‘And Bastogne?’
Ryan nodded. ‘That really wasn’t fun, but at least we went in by truck.’
‘Well, that’s what you’re up against, Lieutenant Ryan.’
‘Explain?’
‘Here’s the key to it.’ Farber held up the transcribed interview with Mrs Charles. ‘The disguise. Has to be a disguise. It takes a strong arm to slam a knife into the back of the skull. That wasn’t any alcoholic. They have all sorts of physical problems.’
‘But that one doesn’t fit the pattern at all,’ Ryan objected.
‘I think it does, but it’s not obvious. Turn the clock back. You’re in the Army, you’re an elite member of an elite unit. You take the time to recon your objective, right?’
‘Always,’ the detective confirmed.
‘Apply that to a city: How do you do that? You camouflage yourself. So our friend decides to disguise himself as a wino. How many of those people on the street? Dirty, smelly, but pretty harmless except to one another. They’re invisible and you just filter them out. Everyone does.’
‘You still didn’t – ‘
‘But how does he get in and out? You think he takes a bus – a taxi?’
‘Car.’
‘A disguise is something you put on and take off.’ Farber held up the photo of the Charles murder scene. ‘He makes his double-kill two blocks away, he clears the area, and comes here – why do you suppose?’ And there it was, right on the photo, a gap between two parked cars.
‘Holy shit!’ The humiliation Ryan felt was noteworthy. ‘What else did I miss, Doctor Farber?’
‘Call me Sid. Not much else. This individual is very clever, changing his methods, and this is the only case where he displayed his anger. That’s it, do you see? This is the only crime with rage in it – except maybe for the one this morning, but we’ll set that aside for the moment. Here we see rage. First he cripples the victim, then he kills him in a particularly difficult way. Why?’ Farber paused for a few contemplative puffs, ‘He was angry, but why was he angry? It had to have been an unplanned act. He wouldn’t have planned something with Mrs Charles there. For some reason he had to do something that he hadn’t expected to do, and that made him angry. Also, he let her go – knowing that she saw him.’
‘You still haven’t told me -‘
‘He’s a combat veteran. He’s very, very fit. That means he’s younger than we are and highly trained. Ranger, Green Beret, somebody like that’
‘Why is he out there?’
‘I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask him. But what you have is somebody who takes his time. He’s watching his victims. He’s picking the same time of day – when they’re tired, when street traffic is low, to reduce the chance of being spotted. He’s not robbing them. He may take the money, but that’s not the same thing. Now tell me about this morning’s kill,’ Farber commanded in a gentle but explicit way.
‘You have the photo. There was a whole lot of cash in a bag upstairs. We haven’t counted it yet, but at least fifty thousand dollars.’
‘Drug money?’
‘We think so.’
‘There were other people there? He kidnapped them?’
‘Two, we think. A man definitely, and probably a woman, too.’
Farber nodded and puffed away for a few seconds. ‘One of two things. Either that’s the person he was after all along, or he’s just one more step towards something else.’
‘So all the pushers he killed were just camouflage.’
‘The first two, the ones he wired up -‘
‘Interrogated them.’ Ryan grimaced. ‘We should have figured this out. They were the only ones who weren’t killed in the open. He did it that way to have more time.’
‘Hindsight is always easy,’ Farber pointed out. ‘Don’t feel too bad. That one really did look like a robbery, and you had nothing else to go on. By the time you came here, there was a lot more information to look at.’ The psychiatrist leaned back and smiled at the ceiling. He loved playing detective. ‘Until this one’ – he tapped the photos from the newest scene with his pipe – ‘you didn’t really have much. This is the one that makes everything else clear. Your suspect knows weapons. He knows tactics. He’s very patient. He stalks his victims like a hunter after a deer. He’s changing his methodology to throw you off, but today he made a mistake. He showed a little rage this time, too, because he used a knife deliberately, and he showed the kind of training he had by cleaning the weapon right away.’
‘But he’s not crazy, you say.’
