kelly twisted him around to stare in his eyes. 'I'm not going to kill you, Billy. You'll leave this island alive. I promise.'

The confusion on his face was sufficiently amusing that Kelly actually smiled for a second. Then he shook his head. He told himself that he was treading a very narrow and hazardous path between two equally dangerous slopes, and to both extremes lay madness, of two different types but equally destructive. He had to detach himself from the reality of the moment, yet hold on to it. Kelly helped him down from the boat and walked him towards the machinery bunker.

'Thirsty?'

'I need to take a piss, too.'

Kelly guided him onto some grass. 'Go right ahead.' Kelly waited. Billy didn't like being naked, not in front of another man, not in a subordinate position. Foolishly, he wasn't trying to talk to Kelly now, at least not in the right way. Coward that he was, he'd tried to build up his manhood earlier, trying to talk not so much to Kelly as himself as he'd recounted his part in ending Pam's life, creating for himself an illusion of power, when silence might - well, would probably not have saved him. It might have created doubts, though, especially if he'd been clever enough to spin a good yarn, but cowardice and stupidity were not strangers to each other, were they? Kelly let him stand untended while he dialed the combination lock. Turning on the interior lights, he pushed Billy inside.

It looked like - was in fact a steel cylinder, seventeen inches in diameter, sitting on its own legs with large caster-wheels at the bottom, just where he'd left it. The steel cover on the end was not in place, hanging down on its hinge.

'You're going to get in that,' Kelly told him.

'Fuck you, man!' Defiance again. Kelly used the butt end of the Ka-Bar to club him on the back of the neck. Billy fell to his knees.

'One way or another, you're getting in - bleeding or not bleeding, I really don't care.' Which was a lie, but an effective one. Kelly lifted him by the neck and forced his head and shoulders into the opening. 'Don't move.'

It was so much easier than he'd expected. Kelly pulled a key off its place on the wall and unbolted the shackles on Billy's hands. He could feel his prisoner tense, thinking that he might have a chance, but Kelly was fast on the wrench - he only had to remove one bolt to free both hands, and a prod from the knife in the right place encouraged Billy not to back up, which was the necessary precursor to any kind of effective resistance. Billy was just too cowardly to accept pain as the price for a chance at escape. He trembled but didn't resist at all, for all his lavish and desperate thoughts.

'Inside!' A push helped, and when his feet were inside the rim, Kelly lifted the hatch and bolted it into place. Then he walked out, flipping the lights off. He needed something to eat and a nap. Billy could wait. The waiting would just make things easier.

'Hello?' Her voice sounded very worried.

'Hi, Sandy, it's John.'

'John! What's going on?'

'How is she?'

'Doris, you mean? She's sleeping now,' Sandy told him. 'John, who - I mean, what's happened to her?'

Kelly squeezed the phone receiver in his hand. 'Sandy, I want you to listen to me very carefully, okay? This is really important.'

'Okay, go ahead.' Sandy was in her kitchen, looking at a pot of coffee. Outside she could see neighborhood children playing a game of ball on a vacant field whose comforting normality now seemed to be very distant indeed.

'Number one, don't tell anybody that she's there. Sure as hell you don't tell the police.'

'John, she's badly injured, she's hooked on pills, she probably has severe medical problems on top of that. I have to-'

'Sam and Sarah, then. Nobody else. Sandy, you got that? Nobody else. Sandy...' Kelly hesitated. It was too hard a thing to say, but he had to make it clear. 'Sandy, I have placed you in danger. The people who worked Doris over are the same ones -'

'I know, John. I kinda figured that one out.' The nurse's expression was neutral, but she too had seen the photo of Pamela Starr Madden's body. 'John, she told me that you - killed somebody.'

'Yes, Sandy, I did.'

Sandra O'Toole wasn't surprised. She'd made the right guesses a few hours before, but hearing it from him - it was the way he'd just said it. Calm, matter-of-fact. Yes. Sandy, I did. Did you take the garbage out? Yes, Sandy, I did.

'Sandy, these are some very dangerous people. I could have left Doris behind - but I couldn't, could I? Jesus, Sandy, did you see what they -'

'Yes.' It had been a long time since she'd worked the ER, and she'd almost forgotten the dreadful things that people did to one another.

