by Tom Clancy
And what was he so worked up about? Pretlow asked herself on the way out.
8
Concealment
It was a combination of things. June 20 was a hot day, and a dull one. A photographer for the Baltimore Sun had a new camera, a Nikon to replace his venerable Honeywell Pentax, and while he mourned for his old one, the new camera, like a new love, had all sorts of new features to explore and enjoy. One of them was a whole collection of telephoto lenses that the distributor had thrown in. The Nikon was a new model, and the company had wanted it accepted within the news-photo community quickly, and so twenty photographers at various papers around the country had gotten free sets. Bob Preis had gotten his because of a Pulitzer Prize earned three years before. He was sitting in his car on Druid Lake Drive now, listening to his police radio, hoping for something interesting to happen, but nothing was. And so he was playing with his new camera, practicing his lens-switching skills. The Nikon was beautifully machined, and as an infantryman will learn to strip and clean his rifle in total darkness, Preis was changing from one lens to another by feel, forcing himself to scan the area just as a means of keeping his eyes off a procedure that had to become as natural and automatic as zipping his pants.
It was the crows that caught his attention. Located off-center in the irregularly shaped lake was a fountain. No example of architectural prowess, it was a plain concrete cylinder sticking six or eight feet up from the water’s surface, and in it were a few jets that shot water more or less straight up, though today shifting winds were scattering the water haphazardly in all directions. Crows were circling the water, trying occasionally to get in, but defeated by the swirling sheets of clear white spray, which appeared to frighten them. What were the crows interested in? His hands searched the camera case for the 200mm lens, which he attached to the camera body, bringing it up to his eyes smoothly.
“Sweet Jesus!” Preis instantly shot ten rapid frames. Only then did he get on his car radio, telling his base office to notify the police at once. He switched lenses again, this time selecting a 300mm, his longest. After finishing one roll, he threaded another, this one 100-speed color. He steadied the camera on the windowsill of the tired old Chevy and fired off another roll. One crow, he saw, got through the water, settling on—
“Oh, God, no . . . ” Because it was, after all, a human body there, a young woman, white as alabaster, and in the through-the-lens optics, he could see the crow right there, its clawed feet strutting around the body, its pitiless black eyes surveying what to the bird was nothing more than a large and diverse meal. Preis sat his camera down and shifted his car into gear. He violated two separate traffic laws getting as close to the fountain as he could, and in what was for him a rare case of humanity overcoming professionalism, slammed his hand down on the horn, hoping to startle the bird away. The bird looked up, but saw that whatever the noise came from, there was no immediate threat here, and it went back to selecting the first morsel for its iron-hard beak. It was then that Preis made a random but effective guess. He blinked his lights on and off, and to the bird that was unusual enough that it thought better of things and flew away. It might have been an owl, after all, and the meal wasn’t going anywhere. The bird would just wait for the threat to go away before returning to eat.
“What gives?” a cop asked, pulling alongside.
“There’s a body on the fountain. Look.” He handed the camera over.
“God,” the policeman breathed, handing it back after a long quiet moment. He made the radio call while Preis shot another roll. Police cars arrived, rather like the crows, one at a time, until eight were parked within sight of the fountain. A fire truck arrived in ten minutes, along with someone from the Department of Recreation and Parks, trailering a boat behind his pickup. This was quickly put into the water. Then came the forensics people with a lab truck, and it was time to go out to the fountain. Preis asked to go along—he was a better photographer than the one the cops used—but was rebuffed, and so he continued to record the event from the lake’s edge. There wouldn’t be another Pulitzer in this. There could have been, he thought. But the price of that would have involved immortalizing the instinctive act of a carrion bird, defiling the body of a girl in the midst of a major city. And that wasn’t worth the nightmares. He had enough of those already.
A crowd had already gathered. The police officers congregated in small knots, trading quiet comments and barbed attempts at grim humor. A TV news truck arrived from its studio on Television Hill just north of the park, which held the city zoo. It was a place Bob Preis often took his young children, and they especially liked the lion, not so originally named Leo, and the polar bears, and all the other predators that were safely confined behind steel bars and stone walls. Unlike some people, he thought, watching them lift the body and place it in a rubber bag. At least her torment was over. Preis changed rolls one more time to record the process of loading the body into the coroner’s station wagon. A Sun reporter was here now. He’d ask the questions while Preis determined how good his new camera really was back at his darkroom on Calvert Street.
“John, they found her,” Rosen said.
“Dead?” Kelly couldn’t look up. The tone of Sam’s voice had already told him the real news. It wasn’t a surprise, but the end of hope never comes easily to anyone.
Sam nodded. “Yeah.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. The police called me a few minutes ago, and I came over as quick as I could.”
“Thanks, pal.” If a human voice could sound dead, Sam told himself. Kelly’s did.
“I’m sorry, John. I—you know how I felt about her.”
“Yes, sir, I do. It’s not your fault, Sam.”
“You’re not eating.” Rosen gestured to the food tray.
