‘Sandy who?’
‘That’s all I have,’ Lieutenant Ryan admitted. He could imagine Farber now, leaning away from his desk in the high-backed leather chair with his contemplative look.
‘Let me make sure I understand things, okay? Are you asking me to check up on two colleagues as part of a criminal investigation?’
Ryan weighed the merits of lying. This guy was a psychiatrist. His job was looking around in people’s minds. He was good at it.
‘Yes, doctor, I am,’ the detective admitted after a pause long enough for the psychiatrist to make an accurate guess as to its cause.
‘You’re going to have to explain yourself,’ Farber announced evenly. ‘Sam and I aren’t exactly close, but he is not a person who would ever hurt another human being. And Sarah is a damned angel with these messed-up kids we see in here. She’s setting aside some important research work to do that, stuff she could make a big reputation with.’ Then Farber realized that she’d been away an awful lot in the past couple of weeks.
‘Doctor, I’m just trying to develop some information, okay? I have no reason whatever to believe that either one of them is implicated in any illegal act.’ His words were too formal, and he knew it. Perhaps another tack. It was even honest, maybe. ‘If my speculation is correct, there may be some danger to them that they don’t know about.’
‘Give me a few minutes.’ Farber broke the connection.
‘Not bad, Em,’ Douglas said.
It was bottom-fishing, Ryan thought, but, hell, he’d tried just about everything else. It seemed an awfully long five minutes before the phone rang again.
‘Ryan.’
‘Farber. No docs on neuro by that name. One nurse, though, Sandra O’Toole. She’s a team leader on the service. I don’t know her myself. Sam thinks highly of her, or so I just found out from his secretary. She was working something special for him, recently. He had to fiddle the pay records.’ Farber had already made his own connection. Sarah had been absent from her clinical work at the same time. He’d let the police develop that themselves. He’d gone far enough – too far. These were colleagues, after all, and this wasn’t a game.
‘When was that?’ Ryan asked casually. ‘
‘Two or three weeks ago, lasted ten working days.’
‘Thank you, doctor. I’ll be back to you.’
‘Connection,’ Douglas observed after the circuit was broken. ‘How much you want to bet that she knows Kelly, too?’
The question was more hopeful than substantive, of course. Sandra was a common-enough name. Still, they’d been on this case, this endless series of deaths, for more than six months, and after all that time spent with no evidence and no connections at all, it looked like the morning star. The problem was that it was evening now, and time to go home for dinner with his wife and children. Jack would be returning to Boston College in another week or so, Ryan thought, and he missed time with his son.
There was no easy way to get things organized. Sandy had to drive him to Quantico. It was her first time on a Marine base, but only briefly, as Kelly guided her to the marina. Already, he thought. You get home for once with your body in tune with the local day/night cycle, and already he had to break it. Sandy was not yet back on 1-95 when he pulled away from the dock, heading out for the middle of the river, advancing his throttles to max-cruise as soon as he could.
The lady had brains to go with her guts, Kelly told himself, sipping his first beer in a very long time. He supposed it was normal that a clinical nurse would have a good memory. Henry, it seemed, had been a talker at certain moments, one of them being when he had a girl under his direct control. A boastful man, Kelly thought, the best sort. He still didn’t have an address to go along with the phone number, but he had a new name, Tony P-something – Peegee, something like that. White, Italian, drove a blue Lincoln, along with a decent physical description. Mafia, probably, either in it or a wannabe. Somebody else named Eddie – but Sandy had matched that name with a guy who had been killed by a police officer; it had made the front page of the local paper. Kelly took it one step further: what if that cop was the man Henry had inside? It struck him as odd that a senior officer like a lieutenant would be involved in a shooting. Speculation, he told himself, but worth checking out – he wasn’t sure yet exactly how. He had all night for it, and a smooth body of water to reflect his thoughts as it did the stars. Soon he passed the spot where he’d left Billy. At least someone had collected the body.
The ground was settling over the grave in a place that some still called Potter’s Field, a tradition dating back to someone named Judas. The doctors at the community hospital that had treated the man were still going over the pathology report from the Medical College of Virginia. Baro-Trauma. There were fewer than ten severe cases of this condition in the whole country in a year, and all of those in coastal regions. It was no disgrace that they hadn’t made the diagnosis – and, the report went on, there was no difference it could have made. The precise cause of death had been a fragment of bone marrow that had somehow found its way into a cerebral artery, occluding it and causing a massive, fatal stroke. Damage to other organs had been so extensive that it would only have been a matter of a few more weeks in any case. The bone-marrow blockage was evidence of a very large pressurization imbalance, 3 bar, probably more. Even now police were inquiring about divers in the Potomac, which could be very deep in some places. There was still hope that someone would eventually claim the body, whose location was recorded in the county administrator’s office. But not much.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ General Rokossovskiy demanded. ‘He’s my man! Did you misplace him?’
‘Comrade General,’ Giap replied sharply, ‘I have told you everything I know!’
‘And you say an American did it?’
‘You have seen the intelligence information as well as I have.’
‘That man has information that the Soviet Union requires. I find it hard to believe that the Americans planned a raid whose only result was the abduction of the one Soviet officer in the area. I would suggest, Comrade General, that you make a more serious effort.’
‘We are at war!’
‘Yes, I am aware of that,’ Rokossovskiy observed dryly. “Why do you think I am here?’
Giap could have sworn at the taller man who stood before his desk. He was the commander of his country’s armed forces, after all, and a general of no mean abilities himself. The Vietnamese general swallowed his pride with difficulty. He also needed the weapons that only the Russians could provide, and so he had to abase himself before him for the sake of his country. Of one thing he was certain. The camp wasn’t worth the trouble it had caused him.
The strange part was that the routine had become relatively benign. Kolya wasn’t here. That was certain. Zacharias was sufficiently disoriented that he had difficulty determining the passage of days, but for four sleeps now he hadn’t heard the Russian’s voice even outside the door. By the same token, no one had come in to abuse him. He’d eaten and sat and thought in solitude. To his surprise it had made things better instead of worse. His time with Kolya had become an addiction more dangerous than his dalliance with alcohol, Robin saw now. It was loneliness that was his real enemy, not pain, not fear. From a family and a religious community that fostered fellowship, he’d entered a profession that lived on the same, and being denied it his mind had fed on itself. Then add a little pain and fear, and what did you have? It was something far more easily seen from without than from within. Doubtless it had been apparent to Kolya. Like you, he’d said so often, like you. So, Zacharias told himself, that’s how he did his job. Cleverly, too, the Colonel admitted to himself. Though not a man accustomed to failure and mistakes, he was not immune to them. He’d almost killed himself with a youthful error at Luke Air Force Base while learning to fly fighters, and five years later, the time he’d wondered what the inside of a thunderstorm was really like and nearly ended up hitting the ground in the manner of a thunderbolt. And now he’d made another.
Zacharias didn’t know the reason for his respite from the interrogations. Perhaps Kolya was off reporting on what he’d learned. Whatever the reason, he had been granted the chance to reflect. You’ve sinned, Robin told himself. You’re been very foolish. But you won’t do that again. The determination was weak, and Zacharias knew he’d have to work to strengthen it. Fortunately, he now had the time for reflection. If it was not a real deliverance, it was something. Suddenly he was shocked into full concentration, as if he were flying a combat mission. My God, he thought, that word. I was afraid to pray for deliverance… and yet… His guards would have been surprised to see the wistful smile on his face, especially had they known that he was starting to pray again. Prayer, they’d all been taught, was a farce. But that was their misfortune, Robin thought, and might yet be his salvation.