'Sandy, I'm sorry that I -'

'John, it's done. I'll handle it, okay?' Kelly stopped talking for a moment, taking strength from her voice. Perhaps that was the difference between them. His instinct was to lash out, to identify the people who did the evil things and to deal with them. Seek out and destroy. Her instinct was to protect in a different way, and it struck the former SEAL that her strength might well be the greater.

'I'll have to get her proper medical attention.' Sandy thought about the young woman upstairs in the back bedroom. She'd helped her get cleaned off and been horrified at the marks on her body, the vicious physical abuse. But worst of all were her eyes, dead, absent of the defiant spark that she saw in patients even as they lost their fight for life. Despite years of work in the care of critically ill patients, she'd never realized that a person could be destroyed on purpose, through deliberate, sadistic malice. Now she might come to the attention of such people herself, Sandy knew, but greater than her fear for them was her loathing.

For Kelly those feelings were precisely inverted. 'Okay, Sandy, but please be careful. Promise me.'

'I will. I'm going to call Doctor Rosen.' She paused for a moment. 'John?'

'Yes, Sandy?'

'What you're doing... it's wrong, John.' She hated herself for saying that.

'I know,' Kelly told her.

Sandy closed her eyes, still seeing the kids chasing a baseball outside, then seeing John, wherever he was, knowing the expression that had to be on his face. She knew she had to say the next part, too, and she took a deep breath: 'But I don't care about that, not anymore. I understand, John.'

'Thank you,' Kelly whispered. 'Are you okay?'

'I'll do fine.'

'I'll be back as soon as I can. I don't know what we can do with her - '

'Let me worry about that. We'll take care of her. We'll come up with something.'

'Okay, Sandy... Sandy?'

'What, John?'

'Thanks. ' The line clicked off.

You'rewelcome, she thought, hanging up. What a strange man. He was killing people, ending the lives of fellow human beings, doing it with an utter ruthlessness that she hadn't seen - had no desire to see - but which his voice proclaimed in its emotionless speech. But he'd taken the time and endangered himself to rescue Doris. She still didn't understand, Sandy told herself, dialing the phone again.

Dr Sidney Farber looked exactly as Emmet Ryan expected: forty or so, small, bearded, Jewish, pipe-smoker. He didn't rise as the detective came in, merely motioning his guest to a chair with a wave of the hand. Ryan had messengered extracts from the case files to the psychiatrist before lunch, and clearly the doctor had read them. All of them were laid open on the desk, arrayed in two rows.

'I know your partner, Tom Douglas,' Farber said, puffing on his pipe.

'Yes, sir. He said your work on the Gooding case was very helpful.'

'A very sick man, Mr Gooding. I hope he'll get the treatment he needs.'

'How sick is this one?' Lieutenant Ryan asked.

Farber looked up. 'He's as healthy as we are - rather healthier, physically speaking. But that's not the important part. What you just said. "This one." You're assuming one murderer for all these incidents. Tell me why.' The psychiatrist leaned back in his chair.

'I didn't think so at first. Tom saw it before I did. It's the craftsmanship.'

'Correct.'

'Are we dealing with a psychopath?'

Farber shook his head. 'No. The true psychopath is a person unable to deal with life. He sees reality in a very individual and eccentric way, generally a way that is very different from the rest of us. In nearly all cases the disorder is manifested in very open and easily recognized ways.'

'But Gooding -'

'Mr Gooding is what we - there's a new term, "organized psychopath."'

'Okay, fine, but he wasn't obvious to his neighbors.'

'That's true, but Mr Gooding's disorder manifested itself in the gruesome way he killed his victims. But with these killings, there's no ritual aspect to them. No mutilation. No sexual drive to them - that's usually indicated by cuts on the neck, as you know. No.' Farber shook his head again. 'This fellow is all business. He's not getting any emotional release at all. He's just killing people and he's doing it for a reason that is probably rational, at least to him.'

'Why, then?'

'Obviously it's not robbery. It's something else. He's a very angry man, but I've met people like this before.'

'Where?' Ryan asked. Farber pointed to the opposite wall. In an oaken frame was a piece of red velvet on which were pinned a combat infantryman's badge, jump wings, and a ranger flash. The detective was surprised enough to let it show.

