‘What the hell’s the matter with the arm?’ he asked the medical examiner. Aside from the needle tracks the arm was twisted around so much that he realized he was looking at the wrong side of it.
‘The victim’s shoulder appears to be dislocated. Make that wrecked,’ the ME added after a second’s consideration. ‘We have bruising around the wrist from the force of the grip. Somebody held the arm with two hands and damned near tore the arm off, like taking a branch off a tree.’
‘Karate move?’ Douglas asked.
‘Something like that. That sure slowed him down some. You can see the cause of death.’
‘Lieutenant, over here,’ a uniformed sergeant called. ‘This is Virginia Charles, she lives a block over. She reported the crime.’
‘Are you okay, Miss Charles?’ Ryan asked. A fireman-paramedic was checking the bandage she’s placed on her own arm, and her son, a senior at Dunbar High School, stood by her side, looking down at the murder victim without a trace of sympathy. Within four minutes Ryan had a goodly quantity of information.
‘A bum, you say?’
‘Wino- that’s the bottle he dropped.’ She pointed. Douglas picked it up with the greatest care.
‘Can you describe him?’ Lieutenant Ryan asked.
The routine was so exactingly normal that they might have been at any Marine base from Lejeune to Okinawa. The daily-dozen exercises followed by a run, everyone in step, the senior NCO calling cadence. They took particular pleasure in passing formations of new second lieutenants in the Basic Officers Course, or even more wimpy examples of officer-wannabes doing their summer school at Quantico. Five miles, passing the five-hundred-yard KD range and various other teaching facilities, all of them named for dead Marines, approaching the FBI Academy, but turning back off the main road then, into the woods towards their training site. The morning routine merely reminded them that they were Marines, and the length of the run made them Recon Marines, for whom Olympic-class fitness was the norm. They were surprised to see a general officer waiting for them. Not to mention a sandbox and a swing set.
‘Welcome to Quantico, Marines,’ Marty Young told them after they’d had a chance to cool down and been told to stand at ease. Off to the side, they saw two naval officers in sparkling undress whites, and a pair of civilians, watching and listening. Eyes narrowed collectively, and the mission was suddenly very interesting indeed.
‘Just like looking at the photos,’ Cas observed quietly, looking around the training site; they knew what the lecture was about. ‘Why the playground stuff?’
‘My idea,’ Greer said. ‘Ivan has satellites. The overhead schedules for the next six weeks are posted inside Building A. We don’t know how good the cameras are, and so I’m going to assume that they’re as good as ours, okay? You show the other guy what he wants to see or you make it easy for him to figure out. Any really harmless place has a parking lot.’ The drill was already determined. Every day the new arrivals would move the cars around randomly. Around ten every day they would take the mannequins from the cars and distribute them around the playground equipment. At two or three the cars would be moved again and the mannequins rearranged. They suspected correctly that the ritual would acquire a great deal of institutional humor.
‘And after it’s all over, it becomes a real playground?’ Ritter asked, then answered his own question. ‘Hell, why not? Nice job, James.’
‘Thank you, Bob.’
‘It looks small this way,’ Admiral Maxwell said.
‘The dimensions are accurate to within three inches. We cheated,’ Ritter said. ‘We have the Soviet manual for building places like ibis. Your General Young did a nice job.’
‘No glass in the windows in Building C,’ Casimir noted.
‘Check the photos, Cas,’ Greer suggested. ‘There’s a shortage of window glass over there. That building just has shutters, here and there. The callback’ – he pointed to Building ? – ‘has the bars. Just wood so that they can be removed later. We’ve just guessed at the inside arrangements, but we’ve had a few people released from the other side and we’ve modeled this place on the debriefs. It’s not totally made up from thin air.’
The Marines were already looking around, having learned a little of the mission. Much of the plan they already knew, and they were thinking about how to apply their lessons of real combat operations to this perverted playground, complete with child mannequins who would watch them train with blue doll eyes. M-79 grenades to blast the guard towers. Willie-pete through the barracks windows. Gunships to hose things down after that … the ‘wives’ and ‘kids’ would watch the rehearsal and tell no one.
