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 I 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.”
“Nice 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, someday.”
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?” Billy 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 to 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 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’re welcome, 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, but merely motioned 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 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 smited—“I guess I did.”
“I didn’t like Europe all that much myself, but I didn’t see the nice parts.”
“What outfit?”
“Easy 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 cle
ars 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.”