"Pretty stupid, really,' Farber explained with a deprecating gesture. 'Little Jewish boy wants to show how tough he is. Well' - Farber smiled - 'I guess I did.'

'I didn't like Europe all that much myself, but I didn't see the nice parts.'

'What outfit?'

'East Company, Second of the Five-Oh-Sixth.'

'Airborne. One-Oh-One, right?'

'All the way, doc,' the detective said, confirming that he too had once been young and foolish, and remembering how skinny he'd been, leaping out the cargo doors of C-47s. 'I jumped into Normandy and Eindhoven.'

'And Bastogne?'

Ryan nodded. 'That really wasn't fun, but at least we went in by truck.'

'Well, that's what you're up against, Lieutenant Ryan.'

'Explain?'

'Here's the key to it.' Farber held up the transcribed interview with Mrs Charles. 'The disguise. Has to be a disguise. It takes a strong arm to slam a knife into the back of the skull. That wasn't any alcoholic. They have all sorts of physical problems.'

'But that one doesn't fit the pattern at all,' Ryan objected.

'I think it does, but it's not obvious. Turn the clock back. You're in the Army, you're an elite member of an elite unit. You take the time to recon your objective, right?'

'Always,' the detective confirmed.

'Apply that to a city: How do you do that? You camouflage yourself. So our friend decides to disguise himself as a wino. How many of those people on the street? Dirty, smelly, but pretty harmless except to one another. They're invisible and you just filter them out. Everyone does.'

'You still didn't - '

'But how does he get in and out? You think he takes a bus - a taxi?'

'Car.'

'A disguise is something you put on and take off.' Farber held up the photo of the Charles murder scene. 'He makes his double-kill two blocks away, he clears the area, and comes here - why do you suppose?' And there it was, right on the photo, a gap between two parked cars.

'Holy shit!' The humiliation Ryan felt was noteworthy. 'What else did I miss, Doctor Farber?'

'Call me Sid. Not much else. This individual is very clever, changing his methods, and this is the only case where he displayed his anger. That's it, do you see? This is the only crime with rage in it - except maybe for the one this morning, but we'll set that aside for the moment. Here we see rage. First he cripples the victim, then he kills him in a particularly difficult way. Why?' Farber paused for a few contemplative puffs, 'He was angry, but why was he angry? It had to have been an unplanned act. He wouldn't have planned something with Mrs Charles there. For some reason he had to do something that he hadn't expected to do, and that made him angry. Also, he let her go - knowing that she saw him.'

'You still haven't told me -'

'He's a combat veteran. He's very, very fit. That means he's younger than we are and highly trained. Ranger, Green Beret, somebody like that'

'Why is he out there?'

'I don't know. You're going to have to ask him. But what you have is somebody who takes his time. He's watching his victims. He's picking the same time of day - when they're tired, when street traffic is low, to reduce the chance of being spotted. He's not robbing them. He may take the money, but that's not the same thing. Now tell me about this morning's kill,' Farber commanded in a gentle but explicit way.

'You have the photo. There was a whole lot of cash in a bag upstairs. We haven't counted it yet, but at least fifty thousand dollars.'

'Drug money?'

'We think so.'

'There were other people there? He kidnapped them?'

'Two, we think. A man definitely, and probably a woman, too.'

Farber nodded and puffed away for a few seconds. 'One of two things. Either that's the person he was after all along, or he's just one more step towards something else.'

'So all the pushers he killed were just camouflage.'

'The first two, the ones he wired up -'

'Interrogated them.' Ryan grimaced. 'We should have figured this out. They were the only ones who weren't killed in the open. He did it that way to have more time.'

'Hindsight is always easy,' Farber pointed out. 'Don't feel too bad. That one really did look like a robbery, and you had nothing else to go on. By the time you came here, there was a lot more information to look at.' The psychiatrist leaned back and smiled at the ceiling. He loved playing detective. 'Until this one' - he tapped the photos from the newest scene with his pipe - 'you didn't really have much. This is the one that makes everything else clear. Your suspect knows weapons. He knows tactics. He's very patient. He stalks his victims like a hunter after a deer. He's changing his methodology to throw you off, but today he made a mistake. He showed a little rage this time, too, because he used a knife deliberately, and he showed the kind of training he had by cleaning the weapon right away.'

