Without Remorse

CHAPTER 32

Home is the Prey

The one bit of usable information to come out of Pittsburgh was a name. Sandy. Sandy had driven Doris Brown back home to her father. Just one word, not even a proper name, but cases routinely broke on less than that. It was like pulling on a string. Sometimes all you got was a broken piece of thread, sometimes you got something that just didn't stop until everything unraveled into a tangled mess in your hands. Somebody named Sandy, a female voice, young. She'd hung up before saying anything, though it hardly seemed likely that she'd had anything at all to do with the murders. One might return to the scene of the crime - it really did happen - but not via telephone.

How did it fit in? Ryan leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling while his trained mind examined everything he knew.

The most likely supposition was that Doris Brown, deceased, had been directly connected with the same criminal enterprise that had killed Pamela Madden and Helen Waters, and that had also included as active members Richard Farmer and William Grayson. John Terrence Kelly, former UDT sailor, and perhaps a former Navy SEAL, had somehow happened upon and rescued Pamela Madden. He'd called Frank Allen about it several weeks later, telling him not very much. Something had gone badly wrong - short version, he'd been an ass - and Pamela Madden had died as a result. The photos of the body were something Ryan would never fully put from his mind. Kelly had been badly shot. A former commando whose girlfriend had been brutally murdered, Ryan reminded himself. Five pushers eliminated as though James Bond had appeared on the streets of Baltimore. One extraneous killing in which the murderer had intervened in a street robbery for reasons unknown. Richard Farmer - 'Rick'? - eliminated with a knife, the second possible show of rage (and the first one didn't count, Ryan reminded himself). William Grayson, probably kidnapped and killed. Doris Brown, probably rescued at the same time, cleaned up over a period of weeks and returned to her home. That meant some sort of medical care, didn't it? Probably. Maybe, he corrected himself. The Invisible Man... could he have done that himself? Doris was the girl who'd brushed out Pamela Madden's hair. There was a connection.

Back up.

??ll? had rescued the Madden girl, but he'd had help getting her straightened out. Professor Sam Rosen and his wife, another physician. So Kelly finds Doris Brown - whom would he take her to? That was a starting place! Ryan lifted his phone.

'Hello.'

'Doc, it's Lieutenant Ryan.'

'I didn't know I gave you my direct line,' Farber said. 'What's up?'

'Do you know Sam Rosen?'

'Professor Rosen? Sure. He runs a department, hell of a good cutter, world-class. I don't see him very often, but if you ever need a head worked on, he's the man.'

'And his wife?' Ryan could hear the man sucking on his pipe.

'I know her quite well. Sarah. She's a pharmacologist, research fellow across the street, also works with our drug-abuse unit. I help out with that group, too, and we -'

'Thank you.' Ryan cut him off. 'One more name. Sandy.'

'Sandy who?'

'That's all I have,' Lieutenant Ryan admitted. He could imagine Farber now, leaning away from his desk in the high-backed leather chair with his contemplative look.

'Let me make sure I understand things, okay? Are you asking me to check up on two colleagues as part of a criminal investigation?'

Ryan weighed the merits of lying. This guy was a psychiatrist. His job was looking around in people's minds. He was good at it.

'Yes, doctor, I am,' the detective admitted after a pause long enough for the psychiatrist to make an accurate guess as to its cause.

'You're going to have to explain yourself,' Farber announced evenly. 'Sam and I aren't exactly close, but he is not a person who would ever hurt another human being. And Sarah is a damned angel with these messed-up kids we see in here. She's setting aside some important research work to do that, stuff she could make a big reputation with.' Then Farber realized that she'd been away an awful lot in the past couple of weeks.

'Doctor, I'm just trying to develop some information, okay? I have no reason whatever to believe that either one of them is implicated in any illegal act.' His words were too formal, and he knew it. Perhaps another tack. It was even honest, maybe. 'If my speculation is correct, there may be some danger to them that they don't know about.'

'Give me a few minutes.' Farber broke the connection.

'Not bad, Em,' Douglas said.

It was bottom-fishing, Ryan thought, but, hell, he'd tried just about everything else. It seemed an awfully long five minutes before the phone rang again.

'Ryan.'

