“Deal.” Ryan wondered how many people were alive because of the people in this room. He was certain that this surgeon could be a rich man in private practice. Jack understood him, understood why he was here, and knew that his father-in-law wouldn’t. He sat for a few minutes at Sally’s side, listening to the machine breathe for her through the plastic tube. The nurse-practitioner overseeing the case smiled at him around her mask. He kissed Sally’s bruised forehead before leaving. Jack felt better now, better about almost everything. But one item remained. The people who had done this to his little girl.
“It had wheelchair tags,” the clerk in the 7-Eleven was saying, “but the dude who drove it didn’t look crippled or anything.”
“You remember what he looked like?” Special Agent Nick Capitano and a major from the Maryland State Police were interviewing the witness.
“Yeah, he was ’bout as black as me. Tall dude. He wore sunglasses, the mirror kind. Had a beard, too. There was always at least one other dude in the truck, but I never got a look at him — black man, that’s all I can say.”
“What did he wear?”
“Jeans and a brown leather jacket, I think. You know, like a construction worker.”
“Shoes or boots?” the Major asked.
“Never did see that,” the clerk said after a moment.
“How about jewelry, T-shirt with a pattern, anything special or different about him?”
“No, nothin’ I remember.”
“What did he do here?”
“He always bought a six-pack of Coke Classic. Once or twice he got some Twinkies, but he always got hisself the Cokes.”
“What did he sound like? Anything special?”
The clerk shook her head. “Nah, just a dude, y’know?”
“Do you think you could recognize him again?” Capitano asked.
“Maybe — we get a lot of folks through here, lotta regulars, lotta strangers, y’know?”
“Would you mind looking through some pictures?” the agent went on.
“Gotta clear it with the boss. I mean, I need the job, but you say this chump tried to kill a little girl — yeah, sure, I’ll help ya.”
“We’ll clear it with the boss,” the Major assured her. “You won’t lose pay over it.”
“Gloves,” she said, looking up. “Forgot to say that. He wore work gloves. Leather ones, I think.” Gloves, both men wrote in their notebooks.
“Thank you, ma’am. We’ll call you tonight. A car will pick you up tomorrow morning so you can look at some pictures for us,” the FBI agent said.
“Pick me up?” The clerk was surprised.
“You bet.” Manpower was not a factor on this case. The agent who picked her up would pick her brain again on the drive into D.C. The two investigators left. The Major drove his unmarked State Police car.
Capitano checked his notes. This wasn’t bad for a first interview. He, the Major, and fifteen others had spent the day interviewing people in stores and shops up and down five miles of Ritchie Highway. Four people thought they remembered the van, but this was the first person who had seen one of its occupants closely enough for a description. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. They already had the shooter ID’d. Cathy Ryan had recognized Sean Miller’s face — thought she did, the agent corrected himself. If it had been Miller, he had a beard now, on the brown side of black and neatly trimmed. An artist would try to re-create that.
Twenty more agents and detectives had spent their day at the three local airports, showing photos to every ticket agent and gate clerk. They’d come up blank, but they hadn’t had a description of Miller then. Tomorrow they would try again. A computer check was being made of international flights that connected to flights to Ireland, and domestic flights that connected to international ones. Capitano was happy that he didn’t have to run all of those down. It would take weeks, and the chance of getting an ID from an airport worker diminished measurably every hour.
The van had been identified for more than a day, off the FBI’s computer. It had been stolen a month before in New York City, repainted — professionally, by the look of it — and given new tags. Several sets of them, since the handicap tags found on it yesterday had been stolen less than two days before from a nursing home’s van in Hagerstown, Maryland, a hundred miles away. Everything about the crime said it was a professional job from start to finish. Switching cars at the shopping center had been a brilliant finale to a perfectly planned and executed operation. Capitano and the Major were able to restrain their admiration, but they had to make an objective assessment of the people they were after. These weren’t common thugs. They were professionals in every perverted sense of the word.
“You suppose they got the van themselves?” Capitano asked the Major.
The State Police investigator grunted. “There’s some outfit in Pennsylvania that steals them from all over the Northeast, paints them, reworks the interior, and sells ’em. You guys are looking for them, remember?”
“I’ve heard a few things about the investigation, but that’s not my territory. It’s being looked at. Personally, I think they did it themselves. Why risk a connection with somebody else?”
“Yeah,” the Major agreed reluctantly. The van had already been checked out by state and federal forensic experts. Not a single fingerprint had been found. The vehicle had been thoroughly cleaned, down to the knobs on the window handles. The technicians found nothing that could lead them to the criminals. Now the dirt and fabric fibers vacuumed from the van’s carpet were being analyzed in Washington, but this was the sort of clue that worked reliably only on TV. If the people had been smart enough to clean out the van, they were almost certainly smart enough to burn the clothing they’d worn. Everything was being checked out anyway, because even the smartest people did make mistakes.
“You heard anything on the ballistics yet?” the Major asked, turning the car onto Rowe Boulevard.
“Oughta be waiting for us.” They’d found almost twenty nine-millimeter cartridge cases to go along with the two usable bullets recovered from the Porsche, and the one that had gone through Trooper Fontana’s chest and lodged in the back seat of his wrecked car. These had gone directly to the FBI laboratory in Washington for analysis. The evidence would tell them that the weapon was a submachine gun, which they already knew, but might give them a type, which they didn’t yet know. The cartridge cases were Belgian-made, from the Fabrique Nationale at Liege. They might be able to identify the lot number, but FN made so many millions of such rounds per year, which were shipped and reshipped all over the world, that the lead was a slim one. Very often such shipments simply disappeared, mainly from sloppy — or creative — bookkeeping.
“How many black groups are known to have contact with these ULA characters?”
“None,” Capitano replied. “That’s something we are going to have to establish.”
“Great.”
Ryan arrived home to find an unmarked car and a liveried State Police cruiser in his driveway. Jack’s own FBI interview wasn’t a long one. It hadn’t taken long to confirm the fact that he quite simply knew nothing about the attempt on his family or himself.
“Any idea where they are?” he asked finally.
“We’re checking airports,” the agent answered. “If these guys are as smart as they look, they’re long gone.”
“They’re smart, all right,” Ryan noted sourly. “What about the one you caught?”
“He’s doing one hell of a good imitation of a clam. He has a lawyer now, of course, and the lawyer is telling him to keep his mouth shut. You can depend on lawyers for that.”
“Where’d the lawyer come from?”
“Public defender’s office. It’s a rule, remember. You hold a suspect for any length of time, he has to have a lawyer. I don’t think it matters. He probably isn’t talking to the lawyer either. We have him on a state weapons violation and federal immigration laws. He goes back to the U.K. as soon as the paperwork gets done. Maybe two weeks or so, depending on if the attorney contests things.” The agent closed his notebook. “You never know, maybe he’ll start talking, but don’t count on it. The word we get from the Brits is that he’s not real bright anyway. He’s the Irish version of a street hood, very good with weapons but a little slow upstairs.”
“So if he’s dumb, how come –”
“How come he’s good at what he does? How smart do you have to be to kill somebody? Clark’s a sociopathic personality. He has very little in the way of feelings. Some people are like that. They don’t relate to the people around them as being real people. They see them as objects, and since they’re only objects, whatever happens to them is not important. Once I met a hit man who killed four people — just the ones we know about — and didn’t bat an eye, far as I could tell; but he cried like a baby when we told him his cat died. People like that don’t even understand why they get sent to prison; they really don’t understand,” he concluded. “Those are the scary ones.”