The site had been carefully selected for its similarity with another place – the Maines hadn’t needed to be told that; it had to be so – and a few eyes lingered on a hill half a mile from the site. You could see everything from there. After the welcoming speech, the men divided into predetermined units to draw their weapons. Instead of M16A1 rifles, they had the shorter CAR-15 carbines, shorter, handier, preferred for close work. Grenadiers had standard M-79 grenade launchers, whose sights had been painted with radioactive tritium to glow in the dark, and their bandoleers were heavy with practice rounds because weapons training would start immediately. They’d start in daylight for feel and proficiency, but almost immediately their training would switch exclusively to night work, which the General had left out. It was obvious in any case. This sort of job only happened at night. The men marched to the nearest weapons-firing range to familiarize themselves. Already set up were window frames, six of them. The grenadiers exchanged looks and fired off their first volley. One, to his shame, missed. The other five razzed him at once, after making sure that the white puffs from their training rounds had appeared behind the frames.
‘All right, all right, I just have to warm up,’ the corporal said defensively, then placed five shots through the target in forty seconds. He was slow – it had been a mainly sleepless night.
‘How strong do you have to be to do that, I wonder?’ Ryan asked.
‘Sure as hell isn’t Wally Cox,’ the ME observed. ‘The knife severed the spinal cord just where it enters the medulla. Death was instantaneous.’
‘He already had the guy crippled. The shoulder as bad as it looks?’ Douglas asked, stepping aside for the photographer to finish up.
‘Worse, probably. We’ll look at it, but I’ll bet you the whole structure is destroyed. You don’t repair an injury like this, not all the way. His pitching career was over even before the knife.’
White, forty, or older, long black hair, short, dirty. Ryan looked at his notes. ‘Go home, ma’am,’ he’d told Virginia Charles.
Ma’am.
‘Our victim was still alive when she walked away.’ Douglas came over to his lieutenant. ‘Then he must have taken his knife away and gave it back. Em, in the past week we’ve seen four very expert murders and six very dead victims.’
‘Four different MOs. Two guys tied up, robbed, and executed, .22 revolver, no sign of a struggle. One guy with a shotgun in the guts, also robbed, no chance to defend himself. Two last night just shot, probably a .22 again, but not robbed, not tied up, and they were alerted before they were shot. Those were all pushers. But this guy’s just a street hood. Not good enough, Tom.’ But the Lieutenant had started thinking about it. ‘Have we ID’d this one yet?’
The uniformed sergeant answered. ‘Junkie. He’s got a rap sheet, six arrests for robbery, God knows what else.’
‘It doesn’t fit,’ Ryan said. ‘It doesn’t fit anything, and if you’re talking about a really clever guy, why let somebody see him, why let her leave, why talk to her – hell, why take this guy out at all? What pattern does that fit?’ There was no pattern. Sure, the two pairs of drug dealers had been taken down with a .22, but the small-bore was the most commonly used weapon on the street, and while one pair had been robbed, the other had not; nor had the second pair been shot with the same deadly precision, though each did have two head wounds. The other murdered and robbed dealer had been done by a shotgun. ‘Look, we have the murder weapon, and we have the wine bottle, and from one or both we’ll get prints. Whoever this guy was, he sure as hell wasn’t real careful.’
‘A wino with a sense of justice, Em?’ Douglas prodded. ‘Whoever took this punk down -‘
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. He wasn’t Wally Cox.’ But who and what the hell was he?
Thank God for gloves, Kelly thought, looking at the bruises on his right hand. He’d let his anger get the better of him, and that wasn’t smart! Looking back, reliving the incident, he realized that he’d been faced with a difficult situation. If he’d let the woman get killed or seriously injured, and just gotten into his car and driven off, first, he’d never really have been able to forgive himself, and second, if anyone had seen the car, he’d be a murder suspect. That extended thought evoked a snort of disgust. He was a murder suspect now. Well, somebody would be. On coming home, he’d looked in the mirror, wig and all. Whatever that woman had seen, it had not been John Kelly, not with a face shadowed by his heavy beard, smeared with dirt, under a long and filthy wig. His bunched-over posture made him appear several inches shorter than he was. And the light on the street had not been good. And she’d been even more interested in getting away than anything else. Even so. He’d somehow left his wine bottle behind. He remembered dropping it to parry the knife thrust, and then in the heat of the moment he’d not recovered it. Dumb! Kelly raged at himself.