by Tom Clancy
“We’ll hold her overnight on public drunkenness . . . we have her dead-bang on possession, right?”
“Cap’n, all I had to do was ask. She handed the stuff to me.”
“Okay, process her all the way through.”
“And then, sir?”
“Like helicopter rides?”
He picked a different marina this time. It turned out to be pretty easy, with so many boats always out fishing or partying, and this one had plenty of guest slips for transient boats which in the summer season plied up and down the coast, stopping off on the way for food and fuel and rest much as motorists did. The dockmaster watched him move in expertly to his third-largest guest slip, which didn’t always happen with the owners of the larger cruisers. He was more surprised to see the youth of the owner.
“How long you plan to be here?” the man asked, helping with the lines.
“Couple of days. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
“Mind if I pay cash?”
“We honor cash,” the dockmaster assured him.
Kelly peeled off the bills and announced that he’d be sleeping aboard this night. He didn’t say what would be happening the next day.
34
Stalking
“We missed something, Em,” Douglas announced at eight-ten in the morning.
“What was it this time?” Ryan asked. Missing something wasn’t exactly a new happening in their business.
“How they knew she was in Pittsburgh. I called that Sergeant Meyer, had ’em check the long-distance charges on the house phone. None, not a single outgoing call for the last month.”
The detective lieutenant stubbed out his cigarette. “You have to assume that our friend Henry knew where she was from. He had two girls get loose from him, he probably took the time to ask where they were from. You’re right,” Ryan said after a second’s thought. “He probably assumed she was dead.”
“Who knew she was there?”
“The people who took her there. They sure as hell didn’t tell anyone.”
“Kelly?”
“Found out yesterday over at Hopkins, he was out of the country.”
“Oh, really? Where?”
“The nurse, O’Toole, she says she knows but she isn’t allowed to say, whatever the hell that means.” He paused. “Back to Pittsburgh.”
“The story is, Sergeant Meyer’s dad is a preacher. He was counseling the girl and told his son a little of what he knew. Okay. The sergeant goes up the chain to his captain. The Captain knows Frank Allen, and the sarge calls him for advice on who’s running the case. Frank refers him to us. Meyer didn’t talk to anybody else.” Douglas lit up one of his own. “So how did the info get to our friends?”
This was entirely normal, but not particularly comfortable. Now both men thought that they had a breaking case. This was happening, it was breaking open. Not unusually, things were now happening too fast for the analytical process that was necessary to make sense of it all.
“As we’ve thought all along, they have somebody inside.”
“Frank?” Douglas asked. “He’s never been connected with any of the cases. He doesn’t even have access to the information that our friends would need.” Which was true. The Helen Waters case had started in the Western District with one of Allen’s junior detectives, but the Chief had turned it over to Ryan and Douglas almost immediately because of the degree of violence involved. “I suppose you could call this progress, Em. Now we’re sure. There has to be a leak inside the Department.”
“What other good news do we have?”
The State Police only had three helicopters, all Bell Jet Rangers, and were still learning how to make use of them. Getting one was not the most trivial of exercises, but the Captain running Barracks “V” was a senior man who ran a quiet county—this was less a matter of his competence than of the nature of his area, but police hierarchies tend to place stock in results, however obtained. The helicopter arrived on the barracks helicopter pad at a quarter to nine. Captain Ernest Joy and Trooper 1/c Freeland were waiting. Neither had taken a helicopter ride before, and both were a little nervous when they saw how small the aircraft was. They always look smaller close up, and smaller still on the inside. Mainly used for Medevac missions, the aircraft had a pilot and a paramedic, both of whom were gun-toting State Police officers in sporty flight suits that went well, they thought, with their shoulder holsters and aviator shades. The standard safety lecture took a total of ninety seconds, delivered so quickly as to be incomprehensible. The ground-pounders strapped in, and the helicopter spooled up. The pilot decided against jazzing up the ride. The senior man was a captain, after all, and cleaning vomit out of the back was a drag.
“Where to?” he asked over the intercom.
“Bloodsworth Island,” Captain Joy told him.
“Roger that,” the pilot replied as he thought an aviator ought, turning southeast and lowering the nose. It didn’t take long.
The world looks different from above, and the first time people go up in helicopters the reaction is always the same. The takeoff, rather like jerking aloft in an amusement-park cable-car ride, is initially startling, but then the fascination begins. The world transformed itself before the eyes of both officers, and it was as though it all suddenly made sense. They could see the roads and the farms all laid out like a map. Freeland grasped it first. Knowing his territory as he did, he instantly saw that his mental picture of it was flawed; his idea of how things really were was not quite right. He was only a thousand feet above it, a linear distance his car traversed in seconds, but this perspective was new, and he immediately started learning from it.
“That’s where I found her,” he told the Captain over the intercom.
“Long way from where we’re going. You think she walked that far?”