'But he's not crazy, you say.'

'No, I doubt he's disturbed in a clinical sense at all, but sure as hell he's motivated by something. People like this are highly disciplined, just like you and I were. Discipline shows in how he operates - but his anger also shows in why he operates. Something made this man start to do this.'

' "Ma'am." '

That one caught Farber short. 'Exactly! Very good. Why didn't he eliminate her? That's the only witness we know about. He was polite to her. He let her go... interesting... but not enough to go on, really.'

'Except to say that he's not killing for fun.'

'Correct.' Farber nodded. 'Everything he does will have a purpose, and he has a lot of specialized training that he can apply to this mission. It is a mission. You have one really dangerous cat prowling the street.'

'He's after drug people. That's pretty clear,' Ryan said. 'The one - maybe two - he kidnapped...'

'If one is a woman, she'll survive. The man will not. From the condition of his body we'll be able to tell if he was the target.'

'Rage?'

'That will be obvious. One other thing - if you have police looking for this guy, remember that he's better with weapons than almost anybody. He'll look harmless. He'll avoid a confrontation. He doesn't want to kill the wrong people, or he would have killed this Mrs Charles.'

'But if we corner him -'

'You don't want to do that.'

'All comfy?' Kelly asked.

The recompression chamber was one of several hundred produced for a Navy contract requirement by the Dykstra Foundry and Tool Company, Inc., of Houston, Texas, or so the name plate said. Made of high-quality steel, it was designed to reproduce the pressure that came along with scuba diving. At one end was a triple-paned four-inch-square Plexiglas window. There was even a small air lock so that items could be passed in, like food or drink, and inside the chamber was a twenty-watt reading light in a protected fixture. Under the chamber itself was a powerful, gasoline-powered air compressor, which could be controlled from a fold-down seat, adjacent to which were two pressure gauges. One was labeled in concentric circles of millimeters and inches of mercury, pounds-per-square-inch, kilograms-per-square-centimeter, and 'bar' or multiples of normal atmospheric pressure, which was 14.7 PSI. The other gauge showed equivalent water depth both in feet and meters. Each thirty-three feet of simulated depth raised the atmopsheric pressure by 14.7 PSI, or one bar.

'Look, whatever you want to know, okay...' Kelly heard over the intercom.

'I thought you'd see things my way.' He yanked the rope on the motor, starting the compressor. Kelly made sure that the simple spigot valve next to the pressure gauges was tightly shut. Then he opened the pressurization valve, venting air from the compressor to the chamber, and watched the needles rotate slowly clockwise.

'You know how to swim?' Kelly asked, watching his face.

Billy's head jerked with alarm. 'What - look, please, don't drown me, okay?'

'That's not going to happen. So, can you swim?'

'Yeah, sure.'

'Ever do any skin diving?' Kelly asked next.

'No, no, I haven't,' replied a very confused drug distributor.

'Okay, well, you're going to learn what it's like. You should yawn and work your ears, like, to get used to the pressure,' Kelly told him, watching the 'depth' gauge pass thirty feet.

'Look, why don't you just ask your fucking questions, okay?'

Kelly switched the intercom off. There was just too much fear in the voice. Kelly didn't really like hurting people all that much, and he was worried about developing sympathy for Billy. He steadied the gauge at one hundred feet, closing off the pressurization valve but leaving the motor running. While Billy adjusted to the pressure, Kelly found a hose which he attached to the motor's exhaust pipe. This he extended outside to dump the carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. It would be a time-consuming process, just waiting for things to happen. Kelly was going on memory, and that was worrisome. There was a useful but rather rough instruction table on the side of the chamber, the bottom line of which commanded reference to a certain diving manual which Kelly did not' have. He'd done very little deep diving of late, and the only one that had really concerned him had been a team effort, the oil rig down in the Gulf. Kelly spent an hour tidying things up around the machine shop, cultivating his memories and his rage before coming back to his fold-down seat.

'How are you feeling?'

'Look, okay, all right?' Rather a nervous voice, actually.