“I’m not real hungry.”
“If you want to recover, you have to get your strength back.”
“Why?” Kelly asked, staring at the floor.
Rosen came over and grasped Kelly’s right hand. There wasn’t much to say. The surgeon didn’t have the stomach to look at Kelly’s face. He’d pieced enough together to know that his friend was blaming himself, and he didn’t know enough to talk to him about it, at least not yet. Death was a companion for Sam Rosen, M.D., F.A.C.S. Neurosurgeons dealt with major injuries to that most delicate part of the human anatomy, and the injuries to which they most often responded were frequently beyond anyone’s power to repair. But the unexpected death of a person one knows can be too much for anyone.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked after a minute or two.
“Not right now, Sam. Thanks.”
“Maybe a priest?”
“No, not now.”
“It wasn’t your fault, John.”
“Whose, then? She trusted me, Sam. I blew it.”
“The police want to talk to you some more. I told them tomorrow morning.”
He’d been through his second interview in the morning. Kelly had already told them much of what he knew. Her full name, her hometown, how they’d met. Yes, they had been intimate. Yes, she had been a prostitute, a runaway. Yes, her body had shown signs of abuse. But not everything. Somehow he’d been unable to volunteer information because to have done so would have entailed admitting to other men the dimensions of his failure. And so he had avoided some of their inquiries, claiming pain, which was quite real, but not real enough. He already sensed that the police didn’t like him, but that was okay. He didn’t much like himself at the moment.
“Okay.”
“I can—I should do some things with your medications. I’ve tried to go easy, I don’t like overdoing the things, but they’ll help you relax, John.”
“Dope me up more?” Kelly’s head lifted, and the expression was not something that Rosen ever wanted to see again. “You think that’s really going to make a difference, Sam?”
Rosen looked away, unable to meet his eyes now that it was possible to do so. “You’re ready for a regular bed. I
’ll have you moved into one in a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
The surgeon wanted to say more, but couldn’t find the right words. He left without any others.
It took Sandy O’Toole and two orderlies to move him, as carefully as they could, onto a standard hospital bed. She cranked up the head portion to relieve the pressure on his injured shoulder.
“I heard,” she told him. It bothered her that his grief wasn’t right. He was a tough man, but not a fool. Perhaps he was one of those men who did his weeping alone, but she was sure he hadn’t done it yet. And that was necessary, she knew. Tears released poisons from inside. poisons which if not released could be as deadly as the real kind. The nurse sat beside his bed. “I’m a widow,” she told him.
“Vietnam?”
“Yes, Tim was a captain in the First Cavalry.”
“I’m sorry,” Kelly said without turning his head. “They saved my butt once.”
“It’s hard. I know.”
“Last November I lost Tish, and now—”
“Sarah told me. Mr. Kelly—”
“John,” he said softly. He couldn’t find it in himself to be gruff to her.
“Thank you, John. My name is Sandy. Bad luck does not make a bad person,” she told him in a voice that meant what it said, though it didn’t quite sound that way.
“It wasn’t luck. She told me it was a dangerous place and I took her there anyway because I wanted to see for myself.”
“You almost got yourself killed trying to protect her.”
“I didn’t protect her, Sandy. I killed her.” Kelly’s eyes were wide open now, looking at the ceiling. “I was careless and stupid and I killed her.”
“Other people killed her, and other people tried to kill you. You’re a victim.”
“Not a victim. Just a fool.”
We’ll save that for later, Nurse O’Toole told herself. “What sort of girl was she, John?”
“Unlucky.” Kelly made an effort to look at her face, but that just made it worse. He gave the nurse a brief synopsis of the life of Pamela Starr Madden, deceased.
“So after all the men who hurt her or used her, you gave her something that nobody else did.” O’Toole paused. waiting for a reply and getting none. “You gave her love, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Kelly’s body shuddered for a moment. “Yes, I did love her.”
“Let it out,” the nurse told him. “You have to.”
First he closed his eyes. Then he shook his head. “I can’t.”
This would be a difficult patient, she told herself. The cult of manhood was a mystery to her. She’d seen it in her husband, who had served a tour in Vietnam as a lieutenant, then rotated back again as a company commander. He hadn’t relished it, hadn’t looked forward to it, but he hadn’t shrunk from it. It was part of the job, he’d told her on their wedding night, two months before he’d left. A stupid, wasteful job that had cost her a husband and, she feared, her life. Who really cared what happened in a place so far away? And yet it had been important to Tim. Whatever that force had been, its legacy to her was emptiness, and it had no more real meaning than the grim pain she saw on the face of her patient. O’Toole would have known more about that pain if she’d been able to take her thought one step further.
“That was really stupid.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Tucker agreed. “But I can’t have my girls leaving without permission, can I?”
“You ever hear of burying them?”
“Anybody can do that.” The man smiled in the darkness, watching the movie. They were in the back row of a downtown theater, a 1930s film palace that was gradually falling to ruin, and had started running films at 9 A.M. just to keep up with the painting bill. It was still a good place for a covert meeting with a confidential informant, which was how this meeting would go on the officer’s time sheet.