“No, sir.” But it wasn’t that far from the water, was it? Perhaps two miles away, they saw the old dock of a farm up for sale, and that was less than five miles from where they were heading, scarcely two minutes’ flying time. The Chesapeake Bay was a wide blue band now, under the morning haze. To the northwest was the large expanse of Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center, and they could both see aircraft flying there—a matter of concern to the pilot, who kept a wary eye out for low-flying aircraft. The Navy jocks liked to smoke in low.
“Straight ahead,” he said. The paramedic pointed so that the passengers would know where straight-ahead was. “Sure looks different from up here,” Freeland said, a boy’s wonder in his voice. “I fish around there. From the surface it just looks like marshes.”
But it didn’t now. From a thousand feet it looked like islands at first, connected by silt and grass, but islands for all that. As they got closer, the islands took on regular shapes, lozengelike at first, and then with the fine lines of ships, grown over, surrounded by grass and reeds.
“Jeez, there’s a bunch of ’em,” the pilot observed. He’d rarely flown down here, and then mostly at night with accident cases.
“World War One,” the Captain said. “My father said they’re leftovers from the war, the ones the Germans didn’t get.”
“What exactly are we looking for?”
“Not sure, maybe a boat. We picked up a druggie yesterday,” the Captain explained. “Said there was a lab in there, and three dead people.”
“No shit? A drug lab in there?”
“That’s what the lady said,” Freeland confirmed, learning something else. As forbidding as it looked from the surface, there were channels in here. Probably a hell of a good place to go crabbing. From the deck of his fishing boat, it looked like one massive island, but not from up here. Wasn’t that interesting?
“Got a flash down this way.” The paramedic pointed the pilot over to the right. “Off glass or something.”
“Let’s check it out.” The stick went right and down a little as he brought the Jet Ranger down. “Yeah, I got a boat by those three.”
“Check it out,” the paramedic ordered with a
grin.
“You got it.” It would be a chance to do some real flying. A former Huey driver from the 1st Air Cav, he loved being able to play with his aircraft. Anyone could fly straight and level, after all. He circled the place first, checking winds, then lowered his collective a little, easing the chopper down to about two hundred feet.
“Call it an eighteen-footer,” Freeland said, and they could see the white nylon line that held it fast to the remains of the ship.
“Lower,” the Captain commanded. In a few seconds they were fifty feet over the deck of the derelict. The boat was empty. There was a beer cooler, and some other stuff piled up in the back, but nothing else. The aircraft jerked as a couple of birds flew out of the ruined superstructure of the ship. The pilot instinctively maneuvered to avoid them. One crow sucked into his engine intake could make them a permanent part of this man-made swamp.
“Whoever owns that boat sure isn’t real interested in us,” he said over the intercom. In the back, Freeland mimed three shots with his hand. The Captain nodded.
“I think you may be right, Ben.” To the pilot: “Can you mark the exact position on a map?”
“Right.” He considered the possibility of going into a low hover and dropping them off on the deck. Simple enough if they had been back in the Cav, it looked too dangerous for this situation. The paramedic pulled out a chart and made the appropriate notations. “Seen what you need?”
“Yeah, head back.”
Twenty minutes later, Captain Joy was on the phone.
“Coast Guard, Thomas Point.”
“This is Captain Joy, State Police. We need a little help.” He explained on for a few minutes.
“Take about ninety minutes,” Warrant Officer English told him.
“That’d be fine.”
Kelly called a Yellow Cab, which picked him up at the marina entrance. His first stop of the day was a rather disreputable business establishment called Kolonel Klunker, where he rented a 1959 Volkswagen, prepaying it for a month, with no mileage charge.
“Thank you, Mr. Aiello,” the man said to a smiling Kelly, who was using the ID from a man who no longer needed it. He drove the car back to the marina and started unloading the things he needed. Nobody paid much attention, and in fifteen minutes the Beetle was gone.
Kelly took the opportunity to drive through the area he’d be hunting, checking traffic patterns. It was agreeably vacant, a part of the city he’d never visited before, off a bleak industrial thoroughfare called O’Donnell Street, a place where nobody lived and few would want to. The air was laden with the smells of various chemicals, few of them pleasant. Not as busy as it once had been, many of the buildings in the district looked unused. More to the point, there was much open ground here, many buildings separated from one another by flat areas of bare dirt which trucks used for a convenient place to reverse direction. No kids playing sandlot ball, not a single house in sight, and because of that, not a single police car to be seen. Rather a clever ploy on the part of his enemies, Kelly thought, at least from one perspective. The place he was interested in was a single freestanding building with a half-destroyed sign over the entrance. The back of it was just a blank wall. There were only three doors, and though they were on two different walls, all could be observed from a single point, and to Kelly’s rear was another vacant building, a tall concrete structure with plenty of broken windows. His initial reconnaissance complete, Kelly headed north.
Oreza was heading south. He’d already been partway there, conducting a routine patrol and wondering why the hell the Coast Guard didn’t start up a ministation farther down on the Eastern Shore, or maybe by Cove Point Light, where there was an existing station for the guys who spent their waking hours, if any, making sure the light bulb at the top of the tower worked. That wasn’t especially demanding duty to Oreza’s mind. though it was probably all right for the kid who ran the place. His wife had just delivered twins, after all, and the Coast Guard was a family-oriented branch of the military.