'Farber. No docs on neuro by that name. One nurse, though, Sandra O'Toole. She's a team leader on the service. I don't know her myself. Sam thinks highly of her, or so I just found out from his secretary. She was working something special for him, recently. He had to fiddle the pay records.' Farber had already made his own connection. Sarah had been absent from her clinical work at the same time. He'd let the police develop that themselves. He'd gone far enough - too far. These were colleagues, after all, and this wasn't a game.

'When was that?' Ryan asked casually. '

'Two or three weeks ago, lasted ten working days.'

'Thank you, doctor. I'll be back to you.'

'Connection,' Douglas observed after the circuit was broken. 'How much you want to bet that she knows Kelly, too?'

The question was more hopeful than substantive, of course. Sandra was a common-enough name. Still, they'd been on this case, this endless series of deaths, for more than six months, and after all that time spent with no evidence and no connections at all, it looked like the morning star. The problem was that it was evening now, and time to go home for dinner with his wife and children. Jack would be returning to Boston College in another week or so, Ryan thought, and he missed time with his son.

There was no easy way to get things organized. Sandy had to drive him to Quantico. It was her first time on a Marine base, but only briefly, as Kelly guided her to the marina. Already, he thought. You get home for once with your body in tune with the local day/night cycle, and already he had to break it. Sandy was not yet back on 1-95 when he pulled away from the dock, heading out for the middle of the river, advancing his throttles to max-cruise as soon as he could.

The lady had brains to go with her guts, Kelly told himself, sipping his first beer in a very long time. He supposed it was normal that a clinical nurse would have a good memory. Henry, it seemed, had been a talker at certain moments, one of them being when he had a girl under his direct control. A boastful man, Kelly thought, the best sort. He still didn't have an address to go along with the phone number, but he had a new name, Tony P-something - Peegee, something like that. White, Italian, drove a blue Lincoln, along with a decent physical description. Mafia, probably, either in it or a wannabe. Somebody else named Eddie - but Sandy had matched that name with a guy who had been killed by a police officer; it had made the front page of the local paper. Kelly took it one step further: what if that cop was the man Henry had inside? It struck him as odd that a senior officer like a lieutenant would be involved in a shooting. Speculation, he told himself, but worth checking out - he wasn't sure yet exactly how. He had all night for it, and a smooth body of water to reflect his thoughts as it did the stars. Soon he passed the spot where he'd left Billy. At least someone had collected the body.

The ground was settling over the grave in a place that some still called Potter's Field, a tradition dating back to someone named Judas. The doctors at the community hospital that had treated the man were still going over the pathology report from the Medical College of Virginia. Baro-Trauma. There were fewer than ten severe cases of this condition in the whole country in a year, and all of those in coastal regions. It was no disgrace that they hadn't made the diagnosis - and, the report went on, there was no difference it could have made. The precise cause of death had been a fragment of bone marrow that had somehow found its way into a cerebral artery, occluding it and causing a massive, fatal stroke. Damage to other organs had been so extensive that it would only have been a matter of a few more weeks in any case. The bone-marrow blockage was evidence of a very large pressurization imbalance, 3 bar, probably more. Even now police were inquiring about divers in the Potomac, which could be very deep in some places. There was still hope that someone would eventually claim the body, whose location was recorded in the county administrator's office. But not much.

'What do you mean, you don't know?' General Rokossovskiy demanded. 'He's my man! Did you misplace him?'

'Comrade General,' Giap replied sharply, 'I have told you everything I know!'

'And you say an American did it?'

'You have seen the intelligence information as well as I have.'

'That man has information that the Soviet Union requires. I find it hard to believe that the Americans planned a raid whose only result was the abduction of the one Soviet officer in the area. I would suggest, Comrade General, that you make a more serious effort.'

'We are at war!'

'Yes, I am aware of that,' Rokossovskiy observed dryly. "Why do you think I am here?'

Giap could have sworn at the taller man who stood before his desk. He was the commander of his country's armed forces, after all, and a general of no mean abilities himself. The Vietnamese general swallowed his pride with difficulty. He also needed the weapons that only the Russians could provide, and so he had to abase himself before him for the sake of his country. Of one thing he was certain. The camp wasn't worth the trouble it had caused him.