'Ready to answer some questions?'

'Anything, okay? Just let me outa here!'

'Okay, good.' Kelly lifted a clipboard. 'Have you ever been arrested, Billy?'

'No.' A littl? pride in that one, Kelly noted. Good.

'Been in the service?'

'No.' Such a stupid question.

'So you've never been in jail, never been fingerprinted, nothing like that?'

'Never.' The head shook inside the window.

'How do I know you're telling the truth?'

'I am, man! I am!'

'Yeah, you probably are, but I have to make sure, okay?' Kelly reached with his left hand and twisted the spigot valve. Air hissed loudly out of the chamber while he watched the pressure gauges.

Billy didn't know what to expect, and it all came as a disagreeable surprise. In the preceding hour, he had been surrounded by four times the normal amount of air for the space he was in. His body had adapted to that. The air taken in through his lungs, also pressurized, had found its way into his bloodstream, and now his entire body was at 58.8 pounds per square inch of ambient pressure. Various gas bubbles, mainly nitrogen, were dissolved into his bloodstream, and when Kelly bled the air out of the chamber, those bubbles started to expand. Tissues around the bubbles resisted the force, but not well, and almost at once cell walls started first to stretch, and then, in some cases, to rupture. The pain started in his extremities, first as a dull but widespread ache and rapidly evolving into the most intense and unpleasant sensation Billy had ever experienced. It came in waves, timed exactly with the now-rapid beating of his heart. Kelly listened to the moan that turned into a scream, and the air pressure was only that of sixty feet. He twisted the release valve shut and re-engaged the pressurization one. In another two minutes the pressure was back to that of four bar. The restored pressure eased the pain almost completely, leaving behind the sort of ache associated with strenuous exercise. That was not something to which Billy was accustomed, and for him the pain was not the welcome sort that athletes know. More to the point, the wide and terrified eyes told Kelly that his guest was thoroughly cowed. They didn't look like human eyes now, and that was good.

Kelly switched on the intercom. 'That's the penalty for a lie. I thought you should know. Now. Ever been arrested, Billy?'

'Jesus, man, no!'

'Never been in jail, fingerprinted -'

'No, man, like speeding tickets, I ain't never been busted.'

'In the service?'

'No, I told you that!'

'Good, thank you.' Kelly checked off the first group of questions. 'Now let's talk about Henry and his organization.' There was one other thing happening that Billy did not expect. Beginning at about three bar, the nitrogen gas that constituted the majority of what humans call air has a narcotic effect not unlike that of alcohol or barbiturates. As afraid as Billy was, there was also a whiplash feeling of euphoria, along with which came impaired judgment. It was just one more bonus effect from the interrogation technique that Kelly had selected mainly for the magnitude of the injury it could inflict.

'Left the money?' Tucker asked.

'More than fifty thousand. They were still counting when I left,' Mark Charon said. They were back in the theater, the only two people in the balcony. By this time Henry wasn't eating any popcorn, the detective saw. It wasn't often that he saw Tucker agitated.

'I need to know what's going on. Tell m? what you know.'

'We've had a few pushers whacked in the past week or ten days -'

'Ju- Ju, Bandanna, two others I don't know. Yeah, I know that. You think they're connected?'

'It's all we got, Henry. Was it Billy who disappeared?'

'Yeah. Rick's dead. Knife?'

'Somebody cut his fuckin' heart out,' Charon exaggerated. 'One of your girls there, too?'

'Doris,' Henry confirmed with a nod. 'Left the money... why?'

'It could have been a robbery that went wrong somehow, but I don't know what would have screwed that up. Ju-Ju and Bandanna were both robbed - hell, maybe those cases are unrelated. Maybe what happened last night was, well, something else.'

'Like what?'

'Like maybe a direct attack on your organization, Henry,' Charon answered patiently. 'Who do you know who would want to do that? You don't have to be a cop to understand motive, right?' Part of him - a large part, in fact - enjoyed having the upper hand on Tucker, however briefly. 'How much does Billy know?'

'A lot - shit, I just started taking him to -' Tucker stopped.

'That's okay. I don't need to know and I don't want to know. But somebody else does, and you'd better think about that.' A little late, Mark Charon was beginning to appreciate how closely his well-being was associated with that of Henry Tucker.