“Sloppy not killing the guy, too.”
“Will he be a problem?” Tucker asked.
“No. He didn’t see anything, did he?”
“You tell me, man.”
“I can’t get that close to the case, remember?” The man paused for a handful of popcorn and munched away his irritation. “He’s known to the department. Ex-Navy guy, skin diver, lives over on the Eastern Shore somewhere, sort of a rich beach bum from what I gather. The first interview didn’t develop anything at all. Ryan and Douglas are going to be working the case now, but it doesn’t look like they have much of anything to work with.”
“That’s about what she said when we . . . ‘talked’ to her. He picked her up, and it looks like they had a mighty good time together, but her supply of pills ran out, she said, and she had him bring her in town to score some ’ludes. So, no harm done?”
“Probably not, but let’s try to control loose ends, okay?”
“You want me to get him in the hospital?” Tucker asked lightly. “I can probably arrange that.”
“No! You damned fool, this is going on the books as a robbery. If anything else happens, it just gets bigger. We don’t want that. Leave him be. He doesn’t know anything.”
“So he’s not a problem?” Tucker wanted to be clear on that.
“No. But try to remember that you can’t open a murder investigation without a body.”
“I have to keep my people in line.”
“From what I hear you did to her—”
“Just keeping them in line,” Tucker reemphasized. “Making an example, like. You do that right and you don’t have any more problems for a while. You’re not a part of that. Why does it bother you?”
Another handful of popcorn helped him bend to the logic of the moment. “What do you have for me?”
Tucker smiled in the darkness. “Mr. Piaggi is starting to like doing business with me.”
A grunt in the darkness. “I wouldn’t trust him.”
“It does get complicated, doesn’t it?” Tucker paused. “But I need his connections. We’re about to hit the big time.”
“How long?”
“Soon,” Tucker said judiciously. “Next step, I think, we start feeding stuff north. Tony is up there talking to some people today, matter of fact.”
“What about now? I could use something juicy.”
“Three guys with a ton of grass good enough?” Tucker asked.
“Do they know about you?”
“No, but I know about them.” That was the point, after all—his organization was tight. Only a handful of people knew who he was, and those people knew what would happen if they got a little loose. You just had to have the stones to enforce discipline.
“Take it easy on him,” Rosen said outside the private room. “He’s recovering from a major injury and he’s still on several medications. He’s really not capable of talking to you with a full deck.”
“I have my job, too, doctor.” It was a new officer on the case now, a detective sergeant named Tom Douglas. He was about forty, and looked every bit as tired as Kelly, Rosen thought, and every bit as angry.
“I understand that. But he’s been badly hurt. plus the shock of what happened to his girlfriend.”
“The quicker we get the information we need, the better our chances are to find the bastards. Your duty is to the living, sir. Mine is to the dead.”
“If you want my medical opinion, he’s not really capable of helping you right now. He’s been through too much. He’s clinically depressed, and that has implications for his physical recovery.”
“Are you telling me that you want to sit in?” Douglas asked. Just what I need—an amateur Sherlock to watch over us. But that was a battle he couldn’t win and wouldn’t bother to fight.
“I’ll feel better if I can keep an eye on things. Go easy on him,” Sam repeated, opening the door.
“Mr. Kelly, we’re sorry,” the detective said after introducing himself. Douglas opened his notebook. The case had been booted up the ladder to his office because of its high profile. The first-page color photo on the Evening
Sun had come as close to the pornographic as anything the media could publish, and the mayor had personally called for action on this one. Because of that, Douglas had taken the case. wondering how long the mayor’s interest would last. Not very, the detective thought. The only thing that occupied a politician’s mind for more than a week was getting and holding votes. This case had more spin on it than one of Mike Cuellar’s screwballs, but it was his case, and what was always the worst part was about to take place. “Two nights ago you were in the company of a young lady named Pamela Madden?”
“Yes.” Kelly’s eyes were closed when Nurse O’Toole came in with his morning antibiotic dose. She was surprised to see the two other men there and stopped in the doorway, not knowing if she should interrupt or not.
“Mr. Kelly, yesterday afternoon we discovered the body of a young woman who fits the physical description of Miss Madden.” Douglas reached into his coat pocket.
“No!” Rosen said, getting out of his chair.
“Is this she?” Douglas asked, holding the photo before Kelly’s face, hoping that his proper grammar would somehow lessen the impact.
“God damn it!” The surgeon turned the cop around and pushed him against the wall. In the process the photo dropped on the patient’s chest.
Kelly’s eyes went wide in horror. His body sprang upwards, fighting the restraints. Then he collapsed, his skin pasty white. All in the room turned away but for the nurse, whose eyes were locked on her patient.
“Look, doc, I—” Douglas tried to say.
“Get the hell out of my hospital!” Rosen fairly screamed. “You can kill somebody with that kind of shock! Why didn’t you tell me—”
“He has to identify—”