by Tom Clancy
He was out there somewhere, Caruso knew. Dominic Caruso was a young agent, hardly a year out of Quantico, but already in his second field assignment—unmarried FBI agents had no more choice in picking their assignments than a sparrow in a hurricane. His initial assignment had been in Newark, New Jersey, all of seven months, but Alabama was more to his taste. The weather was often miserable, but it wasn’t a beehive like that dirty city. His assignment now was to patrol the area west of Georgetown, to scan and wait for some hard bit of information. He wasn’t experienced enough to be an effective interviewer. The skill took years to develop, though Caruso thought he was pretty smart, and his college degree was in psychology.
Look for a car with a little girl in it, he told himself, one not in a car seat? he wondered. It might give her a better way to look out of the car, and maybe wave for help . . . So, no, the subject would probably have her tied up, cuffed, or wrapped with duct tape, and probably gagged. Some little girl, helpless and terrified. The thought made his hands tighten on the wheel. The radio crackled.
“Birmingham Base to all ‘7’ units. We have a report that the ‘7’ suspect might be driving a white utility van, probably a Ford, white in color, a little dirty. Alabama tags. If you see a vehicle matching that description, call it in, and we’ll get the local PD to check it out.”
Which meant, don’t flash your gum-ball light and pull him over yourself unless you have to, Caruso thought. It was time to do some thinking.
If I were one of those creatures, where would I be... ? Caruso slowed down. He thought . . . a place with decent road access. Not a main road per se . . . a decent secondary road, with a turnoff to something more private. Easy in, easy out. A place where the neighbors couldn’t see or hear what he’s up to . . .
He picked up his microphone.
“Caruso to Birmingham Base.”
“Yeah, Dominic,” responded the agent on the radio desk. The FBI radios were encrypted, and couldn’t be listened into by anyone without a good descrambler.
“The white van. How solid is that?”
“An elderly woman says that when she was out getting her paper, she saw a little girl, right description, talking to some guy next to a white van. The possible subject is male Caucasian, undetermined age, no other description. Ain’t much, Dom, but it’s all we got,” Special Agent Sandy Ellis reported.
“How many child abusers in the area?” Caruso asked next.
“A total of nineteen on the computer. We got people talking to all of them. Nothing developed yet. All we got, man.”
“Roger, Sandy. Out.”
More driving, more scanning. He wondered if this was anything like his brother Brian had experienced in Afghanistan: alone, hunting the enemy . . . He started looking for dirt paths off the road, maybe for one with recent tire tracks.
He looked down at the wallet-sized photo again. A sweet-faced little girl, just learning the ABC’s. A child for whom the world has always been a safe place, ruled by Mommy and Daddy, who went to Sunday school and made caterpillars out of egg cartons and pipe cleaners, and learned to sing “Jesus loves me, this I know / ’Cause the Bible tells me so . . .” His head swiveled left and right. There, about a hundred yards away, a dirt road leading into the woods. As he slowed, he saw that the path took a gentle S-curve, but the trees were thin, and he could see . . .
. . . cheap frame house . . . and next to it . . . the corner of a van . . . ? But this one was more beige than white . . .
Well, the little old lady who’d seen the little girl and the truck...how far away had it been...sunlight or shadows . . . ? So many things, so many inconstants, so many variables. As good as the FBI Academy was, it couldn’t prepare you for everything—hell, not even close to everything. That’s what they told you, too—told you that you had to trust your instinct and experience . . .
But Caruso had hardly a year’s experience.
Still . . .
He stopped the car.
“Caruso to Birmingham Base.”
“Yeah, Dominic,” Sandy Ellis responded.
Caruso radioed in his location. “I’m going 10-7 to walk in and take a look.”
“Roger that, Dom. Do you request backup?”
“Negative, Sandy. It’s probably nothing, just going to knock on the door and talk to the occupant.”
“Okay, I’ll stand by.”
Caruso didn’t have a portable radio—that was for local cops, not the Bureau—and so was now out of touch, except for his cell phone. His personal side arm was a Smith & Wesson 1076, snug in its holster on his right hip. He stepped out of the car, and closed the door without latching it, to avoid making noise. People always turned to see what made the noise of a slammed car door.
He was wearing a darker than olive green suit, a fortunate circumstance, Caruso thought, heading right. First he’d look at the van. He walked normally, but his eyes were locked on the windows of the shabby house, halfway hoping to see a face, but, on reflection, glad that none appeared.
The Ford van was about six years old, he judged. Minor dings and dents on the bodywork. The driver had backed it in. That put the sliding door close to the house, the sort of thing a carpenter or plumber might do. Or a man moving a small, resisting body. He kept his right hand free, and his coat unbuttoned. Quick-draw was something every cop in the world practiced, often in front of a mirror, though only a fool fired as part of the motion, because you just couldn’t hit anything that way.
Caruso took his time. The window was down on the driver-side door. The interior was almost entirely empty, bare, unpainted metal floor, the spare tire and jack . . . and a large roll of duct tape . . .