The strange part was that the routine had become relatively benign. Kolya wasn't here. That was certain. Zacharias was sufficiently disoriented that he had difficulty determining the passage of days, but for four sleeps now he hadn't heard the Russian's voice even outside the door. By the same token, no one had come in to abuse him. He'd eaten and sat and thought in solitude. To his surprise it had made things better instead of worse. His time with Kolya had become an addiction more dangerous than his dalliance with alcohol, Robin saw now. It was loneliness that was his real enemy, not pain, not fear. From a family and a religious community that fostered fellowship, he'd entered a profession that lived on the same, and being denied it his mind had fed on itself. Then add a little pain and fear, and what did you have? It was something far more easily seen from without than from within. Doubtless it had been apparent to Kolya. Like you, he'd said so often, like you. So, Zacharias told himself, that's how he did his job. Cleverly, too, the Colonel admitted to himself. Though not a man accustomed to failure and mistakes, he was not immune to them. He'd almost killed himself with a youthful error at Luke Air Force Base while learning to fly fighters, and five years later, the time he'd wondered what the inside of a thunderstorm was really like and nearly ended up hitting the ground in the manner of a thunderbolt. And now he'd made another.

Zacharias didn't know the reason for his respite from the interrogations. Perhaps Kolya was off reporting on what he'd learned. Whatever the reason, he had been granted the chance to reflect. You've sinned, Robin told himself. You're beenvery foolish. But you won't do that again. The determination was weak, and Zacharias knew he'd have to work to strengthen it. Fortunately, he now had the time for reflection. If it was not a real deliverance, it was something. Suddenly he was shocked into full concentration, as if he were flying a combat mission. MyGod, he thought, that word.I was afraid to pray for deliverance... and yet... His guards would have been surprised to see the wistful smile on his face, especially had they known that he was starting to pray again. Prayer, they'd all been taught, was a farce. But that was their misfortune, Robin thought, and might yet be his salvation.

He couldn't make the call from his office. It just wouldn't do. Nor did he wish to do so from his home. The call would cross a river and a state line, and he knew that for security reasons there were special provisions for telephone calls made in the DC area. They were all recorded on computer tape, the only place in America where that was true. Even so, there was a procedure for what he had to do. You were supposed to have official sanction for it. You had to discuss it with your section head, then with the chief of the directorate, and it could well go all the way to the 'front office' on the seventh floor. Ritter didn't want to wait that long, not with lives at stake. He took the day off, not unreasonably claiming that he needed the time to recover from all the travel. So he decided to drive into town, and picked the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. He walked past the elephant in the lobby and consulted the you are here plate on the wall to find the public telephones, into one of which he dropped a dime and called 347-1347. It was almost an institutional joke. That number connected him to a telephone that rang on the desk of the KGB rezident, the chief of station for Washington, DC. They knew, and knew that people interested knew they knew. The espionage business could be so baroque, Ritter told himself.

'Yes?' a voice said. It was the first time Ritter had done this, a whole new collection of sensations - his own nervousness, the evenness of the voice at the other end, the excitement of the moment. What he had to say, however, was programmed in such a way that outsiders could not interfere with official business:

'This is Charles. There is a matter of concern to you. I propose a brief meeting and discussion. I'll be at the National Zoo in an hour, at the enclosure for the white tigers.'

'How will I know you?' the voice asked.

'I'll be carrying a copy of Newsweek in my left hand.'

'One hour,' the voice grumbled. He probably had an important meeting this morning, Ritter thought. Wasn't that too bad? The ClA field officer left the museum for his car. On the right seat was a copy of Newsweek he'd purchased at a drugstore on the way into town.

Tactics, Kelly thought, turning to port, finally rounding Point Lookout. There was a wide selection. He still had his safe house in Baltimore with a false name on everything. The police might be interested in talking to him, but they hadn't made contact with him yet. He'd try to keep it that way. The enemy didn't know who he was. That was his starting place. The fundamental issue was the three-way balance among what he knew, what he didn't know, and how he might use the first to affect the second. The third element, the how, was tactics. He could prepare for what he did not yet know. He could not yet act upon it, but he actually knew what he would do. Getting to that point simply required a strategic approach to the problem. It was frustrating, though. Four young women awaited his action. An as yet undetermined number of people awaited death.

They were driven by fear, Kelly knew. They'd been afraid of Pam, and afraid of Doris. Afraid enough to kill. He wondered if the death of Edward Morello had been a further manifestation. Certainly they had killed for their safety, and now they probably did feel safe. That was good; if fear was their driving force, then they had more of it now that they felt it a thing of their past.

