‘I checked the name again -1 knew I heard it before. He did a job for Allen. Remember last year, the Gooding case?’
The senior man looked up from his notes. ‘Oh, yeah! He’s the guy who found the gun?’
‘Right, and he ended up training our divers.’
‘It still doesn’t explain what the hell he was doing over there,’ the cop pointed out.
‘True,’ his partner admitted. ‘But it makes it hard to believe he’s a player.’
The senior officer shook his head. ‘There was a girl with him. She’s missing.’
‘Kidnapping, too? What do we have on her?’
‘Just a name. Pamela Madden. Twenty, recovering doper, missing. We have Mr Kelly, his car, his gun, and that’s it. No shells from the shotgun. No witnesses at all. A missing girl, probably, but a description that could fit ten thousand local girls. Robbery-kidnapping.’ All in all, not that atypical a case. They often started off knowing damned little. In any case, the two uniformed officers had mainly determined that the detectives would take this one over almost immediately.
‘She wasn’t from around here. She had an accent, Texas, somewhere out there.’
‘What else?’ the senior officer asked. ‘Come on, doc, anything you know, okay?’
Sam grimaced. ‘She had been the victim of sexual abuse. She might have been a hooker. My wife said – hell, I saw it, evidence of scars on her back. She’d been whipped, some permanent scarring from welts, that sort of thing. We didn’t press, but she might have been a prostitute.’
‘Mr Kelly has strange habits and acquaintances, doesn’t he?’ the officer observed while making notes.
‘From what you just said, he helps cops, too, doesn’t he?’ Professor Rosen was getting angry. ‘Anything else? I have rounds to make.’
‘Doctor, what we have here is a definite attempted murder, probably as part of a robbery, and maybe a kidnapping also. Those are serious crimes. I have procedures to follow, just like you do. When will Kelly be up for a real interview?’
‘Tomorrow, probably, but he’s going to be very rocky for a couple of days.’
‘Is ten in the morning okay, sir?’
‘Yes.’
The cops rose. ‘Somebody will be back then, sir.’
Rosen watched them leave. This, strangely enough, had been his first real experience with a major criminal investigation. His work more often dealt with traffic and industrial accidents. He found himself unable to believe that Kelly could be a criminal, yet that had seemed to be the thrust of their questions, wasn’t it? That’s when Dr Pretlow came in.
‘We finished the blood work on Kelly,’ She handed the data over. ‘Gonorrhea. He should be more careful. I recommend penicillin. Any known allergies?’
‘No.’ Rosen closed his eyes and swore. What the hell else would happen today?
‘Not that big a deal, sir. It looks like a very early case. When he’s feeling better I’ll have Social Services talk to him about -‘
‘No, you won’t,’ Rosen said in a low growl.
‘But-‘
‘But the girl he got it from is probably dead, and we will not force him to remember her that way.’ It was the first time Sam had admitted the probable facts to himself, and that made it all the worse, declaring her dead. He had little to base it on, but his instincts told him it must be so.
‘Doctor, the law requires -‘
It was just too much. Rosen was on the point of exploding. ‘That’s a good man in there. I watched him fall in love with a girl who’s probably been murdered, and his last memory of her will not be that she gave him venereal disease. Is that clear, doctor? As far as the patient is concerned, the medication is for a post-op infection. Mark the chart accordingly.’
‘No, doctor, I will not do that.’
Professor Rosen made the proper notations. ‘Done.’ He looked up. ‘Doctor Pretlow, you have the makings of an excellent technical surgeon. Try to remember that the patients upon whom we perform our procedures are human beings, with feelings, will you? If you do so, I think you will find that the job is somewhat easier in the long run. It will also make you a much better physician.’
And what was he so worked up about? Pretlow asked herself on the way out.
CHAPTER 8
Concealment
It was a combination of things. June 20 was a hot day, and a dull one. A photographer for the Baltimore Sun had a new camera, a Nikon to replace his venerable Honeywell Pentax, and while he mourned for his old one, the new camera, like a new love, had all sorts of new features to explore and enjoy. One of them was a whole collection of telephoto lenses that the distributor had thrown in. The Nikon was a new model, and the company had wanted it accepted within the news-photo community quickly, and so twenty photographers at various papers around the country had gotten free sets. Bob Preis had gotten his because of a Pulitzer Prize earned three years before. He was sitting in his car on Druid Lake Drive now, listening to his police radio, hoping for something interesting to happen, but nothing was. And so he was playing with his new camera, practicing his lens-switching skills. The Nikon was beautifully machined, and as an infantryman will learn to strip and clean his rifle in total darkness, Preis was changing from one lens to another by feel, forcing himself to scan the area just as a means of keeping his eyes off a procedure that had to become as natural and automatic as zipping his pants.
It was the crows that caught his attention. Located off-center in the irregularly shaped lake was a fountain. No example of architectural prowess, it was a plain concrete cylinder sticking six or eight feet up from the water’s surface, and in it were a few jets that shot water more or less straight up, though today shifting winds were scattering the water haphazardly in all directions. Crows were circling the water, trying occasionally to get in, but defeated by the swirling sheets of clear white spray, which appeared to frighten them. What were the crows interested in? His hands searched the camera case for the 200mm lens, which he attached to the camera body, bringing it up to his eyes smoothly.
‘Sweet Jesus!’ Preis instantly shot ten rapid frames. Only then did he get on his car radio, telling his base office to notify the police at once. He switched lenses again, this time selecting a 300mm, his longest. After finishing one roll, he threaded another, this one 100-speed color. He steadied the camera on the windowsill of the tired old Chevy and fired off another roll. One crow, he saw, got through the water, settling on –
‘Oh, God, no …’ Because it was, after all, a human body there, a young woman, white as alabaster, and in the through-the-lens optics, he could see the crow right there, its clawed feet strutting around the body, its pitiless black eyes surveying what to the bird was nothing more than a large and diverse meal. Preis sat his camera down and shifted his car into gear. He violated two separate traffic laws getting as close to the fountain as he could, and in what was for him a rare case of humanity overcoming professionalism, slammed his hand down on the horn, hoping to startle the bird away. The bird looked up, but saw that whatever the noise came from, there was no immediate threat here, and it went back to selecting the first morsel for its iron-hard beak. It was then that Preis made a random but effective guess. He blinked his lights on and off, and to the bird that was unusual enough that it thought better of things and flew away. It might have been an owl, after all, and the meal wasn’t going anywhere. The bird would just wait for the threat to go away before returning to eat.
‘What gives?’ a cop asked, pulling alongside.
‘There’s a body on the fountain. Look.’ He handed the camera over.
‘God,’ the policeman breathed, handing it back after a long quiet moment. He made the radio call while Preis shot another roll. Police cars arrived, rather like the crows, one at a time, until eight were parked within sight of the fountain. A fire truck arrived in ten minutes, along with someone from the department of Recreation and Parks, trailering a boat behind his pickup. This was quickly put into the water. Then came the forensics people with a lab truck, and it was time to go out to the fountain. Preis asked to go along – he was a better photographer than the one the cops used – but was rebutted, and so he continued to record the event from the lake’s edge. There wouldn’t be another Pulitzer in this. There could have been, he thought. But the price of that would have involved immortalizing the instinctive act of a carrion bird, defiling the body of a girl in the midst of a major city. And that wasn’t worth the nightmares. He had enough of those already.