There was a lot of that stuff around. The free end of the roll was turned down, as though to make sure he’d be able to pull some off the roll without having to pick at it with his fingernails. A lot of people did that, too. There was, finally, a throw rug, tucked—no, taped, he saw, to the floor, just behind the right-side passenger seat... and was that some tape dangling from the metal seat framing? What might that mean?
Why there? Caruso wondered, but suddenly the skin on his forearms started tingling. It was a first for that sensation. He’d never made an arrest himself, had not yet been involved in a major felony case, at least not to any sort of conclusion. He’d worked fugitives in Newark, briefly, and made a total of three collars, always with another, more experienced agent to take the lead. He was more experienced now, a tiny bit seasoned... But not all that much, he reminded himself.
Caruso’s head turned to the house. His mind was moving quickly now. What did he really have? Not much. He’d looked into an ordinary light truck with no direct evidence at all in it, just an empty truck with a roll of duct tape and a small rug on the steel floor.
Even so . . .
The young agent took the cell phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed the office.
“FBI. Can I help you?” a female voice asked.
“Caruso for Ellis.” That moved things quickly.
“What you got, Dom?”
“White Ford Econoline van, Alabama tag Echo Romeo Six Five Zero One, parked at my location. Sandy—”
“Yeah, Dominic?”
“I’m going to knock on this guy’s door.”
“You want backup?”
Caruso took a second to think. “Affirmative—roger that.”
“There’s a county mountie about ten minutes away. Stand by,” Ellis advised.
“Roger, standing by.”
But a little girl’s life was on the line . . .
He headed toward the house, careful to keep out of the sight lines from the nearest windows. That’s when time stopped.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the scream. It was an awful, shrill sound, like someone looking at Death himself. His brain processed the information, and he suddenly found that his automatic pistol was in his hands, just in front of his sternum, pointed up into the sky, but in his hands even so. It had been a woman’s scream, he realized,
and something just went click inside his head.
As quickly as he could move without making much noise, he was on the porch, under the uneven, cheaply made roof. The front door was mostly wire screening to keep the bugs out. It needed painting, but so did the whole house. Probably a rental, and a cheap one at that. Looking through the screen he could see what seemed to be a corridor, leading left to the kitchen and right to a bathroom. He could see into it. A white porcelain toilet and a sink were all that was visible from this perspective.
He wondered if he had probable cause to enter the house, and instantly decided that he had enough. He pulled the door open and slipped in as stealthily as he could manage. A cheap and dirty rug leading down the corridor. He headed that way, gun up, senses sandpapered to ultimate alertness. As he moved, the angles of vision changed. The kitchen became invisible, but he could see into the bathroom better . . .
Penny Davidson was in the bathtub, naked, china blue eyes wide open, and her throat cut from ear to ear, with a whole body’s supply of blood covering her flat chest and the sides of the tub. So violently had her neck been slashed that it lay open like a second mouth.
Strangely, Caruso didn’t react physically. His eyes recorded the snapshot image, but for the moment all he thought about was that the man who’d done it was alive, and just a few feet away.
He realized that the noise he heard came from the left and ahead. The living room. A television. The subject would be in there. Might there be a second one? He didn’t have time for that, nor did he particularly care at the moment.
Slowly, carefully, his heart going like a trip-hammer, he edged forward and peeked around the corner. There he was, late thirties, white male, hair thinning, watching the TV with rapt attention—it was a horror movie, the scream must have come from that—and sipping Miller Lite beer from an aluminum can. His face was content and in no way aroused. He’d probably been through that, Dominic thought. And right in front of him—Jesus—was a butcher knife, a bloody one, on the coffee table. There was blood on his T-shirt, as if sprayed. From a little girl’s throat.
“The trouble with these mutts is that they never resist,” an instructor had told his class at the FBI Academy. “Oh, yeah, they’re John Wayne with an attitude when they have little kids in their hands, but they don’t resist armed cops—ever. And, you know, that’s a damned shame,” the instructor had concluded.
You are not going in to jail today. The thought entered Caruso’s mind seemingly of its own accord. His right thumb pulled back the spurless hammer until it clicked in place, putting his side arm fully in battery. His hands, he noted briefly, felt like ice.
Just at the corner, where you turned left to enter the room, was a battered old end table. Octagonal in shape, atop it was a transparent blue glass vase, a cheap one, maybe from the local Kmart, probably intended for flowers, but none were there today. Slowly, carefully, Caruso cocked his leg, then kicked the table over. The glass vase shattered loudly on the wooden floor.
The subject started violently, and turned to see an unexpected visitor in his house. His defensive response was instinctive rather than reasoned—he grabbed for the butcher knife on the coffee table. Caruso didn’t even have time to smile, though he knew the subject had made the final mistake of his life. It’s regarded as holy gospel in American police agencies that a man with a knife in his hand less than twenty-one feet away is an immediate and lethal threat. He even started to rise to his feet.
But he never made it.
Caruso’s finger depressed the trigger of his Smith, sending the first round straight through the subject’s heart. Two more followed in less than a second. His white T-shirt blossomed in red. He looked down at his chest, then up at Caruso, total surprise on his face, and then he sat back down, without speaking a word or crying out in pain.