The worrisome part was the time element. There was a clock on this. The police were sniffing at him. While he thought there was nothing they could possibly have to use against him, he still couldn't feel good about it. The other worry was the safety - he snorted - of those four young women. There was no such thing as a good long operation. Well, he'd have to be patient on one thing, and with luck, just the one.

He hadn't been to the zoo in years. Ritter thought he'd have to bring his kids here again now that they were old enough to appreciate things a little more. He took the time to look at the bear pit - there was just something interesting about bears. Kids thought of them as large, animated versions of the stuffed toys they clutched at night. Not Ritter. They were the image of the enemy, large and strong, far less clumsy and far more intelligent than they appeared. A good thing to remember, he told himself, heading over to the tiger cage. He rolled the Newsweek in his left hand, watching the large cats and waiting. He didn't bother checking his watch.

'Hello, Charles,' a voice said beside him.

'Hello, Sergey.'

'I do not know you,' the rezident observed.

'This conversation is unofficial,' Ritter explained.

'Aren't they all?' Sergey noted. He started walking. Any single place could be bugged, but not a whole zoo. For that matter, his contact could be wearing a wire, though that would not have been in accordance with the rules, such as they were. He and Ritter walked downthe gentle paved slope to the next animal exhibit, with the rezident 's security guard in close attendance.

'I just returned from Vietnam,' the CIA officer said.

'Warmer there than here.'

'Not at sea. It's rather pleasant out there.'

'The purpose of your cruise?' therezideat asked.

'A visit, an unplanned one.'

'I believe it failed,' the Russian said, not tauntingly, just letting 'Charles' know that he knew what was going on.

'Not completely. We brought someone home with us.'

'Who might that be?'

'His name is Nikolay.' Ritter handed over Grishanov's paybook. 'It would be an embarrassment to your government if it were to be revealed that a Soviet officer was interrogating American POWs.'

'Not a great embarrassment,' Sergey replied, flipping briefly through the paybook before pocketing it.

'Well, actually it would be. You see, the people he's been interrogating have been reported as being dead by your little friends.'

'I don't understand.' He was telling the truth, and Ritter had to explain for a few minutes. 'I did not know any of that,' Sergey said after hearing the facts of the matter.

'It's true, I assure you. You will be able to verify it through your own means.' And he would, of course. Ritter knew that, and Sergey knew that he knew.

'And where is our colonel?'

'In a safe place. He's enjoying better hospitality than our people are.'

'Colonel Grishanov hasn't dropped bombs on anyone,' the Russian pointed out.

'That is true, but he did take part in a process that will end with the death of American prisoners, and we have hard evidence that they are alive. As I said earlier, a potential embarrassment for your government.'

Sergey Voloshin was a highly astute political observer and didn't need this young CIA officer to tell him that. He could also see where this discussion was headed.

'What do you propose?'

'It would be helpful if your govemrnent could persuade Hanoi to restore these men to life, as it were. That is, to take them to the same prison where the other prisoners are, and make the proper notifications so that their families will know they are alive after all. In return for that Colonel Grishanov will be returned unharmed, and uninterrogated.'

'I will forward that proposal to Moscow.' With a favorable endorsement, his tone said clearly.

'Please be quick. We have reason to believe that the Vietnamese may be contemplating something drastic to relieve themselves of the potential embarrassment. That would be a very serious complication,' Ritter warned.

'Yes, I suppose it would be.' He paused. 'Your assurance that Colonel Grishanov is alive and well?'

'I can have you to him in... oh, about forty minutes if you wish. Do you think I would lie about something as important as this?'

'No, I do not. But some questions must be asked.'

'Yes, Sergey Ivan'ch, I know that. We have no wish to harm your colonel. He seems to have behaved rather honorably in his treatment of our people. He was also a very effective interrogator. I have his notes.' Ritter added, 'The offer to meet with him is open if you wish to make use of it.'

Voloshin thought about it, seeing the trap. Such an offer, if taken, would have to be reciprocated, because that's the way things were. To call Ritter's hand on this would commit his own government to something, and Voloshin didn't want to do that without guidance. Besides, it would be madness for CIA to lie in a case like this. Those prisoners could always be made to disappear. Only the goodwill of the Soviet Union could save them, and only the continuance of that goodwill would keep them healthy.