'Why not at least make it look like a robbery?' Tucker demanded, eyes locked unseeingly on the screen.

'Somebody's sending you a message, Henry. Not taking the money is a sign of contempt. Who do you know who doesn't need money?'

The screams were getting louder. Billy had just taken another excursion to sixty feet, staying there for a couple of minutes. It was useful to be able to watch his face. Kelly saw him claw at his ears when both tympanic membranes ruptured, not a second apart. Then his eyes and sinuses had been affected. It would be attacking his teeth, too, if he had any cavities - which he probably did, Kelly thought, but he didn't want to hurt him too much, not yet.

'Billy,' he said, after restoring the pressure and eliminating most of the pain. 'I'm not sure I believe that one.'

'You motherfucker!' the person inside the chamber screamed at the microphone. 'I fixed her, you know? I watched your little babydoll die with Henry's dick in her, slinging her cunt for him, and I seen you cry like a fucking baby about it, you fucking pussy!'

Kelly made sure his face was at the window when his hand opened the release valve again, bringing Billy back to eighty feet, just enough for a good taste. There would be bleeding in the major joints now, because the nitrogen bubbles tended to collect there for one reason or another, and the instinctive reaction of decompression sickness was to curl up in a ball, from which had come the original name for the malady, 'the bends.' But Billy couldn't fold up inside the chamber, much as he tried to. His central nervous system was being affected now, too, the gossamer fibers being squeezed, and the pain was multi-faceted now, crushing aches in the joints and extremities, and searing, fiery threads throughout his body. Nerve spasms started as the tiny electrical fibers rebelled against what was happening to them, and his body jerked randomly as though being stung with electric shocks. The neurological involvement was a little disquieting this early on. That was enough for now. Kelly restored the pressure, watching the spasms slow down.

'Now, Billy, do you know how it was for Pam?' he asked, just to remind himself, really.

'Hurts.' He was crying now. He'd gotten his arms up, his hands were over his face, but for all that he couldn't conceal his agony.

'Billy,' Kelly said patiently. 'You see how it works? If I think you're lying, it hurts. If I don't like what you say, it hurts. You want me to hurt you some more?'

'Jesus- no, please!' The hands came away, and their eyes weren't so much as eighteen inches apart.

'Let's try to be a little bit more polite, okay?'

'... sorry...'

'I'm sorry, too, Billy, but you have to do what I tell you, okay?' He got a nod. Kelly reached for a glass of water. He checked the interlocks on the pass-through system before opening the door and setting the glass inside. 'Okay, if you open the door next to your head, you can have something to drink.'

Billy did as he was told and was soon sipping water through a straw.

'Now let's get back to business, okay? Tell me more about Henry. Where does he live?'

'I don't know,' he gasped.

'Wrong answer!' Kelly snarled.

'Please, no! I don't know, we meet at a place off Route 40, he doesn't let us know where -'

'You have to do better than that or the elevator goes back to the sixth floor. Ready?'

'Nooooo!' The scream was so loud that it came right through the inch-thick steel. 'Please, no! I don't know - 1 really don't.'

'Billy, I don't have much reason to be nice to you,' Kelly reminded him. 'You killed Pam, remember? You tortured her to death. You got your rocks off using pliers on her. How many hours, Billy, how long did you and your friends work on her? Ten? Twelve? Hell, Billy, we've only been talking for seven hours. You're telling me you've worked for this guy for almost two years and you don't even know where he lives? I have trouble believing that. Going up,' Kelly announced in a mechanical voice, reaching for the valve. All he had to do was crack it. The first hiss of pressurized air bore with it such terror that Billy was screaming before any real pain had a chance to start.

'IDON'T FUCKING KNOOOOOOOOOWWW!'

Damn! What if he doesn't?

Well, Kelly thought, it doesn't hurt to be sure. He brought him up just a little, just to eighty-five feet, enough to renew old pains without spreading the effects any further. Fear of pain was now as bad as the real thing, Kelly thought, and if he went too far, pain could become its own narcotic. No, this man was a coward who had often enjoyed inflicting pain and tenor on others, and if he discovered that pain, however dreadful, could be survived, then he might actually find courage in himself. That was a risk Kelly was unwilling to run, however remote it might be. He closed the release valve again and brought the pressure back up, this time to one hundred ten feet, the better to attenuate the pain and increase the narcosis.