‘No, I doubt he’s disturbed in a clinical sense at all, but sure as hell he’s motivated by something. People like this are highly disciplined, just like you and I were. Discipline shows in how he operates – but his anger also shows in why he operates. Something made this man start to do this.’
‘ “Ma’am.” ‘
That one caught Farber short. ‘Exactly! Very good. Why didn’t he eliminate her? That’s the only witness we know about. He was polite to her. He let her go … interesting … but not enough to go on, really.’
‘Except to say that he’s not killing for fun.’
‘Correct.’ Farber nodded. ‘Everything he does will have a purpose, and he has a lot of specialized training that he can apply to this mission. It is a mission. You have one really dangerous cat prowling the street.’
‘He’s after drug people. That’s pretty clear,’ Ryan said. ‘The one – maybe two – he kidnapped…’
‘If one is a woman, she’ll survive. The man will not. From the condition of his body we’ll be able to tell if he was the target.’
‘Rage?’
‘That will be obvious. One other thing – if you have police looking for this guy, remember that he’s better with weapons than almost anybody. He’ll look harmless. He’ll avoid a confrontation. He doesn’t want to kill the wrong people, or he would have killed this Mrs Charles.’
‘But if we corner him -‘
‘You don’t want to do that.’
‘All comfy?’ Kelly asked.
The recompression chamber was one of several hundred produced for a Navy contract requirement by the Dykstra Foundry and Tool Company, Inc., of Houston, Texas, or so the name plate said. Made of high-quality steel, it was designed to reproduce the pressure that came along with scuba diving. At one end was a triple-paned four-inch-square Plexiglas window. There was even a small air lock so that items could be passed in, like food or drink, and inside the chamber was a twenty-watt reading light in a protected fixture. Under the chamber itself was a powerful, gasoline-powered air compressor, which could be controlled from a fold-down seat, adjacent to which were two pressure gauges. One was labeled in concentric circles of millimeters and inches of mercury, pounds-per-square-inch, kilograms-per-square-centimeter, and ‘bar’ or multiples of normal atmospheric pressure, which was 14.7 PSI. The other gauge showed equivalent water depth both in feet and meters. Each thirty-three feet of simulated depth raised the atmopsheric pressure by 14.7 PSI, or one bar.
‘Look, whatever you want to know, okay …’ Kelly heard over the intercom.
‘I thought you’d see things my way.’ He yanked the rope on the motor, starting the compressor. Kelly made sure that the simple spigot valve next to the pressure gauges was tightly shut. Then he opened the pressurization valve, venting air from the compressor to the chamber, and watched the needles rotate slowly clockwise.
‘You know how to swim?’ Kelly asked, watching his face.
Billy’s head jerked with alarm. ‘What – look, please, don’t drown me, okay?’
‘That’s not going to happen. So, can you swim?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Ever do any skin diving?’ Kelly asked next.
‘No, no, I haven’t,’ replied a very confused drug distributor.
‘Okay, well, you’re going to learn what it’s like. You should yawn and work your ears, like, to get used to the pressure,’ Kelly told him, watching the ‘depth’ gauge pass thirty feet.
‘Look, why don’t you just ask your fucking questions, okay?’
Kelly switched the intercom off. There was just too much fear in the voice. Kelly didn’t really like hurting people all that much, and he was worried about developing sympathy for Billy. He steadied the gauge at one hundred feet, closing off the pressurization valve but leaving the motor running. While Billy adjusted to the pressure, Kelly found a hose which he attached to the motor’s exhaust pipe. This he extended outside to dump the carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. It would be a time-consuming process, just waiting for things to happen. Kelly was going on memory, and that was worrisome. There was a useful but rather rough instruction table on the side of the chamber, the bottom line of which commanded reference to a certain diving manual which Kelly did not’ have. He’d done very little deep diving of late, and the only one that had really concerned him had been a team effort, the oil rig down in the Gulf. Kelly spent an hour tidying things up around the machine shop, cultivating his memories and his rage before coming back to his fold-down seat.