Caruso’s next action was to reverse direction and check out the house’s only bedroom. Empty. So was the kitchen, the rear door still locked from the inside. There came a moment’s relief. Nobody else in the house. He took another look at the kidnapper. The eyes were still open. But Dominic had shot true. First he disarmed and handcuffed the dead body, because that was how he’d been trained. A check of the carotid pulse came next, but it was wasted energy. The guy saw nothing except the front door of hell. Caruso pulled his cell phone out and speed-dialed the office again.
“Dom?” Ellis asked when he got the phone.
“Yeah, Sandy, it’s me. I just took him down.”
“What? What do you mean?” Sandy Ellis asked urgently.
“The little girl, she’s here, dead, throat cut. I came in, and the guy came up at me with a knife. Took him down, man. He’s dead, too, dead as fuckin’ hell.”
“Jesus, Dominic! The county sheriff is just a couple of minutes out. Stand by.”
“Roger, standing by, Sandy.”
Not another minute passed before he heard the sound of a siren. Caruso went out on the porch. He decocked and holstered his automatic; then he took his FBI credentials out of his coat pocket, and held them up in his left hand as the sheriff approached, his service revolver out.
“It’s under control,” Caruso announced in as calm a voice as he could muster. He was pumped up now. He waved Sheriff Turner into the house, but stayed outside by himself while the local cop went inside. A minute or two later, the cop came back out, his own Smith & Wesson holstered.
Turner was the Hollywood image of a southern sheriff, tall, heavyset, with beefy arms, and a gun belt that dug deeply into his waistline. Except he was black. Wrong movie.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Want to give me a minute?” Caruso took a deep breath and thought for a moment how to tell the story. Turner’s understanding of it was important, because homicide was a local crime, and he had jurisdiction over it.
“Yeah.” Turner reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Kools. He offered one to Caruso, who shook his head.
The young agent sat down on the unpainted wooden deck and tried to put it all together in his head. What, exactly, had happened? What, exactly, had he just done? And how, exactly, was he supposed to explain it? The whispering part of his mind told him that he felt no regret at all. At least not for the subject. For Penelope Davidson—too damned late. An hour sooner? Maybe even a half hour? That little girl would not be going home tonight, would never more be tucked into bed by her mother, or hug her father. And so Special Agent Dominic Caruso felt no remorse at all. Just regret for being too slow.
“Can you talk?” Sheriff Turner asked.
“I was looking for a place like this one, and when I drove past, I saw the van parked...” Caruso began. Presently, he stood and led the sheriff into the house to relate the other details.
“Anyway, I tripped over the table. He saw me, and went for his knife, turned toward me—and so, I drew my pistol and shot the bastard. Three rounds, I think.”
“Uh-huh.” Turner went over to the body. The subject hadn’t bled much. All three rounds had gone straight through the heart, ending its ability to pump almost instantly.
Paul Turner wasn’t anywhere nearly as dumb as he looked to a government-trained agent. He looked at the body, and turned to look back at the doorway from which Caruso had taken his shots. His eyes measured distance and angle.
“So,” the sheriff said, “you tripped on that end table. The suspect sees you, grabs his knife, and you, being in fear of your life, take out your service pistol and take three quick shots, right?”
“That’s how it went down, yeah.”
“Uh-huh,” observed a man who got himself a deer almost every hunting season.
Sheriff Turner reached into his right-side pants pocket and pulled out his key chain. It was a gift from his father, a Pullman porter on the old Illinois Central. It was an old-fashioned one, with a 1948 silver dollar soldered onto it, the old kind, about an inch and a half across. He held it over the kidnapper’s chest, and the diameter of the old coin completely covered all three of the ent
rance wounds. His eyes took a very skeptical look, but then they drifted over toward the bathroom, and his eyes softened before he spoke his verdict on the incident.
“Then that’s how we’ll write it up. Nice shootin’, boy.”
FULLY A dozen police and FBI vehicles appeared within as many minutes. Soon thereafter came the lab truck from the Alabama Department of Public Safety to perform the crime-scene investigative work. A forensic photographer shot twenty-three rolls of 400-speed color film. The knife was taken from the subject’s hand and bagged for fingerprints and blood-type matching with the victim—it was all less than a formality, but criminal procedure was especially strict in a murder case. Finally, the body of the little girl was bagged and removed. Her parents would have to identify her, but blessedly her face was reasonably intact.
One of the last to arrive was Ben Harding, the Special Agent in Charge of the Birmingham Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An agent-involved shooting meant a formal report from his desk to that of Director Dan Murray, a distant friend. First, Harding came to make sure that Caruso was in decent physical and psychological shape. Then he went to pay respects to Paul Turner, and get his opinion of the shooting. Caruso watched from a distance, and saw Turner gesture through the incident, accompanied by nods from Harding. It was good that Sheriff Turner was giving his official stamp of approval. A captain of state troopers listened in as well, and he nodded, too.
The truth of the matter was that Dominic Caruso didn’t really give a damn. He knew he’d done the right thing, just an hour later than it ought to have been. Finally, Harding came over to his young agent.