'My God,' Sarah breathed. She hadn't seen the postmortem photos of Pam, and her only question on the matter had been discouraged by her husband, a warning which she'd heeded.

Doris was nude, and disturbingly passive. The best thing that could be said for her was that Sandy had helped her bathe. Sam had his bag open, passing over his stethoscope. Her heart rate was over ninety, strong enough but too rapid for a girl her age. Blood pressure was also elevated. Temperature was normal. Sandy moved in, drawing four 5-cc test tubes of blood which would be analyzed at the hospital lab.

'Who does this sort of thing?' Sarah whispered to herself. There were numerous marks on her breasts, a fading bruise to her right cheek, and other, more recent edemas on her abdomen and legs. Sam checked her eyes for pupillary response, which was positive - except for the total absence of reaction.

'The same people who killed Pam,' the surgeon replied quietly.

'Pam?' Doris asked. 'You knew her? How?'

'The man who brought you here,' Sandy said. 'He's the one -'

'The one Billy killed?'

'Yes,' Sam answered, then realized how foolish it might sound to an outside listener.

'I just know the phone number,' Billy said, drunkenly now from the high partial-pressure of nitrogen gas, and his release from pain was helping him to be much more compliant.

'Give it to me,' Kelly ordered. Billy did as he was told and Kelly wrote it down. He had two full pages of penciled notes now. Names, addresses, a few phone numbers. Seemingly very little, but far more than he'd had only twenty-four hours before.

'How do the drugs come in?'

Billy's head turned away from the window. 'Don't know...'

'We have to do better than that.' Hissssssssssssss...

Again Billy screamed, and this time Kelly let it happen, watching the depth-gauge needle rotate to seventy-five feet. Billy started gagging. His lung function was impaired now, and the choking coughs merely amplified the pain that now filled every cubic inch of his racked body. His whole body felt like a balloon, or more properly a collection of them, large and small, all trying to explode, all pressing on others, and he could feel that some were stronger and some weaker than others, and the weaker ones were those at the most important places inside him. His eyes were hurting now, seeming to expand beyond their sockets, and the way in which his paranasal sinuses were also expanding only made it worse, as though his face would detach from the rest of his skull; his hands flew there, desperately trying to hold it in place. The pain was beyond anything he had ever felt and beyond anything he had ever inflicted. His legs were bent as much as the steel cylinder allowed, and his kneecaps seemed to dig grooves into the steel, so hard they pressed against it. He was able to move his arms, and those twisted and turned about his chest, seeking relief, but only generating more pain as he struggled to hold his eyes in the sockets. He was unable even to scream now. Time stopped for Billy and became eternity. There was no light, no darkness, no sound or silence. All of reality was pain.

'... please... please...' the whisper carried over the speaker next to Kelly. He brought the pressure back up slowly, stopping this time at one hundred ten feet.

Billy's face was mottled now, like the rash from some horrible allergy. Some blood vessels had let go just below the surface of the skin, and a big one had ruptured on the surface of the left eye. Soon half of the 'white' was red, closer to purple, really, making him look even more like the frightened, vicious animal he was.

'The last question was about how the drugs come in.'

'I don't know,' he whined.

Kelly spoke quietly into the microphone. 'Billy, there's something you have to understand. Up until now what's happened to you, well, it hurts pretty bad, but I haven't really hurt you yet. I mean, not really hurt you.'

Billy's eyes went wide. Had he been able to consider things in a dispassionate way, he would have remarked to himself that surely horror must stop somewhere, an observation that would have been both right and wrong.

'Everything that's happened so far, it's all things that doctors can fix, okay?' If wasn't much of a lie on Kelly's part, and what followed was no lie at all. 'The next time we let the air out, Billy, then things will happen that nobody can fix. Blood vessels inside your eyeballs will break open, and you'll be blind. Other vessels inside your brain will let go, okay? They can't fix either one. You'll be blind and you'll be crazy. But the pain will never go away. The rest of your life, Billy, blind, crazy, and hurt. You're what? Twenty-five? You have lots more time to live. Forty years, maybe, blind, crazy, crippled. So it's a good idea not to lie to me, okay?