He was letting one of his junior seamen do the driving, enjoying the morning, standing outside the cramped wheelhouse, drinking some of his home-brewed coffee.
“Radio,” one of the crewmen said.
Oreza went inside and took the microphone. “Four-One Alfa here.”
“Four-One Alfa, this is English at Thomas Base. Your pickup is at a dock at Dame’s Choice. You’ll see cop cars there. Got an ETA?”
“Call it twenty or twenty-five, Mr. E.”
“Roger that. Out.”
“Come left,” Oreza said, looking at his chart. The water looked plenty deep. “One-six-five.”
“One-six-five, aye.”
Xantha was more or less sober, though weak. Her dark skin had a gray pallor to it, and she complained of a splitting headache that analgesics had scarcely touched. She was aware that she was under arrest now, and that her rap sheet had arrived on teletype. She was also canny enough to have requested the presence of a lawyer. Strangely, this had not bothered the police very much.
“My client,” the attorney said, “is willing to cooperate.” The agreement had taken all of ten minutes to strike. If she was telling the truth, and if she was not involved in a major felony, the possession charge against her would be dropped, subject to her enrollment in a treatment program. It was as good a deal as anyone had offered Xantha Matthews in some years. It was immediately apparent why this was true.
“They was gonna kill me!” she said, remembering it all now that she was outside the influence of the barbiturates, and now that her attorney gave her permission to speak.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Captain Joy asked.
“They dead. He killed ’em. the white boy, shot ’em dead. An’ he left the drugs, whole shitload of ’em.”
“Tell us about the white man,” Joy asked, with a look to Freeland that ought to have been disbelieving but was not.
“Big dude, like him”—she pointed to Freeland—“but he face all green like a leaf. He blindfold me af’er he took me down, then he put me on that pier an’ tol’ me to catch a bus or somethin’.”
“How do you know he was white?”
“Wrists was white. Hands was green, but not up here, like,” she said, indicating on her own arms. “He wear green clothes with stripes on ’em, like a soldier, carry a big .45. I was asleep when he shoot, that wake me up, see? Make me get dress, take me away, drop me off. he boat just go away.”
“What kind of boat?”
“Big white one, tall, like, big, like thirty feet lon’.”
“Xantha, how do you know they were going to kill you?”
“White boy say so, he show me the things in the boat, the little one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fishnet shit, like, and cement blocks. He say they tell him they do it before.”
The lawyer decided it was his turn to speak. “Gentlemen, my client has information about what may be a major criminal operation. She may require protection, and in return for her assistance, we would like to have state funding for her treatment.”
“Counselor,” Joy replied quietly, “if this is what it sounds like, I’ll fund it out of my own budget. May I suggest, sir, that we keep her in our lockup for the time being? For her own safety, the need for which seems quite apparent, sir.” The State Police captain had been negotiating with lawyers for years, and had started sounding like one, Freeland thought.
“The food here is fo’ shit!” Xantha said, her eyes closed in pain.
“We’ll take care of that, too,” Joy promised her.
“I think she needs some medical help,” the lawyer noted. “How can she get it here?”
“Doctor Paige will be here right after lunch to see her. Counselor, your client is in no condition to look after herself now. All charges against her are dropped pending verification of her story. You’ll get everything you want, in return for her cooperation. I can’t do any more than that.”
“My client agrees to your conditions and suggesti
ons,” the lawyer said without consulting her. The county would even pay his fee. Besides, he felt as though he might be doing the world a good deed. It was quite a change from getting drunk drivers off.
“There’s a shower that way. Why not get her cleaned up? You may also wish to get her some decent things to wear. Give us the bill.”
“A pleasure doing business with you, Captain Joy,” he said as the barracks commander left for Freeland’s car.
“Ben, you really fell into something. You handled her real nice. I won’t forget. Now show me how fast this beast goes.”
“You got it, Cap’n.” Freeland engaged the lights before passing seventy. They made it to the dock just as the Coast Guard turned out of the main channel.
The man wore lieutenant’s bars—though he called himself a captain—and Oreza saluted him as he came aboard. Both police officers were given life jackets to wear because Coast Guard regulations required them on small boats, and then Joy showed him the chart.
“Think you can get in there?”
“No, but our launch can. What gives?”
“A possible triple homicide, possible drug involvement. We overflew the area this morning. There’s a fishing boat right here.”
Oreza nodded as impassively as possible and took the wheel himself, pushing the throttles to the stops. It was a bare five miles to the graveyard—that was how Oreza thought of it—and he plotted his approach as carefully as possible.
“No closer? The tide’s in,” Freeland said.
“That’s the problem. Place like this, you go it at low water so’s in case you beach you can float off. From here on we use the launch.” Wheels were turning in his mind while his crewmen got the fourteen-foot launch deployed. Months earlier, that stormy night with Lieutenant Charon from Baltimore, a possible drug deal that he’d expected to take place somewhere on the Bay. Some real serious guys, he’d told Portagee. Oreza already wondered if there might be a connection.