It was good to be back at work. Sandy was running her floor again, her two-week absence written off by Sam Rosen as a special-duty assignment, which his status as a department chairman guaranteed would pass without question. The post-op patients were the usual collection of major and minor cases. Sandy’s team organized and managed their care. Two of her fellow nurses asked a few questions about her absence. She answered merely by saying she’d done a special research project for Dr Rosen, and that was enough, especially with a full and busy patient load. The other members of the nursing team saw that she was somewhat distracted. There was a distant look in her eyes from time to time, her thoughts elsewhere, dwelling on something. They didn’t know what. Perhaps a man, they all hoped, glad to have the team leader back. Sandy was better at handling the surgeons than anyone else on the service, and with Professor Rosen backing her up, it made for a comfortable routine.
‘So, you replace Billy and Rick yet?’ Morello asked.
‘That’ll take a while, Eddie,’ Henry replied. ‘This is going to mess up our deliveries.’
‘Aw, crap? You got that too complicated anyway.’
‘Back off, Eddie,’ Tony Piaggi said. ‘Henry has a good routine set up. It’s safe and it works -‘
‘And it’s too complicated. Who’s gonna take care of Philadelphia now?’ Morello demanded.
‘We’re working on that,’ Tony answered.
‘All you’re doing is dropping the stuff off and collecting the money, for Crissake! They’re not going to rip anybody off, we’re dealing with business people, remember?’ Not street niggers, he had the good sense not to add. That part of the message got across anyway. No offense, Henry.
Piaggi refilled the wineglasses. It was a gesture Morello found both patronizing and irritating.
‘Look,’ Morello said, leaning forward. ‘I helped set up this deal, remember? You might not even be starting with Philly yet if it wasn’t for me.’
‘What are you saying, Eddie?’
‘I’ll make your damn delivery while Henry gets his shit back together. How hard is it? Shit, you got broads doing it for you’ Show a little panache, Morello thought, show them I have what it takes. Hell, at least he’d show the guys in Philly, and maybe they could do for him what Tony wouldn’t do. Yeah.
‘Sure you want to take the chance, Eddie?’ Henry asked with an inward smile. This wop was so easy to predict.
‘Fuck, yeah.’
‘Okay,’ Tony said with a display of being impressed. ‘You make the call and set it up.’ Henry was right, Piaggi told himself. It had been Eddie all along, making his own move. How foolish. How easily dealt with.
‘Still nothing,’ Emmet Ryan said, summarizing the Invisible Man Case. ‘All this evidence – and nothing.’
‘Only thing that makes sense, Em, is somebody was making a move.’ Murders didn’t just start and stop. There had to be a reason. The reason might be hard, even impossible to discover in many cases, but an organized and careful series of murders was a different story. It came down to two possibilities. One was that someone had launched a series of killings to cover the real target. That target had to be William Grayson, who had dropped from the face of the earth, probably never to return alive, and whose body might someday be discovered – or not. Somebody very angry about something, very careful, and very skilled, and that somebody – the Invisible Man – had taken it to that point and stopped there.
How likely was that? Ryan asked himself. The answer was impossible to evaluate, but somehow the start-stop sequence seemed far too arbitrary. Far too much buildup for a single, seemingly inconsequential target. Whatever Grayson had been, he hadn’t been the boss of anyone’s organization, and if the murders had been a planned sequence, his death simply was not a logical stopping place. At least, Ryan frowned, that was what his instincts told him. He’d learned to trust those undefined inner feelings, as all cops do. And yet the killings had stopped. Three more pushers had died in the last few weeks; he and Douglas had visited every crime scene only to find that they’d been two quite ordinary robberies gone bad, with the third a turf fight that one had lost and another won. The Invisible Man was gone, or at least inactive, and that fact blew away the theory which had to him seemed the most sensible explanation for the killings, leaving only something far less satisfying.
The other possibility did make more sense, after a fashion. Someone had made a move on a drug ring as yet undiscovered by Mark Charon and his squad, eliminating pushers, doubtless encouraging them to switch allegiance to a new supplier. Under that construction, William Grayson had been somewhat more important in the great scheme of things – and perhaps there was another murder or two, as yet undiscovered, which had eliminated the command leadership of this notional ring. One more leap of imagination told Ryan that the ring taken down by the Invisible Man was the same he and Douglas had been chasing after, all these many months. It all tied together in a very neat theoretical bundle.
But murders rarely did that. Real murder wasn’t like a TV cop show. You never figured it all out. When you knew who, you might never really learn why, at least not in a way that really satisfied, and the problem with applying elegant theories to the real-life fact of death was that people didn’t fit theories terribly well. Moreover, even if that model for the events of the past month were correct, it had to mean that a highly organized, ruthless, and deadly-efficient individual was now operating a criminal enterprise in Ryan’s city, which wasn’t exactly good news.
‘Tom, I just don’t buy it.’
‘Well, if he’s your commando, why did he stop?’ Douglas asked.
‘Do I remember right? Aren’t you the guy who came up with that idea?’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So you’re not helping your lieutenant very much, Sergeant.’
‘We have a nice weekend to think about it. Personally, I’m going to cut the grass and catch the double-header on Sunday, and pretend I’m just a regular citizen. Our friend is gone, Em. I don’t know where, but he might as well be on the other side of the world. Best guess, somebody from out of town who came here on a job, and he did the job, and now he’s gone.’
‘Wait a minute!’ That was a new theory entirely, a contract assassin right out of the movies, and those people simply did not exist. But Douglas just headed out of the office, ending the chance for a discussion that might have demonstrated that each of the detectives was half wrong and half right.
Weapons practice started under the watchful eyes of the command team, plus whatever sailors could find an excuse to come aft. The Marines told themselves that the two newly arrived admirals and the new CIA puke had to be as jet-lagged as they’d been upon arrival, not knowing that Maxwell, Greer, and Ritter had flown a VIP transport most of the way, taking the Pacific in easier hops, with drinks and comfortable seats.
Trash was tossed over the side, with the ship moving at a stately five knots. The Marines perforated the various blocks of wood and paper sacks in an exercise that was more a matter of entertainment for the crew than real training value. Kelly took his turn, controlling his CAR-15 with two- and three-round bursts, and hitting the target. When it was over the men safed their weapons and headed back to their quarters. A chief stopped Kelly as he was reentering the superstructure.
‘You’re the guy going in alone?’
‘You’re not supposed to know that.’
The chief machinist’s mate just chuckled. ‘Follow me, sir.’ They headed forward, diverting from the Marine detail and finding themselves in Ogden’s impressive machine shop. It had to be impressive, as it was designed not merely to service the ship herself, but also the needs of whatever mobile equipment might be embarked. On one of the worktables, Kelly saw the sea sled he’d be using to head up the river.
‘We’ve had this aboard since San Diego, sir. Our chief electrician and I been playing with it. We’ve stripped it down, cleaned everything, checked the batteries – they’re good ones, by the way. It’s got new seals, so it oughta keep the water out. We even tested it in the well deck. The guarantee says five hours. Deacon and I worked on it. It’s good for seven,’ the chief said with quiet pride. ‘I figured that might come in handy.’
‘It will, Chief. Thank you.’
‘Now let’s see this gun.’ Kelly handed it over after a moment’s hesitation, and the chief started taking it apart. In fifteen seconds it was field-stripped, but the chief didn’t stop there.