'Now - how do the drugs come in?'

No pity, Kelly told himself. He would have killed a dog or a cat or a deer in the condition he'd inflicted on this... object. But Billy wasn't a dog or a cat or a deer. He was a human being, after a fashion. Worse than the pimp, worse than the pushers. Had the situation been reversed, Billy would not have felt what he was feeling. He was a person whose universe was very small indeed. It held only one person, himself, surrounded by things whose sole function was to be manipulated for his amusement or profit. Billy was one who enjoyed the infliction of pain, who enjoyed establishing dominance over things whose feelings were nothing of importance, even if they truly existed at all. Somehow he'd never learned that there were other human beings in his universe, people whose right to life and happiness was equal to his own; because of that he had run the unrecognized risk of offending another person whose very existence he had never really acknowledged. He was learning different now, perhaps, though it was a little late. Now he was learning that his future was indeed a lonely universe which he would share not with people, but with pain. Smart enough to see that future, Billy broke. It was obvious on his face. He started talking in a choked and uneven voice, but one which, finally, was completely truthful. It was only about ten years too late, Kelly estimated, looking up from his notes at the relief valve. That ought to have been a pity, and truly it was for many of those who had shared Billy's rather eccentric universe. Perhaps he'd just never figured it out, Kelly thought, that someone else might treat him the same way in which he treated so many others, smaller and weaker than himself. But that also was too late in coming. Too late for Billy, too late for Pam, and, in a way, too late for Kelly. The world was full of inequities and not replete with justice. It was that simple, wasn't it? Billy didn't know that justice might be out there waiting, and there simply hadn't been enough of it to warn him. And so he had gambled. And so he had lost. And so Kelly would save his pity for others.

'I don't know... I don't -'

'I warned you, didn't I?' Kelly opened the valve, bringing him all the way to fifty feet. The retinal blood vessels must have ruptured early. Kelly thought he saw a little red in the pupils, wide as their owner screamed even after his lungs were devoid of air. Knees and feet and elbows drummed against the steel. Kelly let it happen, waiting before he reapplied the air pressure.

'Tell me what you know, Billy, or it just gets worse. Talk fast.'

His voice was that of confession now. The information was somewhat remarkable, but it had to be true. No person like this had the imagination to make it up. The final part of the interrogation lasted for three hours, only once letting the valve hiss, and then only for a second or two. Kelly left and revisited questions to see if the answers changed, but they didn't. In fact, the renewed question developed yet more information that connected some bits of data to others, formulating an overall picture that became clearer still, and by midnight he was sure that he'd emptied Billy's mind of all the useful data that it contained.

Kelly was almost captured by humanity when he set his pencils down. If Billy had shown Pam any mercy at all, perhaps he might have acted differently, for his own wounds were, just as Billy had said, only a business matter - more correctly, had been occasioned by his own stupidity, and he could not in good conscience harm a man for taking advantage of his own errors. But Billy had not stopped there. He had tortured a young woman whom Kelly had loved, and for that reason Billy was not a man at all, and did not merit Kelly's solicitude.

It didn't matter in any case. The damage had been done, and it progressed at its own speed as tissues torn loose by the barometric trauma wandered about blood vessels, closing them off one at a time. The worst manifestation of this was in Billy's brain. Soon his sightless eyes proclaimed the madness that they held, and though the final depressurization was a slow and gentle one, what came out of the chamber was not a man - but then, it never had been.

Kelly loosed the retaining bolts on the hatch. He was greeted with a foul stench that he ought to have expected but didn't. The buildup and release of pressure in Billy's intestinal tract and bladder had produced predictable effects. He'd have to hose it out later, Kelly thought, pulling Billy out and laying him on the concrete floor. He wondered if he had to chain him to something, but the body at his feet was useless to its owner now, the major joints nearly destroyed, the central nervous system good only to transmit pain. But Billy was still breathing, and that was just fine, Kelly thought, heading off to bed, glad it was over. With luck he would not have to do something like this again. With luck and good medical care, Billy would live for several weeks. If you could call it that.