'I will take you at your word, Mister -'

'Ritter, Bob Ritter.'

'Ah! Budapest.'

Ritter grinned rather sheepishly. Well, after all he'd done to set his agent out, it was clear that he'd never go back into the field again, at least not in any place that mattered - which for Ritter started at the River Elbe. The Russian poked him in the chest.

'You did well getting your man out. I commend you on your loyalty to your agent.' Most of all Voloshin respected him for the risk he'd taken, something not possible in the KGB.

'Thank you, General. And thank you for responding to my proposal. When can I call you?'

'I'll need two days... shall I call you?'

'Forty- eight hours from now. I'll make the call.'

'Very well. Good day.' They shook hands like the professionals they were: Voloshin walked back to his driver/bodyguard and headed back to the car. Their walk had ended up at the enclosure for the Kodiak bear, large, brown, and powerful. Had that been an accident? Ritter wondered.

On the walk back to his car he realized that the whole thing had been an accident of sorts. On the strength of this play, Ritter would become a section chief. Failed rescue mission or not, he'd just negotiated an important concession with the Russians, and it had all happened because of the presence of mind of a man younger than himself, scared and on the run, who'd taken the time to think. He wanted people like that in the Agency, and now he had the clout to bring him in. Kelly had demurred and temporized on the flight back from Hawaii. Okay, so he'd need a little convincing. He'd have to work with Jim Greer on that, but Ritter decided on the spot that his next mission was to bring Kelly in from the cold, or the heat, or whatever you called it.

'How well do you know Mrs O'Toole?' Ryan asked.

'Her husband's dead,' the neighbor said. 'He went to Vietnam right after they bought the house, and then he was killed. Such a nice young man, too. She's not in any trouble, is she?'

The detective shook his head. 'No, not at all. I've only heard good things about her.'

'It's been awful busy over there,' the elderly lady went on. She was the perfect person to talk to, about sixty-five, a widow with nothing to do who compensated for the empty space in her life by keeping track of everyone else's. With a little reassurance that she wasn't hurting anyone, she'd relate everything she knew.

'What do you mean?'

'I think she had a houseguest a while back. She sure was shopping a lot more than usual. She's such a nice, pretty girl. It's so sad about her husband. She really ought to start dating again. I'd like to tell her, but I don't want her to think I'm nosy. Anyway, she was shopping a lot, and somebody else came almost every day, stayed overnight a lot, even.'

'Who was that?' Ryan asked, sipping his iced tea.

'A woman, short like me, but heavier, messy hair. She drove a big car, a red Buick, I think, and it had a sticker-thing on the windshield. Oh! That's right!'

'What's that?' Ryan asked.

'I was out with my roses when the girl came out, that's when I saw the sticker-thing.'

'Girl?' Ryan asked innocently.

'That's who she was shopping for!' the elderly lady said, pleased with herself for the sudden discovery. 'She bought clothes for her, I bet. I remember the Hecht Company bags.'

'Can you tell me what the girl looked like?'

'Young, like nineteen or twenty, dark hair. Kinda pale, like she was sick. They drove away, when was that...? Oh, I remember. It's the day my new roses came from the nursery. The eleventh. The truck came very early because I don't like the heat, and I was out there working when they came out. I waved at Sandy. She's such a nice girl. I don't talk to her very much, but when I do she always has a kind word. She's a nurse, you know, she works at Johns Hopkins, and -'

Ryan finished off his tea without letting his satisfaction show. Doris Brown had returned home to Pittsburgh on the afternoon of the eleventh. Sarah Rosen drove a Buick, and it undoubtedly had a parking sticker in the window.

Sam Rosen, Sarah Rosen, Sandra O'Toole. They had treated Miss Brown. Two of them had also treated Miss Madden. They had also treated Mr Kelly. After months of frustration, Lieutenant Emmet Ryan had a case.

'There she is now,' the lady said, startling him out of his private thoughts. Ryan turned and looked to see an attractive young lady, on the tall side, carrying a bag of groceries.

'I wonder who that man was?'

'What man?'

'He was there - last night. Maybe she has a boyfriend after all. Tall, like you, dark hair - big.'

'How do you mean?'

'Like a football player, you know, big. He must be nice, though. I saw her hug him. That was just last night.'

Thank God, Ryan thought, for people who don't watch TV.

For his long gun, Kelly had selected a bolt-action.22, a Savage Model 54, the lightweight version of that company's Anschutz match weapon. It was expensive enough at a hundred fifty dollars with tax. Almost as costly were the Leupold scope and mounts. The rifle was almost too good for its purpose, which was the hunting of small game, and had a particularly fine walnut stock. It was a shame that he'd have to scar it up. It would have been more of a shame to waste the lesson from that chief machinist's mate, however.

The one bad thing about the demise of Eddie Morello was that sweetening the deal had required the loss of a large quantity of pure, uncut heroin, a six-kilogram donation to the police evidence locker. That had to be made up. Philadelphia was hungry for more, and his New York connections were showing increasing interest now that they'd had their first taste. He'd do one last batch on the ship. Now he could change over again. Tony was setting up a secure lab that was easier to reach, more in keeping with the burgeoning success he was enjoying, but until that was ready, one more time the old way. He wouldn't make the trip himself.

'How soon?' Burt asked.

'Tonight.'

'Fair enough, boss. Who goes with me?'

'Phil and Mike.' The two new ones were from Tony's organization, young, bright, ambitious. They didn't know Henr? yet, and would not be part of his local distribution network, but they could handle out-of-town deliveries and were willing to do the menial work that was part of this business, mixing and packaging. They saw it, not inaccurately, as a rite of passage, a starting place from which their status and responsibility would grow. Tony guaranteed their reliability. Henry accepted that. He and Tony were bound now, bound in business, bound in blood. He'd accept Tony's counsel now that he trusted him. He'd rebuild his distribution network, removing the need for his female couriers, and with the removal of the need for them, so would end the reason for their lives. It was too bad, but with three defections, it was plain that they were becoming dangerous. A useful part of his operation in the growth phase, perhaps, but now a liability.

But one thing at a time.

'How much?' Burt asked.

'Enough to keep you busy for a while.' Henry waved to the beer coolers. There wasn't room for much beer in them now, but that was as it should be. Burt carried them out to his car, not casual, but not tense. Businesslike, the way things should be. Perhaps Burt would become his principal lieutenant. He was loyal, respectful, tough when he had to be, far more dependable than Billy or Rick, and a brother. It was funny, really. Billy and Rick had been necessary at the beginning since the major distributors were always white, and he'd taken them on as tokens. Well, fate had settled that. Now the white boys were coming to him, weren't they?

'Take Xantha with you.'

'Boss, we're going to be busy,' Burt objected.

'You can leave her there when you're done.' Perhaps one at a time was the best way to do it.

Patience never came easy. It was a virtue he'd learned, after a fashion, but only from necessity. Activity helped. He set the gun barrel in the vise, damaging the finish even before he started to do anything substantive. Setting the milling machine on high-speed, rotating the control wheel, he started drilling a series of holes at regular intervals in the outermost six inches of the barrel. An hour later he had a steel can-body affixed over it, and the telescopic sight attached. The rifle, as modified, proved to be quite accurate, Kelly thought.

'Tough one, Dad?'

'Eleven months' worth, Jack,' Emmet admitted over dinner. He was home on time for once, to his wife's pleasure - almost.

'That awful one?' his wife asked.

'Not over dinner, honey, okay?' he replied, answering the question. Emmet did his best to keep that part of his life out of the house. He looked over at his son and decided to comment on a decision his son recently made. 'Marines, eh?'

'Well, Dad, it pays for the last two years of school, doesn't it?' It was like his son to worry about things like that, about the cost of education for his sister, still in high school and away at camp for the moment. And like his father, Jack craved a little adventure before settling down to whatever place life would find for him.

'My son, a jarhead,' Emmett grumbled good-naturedly. He also worried. Vietnam wasn't over, might not be over when his son graduated, and like most fathers of his generation, he wondered why the hell he'd had to risk his life fighting Germans - so that his son might have to do the same, fighting people he'd never even heard about at his son's age.

'What falls out of the sky, pop?' Jack asked with a college-boy grin, repeating something Marines like to say.

Such talk worried Catherine Burke Ryan, who remembered seeing Emmet off, remembered praying all day in St Elizabeth Church on June 6, 1944, and many days thereafter despite the regular letters and assurances. She remembered the waiting. She knew this kind of talk worried Emmet too, though not quite in the same way.

What falls out of the sky? Trouble! the detective almost told his son, for the Airborne, too, were a proud group, but the thought stopped before it got to his lips.

Kelly. We tried calling him. We had the Coast Guard look at that island he lives on. The boat wasn't there. The boat wasn't anywhere. Where was he? He was back now, though, if the little old lady was right. What if he was away? But now he's back. The killings just plain stopped after the Farmer-Grayson-Brown incident. The marina had remembered seeing the boat about that time, but he'd left in the middle of the night - that night - and just vanished. Connection. Where had the boat been? Where was it now? What falls out of the sky? Trouble. That's exactly what had happened before. It just dropped out of the sky. Started and stopped.

His wife and son saw it again. Chewing on his food, his eyes focused on infinity, unable to turn his mind off as it churned his information over and over. Kelly's not really all that different from what I used to be, Ryan thought. One-Oh-One, the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Infantry Division (Airborne), who still swaggered in their baggy pants. Emmet had started off as a buck private, ended up with a late-war battlefield commission to the rank he still held, lieutenant. He remembered the pride of being something very special, the sense of invincibility that strangely came arm in arm with the terror of jumping out of an aircraft, being the first on enemy territory, in the dark, carrying light weapons only. The hardest men with the hardest mission. Mission. He'd been like that once. But no one had ever killed his lady... what might have happened, back in 1946, perhaps, if someone had done that to Catherine?

Nothing good.

He'd saved Doris Brown. He'd given her over to people he trusted. He'd seen one of them last night. He knows she's dead. He saved Pamela Madden, she died, and he was in the hospital, and a few weeks after he got out people started dying in a very expert way. A few weeks... to get in shape. Then the killings fust stopped and Kelly was nowhere to be found.

What if he's just been away?

He's back now.

Something's going to happen.

It wasn't a thing he could take to court. The only physical evidence they had was the imprint of a shoe size - a common brand of sneaker, of course, hundreds sold every day. Zilch. They had motive. But how many murders happened every year, and how many people followed up on it? They had opportunity. Could he account for his time in front of a jury? No one could. How, the detective thought, do you explain this to a judge - no, some judges would understand, but no jury would, not after a brand-new law-school graduate had explained a few things to them.

The case was solved, Ryan thought. He knew. But he had nothing for it but the knowledge that something was going to happen.

'Who's that, you suppose?' Mike asked.

'Some fisherman, looks like,' Burt observed from the driver's seat. He kept Henry'sEighth well clear of the white cabin cruiser. Sunset was close. They were almost too late to navigate the tangled waters into their laboratory, which looked very different at night. Burt gave the white boat a look. The guy with the fishing rod waved, a gesture he returned as he turned to port - left, as he thought of it. There was a big night ahead. Xantha wouldn't be much help. Well, maybe a little, when they broke for meals. A shame, really. Not really a bad girl, just dumb, badly spaced out. Maybe that's how they'd do it, just give her a nice taste of real good stuff before they broke out the netting and the cement blocks. They were sitting right in the open, right in the boat, and she didn't have a clue what they were for. Well, that wasn't his lookout.

Burt shook his head. There were more important things to consider. How would Mike and Phil feel about working under him? He'd have to be polite about it, of course. They'd understand. With the money involved, they ought to. He relaxed in his chair, sipping his beer and looking for the red marker buoy.

'Lookee, lookee,' Kelly breathed. It wasn't hard, really. Billy had told him all he needed to know. They had a place in there. They came in the Bay side, by boat, usually at night, and usually left the following morning. Turned in at the red lighted buoy. Hard as hell to find, almost impossible in the dark. Well, probably was if you didn't know the water. Kelly did. He reeled in the unbaited hook and lifted his binoculars. Size and color were right. Henry's Eighth was the name. Check. He settled back, watching it move south, then turn east at the red buoy. Kelly marked his chart. Twelve hours at least. That should be plenty of time. The problem with so secure a place is that it depended absolutely on secrecy which, once blown, became a fatal liability. People never learned. One way in, one way out. Another clever way to commit suicide. He'd wait for sunset. While waiting, Kelly got out a can of spray paint and put green stripes on his dinghy. The inside he painted black.